They call me Madam. They being the women I protect because the law does not. They being the men I work with, breaking any number of laws every day.
I never wanted to be Madam. I wanted to run London's best members-only bar, but it also became the city's most infamous brothel. It's not your typical brothel either, because my girls offer another kind of service that I believe this world needs... Because "they" are also the women who kill for me because that's what the dead deserved.
Doing this work brings me enemies, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't already have them. I'd be lying if I said that it was only the women I hire who kill. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't ready to do it again to the man I blame for it all because of what he did to me..
But I'm yet to find him, and I'm running out of time, not least because another man, another enemy, is coming after me. A man I can't kill. A man who won't give up. Yet I'm the one thing more dangerous than that. I'm a woman who won't give up.
They call me Madam. They being the women I protect because the law does not. They being the men I work with, breaking any number of laws every day.
I never wanted to be Madam. I wanted to run London's best members-only bar, but it also became the city's most infamous brothel. It's not your typical brothel either, because my girls offer another kind of service that I believe this world needs... Because "they" are also the women who kill for me because that's what the dead deserved.
Doing this work brings me enemies, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't already have them. I'd be lying if I said that it was only the women I hire who kill. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't ready to do it again to the man I blame for it all because of what he did to me..
But I'm yet to find him, and I'm running out of time, not least because another man, another enemy, is coming after me. A man I can't kill. A man who won't give up. Yet I'm the one thing more dangerous than that. I'm a woman who won't give up.
The Weaker Sex
By Frances M. Thompson
PROOF COPY – NOT FOR RESALE OR DISTRIBUTION!
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© Frances M. Thompson 2021
CONTENT WARNING
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The Weaker Sex is a fast-paced, suspense-heavy, deep dive into a fictional criminal underworld in London. It's also an in-depth exploration of very real (and urgent) topics like feminism, sex work, and violence against women.
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With this in mind, the author wants you to be aware that there is on-page sexual assault, violence and murder in this book. There is also a little bit of a sex scene and a whole lot of cursing. Go gently if any of the above is potentially triggering for you, and if you want to avoid the sexual assault (rape involving a minor), you can skip Chapter One and still not miss too many salient details for the plot.
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Thank you for reading The Weaker Sex.
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If We Were Men - Afira Bint Abbad, 3 AD
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"What's become of you that you let the king rape your brides?
You are numerous as the ants, yet Afira walks in broad daylight stained with her virginal blood.
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If we were men and you were women, we'd stop this crime.
Spark the fire of war and kill the tyrant or be killed, or take to the wilderness and starve, for it's better to die honourably than live in shame.
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But if you're not moved by this outrage, you might as well bathe in scent and kohl your eyes and wear the bridal dress.
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Death to cowards who strut like men among women."
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PART ONE
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“Though the sex to which I belong is considered weak you will nevertheless find me a rock that bends to no wind.”
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- Queen Elizabeth I
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“The opposite (of death) is desire.”
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-Â Â Â Â Â Â A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
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Prologue
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Now
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That’s him. Isn’t it? Is that him?
I crane my neck to see his face, but a bus pulls up alongside the window and I see nothing but red. I glance ahead, past my driver’s ear. Noticing we’re stuck in traffic I lean forward, gripping the sides of the passenger seat in front of me.
“Are you alright?” asks Abigail, my driver.
“I just…” I pause, willing the traffic ahead and the bus beside us to move on, begging the other people walking along the side of the road to just melt away. “I thought I saw someone I knew.”
Abigail nods. “For a city of millions, London’s still a small world. I always end up seeing the exes I wish I didn’t.”
I sense that Abigail is looking at me in the rear-view mirror, wanting to share a small laugh or reassuring smile, but I don’t take my eyes off the side of the road. The bus starts to move but I know it’s too late. I don’t see the grey hair atop a long navy-blue coat again. I can’t see the woman with the purple scarf who was walking just behind him.
They’ve all moved on.
I finally sit back and apologise to Abigail.
“Nothing to apologise for, Madam. Are you okay?” She asks and I meet her gaze this time.
“I’m fine,” I say, but I’m not. I haven’t been fine for years, and every day I feel more fear. Not fear of him - not any more - but fear that my time is running out.
I’d forgotten what it was like to think I’d seen him. I’d forgotten how I could feel so much, so quickly. An immediate rush of cold freezing my breath, my body, my mind. And then a hot, engulfing heat that rises, like a flame.
I had forgotten how much seeing him could make me feel both lost and found. Lost because it made me remember the pain and helplessness. Found because I know exactly what I have to do to regain control. Found because I am ready to do what has to be done.
Because I have to see a body, a dead body. Even if I have to make that happen myself.
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Chapter One
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Then - Age 13
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I was thirteen years old when I first saw people having sex.
One of those people was my mother, the other was my riding instructor. The whole act struck me as angry, and violent and noisy, not like the sex I had read about in the books I had stolen from my mother’s shelves. It wasn’t just the sounds their mouths made – her high-pitched squeaks and his guttural grunts - it was the sharp slaps of his flesh against hers. The smack of his hips and legs as they slammed against her bare backside. It was the same skin-on-skin crack I heard when my mother’s hand struck my leg or crossed my cheek.
Many seconds passed as I stood watching them. I became so transfixed by the movement of Mr Ferris. I couldn’t take my eyes off the flexing of his buttock muscles as they pumped away behind my mother. That was why I only noticed his head turn in my direction a moment too late. As soon as I did, I stepped back from the gap in the door. I told myself he hadn’t seen me; that the spot I’d been standing in outside my parents’ bedroom had been too dark for him to see anything. Funny how I called the room that as it was a space I had never actually seen my father in. Not once.
I turned and ran down the stairs. Ignoring the calls of Mary our housekeeper, I charged down the corridor and through the front door, an entrance normally reserved only for visitors and new farm employees who didn’t yet know any better. With my back to the house, I raced down the long, curved driveway surrounded by the rows of oak trees that created an arch above my head. I loved walking up and down there in autumn, feeling the crunch of the acorns under my feet. I would bend down occasionally to pick the best-looking ones, but I didn’t stop this time.
At the end of the driveway I waited for a car to pass and then I crossed the road, and climbed over the sty hidden in the hedge. I walked on, looking back every few seconds to check that I wasn’t being followed, and then hoisted myself over a rusting metal fence and found myself where I wanted to be; the rough grassy paddock that was home to our horses Mabel and Mina.
Mabel was my mother’s horse, a tall and elegant black mare whose coat shone in the sun, and Mina was mine. I had once been told that they were related, cousins perhaps, but they looked so startlingly different, with Mina’s brown and white patchy coat and her stubby tail that never seemed to grow as long as those of other horses. While I only ever rode Mina - she was nearly a whole hand shorter than Mabel - I spent many hours talking to both horses, sitting myself down in the grass and looking up at them. I always felt much safer with them than the humans in my life.
I lay down in the grass and tried to forget what I had just seen. But I couldn’t. Through my closed eyes, the image of my mother and Mr Ferris kept returning. Mary had always told me to knock before entering a room I thought my father was in. Maybe she also meant my mother too. I wondered if I should go back and tell Mary what I had seen, but there was something in the noises my mother made - short, sharp, and through a closed mouth - that suggested she had been trying to stay quiet, and I knew better than to betray my mother. Perhaps I could tell one of the girls at school. Perhaps this would earn me some credit with them. Maybe they would giggle about it with me. Or maybe it would just make them laugh at me.
Mabel and Mina stayed close as I lay there, my arms resting over my eyes to block out the late summer sun that was shining brightly above. I heard them take it in turns to pull up strands of grass and chew them as a light breeze played with my summer dress, lifting it off my bare legs.
My father had discussed boarding school with me just a few weeks earlier.
“You wouldn’t be far away, just fifty miles, he had said, as he filled his pipe. “I’d come visit on weekends. Some weekends, not all, of course. And you’d come home for Christmas, and maybe the summer too. You’d make lots of new friends. Better friends. Not like those brats from the village.”
“They’re not brats,” I had said, unsure why I was defending them.
“Well, their parents certainly are,” he had replied, searching for his matches. I found them and handed them to him over his messy desk. “They don’t like you because you’re my daughter and we own the land their daddies work on. It’s how these things work. People don’t like those who have more than them. But at boarding school, all the children will come from families like ours.”
It made me feel nauseous to think of other families being like ours.
“What about the horses?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure they have horses and a riding school there. You’ll go riding at least once a week, I imagine. On much better horses too, no doubt…”
“I don’t want a different horse. I want to ride Mina every Saturday like I do now.”
My father had brought a match to his pipe and I waited for the sickly bitter smell to fill the air and scratch my throat, like it always did. “You can ride her in holidays. I suppose your mother will still be having Ferris over for her lessons anyway…”
“Can I go now, Daddy?” I asked before I had to breathe any more smoke in.
“Yes, yes. Go. Close the door behind you. And tell Mary I’m not to be disturbed.”
I didn’t want to go to boarding school. Mary wasn’t there. My horses weren’t there. The fields I loved to roam alone weren’t there. I didn’t want to live here most of the time, but I didn’t want to leave either.
A hand wrapped itself around my ankle and broke me out of my daydream. I pulled my arms off my face and opened my eyes.
“Did you like what you saw?” The sun shone so brightly behind him, I couldn’t see his face. But I recognised the voice.
I tried to free my foot, but his grip tightened as he bent to kneel with a leg either side of my knees. I looked up and around me, I saw Mina and Mabel, now each a little further away, but no Mary, no Father or Mother.
“I didn’t mean to see…” I said and even to my own young ears, it sounded like a desperate, useless plea.
“Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. At least you know now what it is that grown-ups do. Or I dare say you already knew when you have a mother like that,” he laughed and moved forward onto his hands, above me.
I felt the fight rise up in me like wildfire. For a moment, I felt I had enough force to move him off me, enough speed to escape, enough power to make it stop. I pushed up on my hands to jolt back, but one of his knees shifted forward and landed on my thigh, stopping me. My fists punched at his chest, but his left hand came down on my upper arm pinning me to the ground. I felt adrenaline surge through my body and it made me move any which way I could, but he always caught me. Each time he fixed me to the ground, pushing and squeezing harder. Quickly, I became convinced he could crush and kill me. As the pain began to make me dizzy, I realised no matter how strong I thought I was, he was stronger.
“Would you like to try it too? Would you like to be a grown-up?” He spat into my ear as one of his legs came between my own, separating them. I saw two pink smudges on his neck, both in the shade of my mother’s lipstick.
I hated how quickly I felt air and the material of his clothes on my bare legs. Why did I wear a sundress? Why was I not in jeans or trousers? Why was it so easy for him to pull my knickers down?
“I think you do,” he said as he put a forearm against my throat to hold me still, nearly choking me, while his other hand went to his trousers.
Suddenly scared his arm on my neck would kill me, I stopped wriggling against it and instead tensed my whole body, focusing only on trying to sneak enough air inside my lungs. I used all my energy, all that fight, to just not cry. I knew already from our riding lessons that he took considerable pleasure in me crying and I refused to give him that as well as everything else he was taking from me.
As I heard the metal clank of a belt being undone, his arm came off my throat. I sucked in as much air as I could, readied myself to dig my heels in the ground and get up, but before my lungs had even fully expanded, the full weight of his body landed on top of me, knocking the air out of me again.
I put my free arm over my face and closed my eyes as I felt a rough hand between my legs. I don’t know when I opened my eyes again, if it was before or after the piercing pain of him forcing himself into me, or if it was after that sharp stabbing pain had dulled to a burning ache as he moved relentlessly above me, but when I did move my arm, I saw the lipstick marks again. They lingered in the corner of my eye, jolting back and forward, blurring in and out of focus. I stared at them when I stopped trying to close my legs. I stared at them as the pain stabbed at deep parts of me I didn’t know existed. I stared at them as the tears came, despite trying so hard to hold them back, and I stared at my mother’s lipstick as I began searching for thoughts that would help me get through it. The only one that worked was a silent promise I gave myself, and to Mr Ferris, as he raped me; that he would never get away with it. Somehow, one day, he would pay.
Although I have worn lipstick every day of my adult life, I have never worn a single shade of pink on my lips.
I had my first day of boarding school two weeks later.
Emma’s life has never been easy, and it’s about to get much harder.
Being neglected by her parents, feeling uncomfortable with her own sexuality, seeing the way women are treated, and being raped as a kid all shaped Emma into the powerful woman she is today. She will lie, she will deceive, she will build a safe place for prostitutes, and she will collect her own team of merciless killers, all to protect those she loves. But, personally killing someone – she will only do that twice.
While hunting the man responsible for it all, Emma is also being hunted, and she is running out of time.
This story has it all; diverse characters who all contribute into bettering the plot, rejecting social norms, valid motives, high stakes, drama, friendship, a bit of romance, secrets, and killing.
The story does seem dragging at some points as it pauses more questions that it eventually answers. All the stretched secrecy could also cause confusion and having to re-read some parts to figure out who was doing what. The plot could have also benefited from deeper examinations of certain areas, but nothing seems to stop the book from being highly entertaining and memorable.
The events go back and forth between various points in the past that molded our main character into who she is and what she is capable of doing now.
The plot is fast-paced, direct, intense, and allows the reader a view into a typically secretive world. It explores intense situations and character traits like loyalty, staying true to one’s self, and how revenge comes at a very high price.
The author promises an epic read and she does not disappoint. The writing style is also very gripping, showcasing great talent.
This is my first time giving a book on Reedsy five stars and it deserves each one of them.
I recommend this book to anyone who likes crime novels, you will love this one.