The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay

somewhere to go if she won’t take me back.”
    Nestor nodded, giving a gentle tug at the reins. The horse let out a snort.
    “Be well, Miss Fenwick,” he said, reaching out to touch my hand.
    I wondered for a moment if I was making a mistake. “Will she be different when Mr. Wentworth comes home?” I asked. “Would things have gotten any better?”
    “No, my dear, they would’ve gotten worse.”
    Leaving him was more difficult than I’d imagined. My cheeks burned and my throat swelled with not knowing what to say. I hoped that he’d be at least a little bit lonely without me.
    Jumping from the cart, I landed square on the street.
    “My name’s Moth,” I told him, not waiting for him to say anything more.
    Someone I hold in great esteem would one day explain to me that Nestor’s actions (although meant to save me) were just as criminal as Mrs. Wentworth’s.
    His motives were not pure (enough) .
    True.
    He asked you to commit a crime .
    True.
    He allowed harm to come to you in order to serve his needs .
    Perhaps.
    September 25, 1871
The New York Infirmary
for Indigent Women and Children
128 Second Avenue, New York, New York.
    They are everywhere I look—girl after girl left behind by their mothers, their families, and society.
    Mandy Clarke, sixteen years old, looking as aged and tired as a Fulton Street whore, sores and chancres covering every inch of her body.
    Penny Giles, thirteen years old, ruined by her uncle.
    Fran Tasch, nineteen, her face badly burned by the carbolic she drank to end her life.
    Girl Unknown, approximately nineteen to twenty-five years of age, her corpse found stuffed inside a trunk at the Chambers Street station. Her death was caused by an abortion gone wrong.
    These were just the girls I saw today.
    S.F.



I tried the latch but found it bolted. I knocked, first quietly rapping at the door, then pounding hard with my fist.
    “Mama?” I called, but there was no answer.
    I called again, this time louder, figuring she must’ve tipped back too much Dr. Godfrey’s before bed. “Mama, are you there?”
    When the door finally came open, the face that greeted me wasn’t hers. A stranger stood in her place, a fair-haired woman holding a lamp, her cheeks lined with sleep. She wore a black-fringed shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders just like Mama’s.
    “I’m looking for my mother,” I told the woman as I tried to see past her into the front room.
    She scowled at me and said, “You a beggar—go away.”
    Her voice was throaty and mean, as if she meant for the words to stick in my ears. She was, like so many of the women in this part of the city, filled with distrust. The language of her homeland had not been welcomed by strangers. A-mer-i-ca had turned out to be a false friend.
    Mama still had her mother’s tongue locked up inside her head, but refused to use it. Every so often I’d catch her whispering strings of unknown words to a dress or skirt she was mending. They sounded tender and haunting to me, like someone telling a secret.
    “Teach me to speak like that,” I’d said one night, settling down next to her while she was sewing.
    “No,” she said, biting thread between her teeth.
    “Don’t you miss having someone to talk to?” I asked.
    “Let me be lonely, Moth,” she answered. “You don’t need to learn more words for sorrow.”
    As the woman moved to close the door, I stepped forward to stop her. “Please,” I said, quickly pointing to Mama’s fortunetelling sign still sitting in the window. “Do you know where she is?”
    “Gypsy of Chrystie Street,” the woman said, nodding as if she’d understood.
    I could hear the wheels of Nestor’s cart behind me in the street. He whistled to the horse to pick up her pace, and drove on. I hoped he could see that I wasn’t in the clear and that he’d choose to keep circling for a bit longer.
    “The Gyspy is my mother,” I said to the woman. “Where has she gone?”
    The woman shook her head and frowned.