How The West Was Done (Patreon)

Sofia Vergara had opened up her own little whorehouse in the spring of 1871, setting up business in a two-story frame house that an overly ambitious settler had intended for himself and the seven children he meant to have. When the woman he meant to have them with had turned down his proposal, Sofia had gotten the place for a song.

It wasn’t just the price that appealed to her. With the building between the livery and the saloon, she’d hoped to get cowboys coming and going. Either after they’d dropped off their horses but before they set down to drinking, or just a quick fuck after they were done with painting their tonsils and before they took off on their horses.

It proved a sound investment, as Sofia’s investments often did. A tall, more-than-buxom brunette in her mid-thirties, happy to be discounted for her looks so long as it meant men didn’t count on her quick wits, she’d learned early in life to consider everything when it came to business.

Though she’d come from a wealthy family of Spanish landowners, Sofia’s business acumen didn’t come from parenting. Her father had taken an all-too-keen interest in her developing body and at the not-so-innocent age of fourteen, Sofia left home to work as a prostitute. Figuring with the wisdom of an old soul that if she were going to be fucked, she’d prefer to be paid for it.

Margaret Flanagan had plucked her off the streets of Chicago and embellished that homespun wisdom: if you were going to be fucked and you were going to get paid, then you might as well command top dollar. It was easier to get paid than to get off when you were choosing men on their pocket books.

Auntie Peg, as she liked her stable to call her, had a twofold understanding of men. She knew how they liked ladies to act and she knew how they liked whores to act—she taught her girls one so that they knew how to better deliver the other.

Sofia learned quick. More than that, she learned to learn, educating herself on humanity by the unrefined examples of it that patronized the establishment. The insights she gleamed were uncharitable, but it was hard to say they were inaccurate.

“Give a little gasps, roll your eyes up a little, and be sure to jiggle your bottom… you’ll be surprised how that makes next to nothing of the hour they’ve paid for,” Auntie Peg told her, early on in the curriculum. “Then you just cuddle them and make sympathetic sounds and tell them how good they were at it. You’ll lull them right to sleep and once you do, you’re free to divert yourself however you wish until they wake up. You can even bring yourself off, if you like.”

“If only there was a way they could do that,” Sofia added, drawing a wheezing laugh from her instructor. “Then I’d get paid coming and going.”

On her own, Sofia acquired a rough knowledge of letters and numbers, lessons she practiced in the intervals when her clients had come but not yet gone. A young banker had been easy to ply into teaching her more about sums, when they weren’t buggering, and within two years Sofia had become more Auntie Peg’s business manager than her business.

Once Sofia was confident in her grasp of accounts, she started making the numbers dance for her like a lion tamer with a whip. Always eager to skim off the top for her own benefit. Since Auntie Peg considered Sofia’s payment to still be receiving room and board while not having to prostitute herself, Sofia saw it as negotiating wages. Auntie Peg never made a counteroffer, so Sofia considered that she found Sofia’s demands reasonable.

Sofia never cheated her ‘aunt’ as much as she could. Part of it was being fearful of Auntie Peg’s wrath, part of it was simple fairness. It wouldn’t do to reward Peg’s kindness, self-motivated as it was, with complete skullduggery. But she knew she increased Peg’s profits and most of that excess she rewarded herself with while keeping the operation steaming along, week after week.

Wages, tips, and her own skimming finally added up to enough for her to set out in 1860 and start her first brothel, servicing lumbermen come down the river. When the little settlement became prosperous enough for wives, sisters, and mothers to move in, she left with six thousand dollars and a dozen loyal whores who she could trust to not be foolish. Or at least never to escalate their foolishness to the point where she couldn’t handle it.

Now, once more on the frontier, she was raking in money and looking forward to the time when town life would once again be too civilized for her business of rough men and base impulses. Sofia did not intend to keep being chased away by decent citizens until she was driven into the sea.

She’d found that while having a lot of money didn’t make you respectable, it was something you could buy. And she’d found the perfect broker.

***

“Evening, Moses,” Thorne said to the burly negro who answered his knock.

“Evening,” Moses rumbled back, with a voice that sounded like it came from the bottom of a well. And with his height being what it was, he had room for a well. He’d paid handsomely for his wardrobe: brushed cotton trousers, dress shirt with a high stand collar, even a silk puff tie, but on a frame so large, it was all like putting window boxes on a barnhouse.

“Captain Thorne,” he added belatedly, knowing he should add a note of familiarity to repeat customers.

“I’m here to see Madame Vergara.”

Moses didn’t move aside. Looking over Thorne, he could see the man was dressed roughly, in riding clothes, which were a cut below the usual clientele. Sofia was established enough to impose a dress code on her clients. They were expected to be bathed, shaved, and cleanly attired before they saw her girls—Sofia of course received a dividend from the bathhouse, the barber, and the laundress.

But then Moses’s memory… largely given over to recalling troublemakers Sofia did not want him to let in… made its way to Thorne specifically and how he was not the usual customer. He was more like the doctor who came by to examine the girls.

He stepped aside and held the door open, remembering what Sofia had bid him do. “I will let Madame Vergara know you’ve arrived. You may wait in the parlor.”

Thorne shook off his trail-dust on the hooked rug that was usually just for muddy boots. Then he made his way to the rear parlor. There was only so much Sofia could do with a room that’d been meant for a residence, not a place of business, but she’d done it. The snug room was furnished with couches, armchairs, and a glowing stove. Thorne hooked his hat and frock coat on a hall tree, then went to an armchair.

A brawny negress, big enough to cloth Moses if he ever wished to cross-dress, served Thorne from a bowl of hot rum punch. He toasted her before drinking, then leaned his chair back. He was in a good place to see the entire room, from the wallpaper to the hanging chandelier to the floor, with not a speck of sawdust, which Sofia prided herself on. The upright piano was twinkling away and rot-gut was being served at the zinc-topped bar to a party of buffalo skinners, who looked absurdly uncomfortable with their skin pinkly scrubbed and their beards trimmed down to something like a European king in a storybook.

“It’s civilization, boys,” Thorne muttered to himself, before washing the words down with a sip. “You’re just going to have to get used to it.

Thorne recognized one of the bouncers, Grimes, but he didn’t recognize the girl he led through the door. She bore an almost absurd family resemblance to Sofia, except younger, all but a schoolgirl. What she lacked in Sofia’s air of experience, the suggestion of a keenly honed love for the sex act, she made up for in freshness. She was a vision in virginal white and her tight-fitting, high-necked dress only made her more attractive.

Did Sofia have a daughter she’d somehow sent off to grow up in some European court? He wouldn’t put it past the woman… only he doubted she’d be the kind to get herself knocked up. But then, you never knew. She was a mestizo and there weren’t many only children to be found in that tribe.

Thorne craned his neck to stare after the girl as she went by, getting an ache down low for his trouble. Her rump might not be as wonderfully… expansive as womanhood had made Sofia’s, but it was no less well-formed for how little it was. Relatively speaking.

Thorne grinned to himself. Relatively speaking.