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Dennis O'Kelly, an Irish con man. After she was released she continued to work, and in 1761 a client lent her the capital to open her own brothel in Berwick Street. By the early 1770s, she was running a string of "Nunneries" around the St. James area of Piccadilly. She married Dennis in 1770 and, like many attempting to seem genteel, called herself only Mrs. Kelly. By 1784, under the names of Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Kelly, she had a monopoly on the sex trade in the St. James area, and newspapers and caricaturists acknowledged her as being at the top of her profession. Famed for gratifying every possible "caprice which Flesh is heir to" for men such as the Due d'Orléans and the Duke of Cumberland, youngest brother of the king, Kelly achieved success by matching her clients' peculiar desires to the skills of her staff.
The Town and Country Magazine dubbed Kelly's brothel "Santa Car-lotta's Nunnery" and advertised how it "administers absolution in the most desperate Cases." The joke about the link between brothels and nunneries was an old one, but by the 1780s, the name was a skit on the notion that the girls were virgins when they arrived (so their keepers claimed) and then kept virtual prisoners. Kelly's employees struggledunder the strict discipline. It was, as they discovered, impossible to leave until they became old and the madam sold them to a cheaper brothel, unless they were lucky enough to find a client who would buy them out.
Brothels like Madam Kelly's were renowned for providing music, dancing, and lots of glamorous girls in states of undress.
St. James was the center of high-class prostitution and its brothels became known as "Les Bordéis du Roi" (the royal brothels) after the riotous Prince of Wales, who was in the process of moving out of his parents' home, Buckingham House, and into his own residence, Carlton House, on Pall Mall. Only three years older than Emma, the prince spent wildly in anticipation of an income of around £100,000 per year after his twenty-first birthday, and Mrs. Kelly and the other madams of St. James were the beneficiaries. Within five years of living at Carlton House, he had run up debts of nearly £300,000. The prince's sprees turned an already fashionable area into a playground for the rich. In the daytime, families roamed the waist-high grass of St. James's Park, queued up to buy fresh milk from one of the cows, and vied for a sight of the elephant from the royal menagerie on its daily promenade. At night, men looked for cheap prostitutes in the park and expensive girls in the nearby houses. St. James was a man's world, and no respectable woman, even if she were accompanied by an army of male chaperones, would venture into the streets near the park. By the 1830s, there were more than 900 brothels and 850 similar smaller establishments crammed into the half square mile of St. James. Gold showered through their doors—one declared that the money that dissipated in the brothels in a single night would maintain the whole of the Netherlands for six months. Emma had taken up employment in the most expensive sex resort in the world.
Kelly was fifty-five and at the top of her profession. She had no mercy for anyone: madams in debt, girls desperate to be set free, and groveling men begging not to be exposed to their colleagues or wives. She charged her guests eye-popping prices for food, drink, and medicaments, and kept her staff hopelessly in her debt. As soon as a new girl arrived, Kelly took her clothes and loaned her expensive jewels, dresses, and a gold watch. A timepiece was the crucial sign of a Georgian courtesan, since genteel ladies never wore watches but courtesans had to time their clients. Kelly rented dresses and watches to her staff so that if one escaped (in her finery, for she had nothing else), she would issue a warrant for the girl's arrest for theft. Kelly took a large cut of her employees' earnings and billed them for bed, board, and laundry, as well as obliging them to
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