On the afternoon of May 9, eighty-five skirmishers of the Bengal 3rd Light Cavalry were subjected to an “ironing parade”: In front of their comrades, they were stripped of their uniforms, placed in shackles, and marched off to jail. On the next day the revolt began. According to an official report, the spark for the violence was the haranguing of the remainder of the regiment on the previous night by local prostitutes (so-called frail ones) of the sadr bazaar, who challenged the soldiers’ manhood for not defying the British and freeing their brothers in arms. This chapter examines how the gender-inversion taunts of the prostitutes became a staple of “Mutiny historiography” and gradually found its way into the immensely popular “Mutiny fiction” of Flora Annie Steel, only to ricochet back into modern historical scholarship. The chapter also considers an important, competing set of depositions by sadr bazaar “Cashmerians” (high-status concubine-prostitutes), collected by the police superintendent for the North-Western Provinces, indicating that news of an impending revolt was circulating mere hours before the onset of violence.