She laughed. ‘You don’t need a hammer and nails to prove that, my darling.’
‘Not to you,’ he said, digging her in the ribs. ‘But to myself.’
‘You seem obsessed with proving yourself just now,’ she observed. ‘It’s OK to take things slowly. You don’t have to do everything at once.’
He leant back against the wall, exhaling into the clammy air.
‘If not now, then when?’ he said, turning his eyes to her. ‘I’ve dossed about for too long. Feel like I need to make up for lost time. And there’s so much to prove. Prove I’m an artist, prove I’m a decent bloke, prove I’m a man.’
Jenna laughed. ‘Who doesn’t think you’re a man? It seems pretty clear to me.’
‘To you, babe,’ he said, reaching out to tickle the back of her damp neck. ‘In the bedroom, yeah. But I mean outside the bedroom. In the other places where it counts. In the house, in the street, at the bank.’
‘Ah, money again. It will come,’ she said seriously. ‘It might take its time at first, but it will. In the meantime, if you like, you can consider everything I pay for as a loan. I know you’ll pay it back. I believe in you.’
‘Yeah, you do, don’t you? Weird.’
‘Not weird.’ She laid her head on his shoulder. ‘Perhaps if I do it hard enough, you’ll start to believe in yourself.’
Chapter Ten
LATER ON, IN the bedroom at the hotel, the diary came out again.
The air conditioning was switched to blissfully cool and they lay in a post-shower sprawl, Jenna in a silk robe and Jason in boxers, appreciating each other’s scented skin.
‘Tell you what, we haven’t read about the wedding night yet,’ Jason prompted. ‘I want to know if Harville’s a dirty perv. I bet he is.’
‘I don’t know why you’re so insistent a middle-class Victorian lady is going to want to write porn,’ said Jenna, tutting.
But she took the book from the bedside drawer and turned to where they had left off – the morning of the wedding.
March 11th
I write these lines as Lady Harville. My name has changed, but that is not all. So much has changed, in the time it took for our hands and hearts to be joined for all time, that I can scarcely catalogue it.
I have risen in station to a place of elevation I never dreamed I could occupy. A humble governess, the daughter of a failed businessman, I now prepare to conduct the rest of my life as a lady of quality. The penniless girl may now order whatever she desires without second thought. I have leapt from mutton pudding to veal à la Béarnaise; from calico to silk. I may not feel it yet, but in name and in fortune, I am now an aristocrat.
I have changed also, from single young woman to wife, and what a momentous change that is. I have been accustomed to pleasing only myself, but now I must please another, and put his wishes at the forefront of my awareness. It will not be easy to make this alteration in my very heart, but I am sure I will strive to do my duty and make my husband the happiest man I can.
Another change, and one of which I am apprehensive, is my transit from governess to mother. How will I ever replace the parent those girls remember so fondly and so sadly? I fear they will never take me into their hearts and I will remain always outside their sphere of confidence, branded an outsider and hated for it. I have pledged, all the same, most solemnly, to do my best for Maria and Susannah, in hopes that the day will come when we might be dear friends.
Another delicate distinction is that between servant and served. The staff still look upon me coldly but they must know that to do so for much longer will result in their being replaced – for I will not hesitate to insist that they seek another place, if they cannot treat their mistress with the respect she deserves.
Finally, another change, a most private one, and one I blush to mention. But I intend to be fearlessly honest here in my diary, and so I must not gloss over it.
‘Now we’re getting to the good bit,’ said Jason, putting his chin on Jenna’s shoulder to better view the book’s contents.
‘Anyone’d think you were sex-starved,’ said Jenna dryly. ‘Which we both know not to be the case.’
‘Yeah, but it’s interesting in all this oldy-worldy language. I want to know how she describes it. I bet she cops out and says something sketchy like “it was like opening up to the sun”, or something. Girls can never call a spade a spade.’
‘Don’t be sexist. Anyway, let’s see, shall we?’
I awake a new person, a woman experienced in the duties of marriage. When I came into this bed, I was a mere girl, trembling in ignorance of what awaited me. I had heard that, to get a child, a husband must ‘couple with’ his wife in some way, but I had no fixed idea of what such coupling might entail.
Now I know it, and what knowledge! David came to me, his eyes burning with a strange light that made me shiver. He would not let me keep on the beautiful nightdress from Paris I had made especially for my trousseau. Instead, he made plain that he wished to see me unclothed and unadorned. I nearly burned up with the shame of it, for none has seen me naked since I was a small child, and I had hoped to evade any such embarrassing necessity. But my mother had advised me to follow his lead in all respects – the only advice she gave – and so I clung to this tenet as if it would save my life. After all, he had been married before and knew what he was about.
He sat down in a chair across the room and made me stand before him and remove my nightgown there. I wanted to cross my arms, to cover myself, but he told me, quite calmly and gently, that this would not be permitted.
He told me I was beautiful, that such a beautiful body should never be covered, but exhibited in its glory, for the delight of he who possessed it.
This was a strange thought, to think of my own flesh and skin as belonging to another. Yet it is how my Lord is pleased to view our union, and I suppose all men are so. He told me I must cease thinking of my body as my own and clothe and adorn it always to his taste, in the full knowledge that he would only look at me with the thought of removing all such clothing and adornment in the bedchamber.
‘He seems a bit intense,’ commented Jenna.
‘Knew it. What did I tell you? Raging pervert.’
Jason nodded sagely.
‘It’s so weird,’ continued Jenna, ‘to think that most girls from what would be called good families had absolutely no clue about sex. I can’t imagine growing up like that.’
‘The boys all worked it out from what they got up to at those public schools, I bet,’ said Jason.
‘You could be right. I hope none of them took quite the same approach with their brides, though . . . Ouch.’
‘Reminds me,’ drawled Jason into her ear, ‘I’ve got plans for your arse, woman.’
‘Not tonight you haven’t,’ said Jenna primly.
‘How about the night of the exhibition? Since you’re going to make me work for that . . . you can have a little something of your own to work towards. I think that’s fair.’
‘We’ll see,’ said Jenna, biting the inside of her cheek.
‘Not “we’ll see”. The answer I’m looking for is “Yes, sir, if that’s what you want, sir.” Come on, then. Say it.’
He held both Jenna’s elbows in a tight grip, waiting for her words.
‘“Yes, sir, if that’s what you want, sir,”’ she parroted sulkily. ‘Now can we get on with this? It looks as if you’re right and she really is going to treat us to a bit of Victorian erotica. So have some manners and listen.’
Jason loosened his grip, satisfied with her answer.
‘Go on then.’
For me, who has been accustomed to view a body as a treacherous, weak thing – a wicked vessel for the more noble element of the soul – it was so unaccountable to hear such words that I scarcely knew where to look.
Luckily, my husband had some suggestions on that score. He urged me to look at myself in the pier glass.
I was reluctant to do so, for I have never allowed my gaze to linger over my n
akedness, but I had no recourse but to obey. I listened as he spoke in lustful, sometimes crude, terms of what he and I both saw. He ordered me to hold and touch those parts of myself I dare not name, let alone repeat the strange names he had for them. He saw that I was on the verge of shameful tears, and told me that this was a gift to me and that I must put away all my silly girlish ideas about modesty and propriety and accept that a wife’s role is to be wanton in the bedchamber, and to accept the pleasure her husband seeks to give. Thus it is useless to be coy about the body. He would teach me to enjoy myself, to bring my buried needs and desires to the surface and indulge each one of them.
I told him I would do my duty, and he laughed, loud and long.
‘Duty will be the least of it,’ he said. ‘Now bring yourself to me.’
I stood at his feet and he stood also, exploring all that I had with his fingers. If I protested, or made any sound at all, he sealed my mouth with a kiss. Such a kiss – he put his tongue between my lips. It felt so immoral, so disgusting – and yet, I hate to recall, I found it pleasurable in some deep way I cannot bring myself to examine.
Even when he probed between my legs, the kiss was enough to lighten my head and let everything pass. Everything was permitted to him. I had only to open myself.
He told me this, several times, in a low whisper, before laying me on the bed.
I watched, my eyes half-open, for I feared his wrath if he closed them, while he undressed himself beside the bed. What a time it took. He had so many different things to remove. Cufflinks, cuffs, tie pin, neckcloth . . . The list went on. With each act of divestiture, I saw a little more of him.
Everything I saw was impressive, from his strong wrists to his broad shoulders. When the neck of his shirt fell open, I wanted to gasp at the delicious sight of his unwrapped throat and the glimpse of a chest that seemed to have dark hairs upon it. I had not realised men’s chests could have hair upon them. I have only seen the pale little chests of the boys in the streets of Nottingham in summer as they play under the pump.
His shirt and undershirt removed, I saw a great many more of these dark wiry curls, descending low to his middle and then moving downwards, more downy and soft now, from his navel. How powerful he seemed without his clothes – more so than with them, though in a different way. The man of property in his swallow tail coat and silk top hat was become the elemental man, the essence of masculinity.
But I did shut my eyes when he came to remove his lower garments.
He did not chide me for doing so, but he noticed, and his chuckle was low and amused.
‘What, do you think if you shut your eyes you will be safe from what I have here?’ he said. ‘Indeed you will not. You might as well open them, and know what peril it is you face, rather than be left to your imaginings. No doubt they are lurid enough. Come, Frances. What do you fear?’
‘It is not fear,’ I told him. ‘It is . . . I cannot say. I do not wish to look upon it.’
I felt him kneel upon the bed beside me, the mattress weighted to one side.
‘You will do more than look upon it,’ he said, more roughly. He took hold of my chin with a finger and thumb, pressing them into my jawbone. ‘You will find much of your married life subject to its whims. Look upon it, Frances. Look upon your master.’
Jason laughed.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘The man’s off his head.’
‘So, you wouldn’t say that kind of thing?’ said Jenna slyly.
‘It’s different if I say that kind of stuff. I know you’re up for it. This poor cow hasn’t got a clue.’
‘He could be a bit more sensitive,’ Jenna agreed. ‘But then, that’s Victorians for you, probably.’
‘Harvilles, more like.’
‘Yeah, that wouldn’t surprise me. Harvilles.’
Jenna sighed, thinking of her own narrow escape with a scion of that ilk.
‘I don’t know if I dare read on,’ she said.
‘I’ll do it,’ Jason offered. ‘I’ve got used to that curly writing now.’
‘Oh, go on then. But don’t laugh in the middle of a sentence. Poor Frances. She deserves a bit of sympathy.’
‘No, I’m with you there. She does. OK then.’ Jason cleared his throat and read on.
‘I opened my eyes, but what I saw was not what I had pictured. Nothing like the small appendage sported by Michelangelo’s David. This was a longer, thicker thing, curving upwards like a hunting horn . . .’
‘You promised you wouldn’t laugh,’ Jenna reproached.
‘No, but “hunting horn”! I wonder if she wanted to blow it.’
‘Don’t be horrible.’
‘Sorry. I’ll try to control myself, OK?’
It was certainly almost twice the length of my hand, and it looked primitive and fierce, rising from its nest of downy dark hair as it did. I could look at it for only a second or so before lifting my eyes to his.
They glowed with satisfaction. His smile was wide and bright.
‘Touch it, Frances,’ he said. ‘Put your fingers around it and feel its spirit.’
Its spirit, if such it possessed, was warm, firm, and yet also soft. In my hand, it felt like something I could bend, but I did not dare try.
My husband was satisfied with my quick obedience. He rewarded me with kisses, and not just upon my face. His mouth roamed the length and breadth of my body, his breath hot and fast and broken by growls at times. He was like a wolf, come to feast upon its prey. I should never have imagined him so, from his behaviour in the drawing room. Are all men thus? I suppose I shall never know.
He left no part of me untouched by hand or mouth, even when I tried to shut my legs to his attentions. He would not have it, and made me lie in such an abandoned pose that I felt sinful in the extreme.
At length his wanderings seemed to come to their end, and he crouched above me, close enough for his hair to brush my skin.
‘You know what I must do?’ he breathed, and I shook my head. ‘The best I can do is show you. But be warned. There will be some pain, some blood.’
‘Some . . . blood?’
I felt a bolt of panic rise in my throat and I tried to push him off, but he held me in place, shaking his head.
‘No, Frances, no. You should have been told. Your mother?’
‘She said nothing of blood.’
‘It will be only very little. And it will not last long. The pain will soon ease and then all will be much easier.’
‘You are sure of this?’
He stroked my face.
‘I am quite sure. Hold tight to my shoulders. I will be as quick as I am able.’
Yes he was quick. And it did hurt. And there was blood. But none of these three things made the strongest impression on me. Much stronger, staying with me in my mind, was the sense of violation and of terrible degradation that I felt. Pain was nothing in comparison. Blood could be washed clean. But this feeling of having been burrowed into and invaded could not leave me.
It is not as a wife should feel, is it? I dare not confess it to David, for he will know that I am not what he expected when he married.
‘You look ill,’ he said, roughly, unsympathetically, when he had finished and released me.
‘Oh, I am not ill,’ I said, though my nether regions throbbed and I could feel the warm trickle of the blood upon my thigh.
‘Then what’s amiss? I’ll fetch a cloth.’
He went to the nightstand and returned with a damp flannel, with which he dabbed at my sticky skin.
‘Nothing is amiss,’ I said, but my voice was high and forced. My breathing was not natural – sometime during the indignity, my breath had become caught in my throat, and I could not seem to correct it.
‘You might try and look it, then,’ he groused. He saw something in my face and his next words were gentler. ‘I promise you, the worst is past. Now that this hurdle is crossed, you will find that pleasure is easier to achieve.’
‘Will I?’
I could not im
agine it. I lay down and shut my eyes, hoping he would think me asleep.
He lay back down beside me and made me open my eyes, pulling the lower lids down with his thumb on my cheek.
‘Do not pretend with me, Fan,’ he whispered. ‘I will not have pretence.’
‘I am tired.’
‘You try to hide from me. But I am not the regular kind of man, who is happy to stumble on blindly, ignoring the distance between him and his wife. I will not have distance, or hiding, or any of those things that make a marriage slowly die. I will have you, in all honesty, as naked spiritually as you are bodily. I will own you and you will rejoice in my ownership.’
He sounded like a preacher, but what was he preaching?
I did not want to be preached to.
Is it wrong of me to wish I could step backwards in time?
For all the fortune and wealth and position I have achieved, I cannot help thinking that something else has been lost – something I can never retrieve.
‘Oh, that poor girl,’ said Jenna as Jason shut the book.
‘What? It’ll probably get better. Or it probably would, if she hadn’t married him. Stupid decision in the first place, though, marrying a Harville.’
‘Yes, well, I think you’ll find all this predated the trouble at the pit,’ said Jenna.
‘The disaster had already happened, though,’ he pointed out. ‘She never mentioned that.’
‘It was thirty years earlier. She wasn’t local.’
‘I suppose.’ Jason lay back. ‘I do feel sorry for her. But then, your first time’s always shit, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. Was yours?’
Jason gave her a droll upwards look.
‘Do you really want to hear about that?’
‘Go on. How old were you?’
‘Not old enough. Still at school, just.’
‘I hope you were legal.’
He grimaced.
‘Can’t remember. Roughly. On the border.’
‘And was it with Mia?’ Jenna hesitated to bring up the name, but she thought there was no point brushing Jason’s past under the carpet, really. It was part of who he was, when it came down to it.
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