First Blush: A Meegs Miscellany (A Harry Reese Mystery)

by Robert Bruce Stewart

  Still gagged, and my wrists held tightly, I was poked, and patted, like a chicken at market. The man inspecting me was of immense physique, dressed in colorful silks and with a scimitar hanging from the sash that girded him. Then my gag was removed. I made to scream out, but with powerful hands he held my jaw open wide, then peered in, as if trying to judge the age of a nag. And if that weren’t enough, he went on to carefully examine each of my other orifices—as if expecting to find some hidden treasure.

  When he completed his tour, he handed Mr. Kootonga a purse, easily triple the size of that which Mr. C__ had received. Though my soul was in anguish, I took some satisfaction in the fact my betrayer had made such a poor bargain. Then Mr. Kootonga and his companion left me with the silk-robed giant. He went to the door and clapped his hands loudly. In an instant, a half dozen young women came into the room. He gave them instructions and left as they bowed in obedience.

  For the first time since my arrival in this strange land, I was treated with gentleness. They petted me, and cooed sympathetically, then led me to a room with a large marble pool. First, they carefully washed off the filth and repugnant odors I’d accumulated during my travails, and only then brought me to the warm, perfumed waters of the pool. No bath has ever provided as much comfort as that. They let me bask in it as long as I wished, then dried me, and finally dressed me in clothes like their own—undergarments of the softest silk one can imagine, and a loose-fitting blouse and matching, billowing trousers.

  Then they led me to a large room filled with couches and pillows, and a good many more similarly clad women. At the doorways large, silent men stood sentinel. We sat down and shared a sumptuous feast, the like of which I’d never experienced. All sorts of pastries, some sweet, some filled with spiced meat, eggs of some unknown species, and fruits of odd, suggestive shapes.

  All of my companions spoke in languages I did not recognize. And though they came in many races, several looked of European ancestry. I tried speaking to them in French, German and Italian. They didn’t understand—even when I tried Latin and Greek. Then, at last, a beautiful young woman with flowing black hair and an ivory complexion entered the room. She approached me and, to my relief, spoke to me in English, of the Irish variety.

  When I told her my woeful tale, she smiled.

  “Oh, you must have been sold to Bukhayt, the chief eunuch. I wonder what he paid for you?”

  “Yes, an interesting question. But setting aside the pecuniary considerations, how do I find my way out of here?”

  “I don’t think anyone ever has.”

  “Were you brought here under similar circumstances?” I asked her.

  “No, not very similar.”

  She told me a most fantastic tale. She’d come to the East with missionaries but became separated from her group as they passed through the Khyber Pass and found herself the captive of a native chieftain. From there, she changed hands several times, until eventually landing in her current domicile.

  “But where are we, exactly?” I asked.

  “Don’t you know? We are the harem of the Great King of the White Elephant.”

  She said this as if she were quite proud of the achievement.

  “You mean, this king has his way with each and every one of you?”

  “Well, just as many of us have our way with him. He’s actually quite young, and the handsomest man I’ve ever met.”

  “But don’t you long for your freedom? To return to the work of a missionary?”

  “Oh god, no. Do you know what it’s like living with those people? And the food….”

  “But why did you sign on with them in the first place?”

  “To get out of Limerick, of course. I always planned to abandon the work when we reached the East. That kidnapping was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  I was not of the same mind as my new friend. But later that night, when I was summoned to the King’s chamber, I found she had not exaggerated his exquisite beauty. He told me he found me irresistible, but I imagine it was my novelty that attracted him most. It would have been quite easy for me to succumb to his charms, but I was determined to escape with my virtue more or less intact. A diversion was necessary, and the only one that came to mind was that tired old chestnut women in harems had been using since time immemorial: I would do as Scheherazade.

  I used as my text the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, or at least the bits of it I remembered. Only I bent the tale to fit my needs. In my version Fotis holds her virginity more dear, and it is in order to fend off the advances of her aggressive suitor that she changes him into a donkey. I implied I was privy to the secrets of her sorcery, hoping this would instill a certain caution in my own would-be lover. I continued the tales for six nights running, but I knew the King was losing patience. He pointed out that the fifth tale was nearly identical to the second, and the sixth made no sense at all. The next night, he told me, he’d have me gagged! I was filled with worry the following morning. I knew that I must either escape the palace—or become expert at pantomime—by nightfall. What was I to do?

  To be continued…

  Envoi

  A young woman got married at Chester,

  Her mother she kissed and she blessed her.

  Says she, “You’re in luck,

  He’s a stunning good [fellow],

  For I’ve [met] him myself down in Leicester.”

  Ed. note: Certain obscure words of Saxon origin were improved upon for the sake of clarity.

  ~~~ The End ~~~

  Babes at Sea

  by

  M.E. Meegs

  Book #1 of the Byblos Foretold Novaplex

  1

  The muffled clatter of rain on slate infused the grubby attic room of the grubby inn with a palpable gloom, while the relentless drip caught by a cracked chamber pot provided an unnecessary reminder of the wretchedness of her state… plic… plic… plic….

  For five days, Mrs. Biddle had waited for word. For five days, tension waxed as food and money waned—just as it had throughout the long, wet French spring… plic… plic… plic….

  Eight months on the Pas-de-Calais, the last three in another leaking attic room, where for the first time in her life Mrs. Biddle had been compelled to accept charity. And that she resented most of all. Resented the fact of it, if not the cause. Now, in this last week of May, she had come to Cherbourg on a vague promise from a dubious man. And for five days and nights, she waited… plic… plic… plic….

  Her mood, never one that could be judged sunny, had turned as foul as the weather. Still, as she sponged herself before the few remaining shards of a shattered mirror, Mrs. Biddle took solace in the resplendent, if intermittent, view. She had recovered nicely from her long infirmity. And what was privation to a woman who fed on adversity as lesser women feed on pastry? Tension for her was simply the unavoidable precursor to action. In this she resembled nothing so much as a coiled spring. A rather good-looking coiled spring, to be sure. Few others sported so statuesque a figure, so clear a complexion, or so blonde and lush a mane. As frequently happened, Mrs. Biddle was cheered by her own superiority. But, speaking honestly, she couldn’t deny she was a coiled spring in dire need of a good bath.

  She had just finished dressing when there was a knock.

  “Un message, madame.”

  Mrs. Biddle opened the door and took a handwritten note from a boy in an ill-fitting uniform. As she read, he waited. She looked down at him in disgust.

  “Va-t’en!” she shouted.

  He made a face, then spat back over his shoulder, “Gadoue!”

  It was with the slamming of the door that the fruit of Mrs. Biddle’s recent infirmity announced herself from her makeshift cradle—a small drawer suspended by cord from the peak of a dormer. Her mother picked her up and brought her to the bed. Then hoped against hope that the well had not yet run dry. For like her mother, Eugenia was not one to give up easily.

  The name—meaning as it does well-born—was chosen as testamen
t to Mrs. Biddle’s own opinion of herself. How could her daughter be otherwise? She did, of course, resent the encumbrance on a life which had been kept scrupulously free of encumbrances. Not even marriage was allowed to impinge upon Mrs. Biddle’s devotion to self. But here, at her breast, was an extension of that self, and even if she loved the child only half so much as she loved herself—a daughter’s chromosomal entitlement—it would still be far more than any self-abnegating genetrix could muster.

  “Bonjour, little sister!”

  A petite girl—no older than seventeen, but last called ingénue at twelve—entered the room bearing a baguette and two pots. She set these on the table, then pulled an orange from one pocket of her jacket and a parcel of soft cheese from the other.

  “Where did you spend the night?” Mrs. Biddle asked bitterly.

  “Making sure baby sister has some breakfast beside the milk of a witch,” the girl answered in a thick French accent, but nearly correct grammar.

  After throwing off her jacket, she tied her russet hair into a loose knot, then pried the baby from her mother—the latter making no protest. She sat down at the table and dunked a finger in the pot of milky chocolate, then let the baby curled in her arm suckle it. Mrs. Biddle rose and rebuttoned her blouse before the broken mirror.

  “This is for you to eat,” the girl said, nodding toward the food but not looking upon the woman at the mirror. “I’ve well eaten.”

  “Your belly full, is it? Have a care, girl, or soon you’ll find yourself with your own little sister. Or the pox.”

  “That makes nothing to me,” the girl told her as she waved the small bottle of holy water she wore on a string about her neck and depended on as spiritual prophylactic.

  “Simple peasant. You think that protection enough when you spend the night passing yourself about?”

  “I do not pass myself about!” the girl shouted back indignantly. Realizing her tone had unsettled Eugenia, she softened it. “I was with a… éminent man, the husband of the mistress of the mayor.”

  “He told you the mayor beds his wife?”

  “Yes. And why not? It is a… honneur?”

  “Honor. So, I have the mayor’s cuckold to thank for my breakfast?” Her pride temporarily subdued by the aroma of cheese and coffee, Mrs. Biddle took a place at the table.

  “No. This is for baby sister—you are the cow it must go through first.”

  “Then I suppose I must eat my grass.”

  “And say meuh!” the girl added for the benefit of her little sister.

  “I’m an American cow,” Mrs. Biddle corrected. Then, in a display that would have shocked any who knew her in the prenatal past, she gave her child a spirited “moo-oo!”

  “So the cows talk different also?” the girl asked.

  “Yes, and the roosters.”

  “No cocorico?”

  “Cockadoodledoo!”

  While her elders went through their bilingual bestiary, Eugenia, quite reasonably, looked on in stupefaction. Barely three weeks out of the womb, she had not yet learned an infant must pay for her keep by lavishing signs of amusement on her caretakers whenever they chose to degrade themselves. She was grateful for the chocolate her benefactress had provided, but surely she had adequately expressed her appreciation by not immediately regurgitating it upon the girl’s blouse.

  In truth, the girl—Mélisande, she called herself—was not even ten years younger than her “little sister’s” mother. Though her exact role was a matter of continuous debate, she was an adjunct acquired during the previous winter. She had arrived in Étaples sometime before Christmas and Mrs. Biddle had made occasional use of her as factotum, with the girl wanting no payment beyond lessons in English. It was, she claimed, with that objective that she had come to the colony of Anglophones on the Pas-de-Calais.

  When the money ran low and Mrs. Biddle economized by moving to the hostel’s attic, the artful girl attended her more frequently—like the others at Étaples, she was convinced that sooner or later the proud woman would wire home for passage. For her own part, Mrs. Biddle knew full well the girl was merely ingratiating herself in the hope of securing a berth on the inevitable return voyage to New York. And Mélisande knew that Mrs. Biddle knew.

  When spring arrived and the pregnancy proved difficult, Mélisande took on the duties of nurse, and her self-serving motives were mildly diluted with something resembling compassion. But the birth of Eugenia changed everything. Mrs. Biddle was completely dependent on the girl for two weeks, by the end of which Mélisande’s devotion to her “little sister” had become fact.

  As a nearby bell struck one, the insufferably precious game ended when neither patron nor retainer could remember the call of a rhinoceros. Her dignified demeanor restored, Mrs. Biddle rose from the table and announced they would be sailing that evening.

  Mélisande was ecstatic. Six months of attending this contumelious shrew had worn thin even her good humor. Now, at last, she was sailing to New York. And not as an ignorant provincial likely to end up the exotic in some tenderloin house of sport. She had used her time in Étaples wisely, mingling freely with the expatriate poets and artists—in some cases quite freely—and would arrive in New York thoroughly fly.

  “I must go off to make arrangements,” Mrs. Biddle told her. “You’ll need to start packing. We catch a boat from the Gare Maritime at five.”

  On picking up her jacket, Mrs. Biddle displaced that of the girl. The gold fob of a watch peeked out from a pocket. With a subtle grace born of careful breeding, Mrs. Biddle palmed the watch and slid it into her bag.

  Down below, she negotiated her way through the damp, narrow lane, past the broken glass, half-eaten fruit, and filthy progeny of the slum, trying in vain to ignore the over-powering stench of urine. When an inebriated sailor slouching in a doorway made a suggestion she thought demeaning, Mrs. Biddle spat on him without turning her head. Though few would guess it to look at her—especially those unacquainted with her expectorial marksmanship—Mrs. Biddle was no stranger to her milieu. Her first memories were of a street indistinguishable from this in all its essentials, if not its particulars. The drunken sailor, for instance, who now stumbled from his haunt and challenged her with insulting gibes, would have been wearing the uniform of the U.S. Navy rather than that of the French. But if the menace was universal, the methodology employed in confronting it was quite personal. Mrs. Biddle lowered her arm and shook her sleeve. A straight razor fell into her palm.

  Today, however, there would be no need for threatening gestures. Just ahead a sergeant of police turned onto the block, followed by two gendarmes. As they passed, Mrs. Biddle acknowledged the sergeant’s suggestive smile with a stern look of reproach. When the sailor made a complaint against her, the already annoyed policeman shoved him to the street without slackening his pace.

  II

  Ten minutes later, Mrs. Biddle was in the lobby of the Hôtel de l’Aigle. But it was five minutes more before the other made his appearance. She knew that no matter what time she arrived, he would materialize some minutes later. He was a man of petty habits. The type of man who would hide himself in a corner of a hotel lobby behind a newspaper he couldn’t read.

  “I’m sorry I’m late, my dear,” the man currently calling himself Dowling proffered.

  Mrs. Biddle said nothing, simply smiled contemptuously at the copy of Le Figaro he’d placed on a table. There was no need for her to embarrass him further by inquiring in her perfect French what he’d gleaned from his reading. He averted his gaze, needlessly patting his thin grey hair. Mrs. Biddle had drawn first blood.

  “Why no word for five days?” she demanded.

  “There was no word to send, my dear. When he didn’t board the Deutschland, it became a game of wait and see. It was only this morning I heard he’d be sailing on the Kronprinz Wilhelm. They should have left Southampton an hour ago.”

  “And who is ‘he’?”

  “‘He’ is the perfect dupe, a jay-town rube as wealthy as Midas.
Name’s Dexter. Timothy Dexter. He’s on his way home. With Archie Cobb as his valet. Do you remember Archie?”

  “A bald Englishman? Favored the drop game?”

  “Yes, but he has other talents,” Dowling assured her.

  “And he’s the one who spotted this Dexter?”

  “That was another Englishman, a friend of Archie’s. This fellow had some elaborate game going that went off the track. When it was over, all he had to show for it was the rusting hulk of a steamer stuck in the mud near the mouth of the Thames. Not only was it worthless, he’d been enjoined to have it towed off. Well, he meets this Dexter while loitering about the Métropole, sees he’s an easy mark, and by the next morning he’s sold him the wreck for ten thousand dollars, cash.”

  “How much more does he have?”

  “From what he’s heard, Archie thinks there must be fifty thousand more.”

  “And my share?”

  “A full twenty percent.”

  “And you and Cobb? Forty each?”

  “He’s put a lot of work into this, and I’ve put up quite a bit of capital. Securing cabins at the last minute doesn’t come cheap. It’s only fair.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Well, it will have to come from mine… but I guess I can’t deny you that,” Dowling acquiesced, then added with affected beneficence, “I always was soft on you.”

  A slight, upward curl appeared on Mrs. Biddle’s upper lip. Those of her acquaintances familiar with it took it as a signal to seek safer quarters. Dowling examined the crease of his trousers.

  But Mrs. Biddle knew she had lost the round. His ready compliance meant that he’d probably offered Cobb a twenty percent share, saying she was getting forty. Then agreed to raise Cobb’s portion to twenty-five out of feigned friendship. Now the old man would be taking a full half for himself. It wasn’t the first time she had allowed him to cheat her. But she swore it would be the last.