The Erotic Return of Ambrose Horne

by Chrissie Bentley

  Now it was Lady H_____’s turn to argue. ‘I would sound like a church-going fuddy-duddy were I to suggest a man show some self-control; and inexcusably old-fashioned were I to ask whatever happened to fidelity and respect within wedlock. But ...’

  She was not even allowed the opportunity to complete her thought. ‘But this is respect,’ Horne retaliated. ‘Let us assume our man does not wish to break the bonds of matrimony. Nevertheless, the urges within him are as powerful as the loyalty that bonds him. So what does he do? He forces ... perhaps not physically, maybe not even deliberately ... but he forces his wife to indulge him, so that she is now as miserable as he was. Which, in turn, makes him miserable. By taking the urge out of the house, to a mistress whose company he finds pleasurable enough, he takes it out of the marriage. Problem solved.’

  ‘The problem is not solved,’ said Lady H_____. ‘In fact, it is only exaggerated. Yes, I will grant that there are indeed instances where a partner, either husband or wife, will refuse their lover a certain pleasure, whether through squeamishness, distaste or fear. But the fundament of any relationship is that the other must respect their partner’s feelings.’

  ‘But who will respect his feelings?’ Horne asked. ‘The wife says “no”, and so the husband must forget all about it? That is no basis for any form of stable relationship.’

  ‘So perhaps they should compromise?’ Lady H_____ hesitated.

  ‘Exactly!’ Horne spoke triumphantly. ‘Compromise. Equality. Find an interim solution that, though it might not be wholly fulfilling for one, is not utterly distasteful for the other, and then take further steps until both parties are satisfied.’

  Lady H_____ raised one eyebrow quizzically. ‘Why do I get the distinct impression, Ambrose, that you are not necessarily speaking about the case in hand? That you have another matter entirely on your mind?’

  Horne snorted, and Lady H_____ smiled privately to herself. That sound, she knew, was as good an admission of guilt as she was ever likely to hear the detective utter. ‘The matters on my mind need not concern us, my dear. What does concern me is this preposterous woman and her absurd request. So I would be grateful if you would contact Mrs Blackstock, and politely inform her that I have been called out of the country on unavoidable business, and will therefore be unable to fulfil her commission.’

  ‘Your wish is my command,’ Lady H_____ smirked. Then, under her breath, she added ‘usually.’

  In fact, Mercy Blackstock had no evidence whatsoever of her husband’s infidelity, just an unsettling intuition that blossomed slowly into conviction, and which now haunted her waking thoughts and her sleeping dreams. Not that she was able to sleep in more than fitful increments. Rather, she simply lay motionless in bed, while Jermyn snored gently beside her, her mind running for the hundredth, the thousandth, the millionth time through the checklist that, as yet, she had been unable to check even once.

  There was no telltale hint of another woman’s perfume, no incriminating letters found stuffed in his pockets, no distant murmurings of discontent or disinterest. He was as attentive as he ever had been, both around the house and in the bedroom. And it was there, in the bedroom, where she first realised that something was wrong.

  He had loved her with his tongue, slipping slowly down from the neck where he knew she loved to be nuzzled, ranging warm, gentle kisses across her shoulders and breasts, pausing to tease his lips around her nipples, and then sliding lower. She had never known such ecstasy. In the past, their loving had been comforting, familiar ... predictable, if that were not such a condemnatory word. But this was something new.

  He had never kissed her below the breasts, and she had never dreamed that he might. The thought had never even entered her mind that the invisible line that existed between the top and bottom of the human body could ever be so blatantly crossed. But now his kisses were on her stomach, and moister now, so that his breath cooled each spot even as his warm lips left it. She closed her eyes, trying to empty her mind – not of what he was doing, for it was heavenly, but of what else she suddenly realised she hoped that he might do.

  With a guilty start, Mercy realised her hips were moving of their own volition, as though trying to drive themselves up into her abdomen, to hasten the arrival of his warm kisses ... where? There? She felt herself blushing furiously in the darkness, caught her breath in horror as she saw unfolding in her mind precisely what her body screamed out for. Her every nerve end was standing rigid, straining towards the lips that now dragged above the line of her pubic hair, the cheek that so cheekily brushed her bush.

  Then she felt Jermyn’s fingers at the garden gate ... she smiled at the childhood term that sprang unbidden to mind, then another hot blush swamped her cheeks, as that gate swung open on silken hinges, to admit not the firm fingers or hard penis that she had known and loved for the past eight years, but something soft, moist, yielding, yet firm and demanding, something that snaked through her folds and lapped at her pink; that flickered against the magical nub that always tingled when they loved, but which now was burning with an excitement that she had never known, never imagined.

  She yearned to tell him to stop, that such feelings could not be – she struggled for the correct word. Decent? Decorous? Right? She was a modern woman; she had long discarded the primitive superstition that the pleasures of the flesh were somehow sinful. If the good Lord had meant us to be ashamed of our bodies, He wouldn’t have given us them in the first place, one of her friends once said, and those words had lingered in Mercy’s mind longer than any Catechism.

  But there was pleasure and there was ... this, sensations for which there were no words, desires for which there were no precedents, emotions for which there were no boundaries. And when she came, bucking and squealing, with her hands clamping her husband’s face to her loins, and her hips grinding his features deep into her sex, it was as though every orgasm she had ever experienced in the past was but the curtain-raiser for this explosion of the senses.

  Jermyn came too. She’d sensed, more than seen, his body lying alongside hers as he worked his magic on her body; had registered, but not comprehended, the hand that moved rhythmically in his lap in time to his – and, swiftly, her – movements. She had never seen her husband masturbate before; did not even associate his movements with the abstract expression she had giggled over in the schoolyard. But then his flying sperm slapped against her breasts, a shock of hot that she struggled for a split second to identify, only for her body to make the connection first, and slam into a second, breathless climax, as though unwilling to allow him to experience such excitement alone.

  They lay together, exhausted, his juice pressed and spreading against her flesh as his chest melded with her abdomen. They did not speak, they could not move. They simply lay there, luxuriating in an afterglow that neither had known before.

  And then her mind started asking its questions.

  The Blackstocks preyed, too, on Horne’s subconscious, even as he dismissed them from his mind. He knew the couple vaguely, socially. They had always struck him as nondescript, uneventful people, suited to one another in the same way that salt and pepper shakers are suited to one another. The notion that the salt was now conducting a wild liaison with, say, a fish knife or a gravy boat seemed so absurd as to be beyond comprehension.

  He considered his own condition. Ruthlessly born to bachelorhood, he had nevertheless enjoyed a relationship with Lady H_____ that other societies would consider even stronger than wedlock. Certainly it existed beyond the constraints and conventions of her own marriage, to the ageing Lord who had given her his name, but who also presented her with her freedom as a wedding gift years before.

  But the easy acceptance with which they shared one another’s interests, both within and without the bedroom, had not come easily. He remembered, for example, the night when she proposed that she subject his body to the same penetrative forces as he subjected hers. Though his mind, ever alive to the multitudinous facets of human sexuality, accepted the s
uggestion with desire and curiosity, how he had to fight against his instinctive aversion to the acts ... only to discover, when he finally, tremulously, laid himself at her mercy, that providing her with such pleasure was itself intensely pleasurable.

  The roles were reversed. One night, he asked her to taste his orgasm. She refused – she had experimented once with a previous lover, and was disgusted by the experience. Horne accepted her refusal, but his unspoken disappointment was flavoured by bitter jealousy, that his most intimate, lifelong fantasy should be derailed by another, long-discarded, man’s fleeting reality.

  He wondered at the time if she even comprehended the wounding that her words had inflicted, and resolved never to mention it again. But then it happened, whether by cock-twitching accident or her own sweet design, a brief suck on his glans after he’d spent across her breasts, and he almost ejaculated again when he caught the flicker in her eyes that reassured him, ‘My discomfort lasts for moments. Your gratitude and pleasure are eternal.’ Now, he knew, she derived as much joy from the act as he did; had even witnessed her attain her own shuddering climax as she suckled enthusiastically at the triumph of his. Compromise, equality.

  He wondered what possible division could have arisen between the Blackstocks. Sleepless at his writing desk, his pen automatically flooding the notebook before him with the rows of squirting cocks, pointed breasts and plump buttocks that he doodled while his mind was at work, he struggled to bring the Blackstocks to mind. He failed. There simply was nothing about them that had lodged in his memory, nothing beyond their sheer, unrelenting normalcy.

  Had Jermyn Blackstock found another love? Somehow, Horne doubted that. Although his rational mind refused to put the sentiment in words, certain people are born to be together for ever, and the Blackstocks were numbered among that lucky few. Had he, then, taken another lover? Again, Horne struggled to comprehend that happenstance. What could Blackstock, mild-mannered government drone that he was, ever demand in the bedroom that would have fallen so far beyond his dear wife’s desires that he would rather shatter his world, than let go of his dream?

  Horne glanced at the regulator that hung above the mantel. A little after four in the morning – too early to commence any inquiries now; too late to think about retiring to bed. He thought of hailing a hansom and simply riding the streets, watching the greatest city in the world as she wiped the sleep from her eyes, and prepared to face another day. Too few people took pleasure from the sleeping city ... too few, that is, who could appreciate her, who loved the metropolis without her make-up on, still in her nightdress, with her hair unbrushed and her teeth uncleaned. To Horne, however, that was when London was at her most beautiful – and her most vulnerable. He rose and wrapped himself in his cloak. He would forego the cab. He would walk her silent streets, instead.

  For 40 minutes, his feet led the way; his mind simply obeyed their instincts. Horne stood in a neighbourhood he rarely frequented, but knew well enough. There, where the Kings Road doglegged around Eelbrook Common, was the house that he grew up in. To his left, the Stamford Brook gurgled its way west; he had played in it as a child, never dreaming that, within under 30 years, the developers would come to board the brook up, to build new homes and offices over its banks, and relegate the waters to a secret, underground existence. In a few years time, he wondered whether even the name would remain to remind its residents of the river that once teemed with life.

  He turned, however, to his right, towards the row of Georgian homes wherein the Blackstocks lived their lives. Number 41; it was there, on the corner. It was darkened, of course. Though the sun was beginning to rise, flashing brilliant red off the windows of the city, there would be little life on these streets for at least another hour. Horne would learn nothing here, beyond the unremarkable face of the home confirming the unremarkable nature of its occupants.

  He turned and, with the parade of houses still in view, took refuge in a tea room that was just opening for business. He did not have a concrete plan in his mind, just the knowledge that you can learn almost as much about somebody from their neighbours, as from their own lives. Assuming, that is, that there was anything to be learned.

  ‘Good morning, Mercy. Please come in.’ Lady H_____ ushered her friend into her spacious, but so comfortably furnished drawing room, and rang for the day maid. ‘We will take tea. And ... yes, a few slices of that delicious Battenburg that Mrs Snow prepared last night.’

  Mercy sat. ‘Were you able to speak to Mr Horne?’

  Lady H_____ nodded. ‘Yes, of course. And I can assure you that, if anybody can answer your questions, it will be Ambrose.’

  ‘Thank you so much. Tell me, did he say anything? Any initial ...’ she rummaged in her mind for the kind of terminology that the broadsheets used when discussing the adventures of the greatest detectives. ‘Initial deductions?’

  Lady H_____ laughed. ‘Dear Ambrose doesn’t exactly work like that. No, I think his only words on the subject were to call you a ‘damnable woman’, wasting his time with so much insignificant flim-flam.’

  Mercy looked appalled, and Lady H_____ hastened to reassure her. ‘Which means, he likes to believe, and would have others do likewise, that his entire life is spent fathoming out the most unfathomable riddles for various heads of state. He would never admit that he gathers far more satisfaction from the kind of puzzles that nobody else would even think of taking on. I can almost guarantee to you, dear Mercy, that, if he’s not standing around outside your house, watching to see who goes in or out, then he’s hiding across the road from mine, worrying over whether I’ve yet told you that he doesn’t want the case, and wondering what possible pretext he could employ to burst in and tell you that he’s changed his mind.’

  In fact, Horne himself was in neither place. Half an hour before Mercy Blackstock left the house on her mission, her husband Jermyn had departed on one of his own, never once suspecting that his meeting with the detective was anything but the happiest coincidence.

  Like Horne, Blackstock would never have claimed to know the detective as anything more than a casual acquaintance, despite their womenfolk’s closeness. Nevertheless, he believed that they had much in common, if only they could be given the opportunity to discuss it. And now, as they walked towards the underground halt at Sloane Square, for the District Line train that would rattle them into the city, perhaps they could.

  They spoke of trifles, Horne of his recent visit (if not the purposes thereof) to India, Blackstock of his work as an illustrator at one of the weekly news magazines. The two subjects were not as far adrift as a casual listener might have thought; one of Blackstock’s most recent commissions had been to illustrate the effects of the recent famine that swept across vast swathes of the dark continent, including areas that Horne himself had visited. The artist was gratified to learn that, although he had never set foot out of England himself, his pen had nevertheless conveyed a reality that Horne himself would have struggled to capture with photography.

  ‘But photography,’ Blackstock mourned, ‘is nevertheless the innovation that I fear the most, for one day I am certain that it will put me, and all like me, out of business.’

  Horne, who had predicted just such an end to the art of illustration long ago, solemnly agreed. ‘I’m afraid it is inevitable. Even if we accept the vast opportunities for chicanery that the photographic arts offer to even the most dullard charlatan, if a photograph purports to capture the event as it happens, as opposed to how it is seen by an artist, natural human interest will automatically gravitate towards the photograph.’

  He paused, an idea forming in his mind. ‘Have you voiced your concerns to your lady wife?’

  Blackstock shook his head. ‘I would not want to worry her, it is our livelihood after all. But I think I have found a solution. In fact, it is for that very reason that I was so pleased our paths happened to cross this morning.’

  ‘Really?’ Horne raised his eyebrows in genuine surprise.

  Blackstock did not notice
. ‘I have been taking lessons in photography. Even more than that, I have been studying moving pictures. Photographs may be the future of the printed page, but I foresee a day when one photograph will not be sufficient to convey the full drama of an event, and people will clamour instead to see the events actually unfolding before their eyes. Imagine, Horne, a talking, moving, newspaper, not simply bringing the news to life, but presenting it as life. Fleet Street won’t know what’s hit it.’

  For a moment, Horne was speechless. This, from Jermyn Blackstock? A man whose powers of imagination Horne had once rated dimmer than the electric lightbulbs that were now coming into fashion, but which shed no more illumination than a firefly in a jam jar? ‘This was your idea, Blackstock?’ He could not help the words sounding so shocked, but the artist, if he even detected the emotion, ignored it.

  ‘Completely. It came to me while ... well, I’ll get to that shortly. But yes, I was working on a moving picture project when the thought occurred to me, if I can capture the image of ordinary people doing ordinary things, and the world will flood to watch them, how many more would come to watch extraordinary people doing extraordinary things? The machinations of Parliament, great speeches and oration, musical performances, theatrical presentations. Can you imagine if I captured a terrible fire or a devastating accident? A war? Anything is possible.’

  A handful of objections came to Horne’s mind – of course, you’d have to get to the fire before the fire brigade being the most pertinent. But to raise such matters now would be to seem churlish, even pedantic. Besides, the idea itself was so breathtakingly audacious that he doubted whether Blackstock could have allowed such fundamentals to pass him by. Instead, he asked, ‘So tell me, how do I fit into this scheme?’

  Blackstock’s answer was blunt and to the point. ‘You don’t. Well, not unless you happen to murder somebody, or be murdered yourself. No, I wish to speak to you on another matter. I told you I am studying moving pictures. I am certain you are aware, however, that there are very few people abroad in this country who have the facilities to even make such things, let alone train others in the same profession.’