The Erotic Return of Ambrose Horne

by Chrissie Bentley

  Horne nodded. ‘I know of, I believe, three.’ He named the trio that then controlled Britain’s fledgling motion picture industry.

  ‘There are others,’ Blackstock assured him. ‘But the motion pictures that they make are not necessarily of a type that many people would wish to countenance.’

  ‘Browning and Hearst,’ Horne responded. ‘I know Browning well; Hearst only by reputation. And his work, of course.’

  ‘Hearst, in my opinion, is actually Browning’s superior,’ Blackstock said. ‘Yes, it is he with whom I have been studying, and learning a great deal, I can assure you.’

  ‘About camera craft?’ Horne asked. Over at least the past 18 months, Hearst had been responsible for producing no less than a dozen moving pictures of such intense erotic action and detail that they were almost surgical in execution. And that was the dozen that Horne knew of, and had obtained for his own collection. There were certainly others of which he had not yet been apprised, and one more that was allegedly so lewd that Hearst had never even allowed a print out of his sight, screening it only to very select, and hand-selected gatherings of men.

  ‘About camera craft,’ Blackstock agreed. ‘And other matters, besides. Unfortunately, although Mr Hearst is happy to allow me to operate his cameras, I yearn now for more. I wish to script the action, to direct it, to see my own visions realised on the silver screen, and not be simply the conduit by which another’s’ are so translated. And so I wondered whether you, Horne, with your wide range of contacts and associates within the realms of which we speak, might know of any other connoisseurs who would enter the field, but who would be willing to allow an ambitious young man room in which to manoeuvre?’

  Horne considered for a moment. ‘I would need to know the precise skills that you are offering,’ he said quietly, then looked around at their fellow passengers. ‘But I do not think this is precisely the place in which we should speak of such matters.’ He reached into a pocket and produced a business card. ‘Can you visit me at my home this evening?’

  ‘I will tell Mercy I have an appointment,’ Blackstock assured him, and Horne could not help but ask, ‘Do you need to do that very often? Absent yourself from your wife’s company, for appointments of which you cannot speak?’

  Blackstock looked at him curiously. ‘Never. I have always contrived to tell my wife the truth, even if I cannot tell her the entire truth. She believes I attend art classes, to further my draughtsmanship. No marriage could survive, let alone one as happy as ours, with anything less than honesty and openness.’

  Horne agreed with him and, as the train pulled into the Embankment station, he took his leave. ‘Until tonight.’ Then, as Blackstock disappeared from view, he crossed to the westbound platforms and retraced his journey as far as South Kensington. He needed to speak to Lady H_____.

  He arrived just moments after Mercy Blackstock departed; thought he recognised her figure as it retreated down the road ahead of him. Lady H_____, however, was still standing on her doorstep as Horne arrived. ‘There you are, Ambrose. Don’t tell me you’ve been standing out there all this time?’

  He glanced at her curiously. ‘I have just arrived. Was that Mrs Blackstock I saw?’

  ‘You mean you weren’t certain? But didn’t you follow her here not an hour ago?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Horne snorted. ‘I was speaking with her husband, and a most illuminating conversation it was, as well.’

  ‘So you decided to take the case after all?’ Lady H_____ smiled with the sparkle of a woman who knows too well the manner in which her man thinks, and continued smiling even after Horne insisted that indeed he had not. ‘We met by chance and we spoke of other matters entirely. But I do believe I am several steps closer to solving the wretched woman’s problem.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Lady H_____ as they entered the drawing room, and she tried to wring one more cup out of the now tepid teapot. ‘Allow me to tell you what I have learned. We had a most illuminating conversation, after all. So illuminating, my dear Ambrose, that we should probably adjourn to my chambers, before I attempt to illustrate all of the details.’

  She undressed quickly as they entered the bedroom, but Horne barely had time to remove his waistcoat before she tumbled onto the vast bed and, with her arms firmly around his waist, pulled him down alongside her. ‘I’m not sure, my dear, whether you need to go to all that bother. Not just yet, anyway.’ Rolling him onto his back, she clambered on top of him, her thighs resting on either side of his head, her crotch poised just inches from his mouth. Stretching out his tongue, he flicked at her lips, and felt them part gracefully to admit him.

  She sighed gently, and commenced a slow, gentle gyration against his face, teasing her own flesh against his, seeking the rhythm that would allow her both to relish the sensations he was obediently flashing through her body, without surrendering her every sense to her pleasure.

  ‘The problem ... the Blackstocks’ problem ...’ she spoke between quickening gasps. ‘Is this. Exactly this.’ She felt Horne attempt to break away from her, to ask a question or make one of his observations, and forced her weight down a little harder, trapping his mouth against her pussy. ‘He came to bed one evening, and ...’

  She outlined the events of that fateful night, just as Mercy Blackstock had laid them out, only embellishing her words and descriptions as she felt Horne’s actions becoming ever more febrile, in concert with her language. Reaching one arm behind her, she felt for his crotch; his erection strained against the fabric of his trousers and, with a deftness that surprised even her, she flicked open the buttons and released it. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have been so adamant about him remaining fully clothed,’ she smiled to herself. ‘But never mind. The laundress will be glad for the extra work.’

  Slowly but firmly, she masturbated him, her fingertips sensitive to every ridge and vein in his hardness, but timing her motion to perfection, to ensure that he would not reach his peak one moment before she attained her own. And then, when it was all over, and she had retrieved a rag with which to mop up the worst of his spill, she sat and awaited the inevitable inquisition.

  It was slow in arriving, and delivered with an incredulity that was almost childlike. ‘You mean to tell me, in eight years of marriage, he had never ...’

  ‘Nor she him,’ Lady H_____ replied. ‘I was surprised, too, but then I asked myself, how would they even know of such an act? For sure, their own minds and bodies would certainly have suggested it to them. But neither knew if the other thought the same way and, with no evidence that anybody else, in the history of loving, had ever attempted it before ... well, as you said yesterday, Ambrose, neither Mercy nor Jermyn is exactly the pioneering type.’

  ‘But how,’ Horne puzzled, ‘does she translate one of the most tender acts of supreme love and trust, into what amounts to a confession of sexual unfaithfulness? The first time that I experienced that act to its fullest conclusion, I felt as though I could never, and would never, want to love another again.’ Tenderly, Lady H_____ leaned forward and kissed his forehead. ‘I am so pleased to hear that, Ambrose.’ And then, as though startled that both he and she had voiced aloud the devotion they felt for one another, an emotion that both preferred to leave unspoken, she arose and began dressing. ‘But you spoke with the other half of our dilemma, I believe?’

  Horne laughed. ‘I asked, hypothetically of course, how Mrs Blackstock could leap from such heights of intimacy to such depths of infidelity. I believe it is because she assumed, and she might well have been correct to do so, that he could only have learned of such an act by indulging in it with another woman. Correct?’

  Lady H_____ nodded. ‘Correct.’

  ‘So what if I was to tell you that, although another woman is involved, it was not through doing, but watching ... or, more accurately, recording onto film ... that Jermyn Blackstock made his discovery.’

  Mouth agape, Lady H_____ halted her dressing and stared at him. ‘Jermyn Blackstock makes moving pictures?’

/>   Briefly, Horne detailed all that he had learned that morning, and all that he hoped to uncover when he met again with the man. ‘So far as I am concerned, however, what happened was this. He witnessed an act that he had never before imagined and, astonished at the response it provoked in the woman in question, he hurried home, anxious only to transport his lady wife to the same heights of ecstasy.’

  ‘Never dreaming,’ Lady H_____ joined in with his building laughter. ‘That, by doing so, he would instead condemn poor, innocent Mercy to weeks of hellish torment, as she struggled to understand the change in his technique!’

  ‘Tell me,’ Horne asked. ‘Did you suggest that she reciprocate the deed?’

  ‘I was going to, but worried that, in her present state of mind, she would be consumed either by such fear, or such bitterness, that the act could only end in pain. Emotional, if not physical.’

  ‘Ah, as wise as ever,’ Horne smiled. ‘But I think with your new understanding of the situation, you might find a way in which to introduce the topic that will utterly set her mind at ease? But, I should add, without revealing her husband’s secret learning to her? When the time is ripe for that disclosure to be made, I am certain the newly emboldened Blackstock would prefer to reveal the secret in his own way.’

  Lady H_____ nodded. ‘I will send a messenger to her home this instant, to inquire whether I might pay a visit this afternoon. I think I know what I need to say.’

  ‘And I should be about my business, too,’ Horne agreed. ‘I have several writings that I would like to complete before Blackstock pays his visit this evening. Oh, but I do have one final question for you. You do not need to answer immediately. But a message received before, say, seven this evening would certainly assist me in my forthcoming interview.’

  He spoke, and Lady H_____ was still smiling to herself a full two hours later, as she dismounted her carriage and knocked at the front door of the Blackstocks’ Fulham residence. And she was smiling anew the following evening, as she and Horne sat watching while Jermyn busied around the studio he had spent the day constructing in an unused portion of Horne’s attic, adjusting the lighting one more time, and fussing with a camera that, although it looked so cumbersome and unwieldy, he nevertheless handled with both dexterity and delicacy.

  For positively the fifth time in an hour, he thanked Horne once again for the opportunity he’d afforded him; the freedom to make whatever kind of movies he wished, with whomsoever he chose to make them. Just two requests had Horne made; the first, that he be offered first refusal on the outright purchase of any production made under his aegis; and the second, that the first ever production of the newly christened Black-Horne Pictures should be a true joint effort. Horne would be its star, Blackstock its director.

  All the previous evening, as he and Horne sat toasting their venture, Blackstock had worried over his part in that project – how could any man, he asked himself, hope to direct the great Ambrose Horne in matters of carnal expression? But when he arrived at the studio the following morning, his earlier concerns might never have existed, and he spoke with an assurance that surprised his audience.

  ‘I have given much thought to our production, to the form it should take. And I have arrived at the following conclusion. There is one act ... it has been captured before, I have done so myself. But never more than fleetingly. It is seen in other movies as a means to an end. I wish to present it as an end to itself.’

  He detailed the positions that his cast should adopt; Horne prone, flat on his back, Lady H crouched alongside his torso, with the camera focused as tightly as possible upon the object of her vigorous attentions.

  Horne did his best to feign surprise. ‘Indeed, I have never seen such an act captured on screen, nor pursued to such a glorious climax.’

  ‘Nor I,’ added Lady H_____, smilingly following his lead. ‘Wherever did you learn of such a wonderful favour?’

  Blackstock puffed with pride. ‘Believe it or not – for I could scarcely credit it myself. But it was my own dear wife, who demonstrated to me last night that, far from fading with familiarity, the expressions of love can sometimes only ripen with age. For the purposes of our film, and to thoroughly amplify the visual stimuli that I believe is necessary to its success, however, I must make one minor modification to the experience in which I myself partook.’

  Horne could not control his mirth any longer. ‘Let me guess. Lady H_____? I think he is suggesting that you spit, not swallow.’

  She nodded. ‘To be truthful, Ambrose, I usually do.’ Then, in a whisper that Horne alone could detect, ‘but it’s nice to know that Mercy is willing to improvise so freely.’

  The camera began rolling moments later.

  The Strange Case of the Wishing Box – A Christmas Mystery

  The first time that it happened, Williams put it down to coincidence. The second time, to sheer luck. But the third time ... the third time he wrote down an idle fantasy, and slipped the piece of paper into the ornately decorated, cherry wood box that lay by his bedside, and then experienced his dream within 24 hours, that was when he knew that the old Jew had not been misleading him; that this truly was a Wishing Box.

  The girl alongside him nudged him. ‘A penny for your thoughts?’

  Williams kissed her shoulder. ‘Nothing, my dear. I was just contemplating the generous fates that directed my footsteps towards the Portland Rooms, precisely as you should be tumbling out of them.’ The girl was a whore, of course, and Williams had paid a tidy sum for her company. But even whores had limitations, and acts they would not indulge. This girl, Jenny, had not only gone about the task with enthusiasm; she had actually suggested it herself.

  Jenny giggled. ‘You liked that?’

  ‘I liked it very much indeed,’ he smiled. ‘But I have to ask, how you even became aware of such a thing?’

  ‘Trade secret,’ she cackled. And then, ‘Promise you won’t be cross? I made it up as I went along. I had the idea this afternoon and wondered whether I should add it to my vocabulary, as it were? A lot of the girls specialise in different things these days. I just wanted to find something special of my own. Oh, and a nice man to try it out on.’

  ‘Well, I think you’re ready to show it to the world,’ Williams said, with a bonhomie that, in all seriousness, he did not feel. But he suppressed the urge to offer the girl more money to save the act for him alone. He had read much about those other men who attempted to reform, or at least rein in prostitutes, and had long ago dismissed them as sanctimonious milksops. No, better that Jenny should take her talent to the streets, and allow him to bask in the knowledge that he had been the first man to experience it. And who knows? If he ever experienced the same urge again, he would seek Jenny out in the knowledge that she could only have grown even better at doing it. The Wishing Box would see to that.

  The Wishing Box. For a long time after he bought it, he had scarcely given it a second thought. He was in the East End, passing through after seeing a business acquaintance off at the docks, when one of the horses pulling his cab lost a shoe. Dismounting from the carriage, he intended simply hailing another, and putting the stink of Poplar behind him as quickly as possible. But a store caught his eye, and he found himself inside, glancing over the bric-a-brac while the owner, an elderly Jew with an accent as thick as the fog, fussed beside him, keeping up a running commentary on every item Williams touched upon.

  Such stories he told. The cabinet that once was owned by a great magician, that nobody had ever succeeded in opening – so none could tell what it was that rustled and chinked from within its secrets confines. The stuffed owl that had protected no less than five past owners from all illness and death (so why had they all disposed of it? Williams wanted to ask, but didn’t). And the Wishing Box.

  ‘What does it do?’ Williams asked.

  ‘It answers your prayers,’ the old man replied. ‘You ask, and it delivers.’

  This time, Williams could not help himself. ‘So why is it here? What kind of fool, posses
sed of so magical a gift, would dispose of it on the back streets of London?’

  ‘This sort of fool,’ the old man replied. ‘It was the property of my wife. She owned it for many years, it travelled the world with her, and it never let her down. When she passed away, I kept it, always thinking that someday, I might use it for myself. But look at me. I am almost 80 years old. What wishes could I have that an old box would be able to grant?’

  ‘Long ... no, longer life?’ ventured Williams. ‘Eternal health and riches?’

  The old man’s glasses flashed. ‘And if those were the wishes it granted, then I would indeed be a fool to dispose of it. Unfortunately, the Wishing Box’s talents are, shall we say, a little more specialised than that. And concern themselves with activities that an old man like me would be better off consigning to the archive of memory.’

  A notion began to form in Williams’ mind. ‘Physical activities?’

  ‘Ah, you begin to understand. Yes, physical activities. Man and wife ... or maybe, if sir is unmarried, man and not-wife activities. You tell the box your fondest desire, and very soon, you receive it.’

  Williams laughed. ‘Such a box would indeed be a remarkable possession.’ How many nights, after all, had he lain awake in his bachelor rooms, dreaming of the things he would love to do to – or, conversely, have done by – a beautiful woman? And how many nights had his hands and a kerchief sufficed where warm flesh and willing holes were what he truly yearned for?

  ‘Such a box can be yours.’ The old man quoted a price ... a reasonable one, too, but before Williams could answer, he also made an offer. ‘You will not buy without sampling its powers, however. He tore a strip of paper from his ledger book, and handed Williams a pen. ‘Write. Anything. Your fondest wish, a passing whim, whatever you choose. Slip the paper into the box and go about your business. And, if I do not see you at my door at opening time tomorrow, I will know that either you perished in the night, or you are not the kind of man you appear to be.’