I turned to the next page, a full spread of further photographs, no more or less revealing than the first. The article, too, had ended. But then there followed a letter that added some flesh and bones to the story.
There was no sender’s name or address beyond the autographed Maximillian, but the handwriting was severe and boldly flourished; clearly the letter writer considered him or herself to be of considerable social stature.
Dear Ms Collins, Thank you for your kind note informing me that our act of worship was, perhaps, more fruitful than either of us intended. I think you are wise to keep the information from your husband...
Oops. Someone had knocked someone else’s wife up. …and it is better that he believes the child to be his own, rather than the unplanned result of a religious rite. For my own part, I am simply proud to believe that the old pencil I showed you remains as leaden as ever.
Your account of our interview was excellently realized, and I thoroughly enjoy the opprobrious tone that you utilized throughout. My conviction that exposure within a newspaper of such notoriously lackadaisical regard for the truth would further secrete our organization from prying eyes has thus far proven correct and I would be honored if you would accept my offer of 100 pounds to compensate your travel and other expenses. This sum is slightly above our original agreement, but as circumstances do appear to have gifted me with certain fresh
responsibilities, I feel this initial amount to be right and proper.
Please do not hesitate to contact me over any matter that you may desire.
Affectionately yours…. Several other letters followed, spaced over the course of the next two months or so. The first was little more than chit-chat about current affairs, interspersed with some extraordinary suggestions for naming the baby. The second was equally light-hearted, but did close with an apparently sincere job offer, once mother and baby were on their feet again.
The third congratulated the mother on her recent return to New York, having
completed her course at Cambridge University, but reminded her that the job offer was still on the table. It was the fourth and final letter that brought me to my feet, the folder and its contents falling to the ground as both Magdalene and Ms Ross appeared in the doorway, and rushed to my side.
Dear Ms Collins… I cannot begin to tell you how distraught your terrible news has left me. To lose one’s spouse at any age is a tragedy beyond words, but to lose one so young, and so soon after the birth of the lovely baby Christine….
Christine Collins is the name on my birth certificate. I took my stepfather’s name, Bentley, following my mother’s remarriage, and hadn’t thought of my real name in decades. I checked the date of the letter. September 1971. My father… the man I was told was my father… died in a boating accident when I was two months old. I was born in July 1971. My mother studied journalism at Cambridge, and interned at one of the Sunday newspapers; she and my father had only been back in the US a month when it happened. I turned to Magdalene.
“You knew?” “I suspected. After the death of her husband, your mother returned to England, where she worked as my grandfather’s secretary until his death the following Christmas. That’s my grandfather in those photographs. She remained at the office until the following summer, and was about to take up another position within the family business when she met her second husband, your step-father. A banker, I believe?” I nodded, dumbfounded. Much of this I knew – mother’s brief career in publishing was a family joke, because she hadn’t been known to read any book for longer than it took copy down a recipe. She, however, joked (at least, we’d thought it was a joke) that, if she hadn’t been swept off her feet by a handsome man with money, she might have become the Queen of all she surveyed.
“And she might have been,” Magdalene said softly, as she held me in her arms. “From what I’ve heard, she had some remarkable talents… but no.” She shook her head. “There are some things that a daughter really doesn’t need to know. But I can tell you this. Your love of writing is not the only talent that you inherited from her.”
I needed to sit down. In fact, I needed a lot of things – a drink, a cigarette, a bowl to throw up in. Instead I lowered myself back onto the settee.
“But why… how come I didn’t know any of this?” “It’s scarcely your traditional mother to daughter conversation, is it? Oh, by the way, when I was a freshman at college, I became involved in a pagan sex cult and became pregnant by the High Priest before draining his cock of blood as an act of worship. Which we photographed and sold to the News of the World.
“ Perhaps it was an episode in her life that your mother preferred to keep secret. We… that is, the family…did keep in touch with her, but it was little more than Christmas cards, and the occasional update on how you were doing.”
The sheer magnitude of what I was discovering was finally beginning to dawn. “So you kept tabs on me all these years?”
“Not at all. My grandfather had eighteen children. Eighteen that he was aware of. Eleven of them followed in his footsteps. Between them they had twenty-three children. That’s a lot of footsteps to follow. Besides, we knew that, if and when you were ready, you would come to us.”
“How could I have? I didn’t even know you existed. And besides, I didn’t come to you. If you remember, you came for me. In the middle of the night, in the middle of Madrid.”
“But you came, didn’t you? And I don’t mean in a motor car, with three leering goons pawing your body. You came to us through the life you led, and through the joy that you drew from it. The rest, the tryst in the hotel room in Spain, the movie you made together, and the betrayal he felt when it ended, that was pure coincidence. But we knew that one day, you would meet
somebody who desired you so powerfully that he would do anything to possess you, even if it meant that he himself could never possess you again.”
“The tryst? The movie? Hang on, I thought it was that old man at the meeting in Madrid. The Austrian guy who grabbed me at the coffee machine.”
Magdalene shook her head. “No, it was… I have the details here. Pedro Francisco, born Mallorca, now works as a motorcycle courier for a taxi firm in the capital. Apparently, he followed you to your hotel, and saw you in the bar talking with another man. Assuming the worst, he went out, got extremely drunk, started talking with a stranger, wrote a check….”
I gaped, Magdalene continued. “He paid, you were collected, and – well, here we are.” She sounded almost gleeful.
“But, if you knew who I was, why not just tell me at the start?” “Firstly, we didn’t know who you were. Not at first. It was only after a few days… I think it was Sindy who pointed out how much you looked like Miss Caroline; that’s what people called your mother. We then telephoned her, ostensibly to discuss a detail about the trust fund that your father… my
grandfather… had established for you. The one that paid for your college education.”
I gasped. I knew I had an inheritance, of course, and a tidy sum at that. But I always thought it came from a late Uncle. Uncle… Maximillian. Oh, shit.
Magdalene was still speaking. “Your mother mentioned that you’d been to Spain, and seemed to have been delayed in returning. Then, of course, when we went through the contents of your laptop, and found the rest of your information….”
“But you said it yourself, that only took a couple of days. I’ve been here months now. Why didn’t anybody say anything once you knew?”
“Think about it. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t know you. How you would react? I mean, can you imagine… poor Sindy, or Doctor Owen or whoever, ‘Okay bitch, suck my cock, and by the way, you’re one of Magdalene’s illegitimate cousins, so don’t think too harshly of her when she has her husband stick chili peppers inside your pussy.’ So, we decided to treat you as we would treat anybody, until we saw how you adapted to life here. Plus a few gentle nudges in certain directions, a few extra treats and privileges, a little additional attention. Either blood woul
d tell or it wouldn’t. In your case, it told.”
“And my mother? Where does she fit into all this?” “Well, I told you I had six things for you to sign and, so far, you’ve only signed five. The sixth is a letter to your mother, although you’ll probably want to write it first. She knows that you’re okay, she knows you’re with us and, when you return to your room you’ll see I took the liberty of having the attendants lay out a few items she sent over for you. Including, I believe, a rather lengthy letter, which I trust will answer any further questions you may have. So take a few days, and think about it first, then we’ll make sure your letter is delivered.”
I rose unsteadily. “Yeah, a couple of days.” I started for the door, then a thought struck me.
“What about Pedro? The guy who…” “The guy who turned you into us? Pedro? Funny thing. He was in Monaco, met a rich countess, swanned around her estate for a few days, then left without a word. She was so angry. We picked him up in Nice. He’s being held at one of our sister
communities…. If you care to wait, I’ll have Ms Ross tune in to their closed circuit system.”
I walked back into the room, joined Magdalene and Ms Ross at the bank of screens. There was Pedro, face down on a thin, dirty mattress, apparently suffering a gang bang from a queue of unwashed sodomites.
I watched. I did not feel a pang of regret, or even sympathy. Just a stone cold rage, and a burning desire for… revenge? No, that was not the word. Reciprocation. I wanted him to suffer as he had arranged for me to suffer. It was sheer blind luck that the entire situation had turned out in my favor. Now it was time to discover how his luck was falling.
“Uh… you know that form I signed, the one that said I wouldn’t start burning people’s feet with cigars without telling you first?”
Magdalene nodded. “Don’t say you’ve changed your mind already?” “I haven’t. But if there’s anyone there who is into that sort of thing, do you think they could be sent down to…” – I glanced at the screen. “Room sixty-three. I do believe it’s something I might enjoy watching.”
Magdalene smiled. “Ah, the relentless curiosity that is the true sign of a Priestess. Your mother would be so proud.”
I returned her grin. I was proud as well.
EPILOGUE
Dearest Christine, It’s difficult to know where to start this letter – I suppose by saying how relieved I was to hear you were safe. It was so strange when your stepfather opened an e-mail explaining why you wouldn’t be home, which of course I now realize wasn’t actually sent by you. And then I got the call to tell me what had really happened and that opened a whole new bag of worry, because now I have to tell you why I never told you any of this before, and the only answer I can give is, I didn’t think it mattered.
I expect Magdalene has explained most of what there is to know; I’ll try and fill in the blanks. First, the business about your father. To be truthful, darling, I don’t know. Don’t forget, there was no such thing as a paternity test in 1971 and, even if there were, I had no intention of having it carried out. I can assure you that Maximillian’s generosity to us after the death of my husband – the man you consider your biological father – had as much to do with his nature as it did any possibility that you were his daughter. Even the trust fund that he established in your name was more a ‘just in case’ than an ‘absolute.’
Perhaps I did deceive you by not telling you there was a chance that your actual father was not your biological father, oh, this is so confusing, but I would have been deceiving you just as much if I had. Besides, it is scarcely the easiest subject for any woman to talk about, especially mother to daughter. Put it this way. So far as I am concerned, your parentage is what I have always told you it was.
Next, I expect you are curious about my involvement with the temple? Again, I must prove infuriatingly vague. I discovered it as a student, then arranged with the Priest and Priestess to “rediscover” it for the newspaper. The paper was looking into Pagan practices in England at the time - there was a lot of it about, and my editor was demanding a new approach to what was becoming a tired topic. I delivered that for him. Following Maximillian’s death, I stayed on in London as you know, then I was given the option of remaining on the outside, liaising with the various authorities with whom the communities need to remain in contact, or joining the staff of one of them.
I chose to remain outside, a decision that you, of course, helped me to reach. Children are rarely welcomed within the communities, for obvious reasons although Magdalene does not seem to have suffered from the experience; tell her I say hello and, while I could have placed you with your grandparents, that was never an option. Neither do I regret the course I ultimately took with your step-father and step-brother and, of course, I had the pleasure of watching you grow up in the real world.
But I cannot pretend that I don’t sometimes wonder how things might have turned out for me if I had taken the other option. How strange it is, then, that you should now have set out on the very journey that I turned away from.
Christine, if you have any questions, any whatsoever, please do not hesitate to ask them. I cannot guarantee they will always be easy for me to answer, or even remember, although I’m astonished how many memories have flooded back to me these last months, as you can imagine, it’s not a period of my life that I’ve had much opportunity to discuss over the last forty years. Neither, I’m sure, will you find it especially easy to ask your 66-year-old mother certain things.
But to assure you that the door to absolute honesty is well and truly open, let me begin by reminding you of a conversation we had when you were 19 and dating that boy from Chester, and I asked you about the red stain on the front of your blouse. You told me it was raspberry, and became quite indignant when I laughed. Let me tell you now, I was not laughing because I disbelieved you. I laughed because I’d had much the same conversation with my own mother, when I was around the same age. Except one of my ‘stains’ was on my chin, and my boyfriend was still doing up his trousers when she walked in.
Anyway, darling, the sooner I finish this letter, the sooner you can write back with all the questions I’m sure you are bursting to ask me. Let me finish, however, by telling you how proud I am of you, and the decision you have taken….
The letter wrapped up with a little family news… she’d told everybody that I’d found myself a new job at a school in Andorra, which was only the ghost of a white lie… and an effusive row of kisses. Then, a scrawled PS:
Magdalene tells me you’re a story-teller as well – I’d love to see some of your work. And. in case you worry that it might not be suitable, I enclose a copy of something else I wrote at that time, for a very different type of magazine, that never made it into my scrapbook. Enjoy.
I unfolded the photocopy, and read the opening paragraph…. “I like a man who knows how to cum. But I like it even more when he knows where. Right here on my tongue, so I can savor his love before I swallow it.”
Wow, Mom, thanks. I knew where my love of writing came from. But it looks like you slipped a taste for something else into the gene pool, as well.
About the Author
Chrissie Bentley is the author of over a dozen novels and short story collections, including What I Did On My Summer Vacation, Soho By Spotlight, Cousin Tom’s Motorbike and Below Blue London.
Her erotic fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Best Women’s Erotica 2011 (Cleis Books) The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Erotica (Robinson) Boy Fun (Xcite), The Visitor, Improper Conduct (both Mischief) and Misbehaviour (Black Lace).
Visit her online at http:// jennyswallows.blogspot.com
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Miss America - a BDSM Vampire Tale Page 20
