by Edith Layton
After much whispering of assurance to her, after long starts and stops, after slow sweet extended embraces, he at last took her to him to complete their union. Suddenly from her armor of reticence she grasped at him, she came forth boldly and clutched him and writhed with him and overwhelmed him completely, making him feel as a child might who stepped into a still pool and found himself carried over a cataract of rushing waters. Later, his mind still whirling as he lay there exhausted, she spoke softly in the stillness of the room.
“You know, of course,” she said, lying quiet now, and studying the lofty ceiling of their room.
“Yes,” he said, wondering what it was he was supposed to know.
“It was only that once,” she whispered.
And whispering, she told him of the stableboy that had overpowered her and taken her when she was only fifteen.
“Do you hate me for it?” she asked in a sad, flat voice.
“Hate you?” he cried, reaching for her again. “No, never, how can you say that? You are my wife. I love you.”
And she smiled into his hair as they renewed their union, again and again.
The weeks that followed, while they rested at their honeymoon home, were a sensual blur to Morgan. If he had had time to think, if he were not so totally immersed in his senses, he might have wondered how it was that she knew so much more than he, how she knew so many ways to please him, how she could be, after that one brute encounter in a stable, so endlessly eager. But their only communication was through their bodies, and he had no time, no thought for thought, until even he, at three-and-twenty, was exhausted and wanted some surcease from the endless demands of her body and time for communion of a different sort.
But she yawned through the art galleries he took her to in nearby Edinburgh, and sat with sphinxlike smile as they toured the antique streets, and fanned herself with uninterest within medieval castles, and toyed with her fan at concerts. In the end she told him with a small smile that she would prefer he went on his sightseeing without her, as she needed her rest.
He had thought it might be a child on the way. So he left her to rest in her warm bed while he toured the vicinity. And on that one Wednesday afternoon, he had been standing in a great picture gallery when his gaze fell upon a portrait of the Madonna and Child that looked so like his dear Kitty and the babe of his fantasies that he slapped his hat against his knee, bit back a grin, and turned to hurry home to her. To surprise her with his early return and his reawakened desire.
Her maid flew at him from a shadowed part of the corridor and tried to call him away from their bedroom. She flapped at him like a great bat, but he only smiled and put her aside, for he knew Kitty would not mind this interruption of her daily nap. He opened the door and saw the ruddy, freckled young man’s body like a pulsing growth upon the pale olive clarity of her unclothed form. He remembered the obscenity he saw when he pulled the man off his wife and remembered trying to beat that offending body into nothingness, to erase all signs of gender from the shrieking man he battered.
And then he felt her cool hand upon his shoulder and heard her slow soft voice, louder than cathedral chimes, “Let him be,” she said, tugging at his arm. “Let him go. I asked him to. I asked him,” she said.
Long after the young man had been restored to his senses, long after his wounds had been tended to and he had been given his clothes and dismissed from his job as footman and shown off the premises by the scandalized staff, Morgan sat, his head cradled in his hands, and listened to his wife’s gentle litany, a long and slow telling of her tale, a longer conversation than she had ever had with him before, or would ever have again.
At the time he heard everything and heard nothing, his senses were still so disordered. Yet every word would stay with him till the end of his days.
Yes, she had told him, it did begin at fifteen for her. But it had been no attack, no more than today’s episode had been.
She had been curious. The stableboy had been obliging. But her father had discovered them and reacted just as her husband had. There was mild amazement, Morgan remembered, in her voice as she related that. Her father had kept her under strict chaperonage, but she was endlessly inventive. There had been, in the years before she had caught his astonished eye in London, many such episodes. Many times. Few refused her, from stableboy to farm worker, from chance acquaintances of her father’s to tradesmen from town.
She had been taken first to men of God. Her father had thought, in his strict Methodism, that it was unholiness that accounted for it. That she, poor motherless creature, had been drawn into the devil’s net. Thus, she had been lectured, she had been sermonized, she had been beaten, she had spent hours upon her knees, only to arise and slip out to yet more encounters.
In her seventeenth year, her father had given up on God and taken her to a different set of holy men. He had brought her far from home to a round of physicians of all stripes. Her diet had been altered to whole grains and spring water. She had been denied spices and salt. And then sweets and savories, then red meats and hot foods. She had endured it, for her hunger was of a different sort. She continued to indulge that hunger whenever she could steal away. She had been immersed in steaming hot baths to draw out her sensual humors, and when that failed, steeped in icy waters to depress her heated passions. And no cure was effective.
At last her father was told of an operation, a surgical procedure that would remove that tiny wedge-shaped part of the female anatomy that was supposed to give the keenest pleasure and be the root of unseemly female desire. The surgery would thus effectively remove all her desire for future encounters. The Arabians, her father was told, regularly performed such mutilations upon their women in childhood to keep them content in their harems. “After all,” the learned physician had joked, for he was a jovial fellow as well as a man of science and he was both perturbed and annoyed at the look of horror writ large upon his patient’s father’s face, “how else do you think the old sultans can keep one hundred wives happy?”
When her father, driven to despair after yet another fall from grace upon her part, had threatened her with that, she had only smiled and told him it would be to no avail. It was not pleasure she sought, she had explained, it was only a thing she must do.
Yet his distress was such that he was about to give his consent for it to be done, when the physician said in passing the one thing that staged his hand.
“Of course,” he had said, “you know that then marriage for her will be out of the question. For her husband would of course notice the alteration and would then have adequate grounds for divorce. There are some men,” the physician said, with a sad shake of his head for those less scholarly and scientific, “that would find a woman thus scarred repugnant to them.”
But if the physician had removed one possibility of escape, he had implanted the idea of another. She was yet young, her father reasoned. He could not, as some had urged, incarcerate her in Bedlam; she was his only child. Perhaps marriage would be the answer. Marriage would mean a man at her constant service. Marriage to a man stern enough to contain her might answer.
They went to London.
“Papa wanted me to marry the Baronet,” she said at last, in the last hours of the night, “but I didn’t like him. He was old and ugly. I liked you, Morgan. I do. I told Papa so. Truly. And you are the best I’ve found. But I cannot help myself. I cannot. I didn’t mean to hurt you, you know. I will try harder in future. I will, Morgan, truly,” she said, and then curled up in peaceful sleep, while he sat up through the dawn and tried to understand all he had been told.
They packed the next day and returned to London. Morgan could not bear to touch his wife; could not now bear the looks of admiration upon the faces of other men when they saw her glowing beauty, which had once pleased him; could not even speak with her. He paced and thought, went without sleep, and finally, his mind too full to bear it alone, left Kitty in London and rode back full tilt to Lyonshall.
His father and brother wond
ered at his leaving his new bride alone so soon. Morgan spun them a tale of her exhaustion after their travels on their honeymoon, and they smiled knowingly. Perhaps, his father suggested gently, they would be seeing her soon again, perhaps then with his grandson in tow? A new terror gripped Morgan at his words.
It was late night after dinner on the third day of his visit that Morgan decided to seek his father’s counsel. They sat before the fire and let a companionable silence fill the room, and Morgan had just cleared his throat to speak the unspeakable problem when his father sighed with contentment and spoke first.
“Simon and I are pleased, Morgan, to see you so well settled. He would be here with us now, poor soul, if he felt sturdier. But the doctors have said he needs his rest, and so he does, so he does. And as for me, my boy, I suppose now that you have a wife and are about to start your own family, you can bear the news. For I have been told I have not much longer a race to run, either. It is my one solace, my dear son, to know that you are so fortunate in your life, and that you will ensure that Lyonshall remains as it is. You were a surprise to your poor mother, God rest her, and to me, coming so late in life. But the Lord is wise, and now I can know that when I leave and Simon must go, all will yet be well.”
When Morgan Courtney returned to Town, he was a changed man. Marriage had matured him, his friends opined when they saw his set face, his new air of dignity, his sober aspect. He went to his clubs, he drove his curricle, he visited Gentleman Jim’s, he lived his life as befit any young man of his rank and station. He confided in no one and none knew that he did not touch his wife.
“I cannot divorce you now,” he told her, “as I yearn to, for the scandal would kill my father. But I shall kill you, my dear, if you present me with a babe. For I will know it is not mine.”
“Have no fear on that score, Morgan,” she had replied, unfazed, “for I almost had one years ago, and when I lost it, I was told there was little chance of ever having another. I didn’t lose it, precisely,” she said, watching him closely, for he had so changed since she last saw him that she feared him a little now. “An old herb woman aided me. But, Morgan, I vow I shall make you forget those harsh words. For I promised I would try, did I not? And so I shall. But don’t turn from me. For I need you.”
Looking at her, seeing her soft and yielding, arms held out to him, he had stepped back and snarled, “All this you tell me now? Now when we are irrevocably wed? Perhaps I could forget all that went before, but why did you wait to tell me now?”
“Would you have wed me else?” she said with perfect mad logic.
And he had turned and left. He would not touch his wife, he could not seek other women, for in doing so he would give her license to pay him back in similar coin, and in truth now he wanted nothing to do with them. Those months they stayed in London, he fully believed he was slowly losing his senses.
Everywhere he went, he thought he heard hushed whispers. When he attended a ball with Kitty, he thought he caught sly nudges made by other gentlemen, and covert comment from the ladies. Conversations seemed to be cut off mid-sentence when he entered his club. And he thought he caught pitying looks from the older men he most admired. The world seemed filled with knowing eyes. He was a proud young man and could not believe what was happening to him. For when he taxed Kitty with it, she would protest he was imagining things and that she was faithful to him. And asked when he would come back to her arms.
Then the afternoon came when he returned to his house in London for a forgotten bit of paper and had seen again the mad recurrence of his waking nightmare. Only this time it had been the pudgy pale buttocks of Sir Belvedere that he saw trembling above his wedded wife. Sir Belvedere, a great useless, foppish fellow, had wept and pleaded and named five other fellows who had done the same thing and then left in a great haste, shrinking and sniveling, though Morgan had not even touched him.
“I did try,” Kitty said, her dark eyes wide and frightened at her husband’s great stillness where she had expected bluster and rage. But he only stared at her.
“Are you going to beat me?” she asked.
“Dogs are beaten,” he said with deep sadness, “and if you beat a dog, you are left with a cringing cur who is afraid to do more than lick your boot. That is never what I wanted, Kitty. I only wanted a wife.”
He left the house as silently as he had come.
When he returned a week later, he set Kitty’s maid to packing, sent his servants scurrying to close the house, and called for his coach to be readied for a long journey the next morning. And it was not until they were long out of the City that he finally spoke to his wife. The words he then spoke were almost the last he ever had with her.
“I have joined the regiment,” he said calmly, “and shall leave the country soon. I am returning you to your father. I have the legal right to lock you in a cellar in chains if I so choose, so do not think yourself ill-used by this turn of events. You shall stay with your father until one of two things occurs. You can gain your freedom in divorce if my father dies, or gain it as a widow if I do. But there you shall stay until either thing happens. And if you don't, I shall return and make myself a widower. I promise you.”
He had gone from her father’s house, riding like a fury loosed out into the world. Leaving her father weeping and begging forgiveness, and leaving her wearing her strange sad smile. He had gone to the battlefields and distinguished himself, since he courted death so assiduously. But death is a famously coy mistress, he discovered, and gave favor to other, less deserving men.
He was in hospital, waiting for his shattered leg to mend, when word came of Simon’s death. He made his painful halt way back from funeral to funeral. For word came to him, even as he consoled his father, of his wife’s last illness.
He was in time to stand over her bed and hear her last painful breaths. She lay, her inky hair witch-wild, scattered across her pillow, and breathed deeply as her father, twisting a Bible round and round in his hands, explained how difficult a birth it was.
“Don’t despair, Morgan,” she whispered, opening her eyes to focus on him, “for it died too. The physicians were wrong, you see. But I truly liked you, Morgan. And”—and here he had to bend to catch the last words—“you really were the best, you know. Truly.”
“Enough!” the seventh Earl of Auden cried aloud, his hands tightening on the reins with the force of his thoughts, causing Scimitar to shy. Patting the great horse back to calm, the Earl wrenched his thoughts back to the present, back to the pale green spring morning. He turned Scimitar toward home. A mad start, this, he admonished himself, going back again over lost ground, a foolish unprofitable thing brought on by this ridiculous enterprise. Damn Bev and Tompkins, damn their eyes. I will pick them an heir and be done with it, and whoever I choose will be better than that sad blue babe my loving wife delivered herself of. At least whoever I pick will be my choice, and at least someone’s legitimate son. But not his. He would not contemplate marriage again, not yet. Perhaps not ever. But he could not rid himself of women.
After Kitty, he had gone through a period of celibacy out of revulsion and, he admitted, out of fear of mockery or inadequacy. Then he had swung to excess, proving again and again that Kitty’s wild need could not have arisen through any fault of his. Now he had come to terms with the entire female sex.
He still needed them, he liked them, and more damnably, he desired them. So he dealt with them on his travels on the Continent and he dallied with them only there. He would not return to London, where the echo of whispers still burned in his ears. Neither would he form alliances with local country lasses; the idea of practicing a sort of droit du seigneur revolted him. He had no wish to populate his district with farm and household help all bearing the same stamp of his face. He would not emulate old Lord Babcock down in the South, whose identically hawk-nosed footmen, maidservants, and tenant farmers were a joke through the land.
Instead he sated himself in far-off places, and only then did he return to his great love, L
yonshall. Here he stayed in his heart’s home, until desire sent him ranging for surcease through the wide world again. He would settle the matter of the succession intelligently, he thought, as Scimitar moved on muffled hooves through the young grass to carry him unerringly home again. And he would be done with his regrets and inchoate wishes. He would choose an heir from this unpromising assortment of relatives and put an end to the impostor’s plans. Then he would free himself to live out the rest of his life on his own diminished terms. This decided, as if to speed his own decision, he urged Scimitar to make haste homeward.
The Earl had reached the bottom of the long drive when he saw his friend Bev, neat as a pin and dressed to an inch, striding toward him and calling a hello to him.
“Where have you been, Morgan? It’s almost luncheon and no one knew what you were about. Your guests are roving all over looking for you. You may have had a delightful time riding about, but I’ve had to placate them all and chat them up, and fiend take it, all they wanted to know is where you were.”
“I was out, as you said, riding, and having a delightful time,” the Earl said coldly.
“Don’t look it,” his friend said doubtfully. “Look worn to pieces.”
“I shall assemble those pieces and go to greet my guests,” the Earl said more amiably, seeing the concern on his friend’s face.
“Anthony and I fancied a ride ourselves, but I didn’t think it right to desert the ladies, don’t you know,” Bev complained. “They’ve been asking after you all morning.”
