Casper stood and stared down at her. She expected some regret in his eyes, a lowering of her character in his countenance. But there was none. There was only the expression of a man who was pleased that he had pleased a woman. Roma had seen the same expression on the face of customers buying romance novels for their beloveds. Casper, she knew by that look, was happy that she had enjoyed herself. It was as simple as that. For a moment, she could almost sever it from lesser considerations.
But then she was dressing herself, and presently she and Casper stood in the bookstore in proper dress, as though nothing had happened. Roma was at a loss as to what to say, and Casper seemed content in the silence.
“Kiss me again,” Roma said.
“Even after …”
“Yes. I don’t care.”
They kissed once more, and that alleviated the awkwardness.
“There is more we could do,” Casper said. “We could do it all.”
“All? But what of honor?”
“Whose honor?Mine or yours?”
“Both.”
“I have learnt something this evening,” Casper said, casually stroking her face. Roma did not recoil; she felt that they were past that. “I have learnt that, in some instances, honor must bow before pleasure.”
“That is a dangerous way to think,” Roma remarked.
“Perhaps,” Casper conceded. “But not for us, I think. Who are we harming? What are we offending? Silly ideals of what we are meant to be? Blast the world, and blast its ideals. I would have you.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Will you?”
Roma considered; she shook her head. She had discovered something she had possessed all her life but never fully understood: her body. She idly wondered how many other women did not know their bodies at all.
“On the morrow,” Roma said. “Come to me on the morrow.”
“I will,” he promised.
He stole another kiss and then left her with her books.
*****
In a just over two weeks, Casper’s entire life had been inverted. All his ideals of what a man and a woman should be when conducting intimate relations had been challenged. For what meaning did shy talk have when he had just done something he’d only heard whispers of? He’d never been to a brothel. He’d never – before now – had an illicit love affair. Roma was his first. She had facilitated a complete change in him, and, he hoped, he had done the same in her.
When he returned to his lodgings, he lay upon his head and tried to read a novel, but the words blurred in the electric light. That in itself showed the difference between his father’s generation and his own. Whereas before books were illumed with petty candles, now – let there be light! – there was energy. And what of the energy between him and Roma? Did he feel guilty? Did he feel shameful? Not even a bit. He only felt excited to see her again. He was beginning to see the rules by which he’d been forced to live his entire life as ridiculous. Perhaps he was always going to feel this way eventually, or perhaps Roma had instigated a wholesale rebellion within him. Whatever the case, the idea of humbly going to America and playing the good boy to increase his fortune no longer appealed to him. When he thought of going to America – when he thought of abandoning Roma – his body almost seized up.
She was his temptress. He didn’t think he loved her. He didn’t know her well enough to love her. But that didn’t matter. Love had nothing to do with it. This was something more powerful, something to make their ancestors uncomfortable. This was lust. Perhaps, after all, lust could exist apart and away from love. Perhaps lust and love did not have to co-exist. Perhaps he could admire Roma, think her intelligent and beautiful, and want her, without buying a large house in London and hiring a half-score of servants. Perhaps dirty, illicit, improper lust was just as good.
He would never utter these thoughts in public. If he did, he would become a pariah, and that, he supposed, made him a hypocrite. But it did not change the fact, he reflected as he closed the novel, sat up, and packed his pipe with tobacco, that he would see Roma again—and he would make love to her.
Amid books and wood and danger, he would make love to her.
Late at night, a thought entered his mind.
I hope, he thought, I never make love to any other woman but her.
He pondered if that was the beginning of love, but then let it go. It needn’t concern either of them. The moment was all that mattered. The moment was all.
Roma’s thoughts ran just as Casper’s did. The two of them would have been surprised to learn just how similar their thoughts were. Roma underwent the same transformation of ideals, the same metamorphosis of inherited rules of conduct. She could not help reliving what had happened only a few hours ago. Her body, for the first time in years, felt truly connected to her mind. She had often felt as though she was disconnected, overly bookish, but now she felt like she had been freed. Why must she swoon and act daintily? Why couldn’t she have what she wanted, even if it was a bachelor?
That night, she touched herself. She had only done it twice before. The first time was when she was growing into womanhood, and the urges had been almost overwhelming. She hadn’t done it for ten years after that, overcome with guilt and shame, and since her twenty-second year she hadn’t done it at all. Both times had been guilty activities, and she had felt dirty afterwards. Now, she did not feel dirty at all.
She felt liberated.
She was a single woman, with no family to speak of, who owned and ran a business. Why should she have all the responsibilities of freedom but none of the pleasures? Whose mad idea had that been?
*****
Roma knew something cataclysmic was going to happen. It was in the air that day, and evident in every one of her movements. She was impatient to get the day out of the way, so that evening may arrive and bring Casper with it. It was a busy day, which helped. She was able to lose herself in the ebb and flow of serving customers, and soon she was turning that blessed closed sign and waiting for her—her what? Her beloved? He certainly wasn’t that. Her lover? Perhaps a more appropriate title, but still not entirely accurate. She pushed these considerations aside. They were no longer important.
Her body hummed. Her breasts ached to be touched, and her womanhood was alive to the slightest movement. Even the fabric of her dress brushing against her caused her to wish Casper was here. A half-hour passed, and finally, he knocked on the door. She opened it and let him in. He was dressed in a fine shirt and britches. His beard had not been trimmed since they met, and he looked like a jungle man.
“I will not ask you to not discard me,” Roma said. “That is not what this is. I know what this is. I am not some silly girl, being taken advantage of. I am a woman of one-and-three, and I am going to do this because I want to.”
“Okay,” Casper said, surprised by this unexpected declaration. “I never thought otherwise for a moment.”
“I know,” Roma said. “But other men would. Shall we go upstairs? I have a small room above the shop. There is a bed up there. Better than a desk, I should think.”
Casper agreed, and she led him up the stairs. She was remarkably calm. Her heartbeat had steadied. This was the calm—soon, there would be the storm. As they walked up the stairs, Casper reached around and touched her legs. He squeezed them through her dress and caressed her buttocks. They were tight and small, and he squeezed them hard until there was a little pain. But it was welcome. It made her feel alive.
Then they entered the bedroom. Roma barely had a chance to lock the door before Casper was upon her. She turned to him, and their lips met in a hungry clashing. Their teeth clicked and their tongues danced in each other’s mouths. “Get naked,” he urged.
She pulled her dress over her head and tore her underclothes away, leaving them piled upon the floor. As she undressed, Casper did the same, tearing at his shirt and his britches. His manhood was hard, and big, huge, in fact. She had never seen a manhood before. But seeing it there, hard, ready for her, made a thr
ill of pleasure move through her.
They stood a foot apart, both naked, simply staring at each other. And then he breached the gap and lifted her off her feet. He grabbed her buttocks as he lifted her, and then carried her to the bed. He laid her upon her back, and she looked up at him in the orange light of summer dusk, dim through the drawn curtains. She lifted her legs, and he leaned over her. His muscles stood in his arms, and his shoulders were big with muscle.
He reached down and touched her womanhood. It was extremely wet. Now the storm came, and her breathing quickened, sweat beaded upon her skin, and her womanhood ached. “I’m ready,” she said. “I’m ready, Casper.”
He touched his manhood, maneuvered it, and then pushed.
He was huge; he filled her entirely. There was a pain, and then the pain began to be pushed side. He eased into her slowly, and she opened for him. His manhood burst her maidenhead. He thrust slowly for a few more minutes until she was accustomed to it, and then he began to thrust into her with more fierceness, with more passion.
He pounded into her, his huge manhood hitting a spot deep within her. It was like the pleasure spot on the outside of her womanhood, only it sent deeper, more permanent pleasure through her. She moved with the motions of his thrusts, moving her hips down on his manhood. The pleasure was filling her like a cup until it was overflowing, spilling.
His hands were on her petite breasts, touching the nipples, twisting them lightly. Then it happened again, but it was deeper and more intense. She moaned and bounced harder on his manhood. The Pleasure – the true Pleasure, the Pleasure of womanhood – captured her with its hot hands. She closed her eyes and rode it as he thrust into her, over and over. Her breathing was frantic, as though she was drowning. And she was—she was drowning in the pleasure his body offered.
“Oh, Roma,” he said. “Roma, Roma, Roma.”
He grasped her shoulders, her face, her breasts—and then he thrust into her one final time. He moaned loudly, and then fell to the side, his muscled body slick with sweat. She rolled over and rested her head upon his chest. She could feel his seed spilling out of her. She would worry later; now she was content.
They lay in silence for an hour, and then made love again. This time it was slower, and it happened to Roma five times before he spilled his seed. They made love four times that night, and Roma experienced Pleasure twenty-three times in total. She felt that she was catching up on a lifetime of missing out on it. Why would a woman deny herself this? she wondered. Why would a man deny a woman this?
When she awoke, Casper was at the window, smoking his pipe. He turned with a peculiar look upon his face.
He had thought long and hard after Roma had fallen asleep. Indeed, his thoughts had been a veritable torrent of consciousness, making sleep impossible. Casper was a practical man, he liked to think. He understood that there was the world, and then – standing apart – there was the world as he wished it to be. He understood this. He did not like it, but he understood it.
But fortune had dealt him a kind hand these past weeks. Lust had tackled him, wrenched him, seized him. Lust had emancipated him—both of them. He had thought long last night.
“And I have decided on something.”
Her brown eyes regarded him coolly. “Yes?” she said.
“I have decided,” he said, “that I would like you to be my wife. I tick all the ‘boxes’ a normal husband must. I have money, I am well thought of in society. I have all that nonsense. But that is not why I wish to marry you. We are alike, you and I. There is no other way to explain what we have done. We must be alike. Look at us. We have behaved in an apparently monstrous way, but you are not weeping, I am glowering in silence. I am not ashamed; neither are you. I cannot say that we are in love, but we are definite soul mates. Of that, I am sure.”
“You are a romantic fellow, aren’t you?” Roma said, rising to her feet. She was naked, but she didn’t seem to care.
“Is that a yes?”
She walked across the room and stood before him, her nipples hard, her body lithe. “Yes, I will be your wife. But do not expect me to be wifely.”
“I would expect nothing of the sort,” Casper said.
“Good.” Roma turned and walked to the bed. “Now come here. I have fifteen minutes before the shop must be opened. Husband.”
Casper extinguished his pipe and joined his fiancé, feeling for all the world like the luckiest man alive.
The Duke of Hearts
I would like to dispel the myth that I, Sarah Archer, the daughter of what is usually referred to as a “minor family,” am in any way inferior to my peers. This is commonly muttered amongst the lords when they see how I interact with the “common folk.” That I do not spit in their direction is considered a slight against the most privileged of society. That I, in fact, do not flinch at the idea of sharing the same air space is positively scandalous. Perhaps this is why at the age of twenty-three I was not yet married.
I first saw Francis Seymour in London in 1676. To say I was immediately captivated and intrigued and astonished and beguiled by him would of course be unseemly and yet it is the truth. It was not a planned meeting, and, indeed, no words were exchanged between us, I being in town for a meeting with friends, and he being in town for reasons unknown to me.
We passed mere inches of each other on a thoroughfare not far from Westminster. He carried himself differently to the dukes I had seen before. His arms were by his sides, like a fighting man, and his steps were not ladylike in the slightest, but heavy and probably “uncouth.” He wore dress far beneath his economic powers, with only the slightest frill and flare adorning his jacket and breeches and boots.
As soon as we passed, I asked my maidservant who the man was, and, she being a surprisingly well-informed source of information of that kind, she told me that he was Francis Seymour, and had recently come into his dukedom in Somerset. I admit my heart was beating fearfully quickly; I thought it may break out of my bodice. There, I have said two unrespectable things in the space of a few words! This will cause quite a stir if it is even found, I am sure. Perhaps I will arrange for it to be published after my death, but that is morbid and a concern for another time.
Being thus informed about this man, to whom I felt a pull altogether astounding and perplexing to me, I decided without hesitation that I must see him again. This impulsive and unflinching behavior has, on several occasions, caused men to refer to me as “no kind of woman at all.” Several courtships have met swift ends because of it. Hoping that this mysterious man would not be the same, I set in course motions for my arrival at Berry Pomeroy Castle, under the guise of a social visit to coincide with the fayre.
“Are you sure you want to go all that way for a fayre, daughter?” Father asked, in that timid and slightly reproachful way of his.
“Father, I am positively suffocating. My sisters are all off having children or visiting abroad – they are all, in short, engaged in some kind of adventure – and I believe I am entitled to a little adventure of my own. You need not worry. I will keep the breech-wearing and pipe-smoking to a minimum.”
“Sarah!” Father exclaimed, but there was a smile behind his beard, which he grew despite criticism. We were both out of sorts, Father and I.
Charlotte came to my chambers soon later, with a knock on the door. I bid her to enter and she fluttered into the room like a rose petal blown in the wind. “Sarah!” she cried, holding my hands. “He said yes, didn’t he? We’re going to the fayre! Oh, do you think it will be wonderful? I bet it will be wonderful!”
I admit I was taken up with the girl’s enthusiasm, and we talked at length about how wonderful it would be. It was truly an event for her, and it warmed me to see her so moved. My own sisters having long since moved away, and my brother away making his fortune in London, Charlotte was like family to me.
That night I could not sleep for thinking of the fayre, a mere three months away. Guilt broiled within me, warring with the excitement. I was behaving, after all,
in a cunning and “unwomanly” way.
But we women are so often the pawns. I thought it was time we played the chess master for once.
*****
Having been acquainted with castles since a young age, I was not befuddled at the sight of Berry Pomeroy, though I had to admit it was grand and beautiful. The three months had passed in much the same way as the three months before; I have often wondered if my obsession with the duke would have been so intense had not those months elapsed since our accidental and secret meeting.
We arrived just when the tents and festivities were being erected outside the castle. Jugglers and mummers milled around the tents, waiting for their chance to shine. That the duke allowed this fayre to be held on his land was another sign to me that he was a man unlike others. To be sure I talked among the mummers and jugglers and common folk for quite some time, with the intention of firstly enjoying their conversation, as they had none of the sickening tightness of lip and sternness of face that is so common among our class, and secondly to see if I could learn aught about the mysterious duke. No man there would hear of his name being spoken of in any by a flattering light. My instincts thus reaffirmed, I prepared for my formal introduction to him.
We were welcomed into the main hall, in which several lords and ladies stood in tight circles, clutching their chalices and talking softly to one another. I was accustomed to being stared at as a member of that dying family Archer, and so it did not overly bother me. Presently Duke Francis Seymour walked through the crowds and stood before me.
“My lady,” he said, bowing before me. His eyes were pale blue like ice and his face was kind and strong. He took my hand in his and, before everybody in the room, brought it to his lips. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” he murmured softly, the warmth of his kiss still upon my hand.
I confess I was at first stunned by this display. I had never met this man and had no thought of his ever showing me any affection. I almost wrapped my tongue upon itself in trying to reply, but then I recovered some of my poise and smiled at him, as charmingly as I was able. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” I replied, withdrawing my hand.
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