“That’s a wonderful idea,” Caro agreed, “Let’s try some.”
I was brought down off the platform and carefully seated on a stool in front of a vanity table — though no matter how careful I was, the pins pricked me in some very uncomfortable spots. After trying a dozen models, they finally settled on a sleek skullcap of black coq feathers with a purplish sheen, which covered my hair completely and came equipped with a wispy little veil that came down over my eyes.
Then came the matter of shoes, which were difficult to find to fit me, as my feet are rather larger than the average lady’s; in a back cupboard, Miss Partridge found a pair of black velvet slippers with lovely curved heels and sparkling jet decorations on the insteps, and they were a good deal more comfortable than I expected them to be, though I was rather wobbly walking in them.
“Will your ladyship lend the jewels,” Miss Partridge asked as I practiced gliding up and down the room without falling down, “Or should we search out something here?”
“I suppose we should use real jewelry instead of costume,” Caro thought, “Though I’d have to borrow something from Mamà to go with that hat and dress. We’d need something fairly massive, wouldn’t we?”
“Do you have earrings that don’t pinch?” I asked, remembering the discomfort of Caro’s screw-back earrings.
“I’m afraid your lordship would have to have his ears pierced to avoid the screws.”
“Does that hurt?” I asked, wondering which would be worse, pinching or piercing.
“Only for a moment,” Caro explained, “We just push a hot needle through the lobe, it doesn’t hurt after that.”
“Are earrings absolutely necessary?” I didn’t care much for either option.
“Yes,” both women answered as one.
I tried on some long, dangling jet earrings of a rather antique style, which weren’t as uncomfortable as Caro’s, and the effect was deemed acceptable, so a jet dog-collar choker (to cover my Adam’s apple) and several strands of jet beads were added to the costume. I had to have black kid gloves up over my elbows, as well, as my hands weren’t nearly feminine enough. A black taffeta evening-cape trimmed in fluttery black ostrich was finally draped around my shoulders, and Miss Partridge considered the illusion complete.
“Golly,” Caro admired me from a distance, like a modern painting, then came closer and ran her hands over my corseted waist, “You make such a pretty girl, Foxy.”
“Let me get you out of that frock,” Miss Partridge started undoing the hooks in the back, being careful not to disturb her pins, and Caro helped me get out of the corset; I was allowed to get back into my own clothes without assistance.
“How soon can we have this ready?” I heard Caro asking from across the studio.
“How soon do you need it?” Miss Partridge countered.
“Tomorrow afternoon at the latest.”
“That can be done, but I will have to charge extra for putting my other work to the side.”
“How much altogether?”
“Eighty-five pounds for the costume,” the lady said after making some calculations, “And twenty pounds for the overnight service.”
“Have you got a hundred guineas on you, Foxy?” Caro called out.
“May I write a cheque?” I asked, joining them at the counter near the entrance.
“Of course, Lord Foxbridge,” Miss Partridge smiled happily. And with that, I became an official transvestite.
*****
Lady Bea was absolutely entranced by the idea, when I sprung it on her over lunch at the Dorchester next day, and insisted that both Caro and I come with her in our disguises; she was well-known enough to the Marquis and his set to bring as many guests as she wanted. I’d brought Caro to lunch, too, so the two ladies could get better acquainted, and they got along famously; they took such a strong liking to each other that I soon felt like a third wheel as they nattered on about rival Parisian dressmakers.
It was decided that Caro and I would dress at Buckland House, borrow the Duchess’s car and driver, and pick up Lady Beatrice in Park Lane before having supper together at Ciro’s (which I dreaded but they insisted on as a sort of dress-rehearsal); then we’d proceed to Seven Dials, where the auction was being held in the ballroom of an old-fashioned hotel in Monmouth Street.
I hesitated to share this plan with Pond, but had learned my lesson about not telling people what I was up to; he went into such contortions to try to keep from laughing that I actually had to give him permission to make fun of me lest he herniate something. Once he stopped laughing, he considered the plan a sound one, unlikely to end with me in mortal danger; but he got a very funny look in his eye when I asked him not to breathe a word of this plan to Twister — or anybody at all, if it came to that. He felt Twister should be apprised of my plans, but I was firm: I couldn’t bear to have Twister know I was doing something illegal, and wearing a dress while doing it.
With that settled, I went around to Trumper’s for the best shave money can buy, so my face would be as baby-smooth as possible, and then into a cab to Buckland House.
Partridge was very gentle with me as she put me into my violet gown and makeup; then I practiced walking around the room in my high heels while Caro got into her white tie (shocking me again by stripping naked right in front of me) with considerably less interference from Partridge than I usually got from Pond. We left Buckland House by a back stair that let us out in the stable-yard, where a massive and stately Rolls Royce saloon stood at the ready, a handsome young chauffeur holding the door for us and trying not to giggle as I tried three times to step into the car without catching my train on anything.
In Park Lane, Caro got out and went to fetch Lady Beatrice, as a gentleman should, and Lady Bea exclaimed over and over again how pretty I was, how handsome Caro was, and what fun we were going to have together. She seemed to have forgotten entirely about poor Claude and our reason for coming to the auction, caught up in the adventure of it all.
Dinner was a trial, having to let the waiter seat me and let the sommelier defer to ‘Charley’ instead of me, not to mention trying to eat without disturbing the thick layer of rouge on my lips, and then having to visit the ladies’ room with Lady Bea so I could use the facilities and reapply my powder. But nobody at Ciro’s seemed to notice that Caro and I were not what we seemed, so I suppose it was a good trial run before the main event.
The ballroom of the Hampton Hotel, when we arrived there, looked nothing like where I’d expect a sadomasochists’ slave auction to be held: it was positively Victorian, frothing with German rococo plasterwork and bristling with kentia palms in great china tubs, the walls covered in flocked green paper and the floors in yards of fake Aubusson. The attendees of the auction were a little more true to type, decadent-looking fops and femmes fatales scattered among the more usual white tie and black evening gowns, with a goodly number of opulent middle-European military uniforms dotted among the crowd.
Caro and I followed meekly in Lady Bea’s wake as she made the rounds, being openly addressed as La Pantera and reveling happily in the quite scandalous chit-chat that was offered. Even Caro was shocked by some of the conversation, which I was pleased to note. Nobody paid much attention to us after we were introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Charles Savarell (my mother’s maiden name), though my bottom was pinched rather more often than I thought polite.
Nevertheless, I sort of enjoyed myself. The music was nice, the drinks were good, and many of the people I met were attractive and interesting; if it weren’t for the frank discussions of rather baroque intimate practices, I might have considered visiting among this crowd on my own without having an ulterior motive. I kept thinking about Lady Bea’s admonishment to say Yes, and tried to let go of the last vestiges of priggishness that infested my soul.
Eventually, a hush came over the crowd, and people started drifting into their seats as the music changed and the show began. I hid behind Caro, a little afraid of what I was going to see, but found that she was half-
hiding behind Lady Bea, so we were pretty much in the same boat.
The lights came up on the blue plush curtain, and the Marquis de Mazan appeared in a very impressive scarlet uniform loaded with silver braid, drinking up the scattered applause that greeted his arrival. Lifting his voice to a theatrical roar, he welcomed us to an Evening of Classical Art, and introduced the first act: a tableau vivant depicting “the Rape of the Sabine Women.” The curtain rose to reveal three young men and three young women inadequately draped in shreds of red chiffon; but rather than the boys lifting the girls and carrying them away, as the Rape of the Sabines was usually portrayed in art, they were quite simply mating, arrayed in terribly uncomfortable-looking positions, with a great deal of hair-pulling and bottom-slapping. I was stunned.
The curtain came down on that vision, and the Marquis returned to announce the next tableau, entitled “Apollo Mourning Hyacinth.” I really don’t think that what the two boys revealed by the rising curtain were doing was what anyone could call “mourning.” But the smaller of the youths, with a great red gash painted on his forehead, was laying perfectly still and limp while the larger youth, well, mourned him. It was a little more inspiring than the previous scene, and I started feeling rather warm under my corset.
More tableaux of this sort followed, familiar mythological subjects like Apollo and the Muses, Cupid and Psyche, and the Three Graces, all re-imagined as pornography; and after a while, I found myself becoming rather jaded by the sights and sounds, and even to become a little bored by the end of the show, which culminated in a raucous and quite lurid free-for-all depicting the Fall of Troy, complete with wooden horse.
Once that mess had been brought to its conclusion, the Marquis called an intermission, and the audience moved about in their seats as waiters circulated with drinks. After a certain amount of time, the “slaves” from the tableaux, still in their microscopic costumes, began circulating the room, making themselves agreeable to audience members in hopes of putting up their prices a bit.
By hanging back and letting Lady Bea talk for us, we managed to keep all of the “artistes” at arm’s length, though most seemed intent on sitting in every lap in the room; for while our disguises were convincing from a polite distance, any intimate encounters would have given us away. But eventually the music stopped again, and the boys and girls trooped back onto the stage for the auction.
The auction was very much like a horse auction, with the Marquis announcing the various charms of each slave in equine terminology, ‘fillies’ and ‘stallions’ that were ‘biddable’ or ‘spirited’ but offered an ‘excellent ride’ — though at no horse auction that I’d ever attended had the horses wiggled their hindquarters at bidders. Observing the slaves as they were auctioned off, mostly for double the going rate of a higher-class professional (which I had learned from Gabriel), I thought some of them might be a little drunk, or woozy from drugs, but in general they seemed quite cheerful and pleased to be there. It did not appear to be degrading in any way, though I wondered what sorts of degradation these young people might experience at the hands of their buyers later that night.
After all sixteen prostitutes had been auctioned, and sent backstage to dress and accompany their owners home, the little orchestra changed its tune to something very dark and Russian-sounding in a minor key, dominated by a whining clarinet. The lights went down, and an expectant hush fell on the audience. The Marquis came out in front of the closed curtains and announced that it was time to close the evening with something “very special”: two unwilling virgins, a boy and a girl, to be deflowered by the highest bidder.
The curtains rose on a black and empty stage, and the music rose to a crescendo; with a clash of cymbals, the Marquis whipped two hitherto-unseen black velvet drapes off of two nude figures shackled to great wooden frames on wheels, spread-eagle like the martyred Saint Andrew.
The boy was of course Claude Chatroy; and though I was there to rescue him, I couldn’t help wishing I could buy him instead: for though his intellect wasn’t much, a kindly Creator had rather opulently overfurnished his exterior in more-than-ample recompense. He was quite breathtaking. He seemed to be drugged, probably with opium, as he had a dreamy, confused look on his handsome face.
The girl, quite surprisingly, was also drawn from the upper classes: Miss Melinda Cumming, the beautiful but excruciatingly shy daughter of a famously obstreperous Tory MP, whom both Caro and I knew; and though my appreciation of the female form is rather limited, she made a stirring picture in her shackles, with her long strawberry-blonde hair falling down over one side of her face. She also appeared to be drugged, but aware of her situation and absolutely horrified by it: she struggled weakly to hide herself from view, which seemed to inflame the audience, including my own companions.
“What’s your plan?” Caro asked me, turning her back on the distressing sight of her undraped cousin and the stirring site of Miss Cumming, when the Marquis opened the bidding on Claude at fifty guineas.
“Plan?” I asked back, shaking myself out of a lewd stupor.
“You do have a plan, don’t you?” she hissed in surprise.
“I seldom make plans,” I explained haughtily, making a virtue of my shortcoming; the fact was, I’d been so caught up in the disguise aspect of the adventure that I’d quite neglected to give any thought to how I intended to rescue Claude.
“Well, what are you going to do?” she hit me on the arm in her annoyance.
“Buy him, of course,” it was the only solution I could think of. I’d hate to give my money to the dastardly Marquis, but what other choice was there? I couldn’t well storm up onto the stage and throw Claude over my shoulder, and carry him out of a room full of people, hobbled as I was by an evening gown and high heels. Besides, the Marquis was armed with a sword — which, though probably decorative, still counted as a weapon.
“How much money did you bring with you?”
“Surely the Marquis will send a bill, if he’s charging guineas,” I hadn’t yet considered that little wrinkle. I had about three hundred pounds on me, but Lady Bea had intimated that the virgin auctions went pretty high.
“Will he bill Lord Foxbridge or Mrs. Charles Savarell?” Caro was getting impatient with me.
“Hopefully the latter, then I won’t have to pay,” I joked to cover my own annoyance, both with Caro’s impatience as well as my own lack of forethought. The bidding had already gone to two hundred and ten guineas while we’d been hissing at each other like a couple of conspiratorial teakettles.
“Well, bid already, you moron!” she punched my arm so hard I could swear the bone cracked a little.
I raised my hand at the next bid, but was ignored; apparently only verbal bids were accepted. But I couldn’t very well bid in my own voice, nor could Caro in hers, without “blowing our cover.” Caro could drop her voice somewhat convincingly in conversation, and I had managed all evening with a giggly sort of whisper; but neither of us could project our fake voices at volume. When the bidding started to slow down at three hundred and fifty, I called on Lady Bea’s help once again.
“Lady Bea,” I leaned over and whispered in her ear, “Bid on him for me, would you?”
“Of course, my dear,” she purred, “How high can I go?”
“Any amount, it doesn’t matter,” I frowned at her, “But he mustn’t be bought by someone else. We’re rescuing him, remember?”
“Five hundred guineas!” Lady Bea shouted out gleefully, jumping the bidding out of the ten-guinea increments that had held so far.
“Five hundred ten,” responded the truly repellant man in the front corner of the room who had been leading the bidding all along. He looked a cross between an American gangster and a pantomime Herod: enormously fat and shiny and ugly, with dyed black hair greased back from a low forehead and tiny black-currant eyes stuck in a suet-pudding face; he chewed an immense black cigar and wore spectacular diamond rings on most of his short sausage-like fingers.
“Five fifty,” Lady Bea
turned in her chair to face the competition instead of the prize.
“Five seventy-five,” the ugly man responded immediately.
They went back and forth like this, rapid-fire, not letting the Marquis get a word in edgewise. And anyone who was watching the stage instead of the bidders (as I was doing) could not fail to notice that Claude, despite his drugged haze, was following the bidding intently — becoming, quite visibly, more and more aroused as his price went up. The little tart was enjoying it!
But the fat man started sweating at eight-fifty, and hesitated for a long moment at nine-twenty-five; Lady Bea moved in for the kill.
“One thousand guineas,” she declared in a tone that brooked no opposition, then added with girlish mock-seriousness, “eight shillings, and sixpence.”
Silence reigned for a moment, then the Marquis resumed his role as auctioneer.
“I have one thousand guineas, eight and six from La Pantera. Any further bids, Mr. Arnstein?”
The fat man glowered at Lady Bea, then shook his head sadly. I suspect he’d really wanted Claude, but didn’t dare risk La Pantera’s wrath: if she was willing to pay a thousand guineas for something, being thwarted would probably make her his enemy for life. And nobody in his right mind wants a dominatrix as an enemy.
“Sold to La Pantera for one thousand guineas, eight shillings, and six pence,” the Marquis banged his gavel with an amused smirk, and Claude squinted against the lights trying to see who’d bought him. But he was immediately wheeled off the stage, I suppose to be gift-wrapped; bidding started on Miss Cumming, who’d more-or-less fainted and was drooping picturesquely in her frame.
“Oh, goodness, that was fun!” Lady Bea giggled with exhilaration, “It’s too bad I won’t be able to actually keep him, though. He’s quite a specimen. Did you see how he reacted to the bidding?”
“I did,” my annoyance broke the surface. After all of my efforts on his behalf, he didn’t seem to want to be rescued. I was more than half tempted to let Lady Bea have him, but I’d have to ask Caro first — he was her cousin, after all.
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