by Noelle Mack
For ever after, he would have this to hold over me—unless I killed him. I put my head down, waiting for my chance. I heard him groan, and then heard the slick strokes of his oiled hand sliding over his cock. I surmised that he was bringing himself to orgasm. There was a methodical rhythm to it—fast, fast, then slow—and he was in no hurry to finish. Even so, I knew he was looking at Kitty and not me.
I spied the dagger still piercing the pillow, grabbed it, cut the tie between my feet, and rose to punch him as hard as I could with my free hand. The blow landed dead center on his upper chest, knocking the breath from his lungs and making him stumble. Kitty gave a little scream when I held the dagger to Diego's throat and edged away from us. I kept a wary eye on her—she had proven her strength several times over that night.
This time it was his arm that got wrenched behind his back and held there with all my might. I would have been happy to snap his elbow, happy to murder him in cold blood.
I jabbed the point in a fraction of inch away from the pulsing artery in the side of his neck and kept it there. A thin trickle of crimson blood came forth from the small wound. If he moved, he would effectively kill himself.
I felt him sag against me—he was heavy and it was a struggle to support his weight. But he seized the chance to pull free of my hold. With a bestial roar, he threw me down upon the carpet and the real fight began.
He had been generous with the oil, rubbing it over his groin—my thigh slipped when I tried to hold him down with it. Between our mingled sweat and the spreading oil, our naked bodies melded, but neither he nor I could gain the advantage.
Kitty watched with wide eyes. The sight of two big men, bodies slamming together, eyes on fire with fury, seemed to excite and frighten her at once. She could not escape—we were between her and the door. And I for one would have grabbed her ankle had she tried to flee and thrown her down as well.
Diego rolled upon his wrenched arm and groaned in agony. I had hurt him more than he had hurt me, not distracted by lust for a naked male body as he had been.
I grabbed his hair and smashed his face into the floor. His nose broke and a geyser of blood gushed forth.
"You killed him!" Kitty gasped.
I picked his head up by the hair. He was gagging but he was very much alive.
"No. But he might have killed me. With your help."
Diego's dark eyes were glassy and the fire in them dulled. His head grew heavy as he lost consciousness—I let it drop down with a thud. He would survive. And he would hunt me down again, I was sure of it. His malevolent pride would demand vengeance.
He had intended to kill me. I could not return the favor. Xavi would be free if I did but I would likely die on the gallows. And there is a limit to what a man will do for love.
I put on my clothes and ran for my life. My own house was not safe. I thought of Richard—he lived near the river—and was nearly spent before I found it. The windows were dark but I knocked again and again. I had to rouse him. If he could not harbor me, a friend of his might.
The parallel world of men who loved men had unwritten rules. Given that so many faces were turned against them, they protected their own. One of them would hide me.
My repeated knocks shook the door, and Richard eventually heard them. He glanced at my tattered clothes and bruised face, and let me in at once.
"Who has done this to you?"
"Don Diego. And a little bitch of his acquaintance—she led me into the trap—Kitty."
The next morning I told Richard what had happened, omitting no detail. He thought long and hard over it, looking at me with compassion before he finally spoke. "I am glad you survived. That you hurt him so badly, though, puts your future survival at even greater risk."
"He meant to kill me! What could I do but try to kill him?"
"I understand." He sighed. "At least you are safe. Above all he meant to humiliate you."
"He is good at that. And, by the way, I do not agree that he prefers women. He handled my privates with tenderness."
Richard shook his head. "I have never heard of him taking a male lover to his bed. And many of my persuasion were extremely curious about him. He was much talked about in my circles."
"If you had seen—"
"Thank God I did not." His mouth quirked in an odd smile. "But I think I understand him too. He loves power more than anything. The sex of the person whom he commands is not important."
"What do you mean?"
"He was able to arouse you. True, he had to drug you and beat you to do so, and thus dissolve your strength to resist. To experience pleasure you cannot control for the entertainment of someone you hate . . . there is no greater humiliation."
"Agh." I sunk my head into my hands. The memory of Diego's strong hands caressing me, and my body's inadvertent response to it was still painfully vibrant in my mind.
"Am I—what you are?" I burst out at last. "And do I not know it?"
Richard laughed a little. "I don't think so. But one can always hope."
"Bah! You are no help."
His voice grew soothing once more. "Every man and every woman has something of the opposite sex in their soul."
"I suppose that is so," I said grudgingly. "Given a blindfold and enough whiskey, our opposites may well put in an appearance."
Richard nodded with satisfaction. "I think you understand what I am getting at."
It took a while for me to recover from my beating and the sense of being drugged persisted (although not the interesting hallucinations). I stayed with Richard. Then Anne took me in. I shall be forever grateful to both of them.
.
Twelve
Which leaves Xavi. It was many months before I saw her again. Her odd moods toward the end of our affair and her cold-hearted dismissal of me from the window of her coach baffled me. Our love was not meant to last and few do. Our dearest wishes and fondest hopes can vanish in a heartbeat.
But as Diego ceased to be a threat, I hoped to see her once more before he was recalled to Spain for his many crimes and punished there. And she granted me that much at last...
"Edward, I am sorry."
We were walking in Hyde Park. It seemed safer to meet outside. I longed for her still.
"You could not help what your husband did."
She twirled her parasol and would not look at me.
"I should not have lied to you."
"Everybody lies, Xavi."
"Not to the degree that I did."
I knew some of what she would say—Richard had found out much of her history and indicated there was more to come.
I guided her to a bench under a leafy tree whose branches hung down nearly to the ground on either side of it. We could speak without fear of being overheard.
She closed her parasol and leaned it against the bench.
"To begin with, there is the matter of your last letter. It was stolen."
"Ah. That explains a great deal."
"I found it among Don Diego's papers. I cried when I read it."
"Did he replace it with a forgery of some kind?"
She nodded. "It said that you had found another love—your first love, in fact. She had come back into your life and you could no longer see me. I was heartbroken."
Dear God. The letter may have been a forgery but the words were true. But telling her that would shatter her.
"So I refused to answer it. And when you came running up to my coach, I spurned you. Had I known that you were true to me ..."
I had not been.
"I would not have been so cold," she finished. "And now it is too late." She wiped away a tear with the back of her hand.
Two gentlemen on fine bays trotted by and one turned to look at Xavi as if he knew her.
"Who is that?" she said after they had gone by.
"Lord Gordon."
"He is handsome."
She looked about distractedly. Now that we had been apart for some months, I had begun to see the instabilit
y of her temperament. Each new thing that attracted her soon became her greatest passion but nothing lasted.
"Do you want to know who—who I really am?"
"Xavi, please do not upset yourself."
She threw me a stubborn look. Her confession was her chance to make amends.
"I will begin at the beginning."
I sighed. "Very well. It is as good a place as any."
"I was born in London, not Spain. My mother was an actress."
Richard had found a picture of her. The never-quite-famous Mrs. Donnelly looked hopefully out of an old engraving of her traveling theater company. She had something of Xavi's beauty but not her fire.
"My father disappeared, you know. He left her with three children."
She gave me a watery look and looked in her reticule for a handkerchief, dabbing her eyes with it. Go on.
"They named me Lily. The younger ones were twins, Mary and Moira."
Who had not lived.
"I took care of them for my mother while she looked for work. But she was too old to play ingénues and there were no other roles."
In other words, Mrs. Donnelly had faded away and soon died.
"She died ... and then the babies died. I was alone."
It had the ring of melodrama—but an interesting life often does. I knew that Xavi's confession was partly true and partly fiction. Richard dismissed her as a liar, but he did acknowledge her talent for telling stories.
Still, I vowed to listen.
"When I was fourteen, I entered a brothel."
I was silent. That might well be true.
"They kept me in a locked room on the top floor. The light came in all day from great, slanted windows—do you remember my telling you about the chapel in Spain and how I loved the light there?"
“I do, yes.”
"That was a lie. In my room nothing was holy or sacred. They brought up men to look at me—they put me on a pedestal like a statue and let men look at me with nothing on. I felt like bits and pieces of me were falling off and if I looked only at the light, I would be whole once more."
It was true. I could feel my heart breaking for the girl she had once been.
"I was not touched, though. That little bit of flesh was valuable."
Men were vile beasts.
"But I began to behave so badly—I smashed all the glass to let the light in—that I was sold to the first comer."
I had an idea who that was.
"Will Fotheringay. He looked at me too. But he never saw me. Just my arse or my new-grown tits or my black hair."
The thought was infinitely sad. She had been a child inside a woman's body... and not in her right mind.
"But before I was sold to him I ran away."
"Where did you go?"
"I kicked about Covent Garden. Sold flowers from a basket. But they came looking. Someone had told them about a beautiful flower girl with long, black hair selling violets."
"A pretty picture."
"When people want to buy, it is."
I thought about the many times I had passed a flower-seller and not bought so much as a rosebud. Their sweet-smelling wares were not something they could eat at days' end.
"Will came in. He'd seen the glass that I had smashed out, down on the sidewalk in front of the brothel. And he saw me standing in the room, looking up at the sky. I wished I could fly away up into the clouds and never be seen again."
"I am surprised you did not kill yourself."
"It was tempting."
"Why didn't you?"
She shrugged her pretty shoulders. "I wanted to live more than I wanted to die."
"What about Will?"
"He was not so bad. But it was the same thing in a way. To be looked at and looked at makes you feel less real.
"He did those engravings of me in all those poses and sold thousands and thousands of them. I never saw the money. But there was my face and my body in the printshop windows. Anyone could buy me for a few pence. When he became famous, my price went up to a shilling. I was proud of that."
I felt that it helped her to talk. And it helped me to listen. "Go on."
"I did what every girl does once—I fell in love with a soldier. Or with his scarlet coat, I should say. I ran off again. Then he was sent to Spain and I contrived to follow him there."
By my reckoning, she would have been all of fifteen.
"A musket ball put a hole in his beautiful coat. And in him. I had to look out for myself."
She was not in the least sentimental about the memory.
"I moved up through the ranks. On my back, as they say. I had the sergeant, lieutenant, major, and then the colonel.
"He was killed last of all when the regiment was captured. They made him watch his men be shot one by one. I was put in prison. That was where Don Diego found me. One of his officers had seen me there and he came to look. And look. And look. I felt like an animal in a cage."
"But you married him."
"Yes, I married him. I was sixteen."
I looked at her curiously. "A virgin bride."
"No—did I say that?"
I only nodded.
"I was lying."
She sounded most forthright when she explained that she was lying. It was disconcerting.
"It was so easy. I told Diego my father was Spanish. I had learned the language quickly in prison. I made up the name. I had no papers to prove who I was, and no one knew me."
It could be argued that no one did now.
"Don Diego liked the idea that he could make me into a lady—and treat me like dirt."
"Why did you not run away?"
"Where would I go?"
Another question I could not answer.
"He taught me every ugly thing I had yet to learn. I lost myself again in lies. He did not know the difference and he did not care.
"When he told me of his appointment as ambassador, and I knew I would return to London, I was terrified that someone would recognize me. No one did—no one but him. When he saw his 'innocent' wife in Will's engravings he knew who I really was at last.
"But I no longer did. And when I saw you, I wanted to be everything to you. The self I was born with and the self I became. The only way to do that was to give you my body. And you opened my soul... do you understand?"
She had been so poised when I saw her in Quinn's studio. An almost empty room. Where she could look into the light and put the pieces of herself back together.
At that moment I forgave her everything.
"Yes. Yes, I do."
She picked up her parasol and stood up. Then ducked under the overhanging branches and walked away alone.
And so this romance ends in an unconventional way: I loved two women, they did not love me. And I am alone—not for long. I adore women, in all their complexity and beauty. My heart, I think, was made to love and made to be broken ...
I would not have it any other way.
Epilogue
Back to the pile. I cannot bring myself to burn it. What will my heirs make of these love notes, erotic stories, and torn pages? The engravings of Xavi with nothing on? There is a birch twig—Anne sent that. I use it for a bookmark in my copy of Fanny Hill.
Among the chaos is Richard's shrewd summing-up of the affair, written in a neat hand. He pieced together histories, investigated on his own, talked to many people and visited many places. He collected a great deal of material and gave it to me. Herewith, some of his unedited notes.
Xaviera Innocencia. Born Lily Donnelly. Actress mother died young. Cared for sisters, Moira and Mary. Entered London brothel [nunnery] at fourteen. Kept in locked room at top of building. Escaped. Found in Covent Garden, returned to brothel. Sold to artist Will Fotheringay. Subject of erotic engravings done by Will Fotheringay. Ran away with soldier at 15. Camp follower during Peninsular Wars. Moved up in the ranks "on her back.'" Colonel's mistress. Taken prisoner. Rescued from Spanish gaol by Don Diego Mendez y Cartegna. Married at 16. Moved
to London at age 23. Mistress of Lord Edward Delamar. Divorced Don Diego at age 25. Married Lord Gordon at age 26. No children.
Fotheringay engravings reprinted by the thousands. Portrait by Everett Quinn in the Royal Academy. Fotheringay engravings in private collections and museums.
Anne Leonard. Descendant of a renowned Devonshire family. Married once, widowed. A very private person. Brothel keeper and bircher extraordinaire. Mistress of Lord Delamar. A miniature exists, in a private collection.
Don Diego Mendez y Cartegna. Spain's Ambassador to the Court of St. James. A notorious brute [see records in Old Bailey]. Recalled to Spain in disgrace. Portrait in the Prado Museum.
Everett Quinn. Painter. Lunatic. Cunny man of genius and lover of too many women to count. Portrait in the Royal Academy, The Apotheosis of Quinn, in which he depicts himself as God and his many mistresses as angels.
Will Fotheringay. Painter and printmaker. The first to depict Xaviera Innocencia Lily Donnelly in famous series of engravings. Rival of Quinn.
Kitty. Prostitute and opium addict. Fate unknown.
Signed: Richard Whiston, secretary to Lord Delamar.
Want more? Lord Edward first appeared in THREE ... available now from Aphrodisia
“Come here, Fiona."
She obeyed, but still kept a little distance, unsure of herself and of him. With lightning speed, he reached out and clasped her wrist. "Lift your dress, my lady. Show me your juicy cunny. Let me look my fill. I like to look just as much as you do."
As if he knew she would not refuse, he let go of her wrist. Fiona hesitated, then bent down to pick up the hem of her dress. She wasted no time pulling her dress up high on her thighs and then to her waist, standing before him in drawers of muslin so fine it was almost sheer. Lord Delamar patted the nest of springy curls that showed through the front, and bent his head to press a kiss there. Then he parted the split in her drawers with one hand, holding it open with the other and touched a big finger to her tender flesh. "You are already wet."