“To church!” she said, shocked. The church on the duchess’s estate was a small chapel where mass was said each morning and evening. But it was still a consecrated place.
“In the middle of the afternoon,” he said. “There shall be no one there. There is no chance of anyone interrupting us.”
Kathryn squirmed uncomfortably, aware that her every movement brought her in closer contact with him. “But … It is the chapel. It is consecrated, and there is the sacrament there. No, I couldn’t.”
“What a goose you are,” he said lightly, and kissed just the edge of her ear. She could see that she would have to go with him, indeed, to a private place, else he would be doing this all through the lessons, and it was only a matter of time till they were caught. “Do you think the sacrament can see us, then?”
“Yes.”
He sighed. “Very well, then, at the entrance to the chapel, there are the stairs that lead to the upper level, where the vestments are kept. Between the chapel and the stairs, there is a dark space. If we step in there, faith, no one can see us—as dark as it is.”
Kathryn thought of it and nodded. “Very well.”
“You will meet me, then? Oh, angel.” He pressed closer against her from behind, his body warm and strong and seemingly capable of overpowering her.
“Not here,” she said urgently.
“No,” he said, and stepped back enough that though he still leaned over her, holding her hands in his, she could no longer feel his body pressing up against her. “After our lesson,” he whispered. “Meet me there.”
She nodded once, as steps approached from the hallway toward the door.
“This is how you move your fingers, then,” Manox said. “Now, let’s try the last movement through again.”
Katherine did, her hands trembling, feeling Manox’s hot hands upon hers. Despite her tremors, it was perfect.
Manox removed his hands from atop hers as the movement concluded, and she could feel him stepping back and straightening up, and she let her body go limp, allowing the tension to leave her.
From behind came the tap of a walking stick and then the Duchess’s voice, “Very well done, Kathryn. You are to be congratulated, Manox!”
Chapter Ten
She did not dare avoid the rendezvous. Oh, the temptation was there, as Manox, having bowed to the duchess and thanked her for her kind words, collected his music and left, looking very proper, as though nothing more had happened between them than the most ordinary of music lessons.
“You’re improving greatly,” the duchess told Kathryn. “And I can tell you love playing.”
Kathryn, turning around and standing, awkwardly, asked Her Grace how she could tell.
“It’s the way you’re flushed and happy,” the duchess said. “As though you’d come from a lover’s embrace. Your cousin Anne always looked like that when she’d been playing or composing as well.”
“Was she one of your maids, madam?” Kathryn asked, because she would rather think of anything else than how close the duchess had hit near the mark. Because though she was not Manox’s lover, that was undoubtedly what Manox wanted.
“Anne? Oh, no. Not she. Too fine for my commanding. Her father wished that she and her sister Mary would be great ladies, you know, and his having merchant’s blood, he knew that would require as good an education as any ever seen in this kingdom to carry off. So as soon as they were old enough, he sent them to France to be educated at the French court. They went as part of the retinue of our king’s sister, Lady Brandon that is, when she married her first husband, the French king. I think Anne was all of eight when they went.” The duchess shook her head as she reminisced. “But Anne still visited often enough when she was in country, and of course, I visited once or twice myself. And she was like you about the music.”
“Oh. How … how learned and … and wonderful she must be,” Kathryn said. In her mind’s eye she could see Manox would already have reached the space behind the chapel’s stairs, and she wondered what he’d do if she didn’t hasten to join him. In the disturbance of mind which seemed to possess him, it was all too possible that he would stalk back here and demand she embrace him in front of the duchess.
“Indeed,” the duchess said. “She was always, in a way, too grand to be just a gentleman’s daughter. We should have known she would end with the crown.” She sat down on the chair by the virginal and, looking up at Kathryn, seemed to realize for the first time the girl’s discomfort. “What is wrong with you, girl, need you visit the room of easement?”
“Yes, madam,” Kathryn said, seizing upon the excuse with relief. “And it please, Your Grace.”
“Well, go then,” the duchess said. “I would think you’d have seen to it before coming to your lesson, but hasten you hence.”
Kathryn hastened. Only instead of rushing toward the bottom of the garden where the privy to which the duchess had alluded so delicately was located, she took a sharp turn at the back door, and keeping close to the house and hoping none of her fellows would cross her path, she rushed in the semi-shadow of the building toward the chapel.
Should anyone ask, she thought she could tell them that she was going to pray. The truth was that she was praying hard enough. Praying that Manox had changed his mind about wanting to hold her and kiss her. Praying that he wouldn’t have lost all patience and decided to proclaim their rendezvous in front of the entire household, praying that if he were there and he truly wanted to hold her and kiss her, it wouldn’t be unpleasant.
She didn’t think it would be that bad. She remembered the heat in her body in response to the heat from his and half feared she would like it much too much, even though she was sure she didn’t like Manox himself, not that way. Oh, he was well enough as a music master, but she was sure she didn’t wish to marry him or be attached to him and compelled to obey him the rest of her life.
But when she reached the space beside the entrance of the chapel, there was no one else about. The deep recess between the stone wall and the climbing stone steps was so dark that she was not sure whether Manox was there or not, till she heard as if a sigh from the space and then his voice, more breath than whisper, “Kathryn!”
Steeling herself against the horror of entering such impenetrable darkness, she stepped into the space. There was a moment of disorientation for, though her eyes were open, she could see nothing, and then she felt his hands on her, tentative, on either side of her waist, pulling her to him.
Like this, in the dark, unseen, he seemed bigger, overpowering, his arms surrounding her, his body pressing against her, his hair tickling her face, his lips kissing her, first her forehead, then moving down slowly, down one side of her face and then the other, kissing down her graceful, long neck to the hollow of her throat. “Ah, Kathryn, you came,” he said, and resumed kissing her yet again. She could feel him press against her, and against her stomach she felt a hardness that she judged to be his male part.
It felt full large, full hard, and very hot, hotter than even his heated hands or his hot breath touching her. Her heart swelled with pride because, though it might be wrong, it meant she had a sort of power over him—the power to make his body react, whether he wanted it or not.
In her pride, she allowed him to hold her close, her face pressed against his velvet doublet, his lips now kissing at the top of her head. “You are the kindest girl that ever lived,” he told her. “As well as the most beautiful, possessing the voice of an angel.”
He lifted her off her feet and held her up, his powerful arms around her waist, his lips meeting hers. For a moment of confusion she wasn’t sure what he wished, and then his tongue was in her mouth, caressing her tongue.
Her eyes used to the darkness, she could now see him, though dimly. As their faces parted, she could see his filled with something much like an ecstatic joy, his green eyes shining in delight. “Ah Kathryn, if only I were a lord and had a title and could make you mine only. I’d own the prettiest songbird that ever was.”
> She didn’t want to be owned, but neither did she think they should be talking, for someone walking by the dark space next to the chapel and hearing voices come from it would immediately know someone was there. If the person who heard them happened to be a moralist or otherwise inclined to interfere in the lives of others, they would be dragged out in disgrace, and then all would be lost.
Instead, Kathryn submitted to more kisses and more embraces and, when he seemed calmer, escaped into the daylight, tugging at her disarrayed garments and combing her disheveled hair back under her bonnet.
At least, she thought to herself, that was done and it hadn’t been unpleasant and no one had caught them. Now she need not worry about Manox again.
Chapter Eleven
“Please meet me at the customary place,” Manox whispered as he leaned over her to pick up the books from atop the virginal.
Kathryn looked up, confused. “Why? Why?”
He looked at her, then leaned again, to pick up a book he let fall onto the keyboard, “I must touch you again. I must. It’s a craving that has me in great suffering … The madness of it …”
“But I let you!” she said. “I let you once.”
As she hissed her response, she sharpened her ears for the duchess’s footstep. Lately, the old lady had taken to dropping in on them, and she might do so at any minute.
“Ah,” he said, and his hand, seeming fumble for a book managed to drag up the front of her dress, slowly, caressingly. “Ah, but once is not enough, Kathryn. You must come meet me. You must let me … touch you again. I shall go mad otherwise,” he said.
She sighed. “Very well.”
After the lesson she hurried to the space, but this time he did not call her. Instead, he reached out for her, and before she could recover her breath, he’d dragged her back into the narrow space and was on her. This time his hands were on her everywhere, over the dress, feeling every turn and nook of her body, from her swelling breasts to her nascent hips, to the legs beneath.
Quite before she could tell what he was doing, he had her skirts in his hand, and he was lifting them.
“Master Manox!” she said, though she normally avoided saying anything.
“Please,” he said. “Please, only let me touch you … beneath your clothes. Let me feel your secret, madam.”
She opened her mouth to protest but at that moment, half in horror, half in incredulity, she heard the tap-tap-tap of the Duchess’s walking stick on the path next to the space, accompanied by the sound of her footsteps and the sound of another, heavier set of steps.
“We will have three masses tomorrow then,” the duchess said. “Since it’s the anniversary of my late husband’s death.”
The other voice, recognizably the priest’s, answered something that seemed like a long oration on some subject—perhaps even in Latin, Kathryn thought, since the man was quite capable of answering in Latin a question as to whether it was raining.
Manox had her skirts in one hand and his other hand was questing beneath, feeling her things and then dipping beneath her underwear, to feel at the cleft between her legs.
To Kathryn the feel of a hand there—other than her own, and that only when hygiene necessitated it—was so strange, that she squirmed and would have called out, only she was mindful of the voices in the path. The duchess was saying, “No, I would not use the white roses. You remember how my lord felt about—”
Manox was now using both hands to untie Kathryn’s undergarments and to pull them down, till they were around her ankles, effectively entrapping her, making it impossible for her to take more than a very-hobbled step. She wondered what he meant to do, as he let her skirt fall, and it seemed to her that he had fallen to his knees, though it was hard to see in the deep darkness.
And then she felt his head beneath her skirts, his beard tickling her knees, her thighs, up and up. She felt his lips reverently kissing her where she scarce dared touch. This time, a sigh escaped her, but the duchess didn’t seem to notice, as she was saying, “We shall have some greenery in vases,” and the priest was mumbling something in return.
Kathryn felt Manox’s tongue licking along the length of her cleft, and she had to bite her lips together not to moan.
He licked and he sucked, and he seemed to know things about her body that she did not herself know.
She was torn between horrible embarrassment at what he was doing, this strange kind of kiss that, perforce, could not be natural nor normal, and excitement mounting from her body at the ministrations of his tongue and lips.
He found some part of her that seemed to be a trigger of some sort. The more he licked, the more his tongue played on that spot, Kathryn felt as though pressure were building within her being—a pleasurable, warm, insistent pressure but pressure nonetheless
She put her hands out on either side toward the rough, cold, damp stone walls, afraid she would otherwise utterly lose consciousness and fall, as the pressure built and built till there was nothing else in the world but a desire for a release that she wasn’t sure could come or would come.
If she’d not been conscious of the tap tap of the walking stick upon the path outside, she would have let go and screamed her need and her desire for release.
But she dared not and followed the sound in her mind, as the walking stick seemed to distance itself. She wondered if she was dreaming, if it was her desire building up that had caused her to dream this, but at long last, she couldn’t but risk it.
As her pleasure reached some sort of apex and mingled waves of release and joy washed over her, making her legs weak and her body tremble, she let out a long moan and then a long sigh.
She would have fallen then, save that Manox caught her. “You taste,” he whispered sweetly. “As beautiful as you look and almost as beautiful as you sound.”
Chapter Twelve
Kathryn never quite knew how it came to happen, except that Manox’s suffering seemed to grow with her yielding and every time she met with him and allowed him to touch her in intimate ways, he wished for more. For a year they met at their music lesson and were proper and right, but she sat through the lessons stiffly and trembling, because she knew what would come after.
Part of it was fear—fear of being discovered and shamed, fear of what the duchess might do if she found what was happening under the chapel stairs. But there was also another type of worry for, though the encounters were pleasurable—or at least often brought her to gasping pleasure—they also were in a way against her will. She enjoyed Manox’s hands on her, not because they were Manox’s hands, but because they were hands. She enjoyed attention and praise—she’d had so little of it in her life.
But she didn’t like Manox, or not outside the common way. He had taught her music, and for this she was grateful, but she did not imagine a future with him. Even her dim memories of her night on the street squired by Thomas Culpepper were more exciting and romantic than all she did with Henry Manox. And a superstitious fear gnawed at her mind that she might have to marry him—that this would be the end conclusion of all her escapades—because the lace thrown onto the dormitory floor had said Henry, and behold, Manox was Henry.
If Kathryn was going to have to spend most of her life obeying a man as though he were God on Earth, then she would surely want it to be a man of some worth and situation. Not Henry Manox, second son, music master, bound to work for what he could get. She knew where the end of that journey lay—she’d been born into it, in the family of a younger son, her impoverished father.
What she did for Manox, she did because she thought it would relieve his suffering. And what she did was never enough.
As he leaned over her during the lesson, to correct the positioning of her fingers—an endeavor that after two years of learning the virginal was quite needless, as her positioning was perfect or as perfect as Henry Manox could teach—and readied to whisper in her ear, she whispered fiercely back, “It is no use, Mr. Manox. Be content with what you have got so far. Be satisfied.”
She could see his expression reflected in a bit of silver leaf on the virginal’s figured back, and she saw that he had a certain and sure expression when leaning over her, but now the look in his eyes faltered to something like momentary panic, then disbelief. “You can’t mean that,” he said.
“Be sure I mean it, Master Manox.”
“But … But we haven’t …” He let go of her and started pacing, toward the window, then back again, his eyes wild, his hands clasped on either side of his head, as if he were a man ready for Bedlam. “But can you not see my suffering?”
Kathryn played on, hoping the duchess wouldn’t hear a long silence in the playing and come to see what was about. “I can see your suffering, yes, but I do not know what I can do to relieve it. What you have asked me to do I’ve done, but what I’ve done never seems to relieve your pain, only to bring on a more pronounced bout.”
He paced some more. On the keyboard, her fingers flew, heedless, from a traditional ballad to something that more closely resembled a march. She wondered if this was what the priest meant when he talked about a lady’s citadel of virtue being under siege. It didn’t feel like siege, not unless the conquering armies lay on the floor and writhed about moaning and screaming and telling the resisters to relieve their suffering.
“How can you say you’ve done all I want?” he asked, as he came behind her and, once more, put his hands over hers, stilling them. “How can you claim my suffering should be quite relieved? Don’t you know what the sight of you does to me, the scent of your body, the memories … ?”
She shook her hands, trying to dislodge his. “What I do not understand, Master Manox, is what you mean by this. What can you expect me to give you that will quell such intemperate urges?”
“Some token of your affection for me!” He said.
“What token should I show you? I will never be aught with you, and you are not able to marry me.”
No Will But His Page 7