by Bianca Bloom
When I looked back over him, I realized that he was quite handsome. He must have been about ten years my senior, but the years had been kind to him and only served to make him more alluring. And if I looked closely at his fall, he seemed to be not only well-endowed, but quite interested in what he saw.
It still left me with few options. Approaching him in mixed company was fraught with danger, for he might well be pulled back by those around him before we had the chance to get up to any mischief that might serve to end my marriage. But I realized with some surprise that I would not only be willing to see him for the sake of getting Mr. Barlow to divorce me, I might truly enjoy our encounter.
As I walked back toward my rooms, I felt a layer of shame flush over my skin. Apparently, this quest to free myself of a decade-long sham of a marriage was going to be rather more enjoyable than I thought.
34
I knew that I would be able to enter the Assembly Rooms, as my clothing was beyond reproach. Even if I was not recognized, on seeing me everyone would assume that Mrs. Allen was beyond reproach, if only because of her stylish, expensive attire.
They would not know that the attire was sewn entirely by my own hands, and my mother’s. There were certain advantages to being in my line of work.
When I first entered the rooms, many men and women did look at me, but few appeared to recognize me. I spoke briefly with one or two clients, but all of them were part of married pairs, and nobody appeared eager to ask me to dance.
Everything changed when I saw the man from earlier. He had just finished drinking wine, and was striding back toward the musicians with a frown on his face. Apparently, he was not having an interesting evening, and that small fact was certainly something that I could change.
As soon as I saw him, I took a deep breath. Respectability, I decided, was a habit as much as it was anything else. Just as I would not think of walking the street in shoes that did not fit, and that slapped about on my heels, so I could not imagine speaking to the man without either an introduction or some kind of pretense. After all, I frequently spoke to strange men in my shop, but the circumstances were such that I never felt awkward.
I did feel awkward as I walked up to him, and my face was burning, but I simply curtseyed. After all, I had seen the way his eyes were fixed on me earlier, and unless he had found an even sweeter amusement I knew that rejection was not likely.
“Would you care to dance the next with me?” I asked him.
For a moment, the rakish veil lifted. The man had clearly never heard those words in his life.
“Pardon?”
“I asked if you wanted to dance,” I told him, growing impatient. “But perhaps you would prefer to take a turn.”
My nerve failed me as we danced, and I thought to rescue the exchange and bring it back into the realms of polite society.
“I suppose we should introduce ourselves,” I said, but he only shook his head.
“It is better for us both if we do not know,” he said. “Unless you are interested in me due to my conversation? Would you perhaps care to hear what I think on the exhibition of paintings that I saw this afternoon?”
I started, hoping that no one else had heard the impertinence of his words. The assembly rooms were both loud and crowded, and I satisfied myself that nobody had.
“I would not object to it, sir,” I said, not too quietly. After all, if we only whispered the entire time, an observer was sure to know that there was collusion between us.
“But you wish to hear me on other topics first?” he asked.
I nodded, trying to prevent myself from flushing. If I had entertained any doubts of the gentleman’s intentions, I could not hold on to them any longer.
“I should suppose so,” I said. “That depends.”
He scoffed, but I saw that my point had been well taken. No more impertinent words emerged until we left the rooms together.
35
To an outside observer, nothing would have been out of place about the sight of us. We were just a man and a woman, walking through the streets of Bath, before the summer light had quite faded. The lamps were not yet lit, and there were still plenty of young girls with their mammas. The hour still had some sort of innocence about it, and I was holding the man’s arm as if I were once again an innocent young girl myself. We walked slowly enough to match the pace of others on the street, quickly enough to assure the world that we were not lagging in order to steal embraces. Since speech was not required of me, the expression on my face was not perfectly calm, but at least it must have seemed innocent.
But there was nothing innocent about our encounter. Everything about it was odd, and I was afraid for a moment that the very strangeness of it would leave both of us paralyzed.
We walked nearly to the river, and still I heard no words from my companion. Perhaps he was puzzling over the details. I loved the idea of his throwing me down underneath a bridge and having his way with me, then leaving me with a conveniently monogrammed handkerchief that I might present to a judge. And yet, I was fairly sure the hollows underneath the bridges were both too dark and not nearly private enough, and even to a man with an eye for danger such a liaison would surely be too risky.
We stood still on the street, and I realized that I would have to be the one to move our evening toward a conclusion. The man, perhaps still unsure that I would not tell anyone of his advances, seemed to be holding back. His eyes and his words, apparently, held more bravado than his actions did. Perhaps this was his first encounter with a woman who did not want money for her time, but also was not on the hunt for a husband.
“Is there a place with inexpensive accommodations nearby?” I asked him. “For my trunks are with a friend, but I had needed to seek out a small inn.”
He did not answer me for so long that I wondered whether he heard me, but finally he offered an answer.
“By St. Swithin’s is a small inn,” he said. “It is across the street, with a sign that bears a coat of arms with a dragon on it. They will give a room to me. Mention that you would like the garret and they will be satisfied. If you follow this party up ahead, they will certainly pass it, and I shall take a different route.”
And with that, without any additional farewell, he left me.
36
As I walked off, I recognized that I had surely been wrong. The man had most likely been with many women before, and I should have to be careful that he did not carry any contamination I might wish to avoid. If he really had the experience that I believed, he might well be prepared to take plenty of precautions. After all, I wanted only a divorce, not some particular illness. It was one of the advantages of frigging Mr. Wharton. Though a rogue at heart, due to his fear of women he had been chaste before he married and quite faithful to his wife while she was alive. It took years of leering at me over the counter of my shop, and a powerful dose of loneliness for me, before the two of us came to an arrangement.
I went to his home, we shared less than an hour, and I left with some expensive present that could not be traced to him. In truth, my body was so full of inconvenient urges that I would have gone along with the arrangement even if it did not involve a payment, but it certainly helped salve my conscience when I wondered what my daughter would think of me. If ever she found out and decided I was too dishonorable to keep her good opinion, at least she might receive a large cash present from her estranged mama.
The nameless man was different from Mr. Wharton. He not only had a veritable harem of women at his beck and call, at least according to my imagination, but he also knew how to send them in different directions so as to avert suspicion.
It was wise of him to suggest that the two of us walk to the inn using different routes, as I was easily able to blend in with the large party in front of us, as it consisted mainly of loud women with a few gangly young men mixed in for good measure. I pretended that I was smiling at some of their jokes, all the while watching for the place that I knew the inn to be. If anyone had seen me with
the nameless man, he could have stated rather accurately that he only walked with me for some blocks before I rejoined some others and he went a different way.
As I approached, though, I saw someone on the other side of the street, and quickly turned my face away. In the fading light, it appeared to be Mr. Barlow, walking alone with his eyes searching the streets about him for something.
But as soon as I looked back, he was out of view, and I wondered if I had in fact seen him. If he were courting a young lady in town, there was no reason for him to be in Bath so early in the year.
Hiding my face, I continued on, wondering if I possibly could have seen him. On the one hand, it would be extremely unlucky for me to see the man twice in the span of one week when a whole ten years had passed without our meeting each other even once. After some thought, I did wonder why that was. In the early days of my business, I had been afraid that he would walk through the door on any given day. After all, the people that I served ranged from workers to merchants, merchants to wealthy merchants, wealthy merchants to gentlemen, and finally from gentlemen to wealthy gentlemen and very wealthy ladies. For some years, I had been serving the group that included Mr. Barlow, and yet I had lost my fear of seeing him.
I had assumed that he was likely still at Woodshire, and this was probably close to the truth. It seemed strange that his sister had not come to town, but perhaps she had managed to marry someone from a local “good” family, hand-selected by her mama, as her brother almost had. Miss Courtenay was the other person whose presence I feared, but on that score I had a little bit more peace. The gossip that I heard from one of her cousins, years ago, was that she had married some sort of important Belgian man and gone to live with him for good. So the woman who had found Paris dull was doomed to live all her life on the continent. It would have amused me, were I not terrified that this particular cousin might somehow discern my role in her relative’s humiliation.
The thoughts of the Barlow family swirled about my head as I tried to find the inn, realizing that I may have taken the wrong way through the streets. As the night began to darken, I wondered whether I may have made a mistake, and whether I should hail a carriage simply to have a guarantee that I would be delivered to the correct address. Though I did not have an address, only a landmark.
A landmark that, I realized with relief, was swiftly coming into view. St. Swithin Church looked austere in the fading light. I recalled the story of the saint himself restoring a basket of eggs that were broken by silly men. If I broke some part of myself, would a prayer for forgiveness be enough to restore it? Normally, as someone who did not believe in any sort of higher power, I avoided churches and only attended to show outward respectability. But, for a moment, I wished I were a believer. The power of cleansing myself with a prayer and a little bit of divine intervention would have been quite useful.
Attempting to stop thinking about sin, I straightened my shoulders and looked away from St. Swithin’s to the buildings just across the street. I saw the inn and prepared myself to ask for the little room, well aware that I might be about to do far more damage to my reputation and my hard-won identity than I ever thought possible.
37
When I entered the room, the gentleman was already there, pacing the floor.
“This is a cozy little room,” I tried to remark, squinting to see the bed in the darkness. The fire seemed to be dying, and the curtains were drawn. No light came in from the street.
“Come here,” said the man, and he drew me to him, then began to kiss me and fairly tear at my hair.
It was strange behavior from a man who was neither young nor inexperienced, and I pulled away, wanting to savor the sin a bit more. “We are not in a hurry,” I chided him.
He shook his head. “My wife thinks I am out on a walk,” he said. “She will soon grow suspicious.”
It should have been enough to get me to leave the place, and yet it only served to encourage me. I grabbed the man this time, and now it was I who began the kisses. I loved to think of his little wife, wondering why he should be walking the streets alone at that hour, thinking that perhaps he was only restless. Instead, he was in my arms, and not a soul in the world seemed to know it except the tight-lipped landlady of the hotel.
In fact, it was less than a minute before I felt quite amenable to the man’s ideas. He put his hands over my rear, and even through all the layers of fabric I could feel his strong fingers. I began to approach the bed, thinking that I wished him to continue, but he grabbed my wrist and pulled me over to a chair by the fire, where he sat, drawing me down on top of him.
The chair was a precarious one, and even when we were only sitting there, it began to creak. But apparently this was not the sort of inn where those noises would be remarked upon. In fact, from the room next to ours I could hear similar noises.
“What sort of inn is this,” I asked him.
“The sort where one’s desires can be fulfilled quickly, and discreetly,” he said.
I should have been insulted. Many of the men present were clearly paying for their pleasure. And yet the idea that I was in the presence of genuine harlots only served to excite me further. For the first time, I noticed what I had assumed was some sort of wind. It was, in fact, a man in the next room. His gasps were growing louder, and his voice sounded young. Perhaps he was an addict of pleasure, or perhaps this was the very first time that he had experienced it. Whatever the reason, I loved to hear him, and knew that his lust would only serve to increase my own.
I did not know how it might affect the feelings of the man currently underneath me, but apparently his lust was not at all in need of enhancement. Even before he began to frig me, I could feel quite plainly that the problems of softness which affected many men of advancing years did not in the least apply to him. As I lifted up my skirts, he shook his head. “Turn around,” he grunted, and I was forced to sit on top of him so that his face was buried between my shoulder blades.
It was like being a figurehead on a grand ship. Everything was to the back of me, and I felt as if I were being flung forward, hardly able to stay on the chair. I could see nothing of what was happening, but when the man got himself inside of me, apparently using some sort of French letter to form the thinnest possible barrier between our bodies, I knew what I needed to do.
At first, all I could hear of us was the chair squeaking, even though the woman through the wall had begun to shout “Oh!” in a dramatic manner best suited to a particularly ribald soprano.
“Louder,” he grunted, and at first I obliged only reluctantly. Like the chair, I squeaked, and even the man whose great organ I was pinned on top of could hardly have heard me.
I could hear him, though. For seconds, there would be silence, then he would growl. As I planted my feet firmly on the ground, his growls began to sound more like shouts, and I shouted out “Yes!” just once.
And then great moans rose within me. For the very first time in my life, I did not have to be afraid of what a nearby servant or family member might think. Since the inn was so clearly a place where such customs were not observed, I was now able to allow my voice to break loose.
And the more I thought of myself as a loose, wanton woman, the more I enjoyed the act. Leaning forward so far that the gentleman had to hold fast to my waist and chest, lest I fall off him, I giggled and shrieked, fairly jumping about on top of him. His moans sounded desolate, mine shrill and mad, and when I shivered and died on top of him, I very nearly lost my voice.
He, on the other hand, very nearly lost control. Still inside of me, he managed to stand, and then he withdrew. But he had no time to prepare, and so the result of his efforts went not into a handkerchief, but onto the dark beams of the ceiling as he yelled with agony.
We both sank to the floor, utterly exhausted. But there was no pretense of hand-holding or tenderness. Instead, I mopped my brow and attempted to pin my hair back into place, lowering my skirts and blinking with amazement. He rearranged his own clothes, and by the
time we rose from the floor we would have passed for two indifferent acquaintances in fine clothes. The only person who would see otherwise would have to be someone who knew how to read my flushed neck, his glittering eyes, our conspiratorial silence.
He slapped at my rear end with such familiarity that I smiled, dazed by the strangeness of it.
“You will write to me, won’t you?” I asked, and it must have been a little bit too plaintive, because he frowned as he was straightening his coat.
I endeavored to make my plea sound like less of a burden. “I don’t need flowery words, mind. I just need to know when you wish to take this room again,” I explained, raising my eyebrows.
That made him smile, but he still seemed suspicious. “My money is all my wife’s,” he said. “I never write a word down.”
Since he did not offer an alternative, I should have left our conversation there. After all, if he would not help me obtain a divorce, he was no further use to me.
And yet I persisted. “Then what shall I do when I wish it?” I asked, putting a hand on the spot where I had just seen a large weapon go back under the fine fabric of the man’s breeches, lest he misunderstand me. For, I realized with a sinking heart, even if I could not use him to convince a judge, I certainly wished to use his body for other purposes.
This made him smile more openly. “Believe me, my lady,” he said. “I shall find you before you need worry about such a thing.”
38
Soon after I fell asleep, I had a nightmare. While I was dreaming about walking down one of Bath’s most beautiful side streets, I realized that I was dreaming. And part of me knew that I could make anything that I wished happen in the dream.