“That is entirely different. The male eye has the ability to discern, whereas the female is far more susceptible.”
“Are you suggesting the female sex is the weaker gender or the more sinful?”
Her feisty retort caught Alistair by surprise. Stammering furiously he suddenly felt little more than a whirling scarecrow caught in a gust of wind.
“I mean merely to defend you from the more animalistic side of mankind.”
“I thank you for the sentiment. But I don’t require defending, although, of course, you might if Uncle discovers I am here. He would probably explode in outrage and end up splattered on the ceiling like a tapioca pudding.”
She laughed again. Alistair struggled to keep his grave demeanor.
“He would indeed, and then he would terminate my employment immediately, which is not a frivolous matter, Miss McPhee,” he replied soberly.
“I wouldn’t let him. I have never seen anything so…explicit,” she said, her eyes widening as she glimpsed his current sketch. Alistair stood frozen, still holding out his coattails, unsure about the social conduct the situation demanded. Ignoring him entirely, Margaret McPhee stood on tiptoe and actually peeped over his shoulder.
“But there is a beauty,” she murmured.
“Miss McPhee, I demand that you leave this office immediately, before my position is morally compromised. Besides, where is your escort?”
“Escort? Phooey! I am a governess, Mr….?”
“Sizzlehorn. Alistair Sizzlehorn.”
“Mr. Sizzlehorn. I have also attended Miss La Monte’s art classes so I have seen the naked human form before.”
“But not in this state I should hope.”
She blushed again, violently, and turned away from the table. Taking off her bonnet she revealed a pretty neck and long fair hair. She was no great beauty like Lady Whistle but there was something very appealing about the daintiness of her features and the candor behind which she tried to hide her innocence.
“Do you mean to insult me, sir?” she demanded in a peevish but endearing tone.
“I mean to protect you. This ancient culture is to be studied with an educated eye, one that has a comprehension of the religious significance of such artifacts. This is not pornography, but works of worship, Miss McPhee.”
She looked at him, deeply intrigued but also quizzical, as if she might have misjudged the awkward youth standing before her, his arms still flung askew, his pale face with its burning eyes animated with a feverish passion.
“You draw well, Mr. Sizzlehorn. You have a deft hand, almost as deft as my own.”
“I do?”
Outside both of them heard the distinctive thump of Dr. McPhee’s footsteps approaching. But neither seemed to care, held as if in a spell by the attraction between them. Margaret, seeing that Alistair was hampered by protocol, took the initiative.
“Perhaps one day you might escort me to the show of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at the National Gallery. They are controversial but quite brilliant artists, I believe.” Quickly she thrust her card into Alistair’s waistcoat pocket, a moment before McPhee burst through the door.
“Margaret! What is the meaning of this?” McPhee stood in the doorway, bristling with outrage. His niece immediately ran over and embraced him, which softened his fury considerably.
“Uncle! I grew tired of waiting for you in the lobby so I found my way here.”
“And how was that?” McPhee demanded, glaring at Alistair accusingly.
“A very nice lady at the entrance desk told me you might be found in this office.”
“Alistair, is this true?”
“Absolutely; your niece found her own way here.”
“Well, now she is leaving,” McPhee announced, taking the girl by the arm.
“Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr. Sizzlehorn,” Margaret managed before she was propelled back out into the corridor.
Five minutes later McPhee returned.
“I see ye have almost completed the catalogue, boy. As of tomorrow ye’ll be moved back downstairs where ye can compile a set of illustrations of Grecian vases from the first century A.D. I’m happy to report that the pastoral scenes painted upon these vessels are banal in the extreme. And, Master Sizzlehorn, if I should hear any rumor that ye are playing court to my niece, your employment will cease immediately. I hope, as a gentleman, I have made myself clear on this issue?”
“Perfectly,” his assistant responded, the throb of disappointment in his breast.
The clocks chimed five and Toby arrived as punctual as ever, wearing a festive frock coat of pastoral green rimmed with yellow velvet.
“These are my country rags,” he announced cheerfully. “I am to Whistlewaite this evening—my lady has begun the final preparations for the spring rite. She has told me you are to be collected on the eve of the twentieth, which is tomorrow, and driven to the estate, where you shall be washed and fed. The ritual itself is to take place at midday on the twenty-first. Are you prepared, sir?”
Alistair again wondered how much of a confidant Toby was for Lady Whistle. The juxtaposition of his extreme youth and savoir faire deterred the archaeologist who always felt hopelessly naive alongside the valet’s cocky worldliness.
“I am ready,” he replied faintly.
“Then put a smile on, sir, it should be an adventure. Most men would give their left testicle to be in your position. You’re a lucky man, sir, a lucky man.” The valet winked. His words shocked Alistair.
“But what am I sacrificing? Answer me that,” he responded, articulating his fears out loud. The valet smiled, then did a dance shuffle in his buckled shoes.
“Nothing you wouldn’t have sacrificed sooner or later, believe me.”
“Does Lady Whistle share all her secrets with you, Toby?”
“Me and Lady Whistle go back a few centuries. She trusts me and I trust her.”
“A few centuries?”
“A figure of speech, sir,” the valet finished mysteriously, then left carrying the last illustration for the catalogue.
There are times in a man’s life when his destiny takes on the form of a pendulum, swinging precariously between two directions; times when the normal constraints and social mores by which one lives are rendered as meaningless as melting snow. This was such a time for our protagonist.
As Alistair cleaned the shavings of charcoal from his desk, warmed his hands on the water heater, and looked one last time out of the barred window clouded by the shadows of nesting pigeons, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of doom. Sighing deeply he glanced about the office. On the one hand his senses were stretched as thin as a drumskin upon which excitement had begun its relentless beat; on the other, he felt paralyzed by the intuition that his life was about to change irredeemably. The question was: how?
Outside the museum, instead of turning left—his usual direction home—the apprehensive youth turned right and made his way across High Holborn, down Drury Lane, and toward the river. The waxing moon shone, making shadow witches of the trees and turning every iron railing into the turrets of a magical castle. Alistair was lost, not in thought, but in a rare fog of sensations; a harking back to a more primitive reasoning as something other than logic guided his feet.
What was his fear? He tried to rationalize his emotions. Was it the loss of innocence? It is merely a physical transition, another voice answered, a carnal voice bristling with impending adventure. Don’t worry, you will remain unchanged in essence. You will just gain experience, knowledge of how to pleasure another, it continued seductively.
The image of Margaret McPhee, her face flushed with sensuality, her fair hair loosened, suddenly stared up from the glistening surface of a puddle.
Alistair reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out her card. To his astonishment he was just three streets away from her. With the urgency of a man seeking salvation, Alistair began to run.
It was a large redbrick terraced house, with a straggling cherry tree at the fr
ont. A modest dwelling in a prestigious street; a typical residence of the nouveau riche, the merchant class that had made their money through the manufacturing mills of the north. Alistair bounded up the granite steps and rang the bell.
“The mister and missus ain’t in.” A buxom housekeeper, one hand still grasping a feather duster, stood at the open door, glaring hostilely.
“I’m here to see the governess, Miss McPhee?”
“She don’t take gentlemen callers after six.”
“I am her cousin from the country. It’s urgent.”
“In that case, I suppose you could wait in the pantry.”
Staring aimlessly at a hock of ham that lay on a side table next to a cabinet of fine Dutch china, Alistair suddenly felt like a complete jackdaw. What presumption he had displayed. What if she wasn’t the slightest bit interested in his company? What if she had just been playing him for a fool? Crippled with self-consciousness, he noticed a smear of soot upon his jacket sleeve, which he was busy rubbing off when Margaret McPhee entered. “Coz!” she cried out, startling him.
Margaret turned to the corpulent housekeeper squeezed up behind her in the doorway. “That will be all, Mrs. Porter. I’m certain my cousin wishes for some private words with me.”
After a suspicious look at Alistair, the housekeeper nodded curtly and took her leave. Margaret softly closed the door.
She was more beautiful than he had remembered, but her beauty lay in her ordinariness. She did not have the refined aristocratic cheekbones, patrician nose, or full mouth of Lady Whistle, nor the lushness of her complexion; instead it was the neat symmetry of her form, the animation of her bright, green eyes, her enthusiasm that made her radiant. She smiled at him.
“Why, Mr. Sizzlehorn, you have displayed an ingenious audacity I would not have attributed to one previously so censorious.”
“I had to see you.” His words tumbled out in a clumsy rush.
“Are you ill? You look so pale.”
“I have to go away the day after tomorrow. I have an engagement…” he trailed off, wondering why the proximity of this young woman threw what had seemed so important into irrelevancy.
“An engagement—that sounds mysterious.”
“Just promise me you will come to the gallery tomorrow, to the exhibition you wished to see?”
He moved closer and stood inches from her, drinking in the fall of her hair, the emerald streak that was her eyes, the sheen of her pearl buttons, and found himself wondering if, sometime in the future, she would ever reach out to him naked, call him her own.
“Such urgency is unconventional. Are you here to court me, sir?”
Her sudden formality made him smile, it sat so uncomfortably upon her quaint figure. Seeing his smile, she frowned. He feared he had been misunderstood and took her hand.
“Forgive my impatience, Miss McPhee, but I find myself at a strange crossroads in my life, the outcome of which is uncertain. But to answer your question: yes, I believe I am.”
“In that case, Mr. Sizzlehorn, I shall meet you tomorrow at the doors of the National Gallery at two o’clock sharp. And now I must return to my wards. Good night to you, sir.”
Before he had a chance to respond she was out the door. He stared at a giant copper tureen, which mockingly reflected back his wan, confused face.
“Thank you, Margaret, thank you,” he whispered, drowning.
That night Alistair stoked the fire as high as he could, then dragged the looking glass over and propped it against the mantelpiece. After locking the door, he stripped off his garments and stood entirely naked before the glass.
Was he a well-made man?
His torso was long and pale, his shoulders a good width but already afflicted with the stoop of the scholar. He was slender, his legs tapered and muscled. A thick bush of golden hair crept across his loins and traveled up to his chest. His yard was of a decent size, he presumed, thinking back to the fellows he had seen naked at boarding school. There was still the shadow of boyhood upon his physique, as if his torso hadn’t yet thickened fully. His hips were slim, his buttocks high and firm, his waist strong. No other eye has seen my body, he thought, wondering whether he would be considered handsome or plain. It was a curious, furtive sensation to be examining himself so coldly.
Running his hands down his flanks he tried to imagine they were a stranger’s hands. How would he surrender himself? Would he surrender himself? He did not know how to behave in such a circumstance—or could he trust to instinct? And afterward, would she, Margaret, desire such debased leavings? His thickening sex answered all his queries. As he caught the shadow of his profile—the curve of his body, the arc of his organ, his hands resting defiantly on his hips—he could have sworn he saw the sinister silhouette of the twin horns of Pan rising up behind his head.
The mermaid was painted in the romantic style of the Pre-Raphaelites, but the realism of the scales, the white skin, the pensive but utterly self-absorbed look on the sea-woman’s face as she gazed down at the water, her long red hair trailing into the sea, was shocking. It was a totally credible fusion of fish and flesh.
“I think she would be cold and clammy to touch, like the slimy skin of an ocean trout,” Margaret said, facing the painting. She was dressed in a blue calico gown with ruffles down the front and a straw hat trimmed with matching ribbon. She dared not look at him for fear he would see the rose of excitement creeping across her own fair skin.
“Without a human heart,” Alistair continued, thinking about another woman altogether, “and yet it is her very beauty, her inaccessibility that shimmers so seductively, that creates the fatal trap into which all sailors fall…”
“…to be pulled down to the bottom of the ocean by her clinging arms…”
“…the poor man gasping as he tries desperately to sprout gills instead of lungs,” Alistair concluded wryly.
Margaret laughed, a gleeful childlike sound, her head thrown back, all artifice leaving her. The archaeologist watched her, enchanted, his arms aching with the compulsion to pull her to him. Everything she said and did fascinated him, yet if he were to look unemotionally upon her he would have to conclude that there was nothing extraordinary about her. She was well-mannered, displaying the grooming of her position as a governess; she was neat in her appearance, pretty rather than beautiful, shrewd within the realm of her experience with a wit tempered by an acceptable amount of curiosity. But, most importantly, she listened to him intensely, as if all he had to impart was of the utmost intelligence and import. No one had ever before treated him with such reverence; it was dangerously intoxicating.
She turned to him and, with an air she imagined to be seductive but in fact was a little clumsy, she asked, “Have you fallen prey to such a Medusa?”
“Maybe; maybe not.”
An ambiguous answer that immediately made the young woman desire him more.
Had he, Alistair wondered, trying to concentrate on the next painting: a portrait of drowned Ophelia floating down the river, surrounded by copious auburn hair tangled in water lilies and river reeds. The expression of tranquil resignation on the suicide’s face made him ponder his own destiny: was he too about to voluntarily end his life as he knew it? Would a part of him—the romantic who aspired to higher spiritual values—perish?
Somewhere in the gallery a clock chimed three. The apex of his dilemma drew nearer. Again he felt as if his destiny was split into two clear choices. Margaret could be his salvation; all he had to do was stay here, by her side.
The exotic musk of a passing woman wafted across the room and drew Alistair back into contemplation of the orgy that awaited him. This was his opportunity to be transported back into a time he had dreamed of inhabiting, a chance to taste hedonism. He could have both; why not? He would have Margaret as his future, his life companion, and he would have Lady Whistle as his guide into a realm of money, power, and fantasy. One woman would be his spiritual anchor; the other his sensual liberator.
“Margaret,” he blur
ted, “please excuse my presumption but I have little time. I am to go away tonight for a short while and I fear I shall return changed. How, I cannot tell. I know our acquaintance has been extremely brief, but I believe that time is not linear in such circumstances….”
“What circumstances, Alistair?” she asked, trembling.
“I feel a strong affinity for you. When I am with you I am strengthened; your presence, your words, cause a kind of alchemy in me. One I wish to explore deeply and for quite some time, with your consent.”
He took her hand; it was the first time he had touched her. Gloved, it felt tiny in his own but even through the kid leather he could feel her quiver.
“How long are you gone for?”
“I do not know, but I would like to call for you upon my return. Do you understand the seriousness of my intent?”
“I think I do,” she replied blushing.
Margaret realized she was ignoring all the advice her mother had imbued her with. Could she trust him? She hardly knew him, and yet she had never felt so stimulated by a man. It was as if he were able to appreciate the qualities in her other men had found precocious: her desire to paint, her interest in politics. But most importantly, despite her average attractiveness (for she knew the limitations of her beauty) he desired her.
“I shall wait for a message,” she said firmly, gazing again at the mermaid. It came to her that she should be as mysterious, as alluring as the sea maiden, and so, after allowing him to kiss her hand, she left.
Alistair stood by the window dressed in his new and uncomfortably tight French frock coat, clutching the matching tall hat, feeling like an entirely different man—an individual he suspected he might not like.
Outside, the afternoon sun struggled to penetrate a mass of cumuli. Alistair thought the clouds resembled a pompous judge, his wig tumbling about him in rolls of silver-gray. A brand new traveling bag sat at his feet. He had borrowed a hunting jacket of the finest sharkskin from Harry, but wondered whether he would actually need it. This attention to the details of his forthcoming country visit was a futile attempt to subdue the anticipation that threatened to subsume him.
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