‘But where are we to go?’ I asked.
‘There is a barn on Mr Placquet’s farm where we can spend the night.’
I quivered ferociously.
‘Is it far from here?’ I croaked, dry-mouthed.
‘About five miles. Not far on your horse.’
I wrestled briefly with a last-minute bout of cowardice. What if she was lying to me? What if she was a human gintrap, a snapper-shut of spies? What if I could not get a horn? What if I caught the bube? Then I relaxed. I could see that it was a terrible risk to go with her, but I could see also that not to go with her was a sin against nature, something Dick had warned me about many times. So, taking the bull by the horns, I answered in a very suave and assured manner:
‘Then let us go there, Madam, and put the night to rout.’
Sophie’s eyes shook in their sockets, then darkened with lust. I knew then that my suit would be successful, right to the very end. My heart and loins growled with desire. The field and the booty was mine.
23
Starry Night
Our bodies aflame, we made our way to the tavern stables. Alone, I would have been fretful now lest a prowling corporal had requisitioned my horse for Continental Army use, and left me well and truly adrift in Rebel seas. As it was, with Sophie bobbing loyally by my side, it did not matter if someone had slaughtered and cooked it, and served it up as part of the evening’s entertainment; we would find a way round the problem, Sophie and I. But of course, being prepared for the worst there was no problem to find our way around. The ostler, when we finally found him, was drunk but friendly, and assured us that my horse had been so well fed and watered that even Paul Revere himself could get an immediate thirty miles out of it, before it collapsed in foaming agony. There were whinnies of resentment at this remark, and several equine attempts to decapitate the insensitive ostler, so while the horse was being calmed down, I settled the bill with a mixture of American, English and Portuguese coins. Then I saddled up, cocked my right leg perhaps higher than usual, and clambered on, dragging Sophie up after me.
‘Not riding sidesaddle, Miss,’ enquired the happy ostler as Sophie, with much dress-rustling, squirmed into position behind me.
‘We’re friends,’ said Sophie, inserting what felt like bare knees into my curiously-named popliteal spaces, and clasping her hands around my waist.
‘Hold tight then,’ said the ostler.
‘What, like this?’
Sophie’s grip tightened surprisingly. Hugging herself to me, she rested her chin on my shoulder, and used the extra slack in her arms to give my chest a right royal rubbing. I almost whinnied with ecstasy.
‘Lovely,’ beamed the ostler. ‘With friendship like that, who needs love?’
‘Who indeed?’ I pondered, as we took our leave and trotted away. Needless to say, I was as content as Old Nick, warmed by love and the hot blood that surged both beneath and behind me. Instinctively, I tilted my head back and rubbed my cheek against Sophie’s, falling into a kind of trance as I did so. Indeed, so blissful was my oneness with Nature that my mind, cluttered with accumulated centuries of Reason from Horace to Pope, began to shut down completely, until, intellectually speaking, I was little more than a monkey in a dresscoat. I breathed deeply of the night air, which was odiferous with the warm smell of trees and the scent of Sophie’s blackcurranty skin; I looked up at the waning moon and the bright stars, and goggled at them like a baby; I listened to the distant hoot of an owl, and identified wholly with the mysterious longing of its tremulous soul. In fact, so stupified was I by this wondrous moment, that I felt like confessing I was a spy just to attain perfect Oneness with my love. I was on the verge of doing so when Sophie suddenly decided to root around in my saddlebag.
‘Anything interesting in here, sweetie?’ said Sophie. I looked back and saw that she was angling a sheaf of papers to the moonlight.
‘Oh, ‘tis only an inventory of my stock, and other business papers.’
There was a pause, and a rustle of paper, as if close scrutiny of them was going on.
‘Well, I can’t make heads or tails of them. Here, you look.’
A piece of paper was thrust in front of my face, occluding my view of the road. After making the necessary adjustments to suit my focal and riding capabilities, I found myself staring at one of Dick’s practice code sheets; the scoundrel, it seemed, had dumped all incriminating evidence on me! The realization that the ostler could have found them at any time made me queasy with retrospective danger. A shiver of treachery and vulnerability went through me, noticed by Sophie.
‘What is it, sweetie? Someone walked over your grave?’
The fresh hug of reassurance I received felt more like the arms of a gintrap closing, and I had to fight the urge to shake her off and bash her to death with her stick. Fortunately, the urge passed as quickly as it had come, and I resorted to my usual means of protection, barefaced lying.
‘They’re creditors’ letters, Sophie. Paper arrows in the heart.’
I handed them back to her with a great show of weariness. Job Oysterman.
‘So you’re on the run in New Jersey, as well as collecting debts?’
I sighed and admitted I was. I had hoped with Sophie to stop my baroque, vocational lying, and then Reveal All when the time was right (for without Truth and Honesty, I had read somewhere, there could be no Love). But the exigencies of my terrible trade were now making it apparent that this could not be done: business and pleasure were inextricably linked. And whilst there was fun and fascination to be had in deceiving representatives of authority, ‘twas painful indeed to have to use the same deceit in one’s personal affairs.
‘You’ll be telling me next that you have a pistol about your person.’
‘I do,’ I said, telling the truth for once.
Sophie gasped.
‘Why, Harry – you’re dangerous. Who would have thought it from just looking at you?’
‘Never judge a bookseller by his cover, Sophie.’
‘I begin to wonder now if I have chosen right in riding with you. You might decide to take out your business frustrations on me.’
I was about to reassure her that I would not when a little crab, or something similar, attached itself to my right earlobe. Thinking it to be some horrific form of Colonial nightlife, I shot my hand up to flick it off – only to find my fingernails tapping on Sophie’s teeth. This was perhaps a timely discovery, for had Sophie’s moist darting tongue entered my aural canal unannounced, I fear I would have shot into the air like a drab firework. As it was, forewarned was forearmed, and I was able to relax enough to first endure, then enjoy, and finally adore the outrageous probings. And as if this was not exciting enough, Sophie simultaneously began to stroke with her fingertips the tender insides of my thighs, describing figures of eight on them in a very accomplished manner. Needless to say, I was soon A Spy On The Brink, a mere bag of roaring blood, throbbing veins, tingling nerves, and maddened organs. I managed to hold out for a mile, but then my overloaded cannon burst extravagantly, drenching my breeches and moistening my saddle. A distinct aroma of salt marshes assailed our noses, as though the wind had just got up from the south, but still the tongue-probings and finger-circlings continued, and I was elevated and fired off four more times, until I sagged in my seat, limp, wet, and crick-necked.
‘Less tense now, sweetie?’ said Sophie, as she grabbed the loose reins.
Hardly able to sit upright in my saddle, I confessed that I was.
‘Good. That makes two of us. Nothing like sexual intimacy to break the ice between people. Not, I hasten to add, that there are many people I want to break the ice with.’
I could not help but think that this was good news for George Washington, whose forces in New Jersey were weak enough as it was. But I kept my counsel; indeed, I had little choice, for my faculty of speech had been disabled to such an extent that I could manage little more than a mumbled ‘Far now to go, my dear?’
‘Oh, a couple of miles, perhaps. Another half an hour and you’ll be stretched out on the softest hay in Bergen County.’ Adding, mysteriously: ‘But there I go, bragging again.’
‘No, not at all,’ I said. ‘’Tis good to have local pride in one’s harvesting.’
Sophie squeezed my thighs and laughed.
‘Tch, you are funny, Harry. ‘Tis a wonder no woman has snapped you up before now.’
I shrugged my shoulders modestly, an unconsidered trifle.
‘I mean,’ Sophie burst out passionately and unexpectedly, jerking me back into life. ‘What’s wrong with those New York women? Are they all whores? Are they all blind? They make me so mad, squandering their opportunities. If I lived there, I would have visited your shop every day, just to get a glimpse of you. After a while I would have plucked up courage and devised a way of making you notice me – perhaps by getting you to reach up for books on the highest shelves, so that I could see the cut of your breeches at the same time. In a word, Sir, you would have been under siege, because good things are worth fighting for.’
This was laid on a bit thick, but ‘twas nevertheless a pretty thing to say, and it gave me tremendous pleasure. I warmed to Sophie even more now that I knew my initial instincts about her had been correct. Etiquette demanded that I underplay my fictional achievements.
‘You must remember, Sophie, that a bookseller in New York is as low a creature as an ostler here. I am, or rather was, surrounded by merchants, lawyers, Crown officials, commissioned officers, lottery winners and aristocratic drones – men all fabulously rich and, in many cases, impossibly handsome. Women, naturally, passed me by.’
I thought this a sublime remark, showing sympathy and understanding with the real needs of women everywhere, but it just riled Sophie.
‘Oh, so you have to come out here and make do with cripples like me, is that it?’ said Sophie, with great heat. ‘Small fish, small pond.’
‘No!’ I cried aghast. ‘No! ‘Twas not what I meant at all.’
‘Well it sounded like it.’
I realized I would have to quibble like a lawyer if I was to recover the lost ground, and I sighed at the vast amount of energy I would have to expend in the process, when already I was drained to the lees. Truly, I felt like crying. With another girl I would not perhaps have bothered, but as Sophie seemed worth making the effort for I managed to rouse myself to explain, reason, flatter, cajole and generally grovel, until I was quite worn out. Eventually Sophie’s heavy breathing began to subside, and shortly afterwards harmonious relations were at last fully restored. The only drawback was that I couldn’t speak for the rest of the journey, being tired to the point of fretfulness. Sophie must have sensed this, for she responded by singing me a medley of Colonial lullabies. These were so strange and disconcerting, however, that they only increased my fretfulness, and I was mightily glad when our destination finally hoved into view, and the chance of sleep loomed large.
I slithered from my horse in a most ungainly fashion, tottered, then braced myself to help Sophie down. Despite my tiredness, I was able to swing her to the ground with some panache, though this show of gallantry was somewhat undermined by the plaguey squelchings coming from my sodden breeches. Sophie, however, either did not notice or did not care. Set up on her stick she led me by the hand to the barn door, which she creaked open with practised aplomb to reveal an interior as dark as a tomb; or, indeed, a womb.
‘After you, Harry,’ she said, herding me in with her stick, Little Bo Peep-style, as though to join a flock of other booksellers.
‘Is it safe?’ I enquired, taking a few tentative steps into the blackness, and inhaling the heavy smell of warm hay, which, though inviting, I feared might trigger my latent asthma.
‘It is if you don’t step on a gintrap,’ said Sophie, bending down to reach for something inside the door.
This caught me completely by surprise, and I froze mid-step, remaining in that position – balancing precariously – until a taper was struck, and a lantern flared into light. Even then I was too terrified to speak in case the vibrations of my voice set one snapping into the air.
‘Oh Harry,’ said Sophie, holding the lantern up to my face, the better to see the sweat pouring off my brow. ‘’Twas just my bitter joke. There are no traps in here, my dear; nor gin, for that matter.’
‘Sure?’ I said, lowering my foot gingerly despite the evidence of my eyes.
‘Sure,’ said Sophie, leaving me to my imaginary horrors and blithely going off, lantern swinging, to inspect the dimmer corners of the barn. ‘For…’ the voice was distant and muffled, ‘…even if one had been left lying around accidentally, one of these rats would surely have sprung it by now.’ There was a crack of stick hitting wood, and a cry of ‘Begone, varmint!’
I thought at first that she had discovered a cache of Verne’s friends, up to no good, but the rat that came careering around the corner on two legs confirmed that it was indeed the murine marauders that she was talking about.
‘Rats then, eh?’ I said conversationally, examining a ladder that led to a hayloft. ‘I’ll bet they’re not as big and nasty as the ones on the….on the….’ I drew up sharp, on the edge of a precipice. Twinkle, and I would be over.
‘On the what, sweetie?’
‘Er…on the wharf in New York.’
Sophie sighed romantically.
‘Sounds like everything is bigger and nastier in New York. I’d love to live there.’
‘I don’t know,’ I blarneyed, trying to recover my verbal and physical poise, ‘I think you’re more of a Philadelphia girl myself.’
‘Describe a Philadelphia Girl, Harry, and I’ll tell you if I am one.’
‘Refined, elegant, cultured, beautiful. A different parasol for every mood.’
I knew this was ridiculous even as I said it; I was still confusing my idealized version of feminine beauty with the imperfect yet captivating piece of flesh and blood before me.
‘No,’ she said, kicking sorrowfully an old crate, out of which a cat’s head emerged enquiringly. ‘I’m not a Philadelphia Girl then.’
‘You underestimate yourself, Madam.’
‘I am not underestimating myself,’ Sophie replied with some asperity, ‘I am simply being realistic. Now, Sir, get up that ladder and get your clothes off.’
I had often dreamed, back home in Brighthelmstone, of a girl saying this to me free of charge, but my recent experiences with Nutmeg Nell and Eloise De Witt had somewhat soured the expected thrill. Still, I supposed it was better than being told to impale myself on a rusty bayonet, and I offered only token resistance.
‘May I enquire of your motives, Madam, before I accede to such a demand?’
‘My motives, Sir, are purely humane. You must be uncomfortable in your sodden breeches. There, also, no rats can reach us.’
I bowed humbly in tacit acknowledgement of my sinful weakness, and turned to the base of the ladder, where I stood looking up doubtfully at the gloom.
‘Here, take this,’ said Sophie, handing me the lantern. ‘I’ll follow you up.’
I hardly had strength to climb the ladder without the lantern, let alone with it, but by the expediency of pausing for a rest on each rung – a reluctant Jacob on his way to Rebel Heaven – I eventually managed to rise to the hayloft, which by lamplight did indeed possess a soft, snug, welcoming look. Whilst I was wondering whether to disrobe before or after Sophie’s arrival, a walking stick came cartwheeling over the parapet, narrowly missing my head.
‘Catch!’ called Sophie, after a coughing fit lasting some minutes. Then I heard creaking and grunting sounds below, and concluded that she was on her way up to join me.
‘Still dressed, sweetie?’ she said with surprise as I met her at the top. ‘Why, I thought I’d given you ample time in which to disrobe in private. Still, never mind,’ she added, reaching out to tug at my breeches with a glazed look in her eyes, ‘two pairs of hands are better
than one.’
‘Madam!’ I protested weakly, as Sophie set laughingly about her job, ‘this is an outrage!’
‘Isn’t it!’ exclaimed Sophie joyfully, tearing apart my breeches with the ferocity of a ratter. ‘But these are outrageous times. Fusty decorum and false modesty are things of the…’ Her voice faded away, so that past was barely audible. Something down there, if I was not mistaken, had caught her attention, and subdued her. The salt marsh aroma returned with a vengeance.
‘Oh Harry, I’ve never seen one set in aspic before.’
‘’Tis not aspic, I fear, Madam. ‘Tis…’
‘Oh, I know what it is, Harry. Don’t you worry about that.’
She tilted her head back and inhaled deeply, a look of Mozartian ecstasy on her face. ‘Just smell that Salty Dog!’
Such unconditional and unexpected admiration made me reinterpret my shame as pride. ‘Twas indeed, as the most reluctant sniffer would agree, a very manly tang, so full of vigour and potency that it was surely only a matter of time before my dog was called into battle proper. However, just at the very moment of whimpering surrender, my mind began to proliferate with doubts once more. Most troubling was whether, when it came to the crunch, I dare risk infection with an unknown woman, however captivating. I continued to agonize over this while Sophie went on with her work, peeling my breeches off with a zest refreshing rather than whorish. Indeed, so unconcerned was she about the state of my soul that she even whistled while she toyed with me.
And toy with me she did, chuckling and gurgling to herself as she removed one item of clothing after another. I lay still like a corpse, in the half-hope that she would lose interest and fall asleep, but my non-compliance only seemed to excite her the more. Before long, I was unwrapped completely, and a strange silence replaced Sophie’s chucklings. I was, I felt sure, being gloatingly admired, and in all probability mentally raped. I quickly feigned a light snore.
‘Harreee,’ came up Sophie’s wheedling voice, my name being drawn out coquettishly.
‘What?’ I replied, mock-groggily, smacking my lips.
Infernal Revolutions Page 31