by Byron Rempel
The
Bodice
Ripper
The
Bodice
Ripper
Byron Rempel
A Novel
Copyright © 2017 Byron Rempel
Enfield & Wizenty
(an imprint of Great Plains Publications)
233 Garfield Street
Winnipeg, MB R3G 2M1
www.greatplains.mb.ca
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or in any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Great Plains Publications, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5E 1E5.
Great Plains Publications gratefully acknowledges the financial support provided for its publishing program by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program; and the Manitoba Arts Council.
Design & Typography by Relish New Brand Experience
Printed in Canada by Friesens
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rempel, Byron, 1962-, author
The bodice ripper / Byron Rempel.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927855-71-3 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-927855-72-0 (EPUB).—
ISBN 978-1-927855-73-7 (Kindle)
I. Title.
PS8585.E614B63 2017C813’.54C2017-900626-6
C2017-900627-4
For Geneviève
who supports me in all circumstances
Here is the book we made, you and me
The life we made, that’s another story
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s fantasies or wish fulfillment from repressed unconscious desires. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental, except for the Attila fellow. Certain universities and political entities are mentioned, but the characters and incidents that revolve around them are the product of my own daydreams. I respect and admire those who devote their lives trying to educate slow learners like myself. No bunny was harmed in the making of this novel.
Table of Contents
Part I:
1. A Little Turbulence in 53A
2. Social Networking in the Early Middle Ages
3. Gothic Revival
4. Woman in Jeopardy
5. Special Operations
6. You Have Pomegranate Juice on Your Chin There
7. There Will Be Love
8. Stranded With A Stranger
9. Checkmate
Part II:
10. The Risky Journey Bath
11. The Limit for Wounded Alpha Males
12. Are We History?
13. First Response
14. Anna Eden Elsewhere
15. Elopement Protocol (or, A Thousand Suns)
16. Sympathetic and Contagious Magic
17. Black Ice
18. Pleasures of the Flesh
Part III:
19. Bunny
20. Harassment Assessment
21. Appropriate Risks
22. Ghastly, Unexpected Ends
23. The Queen of Coleridge Park
Part I:
Ambiguous Groping
Happy love has no history.
— Denis de Rougemont
1. A Little Turbulence in 53A
Professor Anna Hill uttered a vow on the first day of autumn, in the wake of her claimed thirty-ninth birthday, twenty-six weeks plus one day before she finally freed herself and a cat from certain doom. She vowed to live an exotic romance, and appeared that night at a costume party dressed as a medieval nun.
Enter the Moor, ibn Rushd, Averroes. He smelled of new wine, his accent (if not his moustache) dripped butter and cream. A weathered face jutted from a scarf that brooded on his head. Anna hoped the moustache was part of the costume, but it didn’t matter when it came to providence. His real name was Christophe and his real work was of troubadours and their disappearance. “Le crépuscule des troubadours.” He had a little place on the Seine in Paris, where unlike Montreal it never snowed. The natives here, he inevitably said, had a word for each kind of snow.
The Inuit, Anna informed him, used recursively addable derivational suffixes, so there was only one base word for snow. Perhaps he was instead thinking of the many curses Montrealers threw at the stuff.
She had to stop with the wine at these faculty parties, where choral music was the preferred dance floor hit. Somewhere the Allegri Miserere, the Vatican’s once secret incantation, curled like a rose vine above a stony chant. Her eyes closed and she saw herself and the French man Dr. Zhivago-ing through the kind of snow best suited for sleighs, shivered as she felt the ice palace, heard him whisper and shout her name.
Christophe backed away from the nun in front of him. Her closed eyes, lips parted, hands clasped at her breast. He was familiar with the varieties of religious experience, but had never been so close to their practice.
Pocahontas danced her way between them, unartfully clad in a few scraps of leather and a handful of feathers. She was not Status Indian, and had likely augmented other aspects of herself as well. Nevertheless, the talking points interested Christophe enough to divulge to Pocahontas that the week coming he would conduct a conference in Paris, and wouldn’t it be agreeable to appreciate it together. Challenges to Heteronormative Troubadours in Post-Intentional Phenomenology the theme, how women were understood and misunderstood under attack, unpacked performativity inside the bedroom.
But Pocahontas, never impressed by schooling and at the party only by accident, had already retreated.Anna opened her eyes. In Paris, she breathed. Your Paris.
A man dressed as Jesus the carpenter appeared at the kitchen door, locked eyes with Anna. When she turned back, Christophe was gone.
[
Six days later on the way to check-in Anna waved away at least three proposals, one of which was rather handsome, to help her with her luggage. She kept at bay any impure thoughts as the security officer followed the contours of her body with his wand. She avoided a peek into the cockpit to assess the pilot. As she squeezed down the aisle towards 53A she was ready, as she had been the few other times she boarded planes, to sit beside a man of grace, elegance and charm.
She checked the boarding pass again, but had memorized her seat number days ago. She had also chosen her outfit, test-driven
a few perfumes, and researched the fuel capacity of the Boeing
777-300er. Only the man in the seat next to hers was not the right man: she was a woman. In a suit. The woman held a precarious tower of loose pages on her lap, and sighed as Anna jostled by.
Anna ignored the sigh. Little bothered Anna now. She had not refused when her mother handed her an ornate pillbox with four magic pills inside. She’d sliced them into quarters and at the gate swallowed the first collection of Clonazepam snacks. Now in her seat she took two more quarters so that (in her mother’s poetic version) she’d already be in the clouds the moment the plane left earth. As she slipped on her camouflage-print sleep mask, the one that brought out the highlights in her red hair, she felt prescriptively calm for almost anything that flight could bring.
“That mask work for you, honey?”
The plane l
eft the ground.
[
Anna drew up a corner of her mask. The air was grey outside the windows. Grey inside too. Her window wept. The plane never left the potholed clouds. She shut her eyes again. One good air bump got a few laughs from the boys in front of her. Anna knew that
in her reality she traveled on a bus down an ill-maintained gravel road, a defrocked priest accompanying her to a cliffside hacienda. She let out a feigned snort that would match her insouciance on that bus.
Beside her, the businesswoman took the sound as an answer to her question.
“Couldn’t do that. Feel too trapped.”
Anna said nothing.
“’Specially with all this chop.”
This was the thing with travel: the complete absence of control. You could prepare for weeks, organize and coordinate schedules, glean from blogs and guidebooks and knowledge of friends, and in the end be left with a handful of chaff. But Anna wouldn’t let it affect her, because she was on her way to a spontaneous rendezvous, unlike anything she’d done before. Inside her mask Anna stared at the ceiling of her mind and wished it as featureless as a prairie sky. She inhaled deeply, one time. She folded her hands together, a saint in earshot of temptation. She would not lift the mask.
“Block things out,” the woman said, “but it won’t get you far.
I should know. Tried it for years. Blocked out my therapist for
fifty-two thousand eight hundred dollars of sessions. Which is
what freed me up, you know: budget constraints. Husband said: go well, or go homeless. Which is some sports cliché. And then
he went.”
Normally, at home, Anna could correct papers while she watched television, talk to her mother on the phone while she scrubbed burned pots. In her classroom she uncovered Spanish priests and bishops in the throes of twelfth-century celibacy while the insistent siren of a snowplow outside the window seduced three hundred and forty-three restless freshmen. But this—this stentorian voice that chipped away at the foundation of Anna’s synaptic peace—it brought everything to the verge of collapse. But she had the solution: Paris still needed a plan.
The conference, for one.
At that moment one of Anna’s shoes hid beneath the seat. The potholes on the way up through the clouds sent it out of reach. She jiggled the other shoe from her toe. She felt her pulse, and breathed a few deep inhales.
The most appropriate place to dazzle Christophe, multiple choice:
a) In the Sorbonne’s Grand amphithéâtre, with its statues of Descartes and Pascal and Richelieu under the golden domes, where, during an otherwise interminable debate among international historians, she stands up in the balcony and with one profound but surprisingly simple conclusion, obliterates all other research and opinion, and the scholars are left babbling about Christophe’s fortune to be with this intellectual Amazon;
b) During a tour of a château half-submerged in a river, when he, without warning, presses her against a wall that clicks open to reveal a secret and close stairway, and as the tour guide’s voice echoes away, Christophe leads her through that murky passage into the sun-drenched boudoir of a king’s mistress, and slides a massive bolt to lock the door as she resists only long enough to let her gaze take in the erotic tapestries and candelabras and a four-poster bed of astounding proportions;
c) On a hidden street deep in the history of the city on a
café terrace, over cafés crèmes, as everything else fades away and it’s the two of them, in their Paris, illuminating embodied qualities of gender. Hands brush when they reach for the sugar substitute at the same time. Their eyes flash to each other’s faces. A shock of recognition mutates into passion. A tourist couple walks by, marvels at their perfect tableau of love, envy in their voices… “And such gorgeous shoes,” the woman says…
“You’re not asleep, are you?”
Anna said nothing, but didn’t jiggle her shoe.
“The way you fidget. Maybe you should have a glass of wine.”
Anna sighed. Her hand rose from beneath the flimsy blanket. She lifted a corner of her mask.
“Peek-a-boo,” the woman said. She held two small bottles of red wine. “We are headed for France.” She folded down Anna’s tray and placed a plastic glass and one of the bottles in front of her. She’d already twisted them open. “Bon voyage.”
Anna brought the mask up to her forehead and sprouted corkscrews of red hair. She was glad her seatmate wasn’t a man after all.
“You know how I could tell you weren’t asleep? Your fingers were rigid on the armrest. Look at the dents you left.”
Anna looked, but there were none.
Had the woman given her name? Anna recognized the dream quality of the Clonazepam her mother said she might feel. So little to worry about in the world. When you thought about it. Or didn’t.
It was now black outside her tiny window. Anna tried to worry. Was it early morning? Late evening? The video screen in front of her showed a map. Ocean predominated. The screen claimed they were thirty-six thousand feet in the air, and boasted of five hundred and fifty-three miles an hour. She tried to worry: there was only cold above and beneath her. And then Anna smiled, and watched her hand swim towards the tray table and the plastic glass of wine.
“Atta girl,” the woman said.
They clinked glasses, a dull bump. The wine smelled foreign on the plane.
“You’ll stay in Paris?”
Paris. The word brought her closer to consciousness. She was on her way to Paris.
“Yes.”
“Me too.”
Anna nodded. Christophe would be there. She may stay in Paris the rest of her life.
“I may stay there the rest of my life.”
The woman raised her eyebrows. “First time, huh?”
Anna’s head bobbed.
The hostesses came by with plastic trays of plastic food.
“My name’s Julia,” said her seatmate. Julia waited a few
beats. “You?”
“Oh. Professor Anna Hill.” Anna could not explain why she had called herself Professor.
“A prof,” Julia said, as if academics were a rare sight thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic. “Let me guess: Literature.”
“Medieval history.”
“Whew. Close one. So, Professor Anna Hill: you going to teach in Paris?”
“Oh no. A conference.”
“What on?”
Julia left her tray of food sealed, and instead stopped the hostess. “A couple more bottles of the house red,” she said.
“The Siege on the Castle of Love,” Anna said while she tore apart the sandwich wrap with her teeth.
“Huh.”
“An interdisciplinary conference on the religion, culture, work, cuisine and ceremony of a castle under siege.”
“Wow,” said Julia, “a real potboiler.”
The woman spoke like she’d come out of the 1940s. But she wasn’t much older than Anna. She let her grey hair show, in a
girlish ponytail.
“These things lasted years, you know,” Anna said.
“The conferences?”
Anna turned to look at Julia, but her eyes closed as she sipped wine.
“I need to research a paper. The culture part. Re-Gendering Liminal Exoticization.”
“You’ve all got such cute titles.”
“It’s where historians get to kick out the jams.”
“I’ll say. I bet things get crazy at these conferences.”
“Absolutely historical,” Anna said.
Anna knew the conference would be Medieval Studies as she’d always known it. Tribal pow-wows she’d joined before. New theories, the same biases. The one-upmanship of knowledge: three hundred scholars, one hundred and fifty papers, a shipment of rubber chickens as bad as the airline’s. Except no
t. This time it was the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne. This time it was Paris. The chickens would not be rubbery: they would be exquisite, bathed in butter and cream, tended by hands that nightly plucked mushrooms from hidden woods, that freed the chicks to play in fields of wild rosemary bushes and thyme and… and… there was another herb, what was it? Whatever. The invitation was official: this time it was Paris, and this time it came from an urbane and wealthy Frenchman who probably had a garçonnière that hung over the Seine. One of those cute little European convertibles too, steered with those kid leather gloves he sported, to whisk her away from the drones of the conference and on to his own vineyard, where at the ancestral manse they would be welcomed by three inquisitive wolfhounds and an ancient but kindly caretaker named Gustave. That was the thing with travel: the world was open and infinite.
[
Fifteen minutes after the turbulence Anna still giggled, even though the shirt she’d chosen in which to greet Christophe (an off-white blouse with festive sleeves and collar) was now spotted with pink Rorschach tests. From her breast rose the musty smell of rustic French villages at the end of a September’s day.
“You’re all right, though?” Julia asked.
“My paper,” Anna continued, a new wine glass in hand, “was called Lie Still and Think of Spain: Homosocially Segregated Environments among Early Visigoth Settlers in Iberia, 450-600 AD.”
Julia gazed into the empty video screen. Now every time the plane bumped, she grabbed the armrest. “Sounds like a ringer. You got some mayo there. On your chin.”
“My book, though. Maybe you’ve heard of it? It’s called Love in the Material-Semiotic Realm: Gender, Death, and Medieval Courtship. But you know what?”
Anna was in a confessional mood. She wasn’t sure, was Clonazepam the truth drug? Or was that Champagne?
“The book had nothing to do with love. In the courts, daughters and sons were exchanged for political maneuvers. So little source material exists on the commoners. And because of that it was cold, and hard, and footnoted to death.”
“The love?”