Pursuit

by Felice Picano

  At last we all wandered away to our wagons, Jonathan drunk, Billy and Suzie cordially tipsy, and myself in a quiet frenzy of anticipation, albeit acting as though I too was inebriated.

  So, they pushed me into sick Amy’s wagon, where she slept snoring away and none too clean smelling neither, while they celebrated with a rare husband and wife cohabitation.

  As the ’vans were placed together in one side corner of a minor lane of the main square, I could, by peeping out of the curtains, sometimes even see what took place in the other two. Thus, at ten o’clock sharp by the local steeple bells, I was on the flagstones outside the smaller ’van, as washed and close to undress as I dared be, making my whistle-signal to the Grande Personne herself.

  Naturally, the interior was dim-lit, a mere candle-end set upon a carton of costumes that served as a bed stand. Through the wooden partition, I could easily hear the stentorian gasps and wheezing, snores, and assorted harrumphs of old Jonathan in his sleep.

  And there lay my Love, all soft and white-skinned amid her furled bedclothes. Her hair lay in shining ringlets upon her noble neck and tumbled a bit upon one ivory shoulder. I might easily make out the softly ridged concavity of her back, guarded as it was by her two pillowy softnesses. She turned an unpainted face toward me and with one finger, soubrette style, to her lips bade me be very quiet.

  She lay like that while I removed my shirt and trowsers—I’d come barefoot—as though musing, and she seemed most pleased, as she reached for my extremity which greeted her so avidly.

  Soon enough I was atop her and fondling. Unlike Suzie or even Amy, she was slender rather than voluptuous, smooth-skinned, but free of that padding wherein I might lose myself after passion. Her breasts were small and almost firm but were as much her weakness as any other female once I had them well in hand. Soon enough was I hand-guided to her lower regions and there she equalled Suzie well enough.

  As onstage, her kisses were intoxicating, and I will even use the oft-repeated term breath-taking. At times, I believed I might never recover my breath unless I detached myself from her lips. I did so less and less as she guided me within herself, and from atop and behind her I began my manly ministrations.

  Believe me, My Lord, when I report I never had encountered before and seldom since such passion from a partner in love-making. Most ladies merely receive a gentleman, some with greater motion than others, few with such enthusiasm and even athleticism and unstanched hunger.

  Quickly enough, despite my efforts, did we rise and fall toward that bliss that is common to all. Much as I resisted, much as I had been taught by Suzie and Billy Darrow to resist, all teaching went for naught in that bed. Nor were either of us satisfied even then, but we must start up again for a second time, and while that lasted longer, and we rose to new feats of intertwining, never mind conclusion, did even that suffice, but we tried a third time.

  If I seem somewhat muddled in the telling now, My Lord, you may well imagine how utterly fuddled with longing and lust was I at the time. And so I shall attempt to write it as I recall, precisely and in order.

  Firstly, we had risen off the mattresses and now were standing up, my mistress holding on to the curved upper bars of the caravan for support, myself holding on to her chiefly, also grasping an overhead strut every once in a while.

  As I was riding my way into my final voyage de amour, one hand cupping her breast slid downward. To it I joined my second hand and just as the great heat was upon me, it slipped further down and encountered—how can I write it?—manhood as large and stiff as my own. And inches below, a distinctive womanhood.

  I gasped quite loudly. At the same time, I felt myself drawn in ever more deeply and closely. She spent. I spent. And all the while I had one hand on her manhood and another upon her womanhood.

  In that same instant, the partition shook and splintered, and Jonathan Darrow himself, wide awake and bulging red with drink, thundered, “Must you? Must you? Must you yet again?”

  His complaint was stopped by the vision that even a vat of ale and a decanter full of Scots whiskey could not undo: the vision, that is, of ourselves, standing before him in flagrante and possessing not two but instead three sets of genitals.

  “What then…What demons be ye?” he added, doubtless quoting lines from some play we knew not. And he fell over the partition on to the bed alongside us.

  My companion pulled free and leapt to the bit of floor where clothing was tossed all about until some semblance of costume was put on. I stood there in great astonishment, clad as I was the minute I was born. Jonathan rose in his fusty bedclothes and lurched toward me. I fought him down and rushed out of the ’van following my partner who, now dressed, had alighted and stood in a defending posture, looking like a very Achilles in those prints by Mr. Flaxman.

  Roused by the great noise, Billy and Suzie and even Amy had looked out of their curtains, just as Jonathan tumbled out of the ’van and lunged toward me, only to be stopped by a perfectly aimed and quite powerful full-fisted blow to the nose by my lady transformed into man.

  Soon, those in the pub’s inn chambers nearby had thrust up their window sashes, and the scene was there for all to see.

  My hermaphrodite pushed past me once more into the ’van, thrusting my clothing at me, where it fell upon the cobbles, and in a minute had run to the front exit and leapt on one of the old bays kept there un-shafted and roused it with a kick. Minutes later, we witnessed our sixth actor riding upon it, bareback as any American Indian or Amazon warrior, off across the square of Croydon into the frosty night.

  By this time, the entire plaza and surrounding streets were lighted up, as I pulled on my trowsers. Folks were shouting and calling jibes at us, throwing down objects upon our heads.

  “Damn your hot blood!” Billy Darrow rushed out at me. “Didn’t I tell you not to?”

  Luckily, he stumbled in his ill-timed charge at me.

  In short time, I was up and inside, past Suzie and gathering my belongings and pay.

  By the time I was upon the ground again, it was in time to hear Billy railing, “You’ve ruined everything. Everything! Everything!”

  Still not fully clad, I pushed on my shoes as best as I could, and then I blew Suzie a kiss, and I too sped off, in the direction of the most surprising lover of my life…although toward where exactly, and what I expected to find, I could not say.

  ✥ ✥ ✥

  From just outside of Croydon-town north to London is not far, and while fatigue soon approached my walking thither, so did an elderly farmer, who offered me a ride in a dray laden high with split-ricks of horse feed. I could not help but note that all the while, he looked carefully at my face and my theatrical costume. The former was still not free of the greasepaint of the night’s performance, and the latter rather more elegantly turned out than is common among those he might be expected to regularly encounter at so small an hour upon the road.

  I explained my predicament as well as I might, which gained his laughter and eventual help.

  He left me near the King’s Yard in Deptford, where his business of the morn lay, and he was good enough to arrange for me to travel onward farther than I might have dared hope, through Upper Kent, upon an acquaintance’s dogcart, up to Halfway House. Once arrived, I dropped off, tipped the fellow a penny, and was left to my own devices.

  Although I’d asked as often as we encountered others coming against us on the roads or whenever we must stop, no one had seen my Amazon. So it was, with a growing, sad belief that I had lost forever those so ambivalent charms, that at sunrise I took to my tuppence bed at Halfway House, that noted inn.

  I awakened late at noon and was immediately assailed by two strong odours. One, quite unpleasant, was due to the retraction of the Thames River tide, only several streets distant. The other was an equally strong and thus countervailing delicious aroma of Arabian coffee being brewed. From the height of the inn’s placement, I might look across the flats of East Rotherhithe to the Thames’s largest bend south, and
across it to the India Docks and Isle of Dogs. So I found myself quite near to London itself, place of my birth and of my earliest years.

  Even so, it was a very different scene from that I’d appreciated only hours before—I mean the deep green lawns and flowered country lanes about the town of Croydon—that I must have sighed rather more theatrically than my new companions were accustomed to hearing. Indeed, our view was of a grey and rainy day. Sleet crossed the face of the mullioned windows in slow gales. The vista they gave upon even the best of days was, however, oppressive: miles of double-storey dockside warehouses. The river presented its least prepossessing prospect here, and upon its other bank lay only more of the same dreary warehousing, interspersed with thrown-together hovels and other constructions of iron used, I supposed, for lading.

  “Cheer up, lad,” the slavvy in her food-stained apron said. “Since you had coin, you’ll break fast well here at Halfway House. Fresh baked bread, Irish pertaters baked and topped in a buttered slab, three fat toasted rashers, a half slice of tomater…what do you say also to an egg?”

  I said that it sounded to be a Lupercullan feast and soon sat down to it.

  Imagine my astonishment, if you will, when several minutes later I had only just wiped the egg off my chin, who should saunter down the stairs and into the public room but a lanky fellow with hair as orange as one of those Spanish mandarins.

  Though youthful, he had the casual yet elegant air that declared he was living off five hundred a year in railroad shares. He also possessed a voice, that once heard, I could never forget.

  “Eeer now, me blandished female of pulchritude,” says the newcomer in greeting to the semi-stupefied lass pouring him coffee. “I’ll need as large a repast as possible this day.”

  In vain did she offer him her bill of fare: kippers, herring, potatoes and tomatoes. He waved them off as “Fer mere riff-raff.” Eggs, bread, bacon, and ham also were dismissed out of hand. He had had “a regular laborious night of it,” averred he, and what he wished—his grey-blue eyes all a glitter—was nothing less than a “beefsteak with all the trimmin’s. And don’t yer skimp on the gravee none.”

  After she had left for the larder, he smelt his coffee and sipped it as though he were the grandest Turk among the Ottomans. He had made short work of it when he deigned to notice myself quite openly staring at him. He then cocked one flame-coloured eyebrow over a suddenly inquisitive eye.

  “Do I know you, sir?” he asked, loudly, and in the most provocative tone of voice possible, to the otherwise empty taproom.

  “I believe you do know me, sir!” I responded, equally aggrieved.

  Now his two burning bright eyebrows fought for which might reach his hairline first, he was so irate and perplexed.

  “Have we had words, sir?” asked he, fuming.

  “Upon a time, we did indeed have words. And slept together too. Arm in arm, legs pressed against each other,” I added saucily.

  He retained his surprisingly cool demeanour, especially after having been given such extreme provocation.

  “Indeed, sir, you are extremely young to afford the services that are provided by Mr. Alistair MacIlhenny the Third.”

  Here he peered at me closely.

  It was all I could do not to burst into laughter.

  “Perhaps so, sir,” I replied. “But at the time, your sleeping services went for less than nothing, as you were yourself so young.” And as he blinked at me, I added, “And you were at that time hailed by the name of Lobster Tail.”

  He all but knocked over his coffee cup.

  “Yer don’t say so! Then art yer one of the Grimmins Lads? I thought yer face familiar, albeit too clean for any certain identification.”

  He stood up and approached my table. “Let me guess, Little Tomallalley, is it? Or rather Lil’ Tarpon? Wait! I know who? That voice!” He pretended to ponder, listening to some invisible interlocutor. “Ne’er Cockney, always a bit larned.” He turned to me in triumph. “’Tis Scallop. Why! Scallop! It is, ’tisn’t it?”

  Here we both rose and clasped hands and shoulders, and he joined me at my deal table, where he explained neither his alias, nor a great deal else, at least not immediately.

  I drank more coffee while his meal, more apt for evening than morning, arrived and as he tucked into it, I was once more taken by how such a slender lad could put away such large quantities of food. He had done so as a boy, taking four meat pies, not two like the rest of us Grimmins Lads, and two fat brown loaves not one, and always making fast work of them.

  We exchanged our histories—or at least in my case a somewhat expurgated version of the same. Here, across the river from London town, it had already become evident to me that should I ever perchance come across The Person whom I’d lost and still sought, it would be completely circumstantial. In a city of a half-million souls, s/he was as lost to me as a ha’penny at the Seven Dials crossroads.

  “Then yer cannot return to the te-atter?” MacIlhenny said, more than asked, after I had explained my predicament.

  “Not that theatre, at least. Certainly not. And who knows but in a few weeks’ time the word will have gotten about of my misadventure. And I shall be barred from all such establishments.”

  “’Tis a shame,” Lobster Tail declared with a frown. “I do like a good play, mesself, and I would’ve so enjoyed seeing yer tread the boards all costumed up as a pirate or maid. But as yer now unemployed and I suppose seeking some of the same, p’raps I may have a proposition to dangle afore yer?” said he.

  “I am eager to hear,” said I. “Are you self-employed?”

  “Nay. But I am well employed.” He looked about to see that no one was listening, then added conspiratorially, “By none other than Tiger Jukes!”

  “Tiger Jukes?”

  “Not so loud. Not so loud. The Tige prefers to be known but not well known, if you see what I mean.”

  I didn’t but shook my head anyway. “In what capacity?”

  “Rum.”

  “Rum to drink?”

  “Aye, some of that, but all of what Tiger Jukes operates and manages is damnably rum!”

  By which I gathered that Tiger Jukes was a master criminal of sorts and Lobster Tail now one of his gang of crime-fellows.

  “In what capacity?” I repeated with real interest.

  “Why, Tige’s got the ‘extras’ of the docks sewed up tight, does Tige. From China Hall to Jamaica Row and all of the docks of the Driff in betwixt, not one single spot of cargo is pilfered but Tiger Jukes isn’t behind it or doesn’t receive a percentage of it.”

  “And this is how you eat beefsteaks for breakfast?”

  “Well, never mind I, Scallop, me lad. Yer shall be eatin’ them soon enough. I shall take yer to Tiger Jukes mesself.”

  There was the little matter of him paying his tariff, which Lobs—I mean MacIlhenny—settled by grandly saying, “The genl’mun upstairs shall pay it all. As usual.”

  Laughing at my befuddlement at this mystery, he grasped my arm and led me forth.

  We strode on in the decreased drizzle, two great lads, well fed, and with pence in our pocket. Pounds carried I, wrapped tight beneath my more naturally acquired prized possessions. We walked toward where we could make out Wapping, across the turbid waters. The rain had abated only a little by then.

  There, upon a neighbourhood not extremely different from that we had just left, if more ancient, seemingly erected during the time of Charles the Murdered King, we came upon those mansions, somewhat the worse for wear from the eternal southerly winds known as Folly’s Ditch that blew off Jacob’s Island.

  Amid the twists and turns of the various lanes, one larger and somewhat more restored edifice rose upon Rope Lane and Rotherhithe Road. Before this better-looking establishment, three Bravos idled, coming to stand tall once we had approached across the lane. Recognizing my companion, they sat themselves down again and proceeded to idle once more, playing mumble-the-peg and swearing at the results.

  “’El-lo, Mac,�
�� said the tallest, roughest, and least scarred of the three, an Irishman of so snub a nose once might roll coins upon it and they would gather but not fall, of hair so strong and straight and black that were it not for his high complexion and green eyes, one might take him for a Portaguee.

  “’El-lo, Dunphy. Is the Tige up and about?” Lobs asked.

  “Holding’ ’er usual levee, Mac.” Then looking me over, “Who’s this, then?”

  “A friend.”

  “A house-lad, you mean to say.”

  “I said a friend,” MacIlhenny insisted.

  Dunphy moved back, but as I passed in through the foyer said, “Ye’ll be dining on Irish sausage yet,” which I thought an excellent prophecy, as I was partial to sausages.

  The restored grandeur of the exterior of this manse was duplicated within, and soon we arrived at a curved stairway dropping down into a fleur-de-lis papered hall. There sat a heavily painted and cheerful woman, her figure all but hidden in a gigantic flowery chintz pelisse, her high hair all but secreted within dozens of paper curlers. She sat at a fine, almost spindly, French-looking table upon which tea in bone china and half-eaten pasties were placed.

  Several men were seated in chairs before her or standing and listening to her carefully, as her voice was low and rather sweet. My companion held me in the rear of the crowded room, only crooking a finger when she happened to look in our direction. I noticed a lovely pair of large, almost saucy, black eyes, and the once pert features of a soubrette as she looked myself over.

  As they all spoke in a low tone of voice, all I might make out were various expressions of astonishment and dismay from the men, while she remained ever level and even-toned. At last their business was concluded, and the fellows all made for the exit.

  She now crooked a finger at us, and Mac pushed me forward.

  “Mrs. Athaliah Jukes,” said she, swanning toward me a not unattractive hand. She made a moue, and I knelt to buss her chubby pink hand.

  “Mr. Addison Grimmins,” I said, causing Mac to let out and then suppress a laugh.