Corroded

A steady arm wrapped around my shoulders, supporting me against a warmth that combatted the chill I suffered, but it did not help. Everything rocked. “Easy,” murmured a soft spoken voice. Masculine, firm. “Rest while you can, Miss St. Croix. ’Tis a long journey out.”

A glass rim touched my lips. Bitter alcohol coated my tongue. Because I was naught but a creature of habit, I drank every drop of the laudanum fed me.

I had learned nothing, after all.

Peeling my crusted eyes open showed me the blurred glare of a small lantern, and a glint of red where it reflected off copper hair. The gentleman cradled me against his side, his features lost in my bleary sight.

A carriage, I realized. We were in a carriage, it was night—or perhaps the curtains were drawn. The jarring came from roads that were not of London-make, yet that we took a carriage and not a sky ship suggested a certain amount of secrecy.

The laudanum burned a path to my belly. What little deductive reasoning I’d grasped faded away beneath a tide of sweet lassitude. Pain faded. Worry, theory, even interest dulled to nothing.

Opium to dull the pain, and I bore so very much.

My head lolled, and gently, the man I traveled with adjusted his arm so that he supported my inevitable wilting.

My lips moved. “Who...?”

The carriage rocked again, and this time he splayed his free hand over my chest, covered by an ermine blanket to combat the chill. It put his face closer—enough that I could see that his hair was short, messy as if he’d dragged his fingers through it repeatedly, and a bruise stained the pale skin of his jaw. Another abrasion marred his left cheekbone.

Aristocratic features. I could not place them; could barely be bolloxed to try.

“Rest, Miss St. Croix,” he murmured. The lantern reflected back in brown eyes. “There will be time for questions after we’ve dried you out.”

My eyelids drooped. I wanted to feel fear at the words, feel worry or anger or anything—I could not. Sleep beckoned, and with it, that woman’s ghostly song.

I didn’t want to hear it; didn’t want to dream of red ribbon wrapping my limbs, of echoes of weeping and my own worthless sorrow. I did not want to dream of a wicked man with unfamiliar eyes, taunting me from Micajah Hawke’s cruel sneer.

I whimpered my distress.

His arm tightened around me. “It will not be easy,” he said in soft tones designed to soothe. “We will nevertheless persevere. Non omnis moriar.”

My Latin had not been utilized for far too long. I could not parse his intent.

“Who,” I mumbled again. My fingers found his side beneath the blanket, clenched into his shirt. “Please...”

The hand he’d used to brace me now stroked my hair from my forehead. “It has been entirely too long, I think. Oliver Ashmore, at your service.”

I stiffened, more out of habit than any true fear. It was as if the memories of it—the understanding that I should be afraid of this man—hammered at the door to my fatigue, and opium sealed the lock.

Long had I imagined my absent guardian a demon, always had I feared when his booted steps echoed down the halls of my childhood corridors. I had never gone out of my way to see him, always avoided him. Seven long years, and he had remained the demon I feared the most.

Ashmore paused, perhaps recognizing my worthless struggle for what it was. He did not let me go, nor did he allow me space to wriggle away—I could barely summon the will to try. With his arm wrapped around my shoulders, his voice dropped an octave. “I promise you thisY,” he intoned, with such lyrical rhythm as to be nearly mesmerizing. “You are once more in my safekeeping. Now rest.” What dregs of sudden panic spiked beneath the laudanum he’d fed me soon evaporated to bone-deep lethargy.

I would never have dreamed the word I whispered next. “Stay.”

“You have my word.”

The irony of my new predicament did not elude me. Saved from the madness of the Menagerie, only to be threatened with the loss of the one vice that kept my sanity in check. That the determination came from my guardian only made it all the worse, for long had I bemoaned his long-distance interference in my life. The naivete of those days might have shamed me, were I not so eager to avoid thinking of anything at all.

For all my conceit, it took a demon to save me from the devil.

My eyes closed entirely. Part of me could not decide whether weeping or laughter would be most appropriate. With my head pillowed against Ashmore’s shoulder, I could do neither—only fall into a deep and trance-like state of sleep.

I had, after all, nothing left to lose. In the end, sobriety had become the demon I feared most.

* * * * *

Author’s Note

“But, Karina,” you might be saying to yourself as you ponder the events within the Midnight Menagerie, “everyone knows the English were prudes. What’s all this talk of racy showmanship and possession?”

A fair question. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to introduce you to a man who might give you something of a new view about Englishmen and Brits in general. Through one man’s efforts, I will show you a time in which sexual deviancy, pornography, piracy of the literary kind, and mass mailings all took place.

Although the exact date is unclear, it is proposed that two clubs were formed at the same time in 1863. The first, The Anthropological Society, which is a club whose interests are obviously included in the name. The second, founded by Sir Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt, was given a name much less telling—or, given your nature, all the more so: The Cannibal Club. It’s thought that the name was derived from Burton’s obsession with the act, which he had long regretted he’d never seen in his many travels.

Burton was a man whose healthy regard for sex and sexuality often put him in conflict with the rather, erm, rigid viewpoints of the Victorian Era. Within The Cannibal Club, he held meetings—which he liked to call “orgies,” though his wife’s father and brother often visited—wherein deviancies of all kinds could be discussed. If it was considered wrong, taboo, or otherwise unacceptable by the staid British institution, then it was ripe for the talking—and, rumor goes, testing.

The members of this club were all men, naturally, though rented girls would have to be an occasional part of the equation. From discourse to experimentation, and rumor had it more than just that, The Cannibal Club played host to any number of vagaries uncommon for the time—or rather, uncommonly spoken about for the time.

Not content with discussion, the members fancied themselves authors, of a sort. They’d gather to write pornographic stories, utilizing a round-robin style that started with one man beginning the tale, then passing the story on to the next, then the next, each adding to it. Sound familiar, writers?

Sir Richard Burton’s contribution to the, ahem, betterment of English mores and morale did not end there. An accomplished spy and polyglot, he was well-traveled and extremely adept at hiding his origins as an Englishman, even so far as darkening his skin to better fill the role. He spent years in India, and he also achieved a disguised pilgrimage to Mecca—not the only Englishman to successfully do so, but arguably the most famous. He was known for the books he brought back, and while the most widely known might be The Arabian Nights, certainly the most infamous came from India—The Kama Sutra.

There was never any secret that Burton was fascinated by sex and sexuality. His writings were often frank about the sexual practices of the cultures he visited, and his journals detailed. The Kama Sutra, translated with help from Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot and archaeologist Bhagwanlal Indraji, was the kind of book suggestive, seductive and scandalous enough to get a man jailed. Quite literally, no less. Since the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, many publishers had been jailed after prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and publication of “obscene” material had become too much a risk.