staff through the material of his trousers. I was for several moments in a state of bliss, and I realized that in a little while, if I persisted, I would be in a state of ecstasy because, while the viscount sucked at my nipples, he had lifted my dress and skirts and was tantalizingly playing with the short curly hairs of my mount without venturing further. His breath was labored but he managed to convey how much he adored me, worshipped me, loved me. “Incomparably seductive,” he said, raising his head, “and fantastically beautiful…” It was at that moment that he touched what I am pleased to call the most excitable semiburied tissue in the whole of the human anatomy, excepting the prick, of course. My knees threatened to give way. I was alarmingly liquescent-and I did not wish to achieve the heights without my mover-and-shaker paralleling me. “Hugh,” I said. “Yes?” “I want to undress and lie down with you.” “Of course, Clarissa.” He still breathed stertorously when I went-to the bathroom, which only led me to think that the viscount rarely, if ever, must have exercised in the sweep of his twenty-one years. The supposition did not trouble me and I therefore took it no further while I rapidly moved to the state of nudity. When I reappeared before him, I must have seemed magnificent. He sharply sucked in his breath several times as his eye traveled the length of me-from my face helmeted by jet-black tresses to the largesse of my high-nippled breasts, and then to the region of the essential female where the hair curled as if ebon foam. There was the bloom of my hips and the fruit of my arse. I rippled, I was sleek, I was all velvet as he showed me his own broad- shouldered elegance after he had led me into his austere, practically ascetic bedroom that had nothing more in it than the simplest of beds, an unprepossessing highboy and a small face mirror resting on its top. I sucked in my own breath sharply when he revealed the reach of his apparatus. It was snakelike, but with no touch of the venomous as I was to learn of another later in the evening. Crooning, cooing, I took the hooded, warm-skinned creature into my mouth, playing with it, teasing it, drawing upon it as though through a straw until Hugh, paling, fell back upon the bed. Had I attended his pallor, I would have quit the game instantly, but I was too caught up in the overwhelming reverberations of my own senses-I had my beloved, I had my beloved, I kept repeating to myself. I shook my breasts as if they were barbaric bracelets, and Hugh leaped upon them with feverish hands, twirling them as if he would strike a primitive fire from them, and my little moans in a little while were tributaries to a scream as Hugh mounted me, a curious foam at the comers of his mouth. Shrieking triumphantly, I guided him in and he proceeded to dart at my roots-as if to cut them off, or scalp me, or punch a hundred holes in me. I screamed again and again. There was a wild, crazed expression on Hugh's face-not unusual in the circumstances, I thought; but what I did not notice was the slackness of his jaw and an increasing stupor to his eye, as if he were about to go blind. And, just before I was about to have an orgasm, Hugh Kinsteares suddenly became rigid and abruptly ceased all motion and lay heavily atop me. There was a good deal of white foam about his lips. “Hugh,” I whispered. There was no response.
It was a nightmare. I slid out from under him and shook him by the shoulders. He moved not a fraction. I was wild with unconsummated passion and terror. I shook Hugh violently. He said nothing. He did not stir. I screamed in a transport of fear-screamed his name, but he was inured to the sound with the deafness of death. I knew, then, that he was dead and that somehow I must have brought on the attack that killed him. I went mad with guilt and kept screaming, clawing at Hugh, taking his face in my hands and mewing to it that he must hear me, hear me-and then I felt a series of slaps to my own face and I looked up in horror at the lantern-jawed Aaron Heeg-Hugh's valet, as it turned out, when he later identified himself, the “puritanical” Heeg. I told Heeg he must find a doctor right away. He laughed at me. I was trembling with grief and unrequited lust-I ordered Heeg to find me a robe.
Instead he draped a counterpane over Hugh's body and pulled me into his own bedroom where he flung me on the bed. “You must bring a doctor,” I said pleadingly. The lantern-jawed Heeg shrugged as he stripped himself of his clothes. “All in due course, milady,” he said. “I will bring a legion of doctors, and they will all celebrate you as a breeder of cause. I myself celebrate you, milady-have you ever witnessed a more rapid engorgement?” His rod, too, was snakelike, but with the stance of the venomous, the cobra about to strike, the rattler about to lunge. The rest of Aaron Heeg was skin and bones, but the truth was and is that I wanted badly to be fucked by that point, terrified as I was, repelled as I was by the leanness of Heeg's body and the stench of his breath. So, while I realized that my true lover was dead, I drew up my knees and parted my thighs so that the surrogate sensualist, the “puritanical” Aaron Heeg of the stinking mouth, might make his way. And make his way he did. The impact was brutal-and overwhelmed me. Heeg's venomous machine tipped at my cervix, and I very nearly lost consciousness from the transport this put me in. If I could have held him there, tipping at my cervix, I would have, so disloyal had I become to my beloved Hugh. But Hugh would have understood, I told myself. He would have comprehended the siren call of mortal flesh-he would have comprehended my weakness, the female flaw involved in the woman concupiscently aroused-any animal, had it been so directed, could have taken me at that point, so swooning with secretions I was, so swollen and soft, so gapingly open. And it was like a creature, a lower animal, that Aaron Heeg took me. The analogy, I assure you, dear reader, is valid, because in a comparatively short time I was to become the mistress of Sir Lawrence Terstyke, and have to experience the nightmare with Sir Lawrence's dog. But I am anticipating myself. It was Aaron Heeg, now, who was lunging in and out of me with fantastic rapidity while I boiled over-once, twice, three times-unafraid of Heeg's sperm whenever they would make the fountain of their appearance, as had Oliver Harwell's. No pregnancy had resulted because of the Harwell affair and I had come to the conclusion-after a surreptitious visit to a Harley Street doctor-that I was sterile, to which, to this day, there has been no exception… As he whipped in and out of me, Heeg bit me without mercy. He bit me on the neck, and then sucked up the blood. He bit me on my nipples, and sucked up the blood there. He bit me on my arms and my rib cage, and sucked up the blood in each place-and giggled as he did so. I do not exaggerate. The “puritanical” Aaron Heeg giggled as he sucked up my blood and thrust in and out of my loins-and I continued, in an equally insane fashion, to climax.
Heeg was laughing now. He was skin and bones but for all his nakedness he seemed attired in black. Attired in clothes for the grave. And I thought of the corpse in the next room, my erstwhile early lover who had become impassioned with me too late, too late, too late-I had killed him. That was what it amounted to, my guilt informed me. If he hadn't met me, if he hadn't had to take me, he might still be alive. How would I face his progenitors? How would I face my own mother and father? They would all come to know, for I would have to wait till the doctor came round to examine the dead Hugh Kinsteares-I could not eave him alone. Oh my God, I must be mad, thinking on such while the stink-mouthed Heeg rode me and spattered my pubes with his sperm as I whinnied in bliss and dug my fingers into his bobbing rump.
Once again he emptied his gonads into my penis-thresher, laughing intemperately. But on this occasion he abruptly withdrew and, with an expression of distaste and contempt, told me he had had enough because I was beginning to stink. To my utter horror I heard myself asking him to stay, that I wanted him utterly to exhaust me- and I found myself pulling at his cock, milking it of its last drops and then with my mouth lapping at it as a cat might at a saucer of cream. I confess that at that point I was absolutely without shame-Heeg's cock had maddened me, had set me off like a series of Chinese rockets. But the man was adamant. Heeg roughly shoved me away and dressed rapidly and then with some faint hint at compassion promised me that he would fetch a physician for that poor bastard of a cadaver a few rooms away from us in the flat, the once elegant and tender Viscount Kinsteares.
The rest of that night, and the days and nights of the succeeding weeks, were sheer nightmare. I suppose I could have run from Hugh's rooms then and there and let the doctor find poor Hugh's corpse unattended, but I was insufficiently callous for such a course of conduct and-I loved him. Had loved him, I suppose; what was dead was no longer lovable. Still, I loved Hugh in memory-it took me a terribly long time to stop loving the memory and to stop feeling guilty for his death, that I had brought on the coronary thrombosis that had killed him. The Earl and Countess of Lamensfirth, his father and mother, spoke not a word to me when they came to claim their son's body. They glanced at me once, icily-and from that point on I ceased to exist for the nobility of Lamensfirth. As a matter fact, I practically ceased to exist for the nobility of Portferrans once word had seeped out that I had been the woman with Viscount Kinsteares on the night of his demise-the Quist-Hagens felt quite shamed in the eyes of the London aristocracy, and were not in the least subtle in hinting that perhaps I ought to find other more suitable quarters in which to live, of which my mother seemed more the instigator than my father, but the two nevertheless presented a glacial front. “We would, of course,” the master of Hagen House said, “remit you a handsome stipend and a sufficiency whereby you would have the necessary number of servants-naturally we would expect you to change your name… I burst out into hysterical tears and retreated to my rooms, sobbing my beloved's name-Hugh, Hugh Kinsteares, Hugh… I told myself I wanted to join him in death if, indeed, he would greet me in that bourne and forgive me. He must forgive me, I cried. I had not meant, with my little scissoring cunt, to cut him down, to cut
