his testicles and were now smashing through Stanley Widdemer's grand canal. I directed the flood toward the parched sand, but I felt nothing more than a mild disdain. My groin-to stretch a figure- continued to yawn at sex. The juvenile lead smiled at me-gratefully. I lifted an eyebrow and reconstituted myself in my bathing clothes. I might just as well, I thought, go back to the hotel and rejoin the rest of Maytemper's Mummers. There certainly was no point in collecting empty shells any more. The ghost of Kinsteares continued to rule my sexual roost.
10
I venture upon this chapter, my dear reader, with considerable trepidation. It is not matter suitable to delicate digestions, and may well horrify the overrefined, but it was part of the life I lived, and justifiably may be set down to insure the reader's all-inclusive grasp of reality-otherwise my story would be grievously incomplete. My life situation was, if I may faintly belabor the point, inadequate after the death of Hugh Kinsteares. Whoever the man or woman, whatever the place, I could generate no erotic response-I remained in mourning for the demise of the one man I have loved in this life aside from my brother James. How that mourning was terminated is the gist of this chapter -and I shall make no apologies for it, the method, that is. I do most certainly apologize for any stomach I may turn, and to any sensibility I may offend. While it is not my purpose to put down matter that may shock the ingenuous ear, I have no recourse other than to inscribe the truth as it occurred-we must at least be faithful to the proper recording of an event lest the event itself deceive us. I insist I shall not be deceived and, if I may identify with the reader momentarily, I feel that the reader, too, is opposed to deception. Nevertheless, as I say, I proceed with trepidation. While truth may be experienced precisely, and undoubtedly is, the accurate rendering of it is another story-so frequently will that be at variance with the morals of the day and will be characterized as either overly puritanical or overly bestial. In any case, I will take my chances with the devoted reader and get on with the story… Maytemper's Mummers were still in Brighton, having gained a large measure of success. After one of the afternoon performances of As You Like It, I sat down to the dressing-room table -a dressing room, of course, I shared with the other females of the cast-and went about the process of removing my makeup in the gaslight. I was feeling unusually taciturn, practically sullen-when the doorman from the stage door came in and put an engraved card on the vanity before me. The leading lady, Sylvia Knox-Drendendorff-who owned execrably bad teeth whose stench preceded her-leaned her nose over my shoulder and read the card aloud: “Sir Lawrence Terstyke, Bart., Merlin House, Sussex.” On the obverse side in rather a childlike scrawl it was evidently Sir Lawrence who had inscribed-to Knox-Drendendorff's post-adolescent glee-that my acting had made a very considerable impression upon him, and that he begged to make my acquaintance-he would be waiting with his coach-and-four just outside the stage door. “Ah,” said Sylvia Knox-Drendendorff in her rather shrill voice, but one could not fault her on her thespian ability. She tapped me lightly on the shoulder with her fan.
“And will you take the gamble, my lass?” Her smirk extended to both ears which I immediately wanted to take and give a sound boxing to, but she did need her ears for cues, didn't she? I therefore checked my felonious intent, put on a mask of extravagant indifference and shrugged the shoulder Sylvia had dubbed. She pinched up her skirts, seeing I wasn't going to make any comment whatsoever, and flounced off angrily. The girls who played minor roles and who doubled in the crowd scenes, regarded me with fresh admiration and chorused me with naive glosses. “Suppose he's fake, Victoria-what would you do?”
“How wonderful to be loved by the nobility!” “I dreamed of my white knight in a coach-and-four…” “He could be an old man, Victoria.” “I wouldn't accept him on his first advances, but on his second he could advance all over me! Oh, la!” By that point I was sans makeup and ready to go. I had not decided whether I ought to go out with the Baronet or no. I should have to see him first and observe what I could in the twilight before making up my mind.
And there he was as I stepped out of the stage door-lounging gracefully, for all his heft, against the door of his coach-and-four.
Seeing me, he slouched to my side. “Miss Collins,” he said. He had one of those rich bassos that banished all care in the listener.
And his basso, of course, was suitable to his physique, which was extraordinarily broad-shouldered and slim-hipped. He stood some six feet seven inches. But what was so immediately strange was not that Sir Lawrence had iron-gray hair and amber eyes, nor even the impression that his eyes might glow in the twilight-but that his eyes were feral… As for his skin, it had that leathery aspect difficult to ascribe years to. His cheekbones were high and prominent, and his chin had a hard thrust. The whole picture of the man was that of boniness, boyishness, power and enormous tensions held in reserve. And he had those long sinewy hands equally facile with a skillet or gun or the nipples of a woman's breasts. His age, I judged, was somewhere between forty-five and fifty, with a tip toward fifty. “Yes,” I said inanely, “I am Victoria Collins. You, I take it, are Sir Lawrence Terstyke.” “Quite, Now then, Miss Collins, are you hungry after your performances?” He said this with an air of the most tender concern, as if his waiting upon me would be enough to give him the most exquisite delight. I looked at him a long time. Not for a moment did his solicitous ambiance change. But what could one really tell?
There were the feral amber eyes, the broad shoulders, the slim hips, the long legs tightly tailored. Doubtless he would be more than competent in bed, but that was not the question. The question was, would he have the unique competence requisite toward ending my mourning over Hugh Kinsteares, so that my membranes could once again react ardently to caresses, to strokings, to gentle or savage penetrations, and that my glaciality be altogether dissipated? I decided to take the gamble of finding out. What, really, could be dangerous about that? Sir Lawrence's manners were impeccable-there was no doubt he was a gentleman born. I smiled wickedly. “I am terribly hungry after performances, Sir Lawrence.” “Ah,” he said.
He gave me a small smile, not as if he were restraining himself or that he had no more to give, but that the small smile was proper in the circumstances. “In that case,” he continued, “would you prefer the Boar and Bramble, most suitable in these parts for dining and modest drinking, or would you rather incline toward the less public virtues of my own manse, Merlin House? I must point out that the Boar and Bramble has a most unparalleled view of the sea, while all Merlin House can offer you is the pleasance of looking out over one of the serenest valleys in Sussex. My coach-and-four are at your service, Miss Collins.” “Merlin House, Sir Lawrence.” “I am indeed honored, Miss Collins.” As he handed me into the coach-and-four, I said, “I should be much more at my ease if you simply called me Victoria.” “Thank you, Victoria. And I should be happier-and more honored-by the use of my Christian name alone.” The baronet picked up the reins and we were off in his coach-and-four. It was perhaps a twenty-minute ride at a vigorous pace to Merlin House, but the baronet did not neglect me for his horses. Quite the contrary.
Since one could still see how nature preened itself even during the hour of dusk, Sir Lawrence pointed out to me some of the more vivid historical aspects of this part of Sussex. There, for example, was Marcy's Oak, a vastness of a tree, from one of whose sturdy limbs Raymond Marcy had been hanged in 1723 when the outraged citizenry of the district whom Marcy represented in Parliament discovered he was additionally lining his pockets with a moonlit and nonmoonlit career as a highwayman in Essex. The brief bridge they were crossing over at the moment, Sir Lawrence commented, was tarried at by no less a personage than Chaucer, on his journey from Brighton to London, who had written immortal couplets about it-rendered somewhat more mortal by the fact that the manuscript, titled Henry-the-Ghost's Navigaunt Crossing, had been irretrievably lost because one of his mistresses, a Lady Surcom, leaving London for a visit to Edinburgh, had been incensed that Chaucer refused to accompany her, and she had thereupon torn to unidentifiable pieces the very manuscript Chaucer had presented her with after returning from Brighton. “I suppose that taught Chaucer a lesson,” I said. “Well,” Sir Lawrence said, “we have no record of the poet thereafter giving any of his manuscripts to his succeeding mistresses.” “I suggest that the good Lady Surcom was not incensed because Chaucer refused to go with her so much as she might have been angered over the years that other mistresses had preceded her and that she would be superseded herself.” “I would venture to say,” the baronet told me, “that you, Victoria, would not be such a stickler for what, by a euphemism, might be called the pseudovirtuous.” One of Sir Lawrence's gray locks fell over his forehead and thereby enchanted me-the presumably open-faced boyishness of the baronet's countenance mingling with the subtlety and power showing there as well, would have, before the advent of Hugh Kinsteares, shaken me to my figurative balls-which I had released to Hugh. Now I was not shaken in the slightest, but there was, encouragingly, the faintest tingle at my fingertips which was, discouragingly, something of a distance from my heart. “I am not a
