Installment 37

The halls of the convent echoed with footsteps, as one of the novitiates led Lady Xenia towards a cell in the unused wing, her candle casting meagre light upon the smooth stone floor. Xenia was still dressed in the muddy cloak that she had worn since fleeing Paris, abandoning her gowns and jewels to escape the clutches of Baron Estabrook. Her coalblack maidservant, Azimba, had spotted Estabrook's hired man outside the Tuileries, consulting with the concierge at the hotel, doubtless plotting to shanghai Lady Xenia as she emerged that evening to attend the opera.

"I pray that this room shall be to your liking, madame," the novitiate said, as she opened the door. Lady Xenia was roused from her reverie, and for the first time noted the childlike innocence in the novitiate's eyes, as well as her supple skin and lovely mien.

"This will do, for now. Though I believe I shall need some help unlacing my corset before I am able to retire. Do you think that you might be able to render me one more service?" Lady Xenia entered the cell, after glancing at the young girl's face and noting her sudden intake of breath and the downcasting of her eyes. Ah, she thought..."What is your name, child?"

Sister Maria entered the room, and after Lady Xenia had hung her cloak, moved towards the mirror. Odd that a nunnery would have a mirror within one of the cells, but she dismissed the thought, assuming that perhaps this room was always used for guests. Maria moved her trembling fingers to Lady Xenia's back, and began to undo the lacing, slowly and carefully. Lady Xenia was able to observe her face, and noted that her chest heaved with fear...or perhaps it was excitement.

Swiftly, when Maria had finished unlacing the corset, Lady Xenia turned and grabbed both her arms, pulling her close. She stared into those dark eyes, and herself shuddered. The girl could not have been more than 18, and her dark Spanish beauty was entrancing. This flesh should not be shut up in a nunnery to turn dry as an old parchment before crumbling to dust...Maria licked her lips, and they became like the berries that Xenia remembered from her childhood in Devon, the ones that she would greedily gorge herself on in the summertime, until the juices stained her chin and the front of her pinafore. She moved closer, and listened as Maria's breathing became more audible. Maria did not turn away, and Lady Xenia's lips met Maria's, first chastely but then opening into soft passion. Lady Xenia released Maria's arms, and the two broke apart.

"Madame...I do not know...I must leave..."

"Nonsense. I felt your acquiescence to my kiss, and could taste your eagerness. Remove that wimple, child, and let me see your hair."

Maria could not resist Lady Xenia's exhortation, and allowed her hair to flow down her back as she shook her head like a panther. Lady Xenia exposed her bosom and walked towards Maria, forcing her backwards onto the bed. Her gasps of delight overwhelmed Maria's squeak of shock, and soon the two were entwined, moaning to each other like turtledoves as their pleasure mounted and subsided in waves. Articles of clothing were shed until both wore only skin and hair, and their hands wandered over hillocks and dales of warm flesh, pilgrims in pursuit of some encaverned reliquary. Sighs floated from their mouths, drifting about the room, as their tongues were far too busy to shape words.

Finally, after an hour or so, their two bodies decoupled, and they exhaled with an admixture of pleasure and exhaustion. Lady Xenia's hands traced an arabesque over the abdomen of the young nun. Maria turned towards her, and gave her the smile of an experienced courtesan.

"I knew that you innocence would fall from your eyes like scales, cheri. Perhaps now you shall rethink your decision to remain in the convent?" Little did Lady Bloodsweep realize what the rest of the evening had in store, for the mirror on the wall hid a secret room from which an handsome older woman had been watching all along...

INSTALLMENT 18

          Lady Xenia quivered with felt sensations, her skin like a sponge, as through each pore flowed trembles of electricity sparked by the longed-for manflesh.  Her intricate latticework of passionmuscles became engorged, piece by piece, and locked together with the perfection of a well-crafted Swiss timepiece. 
        Like a struggling woman-sailor trying to keep her head afloat in a wildly raging tide, Xenia tried to keep mind and body apart, tried to keep her senses keen and aware, feeling the delights of each new touch from the Captain's hands, now two staves of lustfire.  But engulfed by wave upon wave of rolling heat, she find herself sinking into a stupor of languid pleasure.  The Captain's careful workings upon her were like so many amusements at a fair, and like a child surrounded by hobbyhorses, dancing monkeys, trained gypsy acrobats, burbling caramel, brittles of all flavors and kinds, demonstrations of archery, fireeating pygmies, dogs dressed up to look like the King of Spain, and a recreation of the battle of Lepanto carried out on a nearby pond, she couldn't control herself.  Overcome, she gave way, let her head sink into the formed ripples of the Captain's chest, and felt her mind slip away.
         In that moment of complete rapture, memories danced before her like a projections from a mesmerizer's lantern.  She was taken back, drifting slowly into the past.  As she floated like a phantom down the long hall of her personal history, a procession of lovers past seemed to dance by, shadowy figures at a masquerade.  There passed before her eyes Silas Blackwater, whose dark visage and wicked laugh had in no way diminished his skills at ladyplay.  Giles Von Sattle, who in the stony tower of his Austrian alpine retreat, had taken her upon a bearskin rug as thick snowfall fell beyond the windows.  She saw slip before her Blaise Du Beaumont-Dupre, a seasoned Gallic mountebank whose only true words were muttered to her in Langue D'Oc across a silk pillow in the hour before dawn whilst they both lay, spent. Now passed Parson Millentorque, a man of the cloth who burned with a prophet's flame.  Now Lance Corporal Seetonstall, and his commanding officer Lieutenant Dunksweer, and various nameless cockney grenadiers under their command.  She saw Nigel Rigginsbone, whose famed skill as a barrister was matched only by his quickwittedness as a bedmate.  N'Goki, the tribal headman of the Banditi tribe of the Congo delta.  The Prince Regent himself - yes, he too had graced her with his royal touch.  Baatanoor, a Mongolian steppeman fired from his drink of fermented mare's milk.  Hamish MacDunnstratten, who had wielded the broadsword at Culloden, and before countless willing maidens.  Red Bird, brought across the Atlantic to show the Queen the peerless form of the red-man, and who showed that and more to her Ladyship.  Giuseppe D'Avriligno, whose hands were made dextrous by his constant card-playing, and whose eyepatch was a source of much debate and accusations of cheating.  There passed before her Ignatio Pomerade, Eustis McIsaac, Vigiro Timbly, Eisen Hobsbadden, the nameless blacksmith of Kensington, Seamus Fallon, Ivan Krensky, Nicolo Vladinesko, Ferminteen Adanock, Kristopps Topwater, Bain Topwater, Hirod Topwater, Aldonsteen Blackwood. 
          But as Lady Xenia floated into the past, there was one moment that pulsed more vividly than any other.  She found her mind wandering back to Violeta Tweedsmuir-Wolfington's Academy for girls.  To look upon its stone frame, its wrought-iron gates, its featureless halls where young, timid girls paced about nervously and prepared for the cruel society that awaited them, one would think it was no place to find desire awakened.  But there, beyond the far ballfield, was the misshapen wooden house of the groundskeeper, and his young, strapping son Marcus, barely 15 and yet ripe with masculinity. 
         It was there, out in the poorly-roofed bothy, between pitchforks and heaps of peatmoss, pushed up against cracking oak boards, that Lady Xenia had first found the flower of her ladyhood blossoming, first felt the ache of woman, and first found its one effective salve - the arms of a boy, coiled with formations of muscle hewn from his labor.  It was there, in a tiny hovel that barely shielded from the moorwinds, that she first learned to stir, and receive. 
 

MM's Remarks on Installment 17

Allow me the opportunity to recast the story to this point, as Captain Hawksbeam reminds me of Lady Xenia's previous lover on Barbados, Marius Van Veldt, the octaroon who made his fortune exporting that sweet cane to Blighty, but whose ancestry prevented his entrance into the society of the landed gentry. It was he that first took her, under the vault of the heavens, while the moon was slowly consumed in a lunar eclipse. It was the very eclipse during which her intended, St. John Sykes-Partington, was to ask her hand in marriage. How was she to know that, while her initiation into the pleasures of the flesh at the hands of that rough and dusky man, whose whole being seemed to tear her ivory-white body into successively smaller pieces until, finally, she cried out and was remade Woman, at that very moment wild dogs were tearing Mister Sykes-Partington to pieces in his isolated mountain observatory, the very observatory where she should have been at that moment, observing the celestial event through St. John's precious reflecting telescope? And how was she ever to guess, until she discovered the encoded correspondence and broke its cypher that the dog attack had not been a case of fate's wicked caprices but rather had been arranged by Carlyle Smollett, Lord Bloodsweep's (God rest his soul!) traitorous business manager, a man whose wickedness was exceeded only by his brilliance at the Exchange? Had it not been for this encournter in the curing station deep in Van Veldt's cane fields, an encounter precipitated by a message delivered by her hearty maidservant, Mary, who, though raised in the filth and miasma of the Isle of Dogs, had risen to become not only an asset to her mistress but also an ally, in fact to all the noble Bloodsweeps. Was it mere chance that had caused Van Veldt to send this note? She had felt his eyes upon her, had blushed at their boldness. A weaker woman would have wilted under that smoldering intensity, a gaze that seemed to peer into the very depths of one's soul and discovered one's inner secrets. Yes, it was passion...but was it something else as well that made Marius send that note? According to the islanders, Marius Van Veldt possessed some sort of power of sight, attributed to the caul that had covered his head at birth. Lady Xenia cared not for the idle speculations of the natives, and was even less interested in their bogeys, their superstitions, their zombies and were-beasts. Still, she had noticed a certain otherworldliness which hung about Van Veldt, and had responded to the messages he seemed to send to her heart with her own unwavering looks, but she began to wonder whether Van Veldt did indeed possess some ability to see into the future?

But these speculations were idle...Van Veldt supposed ability to prognosticate failed him when he was captured by French privateers and thrown in their abhored prison, La Fer, on that rock in the harbor of Martinique, presumably never again to smell free air or peer upon the visage of Lady Bloodsweep. Viscount Samson Marley, her deceased father's younger, bastard brother, as she later learned by letters from Azimba, the coalblack servant Lady Xenia had taught to read and write while in Barbadosm, had claimed that Van Veldt had perished in a hurricane and had then taken command of his cane fields on the basis of a suspect will, drawn up and witnessed by two dead solicitorsm, Arthur Locksley and Francis Blackwater, men whose bones supposedly now sat at the bottom of the Sargasso Sea, visited only by the scuttling denizens of the deep. Lady Bloodsweep had escaped the pirates due to her own courage and dear Mary's forethought, and, now aware of the machinations of Smollett, and, as the stolen encoded letters sent her by Azimba had revealed, Viscount Marley, had had to flee to her aunt's estate in Jamaica, where she had to take on the guise of her veiled deaf-mute sister, Ermintrude, who was, in reality, hidden in a convent on Lake Geneva, translating the apochryphal epistles and perhaps guarding a secret that might save the Bloodsweep line from extinction and poverty. Alas, her aunt, grown old and somewhat senile, had allowed her step-daughter the Hon. Sarah Tyburne to arrange a marriage for Ermintrude with a Baron Estabrook, a man whose fortune was built on the Chinee opium trade. Xenia, unable to reveal that she was not actually Ermintrude for fear that word would reach Viscount Marley, who assumed Lady Xenia had perished in the hurricane and who would doubtless stop at nothing to see her dead was forced to accept the arranged marriage. And, if I recall, that is why our dear Lady Bloodsweep is traveling to the Malabar coast to a marriage to a cold tyrant whose heart moves only at the sight of money. I look forward to volume 18...will Van Veldt escape? How will Lady Xenia regain the wealth of the true Bloodsweeps? What new torments and pleasures await her in India, at the hands of Estabrook. Is Mary with child? Will Ermintrude be discovered?

INSTALLMENT SEVENTEEN

You will recall that Lady Xenia Bloodsweep is now voyaging from her aunt's plantation in the West Indies to the sultry coast of Malabar, where her prospective husband, Baron Estabrook, a cold and calculating man whose heart never stirs save for sinister pleasure over his latest profit-taking, awaits. But, you will remember, the journey itself seems to have awakened something in Lady Xenia, for Captain Hawksbeam's dark eyes and chiseled visage have set her astir. . . .

INSTALLMENT 17
Xenia had come to the Captain's cabin in hopes of refilling her whale-oil lamp, but when she pushed back the mahogany door, and saw Hawksbeam's statuesque frame coiled over his charts and a glass of blood-dark port, it flashed across her mind that she might yet be filled in other ways.
"Captain, I. . . I didn't mean to. . . "
"Startle me? No, my lady. I, who has ridden the briny toss since hairless boyhood, who has seen the brutal scimtar of the Tripoli pirate, and the cutting teeth of the sperm whale, who has seen the porpoise mount his mate in waters thick with heaves of ice, am not so easily startled."
"Indeed." Now the tables were turned - she herself felt startled. Startled with the stirring in her bosom, the warmth that seemed to fill her loins like steaming water flowing into a teacup. Unsettled, she attributed it to the tropical sea air, the thick molasses black of the ocean night.
"Yes, I have tended no land, and served no king, and apprenticed at no craft. But only the sea, the salt-filled queen who makes slaves of men, has been my master. Surely I hold no regret - not for the men I felled beneath my cutlass, for they were knaves, not for the life left behind on shore, for the life of the shoreman is one of ease and emptiness. Yet one doubt lingers, hovering about me like a merciless bird of prey, slowly flying around a wounded jackal on the African veldt."
She felt herself spellbound, as if captured in a pit of tar, by the Captain's words, which fell from his tongue like gentle snowfall. And like a thirsty drunk, coming across a wine barrel that fell to the street, she drank, deeply.
"What, pray, Captain?" The words could barely escape her luscious lips, for she was nearly bent with unnamed anticipation.
"It is this, Lady Xenia. What has escaped my muscle-corded hands, is love, the love of a woman that stings like poison and fills like stout porrage.
"I. . . I. . ." Xenia could hardly mutter, as she saw the captain rise, his sinews each tense as his manly body rippled as he stood.
"But you, you, with your eyes as azure as the azure stone itself, your skin like cut cream, your hair a raven-toned cascade of inviting folds. You - I must have!"
He moved towards her, his steps full of strength and intent. It was all she could do to stumble backwards, propriety blending with unquenchable desire as she fell back against the hard wood of his seachest. She felt her bodice-pin clench against her heaving flesh as his arms, firm like firewood, encircled her quivering frame.
She would have fainted, fainted with need and desire, but the heat of his manflesh sent shivers of lifesblood through her veins. Softly, with breath weakened by maddening passion, she begged him to take her.
But he knew, knew better than she herself what she needed. His thrusting member rumpled her petticoats around her accepting thighs. And though she was a novice in the arts of sea-bound lovemaking, she didn't shy away, no trembling virgin her. Indeed, she felt herself moved as if by an unseen hand, into him, with a vigor and animal wildness that would have stunned a Mongolian tiger. . . .