‘And she lives?’ Augusta’s sightless eyes glistened. They might not see, but they could still weep.
James took his handkerchief and reached across to dab the gathering glimmer at the corners.
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘I think, if she were dead, some effort might have been made to trace me. I have kept watch on all the newspapers.’
‘You don’t know where she is?’
‘No.’
‘Please, put your handkerchief away, I am well. This was the love you did not wish to speak of?’
‘Yes. But I should tell you. You have made me such a handsome and generous offer – it is ungenerous of me to hoard my secrets from you, even if you may hate me for them. You deserve to know.’
‘Please tell me about her. Tell me whom I must eclipse.’
‘Augusta, it is not a case of eclipsing her.’
‘Then whatever it is I must do to replace her in your heart.’
‘You have a place in my heart. You are precious to me, so very precious. I have never had such intensity of communion with a woman. I have never known one who shared my dark proclivities to such an extent—’
‘Oh, don’t! Don’t make it all about the bedchamber. I shall hate myself.’
‘Why? You should love yourself, as I love you. It is nothing to be ashamed of. It makes you mine, and me yours.’
‘But I suppose what you felt for her was on a higher plane?’ Augusta’s voice was bitter, tight with jealousy.
‘I shall not speak of it if it upsets you so.’
‘James! I shall leave here, leave you, if you will not tell me.’
He felt that she meant it.
‘Very well. In the briefest possible terms: She was a chorus girl at the Olympic Theatre, which stands on Wych Street and has a stage exit on Holywell Street. I would see her there, leaving every night with her companions. I was, at the time, barely twenty-one years old.’
‘And you are now twenty-seven? It was not long ago.’
‘It seems very long ago, to me. Her name is Ellen. Was. Is. I know not. I would contrive to be, each night, in the public house they sometimes visited after performing. I haunted it, although she would only come in perhaps one or two nights of the week. I became a little … unhinged … with the need to possess her. I pursued her remorselessly. At first she would make fun and then it became a kind of game – she would avoid me, but it was clear that she expected me to follow her, to chase her. She took pleasure in it. It became a consuming affair, for both of us.’
‘I should so like to be courted like that,’ sighed Augusta.
‘She liked the courtship well enough. It took almost a year but at length I wore her down and she consented to marry me. Why I ever thought myself a suitable husband, I don’t know. I earned, then as now, very little and had only my room above Stratton’s bookshop to call a home. But she said yes. I didn’t question it.’
‘A life of poverty, with love, is still a good life.’
‘You might think so, Augusta, but I advise you to keep a close hold on your money. Our life was not a good life. I wanted Ellen to stop working at the Olympic, but she would not. The end of our little game of chase was the end of her feeling for me – I suppose she had not expected her affections to fade as soon as she was caught, but they did. She had no genuine love for me. One night, three months after our wedding, she did not return from the Olympic. I have not seen or heard of her since.’
Augusta was silent for a time.
‘Was there nobody you could ask? Her friends, the other chorus girls, the theatre manager?’
‘I asked everyone I could think of. She had left the theatre with a gentleman. They were to dine at some rooms on the Strand. Nobody knew what happened after that, nor yet the gentleman’s name.’
‘I suppose he installed her somewhere as his mistress?’ Augusta hazarded.
‘I suppose you may well be right.’ He drank the remainder of the champagne. ‘I was too young, and she was too beautiful, for a life spent in Holywell Street. You see me now, a sadder and a wiser man. Yet not so sad.’ He took her hands again and kissed her fingertips. ‘For you have revived my spirits.’
‘We are star-crossed,’ she said.
‘Had Juliet been blind and Romeo been married, and both been of a class apart. It is to be hoped our story will not end so, however.’
‘What an anomaly you are. The gaol-born gentleman. The schoolmaster who spared the rod – but only on his pupils. The married man with no wife. It is all terribly romantic.’
‘Until you live it.’
‘Yes. I am sorry. I was insensitive.’
The pause that followed was almost too full for James to bear. He wanted to get up and pace furiously up and down. Could he leave the country with her? Would his pride let him live on her money? Did he, after all, love her enough? What obstacles stood in his way?
Augusta was first to speak again.
‘If she were to come back …’ she said.
‘Ellen?’
‘Yes.’
He looked up to the clouds above, which were clearing, revealing pockets of starlight.
‘I do not think it likely,’ he said.
‘But if she did.’
He shook his head. ‘She is my wife,’ he said. ‘But that does not mean I must take her back. I am not the same man now as I was then, and she is not the woman I dreamed she was.’
‘She is your past.’
‘Yes. I wish I had not such a past, but I cannot erase it. What I can do is look to the future, and marvel at the possibility that it might contain you.’
‘It must contain me. Mine must contain you. We could leave tomorrow, before Mrs Shaw returns. I need only go to the bank and make a withdrawal for the passage.’
‘Augusta, do not act in haste.’
‘I have thought and thought about it.’
‘We have known one another two months.’
‘It is long enough! Is it not long enough for you?’
‘I have some affairs to settle before I can leave town.’ Annie’s face, her cheeky grin replaced by distress, lodged itself in his mind and would not be moved.
‘You can write your stories anywhere in the world and post them to London.’
‘Those are not the affairs I have in mind. I must file this piece on the Contagious Diseases Act. I must see that my neighbour is released from the Lock Hospital.’
‘Oh, your neighbour!’ cried Augusta, frustrated. ‘Are your whores and chorus girls always to come before me?’
‘Augusta, I will not have you speak so,’ he hissed in a furious undertone.
She was meek straight away, casting her face down to the table.
‘Forgive me. I spoke rashly. I am merely anxious to know my own future.’
‘My love, let us give ourselves time to consider this decision. If I am with you, whether in London or, or the East Indies, or anywhere, I am well. If you fear Mrs Shaw’s return, you needn’t. You are perfectly within your rights to dispense with her services.’
‘Oh, I could never … I would far rather just leave and never have to deal with her again.’
‘It is the coward’s way, Augusta. I know you better than that. If you wish, I can be with you for the difficult interview.’
‘Oh, would you? I could do it if you were by my side.’ She shuddered briefly.
‘Of course,’ he said softly. ‘And I think, if we leave, Paulette should come too. What future has she, if thrown back on her own resources?’
‘I would give her a character. You need not be the personal saviour of every fallen woman in London, you know. Leave it to Mr Gladstone.’
James bit back a sharp retort.
‘You know nothing of their lives, and you should thank God for it,’ he said, more mildly.
‘Oh, let’s not quarrel. Not on such a night as tonight, when I am so full of hope and love and elation. You do love me, do you not?’
‘I do. I cannot expect to thrive without you.’
‘Nor I without you. Oh, why did I not seek you out sooner? We could, even now, be sitting beneath palms on some southern shore.’
‘Or drinking Madeira wine in Madeira.’
‘Or walking hand and hand through some scented garden on the Amalfi coast.’
‘Or listening to a real German band in Germany.’
‘Or lying abed, anywhere at all, it would matter not where.’
‘Yes, that last is my favourite, I think. But we can do that here.’
‘Here? At Cremorne?’ She giggled coquettishly.
‘If we wish it.’
‘You are a devil! Oh, will you dance with me? I do so love this tune.’
The music, seductive and shimmering, drew them to the platform. James held Augusta tightly in his arms, so she needed only to rely on the movement of his body against hers and the rhythm of the band to dictate her steps and cast off into the waltz. Now that there were others on the floor, he was self-conscious about the figure he cut, but after a time it became clear that the other dancers were all absorbed in their partners, or in trying to remain upright after a few too many of Cremorne’s special beverages.
Her waist strained and twisted against his hand and her bosom was pressed to his lower chest. If only she didn’t wear so many petticoats, he thought he would be able to feel the heat flowing from her sex. Her initial stiffness melted by degrees until she was content to be led around the floor, so complete was her trust in him.
Not for the first time, James tried to imagine how blindness must feel. Would he be able to let another be his eyes? He felt a profound sense of responsibility – the confidence she rested in him was humbling. For all she knew, he could be making faces of revulsion every time he spoke to her. He could be a fortune hunter, cold, hard avarice in his eyes – she would never see it.
Then it was that a disquieting question occurred to him. Was it him she loved, or the escape he represented? Perhaps, after all, she had been playing him and conspiring to free herself from the implacable grasp of Mrs Shaw.
But then, would this possibility not have occurred to that sharp-eyed lady?
Rings within rings within rings of possibility spun in his head, making it ache. Heavy perfumes and beer fumes added to the fug of his brain until he had to draw Augusta aside and stagger from the platform before he swooned like a girl.
‘Kiss me,’ she sighed, once the press of bodies on all sides had thinned out and they were among the bushes and box trees behind the platform.
‘The way you swore only the man you loved could kiss you?’ he reminded her. What a victory it had been, the first time she allowed him to touch her lips. Surely she had meant this? Surely such profound sentiment could not be counterfeited?
‘Yes, yes, and it was you. At last, it was you. Kiss my lips, my love, and know that they are yours, that all of me is yours.’
A tree bark of suitable width and smoothness presented itself before him and he manoeuvred Augusta against it, still in their dancer’s clasp. Her fingers pressed into the back of his neck as he bent his head, clearing now that the air was less heavy, and took her lips with his.
He lifted the little hand that he held clasped and fixed it high above her head, against the tree trunk, holding her in thrall. Her bosom heaved against him, fast as the breath he was stopping up with his mouth.
You are mine, he insisted to himself. You mean this.
With his hips he imprisoned her in position, her legs clamped between the tree and his solid form. She made no effort to escape her plight but showed that she welcomed it, pushing her pelvis into him and darting her tongue between his lips.
He feasted upon her, ravenous, as if the Cremorne supper had gone uneaten. He bit and sucked and probed every inch of her warm, wet mouth until she made tiny mewls of protest in her throat. He released her for a second, during which she gasped, ‘My breath!’ and then caught her again.
The hand that had been around his waist slipped under his jacket and stroked the silken back of his waistcoat. Her knuckles ran lightly up and down his spine. He growled and fixed his teeth to her lower lip. The hard knot of his erection pushed into her stomach and he parted her legs with an importunate knee.
‘Dearest, wickedest love,’ she panted, released for another brief intermission. ‘You can have no idea what a wanton creature your pet is.’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘But what if I told you I had neglected to wear anything beneath my skirts tonight?’
He grew faint again, leaning his head on the bark, pressing his lips to her ear.
‘You cannot untell what you have told me,’ he whispered.
‘No,’ she said, quivering.
‘And, now it is told, I cannot unhear it.’
‘No.’
‘And, now it is heard, I cannot but act upon it.’
‘I cannot stop you.’
No, she could not stop him, and he made this clear by lifting up her skirts so that her pale bare legs trembled in the new moonlight.
‘Put your arms about my neck,’ he ordered. ‘And hold tightly.’
She obeyed, with a shuddering laugh, as if afraid of what he had in store for her but knew herself powerless to evade it. He clasped the backs of her thighs in each hand and lifted her feet from the ground until her legs were wrapped around his waist.
She yelped but he silenced her with another kiss, even more brutal than its predecessors.
‘Take what you are given,’ he muttered into her ear, pushing himself hard against her so that she was firmly pinned.
She clung with monkey-like tenacity while he unbuttoned and unbraced and released his stiff cock from its trammels.
‘I suppose you are wet enough,’ he wondered aloud, as much for her benefit as his, for he knew how she loved to die a thousand shameful deaths under the lash of his tongue. He jammed his crotch into hers and rubbed her juices all over his shaft. ‘Oh yes, I see that you are. Of course you are. You are empty without it, are you not? Incomplete unless filled to the brim with what I have to give you, are you not, pet? Answer me.’
‘Yes, sir, yes, it is true, I long to have it in me, always.’
The words spurred him to action and he buried himself, swiftly and sharply, inside her tight, willing sheath. The stroke was bold and she cried out, needing more of his masterful silencing treatment, his tongue mimicking the other member, deep in her throat.
No gentle build-up now, no caressing, no easing into coition. Instead a shocking rhythm from the start, thrusts that slammed her against the tree and made her hold on to him so tight that her arms and legs shook with the effort of it.
She buried her face in his neck, trying to muffle the unearthly sounds issuing from her throat. When he felt her teeth on the sensitive skin there, all thoughts of drawing the coupling out were driven from him. She made him lose control of himself, she made him mad. It was impossible to take her hard enough. If he could slam her right through the tree’s bark, he would, but he had to content himself with filling her with his seed, letting it pour, hot and plentiful, into that tight little quim that belonged to him.
The deed was done before he considered its implications.
‘Oh,’ he breathed, laying his forehead on her shoulder. ‘Oh, I should not have—’
‘No matter,’ she whispered, finally releasing his neck from the clamp of her pearly little teeth. He would be marked. He must wear his collar high tomorrow.
James’ knees could no longer hold out and he sank down to the ground, still connected to Augusta at their most intimate juncture. They clung to each other like ceramic figures on a mantelpiece, if ceramic figures in such an improper pose could exist, as if fused together.
‘No matter,’ she repeated, kissing his cheek and nibbling at his earlobe. ‘We are leaving here.’
James still privately felt that, however far they travelled from London, their circumstances were less than ideal for bringing a child into the world. But it could not now be helped and, with a little luck, they might escape that eventuality all the same.
‘I love you so, James,’ she said.
‘And I you. But I was a brute. Was there pleasure in it for you?’
‘Oh yes. Very much pleasure.’
They kissed fervently and were still so engaged when a rustling from the bushes close by disturbed their post-coital embraces.
Augusta broke off, having heard it first, and James looked up to see a pair of men he did not recognise, in the company of a uniformed police officer and … James stared.
‘Mrs Shaw.’