Now to Brighton all repair
To taste the pleasures that flow there.
Sure no place was e'er like this –
All is pleasure, joy and bliss!
‘My dear young gudgeon,’ Captain Charles Stanville exclaimed, without attempting to disguise his amusement. ‘You will allow ’tis hardly an excursion to the underworld or life membership of the Hellfire Club that I'm proposing. I'm merely taking steps to complete your education; an exercise that by all accounts is lamentably overdue.’
‘Yes, I realise that, Charles, and am obliged to you. But I still say that to do it this way seems, well, confounded cold-blooded somehow.’
It was only with an effort that David could bring himself to relinquish his study of the rutted surface of the road ahead and look his elder cousin in the eye. ‘To ride out like this in the full light of day, I mean, and sober…’
Patiently, Charles transferred his reins, to fish out from his pocket a tabatière and tap the painted lid. ‘Are you saying then that you'd rather we made this expedition after nightfall, and with a bumper or two of brandy in our bellies?’ He extracted a pinch of dark brown rappée and inhaled it sharply from his glove. ‘Is that it, Denton?’ He enquired.
‘Well, yes, if you want to frame it that way, I suppose – at all events…’
‘And that’s the trouble with a private tutor's education, bigod!’ His cousin interrupted.
Charles flicked shut his snuff-box and exercised a silk bandanna beneath the sweep of his moustache. ‘Good heavens, man, I’m taking you to a woman; to an amatory adventure not a surgical amputation! And let me assure you, David, that nine times out of ten a healthy young fellow of your address may be relied on to survive the professional removal of virginity without recourse to alcohol. My dear fellow, ’tis a medically established fact!’
‘Don’t be a donkey, Charlie, you know exactly what I meant.’ David flushed with vexation; although in truth, as much with himself and his embarrassing lack of carnal experience, as with Captain Charlie’s teasing manner. Innocence in a young lady like Octavia might be attractive, even vital. But in a nineteen-year-old young man of any persuasion, leave alone a titled viscount – it had to be absurd to say the least.
‘I just happen to think that one should be in the right mood for this kind of an adventure before ever undertaking it, that’s all,’ he added, feeling quite as desperately foolish as he sounded.
His cousin laughed outright and leant across to punch him on the arm. ‘Mood, d’ye say? Is that what it is you’ve been waiting for these four years past? Because if it is, I have to tell ye, Denton, that your mental state’s the last thing on this earth you should be thinking of at a time like this. Confess to yourself the nature of your ailment. Then find yourself a pretty Paphian, one of Mrs Perrin’s lambs, to help you with the purge. I needn't refine upon it, surely? You don't require the cloak of darkness or libations to the gods, for pity’s sake! You need a woman; a merkin, your lordship! And that's really all you need. Then when you have one in your sprawl, the mood will come to you damn soon enough, ye can take my word on that!’
The two young men had ridden out through the dragon gates of Hadderton that May morning of 1818 – ostensibly to attend a spring race meeting on Whitehawk Down, but in reality to do their own jockeying, and on fillies that could be relied upon to run slower with every extra guinea placed on them. Charles, now become a Captain, had succeeded in securing yet another furlough from his regiment – a leave of four whole months this time, requested and granted for the very practical object of a formal courtship. The second daughter of a wealthy Hampshire neighbour was become quite desperate to be married, his mother had thoughtfully written to inform him; an opportunity by no means to be wasted by a warranted Waterloo Man. His commanding officer had seen the sense of it; for in peacetime the British army were ever willing to encourage such gentlemanly pursuits as fortune hunting. So naturally had Charles, despite an immediate intention of spending his initial weeks of freedom in a visit to his relatives at Hadderton, and in concentrated whoring down in Brighton – this last, a necessary preliminary to the duller work of matrimonial courtship, and one he planned to share with his uninitiated cousin.
That Cousin Denton had succeeded in attaining the age of nineteen without more than a kiss and promissory fumble from a laundry maid, had shocked Charlie almost more than anything he’d heard, when the poor boy solemnly confessed to him as much over their second celebratory decanter on the night of arrival.
‘My dear fellow, nothing simpler than the treatment for that ailment,’ he had promised with a dryness that concealed his real astonishment at such a tragic thing. ‘You follow my prescription twice daily for a week, twice weekly for a further month, and I'll wager that you'll scarce remember what ’twas like to be a sufferer. We’ll start the remedy at once; tomorrow morning, Denton, I insist!’
And here they were embarked upon the cure together, riding down through Moulsecombe in a balmy scented atmosphere of may blossom and flowering parsley – with the song of birds and brilliant verdure of the springtime fairly shouting their approval; the kind of day when even celibates and aesthetes must feel the tug of natural instinct. And yet with David sitting tense and upright, holding back his horse as if an executioner, and not the soft and willing body of a woman, awaited him in Brighton!
They left their mounts, and a silver coin or two, with an obliging groom in the Royal Horse Artillery barracks on the Lewes Road, to proceed down the Steine on foot – Charles of soldierly appearance, complete to a shade in dark blue superfine and buckskins, with a military black silk stock and beaver hat – David rigged out in yellow nankeen breeches, a green silk swallowtail set admirably across his shoulders, close-fitted to an ornamented Marseilles weskit. Two proud young chins uplifted by shirt-points of quite prodigious height. Two pairs of elbows squared. Two pairs of elegant, well-muscled legs deliberately exposed; patrician peacocks in ritual display, clinking their boot-spurs past the Regent’s fantastic Hindoo-Chinese palace, now rearing up a vast new onion dome beneath its scaffolding, striding westward into Castle Square where coaches stood in ranks awaiting passengers. Then on the stroke of noon, to wend their way down through the crowded lanes and twittens of the fishing-quarter. Two proud young gentlemen demanding passage through the throng.
But, whereas Charles’s pride was founded on the very solid conviction of his own superiority, David’s, as they approached Madge Perrin’s house, was still nine-tenths bravado. He felt unsexed, less amorous at that moment than he ever could remember – few things that he’d less rather do just now than follow on his worldly cousin’s heels into a Brighton whorehouse!
But, as with the roofs of Hadderton when they’d first scaled them together all those years before, he knew he’d almost sooner die than show his fear to Charlie. There was no turning back.
‘You’re very privileged, Denton, d’ye know that?’ his cousin said as he briskly rapped six times with his gold-headed cane on the brothel door. ‘For you’d never be admitted here ye may be sure, without presuming on my acquaintance with the house.’ He turned with provoking good humour to flash a grin at David.
Resisting the temptation to turn and run for his young life, his cousin swallowed convulsively and dragged up the corners of his own mouth into the expected response; at the same time rummaging beneath his coat-tails to blot his palms on his nankeen buttocks, in case he might be called upon to shake a hand – or something!
Inside, they heard the sound of footsteps. A small Judas window in the door flicked open, and then shut again, to be followed by the sound of well-greased bolts and the rattle of a chain.
‘First come, first served,’ said Charles with satisfaction as the door began to open. ‘This way you get to pick from all the merchandise on offer. Aye, and pick ’em fresh into the bargain. No ready-buttered buns for us, eh Denton?
‘And a good afternoon to you, Mary,’ he added imperturbably, sweeping off his beaver and bowing to the figure in the doorway with the courtly air he used to mask his own excitement. ‘Your very obedient servant, Ma’am.’
‘Lieutenant Stanville, I declare!’ cried out that functionary with very obvious pleasure. ‘Bless us, we ’adn’t heard you was in town!’
But even as she said it, her eyes were travelling past him to the young man at his shoulder; cautiously assessing eyes in a pinched unpainted face – a brothel housekeeper no different it would seem to any other kind.
‘’Tis ‘Captain Stanville’ now, Mary,’ Charles corrected with another little bow. ‘I’d show ye the French braid on my jacket and the extra band around my shako if I had my regimentals with me – and now this young tulip of fashion that I’ve brought you is my cousin, Lord Denton,’ he added with a wink. ‘David, meet Mrs Mary Price.’
‘Servant, Ma’am,’ said David gravely.
The woman acknowledged the salute with a coyness that was surprising in the circumstances, and a moment later closed the door behind them. ‘Mrs Perrin won’t be but a minute,’ she apologised, pulling back the curtains of the vestibule to admit a little sunlight through the blinds. ‘So shall I fetch ye Sary Ann, Sir?’ she said aside to Charles. ‘Or Barbara?’ She gave David another swift assessing glance. ‘An’ Louise too, maybe?’
‘We want ’em all, confound it! His Lordship wants to take his pick,’ Charles Stanville declared grandly, while David made a detailed study of the mouldings on the ceiling.
Poor David! His mind a battleground of contradictions – half of him accepting the practical necessity for this initiation, the other half appalled by the brisk way in which Charles and the female denizens of this place proposed to go about the business. A simple, basic and entirely loveless act, he knew that’s how it had to be with whores – a compromise with nature; an adult man’s solution to his adolescent fumblings on the roofs of Hadderton, and to the guilt that he attached to them. No need to be ashamed to choose between the girls they trotted out for his approbation in the salon. If harlots wished to sell themselves like nags or cattle at a fair, the buyer had no need to feel degraded. No reason in the world! (And yet he did of course, most comprehensively.)
‘An’ ’ere’s our Sary Ann. Just take look at ’er shape an’ ’er pretty face – now what a livin’ beauty, d’ye ever see such hair an’ eyes?’ demanded Mrs Perrin a few minutes later in the rattling manner of a Market auctioneer. ‘Or is it Barbara as takes yer fancy? Now she’d be an ’andsome ’andful for any young gentleman, yer Lordship, as Captain Stanville ’ere will bear me out. Eh, Charlie? Or ’ow about our Peg for somethin’ out of the common way? Show ’im, Peggy – there Sir, smooth as silk an’ black as ebony. There’s a prize! An’ this ’ere’s our little firebrand, Bridie. …’
He chose in panic without thinking – anything to escape the woman’s leering, painted face; to stop her strident commentary, to stop the girls displaying their undoubted charms in gowns that clung or parted so upsettingly as they walked by, and above all to escape the insufferable irony of Cousin Charlie’s smile!
David made his choice without thinking – almost without a thought, but maybe not entirely. Because one girl’s face had seemed to him less openly suggestive than the others, the expression in her eyes perhaps shade more kindly; and it was she he chose.
The girl herself seemed genuinely pleased. Her smile deepened, and with an absurd naturalness she hooked her arm through his. From the head of the stairs she guided him through a second lavish salon; its taste Parisian, or what in Brighton passed as such, faced all around with looking-glasses purposely hung low – smelling of freshly-applied perfume, with something else beneath it, staler and less appetising. A corridor beyond exhibited an impressive collection of French engravings; folio prints that were appealing less from the artists’ varying skills than from those of their enthusiastic, even athletic, models. At intervals between the pictures were narrow, panelled doors, from one of which a maid emerged, to brush past David and his escort with eyes downcast demurely – and a little oddly in view of her surroundings
At another door a little further on, the girl, Sary Ann. disengaged herself from David’s rigid arm. ‘’Ere we are then. ’Ere’s where yer fondest dreams come true,’ she announced in the immemorial way of her profession, beckoning him to follow her inside. ‘Ye pay two guineas a time, or ten for the ’ole afternoon. But bless us, dear, ye don’t ’ave to find it yet!’ she added on a warmer note as David reached inside his coat. ‘Not ’til we know what suits.’
He nodded dumbly while his eyes travelled round the chamber with a helpless kind of fascination, like someone disassociated from the present, from this ill-matched pair of strangers and the act that they were shortly to perform here.
The room was scrupulously clean – bright, not only with the sunlight that flooded through its open window, but with the astonishing array of colours and of textures that it lit. Curtains of deep red moreen with golden tassels, a blue and yellow carpet, a vase of curling ostrich plumes dyed orange, puce and purple; on chairs and ottomans and on hooks around the walls, gowns, sprigged, spangled, striped and tamboured in every rainbow hue; with bonnets, shawls and parasols to match or clash with them – a little doll perched on a cushion with a gleaming carnation ribbon tied round its waist, and on a table in the window a fresh bowl of living, crimson roses.
‘I do like to see a bit of colour in a room,’ the girl said by way of explanation, seeing David blink. ‘If the good God wanted us to be dull in our traps an’ togs, then ’E surely wouldn’t ’ave coloured ’Is own flowers an’ butterflies an’ all so bright an’ fanciful. That’s what I always says – now would ’E though, yer Lordship? But there,’ she added, her own warm golden eyes appraising. ‘Wouldn't do no harm to shut out a bit o’ sun I daresay.’
With which she strode across to slam the sash down and tug the tasselled curtains to; leaving David with an image of painted features as loud and obvious as her taste in clothing. But the girl Sary Ann was something special, his first instinct had been right – a realisation that did nothing in itself to lessen his discomfort. In the corridor outside he could hear approaching footsteps, the sounds of Charlie's voice and female laughter, the opening and latching of a door, the crash of one boot falling, then the other. Then silence.
‘I won’t be but a minute. So don't ye run away, now will ye, duck?’ The girl instructed, turning smartly on her heel to disappear behind a dressing-screen on which she’d pasted a selection of crudely coloured copulatory engravings. ‘Take off yer coat, why don’t ye, an’ make yerself at ’ome.’
She meant it kindly, but that somehow didn't help.
‘Yes, ah capital,’ he forced himself to answer sturdily and rather louder than he needed to, then took his coat off with all the gravity of a Barcelonian bishop, feeling sick.
Sary left the young swell gazing at the blue and yellow carpet of her bedroom, arms crossed defensively, poor gawky! By the time she'd changed into an open robe de chambre, applied more jessamy and checked her painting in the glass, he had progressed as far as pulling off his boots, with coat and weskit already neatly folded on a chair. But that was all. She knew his case. A Johnny-raw – ‘Green as a gooseberry,’ Charlie had whispered to her in the downstairs salon – the rarest of all brothel visitors, a virgin male! In near three years of constant, conscientious work Sary had met with relatively few of them, and like others of her calling preferred the older, grey-head culls for choice as generally less wearing and more appreciative of what she had to offer. Young men were too much in a hurry as a general rule; too barbarous in usage, too anxious to impress. But these Johnny-raws were something else. They needed reassurance, and practical instruction to set them on the right path for the future, which had to be a duty and a pleasure for any self-respecting whore. Although you didn’t let ’em know you’d guessed their secret, naturally. She’d tried that once or twice, and succeeded only in making it much harder for the wretched things – or softer actually! The idea made her smile.
‘That’s it. Now you look more easy, duck,’ she lied, pretending not to notice how he’d started at her sudden reappearance; a reflex which very near upset her own precarious gravity. For unlike her titled client, Sary found it hard to hide her feelings.
‘So come over ’ere an’ sit by me, Sir, an’ let’s see if we can't find a way to improve on our acquaintance?’
She plumped down on the bed to pat the green and scarlet Paisley counterpane beside her. ‘Ye won't find a better bed-steddle than this in all of Brighton – an’ just me to exercise it too. It’s ’ardly ’ad no kind o’ wear so far to speak of. Just me an’ not above five dozen pairs o’ cullies’ knees an’ elbows all in all. Why, ’tis very near brand new!’
She patted the Paisley by her thinly-covered thigh again invitingly. ‘Come over ’ere along of me an’ give ’er a try then, why don't ye dear?’
‘Yes, yes thank you very much, I will.’
His voice was preternaturally bass still and as confident as he could make it – with just a trace, she noticed, of a rural accent beneath its clipped and educated tone in the style of the provincial aristocracy. There was something familiar too about his bearing, Sary couldn’t help but think – so very slim and upright, as he moved with jerky nonchalance towards her very-near-brand-new working mattress. And brown eyes. He had brown eyes, this Johnny-raw of hers, brimful with tension anxiety despite his efforts to appear relaxed – brown eyes with blackly feathered brows, and dark brown hair which flopped like a colt’s across his perspiring forehead – a long straight nose, a narrow jaw, a mouth as yet too undecided to stamp the whole as handsome; a boy's face still, not yet a man's.
‘Not yet, but very soon to be,’ she thought, ‘or I'm no spigotmonger!’
He sat down, careful not to touch her, bolt upright in his shirt and high starched collar; his hands upon his knees to stop their trembling – long hands, she noticed, with dark blue veins and jutting wrist bones.
‘An’ stiff everywhere,’ thought Sary, moving closer, ‘but where the poor thing needs it most. Lor’ bless ’is innocence!’
‘Well now, I’d think ’tis time to raise Sir Nimrod's spirits an’ invite ’im to pay the pair of us ’is compliments,’ she said aloud by way of conversation while she went to work. ‘Wouldn't you, m’dear?’
It was a question that required no answer. For as David was aware, she already had its solution well in hand. 'Procul, o procul est profani,' he quoted to himself from the sixth book of Virgil's Aeneid. 'Begone all you who are uninitiated!' His brain absurdly unconnected with his body and the things that she was doing to it – his eyes still ranging round the shadowed room, recording images; the doll on the ottoman, the roses in the narrow bar of sunlight that still fell between the curtains, his own reflection in an angled mirror, its face brick-red, its mouth ajar, while all the time she calmly, expertly went about her business.
‘Warm gin,’ the girl presently remarked, as a muscle in his left buttock went into spasm of its own accord, and David’s legs began to splay. ‘’Tis what most use before, to keep ’em safe. But I don’t ’old with that. Never ye mind, you leave it to Sary, Sir, she'll show ye after what to do. An’ as for now, we'll see ’ow a little drib o’ jessamy will answer.’
She reached behind a tangled heap of ribbons on a bedside table. ‘Next article,’ she said smiling. ‘Never ye play at billiards, Sir, without a well-chalked cue!’ And in a moment David felt, not chalk, but something closer to a wet, live octopus at exercise within his lap. ‘That's it, that's the dandy!’ The girl was laughing now deliciously. ‘That nice then, dear? Oh yes, I see ye think it is! An’ I’d say ye’re ready justabout, young man, to play yer jack against my ace. Aye, justabout!’
And so for sure he was – no time to think the thing contrived, or glimpse his sudden, clumsy movements in the mirror – scarce time enough to find the place she offered, and none to savour it. Time only for the final raw convulsion of the act, bellowing like a charging bull!
Only to find he'd charged a solid wall and stunned himself quite senseless, all faculties suspended.
In a little while she gently heaved him off, marvelling as she’d marvelled many times before at the ruthless core of violence that is man! – this one’s innocence a thing now of the past; a gift he'd made involuntarily and with a mighty cry that Sary found strangely touching.
Behind the dressing-screen again, she squatted down to douche herself with tepid alum-water and a glass syringe.
‘If you ask for my opinion, Sir, I’d say ye’re like enough as safe with Sary Snudden as a guinea in a miser’s purse,’ she called out to him encouragingly from her seat on the chamber-pot. ‘But there again, we can't always tell fer sure, ye know, an’ better safe than sorry.
‘So come on then,’ she prompted when he failed to answer, emerging from behind the screen with a small towel in her hand. ‘Come back ’ere an’ let Sary show yer Lordship what to do to guard yerself against Pavilion-garden gout.’
For the second time (and with a Johnny-raw there always was a second time, in Sary's experience of the type), she decided on a generous impulse, to dispense with clothing altogether, inviting him to do the same.
Hoddy-doddy, hoddy-doddy… But not this time. Because this young man did have a body, as she very soon discovered, to complement those warm brown eyes of his – eyes free from tension now as they regarded her; faintly clouded now and dark, as dark and warm and soft as velvet.
So why not break her rule?
‘Why not this time?’ she asked herself, already conscious of the answer as she watched his smooth young limbs slough off their nankeen coverings. Sixty culls or more a week, each week. So if she wanted to, why not pretend that she could feel as much as he could – to feel as much at least as a green gosling Johnny-raw in all his blundering maladroitness?
And curiously enough, it was in that first moment of beholding young David Stanville as she'd impulsively intended, mother-naked, that it came to Sary who he was and where she'd seen the boy before – fully clothed on that occasion, and yes, on horseback in the great deer-park at Hadderton!
David on his side, was a deal too much absorbed with present matters to recall the sight, or the wearer, of the famous bonnet above the deer-park wall – or to connect it with the vivid ostrich plumes in their vase across the room.
In his first few minutes as a finished man, he lay unmoving while feelings of relief and gratitude and faint astonishment washed back across him in a slowly ebbing tide. But then she'd called him to the washing stand behind the screen to show him what to do, and afterwards to lead him back to bed again to learn some more. And now he found he wanted to discover who she was and all she was about – no longer a facility, but a living, lovely girl to be explored, enjoyed, and understood. He wanted to know everything about her – how old she was, and where she’d come from and how she’d come to be a whore. He had to know if she would let him kiss the smile that lit her face, and kiss it through her scarlet salve; how it would feel to touch her here, and here – oh yes, particularly here!
Already he'd forgotten all the rest in an abandonment of touching, and of being touched, of seeing and of being seen – until mere sight and touch inevitably led, through every shade and graduation of delight, to a state of plunging ecstasy that could scarcely be defined – hot-shoots, or were they cold and thrills, which pierced through all known barriers of pain and pleasure – intolerably to die of surfeit in the very instant of their birth!
‘Oh god!’ he thought exultantly, ‘oh god, I want to die like this, right now and with this glorious girl!’ His head and heart in heaven, the rest of him consumed by flames in quite another place – he felt as if at very least he must erupt like a volcano. Which to be sure he did quite soon, explosively.
And afterwards he’d simply smiled at her and fallen gently into sleep, his dark hair damp and rumpled, his mouth now softened, falling open. ‘Like a kiddy,’ Sary thought with a rush of sudden tenderness that took her by surprise; her own nerves more agitated than she ever would believe, her heart more loudly beating than she ever could remember.
She touched his hair, and then the finer hairs between his collar bones. With an exploratory finger she coursed up his throat to feel the strange, hard outlines of his windpipe and his Adam’s apple; rasped through the growing stubble of his upraised chin to slip between his parted lips, the dark lips of a dark-haired man, to find the soft, red wetness of his tongue – for Sary the most intimate exploration she had ever undertaken with a man. And then she stooped to kiss his eyes, and then again until they opened and looked up at her, as hungry as before.
‘An’ my word, ’tis marvellous ’ow quick they are to grasp what’s what, these Johnny-raws,’ thought ‘Sary breathlessly. ‘They never do need showin’ twice, that’s sure!
‘But take heed, gel,’ she told herself belatedly as David Stanville’s arms reached up around her. ‘E’s just a man, ’e’s just another cull when all is said. So ’ave a care now, Sary Ann.’