I turned to her. “Yes, Miss Cleves?” I said indolently, arrogantly. Was she going to presume, I thought, to give me a lecture on the morality of a female showing her calves. Was she going to inform me that Englishwomen throughout the glory of the British Empire under the reign of Queen Victoria regarded it as unthinkable to display anything more than a well-turned ankle? Well, since Cleves was already shocked by my bestockinged calves, I might just as well risk a shriek from her by my next action. I bared part of my thighs.
Angela's jaw dropped. Indeed, if it had been attached to loose hinges, it might very well have separated from the rest of her skull.
But I wished her no ill any more-she was our sexual plaything, available whenever James and I wished her to be. As for tormenting her in the coach, it was simply a pastime to mark the highway to Cornwall.
What I actually wanted was to stir up some interest from our tutor. I stirred up interest, yes, but not the kind I wanted. He turned from the coach window and said, his full lips barely hinting at a smile, “Miss Clarissa-” “Yes, Mr. Harwell?” “Are you terribly warm?” James chuckled. Harwell ignored him. “Yes,”
I said, “I am.” “I judged so,” Mr. Harwell said. “What I suggest, then-and you can certainly do this without trepidation, since we have all been socially intimate here with one another for some time- what I suggest, Miss Clarissa, while your brother and I turn away our faces, of course, is that-if you will forgive the possible indelicacy and, indeed, the possible outrageousness of the suggestion, which I trust everyone here will keep in confidence -what I suggest for your relief from the heat is that you remove some of your undergarments-please forgive the vulgarity of the expression-and loosen your bodice.”
He nodded amiably, stroked his beard a few times and turned away again to contemplate nature through the coach window. The consequence, of course, was that I didn't take his suggestion at all-James was snickering and Angela was white with shock-I let down my skirts, sat bolt upright, adopted a stern eye looking at nothing, and endured the rest of the journey without comment, which took quite a while since the Cornwall coast, at the point we were situated, is some four hundred miles from London, necessitating stopovers at inns along the way, not only to rest the horses but to provide a good night's sleep for the weary traveler. At any rate, I shall note here that I had no further personal interchange with Oliver Harwell until I was fifteen, which shall be described in due course. Some readers may well wonder what a tutor was doing with his charges during the summer months, ordinarily a vacation period. The explanation is quite simple: the Marquis did not believe in educational hiatuses. He believed that some mode of instruction of a token nature be sustained during the halcyon days, so that the discipline under study might not entirely go into limbo. Libidinously, then, I was forced to be content with practices involving my brother and Angela Cleves. One night stands vividly in mind even now, the curious telling of which by Cleves herself will most properly, although strangely, close this account of my prepubertal years, after which we can proceed directly to one of the high points of my adolescence. The night I propose to regale you with, dear reader, was an inordinately hot and humid one. It was amazing that anyone managed to sleep, but I was so overcome with discomfort that I cared not a whit as to who was slumbering or no. For a while I stood by the window, thinking that the humid westerly wind might be of some mysterious benefit. I could not have been more mistaken, and I shut the window. I tarried a few moments longer there, entranced by the play of heat lightning across the ocean sky and the revealed sight of thousands upon thousands of whitecaps bobbing on the stormy waters-and then I turned away. Oliver Harwell was on my mind.
His size was on my mind. I had not appreciated his size before. I had not given his size much thought. Now his size filled my brain. I did not realize that night that before anything would occur with Harwell I would be fifteen years of age. In any case I wished that I could seduce him. But to all of my exhibitionism Oliver Harwell remained impervious… I paced my bedroom.
There was only one person who understood me. My brother. I had to talk to him, I had to pour out my psyche to him… His bedroom door was unlocked, and I let myself in. He was asleep, but lightly.
James was never heavy about anything. He awoke instantly the moment I began to whisper to him. “You're consumed with Harwell,” he said. “Yes.” “I think I know how to relieve you, Clarissa.” “Oh?” “Suppose I demonstrate with Angela.”
“If you wish, James.” We found Angela Cleves quite solidly asleep, her thin cotton nightgown bunched up over her belly… Both James and I clambered into her bed and began to play with her…
If the reader will indulge me, I should like with his permission to insert at this point-before I go on to my adolescence -a most astonishing account of the episode above by Ange Cleves herself from her otherwise rather tedious journal, which I have in my possession to this day. James and I found the journal before the Cornwall constabulary ransacked her quarters at Quistern House, and secreted it in her own rooms. What had transpired was that, several days after the episode she recounts -which, as she writes it, has so poignant and pathetic a beginning-Angela Cleves vanished from Quistern House. To this day, too, her disappearance has never been satisfactorily explained. Cleves, wherever she had gone, had taken nothing with her. Her modest suite had been in perfect order. Her valises had been untouched. No valuables had been missing from Quistern House, and the precious gems in my father's collection had been undisturbed. It is possible, of course, that in her distracted state -a state none of us had been in the slightest aware of-she might have ended her life by her own hand. But no evidence was turned up to form the basis for such conjecture-unless this excerpt from her journal could be construed to indicate that Cleves had had suicide on her mind. A pall settled over Quistern House for the remainder of the summer, and for the first and only time the staff of Quistern House, the Marquis and Marchioness, and James and myself-were distinctly relieved when we made our summer-end move back to London. In any case, here follows the relevant excerpt from the journal of Angela Cleves. I'm helpless! helpless! helpless! I can't go on like this. I would never have dreamed it possible… really… that I should be the captive of my exquisite charges, my exquisite Clarissa and my elegant James. And I am their willing captive.