It was a nightmare. I slid out from under him and shook him by the shoulders. He moved not a fraction. I was wild with unconsummated passion and terror. I shook Hugh violently. He said nothing. He did not stir. I screamed in a transport of fear-screamed his name, but he was inured to the sound with the deafness of death. I knew, then, that he was dead and that somehow I must have brought on the attack that killed him. I went mad with guilt and kept screaming, clawing at Hugh, taking his face in my hands and mewing to it that he must hear me, hear me-and then I felt a series of slaps to my own face and I looked up in horror at the lantern-jawed Aaron Heeg-Hugh's valet, as it turned out, when he later identified himself, the “puritanical” Heeg. I told Heeg he must find a doctor right away. He laughed at me. I was trembling with grief and unrequited lust-I ordered Heeg to find me a robe.
Instead he draped a counterpane over Hugh's body and pulled me into his own bedroom where he flung me on the bed. “You must bring a doctor,” I said pleadingly. The lantern-jawed Heeg shrugged as he stripped himself of his clothes. “All in due course, milady,” he said. “I will bring a legion of doctors, and they will all celebrate you as a breeder of cause. I myself celebrate you, milady-have you ever witnessed a more rapid engorgement?” His rod, too, was snakelike, but with the stance of the venomous, the cobra about to strike, the rattler about to lunge. The rest of Aaron Heeg was skin and bones, but the truth was and is that I wanted badly to be fucked by that point, terrified as I was, repelled as I was by the leanness of Heeg's body and the stench of his breath. So, while I realized that my true lover was dead, I drew up my knees and parted my thighs so that the surrogate sensualist, the “puritanical” Aaron Heeg of the stinking mouth, might make his way. And make his way he did. The impact was brutal-and overwhelmed me. Heeg's venomous machine tipped at my cervix, and I very nearly lost consciousness from the transport this put me in. If I could have held him there, tipping at my cervix, I would have, so disloyal had I become to my beloved Hugh. But Hugh would have understood, I told myself. He would have comprehended the siren call of mortal flesh-he would have comprehended my weakness, the female flaw involved in the woman concupiscently aroused-any animal, had it been so directed, could have taken me at that point, so swooning with secretions I was, so swollen and soft, so gapingly open. And it was like a creature, a lower animal, that Aaron Heeg took me. The analogy, I assure you, dear reader, is valid, because in a comparatively short time I was to become the mistress of Sir Lawrence Terstyke, and have to experience the nightmare with Sir Lawrence's dog. But I am anticipating myself. It was Aaron Heeg, now, who was lunging in and out of me with fantastic rapidity while I boiled over-once, twice, three times-unafraid of Heeg's sperm whenever they would make the fountain of their appearance, as had Oliver Harwell's. No pregnancy had resulted because of the Harwell affair and I had come to the conclusion-after a surreptitious visit to a Harley Street doctor-that I was sterile, to which, to this day, there has been no exception… As he whipped in and out of me, Heeg bit me without mercy. He bit me on the neck, and then sucked up the blood. He bit me on my nipples, and sucked up the blood there. He bit me on my arms and my rib cage, and sucked up the blood in each place-and giggled as he did so. I do not exaggerate. The “puritanical” Aaron Heeg giggled as he sucked up my blood and thrust in and out of my loins-and I continued, in an equally insane fashion, to climax.
Heeg was laughing now. He was skin and bones but for all his nakedness he seemed attired in black. Attired in clothes for the grave. And I thought of the corpse in the next room, my erstwhile early lover who had become impassioned with me too late, too late, too late-I had killed him. That was what it amounted to, my guilt informed me. If he hadn't met me, if he hadn't had to take me, he might still be alive. How would I face his progenitors? How would I face my own mother and father? They would all come to know, for I would have to wait till the doctor came round to examine the dead Hugh Kinsteares-I could not eave him alone. Oh my God, I must be mad, thinking on such while the stink-mouthed Heeg rode me and spattered my pubes with his sperm as I whinnied in bliss and dug my fingers into his bobbing rump.
Once again he emptied his gonads into my penis-thresher, laughing intemperately. But on this occasion he abruptly withdrew and, with an expression of distaste and contempt, told me he had had enough because I was beginning to stink. To my utter horror I heard myself asking him to stay, that I wanted him utterly to exhaust me-and I found myself pulling at his cock, milking it of its last drops and then with my mouth lapping at it as a cat might at a saucer of cream. I confess that at that point I was absolutely without shame-Heeg's cock had maddened me, had set me off like a series of Chinese rockets. But the man was adamant. Heeg roughly shoved me away and dressed rapidly and then with some faint hint at compassion promised me that he would fetch a physician for that poor bastard of a cadaver a few rooms away from us in the flat, the once elegant and tender Viscount Kinsteares.
The rest of that night, and the days and nights of the succeeding weeks, were sheer nightmare. I suppose I could have run from Hugh's rooms then and there and let the doctor find poor Hugh's corpse unattended, but I was insufficiently callous for such a course of conduct and-I loved him. Had loved him, I suppose; what was dead was no longer lovable. Still, I loved Hugh in memory-it took me a terribly long time to stop loving the memory and to stop feeling guilty for his death, that I had brought on the coronary thrombosis that had killed him. The Earl and Countess of Lamensfirth, his father and mother, spoke not a word to me when they came to claim their son's body. They glanced at me once, icily-and from that point on I ceased to exist for the nobility of Lamensfirth. As a matter fact, I practically ceased to exist for the nobility of Portferrans once word had seeped out that I had been the woman with Viscount Kinsteares on the night of his demise-the Quist-Hagens felt quite shamed in the eyes of the London aristocracy, and were not in the least subtle in hinting that perhaps I ought to find other more suitable quarters in which to live, of which my mother seemed more the instigator than my father, but the two nevertheless presented a glacial front. “We would, of course,” the master of Hagen House said, “remit you a handsome stipend and a sufficiency whereby you would have the necessary number of servants-naturally we would expect you to change your name… I burst out into hysterical tears and retreated to my rooms, sobbing my beloved's name-Hugh, Hugh Kinsteares, Hugh… I told myself I wanted to join him in death if, indeed, he would greet me in that bourne and forgive me. He must forgive me, I cried. I had not meant, with my little scissoring cunt, to cut him down, to cut his heart to the quick, the youth with the twilight-blue eyes… I heard loud voices suddenly and threw open my bedroom door-I knew I had recognized my brother's voice in what seemed to be a verbal melee downstairs. I peered over the stairway bannister and there were my mother and father, their backs toward me, marching haughtily to the downstairs library as my brother continued to excoriate them on my account. His words were abusive but not quite billingsgate. It was only after the Marquis shut the library door that James called a halt to his own tongue and leaped up the stairs two at a time to fold me in his arms and to tell me in no uncertain terms that I absolutely was not responsible for Hugh's death, that the coronary he suffered would have slain him in due course, and that I need not atone for having loved Hugh because that had probably given the viscount a happiness he had rarely enjoyed. Then James bade me dress warmly. “What you need to do is walk and talk with me, Clarissa-I daresay you've scarcely ventured forth since the ghastly Lamensfirth contretemps. Come, the night air will brace you…” He took me to London Bridge, that five-arched granite span we proceeded to cross and recross, the traditional fog swirling about us and the clop-clop of the hansom cabs in our ears. “I wanted to come here to begin with,” I told James, “the night Hugh died. I wanted to come here and deliver myself to the Thames.” “It would have cast you back up, as the whale did to Jonah. I doubt your palatability to the fishes, too. In any case, Clarissa,” he said, nodding amiably to a passing bobby, “the British constabulary would have pulled you back before you gained the nerve to jump. The London bobby is famous for his suicide-prevention on this bridge.” “James…” “Yes?” “James, what am I to do? In all seriousness?” “Forget him-forget Hugh Kinsteares. In all seriousness.” “I can't,” I said. “I loved him. I love him even now-oh, not the dead shell, but the spirit of him hovering within me.”