It was like a mug of cold vinegar hurled in my eyes. I stood there stunned, my soul all full of desire and she already halfway across the cell and tugging on the cork of the claret. It was all I could do, I trow, to keep myself from stumbling toward her and throwing myself upon her, for I was not much different at that moment from a catapult that has been fully wound up: that is, once the mechanism is set in motion, how can the catapult help but discharge its load? The only thing that held me back and let me master myself once again was the awareness that I might have misread her entirely. Perhaps there was no flirtatiousness in her manner and no provocation intended by the freedom she had taken with my body. Perhaps she had no shred of desire for me at all, but saw me merely as a foul-smelling prisoner who needed cleansing. And perhaps it was all a test, to see if I could be trusted, and six guards lay in wait outside the cell to fall upon me at her first outcry of rape.
That was a cooling thought indeed. Fear overcame yearning. For I was among Portugals that might cheat at any game, even this, and mayhap they looked only for a pretext to hang me. To assault a woman of their nation would be sufficient charge, and she could well be part of a plot to open me to such a charge. At once my member droped and I turned away, and found my shabby clothes.
Dona Teresa, pretending unawareness of all my states of changing mind—I know that she was pretending—smiled most graciously and offered me a goblet of wine.
We drank together like lord and lady. We kept piously far apart, and talked of trivial things. I was bewildered and utterly disarrayed by the games she had played on me; my jaws ached of tensing them, my eyes throbbed, there was a band of fire across my forehead. The wine eased me, but only somewhat. I think I grew drunken, a little, and I stared more at her bosom than at her face, which she noticed, but she gave me no further provocations, and I kept my distance. In time she said she must leave, and she collected the empty bottle and the goblets and tucked them in a straw bag, and came toward me and smiled and flashed me such a look of direct and blatant invitation as like to have melted my kneecaps. But before I could comprehend it and conclude what response I should make, she kissed me lightly on the cheek, a sister’s kiss, a butterfly grazing, and sweetly wished me well and took her leave.
That visit much muddled my mind. In the days that followed I relived it a thousand times in memory, wondering if it had been her intent to make me so asweat with desire, or if I had wrongly imagined her motives. That I had meant to remain chaste was sure; that her sponging had magicked all chastity out of me was equally sure; but had I been toyed with? Or was it only that I was overripe for loving and was coming to see my fidelity as mere romantic folly? I knew not my own mind. I was overmatched with this Dona Teresa, I suspected: she was too cunning a player of the game of man and woman, and I far too simple.
When she visited me next, a few days later, she came swathed in black garments trussed as secure as a nun’s, and neither kissed me nor gave me looks of the eyes, but was proper and chaste with me. On the next visit from that she was more playful, and wore flimsy clothes again; on the next, she stayed only a few minutes, and was coy and remote. I never seemed to see the same Teresa twice running. And on the next she came in garments so light she might as well have been naked, a rain-soaked shift through which I saw everything, her dusky breasts and dark nipples, and the socket of her navel, and the three-pointed mat of dark curls below. It was too much. I knew for sure, the moment she slipped off the cloak to show me the wonders of her body barely hidden by that faint fabric, that she was playing a devil’s game with me.
“I have brought more wine,” she said.
“Will you bathe me, then, as you did that other time you came with claret?”
She laughed prettily. “Are you uncleanly again?”
“Nay, I am clean enough. But the sponging made a good preamble to the wine.”
I was altogether in her spell. My eyes traveled her body as though it were the map of the highway to paradise.
Coolly she said, “I have not brought the basin with me, nor the sponge. And if you need no bath, why take the trouble to have it, sir?”
“Because it gave me pleasure.”
She pretended to chide me. “Sir, you are a prisoner! You are not entitled to pleasures!”
“The wine?”
“Oh, that. It is for your health alone.”
“Bathe me with that, then.”
“You forget your place,” she said, sounding stern, but her eyes were sparkling and her smile was bold.
I went toward her. I was the aggressor, no denying it: but she had so maneuvered and chivvied and manipulated me that I was altogether her toy, and if I seemed to be the forward one, it was only an illusion, for I was moving along a path that had been wholly preordained by her scheming. My hands went to her shoulders. I pulled her close against me. She stiffened and pretended to be shocked, but it was mere pretense. That much was apparent. “Sir,” she cried. “Sir, what is this?”
I made no answer. I brushed at her shift, trying to sweep it from her, but in my need and my anguish I was clumsy, with fingers of wood, and even while she squirmed and feigned resistance she managed to reach about and touch some catch, so that the thing opened and fell away like fog in the morning sun. At the sight of her breasts I came close to releasing her and backing off, for her nipples were brown and the wide circles that surrounded them were brown. It was the African in her blood revealing itself. The women of Portugal and Spain, I know, have darker skins than those of England, but the ones I had lain with in my days aboard the merchant vessels had the breasts and nipples of an Englishwoman, more or less, a deeper hue of pigment but not brown like this, and in the baring of her breasts Teresa displayed the strangeness within her soul.
Not that I saw anything dreadful about African women, though they were not then particularly to my taste; but it was the mixture that put me off, the mingling of the blood of two worlds. Dona Teresa was a creature beyond my knowledge of women. I felt ensnared by the Devil, a slave to dark forces.
But I was enslaved also by another force that hammered and beat within my own veins. And so I covered those alien nipples with my quivering hands and gripped the dark satiny globes and pressed my mouth to hers, while she pulled away my clothing. And we sank down together to the damp earthen floor and her thighs parted and she received me, for she was more than ready and there was no need for the prelude of stroking and opening that many women prefer.
And O! and O! and O! all thought went from my mind!
Her back was arched and her legs wrapped themselves about my body and her fingers dug into my back, and down below I felt the hot sweet moist hidden mouth of her consuming me like the hungry mouth of a starfish, and there came a rising tide within me that altogether swept me away, nor did I fight against that. Buried deep in that lovely nether mouth, in that warm comforting harbor, I yielded up my ghost in a cannonade of lunatic explosions that entirely unmanned me, and left me dead and gasping on the floor by her side.