She leaned over her mistress closely so as to press more of her weight upon her hands, but as she did so her own ripe breasts beneath the white linen tunic brushed lightly against the princess’s back with a shocking intimacy, and the princess stirred beneath that touch, making no move to reprimand it. Then the impudent slave began to run her fingertips teasingly up and down the smooth and glistening crevice from the princess’s buttocks down to knees and back again, but teasingly, as if she were engaged not in work at all, but in pure play.
Then, before the shocked eyes of the other slave-girls, Sosostris actually eased those young white thighs apart. Leaning down, she unloosed her tresses and shook them free, and began to sweep her long black hair up and down between her mistress’s thighs, and up over her buttocks and her back and then down again. Sosostris’s hair was of that magnificent Egyptian hue, blue-black in intensity, long and perfectly straight and reaching almost to her waist. Now she used it not as mere decoration but as an implement of seduction. Under her wicked ministrations, Princess Honoria gave a soft moan and, almost despite herself, it seemed, raised her buttocks a little and arched her slender back. When she settled herself again upon the silken cushions beneath her, it just so happened that her thighs were no longer quite together, but just a little apart, as if with lewd invitation. The Egyptian girl smiled a smile of quiet triumph, and dipped her fingertips into the bowl of perfumed oil again.
At this point it is said, though I would fain not believe it, Honoria turned her head slightly, and murmured to the rest of the slave-girls that they were dismissed, at which they all retired from the chamber. But, women being slaves to concupiscence as well as to insatiable curiosity and gossip, they did not retire completely, but concealed themselves in a neighbouring antechamber, pretending to close the doors, before opening them again silently and peeking out between the drawn curtains at the Egyptian slave-girl’s treatment of their mistress.
It seemed Sosostris was no innocent as to this, either, for after a few moments she glanced towards where the other slave-girls were concealed, and looked saucily at them, even though she could barely have seen them there in the shadows. And she arched her eyebrows and smiled at them, as if she knew very well that they were there and watching, and even enjoyed the knowledge that her pleasuring of the princess was being watched.
Now she… But here I must break off, for decency’s sake. There is more to tell, much more; but let not such scandalous lewdness stain the pages of my humble chronicle. Other writers of a lower type may write of the loves of Princess Honoria as they choose, and make a grubby penny thereby. Let that not be my fate, O Muse!
For there is no way to tell all that I know of the Princess Honoria and remain within the bounds of decency. Many a time after that, the secretly watching slave-girls stood long into the night, and heard many more sighs and moans, and witnessed many more outrageous lecheries performed between girl and girl, which would have shamed the most shameless quayside whore of Corinth. Yet how to tell more without offending beyond recall the modesty of my readers?
How to tell of how those two wanton hussies, one a royal princess and one a mere slave, spent that whole night devising new depravities, and attaining thereby new and hitherto undreamed-of summits of pleasure? How to tell of the night when they half dressed each other again, but only to augment the delight they took in each other’s semi-nakedness, which is always more lewd than pure and unadorned nakedness, as any whore knows? How to describe the slave-girl seating her mistress upon the couch, and lacing the giggling princess into her own high-laced red leather sandals, and clasping a slim gold chain round her slim girlish waist, and applying fresh lipstick to her already swollen and cherry lips, and dark kohl round her eyes, until the hitherto innocent girl, in appearance now as well as in conduct, looked like the most fatal succubus of every chaste man’s dreams? And how the Egyptian slave-girl…
But no, horresco referens, I shudder to relate. No more I say, for shame. It would be grievously wrong to detail further acts of such wickedness.
Now my lamp burns low, and the hills of Italy beyond my window are fallen silent for the night, but for the lonely cry of the lych-owl. There I must break off. At my age it is not good to work so late, as I shall exhaust myself. The silent scriptorium is growing chilly, and yet I feel a strange and over-rapid beating of my heart, as if from great exertion, and a heated perturbation within myself. Suffice it to say that Princess Honoria, as I have painted, was most shamelessly given up to pleasures of the flesh, to which she gave her exclusive attention; and that these pleasures were equally derived from, and slavishly bestowed upon, both men and women, with all the indifference that is the true mark of the inveterately promiscuous and enflamed temperament. But it would be wrong to dwell further on the princess’s private and lamentable practices.
And so to bed; and the Lord keep me from lewd and unchaste thoughts.
13
The following morning: and to return to Honoria.
After the awakening of her lower nature, and while she still enjoyed the vile attentions of Sosostris to the full, it was only a matter of time before this incorrigible nymphomaniac surrendered more dangerously to the charms of a man. His name was Eugenius, and he was her chamberlain. In the midst of the tedious limitations and formalities of the royal court, the princess yielded to the impulse of her nature and threw herself into his arms, more out of a longing for experience and adventure, perhaps, than from any real love for him. Her guilt and shame were betrayed soon enough by pregnancy, made even more obvious by her slim form.
Her mother, reserved and correct in all things, was angered and shamed beyond telling. She had the poor girl instantly confined to one of the darkest, dimmest chambers of the Imperial Palace behind a locked door, and put on a starvation diet such as you might impose on the most disgusting criminal the night before his execution. Honoria’s brother, meanwhile, ever vengeful, suspicious, and still without children of his own, plotted an even worse punishment.
One twilight evening, an old crone scuttled into the palace and was led to that darkened chamber. There, to cries of the utmost distress, she performed her horrible craft with abortifacient herbs: tansy and mugwort, asafoetida, called ‘devil’s dung’ from its foul smell, and infusions of boiled pennyroyal. Once these ancient and unhallowed emmenagogues had begun to take effect, and the poor girl’s innards felt as if they were being crushed in a giant fist, the old crone had the girl held down and splayed, while she peered and delved and dragged with specula and long, hooked needles. Finally she pulled forth the swollen purple remnants of a three-month old foetus, which she tied up in filthy linen rags and tossed into a pail by her side. Mopping up the copious blood and tissue, she said by way of consoling the girl that the creature would not have lived anyway, for its spine was badly deformed.
Honoria lay in silence for more than a week, her mind moving through blank despair to grief, to bitterness, recrimination, and thoughts of blackest revenge. Even confined as she was, she managed to establish communication with others in the palace and beyond, in return for the promise of rich future rewards. Her plot was no less than to have her idiot brother murdered, and Eugenius, her slave-born lover, placed on the throne in his stead. It is hard to know whether to laugh at her audacity, or pity her naivety in thinking that an empire can be so easily overturned.