Madam, you're wrong if you think I want to fuck this sweet, delightful creature. Just to watch her, myself unseen, that is enough. In fact she's far too exquisite to be fucked. There is something infinitely gentle about her, and what I feel for her is the kind of tenderness and wonder one might feel for a spiderweb all sparkling with morning dew, an intricate simplicity not to be touched without destroying it.
Only, of course, this favourite young whore of mine is also infinitely more appealing to the senses than any spiderweb!
I love watching her when she doesn't know I'm there. I love watching her when she doesn't know anyone's there. When she thinks she's quite alone, and so perfectly natural.
All I want is to be as close to her as possible.
I would like to be her comb.
I wish I was her dress.
Best of all, how I'd love to be my child-whore's silk stockings!
Well, reader, there you have it - the secret erotic life of Robert Tiresias Pickleherring Reynolds.
Old Mr Pickereclass="underline" his wholesome whoreson pleasures.
I never meant to put that in my book but now I have I shall not cross it out.
And having put it in, it occurs to me to observe that my watching the young whore through this peep-hole is perhaps a perfect emblem of this art of biography in which I am involved for the rest of the time. What is the biographical act but a species of spying? You participate in a life you cannot share. You take part offstage in a play that is none of your making.
Besides, it is only fair that if a biographer tells you the unpalatable and the disagreeable things about the life of his subject (as, in the name of truth, he must), then he ought to be prepared to tell you about his own unpalatables and his own disagreeables. I make it a rule for all who follow me in this new art. Procopius and Suetonius should have done no less. When a man wants to spit at life, he should spit in his own face, first.
Watching my perfect little whore at her toilet is like writing about Mr Shakespeare. It's her private face I want to know, not the tricks that she turns for others.
I have never yet watched her being fucked, though sometimes I have listened. It sounded as if she was laughing. I stopped up my ears.
If I ever do watch while she's fucked, I'll tell you about it.
There has been, at all events, a moral outcome. Feeling good after last night's rapt observance of my darling, I stumped up this morning and paid Pompey Bum the rest of his rent. I used a guinea that was in today's box, a guinea given to Mr Shakespeare by a whore. It was Lucy Negro who gave Mr Shakespeare that guinea. Why she gave it to him I do not know. So I have no story to tell you about that guinea. I cannot tell you a tale I do not know. (Other biographers, please copy.)
Having been moral, and paid the money I owed, I had my reward not in heaven but here on earth immediately. That whore must be my good angel. A good angel in dainty white garters! Whatever she is, Pickleherring's day was made when Pompey Bum called out to the girl, addressing her by name as he passed her on the stair.
She is called Anne.
Chapter Forty-Six About silk stockings
So you think it strange that Pickleherring wants to be a young whore's stockings as she's putting them on?
There have been stranger desires at the Court of Queen Venus.
King James I (of England) and VI (of Scotland) used to come off paddling naked in the entrails of just-slaughtered stags.
Veronica Juliana, a nun, beatified by Pope Pius II, always slept with a lamb, kissing it and letting it suckle on her breasts.
The philosopher Aristotle liked to be ridden by a courtesan of Athens with nothing on his person but a saddle and bridle.
Philip Massinger, the playwright, once told me that the only interesting part of a woman was her shoe. Laced boots with high black heels especially charmed him.
Guy Fawkes collected girls' handkerchiefs.
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, perished in the act of intercourse with a hen. He had stuffed its little love-hole full of snow.
Some of these people had excuses.
The nun, for instance, claimed that she took the lamb to bed in memory of Jesus. And Bacon's genitals were very small.
Pickleherring's excuse would be that this is the price he has to pay for all the women's parts he's had to play. He fell in love with the clothes he wore to do it.
His real name as he has told you is Nicholas Nemo. Nobody can say what Nobody is capable of.
But perhaps there was always much of a woman in my own innermost nature. And Mr Shakespeare saw that right from the start.
So he re-named me, and my name has been:
Portia Juliet Ophelia Hermione Silvia Cordelia Cleopatra Jessica Desdemona Rosalind Beatrice Cressida
My many parts. So many a time I ended with an A. Why I don't know. You'd have to ask him, and I doubt if he could answer. Perhaps because A stands for Anne. And now I've an Anne of my own.
But I need no excuses. Silk stockings are very nice and sweet and voluptuous, and no justification should be required for their worship.
It was the Virgin Queen herself who set the fashion. In the second year of her reign, her silk woman, Mrs Montague, presented Elizabeth with a pair of black silk stockings for a new-year's gift. They say that wearing those silk stockings pleased the Queen so much that she sent for Mrs Montague, and asked her where she had these silk stockings from, and if she could help her to any more of the lovely things.
'I made them very carefully for your Majesty,' said the silk woman, 'and of purpose only for your Majesty. But seeing these silk stockings please you so well, I will presently set more in hand.'
'Do so,' quoth the Queen, 'for indeed I like silk stockings so well, because they are pleasant, fine, and delicate, that henceforth I will wear no other stockings.'
And from that time to her death Queen Elizabeth wore only silk stockings. No doubt she was wearing them at the time of her revels at Kenilworth. And perhaps at her earlier revels in the Forest of Arden.
(I don't always cite my sources, any more than a good cook will give you his recipes, since the craft is in the cooking not the ingredients. But in this case - just to prevent you from discrediting yourself with the suspicion that I might be making it all up to justify or aggrandise my own passion - I advise you to consult John Stow's Chronicle, the 1631 edition being the one I have open before me, and look at page 887.)
I confess I like silk stockings linking Queen Elizabeth and my little tart Anne. Confess it, now, all you lechers: Any woman wearing a pair of silk stockings is much more desirable than one with nothing on. I think even your most hardened modern rake - that young Earl of Rochester, say - would agree with Pickleherring in this matter.