It was as if they knew that I was watching them, and they did not care. But I do not think they could see my eye at the peep-hole. They were too much involved with each other to know I was there.
Then, as I watched, the older woman (who for some reason to do with her air of assurance and self-possession I now began to think of as the Countess), this Countess began to run her long fingers up and down Anne's dildo wonderingly, as if the thing was real, and now it had crossed her mind to play with it, to inspirit it into action once again.
Anne laughed at such sport. Then she jumped up, and strutted up and down. She walked about the chamber, in and out of the flickering circle of candlelight, her hands on her hips, and wriggling her bottom most wantonly. She was shaking the dildo, she was slapping it, she was waggling it up and down and from side to side as she strutted. She pranced. She pirouetted. Every joyful little gesture made the thing to dance as if it had a lewd life of its own. Anne looked so innocent with her dildo on. I know that's a strange thing to say, but I say that's how it was. You could see it was all such fun to her, such frolic, such forked excitement. She wagged her little tail as she walked with her black dildo on. She was like a child playing games, and her games the more exciting because adult and forbidden.
Then my darling jumped up on the bed, and smacked the Countess. She smacked the Countess, hard, across the breasts, with the black dildo. She did not take it off, but she made it do the smacking. The Countess screamed at the stings, but she seemed to like them.
Anne stopped.
She kissed the Countess lightly on the lips.
Then she kissed her again, most chastely, this time on her cheek.
Then she extricated herself from her bed-fellow's arms where they beseeched her, and rolled nimbly from the wide bed, and stood beside it.
Anne stood still. Trickles of sweat ran down her breasts. Her breasts are like little apples. She looked so lovely I could hardly bear it.
Then, as I watched, with bated breath, Anne slowly unstrapped the dildo from her thighs. She was taking her time. She was making her victim wait.
Suddenly, the dildo unstrapped, and clutched now in her right hand, Anne pushed the Countess back on the bed, and rolled her over, and with a squeal of glee began beating her with the dildo on her bare buttocks.
The Countess was wriggling her bum. She writhed beneath this punishment. I had no doubt at all but that she was enjoying it. She was crying out with the pleasure the pain was giving her. Her body arched up in long, exquisite shudders from the bed.
Anne's response was to beat the proffered bottom yet more savagely. She smacked and she spanked till the Countess looked quite red and raw. Both were panting, and shouting out obscenities in their excitement. It surprised me to hear Anne shout out several words I would not have thought she knew. I mean words that I had hoped she would not have known on account of her tender years.
Then, eyes blazing, Anne strapped on the dildo once more, and in no time at all the two women were at it again, at their amorous rites, first in this position then in that, like two sleek dolphins copulating in the foam ...
I could watch it no more.
I could stand it no longer.
I drew away from the peep-hole.
Pickleherring had seen enough.
I put Ovid back over the aperture.
This morning I don't feel much like working on my book. The day is hot. I have opened my window an inch or so. I can hear from the street below the sound of children playing. In summer this street is alive with the children of misery. Outside the grocer's a band of juvenile pickpockets will be absorbed in pitch and toss. At a short distance, a motley crew busies itself with games of barley-break, blow-point, loggats, marbles, muss. Oaths and idiot laughter mar their play. They spit and cheat. Osric is drunk and Mopsa adjusts her gaiters. Hal writes on Tybalt with a rusty knife. Pretty Lavinia farts. Lysander picks his teeth with the point of an arrow. It is still early, but the sun, who at this season takes only a nap, like myself, has got his chin above the level of the roof-tops opposite, where sparrows ...
Enough of that.
It gets boring when you lie, and more boring when you accuse yourself of lying, when you wonder if the original statement was a lie, or the accusation of lying a lie, and then realise the pathetic flick at honesty implied in putting it all down, worrying your head over the whole thing, lie, counter-lie, truth, imbalance, balance, this whole damned trick of biography, of delicacy, of morality, this whole business or stamp of susceptibility, words, hesitations, qualifications, definitions, withdrawal, what the present writer is trying to get away from by writing the Life of Shakespeare.
In a word already said: sensibility.
Sensibility a curse.
Melodramatic, madam?
Try again.
Sensibility a nuisance. That's enough.
But I tell you last night's love-scene was not what I expected.
And nor did I mean to write it out today.
Yet, having written it, I will let it stand. I can see that it forms part of my Life of Shakespeare, coming somewhere (as it does) after Venus and Lucrece and Rizley but before the Dark Lady of the sonnets. I cannot explain it. I will have to let it stand. Life sometimes gives you toads for your imaginary garden. Not that my Anne is in the least like a toad. I mean just that she is real.
I am the toad, in fact. And she is the jewel in my head.
Last night's love-scene in my secret theatre of desire was not at all what I expected.
To have seen Anne like that disturbs me to the core. It has dismayed my spirit. This morning I am shaken, I am shattered. Where did my sweet child learn such things? For sure, they could not come naturally. But can she ever have been innocent? She must be wicked, yet she is so young.
Pickleherring, your servant, has lived a long life. I have seen most things, and I have done most things also, but never before have I seen a young girl fuck another female, a woman old enough to be her mother.
The terrible thing, of course, is that I enjoyed it.
Chapter Seventy-One In which Pickleherring presents a lost sonnet by William Shakespeare
The door to the room where Mr Shakespeare wrote his sonnets would not close fast again. Its hinges had been rusted up with the salt water of tears.
I call those sonnets William Shakespeare's spiritual and sentimental autobiography. In them he opens his heart.
Mind you, some of the sonnets were very obscure in their original form.
What would happen is that he would write one and then he would try it out on me, have me read it, or better still have me read it aloud to him, and then I would say I liked this line or that line, and he would strike out the others. Or he would learn what he needed to know about the sonnet from my reading of it, the hearing of his words spoken by another voice, and he would strike lines out himself, or add them to other lines. Sometimes he would end up with a completely new sonnet made from the lines I had liked. At other times, he would end up with several sonnets clarifying an obscure one, sonnets written by taking lines out and making sense of them by finding them new homes where they belonged.
Mr Shakespeare used to say that in a true poem the words make a truth of themselves. But unfortunately I do not know what this means.
To give you some small notion of what he was up against - the degree of confusion in his mind and heart - I am going to include in this book a sonnet of William Shakespeare's never before published. This was a first draft of one of the early ones. While this sonnet does not appear among the 154 eventually published by Thomas Thorpe from the manuscripts provided for him by William Hervey, Rizley's stepfather, and sold as a sixpenny volume in 1609, it contains within itself the germs of more than a dozen which are to be found there, lines with which the reader may therefore be familiar.