Diamonds Forever (33 page)

‘Well. Not that badly,' he said, with a wink. ‘I got my own back.'

She smiled, remembering the London sex shop they had so memorably visited.

‘Ah, water under the bridge,' she said. ‘Shall we promise to just love each other from now on?'

‘I thought we already did. Marriage vows? Ring any bells?'

She laughed and laid her head against his shoulder.

‘You're right. We've got all our lives ahead of us now, to spend just loving each other. Just you and me.'

‘Just you and me,' echoed Jason, with a kiss of her lips. ‘And Bowyer.'

He jumped as the cat sprang on to their feet and rubbed himself, purring, around their ankles.

‘Yes. You and me and Bowyer, forever.'

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A SMALL CROWD
was gathered outside the premises of Thos. Stratton, Antiquarian and Dealer in Rare Books, of Holywell Street, Strand. Largely composed of legal clerks taking their lunch hour, it jostled and catcalled beneath the Elizabethan gables from which one still expected to hear a cry of ‘gardy loo' before slops were emptied onto the cobbles.

Some would argue that the shop itself was little better than those aforementioned slops, an abyss of moral putrefaction and decay. Despite the passing of the Obscene Publications Act some ten years previously, many windows still displayed explicit postcards and graphic line drawings. The object of the crowd's interest today was a tintype image of a young woman. She was naked and sprawled in an armchair, luxuriant flesh hand-tinted to look warm and inviting. One of her legs dangled over a chair arm, revealing split pinkened lips beneath a dark bush of hair. Her nipples had been touched up, too – in a figurative sense – improbably roseate against alabaster skin. Most shocking was the positioning of her hands, one of which cupped a breast while the other delved inside that displayed furrow. If she had derived any pleasure from her explorations, it did not show on her face, which was blank and stony. But nobody was looking at her face.

A woman, smartly but not showily dressed all in black, cut a path through the grinning throng. The young men fell back naturally, tipping hats and begging her pardon. A less formidable-looking woman might have found herself joshed or even groped, but nobody would have dreamt of doing any such thing to this lady.

She paused to evaluate what had been creating the sensation and the men around her looked away or to their boots, suddenly sheepish.

‘For shame,' she said, then she put her hand to the door of the shop and entered to the dull jink of rusty bells.

A pasty young man whom nobody had cautioned against the excessive use of pomade double-took at the sight of her.

No woman had ever crossed the threshold of the shop before.

Panicking, he came out from the behind the counter.

‘I think you may have the wrong address, madam,' he said, placing himself between her and a display of inflammatory postcards from which a portly woman wielding a whip glared out.

‘I wish to speak with Mr Stratton.'

‘Oh.' The youth found himself at a loss, his eyes darting wildly around the room at all the potentially feminine-sensibility-violating material on display. ‘He is out.'

‘When do you expect him back? I am able to wait if he will not be too long.'

Two of the clerks entered, throwing the shop boy into worse throes of confusion.

‘Oh dear, customers. Perhaps you might wait in the back room? But it is not comfortable and … oh, it is not a place for a lady. Pray, put that down, please, gentlemen, it is not for common perusal.'

He spoke the word ‘perusal' with absurd emphasis, as if bringing out a rare jewel from the duller stones of his workaday vocabulary.

‘What, is it too dirty for the likes of us?' said one, sniggering.

‘Please bear in mind that there is a lady present,' begged the shop boy.

The lady in question simply swept onwards into the back room.

Oh, if the clerks could have come in here, then they would see how tame, how positively innocent the self-loving young lady in the window display was.

The woman in black sat by the grimy back window and cast her eye over a box of postcards. Far from averting her gaze, she picked one out and examined it. A woman in a form of leather harness knelt behind another, younger, girl. This one smiled sweetly and broadly towards the camera whilst on her hands and knees. And behind her, the other woman pivoted her hips forward, ready to drive a thick wooden phallus directly into the rounded bottom of her playmate.

The visitor's lips curved upwards.

‘Lovely,' she breathed.

The rooms above the shop had been used, over the years, for various purposes. They had been stock cupboards, brothels and family dwellings but never, until that late spring day in 1865, had they been used as a schoolroom.

On that afternoon, however, James Stratton had tidied away all the ink-stained papers from his well-worn desk and replaced them with a slate and chalk and an alphabet primer, with which he was doing his utmost to teach the buxom young woman beside him to read.

‘I do know me letters, though, Jem,' she said, declining to place her fi nger beside his underneath the
A
. ‘I can tell that much. It's just putting 'em together I 'as trouble with.'

‘So if I wrote a simple three letter word, such as this …' He paused to write the word
cat
in as perfect a copperplate hand as the sliding chalk would allow. ‘You could tell me what it said?'

She leant closer to him, very close, so that he could smell that cheap musky perfume all the fallen girls wore, mixed in with sweat and last night's gin and last night's men and, way beneath it all, a faint whiff of soap. He knew why she was doing it. She wanted to distract him with her breasts, and very fine breasts they were too, but today he was fixed in his purpose and he intended to achieve it.

‘Why, that curly one's a
c
, I think, and the middle is definitely an
a
. Yes, definitely. The one at the end, I don't know, it might be an
f
or a … but
caf
don't make sense, so it must be a
t
.
Cat
!' She spoke the word triumphantly, beaming up at him with teeth that were still good, lips that were still soft and plump.

‘Very good, Annie. I'll make a scholar of you yet.'

‘That you won't. Who wants a whore what's read the classics anyway?'

‘You'd be surprised,' he said, his lips twitching into a smile. Annie always had this uniquely cheering effect upon him for some reason, though what kind of a man this made him he didn't dare explore. She'd made her living on her back since she was fifteen and now, at twenty-two, she was quite an old hand at the game, yet somehow she refreshed him.

‘Would you think better of me if I could quote yards of Latin while I rode your cock horse?'

‘Hush, Annie,' he tutted, regarding his slate with resigned despair.It was clear she was not in the mood for concentration.

‘Besides, I've usually got my mouth full when you're around,' she continued cheerfully.

‘Now, I won't hear this,' he said sternly, jabbing a finger at the primer. ‘Eyes down, Annie, or I shall have to take measures.'

‘Ooh, “take measures”? Like in them stories you write? I'd far rather you read me one of those. Go on, Jem. It's too hot for this, and I didn't get much in the way of sleep last night and me head's all stuffed with rags. Tell me one of your stories.'

He ran a hand through luxuriant dark hair, exasperated at how easy it was for her to tempt him off his virtuous path. Truly, the road to hell was paved with good intentions, and he drew ever closer to the fiery void. But she was right. It was too hot and the buzzing of a fly against the grimy window played his nerves like a fiddle.

Besides, he needed a fi nal read through of that latest story before he dispatched it. Annie made a splendid captive audience, always hanging on his every word. Perhaps she could be captive in more than one sense, if he bound her wrists to the bedstead … but no. Much as she pestered him for his latest chapters, she had never shown the slightest sign of sharing his darker proclivities. She was a girl of simple tastes, at heart.

‘Oh, all right,' he said, closing up the ranks of upper and lower case letters with a thump. ‘But tomorrow we must study in earnest, Annie, and I will accept no excuses. Do you mind me?'

‘Of course, sir,' she said, the sweet little word of deference stirring him more than he cared to admit.

‘Good. Well, then. Go and sit on the bed and I shall bring it to you.'

She scampered up, her gaudy skirts swishing, and climbed up on to the high bed that took up the greater part of the room, plumping up pillows behind her.

James opened a desk drawer and took out a sheaf of papers, all covered in his tightly packed script, tied with a scarlet ribbon.

‘Is it the one about the dairymaid who went to the bad?' asked Annie, unlacing her much-patched boots and throwing them off the end of the bed. ‘That's my favourite. Poor girl, though.'

‘My clients pay a premium for exquisite distress,' said James, taking his place beside her. ‘This unfortunate dairymaid has kept me in shirt linen and port wine for upwards of a year now. Speaking of port wine, would you care for a drop?'

‘Oh … maybe afterwards. Come, I want to know what will happen to her. Had she not just been tied to a fence post and whipped by four swells on a spree in the country?'

‘Indeed she had.' James released the papers from their ribbon and held them before his face.

Annie laid her head on his shoulder, settling into his chest with a comfortable sigh. He had to put one arm around her so as to have the freedom of its movement.

He cleared his throat and began to read.

‘A high-set sun illuminated the meadows and hedgerows, its rays roving over the breathing and the inanimate alike. It bathed cow and sheep, parsley and nettle in its golden warmth, but today, could it but know it, there was a fascinating addition to the bucolic serenity—'

‘Never mind that, what about Emma?' said Annie.

‘Don't interrupt, or you may find that you share her fate.'

She wriggled delightedly against him and James wondered, not for the first time, why his idle threats excited her so.

‘
How pitiless that post-noon heat felt to Emma as she tried in vain to extinguish the fire that raged at her rear. Those fellows, all four of whom still stood about her, leering and laughing at her fate, had plied the whip with a most diabolical will and her poor little round bum was all welted and throbbing, as if stung by a swarm of bees.
'

‘Poor creature,' murmured Annie, but James chose to ignore her this time.

‘
As if it were not enough that the quartet's insolent eyes roamed at will over her naked body, Emma feared that any moment a cart from one of the neighbouring farms would pass by, its wheels throwing up a cloud of dust, while the men on the box would see her bare, whipped bottom and, should they choose to alter the angle of view, her breasts squashed against the post to boot. Worst of all, the ringleader of that devilish coterie had made her spread her thighs apart, so that he could flick the tip of his whip lazily over the soft flesh located within, thus opening her tender little cunny to the gaze of whomever chose to feast upon the sight. And such a passer-by would see the swollen lips and the fat red bud that nestled inside, all downed with Emma's pale, sparse hairs. They would also see that little portal, once so tightly guarded, now the happy resting place of many an eager cockstand while Emma lay on her back or her belly, welcoming all to her glistening quim.
'

‘Heavens, Jem, how does it all come to you? It's too rich for me. I never thought my ears was delicate, but you make me blush.'

‘Should I stop reading?'

‘Oh no, go on, do.'

‘No matter how she strained against her thick rope bonds, she could not alter her shameful position, nor could her hands, tied high above her head, reach down to shield or soothe the agonies of her posterior.

“Sirs,” she begged, “I have paid the price for my wanton behaviour at the inn last night, and heavy toll you have exacted from my poor sore bottom. Won't you please release me now and I will thank each of you on my knees, with my mouth.”

“Why, that's a fine offer, naughty maid,” spoke the chief of the swells. “But we have another means of showing your gratitude in mind. For when a man helps a maid understand how she has erred by applying merited chastisement, he has surely earned the right to take such payment from her as he desires.”'

‘What client is this?' asked Annie. ‘Who reads this story?'