It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an unhappily wed couple, having practically entombed themselves in a country house of little proximity to friends or family, must be in need of a good, tall, hard, stiff, drink.

The candlelight flickered dimly on Viscountess Felicity Fabreigh’s bare shoulders as she sat at her dressing table. The lacy rufflage of her peignoir did little to conceal her ample and forsaken bosom. (Did a heart still beat inside those temples of flesh? she wondered, as another glass of brandy seared her throat.)

Unconsciously, she had been running her fingers back and forth across the shell of her pet turtle, Orlando. Some months ago, in a fit of boredom, she had encrusted its shell with sapphires and peridots, moonstones and jade. Too weary to argue with her, Frederick had paid for it all.

Within hours, the turtle was dead, smothered under the weight of its adornment and Felicity had not yet bothered to remove the corpse from her dressing table. She thought it pretty.

She reached again for the crystal decanter, then paused. There are some thirsts, she thought, that even the strongest liquor will not satisfy.

In a sudden fit of passion, she clutched the rotting reptile to her breast. “I want to feel,” she gasped, as the gems’ cold facets dug into her yielding flesh. “I need to feel again!”

Orlando did not reply.



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *



In the manor’s opposite wing, Frederick finished his decanter of port. Sprawled across the Abyssinian carpet which reached from one end of the wood-paneled study to the other, he had been perusing his old sketchbook. It was bound in what he believed to be the finest Italian leather. Its pages were filled with what he believed to be the seeds of genius.

He turned a page and paused, absorbed in a pencil sketch which he had executed as a youth on holiday by the Mediterranean sea. “That peasant girl,” he thought. “Her eyes expressed a sentiment at once so simple and so profound.” He was astonished at the skill with which his twenty-year-old self had rendered the play of light and shadow.

A few pages onward, he happened upon some lines of verse. Tears leaped to the corners of his eyes. If only he had not abandoned his gifts. If only he had not abandoned his gifts!

Seeking a distraction, he lit a cigar and exited the study. He wobbled down the hall, penetrating into its gloom at an uncertain pace.



* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *



She smelled him a moment before he arrived. Frederick burst through the door of her chamber, staggered a few feet into the room, and paused, swaying harmlessly from side to side. He seemed to be composing a thought.

“Strumpet,” he burped.

“You are smoking again,” Felicity said coldly. But something was uncoiling inside her. He had not been inside her sanctuary for months. “I have told you that I will not tolerate your cigar smoke anywhere in the house but where I cannot smell it. You can smoke in your study.”

Frederick approached her on unsteady feet. She turned and rose to meet him. His breath hot in her face, he reached past her and stubbed out his cigar on one of the turtle’s moonstones.

“Jade,” he slurred.

With perfect control, she grabbed his collar and ripped open his shirt. She heard the buttons skitter to the floor as she stared at the damp hair clinging to his pallid chest. She paused, breathing heavily, as Frederick blinked at her. Almost trembling with contempt, she pursed her lips and spat in his face.

He blinked again and then wiped the saliva from his moustache. Delicately and deliberately, Felicity loosened the ribbon at her throat. Her peignoir fell in a breath to the floor. Still he did not move.

“You coward,” she said, her nakedness magnificent against the room’s shadows. “Even now, with all that expensive port and cheap sentiment swimming inside you, you still can’t take me. Or have you forgotten how it’s done?”

Uttering a guttural noise, Frederick took hold of her arms and threw her roughly to the floor. Their eyes met, and something passed between them that both had thought dead for many months. As Felicity looked up at him, breathing quickly and growling in anticipation of pleasure, Frederick lowered his trousers and descended upon her.

“You are not my wife,” he said, pinning her arms above her head.

“And you are not man enough to be my husband,” she snapped, arching her back in defiance.

These exchanged insults drove the couple into a lustful frenzy. Frederick’s trousers bunched up around his knees, and Felicity’s moans increased in both pitch and volume. With each thrust, with each delicious rush of sensation, they swore oaths at each other. It was an apotheosis of spiteful desire, the consummation of years of recrimination and regret. “I hate you,” Felicity panted. “I hate you!” She raked her fingernails down his back.

Frederick grunted with pleasure. Then, suddenly, he stopped. Felicity opened her eyes and looked at his face, which was frozen in horror. Without another word, Frederick released her arms and tore himself from her body. He stood unsteadily, and, with his back towards her, pulled up his trousers, which were drooping at his ankles. He fastened his belt in silence and left the room without a word—stepping over her naked body on his way out the door. For an instant, Felicity lay there numbly. Then, with a curse, she picked herself off the floor and pulled her crumpled peignoir around her aching, unfulfilled flesh. He had done it on purpose, Felicity realized, furious. All he had wanted was to torment her.

But something entirely different had happened. At the moment when Frederick had begun to feel his anger transform into something like ambivalence or even happiness, an image had flashed through his mind. Despite the visual feast which lay before him–the flickering light, the bejeweled tortoise on Felicity’s dressing table, the nude voluptuousness of his wife–it was a vision of that stable boy, shirtless, standing knee deep in a lake, playing a violin, which had appeared before him. It was this image above anything else which had brought him to the brink of completion.

As he fled through the dark rooms of his mansion, Frederick tried to erase the image from his mind. He tried to think of Felicity, of the housemaid, of the governess who had seduced him when he was twelve. But no bevy of bosomed beauties could match the burnished biceps of the stable boy and the masterful motion of his fingers as he coaxed music from the violin. The vision haunted him, and it would keep haunting him, a vision that even the oceans of port he imbibed that night would not wash away.

Chapter 3 to be found in ArtsFriday...