The Prince of Eden (55 page)

For eight months both had lived in this furtive manner, seeing no one but each other and maintaining this ungodly silence. To be sure, Sigfried had heard the young woman speak on two or three occasions, but she'd been talking in her sleep and the words had .been muddled.

Sigfried smiled, surveying the young woman, peculiarly pleased by her plight, her clear humiliation. Lady Harriet Powels, or so she'd been introduced by Lord Powels. Sigfried wasn't stupid. She knew precisely what had happened. The eligible and titled lady had been betrothed to an eligible and titled gentleman, yet at some point, early on, she'd opened her legs to another. Now, disgraced, she must be kept out of sight until the seed, full-term, slipped out. Then with careful intake of food, the young lady would regain her virginal figure, mysteriously recover from an even more mysterious illness, and rejoin her intended, only slightly worse for wear.

As for Sigfried, she would take the excess baggage down to the Mermaid and Humphrey Hills, who already had paid one thousand pounds for their little plot, and would pay an additional thousand if she managed to deliver a whole healthy infant.

At that instant, the young woman groaned. The hands which had been resting on her breasts moved downward, clutching at her belly. Though alert, Sigfried held her position. Amused by the silent agony on the bed, she smiled. Interesting, how they all suffered alike, rich and poor, lady and whore.

A game occurred to her then to relieve the boredom and the waiting, to see how long the Queen of Silence could hold out before crying aloud for help. If birth were truly imminent, it was Sigfried's guess that at most the stubborn young woman would last three hours, perhaps four. But as soon as the brat's head shifted and began to press down on vital organs, as soon as her bones began to feel as though they would crack and split with the upheaval of birth, as soon as the water burst and the high-born fastidious woman had the sense of soiling herself, then Sigfried knew from experience those prim lips would utter an entreaty, and the weeping would start, then the moans, and ultimately the screams.

Roughly Sigfried drew back the coverlet and lifted the nightdress. With her hands cold from the window, she clamped down on the protruding lump, causing the young woman to press backward on the cot, her hands covering first her eyes as though to prohibit sight, then her mouth as though to prevent outcry.

So! Sigfried smiled. The pretty wanted neither to see nor to speak. Well, there was time yet. The lump was shifting, that was clear, though the fluid in which it was floating was still intact. A good sign. The birth would not be easy. Hours yet ahead.

As she stood up from her examination, Sigfried saw the young woman shivering. Silent tears were streaming from the corners of her eyes. The grotesque body lay naked on the iron cot, the nightshirt pushed up to her neck revealing blue veins in her swollen breasts. Sigfried smiled again. If only the young woman's intended were here now. What a pleasurable scene that would be.

Hurriedly Sigfried fetched a stack of linens from atop one of the upturned trunks and placed them on the table beside the cot. While she wanted to hear the young woman speak, she knew she must not allow screams to go on too long.

Moving more leisurely now, Sigfried went into the small cubicle where she slept and fetched her valise containing the necessary instruments. She returned and placed them on the table alongside the linens.

Then, feeling a kind of excitement, she drew a chair close beside the cot and commenced tearing the linens into strips of appropriate lengths; there must be gags for the mouth, longer double strips to tie about each ankle, binding strips to secure the wrists to the iron frame, the large pieces to accommodate the filth of the birth, and enough left over for swaddling for the brat.

As Sigfried saw one hand begin to push down the nightshirt as though to cover her nakedness, she leaned quickly forward and angrily

pushed it back, shaking her head. The ugliness must be closely watched. Now Sigfried thought she saw two faint circles of color on the pale face as though she were mortified to be so openly laid bare.

Good! And again Sigfried smiled, determined to humiliate her beyond measure, as she had known a lifetime of humiliation. Indeed, thinking upon it, how did they differ? One was an old whore, the other a young one.

Suddenly, with brute force, Sigfried ripped a long strip of muslin in half. The girl's eyes widened at the tearing sound, as though at that moment she knew precisely what was ahead of her.

Good again! With a certain lightness, Sigfried smiled. It was nice to realize that for ever more she would be permanently etched in the young woman's memory. However rich and fine a lady she might become, there would always be private dark moments when she would remember this room and Sigfried's face.

A gleam of pleasure blazed in Sigfried's eyes. It was nice to know she would be remembered.

In the beginning it had been merely a matter of retaining her sanity. Now for Harriet Powels, lying on the iron cot in her extremity, she wondered quite seriously if that sanity was worth retaining.

The spasm of pain was receding. But she was cold. Why wouldn't the woman cover her? And why did she stare so cruelly, down?

Eight months ago, she'd not thought it possible to live in such isolation. She still remembered the confrontation with her parents when she'd informed them of her predicament, her mother's weeping rage, her father's anger as he'd tried to bully a name out of her. But she'd held her silence then, as she'd held it throughout her confinement.

As for herself, although she'd never spoken the name aloud, she'd thought it often enough. Edward. Why hadn't he believed her? Why hadn't he been content with a limited paradise? They had shared more in five short days than they'd had a right to expect. Even her present condition made a kind of sense, a reasonable price to pay for five perfect days. What she had not anticipated had been the wrath of her parents.

She'd seen neither of them during her imprisonment, and at first had had little desire to see them. The months had passed calmly with the old foreigner. There was a small side balcony off the storage attic where at night she was permitted to exercise and take fresh air. For the rest of it, her needs had been attended to, and she'd passed the days in needlepoint. And books. Endless books. She'd let in as much of the world as she could handle, so that in a way her isolation had not been too difficult.

Now in spite of the staring hard eyes of the old foreigner, Harriet smiled. The final upheaval was imminent. Then let it come. With every wave of agony she would erase her sin. As for the burden she was carrying, her father's plan was for the best. It had no place here, did not belong. The old woman, according to Harriet's father, had promised to find it a suitable place.

Then she would meet her responsibilities as it had always been her intention to do, would fulfill her destiny and fulfill her parents' dream as well, and settle into Eden Castle, her name unblemished. And because of this, it was her private vow never to lay eyes on the weight shifting in her belly, to blindfold herself and cover her ears lest she hear a birth cry that would cause her to weaken her resolve. After her crucible was over, she would appear again miraculously recovered from a contagious illness.

She closed her eyes. The weight was shifting again. Another spasm, this one longer, her spine aching in her effort to assimilate it, the old woman still grinning down on her.

It could be endured. It must be endured with no outcry. God had been generous enough to let her know love. There had been a man, a miracle of a man. She had known him, enjoyed him, and would, forever after, know what the poets meant when they spoke the word. Love.

The spasm was passing. She was aware of the old woman standing over her, aware of hands cold as winter probing inside her, heard the woman's grunts and unintelligible mutterings in a foreign tongue. Then Harriet was aware of something else, of the old woman tying long strips of muslin about each of her ankles, drawing her legs apart and knotting the strands beneath the iron frame of the cot.

Harriet started to protest, but decided no. This too was part of the bargain, the shame and embarrassment, her helplessness in the face of her coming ordeal.

The old woman moved up to her arms and smiled down on Harriet and muttered something as she removed the nightdress altogether and commenced tying similar strips about her wrists. Then with what seemed unnecessary force she drew Harriet's arms over her head and secured her wrists to the iron frame.

Thus naked and bound, Harriet watched as the woman arranged mysterious instruments on the table beside the bed, her worn fingers stopping now and then to caress one as though she were particularly fond of it.

At that moment a grinding pain cut down across Harriet's belly, and as her body arched upward, she felt her legs pull against the muslin strips. A scream was rising in her throat. But she halted it before it

passed her lips. The last thing she saw was the old woman's face, a look of anger as though Harriet had offended her by not screaming aloud.

The woman was muttering something, but Harriet couldn't understand. Darkness soon swallowed the ugly room and the woman's angry eyes. And for some time, there was visible in the darkness only one image, the deep music of his voice, the tenderness of his touch.

Her last hope was that he had recovered, for she had every intention of doing so.

The Mermaid was a comfortable country inn located on the Shropshire-Wales turnpike. Directly across the road from the inn was an elegant black iron gate beyond which stretched the circuitous road which led to Hadley Park.

The inn had not always been a public house. Constructed in the early seventeen hundreds, its original purpose was to serve as barracks for the army of artisans and masons who were engaged in the awesome task of creating Hadley Park.

After the estate had been completed, the army of workmen departed, leaving the annex at the end of the parkland abandoned until 1790, when an enterprising Shropshireman named Simon Hills bought it and converted it into a country inn for travelers journeying between England and Wales. He made vast improvements, refurbishing the private chambers, terracing the front gardens and placing an arrangement of wooden benches about under the soft yew trees so that road-weary travelers might gaze across at the pastoral elegance of Hadley Park.

When Hills died in 1829, he left a remarkably thriving enterprise to his only son, Humphrey, who was not quite as enterprising as his father, yet cunning and troubled in his own way. Unmarried at thirty and likely to remain so, Humphrey was a slight man with a physique which more accurately resembled a young boy's than a middle-aged man's. He had had a sickly youth, plagued constantly by pleurisy and congestion, although he was in fairly good health now. At thirty, he was semi-bald, an unfortunate trait he'd inherited from his father, with only a slight rim of red hair still clinging to his small round head.

But of greater importance than his physical appearance was what people in the area generally referred to as his "attitude." Having grown up in the shadow of Hadley Park, the estate and its inhabitants had become for him a kind of nemesis. Humphrey was capable of telling any passing stranger the complete history of each descendant, an incredible biographical knowledge, as though knowledge alone might somehow gain him access to that rich distant world.

Thus it was that as a boy, Humphrey, on his knees, scrubbing the red brick terrace with the acid of lye soap burning his hands, had been forced to look across the road at how others lived, a world so near, yet so remote.

Before Lord Powels had fenced the entire parkland, the little girl, Harriet Powels, had on occasion ridden her pony to the edge of the road, and more than once, Humphrey had seen her, had watched with infinite longing as she'd raced the pony back and forth, her long hair flying over the collar of her little blue velvet riding suit. And once, as he had been cutting weeds in the gulley, she'd ridden so close to him he could hear her breathing. And when with sweat dripping from his face, he'd dared to look up, he'd seen such a devastating expression of pity in her pretty face that he'd lowered his head and wished with all his heart that he were dead and not an object of her pity.

She'd returned to that same spot several days thereafter, as though hoping to find him again, and she always did, and for three months of that incredibly beautiful summer, Humphrey had learned to ignore the look of pity in her eye, and their conversation had been enjoyable.

Although only fourteen at the time, Humphrey knew he was in love, and gave in to rare fantasies, imagining himself crossing that road and entering those handsome gates as a legitimate suitor for the hand and affection of Lady Harriet Powels.

But one day as he was dressing to go out and cut weeds again, his father had taken him by surprise, had come up behind him in his dank small room off the cellar beneath the inn, had bound his wrists to the bedposts and with a horse whip had given him fifteen lashes across his back, had given him a lecture with each lash, the words more painful than the cutting sting of the whip, informing him that he was nothing, had been born nothing, and would remain nothing, that he was never to go near that side of the road again, and was certainly never to speak to the young lady, or else old Simon would wash his tongue with the same lye soap that burned his hands and left them bleeding.

The young Humphrey had endured the beating, but something important had died within him that day, and worse than the death was the birth of a new quality, a negative force brought to life in the last sparks of reason. There were those who claimed that that was the day he formed his "attitude," and while he was a dutiful son for the rest of old Simon's life, it was a subdued and savage duty. And on Simon's death, Humphrey shunned the black of mourning, shed his worker's apron for the last time, arrayed himself in pink satin waistcoat and amber cutaways, and from then on always dressed as though he were a fine gentleman rather than the proprietor of an inn.