Feral Park (47 page)
Authors: Mark Dunn
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #British & Irish, #Historical, #Dramas & Plays, #Genre Fiction, #Drama & Plays, #Historical Fiction, #Irish, #Scottish
“Mr. Peppercorn, if you do not let go of my hand at this instant, I shall scream—here, outside the vicar’s garden where every parishioner will hear me. Unhand me immediately!”
As the voices faded and Anna made a note to herself to thank her father profusely for helping her gain the advantage over her odious aunt, she spied the two lovers beneath the appointed tree. Lieutenant Alford was kissing Nancy with a terrible urgency that reminded Anna of her own impulsive kisses with Tripp in the woods. How easy it is, she thought, to find oneself caught up so thoroughly in the vortex of that violent whirlpool of delicious (and deciduous) untrammeled desire!
As she grew closer Anna began to hear the sound of deep throaty moaning and highly-pitched peeps of satisfaction. She could see that neither body was set in one place and motionless in the romantic intercourse; there was definite writhing to be observed, and full, exploratory caresses that jumbled the hands and limbs, and kisses that did not limit themselves to the mouths only, but put the lips to every inch of skin that was exposed, or which had previously been clothed but now was set free: the soft, powder-white knob of Nancy’s right shoulder, the unveiled muscles of the lieutenant’s two grasping and pumping arms. The picture gave Anna pause and she felt her whole body become warm and commence to tingle. When Lieutenant Alford placed his large hand firmly upon Nancy’s breasts and then burrowed beneath the collar of the gown to touch the warm flesh and to stroke and knead and revel in her available bosom, Anna touched her own breast and felt the blood vacating her head, so that she sensed that she was about to faint. She had had exactly such a moment as this with Tripp, but now it was going beyond what
that
day had given to
her
and she rebuked herself for not allowing Tripp to go further. And yet, thought she, does not the heart sing loudest in such intercourse when there is genuine love and attachment between the two? Here was true love pushed against a tree and writhing with mouths open like fishes to kiss and suck and lick with moist wet…
Anna was brought round with gentle taps to the face by her father. Above her stood Lieutenant Alford and Nancy Henshawe looking down and looking worried.
“She has come back to us,” said Mr. Peppercorn in a relieved voice. Anna attempted to rise but was told to remain prone for a little while longer.
“What has happened?” she asked.
“You fainted,” offered Nancy. “It is good that you fell upon this bed of moss for now there will be no knots or bruises.”
Surprize now turned to mortification and Anna knew not what next to say. Nancy and her lover coloured as well, for it was obvious that it was their kissing and mutual movements which had brought Anna to insensibility. Every thing was said by nothing being said, and after the passage of an awkward silence, which was underlaid by Mr. Nevers’ booming pulpit voice wafting over from some distance, Anna informed the lovers that she had come to warn them that Mrs. Quarrels was on the prowl and that they would do best to remove themselves before they could be discovered.
“Indeed we will,” replied the lieutenant. “In fact, I plan to keep Miss Henshawe to myself for the chief of the day. Tell her aunt this if you wish, but I will not return my angel to Moseley Manor until this evening.”
“Will not she then punish you in some horrible way for this?” asked Anna of Nancy, who seemed happy and without a care for the consequences of her truancy.
“It was
my
idea that we should spend as much time together as we are able,” said she, “and I will bear whatever cost must be exacted, for I know not when I shall see Lieutenant Alford again.”
As Anna was being helped to stand upon her feet by her father and the lieutenant, she said, “But Miss Henshawe, you will see each other at the ball. That is its primary purpose now!”
“Yet if we
do not
—”
“I do not understand why you
should
not. You will attend that ball—you and your sisters—even if I be compelled to steal each of you away at the point of a pistol!”
“Anna, do not be silly,” said Mr. Peppercorn.
“My life is not my own,” said Nancy in a sad and quiet tone.
“Not for now, no. But I will free you in the end,” said Lieutenant Alford, who then kissed his sweetheart boldly upon the cheek.
Anna, thinking that she heard a rustling sound, turned to glance over her shoulder. The coast remained clear. “What have you done with Mrs. Quarrels, Papa?”
“I have misdirected her so as to buy the lovers more time. I have sent her in entirely the wrong direction, but she will figure out my ruse in very short order and will come back this way, so perhaps you both should hurry along.”
Nancy Henshawe could not go without thanking Anna for making it possible for her to spend a precious afternoon with the man who had won her heart with a smile. “I will never forget this kindness,” said she, taking Anna’s hand. Then there was a kiss to the hand, which caused Anna to blush, and another kiss to the hand by the lieutenant, which caused Anna to blush even more, and then thoughts of what she had observed under the oak tree which caused a returning lightness to the head that well-nigh put her out again.
After the two lovers had gone, Anna turned to her father and gave a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you, Papa, both for your endorsement of my plan and for your assistance in helping me see it to fruition.”
“Think nothing of it, dear girl. But are you well? I do not believe you to have ever fainted before.”
“I am quite well, Papa. I was merely overwhelmed by the circumstances. I will be fine.”
“He is a good-looking man and kind-hearted, and was she not radiant herself?”
Anna nodded. She was thinking that the lieutenant’s brother Perry was even better looking, but not as kind-hearted, at least for the present.
Anna’s thoughts were interrupted at that moment by the sound of a thud—a dull thud, and then another and then another in a regular fashion, just as a housemaid beats a rug. In fact, this is exactly what the thuds reminded her of—something or
someone
being beaten. “Do you hear what I am hearing, Papa?”
Mr. Peppercorn nodded. He turned his head to catch the direction of the sound. “That is a most curious thing to hear on a Sunday morning!” said he. “Who works or even does house chores on the Lord’s day but the Jews, for they have a different Sabbath. But then, we have no Jews in Payton Parish, so this would be an irrelevancy.”
“Papa, be quiet. There. That is the direction.”
The two started off to discover the source of the curious repetitive sound.
As they drew closer, the rhythm of beating became joined to moaning and groaning, as if one were reacting to an infliction through a vocalized expression of pain. “How horrible, Papa! Someone is being whipped! Do you hear the cries?”
“Aye.”
Anna recollected Sir Thomas’ love of the ferule and especially what he had attempted to do in the abandoned gamekeeper’s cabin. Quickening her pace she thought to herself, “I did not see Sir Thomas amongst the other congregants. Perhaps the reason for his absence Papa and I are about to discover!”
Walking briskly together, the two entered a copse, the sound of the whipping and the sound of the pained cries growing in volume and intensity to their ears. “Over here!” said Henry Peppercorn, and off they flew down a worn footpath, which seemed to be leading the way.
The strikings had grown even louder now, not only from the auditors’ proximity to the source but also from a more forceful application of the instrument of punishment. So too did the cries, which had advanced to the level of undulating wails, growing much more pronounced and frightening in their reactive anguish. Round one stubby tree and then another Anna and her father ran their tortuous circuit through the copse and then suddenly turned a corner to find themselves face to face with the perpetrator and the victim, neither of whom was Sir Thomas Turnington. The victim was, in fact, Mrs. Taptoe’s son-in-law Luther Mallard. He was bent forward over a fallen timber, his breeches and underclothes totally removed and folded neatly over the trunk of the downed tree. As much as she regretted it, Anna’s eye could not help going to that which was most prominent within the scene: Mr. Mallard’s exposed buttocks blazing red from the attack of the wooden ferule, drawing sharp contrast to the snow-white of his sun-deprived avian spindle-legs. Turning to look with horror upon his interlopers, Mr. Mallard let out a howl of anguish far different in tone and execution from those cries which had earlier accompanied his apparently solicited spanking; this cry seemed both painful and lamenting and did not abate even as he fled, too distraught it appeared even to think of taking his breeches with him.
Mr. Mallard’s sudden departure left the wielder of the paddle standing frozen to her spot, the ferule raised in mid-swing. Her expression seemed to carry the shadings and hues of ten different emotions, from shock and mortification to self-rebuke and contrition. The voice remained silent.
“Is this what Methodists do on Sunday morning?”enquired Mr.Peppercorn in a rancorous voice. Not waiting for an answer, he turned suddenly and stalked off without saying another word. Anna touched her father’s shoulder as he passed, the gesture provoking him to pull violently from her reach.
With the two men now gone Anna looked at Miss Younge, and Miss Younge looked at Anna and there was nothing that could be said that was not already being conveyed. Georgiana Younge had made a decision which had put things with the man she loved into a most difficult spot.
Anna knew that it would be up to her to fix what was now horribly broken. But how?
Upon his return to Feral Park, Mr. Peppercorn retreated to his bedroom and did not come out. Anna related to Mrs. Taptoe what she and her father had interrupted in the coppice, and the mother-in-law of Luther Mallard laughed without moderation until, consequently, the fullness of her heart brought her to concern for her daughter and how she would bear the truth about her husband, and at this point worry supplanted every other emotion that Mrs. Taptoe was feeling, and she decided that she would go that very afternoon to see how Guinevere was getting on and offer her two generous bosoms for the despondent daughter to cry into.
When Mrs. Taptoe returned that evening to her temporary lodgings at the Park she had Guinevere at her side, as well as her two granddaughters, and a significant amount of luggage in hand. All eyes were red and puffy, but the attachment of Guinevere Mallard to her mother’s arm was sufficient to produce a glimmer of a maternal smile through all the gloom and all the fretting over what the future now held for the wife and daughters of a man who would pull off his breeches, lean over a fallen timber, and ask to be struck upon the behind for his pleasure. The smile was not born of a mother’s feeling of vindication after having held doubts as to the temperament and worth of the man who had taken her daughter’s hand in marriage, but simply this: that she was
needed—
needed for the consolation that only a mother could give, needed to offer a mother’s love without reservation so as to help her daughter heal from the injury of a husband’s inconstancy in fundamental terms.
Anna could not help but hear every word of the late afternoon conference between Mrs. Taptoe and her daughter Mrs. Mallard through the thin wall that separated her own apartments from Mrs. Taptoe’s. The two girls had been handed to Anna to take for a walk through the meadow, but she had passed them along instead to Miss Leeds and feigned a headache, and the words that asked the favour of Miss Leeds had scarcely left her mouth when Mrs. Dorchester arched her brow and said in a low voice so that she would not be heard by either Miss Leeds or the two Mallard misses, “Headache? Psha! You are going up to listen in on a private conversation between Mrs. Taptoe and her daughter, for why else is there an empty glass in your hand, since you have, no doubt, drunk all of my son’s absinthe to the dregs?”
“It so happens,” protested Anna in an equally lowered voice and with an indignant upturn of the lip, “that I am about to pour myself a glass of milk. The glass is to be put to my lips, Mrs. Know-Every-Little-Thing, and not to my ear!”
The glass, in fact, fitted quite nicely against the ear and allowed Anna, after pouring its contents into a vase en route to her room, to eavesdrop upon the following exchange:
“Sit down, Guinevere. You will wear a furrow in the floor from all your pacing back and forth.”
“I cannot sit still, Mamma. To think of what he did!”
“At least I did not have to be the one to tell you, for then you would not have believed me and you would for ever thereafter hold the disclosure against me as an attempt to hurt you.”
“I am sorry, Mamma, that I was never receptive to the things you told me. But I have never known a mother and daughter to be more different, and it has served to our detriment and then driven us apart. I suppose there is something good that comes from this discovery, and that is the fact that it has now required us to repair the rent between us.”
“Aye. Now how was it that you came to learn about what your husband did?”
“He simply walked in and told me himself. He said that he could not have kept it from me anyway, for Miss Peppercorn would have told
you
, and then
you
would have told
me
because—said he—you have never wanted Luther and me to be happy.”
“What an abominable thing to say! I have never wanted any thing
more
than that the two of you should be happy in your marriage! It is the fact that you did not
wish
to be happy that has always troubled me so. You have never seemed to take even the smallest joy in any thing that life has offered you. Even upon the connubial bed you and Luther have always kept the candles snuffed out and done your business as if you were in a counting house adding figures.”
“Luther has always said that congress in marriage is for the purpose of conceiving children and that alone. And that a wife should derive no pleasure from the conjugal act with her husband lest she be wanton.”
“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. Did he not pleasure
himself
with
you
? By his own definition was there no wantonness on
his
side?”
“I cannot say that he
did
pleasure himself, Mamma. He never said a syllable that would lead me to think so. Oh, my good gracious Lord!”
“What is it, my dear? What is the matter?”
“There was the one time that he—oh, Mamma, I cannot even say it.”
At this very moment the glass slipped from its situation between Anna’s ear and the wall and dropt to the floor, but to her relief it did not shatter and make a large noise and she was able to retrieve it and quickly return it to its purpose.
“But you could not accommodate him,” was the next thing from Mrs. Taptoe that Anna heard.
“Could not, would not,
should
not. I could not even believe that he would make such a request.”
“It is quite plausible to me that he, along with every other man in the parish who came under the rule of the cruel ferule, could ask such a thing without hesitation.”
“But, Mamma, it must certainly be an illness of the head to want this thing to be done to oneself!”
“And you have never wanted an odd thing within the bedroom for
your
self?”
“
Me
?”
“Yes, you, dear. Have you not sought at one time or another something else from your husband, or perhaps even from another man who occupies your fancy-thoughts—something other than to blow out the candles and lie back and have your womb seeded with a yawn?”
“Mamma, I cannot believe that we are speaking to one another in such candid terms!”
“It is about time that we did. Now sit down here and tell me, my child, if there has ever been any thing that you wished within the deepest marrow of that which defines you as a woman, deep within the recesses of your commodity, which you desired—perhaps even felt that you
deserved
from your husband.”
“I should not like to paddle a man whilst he squirms and laughs, I know
that
!”
“I do not acquit Luther for what he did, but did he not ask you himself if you would perform this service a few years ago, and did you not just tell me that you fled from the request and hid behind the chicken house? But our discussion has now shifted to
you
, my dear, and you alone. You must tell your mother and in doing so clearly admit to
yourself
that you have all along required something else, something more fulfilling and gratifying than that which you have been given by your husband in all the years of your puritanical marriage.”
“Yes, Mamma. There is something. There are two things, in fact. Are you pleased with yourself that you have got me to admit it?”
“Well, I have not got it fully from you,
yet
.”
There followed a great, heaving, put-upon sigh from Guinevere Mallard. Then she said, “I should like, Mamma, to enjoy the pleasure that comes to some women through sexual commerce.”
“You would like to have an orgasm.”
“Yes. If I possess that capacity. I know that some women do not.”
“Nonsense. All women have the capacity; it is part of the physical makeup of every member of our sex, though there be some for whom it may be more difficult to achieve than others. My goodness, just the other night Miss Drone, feeling quite revelatory from a fourth glass of claret, said to me that she once walked in upon Miss Pints herself moving in a rippling way beneath the covers of her bed and crying ‘tantivy! tantivy!’ and then throwing herself off the bed in a happy convulsion of the naked waist and hips.”
“Yes, Mamma, I have heard that some women are able to do this for themselves, but I am not one of those woman. Moreover, I find this discussion most mortifying.”
“Well, my dear, we cannot suspend quite yet, for I have not told you the solution to your problem, nor have you told
me
the other thing which constitutes your great desire as a woman.”
“I will tell you, Mamma, and then we cannot go on.”
“And why is that?”
“Because this entire discussion is most improper.”
“And what if I say to you that a woman who admits to sexual congress with her husband only in the dark and without taking any pleasure in the act is admitting to a gross impropriety herself? An impropriety of the tuzzy-muzzy!”
“Oh, Mamma, do not be so disgusting!”
“To reject, as well, with such impertinent ingratitude a gift that has come straight down to us from none other than our very Maker! To eschew the possibility of deriving joyous, wholly transporting ecstasy through sexual intercourse with the one whom we love most—why, it is an apostasy! Guinevere, answer me truthfully: do you love your husband?”
“Yes. Despite what you may think to the contrary, I still love him very much.”
“Yet he is rarely ever able to shew his love for
you
, now is he?”
“I suppose he has tried. Yes, Mamma, he has very much tried. He tried when first we were married to take me with riot and passion and I shrank from him. Over time he stopt trying. Over time we came to the place where we now reside—at least until everything changed to-day: dull partners in our shop and in the raising of our girls and dull partners everywhere else, including the connubial bed. What I
want
, Mamma—that other thing which you wish me to confess—is simply for Luther to desire me, in body and soul, to want from me what he wanted when first we were married—that thing that I was not able then to give him.”
“So you have not been honest with me.
He
was not the one to say those things about a wife’s purpose and this and that. It was always
you
who blew out the candles—always
you
who hid beneath the sheets.”
Here nothing was spoken. Anna discerned that Guinevere Mallard was silently nodding in agreement. Then, although she could not be certain, Anna detected the sound of weeping, accompanied by sniffs—snuffly sniffs from both mother and daughter.
“Let me tell you what you must do, my dear. You must go to your husband this very evening. You must go to him whilst your girls are spending a night with their grandmother, and you must do each and every thing that he asks of you which does not make you shudder or otherwise discomposes you, which means that you should open yourself to every thing that heretofore you could not bring yourself to think about. And you should ask him in turn to do each and every thing that you have always secretly wished from
him
.”
“Oh, but I
cannot
, Mamma.”
“Yet you must.”
“I am so afraid.”
“Of
what
, my dear?”
“That I have forgot how to make myself happy. I am afraid that I have become like our hostess Anna Peppercorn, who has given up on ever again being happy and so must content herself with being merely facilitator and custodian of the happiness of others.”
“What an odd thing to say! You believe that Anna has given up on her own happiness?”
Anna trembled to hear herself brought into the conference, and in such an uncomplimentary context.
“Depend on it. Though she is still young, she acts as an old woman, resigning herself to living only through others—unlocking secrets, scheming and intriguing and matchmaking, and setting things right—all good things, be sure of it, but nothing ever for herself. Had you not come to me this afternoon, I have no doubt that she would have come herself to my lodgings and extended the consolatory handkerchief and said many of the things which you have just said but perhaps without the candour that is your trait. I wager, in fact, that if she were not taking Sarah and Janet on a walk about Feral Park that she would be up here listening against the wall to every thing that we say, so that she might add her bit or comment later on and derive a vicarious frisson from participation in the remedy to my distress.”
“Ah, there she is! I can see her down below with the two little ones.”
“That is not she, Mamma. It is her maid Miss Leeds.”
Silence followed, and Anna, feeling suddenly like a trapped animal, scrambled under her bed where she remained for above a quarter hour in the company of three rabbits. Above a quarter hour was time enough to allow Mrs. Taptoe and her daughter to go down stairs and Anna to slip down the back way and pretend that she had been helping Mrs. Dorchester knead bread for all of the previous half hour. Instantly perceiving the ruse and bartering her complicity with Anna for a recompensable raise in her wages, Mrs Dorchester was successful in saying every thing that was necessary to put the scheme over.
Later that afternoon Mr. Peppercorn, still shut in his room, took a little broth but nothing else,and would not answer Mr.Maxwell’s enquiry with regard to a request by the man with the traps for advance payment. Subsequently the trapman put his hare-snares back onto his waggon and drove away without taking a single cony with him, leaving the furry creatures to feast in the spoilt vegetable garden and to continue to aggregate and multiply.