Suzie and the Monsters (24 page)

‘You mistake me,’ she whispered, backing away from me, so that I had to follow her to a less secluded, safer part of the garden.

‘So much for holding fast,’ I called after her, but she didn’t reply, and avoided being alone with me for the remainder of the afternoon until I left. That was the last time I ever received an invitation to visit her.

A week later, Sally turned up uninvited at the house where I lived then. She was agitated, barely touching the tea, her usual enthusiastic discourse reduced to nervous pleasantries. I sent the maid away home, so that I could be alone with my prey, the pretty Sally, and sat down next to her on the sofa, my lips tantalisingly close to hers.

It started with a kiss and a caress, and progressed gradually, visit by visit, so that soon I was freeing her beautiful breasts from the dress and stays and sucking gently at her hard nipples, or guiding her reluctant mouth to my own impatient peaks. Her resistance to my fingers exploring her secret desire evaporated swiftly. I still remember clearly her look of panic as her body exploded with orgasmic contractions for the very first time, her sharp nails finding purchase in my flesh.

Make no mistake. This was no love affair. Nor was it sex-without-strings, as they say these days; and it certainly wasn’t rape. Although I have been Lovelace to many Clarissas over the years, it’s more entertaining to make my victims conspire in their own defeat, by which I mean liberation from the inhibitions and societal irritations that interfere with sexual destiny.

Take, for example, oral sex. There are a few things for which I am grateful to my husband, chief among them being the joy of oral sex, and I don’t mean blow jobs. It’s true my lips have wrapped themselves round hundreds of cocks, of various shapes and sizes, all proud and beautiful; I enjoy the power it gives me, and it’s certainly useful as a means to an end, but only if it’s my end. No, whether giving or receiving, it’s the other that I love. I can spend hours lapping away between a lover’s thighs. I’m generally not a fan of the Bible, but I’ve always liked that line in the Song of Songs about the vulva being a cup ever filled with wine.

But it’s really only during the last hundred years or so that the English have opened up to this divine pleasure. In Sally’s day the genitals were ‘unclean’ and oral sex, even between husband and wife, seen as profoundly unnatural, but this is what I was determined to get from her. What I wanted, pure and simple, was the corruption of Sarah Fielding for my own perverse pleasure and capricious need for vengeance.

She was under no illusion. Every week she left, burning with shame at what she had just done, promising never to return, and every week she returned, burning with shame at what she wanted. She even begged me not to admit her if she returned, crying, ‘Better that I stand humiliated on your doorstep than be admitted to the iniquity within!’

On one particularly warm, sunny day during the summer, I asked the maid to stop by my aunt’s shop and deliver a letter that suggested she might like to close early. When Charlotte, my widowed ‘aunt’, arrived home an hour later, she discovered Sally naked and tied spread-eagled to the table in the dining room. Ignoring the terrified girl’s desperate struggles, I offered to make Charlotte tea, to which she agreed without even raising a eyebrow in surprise. Hilariously, Charlotte sat down at the table, said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Fielding,’ and proceeded to ask after the health of her sisters and of Lady Gould. When I brought the tray from the kitchen, she stayed at the table, sipping her tea and making polite conversation, while I returned my attention to eliciting pleasure from the entangled girl until she climaxed in tears. That was the last time she dared to let me tie her up. After she had gone, Charlotte and I spent the rest of the day giggling and making love.

Sally was addicted to the pleasure that only I could give her, and it let me strip away her moral armour, exposing the harlot concealed within the maid, for an hour or two of urgent pleasure. I never asked her what she told her family to explain these regular visits, but there was never any doubting her intelligence and inventiveness.

At last I took pity on her. As Sally drank my Biblical wine one day, I asked her, ‘Don’t you wish it was Jane Collier’s thighs you knelt between?’

She recoiled in sudden fury and stood to face me. ‘Jane Collier is a good woman!’ she raged at me. ‘How dare you tarnish her name with this vile act!’

‘She is a good woman,’ I agreed calmly, ‘and one that adores you, Penthesilea.’ The misquote distracted her, but then she blushed as she realised what I had said. I helped her to get dressed, then showed her out. ‘Farewell, Sally Fielding,’ I said as she left. ‘You’ll never see me again. Just remember: there’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ (One of my biggest regrets is that I never met Shakespeare.)

I don’t know whether Sally ever played the seductress with Jane, but I do know that I’ve never seen two women so happy together as they were.

*

My glass is empty. The bottle too, but at a signal from me the Rosso del Conte is brought over and poured. This wine is good for tales of blood, horror with a hint of cherry.

‘During the past ten days, I have been responsible for the deaths of six men.’ Cleo starts to protest but I quiet her. ‘My marriage consisted of three years of ignorant bliss and forty years of soul-destroying hell.’ The parallels between my husband’s manipulation and degradation of me and my own cruel treatment of Sally Fielding are not lost on me. But addiction is a terrible sickness, and mine, unlike Sally’s, was inescapable.

‘My husband liked to make me kill, and I don’t think a month went by without a life taken. I quickly lost count. Forty years? Could easily have been five hundred people, mostly young women, sacrificed for my lust.

‘Travelling around sixteenth century Europe may sound romantic, but mostly all I can remember now is blood, death and hatred. Later on, free from my husband, the killing didn’t stop, but it was killing for self-defence, or for food, or vengeance. There was always a reason for it. I made a determined effort not to kill unnecessarily, but...’

I shrug. ‘Thousands have died at my hands. What right do I have to judge human predators? What right do I have to exist?’ I take a sip of wine, and whisper, ‘What right do I have to bring Cleo into my world?’ I empty the glass down my throat, and close my eyes, feeling the dark, familiar ocean of self-loathing and despair coiling around me, cold, implacable.

I’m brought back to consciousness by Cleo and Alia shaking me, shouting my name, Alia even shouting ‘Elizabeth!’ in a desperate hope. I open my eyes to glare at her for a moment, then collapse shivering into Cleo’s arms and let the tears flow for a while. Held like this in Cleo’s protective, comforting embrace, I’m startled by the realisation that I want to stay like this, to let Cleo be the strong one and look after me. I’m so tired of being on my guard all the time. It would be so nice to be able to relax and let Cleo take charge and look after me.

It’s a fantasy both seductive and absurd. Staying one step ahead of human technology and policing is difficult and dangerous, and Cleo knows nothing of this. She’s like a bride on a honeymoon, relaxed, happy, enjoying the passion of adventure and discovery, blissfully unaware of the tedious details and tensions that will encroach on her new life. She will learn, of course, and maybe one day I will be able to relax for a while in a partnership of true equality.

But for now I need to be strong. Brushing away my tears, I lock away the darkness in my mind and still the trembling of my flesh, and find once again the girl called Suzie Kew. ‘Al traditore!’ I whisper fiercely, sitting up. ‘Scellerato! Why should this villain sleep, this treacherous man, who has for ever robb’d me of my rest?’ I glower at Alia as if demanding an answer from her. ‘Why should I fear to die, or murder him? It is but adding one sin more to th’ number.’

Cleo stares at me anxiously. ‘Suzie’s always quoting Aphra,’ Alia says to her.

‘Hah! Those words were borrow’d from my sweet lips, as ripe with rage as tender kiss’d,’ I cry with pretended offence.

Aphra, my salvation, my guide, my conscience. My Restoration angel.

I guess that’s as good a time as any. I pour another glass of the Rosso del Conte and take a sip before starting.

‘For a while, during and after the Restoration, it was possible to be both a woman and a sexual creature,’ I say. ‘Indeed, I think it’s fair to say that both men and women were generally regarded as creatures of lust — a lust that ought to be contained and controlled, of course, but often wasn’t. Some of London’s pleasure gardens were witness to many varied pleasures indeed, and quite openly after dark. The Dog and Duck was one of my favourite haunts south of the river. It wasn’t just prostitutes and pimps, there were plenty of others looking for adventure there. I also joined in some pretty wild higher-class orgies in those days. Don’t get me wrong, it was just a handful over a period of fifty years or so. I was no party animal. Mixing with the middle classes and aristocracy has always been complicated. Too many questions.

‘It was always complicated, though. Just surviving. Finding somewhere to live. The workhouses weren’t an option. Horrible places, worse than the prisons in many ways. Sometimes I stayed in lodging houses, with prostitutes and naïve immigrants, country girls, for company, although it was always a little depressing to see so many girls come to London with high hopes, only to have their savings stolen, or simply used up while they searched increasingly desperately for work, until they had nothing but tears to spend and a choice between starvation and prostitution. The Harlot’s Progress, as Hogarth put it. I couldn’t help them, and they were of no use to me, although their innocent beauty and enthusiasm between the sheets was certainly enjoyable.

‘Of course, it wasn’t just the immigrant girls who became prostitutes. The poverty in much of London was extreme. I saw girls as young as twelve, perhaps younger, forced to work the streets. And the little boys who carried the torches, lighting the way at night through the dark streets, were selling their asses. There has always been plenty of that going on in London, and God help anyone who got caught doing it.

‘Anyway, even lodging houses weren’t safe for me, and certainly not in other towns and cities. I was too visible to too many people. Far better to find someone to live with. Like Kitty. She had a shop and rooms on London Bridge, making and selling stays and leather gloves and breeches. It had belonged to her husband, but she had been allowed to keep the shop after he died. She was determined to keep her independence, but it was a struggle, especially with no servants and a young child to look after. After we got to know each other a bit, I persuaded her to let me live with her as her orphaned niece, and I could help her run the shop, and so on.

‘Of course, I never ate meals with her, and sometimes disappeared for hours during the night, often returning with bloodstains and liberated wallets, which she never spoke of except once when she demanded to know whether I was whoring or just thieving. My sweet, jealous Kitty. Didn’t care how many throats I cut or pockets I picked, so long as I was hers and only hers.’

I make significant eyes at Cleo, who asks, ‘And were you?’

‘For ten years, yes. I loved Kitty, and I loved living on London Bridge. It had a huge advantage in that people could chuck all their waste into the river, so you weren’t wading through sewage all the time. The view across the river was fantastic too, hundreds of boats everywhere. And the funny thing was they couldn’t really go under the bridge, because the piers and water-wheels blocked so much of the river that the flow through the arches was strong enough to capsize the boats, and often did.

‘It was the only bridge across the Thames in those days, and the congestion was horrendous. They didn’t have Ken Livingstone to sort things out. In 1749, when they were rehearsing Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks in New Spring Gardens — which was fantastic, by the way, especially since the real performance a few days later was such a fiasco — the traffic on London Bridge was solid for hours. Westminster Bridge was finally opened the following year, although that was such an engineering disaster they spent the next hundred years trying to fix it.

‘Anyway. That was one of the best periods of my life, but after ten years my continued youth was increasingly prompting questions from friends and neighbours, and Kitty had started getting increasingly paranoid about my behaviour, would watch me all the time. It didn’t help that Stephen, her son, had grown old enough to be curious about girls, and was becoming obsessed with me, his enigmatic cousin. Kitty was forgetting how to laugh, how to love and be loved, and it was breaking my heart.

‘So one night I left and didn’t return, must have been March 7th, because the following morning, while it was still dark, there was a huge earthquake, even bigger than the one the previous month. All the preachers and moralists were saying it was God warning Londoners to mend their sinful ways. What was really funny was the mass hysteria over the belief that a third, apocalyptic earthquake would devastate the city on April 8th. I wasn’t there to see it, but from what I heard later the whole populace fled their houses that morning for the safety of the fields and roads and rivers.

‘Kitty wasn’t the only reason I left London. After the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed in 1748 and World Peace was declared, a lot of men were released from the army and navy, and the shipyards, tough guys, used to fighting, a lot of ex-convicts. A lot of them looking for work in London, and of course there weren’t jobs for all, so the crime rate went through the ceiling. It changed the soul of the city. There was a lot more brutality, robberies and murder, no easy pickings for me, and Henry Fielding’s thief-takers added extra danger.

‘There was a major increase in street lighting as well. Back in the seventeenth century there was none to speak of, just candle-lit lamps outside people’s houses that they were supposed to keep lit until eleven o’clock, but generally didn’t. It made London the perfect hunting ground for the likes of me. Starting in the late thirties the authorities got a lot stricter, and soon there were thousands of lamps around the city, although it was still islands of light in a sea of darkness, the little link-boys as essential as ever. In 1750, however, they added reflectors to the lamps, making them much brighter, and started keeping them on all night. Not everywhere, of course, but certainly in the main streets and some of the pleasure gardens.