The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches 1)

"I do not care to spend the night here," I said to her, "and if you will not provide me with a coach, I shall walk to Port-au-Prince."

"Explain this to me, that you do not like pleasure," she said gently, tugging at my coat. "Surely you are hot in these miserable garments. Do all Dutchmen wear such clothes?"

"Stop those drums, will you?" I said. "I cannot bear the sound." For the music seemed to come through the walls. There was a melody to it now, however, and that was a slight bit reassuring, though the melody kept putting its hooks into me and dragging me with it mentally so that I was dancing in my head against my will.

And somehow or other I was now on the side of the bed, with Charlotte removing my shirt. On the table but a few feet away sat a silver tray with bottles of wine and fine glasses, and to this she went now, and poured a glass full of claret and brought this to me and put it in my hand. I went to dash it to the floor, but she held it, and looked into my eyes, and said:

"Petyr, drink a little only that you may sleep. When you wish to leave you may leave."

"You are lying to me," I said. Whereupon I felt other hands upon me, and other skirts brushing my legs. Two stately mulatto women had somehow managed to enter this chamber, both of them exquisitely pretty, and voluptuous in their freshly pressed skirts and ruffled blouses, moving with ease no doubt through the general fog which now shrouded all my perceptions, to pound the pillows, and straighten the netting of the bed, and take my boots from me and my trousers.

Hindu princesses they might have been with their dark eyes and dark eyelashes and dusky arms and innocent smiles.

"Charlotte, I will not have this," I said, yet I was drinking the wine, as she held it to my mouth, and again there came the swoon. "Oh, Charlotte, why, what is this?"

"Surely you want to observe pleasure," she whispered, stroking my hair in such a way that I was very disturbed by it. "I am quite serious. Listen to me. You must experiment with pleasure to be certain that you do not care for it, if you know what I mean."

"I don't. I wish to go."

"No, Petyr. Don't now," she said as if talking to a child.

She knelt before me, looking up at me, her dress binding her naked breasts so tightly that I wanted to free them. "Drink some more, Petyr," she said.

I shut my eyes, and at once lost my balance. The music of the drums and the horn was now slower and even more melodic, and put me in mind of madrigals though it was far more savage. Lips brushed my cheeks and my mouth, and when I opened my eyes in alarm, I saw the mulatto women were naked and offering themselves to me, for how else could their gestures be described.

At some remove Charlotte stood, with her hand upon the table, a picture in the stillness, though everything was now quite beyond my grasp. She seemed a statue against the dim blue light of the sky; the candles sputtered in the breeze; the music was as strong as ever, and I found myself lost in contemplating the two naked women, their huge breasts and their dark fleecy private hair.

It then came to me that in this warmth I did not mind at all being naked, which had seldom been the case in my life. It seemed quite fine to be naked, and that the women should be, and I fell into contemplating their various secrets, and how they differed from other women, and how all women were alike.

One of them kissed me again, her hair and skin very silky against me, and this time I opened my mouth.

But by then, you know, Stefan, I was a lost man.

I was now covered with kisses by these two and laid back on the pillows, and there was no part of my anatomy which did not receive their skilled attentions, and each gesture was prolonged and rendered all the more exquisite in my drunkenness. And so loving and cheerful they seemed, the two women, so innocent, and the silkiness of their skin was maddening me.

I knew that Charlotte watched these proceedings but that did not seem of importance any longer, so much as kissing these women and touching them all over as they touched me, for the potion I had drunk was working no doubt to remove all restraint and yet to slow down the natural rhythm of a man under such circumstances, as there seemed all the time in the world.

The room grew darker; the music more soothing. I grew more impassioned, slowly, deliciously, and completely consumed by sensations of the most extraordinary sort. One of the women, very ripe and yielding in my arms, showed me now a band of black silk, and as I puzzled what this could be, this broad ribbon, she put it over my eyes, and the other tied it tight behind my head.

How can I explain how this sudden bondage fanned the flame in me, how, blindfolded like Cupid, I lost whatever decency remained to me, as we tumbled together in the bed?

In this intoxicating darkness, I finally mounted my victim, feeling my hands fall gently upon a great mass of hair.

A mouth sucked at me, and strong arms drew me down into a veritable field of soft breasts and belly and sweet perfumed female flesh, and as I cried out in my passion, a lost soul, unquestioning, the blindfold was ripped from me, and I looked down in the dim light to see the face of Charlotte beneath me, her eyes closed demurely, her lips parted, and her face flushed with an ecstasy equal to my own.

There was no one but the two of us in this bed! No one, I saw, but the two of us in this little house.

Like a madman I was up and away from her. But it had been done. I had reached the very edge of the cliff, when she came after me.

"What would you do!" she cried miserably. "Jump into the sea!"

I could not answer her but clung to her lest I fall. If she had not pulled me back, I would have fallen. And all I could think was, this is my daughter, my daughter! What have I done?

Yet when I knew it, my daughter, and repeated it, my daughter, and looked full in the face of it, I found myself turning to her, and catching hold of her, and bringing her to me. Would I punish her with kisses? How could rage and passion be so melded? I have never been a soldier in a siege but are they so inflamed when they tear the garments from their screaming female captives?

I only knew I would crush her in my lust. And as she threw back her head and sighed, I whispered "My daughter." I buried my face in her naked breasts.

It was as if I had never spent my passion, so great was it then. Into the room she dragged me, for I would have taken her in the sand. My roughness held no fear for her. She pulled me down onto the bed, and never since that night in Amsterdam with Deborah have I known such release. Nay, I was not even checked by the tenderness I knew then.

"You foul little witch," I cried out to her. And she took it like kissing. She writhed on the bed beneath me, rising to meet me, as I came down upon her.

At last I fell back into the pillow. I wished to die, and to have her again at once.

Twice more before dawn, I took her surely unless I had gone completely mad. But I was so drunk then I scarce knew what I did, except that all I had ever wanted in a woman was there for the taking.

Close to morning, I remember that I did lie with her, and study her, as if to know her and her beauty, for she was sleeping, and nothing came between me and my observations--ah, yes, I thought bitterly on her mockery of me, but that is what they were, Stefan, observations--and I learnt more of a woman I suppose in that hour than ever in my entire life.

How lovely in its youth was her body, how firm and sweet to the touch her young limbs and her fresh skin. I did not want her to wake and look at me with the wise and cunning eyes of Charlotte. I wanted to weep that all this had taken place.

It seemed she did wake and that we talked for a while, but I remember more truly the things I saw than the words we spoke.

She was again plying me with her drink, her poison, and had added to the mix an even greater inducement, for now she seemed deep and saddened and more eager than ever to know my thoughts. As she sat there with her golden hair falling all about her, the Lady Godiva of the English, she puzzled again that I had seen Lasher in the stone circle in Donnelaith.

And it seemed the trick of the potion now, Stefan, that I was there! For I heard th

e creaking of the cart once more, and saw my precious little Deborah, and in the distance the thin image of the dark man.

"Ah, but you see, it was to Deborah that he meant to appear," I heard myself explain, "and that I saw him proves only that anyone could see him, that he had gathered by some mysterious means a physical shape."

"Aye, and how did he do it?"

And once more I pulled out of the archive of my head the teachings of the ancients. "If this thing can gather jewels for you ... "

"--that he does."

"--then he can gather tiny particles to create a human shape."

Then in a twinkling, I found myself in Amsterdam in bed with my Deborah, and all her words to me of that night were spoken again, as if I stood with her in the very room. And all this I then told to my daughter, the witch in my arms, who poured the wine for me, whom I meant to take a thousand times before I should be released.

"But if you know then that I am your father, why did you do this?" I asked, while at the same time seeking to kiss her again.

She held me off as she might hold off her child. "I need your height and your strength, Father. I need a child by you--a son that will not inherit Antoine's illness, or a daughter that will see Lasher, for Lasher will not show himself to a man." She considered for a moment and then said to me: "And you see, you are not merely a man to me, but a man bound to me by blood."

So it was all planned.

"But there is more to it," she said. "Do you know what it is to me to feel a true man with his arms about me?" she asked. "To feel a true man on top of me? And why should it not be my father, if my father is the most pleasing of all the men I have ever seen?"

I thought of you, Stefan. I thought of your warnings to me. I thought of Alexander. Was he at this moment mourning for me still in the Motherhouse?

Surely I shed tears, for I remember her comforting me, and how touching was her distress. Then she did cling to me, like a child herself curled beside me, and said that we two knew things that no one else had ever known save Deborah and Deborah was dead. She cried then. She cried for Deborah.

"When he came to me and told me that she was dead, I wept and wept. I could not stop weeping. And they beat on the doors and said, 'Charlotte, come out.' I had not seen him or known him until that moment. My mother had said: 'Put on the emerald necklace, and by its light he will find you.' But he did not need that thing. I know it now. I was lying in the darkness alone when he came to me. I will tell you a terrible secret. Until that moment I did not believe in him! I did not. I had held the little doll she gave me, the doll of her mother ... "