One Wicked Night. Noelle MackЧитать онлайн книгу.
night from untimely destruction, I suppose I should pick it all up and sort it as best I can…my contributions in one pile, Xavi’s in another…
There, I have done so—got it back upon the desk, if not sorted it—and finished the brandy in the decanter. After some moments of reflection I find I have not the heart to separate my things from hers. The task could be accomplished quickly. The writings of Lady X—she did beg me to destroy them, which I will in due time—are easy enough to distinguish from mine, owing to the different paper and the delightful small sketches that sometimes enlivened them. Here is one of hers—it has jumped to the top of the pile!—a drawing of a fetching little whore in black stockings and nothing else. She very much resembles X, who told her stories from a feminine point of view, of course, providing a highly stimulating counterpoint to mine. She had a rare talent for becoming anyone she pleased.
My naughty inamorata was the Lady X, of course. Notorious. Uncommonly lovely. And for a while, the talk of London. The scandal sheets never printed her full first names, Xaviera Innocencia, let alone her last.
Don Diego Mendez y Cartegna was her husband, a grandee in his own land, a person of great influence in ours as the Peninsular Wars dragged on.
Don Diego prided himself on his jealous supervision of his young wife. Nonetheless, Xavi assured me that after he had taken her virginity—adding that it was without a doubt the most unpleasant five minutes of her life—she never went again to his great gilt bed, knowing that her side of it was sure to be occupied by a housemaid or some other unfortunate female who did not have the power to refuse the lord and master of the household.
So perhaps her infidelity was justified—she thought so and I was not inclined to argue the point. My feelings for her had been sparked in an instant and the fire between us leaped high for many months. Yet our passion was unequal and it was clear from the beginning that I loved her rather more than she loved me. At least she was truthful about that.
Her desire for sex was more than a match for mine. Hence the little blank book in which I wrote, at her request and for her amusement, of amorous adventures. Rescued, it sits on the other side of my desk, holding down a ream of my preferred paper: foolscap. The word is appropriate. Love is a fool’s game, no matter one’s skill at it.
In that arena, I would call myself simply lucky, although there were women who told me—their fervent words, not mine—that my magnificent build and remarkable height and handsomeness and so forth and so on were enough to make them swoon. Romantic flattery, nothing more. Some females need a reason to be overcome, and if my appearance met with their approval, then well and good.
I myself do not set much store by physical perfection, being attracted just as much by intelligence and high spirits—the quality the French call joie de vivre—and the way a woman carried herself. If, underneath her frills and furbelows, a female of new acquaintance seemed quite at home in her own skin, as lithe as a healthy animal and as bold, then I marked her as mine.
Xavi had all those qualities and a sultry beauty of her own that set her apart from English women. She was outwardly demure; inwardly, not at all. She called to mind the most outrageous erotic fantasies.
Naked from the waist down, straddling a chair…her full breasts bared and held up high by her tight stays, her nipples turned deep pink from the light tugging and rolling between my fingers…her soft lips, parted to tell me what she wanted…ah, I envisioned her just in that way at the moment I saw her.
I happened to be visiting the studio of my good friend, Everett Quinn, a portrait painter of note. Men who had risen far above their humble beginnings, millionaire brewers and the like, came to him for gilt-framed ancestors to hang on the walls of their new country houses. Any ancestors would do, so long as their painted faces suggested a distinguished pedigree.
Bewigged, ruffed, clad in courtly velvet or sober Jacobean black, the subjects were entirely imaginary but they bore an unmistakable resemblance to whoever had commissioned them in the first place. Quinn’s skill at reinventing a given set of features through the centuries was unrivaled and he commanded high fees.
He also did the portraits of actresses lucky enough to bag a peer or wealthy lover. These men paid well to have their women immortalized at the height of their beauty and fame. Quinn had a knack for making them look altogether respectable at the same time, to everyone’s amusement.
It was at his studio that I first glimpsed Xavi. Quinn was seldom alone there, and various people came and went at all hours. There was an older woman, a Miss Reynaud, who did the drawings for the engraved reproductions of his paintings, which were peddled in the print shops; and Rob Hutchenson, the apprentice who mixed his colors and did the other dirty work; and his models, human and otherwise. For a while Quinn had kept two small spotted pigs he’d needed for a rustic landscape. They clattered about on the bare wood floors and stuck their snouts into everything and he’d had to give them away.
But on that day only the apprentice was there, a lad of nineteen or so who showed me in without taking my hat or my greatcoat. He didn’t bother to introduce me to a pretty girl, neatly dressed, who I took to be a ladies’ maid. Not of the more fashionable French type, to be sure, and new to her calling—the girl had an air of the Surrey countryside about her and seemed English to the bone. She sat quietly in a straight-backed chair and did not look up as I passed by. I assumed she had been brought along to give the appearance of propriety.
No doubt the subject of Quinn’s latest commission was in the next room. I wondered idly who it might be this time as I pushed aside the heavy curtain that blocked the door.
Quinn was always working and there were many paintings propped against the walls, some framed and some not. He liked to fiddle with them and add improvements: dabbing rosy cheeks on the plainer females and painting breasts upon females not thus blessed by Mother Nature, who had not thought to buy a pair of artificial ones in the shops to fill out their bodices.
But the woman I glimpsed in the center of the room needed no help of that kind with her complexion or her figure. Calling a halloo, I entered without further ado—Quinn cared nothing for social niceties—and then stopped and stared.
She was sitting on a raised platform in perfect stillness, her exquisite profile turned into the light that flooded the room from the high, north-facing windows, so that she did not see me looking at her. I was thunderstruck. She was remarkably beautiful, almost exotic, and her body, even clothed, was utterly graceful in seated repose.
Motionless and silent, she scarcely seemed to breathe, but I perceived the slight rise and fall of her bosom when I came back to my senses. I turned my back to her and mouthed a question to Quinn. Who is she?
He winked at me, noticing my obvious interest, and put down his brush and palette to answer, thinking for a moment before he raced through the syllables of a very long Spanish name, the sort of name which included ancestors and in-laws and several Catholic saints. She had just come to England, he explained. They had exchanged only a few words—sit here, look there—and he did not think she spoke or understood much English.
I looked over his shoulder at the woman whose outline was sketched upon the canvas supported by Quinn’s easel. Her gaze rested now upon two finished, nearly life-size portraits hanging on a wall of the studio, a matched set meant to convey the appearance of happy matrimony between the earl and the countess depicted. I had to smile. I knew both of them, though not well. In any case, their names—or the first letters of their names, followed by unsubtle dashes—frequently popped up in the press, which gleefully chronicled their affairs with others and their noisy public squabbling.
Xavi studied the portraits thoughtfully. Something about her deliberate consideration of the two, as if she were assessing everything from the sitters’ clothes to their character, suggested a considerable intelligence and made me think that she did understand us. But I could not stop Quinn from continuing blithely on, although he kept his voice low.
The lady who sat so patiently upon his platform was the wife of the Spanish ambassador, he explained. The man was descended from an ancient family of Castile and was a disgusting old goat—
“Have you met