The Last Crossing (30 page)

I start off again. It is all I can do to restrain myself from bolting after her in a headlong rush. Her name bursts on my lips. “Mrs. Stoveall! Mrs. Stoveall!” I freeze, waiting for some answer, however faint. Nothing. Even the madrigal of the coyotes ceases, quelled by the sound of a human voice.

There comes a flap of angry air, scant feet above my head. I duck, eyes falling to a swoop of shadow. Shadow and flesh spring together in a violent convulsion, a puff of sand, a fanfare of beating wings that subsides into stillness.

Two gold discs, the yellow eyes of an owl, stare back at me as some small thing writhes at its feet.

A broken human wail quavers beyond the waves of sand, sending the owl into flight, the tail of a mouse wriggling in its talons. I sprint towards the cry, encounter an enormous dune, fly at it, slip and fall, stagger to the summit. Below me is Lucy Stoveall, a stick thrust out from her waist as if she holds at bay an invisible adversary. Her body shudders and the stick partners her in a spasmodic dance.

I shout to her, but she seems locked in a catalepsy beyond my reach. I plunge down the drift, feet churning in the loose sand, plunge through the tearing brush. I snatch her shoulder, shake her, shouting her name. Her mouth opens to protest, then slowly closes as recognition stirs.

I pull her close, clasp her to me. Her hands reach up, fumbling for my face, and I taste the surprise of salty blood as her fingers touch my lips. Her hands slip inside my shirt, the soft undersides of her wrists glide along my ribs, her fingers fondle my spine.

“I want to swim on you. Let me swim on you,” she pleads.

We stagger, clutching one another. I fumble her bodice open, she shrugs her arms from its sleeves, and begins to strip me of my trousers. Falling to her knees she hugs my thighs, the bounty of her red hair teasing my prick.

“Come down. Come down to me,” she whispers. There is a small gasp as I enter her and then I am left whimpering in the grip of desire.

The cold eye of the moon at my back. The sensation of being exposed – no walls, no curtains – the immodesty of an animal, naked
of everything but instinct and need, there is only this. She smiles at me, turns her head away as I lose myself completely in the throb of release.

The Captain has never dreamed his curiosity would be so well paid, so well satisfied. His brother, an actor in a thrilling pose plastique, a stimulating tableau vivant. He lowers his head below the dune and buttons up his fly.

CHARLES
With every day that passes, it is brought home to me ever more clearly and discouragingly that my brother regards the search for his own brother as nothing more than an opportunity to exercise his taste for outdoor life and adventure. He is a character in a boy’s book. The several days he spent playing intrepid explorer in the Sand Hills has necessitated we make a detour. The dunes have proven to be impassable by wagon and Potts informs us that we must skirt them to reach Fort Whoop-Up and the other whisky posts that lie to the west, beyond the Saskatchewan River. This dictates turning either north or south to avoid the thirty miles of sand that block our way. Addington has chosen the northern route, most likely because he wishes a glimpse of the great Saskatchewan River. Yet Addington’s wilful opposition, his willingness to sidetrack from Simon’s possible trail, makes me hold ever more tenaciously, beyond all reason, to some shred of hope.

A little experience of this vast land should bring me closer to the unthinkable, closer to admitting that any hope of finding Simon alive may be nothing more than that. It grows ever more likely that Addington and I shall return to England empty-handed. We shall return to face Father, who is sure to accept no excuses for failure since he cannot conceive of the impossibility of the task he set his sons to perform.

This is all I contemplate. Or, rather, this and Lucy Stoveall. What uncharted waters I find myself in with her, far different from my previous situations, where things were always clear. Though there was always a price to pay, in some fashion, I always understood the terms. But matters are on a different footing with Lucy. There is nothing about it that is defined. But linked by our respective losses, so often discussed in the past weeks, she has supported me with a quiet, unflagging sympathy that I have done my best to return. Like Simon’s in earlier days, her simple presence, even her silence, has been consolation in my times of trouble. But when a helpmeet becomes a lover, what then? Can the word “mistress” be spoken to a woman like her. I think not.

We must be discreet. If Addington detects our feelings, our erotic indulgence, there will be the very devil to pay. I can hear him now, reporting to Father. “Sir, I consider it my duty to relate to you that Charles pays his attentions to a woman who wears his boots.”

Could I expect Father to understand what I cannot fully understand myself? Father, who would have had his sons fear the very act of love itself? How tactful of him to present Simon and me with Dr. J. L. Milton’s masterwork,
On the Pathology and Treatment of Gonorrhoea and Spermatorrhoea
, for our fourteenth birthday. A chastening medical volume outlining the dire consequences of a lavish expenditure of seminal fluid and what it results in, inevitable imbecility and early death.

But young men are not necessarily dogs. After a suitable lapse of time to allow Father to cool after my refusal to return to Oxford without Simon, my brother somehow worked his way with him, managed to prevail upon Father to let us take up bachelor quarters in Grosvenor Square. And we certainly did not sink into depravity when freed from his strict supervision. No, instead we studied assiduously. For two years forswearing the pleasures of youth, refusing to entertain or to be entertained, living the pact we had made, to prove to Father his sons were not wastrels or dilettantes but fellows of serious purpose. We strove and we laboured, Simon to find God, I to make myself a painter.

So like the idyll of our early childhood those days now seem, the two of us supporting one another’s pursuits and hopes. Shut up in that house, happy monks. Simon leaving it only to buy more books, or to occupy a back pew in some dank church. And at tea time, the two of us sharing the day’s successes and failures. I, displaying my sketches for Simon and he briefing me on his reading, theology, Fourier, Thomas Carlyle, William Blake.

How he loved Blake. I had my reservations about where Simon’s tastes were leading him, but his enthusiasms so delighted him I did not have it in me to contradict them. After all, he gave so much more than he received. It was Simon who insisted I take the large room with the French windows for a studio and helped me set it up. Simon who sacrificed time from his own pursuits to model for me. Simon who, despite his natural modesty, stripped to shiver uncomplaining in the winter damp.

But surely I was wrong not to attempt to inoculate him against the mysticism of Blake, so dangerous for one of Simon’s temperament. Or against those clanking volumes of sermons by rural vicars and those pious effusions of old maids printed up in pamphlets at their own expense. It seems so now. Let him have the bombast of Carlyle, but not the piffle of those second-rate mystics who cultivated the ground for my brother’s susceptible mind to be poisoned by the charlatan Witherspoon. And all the time, without my realizing it, the small crack between us which first appeared at Oxford was slowly, imperceptibly widening into a gulf wide as the Bosporus.

Certainly I had a hand in the breach. The little white lies concerning my immoralities, they may have prompted Simon to feel he, too, deserved his own secret life. Telling him I would spend the day at the British Museum or Gambart’s gallery, deflecting him when he wanted to accompany me. The flimsy excuses. “You do not enjoy Gambart’s, because you do not approve of gossip, and that is why I go, for that as much as the pictures.” The subterfuges. A quick visit to the viewing rooms in case he later asked questions about the exhibitions. Then off to other viewing rooms with a more infamous reputation: the Alhambra, the Argyll in Great Windmill Street, the Holborn Assembly
Hall. Or a leisurely coast up and down Regent Street enjoying the sights, the luxurious shops, the choice restaurants, the concert halls, the dusk slashed with golden light streaming from their windows. The most expensive courtesans in London on display, resplendent in silk and satin, strolling about arm in arm. Or summer excursions to Cremorne Gardens, a place I had never heard tell of until I saw the print,
Derby Night at the Cremorne
, hung in Tom Budge’s room at Oxford, his souvenir of jolly evenings spent with jolly girls.

To make excuses for oneself is petty, but I was not debauched. Intervals of many months sometimes passed between my escapades. And it was the strain of work as much as carnal desire which sent me into the streets, the need to forget the drawings which always left me disappointed. The endless drudgery which I now understand is the price of ambition married to a small talent.

I spent most of my time with dollymops rather than hardened whores. Dollymops had more life to them. Girls for whom entertaining men was a sideline, not their life work. Always adamant they were not “gay,” not on the game, charming milliners, maids, seamstresses, shop assistants willing to share a gentleman’s pleasures on their day off. A good dinner and a bottle of wine, a handsome present, two pounds here and there, where was the harm?

My favourite among them, Iris, I never bedded. It would have put us on too blatantly mercenary terms. I liked to think she went about with me simply for my company. The first time we met, she stoutly declared, “I decide whose arm I take, sir. I don’t go about with ruby-nosed gentlemen for the sake of a bit extra. I’m after a spot of fun, I am.”

And fun we had, although I suppose I did not learn all I might have from those poor girls who had the courage to seize the moment with reckless good humour and thumb their nose at tomorrow. Their independence, their frankness, their lack of airs struck me as healthy and vital. Perhaps I see the same qualities in Lucy.

It delighted me the way Iris mocked my “nobbish airs” and dragged me off to her favourite haunts, penny gaffs where bibulous patrons pilloried men of my sort in ribald ballads. I shall never forget the shock
of hearing the Royal Family itself sent up in the song about the costermonger and his donkey. Iris, her arm hooked in mine, swaying to the melody, the comic on stage winking and leering as he bellowed,

This undercurrent of turbulent, tongue-in-cheek anarchy rife among the lower orders was something I had never suspected. All about me, I felt the audience slyly gauging my reaction to the scandalous tune, endeavouring to provoke me by tugging their forelocks, by winking at the toff in the silk top hat. One fellow had the impudence to stagger up and pant stale beer into my face. “Does a costermonger’s opera tickle the gentleman’s fancy?”

As a matter of fact, it did. Enormously.

My overweening affection for these girls was not
nostalgie de la boue
but a recognition they were cleaner clay than myself. Charles Gaunt was truly the kept creature, incapable of asserting himself, incapable of bending the golden bars of his father’s cage and making his escape.

Iris sometimes seemed offended that I made no advances, asked nothing in return for the little treats I gave her, scent, flowers, champagne dinners. But her good humour always returned once we embarked on an outing. She would mockingly refer to me as “Champagne Charlie” and tickle me in public. Sexual intercourse with Iris would never be a chilly transaction. It was the reason I was saving her for another.

As does Lucy Stoveall, Iris had passion, passion coupled with an attractive strength and self-reliance entirely foreign to respectable
drawing rooms where ladies engineer marital prospects like Metternich balancing the power of great states at the Congress of Vienna.