The Moonlight Mistress (7 page)

“Especially when your skin is damp,” Lucilla said. She felt strangled, though she was breathing deeply; her nipples had drawn tight, and rubbed painfully against her bust bodice.

“I suckled her nipples and also her cunt, then she removed her shift. Her skin was like cream, except on her breasts, where the skin had stretched and left shiny lines. I licked each one, trying to forget my cock, but this was difficult, you understand.”

“No doubt. What did she do for you?”

“She held my shoulders or arms, but that was all. I think if she had done more, I would have spent myself immediately.”

She would have done more, had she been in the widow’s place. She wouldn’t have been able to restrain herself from stroking every inch of him, for wasn’t that part of the pleasure? The freedom to touch as one willed? Perhaps for Madame Jacques, the freedom had been in allowing another to borrow the control she held over her body. “And then?”

“When she was ready for me to fuck her, she knelt on the bed with pillows to support her, and I knelt behind her. I rubbed myself along her back and on her rear, which was soft as a pillow, and could easily have done nothing else, but she spread her thighs and cried out for me to fuck her. It was….”

“Powerful,” Lucilla said, imagining that she could order someone else’s pleasure.

“Yes. But as soon as I was inside her, I felt an obliteration of the self, of the self that thinks. It was not only my cock that she squeezed inside her passage, but my whole being, shrunk into one fine point. It was extraordinary. All-consuming.” He paused. “Is it like this for you?”

Lucilla had to think to understand the question he’d asked. He’d been honest with her, so she would do her best to be so
with him. “It’s like…holding my breath, and reaching, and…No. That doesn’t explain it.” She swallowed. “There’s wetness, and tension, and it’s close, so very close…I’m no good at explaining this.”

If there were a formula, perhaps, and a predictable outcome. A protocol of physical actions leading to replicable results, easily described in terms of weight and color and viscosity. It ought to work that way, if the world were just. But she knew it didn’t. Though her first experiences with sex had only felt more than physical at the beginning, her later solitary experiments had been harder to quantify and more varied in result. And what she’d shared with Pascal had been different than that; she hadn’t always been aware of herself, or of her own body, in her fascination with him and his. Yet at the same time she felt fulfilled. Happy. Why? Did her body need sex, like a vitamin? If that was it, why was sex better with Pascal than alone? She shouldn’t notice a difference. She drove another kilometer in silence.

Pascal interrupted her thoughts. “Perhaps next time, I will ask you what you feel at the appropriate moment.”

“If I can form sentences, you’re welcome to try.” She took a deep breath. “What happened next? With Madame Jacques.”

The motor purred. “It progressed in the usual way,” he said.

Lucilla cast him a glance. “That’s vague. I thought you remembered everything.”

“I don’t think I can speak on this anymore, unless my hands are on you,” Pascal said.

Her stomach twisted a little, as if hungry for him. “Finish the story, at least.”

“The smell of baking bread is, to this day, a reminder.”

“So if I brought you a baguette, you would—” Imagining
the lewd appearance of a baguette, Lucilla began to laugh. Pascal joined her. To her surprise, the rest of their journey, all through the night, became a blur of laughter and shared memories, but now only memories of safe things, such as her childhood experiments with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, and his first dish of ice cream, which had been strawberry.

She told him of when she’d been a girl, and imagined that she could easily dress in boys’ clothes and run off to have adventures, just like the boys in the illustrated stories that Tony and Crispin pored over. She’d had to read those stories in secret, sneaking them into the garden shed to avoid her mother’s lecturing on what was appropriate for a young girl and, at much greater length, what was not. “But now,” she said with great satisfaction, “I am on an adventure of my own.”

“Am I required to be your assistant in this endeavor? Or may I be the intrepid scientist?”

Lucilla grinned at him and deftly swerved around a hole in the road. “I stole the motor. I think you’d better be the girl. Only no swooning, I beg you.”

“Only if you ravish me at the end,” he said hopefully.

BOB HAILEY’S SISTER WAS NOT IMPRESSED WHEN told the regiment was mustering.

“You can’t leave,” Agnes said. “The water closet’s got a leak. It makes a terrible drip all night, and keeps Mother awake.”

“I’ll have a look before I go,” Bob said. “Captain Wilks is expecting me early.”

“You care more about that old man than about your own family!”

“It’s my duty.”

“We’re your duty! And what do you think will become of us if you get sent who-knows-where to be killed?”

“Haven’t I done enough already? You’ll get my pay, same as you’ve been getting,” Bob said. “I’ve asked Mrs. Tollis upstairs to look in every few days. She’s happy to do it.”

“She doesn’t care two pins for me, she just likes to gossip with Mother.”

“You’re able to take care of yourself,” Bob said. “You had a factory job before I went into the service. If you need to, you can do it again.”

“And then who’ll take care of Mother, I ask you? She can’t stay by herself any longer, and you know it. Yet I don’t see you here but once in a fortnight.”

Agnes was convinced the army was like a holiday camp, enlisted in for the adventure of it, much as their father had signed on with the merchant marine. Though of course he’d never been seen again.

“If I’m killed, will you still blame me for not mending the leaks?” Bob asked wearily. “I’m off.”
To my other life
.

LUCILLA DID NOT REALIZE THEY HAD CROSSED the border into France until she stopped the motor so they could relieve themselves. The night sounded unusually quiet; she’d grown used to the motor’s vibration and the mournful baying of dogs, and she stood for a moment, listening to the engine tick. She heard Pascal’s returning footsteps, then a curse. He’d stumbled into a stone milepost. She backed the motor enough for the headlamps to illuminate it. The distance it marked was worn illegible, but it sheltered a gaily painted plaster Madonna, her feet pinning at least twenty scraps of paper, their penciled prayers inscribed in French. Lucilla was tempted to leave an offering of her own, she was so glad to be free of Germany, but at the same time, she realized her journey’s end would mean the end of her affair with Pascal. She restrained herself from snarling at the statue’s serenely smiling face.

She stepped out of the headlamps’ glare and said, “If we keep going, we might find a village in time for coffee and croissants.”

“We could stop here and rest,” Pascal said.

“And sleep on the ground with no blankets? If we push on, we might find a nice, comfortable bed.”

The wavering headlamp turned Pascal’s grin more devilish than he might have intended.

“I intend to have a good day’s sleep, at least!”

“I intend to make sure of it,” he said. “Come. You’re right. This road should lead us toward Verdun and Reims. There will be towns along the way if we run out of petrol.”

Lucilla planned never to forget that dawn, pink and orange like a dish of sweets, the light gently washing over fields of summer hay. She glanced at Pascal to share it with him, but in the few moments since they’d last spoken, he’d fallen asleep.

She yawned, and considered pulling to the side of the road for a small nap herself, but she wanted a bed. More than that, she wanted one last time to make love with Pascal, so the sooner they reached a place where she could have that wish, the better.

This adventure was drawing to an end. She could feel it like a doom advancing. They would be separated, by her own choice before it could be his, and she would go home, and if England went to war, she would go, as well, who knew where—she might be sent anywhere. For all she knew, she would be sent back to Germany—that would be ironic. And Pascal had been in the army, like all Frenchmen. He would not be able to escape some form of service, no matter how he felt about it. And he could easily be killed, or be wounded or so changed by a war that he would forget about her completely. And that would be that. She would spend the rest of her life alone.

She berated herself for being melodramatic. It would
matter to her if he were killed, but so far as her life went, it would not matter, as she knew already she would not see him again. Clinging together in the midst of chaos was no solid basis for anything long-lasting. He was a young man, with a future ahead of him, whereas she was already past forty and had no wish for children or housewifery. If she planned, hoped, to see him again, she would be building castles in the air, as she had when she’d envisioned marriage with Clive, long and comfortable and filled with hours of quiet study, when she should have known what he really wanted was a helpmeet and someone to bear his children. He’d only wanted an educated wife so he could show her off to his fellow dons as she served them tea.

She had even less idea of what Pascal wanted. She’d only known him for…she was too tired to calculate the hours, and too dispirited to think on the future any longer. Oh, for a thermos of coffee. And now they were in France. She could really have croissants, with thick creamy butter and clots of strawberry jam.

Pascal woke when she slowed the motor on the outskirts of a sizable town. He squinted at the sunlight and growled in French. His stubbled face and shadowed eyes made him look particularly villainous and bad-tempered. Lucilla grinned because she felt much the same. “We’ll have coffee soon.”

“And a bath,” he said, scrubbing at his face with one hand. “And a bed. If such are to be had.”

They soon discovered that hotel lodging was difficult to come by here, as well, but a concierge directed them to a lodging house that still had a few rooms. Posing as a married couple, by afternoon they were ensconced in a large attic room, a bit warm from the sunlight that poured through a
skylight, but clean and smelling of lavender and old wood, and enlivened by bouquets of bright poppies. Best of all, there was a shower, the prettiest Lucilla had ever seen, with brass fittings on three walls in the shape of lily blossoms, and tiled in green-and-white patterns like lacework.

Lucilla was nearly asleep in a borrowed linen nightgown when Pascal returned from his shower. He didn’t speak, but smoothed his hand over her wet hair, and stroked her face. She murmured, pleased, and reached her arms for him. He went into her embrace, tucking her close against him, before he said, “Lucilla. Please wake up.”

She blinked, her hand lazily curling on his shoulder. “Be quick about it.”

“The German army has crossed into Belgium. Your country and mine are now both at war with Germany and Austria.”

Lucilla closed her eyes again. She might not have forgiven him, had he spared her this news. They had little time left together now. She didn’t want to waste it in sleep. “Kiss me. And help me remove this gown.”

They woke in the wee hours of the morning and coupled once more, in a feverish and sweaty tangle of limbs that, in her fatigued haze, felt like a dream, even when their bodies struck together with enough force to shake the heavy iron bedstead. It was the sort of dream that is brighter and more vivid than reality, and that upon waking is so engraved in memory that it feels as if it were real. If only it were a dream, then she would not suffer the inevitable grief of their parting. Lucilla clamped her thighs on Pascal’s hips and locked her arms about his torso, hiding her face in his shoulder as she silently urged him on with her hips and fingernails; his fingers and cock, meanwhile, drove her higher and higher until she screamed her pleasure
into his skin. After, he turned onto his side and kissed her for an interminable interval, his hands tracing over her skin as if to imprint her body on his perfect memory. They broke apart only to gasp for breath before joining their mouths again. Lucilla thought that was to be the end, but hadn’t reckoned with Pascal’s vigor. In a quarter of an hour, he rose to the occasion again, and this time she took him from above, silent and fierce and angry that this had to end.

It was less than an hour until dawn when she dragged herself from his arms and tugged him down the hall into the bathroom, luckily deserted at this hour. She inspected his injured arm once more, then pulled him into the shower with her, where they soberly soaped each other, and washed each other’s hair. When her gentle, soapy handling brought Pascal erect again, Lucilla backed him against the shower door and took his cock in her mouth. She’d never done such a thing before, but they had no condoms with them, and she feared, besides, that coupling would be unsafe on the slippery floor. He tasted of clean flesh and his cries, even muffled by his teeth in his arm, were the sounds of someone torn apart with pleasure. The hard pressure of his cock’s head against her palate reminded her of having him deeply inside her sex, except that she was more in control of this and could lick and scrape and tease and pull on his cock and scrotum to such an extent that his knees failed him and they sank to the floor of the shower in a heap.

They’d intended to leave at dawn, but her vision blurred with exhaustion. She wouldn’t allow Pascal to reciprocate the pleasure she’d given him when they returned to their room. Together they made up the bed with fresh sheets she’d found in a closet, and tumbled into an exhausted heap, her head pillowed on his chest.

She slept until the afternoon. This time, Pascal woke her with aromatic coffee and rolls and an omelette on a tray. Unshaven, wearing a severely crumpled shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and with his bruised arm all the colors of the rainbow, he still looked delicious enough to make her mouth water. She tasted raspberry jam on his lips.

“Café au lait,” he said, placing a cup into her hand. He ripped a roll apart and buttered it for her. “The trains are running. Not often, but perhaps the train would be better than the motorcar. We can get to Le Havre by way of Rouen.”

Lucilla swallowed coffee and closed her eyes for a moment, in bliss at the smooth sweet milkiness. “You don’t have to go with me,” she said. “I could leave from Brest, or Dieppe.”

“With a great deal more trouble, and knowing no one at those ports,” he said, putting down her roll and picking up another for himself. He paused, with the bread held in one long-fingered hand. “You don’t want my help?”

“I don’t want you to feel you have to take care of me,” she said.

“We have had this discussion before,” he noted. “We have fucked, and now you wish to part? Have you considered my faults and taken me in dislike? Because I know you aren’t in the least foolish, and I can think of no other reason. What is the point of, of rabbiting across France alone—”

“Haring off,” she said. “Not rabbiting. I can take care of myself.”

He flicked his hand dismissively. “You do not need to prove to me that you are capable of taking care of yourself. Truly, do you want me to go away?”

His jaw was tight, and his brows drawn. Lucilla remem
bered tracing her fingers along the lines of his eyebrows in the night. “No.” She looked down into her coffee cup.

“Good, then we will stop this pointless arguing. We go to Le Havre, and my
oncle
Marius will find a berth for you. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said, ripping apart his buttered roll and stuffing half of it into his mouth.

Lucilla drained her coffee and cut herself a bit of omelette. It was dense with soft cheese and thin ham and fine herbs. For the next several minutes, they ate in silence. When she emerged from her troubled thoughts and glanced at Pascal, he was watching her, his fork lax in his hand.

She said, “It’s very good of you to offer your help, and your family’s.”

“You are welcome,” he said. He poked at the omelette with his fork. “I am not at all gracious. I do this because I’m selfish. I wish you to be safe. I would be unhappy if you were not.”

Lucilla swallowed the lump in her throat. His gaze burned straight through her. “When does the train depart for Rouen?”

The posted train schedule was overly optimistic, but the trains were running. One had only to be patient amid the tense, unusually large crowds. They bought tickets and drank coffee at the station as the sun set. Lucilla bought a pack of cards from an enterprising vendor and taught Pascal to play All Fives while they sat crammed onto a bench near the departures board. The snap of their cards vanished in the noisy clack of numbers being constantly changed on the board and the low roar of hundreds of conversations.

On the crowded train, Pascal used his long legs to secure seats for both of them, and for all the ride to Rouen, though she’d intended to converse, Lucilla dozed with her head on
his shoulder, waking only when he waved a sandwich beneath her nose sometime after midnight. The paper-thin slices of ham and dark mustard might as well have been paper, for all she tasted; the fizzy lemonade burned in her stomach, which was uneasy with nerves.

Pascal poked the crumpled sandwich paper into a pocket on the outside of his rucksack. “Sleep,” he said, his voice rough. “I will wake you at Le Havre.”

“It’s your turn to sleep,” she said. “I can play Patience.”

“I’m not tired,” he said. A moment passed, then he touched her cheek, tracing the shape of her cheekbone. Lucilla shivered. He said, sounding angry, “I would go with you if I could.”

“I know you must stay here.”

“I could leave. I have lived in England before.”

“You will go back to the army,” she said. “I understand that you must. Just as I will do what I must.”

Scowling, he turned his head toward the window. Lucilla slipped her arm into his and laced their fingers together, not caring if anyone saw. She would never see these people again. His hand tightened painfully. He did not speak again. Lucilla closed her eyes and fell into shallow, chaotic dreams.

Despite the early hour of their arrival, Le Havre was even more overwhelmed with travelers than the train station had been. She heard English spoken more than once, fragments carried to her on waves of the crowd’s ocean.
Have the tickets?…Where’s Teddy? I told you to watch…leaves on the hour, but I don’t believe…what shall we do…hold the bags…

Lucilla was glad enough to cling to Pascal with one hand and to her carpetbag with the other. She was gladder still when he led her away from the mobbed station and through a series of small side streets to his uncle’s house, a white two-
story cottage wedged tightly in a row of similar homes, each one featuring a different array of flowers in front. Pascal introduced her as a chemist and colleague, which garnered baffled looks from his uncle, aunt and three female cousins, but she was still offered kisses on both cheeks and fresh coffee and croissants and a chance to freshen up. She scrubbed her face and the back of her neck roughly with a cloth, hoping to wake up before she had to be polite to strangers.

Lucilla spoke French with some facility and understood it better, but their accents baffled her unless they spoke very slowly, so she smiled and nodded as often as she could. Pascal’s accent was the same, she noted, as he explained her needs to his uncle with a number of expressive hand gestures. His uncle departed soon after reassuring her that a berth would be easy to obtain, for him at least. Lucilla would have given him money for bribes, but he assured her it was not necessary; he was calling in favors.

Her lack of proper sleep had left her in a hazy, numb state. When one of the cousins took her by the arm and led her upstairs to a cramped loft, she was only barely aware of having her shoes unhooked for her as she drifted off to sleep, fully clothed and atop the coverlet.

“Lucilla,” Pascal said.

She patted the mattress next to her, but he wasn’t there. She rolled over and reached for him; he captured her hand and brought it to his lips. She shivered all through the center of her body, waking into a rush of sensual awareness. What was she to do without him?