The Secret Memoirs
Date: 07.02.2008
Keywords: Secret, Memoirs, The,
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
The Secret Memoirs of Elizabeth Bartlett
Chapter I.
I have lived a life of strange and fascinating adventure, of violent contrasts between abject subjugation and sublime command, of both the greatest pains and the greatest pleasures imaginable in the life of woman. But these pleasures were those unspeakable to society, those carnal pleasures, those deep, dark revels of the body that in our age are hid away and forever banished from the light of day. Much as I yearn to, I dare not speak of them aloud. Instead, it is to mute paper I commit my story, in expectation of the day when, perhaps, my name may rise from the page, and these scratches of ink conjure images of soft sanguine flesh and bodies locked in passion.
For the purpose at hand, little need be said of my first eighteen years upon this earth. I was an English country girl, raised first on my family's own modest farm until the death, first of my mother when I was six, and then my father when I was twelve. From then I grew up on the estate of my widower uncle Thomas Bartlett, a man of some wealth and also a stern, strict follower of the old sort of religion. Of my neighbors, none need be mentioned except Katherine, who was to become my best friend. Kat, as I called her, was two years older than me and much less ignorant of the ways of the world; even as I carried on in complete ignorance of all carnal matters, she was playing kissing games with the boys from the village; it fit our characters, somehow, that her hair was a playful blond, and mine a dark, rich brown. As we grew into the flower of young girlhood, Katherine's figure filled out to a voluptuous collection of curves, wonderfully matched by her sly and playful face.
I, on the other hand, grew more svelte and smooth, though my breasts and buttocks turned out full enough; I believe it is not too immodest to say that I was quite a pretty girl. By the time we were seventeen, Katherine resembled one of Boucher's coquettish nymphs, in appearance as well as character, while I, not tall or petit but admirably well-proportioned, possessed the passive grace of a Grecian nude—though, of course, my modest demeanor always kept me most resolutely clothed. (I am not sure the same could have been said for Kat.)
I was, indeed, a most modest young woman, and carefully kept so by my pious uncle Thomas. In Kat, however, I saw a hint of something strange and unimaginably forbidden, something I felt stirring, if only most faintly, within the depths of my own being.
* * *
In the Summer of 1866 I embarked on the first journey of my life. Uncle Thomas, shaking off some of his customary domesticity, decided it was high time for a grand tour of Europe and the Holy Land, and so we set off. With us were Katherine (and only Katherine, for while Thomas was willing to pay for her passage, even his generosity did not extend to treating her entire family) and another family of our neighbors by the name of Whipple, consisting of a mother, a father, and their young son.
We traveled through France and Italy, celebrating my eighteenth birthday in a searing hot Rome on the twenty-sixth of July. Our tours were perfunctory in the extreme, restricted, as they were, merely to viewing such ruins, churches and palaces as we could before returning to our place of lodging in the evening. But for a girl who had never left the English countryside it was more than enough.
From each stop we were conveyed to the next by the same steamship, the Galatea. Along the way a sort of society sprung up among the passengers. We attracted a young man by the name of John Grayfield to our expedition. Even then, I could not but notice that it seemed to be Katherine's bold charms, more than an interest in Biblical history, that persuaded him to join our tour of the Holy Land.
We arrived in Palestine in August and made our way through the various more or less uninteresting towns of the region. (The only attraction of these decrepit villages, it seems to me, is the attachment of their names to certain passages in a dusty old book.) John left us in Jerusalem as we prepared to cross the Sinai to Egypt—his constitution, he said, was not meant for desert voyages. So the rest of us set out across the dunes on camelback with two hired Bedouin guides armed with antique muskets showing us the way.
Here, however, is where my narrative breaks from the model of the usual travelogue. For as we passed through the broiling desert something happened that was to utterly change the course of my life.
We were three days into the desert. I was in the center of our little caravan, perched precariously on my camel, clothed only in a loose yellow walking dress and no corset, with my face shaded by a wide-brimmed straw hat—a loosening of sartorial rigor permitted by my uncle as an accommodation to the heat.
It was near mid-day with the sun pounding down when I heard a crack echo through the air.
I twirled my head around. One of the Bedouin guides rolled over in his saddle, dead. The other pulled his long musket from its sheath, but before he could bring it to his shoulder another shot pierced the sky and he, too, fell dead. I looked to my left. A dozen or more men swathed in robes and turbans streamed over the nearest dune, guns at the ready. A flurry of shots flew out.
Uncle Thomas drew a revolver from his side.
"Run, Elizabeth! Run!" he shouted.
Without thinking I kicked the flank of my camel, sending him racing forward. Though I heard what seemed like a thousands shots ringing out, I did not turn my head to see the struggle raging behind. Instead I rode as fast as I could—to where, I knew not. As the sound of gunfire faded in the distance another sound took its place: pounding hooves, and the yells of men fast on my trail.
I desperately kicked my camel in a wild attempt to outrun my pursuers. The chase was short. Suddenly I felt myself slipping; the camel tumbled into the sand, sending me sprawling. As I regained my senses I became terribly aware of the two black-robed men standing above me.
They wore smiles of malicious glee and spoke to one another in foul, barking voices. Their faces were shaded by their great turbans. Fear swept across me. Their burly hands grasped my shoulders and pushed my back into the sand. Their bodies pinned me to the ground. I squirmed. Then one of them, a man with a terrible scar across his cheek, slipped a great curved knife from his waist and held it to me bosom. I became absolutely still, except for the heaving of my chest with each of my short, panicked breaths.
The scarred Arab slipped the tip of his knife under the neckline of my dress. I though my life was surely about to end. But rather than driving it into my flesh, he pulled it violently away, cutting the cloth the ribbons. The other Arab grabbed hold of pieces of the mangled fabric and rent them apart with his powerful hands, while the other cut slit after slit in my dress with his knife. I was terrified. Soon nothing was left but shreds.
Beneath the ruins of my dress only a short chamise shielded my flesh from their touch. And this, too, was soon under attack. The scarred Arab made an incision in the fabric just above my navel; then, roughly but with unexpected precision, he carefully pulled the knife up, extending the incision between my breasts and up towards my neck. Every second I feared he would slip and send the blade slicing through my tender flesh.
When the scarred man had made the final cut through the neckline of my undergarment, the other instantly seized either side of the rent material and pulled it violently apart. I gasped. My breasts were suddenly exposed, naked to the desert air and to their eyes. No man had ever seen them before, those full mounds of softest ivory. To my terror was suddenly added a tremendous sense of shame, such as I had never felt before.
The two men's mouths curled in vicious grins. Their calloused hands fell onto my virgin flesh, grasping my tender breasts. I recoiled, but there was nothing I could do. I did not have any idea what it was they wanted to do to me, but I knew that whatever it was I would have no choice but to submit.
And then another gunshot rent the air. The two men jumped to their feet. I looked up in a daze. There was a man on horseback, astride a magnificent black horse like none I had ever seen—and the man, too, was like a vision. He was tall and dark, dressed from head to foot in gleaming white robes. In one hand was a raised, smoking pistol. At his side were a sword and dagger, each in a jeweled sheath. With the sun behind him I could not make out his face.
The two men in black robes pointed at me and barked something. The man on horseback said something in return, with a deep voice that was even, yet filled with resolution. The others walked away from me, mounted their camels, and rode of across the dunes.
The man in white dismounted his horse and walked to where I lay half-naked in the sand. He knelt by my side and calmly drew his dagger. I was terrified, once again, for my life, certain that he had come to put me to death. But instead he slipped the tip in the slit cut into my chamise and drew it down, from my navel to the hem. When the cut was completed, he pulled the entire undergarment—split now from top to bottom down the middle—and threw it behind him.
I knew not what to do. Her I was, lying naked as Eve in the desert underneath this great, strange man. He had a thin black mustache. His dark brown eyes had a burning intensity I had never seen before. For what seemed like a very long while he merely looked at me. In spite of myself, I felt an unfamiliar fascination stirring in my belly.
The man put his arms around me and pulled my face to his. His lips met mine—the first time I had ever been kissed. He pressed himself against me in a long, deep embrace, as if the passion I could feel raging in his heart were passing from his body to mine. What will I had to resist died at that moment.
He kissed me again, and then again, each time lingering over my lips before parting.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next
Keywords: Secret, Memoirs, The,