A Fallen Woman. Nancy Carson

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СКАЧАТЬ see Louise next time. You know how it is – time and tide…’

      With little enthusiasm for leaving, Benjamin swung his legs out of bed and stood up. He grabbed his long johns from the bedrail and pulled them on, then his vest, then his shirt, which he buttoned up and tucked into the long johns.

      ‘Shall you pop back later?’ Maude asked, fingering the pearl necklace – a recent gift from Benjamin.

      ‘Course, if I get the chance. Failing that, tomorrow.’

      She nodded her understanding, reminded that she was just a kept mistress, and that circumstances, maybe even of the marital kind, might prevent his presence.

      ‘Has your beautiful wife decided what she’s going to wear for that wedding you’re going to?’ There was grudge in her tone. The wedding, which was to Maude irrelevant, was to occupy him and frustratingly keep him from visiting her. If only the day would quickly arrive when she herself was openly regarded as Benjamin’s official companion, instead of his closet mistress.

      ‘How should I know?’ he answered with a shrug. ‘I imagine she and her dressmaker will have concocted something between them.’

      It was in his interests to appear indifferent to his wife’s couture so as not to arouse Maude’s jealousy too much; Maude could be a handful, and might even withhold her favours for a day or two. A mistress was for pleasure and a little tenderness, to spice up one’s otherwise dull life and add a bit of comfort to it, not to be cold, indifferent and a source of irritation or enforced celibacy. He suffered enough celibacy at home.

      ‘She must cost you a tidy penny in silks,’ Maude remarked pointedly.

      He made no reply as he pulled on his trousers and buttoned up the fly.

      ‘I don’t know how she’s got the nerve,’ she added for good measure, her scorn as edged as a shard of glass.

      Benjamin shrugged again and, without meeting her eyes, decided it might behove him to act a little stupid. ‘How do you mean? For going to the dressmaker, or for presenting me with the bill?’ He pulled his braces onto his shoulders.

      ‘She’s got you for a nincompoop.’

      ‘Oh, I’m no nincompoop, Maude,’ he declared, irked at her indictment. ‘I’m just biding my time.’ He began attaching his collar.

      ‘Biding your time, my foot.’ Maude sat up, striving but failing to conceal her own agitation. She turned to adjust the pillows behind her while Benjamin’s eyes lingered on her breasts, full and round, bouncing with tantalising pliability as she twisted her naked torso. ‘Why ever you had her back after she left you I’ll never know.’

      ‘She was expecting a child.’

      ‘Yes, her second…But whose child? Not yours.’

      ‘Oh? Who else’s could it have been?’ He reached for his necktie, also hanging on the bedrail.

      Haughtily, Maude shook her mane of mousy hair. Here was the perfect opportunity to really make him see. ‘Benjamin,’ she began, leaning forward and pronouncing his name with charged emotion, ‘in the first place, your beautiful wife left you for another man, and she came back when that man spurned her just as soon as he knew she was carrying his child. Either he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, have anything more to do with her. So she came back to you. It’s the easiest thing in the world for a woman to dupe her husband into believing the child she’s carrying is his. She did that to you, and you fell for it good and proper.’

      ‘You don’t know it for a fact, Maude,’ he replied defensively. The notion that somebody might have made a cuckold of him he dismissed, for he considered himself too smart to be duped by a mere woman, however much she might be admired and desired by other men. So he tried to convince himself that Aurelia could not have been unfaithful, that it was not in her nature to be unfaithful. Yet he tried to recall the times he might have coupled with her, rare as they were, during the time when she must have conceived.

      ‘You don’t have to be Sir Isaac Newton to work it out, Benjamin,’ Maude went on. ‘I know what women are capable of, even if you don’t. Whenever you went away on business, she’d be off as well, flying her kite somewhere with somebody else. Some nights she didn’t even come back home.’

      ‘Hearsay, Maude. That’s only what Mary, that damned unreliable slut of a maid we used to have, told you. She was a mischievous little bitch with an axe to grind, and the biggest liar in Christendom to boot…’

      ‘I lived in that house as well, Benjamin, remember. I was nanny to your son, almost from the moment he was born. I knew what was going on.’

      He paused, pondering again the strength of the allegations, and the conviction with which Maude delivered them. ‘If Aurelia had been unfaithful I’d have known,’ he said with dwindling certainty. ‘She’s a fine-looking young woman, so it ain’t surprising men fancy her, but who on earth could she have been carrying on with?’

      ‘I would have thought that obvious.’

      ‘Well, it ain’t obvious to me. Pray, enlighten me.’

      ‘Clarence Froggatt, who else? That nincompoop whose wedding you’re going to…She was engaged to him once, you told me so yourself…’

      ‘You think she was seeing Clarence Froggatt behind my back?’

      ‘Yes, for ages.’

      ‘Never.’

      ‘Oh, I’m sure of it.’

      Benjamin pondered the suggestion a second or two more. ‘But it doesn’t add up,’ he said eventually. ‘He would hardly be marrying that girl Harriet Meese. I mean to say, compared to Aurelia she’s a gargoyle. God must’ve given her the plainest face he could find, and then hit it with a shovel. So why would he settle for a plain Jane if he could have a pretty one? It ain’t in a man’s nature. Aurelia is a good-looking young woman, even you have to admit that.’

      ‘But maybe he realised he could never have Aurelia – she being already married to you…Anyway, as far as her looks are concerned, beauty is only skin deep,’ Maude added with another outpouring of scorn, for she could never admit that Aurelia was beautiful.

      ‘But your beauty goes deeper, eh, Maude?’ He winked at her and grinned, in an effort to remove the intensity, which was becoming rampant in the discussion.

      ‘Oh, go on with you.’ Maude allowed herself a smile; there really was no doubt whom he preferred bedding, and the knowledge induced a renewed warm glow. She was reassured that at least she had this hold over him, this delectable sexual allure. He kept coming back for more. He loved it, and so did she. ‘So I might see you later, then?’

      He picked up his jacket, went over to her and kissed her. ‘I reckon,’ he grinned, and tiptoed down the narrow, twisting staircase.

      * * *

      Benjamin Augustus Sampson, twenty-seven years old by this time, was the sole issue of the late Benjamin Prentiss Sampson, and thus the sole beneficiary to the old man’s estate. Part of that inheritance was the once thriving Sampson Fender and Bedstead Works, which the son Benjamin had contrived to expand, albeit unprofitably, into the new and challenging world of bicycle manufacture. For young Benjamin Augustus СКАЧАТЬ