a pathless comet, and a curse

“I did it because it pleased me to separate the two of you and because I found Alleyn himself an unsuitable companion for a young man in my care. I had known you might find such a friend at university; I had already reconciled it to myself. It was Marion who was unsuitable for the part.”

“Then you’ll be disappointed to know you have achieved quite the opposite. If you find Marion Alleyn pleasing enough for a bedfellow, then so have I, and I have no remorse for it, nor any care for who you might prefer for me.”

The Earl had fashioned him in his image. Edward knew now how this could be so, and he knew that Holland feared that thought just the same, that he had transmitted some defect of willfulness or sin despite his occasional best efforts. Here in his father’s London rooms, he did not bother to lower his voice — his agitation was too hot, and he had no real experience of what it meant to have neighbors on either side.

“I am a grown man, with my own habits. I knew him for what he was within minutes of our meeting, though it would be more accurate to say we had met before. I know the young man’s family very well indeed.”

“You are such a fine judge of character, almost a prodigy. Did you think I would be shocked that you took him to bed? Did you think I did not know what you are?”

The Earl had taken Marion to see him in his abject state, like some men show their guest the sports of nature they collect, locked up in cabinets. After that, the two of them had gone away, and Edward had been left alone. He had listened to them carry on, in the nicely furnished rooms above his prison — or he had imagined it that way, and invented the kind of distant sounds that carry through an old aristocratic house at night.

Holland sat before him seeming perfectly unbothered — one of his books lay on the blotter, and he went about opening its uncut pages with his penknife.

“I am many things. You may learn my reputation for yourself; you’re certainly old enough. Your Marion is no John the Baptist, but only a vicious young man with questionable politics. That is all.”

Edward placed his hands against the Earl’s desk, looking into his face with full youthful fierceness. “You thought it would break my heart. You thought I would be too shocked to carry on.”

“I taught you a lesson, and I hope you will not soon forget it. Marion was not your friend any more than he was mine.”

Edward set his brave young face and drew into his voice a strength and intensity he did not quite feel — though he found he did not care after all whether they were overheard, in this strange place peopled with curious strangers on all sides.

“You haven’t taught me anything, and I haven’t broken with Marion over it. Marion is closer to me than ever. I’ve known him, and he has known me, in every way a man can — he has done things to me for which I do not know the proper names, and I have done the same to him."

You are being very childish if you think this can shock me. If you knew even a little of my reputation in polite society, you would not try to make me blush with your reports of buggery.”

Holland put his penknife away very carefully in its locked drawer, as though Edward might snatch it away and cut his throat with it. Edward snorted.

“You have a jealous nature. You would be the first to admit it. Don’t pretend you didn’t presume to make me jealous too.”

“I’ve known the young man myself. Only an innocent would think there was anything left under the sun to shock me. Did he tell you what we did together, your sweet Irish rebel?

“You used him as a man uses a boy for his pleasure. I never doubted you would do it, and that you would do it to spite me. I’ve no doubt you enjoyed each other, but I have enjoyed him since, and I have enjoyed him more than you have.”

“Tell me, then, what he did to you that was so shocking.”

Edward martialled his face, raising his chin. He was eager for a fight, and he knew it; accordingly, he dredged up the ugliest language he knew. “I fucked him, and he fucked me. I took his prick inside me. I let Marion fuck me, and I’ll do it again.”

“Then you are every inch a university man. Is there more than that? Have you more fresh discoveries? Have you invented some new kind of buggery?”

Holland laughed, a dark rich laugh marked with genuine amusement — Edward felt his cheeks begin to color at it and bit down savagely. His frame of reference for perverse acts was not broad. Edward knew all the sordid acts of Scripture and those his education could furnish to a serious young mind — that the concubine Phyllis rode Aristotle like an ass and that when discovered, sodomites were put into the stocks. He knew Richardson’s Clarissa and the own coarse jokes of his classmates, and he knew that whatever lay between himself and the Earl of Tyne was not licit — that it had no name, and that it could not even be described. Marion had touched on it in his painfully forthright way — whatever relations he might have enjoyed with Alleyn from their last candid conversation onward, they would be forever altered by the knowledge of what had passed between the man he knew to be his friend and the man whom he knew to be his father. It was not a deed done out of depravity or even simple mutual desire but as a conscious act of cruelty against Edward himself.

If the Earl of Tyne took pleasure in cruelty, then Edward might do the same. To find enjoyment in one’s own suffering seemed suitably perverse — and his indignant anger led him to state the intimacy he had once enjoyed with another person besides Holland in terms as strong as possible. If he had wanted it he could have had Marion in his bed and some dozen others besides, he had not been kept cloistered, his life at university was no walled garden. The two of them had scarcely even kissed, himself and Marion Alleyn, but all the things they might have done, and might do for spite if the Royal Navy ever relinquished its grip on the man —

Edward felt that spite growing within himself, and he did not like it, but he let it ride over him anyway. His voice had taken on a throaty quality, and his body thrummed with uneasy energy that left him pacing back and forth before Holland’s desk.

“More than that. He beat me. I let him beat me like a schoolboy and I enjoyed it. I let him strike me as much as he pleased, for his own pleasure and mine. He knew me that way.”

“Can he possibly know you any deeper than I do?”

But Holland would not look at him. Edward felt the wild impulse to take his face in his hands, as the Earl had so recently done with him, and to force Holland to look him in the eye.

“You don’t know me at all. You don’t know what I’m capable of.”

“I will call on you again when it pleases me. You have much to learn, and now I have less cause to regret what I might do. Consider yourself dismissed.”

But the next day came and departed, all without event — in his rooms, Edward took his supper of cold meat and strong tea with the expectation that some further confrontation might await him, and that he would need all the strength available to him. He even thought of taking a little wine, or sherry, or anything else that might stir his spirit for the matter at hand, but all his body seemed lain over with a kind of queer anticipation, a second cousin to dread. He did not know what had come over him to make him say such things, besides anger, and the spirit of perversity. Perhaps Holland had avoided his eyes because the alternative would have been to laugh in his face — perhaps the pair of them had laughed then, those years ago at Tyne, at the thought of him.

The bitter tea had made him drowsy rather than sharpening his senses, and the uneasy state of waiting left him with a pain in the head — it seemed he had only just laid himself down for a moment on the couch, still in his clothes with only the neckcloth loosened a little and his shoes set aside, when he found himself sinking into sleep.

He knew only darkness and the sensation of rough handling — he jerked his head frantically but insensibility overcame him before he could struggle much. The next time, Edward roused only a little; he was still in darkness, but he perceived steady movement, the clatter of horses’ hooves. He was in a carriage, and he was not alone there. Once or twice, a cold clean-smelling hand stole out to stroke his cheek or to adjust the cloth of his blindfold — it could only be a man’s hand, broad but not coarse.

He had passed through panic, into a kind of cold apprehension that this was what he had waited up for — for another outrageous gesture and another display of cruel treatment, of what kind he knew not. His only companion was unmistakable. It could only be the Earl — by the smell of him, and the sound of his placid breathing, but he was so drowsy that he feared this too might only be a dream —

“Where are you taking me? Where are we going?”

“I only sent you away to university that you might be educated. Seeing as the curriculum is not to your liking there, I must tutor you myself. Lean your head back, Edward, and rest.”

He could do no other. Sleep came over him once again, nauseatingly close heavy sleep.

*

He awoke again to the pungent smell of salts wafted beneath his nose — the painful reek of it made him instinctively recoil and at once shed the traces of that sickly sleep. Wakefulness was worse, for when he did he found himself to be upright but bound. His breeches were down around his knees, like a schoolboy’s, and his shirt had been rucked up to expose his narrow soft backside. The shock of it raised in him the memory of his university hazing — how it had been to be buffeted by many hands, and treated roughly, exposed before strangers whose names and faces he wouldn’t recognize later. If the Earl had brought him here to be disgraced in front of strangers, that would have been too much to bear; he would have died from it, he would have dashed out his brains rather than be exposed again before strangers. But when Edward listened closely he heard only Holland’s familiar footsteps — in the distance, he could hear the clatter of passing traffic that suggested they were still in London, the cries of street hawkers outside, and the creak of other persons moving about on some higher floor. Now, at least, they were alone.

“I would be much obliged to you if you would uncover my eyes now,” Edward said.

He could smell leather polish, and something else besides that did not please him. He was trembling, not from fear but the anticipation of action — it wasn’t at all clear If Holland meant to burn him with a brand, or flog him senseless, or simply to look over his body with those hard affectionate eyes of his and look his fill on Edward’s exposed parts.

“Since you have asked so nicely,” Holland said, “I will.”

Edward felt Holland’s body moving past him in the muffled darkness, stepping over some obstacle and untying the knots that kept his eyes covered. The touch of those hands made him realize he had been blindfolded with his own neckcloth, which was somehow more embarrassing than being bound with any other thing, even the stout soft leather thongs that held his wrists in place.

Holland stepped back, and the cloth came away. Edward blinked several times in pain the moment his eyes were uncovered, but the light was scarcely any brighter than it had been before — he could see nothing before him but a single lamp, and a shabby little room with some small furnishings that evoked a faded grandeur. There was a leather divan with a few assorted implements, and a dressing table with basin and jug, but nothing was as striking as the device to which he found himself bound.

The device could only have been devised for punishment, but it would have to be strange punishment indeed. The piece was padded with leather and studded with tidy brass nails more fitting to a pretty piece of furniture than a barbarous device, but the hard lines of its shape savored of strange cruelty, like those sinister devices to which Christian martyrs once found themselves strapped at the last ordeal. It was fashioned something like a ladder, to which he was tied face-first at hand and foot — if he shifted his limbs he might rest his weight against the padded leather bars that made each rung and thereby relieve some of his discomforts, but hardly all of it. More than that, it left him perfectly exposed to the front as well. The very state of exposure had his prick stirring, and that brought tears of shame to his eyes that made him regret parting with the blindfold.

It occurred to him suddenly that he had not come there on his own, and that other hands must have carried his drowsy body into its present position. The Earl had a terrible strength in his body, but not enough to toss him about like a man of straw. He had a murky half-memory of hands fastening on his wrists, soft white hands like a well-bred woman’s — but what did he know of women, here, and what manner of woman could inhabit such a place as this? If he strained, he could glimpse the Earl behind him, going about some business he could not fully make out — going over the utensils with which he had determined to torture him, or whatever he had planned to do with him for his willful disobedience.

At length, Holland spoke to him, pleasantly enough.

“Do you know what this is, Edward? It’s only a ginger-root. I am carving it with my penknife, that it may better serve my purpose.” The explanation was almost superfluous — the smell of it was keen in the air, and its fragrance was hot and cutting like a bruised nettle-leaf. “If I am to beat you for your own pleasure, I will do it well, but this will be your incentive to mind your manners while you are beaten. What did he hit you with, your Marion?”

“A whip,” Edward said, annoyed. “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten.”

“What manner of whip?”

“Oh, does it matter? I don’t want to think of it now, I want to forget him entirely.”

What would Marion think, to see him like this?

Holland came up behind him again, brushing against his naked thighs and backside — he was stripped to his shirtsleeves but otherwise dressed as he had been before, so not so much time had passed as Edward might have initially supposed.

“You will hold this for me, and not let go of it.”

Holland parted his buttocks with a cool hand and found the tight entrance of him that had been hitherto unknown — not by Marion or any other person. Edward made a cry of objection, but it was no use for what came to pass.

The knob of ginger fit into him snugly — substantial enough in size to cause discomfort as it pressed past the tight band of his fundament, but not so big as, Edward supposed, a man’s prick, or any of the other tools that might serve. Its fragrant juices left it beneficially slick, if cold, and the cool intrusion lent the tableau he was in an edge of absurdity. The indignation of it made him choke, and he had a mind to force it out again, but Holland pressed the root in deeper with a hard probing finger beside and that sensation of being pierced and stretched left Edward at present too ashamed to struggle more.

“I think you’ve lied to me, Edward. Since you insist on behaving yourself like a boy, I will spare you heavier chastisements, and only give you a birching.”

The tingling cold had begun to pass, as the hot shame of his body took precedence — his bare skin rose in gooseflesh,

“Fine, then. Do what you will with me if you have made up your mind.”

Though he spoke bravely, summoning all his defiance, Edward’s heart was filled with dread. Holland had chosen the birch, out of who knew how many other frightening possibilities — a bundle of rods bound together to serve for a handle, branches stripped of their leaves and chosen for their cutting resilience. When Holland allowed the implement to trace down his naked leg, the touch of it made him shiver.

“It has been soaked in salt-water. This is for your sake. I shall give you a dozen cuts, and I must ask you not to struggle. Are you ready?”

Edward hardly had time to ready himself, for his thoughts were flying — whether he should cry out in earnest or whether he should apologize for his hasty words and spare himself some unthinkably strange fate. The first blow was delivered with whisking lightness, so sudden and sweeping that he did not immediately register it as a pain — it felt like more of a strange scattering, like sleet. He cried out, “Oh!”, not from pain but surprise, and it made Holland laugh.

“Be as loud as you like. This house is a brothel; so are its neighbors on all sides.

But once the groundwork had been laid the smarting skin took in the sensations more keenly. Sometimes the blows crossed over one another, or the fine long twigs caught at him when the rod withdrew — each cut raised a fresh cluster of welts, and each successive impact of the birch caused him to flinch and jerk against his bonds. His breathing quickened, and with each pass of the cruel bundled rods, his backside grew more scarlet, smarting and flushed with the red wash of his shame.

Edward strained to look over his shoulder, to catch a glimpse of his father and to anticipate what might come next. His upright position compelled him to tense his muscles somewhat, and that tension through the pit of his groin made the intrusion of the ginger-root ever more palpable. The distinct sensation of warmth had begun to grow within him, as the plant’s fresh juices began their terrible work. Holland stepped in close to him, planting his feet almost between Edward’s spread legs, and he took him by the hair. He held him there firmly, tugging with enough force to exert steady pressure but not sharp pain — Edward cried out in surprise and not a little fear, but it had drawn his attention surely enough.

Holland spoke from very near behind him, almost at the nape of Edward’s sweating neck:

“Don’t turn your head. There is no one here but me, Edward. Only me.”

Upon releasing him, Holland’s cold hand passed over Edward’s hot backside and made his face blush scarleter still with its candid squeezing.

Edward resolved himself not to cry out anymore, or to struggle in his bonds, only to endure. He reasoned that these things might give Holland the satisfaction he sought, that of proving for certain that Edward was a novice in cruelties and not a young university libertine, and he would not give him that pleasure. Still, the muscles of his arms tightened after each impact, like the vibration of the blow running through him, and his buttocks clenched around the knob of ginger-root. The humiliation alone would have smarted, but the intrusion of an unfamiliar object in such an intimate part of himself amplified the shame tenfold — its intention could only be to humiliate, for what else was there?

After the first few strokes, the sensation of the birch had changed from a stark pain to a queer, glowing heat — he could almost see the pain in his mind’s eye, as his eyes were shut and his pinched-up face turned downward, and the rhythm of it grew familiar. Holland’s limping footsteps would come as if he rocked forward a little for the swing, and then the next cut came down — he knew now why it was called that. It was no shock that schoolboys and servant girls could bear such rude treatment, but to suffer it as a gently-bred young man of twenty years was unbearable.

Though its penetration couldn’t be so deep or obtrusive as it felt, still he felt the sensation of the ginger, its tingling burn increasing to a keener, brighter discomfort. Edward could not help himself from clenching tighter, though it made him burningly aware of the intrusion for another time. He set about unlocking his knees and resolving with all his body to accept each blow as it came — but so surrendered, he found pleasure infinitely harder to bear than pain. Pain could be borne with a bitter resolution, but pleasure of such a humiliating kind undercut all his resolve. He braced himself with legs trembling, struggling to find his footing like a newborn colt — the burning pain now rising to a peak, and the stiff intrusion leaving him more erect and more humiliated with every reverberating blow, so that momentary respite was no relief at all.

The birch being set aside, Holland advanced on him, and the sound of his footfalls caused Edward to tremble — the anticipation of being seized by the hair made him stiffen, but it was no less agonizing when Holland’s hands came to caress him instead, to stroke the untouched small of his back and to make the downy hairs there prickle in exquisite awareness.

“Have I warmed you up sufficiently?” Holland asked. His hand dug into the softest part of Edward’s bottom, exciting a wave of fresh pain — the smarting agony suffused the hot skin of his thighs, as they pressed together in shameful modesty.

Edward could say nothing that was not a whimper or a groan. He was burning all at once, within and without, and the mad heat had excited his animal desire whether he willed it or not — no man could have willed this, no man could have wanted it, but Holland must have seen in his heart what Edward was pressing him to do without even being aware of it himself. He had incited the Earl to this treatment because to be beaten and groped by the man he still felt such natural affection for was nevertheless easier to bear than not seeing him at all.

He had made some inadvertent resistance in the process of relaxing his muscles, that threatened to dislodge the source of his burning torment, and Holland must have noticed — at once he pressed between his buttocks, finding the slick and smarting hole there and pressing the ginger-root still deeper into him. Edward cried out, both in shock at the sensation of renewed penetration and at the awareness that his prick was now fully erect from it.

Holland continued. “Dishonest men, it’s said, treat their horses with ginger to make their gait more lively in front of their buyers. I do not know whether I believe it. Have I enlivened you?”

Holland commenced again with his strokes, but the tipping point had already been reached. The heat suffused and excited Edward from the tips of his ears to the trembling muscles of his thighs; his balls tightened with each cutting impact, and his aching prick jutted. The shame and the anger left him with his face bathed in hot tears — his prick standing helplessly in a state of full erection, streaming with spend but unrelieved by climax.

“Touch me,” Edward gasped, “touch me and be done with it,” but if Holland heard him he did not heed him — the Earl withdrew a handkerchief or something like it from his pocket and dabbed at the cheeks of Edward’s scarlet bottom. For a terrible instant, Edward could only imagine he was bleeding in great torrents, and that what ran down his legs was blood and not sweat and spend, and that Holland was taking for himself a souvenir, like those brutal men who swarmed upon the headless Charles the First to daub their handkerchiefs in his royal blood.

“Oh, I wish that you wouldn’t,” Edward said, quite stunned — but when the Earl proceeded to show the handkerchief to him, there was only a small amount of blood, such as a bad scratch might produce. He held it before his face, to be certain he saw it.

“I’ve taken your maidenhead, of a kind. That was the last of twelve strokes, Edward, and it did not take such a long time after all. I should have made you count them, one by one.”

Edward’s voice shook, and his blood seemed to all be drawn into his loins, all in one terrible pulse. He felt he understood murder now, not only the impetus for it but the confused anger that might remove a man from his reason. He was there himself, on the brink of some terrible deed — sweating, shaking, burning with shame.

“When you have released me, I will shoot you. You shouldn’t have done this to me — I will shoot you and I won’t be sorry.”

“I don’t think you will,” the Earl said, but his

“I shall come when you least expect it and end you. I cannot go on like this. Oh, Holland—“

His climax came upon him, even as his vision went white, losing all color and clarity in a great shuttering surge. Even as he spent himself, Edward slumped, sagging in his bonds with a pathetic bodily grace like St. Sebastian. The young man had fainted.

*

Edward Clare woke again to careful hands and the touch of a soft cloth. Once again he was in unfamiliar rooms, with an unfamiliar herbaceous smell in the air, and hot water rapidly turning to cool as it ran down his skin. He realized in alarm and relief that he was no longer in that little room with its shabby furnishings — no longer bound to that queer apparatus with its stiff leather straps — but also that it was day again. Though he had never been in this particular room before, he recognized the paint and plaster as proper to a residence and not whatever place of sin he had been carried off to in the night. The sunlight was creeping in past the curtains, but it was only a wan Early light and not the unhappy glare of noonday.

Edward did not need to ask who now held him in his arms, even as his sore eyelids struggled to remain open and his pale eyelashes fluttered at the edges of his vision. The smell of that undeniably male body was nevertheless refined and pleasant, with the faint smell of man’s sweat relieved and lightened by that of vetivert and neroli. He knew it, and for a moment he was past the horizon of all thinking.

“Where have you taken me now?” His throat was very dry, and his whole body ached, which was no surprise. His backside had been so torturously treated that he could not begin to imagine either standing up or sitting down.

“I keep a residence here in London, for when it suits me. You know that. This is my bedroom in it, you simply haven’t been here before.”

The young man endeavored to sit up, but weakness overpowered him at once; his backside was a smarting mass, still tender and scarlet, and he felt it must be crossed with bleeding welts from the bitter salted branches of the birch. The Earl himself was handling him most solicitously — washing the sweat from Edward’s limbs and drying him with a soft cloth, attending to one area of naked skin at a time like he was making an orderly map of him. He was in shirtsleeves once again, but had changed into fresh linen, and not far off by the crackling hearth another clean shirt lay over a screen to warm. The sensuality of it struck Edward all at once as ridiculous — he put out a hand to grab Holland’s sleeve, halting him in his work. His wrists ached.

“Have you hurt me?”

“I haven’t done you any lasting injury. Your soreness will deepen with time, and the welts will come to ache more than they do now, but I haven’t crippled you.”

“I didn’t think you would,” Edward said. “You would kill me first. You told me once that you choked my mother when she asked you to.”

“Do you think me always such a conscientious lover?” Holland remarked dryly, but the tight sardonic edge of it gave Edward a pang. “I would not do that for you, Edward, not even if you asked me nicely.”

“Is this how you’re accustomed to giving scandal, Holland?”

“No, it is not. I am a cruel man, and I cannot say I do not relish cruelty for its own sake, but that is no longer my method. Do you remember what I said? I am going to turn you over now, so don’t struggle.”

And he did, rolling Edward over in an uneasy tangle of young limbs — though exhausted and enervated he was not pleased to be handled like an inanimate object, turned this way and that, and he made some protest. The Earl rubbed lightly-scented balm into the welts crossing Edward’s thighs and backside, stirring up fresh pain in the process but also a queer sort of comfort — the steady kneading of those hands, that so recently had struck stinging blows in those same places, and the balm itself seemed to do a sort of work. The balm smelled like green herbs, like one of the compounds of fragile leaves which men call weeds that the cook at the old house had kept for burns and bruises. Edward found himself growing almost drowsy again, exhausted as he was, but to his embarrassment found himself stirring too — how strange it seemed, that he could still feel such emotion as embarrassment after what had been done to him so recently

“Will there be scars?”

“Unlikely. A dozen strokes is not so much; I gave you twelve good cuts, but my intention was only to warm your backside, not to maim you.”

Edward wondered if Marion’s father had given him worse ones — but the thought made him shudder, and he could hardly ask whether the birching of young men compared to the birching of boys. When Holland had finished anointing his backside and thighs, the Earl’s slick fingers found the entrance of him once again, making Edward stiffen and cry out — but the burning discomfort had long since passed away, it was only habit that made him clench his muscles and stiffen his back.

The circling of those slick fingers eased through his resistance, and he found himself easing open, aching with dull pleasure rather than smarting at the intrusion. The eagerness of his own body was shocking to him — it seemed strange that he might experience pleasure at all like this, not the ambiguous pleasure of embraces and kisses but an intensity of physical pleasure he had never known before.

“I’ve used you cruelly, just the same,” Holland said, almost offhandedly as though they were at table together or riding in the same carriage. “I would have buggered you senseless just then if it would not have had undesirable consequences for my own person. How comely you looked, marked out in scarlet. I wish you could have seen it for yourself.”

“Perhaps a mirror next time.”

“Don’t presume.” Holland slipped another finger inside him, making him groan. His inner passages were still tender, but they were all too ready to yield — Holland’s fingers pressed past that burning band and slid inside easily, working in and out with a confounding steadiness. Holland’s thumb stroked the seam of his balls, where nature had knit him together — at once he thrust in with his two fingers and pressed down on the spot just below, both firm and gentle. The sensation that followed was a deeper and duller kind of pleasure-pain, issuing from a deep and secret place of which Edward had heretofore been unaware. It had never occurred to him before, in his passing education in the sins of others, that such a thing might give pleasure at all.

Holland began to work against him with a steady, kneading pressure — Edward squirmed and twisted but the ache of new bruises kept him exactly as he was wanted, and the building pressure on that arcane spot brought building pleasure as well to the pit of him. Edward gasped for breath, bracing himself against the Turkish carpets — Holland’s arm moved, and his chest rose and fell against Edward’s side, but he did not relent. Edward did not ask him to. He groped for his own prick, rutting against his hand in a sprawl.

Holland pressed his face to Edward’s throat, with such an intensity that he feared he might be bitten, and spoke: “I have marked you out for my own pleasure; I have brought you up for sin. Forgive me for my excesses.”

“If you want my forgiveness, you must fuck me and be done with it.” Edward gritted his teeth, arching his body in a gesture of self-conscious advance — twisting onto his side and drawing up his legs to present his aching posteriors. Whether it was to shock or truly to provoke he didn’t know — the motion seemed as natural as anything, as if nature itself had taught him.

“I will not do that,” Holland explained as if it were very natural, “but I will do this much for you.”

Holland held him against himself, letting his hands travel freely over Edward’s naked body — from the hollow of his throat to the swell of his breast, pinching his blushing nipples until they stiffened at the touch and then caressing the high slope of his belly. With his other hand, Holland traced the marks which he himself had made, as if examining his work with infinite care — there was a little sadness in it, but more of that physical desire he had shown before, stoking Edward’s own even as it fueled his shame.

“Oh—“

Edward began to cry out, but he stifled himself, almost in a sob.

Holland reached around past Edward’s hip, cupping his prick in his hand, and drew him off with a deliberate care to match his capacity for deliberate cruelty. The dual motion felt more like being operated upon than loved, as though he were simply manipulating him further to relieve his discomfort, and that was enough. Edward found that he did not want to kiss him, or to be held by him, or caressed by him, or any of the exchanges they had once enjoyed in that twilight state of half-recognition. He only wanted to be had and to be used indiscriminately, and then to sleep, to die.

Edward spent himself, all in a jet, and Holland kissed the silver slick of his spendings from his soft white belly.

They lay together there among the carpets, exhausted again from the night’s adventures and too spent for shame. Was this where Holland bedded his conquests or did he sleep alone in this great chamber and hunt his quarry in pleasure gardens and parlors? There was certainly no trace of a woman in the room, only those necessities which any gentleman would require.

Holland’s fingers stroked his hair, worrying it into damp locks. Edward was dimly aware of Holland’s own arousal, as he had been the night before, from the sound of his breathing and the soft pressure of his body — but it was not forced upon him, and he did not resent it, he only rested with it a while as a new fact. At length Holland spoke, tracing a great blunt hand down Edward’s chest as though observing the shadows it cast by firelight.

“I am sorry if I really did you any hurt, either through my familiarity with your Marion or through last night’s adventure. Blood is not everything, and bruises heal, but I don’t expect you will forgive me.”

“I didn’t know such places as that one existed,” Edward said, quite truthfully. “I didn’t understand what you meant by any of it, or what I meant in the first place.”

“In my day, only a jaded old libertine would make use of such inventions, or one who had exhausted his stamina entirely and otherwise could not stir. I considered myself advanced beyond my years, so far as cruelty, and I found the distance imposed by the rod to be agreeable to me. I would spend my nights at a certain club in J—— Street, where young girls might be had for flogging for a sum of ten guineas — I do not need to justify such expenditures to you, I only say so to illustrate that mode of life — and married women for nothing at all, their love of the rod was so strong. I might have had any youth I liked, writhing under such blows as I dealt then.”

“Were you ever beaten then, for pleasure?”

“No, never. My appetites have recovered some of their scope since such wandering days, but it is only that I know my own mind these days, and have no need of seeking out such specialized premises. You have driven me to it again after all these years. When I was a boy my guardians thought themselves to be the rightful owners of my body, and that they might do with it as they pleased. It did not matter whether I cried out for them to leave off their tortures, or if I begged to be allowed to run and play with other children, limping as I might — my body was their property by the laws of God and man, to dispose with as they would. I grudge them what they did with me, but I do not grudge the principle. You are mine, body and soul.”

The Earl kissed him on the forehead, and then again on his eyelids. Edward jerked up his chin and captured Holland’s mouth, feeling him sigh.