“I was sixteen and in love,” he said. “With a neighbor’s fourteen-year-old daughter. We swore undying love and fidelity. I even managed to get her alone once and kissed her—on the lips. For all of three seconds. It was very serious, Jane.”
“It is not always wise to mock our younger selves,” she said, responding to his tone of irony as if she were an octogenarian. “Love is as serious and painful a business to the young as it is to older people. More so. There is so much more innocence.”
“My father got wind of it and became apprehensive,” he said. “Though doubtless if he had waited I would have been sighing over some other maiden two or three months later. It is not in the nature of a Dudley to be constant in love, Jane—or even in lust, for that matter.”
“He separated you?” she asked.
“There is a cottage.” He set his head back and closed his eyes. “I mentioned it to you before, Jane. With its inhabitant, an indigent female relative ten years my senior.”
“Yes,” she said.
“There was a pool not far from her cottage,” he said. “Idyllic, Jane. At the foot of the hills, green with the reflections of trees, loud with birdsong, secluded. I used to go there often in the summer to bathe rather than frolic in the lake closer to the house. She was there one day before me, bathing, wearing only a thin shift.”
Jane said nothing when he paused.
“She was suitably flustered,” he said, “as she came out of the pool, looking as if she wore nothing at all. And then she laughed and joked and was charming. Can you picture it, Jane? The accomplished, well-endowed courtesan and the ignorant, virgin youth? That first time we did not even make it back to the cottage. We rutted on the grass beside the pool. I discovered what went where and what happened when it was in deep enough. I do believe all was accomplished inside thirty seconds. I thought myself one devil of a dashing fellow.”
Jane’s eyes were closed, he noticed when he opened his own.
“She was my first obsession.” He chuckled. “The day after that I went to the cottage, and the day after that again. I labored mightily on that last occasion, having quickly learned that I could make the pleasure last considerably longer than thirty seconds. I was proud and exhausted when I was finally finished demonstrating my prowess. And then she started to talk, Jane, in a very normal, very amused voice.
“‘He is an apt pupil and shows enormous promise,’ she said. ‘Soonhewill be teachingmetricks.’ And then before I could get my head up to discover what the devil she was talking about, another voice, Jane. My father’s. Coming from the doorway of the bedchamber behind me.
“‘You have done very nicely, Phoebe,’ he said. ‘He was bucking lustily enough between your thighs.’ He laughed when I jumped off the bed on the opposite side from my clothes as if I had been scalded. He was standing with one shoulder propped against the doorway as if he had been there for some time. He had, of course, been watching and assessing my performance, probably exchanging winks and leers with his mistress. ‘No need for embarrassment,’ he told me. ‘Every man ought to be deflowered by an expert. My father arranged it for me; I have arranged it for you. There is no one more expert than Phoebe, though today is your last with her, my boy. She is off-limits as of this moment. I cannot have my son sowing his oats in my woman, can I, now?’”
“Oh,” Jane said softly, bringing Jocelyn’s mind back to the present with a jolt.
“I gathered my clothes up and ran out of the cottage,” he said, “without even stopping to dress first. I needed to vomit. Partly because my father had watched something so terribly private. Partly because it was hismistresswith whom I had been dallying, and he had planned it all. I had not known until then that he even had mistresses. I had assumed he and my mother were faithful to each other. There was never anyone more naïve than my boyhood self, Jane.”
“Poor boy,” she said quietly.
“I was not even allowed to vomit in peace.” He laughed harshly. “My father had brought someone riding with him—his neighbor, father of the girl I fancied myself in love with. And out strode my father on my heels to share the joke in all its lurid details. He wanted to take us both to the village inn to toast my newly acquired manhood with a glass of ale. I told him he could go to hell, and I repeated the invitation at greater length when we were at home later. I left Acton the next day.”
“And for this you have felt guilt ever since?” Jane asked. He discovered suddenly that she had got up from her place and crossed in front of the hearth to stand before his chair. Before he realized what she was about to do, she sat on his lap and burrowed there until her head was on his shoulder. His arms closed about her in sheer reflex action.
“It felt like incest,” he said. “She was my father’swhore, Jane.”
“You were at the mercy of a ruthless man on one hand and a practiced courtesan on the other,” she told him. “It was not your fault.”
“I was in love with an innocent young girl,” he said. “And yet I spared her not one thought as I rutted with a woman ten years my senior whom I thought to be a relative. I learned one valuable lesson from the experience, though, Jane. I was my father’s son through and through. Iammy father’s son.”
“Jocelyn,” she said, “you weresixteen. No matter who you were, you would have had to be superhuman—or subhuman—to resist such a powerful temptation. You must not blame yourself. Not any longer. Those events did not prove that you have a depraved nature. Far from it.”
“It took me a few years longer to prove that,” he said.
“Jocelyn.” He could feel her fingers playing with a button on his waistcoat. “Tell me something. Someday in the future when you have a son, will you ever do that to him? Initiate him with one of your own mistresses?”
He drew breath slowly and imagined it—the precious human who would be his son, product of his seed, and the woman with whom he would slake his appetites rather than remain true to his wife. Coming together, performing while he watched.
“I would sooner tear out my heart,” he said. “My nonexistent heart.”
“Then you are not your father,” she said, “or your grandfather. You are yourself. You were a sensitive, artistic, romantic boy, who had been repressed and was finally cruelly seduced. That is all, Jocelyn. You have allowed your life to be stunted by those events. But there is much life left to you. Forgive yourself.”
“I lost my father on that day,” he said. “I lost my mother soon after, once I had arrived in London and learned the truth about her.”
“Yes,” she said sadly. “But forgive them too, Jocelyn. They were products of their own upbringing and experience. Who knows what demons they carried around inside them? Parents are not just parents. They are people too. Weak like all the rest of us.”
His fingers were playing with her hair. “What made you so wise?”
