The Mysterious Heir by Edith Layton Page A

flapped at him like a great bat, but he only smiled and put her aside, for he knew Kitty would not mind this interruption of her daily nap. He opened the door and saw the ruddy, freckled young man’s body like a pulsing growth upon the pale olive clarity of her unclothed form. He remembered the obscenity he saw when he pulled the man off his wife and remembered trying to beat that offending body into nothingness, to erase all signs of gender from the shrieking man he battered.
    And then he felt her cool hand upon his shoulder and heard her slow soft voice, louder than cathedral chimes, “Let him be,” she said, tugging at his arm. “Let him go. I asked him to. I asked him,” she said.
    Long after the young man had been restored to his senses, long after his wounds had been tended to and he had been given his clothes and dismissed from his job as footman and shown off the premises by the scandalized staff, Morgan sat, his head cradled in his hands, and listened to his wife’s gentle litany, a long and slow telling of her tale, a longer conversation than she had ever had with him before, or would ever have again.
    At the time he heard everything and heard nothing, his senses were still so disordered. Yet every word would stay with him till the end of his days.
    Yes, she had told him, it did begin at fifteen for her. But it had been no attack, no more than today’s episode had been.
    She had been curious. The stableboy had been obliging. But her father had discovered them and reacted just as her husband had. There was mild amazement, Morgan remembered, in her voice as she related that. Her father had kept her under strict chaperonage, but she was endlessly inventive. There had been, in the years before she had caught his astonished eye in London, many such episodes. Many times. Few refused her, from stableboy to farm worker, from chance acquaintances of her father’s to tradesmen from town.
    She had been taken first to men of God. Her father had thought, in his strict Methodism, that it was unholiness that accounted for it. That she, poor motherless creature, had been drawn into the devil’s net. Thus, she had been lectured, she had been sermonized, she had been beaten, she had spent hours upon her knees, only to arise and slip out to yet more encounters.
    In her seventeenth year, her father had given up on God and taken her to a different set of holy men. He had brought her far from home to a round of physicians of all stripes. Her diet had been altered to whole grains and spring water. She had been denied spices and salt. And then sweets and savories, then red meats and hot foods. She had endured it, for her hunger was of a different sort. She continued to indulge that hunger whenever she could steal away. She had been immersed in steaming hot baths to draw out her sensual humors, and when that failed, steeped in icy waters to depress her heated passions. And no cure was effective.
    At last her father was told of an operation, a surgical procedure that would remove that tiny wedge-shaped part of the female anatomy that was supposed to give the keenest pleasure and be the root of unseemly female desire. The surgery would thus effectively remove all her desire for future encounters. The Arabians, her father was told, regularly performed such mutilations upon their women in childhood to keep them content in their harems. “After all,” the learned physician had joked, for he was a jovial fellow as well as a man of science and he was both perturbed and annoyed at the look of horror writ large upon his patient’s father’s face, “how else do you think the old sultans can keep one hundred wives happy?”
    When her father, driven to despair after yet another fall from grace upon her part, had threatened her with that, she had only smiled and told him it would be to no avail. It was not pleasure she sought, she had explained, it was only a thing she must do.
    Yet his distress was such that he was about to give his