Lord of Darkness

  “Keep this by you,” she said, “and all will be well.”

  I opened my hand and looked upon it. It was a wooden carving, cunningly done of some very black wood, that showed a woman with a swollen middle as though with child, and heavy breasts, and a deep slit carved in the place of her sex, and there was hair fastened to the head: five or six strands of dark coarse hair much like Dona Teresa’s own. When I touched this little idol with my thumb it felt warm to me, with the warmth of her own body impressed into it; and it troubled me, for it smelled of witchcraft.

  “What is this thing?” I asked.

  “A talisman,” said she, “to protect you from harm while you are in this place, and ever after.”

  “A devilish little amulet, you mean?”

  “An amulet,” said she, “but not devilish.”

  “I think any amulet is the Devil’s manufacture.”

  “A crucifix, too? Is that not an amulet?”

  “Aye,” said I. “I do abhor all that sort of stuff, even the ones claimed by the Papists to be Christian.”

  “Well, and abhor not this one,” Dona Teresa said. “For it will guard you, Andres.” She folded my fingers over it again, and, whispering close, said, “Take it. Keep it close by you. Do this for me, will you, in return for the services I have done you, and will in the future do you. Will you, Andres?”

  “I will,” said I reluctantly. “But only because it is your gift, and I think fondly of it, that it came from you. For I tell you, I do abhor any amulet of the Devil.”

  “I say again, it is not of the Devil.”

  “It is no Christian thing, though.”

  “Nay, that it is not.” She put her fingers to her lips. “We are Christian here, but we know some of the old ways, too, those that are of merit. This is one. Keep it by you, Andres, close against your body, and all will go well for you.” Then did she put her hand over mine, that held the talisman, and she said, “One thing more, though. Keep it from the sight of the Portugals, for they do not understand these matters. And if they should find it, I pray you do not say you had it of me. For I am thought of by them as full Portuguese in my ways, and I would not have them knowing I do follow a few of the old teachings. Eh, Andres? Will you pledge me that, Andres?”

  She frightened me. I felt it was a Devil-trap she was leading me into. Perhaps it was because I had lately written in my mind that play of Samson who was snared by the Dalila who destroyed him, that woman of another tribe, in enemy employ. And here she was, yet, toying with my very hair, as Dalila had with Samson’s. Aye, I feared Dona Teresa. I feared her for her beauty, which was overwhelming, beyond that of any woman I had known, and I feared her also because she was part Portugal and part African, which is to say, Papist on one side and demon-worshipper on the other, but not an atom in her that was English. At that time of my callowness I looked upon women who were not English as something terrifyingly other, for all that I had chosen a French one to lie with first, as a boy. To me Dona Teresa was a bubbling pot of mysteries and magics, a stew-cauldron of unknown perils. And then, too, I suspected that she might be spying for her Portugal masters, which made me naturally cautious of revealing my heart to her.

  And so I was wary with her and did not reach to embrace her, which I think she was inviting me next to do. But I did accept the little idol from her.

  She felt my coolness and retreated after a bit, and said, hiding her annoyance well though not completely. “It was not easy for me to gain permission to visit you.”

  “Will you come again?”

  “Do you want it?”

  “Why have you come?”

  “When you were ill, I nursed you. I feel an ownership of part of your life, from that. Now you suffer again, in a different way, and my soul goes out to you.”

  “You are most kind, Dona Teresa.”

  “They say I can come every second day. I will do so.”

  She looked to me as if waiting for me to refuse that. But I did not. Uncertain of her though I might be, I was not so foolish as to spurn the first companionship I had had in many months. Thus I told her I welcomed her return, and indeed it was no lie. I spent the day that followed counting away the hours. She had broken entirely the rhythm of my solitude, and I could not employ the little diversions now, the conversations and fantasies, that had whiled the time. Despite myself Dona Teresa had unsettled my philosophical equilibrium and reawakened me to life.

  When she returned she brought two things with her, that she carried one at a time into the cell. The first was a flask of wine: not the sweet palm-wine of the blackamoors, that Barbosa once had given me, but true claret of Portugal, whose taste I had all but forgotten.

  “This was not easy, either,” she said. “It is rare stuff.”

  “You do me great kindness. Come, let us draw the cork!”

  “Not so fast, not nearly so fast.” She put the wine aside and went beyond the palisade, and came back a moment later bearing a broad basin and a great rough yellow sponge. “Put off your clothing,” she said to me.

  “Dona Teresa—”

  “Do you think your odor is fragrant?”

  “Nay, they issue no perfume to captives here. But this shames me, to put off my clothes before you this way.”

  “In the hospice you lay with no clothes at all, and you had no shame of it then.”

  “I was far from my right mind.”

  “But the shape of your body comes not as news to me. And if we are to sip wine together, you must be more clean. Come, sir, do as I say!” She snapped her fingers at me as though she were a queen.

  On that day she had chosen to wear a light bodice, cut very low, that all but revealed her breasts. They gleamed out from their captivity like fine polished carvings of precious wood, round and smooth and dusky-bright, reminding me of the breasts of her little idol. I felt myself swept along on a tide too powerful to resist.

  But yet I was determined. Still did I intend to remain faithful to my Anne Katherine, whatever temptations this Dalila dangled at me: and if the words sound overly innocent to you, as they do to me, yet I will not deny them, for that was my intention, poorly conceived but deeply felt. I knew I might remain the rest of my life in Africa, and then my fidelity would be a fool’s medal, but thus far, thus far at least, I meant to cling to it, having held it so long already.

  So I intended, at any rate.

  Yet to clean my body was not a bad idea. I have always felt a fondness for bathing. I suppose if I were a grandee of the court, I would be content with powders and unguents and perfumes, and never once put my skin into water; for that is how they do it, so I hear. But simpler folk of the outlying towns have cleaner ways, and especially those that go to sea, for one often stands naked in a driving rain and the touch of water against the skin is neither unfamiliar nor painful, but rather becomes to be enjoyed. Here in my dungeon I was much bothered by the crawliness of the filth that was accumulating upon my sweltering body. So for all my uneasiness with Dona Teresa I did drop my clothes, and made as though to take the washbasin from her.

  “I will do it,” she said.

  There was no refusing. She wet her sponge—a harsh thing, not long from the sea, that scratched like briars—and scrubbed it down my back, and then my shoulders, and she spun me around and sponged my chest, not gently, so that my skin began to tingle and a rosy hue came into it. “How foul they have let you be!” she said. “Look, the water runs in dark streams from your hide!” I thought she had done with me when my upper body was cleansed, but no, she was most devilish thorough, and took her sponge over my belly, more kindly this time, and down my thighs, and along my legs both front and back.

  In doing this service, which she performed as calmly as though she were swabbing a statue, she traveled most intimately close to my private parts, though she took care not actually to touch them. Yet she might just as well have caressed my privities fondly with her hands, for the effect was the same on me, that had not lain with a woman in two years and some. Her ey
esight alone, casting its beam on my flesh as she knelt to rub my haunches, would have been enough to inflame me with lust. I strived to keep my body in check. I felt the sap rising in my loins, I felt my member quickening with life, and it was most shameful to me to know that it was getting stiff. I did not dare look down. But I could tell without looking that my mast was up, and royally so. And my heart thundered, and my throat went dry, and I recited the catechisms and other such dreary things to keep myself from throwing myself upon her, for how could I let myself do that?

  How, indeed? When I meant to be faithful to a fair young woman in England, how give myself to a dark wench out of the jungle of Africa?

  You smile. You say, Go to, only a monk would have retained his fidelity, or a eunuch, under such provocation. A man and a woman alone in a locked cell, and the man naked and the woman nearly bare-breasted, and so long a chastity for him, and the temptation so overpowering—surely the man would yield, and quickly and gladly, in that circumstance. I smile, too, at the recollection. But I was there, not you, and I swear by the bloody palms of Jesus that I kept myself chaste that day.

  But not, I needs must add, in any way that was creditable to me. For as this bathing of me continued, my mind went hazy as with sunstroke and my vision clouded and my perceptions became narrowed down solely to that aching rod sprouting from my loins. And I sucked breath deep into my lungs and knew I could no longer withstand the gift of what seemingly was so freely being offered. I was on the verge of reaching for her, to take her to my pallet and push up her robe and slide myself deep into her harbor, with all thoughts of England and Anne Katherine and chastity blasted from my mind. Then suddenly she rose and stepped back and said, coolly, with a brusqueness, “There. Now at last you are properly clean. Clothe yourself, and let us enjoy our wine.”

  It was like a mug of cold vinegar hurled in my eyes. I stood there stunned, my soul all full of desire and she already halfway across the cell and tugging on the cork of the claret. It was all I could do, I trow, to keep myself from stumbling toward her and throwing myself upon her, for I was not much different at that moment from a catapult that has been fully wound up: that is, once the mechanism is set in motion, how can the catapult help but discharge its load? The only thing that held me back and let me master myself once again was the awareness that I might have misread her entirely. Perhaps there was no flirtatiousness in her manner and no provocation intended by the freedom she had taken with my body. Perhaps she had no shred of desire for me at all, but saw me merely as a foul-smelling prisoner who needed cleansing. And perhaps it was all a test, to see if I could be trusted, and six guards lay in wait outside the cell to fall upon me at her first outcry of rape.

  That was a cooling thought indeed. Fear overcame yearning. For I was among Portugals that might cheat at any game, even this, and mayhap they looked only for a pretext to hang me. To assault a woman of their nation would be sufficient charge, and she could well be part of a plot to open me to such a charge. At once my member droped and I turned away, and found my shabby clothes.

  Dona Teresa, pretending unawareness of all my states of changing mind—I know that she was pretending—smiled most graciously and offered me a goblet of wine.

  We drank together like lord and lady. We kept piously far apart, and talked of trivial things. I was bewildered and utterly disarrayed by the games she had played on me; my jaws ached of tensing them, my eyes throbbed, there was a band of fire across my forehead. The wine eased me, but only somewhat. I think I grew drunken, a little, and I stared more at her bosom than at her face, which she noticed, but she gave me no further provocations, and I kept my distance. In time she said she must leave, and she collected the empty bottle and the goblets and tucked them in a straw bag, and came toward me and smiled and flashed me such a look of direct and blatant invitation as like to have melted my kneecaps. But before I could comprehend it and conclude what response I should make, she kissed me lightly on the cheek, a sister’s kiss, a butterfly grazing, and sweetly wished me well and took her leave.

  That visit much muddled my mind. In the days that followed I relived it a thousand times in memory, wondering if it had been her intent to make me so asweat with desire, or if I had wrongly imagined her motives. That I had meant to remain chaste was sure; that her sponging had magicked all chastity out of me was equally sure; but had I been toyed with? Or was it only that I was overripe for loving and was coming to see my fidelity as mere romantic folly? I knew not my own mind. I was overmatched with this Dona Teresa, I suspected: she was too cunning a player of the game of man and woman, and I far too simple.

  When she visited me next, a few days later, she came swathed in black garments trussed as secure as a nun’s, and neither kissed me nor gave me looks of the eyes, but was proper and chaste with me. On the next visit from that she was more playful, and wore flimsy clothes again; on the next, she stayed only a few minutes, and was coy and remote. I never seemed to see the same Teresa twice running. And on the next she came in garments so light she might as well have been naked, a rain-soaked shift through which I saw everything, her dusky breasts and dark nipples, and the socket of her navel, and the three-pointed mat of dark curls below. It was too much. I knew for sure, the moment she slipped off the cloak to show me the wonders of her body barely hidden by that faint fabric, that she was playing a devil’s game with me.

  “I have brought more wine,” she said.

  “Will you bathe me, then, as you did that other time you came with claret?”

  She laughed prettily. “Are you uncleanly again?”

  “Nay, I am clean enough. But the sponging made a good preamble to the wine.”

  I was altogether in her spell. My eyes traveled her body as though it were the map of the highway to paradise.

  Coolly she said, “I have not brought the basin with me, nor the sponge. And if you need no bath, why take the trouble to have it, sir?”

  “Because it gave me pleasure.”

  She pretended to chide me. “Sir, you are a prisoner! You are not entitled to pleasures!”

  “The wine?”

  “Oh, that. It is for your health alone.”

  “Bathe me with that, then.”

  “You forget your place,” she said, sounding stern, but her eyes were sparkling and her smile was bold.

  I went toward her. I was the aggressor, no denying it: but she had so maneuvered and chivvied and manipulated me that I was altogether her toy, and if I seemed to be the forward one, it was only an illusion, for I was moving along a path that had been wholly preordained by her scheming. My hands went to her shoulders. I pulled her close against me. She stiffened and pretended to be shocked, but it was mere pretense. That much was apparent. “Sir,” she cried. “Sir, what is this?”

  I made no answer. I brushed at her shift, trying to sweep it from her, but in my need and my anguish I was clumsy, with fingers of wood, and even while she squirmed and feigned resistance she managed to reach about and touch some catch, so that the thing opened and fell away like fog in the morning sun. At the sight of her breasts I came close to releasing her and backing off, for her nipples were brown and the wide circles that surrounded them were brown. It was the African in her blood revealing itself. The women of Portugal and Spain, I know, have darker skins than those of England, but the ones I had lain with in my days aboard the merchant vessels had the breasts and nipples of an Englishwoman, more or less, a deeper hue of pigment but not brown like this, and in the baring of her breasts Teresa displayed the strangeness within her soul.

  Not that I saw anything dreadful about African women, though they were not then particularly to my taste; but it was the mixture that put me off, the mingling of the blood of two worlds. Dona Teresa was a creature beyond my knowledge of women. I felt ensnared by the Devil, a slave to dark forces.

  But I was enslaved also by another force that hammered and beat within my own veins. And so I covered those alien nipples with my quivering hands and gripped the dark satiny globes and
pressed my mouth to hers, while she pulled away my clothing. And we sank down together to the damp earthen floor and her thighs parted and she received me, for she was more than ready and there was no need for the prelude of stroking and opening that many women prefer.

  And O! and O! and O! all thought went from my mind!

  Her back was arched and her legs wrapped themselves about my body and her fingers dug into my back, and down below I felt the hot sweet moist hidden mouth of her consuming me like the hungry mouth of a starfish, and there came a rising tide within me that altogether swept me away, nor did I fight against that. Buried deep in that lovely nether mouth, in that warm comforting harbor, I yielded up my ghost in a cannonade of lunatic explosions that entirely unmanned me, and left me dead and gasping on the floor by her side.

  She laughed, a light and tinkling laughter, and ran her hand through the golden fur of my chest.

  “So eager, Englishman, so hurried! But I forgive you. It has been a very long time, has it not?”

  “A thousand years.”

  “The next time will not be so far away.”

  “Nay. Hardly another three moments, I trow.”

  She cradled me against her breasts. My fingers roved her skin. In the aftermath of lovemaking it had the look of finely burnished bronze, and her hair below was crisp and closely coiled, another secret sign of the Africa in her veins. In the touching of her I felt my manhood return almost at once to life.

  I rolled free and embraced her again.

  “This time more slowly, for your impatience will not be as great, eh, Englishman?”

  “Aye,” I answered. And gave the devil her due.

  EIGHT

  SO WITH those first thrustings of flesh into flesh, commenced what I must now recognize to be one of the greatest adventures of passion that I have known, possibly the most grand of all, that transformed and wholly altered my life. I did not suspect such a thing at the time. I had no sense of anything of significance having its beginning, but merely that I was a lonely sufferer far from home who had tumbled into the snares of the Fiend. Dona Teresa, having cozened and dangled me until I was little more than a cunny-thumbed fool, had pried my much-vaunted chastity from me and in so doing had demonstrated—probably not for the first time—the power of her wiles over a helpless man. If I had been a Papist, I think I would have feared for my immortal soul, and gone bleating to the confessional the moment she left my cell.