Miss Mabel is my first attempt at erotic writing. It is set in North London in the late 1850s, and I have tried to get the speech and manners as right as I can.
You may recognise that I have appropriated the character of Camille from Walter's tome My Secret Life.
My thanks to volunteer editor CreativeTalent.
Miss Mabel, a story in six parts
Part 4. Playing at kittens, part one.
North London, September 1858.
"Arthur dearest, what does 'playing at kittens' mean?"
It was in one of our snatched moments together. Mabel was on my lap, and her hand was creeping softly inside my trousers, seeking for the instrument that, once she had encountered it, seemed seldom far from her thoughts.
In that position the hoops of her semi-crinoline gave me easy access and my hand, likewise, had found its way to paradise. My caresses stopped abruptly, and I sat up straight, almost tipping her on the floor.
"Where did you come across that?" I asked. There was only one place she could have found it - the letter in which the phrase occurred was hidden away separated from the others, and under lock and key.
"Oh, Arthur dear, I have been awfully naughty again, and I knew you would be angry with me, but I just had to know. I am afraid that I have earned a punishment."
"Tell me how you found that letter", I asked. "It was not in the secretaire with the others. Did Miss Emily see it too?"
"Oh no, Arthur, of course not. I wouldn't dream of letting her see it. I am afraid I have been going into your room on my own. I can't help it; her letters are so beautiful and exciting. She is so lucky to have a sweetheart like you.
Usually I just lie on your bed and think about you, but the last time I went, you had left the key to the drawer on the washstand, and I just had to look."
"Well", I said, "You certainly know what to expect. It will be the cane this time."
"So, aren't you going to tell me? How do people play at kittens?"
"It is something delightful that lovers do to please each other. If we could find an afternoon on our own I should love to teach you."
"Are we lovers then, Arthur? I do so want us to be, for I know I am starting to love you."
Flashback Loughborough/Leicester 1851.
Once I was alone again, my mind travelled back to Loughborough in the July of 1851; that Summer when the news of the Great Exhibition filled the pages of the newspapers and packed excursion trains enriched every railway company in the Kingdom.
The Midlands were suffering under an oppressive heat wave, and I was at my desk, sweat running down my back as I worked. The Chief Cashier, Frank Dennis's door was open, and he called me cheerfully from within.
Frank was maybe twice my age; a slim, dapper man with an air of unconquerable affability and charm, appealing to men and women alike. Happily for me, he was chief cashier at our branch bank, and he supervised my work with meticulous care and kindness.
I was especially fortunate as he took a liking to me, and over our snap, and our occasional cups of coffee after work, I soon learned that his great passion was the ladies, and it could not escape my notice that he had great success there. He became confidential, and gave me hints and suggestions that I implemented with some success with the local girls.
"Arthur my lad, I have a treat in prospect for you. I am taking you to the Singing Rooms in Leicester. A comedian from London, the Original Joe Miller will be foot of the bill and I should like to see him.
Have you ever been to a Singing room? Well then, there really is a treat in store for you, especially if we meet up with one or two of my little friends. Don't worry about money. This one's on me".
" The original Joe Miller? He must be pretty ancient", I replied, for Joe Miller's Jest Books were the staple of my schoolboy years.
"Everyone's pretty ancient to you Arthur," he teased me. "But don't worry, you'll grow out of it."
Joe Miller was a large, elderly, red-faced man in a drab short-coat with a bludgeon sticking out of one pocket, red muffler round his neck, florid weskit and knee-breeches.
He strode about the stage, behind the flickering row of gas-lights; told a string of jokes and then sang The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington with frequent interruptions for cockney patter.
His jokes, delivered in a droll manner, in a loud, raucous voice, were very raw. Many of them passed me by, but the whole audience, men and women alike, laughed uproariously at lines that would have earned me a beating with my father's razor-strop,
About the Singing Rooms; a large, gaslit room over a hostelry in Silver Street; I remember little other then the heat, the overwhelming noise and the odour of crowds of overheated men and overscented women.
The greatest excitement of the evening was to come later. In one of the intervals, when the crowds were calling for beer, gin and pigs-feet, Frank took me to admire the Ladies of the Night, in the area at the back of the room that served as the promenade.
They were certainly a contrast with the poor, bedraggled, half-starved creatures who plied for trade in the streets around the railway station at home.
These women were well, even sumptuously dressed in bright silks and lace (Frank afterwards told me that most of them did not own the dresses they wore, but instead hired them from the inconspicuous older women who stood, eagle-eyed in the shadows.)
Their hair was elaborately done up, and they wore perfume, powder and rouge and colour on their lips. They smiled invitingly, and some greeted Frank as an old friend. Frank, meanwhile searched the bright, gay group for a familiar face, and, soon he found one.
"Camille my dear", he cried, reaching out his hand to a plump, thirtyish woman with dark hair and dark eyes, wearing an elegant evening dress in wide stripes of alternating dark and light green, out of which rose her white shoulders and the cleft of her bosom.
She smiled at him, and replied "Monsieur Frank, quel plaisir." Her voice was low, soft and beautifully modulated, with a strong French accent.
So, was this one of the legendary Parisian whores one read about in the Holywell Street press? What was she doing in a dowdy provincial town like Leicester, rather than in Shaftesbury Avenue or the Haymarket?
Frank introduced us. "Camille my dear," he announced, as I shook her gloved hand, "I want you to meet my young protégé Arthur. I hope you will take his education a little way towards completion".
"Mais certainement, avec plaisir", she replied, a sweet smile on her sweet face, "but I do hope you will be joining us, Monsieur Frank."
We left the Public House, just behind High Cross Street, and, resisting Frank's urging to take a cab, we walked down towards the house she apparently used when in Leicester, in the maze of shabby, run-down streets around the recently-built "Bastille", the Union Workhouse, where, only a few years previously, the rioting inmates had presaged the Chartist disturbances of 1842.
The house she led us to was larger and better built than its neighbours, We knocked and the door was opened by an elderly maid. Camille sent the maid out for drink, and led us up the stairs to the front bedroom.
Frank lit the colsa-oil lamp, which soon gave a bright, cheerful glow to a room furnished sparsely, with bed, chest, wash-stand, two armchairs and a rag-rug in a geometrical pattern; a counterpart to the one in my mother's front parlour. Even before the maid returned with the brandy, Frank and Camille, after a hurried and secretive consultation, began to disrobe.
In a minute they were naked, and as calm and self-possessed as if this was their attire of choice. I had never been in the room with a naked man, or woman, and had certainly not disrobed before anyone's eyes since infancy. Embarrassment and a crushing lack of confidence in my scrawny boy's body overcame me.
Frank's naked body was smooth, white and almost hairless. As he lay down lazily on the bed, a cigar in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other, he looked as handsome and as confident as if he were in his business clothes, conducting a client to his office.
