My gratitude to Creativetalent for her help and advice.
Miss Mabel - a story in six parts.
Part 6. The consequences of a letter.
After two months at my lodgings at Boscastle Street, the front sitting room had been tacitly recognised as my province, at least in the evenings and weekends. I could write letters and check accounts at the bureau-bookcase, which also held my few books and folders of press-cuttings. I could sit at my ease in the armchair with the newspaper, ever alert for the news from France, the Low Countries, Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Saxony which could affect the bank's business.
As a favoured and privileged paying guest, I did not despair of having a fire in the fireplace once winter had set in. By now Emily knew of our affairs and would not spoil sport, so Mabel, seeing that we were unlikely to be disturbed there, was growing ever bolder, although we were ever alert for a warning footstep outside.
On Saturday morning, I was in a buoyant mood and started singing to myself the popular minstrel song:
I am going to Californ-i-ay, my true love for to see
I am going to Californ-i-ay, my banjo on my knee.
Oh Susannah, don't you cry for me,
For I'm going to Californ-i-ay with my banjo on my knee.
Miss Mabel heard me singing, rather loudly I confess, with the door, as usual, ajar. She slipped into the room.
"Oh Arthur, I don't like that song", she said. "Was poor Susannah like me, do you suppose? "When you went to Loughborough to see your sweetheart I cried all weekend, although there was nothing between us then. How much worse it would be for me now."
"Come, my dearest, it's only a song". I replied feebly.
"When you marry Jessie, I shall be all alone. Perhaps you could make me your mistress, and keep me in a little apartment in Regents Park. Oh but you're not rich enough for that, are you?"
It was not like Miss Mabel to let her fears out so openly, and I did not know what to say. I tried to change the subject.
"Mabel dearest, we must let the future take care of itself. Besides, long before I could afford to support a wife, Mr Harker, or one of your other old flirts will ask you to marry".
"Willie Harker! That dry old stick! I should far rather stay single. If he wants anything from me, he wants my share of this house. At least you want my kisses and cuddles."
In her volatile way, she immediately dropped her melancholy, and we fell, to planning our next visit to the house at Embury Street.
We had made three more visits to the house of assignation since our first game of kittens. Only once had Miss Mabel brought the cane -- after she had flared up in a temper and slapped my face on finding me reading a letter from my sweetheart Jessie.
She then went into a paroxysm of remorse, and wept on my shoulder, blaming herself for being a jealous, mean-minded cat.
So it did not surprise me that she appointed her own punishment. On the two later occasions, we spent the hours naked, and brought ourselves to a pitch of pleasure that grew greater as our knowledge of each other's bodies grew.
I could feel, all the same, that Miss Mabel's curiosity about the act of love was growing, and that it could not be put off much longer.
This worried me, and for good reason. Firstly, I was concerned that her chance of making a good marriage would be compromised if she gave up her maidenhead.
Secondly, I was concerned that, with all precautions, and the regrettable but necessary employment of Captain Condom's clever prophylactics, she might fall for a child.
I had never tried a condom, but my friends told me that even with the use of cold cream or macassar oil, the sheep-gut of which they were made, chafed the tender skin of the penis, and they were difficult to put on and take off.
One reason above all made me willing to make the attempt and hang the consequences. This was that as Jessie became more distant in time, and Mabel closer and closer, my affections were shifting.
I was becoming steadily more attracted to my Miss Mabel; responding to her attractiveness, her courage and resilience, her irrepressible sense of humour, her loving nature, and, I confess, the deep vein of voluptuousness that I was helping to uncover in her.
She began to seem to me the perfect combination of wife and mistress that men dream of and so seldom find. She was becoming bolder and less fearful of the consequences, almost as if she wanted to provoke a confrontation with her mother and her aunt.
Her recent trick was to come into the front parlour when I was working, open my trousers, and, gamahuche me, licking and sucking my cock, although seldom to a conclusion. When I remonstrated with her about the risks she was taking, she would put on her most innocent look and say,
"But Arthur dearest, don't you like it? I know I do," and I would not have the strength of will to resist her.
In October we planned our next assignation, and Miss Mabel carried it through with aplomb, arranging a visit to a new dressmaker he had discovered off the Aldwych. Miss Emily was in on the plot, seeming to gain a pleasure of her own in deceiving her mother and aunt, and she said that she had arranged for an old schoolfellow to come to the house that afternoon, but that she would visit the dressmaker next time if she proved suitable.
Of course I had business in the neighbourhood and offered to escort her.
On that Saturday morning a letter arrived for me from Loughborough. It was from Jessie and Miss Mabel collected it from Ellen as it arrived. She gave it to me, tragedy writ large on her countenance. Don't worry Arthur," she said. "I am not going to make a fuss", and she left the room saying no more.
I looked at the letter with slight surprise. Jessie's letters had been getting fewer and shorter of late, and rather more like chatty accounts of the doings of her neighbours and friends than the passionate outpourings of love I had received in the first month or so; the ones that Mabel and Emily had read.
This one laid out the matter clearly:
Loughborough, October 1858.
My Dear Arthur,
