Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [3]
The man nodded gratefully, evidently glad she’d taken the lead. Lisa-Beth finished the job of unbuttoning him, and tried not to smirk when his big pink gut wobbled its way out into the open. She herself decided to keep her corset on, although by this time her chemise was already folded over the chair by her dressing-table. She briefly wondered how long she could keep the man happy before he worked out that the Rite of the Mare Ascendant was just another way of saying that he’d be flat on his back and she wouldn’t. No doubt the Kama Sutra had an even more impressive name for it.
When the ‘Rite’ itself began, it was, as Lisa-Beth had expected, staggeringly dull. His Lordship was one of those annoying men who went ‘oh!’ whenever she so much as breathed on him, the noise suggesting such ecstasy that frankly she couldn’t even be bothered trying. She just kept herself moving back and forth, working the man and the bed up into a single rhythm of creaking and mumbling. She tried to keep a smile on her face, but he hardly could have noticed, seeing as his attention was still focused on the red diamond.
Running like a machine, thought Lisa-Beth. Once, not long after she’d come home from India, she’d seen the insides of a factory in Manchester where a huge, fat, belching device had been constructed. The device could work cotton, the foreman had said, and he’d been certain that soon all the work would be done on machines like this even though it hadn’t worked properly half the time. An infernal machine with a hundred arms, hands bent into claws, stretching raw matter into thread with its innards hissing like gas. The kadaka-kadaka‐kadak, going on and on and on without ever stopping, in exactly the same rhythm as the ga-bonk‐‘oh!’‐ga-bonk‐‘oh!’‐ga-bonk of the bizarre animal/bed construction which Lisa-Beth now found herself operating.
In the future, thought Lisa-Beth, will there be machines to do this job? Will the de Vaucansons and the factory-men set their mechanical courtesans on the hapless men of Westminster, a race of clockwork dolls to pound the living daylights out of any politician who crosses their path? Kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak‐‘oh!’‐kadak. Perhaps that hag downstairs is one of them already, thumping away at all hours God sends and blowing infernal opium fumes out of her backside.
It was only when Lisa-Beth found herself actually trying to look into this strange new world that she realised she’d gone into Shaktyanda.
That was understandable, as Mother Dutt had taught her. Up in the jute-stinking room at the back of the House of Dutt – because everything stank of jute on the Bay of Bengal, or at least, that was Lisa-Beth’s memory of it – the Mother had taught her about the secret muscles of a woman’s body, those contours and areas which the scientific minds of the age had spent many, many hours avoiding. Lisa-Beth remembered sitting on a bed covered with animal-hair, alongside the other English girl who’d been brought to the house, the one Mother Dutt called ‘the Little Rose’. They’d learned about the hidden rhythms, the tappings and the drummings that lay concealed inside the body: the little rhythms of the pulse and the lungs, and the grander, slower, twenty-eight‐day rhythm of what the haut ton now amusingly called ‘the Prince’.
‘Time is the key,’ Mother Dun had explained. Little Rose had looked alert and attentive, while Lisa-Beth had also taken note of the lesson, knowing even then that this was exactly the kind of talk which kept a man interested. If you knew how to play the part.
It was like being drunk, the Mother had said. Wine changed the rhythms of the body, made the blood go to your head, caused tiny little chemical outbursts inside you that all the physicians in Europe couldn’t begin to explain. When you were drunk, your body took on a rhythm all to itself, one that no clock could measure.
‘Think about the last time you drank,’ the Mother had said, and Lisa-Beth