Hope - Lesley Pearse [160]
All she knew about men with this problem had been learned from Bridie. Shortly before Anne was to marry William, Bridie had told her a tale of a butler and groom at her previous position. They were dismissed when they were found in bed together. Bridie called them ‘nancy boys’, but explained such men were often called sodomists. Anne had often wondered what prompted her old maid to tell her such a thing, but now it looked as if Bridie had sensed William might be one and she wanted to warn her.
‘I have been so unfair to you,’ William cried. ‘I swear to God I didn’t know when we got married, but I soon realized I wasn’t right. I couldn’t speak of it, though, not to you or anyone. I truly loved you; I still do, so I beg you not to doubt that. But after I’d managed to give you Rufus I thought it would be all right to go my own way.’
In an odd way Anne felt a kind of relief. Whether that was because what William had told her gave her some justification for her own behaviour, or because it finally made sense of all those questions about her marriage for which she could find no answers, she didn’t know. But all at once she didn’t feel quite so hunted.
She listened in horrified fascination as he poured out that he’d been seduced by another man at a card party in London just a year after their wedding.
‘I loathed myself for giving in to it,’ he sobbed. ‘But I couldn’t help myself.’
Maybe if Anne hadn’t experienced illicit ecstasy herself she wouldn’t have understood that explanation. But William’s explanation was exactly how she would have described her own infidelity.
She had often raged to herself about the unfairness of a society which not only accepted a man taking a mistress, but almost applauded it, while an adulterous woman was seen as a harlot, and damned by everyone. It was a man’s world. Men could rape servants, go with prostitutes and bring diseases home to their wife; they could even deflower children and not be punished. Yet absurdly, a man could not have a preference for his own sex without being considered a perverted animal, and if he was exposed, he would be an outcast in society.
She didn’t want William to be an outcast. She didn’t like what he’d told her, yet it seemed to her that it wasn’t his fault he’d been made that way. But if he had had normal desires, then maybe she wouldn’t have been unfaithful either.
In a way, it was like shining a light in a dark corner, for suddenly she was remembering how he was when they first met and married, and seeing that there had been many pointers to suggest he was different from other young men.
He’d been almost pretty with his blond curls and smooth, hairless chin. He was always more comfortable with women than with men. On their wedding night he’d admired her beautiful nightgown, yet shown no real enthusiasm for what lay beneath it. In truth they had been more like two girl-friends than husband and wife, lying in bed together giggling or chasing each other up and down the stairs. If she hadn’t met Angus and found out what real men did with their women, and William hadn’t found someone like himself in America, they might have stayed in that untroubled, passionless friendship for ever.
‘Poor William,’ she said, hugging him to her breast. She could afford to be magnanimous now for she had discovered the beauty and ecstasy of normal passion.
Encouraged by her sympathy, William bared his soul, telling her how he’d found there were many men like him, forced to search one another out in secret, always in fear that they would be discovered and denounced.
‘You accused me once of going to a brothel,’ he said brokenly. ‘I wish that’s where I had been for there is terrible danger in consorting with other men like me. Most are as sad and bewildered as I am; we wish more than anything we had not been cursed with such desires. But there are some who delight in their depravity and prey on the weak, bending us to their will. We cannot escape their clutches for they hold us fast by blackmail and