Mermaid of Penperro Read online

  The Mermaid of Penperro

  by

  Lisa Cach

  (Originally published in 2001 by Dorchester Publishing)

  Version 1.1 – November, 2012

  Published by Lisa Cach at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2012 by Lisa Cach

  Discover other titles by Lisa Cach at www.lisacach.com

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  Chapter One

  Kent, England, 1804

  “Konstanze, my darling, I have something new for us to try,” Bugg whispered into her ear, and laid a book in her lap. Her elderly husband was standing behind her, bending low over her shoulder as she sat on the sofa in her sitting room, a coal fire burning in the grate before her. His whisper carried the stench of rotting teeth and brandy. His clothes smelled of tobacco, stale sweat, and sour hints of urine. A shudder ran across her shoulders and up her neck.

  She reluctantly opened the front cover of the book, finding the name of Edmund Quarles inscribed there in a shaky hand. Mr. Quarles was a good friend of her husband—perhaps his only friend—as well as his solicitor. The two of them had been drinking and conspiring for hours, huddled together in the dark, dreary drawing room downstairs.

  “I was wondering what the two of you had been discussing,” Konstanze lied, wishing he had stayed downstairs with Quarles and left her alone with her private thoughts. She had been busy imagining herself a princess on a South Sea island, her dark red-brown hair dressed in fragrant tropical flowers, her body clad in a wrap of bright cloth. In her daydream she lived in a palace made of palm, the dried fronds rustling in the warm breeze as she sat and looked out over the turquoise water. Dark, half-naked men knelt at her feet, offering pink and yellow fruit from wooden platters…

  “Look inside,” Bugg urged.

  She gave a little sigh and fanned the pages of the book, then stopped at the first illustration, her attention suddenly focusing. A woman lay on her side on a bed, her hands and feet trussed, her chemise pulled up to expose her naked thighs and hips. Her face wore what was supposed to be an expression of fear and distress, but looked rather more like a bad case of colic. Behind her a dark-faced man with bulging eyes, fully clothed including wig and tricorn hat, had his arm pulled back and ready to strike, a bundle of twigs clenched in his fist.

  Bugg’s breathing grew heavy in her ear, his warm, foul breath moistening her skin. “The idea stirs me,” he said. “Does it stir you, Konstanze? Does it heat your blood as it does mine?”

  Surely he could not be serious? She turned to the next picture, this one of the same bound, naked woman crouching down, her bare buttocks in the air. The dark-faced man leered, a cat-o’-nine-tails dangling from his grip.

  “I have a riding crop I can use,” her husband said, his voice shaking with excitement.

  “John, I do not think I wish to try this,” she said quietly.

  “Are you frightened?” he asked, his eagerness showing.

  “I do not wish to be bound and beaten.”

  “‘Tis only a game. ‘Tis only play.” He reached down her chest, cupping her breast in his palm, then pinching the nipple, hard, between his fingers.

  “John, stop it!” she protested, and shoved his hand away.

  “Are you excited?”

  “No!”

  There was a moment of tense silence; then she felt the sudden change in his mood. “You could try it once, to please me,” he said, his tone going harsh, and suddenly he wrapped his arm around her neck, his elbow beneath her chin, painfully jerking her head up. “For me, Konstanze, darling?” he said into her ear. “Your dear husband? You can do that much, I am thinking, for the man who saved your tender young self from the poorhouse.”

  She held perfectly still, her eyes wide, her breath coming in shallow gasps. John Bugg’s fits of rage came only rarely, and only when he had been drinking, but he was dangerous while he was in one. It had been many months since his last fit, but at that time he had shoved her against a wall, pinning her there with his hands around her throat. She had been frightened he would choke the life from her, but he had released her without doing further harm. She had wondered since if the next time she would escape so lightly.

  “I want you to go into our room and disrobe down to your chemise. I want you to let down your lovely hair. I want you to find me something from which to make bindings for your pretty hands and feet. I’ll fetch the crop myself, my darling. I will do that much for you,” he said, and stuck his tongue in her ear.

  Konstanze squeezed shut her eyes and nodded against the arm around her throat.

  “No, not like that! Stupid girl, can’t you do anything right?” Bugg complained, and swung his riding crop at her.

  “I’m trying my best,” Konstanze protested even as she rolled away from the crop, its leather tip striking the coverlet instead of her thigh. He was too drunk to match her reflexes, and she could not control the instinct to avoid his blows. Her hands were tied together in a strip of linen attached to the bedstead, although so poorly knotted that she could have released them with a few twists of her wrists. Her fear of him had been subsumed by a horrid sense of humiliation at being trussed naked to the bed, like a disobedient animal, and part of her watched as if from a distance as she shamed herself further by trying to accede to his wishes.

  “You’re supposed to hold still!”

  “It’s very difficult, John.” She’d like to see him hold still for the crop!

  “And you’re supposed to moan.”

  “Ohhhh…” she tried, thinking of the illustration of the woman with colic. She pulled from memory the last time she had suffered severe indigestion, after eating a meat pie that had gone bad. “Ohhhh…”

  “Wait until I hit you! You can’t moan just lying there unharmed. What’s the point?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll try to wait until the proper moment.”

  “Stick out your rump, like in the picture.”

  She rolled to her side, pulling her knees up and arching her back. The bedroom air was cold on her buttocks, and for an absurd moment she felt like a toddler about to have her bum wiped.

  The whistle of the crop through the air came again, and again she avoided its bite, pulling in her buttocks just before the leather would have struck her.

  “God damn you, Konstanze!” Bugg lifted the crop again and again, but each time she heard the whistle and moved out of the way.

  “Ohhh, ohhhhhh,” she moaned, in the hope that perhaps he might think he had struck her. “Ohhh.” She pictured moldy bread on her plate, waiting to be eaten. Bruised and rotten pears. Meat gone gray, with an iridescent sheen of green.

  “Just… hold… still…” Bugg ground out, his breath coming in pants now as he kept swinging.

  “Ohhhh…”

  Suddenly Bugg was on the bed and on top of her, pulling at her hands until they came free of the linen strip; then he took her by the arm and dragged her off.

  “John, I’m sorry! I’m trying my best!”

  “Do I have to show you how to do everything?” He slapped the handle of the crop into her hand, then flung himself facedown onto the mattress, his legs hanging off the side.

  Konstanze frowned at the crop in her hand, then at her husband’s bare and hairy buttocks with their loose, grayish white skin. He looked like a plucked goose.

  �
��Hit me!”

  “Who, me?”

  “Do you see anyone else? You think I want Quarles to come do it?”

  “I can’t strike you,” she said.

  “You can and you will. I’m showing you how this is done.”

  She stood barefoot and naked, her hair around her shoulders and brushing the small of her back. For a moment she felt fragile and exposed, her flesh sensitive to the drafts of the room, to the worn carpet beneath her soles.

  She looked at Bugg. The crop felt firm and warm in her hand. His buttocks awaited.

  “Why are you taking so long? Brainless girl, I should have left you to the Paris whorehouses, although even they wouldn’t want the likes of you. Can’t do the simplest thing—”

  Her fist tightened on the handle of the crop, and a bitter stream of long-suppressed anger seeped up from within her heart. With a rage and a strength she had not known she possessed, she pulled back her arm and whipped the crop against that plucked goose’s butt.

  Bugg screamed.

  The crop whistled again and again as Bugg struggled to escape its strokes, obscenities pouring from his mouth. She got him on the back, on the thigh, and when he turned around she got him right across the groin. She couldn’t stop herself, even as she saw the fury in his eyes. He shouted at her, but she could not hear the words, her own senses overwhelmed by the thrill of the crop in her hand. With each stroke she felt her breasts jiggle, her buttocks jolt, and each movement was a confirmation of her physicality, of the power of her own body. She was Boadicea, bare-breasted warrior queen of Britain! She was mighty, and she would destroy the enemy!

  “On your knees, dog!” she ordered, whacking him across the crown of his liver-spotted head. The blow caught him off balance, and he fell off the edge of the bed to all fours on the carpet. Possessed by the madness of power, she swung a leg over his back and sat astride him, and with the crop gave him a hard smack on his haunches. “Trot, dog!” She gripped a fistful of his hair, jerking hard, and gave him another whack on the rump with the crop.

  Bugg roared in fury and threw her off to the side, pinning her leg beneath him and then using his superior weight to keep her on the floor as he crawled atop her. He wrenched the crop from her hand, and Konstanze felt her power drain away with it, the spirit of Boadicea fading into the air. She looked up into the eyes of her husband, and knew fear beyond anything she had felt before. What she had just inflicted upon him would be nothing compared to what he was about to do to her.

  She lay on her belly, naked, her tears long since stopped, her eyes staring at the candle that burned low on the bedside stand. The odious Bugg snored beside her on the mattress, each breath an insult, a reminder that she belonged to the vile creature. There was a hot, tight ball of emotion in her chest that made it difficult to breathe. It was grief and rage, coming together to coat her heart in black hatred for her husband.

  She had been married to John Bugg for two years, since her mother, an opera singer in Paris, begged on her deathbed that Konstanze marry the man and secure for herself a stable, respectable future. Bugg had been paying their bills for two months by then, and had seemed a generous, gentle man, thoroughly devoted to her. Becoming his wife and returning to England had seemed preferable to being penniless on the streets of Paris, especially as the war with England showed every sign of starting up again.

  Bugg’s demeanor had changed, though, almost as soon as her mother was buried and his ring was upon Konstanze’s finger. He had gone from the generous, well-groomed, avuncular man she had first known to the filthy, drunken, controlling beast in bed with her now.

  She didn’t know why he had changed, but the first inkling of trouble had come on their wedding night. Something had gone wrong, although she did not know precisely what. Bugg had put his hands all over her, grunting and muttering words she could not understand as he rubbed his hips up against her loins and her buttocks. For painful minutes he’d shoved his hand between her legs and handled her roughly, hurting her in places she hadn’t known she could be hurt. She had bitten her lip and shut her eyes, tears leaking out the sides, and waited for it all to be over.

  And then he had stopped, cursing, flinging the sheet over her and leaving their bedroom. He had returned only when thoroughly drunk, and promptly fallen asleep while she lay awake beside him, empty and confused, feeling a failure as a wife. She had expected no pleasure from their joining, and had received none. She had thought, though, that the man was supposed to derive some manner of enjoyment from the encounter, and it did not look as if her husband had done so. Neither was she at all certain just what part of his activity had constituted the consummation of their marriage, although she had the throbbing remnants of pain to confirm that she was virgin no longer.

  She had felt a faint stirring resentment toward her mother. The woman had been so obsessed with protecting Konstanze from all that was unladylike that she had never discussed what went on in the marriage bed. She had rushed Konstanze away when any of her theater friends began to gossip on the topic, and Konstanze herself, sensing her mother’s wishes, had refrained from asking questions despite her natural curiosity.

  The morning after the disastrous wedding night she had gathered her courage and asked Bugg if she had displeased him somehow, if in her ignorance she had done something wrong. He told her to shut her mouth.

  She had not asked again.

  The candle on the bedside stand guttered and went out. Konstanze was cold but did not pull the sheet over herself, for the discomfort fit her mood. The chill on her flesh seemed one more thing for which she could blame Bugg. He could at least have covered her when he was finished. He would be sorry if she perished of a lung disease, for he would never be so fortunate as to fool another young woman into becoming his wife. She imagined his weeping distress as she lay in bed, her skin translucent with approaching death, her gray eyes sunken into purple shadows.

  She wrinkled her nose and switched the image from herself to Bugg lying in the sickbed, his face turned skeletal from wasting illness, raw red sores on his skin. Much better. She would nurse him as if a devoted wife, bathing his forehead with a damp cloth while subdued visitors whispered in awe of her saintlike patience and goodness. She would sing soothing melodies to her dying husband, and a handsome young man come to pay his respects would stand in the hall and listen, unwilling to interrupt her angelic song.

  Bugg snorted and rolled onto his side, then held his breath for a moment. She winced, knowing what was coming. A moment later he broke wind and breathed out a sigh of contentment. The man was as revolting as a hog, and just as healthy.

  Two years of marriage played through her mind. The first year was a blur of grief as she mourned for her mother, paying little attention to the state of her marriage. After that, the memories were mostly of her feelings of revulsion for and a growing fear of her husband—and of his son, John Bugg II, who when he was at home leered and panted after her, varying his amorous attentions only with spiteful remarks that came from his jealousy of her position in his father’s heart. She supposed Bugg II was afraid that his father would spend his fortune on her. He needn’t have worried. The old man, now that he had Konstanze, was as possessive of his coin as he was of her person.

  When the emotions of grief and revulsion had not been present, there was nothing of the two years to remember. She had passed her time in daydreams, creating worlds of her own in which to escape, much as she had when she’d been younger and unhappy, with no way to alter her circumstances. She had not even the heart to sing, which had once been the joy of her life. She did so now only when Bugg demanded a performance.

  In their bed at night, Bugg’s attentions had come with less and less frequency, and it had grown increasingly easy to ignore her husband’s fumbling hands and muttered curses. She had closed her eyes and imagined she was on a ship bound for India, the waves slapping at the hull, or that she was onstage in Vienna, singing for the nobility as her mother once had.

  For two years she had
been all but absent from her life, living in her head except for those too-real moments of fear and revulsion.

  This was not how Mama would have wanted her to live, and it had not been her intention in asking Konstanze to marry Bugg. And this was not how she, Konstanze, wanted to live. She was twenty-four years old, and her life was slipping through her fingers, pouring away for the pleasure of a dirty old man with a mean heart. Konstanze did not like what she was becoming, and she did not want to live a life of hatred and violence such as she had experienced tonight.

  She slid off the bed and drew her wrapper around her chilled body, cautious of the welts Bugg’s crop had raised on her skin. She lit a fresh candle from the embers in the hearth and slipped into her sitting room, easing the door shut behind her.

  In the drawer of her secretary, hidden beneath the blank stationery, she found the key and deed to the cottage in Cornwall, secreted there months ago, and examined repeatedly. The solicitor who’d delivered them, Mr. Rumbelow, had by chance come to the house when Bugg was out of town on business. He’d said it had taken a hired agent over a year and a half to track her down as the last surviving heir of Robert Penrose, her maternal great-uncle. That she had been tracked down at all was owing only to the perseverance of the will’s executor, a Mr. Thomas Trewella of Penperro, Cornwall.

  Penperro was the small fishing village near which her great-uncle had lived. Konstanze had spent the first ten years of her life living with her grandparents in Mousehole, Cornwall, and remembered visiting her great-uncle on two occasions only. Both times they had gone by sea, for Cornwall was inaccessible by land, the roads few and rough and aswarm with highway robbers. People here in “civilized” Kent thought Cornwall to be the end of the earth, nearly as remote as the jungles of deepest, darkest Africa.

  It was that very inaccessibility that interested her now. Bugg knew nothing of her Cornish ancestors, and had known both her mother and her only by the name of her deceased French father, Crécy. She could slip away to Cornwall and take up residence in this cottage, and if she were careful—very, very careful— perhaps he would be unable to track her down and haul her back to Bugg House.