Innocence Examined Read online

  He found himself drawn especially to the long section on the corporal punishment of women, but he was so greatly troubled by how much it moved him that he read that part hurriedly. It troubled him even more that as he walked into Sir Gerald’s house behind Dr. Brown, he felt so strongly the need to return to his room in order to study that section more closely. He swallowed hard and tried to keep his mind on the case they would address here in Cadogan Square. What had Dr. Brown said? A young lady with untoward tendencies?

  Sir Gerald met them in the parlor, where Dr. Brown introduced James as his new assistant.

  “You will be present at the examination of course, Sir Gerald, as her guardian,” Dr. Brown said, as Sir Gerald led them upstairs to Caroline’s chamber, where it appeared Sir Gerald had instructed the girl to wait.

  “Yes?” Sir Gerald said. “Are you sure that’s… that is to say, I know she has many questions of an… intimate nature.” James felt his attention focus like a whetted knife on the conversation. He had endured five calls with Dr. Brown thus far, none of them of any interest. This one seemed likely to be interesting, at the very least.

  “And it is essential that you hear my answers, so that you can be easy in your mind that you and I are delivering commensurate messages.” Dr. Brown was a scotsman of very good breeding and education. He was tall, bespectacled, and gray-haired and -eyed. “You and Mr. Vance have read my essay, I know, and Mr. Vance was kind enough to compliment me upon it, so I am sure that my way of addressing these matters will suit your own wishes, but there is great need of precision in such things, and therefore I deem it important that you be present when I speak to Caroline about these tendencies of hers, and about their relation to her physiology.”

  Was the essay to which Dr. Brown referred the pamphlet on the exercise of masculine rights?

  “Well, yes…” said Sir Gerald. They stood now outside a bedroom door on the second floor. “You were kind enough, Dr. Brown, to reassure me as to these things. Vance couldn’t do it, you know, with those sophistical philosophic arguments of his.”

  They must be speaking of the pamphlet, James thought. What sort of a house was this, where Dr. Brown clearly had a special status? James’ mind began to grow a little wild, wondering if Dr. Brown had spent long evenings here, convincing Sir Gerald and his cohabitant friend Mr. Vance that it was right and natural for a man to fuck as he pleased, whether in cunny, mouth, or anus, just as the pamphlet said.

  He imagined Dr. Brown sharing his very extensive knowledge of the nature of female desire, in order to make Sir Gerald more confident about the way he treated young women who came into his power. Was the girl they were about to see one of those women?

  “Sir Gerald,” Dr. Brown said, “you must understand that your own pleasures are the best guide to your girl’s pleasures. Your girl’s pleasure comes from your pleasure, and if you derive pleasure from causing her, let us say, erotic discomfort, whether with your cock or with the birch, your girl’s true pleasure will derive from that discomfort in its turn.”

  James found himself swallowing hard again, as he wondered what sort of girl awaited them on the other side of this bedchamber door.

  “Exactly, Sir Gerald,” said Dr. Brown, as if concluding an argument. “Mr. Vance and I are of one mind on the matter.”

  Sir Gerald looked sharply at James. “And Dr. Fairleigh, here? Is he of the same mind?”

  James felt his mouth open in surprise and dismay at having been challenged thus. “I…” he began.

  “Dr. Fairleigh,” interrupted Dr. Brown, “is a student in these matters. He has not, I believe, fully made up his mind as of yet.”

  “Should he be here, then?” Sir Gerald asked in alarm.

  “I believe that he should.”

  “You do?” James asked, turning to Dr. Brown.

  “I do, for although you have not made up your mind, I am confident that you will, on the other side of this door.” Dr. Brown turned back to Sir Gerald. “Dr. Fairleigh here does not know that I know that he has been sent to spy on me.”

  “What?” asked Sir Gerald. “Why have you brought him here, then, Brown? Do you wish to ruin me?”

  “Tosh, Sir Gerald. The whole of the ton already knows that you and Vance keep Anne and Charlotte here as fucking pieces. You have already lost all the standing you will ever lose, even if you do carry out Vance’s excellent plan of removing to the Hebrides. You cannot be ruined. I, however, will be, unless I can demonstrate to Dr. Fairleigh here the justice of my views, and the preponderance of the benefits they provide over against the absence of harm.”

  “You know why Dr. Grey assigned me, then?” James asked in an urgent whisper into Dr. Brown’s ear.

  “Indeed,” said Dr. Brown aloud. “And I know that you lost no time in purchasing my essay.” Once again he addressed Sir Gerald. “I know you, Sir Gerald, and thus I know that truly you have no objection to doing what Mr. Vance calls the grace of inspiration, and enlightening young Dr. Fairleigh. I know indeed that your fancy inclines rather strongly to hearing, as I warrant you shall hear, the approval of such as Dr. Fairleigh for your mode of life.”

  “But this is my ward we are discussing, not Anne or Charlotte!”

  “You know by now,” said Dr. Brown, “that in my view a girl of eighteen, whoever she be, is ready to be tried, to see if she be one of those girls who needs to have the right of the phallus exercised upon her.”

  James gasped to hear it right out like that. He looked at Sir Gerald, whose face betrayed an uncertain expression that James began to suspect represented its most characteristic appearance.

  Dr. Brown said, “At all events, we are circumstanced now as we are circumstanced. Either Dr. Fairleigh will report back to Dr. Grey or he will not, but neither will occur until after he has witnessed my examination of Miss Caroline, which I am very confident will decide the matter in our favor, Sir Gerald, even if Dr. Fairleigh is not disposed to enter upon the life of the natural man himself just yet.”

  With that, Dr. Brown knocked upon the door and opened it. James, entering the room after Sir Gerald, knew in an instant that he would not report ill of Dr. Brown, for the moment he saw Miss Caroline Hollins, he fell in love.

  He could never say, whether then and there in her bedchamber in Cadogan Square or later, what circumstance truly bore the responsibility for his instant, overwhelming feeling of affection for Caroline, but he strongly suspected even then that Dr. Brown had set him up with great precision to fall hard and fast into love. The ideas expressed on the landing, a sort of practical summary of Dr. Brown’s essay on the necessity of a man’s exercising his natural rights over a woman’s body, as well as a demonstration that there were men in London who put the ideas in the essay into effect, James thought, must have prepared his masculine heart to seek out a young woman who might serve him in that capacity.

  And there sat Caroline, looking exquisitely beautiful in her clearly anxious state, concerning the examination to come. Her auburn hair flowed girlishly down the back of her blue morning dress, and her blue eyes went wide at the sight of him—of James, for James was the only one of the three men Caroline did not know.

  He wanted to go to her, take her hand, and kiss it, but he also wanted, even more, to discover whether she might embody the confirmation of Dr. Brown’s ideas: whether if, as the pamphlet said a natural man should do, he were to tell Caroline to kneel before him, uncover his cock, and suck it, she would obey.

  At the same time, the moral, conventional part of his heart cried out against the idea of such a profanation of the lovely, defenseless creature in the blue morning gown. James had courted only one young woman, but the ideas impressed on him from his breeding and from that courtship of a few weeks’ duration—though his relations with that girl in Shropshire had also included erotic scenes that lay beyond the bounds of Miss Austen’s, or Sir Walter Scott’s, presentations of courtship—pressed back against the notion of the wicked pamphlet.

  So James stood there, knowing he was
in love, smiling in what he hoped might be a reassuring way, and at war with himself over what his love meant, or required of him.

  Chapter Seven

  Sir Gerald saw Caroline’s surprise at the presence of Fairleigh, and felt his brow furrow as the thought crossed his mind of what it might portend for her that the young, handsome doctor was present at this examination. Did Fairleigh have any sort of fortune? Did Brown have any intention in that direction? The man was deep, and Carruthers would certainly not put it past him to try to introduce his own suitor for Caroline’s fortune this way.

  It was Brown, after all, who had found the little island in the Hebrides, to which Vance had proposed the household remove, and in return Vance had promised him a share in the household’s pleasures when he came to visit, which was only right, as Sir Gerald himself agreed. Would Caroline somehow be wrapped up in their scheme, and was Fairleigh somehow an accomplice—even an unwitting accomplice?

  When Fairleigh had come in the door with Brown, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man whom Brown introduced as “My young associate James Fairleigh, whom I hope you will allow also to be present at the examination, as such real-life experience is invaluable in medical education,” Carruthers had been taken a bit aback. Willing to go along with convention whenever convention should be identified to him, though, he had said, “Of course. Very pleased to meet you, Dr. Fairleigh.”

  “It is an honor, Sir Gerald,” Fairleigh had replied in a cultured voice that Sir Gerald now remembered he had found quite pleasing. Now he saw Fairleigh regard Caroline much as he imagined he himself had regarded Anne the first time he had seen her in her father’s parlor. On the young man’s face sat a look of kindness that encompassed also, somehow—perhaps in the angle of his neck?—a will to possess the girl.

  Sir Gerald found that jealousy had flared within him at the thought that he might not be the man to have Caroline first. He wondered how it could happen that he felt thus, and he reflected that it must result from the girl’s own strange conduct. Certainly, he thought, it was simply impossible for a natural man (here he adopted Brown’s phrase unconsciously, so thoroughly had the physician’s scientific philosophy of sexual relations penetrated his mind) to regard a comely young woman without feeling an interest in having her in his bed. But he had never had any more specific designs upon Caroline Hollins, his ward, until she had appeared in his bedchamber when Sir Gerald was in the act of bottom-fucking his mistress. That circumstance, Sir Gerald concluded, must have caused him to entertain otherwise untoward thoughts about Caroline, which Vance had, in his way, then fomented with his talk of sharing her between them.

  “Miss Hollins,” said Brown, “may I introduce to you James Fairleigh, a new member of the Royal College?”

  Sir Gerald watched Fairleigh take Caroline’s hand and bow over it.

  “I am most pleased to meet you,” Caroline said, not automatically, the way she usually would, but with an evident sincerity that Sir Gerald found rather troubling, and as Fairleigh raised his head, he watched their eyes meet. In that instant, the compunction he had felt about Vance’s scheme of enjoying Caroline as part of their domestic arrangements seemed to vanish: Sir Gerald would not suffer this rival in the erotic pursuit of his ward. Sir Gerald would deflower Caroline this very night, if he must, to ensure that his cock was first into that unglimpsed, but surely lovely, virginal quim. Vance might have the mouth and the bottom, but Caroline’s cunt belonged by rights to her guardian, and by God he would have his natural rights.

  Brown interrupted Sir Gerald’s rather violent train of thought with his first instructions to his young patient. “Please undress down to your shift, Miss Hollins,” he said.

  “Yes, doctor,” Caroline said, and moved to go around to the other side of the dressing screen.

  “I shall ring for Mary to help you undress,” Sir Gerald said.

  “There’s no need of that,” said Brown. “I will unfasten her gown.”

  Caroline blushed prettily, but nodded and turned so that the doctor could get at the hooks in the back of the gown.

  “Or would you rather have Sir Gerald or Dr. Fairleigh do that?” Brown asked teasingly, and Caroline’s blush grew as the doctor unhooked the gown. Curse the man, Sir Gerald thought. He must be laughing at Fairleigh and at me, knowing we both cannot help wanting the girl.

  “How do you feel today?” asked Brown.

  “I feel quite well, thank you,” Caroline replied.

  “I understand you have been having rather unusual thoughts recently? And perhaps also unusual feelings, both in your heart and in your body?”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  Brown had finished with the hooks. “Alright, Miss Hollins, please lower your gown now.”

  “Here?” Caroline asked in alarm, turning about to face the men who awaited the sight of her without her gown. “Not behind the screen?”

  “What purpose would the screen have?” Brown asked. “We shall all be gazing upon you in your shift in a moment anyway, and then, in a few moments, I will uncover you as well, to discuss the changes your body has undergone as you have become a grown woman, and how they relate to your new thoughts and feelings.”

  Caroline’s eyes widened and her nostrils flared. Her breathing became quite audible, and her mouth hung a little open, but she clearly could think of nothing to say. Her brow furrowed, and she compressed her lips into a tight line. She gave a little nod and shrugged the blue silk down until it fell around her feet.

  Sir Gerald had seen his ward in her shift before this, of course, but something about the way they were situated now, with Caroline made to undress for three men’s inspection, made him look at her anew, as Brown’s natural man might do. The apparent innocence that sat in Caroline Hollins’ lovely blue eyes, looking out from a porcelain complexion, seemed to contrast with the heaving of her little breasts in the translucent cotton lawn of her shift. Sir Gerald had the unwelcome urge to reach out and fondle the roundness of her young bosom, to see if he could make her whimper with passion, to show him that she longed to be possessed by him, as he wished to possess her, in Brown’s phrase, by right of the phallus.

  Three phalluses in this room, Sir Gerald thought. But surely two of them must be scientific and dispassionate, while mine is authoritative. And she is my ward, as well. Yes, Vance had it right: no one else should fuck young Caroline Hollins but me. And, afterwards, Vance may have her too.

  Brown’s essay, Sir Gerald remembered, had a few paragraphs about how the presence of multiple men changed the necessities involved in men’s exercise of their natural rights. The right of the phallus did not change, Brown asserted: a natural man must have his way as he saw fit. But in every situation wherein a woman’s charms stood at hazard among more than one natural man, only one of those men might hold the right of the phallus, though the task of discerning which one, in any given situation, could require some discernment.

  Surely, though, it must be I who have the right of the phallus here, in my own house, in regard to the fucking of my lovely ward? Certainly his phallus had grown hard enough, Sir Gerald reflected, to challenge even such a young, vigorous staff as Fairleigh must have.

  “Now then,” said Brown. “Miss Hollins, please lie down on your bed, on your back, so that I may begin the examination.”

  Trembling a little, Caroline did as the doctor bid, looking up at him as he pulled the chair from her vanity table to sit next to her at the head of the bed.

  “I am afraid you will find many of my questions most embarrassing, Miss Hollins, but it is absolutely necessary that we be as frank as we can be in these matters. In the old days, many girls were left entirely at sea where their erotic lives were concerned.”

  Fairleigh cleared his throat, a little uncomfortably, Sir Gerald thought, and Caroline’s eyes seemed to seek him out at the sound, but Brown paid him no mind and continued, “Even today, those outdated notions of feminine modesty make many girls’ lives a misery of secrets and of unfulfilled longings. Do you think
you know what I mean, Miss Hollins?”

  “Yes, doctor,” Caroline whispered.

  “Your guardian here, who feels himself unqualified to undertake this sort of examination, and to inform you on these matters, has nevertheless, as you will perhaps soon discover more fully for yourself, embarked with Mr. Vance on a thoroughly up-to-date course of life. Now that you have begun to inquire about such things, he wishes to allow you also the opportunity to take that enlightened perspective on them. I imagine you do not quite take my meaning, Miss Hollins?”

  “No, doctor.” Caroline’s brow grew troubled. “Do you mean that Sir Gerald wishes me to understand about how he and Mr. Vance live with Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte? For I very much wish to learn about that!”

  Brown smiled, and winked at Sir Gerald. The wink made Sir Gerald’s blood sing in his ears, with the way it seemed to say, “Do you see? How can you doubt that she should be acquainted with the ways of a natural man as soon as you like?”

  “Yes, that is it, Miss Hollins, in part,” Brown said. “But it falls to me also to acquaint you with these matters more generally, and to try to discern whether you may be ready, and well suited, for that sort of life yourself.”

  “Do you mean for a husband?”

  “Not necessarily,” said Brown. “For it may be that I discover in your unusual feelings signs, known to me as a leading researcher in this field, that conventional married life will not bring you happiness, and that a different sort of life recommends itself more strongly, for your coming transition to adult life.”

  Caroline’s blush deepened, as did the crease in her brow. “Doctor,” she said. “I do not understand at all! What do you mean?”

  “I know, Miss Hollins. Do not be alarmed. I shall not reveal everything to you today, for that would abridge the rights of the man who shall, either as your husband or as your awakener, under other circumstances, teach you to please him. I shall, however, reveal enough to set your mind at ease. Now please raise your shift to your waist, lift your knees, and spread them as widely as you comfortably can.”