City of Dreams (46 page)

“My very best wishes, Mistress DaSilva,” the justice of the peace said. He was speaking to her.

Jennet dropped a quick and automatic curtsy. Solomon took her arm and led her to the front door, then left her there for a moment while he had another word with the man and his wife before they climbed back in the carriage.

That was it, then. She was married. To Solomon of all people. It was simply too astonishing to be true.

“Take us home, Clemence.”

“I can’t go home, Solomon, I can’t think what my father and mother will—”

He chuckled. “Hall Place is no longer your home, my dear. You live on Nassau Street now.”

When they arrived at the front gate Clemence reined in the horses, got down, and started to open the carriage door. Solomon waved him away. “Leave us. I will call you when you’re wanted.” He drew the curtain on the window on his side of the carriage, then reached across Jennet and closed the one on her side. “Now,” he said softly, “I am going to show you what you are, my dear, in your deepest soul. Here in my carriage, where I first came to realize it.”

Caleb had kissed her a few times after they had agreed to be engaged. But those were very chaste kisses, a bare meeting of the lips. Solomon began the same way. He took her face in his hands and put his mouth on hers. But then he forced her mouth open and put his tongue inside it.

She hated it. He tasted of tobacco and alcohol. But she did what she had promised herself she would do. She closed her eyes and endured. It could not be that he meant to do the whole thing here in the carriage. She wasn’t entirely sure what was involved—the medical books were not very explicit—but she was fairly sure it required some disrobing, so they would have to go inside. This starting-out bit in his carriage was bound to be over soon.

She felt his hand on her bosom. Jennet gasped, and that drew his tongue deeper into her mouth. He was unlacing her bodice. Her corset, however, laced from behind. He could not reach the ties, but her breasts pushed up over the top of the restraint, and once Solomon had the front of her dress open he stopped kissing her mouth and lowered his head and began kissing the soft flesh of her breasts, drawing his tongue over the crease between them.

Jennet kept her eyes closed, but she wasn’t enduring this part. It was quite nice. She felt her nipples swell the way they sometimes did when she had a bath and rubbed soap all over herself. All over. Even the parts that Solomon was now … Oh. Oh, dear God. No one had ever touched her there. She had never touched herself there. Not the way he was touching her.

Solomon’s hand was under her skirt and between her legs and he was doing things she did not understand, making her feel things she had only felt half asleep in the morning, in the bed she shared with her three sisters, when she was still dreaming. Sometimes she would shiver and feel that burning and that insistent pulse between her thighs. But she always woke up and it ended. This did not end.

She groaned and slid down a bit on the seat. Solomon cradled her in one arm, the other remained busy beneath her skirt. “This is what you are, Jennet,” he whispered. “You are a woman with feelings. A real woman. I’ve always known that about you. Now I know why. It’s the savage in you. I wish you could see yourself as I’m seeing you. With your lips parted like that, moaning and gasping. And your breast heaving. And how is it if I do this?”

He had found another place to stroke, even more sensitive. Too sensitive. She could not bear it. “Stop,” she moaned. “You must stop, please …”

“I won’t stop. You belong to me. I can do what I want with you, so you must bear it. I can touch you right here, keep rubbing you right here, until … Ah, yes. That is what I want you to do. Let me feel all of you tremble. Yes! Exactly like that!”

A throbbing and pulsing that would not end, a great implosion of feeling. She was shaking and sobbing and crying out little cries. And afterward, when it was over, she thought she must die of shame.

Solomon said nothing to make her feel better about what had happened. Only, “Lace your bodice and put your cap back on. We must go inside now.” While he wiped his fingers with the same pocket cloth he had a short time before given her to dry her tears.

She saw it all as if through a haze: the polished wood floors covered with tightly woven canvas cloths painted in vibrant reds and blues, the chandeliers made of hammered silver and fitted with candles beyond counting, the gilded chairs with their silken cushions tied on with golden braid. It was a palace, but she felt like a scullery maid, not a queen.

“You can see the rest later,” Solomon said when he had walked her through some of the downstairs. “Flossie will take you to your room.”

The woman was white, and she spoke with a strong Irish accent. Another time Jennet might have been curious about who she was and how she came to be a servant in this house in New York. Now she could summon no coherent thoughts to make into words.

“Sure and it’s everything you have to be taking off, child,” the woman said as soon as she’d brought Jennet to the largest bedchamber she’d ever seen. “Here now, I’ll help you.”

“Why? It’s not night. Why must I take off my clothes?”

Flossie laughed. “Just you be doing what I say. And more important, doing what himself says. It’s soon enough you’ll be finding out the rest of it.”

She had already learned more than she wished to know. If she had ever doubted the truth of the story about her grandfather Nicholas, what had just happened in Solomon’s carriage convinced her. And it must have convinced Solomon as well. Perhaps he hadn’t before believed the story. Perhaps that’s why he wanted to marry her. What would he do now, when he knew it was true?

“A gorgeous thing you are,” Flossie said, stepping back to admire her naked form. “No wonder he’s quite mad with the thought of you. And clever you must be, lass. There’s many as wanted to marry Solomon DaSilva, for all he’s a Hebrew and an ugly one to boot. But it’s bed them not wed them has always been Solomon’s way. Until now—and I can hardly credit it—here I am readying his bride.”

While she spoke Flossie busily patted scented powder all over Jennet’s naked body, with a large, soft cotton puff, buffing the powder into her skin. “So someday, when you’ve your wits about you and have stopped looking like a scared little rabbit about to be set upon by the hounds, perhaps you’ll tell me how you went about the doing of it. Sure, and don’t I know you will. It’s great friends we’ll be, lass. I can feel it in me bones.”

Jennet barely heard this stream of chatter. She was too dazed to be embarrassed by the woman’s attentions, or to ask what she was being prepared for. He’d already done it, hadn’t he? Whatever it was that men did to women once they wedded them, Solomon had done it to her. Out in the carriage. On the street.

And she had carried on like a strumpet. Not in the shy and retiring way her father’s medical books spoke of when they discussed women and their reactions to what they called “the marital act.” Solomon had no need to be reminded of what the books described as “the differences between a modest, God-fearing gentlewoman, and those of cruder nature whom the groom may have known before he wed.” She was one of the crude ones, with the sensibilities of a strumpet. That’s what Solomon had meant when he said he was going to show her what she was.

“All right, lass, hop in.” Flossie had turned back the covers of the high fourposter bed. “Come on now. It’s impatient himself is. Don’t keep him waiting, lass, not even on your wedding day. There’s little to be gained by raising the temper of Solomon DaSilva. As I expect you’ll learn soon enough.”

Jennet stumbled toward the bed, too confused and frightened to argue. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “I’m not sleepy. And we’ve had no dinner. Perhaps I should go downstairs and see about getting Solomon some din—”

Flossie hooted with laughter. “It’s not food he wants at the moment, lass. In you go to the marriage bed, naked as the day you were born, with the covers drawn up to your chin. I’m off then. And you stay right here. I doubt it’s long you’ll be having to wait.”

Flossie had left the curtains open. Solomon drew them. “I think we will leave daylight for a later pleasure, my dear. When you’ve a bit more experience.” Bright sun crept around the edges of the curtain and created a shadowy dimness rather than the blackness of night.

DaSilva was not proud of his body. He was thirty-nine years old, more than twice as old as she, and short and thickset and covered with black hair, like an ape, he often thought. Certainly nothing like that tall slim young redhead she’d expected to marry. At least he had no cause to be ashamed of what he brought to deflower her with. His erection was enormous, and when he turned back the covers and saw what was waiting for him, it grew still bigger.

“You are very beautiful,” he said softly. “Do you know that, Jennet?”

She shook her head. She was staring at his face, as if afraid to look elsewhere. He leaned over her and took her chin in his hand. “Well, it is true. You are exquisite. Now, do you know what I’m going to do to you?”

She felt she had to say something. The only thing she could think of was the punishment he’d mentioned when he accused her of being headstrong and willful. “Spank me?”

He chuckled. “No. Perhaps sometime in the future, when you are ready to be introduced to more sophisticated pleasures, but not now. Now I am going to please only myself. I am about to possess you, Jennet. And after that you will be completely and utterly mine. More so than any words spoken by a justice of the peace can make you. So much mine that your father will not dare to raise any objection to the manner in which I carried you off.”

“But … outside,” she whispered, “what you did in the carriage. I thought …”

“You thought that was what transpires between men and women? Oh, no, my dear, most women never feel what you felt in my carriage. Their husbands are not skilled enough to produce such feelings, and they are not capable of them in any case. But you are not like most women. I promise you will feel that way again, though perhaps not this first time. Now, enough talk. I want you to keep looking at me. Keep your eyes open, exactly like that. And spread your legs.”

He clambered onto the bed and knelt over her and lifted her hips with his two hands; with one sharp thrust he was inside her, but not all the way. She made a little grunt of pain, but she kept looking at him as he had told her to. And he kept looking at her. “Now,” he said softly. Another thrust, this one harder and deeper, resisted for only the briefest of moments. Then her body yielded to him.

He withdrew almost entirely, then thrust again. Slowly, and with great concentration. Prolonging for as long as he could every sweet instant of the exquisite pleasure a woman, any woman, could give only once.

DaSilva saw the way Jennet’s eyes widened in shock and pain. He gloried in it. And in the knowledge that he was the first, that she was truly and in every way virgin, and that he was going to mold her to his desires, shape her to his pleasure, and that someday when he thrust in and out like this she would scream with delight. But right now he was exultant when he saw the two tears that formed in the corners of her dark blue eyes and began to slide down her cheeks.