Authors: Michelle Woodward
Cornelia flew at him like one wild. She pressed her mouth against his and felt his hands come up into her hair, massaging the pins out of it, heard them clatter to the floor, and suddenly his hands were full of her wet locks. She skimmed his waist with her palm, felt a solidity against her palm pressing up from between his legs, and knew this was a sensuality she would never gain from a dry little gentleman. They were not like this, not like the satin brown skin beneath her. When he stripped her bare, undoing her blouse carefully, as if the ruined material was precious—or was that the woman beneath?--she felt no shame, for how could she feel shame in this union? She knelt to strip him of his pants, enjoying the subservience to one who had formerly been subservient to her. The feeling of her head, her mouth, her eyes being so close to the essence of his maleness ignited her, and when she lowered his pants to free his member, she almost let out a hiss of a sigh in reverence.
She kissed the head of his penis, felt the soft skin laid over a collection of blood and nerves and steel against her lips, and felt him lower a hand to her head. She looked up at him, and there was that blinding smile again, mouth forming no words, transferring them instead to his eyes. She took his hand and rose, pressing her naked white body against him, relishing the feeling of skin against skin. This was to be no fumbling; this was to be a continued awakening of a spirit she had in her all along.
What she felt that night was something many do not feel their entire lives. The tenderness with which he lowered her to the bed, the passion with which he covered her with his own body would sear themselves onto her memory for the rest of her life. She wrapped her naked legs around him as he kissed her breasts and stomach, lavished attention on those brown nipples. She pressed her palms against him, wrapped her arms around him as he pushed inside of her willing invitation. She lost herself in the ocean of sensation, feeling animal gasps rise from her body and throat. She cared not a whit what anyone thought of her as she raked her fingernails down his back. She welcomed everything, the sting of pain upon first entrance, and the feeling of fullness as she grew accustomed to his girth inside of her. What a marvelous feeling, this flesh enclosed in flesh! She moaned long and loud as he rocked inside of her, on the edge of in and out on a particularly delicate spot, drowned in his smile as he swallowed her sounds. She erupted first, in a hoarse cry he covered with his hand to escape censure, and kept rising and falling above her until she felt the hot spurt of him inside of her.
They lay cradled together with his hands holding her breasts for hours. She looked down to see the sight and recalled the term chiaroscuro, light against dark, from her art lessons. His hands, finely boned and beautifully scarred and callused from hard work, held the creamy mounds of her breasts as if they were fine jewels, her nipples peeking out with deliciously jarring wantonness from between his fingers. She moved her backside against him, felt him rise once more to the occasion, and rubbed harder in a motion that would have been unknown to her even days before. She felt his warm breath on her neck, felt the press of his lips against the sensitive hairs there, and reached behind her head to wind her arms around him. Cornelia entwined her hands in his thick and luxurious hair and felt his hands slide down her bare waist. When he turned her to face him, she felt safe and small, and bound.
“We are each other’s,” she told him, whispering the secret into his neck.
“Each other’s,” he agreed, and quite suddenly, his body went completely rigid and he let out a loud cry.
It appeared as though Cornelia's Indian ama had risen hours before the sun to ensure that her blooming young charge did not wake up in a scandalous situation that would expose the three of them to her employers. She chose to make her presence known by whacking Cornelia's lover over the head with a broom and dragging him out of bed by his ear. She jabbered on something in their native tongue, clearly angry, and it was all Cornelia's lover could do to escape her oncoming blows. She pushed him out of the door without giving him a chance to put his clothes on, throwing them out after him like so much trash.
“What will your parents think of me?” she wailed, pushing Cornelia out of the bed so she could change the sheets immediately.
And although in that moment, Cornelia told herself she did not care, she did seconds later when her father burst through the door of her room, holding the Indian boy by his ear.
“What is the meaning of this?” he roared. Cornelia's visitor looked quite overwhelmed by the double beating he had received that morning and quite irate at being so manhandled so early in the morning.
Despite her pleas and protestations, it appeared that the native boy was fired immediately. Her father proclaimed he was lucky he did not have him dragged before the plantation magistrate to be publicly flogged for so defiling an English girl. Although Cornelia insisted that their union had been more than consensual, her father claimed she knew no better since she was a child. He arranged her passage back to London, far away from “these heathens,” and upended his family once more. Cornelia's mother and sister were more than overjoyed to be returning to their fashionable hometown, but Cornelia was distraught at the thought of never seeing her lover again. What was to be her fate now?
Her fate, ironically, was sealed by the action of her own hands. Several weeks after they had returned to England, they were to attend a rather important party of one of her father's duke friends. The modiste had been ordered to create the finest attire for the ladies of the house, and was doing her fastest and finest work until she ran into a snag in the plans. It appeared as though the measurements she had taken for Cornelia had experienced a rapid change for the larger in a very brief window of time. While her sister and mother praised the English diet for returning health and sanity back to their ponderous family member, Cornelia's Indian ama, who had been transported back with them, as was often the style, cast a suspicious eye on her charge. Cornelia still had the power to silence her with a look, but she did not seem to have power over her own body, as the ama's suspicions were confirmed three days later when Cornelia upchucked her entire breakfast into a porcelain washing bowl by her bedside.
“Oh ama,” wailed Cornelia miserably, hugging her porcelain receptacle. “What did I eat?”
“You eat nothing,” replied the ama briskly. “This happen sometime when you lay with man.”
“You don't mean—no,” gasped Cornelia, paling even further. “What am I to do?”
Together, they hatched a plan that could have only been borne of desperation. Cornelia needed to marry, and fast. The modiste was slipped something extra for creating not one, but several gowns with extra paneling, as well as for her silence. That night, Cornelia made sure to shine her brightest, for now she was a wild rose with a mission to plant her seeds in her own native soil.
Still, miracles do not simply happen, and it was a full month before she was able to achieve her goal. She blessed everything she held dear that she carried small and that the man she was marrying was a fool. Lord Steven Davenport was exactly the kind of man she had spent so long dreading—an English gentleman with no taste for wildness, no understanding of women or their sensuality, but at least he was a dullard who would not do any particularly careful calculations. They celebrated a wedding in high style, even if it was fast enough to stir some gossipy whispers.
When she lay with him, she allowed her mind to drift off. It was as if she was creating her own inner monologue, in which she lived another life, a secret life with the boy she could never be with. She looked down and saw her husband's pale, flabby body pumping into her secret caverns and begged the boy for forgiveness. As time went on, she drifted into a darkness in which she imagined him watching, the nails on his fingers digging into his palms even as his cock rose up in unrestrained lust to see her so used.
Her belly swelled with the months, and Lord Davenport could not have been more puffed up and pleased at his own virility. He crowed everywhere that he was surely the most prodigious man for look at how quickly his luscious new wife had conceived. Cornelia would close her eyes and squeeze them together in disgust, trying her best to shut her new idiot husband out of her mind, out of her life; he would mistake this for a symptom of her pregnancy and ask if he could bring her anything. It was always water she requested, glass after glass, for nothing could quench her thirst. She had been endlessly parched since Assam, and no amount of water her ama could bring her could fill her up. An ache and emptiness inside of her the size of a whole country had appeared and nothing could fill it.
When the baby was born, it came into the world as messily as it had been made. There was more blood than Cornelia could have ever imagined, and a pain that ripped her from anus to belly. As she pushed, her hair once again stuck to her skull, and she transformed into a sweating, grunting animal; it was the only time she felt alive since the boy. Only pain and pleasure could awaken her true self, it seemed, until she held her baby daughter in her arms. A little girl with dusky skin and rosebud lips, a little girl who latched onto those brown nipples and stared up at her with eyes the dark blue of all infants that are born. Part of the ache subsided, for Cornelia carried a piece of her true self by her side at all times.
In time, the infant's eyes lightened to a strange, pale green. When Lord Davenport delightedly exclaimed upon his daughter's undeniable beauty, a strange fear gripped Cornelia. She explained that the baby's unusual eye color stemmed from a distant relative who had died years ago. The desperate glance of a mother tiger protecting her cubs did not escape her ama, who sealed her lips, joined in the secret and in the love of the little child before them.
The child called India.
Lord Davenport attributed the unusual name to Cornelia's time in Assam. “Your father's work was so important there, lifted so many of the natives out of their tragic, heathen lives,” he would tell her. It surprised her, or would have, had she still been alive for anyone other than her progeny, the way he had transformed since India's arrival. She had thought the allure of her nubile young body was only an added bonus and that all he was after had been a share in her father's company, but it appeared Lord Davenport was even stupider than he appeared. It appeared he actually held pride in the work of an exploitative company and believed that the natives were naught but ignorant slaves headed straight to hell.
Well, if that's where they were going, then Cornelia wanted to tumble along with them, head over horns over heels.
She carried her true self inside for all the years of her life. Only she and her ama knew the full truth, and yet there were things to be grateful for. Lord Davenport, believing against all odds that India was his rightful daughter, bestowed upon her the finest education and wealth he could provide. Cornelia saw to it that her daughter had the finest tutors from all around the world, for she would not have her grow up to become as limited in her world view as her alleged father. For it seemed that no matter how hard Lord Davenport tried, he could never replace the love that was already in her heart for the native boy. And so it was with no great remorse that Cornelia received the news that Lord Davenport had died in a hunting accident when India was eight. She simply made sure all the papers were in order and that her daughter, the result of her union with a less than appropriate man, was to be accepted into London's high society as a lady of the first order.
She kept her secret close to her heart until India reached the ripe age of eighteen and was ready to come out on the social scene. And then, Cornelia Augusta did the unthinkable. She signed over her inheritance to her daughter, left her ama behind, and traveled back to India. The scandal hit London's social scene like a grenade, leaving shrapnel everywhere, sparing no one. Not her father, who had tried his best to protect her, not her mother and sister, who had willingly turned a blind eye to the occurrences that had had happened after their fateful venture into a foreign land. And so it happened that Cornelia returned to a land that had always felt closer than home, off to find her fortune or to find a much greater joy that perhaps she had always laid claim to. India did not pretend to understand all of the details of her mother's story, for little was shared other than the truth of her parentage through the letter her mother had left behind, but she understood her mother's heart most intimately.
It seemed that they were both different from the norm, and both of them against their will. India cast no blame, just wished her mother a fond farewell with a promise to write. For it was time for them both to move to foreign territory, and the lives that awaited them both were changed forever by simple acts of passion.
But that was yet to come.
* * *
The coming out ball thrown in honor of India Augustina raised speculation far and wide, but also attracted the highest number of the ton in attendance that had been seen in over a decade. Nobody had seen the young lady since the death of her father, for her mother had been a most curious creature, obsessed with a land that was populated mostly by savages. Some speculated that the girl had followed the same route and lived much like the ama who was raising her; that is to say that rumors had flown about that the girl was residing in a room filled with spices and witch-like spells, a ridiculous notion if India had ever heard one. She was putting the finishing touches on her own curls when the servants informed her that the carriage was ready to take her to the Davenports. The elderly couple had much taken her under their wing during the time her mother had left. Had India been a more charitable young lady, she might have recognized that her grandparents meant well. Ever since her mother's quite sudden permanent trip to the land of tea leaves, India had instead invested much in bringing out her own stubborn streak of independence. She had accepted the ball being thrown in her honor, but she was certain that she would not find what she was looking for there.