🔥 The Fourth Plate 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from An Heiress for the Wicked Duke by Evelyn Ashcombe

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in August 1888, midway through An Heiress for the Wicked Duke, picking up the moment Chapter Ten ends on the stillroom floor. It contains spoilers through the middle of the novel and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Alistair’s side of the morning he turns Vivian’s camera on her: a north window, eight seconds of holding still, a slate bench, and a plate that develops into something neither of them expected. Explicit content — 18+.

The Fourth Plate

He did not know how long they lay on the flags.

Long enough for the cold to come up through the velvet into his knees and stay there. Long enough for her breathing to slow against his throat, and for the north light to move a hand’s breadth along the whitewash. Her fingers were still in his hair. Every so often they combed through it, once, the way a woman runs her hand along a banister she knows.

Across the room the big camera stood on its three legs with its one eye open, staring at an empty windowsill.

“You moved,” said Vivian, into his neck.

“You have mentioned it.”

“I shall mention it a good deal. It is the only plate of yours I shall ever be able to describe at dinner.” She stirred. “I must get those three into the box before the light goes off them. If a housemaid so much as opens the door with a candle—”

“The bolt is on the inside.”

“So it is.” She did not move. “I had forgotten. I have never had anything that bolted from the inside before. I keep forgetting it is there, and then remembering, and being happy all over again, like a child with a new tooth.”

He lifted his head and looked at her.

She lay on her own focusing cloth with her skirts rucked to her waist and her bodice open at the throat where he had got two hooks undone and given up on the third. Her hair had come down altogether. One stocking had slid to the knee. Her mouth was swollen from his, and from the other thing she had done with it, kneeling on this floor, for the sake of a photograph. She was flushed from her breasts to her hairline and looking up at him with that enormous, patient, merciless attention, as though he were still the most interesting object in the room.

He thought: she has three plates of me in a slide box, and I have nothing of her at all.

He thought it very clearly, and it frightened him a good deal less than it ought.

“Vivian.”

“Mm.”

“I want to ask for something. You may refuse it. You will probably refuse it.”

Her eyes sharpened at once. She knew that voice. It was the one he used for the price of lead.

“Ask.”

“I want to take you.”

She went perfectly still under him.

“On a plate,” said Alistair. “As you took me. Here, in this light, with nothing on. You have looked at me through that glass three times this morning and I have stood there and let you, and I have never in my life been so frightened, or so—” He stopped. “I find I want to see what you saw. From the other side. I want to put my head under that cloth and look at you upside down and know that you are letting me.”

“You don’t know how to work it.”

“You will teach me. You taught me the focusing screw on my own roof.”

“That was one screw.”

“I am a quick study. I learned a whole wife in seven weeks.”

That surprised a laugh out of her. It went through her belly, where he was lying on it, and he felt it in his own.

Then the laugh was gone, and she was looking past his shoulder at the camera, and he watched her think about it as she thought about everything: honestly, turning it to the window, hunting the flaw.

“Nobody has ever taken me,” she said at last. “Not one that I would own to. My mother’s man in Baker Street, with the iron clamp. A woman in Paris who painted my mouth smaller. They are all of somebody very well behaved, standing next to a palm.” Her fingers had stopped moving in his hair. “I don’t know what I look like, Alistair. I have spent six years waiting for other people to forget their faces. I have never once had the chance to forget mine.”

“Then forget it now. I’ll do the remembering.”

“And the plate?”

“Is yours. Yours to burn. That is the rule. It has always been the rule.”

She looked up at him a long moment.

“You may ask,” she said slowly, “for anything.”

“And neither of us may assume. I know.” He kissed the corner of her mouth. “I am not assuming. I am on my knees on a stone floor, asking. Will you sit for me, Duchess?”

“I won’t sit,” said Vivian. “I’ll stand. I want my weight on my own two feet.” And then, with the crooked smile, the first of the day that was entirely for herself: “Yes.”

She undressed for him by the north window.

She did not do it prettily. She was not a woman who did things prettily; she did them thoroughly. She stood with her back to the glass and worked the third hook of her bodice with her bare stained fingers, and when it would not come she said a word she had learned from brakemen and tore it, and the hook went skittering across the flags under the copper. He laughed. She glared at him. Then the bodice was off, and the skirt dropped round her ankles, and the petticoat, and she unlaced her own stays crossing by crossing, without hurry, watching him the whole time, and let them fall.

The chemise came over her head. She dropped it on the cold copper.

Then she stood in the north light in her stockings and garters and nothing else, with her arms at her sides, and let him look.

He had seen her naked by lamplight, by firelight, by the gold of an east window at six in the morning. He had never seen her like this. The north light hid nothing and flattered nothing, exactly as she had promised him; it simply told him what was there, all at once, at the same rate. The freckles across one shoulder, and a scatter he had not noticed on her hip. The faint red print of her stays still on her ribs. Small high breasts, the nipples drawn tight and dark in the cold. The soft crisp hair between her thighs, darker than the hair on her head, and below it the inner skin of her thighs still wet and shining from him. Her chin was up. Her hands had curled into fists. She was enduring it, the way she had endured the lamp on their wedding night, and daring him.

“Well?” she said. “Your sitter is getting gooseflesh, Duke.”

“Don’t move.”

“I’m not moving. I’m freezing.”

“I know. Stand exactly so.” He got up off the floor. He had no notion where his trousers had gone and found that he did not care. “I am going to do this properly.”

“You don’t know what properly is.”

“Then talk me through it.”

So she did. She stood naked by the window with her teeth very nearly chattering and talked him through her camera like a railroad man talking a boy through a locomotive, and he obeyed every word. The legs set wider; the brass screw tightened; the bellows run out along the track until she said there. He drew the black velvet up off the floor where they had lain on it. It was still warm in one place. He shook it out, and put it over his head and the back of the camera together, as he had seen her do a hundred times, and bent.

The day went out.

He was in the warm dark that smelled of her, of bergamot and struck matches and, faintly now, of him; and in front of his eyes, on a pane of ground glass the size of a book, burning, upside down, was his wife.

He had to put a hand on the tripod.

She hung from the floor like a lamp. Her feet were at the top of the glass and her hair poured down toward the bottom of it, and the whole of her was soft and swimming and luminous, as though seen through water. Everything stands on its head, she had told him on the roof. It is how you tell if a picture is any good. Nothing can flatter you upside down.

Nothing did. Nothing needed to.

“I can’t see you properly. You’re soft.”

“You’re unfocused.” Her voice came to him through the cloth, from very far off and very near. “The screw on the right. Turn it toward you. Slowly.”

He turned it. The soft shape sharpened, and blurred, and sharpened. He went past it and came back.

“A fraction,” he heard himself say. “A fraction more.”

She made a small sound. He did not think she meant him to hear it.

And there she was. Every eyelash. The fine down at her temple caught in the light. The pulse going in the side of her throat, so hard he could see it jump on the glass. Her mouth, a little open. Her breasts rising and falling far too quickly for a woman who was only cold.

“Vivian.”

“What?”

“You’re shaking.”

“It’s December in here.”

“It’s August. You’re not cold. Tell me why you’re shaking.”

A long silence. On the glass, upside down, he watched her swallow.

“Because you’re looking,” said Vivian, “and I can’t see you do it. I can only see that great black hump of velvet with your bare legs coming out of the bottom of it, which is the least dignified thing I have ever seen a duke do, and I know your eyes are on me and I can’t tell where.” Her voice had dropped. “I didn’t know it would be like this. On this side. I always thought my sitters were frightened of the lens.”

“What are they frightened of?”

“Of me,” she said. “Behind it. Choosing.”

“I’m not choosing. I’m only looking.”

“I know. That’s worse.”

He came out from under the cloth.

He came out flushed and blinking into the white light, and she was standing exactly where he had left her, by the window, naked to the garters and trembling, and she had not covered herself, and her eyes went straight to his face and then, helplessly, down. He was hard. He had got hard under the cloth looking at her upside down, so hard it ached, and he had not had the smallest idea of it until now.

She looked at it. She looked back up at him. Her nipples were standing out like two small stones.

“Oh,” said Vivian softly. “That’s what my sitters are frightened of.”

“Hold still.”

“I am holding—”

“No. Not for the plate. Not yet.” He crossed to her. “I want the second after. When you’ve grown tired of holding it. When you’ve gone back to being whoever you are. That’s what you taught me, isn’t it? Everybody runs out of face in the end, and the picture is in the second after.”

“Alistair—”

“So I’m going to wear yours out for you.”

He went down on his knees on the flags in front of her.

She put her hand flat on the cold glass of the window behind her. He took her other hand, the left one, and turned it over, and put his mouth to the inside of her wrist where he had bitten her in June, and felt her pulse go wild against his tongue. Then he let go of it, and set his two hands on the backs of her thighs, above the garters, where the skin was hot, and drew her a half step forward off the glass, and put his face between her legs.

She cried out. It rang off the whitewash.

“Alistair—the window—”

“Faces north. Onto a kitchen court and a wall nine feet high. Nobody has stood in that court since my grandmother’s still went cold.” He spoke against her. She was wet, hot, slick with him and with herself, and the taste of the two of them together went to his head like brandy. “There is nobody in the world to see you but me. Open your legs.”

She opened them.

He licked her slowly from the bottom to the top, one broad flat stroke, and felt her knees go. He held her up by the thighs. He did it again, and again, unhurried, learning her as she had once learned his face from under a cloth: the soft folds, the hard little bud of her at the top, already swollen, the place just inside her that was still loose and wet from his cock. He put his tongue there. She swore. He went back up and closed his lips round her and sucked, gently, and then not gently, and her hand came down off the window and fisted in his hair.

“Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop, I’ll—oh, God—”

“Look at the camera.”

“What?”

“Look at the camera, Vivian. Over my head. Look at that glass eye and think about what it would see if I’d drawn the slide.” He licked her again, hard. “Your hand in my hair. Your knees shaking. Your cunt in my mouth in the middle of the morning with the light on you like a sermon. Think about that on a plate.”

She made a sound he had never heard from her. It was not a word.

“I’d keep it,” he told her, against her slick skin, between strokes. “I’d keep it in a box with a lock, and I’d hold the key, and on the nights I’m in London alone I’d take it out and look at it by a candle. And I’d never let another soul in England see it. Not one. Just me. Mine.”

“Alistair—”

He slid two fingers into her and crooked them, and set his mouth back on the bud of her and sucked in time, and she came apart standing up.

She came with her back arched off the window and her head thrown back against the glass and her fist wrenching his hair, shouting, shuddering, her thighs clamping on his ears so that for a moment the whole world was wet heat and the muffled roar of her voice. He did not stop. He held her up and licked her through it and on, until the shudders broke apart and came again, smaller and sharper, and she sobbed his name and tried to twist away and could not.

Then he sat back on his heels and looked up at her.

She had slid down the window a few inches. She was clinging to the sill with one hand. Her hair was stuck to her temples, her mouth was open, her eyes were wet and blind and dazed and she was not holding anything at all. There was no chin up. There was no daring. There was a woman who had just been taken apart against a north window, looking down at the man who had done it with an expression of such naked, startled tenderness that he felt it in his teeth.

“There you are,” said Alistair quietly. “Don’t move.”

He got under the cloth so fast he struck his head on the camera.

“Slide,” she said, from the window, in a voice like a woman talking in her sleep. She had not moved. He did not think she could. “It’s in the box by your foot. The one on top. Run it in. Grooves toward you.”

He ran it in.

“There’s a sheath. A dark sheath. You draw it out before you uncap—”

“I know. I’ve watched you.” He was not listening. He was looking at the glass.

She hung there upside down, gold and white and dark, her hand on the sill, one stockinged foot turned in. She was looking straight at the lens. She was looking straight at him, he understood, through the glass and the brass and the velvet; she had found where his eyes were at last. Her face was not arranged. It was not anything. It was only her, after.

He had never seen anything so beautiful in his life, and he had owned a Canaletto.

He came out and took hold of the brass cap.

“Eight seconds,” she said dreamily. “Can you count?”

“I married a railroad.”

He lifted the cap.

“One,” said Alistair.

She held still. She held still for him, naked by the window, and he stood beside her camera with the cap in his fist and looked at her the whole time; not at the lens, at her, and she looked back. Two. Her breasts rising. Three. The flush going down her throat. Four. Her mouth moved. He thought it was his name. Five. He was so hard he was shaking. Six. Seven.

“Eight,” he said, and capped the lens, and crossed the floor, and she was already reaching for him.

He took her against the slate bench.

He had meant to be careful. He had meant to lay her down on the velvet and be slow, since he had been neither on the floor an hour since. But she got her hands on him and dragged him in by the hips, and her mouth was open on his, and she was saying now, now, I want you now in the voice that undid him every time, and he lifted her by the waist and set her bare on the cold slate edge.

She yelped. He laughed into her mouth.

“The tin—”

“My skirt. On the floor. Left pocket.”

He found it. He dealt with it with hands that would barely serve him, while she sat on his bench with her knees apart and her heels hooked over the bench’s lip and watched him do it, flushed and wrecked and impatient, saying quickly, Alistair, quickly, I’m cold.

“You’re not cold.”

“I’m cold everywhere you aren’t.”

He stepped between her thighs and set himself to her and went into her in one long slow push, all the way, and she wrapped her legs round him and her arms round his neck and said oh in that other voice, the astonished one, as if she had never had him before.

He held still, deep, his forehead on hers.

“Look at me,” he said.

“I am looking at you.”

“Keep looking.”

He began to move. Long, hard, deep strokes, the slate scraping at her as he drove her back against the wall, her breasts dragging on his chest, her nails in his shoulders. The brown bottles chimed on their shelf above her head. She was so wet, so slick and hot round him, still fluttering from his mouth, and every stroke wrung a sound out of her that went straight to the base of his spine.

“Tell me what you see,” she gasped. It was her question now. She had stolen it from him in a ruin by the lake and never given it back.

“I see what I saw on the glass. Only right way up.” He thrust deep and held, and her head fell back against the whitewash. “I see a woman who has just let a man take her picture. Naked. In daylight. Who has no idea in God’s world what her face is doing, and doesn’t care.” Another stroke. “I see my wife being fucked on her own bench, in her own room, with the bolt shot from the inside. I see that she likes it. I see that she wants it harder.”

“I do. I want it harder. Please—”

He gave it to her harder. He gripped her hips and pulled her onto him, and the bench rocked, and a brown bottle went over and rolled and did not break. She was clinging to him with her arms and her legs and her cunt, all three, gripping him like a fist at every stroke. He got his hand between them and found her with his thumb, slick and swollen, and rubbed, and she bit his shoulder hard enough to mark.

“I’m—Alistair, I’m going to—again—”

“Look at me while you do.”

She looked at him. She looked at him with her eyes wide open and her mouth open and the whole of her face coming undone, feature by feature, six inches from his, and she came on his cock like that, in the full north light, clenching in long hard waves and crying out and not once looking away; and he watched every second of it, and kept it, and knew that he would never need a plate. He would carry it the rest of his life behind his eyes. It dragged him over with her. He drove into her one last time and spent, deep, shaking, with her name torn out of him and his face against her throat.

For a long while there was nothing but their breathing, and the cold slate, and the bottle that had finally stopped rolling.

“Well,” said Vivian, against his hair, unsteadily. “Do the goods answer?”

He laughed until he had to hold on to the bench.

She developed it that night, by the ruby lamp, with the door bolted. She would not let him in. He sat on the cold flags of the kitchen passage outside the stillroom like a man outside a lying-in chamber, and at a quarter to eleven he heard her begin to laugh.

She opened the door. She was holding a sheet of glass up to the red light, in her apron, with tears running down her face.

It was perfectly clear.

There was nothing on it. Not a shadow, not a smear, not a window. Not her.

“The sheath,” said Vivian, weeping with laughter. “You never drew the sheath. I told you. I told you twice. You stood there and counted eight perfect seconds into a closed box, you magnificent—you lovely idiot. It’s blank. There is nothing on it at all.”

He looked at the clear glass in the red light. He thought of her by the window, after; her hand on the sill, her mouth saying his name on five.

“No,” said Alistair. “It’s all on it. You’re simply not able to see it.”

She stopped laughing.

“Then you’ll have to describe it to me,” she said, after a moment, quite differently. “Every inch. In order.”

“Now?”

“Now. Plainly.” She drew him in by the shirt front and shot the bolt behind him. “And then you may ask me to sit for you again. And this time, Duke, I’ll stand by the camera and draw the sheath myself.”

She never did put the fourth plate in the japanned box with the other three. It went back into the dark slide, unexposed, and a fortnight later it took a pair of old grey hands dressing lead into a gutter, eight inches from the lens.

But when she asked him, years afterward, what he had seen on it, he could still tell her. Every inch.

In order.

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