🔥 The Palais-Royal 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Her Ladyship’s American Wife by Evelyn Ashcombe

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place in Paris in November 1896, during Constance’s first month abroad after the end of Chapter Twenty and before the Epilogue. It contains spoilers for the whole of Her Ladyship’s American Wife and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Constance’s side of a rainy Saturday in the Palais-Royal: a shop behind a window full of gloves, forty-five francs of her own money, a harness and a piece of polished boxwood, and the one thing she has never had back. Explicit content — 18+.

The Palais-Royal

It rained the whole of their second Saturday in Paris, and Beatrice said that was the point of the Palais-Royal: you could walk round it all afternoon and never once get wet.

She had heard of the shop from the Lyon girl at the next bench, who had heard of it from a model, who had heard of it from a woman who sat for Rodin and therefore knew everything. Beatrice did not tell Constance any of this. She said only that there was a glover in the Galerie de Valois who did kid at half the Bond Street price, and that Constance’s left glove had now been darned at the thumb so many times it was more darn than glove, and that she had no intention of buying her another pair. She was to buy them herself. With her own money. Beatrice would carry the umbrella and say nothing.

“You are being very mysterious,” Constance said, under the arcade.

“I’m being very obedient. You told me in July never to buy you so much as a hairpin.”

“I told you not to buy me a range.”

“Hairpins are on the same list. It’s a long list. You wrote it.”

The arcade ran the length of the garden in a long stone tunnel of shop windows, gaslit at three in the afternoon because the November dark had come down early. Rain fell past the arches in silver threads onto the bare lime trees and the shut fountain. They passed a medal-maker, and a man who sold tin soldiers, and a window of nothing but walking sticks, and then a narrow door between a stamp dealer and a shuttered café, with a small bowed window full of gloves.

Constance stopped at it of her own accord. There were gloves in every color a hand had ever wanted, laid in fans on faded velvet. And in the corner, in small gilt script on a card she had to bend to read:

Articles de toilette pour dames. Discrétion.

She read it twice. Then she straightened and looked at Beatrice, who was examining a lamp-post across the arcade with the concentration of a woman who had never seen one before.

“Beatrice.”

“Hm?”

“Did the Lyon girl recommend the gloves?”

Beatrice’s ears went red to the tips. “She mentioned them.”

“I see.” Constance took her own darned glove off, finger by finger, and put it in her pocket. “Then I had better buy some.”

She went in.

A bell rang. The shop was no wider than a railway compartment and smelled of leather and violets, and behind the counter, on a high stool, sat the smallest woman Constance had ever seen, eighty if she was a day, in black bombazine and steel spectacles, with a measuring tape round her neck. She looked up from her sewing. She looked at Constance, in second-best gray with her bare left hand and the plain gold ring on it. She looked past her at Beatrice, who had come in behind and shut the door and was now very interested in a drawer of buttonhooks, with the same plain gold ring on her left hand.

The old woman looked from one ring to the other for a long moment.

“Ah,” she said. “Mesdames.”

She got down off the stool, unhurried, and went through a curtain into the back without being asked anything at all.

Beatrice put her forehead against the glove cabinet. “Oh, God.”

“You might have warned me.”

“I didn’t think you’d go in.”

“You have spent three months informing me that I am to ask for what I want.” Constance laid her bare hand flat on the counter. Her heart was going hard, and she let it. “I should like to know what is in the back room. I am asking. Go and stand by the door and look at the rain, if you cannot bear it.”

Beatrice did not go and stand by the door.

The old woman came back with a flat case in black morocco, and laid it on the counter, and opened it as a jeweller opens a ring box, and stood back with her hands folded.

Constance looked.

She had not, if she were honest, known exactly what she expected. She had a general notion, from the Lyon girl’s existence and Beatrice’s ears. What lay on the cream silk lining was a harness of soft black leather, straps and steel buckles, very finely stitched, and set in a fitted hollow beside it a shape of polished pale wood as smooth as glass. It was the length of her hand and somewhat more, and thick, and carved with a care that was frankly anatomical. The grain ran down it in long faint lines like water.

She found that she had stopped breathing. She made herself begin again.

“Buis,” said the old woman, helpfully, and tapped the wood with one fingernail. “Boxwood. Très lisse. Ça ne casse jamais.”

“Boxwood,” Beatrice said faintly, behind her. “Con. That’s what my calipers are made of.”

“I am aware. I have had them on my ribs.” Constance did not take her eyes from the case. She thought of a ruler across the knuckles at seven. She thought of twelve years of alternate Thursdays in the dark, and of a body that had been a thing done to, a duty settled. She thought, with total clarity, that she would like very much to know what it was to be filled by something she had chosen, in the lamplight, by a woman who was looking at her.

“Combien?” she said.

The old woman named a figure. It was forty-five francs. It was rather more than Constance spent on herself in a quarter.

Beatrice’s hand went to her pocket.

Constance turned her head. She did not say anything. She only looked, as she had looked at the bath on its lion’s paws.

The hand came out of the pocket empty. Beatrice put it behind her back, like a schoolboy, and held it there with the other, and pressed her lips together so hard they went white.

Constance counted out forty-five francs from her own purse onto the counter, coin by coin, left-handed. The old woman wrapped the case in brown paper and string as if it were a pair of gloves, and handed it across, and then, as an afterthought, laid a pair of dove-gray kid gloves on top of it.

“Pour madame,” she said, and nodded at the darn in Constance’s pocket. “Cadeau.”

Constance put on the gloves. They fitted as if they had been measured.

Outside, under the arches, with the parcel under her arm and the rain coming down in sheets past the stone, Beatrice let out a breath she appeared to have been holding since the bell.

“You bought it.”

“I did.”

“With your own money.”

“With my own rent,” Constance said. “Which you paid me at Michaelmas, in a sum agreed by Mr. Finch, for value received. I have bought myself something I want.” She tucked her gloved hand into Beatrice’s arm. “You may carry the umbrella. You may not carry the parcel.”

“Con.”

“Yes?”

“I think I’m going to have to sit down.”

“You will have to wait,” said Constance. “It is two miles, and I should like to walk.”

Their rooms were on the fourth floor of a narrow house in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, over a picture-framer’s, five minutes from the impasse du Maine. Two rooms. A bed in one, a stove and a table and a long window in the other, and nothing else Constance had wanted from Paris but a door that locked. Madame Gilles, the concierge, believed them to be two English cousins of artistic temperament, one of whom was in mourning for a husband and the other for her complexion, and had stopped asking questions on the second day.

It was full dark when they got in. Beatrice lit the lamp and the stove while Constance stood in the middle of the bedroom in her wet hat with the parcel in both hands.

She had walked two miles with it. She had walked past the Louvre and over the Pont des Arts, where the river was brown and high and slapping at the piers, and down the rue de Rennes in the rain with her own heart going like a drum, and had not let Beatrice carry it once. The want had walked all that way beside her, patient as a dog, and now that they were in the room with the door locked she found that it had become very large.

Beatrice came and took the hat off her head, and the pins out of her hair one by one, and put them in her pocket, where they lived. She did not touch the parcel.

“You don’t have to,” she said. “We can put it in the drawer. We can look at it on Sundays.”

“I did not walk two miles in the rain to look at it on Sundays.”

“No.” Beatrice’s voice had dropped. “No, I don’t suppose you did.”

Constance set the parcel on the bed and untied the string. She lifted the lid of the case and looked at it again in the lamplight, the leather and the steel and the pale smooth wood, and then she looked up.

“I should like to ask you for something,” she said. “I have been composing it since the Pont des Arts. I should be obliged if you did not make a joke until I have finished.”

Beatrice sat down on the end of the bed. She folded her hands in her lap. Her face had gone very serious and very young.

“Ask.”

“For twelve years I was married to a man who came to my bed on alternate Thursdays with the lamp out. You know this. I have told you.” She kept her voice level by main force. “What he did there I endured. I did not choose it. I did not want it. I had not the least idea that a woman could want it. I believed for twelve years that it was a thing one lay still for, and paid, and then washed.”

Beatrice said nothing. Her hands had tightened on each other.

“Since July you have taught me that I was wrong about nearly everything. You have taught me that I may be touched and want it. That I may be looked at. That I may ask. But there is one thing I have never had back.” She drew a breath. “I should like to be fucked, Beatrice. Properly. In the lamplight, with my eyes open, by someone I chose, who is looking at me while she does it. I should like to know what it is like to want that. I bought this so that you could.”

The stove ticked in the next room. Rain ran down the window.

Beatrice’s eyes had filled. She did not make a joke. She stood up from the end of the bed and took Constance’s face in both hands, very gently, and kissed her on the mouth, once, and then rested her forehead against Constance’s own.

“Yes,” she said. “God. Yes. Anything you want. Tell me how.”

“I have not the faintest idea how,” said Constance, and both of them began, shakily, to laugh. “That is rather the point of you.”

They undressed each other in the lamplight, slowly, the way they had promised on their wedding night that they always would. Forty hooks. Eleven pins. The plain gray wool of Beatrice’s walking skirt and the shirtwaist with clay still in the cuff, and under it the warm freckled skin Constance had learned by heart. She knelt to unlace Beatrice’s boots. Beatrice knelt to unroll Constance’s stockings. Neither of them closed their eyes, because that was a vow.

Then Constance took up the harness.

“Stand up,” she said. “I want to do the buckles.”

Beatrice stood. She was flushed from her throat to her breasts, the color climbing, and she had folded her arms over herself out of the old habit, and Constance unfolded them, one at a time, and laid them at her sides.

“No. I want to look.”

She knelt on the bare boards in front of her and fitted the leather round Beatrice’s hips. The straps were cool and smelled new. She found the shape of the thing by touch, as she found her own stay-lace in the morning: this strap under, this through, this buckle drawn to the second hole and then, at Beatrice’s breathless “tighter,” to the third. The boxwood sat in its ring of leather, pale and smooth and absurdly elegant against the auburn curls and the freckled belly, and Constance knelt back on her heels and looked at it, and felt her whole body go hot and heavy and slick between her thighs.

“Well,” she said, when she could. “That is very handsome.”

“I feel ridiculous.”

“You look magnificent. You look like the figurehead of a ship.” Constance laid her palm flat on Beatrice’s thigh, just beside the strap, and felt the muscle jump. “How does it feel?”

“Strange. Heavy.” Beatrice swallowed. “It presses. Here.” She touched the base, where it sat against her. “When I move.”

“Good,” said Constance, and leaned forward, and put her mouth on the wood.

She did not know why she did it. She only wanted to; and she had learned that this was reason enough. It was cool against her lips and tasted of nothing, faintly of polish, and she drew her tongue along the length of it, slowly, with her eyes on Beatrice’s face, the way Beatrice had once licked clay off her own fingers in a coach house and Constance had not understood.

She understood now.

Beatrice made a sound as if she had been struck. Her hand came down into Constance’s hair.

“You can’t feel that,” she said, wrecked. “I can’t feel that.”

“No. But you can see it.” Constance drew back and looked up at her. “And you like to look.”

“Get on the bed,” said Beatrice, in a voice Constance had never heard her use, “before I lose my mind entirely.”

She lay down on her back on the white counterpane of a Paris lodging-house bed, with the lamp turned up as far as it would go, and opened her knees.

She had never once in her life lain like this to be looked at. She did it now on purpose. She made herself keep her hands at her sides and her eyes open and let Beatrice see everything, the flush and the wet and the shake in her thighs, and Beatrice knelt between her knees in the harness and simply looked, for a long time, until Constance could feel the look like a hand.

“You’re soaked,” Beatrice said softly. “Since when?”

“Since the shop.”

“Since the shop?”

“Since she said Mesdames,” said Constance, and Beatrice laughed, low, and bent and put her mouth to her.

She did not hurry. She never did, when she was let. She licked Constance open with the flat of her tongue, long slow strokes from bottom to top, and circled her clitoris until Constance’s heels dug into the counterpane, and slid two fingers into her and curled them, and then three, stretching her, readying her, kissing the inside of her thigh between strokes and talking to her in a murmur that was half nonsense. That’s it. Let me. Look at you. You’re so ready for it, sweetheart, you’re so wet I can hear you. Constance came the first time like that, on three fingers and a tongue, quite suddenly, with a cry she did not try to keep in, because there was no one in the house who mattered and Madame Gilles was deaf in one ear.

Beatrice brought her down slowly, and then lifted her head.

“Now?”

“Now,” said Constance. “Look at me.”

Beatrice came up over her on her forearms. The harness pressed cool against the inside of Constance’s thigh, and then the boxwood, smooth and hard and blunt, nudging against her where she was open and slick and still pulsing. Beatrice reached down between them and took hold of it and set it to her. Her hand was shaking. Constance felt it shake.

“If it hurts—”

“I shall say so. I am very good at saying so now. I have had lessons.” Constance put her hand flat on Beatrice’s cheek. “Slowly. And do not look away.”

Beatrice pushed.

It was nothing like. That was her first clear thought, as it had been against a workbench in July, and it was truer now than it had been then. It was nothing like anything that had ever been done to her. It went into her slowly, an inch and then a breath, the smooth wood opening her, filling her, a fullness so complete it was almost unbearable, and above her Beatrice’s face was drawn tight with concentration and something close to fear, watching her, reading every flicker, ready to stop. It was not done to her. It was being given to her, by someone who was afraid of hurting her, at a pace she was allowed to choose.

“More,” Constance said.

“Con—”

“All of it, Beatrice. I am asking.”

Beatrice made a broken sound and sank into her, all the way, until the leather of the harness pressed flush against her and there was nothing left to give, and held there, and they both lay quite still and looked at each other, breathing.

Constance found that there were tears running sideways into her hair. She did not know when they had started. It did not hurt. It was only that she was so full, and had chosen it, and was being looked at while it happened, and nobody had ever told her that a body could be given back.

“Are you—” Beatrice’s voice cracked. “Sweetheart. Am I hurting you?”

“No. No. Do not stop. I am not sad.” She laughed, wetly, with Beatrice inside her. “I am very far from sad. Move. Please. I want to know what it is like when you move.”

Beatrice moved.

She drew back slowly, almost to the end, and pushed in again, slow and deep, and Constance’s back arched off the counterpane. Again. The pressure dragged against something inside her that sent a shock straight down to her toes. Again, and the base of the harness ground against Beatrice as she thrust, and Beatrice gasped every time, and Constance understood, with sudden fierce delight, that it was not one-sided at all. Every stroke Beatrice gave her, Beatrice felt too.

“Is it good?” Constance said. “For you. Tell me the truth.”

“Christ. Yes. It presses, every time I—” Beatrice drove in again and her voice broke on it. “Every time I go in you it presses right on me. I can feel you take it. I can feel your hips come up. Con, you have no idea what you look like.”

“Then tell me.”

“You look—” Beatrice was rocking into her now, long and steady, and her breath came with every stroke. “You look like you did in the glass. Undone. Wanted. You’ve got your mouth open. You’ve got that flush right down to your breasts. Your cunt’s taking every inch of me and you’re watching me do it, you’re looking right at me, you haven’t shut your eyes once—”

“No,” said Constance. “That is the vow.”

She put her hands on Beatrice’s hips, on the leather, and pulled her in harder.

Beatrice groaned and gave it to her. The bed began to knock against the wall. Constance did not care. She hooked her knees up around Beatrice’s waist the way she had seen it done in no book whatever and only in her own imagination, and the angle changed, and the next stroke went so deep and dragged so exactly across that place inside her that she shouted.

“There. There. Do not—Beatrice, do not stop—”

“I won’t. I won’t. I’ve got you. Let me have it. Let me see you—”

It was nothing like the others. It did not climb or fall. It gathered from everywhere at once, from the drag of the wood inside her and the press of the leather and the weight of Beatrice’s body and her eyes, those brown eyes gone black and fixed on her face, and it closed round all of it like a fist and did not let go. She came on it clenching, wave after wave around the hard smooth length that filled her, her back bowed off the bed and her hands fisted in the straps at Beatrice’s hips and her eyes wide open, and she said Beatrice’s name, and said it, and said I love you into the lamplight in the plainest voice she owned.

Beatrice watched every second of it. Then she made a sound that was nearly a sob, and drove into her twice more, hard, the base of the harness grinding against her, and came too, shaking, with her face crushed into Constance’s neck and her hips still moving in small helpless jerks, saying mine, mine, mine.

For a long time neither of them could speak.

When Beatrice finally drew out of her, she did it so slowly and so carefully that Constance laughed at her for it, and then stopped laughing, because the emptiness after was a strange thing too, and she wanted to feel it properly. Beatrice fumbled at the buckles with clumsy fingers, swearing softly, and Constance pushed her hands away and undid them herself, one, two, three, as easily as her own stay-lace.

“You’ve done that before,” Beatrice said, accusing.

“I have done it once. Ten minutes ago. I learn quickly.” She set the harness on the floor beside the bed, with the boxwood still gleaming wet in the lamplight, and lay back down, and pulled Beatrice against her. The stove ticked. The rain went on. Somewhere below in the street a cab went by on the cobbles. “Was it—” She stopped, and made herself say it plainly. “Did you like it? Truly?”

Beatrice lifted her head off Constance’s breast and looked at her as if she were mad.

“Constance. I came without anybody laying a finger on me. I came from watching you.”

“Yes. I noticed. I was rather proud.”

“You should be. I’m going to be thinking about it for a month. At the bench. In front of Marchand.” Beatrice dropped her head back down and groaned. “She’ll know. She’ll take one look at me Monday and know.”

“Then she will be very pleased with us both. She told me in August that I faced the right way.”

Beatrice laughed into her skin, and then she went quiet, and then, after a while, she said, very low:

“Thank you for asking me.”

Constance looked up at the ceiling of a Paris lodging house, where the plaster was cracked in a long line like a river on a map, and thought of a white bed at Seabrook, and a brass rail, and a stay-lace tied in a flat knot with two fingers of slack. She thought of a girl of nineteen who had lain awake thirty-one nights knowing exactly what she wanted and doing nothing about it whatever.

“Thank you for letting me pay,” she said.

Beatrice was silent so long Constance thought she had fallen asleep. Then she felt the smile against her breast.

“It nearly killed me.”

“I know. I watched your hand. It was in your pocket for a full second.”

“Less than a second.”

“A full second. I counted.”

“Of course you did.” Beatrice’s hand found her left one on the counterpane and laced their fingers together, so that the two plain rings touched. 3 · X · 96. Asked. “Con.”

“Yes?”

“Next time,” said Beatrice, a little hoarse, “I want you to wear it. I want you to do up those buckles yourself, the way you did them just now, like you’re doing the household accounts. And I want to be on top. And I want to take it slow, and tell you when.” She swallowed. “I’m asking.”

Constance thought about it, gravely, as she thought about everything.

“I shall have to practice the buckles,” she said.

“You’ll have to practice a great deal.”

“I have a month in Paris,” said Constance, “and nothing whatever to do in the afternoons.”

Beatrice laughed so hard the bed knocked against the wall again, and somewhere below, Madame Gilles, who was deaf in only one ear, thumped twice on her ceiling with a broom.

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