Free The Marquis of Westmarch by Frances Vernon Page B

she knew it.
    “Westmarch. My God.”
    Meriel started to laugh. “Yes, yes, Westmarch. You tell me you love me, but you can’t love a man, and I tell you I’m a woman, to make you see it is proper to love me, but to be sure in truth you can only love a man, and you look as any other would look, by God — something foul about a female, ain’t there? Oh, it’s rich, sir, it’s hell’s own jest!”
    Like a young animal hunting prey for the first time, Meriel watched him: and yet her avid anxious face looked oddly pitiful, as she sat there seeking understanding.
    Auriol was not yet able to give understanding. He said as gently as he could, “But how — how could it not have been discovered, till Juxon — till you were twelve years of age , all but a woman! I know that at that time you were ill, and he was attending you, but why not before?”
    “Oh yes, it was not six months later that I began to bleed.” Stiffly her woman’s face nodded at him, then she grew livelier. “Oh, don’t you see? How should anyone with no more than common knowledge guess, before I reached that certain age? Girl-children and boy-children are not unalike, but that the one has a protrusion and the other not! Mine was but a slight one. The part was there, sir, it seemed only too small ,” Meriel insisted.Auriol slowly began to believe her. She went on, with her back turned to the sea.
    “My nurse, Araminta, she bathed me till I was six or seven years of age — and I’ll own I remember her looking at it, and my feeling a trifle uncomfortable, as any boy would, and so I asked that I might bathe myself. Then no one at all saw me unclothed, sir. By the luck of the devil I only once suffered an accident that required a physician’s attention, when I was eight, and no very close inspection took place. And after that my father forbade me to swim, so I never was seen naked. He thought I had a weak chest.” Meriel swallowed, and tried to laugh. “How I did resent it at the time, for Philander might swim, you know!” She returned to the real subject of argument.
    “But my nurse must have thought only that it was oddly small — how could she, a woman of no education, guess it was no male part, no penis at all, but a female — Juxon did tell me the name — ay, vulva-clitoris, that was it. She must have thought only that it was a remarkably undersized organ — and God knows I have lived in dread of the mere thought that she might, in fact, have begun to guess! I’ve ignored her for years and years for fear she might guess now, remembering, and looking at my face, though she’s all but blind now. As for my mother, my nurse was to me what a mother is to a child of no family, mine as you know never stirs from Castle West, she scarcely saw me when I was at Longmaster Wood.” Meriel drew a deep breath, and tried to conclude, though her conclusion was only a repetition.
    “But if my nurse had guessed she would have said so, would she not? She would not have held her tongue. And no one else saw me, and I myself, from the little I knew, thought only that I was undersized! That distressed me enough in all conscience — when I observed when I was ten or so that the thing did not grow with me. Do I put you quite out of countenance, Wychwood, by discoursing on such things?”
    Auriol jumped at her slight and bitter change of tone. How very protected, he thought, Meriel had been — he tried to arrange his thoughts as he looked at her in silence. Marquis Elphinstone must have been an odd kind of man: as possessive and protective as Juxon in his own way, though he had, it was true, given her one young companion.
    Meriel smiled down at Auriol with cynical concentration, and made a move as though to touch him, then drew back and said, “Wychwood, you were a boy. If you had suspected there were something ever so slightly wrong with your virile parts — having read a little, heard odd remarks, as I did — would you not rather have died than consulted