Another class of workers chose this moment to move into position for their nightly duties. Groups of women, dressed in bright colors adorned with ruffs and silk stitching, made dance-like movements in brightly beaded shoes with elevated leather heels and took up pre-ordained positions on the steps leading up to the old church. Clearly, they had not come to pray, as they gathered their skirts about them and raised them sufficiently to display their high heeled shoes and silk hose. That night, seven of them sat evenly distributed in a three-dimensional pattern up and down the church steps, striking casual poses and shaking back their heads to allow their long trestles of hair to fly loose and cascade like silk waterfalls over their pink shoulders and into the cleft between out-stretched breasts.
“Holy Mother of God…” exclaimed Howard, having caught sight of one particular, raven-haired beauty, still evidently uncomfortably new at this, whose huge eyes were deep blue pools of warm and glistening liquid. She shifted her position ever so slightly, and Howard thought he could hear the stiff cloth of the long shift that assuredly lay beneath her skirt as it rubbed against her thigh like a tender twig.
“Close your mouth, Howard,” said Dormoy looking genuinely embarrassed at his friend’s naivety.
“Yea,” said Gaudin, “She might think you’re having an epileptic fit. She’ll take you to one of their doctors who specialize in syphilis and epilepsy, two common ailments among whores.”
“As usual, our model for sensitivity and respect,” commented Testagrossa putting a fatherly hand on Howard’s shoulder. “One must respect women as the very pinnacle of God’s creation. On the other hand,” the young Italian added with a self-deprecating shrug, “One cannot help but admire women as the very pinnacle of Nature’s handiwork! Therein lies the dilemma of the human condition.”
“Oh, shut up, you prig!” said Gaudin, who was getting increasingly irritated with his philosophical friend. “That’s the most fat-headed remark I have ever heard. You persist in confusing love with lust, which is a simple human vice, in which many of us engage daily without so much as a second thought about the nobility of human nature or the eternal destiny of man,” pronounced Gaudin, his right hand raised in a rhetorical gesture.
“Do you deny the eternal destiny of man?” asked Testagrossa, his own right hand cutting through the air opposite Gaudin’s.
“By no means,” added the leader of revels, “but why must it interfere with my pleasure?”
While our two protagonists were thus engaged in a truly eternal debate, the workers whose preparations for the morning market were now complete had decided to reward themselves for their evening´s labors by sampling the church step wares. They sauntered up alone and strolled away in couples with an ease and grace that one would truly expect of hereditary nobility, while the boys were left with their words.
This gave Dormoy a new sense of purpose. “I think,” he postulated with the smoothness of a southerner, “that it is time to initiate our young friend into the mysteries and the pleasures of the night.”
“With a prostitute?” asked Testagrossa in genuine indignation.
“What’s the difference?” asked Gaudin with a cavalier disregard for his friend’s sensitivity. “They’re all sisters under their shifts, you know,” he added, strutting a few steps, like a rooster.
“It should be one he fancies,” counselled Dormoy. “The first time should be special.”
“Every time is special for me,” said Gaudin, still perfecting the rooster movement with his neck.
Howard ignored them all and just stepped out, slowly and tentatively, in the direction of the dark-haired girl. He caught her eye and she turned toward him so that he could have a full-frontal view of her low bodice framed with her silky, shining hair, darker than the night sky. Howard drew in his breath. He could feel himself shaking and he was sure that he was about to lose his courage, turn and run, but the girl boldly fixed her gaze, those enormous pools of blue luminosity, on him. Like a force greater than the pounding surf and inexorable tides, her eyes drew him into the sphere of her power and the deft practice of her art.
Howard’s friends broke off their extended debate on the nature and destiny of man to notice that one man, at least, had already taken matters into his own trembling hands. They felt as if they were watching someone in a dream, walking through a door without any knowledge of what he might find on the other side. They were both happy and afraid for him, and not one of them thought to call out any words of banter or of advice. Howard was beyond their sphere, well past the need for anyone’s advice.
…
I leafed through several more pages, after this entry, to see if Howard said anything about having gone back to St. Severin to resume his encounter with the dark-haired, blue-eyed prostitute. I found no reference in any subsequent entry that would either confirm or deny that such a second visit had even taken place. I did, however, find a single folded sheet of paper, pressed between two blank pages not far from the entries to which I have just referred. What I found on that sheet, in Howard’s careful and steady hand, was the following sonnet, written simply “To Julie…One Evening”:
Thou comest on the shadowed wings of night,
Thy tresses black as mid-night raven's cloak.
Thy crimson robe, thy milky flesh, delight,
Thy fragrance, sweet as rising incense smoke.
Yet from thine eyes the light of midday burns,
Two orbs as crystal blue as summer's sky.
For these twin brilliant pools my soul still yearns,
My body trembling, as if wont to die.
Thy lips, like fragrant flowers open wide
To whisper wordless oaths of passion's fire,
And bids me drink, while close to thee I bide,
Thirsting so to quench my chief desire.
In lightest dark, in coldest heat, we live,
'Til we, to one another's passions give.
As I read these lines over and over again, my mind returned to the scene of trembling at the steps of St Severin, and I was satisfied that I had, in fact, read the next chapter of that story.
If you enjoyed this excerpt, read more in The Fall of the Sparrow, available on Amazon and anywhere books are sold.
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