The Now Former Lady Deveroux Ch. 09

Samantha giggles with her. "So he was inexperienced as well?" 

"I always suspected there was something between him and Charlie that both would take to their graves," she shrugs, then rolls her eyes. "You know how boys are." She smirks and continues. "Michael loved dry rubbing, though I'm such an easy lay I never stayed dry for long. He was of the mind that so long as nothing was inserted, it wasn't a sin, but I didn't care much then. He was willing to touch me and that's all I wanted." 

"How did it end?" She was curious, wondering why the girl was so uncontent in her prior life. 

"I ended it," Esther replies simply. "He was so tame and respectable in how he fucked me. I was still figuring out how to tell a person, 'harder,' and it felt like he viewed my body like a porcelain doll." She pauses, pursing her lips and letting them grin mischievously. "For a time, he had been the only one offering to kiss me, so I had remained. Until Cynthia came to town, that is." 

Samantha nods, impressed. "And all the while you were skinny-dipping with Rebecca, smitten with her." 

"I craved anyone who gave me attention," Esther confirms. "Half the reason I'm in the church is that I needed someone to give my life to, especially, well..." She lifts her shoulders and drops them, uncommitted to the sentence. "As I've said," she says instead, "I don't wish to hold the reins of my life. I just wish to give them to someone whom I may nestle my head against and feel safe." 

Samantha enjoys the way Esther then kisses her chest lightly. Letting her hand drift down to the woman's bottom, patting it lightly to remind her of all the spanks she had given it the day before, she teases, "So I share your crop with God?" 

And, muttering weakly, perhaps returning to the throws of sleep, Esther whispers, "If you wanted it to yourself I would give it to you." 

And something unsettling churns in Samantha's stomach - the sort of reaction one has by impulse and which resists any attempt to fight it. It was a feeling of dread, perhaps, of past and of memory, of a time long ago bleeding into the present in such a way that one may not escape it. 

When Samantha replies, her voice is level, tight. "Pardon? Are you saying-," 

Esther interrupts to repeat herself. "If you asked me to hang up my robes and escape to the countryside with you, I would not hesitate." 

Samantha cannot hide the feeling within herself now. Her body grows stiff and tense. 

-- -- -- 

Please. 

"I cannot help this, Samantha. It is simply what things are. It is the truth, upsetting, to be sure, but plain and simple."

But they won't have to see me. I'll stay away, at home, so long as I may still be with you when the night comes, that is all I would need-

"If I do not appeal to the respectability of class, I shall never find entry into my family. In their eyes, you are, and always will be, inferior company." 

Cordelia, please. 

"I've already made up my mind. I cannot remain in this place-"

But you'd need a maidservant, wouldn't you? A chambermaid? Anything. 

"It'll be easier if we just accept this cannot last." 

If the courtship is successful, you will need servants in your home. That could be-

"Samantha."

I'd do it for you. Sell myself into a contract. I could be by your side all the while. 

Say something. 

Please, I love you. 

Cordelia. 

Cordelia? 

-- -- -- 

Samantha rises from the bed, ashamed, as she has always been, to recall the tone of her voice that day. Even in memory, trapped in the walls of her head and played only when she hated herself, she could not tolerate it. That feeling of emptiness that was encroaching, the desperation to not be left behind, that fear that without Cordelia she was nothing. 

The rejection, the termination of their love, had forged her. It had taken the raw ore of her body and turned it into a saber - cool steel. 

It was that feeling which brought out the worst of her, had turned her into the monster that told everyone Cordelia's dark secret, had destroyed the courtship her lifelong friend had so painstakingly crafted. It placed her into Revier's field of view, made her the person who wanted - needed - to take everything Cordelia had wanted and claim it for herself. It made Katherine hate her like she did not believe Katherine was capable of hating.

The hours and hours she had spent, helping Cordelia craft her manners, all became her arsenal. The kindness of her heart and care of her words suddenly became asp and adder, smoke and mirror, blade and scabbard. When she danced with Revier at a ball, nameless and landless, known only and permitted only for the beauty of her form, she thought of that feeling. 

When she made vows to him at an altar, knowing how deeply Cordelia would hate her for it, she thought of that feeling. 

And when Annette had made the same request of her, to allow herself to be bound to Samantha with a contract and a collar, she thought of that feeling. 

And Esther... 

"Excuse me," Samantha chokes, drifting from the bedside and away into the living room. She places herself down upon one of the reading chairs, hardly minding the darkness of the room around her, and drops her face into her palms. 

Esther, poor girl, gives her a few moments of solitude before joining her. Her feet approach, weightless and timid in her step, and she drops to her knees at Samantha's side. "Have I done something wrong?" 

A pause. "No, dear." 

Even behind her hands, Samantha can feel Esther's furrowed brow. "Strangely," the woman muses, gentle and careful with her tone, "I don't believe you." 

Samantha shakes her head, trying not to continue letting that contemptible impulse within her take hold. 

She hated herself for that feeling. That feeling which told her that all she had been was nothing. She hated it then, and hates it now. The pity of it, the desperation of it...

"Sit," she sighs, trying to expel the weighted air from her lungs. She waits for Esther to obey, pulling over an ottoman and sitting down onto it, just a foot away. "My first love was named Cordelia." 

Esther purses her lips. "The woman whose home you're staying in." 

Samantha nods, beginning her story. "My mother was her mother's collar, but Cordelia and I were raised as dear friends, just as our mothers were actually friends. Some even thought we were cousins." She thinks briefly of Susanna and Katherine's friendship, wondrous and deep, and then again of how sorely Katherine despised her now.

She sucks in another breath, feeling a tightness in her chest and a nervous warmth in her limbs. "She first kissed me a year after my mother had passed, and I loved her like all I was belonged to her. It was everything to me.

"As Cordelia grew older..." She pauses, but forces herself to continue. "She became obsessed with gaining the approval of her illegitimate father. Her mother, Katherine, had been his mistress. Cordelia wanted to sidestep being a bastard, and to figure out how to become gentry, and she very nearly did it. 

"Cordelia had a courtship in order, was gaining invitations to balls, was on the way. But," Samantha halts on the word, considering its turn for a moment. "But she grew concerned about what people would think if her dearest friend was some poor girl whose mother had been a servant, a collar. She told me things needed to end between us, and, desperate for her love, I offered to sell myself into a contract to her, binding us together for years." 

"And so you-,"

"Listen, please," Samantha croaks. Another deep breath, and she ignores the trembling in her hands. Was it embarrassment? Anger? "I have hated myself for that offer the whole of my life. I was, in that moment, nothing. I possessed nothing, believed in nothing, desired nothing but her uninterrupted attention - that which she would never give me. To say I became a shell of a person for her would be to give me too much credit." 

"And so," Esther says carefully, her voice level and measured, "you think of me as becoming nothing in your hands, because of what I have said?" 

Samantha thinks of Annette, making the very same offer to her earlier this year, and how bitterly she'd rejected her. She hangs her head low. "I have thought such a pitiable thing in the past." 

Esther rises from her seat, crossing the room with a heaviness in her step that had not been there when she entered. Her hands are at her hips, thinking, and her face looks pale and fraught. Samantha can't read it, can hardly feel anything but the hatred of herself mucking about in her gut. 

When Esther speaks at last, her voice is tight. Cold. Fearful. "The highest expression of my love is pitiable to you?" 

Samantha looks at her, unable to respond amidst the swirling shame inside of herself, and again despises everything that made her the woman she is, the woman she so pitifully thought Esther could remove from her. 

"If you were a man," Esther continues, her voice working up steam, "this giving away of myself would be encouraged - nay, demanded." Her brow furrows. "It is pitiable to you?" Anger, unfamiliar to Samantha when set upon Esther's face, bubbles up into her tone. "For a woman who desires to love me, I quite suddenly feel an absence." 

Cordelia, please. 

Esther ought not give all of herself away to me, she feels her insides cry out. I shall only learn to hate her for it, just as I have learned to hate myself. 

And, unable to think of anything greater to say, Samantha mutters, "I am no man, Esther, and we are not betrothed." She hates herself for it.

"Is it so wretched I want that?" The flash of anger crashes forth suddenly, and then Esther's arms are over her chest as she glares at Samantha. 

Esther taps her foot impatiently, then speaks again with a frown in her eyes, "'Esther,'" she puts on a character, speaking with her voice a little lower, gruffer, pretending to be a man, "'How I adore your lovely face. Oh, to steal you away and marry you! Alas, I wish my heirs to be my flesh and blood, and you cannot give me such a thing.'" 

And before Samantha can speak, Esther has dropped that character and placed another upon herself, her voice light and feminine. "'Oh, Esther, how your laugh warms my heart, and brightens my day. If only - if only you were once-born, still a man, and we might be together. Your spirit would be the same, would it not? Simply dressed in a man's form, yes?'"

And then she drops that character as well and shouts from her own voice, leaving Samantha to wonder when someone had said such contemptible things to her. "Christ, even the church nearly wouldn't accept my commitment! Sister Pullwater had to fight to secure my place in a convent!" 

Esther shakes her head, pacing back and forth. "Am I so detestable that even you cannot find it in yourself to desire all of me?" She marches on before Samantha can even think to reply. "I gave myself to God and cut these feelings out of my chest because I was convinced I would be nothing but repulsive in the eyes of any lover I could acquire. A thrill for them, sure, but never someone to love. I've carried the guilt of praying to God like he wasn't my consolation prize." 

"I did not mean to say-,"

"No, no I am not quite finished, dear," Esther glowers. Her voice grows softer, more pained and full of longing than fury. "Do you understand what power you have over me? There are those who believe the accident of my first birth to be prophecy - that to be born male is to be condemned to it. I have often felt like a pale imitation of womanhood, a lower than second class sex, desired by men of fetish and women of comfortable experiment, but never for love.

"But you... Samantha, you are my once-born goddess," Esther is crying, tears which burrowed behind her eyes now trickling forth. "You are the perfection of woman, and if you see it fit to give me your attention, you, who only desires beautiful women, do you see what that must do to me?" 

And then she falls to her knees, almost as though praying to Samantha. "I would eat the scraps from your hands, crawl on my hands and knees for miles, sustain myself on nothing more than desperation, just to see your breathtaking eyes call me 'beautiful girl.'

"If you do not mean to accept my love and hold it for a long time," she pleads, "then tell me now, and give me the peace to shut myself away again." Her hands fumble with the clasps of the leather belt around her thigh, ripping it off of herself and holding it out towards Samantha. "If you do not wish to love me as I am, then do it - prove you are still the cruel, heartless woman of status I took a chance upon." 

For a horrible moment, Samantha feels herself teeter upon that wicked crest of possibility. It was the sort of breath between two people that foretold anything could come of this moment, any scenario containing equal probability. She might scream. She might cry. She might gnash her teeth and race off to the woods. She might fall to her knees and pray. 

The loathing pulls against the scale. 

There was that terror, existential yet proximitous, that not only would Esther be willing to carve herself open and be filled with nothing more than whatever Samantha deigns to place within her, but that Samantha would only know how to place evil within. 

It was a fear of desecration. 

To taint a nun, to pull her from the path of purity and righteousness, to reveal to her that she possesses the same lusts, the same needs, the same burning as all else does - such a task was fun, erotic even. To have watched Esther fluster and argue within herself, torn up over her commitments to her creed on the one hand, and her depraved longing for Samantha for the other, it was beautiful in its way. It was adorable. And the way Esther kisses her is full of that emotion. 

But, love, that horrible feeling, that must surely rot her from within. Love was a thing that Samantha had previously denied because she believed it to be the source of all corruption within the world - admittedly an ideology borne from what love stole from her. Her love for Cordelia, and its subsequent betrayal, had snatched from Samantha the hopes that perhaps she was destined to be good. The denial of it, the rejection of it, confirmed that in her dwelt a violence that could emerge quickly if ever coaxed. 

To lust for Esther, and to stoke hers in return, was in Samantha's eyes harmless. But to have loved her... 

Surely that was an act of wickedness. For now, just as Cordelia had watched Samantha's fury, and just as Annette had seen her vitriol, and just as countless other women had watched her cast them aside - Esther lay within her sights like a carcass upon an altar, ready to be carved open. A sacrifice to the goddess of her self-hatred. 

And so, within her spirit, Samantha feels as though a knife has been placed between her palms. Heavy. Wide. Like a butcher's blade. And there before her, upon the table, was the livestock. And it was living. Breathing. 

To love her would be to slaughter her. 

When Annette had said to Samantha, What if I traded my contract to you?, she had been handed the knife, just like now. She stared into the poor girl's eyes, smitten and longing, and saw how lonely she was. God, they were pitiful, in the ways in which a calf must be when born; barely even standing, covered in the bile of birth, so ripe for the harm of the world. She could have said: yes, my dear, for you know I may love you. And then Annette would have been hers to keep. To carve open. 

Samantha had not the strength to slaughter her. So she cut her free, wounding her so that she might never come back. 

And Esther... 

With those wide, brown pupils in the night, she looked very much the doe-eyed sacrifice. Upon her knees, how easy it would be for Samantha to plunge the knife into her, to tell her: My dear, empty yourself. Give me all of you. Leave nothing behind. 

And likewise, it would be easy to scare her, to hurt her, to promote within her such a pain that she would never make the mistake of offering herself to Samantha ever again. In a way, that felt like a kindness, for Samantha felt wicked for even considering the woman in such a way as she was now doing. 

"Say something," the sister pleads, still looking up at her. She was begging for the knife. 

Samantha swallows, and for a moment considers it. Considers giving her what she wants and taking everything that was within her and having it for herself. She could make Esther anything she wished to be. Why join the Sister's when she could simply steal the poor girl away from them? 

"Please," Esther chokes. 

So she considers the other possibility. A loud noise. A few harsh words. A proof of the cruelty within her, and Esther would be gone, would be spared from the altar. 

"Please." 

-- -- -- 

She was crying and couldn't explain to Katherine why. It was a different sort of tear than she had shed when her mother died, and Katherine Jones had known it. Perhaps she knew heartbreak when she saw it. 

She had asked Samantha what was wrong, but to tell Katherine would be to admit what had been going on with her and Cordelia directly under her nose. That was impossible. 

So too, was it impossible to think of what might come to pass if Cordelia returned home that night to see her like this. Cordelia was supposed to be out courting, or rather, allowing herself to be courted, and if all was well she would likely not be staying in this home for very long. 

So Katherine asked what was wrong again, and Samantha learned what it meant to take up the knife. It was first plunged deep into her own chest, excavating out that feeling of nothingness which was so intolerable. 

And then she had stopped crying, told Katherine that it was about her mother when it really wasn't. She clutched the handle tighter in her hands and shook away the blood, a horrible plan forming within her mind, and left the home.

Left the home ready to let Cordelia taste the knife as well. 

-- -- -- 

Samantha's hands are shaking. She swallows a breath and wonders, pitifully, if there really was an accounting for all her actions to come in the next life. Would St. Peter watch her carefully now, chisel in hand, ready to enter her sins into the ledger of her life? Was it more evil to love Esther or to send her away?  

And then Samantha feels tired. She is neither young nor old, yet in this moment she feels very old indeed. Old enough, and weary. It is the sort of exhaustion that comes from a pattern repeating, one in which the completion was obvious and inevitable, and one in which the conclusion was painful. 

The weariness gives way to the recollection of Esther in bed beside her, gives way to the look in the Sister's eyes when she beheld Samantha. She looks at Samantha like she truly believes the former noblewoman was not destined only for the wielding of blades and the curses of hatred. What had Esther said the night of Judith's birthday? 

I feel as though I saw you today. 

You see me very nearly everyday, that was Samantha's reply. 

Actually saw you. You weren't acting, you weren't pretending to be someone else. You were just... you.

Then, just now, when Esther dared Samantha to reject her, she accused Samantha of being the cruel woman all along. Which was the pretending? Which was the actuality? 

And Samantha has something very near an epiphany. It sounds so stupid in her mind to consider it, to painfully clear that it almost feels as though it is nothing. 

That, perhaps, change was possible. 

Everyone said such a thing. It was nothing new or revelatory, nor was it wisdom borne out from an ancient source. It was simple. Human. But what overcomes her is not the exposition of the idea, the introduction of it into her mind; she is overpowered by the sudden internalization of it. Simon had said there are many ways to know things, but that some only come to pass through the teacher of experience.