Page 24 of Ash and the Butterfly

London - May 6, 1822

Grace Chetwood had done a great many things in her life out of curiosity.

She’d climbed onto the roof of an Irish castle. Swum in the ocean. Allowed herself to be stung by a bee. Had her fortune told by an old woman in a red velvet shawl standing outside a gambling hell. She’d befriended an actress. Stolen a cheroot from her father and smoked it in the stable. Worn a gown in three shades of pink, entirely because Aunt Amelia told her that a girl with red hair should never wear the color. She’d kissed a man—more than one man, because how could one know if a kiss was good without having had another for comparison? When she’d visited Paris to see her friend Arabella, she’d gotten lost on purpose just to see what she would discover.

Tonight, for the sheer curiosity of it, Grace was going to divest herself of her virginity.

Beyond her appetite for knowledge, she also fancied the gentleman who would be obliging her. Lord Randolph St. George, Georgie to his friends, was a handsome, fair-haired future viscount with a small pile of other titles also awaiting him, four and twenty, well dressed, eyes that went from courteous to sly in a blink. Grace suspected he knew his way around a bed.

St. George had brought up the idea at a dinner party the previous evening. They’d managed to slip briefly away from the parlor, where the lady of the house was playing Mozart almost passably, to take the air in the garden, find a patch of shadow, and kiss.

It was their first kiss. It was hurried, but, in Grace’s opinion, promising. Granted, the small handful of other kisses she’d experienced were also somewhat hamstrung by their furtiveness, also the products of slipping away during an event for just long enough to allow herself to be very slightly ravished.

St. George’s mouth was warm and soft, and smiled against hers. But then they heard other party guests coming, and broke apart.

“A pity,” she’d murmured, on a giggle. She had wanted a longer kiss. She was given to understand tongues were involved in certain types of kissing, and she could not decide if that would be disgusting or delicious.

“Come to me tomorrow night, Miss Chetwood,” he’d whispered in her ear. “And I will kiss you senseless.”

“I could not possibly,” she said, her tone a light scold, as they walked back to the house.

“You could if I sent a carriage to the back of your father’s property, and you slipped away to my home, where I shall be quite, quite alone.”

He shrugged, as though he’d only presented the idea as a lark. But there was a heat in his eyes, and his voice dipped low when he continued. “I think of little else but you, Miss Chetwood. I have a great deal of curiosity about you that I would very much like the chance to satisfy for myself.”

She liked that he’d used that word. Curiosity. She too was curious.

“He will offer for your hand by the end of the month,” Grace’s friend Clara Abernathy had told her. “He is smitten. You will be a viscountess, Grace.” Clara was a serious person, reluctant to get caught up in frivolity. So Grace considered her opinion unusually sound.

Once they were married, intercourse would be a matter of, well, course.

What harm in beginning the fun just a tiny bit early?

And — if such a large part of marriage hinged upon two people’s ability to join and make offspring, should they not give it a quick test, to be sure they were fully compatible?

Grace enjoyed gossip so much that most people didn’t realize that she was also very, very good at keeping secrets.

She liked the idea of this secret.

She agreed to meet St. George the following night.

*

Grace had read about coitus in medical textbooks in her father’s library, where she had also located a book of bawdy drawings that gestured toward the wide variety of moods and positions one might experience. Penises, it seemed, could go not just in a woman’s sex but also her mouth, and there seemed some upside for the man in a woman grasping his length firmly in hand. Men, for their part, kissed a woman all sorts of places, and when they got it right, her eyes rolled, she tipped her head back and cried out to the heavens.

Grace looked forward to that part. The part where he sent her into an aria of bliss. She’d given herself pleasure in the bathtub, but that seemed perfunctory in comparison to the fireworks a man might provide. Or why would men and women go to such lengths to be together?

He met her carriage in the dark, in front of his family’s large manor home, and slipped her past a sleeping footman to his father’s library, mumbling something about the creaky stairs up to his bedroom.

The library was big, cold, and smelled of old tobacco. He pulled pillows off the chairs and arranged them on the rug. Then invited her to come sit beside him. He kissed her, and immediately started work on the buttons of her gown. Though they now had all the time they could want, St. George nevertheless seemed to be in quite a hurry.

And here, the giddy bubble in Grace’s chest began to deflate.

He seemed to have a checklist in his head. He wished to see her breasts, bare. He wished to hold them in his hands, and he wished to pinch each nipple. He did not look to her face during these procedures. It did not seem to occur to him to see what the result of touching her nipple might be, or what might happen if he continued to touch the nipple, with, say, variation in pressure. He did it to have done it, and then he moved to the next item on the list.

The addition of tongues to kissing was not unpleasant, but it did not rouse her. It felt a bit like brushing up against someone while swimming in a lake. Friendly, but not something that took one closer to heaven.

He was breathing hard, and saying poetic things to her, about her beauty, her desirability, the way her body had enslaved his imagination. “You were made for me,” he said at one point, stripping off her stockings, and that did give her a little shiver up her spine. To think of perfect compatibility between two people, a fit like two halves making a whole.

But was she made for him? He trailed a hand up her leg, to find her sex, then withdrew the hand to spit on it and lave the moisture over her. He seemed to believe this a supremely chivalrous act. Grace had by this point lost the narrative thread. She felt more baffled than aroused.

And then his hips were between her legs, prodding her with his thin, hard penis, and it was only as he added another swipe of spittle to the proceedings that it occurred to her that she might request that he slow down, or, even better, stop.

Just as she had the thought, he shoved inside her with an impassioned grunt. It pinched.

He was saying something romantic, and his voice was unsteady, and she found she could not pay attention. She was so distracted by the wave of disappointment that crashed through her as he began to move.

Good God. Was this it? She was certain that once the novelty ebbed, this activity would be boring. Why had her married friends told her it was special? Was it all a conspiracy to make her feel like a fool?

“St. George,” she said, and he didn’t hear her over his own groans. “Georgie,” she said, louder, and he slowed.

“My plump little angel,” he said huskily.

Now, she eased out from under him. She simply needed a short moment to herself. To adjust, to discuss this endeavor and see if they couldn’t make it a bit . . . what was another word for “better” that was less likely to hurt a man’s feelings?

“You can’t stop in the middle like that,” he panted. “Come here, darling.” And he crawled to her, kissing his way from her neck to her mouth.

She did like that, the feeling of lips feathering over her collarbone, up her throat. “More of that, please,” she said, and she felt very glad indeed to have found something to work with.

But she’d found it too late, because at that moment, the door of the library swung open.