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‘It’s not very easy to say this to your face, is it? When we first met in Bodmin and quarreled, I thought, there is a man who … And again when you came to examine my throat. It was not that I liked you, it was that I felt—’ She sat up. “No, I can’t tell you. Let’s go.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I don’t know what I feel for you – there that’s the truth. Now go away.’
She got to her feet and moved a step towards her horse, but he jumped up and barred her way. ‘You must tell me, Caroline.’
She flared at him, but he caught her wrist and held it. She said: ‘Well, you should know without being told. I wondered what it would be like to be kissed by you, whether I should like it or hate it, whether it would feed or kill my interest in you. But I didn’t know and I haven’t known and I shan’t ever know – and now it does not matter because I’m going away. Oh, there have been other men who’ve attracted and plenty more who will! But I shall not marry the first of them nor the second. In October—’
But she said no more. He put his hands on her elbows and pulled her against him and kissed her on the cheek and then on the mouth…
-Warleggan, Chapter Five. Winston Graham.
Caroline had told Dwight that she wondered what it would be like to be kissed by him because she could not say all of what she had meant, what she had wondered. Ever since that first unfortunate visit to cure Horace, she had not known if she wanted to pummel Dr. Enys with her fists, shred him to pieces with her words, or –
She told him that she had known by hearsay what it was like when two people slept together, and he had raised his eyebrows and looked ironically at her in such a way that she had wanted to say, then, that she had wondered if it wouldn’t be better to try out one’s partner in bed like one tried a partner at the gavotte. She had spoken about the gavotte, in any case, but to a different end. She did like provoking him, whether by shocking him with her knowledge of carnal matters, or with her suggestion that the Cornish poor would be better off dead. He could not have known that she had read Swift, she thought; if she were a man, he would have readily identified her argument as a parody of the class she came from. But something in her hesitated to correct him, even after he guessed the oranges came from her; rather, Caroline delighted in shocking and tormenting him, fearing that without that goad he would lose interest in her. But still she hesitated, even privately, to say why. What good could come of such perversity? The more she teased him, the more she wanted him to –
Oh, why could she not follow through with this thought in her mind? Still she stopped short of it, skirting the object of her desire. What did she want of Dwight Enys? A husband? He had reminded her, when she had tried to sell him on the advantages of Bath, that there was no use persuading him to doctor in a spa town, when she could not even bear the thought of marriage. Was he correct? Was it marriage she could not bear the thought of? Or was it the marriage bed?
After his kisses, she could not be sure that either one was loathsome to her. Certainly, since she had returned to Oxfordshire, she had spent most of her time trying not to think of the blueness of his eyes, of the width of his shoulders under his coat, or the warmth of his arms around her – for as soon as she remembered these things about him, or received one of his letters in her hand, her thoughts went to other places that would best not be contemplated before marriage.
She had time for long rides in Oxfordshire, solitary as they were in comparison to her Cornish pursuits. Her uncle William had not the sharp eye of Ray Penvenen, and as long as she was accompanied by the omnipresent groom, she could go where she wished. Saddling a horse inevitably reminded her of Dwight and his silly horse, his silly saddle, the feel of his gloved hands on her collarbone as he kissed her against the tree. His cravat had come slightly askew from the ride, and she had seen slender, dark hairs against his chest when he withdrew his mouth from hers. Sir Hugh had often boasted of being the hairiest man in the world, and his claim had disgusted her; she could not imagine what he found to boast about in that. But seeing that glimpse of Dwight underneath his shirt, seeing the pale skin against the darker hair – Caroline was bewitched, transfixed, enchanted. She wanted to see more, remembered the light, scant hair at his wrists, transparent even on his long fingers. She imagined what he would look like in the evenings after a long day of house calls, his cravat loosened, his hair askew, cheeks flushed at the exertion, spreading his legs comfortably wide in a chair by his fire. He had one servant, she knew, an older man named Ward, but there was no one to see to the creature comforts, no one to chat amiably with him when the day was done, no one to share his –
Though she was personally unacquainted with the sensation, the trot of her horse reminded her of the steady, effortful thrusts of her uncle’s manservant, whom she had once caught in the hall mounting Betty, her own maid, from behind. Caroline was fifteen years old to Betty’s sixteen, and had never told the other girl what she had seen. She had hidden and watched them that day, entranced by the rhythm: the man asserting himself, the girl returning the assertion with her own smaller movements and sighs. It had both been repugnant and fascinating once she had realized what was happening. Since that date, she had been both wary of and aroused by such rhythms. At one chamber concert she had attended in London, she had had to remove herself suddenly from the room when the deep percussive voice of the cello had reached her right between her legs and reminded her of the man’s grunts and the girl’s sobs. The music seemed to be seeking some great resolution, too, in the crescendo and the progression of the chords, and Caroline felt as if she must break apart and crash like the girl if she stayed in her chair. So she fled, not knowing why until this afternoon on the downs when the rhythm of her horse was suddenly converted into unbearable, unresolved pleasure between her thighs at the memory of Dwight’s long, gloved fingers at her throat.
Caroline steadied the horse down to a walk, called the groom over and slipped him the reins, instructing him to bring the horse home. She would walk, she told him; the day was fine, and she was not expected back till supper. So Caroline walked home, the groom some forty paces behind her, her face flushed and humiliated by whatever it was that she had felt, that unexpected hint of ecstasy against the saddle. Caroline pleaded a headache to Uncle William and asked for a tray to be brought to her room, where she set about pacing and pulling the pins out of her hair in agitation. To think, only to think for once – to stop feeling, to stop all sensation, to return to the virginal indifference she had felt, in almost all her dealings with men, save this one. She had prided herself another Artemis, cool and white and distant like the moon, unable to be roused. And now she was on fire, it seemed, and without remedy other than that which had overtaken her unprepared on her ride.
It was ridiculous, she told herself, all this fuss over a nobodyish country doctor, the kind of man she would never had paid the least attention to before – before –.
But now Caroline could not remember what it was like to not feel this burning interest in a man, to not wait for his letters and plan hers out in return, to not imagine every miniscule detail of every hour he spent away from her, to not blush whenever someone, anyone, mentioned a visit to the doctor. And if anyone was ridiculous, it certainly wasn’t her country doctor, with his scrupulously polite letters to her that told her of medical cases and Cornish mining prospects. He wrote to her more of Ross Poldark than of himself, and she read and re-read his letters just to glimpse his affectionate signature, the “Yours” he placed before his name.
It was madness, this obsession, Caroline thought, and there was no use hiding it from herself anymore. The ride had shown her that much; the more she denied this attraction, the stronger she felt its pull. She would be ready in October to beg Dr. Enys to marry her, if she didn’t find some relief sooner. The first step would be to admit to her own desire, to name it to herself at least so that she might gain some greater control over it.
This was it, then: When she had first seen Dwight Enys, she had thought to herself: “Now, that is a man to whom I should like to lift my skirts. That is a man who will not let me get away with my usual whims.” And every conversation, every parry they had shared together had only confirmed her first impression of him, as someone she simultaneously wanted to tame and wanted to be tamed by. She was not unaccustomed to being in command, but it was this desire she had to bend to him, to let him do as he will – though she might laugh in his face for it – that made her suspect her own lunacy.
Her maid had left her in her nightdress. Now Caroline removed the rest of her clothes and climbed between the fine linen sheets and down quilts of her borrowed bed, nestling outrageously against the mattress, the sensation of bare skin on fabric almost unbearable after her ride that afternoon.
Images came to her unbidden – images of Dwight kissing her against that tree, then turning her around so that her arms leaned against the bark and he, behind her, slowly lifted her skirts…She imagined she could hear the rustle of the fabric against his gloves, and then the soft sound of his gloves coming off. His fingers on her corset, then down over her petticoats, gripping her bottom through the cotton and lace, palming her thighs and spreading her legs wider as he reached lower, underneath the skirts and up, his hands at last touching her silk-shod legs. In her fantasy she wore no drawers, and his clever fingers made quick work of her garter and stockings, running up and down her bare thighs before coming between them, at last, as her own fingers were doing now, finding that perfect small nub where her legs met and all the pleasure in the universe was contained within.
Caroline lay back on her bed, panting and shiny with sweat, touching herself in the places she imagined Dr. Enys – Dwight – touching her. In her fantasy she could not bear to meet his eyes; she kept looking at the tree, examining its thick, fissured bark, even as he continued to spread her legs and kiss the back of her neck. She imagined leaning back against him, as her maid had done with the manservant, waiting for the moment when her fingers would replace his and he would adjust himself, swiftly removing his cock from his trousers and working his way into her from behind. She would be wet for him, as she was now for herself, and it would be hardly an effort for him to fit himself between her buttocks and into the most precious of spaces. He might pant, at the sensation of them joining, or he might whisper soft words of love, of her beauty and his infatuation, as he roused her further with his voice. “How you have wanted this, my pet,” he might say, and the thought made her gasp further. “Don’t deny you want this now,” she made him say to her as he continued his steady movement within her, those enchanting thrusts that would lead her to her completion.
Alone in her bedroom, Caroline need not worry about shame, need not worry about getting with child or what her uncles would say or if there was some wayward groom following them about the forest. In her dream she was alone again with Dwight in the woods, supported by the oak in front of her and secured from behind by his hands on her waist and his lips on her neck and that glorious, sturdy cock that he had fit up inside her, shocking her and taming her with the intrusion. He might bring his hands around to palm at her breasts, which with no effort at all would come loose from her corset, small and pert in his fingers as they were now in her fingers. She touched her breasts with one hand and her cunt with the other and she was back where she had been on the horse this afternoon, that same sensation of thrusting and pulsing and reaching towards something, something – and when it came it was swift and strong and exact, and Caroline cried out and lifted her head from the mattress and dropped it back in exhaustion and pleasure. She kept working herself until the sensation was painful and she could no longer call up the memory of Dwight’s swollen mouth without sorrow instead of pleasure, for here she was again alone, alone without her lover, alone in a borrowed bed chamber when all of her soul longed to be in a blue Cornish wood with the man she knew she loved.
Still the aftershocks of her climax made her tremble, and she felt first cold and then hot again, and with tears on her cheeks as if she had been crying. Was she crying? Was this, then, what she had wanted from Dwight? She had wanted it just as much from herself, she realized: she wanted to give herself to Dwight as she had imagined doing just now. She still burned with the desire to be had, to be docile in his arms, to let herself go. This was what she was afraid of: this surrender to a husband, this reconciliation of her self with another, which she still feared meant an acceptance of her role as a woman when she had always scorned such a position.
It would have been easy to have married Unwin, she now realized, and to have never given him the satisfaction of taming her. Dwight, though he did not know it, was halfway to doing the very thing she had always feared, and she knew now that her heart’s deepest desire was to be had by him; she wanted, she needed to have another, stronger person take ahold of her thoughts and her body and give her an hour’s bloody peace for once. Was this accepting her destiny as a woman, or defying it? She had brought herself to pleasure tonight without any man (at least, in body), and this was an argument in favor of her controlling, as she always had, her own fate. But this self-love felt somewhat vacuous, a substitute for that which she now admitted she desired, and she knew she would not be satisfied without it for long.
She rose from her bed, went to her toilet to clean herself and dress again in a warm robe, before pulling out a traveling desk and setting herself to write another letter.
Dear Dwight:
It may not surprise you that Oxfordshire bores me, with its green pastures and slow canals. I feel restless yet unsatisfied with the usual enticements to pleasure: the balls, the drawing rooms, the walks through the colleges. And I wonder: What sort of cure might you prescribe me, were you to be here?
I went on a ride today with my groom, and it reminded me of our rides in May before I left Cornwall. I was reminded especially of the last time I saw you, when you persuaded me to tell you what I thought of you. There is more to tell now, if only I were back at your side and a bolder woman than I was then. Perhaps you can convince me, for the sake of my health, to return before October, as I grow wan and faint in these environs. Or you might find professional inducements to return to the University you studied at in you youth, dear doctor. I might then pass my birthday in your company, and at last call myself a Woman with someone who, I believe, could guide me better in this area than any guidance I have thus given myself.
I may burn this letter in the morning; you would find it unprincipled, and I scarcely know what I am suggesting. If you were here instead, I would whisper sweet words in your ear, and neither of us would have any doubt then as to what I was proposing.
Until then,
Your Caroline.