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Stanley Huntington had come down from London to begin research on a book he’d been promising to write for years. An intense man of thirty-nine, Stanley had the air of the perpetual student; nevertheless he was ambitious. Now that he had finally finished his doctorate, an utterly useless thesis on the methods of medieval roof-thatching, Stanley had decided to pursue his great passion: to write the definitive biography of his famous ancestor.
Lord Cedric Huntington was sent by the king to destroy the notorious Welsh lord Llewelyn the Fierce. Llewelyn, from all accounts, was four foot eleven and ferocious, with a great mane of black hair. Determined to win Shropshire from the English, he was hated and feared by the local nobility and had already enjoyed several victories by the time Lord Huntington was commissioned to despatch him.
His aristocratic ancestor was, as Stanley described to Dorothy, a modern thinker trapped by the historical restraints of his time. A less generous description might have involved the word fascist. Whatever the true nature of Lord Cedric Huntington, Stanley was a man in need of a hero and a hero he had found.
Dorothy spent the rest of the afternoon helping Stanley go through tomes of medieval battle accounts. The two of them worked together in the office where the archives were stored. It was hard not to bump into each other in that confined space, and again Stanley found himself strangely drawn to this dumpy awkward woman who kept apologizing for the dusty chaos. She wasn’t his usual type at all.
Whatever his failings as an academic, Stanley had never had a problem attracting women. His good looks and faint air of helplessness endeared him immediately to the opposite sex. Promiscuous in a dispassionate way, he preferred to conduct three or four liaisons at once. His air of innocence was a powerful alibi and the women never guessed his duplicity, happy to believe him when he used his scholastic studies as an excuse for his absence. Consequently, his affairs had as much emotional impact on Stanley as the weather. But then Stanley had never been in love.
He cast a furtive look at Dorothy, who was bending over a yellowed map of the castle. Aesthetics were important to him and the librarian was anything but beautiful. Nevertheless, there was something extraordinarily compelling about her. Something he couldn’t apply logic to, but it had been affecting his groin all afternoon.
“I’ve found it!”
Her voice jolted him back. He’d been deep in thought, wondering what she’d look like naked and spread-eagled across the small library steps folded away in the corner.
“Found what?”
“The record! Here!” She slipped on her thick National Health glasses and read aloud.
“The hanging of the traitor Llewelyn the Fierce was conducted by Lord Cedric Huntington, who took particular pleasure in prolonging the execution by partially reviving the Welshman before hanging him again. When the news of Llewelyn’s final demise spread there was great mourning all over Wales.”
Dorothy, suddenly aware of ancient enmity between their two races, frowned. “Lord Huntington sounds like a real sadist,” she volunteered.
Stanley edged a little closer then thrust a hand into his trouser pocket; the way she had lisped over the word sadist had given him an instant erection. “Sadism does not exclude greatness,” he announced grandly, the perfume of her hair driving him crazy. He tilted his face forward at an angle he knew was flattering. “Say, what are you doing later?”
They went for scones at Dorothy’s favorite tearoom. The seventeen-year-old waitress with orange dreadlocks and a nose ring, who normally made a point of ignoring Dorothy, was at the table in a flash. She simpered all over Stanley but Dorothy noted that he had eyes only for her. His attention was immensely flattering but she couldn’t help feeling slightly guilty. She actually toyed with the idea of warning him that he might be attracted to her under a false premise. But as he leaned toward her, a blond lock of hair falling over those heavy-lashed eyes, she realized that she was far too fascinated to disillusion him, even when he embarked on an extraordinarily detailed and boring thirty-minute soliloquy about the beauties of medieval roof-thatching. In short, Dorothy was hooked.
Afterward Stanley wanted her to take him back to her village, to sample “the border culture” as he put it. Dorothy hesitated, which only encouraged Stanley further, his wide eyes wandering across her bosom as if he were caressing her already. Dorothy had been celibate for months and she was finding the way his fingers made love to the sugar container more than a little distracting. Prudence won in the end. She promised to meet him for lunch the next day.
Stanley walked her to her car. There was a slight sullenness in his step. He wasn’t used to not getting his way immediately and he couldn’t remember a time when a woman had interested him so profoundly. Perhaps it was her very ordinariness that attracted him. He pondered over the absurdities of lust—desire certainly fell where it wanted, yet, try as he might, he could not banish the vision of her lying naked beneath him, preferably still wearing those rather old-fashioned glasses. That fantasy was enough to bring him to orgasm later that afternoon and keep him going most of the night.
Dorothy returned home in a state of considerable excitement. Was this love? Her racing heart, th
e dryness of her throat, and the way she kept glancing at herself in the mirror, as if searching there for the mystery that he so obviously perceived in her, indicated the prerequisite emotional turmoil. Even the penis, trailing her around forlornly, seemed to sense a transformation it didn’t particularly care for, as if somehow it realized in its blunt primordial head that perhaps it was no longer the center of her attention.
Before going to bed, Dorothy sat at the walnut dresser she’d inherited from her mother and examined her reflection. She loosed her thick black hair and leaned forward to study her blue eyes and high forehead. She did possess a certain charm, but considered herself a little overweight. Pulling back the skin of her face, she noted with harsh objectivity the sagging of her cheeks and the thin wrinkle that ran down between her eyebrows. She reached for a tube of makeup.
The penis, perched between a black-and-white photo of Dorothy’s mother in her Girl Scout uniform and a miniature plastic statue of the Virgin Mary, watched her with a slightly critical droop. She ignored it and smeared the pale liquid over her cheeks, then peered tentatively into the mirror. She looked like an amateur Noh actor. Was there any hope for a woman incompetent in the arts of feminine beauty, clumsy in her movements, with a second-rate degree in military history? There had to be something she could improve on.
Her eyes wandered back to the penis. It had inched its way across the dresser and was busy dipping itself into a pot of lip gloss. It toppled forward and got stuck, its tip in the pot while its balls dangled uselessly in midair. Dorothy laughed out loud. It resembled a bizarre Japanese erotic print she remembered seeing. Just then the obvious occurred to her: perhaps she could become a wonderful lover. She had something to practice with, even if it lacked the dimensions of a full-size man.
The penis fell over with a crash. It waddled blindly toward her, now wearing the lip-gloss pot like a ridiculous helmet. Dorothy’s mind was made up.
In bed that night she reached across and picked the penis up from where it was curled in its usual spot on the pillow.
She ran it gently along her body, over her nipples and down across the soft skin of her inner thighs. It stiffened immediately. Then, with a kind of impatience, it shook itself out of her hands and took over.
The man who the penis was originally attached to must have been a wonderful lover, Dorothy concluded, lying back in a haze of bliss. That night she experienced pleasure she hadn’t known she was capable of, relaxing in a state of near ecstasy as the organ prodded, probed, caressed, and sort of licked her body for hours. It finally reached a shuddering orgasm of its own after Dorothy’s fourth climax…or was it the fifth?
Now satiated, Dorothy found it far easier to distance herself from Stanley’s advances. She canceled on him twice and three times rang to rearrange dates. Her coolness surprised and excited him; it wasn’t something that he’d experienced before. What had made her so mysteriously resilient to his charms? He thought she might have a hidden lover, but a few strategically placed questions debunked that theory. Maybe she just didn’t like men? But he could tell from her sudden blushes, the way she walked beside him, her hips swaying, her body leaning toward him, that she found him attractive. Her elusiveness heightened the chase. Stanley was decided: he must have her.
They dated for four weeks. The budding historian swung between tortured frustration and masochistic anticipation. The daily proximity of Dorothy made every inch of his body throb. Baffled, he channeled his chagrin into his work, discovering within himself new depths of intellectual discipline. To his amazement he even started to see Dorothy as his muse. Finally, determined to ensnare her, he decided to recruit her as his editor. Dorothy was ecstatic. It was the first time anyone had acknowledged her creative potential. She threw herself into research.
As Stanley developed the outline of the book, he began to project parallels between himself and Lord Huntington. He imagined that he could see a faint resemblance between himself and his famed ancestor in the aristocratic arch of his nose, the high forehead, the intelligence behind the limpid blue-green eyes. But there was one aspect of his forefather’s personality that Stanley did not wish to emulate. It seemed Lord Huntington had been universally hated, even by his own men, his legendary cruelty undermining any potential loyalty.
One fifteenth-century account scrawled in Latin by a local cleric described the pillage and destruction of a Welsh hamlet that, during the border battles, had unfortunately slipped over to the English. Lord Huntington had personally supervised the rape of the women and girls, as well as the beheading of all males over the age of ten. Even Stanley was nauseated as he plowed through the account, pages of which appeared to be blood-splattered. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find any redeeming features in his heroic relative.
Meanwhile, Dorothy started collecting and editing material for Stanley to incorporate into the main work. He gave her the task of researching Llewelyn the Fierce—Lord Huntington’s sole nemesis, until his execution. From all accounts Llewelyn appeared to be a Welsh Robin Hood, famous for his generosity to the common people, even those he conquered. Folklore rumored that Llewelyn always offered the choice of Welsh nationality before he impaled anyone. He was also infamous for the number of women he had scattered throughout the Welsh foothills and as far east as Kidderminster.
