Veil of Darkness
Copyright 2004, R V
Raiment
(rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved.
Content may not be copied
or used in whole or in part
without written permission
from the author.
Copyright 2004, R V
Raiment
(rvraiment@yahoo.com)
All rights reserved.
Content may not be copied
or used in whole or in part
without written permission
from the author.
Veil of Darkness
by R V Raiment
The figure in black cruises implacable, dark and purposeful, cleaves her way briskly through the teeming,
colourful crowds on the sidewalk, a man-o-war on active duty forging her path through some festive regatta. Like
that man-o-war, too, she is heedless of any confusion she leaves in her wake, her eyes alert only to enemy sail
or to ought that’s a threat. There is little to threaten her here. The only broadsides she must face are those
‘broad sides’ occasioned by the hoops and panniers of ladies in fashionable daywear, and the oil-and-lampblack
printed sheets of the broadside peddlers hawking the tales of doom and gloom of miscreants hanged or soon to
be.
The skirt of her ebony taffeta gown is waisted, flowing wide from hips that entice even some of those very
gentlemen who pause mid-stride and doff their hats in acknowledgement of her signalled loss, and who wonder,
perhaps, how soon that lovely figure will emerge from mourning, how hungry for a man. She does not see them.
Even in the light of mid-morning the black silk veil dependant from her modest, no-less-black, broad-brimmed hat
ensures that she sees everything darkly, that her eyes must focus as purposefully as her heart, which sees
everything darkly now, with or without the veil. It serves to hide her, is expected to hide her grief, but hides her
anger more, masking the glitter in her eyes.
She is angry still. In some dark corner of her mind a candle-lit shade of her re-fights the fight, endlessly, loses
endlessly, wonders why, endlessly. And in his ghost she still sees too vividly the mottled, jowly features of her
father, eyes pinched between the fat, flushed cheeks and lids of a face swollen by indulgence, ugly with narrow,
mean authority.
“YOU… WILL… NOT…SEE… HIM!” Pounding on the table, his fist punctuated every word. “D’ye think I’d let it be
known that MY daughter ever loved such a scoundrel! D’ye think I or your mother could ever walk abroad again
and not be forced to hide our faces for shame, if the world knew MY daughter wept over the fate of a traitor!”
“He is NOT a traitor, father, and you know so! TELL him, mother, please!”
Not that her mother, reduced to a timid, sagging grey bolster beside her, would ever have heeded her appeal,
would ever have contradicted the man who was Lord and Master of them both.
“NOT a traitor?” Quite remarkably, the patronising sneer upon her father’s face actually seemed to render him
even uglier than before: “The King’s Bench has judged him so, Madam! Your elders and betters, the best minds
in the land, have weighed testimony and evidence, Madam! And they have found him guilty! There is nothing
more to be said!”
Nor was there, and she’d known it. Not that the accusation of his spying for the French government could have a
grain of truth to it, she knew her man too well for that. England and France seemed to have scarcely known a day
of peace between them since the Hundred Years War began in 1337 and less than a half a dozen years ago
France had directly contributed to the success of the rebellion in the American colonies, demonstrating her
continuing jealousy and resentment of British Imperial success.
It was not much to be wondered at that a state of paranoia and distrust persisted, nor that unscrupulous men
should conspire to denounce a young man of French birth as a traitor because there was profit in it. But there
was nothing more to be said because her father would not hear it. Her father knew black and white alone, that
the world was neatly divided between good and evil, industrious and feckless, and that wealth and poverty were
the God-given manifestations of both.
Her father’s power was absolute. She could go, and be disowned, or she could stay and secure her future. Her
choice had not been easy.
The gaoler smells, as most everything smells here, of flesh unwashed, of sawdust, straw and stale beer, of hope
decaying, and she holds a white kerchief, edged with black lace and deeply perfumed to her covered face,
compounding the veil’s concealment. Though curiosity burns in him to see that face, to try to distinguish the
features behind the veil, the gaoler keeps his eyes averted even as she places the money in his hand and as
she steps, black skirts rustling, through the doorway. As he closes and locks the door behind her it is safe to
look, for she will stand with her back towards him, but mindful of his promise and her reward he closes the Judas
window in the door and walks away.
The pale face of the figure seated in the corner turns away from the feeble whim of light that filters through the
small, high window and its grille, and he looks towards her. The man says nothing.
“My poor boy!” Such gentleness in this, such pain of heart, that it cannot help but stir him who has come to think
that nothing ever will again:
“It is kind of you to come.” The words sound feeble in his ears, but he has struggled to know how to conduct this
interview from the moment the gaoler announced it to him.
“Kind? D’you think I’d leave you alone this night, sweet boy? Not I!”
He says nothing, merely nods gently, waiting, watching as her hidden gaze flits around the almost empty cell.
She has at least made sure of his seclusion, and he is grateful.
“It grows late,” she says, and he smiles tiredly. It grows late indeed. Drawing-off her gloves, she adds: “We have
not much time…”
The hands within the gloves are delicate, narrow and pale. It seems hard to believe, to him, that a world so ugly
can contain such beautiful, slender fingers, and that none of those slender fingers of hers bears a ring.
And ring-less they move, those fingers, pale against the darkness of her dress, her hand rising gently, yet no
less purposefully, toward the collar beneath her veil. In the taut, dark silence of isolation, surrounded by iron and
stone, he seems to hear the button part, watches her hand descend to the next.
The short coat falls silently, almost lost in the shadowed blackness of the floor, and her fingers continue to play,
rhythmically it seems, so very steadily, till the dress itself cascades, seeming to melt into the stone about her
feet. She wears nothing – not so little as a shift - beneath that dress, stands naked but for her hat and veil.
So audible, his sigh, escaping as a hiss into the silence like an organ bellows inadvertently pressed amid a
congregation at prayer, and so silent her approach.
So white in the feeble light. So white her shoulders, so white her slender limbs, so white her young up-tilted
breasts smudged with the penumbra of her nipples. So white her belly and her thighs, so dark that secret nest,
that triangle of shadow.
So dark her face behind that veil. He wishes she would uncover it.
Uncertain, still, he rises slowly to his feet, not quite yet believing, astonished she would do this, in such a place
for him, the light pressure of her fingers at the neck of his open shirt is almost startling. The rim of her hat
scrapes his belly as she kneels, naked on cold stone beneath him, unfastens and draws-down his breeches. It is
her turn to sigh.
So cold, the cell, and dark, as chill with the lack of daylight as their world is with enlightenment, and yet, her veil
soft shrouding round his cock, so hot her mouth, and wet, as she takes him in and he shudders.
Is this it, then? Has she come to taunt him? Angered at the futility, still his full cock feels the need, the skin of
scrotum tightening round his balls, his loins beginning to burn with the heat that is always so immediate. He does
not ask, just stands, shivering with cold and with excitement, the forbidden happening here in this forbidden and
forbidding place at this forbidden and foreboding time.
His cock plunges as she rises, lets him go, and it now hangs swinging as the bowsprit of a sloop uneasy at her
anchor, hot and full and flushed and ribbed and wanting, wet with the juices of her mouth, warm with the memory
of her tongue.
She bids him, softly: “Lie” and the chill of stone at his back she descends so warm upon him, straddling him, her
back toward the door, and a small hand finds and guides him, slides him in.
“Take me, my lover!” A whisper. Warm. A softness he has not heard for so long. A heat and a hardness in
possession of him as she rises and falls upon him, rides him, gently first, leans towards him till her breasts
descend and rest upon him, nipples hot nails of wanting, flesh suffusing heat full through him.
In the joyful agony of wanting, buttocks thrusting upward from the frigid ground into wet, hot want of her, of inner
muscles clenching, grasping, drawing, the veil that, hanging between them, caresses his face, now seems to him
obscene.
Of the hands clasped tightly round the gentle swells of her white bottom, pale poems gleaming and shimmering
now, one hand rises carefully, touches the veil rim, slowly lifts it. Will she stop him? Will she cease? Will she
run, affrighted?
But she does not, merely smiles at him beneath the veil that covers them both, lowers her full dark lips to his own,
closes on him. His tongue explores her mouth in frisson of excitement at the knowledge that his cock was lately
here, that that same tongue which wrestles soft and wetly with his own grappled with his fullness barely moments
earlier. His hand returns to her poetry, delves deep into that sweet valley, slides a finger deep into that dark and
secret other heat of her as her pubis grinds on his, and her tongue roils within him in excitement.
Bucking and pounding he cannot let go of her, will not let go of her, makes war within on a desire to wrest his
mouth away for he can barely breathe now, and winning he clings, breathing her, becoming that little dizzy, that
little muzzy, till the surge within him, contained within his thrusting hips, makes him forget. All is forgotten in that
instant, that pushing, upward-driving instant of desire made hot and liquid and complete when nothing matters
but itself.
Afterwards she says not a word but rises, restoring her veil even as she straightens, and he watches her dress.
In a fleeting gleam of light through the window he sees her body shimmer, a gleam of wetness on her upper thigh,
shadow and veil rendering her a headless ivory statue that fades to darkness, grows invisible as she draws her
long dress over her. Like a last bright hope her beauty fades to black and silence, broken only by her rap upon
the door, summoning the gaoler who arrives unspeaking, turns the rasping, noisy key, watches her leave from
the periphery of eyes that are still averted. He wonders if the prisoner got to see her face, and what it looks like.
The sun scarcely risen the following morning the square is already crowded. There is always a crowd upon such
occasions, and she took her place early so that she might not have to forge her way through its teeming
humanity. And now she is almost unique in sitting alone at a window, her privacy bought as so much is, sitting in
black with her veil down, anonymous to any who might see her. But the crowd is not looking at her, nor are those
others cramming other windows or even crowded on rooftops.
Men, women and children are there, and today it’s a press, a small boy being handed back over the heads of the
crowd, transported on willing, strangely gentle arms, removing him from the crush. In a way she knows them all,
though they are there in their thousands. Innocent men and women, guilty men and women, pie-vendors and
broadsheet-sellers elbowing through the compressed assemblage of butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers and
their various apprentices, wary of prostitutes and of pickpockets, and of their apprentices too. Many are
laughing, and why should they not be?
At least one is not; dressed dark and slender built, making notes on paper - probably a journalist who will rage
loud in print at the solemn un-solemn injustice. She wonders how the crowd will react today, and knows it
depends on the crimes of those punished.
And now ‘he’ is there, the Ordinary of the prison exchanging last words with him, the hangman prepared,
standing waiting. Their prisoner looks calm. He is looking and, she guesses, for her, but she makes him no
sign. Still, he has found her, nods almost imperceptibly just as they raise the hood above his head, begin to draw
it down over his morning-pale face.
He has made no fuss with the rope and its knot as some do, probably knows that all, now, is chance, no doubt
praying within for the broken neck that the ignorant expect and very few get.
There is a sigh and a moan, from the crowd, at the drop. There always is. And some anger now, as usual, for he
is not so very fortunate and the dreadful dance seems to go on forever, the hopeless, mindless body bucking
and twisting, threshing and helpless, much as yesterday when he lay beneath her. And it is that thought which
brings her, the ache in her gut exploding white hot, flushing her belly, her cunny and thighs, sparking and
dancing like fire deep within her, soaking the hidden towel on which she is sitting and around which she clenches
with want.
It would not have happened thus, she knows, and nor could she have begun this, had her father not, at the last
moment, ‘relented’, given her permission to see him once more. It was a fraud, of course, a lie, his patronising
concession to her feelings only a pretext, the means he had used to bring her that day to this crowd ‘to watch
the knave die as he should’. They had arrived too late, as he had planned they should, and she had no
communion with him, just as her father had planned she should not. Nor at the last had he even seen her, but
she had been made to be witness and drenched the seat of their carriage, shockingly, in her pain and her
wanting.
How many, now? She chose not to answer herself. Elsewhere some other stranger sat waiting, or was being
tried, for whom she would pay the gaoler and whom she would visit on that dreadful last night, whose death she
would witness the following morning with a small death of her own in which there was, still, a memory borne.
Nor did Father object, now, to ought that she did, or how she disposed of the much that she owned, for her father
was dead, of mysterious circumstances, much missed by his peers who much sought to condole her, blind to the
smile behind the veil she always wore. The mysteriousness of those circumstances she could, of course,
resolve, and such was her intention, but only when the time came when that little death would suffice no more to
ease her pain and wanting, when she came to choose that final dance for herself.
Copyright 2004, R V Raiment (RVRaiment@AOL.com)
All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or in part without written permission from the
author.
by R V Raiment
The figure in black cruises implacable, dark and purposeful, cleaves her way briskly through the teeming,
colourful crowds on the sidewalk, a man-o-war on active duty forging her path through some festive regatta. Like
that man-o-war, too, she is heedless of any confusion she leaves in her wake, her eyes alert only to enemy sail
or to ought that’s a threat. There is little to threaten her here. The only broadsides she must face are those
‘broad sides’ occasioned by the hoops and panniers of ladies in fashionable daywear, and the oil-and-lampblack
printed sheets of the broadside peddlers hawking the tales of doom and gloom of miscreants hanged or soon to
be.
The skirt of her ebony taffeta gown is waisted, flowing wide from hips that entice even some of those very
gentlemen who pause mid-stride and doff their hats in acknowledgement of her signalled loss, and who wonder,
perhaps, how soon that lovely figure will emerge from mourning, how hungry for a man. She does not see them.
Even in the light of mid-morning the black silk veil dependant from her modest, no-less-black, broad-brimmed hat
ensures that she sees everything darkly, that her eyes must focus as purposefully as her heart, which sees
everything darkly now, with or without the veil. It serves to hide her, is expected to hide her grief, but hides her
anger more, masking the glitter in her eyes.
She is angry still. In some dark corner of her mind a candle-lit shade of her re-fights the fight, endlessly, loses
endlessly, wonders why, endlessly. And in his ghost she still sees too vividly the mottled, jowly features of her
father, eyes pinched between the fat, flushed cheeks and lids of a face swollen by indulgence, ugly with narrow,
mean authority.
“YOU… WILL… NOT…SEE… HIM!” Pounding on the table, his fist punctuated every word. “D’ye think I’d let it be
known that MY daughter ever loved such a scoundrel! D’ye think I or your mother could ever walk abroad again
and not be forced to hide our faces for shame, if the world knew MY daughter wept over the fate of a traitor!”
“He is NOT a traitor, father, and you know so! TELL him, mother, please!”
Not that her mother, reduced to a timid, sagging grey bolster beside her, would ever have heeded her appeal,
would ever have contradicted the man who was Lord and Master of them both.
“NOT a traitor?” Quite remarkably, the patronising sneer upon her father’s face actually seemed to render him
even uglier than before: “The King’s Bench has judged him so, Madam! Your elders and betters, the best minds
in the land, have weighed testimony and evidence, Madam! And they have found him guilty! There is nothing
more to be said!”
Nor was there, and she’d known it. Not that the accusation of his spying for the French government could have a
grain of truth to it, she knew her man too well for that. England and France seemed to have scarcely known a day
of peace between them since the Hundred Years War began in 1337 and less than a half a dozen years ago
France had directly contributed to the success of the rebellion in the American colonies, demonstrating her
continuing jealousy and resentment of British Imperial success.
It was not much to be wondered at that a state of paranoia and distrust persisted, nor that unscrupulous men
should conspire to denounce a young man of French birth as a traitor because there was profit in it. But there
was nothing more to be said because her father would not hear it. Her father knew black and white alone, that
the world was neatly divided between good and evil, industrious and feckless, and that wealth and poverty were
the God-given manifestations of both.
Her father’s power was absolute. She could go, and be disowned, or she could stay and secure her future. Her
choice had not been easy.
The gaoler smells, as most everything smells here, of flesh unwashed, of sawdust, straw and stale beer, of hope
decaying, and she holds a white kerchief, edged with black lace and deeply perfumed to her covered face,
compounding the veil’s concealment. Though curiosity burns in him to see that face, to try to distinguish the
features behind the veil, the gaoler keeps his eyes averted even as she places the money in his hand and as
she steps, black skirts rustling, through the doorway. As he closes and locks the door behind her it is safe to
look, for she will stand with her back towards him, but mindful of his promise and her reward he closes the Judas
window in the door and walks away.
The pale face of the figure seated in the corner turns away from the feeble whim of light that filters through the
small, high window and its grille, and he looks towards her. The man says nothing.
“My poor boy!” Such gentleness in this, such pain of heart, that it cannot help but stir him who has come to think
that nothing ever will again:
“It is kind of you to come.” The words sound feeble in his ears, but he has struggled to know how to conduct this
interview from the moment the gaoler announced it to him.
“Kind? D’you think I’d leave you alone this night, sweet boy? Not I!”
He says nothing, merely nods gently, waiting, watching as her hidden gaze flits around the almost empty cell.
She has at least made sure of his seclusion, and he is grateful.
“It grows late,” she says, and he smiles tiredly. It grows late indeed. Drawing-off her gloves, she adds: “We have
not much time…”
The hands within the gloves are delicate, narrow and pale. It seems hard to believe, to him, that a world so ugly
can contain such beautiful, slender fingers, and that none of those slender fingers of hers bears a ring.
And ring-less they move, those fingers, pale against the darkness of her dress, her hand rising gently, yet no
less purposefully, toward the collar beneath her veil. In the taut, dark silence of isolation, surrounded by iron and
stone, he seems to hear the button part, watches her hand descend to the next.
The short coat falls silently, almost lost in the shadowed blackness of the floor, and her fingers continue to play,
rhythmically it seems, so very steadily, till the dress itself cascades, seeming to melt into the stone about her
feet. She wears nothing – not so little as a shift - beneath that dress, stands naked but for her hat and veil.
So audible, his sigh, escaping as a hiss into the silence like an organ bellows inadvertently pressed amid a
congregation at prayer, and so silent her approach.
So white in the feeble light. So white her shoulders, so white her slender limbs, so white her young up-tilted
breasts smudged with the penumbra of her nipples. So white her belly and her thighs, so dark that secret nest,
that triangle of shadow.
So dark her face behind that veil. He wishes she would uncover it.
Uncertain, still, he rises slowly to his feet, not quite yet believing, astonished she would do this, in such a place
for him, the light pressure of her fingers at the neck of his open shirt is almost startling. The rim of her hat
scrapes his belly as she kneels, naked on cold stone beneath him, unfastens and draws-down his breeches. It is
her turn to sigh.
So cold, the cell, and dark, as chill with the lack of daylight as their world is with enlightenment, and yet, her veil
soft shrouding round his cock, so hot her mouth, and wet, as she takes him in and he shudders.
Is this it, then? Has she come to taunt him? Angered at the futility, still his full cock feels the need, the skin of
scrotum tightening round his balls, his loins beginning to burn with the heat that is always so immediate. He does
not ask, just stands, shivering with cold and with excitement, the forbidden happening here in this forbidden and
forbidding place at this forbidden and foreboding time.
His cock plunges as she rises, lets him go, and it now hangs swinging as the bowsprit of a sloop uneasy at her
anchor, hot and full and flushed and ribbed and wanting, wet with the juices of her mouth, warm with the memory
of her tongue.
She bids him, softly: “Lie” and the chill of stone at his back she descends so warm upon him, straddling him, her
back toward the door, and a small hand finds and guides him, slides him in.
“Take me, my lover!” A whisper. Warm. A softness he has not heard for so long. A heat and a hardness in
possession of him as she rises and falls upon him, rides him, gently first, leans towards him till her breasts
descend and rest upon him, nipples hot nails of wanting, flesh suffusing heat full through him.
In the joyful agony of wanting, buttocks thrusting upward from the frigid ground into wet, hot want of her, of inner
muscles clenching, grasping, drawing, the veil that, hanging between them, caresses his face, now seems to him
obscene.
Of the hands clasped tightly round the gentle swells of her white bottom, pale poems gleaming and shimmering
now, one hand rises carefully, touches the veil rim, slowly lifts it. Will she stop him? Will she cease? Will she
run, affrighted?
But she does not, merely smiles at him beneath the veil that covers them both, lowers her full dark lips to his own,
closes on him. His tongue explores her mouth in frisson of excitement at the knowledge that his cock was lately
here, that that same tongue which wrestles soft and wetly with his own grappled with his fullness barely moments
earlier. His hand returns to her poetry, delves deep into that sweet valley, slides a finger deep into that dark and
secret other heat of her as her pubis grinds on his, and her tongue roils within him in excitement.
Bucking and pounding he cannot let go of her, will not let go of her, makes war within on a desire to wrest his
mouth away for he can barely breathe now, and winning he clings, breathing her, becoming that little dizzy, that
little muzzy, till the surge within him, contained within his thrusting hips, makes him forget. All is forgotten in that
instant, that pushing, upward-driving instant of desire made hot and liquid and complete when nothing matters
but itself.
Afterwards she says not a word but rises, restoring her veil even as she straightens, and he watches her dress.
In a fleeting gleam of light through the window he sees her body shimmer, a gleam of wetness on her upper thigh,
shadow and veil rendering her a headless ivory statue that fades to darkness, grows invisible as she draws her
long dress over her. Like a last bright hope her beauty fades to black and silence, broken only by her rap upon
the door, summoning the gaoler who arrives unspeaking, turns the rasping, noisy key, watches her leave from
the periphery of eyes that are still averted. He wonders if the prisoner got to see her face, and what it looks like.
The sun scarcely risen the following morning the square is already crowded. There is always a crowd upon such
occasions, and she took her place early so that she might not have to forge her way through its teeming
humanity. And now she is almost unique in sitting alone at a window, her privacy bought as so much is, sitting in
black with her veil down, anonymous to any who might see her. But the crowd is not looking at her, nor are those
others cramming other windows or even crowded on rooftops.
Men, women and children are there, and today it’s a press, a small boy being handed back over the heads of the
crowd, transported on willing, strangely gentle arms, removing him from the crush. In a way she knows them all,
though they are there in their thousands. Innocent men and women, guilty men and women, pie-vendors and
broadsheet-sellers elbowing through the compressed assemblage of butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers and
their various apprentices, wary of prostitutes and of pickpockets, and of their apprentices too. Many are
laughing, and why should they not be?
At least one is not; dressed dark and slender built, making notes on paper - probably a journalist who will rage
loud in print at the solemn un-solemn injustice. She wonders how the crowd will react today, and knows it
depends on the crimes of those punished.
And now ‘he’ is there, the Ordinary of the prison exchanging last words with him, the hangman prepared,
standing waiting. Their prisoner looks calm. He is looking and, she guesses, for her, but she makes him no
sign. Still, he has found her, nods almost imperceptibly just as they raise the hood above his head, begin to draw
it down over his morning-pale face.
He has made no fuss with the rope and its knot as some do, probably knows that all, now, is chance, no doubt
praying within for the broken neck that the ignorant expect and very few get.
There is a sigh and a moan, from the crowd, at the drop. There always is. And some anger now, as usual, for he
is not so very fortunate and the dreadful dance seems to go on forever, the hopeless, mindless body bucking
and twisting, threshing and helpless, much as yesterday when he lay beneath her. And it is that thought which
brings her, the ache in her gut exploding white hot, flushing her belly, her cunny and thighs, sparking and
dancing like fire deep within her, soaking the hidden towel on which she is sitting and around which she clenches
with want.
It would not have happened thus, she knows, and nor could she have begun this, had her father not, at the last
moment, ‘relented’, given her permission to see him once more. It was a fraud, of course, a lie, his patronising
concession to her feelings only a pretext, the means he had used to bring her that day to this crowd ‘to watch
the knave die as he should’. They had arrived too late, as he had planned they should, and she had no
communion with him, just as her father had planned she should not. Nor at the last had he even seen her, but
she had been made to be witness and drenched the seat of their carriage, shockingly, in her pain and her
wanting.
How many, now? She chose not to answer herself. Elsewhere some other stranger sat waiting, or was being
tried, for whom she would pay the gaoler and whom she would visit on that dreadful last night, whose death she
would witness the following morning with a small death of her own in which there was, still, a memory borne.
Nor did Father object, now, to ought that she did, or how she disposed of the much that she owned, for her father
was dead, of mysterious circumstances, much missed by his peers who much sought to condole her, blind to the
smile behind the veil she always wore. The mysteriousness of those circumstances she could, of course,
resolve, and such was her intention, but only when the time came when that little death would suffice no more to
ease her pain and wanting, when she came to choose that final dance for herself.
Copyright 2004, R V Raiment (RVRaiment@AOL.com)
All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or in part without written permission from the
author.
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