A YOUNG LADY can take only so many injuries before humiliation and insult forge a vow of revenge.
The story I’m about to tell you may make you uncomfortable. Greater still the shock may be for those of you bound by quaint rules of morality. I won’t judge you. In fact, I give you permission to hate me.
I’m no heroine. I feel no inner struggle over any supposed codes of ethics, nor have I lost sleep over the “wrongness” of my decisions.
You’ll understand why soon.
Or maybe you won’t.
You’ve been warned.
Revenge takes time, you see. And I have been patient. Today, on June 27, 1862, in Rochester, England, Mr. Bellamy, the former editor of the Illustrated London News, danced like the famous drunkard he was in his foyer while his wife was with family in Yorkshire. Tripping over the expensive Turkish rug, he took another swig of whiskey through his thin lips and held out one chubby white hand for me to take. I did, with a smile, and we danced together. I suspected it was what he’d been waiting for all these years. For me to finally cast off the costume of civil British society and become the wild “animal” he thought I truly was.
“Dance, Sally, dance, my dear!” The slobbering Mr. Bellamy demanded it of me even as the scowling portrait of his wife glared down on us from the floral-patterned wallpaper.
His breath was as foul as rotted eggs. Just as I expected, the balding man was still prone to the wiles of “exotic” young girls. “Dance now, Sally!”
I obliged. My legs were trained in many genres. They could perform a waltz to perfection. Ten years ago, when I was presented to him in that wretched woman’s cold drawing room, he couldn’t stop looking at those legs with his lecherous eyes. If only he’d realized then why they were shaking. If only he’d realized that they were the quivering limbs of a frightened child newly stolen from Africa.
“Queen Victoria’s goddaughter,” Bellamy said as he intertwined his fingers with mine. “The enslaved African princess given sanctuary by the Queen. How I’ve wanted you for so long . . .”
My stomach churned as I thought of his sickening looks and not-sosubtle advances, never returned for a decade until now.
“Why, Mr. Bellamy!” In the editor’s foyer, I jumped a little and bit back my anger when the stupid drunkard’s free hand reached lower than the crease of my back. His pants tightened as he stared at the teasing glimpse of my breasts tightly bound in a laced off-white corset. Now that I was freshly eighteen, there was no reason for him to hide his carnal desires.
Yanking his hands off me, I grabbed the whiskey and poured it down his throat, making sure he downed this bottle, the third he’d managed in my presence due to my insistence. “Tell me again what it was like to climb the Duke of York’s tower with the famous Antoine Claudet.”
My voice was pleasing to the ear, melodic like music. I’d learned how to make it this way. It was how I survived. I rubbed the bald spot on his head because I knew British men like him loved to be flattered like children.
“Or better yet,” I added with a wink, “perhaps you can tell me in your bedchambers?”
There was a term used among the British men who expressed their deepest fears and most hypocritical, insatiable desires concerning girls like me, the reason why so many of their wives feared when their husbands would travel overseas to lands unknown: “going native.”
