Mystery Sex Scene

 

 

WARNING: As you might expect from the title, this page contains adult content.

April and May 2010

As we’re already heading towards the end of April, the following will be the mystery sex scene for both April and May. I’m only going to say one thing about this scene: this is as raunchy as this book gets.

She held out her arms to him, smiling broadly, her eyes filled with brilliance. “Come here, darling. I want to touch you – ” He sat down beside her and her finger-tips moved over his face, wonderingly, as though she could not believe even now that he actually was there. “How fine you’re looking,” she whispered. “Handsomer than ever – ” Her hands moved down over his broad muscular shoulders and chest, pressing hard against the warm brown flesh. Then all at once her eyes returned to his and she found him staring at her…

Their mouths came together with sudden devouring violence. Unexpectedly she began to cry and her fists beat against him, passionate, demanding. Swiftly he pushed her back upon the bed and her arms strained him to her. When the storm was spent, he lay with his head on her breast, relaxed against her. Now their faces were still and peaceful, content. Tenderly her fingers stroked through his coarse black hair.

March 2010

The Mystery Sex Scene won’t be quite as much as of a mystery this month.  Although I didn’t intend using a scene from another Angelique book just yet, I couldn’t resist using one which takes place in exactly the same location as the last – 350 years later.

 

Jacques Callot, View of the Pont-Neuf

The Tour de Nesle is the somewhat dilapidated looking tower in the foreground of this 17th century view of the Seine by Jacques Callot.  It was built in the early 13th century by Philippe Auguste as one of the guard towers in the walls around Paris he was constructing.  Subsequently it became notorious for its association with the adultery of the daughters-in-law of the 14th century King Philippe IV.  The princesses were imprisoned, their lovers castrated and executed.

The Tour de Nesle was destroyed in 1665.  But in the early 1660s, when Angelique arrives in Paris, it would still have been standing.  The first book in the Angelique series, Angelique: The Marquise of the Angels, describes Angelique’s marriage to Joffrey de Peyrac, Comte de Toulouse and her first encounter with the Court of Louis XIV.  The marriage ends in tragedy, and Angelique, deserted by the King, the Court, her old friends and even her family, finds herself out in the street, destitute.  It is then that she falls in with a childhood companion, Nicholas, now the leader of a band of criminals who have taken up residence in the Tour de Nesle:

It was in fact an ideal brigands’ lair.  Half-ruined halls, crumbling ramparts, tumbling turrets, offered hiding-places which the other gangs, in the faubourgs, did not possess.

The washerwomen who, for a long time, had been putting her laundry out to dry on the battlements of the Tower of Nesle had fled before the terrifying invasion.  Nobody had come to dislodge the rogues who made a practice of lying in wait for the carriages of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, hiding under the small, hump-backed bridge that spanned the ancient moats.

People confined themselves to whispering that this passageway by the Tower of Nesle in the heart of Paris had become a real cut-throat alley.  And the sounds of the violins in the Tuileries, on the other bank of the Seine, would sometimes mingle with the fiddling of Father Hurlurot or the refrains of Thibault the hurdy-gurdy grinder, playing for the beggars’ dances on a night of revelry.

Angelique wakes up in the turret room where the gang stores its loot:

Built of enormous stone like the ancient dungeons, it was round and gloomily lit by a barred loop-hole.  It was filled with an array of multifarious objects, from dainty mirrors mounted in ebony and ivory to old iron scrap, work-tools such as hammers and picks, and weapons…

Angelique stretched herself.  Only half awake, she gazed around with astonishment, got up and went to look in one of the mirrors.  Its reflection showed an unknown face: that of a pale girl with wild, staring eyes, like those of a ferocious cat watching its prey.  The evening light added a sulphurous glint to her tousled hair.  She threw the mirror away, frightened.  This woman with the hunted face of an outcast could surely not be she…! What was happening?  Why were there so many things in this circular room?  Swords, pots, caskets filled with baubles, sashes, fans, gloves, jewels, canes, musical instruments, a warming-pan, piles of hats – above all, coats, which, thrown one on top of another, composed the bed on which she had slept.

[...]

She ran towards the window.  Between the bars she caught a glimpse of the Seine, rolling its slow, wormwood-coloured waters and its incessant traffic of boats and barges under the cloudy sky.  On the other bank, already swathed in dusk, she recognised the Tuileries and the Louvre.

This vision of her former life gave her a shock and convinced her that she was mad.

It’s in this room that Angelique and Nicholas quarrel: he expects that now she has accepted his protection, they will become lovers; she has other ideas.

She stared at him defiantly.  The red glow of a bargeman’s fire, down on the river bank at the foot of the tower, illuminated them.  Nicholas took a deep breath.

[...]

“Everything that used to stand between us, Footman and Comtesse, that no longer exists.  I am Calembredaine, and you…you’re nothing any more.  Your people have deserted you.  Those, over there…”

He lifted his arm, pointing to the other side of the dark Seine, at the outlines of the Tuileries and the Louvre where lights were twinkling.

“For the people over there you no longer exist.  And that’s why you belong to the underworld…because that’s the home of those who’ve been abandoned…Here, there’ll always be something for you to eat.  You’ll be protected.  We’ll avenge you, we’ll help you.  But don’t ever betray us…”

Angelique realises she has no choice.

With a sudden resignation, she passed in front of him and, near the litter, began to unfasten her brown serge bodice.  Then she let her petticoat slip to the ground.  In her shift, she hesitated for a moment.  The cold was biting on her flesh, but her head was burning.  Quickly she removed this last garment, and lay down naked on the stolen cloaks.

“Come,” she said calmly.

He had remained breathlessly silent.  Her docility seemed suspicious to him.  He approached, watching her closely.  He slowly stripped himself of his own rags.  On the verge of reaching the climax of his most extravagant dreams, Nicholas, the former farmhand, stood trembling.  The flickering light of the fire on the riverside below projected his gigantic shadow on the wall.

“Come,” she said again.  ”I am cold.”

She too had begun to tremble, from the cold perhaps, but also, before this tall, naked, expectant body, from impatience mingled with fear.

With a wolf’s bound he was upon her.  He crushed her in his arms as if to break her, and he gave great bursts of spasmodic laughter:

“Oh!  This time it’s real.  Ah! this is good, you are mine.  You won’t escape me again, you’re mine…Mine!  Mine!  Mine!” he kept repeating, punctuating his virile delirium.

And with violent haste he possessed her.

I didn’t notice until just now that both scenes use the motif of the firelight casting a human shadow on the wall.  While I remember the imagery best from the scene in Le roi de fer, with this one I was much more engaged with Angelique herself and her emotions.  I think this scene is all the more effective for its setting.  Not only is the Tour de Nesle a wonderful location for a bandit’s lair, but Angelique’s view of her former haunts across the Seine brings it home to her that her old life is over and she has lost everything.  She has to accept Nicholas’s love in order to survive.

February 2010

This is a scene I read first as a teenager; it somewhat stuck in my mind. I’m sure you’ll see why.

Her eyes glittered; her black curls danced on the curve of her forehead.  In one swift motion, she thrust her beautiful, perfumed shoulders out of her dress, and let her clothes fall to the ground as if she wanted to defy her husband, across the distance and the night.  She put Philippe’s hands on her hips.

At the other end of the room, Blanche and Gautier lay close together, indistinctly entwined, and Blanche’s body gleamed like mother-of-pearl.

Outside, in the middle of the river, the noise was building.  The Templars were being tied to the stake; in a moment, it would be set alight.

Marguerite shivered in the night air, and moved closer to the fireplace.  For a moment she paused to stare into the fire, exposing herself to the blaze until its hot caress became unbearable.  The flames cast a dancing, shimmering light over her skin.

“They’re going to burn, they’re going to roast,” she said in a husky, panting voice, “and all the time, we…”

Her eyes sought hellish images in the heart of the fire to feed her pleasure.

Abruptly she turned round to face Philippe and offered herself to him, standing, as nymphs of legend offered themselves up to the lust of fauns.

Their shadow played over the wall, so vast it reached the vaulted ceiling.

If you’re wondering why it sounds a little clunky, I translated it from the French.  Here’s the original:

Ses yeux luisaient; ses boucles noires dansaient sur son front bombé.  D’un mouvement rapide, elle fit surgir de sa robe ses belles épaules ambrées, et laissa choir ses vêtements à terre comme si elle avait voulu, à travers la distance et la nuit, narguer le mari qu’elle détestait.  Elle attira sur ses hanches les mains de Philippe.

Au fond de la salle, Blanche et Gautier étaient étendus l’un près de l’autre, dans un enlacement indistinct, et le corps de Blanche avait des reflets de nacre.

Là-bas, au milieu du fleuve, la clameur croissait.  On liait les Templiers sur le bûcher auquel, dans un instant, on mettrait le feu.

Marguerite frissonna sous l’air nocturne, et se rapprocha de la cheminée.  Elle resta un moment à regarder fixement le foyer, s’exposant à l’ardeur des braises jusqu’à ce que la caresse de la chaleur devînt insupportable.  Les flammes moiraient sa peau de lueurs dansantes.

«Ils vont brûler, ils vont griller, dit-elle d’une voix haletante et rauque, et nous, pendant ce temps…»

Ses yeux cherchaient dans le cœur du feu d’infernales images pour nourrir son plaisir.

Elle se retourna brusquement, faisant face à Philippe, et s’offrit à lui, debout, comme les nymphes de la légende s’offraient au désir des faunes.

Sur le mur, leur ombre se projetait, immense, jusqu’aux voûtes du plafond.

This is excerpted from Le roi de fer (The Iron King), the first volume in Maurice Druon’s (Les rois maudits (Accursed Kings) series.  King Philippe IV (Philippe le Bel) has ordered Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master of the Templars, burned at the stake –  whereupon Molay curses him and all his descendants.  Meanwhile, his daughters-in-law, Marguerite and Blanche of Burgundy, meet their lovers in the Tour de Nesle.  The scene as quoted ends a chapter, which makes this a typical 1950s sex scene, steamy but short on detail (as opposed to the play-by-play accounts which became acceptable later).  It does read better in French!

January 2010

In my reading I’ve usually found that very many sex scenes fall into two categories: rapturous orgasmic sex or rape.  Well, both occur in fiction and in life but they represent extremes of experience and much of human sexual activity falls in between the two.  I always appreciate an author who can describe sex which is neither perfect nor horrible – or sex where one partner has a very different experience to the other.  January’s scene is a perfect example of the latter:

He is old and his appetite in the bedroom is strong but the execution is not easy for him at his great age and because he is so very fat.  I have to use all my little tricks to help him along, poor old soul.  I let him watch me slip off my nightgown, I make sure the candles stay lit.  I sigh in his ear as if I am swooning with desire, a thing that all men love to believe.  I whisper to him that all the young men of the court are nothing compared to him, that I despise their silly, youthful faces and light desires, that I want a man, a real man. When he has taken too much to drink or is too weary to get himself above me I even do a trick that my dearest Francis taught me, and sit astride him.  He loves that, he has only had whores do that for him before, it is a forbidden pleasure, that God doesn’t allow for some reason.  So it thrills him that a pretty wife with her hair let down over her shoulders should rear above him and torment him like a Smithfield harlot.  I don’t complain of having to do this, actually it is far nicer for me than being crushed beneath him with the smell of his breath and the stench of his rotting leg making me sick as I moan with pretend pleasure.

Did the stench of Henry’s rotting leg give it away?  This is of course Henry VIII and Catherine Howard from Philippa Gregory’s The Boleyn Inheritance.  This made me feel so sorry for Catherine having to put up with this night after night and also it helps the reader better understand her motivation for her affair: it’s not like she’s getting much satisfaction at home.

December 2009

I thought it might be nice to have something consensual this month, so here goes:

The firelight made a golden halo of his hair.  Smiling up at him, she lay back on the cushions, pulling him with her, holding his head in her hands, bringing it down to her breasts, wanting to lose her pain and fear and humiliation in the golden, worshipping body of the king.  She gasped as his lips caught at her nipple, teasing it, sucking, and her body arched towards his from the soft pile of cushions.

She flung her head sideways, staring at the fire, unseeing, turning inwards, feeling only the growing rush of pleasure as it built towards its crescendo and final explosion.

Here’s a clue: yes, there’s a king involved, but it’s not one of the Royal Mistress Challenge books

The reason this isn’t a Royal Mistress Challenge book: as Barbara Erskine says in her Author’s Note, there is no evidence of a relationship between the two people in this scene, her central character, Eleyne of Mar, and Alexander II of Scotland.  But as Erskine says: ‘Alexander II did indeed have many lady friends – why not Eleyne?’

Child of the Phoenix is her only non-timeslip historical novel and a great read.  This was one of my favourite scenes because I liked the idea of the sex on the floor in front of the fire.  I’m not sure, though, whether I would write such a scene myself.  Some readers think sex on stone floors would be uncomfortable and there’s also the nature of medieval floor coverings to be taken into account.  They would be covered with rushes or rush mats which probably weren’t changed very frequently, although they would be sprinkled with fresh herbs from time to time as a deodoriser.  According to an entry in King John’s Patent and Close Rolls for 1207, sand and straw might also be used on floors – which wouldn’t be pleasant to lie on.  Nevertheless I liked this scene and it serves a plot purpose – Eleyne has precognitive ability and she sees a vision in the fire.

November 2009

He ripped open her bodice and with a groan of pleasure pressed his greedy lips upon her breast.  She kept twisting in revulsion, struggling to escape him, but he only tightened his hold upon her and began spreading her legs apart to take possession of her.  Just as he was about to succeed, she gave a tremendous heave with all the strength left in her body.  He swore and hit her violently, causing her to howl with pain.  For interminable minutes she had to endure his blind fury devastating her, and allow him to glut his passion upon her with all the delicacy of a rutting boar in his lair.

When finally he stood up, she was burning with shame.

You can’t imagine how pleased I was that the very first Mystery Sex Scene begins with the words He ripped open her bodice.

You might have guessed from these words, and from the scene in general, that this was a 1950s/60s era novel.  It is fact Angelique and the Sultan, by Sergeanne Golon, first published as Indomptable Angelique in 1960.  In this scene, Angelique is raped by a pirate, the Marquis d’Escrainville.  Angelique usually gets raped once a book (at least) and while she is never shown to enjoy it (or only once that I can think of) she doesn’t seem to suffer from PTSD either.  She just gathers together the ripped edges of her bodice and moves on.