Notebooks of the Young Wife Read Online Free

cunt squelched into orgasmic union. I remember a great yell – from me, from him, more likely both – and a delirium of pumping bodies, and then a slow slide into the torpor of satiation.
    How long we lay in blissful languor I do not recall, but I do know it was very much the end of that day. For me, I should say. Dominic took himself off muttering in the way he often did after sex; I could never quite work out whether it was a general post-coital malaise from which men are said to suffer or a more specific sense of being used. Which of course he was. I’m afraid that once I discovered his predilection I was quite shameless in exploiting it for my own purposes. Women I was accustomed to bed in a more reciprocal fashion; I took pleasure in perversely treating men as they are commonly held to treat us. That disposition, however, was to be challenged by the improbable affair that came at me out of nowhere. Indeed, neither was there back then a hint of the gallivanting in store to secure the return of the missing notebooks.
    No, all I knew was that there was very probably a large mass of disreputable materials up for grabs. The Everett name was a byword for aristocratic depravity but my acquaintance with the history of the house was sketchy. To be honest, I wasn’t very sure even where it was. However, I decided that any research into these matters would keep until morning. I was too spent even to contemplate banter over a jar or two round the corner at the Hellfire Tavern . Instead there was the remains of a bottle of Bruaichladdich in the flat that would send me pleasantly into oblivion, and to that end I let myself out of the back door and headed up the stairs.
     
     
Uxor Studiosa
     
    The morning had started well. Ardingley End was easy to find online in the Country House Index, which delivered the basic facts. Begun in 1610, it contained a Jacobean core that was later flanked by wings with rooms by Robert Adam. The Everetts came into the picture by acquiring the property in 1695, and stayed with it from generation to generation until Monty popped his clogs and brought the line to an end. But then my luck ran out. I searched the usual sources like Ashbee, Porter, Hitchcock and so on – any commentary I could lay my hands on that was indexed – only to find they contained no mention of the family name. It was common, of course, for disreputable items to appear under a false name or no name at all, but the pen names of particular eighteenth-century enthusiasts like Perry or Ireland had often been cracked. Not so with Everett, it seemed, if indeed there were any original materials to be had.
    I ground up a quantity of beans and set the coffee machine hissing and bubbling while I racked my brains. We knew about the interests of the present – or rather, late – Sir Montague, and through him of the fact of likeminded ancestors. Had any of them published flagellatory erotica copies would be preserved in his own collection, and it was unlikely that they’d have been left to lie in scholarly oblivion. Not at least by one of Monty’s aptitude for self-promotion. I glanced again at the clutch of books I’d hauled upstairs from the basement. At the bottom was the imposingly titled Organum Venereum : a recently acquired nineteenth-century reprint of the 1787 original. I had put it aside for reason of its lack of index, but now it occurred to me that it may be worth a quick scan, since it contained material from an earlier period than the rest. Earlier, and therefore thinner on the ground.
    Coffee poured at hand, I settled to the task. The main body of the book was a dissertation on the medical or pseudo medical works that purported to explain why a good whipping of the buttocks inflamed lechery, while in the process dwelling lasciviously on all the bodily details. At another time I would have been diverted, even titillated by evidence of preoccupations like my own two or three centuries in the past. That day, however, they