Oh! Lizzie! and did you let him have you?'
'I did not say that he had me, Charlie, so you need not get into a fit of jealousy, you silly boy! No! If there is one man in the world to whom I would forever say no, it is Searle; but he was here all the same.'
I breathed. Somehow Lizzie had grown dear to me, she had been so nice, such a splendid fuck, and so tender towards me in spite of her disclaimer of love.
'What did he want, Lizzie?'
'What you say you do now, Charlie! But oh! we had such a row! I declare it has given me quite a headache! Oh! Searle! you ... cursed beast!'
'And what did he do or say Lizzie! Tell me!'
'Well, you had hardly got across the road before Searle, who had apparently been watching for you to go, sneaked on to the verandah around the corner, and asked if I had got his note. Now I had received a note from him which I had kept to myself, and which I had not shown you, dear, for I did not want to make you jealous; a fine production it is, too, and a very useful one for me, I can tell you. I think he must have been either drunk or mad when he wrote it, for he could not have written a more damning piece of evidence against himself if he had tried to do it in his sober senses. Oh! Mrs Searle would give a cartful of her rupees to have it, for she could then get the divorce she longs for. Plenty of good fellows are ready to marry her if she could get divorced, and I know she has often said she would be glad to give up her present life; but Searle knows this, and his only revenge against her is to behave so prudently as not to give her any chance. If ever he has a woman it is so on the sly that no one knows it. Well, he has written down in black and white that he has had me - and since Mrs Searle left him, too. Let's light a candle and I'll show you the letter!'
Full of curiosity and rather astonished to find how the truth comes out, for I had certainly understood Lizzie to say that Searle had never had her, nor ever should have her by her permission, I went for my candle and lit it. Lizzie then took the precious letter out of her pocket and gave it to me to read.
It commenced with prayers and entreaties to let him come and have her whilst I was at mess. It said that he knew well that I did nothing all day and night but fuck her, that by this time she must be tired of me and at least that a little of her accustomed change of diet would be agreeable. From prayers, it went to using threats. Her husband's regiment was at Peshawar, now with a newly appointed colonel who was death on adultery and fornication, and he had given out that the first time he found any of it going on amongst the married women of his regiment, he would set the penal laws on the subject in force and that he (Searle) had plenty of evidence which would put me (Devereaux), into prison and send her out of the country branded as an unchaste woman, a whore and an adulteress, and that unless she admitted him to her embraces he would help the colonel to make good his word. Then came more prayers and more earnest entreaties - then offers of a thousand rupees (twice what his own wife charged) - jewellery, anything, if she would but consent, and then in a postscript, he boasted that he had already fucked her, at Agra, on an occasion when, stunned by a fall from an overthrown gharry, she had been carried into his bungalow, and seeing who she was, and determined not to lose the precious opportunity, he had raped her in her unconscious state, and enjoyed the 'wealth of her voluptuous cunt'- he actually used these last words.
'The intense blackguard,' I exclaimed, moved to great wrath by the reading of this precious epistle.
'You may say so, Charlie! But now hear what the brute did. At first he asked had I got his letter. I said yes. Then he asked me in a wheedling tone would I consent and let him have me. I said not for all the thousand rupees in India, that he was too loathsome a brute for me to touch with the end of a barge-pole, let alone take
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