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amongst many). An erotically charged relationship involving complicated liaisons in obscure and extremely dangerous places (she was rather good), the love affair had exhausted D’Arcy both emotionally and existentially. Three tortured years later he encountered Clementine at her coming-out ball. Then sixteen, she seemed to embody all the virtues his older lover did not: virginal, uncomplicated, and delightfully candid. At the time D’Arcy had despaired of the possibility of marriage, having come to the conclusion that he was now too jaded to experience the emotion of love. However, he broke off his affair with the married woman and took to pursuing the young girl, a pursuit further fired by her uncle’s objections. A year later they were engaged.
    Clementine’s innocence had swept through his life like a scented breeze over a barren landscape, a metaphor he clung to as strongly as his cologne-infused handkerchief, now pressed to his face as he turned in to the dense and pungent chaos that was Soho. The daily sewage-laden miasma of the Thames was now blowing in from the south, and in the unusually hot summer the stench in this densely populated borough was particularly disgusting.
    Despite living in the comparative luxury of spacious, green, and quiet Mayfair, D’Arcy was constantly drawn to the vibrancy of Soho, the bustling narrow streets with their tailors, leather-curing factories, coffeehouses, and inns as well as the once-grand mansions of Golden Square, now reduced to cheap housing in which whole families often lived in one room. But there was a warmth and rhythm to the place that the promenades of Mayfair lacked—a borough controlled and austere in its wealth. This seething mass of striving humanity was exotic to D’Arcy. And as a member of the titled classes, he could afford to indulge in its corrupt pleasures and, most important, get out when he wanted.
    Indeed there was one particular prostitute he was fond of visiting who lived on Golden Square—a practical Irish wench who had scraped together the flimsy trappings of respectability. It was to here that D’Arcy, after a spiritually uplifting but frustrating evening with his fiancée, would often return, if only to enact upon the lady’s rented body fantasies he knew he would never be able to execute upon Clementine’s slender, lily-white frame. And it was at this very harlot’s window that D’Arcy now found himself staring, his feet having guided him there by pure instinct. “No, I shall resist,” he told himself, knowing that taking out his anger or frustration upon the prostitute would be counterproductive and, knowing her rates and his purse, economically disastrous.
    â€œI really will confront Clementine. As suspicious as I am, I’m sure there is a completely innocent explanation—pure coincidence, for example.” It was an argument that failed to convince even him.
    Nevertheless he glanced wistfully back up at the window—the ironically named Prudence O’Malley was a comely girl with an earthy sensuality matched by an earthy laugh. She was also very good at the amusing but erotic scenarios D’Arcy found entertaining. In short, despite the heat of the afternoon, it would have been a very pleasant distraction from the young biographer’s current troubles. The memory of their last encounter, during which D’Arcy had donned a leather saddle at her command so that she could ride him and whip him, made him harden. He waited until his tumescence had lessened into some semblance of decency, then walked on—ah, the glorious dictatorship of a young body; I remember it well!
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    â€œWhat exactly are you trying to say, my love?”
    Clementine, wearing a rose-colored day dress, was perched very becomingly on the edge of a chaise longue, fingering the beaded fringes of her shawl; her escort, an ever-present maiden aunt, sat at a discreet