Читать книгу Raine - Elizabeth Amber - Страница 8

When the curtains opened, all eyes fell on Jordan. She faced the audience for this initial inspection, assuming the semireclining pose Salerno had taught her years ago. Both arms were braced straight behind her, with elbows locked and her hands flat on the table, fingers outward. Her back was arched so the surrounding light caught her chest. Her knees were high and widespread. Salerno wanted the features of her body that were so at odds—breasts and phallus—to be prominently on display.

As always, there were gasps and murmurs.

“Aberration. Monstrosity. La Maschera,” they whispered.

La Maschera—The Mask. It was what Salerno had dubbed her in view of the bauta she wore as a disguise. He felt it lent an air of mystery and intrigue to the novelty of her, his prized exhibit.

Those in the back rows stood for a better look. Goosenecks craned. Avid eyes were eager for a glimpse of her—the human freak show Salerno had promised them all today.

Typically, most of the attendees were medical men, here only in the interest of scientific study. But there were also those who came hoping to be titillated or to gather an amusing anecdote with which to amuse other acquaintances in the days to come.

Inspired by her strangeness, some gawkers in the farthest rows would eventually turn silent and slump in their seats. Their hands, hidden under hats or coats on their laps, would begin busily working at their cocks.

In fact, the show today was exactly the sort of event that would appeal to some of her wilder male friends here in Venice. She dreaded that one day she might gaze into the audience at one of these annual spectacles and find Paulo or Gani in attendance.

Her greatest admirers had come early enough to garner prime seating in the front row as always. They were the ones Jordan privately dubbed the Worshippers, though they referred to their group as LAMAS, an acronym for the La Maschera Admiration Society. Comprised of a half-dozen men and women, they’d come every September for the past five years. They saw her as some sort of mythical goddess and occasionally wrote odes in her honor, which a disinterested Salerno passed on to her. They were an odd but harmless bunch.

After the initial wave of speculation and consternation waned, Salerno extended a hand in Jordan’s general direction. “Learned colleagues and interested spectators—I offer for your enlightenment a living specimen of ambiguous sex! One willing to be examined for the purposes of advancing science.”

Jordan lifted a hand and wiggled the tips of her fingers at the audience. A nervous rustling wafted across them. In general, medical men were more accustomed to attending lectures involving the study of cadavers that were far less animated than she. Only the members of LAMAS waved enthusiastically to her, tossing posies and small tokens onto the stage.

The artist stood suddenly, dragged his chair away, and shuffled through his drawings for a few moments. His footsteps were loud in the momentary quiet as he made to withdraw from the stage.

Jordan turned her head and watched him go. She saw that he’d finished the last sketch and left it positioned on the easel. He’d portrayed her genitals three times actual size. They’d been faithfully rendered. He really was quite good.

“Bear witness to this spectacle. This miracle of science,” Salerno went on. Like a conductor, his hands moved in staccato gestures to punctuate his words and lend them added importance.

Jordan looked beyond him, scanning the sea of faces blurred by darkness. Because of her, Salerno’s reputation had spread far and wide. Today the theater had filled to capacity. Several hundred were in attendance. Candles lit the stage, so they could easily see her. But beyond the candles, the crowd of onlookers appeared to her as shrouds with shadowed features.

“Hermaphroditism has never been as pronounced in any other subject, now living or dead,” Salerno was saying. “This is a rare opportunity, I assure you. The subject is nineteen years of age. Such cases rarely endure so long. Early death due to venereal disease or suicide are typically the fate of these creatures.”

Jordan rolled her eyes. “No, really. Don’t bother trying to spare my feelings,” she muttered sotto voce.

It wasn’t that Salerno was being intentionally cruel to her. He didn’t care enough about her as a person to bother with cruelty. To him, she was merely a medical curiosity. A stepping stone to fame and glory in his chosen field. That she might also be a human being with feelings was immaterial. His lack of empathy made him all the more dangerous.

In time, Salerno grew weary of his own voice and called for the interrogation to commence.

“Why the mask?” a voice inquired from the crowd.

“It is a requirement the subject’s family insists upon,” Salerno replied. “Hence the moniker, La Maschera.”

“But why specifically the bauta when any mask would have done?” another called.

“I’ve always worn the bauta of Carnivale,” Jordan returned. “Even before the Austrians.”

Salerno shot her an annoyed look. She might have to obey him in most things, but she refused to play the silent victim he would prefer her to be. He should be accustomed to that by now.

Onlookers always questioned the mask, but it had taken on added significance this year. Because some Venetians who still rebelled against Austrian rule had chosen to disguise themselves behind Carnivale masks to make mischief, such masks had recently been outlawed. The festival that had for centuries been so integral to the city was now forbidden.

“Let me direct your attention to matters below the subject’s neck,” Salerno said, indicating her bosom. His hand was cold as he took the weight of one of her breasts between his thumb and two fingers, lifting. “Paired with what is displayed between the subject’s legs, such objects often draw titters from the crowd.”

Jordan cringed at the pun, having heard it before from him on every birthday since her breasts had developed. She’d had to bind them every morning thereafter to perpetuate the fiction that she was entirely male.

“They’re not much proof of sexual ambiguity,” a voice complained. “I’ve seen men with tits as big.”

“But only fat men, I’ll warrant,” Salerno quibbled. “And this subject is hardly fat.” He let her breast flop free.

“Let’s hear the subject speak further so that we may judge the quality and timbre of the voice,” someone called.

Jordan tilted her jaw to a challenging angle. “What would you have me say? That you’re a toad? A prick? An ass?”

The questioner blushed. Appearing quite sorry he’d dared ask, he meekly added, “The voice is too low to be strictly female, yet too high to be male,” before quickly reseating himself.

Another man stood. “Has the, uh, subject been clean shaven? Does, he, she, uh—” His words trailed off as he searched for the appropriate pronoun to apply to her.

Nouns always sprang with ease to the audience’s lips when they beheld her—freak, specimen, subject, monstrosity. At the Paris school of medicine where she’d been taken for observation as a child, she’d been labeled le malade, the ill one. But no one ever knew what pronoun to apply to her. Sometimes they labeled her “her,” sometimes “him,” and worst of all, in imitation of Salerno, “it.”

“You may to refer to the subject as ‘La Maschera’ or ‘it,’” Salerno informed him.

“Very well then,” the man continued. “Does it have a beard?”

“Of course, just look between its legs,” joked another voice from somewhere in the audience.

The group guffawed. Jordan affected a bored expression. She’d heard the jest before from other doctors in other theaters.

“I only wondered if its jaw might have been clean shaven before this event in order to throw us off a proper diagnosis,” the man protested.

Salerno’s hand cupped her jaw, massaging. “Soft as an infant’s behind, I assure you. Come. I invite you to feel for yourself.”

Jordan steeled herself for what was to come. This invitation would be the first of many.

The questioner strode forward. His fingers stroked Jordan’s cheeks, neck, and throat. He tilted her jaw one way and then the other. She purposely caught his gaze, hoping to startle him with her unusual obsidian eyes.

Under her unwavering stare, he quickly dropped his hand. Wiping it on his pants leg, he stepped away.

“Beardless,” he pronounced to the audience, before striding back to his seat.

More questions came, thick and fast. None were new to her. But she lay in wait for the one question to which her answer would be new. It would almost be pleasant to see the shock on Salerno’s face.

“Is the vaginal canal blind?” someone asked.

“No, there is a small perforation at its climax,” Salerno assured him.

“How small?” asked yet another.

“Discover it for yourselves.” Salerno beckoned the two questioners toward the stage.

Jordan lay back, folding her hands across her midriff. This was proceeding as all the other events had in prior years. In some ways, it was boring. In others, painful. But first and foremost the exploitation engendered a deep, private humiliation in her.

Salerno produced a pot of ointment. It was passed between the two men. The first of them scooped a dollop onto two of his fingers.

Salerno sought a glass of water to soothe his vocal chords as he waited.

A cold, lubricated finger slid along her slit, finding her opening. It poked inside her. Anger filled her as steadily as the finger, but she focused on breathing evenly, waiting for it to be over.

“No virginal barrier,” announced the first poker, suspicion coloring his tone.

“It once existed, I assure you,” said Salerno. “It was breeched years ago by other investigations.”

Yes. Jordan remembered.

The finger probed deeper, searching, until even the knuckles of the hand had folded into her. Eventually the finger prodded the end of her canal, exploring the perforation it found.

“Ah! Yes, I feel it.”

Jordan gritted her teeth against the cramping in her abdomen.

He pulled out.

The lubricated finger of another replaced his in her vaginal channel, probing again. The man found the opening, nodded in agreement, and then withdrew.

Fury swelled in her, but she tried to tamp it down. Whatever was done to her on this day, she must allow, she reminded herself. Her mother’s as well as her own continued comfort depended on her obedience.

Obedience. How she detested the word. Every year she balked when Salerno came for her at dawn, but her mother always wept and pleaded. Was one day too much to ask of a child so that her only parent might live in luxury for the other 364 days of the year? she wheedled.

Jordan’s father’s wealth—a considerable fortune—had hung in the balance that morning when she was born nineteen years ago to this day. He had been struck dead in a hunting accident only a week prior. If Jordan had been pronounced female upon her birth, a distant male cousin would have inherited it all. She and her mother would have lost the lovely house and its sumptuous furnishings, the investments, the jewels, the social standing, and the esteem of every patrician family in Venice.

But were Jordan to be pronounced a male—ah! That was entirely different.

Salerno, a young surgeon at the time, had attended her mother at the difficult birth. When Jordan had been born a case of ambiguous sex—one body possessing both male and female parts—he’d been crafty enough to see the potential for his future. A bargain had been struck between him and her mother. He had pronounced Jordan male. And her mother had inherited the entire Cietta family fortune.

For all of her nineteen years, Jordan had faced the world as a man. She wore trousers, was addressed as signore, and was given the respect due a wealthy young man of family name and status.

But this was not what she wanted. And as each day passed, she chafed under her masculine mantle and grew ever more desperate to make a change.

“If a creature has a phallus, it is male. It’s as simple as that,” a man in the audience postulated.

“You call that puny little cannoli a phallus?” scoffed another, waving a hand in the general direction of Jordan’s genitals.

“I hear that’s what the ladies say to you in the privacy of their bedchambers,” Jordan quipped.

Laughter exploded.

“Yes, I call it a phallus,” Salerno interjected, raising his voice in an attempt to restore order. “What would you have it called?”

“A hypertrophied clitoris,” the man replied, loudly so as to be heard over the din.

Salerno sliced the air with his hand. “Absolutely not. There’s no such organ to be found here. I contend the phallus has displaced it.”

“May I put a question directly to the subject?” another man called out.

“Yes,” Jordan shouted back, before Salerno could. “But I don’t guarantee an answer.”

“Quiet, please!” Salerno commanded moving to the forefront of the stage. “Only then will we continue.”

When order was finally regained, the man tossed his query at her. “Do you bleed?”

“No,” she replied with a shrug. It was an easy question.

The questioner snapped his fingers. “That’s settles it then. There is no uterus. No womb.”

“Whether or not a uterus exists is a matter undetermined as yet,” said Salerno. “I’m sure you realize that some women who possess female organs do not bleed, yet they are still female.”

“Overall, do you have a sense of maleness?” another voice asked her. “Or femaleness?”

Her eyes found Salerno’s. “Femaleness,” she said defiantly.

“Never of maleness?” the questioner pressed.

She hesitated. “That’s difficult to say. For instance, I enjoy needlework and female fripperies. But at the same time, I enjoy male pursuits—riding a good mount or having a stiff drink and a good laugh with friends. Of course, I don’t mean to imply I ride and do needlework literally at the same time.”

A few uncertain snorts and giggles came and were quickly snuffed. Her interlocutors preferred to think of her as a specimen under a microscope. When she revealed humor, they were uncomfortable and never quite certain what to make of her.

“Are you now living in society under the guise of female?” someone shouted.

Salerno held up a hand, rebuffing the question. “The subject’s family forbids that question and all others that might lend clues as to its identity.”

Grumbles rippled over the audience.

“I object to the term it, which seems inappropriate and demeaning,” an Englishman wearing spectacles protested.

“What would you have me called?” Jordan snapped.

“An abomination!” someone shouted from the back of the theater.

Heads swiveled backward, peering toward the far end of the center aisle. Two men had entered unnoticed at some point and now stood there.

Jordan sat forward and shaded her eyes, trying to better see them. The one who’d spoken was rounded with too much flesh, but the other was broad shouldered, narrow hipped, and extremely tall. She felt the tall one’s eyes travel over her. Weighing her. Did he think her an abomination, too?

She squinted, trying to make out his features, but found it impossible to decipher them clearly through the dimness. His bearing was straight, almost rigid, giving the impression he was well over six feet.

Her cock perked to attention under his lengthy inspection and she hunched, hugging her arms around her knees to hide it.

The tall one’s gaze darted up to lock with hers. Sparks of silver caught the candlelight. He’d seen her desire, his eyes told her, and he wanted her as well. But somehow she sensed he didn’t like it.

“You’re a monster. A creature of the devil,” the squat man beside him stated with unshakable authority.

The taller one remained silent, ignoring his companion. So he would not defend her. But then why should he? No one ever had. She would defend herself.

Her eyes shifted from him to the other one. He wore the robes of a bishop. It mattered not what he thought, she told herself, but she could not let his slanderous comments pass unchallenged.

“Why should my external genitalia define me as a monster?” she argued. “For all you know I could be a saint in my heart.”

“Blasphemous creature!” the bishop snarled, shaking a finger at her. “It’s obvious you’re no saint.”

At that moment, a thin, anxious man stepped up to the pair of interlopers at the back of the theater.

Salerno moved toward the center of the stage, obscuring her view of them. Raising and lowering his arms in a flapping manner, he attempted to regain the attention of his audience.

“Gentlemen, please. Let us continue with our debate…”

Jordan pushed herself higher, trying to peer beyond him. But the two men in the aisle were gone now. Disappointment shot through her.

“You will note the presence of labia minora and labia majora as can be found in any female,” Salerno droned on, moving to her side.

Reluctantly, she released her grip on her knees and splayed them. With one hand, Salerno reached between her thighs.

“The labia majora is not fused—” He broke off, abruptly leaning closer to peer between her legs. “What the devil?” He grasped her phallus between his thumb and two fingers. Gently he squeezed.

His excited eyes came up to meet hers. “I’ll be damned. I do believe you have the makings of a hard-on.”