Chapter One Hundred and Twenty-Six
That afternoon, the duchess was passed from Genevra, Enid and Rosella—who inflicted on her their harshest fantasies—to Misters Drig and O’Herlihy—Seamus watching ambivalently whilst his lover subjected her highness to excruciating sexual humiliation, imagining Charlotte all the while—then, evening having arrived, that time when the dimming of the light betokens the curtailment of men’s hopes, and the onset of the concession that the heroes of ancient tales lived lives of a fullness our era could not countenance, our fates will not brook; and all the while, the honeyed call of obsolescence sounds more sweet, less horrific, with each passing year—evening having arrived, the duchess was passed to Curtis/Thaddeus, who happened to be strolling by, and duly took her to the servants’ quarters and summoned his fellows, who, en masse, extracted from her body, with her passionate consent, a settlement of millennia-old debt, all the unrealised promises of her class to theirs, bespoken by the multiple insemination of her womb with their seed, portending the birth of a classless monster who would, if carried to term, level civilisation as they knew it—before she finally, exhausted, the dignity of herself and her royal house dismantled beyond repair, returned to her suite, where Voot and Sniggly bathed her, fed her and cradled her to sleep.