Page 22 of Sure as Shooting

As was customary with the business of men versus women, the woman was whisked from the room before the really interesting conversation took place. So Belle, holding her warm teapot and her pillow book, pretended to stalk toward the kitchen, but sidled back to the study door to listen.

“This treatment,” Ashbury said. “Might it involve the same sort of medical massage you practiced on me?”

“In a way,” Whit said. “But for a woman suffering from hysteria, the treatment is much more focused. Massage of the arms and shoulders, for example, doesn’t help.”

“Belle is hysterical? Does she have fits like an epileptic?”

Whit didn’t bother hiding his chuckle. “No. The fact that hysterics don’t become incontinent during their spells like epileptics do, and they don’t fall down as epileptics do, has led some skeptics to accuse hysterics of malingering.”

“If the treatment is the same as what you performed on me, I can understand where some women would malinger!” Ashbury sounded genuinely angry. If he was such a Mrs. Grundy as he appeared to be, it would stand to reason he’d be smoking about such activities under his own roof.

Whit soothed the major. “Don’t worry, Huntley. I’ve performed this hundreds, probably thousands, of times. It’s an accepted and very common practice, back east anyway. Don’t you have any interest in your maid becoming less hysterical?”

Ashbury snapped, “She seems perfectly sensible to me!”

“Do I detect jealousy on your part, Major Ashbury? Perhaps you’d like to witness my technique so you can improve your own skills?”

Ashbury sputtered, “I’ll do no such thing! And my own skills are perfectly skillful!”

Boot steps came toward the study door, so Belle skittered back to the kitchen to deposit her teapot. She managed to get down the hallway to her own room before Whit saw her.

Belle liked this room. Airy and spacious, with a view through tall windows of rolling, green, oak-studded hills, it was much better than her room in Missouri, when she lived with Ned. In Carthage, they lived on the town square near their livery and inn. Her view out her bedroom window mostly consisted of horse’s hindquarters and tails. They had dreamed of building a house like this in California, with unimpeded views over hills and valleys. California was every American’s Manifest Destiny, where one could live freely, exactly as one chose. Right now the rain pounded so relentlessly several impromptu lakes were filling up in the lime-green valley. Belle closed only the sheer lace curtains because she loved the diffused light filling her room and wouldn’t need to light a lamp.

She was peeling off her shirt and skirt when Whit came silently in the door. He held only a folded-up sheet and a green glass bottle, and he smiled reassuringly at her.

He said, “I’m sorry I didn’t admit to Huntley that I knew the pillow book was yours. But that would be to admit we’d talked about it. I thought if I could surreptitiously purchase it back fromHuntley—”

“Oh, no, you did the right thing!” Belle surprised even herself with the fervor of her feelings for the doctor. He seemed to possess the knack for consistently doing the right thing. But then, that was a good quality for a physician to have. “The major seems a bit of a lump when it comes to anything slightly bawdy.”

As he floated the sheet down to cover her bed, Whit threw his head back and laughed. “Well. He’s had about a hundred ‘wives,’ so he can’t be such a dull tool, can he?”

“Whit. Having a hundred Indian ‘wives’ does not mean he’s educated in matters of European refinement. You’ve spent years in Europe. I am sure you’re a much more experienced man in these matters, though you may not have had a hundred savage wives.” She was surprised to hear herself call her former sisters “savage,” but it was true in the primal sense of the word. Indian women were very basic in their sexual doings. They didn’t feel the need to heat things up with inventions or implements, as far as she knew.

Whit smoothed the sheet down and uncorked the bottle. A cloud of lilies wafted over to Belle, perfumed like a rich forest floor. “But haven’t you been married once, Miss Pennington?”

“I have hardly been ‘kept’ or loose, Doctor!” When Whit made a soothing face, Belle felt bad about her outburst. “I did have a beau prior to my husband. He was French, and we experimented with the French way of doing things. It was he who gave me the pillow book. So I was understandably a bit disappointed when I wed and things were not quite as…”

“French?” Whit suggested.

Belle giggled with relief. “Yes, not as ‘French’ as I imagined they might be.”

Whit gestured at the bed. “Well, this technique—quite simple, really—has been known to provide vast relief. You may lie on your back.”

Belle clambered onto the bed. She hadn’t been telling Bud the entire truth when she said she hadn’t slept well on this bed. This bed was heaven compared to her bearskin in her ochum, which she had never gotten completely accustomed to. She just hadn’t been sleeping well, had been bothered by hysterical and lusty feelings—almost all involving Dr. Whitney. And now he was about to put his hands on her in some manner! It was thrilling to the utmost, and gooseflesh prickled her calves and arms as she arranged herself flat on her back, eyes closed and hands at her side as though pushing up daisies in a battlefield.

Whit sat next to her at thigh level and said quietly, “Women often feel more relaxed with a pillow and arms above their head.”

She did as he bade, and waited with fluttering heart.

“It will help you to relax and not speak, and perhaps think of the images in your pillow book.” Whit’s voice was warm, friendly, and professional. “Perhaps the one with the swing. That seemed to hold the most appeal for you.”

So she thought about the couple on the swing, the man impaled up the anus with what she had discovered was called a dildo during a visit with Ned to St. Louis. A bookseller, again a Frenchman, had scared her by surreptitiously showing her a box containing an elephant’s tooth carved into the shape of a hulking, leering penis. She had scurried away since she was with Ned but had returned the next day alone, when the bookseller confided in her that it came from some primitive African country called Zanzibar. Again she had scuttled away shamefully but had never forgotten that dildo.

It had occurred to Belle that Huntley Ashbury was the biggest trader in the Sierra. Perhaps he could find such an item. Oh, that would be beyond shameful. He would discharge her from her position as his maid. Lying on her bed now, she almost giggled, but instead gasped when Whit’s large, warm hands gently eased her thighs apart. She allowed them to be eased and utterly forgot about the dildo when Whit scrunched her chemise up about her hips, then sought the opening slit in her drawers.

Of course. She knew the treatment would involve her vagina—her cunt, she’d heard it called by some experienced folks. Her cunt was the source of her hysteria, the central font of all problems and paroxysms, the area physicians glimpsed at disdainfully, down their noses, when referring to hysteria. Her cunt had quivered, become mushy and spongy when accepting her beau’s penis—had clenched in boredom and sometimes disgust when Ned mounted her. Lately, her cunt had been quivering again, becoming full and agitated when viewing Whit’s enormous prick bulging inside his trousers or watching his cotton shirt straining to cover the wide, powerful expanse of his shoulders, or when catching a glimpse of his collarbone—

“Ah!” Oh my, had she just gasped aloud? Whit’s broad, oily fingers eased apart the petals of her cunt, and now he slipped the longest finger directly down the expanse of her clitoris! She jumped and tried to remain still as the cloud of lilies floated up her torso, climbing into her nostrils. Perhaps there was laudanum in that lily oil, because she felt extremely light, as though her normal workaday mind hovered somewhere up near the ceiling, completely unembarrassed by the intimate yet medical act that was taking place.