A MAN AND A WOMAN EXCERPT ...

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“I am a eunuch, madame.”

 

Her gaze did not waver from his. “I would say, sir, that your performance last night attests otherwise.”

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Silently he cursed the heat that blistered his cheeks. He had not blushed in forty years. Twice now this woman had caused him to blush.

 

“They cut off my stones,” he said crudely, hoping to shock her. To horrify her.

 

To prove he was not the man she believed him to be, but which he had felt like for one single night.

 

She regarded him calmly. “By stones, I take it you mean your bollocks?”

 

The tips of his ears pricked hotly at her blunt English. “I have no seed.”

 

I have no seed reverberated inside his head—the cry of the thirteen-year-old boy he had once been, irreparably altered. The excuse of the Muslim he had grown up to be, filled with rage.

 

“My husband was a vicar,” Megan said in a clear, dispassionate voice. “When the surgeon told him I was fashioned in such a manner that I would not be able to carry his children, he refused to share my bed. He did not want to endanger my life, he said, by causing me to have any more miscarriages. The local midwife apprised me of certain prophylactics that would prevent conception. My husband refused to use them, even though their use would have allowed us to be together. He said such devices were immoral, and that marital pleasure was solely for the benefit of procreation.”

 

The faint protest of a carriage squeaking and the dull clip-clop of hooves broke the stark silence that followed her words. Just as suddenly the external sounds faded.

 

“I wish to God that my husband had had no seed—or that I had been barren,” she concluded with cool decisiveness. “It would have been far more preferable than the loneliness he condemned us to.”