“We quarreled,” I said, shortly, but she pressed me for the details, and I surprised myself by telling her all.
“I even gave up my family for him,” I continued. “Last fall in Canterbury, a disagreement with a local tailor had come to blows, and he’d screamed out his accusation on the public street: Sodomite! My father was constable, and put an end to the quarrel, but that evening he taxed me with the accusation. ‘Is what Corking said the truth?’ I wanted to deny it, at least to him, but denying that meant denying Tom, and that I could not do.” I ran my thumb over the T-shaped scar on my right hand. “So I confessed. I hope never to pass another such night as that! My mother crying, my father pacing, striking me blows now and again, which I made no effort to block. Was it something that they did? No, it was the way that I was. Who had made me so? Manwood, who had gotten me my scholarship? No! Who then? God, or no one! That earned mea blow that sent me sprawling off my stool to strike my head against one of my father’s iron lasts. They made no effort to help me, left me there bleeding from a cut above my right eye—see the scar? I knew then that they were lost to me. When I found the strength I made my way to the door, ‘I think it best that you not come again,’ my father said, thrusting my cloak and my small bundle of belongings into my hands. I’ve not been back to Canterbury, nor will I ever return to that house. I am as the dead to them, and they to me.”
“Hero” seemed to feel the depth of my pain and humiliation. She took my hand for a moment, then reached up to run her long fingers through my hair. I trembled as she drew my face close to hers, kissed my eyes, then my mouth, licking my lips with her soft tongue. I was amazed to feel arousal, not the disgust occasioned by my few perfunctory performances with the tavern trulls I’d drunkenly attempted upon dares from my friends. I moaned and thrust my tongue deep into her mouth, my hand falling to her hip. Her hands were busy loosening my doublet, unlacing my points, slipping in beneath my shirt to caress me, then trailing down to the fastenings of my trunk-hose. I gasped as she slid her hand between my thighs, then up to my groin. “Stop!” I groaned and she chuckled.
“Is your fire all for poetry now and none left for the flesh? Do you really desire that I stop?”
“Yes. No! But I do not even know your name,” I said lamely and cursed my faltering speech: the great poet at a drunken loss for words. She chuckled again, pulled her hands from my clothing, and poured more wine.
“I am Rózsa Treska Guadalupe de Salinas y Miklos, but I am called Rózsa la Loba,” she said softly, handing me the glass. I drained it and she filled it again
“Spanish?” I was both surprised and interested.
“Spanish and Hungarian,” she replied. “My godfather and guardian, Nicolas von Poppelau, is Bohemian, a friend of my mother’s family. My parents were killed and I have lived with him ever since.” She smiled and anticipated my next question. “They were murdered by the Inquisition. Nicolas spirited me out of Spain, back to my mother’s family in Hungary. They did not want me either: ‘la Loba’ is another name for ‘half-breed’, you know.”
“I thought it meant ‘she-wolf ’,” I said feeling dizzy from more than just the wine—how was she doing this to me?
“That as well,” she smiled and kissed me deeply before helping me out of my clothing. She stood for a second, slipped off her gown and let it pool around her ankles. I watched the firelight play over her body. She was slender, almost, as the boy I had thought her, with small underdeveloped breasts, slim hips, and flat stomach. She knelt beside me, pushing me back on the pillows, her hair caressing my chest as she kissed my nipples. “You smell of lavender and roses,” she murmured. The effort involved in actually forcing my landlady to provide the weekly bath we’d agreed upon was prodigious, but I was happy that at least this time I had persevered. I hated bedding an unwashed lover myself—Rózsa realized that my thoughts were