Secret Souls (11 page)

Chadwick smiled at everyone gathered in the garden and then walked over to Hannibal and sat down next to him on the stone bench. He placed an arm round her shoulders and she leaned for a
few seconds against him, resting her head against his heart. There had, as the months had gone by, been signs of affection from Chadwick to Hannibal but here was something more intimate. Not a person in the garden could help but be touched by the gesture, but what they did not know was that it was at that moment that Chadwick fell in love with Hannibal Chase.

Cook broke the spell by walking over to Chadwick and placing the cake on the table in front of her. Chadwick sat up and gazed at the array of tiny flame. Then, standing, she said, ‘I’m going to make this my official birthday.’

‘Well, that’s a good thing because we all brought birthday presents,’ said Warren.

For the first two years of Chadwick Chase’s new life she remained at home studying with tutors who were teaching her academic subjects, elocution, piano, ballet, and the manners befitting a daughter of Hannibal Chase. She took everything in her stride, with enthusiasm and infinite joy. Chadwick was being educated and groomed so that she might be ready to go to Miss Porter’s private school for wealthy society girls, not as a bumpkin from the backwoods but as, at the very least, an equal to her peers. That was where Diana had gone and her mother before her. Chadwick Chase was expected to finish her schooling and come out a debutante ready to take on society and the world – or so Diana and Warren and Hannibal’s friends thought. But in both the child and Hannibal’s hearts, though never spoken of, they were aware that Hannibal was grooming Chadwick not for the world but to become the perfect society beauty and companion of his life.

It was far from being all work and no play. There was fun besides, happy times: in the city, shopping for clothes with Diana and even sometimes Hannibal. Incredibly, exposed to refined taste, Chadwick learned quickly what was beautiful and elegant, what was trashy and common, what best suited her unique kind of beauty. Warren took her to museums, and skating at Rockerfeller Centre. Hannibal took her with him to every social event where it was acceptable to take a child and that her schedule would allow.
He was inordinately proud of his adoptive daughter and the affection between them was a joy for all to see.

There were concerts and operas, the theatre, and days and evenings at home, being quiet or attending one of Hannibal’s dinner parties where there was always a place for her at table. Weekends were spent in the country house in upper state New York: an impeccably restored nineteenth-century mansion with stables, a pheasant shoot, and rolling grass fields down to the Hudson River. There were frequent house-parties there for friends of Hannibal’s and his children. It was there that Chadwick learned to ride and shoot. But here were things that Hannibal would no longer do like walk for miles through the dense wood on the estate, though he didn’t mind driving on the dirt roads cutting through it with Chadwick and a picnic by his side. Everyone said it was a matter of time, of getting over the trauma of his trek through the eastern Tennessee woods to save his life.

Strangely this new Chadwick who had loved the backwoods of Tennessee so much, like Hannibal had little interest in the beautiful woods surrounding Merrifields, and in running through them as a free spirit, none at all. What she had said in answer to Hannibal’s questions about it was, ‘That Chadwick never had anywhere else to go, she went there to stay alive. That Chadwick’s gone forever. For Chadwick Chase everything is different. That other girl left the backwoods and her Indian relics, her canoe and a family who beat her, behind her.’ At this point she slipped her arm through Hannibal’s and stood on the tips of her toes to kiss him on the cheek, ‘One day we’ll take that walk through the woods together. Chadwick and Hannibal Chase.’

There were winter holidays in the Palm Beach house where the Chases were very much accepted among that small and closed upper crust society of the old New York Four Hundred. A group of socialites who even after so many generations were the descendants of those four hundred who were invited to the Vanderbilt Ball (no more would fit into the room, and that was the birth of American high society). Hannibal never entertained on a grand scale there. The beautiful mansion on the water was for family and close friends, of which there were many. Life was
casual, and no matter what, he pursued his interests but never business. It was there in the winter sun that he would teach Chadwick all about society, high, low,
nouveau riche,
between sailing and swimming and deep sea fishing. And strangely it was there that he accepted the odd social invitation and kept up his obligations as one of the Four Hundred, seeing to it always that Chadwick was accepted by all as a Chase.

Even aged twelve Chadwick had caused men and women alike to be instantly interested in her, and they became more so as the years passed and she developed into a sensuously exciting, somewhat mysterious young woman with a haunting beauty and a certain charisma. Hannibal had finally to accept that he had been smitten by the mature beauty and kindness and, yes, a certain sensuality about Chadwick from the very first time he had seen her. In his heart he had always known that he had bought Chadwick from her father as much for himself as he had for the child.

At sixteen it was difficult to ignore her stunning sexuality, Warren was besotted by it but restrained himself because she was his adoptive sister. At Miss Porter’s school she made friends and enjoyed them and had a stream of interested boyfriends from the time she was fifteen. She charmed and she teased them, not intentionally but by her sensual ways, her incredibly alluring secrecy, her kindness and intelligence which were never overbearing but if anything restrained.

Since the night when Chadwick had become Chadwick Chase she held back nothing of the deep affection she had for Hannibal. Everyone who saw it was charmed by her love for him; the way she would snuggle up to him and they would sit enfolded together as they read to each other in a deep leather chair by the fire, he sometimes petting and stroking her as if she were his favourite cat, she sometimes running her fingers through his hair. Diana, Warren and the staff thought it nothing out of the ordinary when they found Chadwick and Hannibal sitting in bed having breakfast together and reading the Sunday papers.

Their devotion to each other was total and Chadwick became enslaved by Hannibal’s love for her. Her own love and gratitude
for the life he created for her and her sexual attraction to Hannibal played its part. Yet they were not obsessed with each other. There were many women through the years in Hannibal’s life. He had been forty-five years old at the time of the crash, a young and handsome, successful and very wealthy conservative widower of high society and old money. The women chased him; there were even several times when an engagement seemed imminent and all three children gave their approval. But he always sent the women away. Reserved and discreet, Hannibal had always had, would always have, a strong libido and an active and exciting sex life. His family and friends knew it, the gossips whispered about it.

When Chadwick was seventeen, her sexuality began to interest Hannibal. Quite simply, he wanted her in a new, intensely erotic way. But he kept those desires hidden from her; she was too precious to him to exploit. He took it upon himself to see that she was sexually educated but kept pure, unsullied by lust. He found exactly the right woman, a beautiful, discreet, two-thousand-dollar-a-night lady to tutor Chadwick in the ways of sexual pleasure.

The bond between Chadwick and Hannibal was so strong that they told each other everything and so he spoke to her about Lilana de Chernier and how and why he had chosen her to educate Chadwick in all things erotic, teach her about lust. ‘I do know a lot,’ was her answer to Hannibal.

‘I am sure you do, dear, but wouldn’t you like to know more, experience the adventurous side of all things erotic? If I didn’t think you did, I would not have suggested you see Lilana.’

‘You know me better even than I do, Hannibal.’

Chadwick had always called him by his first name, they had settled on that rather than Father or Dad, and never was he more happy about that than he was at this moment. Neither was she because the last thing she said to Hannibal as she walked from the room clutching Lilana de Chernier’s calling card, excited but not showing it, was, ‘I do hope that you can accept that you are doing this not for me but for us, Hannibal, because that’s why I’ll be going.’

Chapter 6

There had been boyfriends, and kisses, and petting. There had been expectations, even sensations that had stirred something in Chadwick. In that she was much the same as most of her girlfriends: sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old girls hungry to find the man to turn the key that would open the door to their discovery of sensational sex and satisfaction.

Chadwick had been, in her younger years, exposed to the crudest of sexual antics by her father and his voracious appetite for sex. She had seen, had been made to observe sex in all its base raunchiness; it had become the norm, as much a part of her life as it was Ed’s and in fact her entire family’s. It was the environment she grew up in. She had wiped that out of her mind just as she had all else in her life that happened before she had found Hannibal and became Chadwick Chase.

Now, after several visits to Lilana, she had come to realise that from a very young age she had had strong sexual desires, albeit quiescent, and never fully understood. She had been too busy fighting off her father’s advances even to contemplate them. As Lilana and she spoke about sex and sexuality she could understand how she had suppressed sexual desire, internalised it, turned sexual awakening into one of the many secrets that she kept to herself. Chadwick’s secrets had always been important to her. They still were.

Lilana de Chernier was beautiful, sensuous, and with a very understated chic. A woman of thirty-five who looked more like twenty, she was intelligent, cultivated, incredibly glamorous, and kindness itself. Almost immediately a rapport developed between the seventeen-year-old Chadwick and Lilana. Chadwick was to
learn from her every nuance of exciting sex: how thrilling the erotic could be in its many and varied forms, how to excite, to seduce a man; satisfy her own sexual inclinations; how to fire up desire – her own, a lover’s.

The women talked of sex, erotic games and fantasies, over long, luxurious lunches in the small bay window of Lilana’s flat that overlooked Central Park. After several weeks, Lilana recognised that Chadwick was hungry and ready to experience some of her sex education so they were joined at their luncheons by several different men. Handsome and sexy in the prime of their sexuality these men who ranged in age between twenty and thirty-five were only too delighted to dine with the glamorous and sensuous Lilana and her protêgé to discuss sex, sexuality, the thrill of orgasm, how and what they delighted in sex. It was very erotic for everyone concerned to fire up this very sexual seventeen-year-old with talk of their own sexual experiences.

Each time Lilana managed to leave Chadwick alone with their luncheon guest, not for too long, but long enough for the men to excite Chadwick with more than just words. It had been Jed Thomas who thrilled her with caresses, who sucked on her nipples, nibbled at her breasts, licked them with his tongue. Chadwick, for the first time, was able to feel the thrill of sexual heat that comes with passion, when erotic excitement sends shivers down the spine.

One afternoon Lilana had held her in her arms and stroked her hair, whispering in her ear the pleasures she was about to experience when she was left to Tom Fielding’s lust. Lilana had known Tom for years and what an exciting lover he was: imaginative, thoughtful, a man who adored all forms of sex with young women. She had chosen Tom to ease Chadwick away from her virginity into love of a man for nothing more than the thrill of sex.

Tom was the first man with whom Chadwick experienced oral sex. Lilana had been a more than competent instructress and it was as pleasurable an experience for Chadwick as it was for Tom. However, never could Chadwick have imagined any sensation as thrilling as when Tom finally went down on her. She came in a wave of powerful orgasms and entered a world of sexual bliss.
She knew from that moment on that this was a place where she wanted to dwell.

Tom was also the first man with whom she had sexual intercourse. That exquisite moment of pain when he broke her hymen was followed by slow and careful thrustings as Chadwick was possessed by his hard and throbbing penis. His kisses and caresses, his lust, made this important sexual experience pure pleasure and he instilled in her a love for the sexual side of her life and a man’s erotic soul.

Once Chadwick was well versed in the experience of sex, and Lilana saw how ready she was to experiment with her erotic desires, more sexual adventures and games were played to excite, to take Chadwick one step further down the path that leads to erotic oblivion, that place she now craved to be in. She had, at first, been fearful and shy but now she enjoyed the many and varied sexual acts, sometime played out with two or as many as four men and women. For Chadwick it was sexual fun and adventure and it had to do with growing up sexually for the man she loved.

The more Chadwick developed this side of her nature, the more she wanted Hannibal for a lover, and the more he wanted her. The mere knowledge that Chadwick was experiencing sexual awakening without him began to prey on his mind. He and Chadwick had become such an integral part of each other’s lives that as much as he thought he was prepared to let her go free, sexually, something more dark in his soul, erotic desire that knew no boundaries, ignored the morality he’d believed in all his life, telling him he could not.

This man who had never been knowingly devious, who indeed despised deviousness in any form, was tortured by his own in relation to his sexual hunger for Chadwick. He fought it, made heroic efforts against it: once he had given Lilana de Chernier her brief to educate Chadwick in all things erotic, he never once discussed Chadwick or her sex life with Lilana. But that had been a small effort and accomplished only to assuage his guilt for wanting Chadwick sexually as he had never wanted any other woman before. His fantasies about sex with her were at first quite
simple and then more complex and then more thrilling. They became the greatest pleasure of his life.

But as much as Hannibal lusted after Chadwick, he loved her with the same intense passion. As the months of Chadwick’s visits to Lilana passed, he came to terms with his love and lust for Chadwick, at least to some degree. He would never make a move on her for sex. Chadwick would have to approach him, theirs would have to be a mutual lust and love. Anything else would be unthinkable.

Often when they were together, and they were very much together as they had always been, he would wonder whether Chadwick had as yet been with men, what men, how those men might have enjoyed her, if she had enjoyed the sex with them? Strangely he felt no jealousy at the idea of her with handsome, powerfully sexual men. He did in fact quite enjoy the idea of her having sexual fulfilment, it became a part of his love for her.

And so life went on for them without tension or angst due to a mutual love that would not allow the changes in Chadwick’s life to infringe on their joy in one another, their home life, the family. They still spent their Sunday mornings breakfasting in bed together, they still caressed and petted each other, they went almost everywhere together.

Hannibal sensed that the quiescent sexuality that Chadwick wore like a second skin was somehow not the same. It was not so much that it wasn’t there as it had always been but more that her sexuality had been somehow transformed into one of those secrets about herself that she held so dear. It made her even more enigmatic, more intriguing.

It was a beautiful late-spring day, a Thursday, Hannibal was waiting for Chadwick to return from shopping and they were going to Merrifields for the weekend. For weeks, there had been great excitement in the house and the family. Chadwick had graduated from Miss Porter’s with top grades and had had an acceptance from Yale University. Only Chadwick knew that as good as that was, for her the real joy was the flowering of her own sexuality, the realisation that one day all that Hannibal had groomed her for would be his, theirs, for she had made up her
mind that there was nothing else for it: she would have to seduce Hannibal. Their relationship demanded that she make the first move. She didn’t mind, it somehow seemed only fair to her.

All morning Hannibal had been testy. It had started the night before at a reception in the hall of the Metropolitan Opera House. He’d realised for the first time that Chadwick no longer looked like a young beauty but a sensuous, mysterious, stunningly perfect and delicious object of sexual desire. Not only he but very nearly every man who saw her took a second glance, and experienced an instant of wishful thinking. All evening, just being on his arm, standing next to him, the way she would look at him brought a burning heat to his loins.

Sitting in the darkness in their box during the performance of
Aida,
she caressed the inside of his thigh, never taking her eyes from the stage. It was a moment of exquisite pleasure for him rather than embarrassment. Just before the house lights went up Chadwick removed her hand, took one of his in hers and raised it to her lips to kiss his fingers. She turned his hand and licked his palm with the tip of her tongue, replaced the hand on his thigh before she put her own together and applauded the performance as she rose to her feet and called out, ‘Bravo, bravo!’

He had risen from his chair, following suit, and glanced over at her. She turned to gaze into his eyes and he recognised, for the first time, lust in hers for him. His heart raced, he wanted to weep with joy; instead he smiled at this new woman dressed in a black silk taffeta strapless gown that barely covered her luscious breasts and whose bodice clung to her like a second skin above the many yards of deep amethyst-coloured taffeta swirling out from her narrow waist. Her voluptuous figure was accentuated even more by a belt of emerald green satin.

He held out the short jacket constructed completely of ruffle upon ruffle of black silk taffeta that buckled at the waist and she slipped into it. Neither could find the right words and so instead of speaking about what had passed, or themselves, they spoke about the opera. In the lobby they were joined by Andrew and his wife and son, Andrew Junior, and they all went on to dine at the Knickerbocker Club. After dinner, at home, Hannibal asked
Chadwick to join him in the library where he poured himself an Armagnac and offered Chadwick a coffee liqueur, her favourite drink of the moment. She declined. There was not the least bit of tension between them, nothing awkward, they were as they had always been with each other.

Hannibal took a sip of his drink and watched her while she shrugged out of the ruffled sleeves of the pretty jacket to her dress. The long slim neck, her lovely naked shoulders, the swell of her breasts rising above the crisp black silk, were so young, so fresh, so delicious to behold. Hannibal and Chadwick were standing opposite each other and not too far apart. Hannibal placed his cut crystal tumbler on the mantelpiece and stepped closer to Chadwick. Very slowly, deliberately and with great finesse, he lowered the silk covering her breasts. He had seen her naked breasts many times before, had caressed them before, but not as he was doing now. Now there were sexual connotations to his touch. He kissed them but his kisses were no longer a teasing and quick peck, the affection of a man for a budding young girl. These kisses lingered, and he licked Chadwick’s breasts with his warm moist tongue. With cupped hands he held them, caressed their luscious swell, felt the weight of them in his hands. He took her nipples between his fingers and teased them tenderly, pinched them with a light but decidedly erotic touch, enough to excite. Then he placed his lips upon first one and then the other and sucked.

Chadwick’s eyes told him everything: how much she was enjoying his advances. Her sighs, the way she squirmed ever so slightly, a signal to him that she was ready to come or had already come in a small sweet rush of orgasm. Hannibal raised his face from between her breasts, he caressed them once more and then covered them with the top of her silk bodice. He stroked her hair and then kissed her first on one cheek and then the other. Her lips were trembling when he pressed his against them, not with the overwhelming passion he was feeling for Chadwick but with the deep and genuine love of a woman for a man.

Hannibal took both her hands in his and told her, ‘In the box in the opera you were asking me something with your advances, my
darling girl. Here, now, I have answered you with mine. You have to think quite hard about what’s happening between us and all it entails. We both must. Tomorrow, you must give me your answer, or the day after, or the one after that. There is all the time in the world for you. I will never press you, merely ask you to say nothing tonight.’

Chadwick was ready, more than ready to answer him then and there, but for her Hannibal had always been right. It was quite natural for her to obey him, she always did in everything, almost without his having to ask. For the most part it was instinctive. Together, arm in arm, they walked from the library and up the long curved staircase to the floor above, Hannibal telling her how lovely she had looked at the opera and how she had turned all the men’s heads. She smiled and laughed and before they started the next flight of stairs to the bedroom floor, she kissed him on the lips, a kiss to seduce, a kiss that promised the wonders of conjugal bliss, before tapping him teasingly on the end of his nose with the tip of her finger. Looking happier than Hannibal had ever seen her, she raised her voluminous skirts above her ankles and fled up the stairs to vanish behind her bedroom door.

The windows facing the street were open and the scent of daffodils and hyacinths from the planted window boxes were wafting through. Hannibal was standing by the window looking for Chadwick. He checked his watch. It was not like her to be late and he was anxious to get off to the country.

Once in bed the night before he had had Akari bring him another drink and had sipped it slowly, reliving the evening. Chadwick, this new Chadwick, was the most exciting and seductive creature any man could want – and she was his. He knew that in the very core of his being. He would wait for as long as it took to take sexual possession of her. He was the happiest of men. So happy that he had picked up the, telephone and dialled Lilana’s house.