Sentence The Fortythird
And Daphne Dumbiedykes allowed the former Dean, Dr Hamish MacAlpine-Fandango to entertain her with his ready supply of quips and bons-mot, all spoken in the honeyed tones of an Advocate at the very peak of his powers of persuasion, but 'you won't get into my knickers, however hard you try, Sonny Jim,' thought Daphne to herself as she buttered another toasted teacake, added bramble jam for good measure and slipped it into her mouth, while fluttering her eye-lashes at the smitten Dean; and then asked him in a breathy tone, that he hadn’t yet touched upon his promised nugget apropos Sir Parlane MacFarlane – at which point the rubicund Advocate surreptitiously placed his left hand upon Daphne's knee, under cover of the snowy-white tablecloth, gave it an affectionate squeeze and said
“I was saving that for afters, if you'd like to join me in my chambers for some fine old Port I've been hoarding towards a special occasion entre nous, but if you would rather I was bolder I'm sure I could put my hand on something which will delight you,” and Daphne tried furiously to affect a maidenly blush, but the feel of his hand was like having a wet haddock resting on her knee and struggling for breath, so she simply fluttered her lashes again and said that he could proceed at his peril, for this was surely a certain case of caveat emptor, and smiled warmly; as his hand began making a snail's pace ascent of her upper-leg, Daphne wondered to herself how could it be that certain types of women seemed to find the male gender in some strange way appealing – for she had no such vulnerability herself, and nor had her dearest love, her cousin Maude – and though it might have baffled actuarialists, the same variance also applied to the majority of their nieces – only Ginger Lyttleton and Goldy Dumbiedykes (she often found it difficult to recall their married names and blessed Scots Law for it's steadfast adherence to a woman's birth-name) had attached themselves to males and this thought brought her mind back to the hand which had moved a whole inch during her musings, and wondered – not for the first time in her long and adventurous life – what it would be like to permit this hand free access to the prize it sought; on a whim, she made eye-contact with Hamish, and began to listen, for she had tuned out his voice for a good twenty minutes, but the mention of “the site of Parlane MacFarlane's House stood on that very spot,” and dared a murmur of interest, which the former Dean took to be a double encouragement, for as his hand crept another quarter of an inch, he said, “it was believed to extend much further below the street level, as above it, with tunnels running down into fissures in the rock itself, and more than one oubliette for MacFarlane's enemies (or those who knew too much to be allowed their freedom) and former friends even – it was not unlike Allan Ramsay's in appearance, but obviously more palatial, extending up and down the High Street under neighbouring properties, even to the extent, I understand, of his having secret access to several, including Longformacus House in fact and there are accounts extant of some nefarious rowdyism – nothing, I hasten to add, on a par with Gilles De Rais, for we Scots seem condemned to restraint in our debaucheries and, though Sir Parlane may well have been debaucher-in-chief, he was still only a dabbler by comparison with some of our continentals; oh, I grant, he was ruthless when he felt it necessary for his own purposes, but he seems to have derived his pleasures chiefly from the seductive arts and practised them with a vigour well into later life; I only wish I had his stamina,” he gave a little squeeze and moved his hand higher, and winked, a form of communication which Daphne herself was unable to reciprocate, for she was one of those unfortunates who can close both eyes simultaneously, but neither one alone; and Daphne heard herself say that the thought is father to the deed – and could not for the life of herself account for this appalling lapse into cliché – but Hamish seemed not to mind – indeed his hand moved further up her leg, his index finger, rather like a snail's antennae, probing further than the rest, and seeming to draw the remainder after it; Daphne surprised herself by acknowledging that this particular activity happening both under the table-cloth, and under the skirt of her tea-dress, was not as repugnant as she would have expected – particularly given her long acquaintance with Hamish – although she conceded that this was not the first time that a male hand had caressed her inner thigh, but the other occasions had happened in her innocent youth, when comparatively inexperienced, and in warmer climes, where lust is said to run molten through the loins of adolescents and young adults (she remembered the Sultan of Zanzibar, a muscular young warrior with jet black hair on his head, his face, and peeking out from the waistband of his billowing 'harem pants'; the Grand Mufti of Mesopotamia, a sweet-talking cleric with a passion for pale complexioned. blonde girls and women, particularly with the accents of Morningside and The Braid Hills; and, of course that Greek Apollo, working on the Dig on Crete, a body full of energy, strength and rippling masculinity of a sun-dappled kind rarely glimpsed in Edinburgh, for all it was called The Athens of The North, who, coming upon Daphne in a tunnel underground, where the air was musky with sweat from toiling archaeologists and their labourers, had pinned her against the wall, kissed her fiercely and with a sense of ownership burrowed his hand between her thighs – oh, Daphne still tingled at the thought of that Adonis, that Heracles, with that hand and it's determination and afterwards, above ground, his muscular body glowing by the light of a silvered moonbow, truly he was Eros incarnate – she had never told Maude of the encounter, considering her Life Companion and Soul-Mate a little too delicate for such carnal details, and justified it to herself as being unsought and therefore unnecessary to broadcast; and all the while Hamish was growing bolder and he leaned closer, to speak confidentially (conspiratorially even) and this allowed his perseverating hand to reach that bit further up her thigh, so close that she could almost remember the Greek boy's thrusts and pressures and she looked Hamish full in the face and saw his paunchy cheeks, his puffy eyes, his balding head, his rather too-full lips, his bulbous nose, and the reverie evaporated like summer mist and – to deflect an omnishambles of an unlikely seduction which could never hope to reach a satisfying conclusion for him and to spare Hamish any embarrassment, for she did feel an affection towards him, carried through the years since he was a rather under-weight schoolboy hanging around her school gate with a group of similar friends (boys with acne and grubby fingernails and socks that forever slumped around their stick-like ankles, who unconsciously demonstrate their immaturity in thinking the smart way to approach girls is to pull their pigtails and call them 'specky' or 'skinnymalinks', or 'ginger') when she and hers, but principally Maude, stepped into the Edinburgh afternoon – she grasped his wrist with a hand that had hewed rocks on Mount Ararat, hauled boulders on the shores of the Red Sea, and reigned in a stampeding Camel in the Sahara; Hamish winced; Daphne reminded him that he had promised her a nugget, which she took to refer to something she had never known before – old gossip was lacking in piquancy, old hands lacked the dexterity of youth; Hamish winced at the verbal jabs which hurt every bit as much as the nails which cut into his wrist; he coughed and had the grace to look a little shamefaced, then she saw a brief flash in his coal-black eyes – which reminded Daphne that the Fandango had reputedly been a Gaucho on the Pampas of The Argentine who had swooped on the lonely wife of the Reverend Archibald MacAlpine and swept her away from a sterile marriage with his calloused hands and nut-brown face, its coal-black eyes and flared nostrils – Hamish was the grandson of that elopement, divorce and marriage, which had cost his grandmother acknowledgement in Forres and a welcome in Edinburgh, but she outlived her detractors and established herself as a writer of romantic fiction for women, featuring rollicking seamen, proud gauchos, hirsute fur-trappers, daring explorers, nut-brown faces aplenty and, often as not, lonely wives of Presbyterian Missionaries and which earned her enough to support her gaucho and send her two boys to Fettes; Hamish was the son of the younger boy, a quarter Gaucho and as Daphne held his wrist she looked deep into his eyes and saw a spark of that ancestral spirit which had won the heart of the Minister's wife from Forres and she asked him, laissez-aller – believing that she had nothing to lose but all to gain from throwing caution to the winds and scattering clichés like rose petals in a boudoir (oh, how Maudie loves rose petals) quite, quite directly, if they had a deal, in which case he might receive a nougat for a nugget – at which Hamish nodded fiercely and, as she released her hold on him, slid his hand into the softness of her inner thighs, towards what Daphne – as a lifelong legacy of her days at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls – still thought of as, her Bloomers!
And Daphne Dumbiedykes allowed the former Dean, Dr Hamish MacAlpine-Fandango to entertain her with his ready supply of quips and bons-mot, all spoken in the honeyed tones of an Advocate at the very peak of his powers of persuasion, but 'you won't get into my knickers, however hard you try, Sonny Jim,' thought Daphne to herself as she buttered another toasted teacake, added bramble jam for good measure and slipped it into her mouth, while fluttering her eye-lashes at the smitten Dean; and then asked him in a breathy tone, that he hadn’t yet touched upon his promised nugget apropos Sir Parlane MacFarlane – at which point the rubicund Advocate surreptitiously placed his left hand upon Daphne's knee, under cover of the snowy-white tablecloth, gave it an affectionate squeeze and said
“I was saving that for afters, if you'd like to join me in my chambers for some fine old Port I've been hoarding towards a special occasion entre nous, but if you would rather I was bolder I'm sure I could put my hand on something which will delight you,” and Daphne tried furiously to affect a maidenly blush, but the feel of his hand was like having a wet haddock resting on her knee and struggling for breath, so she simply fluttered her lashes again and said that he could proceed at his peril, for this was surely a certain case of caveat emptor, and smiled warmly; as his hand began making a snail's pace ascent of her upper-leg, Daphne wondered to herself how could it be that certain types of women seemed to find the male gender in some strange way appealing – for she had no such vulnerability herself, and nor had her dearest love, her cousin Maude – and though it might have baffled actuarialists, the same variance also applied to the majority of their nieces – only Ginger Lyttleton and Goldy Dumbiedykes (she often found it difficult to recall their married names and blessed Scots Law for it's steadfast adherence to a woman's birth-name) had attached themselves to males and this thought brought her mind back to the hand which had moved a whole inch during her musings, and wondered – not for the first time in her long and adventurous life – what it would be like to permit this hand free access to the prize it sought; on a whim, she made eye-contact with Hamish, and began to listen, for she had tuned out his voice for a good twenty minutes, but the mention of “the site of Parlane MacFarlane's House stood on that very spot,” and dared a murmur of interest, which the former Dean took to be a double encouragement, for as his hand crept another quarter of an inch, he said, “it was believed to extend much further below the street level, as above it, with tunnels running down into fissures in the rock itself, and more than one oubliette for MacFarlane's enemies (or those who knew too much to be allowed their freedom) and former friends even – it was not unlike Allan Ramsay's in appearance, but obviously more palatial, extending up and down the High Street under neighbouring properties, even to the extent, I understand, of his having secret access to several, including Longformacus House in fact and there are accounts extant of some nefarious rowdyism – nothing, I hasten to add, on a par with Gilles De Rais, for we Scots seem condemned to restraint in our debaucheries and, though Sir Parlane may well have been debaucher-in-chief, he was still only a dabbler by comparison with some of our continentals; oh, I grant, he was ruthless when he felt it necessary for his own purposes, but he seems to have derived his pleasures chiefly from the seductive arts and practised them with a vigour well into later life; I only wish I had his stamina,” he gave a little squeeze and moved his hand higher, and winked, a form of communication which Daphne herself was unable to reciprocate, for she was one of those unfortunates who can close both eyes simultaneously, but neither one alone; and Daphne heard herself say that the thought is father to the deed – and could not for the life of herself account for this appalling lapse into cliché – but Hamish seemed not to mind – indeed his hand moved further up her leg, his index finger, rather like a snail's antennae, probing further than the rest, and seeming to draw the remainder after it; Daphne surprised herself by acknowledging that this particular activity happening both under the table-cloth, and under the skirt of her tea-dress, was not as repugnant as she would have expected – particularly given her long acquaintance with Hamish – although she conceded that this was not the first time that a male hand had caressed her inner thigh, but the other occasions had happened in her innocent youth, when comparatively inexperienced, and in warmer climes, where lust is said to run molten through the loins of adolescents and young adults (she remembered the Sultan of Zanzibar, a muscular young warrior with jet black hair on his head, his face, and peeking out from the waistband of his billowing 'harem pants'; the Grand Mufti of Mesopotamia, a sweet-talking cleric with a passion for pale complexioned. blonde girls and women, particularly with the accents of Morningside and The Braid Hills; and, of course that Greek Apollo, working on the Dig on Crete, a body full of energy, strength and rippling masculinity of a sun-dappled kind rarely glimpsed in Edinburgh, for all it was called The Athens of The North, who, coming upon Daphne in a tunnel underground, where the air was musky with sweat from toiling archaeologists and their labourers, had pinned her against the wall, kissed her fiercely and with a sense of ownership burrowed his hand between her thighs – oh, Daphne still tingled at the thought of that Adonis, that Heracles, with that hand and it's determination and afterwards, above ground, his muscular body glowing by the light of a silvered moonbow, truly he was Eros incarnate – she had never told Maude of the encounter, considering her Life Companion and Soul-Mate a little too delicate for such carnal details, and justified it to herself as being unsought and therefore unnecessary to broadcast; and all the while Hamish was growing bolder and he leaned closer, to speak confidentially (conspiratorially even) and this allowed his perseverating hand to reach that bit further up her thigh, so close that she could almost remember the Greek boy's thrusts and pressures and she looked Hamish full in the face and saw his paunchy cheeks, his puffy eyes, his balding head, his rather too-full lips, his bulbous nose, and the reverie evaporated like summer mist and – to deflect an omnishambles of an unlikely seduction which could never hope to reach a satisfying conclusion for him and to spare Hamish any embarrassment, for she did feel an affection towards him, carried through the years since he was a rather under-weight schoolboy hanging around her school gate with a group of similar friends (boys with acne and grubby fingernails and socks that forever slumped around their stick-like ankles, who unconsciously demonstrate their immaturity in thinking the smart way to approach girls is to pull their pigtails and call them 'specky' or 'skinnymalinks', or 'ginger') when she and hers, but principally Maude, stepped into the Edinburgh afternoon – she grasped his wrist with a hand that had hewed rocks on Mount Ararat, hauled boulders on the shores of the Red Sea, and reigned in a stampeding Camel in the Sahara; Hamish winced; Daphne reminded him that he had promised her a nugget, which she took to refer to something she had never known before – old gossip was lacking in piquancy, old hands lacked the dexterity of youth; Hamish winced at the verbal jabs which hurt every bit as much as the nails which cut into his wrist; he coughed and had the grace to look a little shamefaced, then she saw a brief flash in his coal-black eyes – which reminded Daphne that the Fandango had reputedly been a Gaucho on the Pampas of The Argentine who had swooped on the lonely wife of the Reverend Archibald MacAlpine and swept her away from a sterile marriage with his calloused hands and nut-brown face, its coal-black eyes and flared nostrils – Hamish was the grandson of that elopement, divorce and marriage, which had cost his grandmother acknowledgement in Forres and a welcome in Edinburgh, but she outlived her detractors and established herself as a writer of romantic fiction for women, featuring rollicking seamen, proud gauchos, hirsute fur-trappers, daring explorers, nut-brown faces aplenty and, often as not, lonely wives of Presbyterian Missionaries and which earned her enough to support her gaucho and send her two boys to Fettes; Hamish was the son of the younger boy, a quarter Gaucho and as Daphne held his wrist she looked deep into his eyes and saw a spark of that ancestral spirit which had won the heart of the Minister's wife from Forres and she asked him, laissez-aller – believing that she had nothing to lose but all to gain from throwing caution to the winds and scattering clichés like rose petals in a boudoir (oh, how Maudie loves rose petals) quite, quite directly, if they had a deal, in which case he might receive a nougat for a nugget – at which Hamish nodded fiercely and, as she released her hold on him, slid his hand into the softness of her inner thighs, towards what Daphne – as a lifelong legacy of her days at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls – still thought of as, her Bloomers!
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