Black Moon

by Stephen Wright

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Historical Romance

Synopsis

An utterly wild, debauched, romantic, and violent ride inspired by the 18th-century Irish pirate Anne Bonny, reimagined here as Amethyst "Meeks" Connell, one of the most extraordinary outlaws of any age, for readers of George Saunders, Percival Everett, and Maggie O'Farrell.
 
Meeks is a poor Irish orphan whose energy, wit, and native sensitivity to the “main chance” take her to the unlikeliest of places. She marries into the aristocracy and follows her war-besotted husband into the latest of England and France’s seemingly endless scrapes where her husband is killed and she, on her way home, is taken prisoner by pirates, resulting in a tryst with the pirate captain that sets in motion an unlikely turn of events, leading her to join his crew. Upon the open sea, her ambition and cunning become her greatest assets as she reinvents herself anew.

From Irish reformatories to the battlefields of Europe to the swashbuckling high seas, Black Moon introduces a character you’ll never forget in an adventurous world you’ll never want to leave. Throughout Meeks’ globe-spanning narrative, we come to know a heroine of unconquerable ambition, boundless intelligence, and insatiable appetite—and to recognize a lawless, brutal, and bounteous world much like our own. Black Moon is an ingenious work of ventriloquism and page-turning entertainment from “an extravagantly talented novelist” (The New York Times). 

Release date: October 20, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 432

Sample

MEEKS’ FAVORITE GAME WAS HIDE-AND-SEEK AND HER FAVORITE HIDEY place was under the gorse off the nether end of Carpenter’s Lane. She liked to slide in beneath the coconutty shade of the leaves and thorns and lie quiet on her back, the cold earth seeping up into her, and the big blue sky pressing down, and stare up into the fluttery canopy of bright yellow petals that turned the whole upside-down into a shower of gold. Then, for a time at least, she could pretend she was safely boxed. Until turned and busted in upon by Bertie or Arch or Sticky Micky or Long Pins.

Whenever Long Pins found her first he’d jump on her back and stick his tongue in her ear and call her a “nasty arsworm” and they’d roll around in a bit of a kick-up until they tired and promised never to touch each other ever again until the next day when somebody dinged somebody else and the whole bloody basting fell to all over again.

Meeks had originally been named Amethyst her mother’s favorite gemstone, but during her toddler years the name gradually evolved through Meth, Mist, and Thistle, until finally coming to rest upon Meeks, the variable her young tongue seemed happiest in sounding out.

She lived with Mr Connell in a stone cottage on top of the hill where the River Road wore away. She never called her father pa or papa or pap. She addressed him as Mr Connell. A cutting wind also lived on top of the hill. It was hard and loud. The grass was green and long. A sandy path led up to the great wooden door that creaked like it hurt when it was opened or closed. Paddy came often through the door. And Nunkie Boyle. And Rory, too. And Patchwork Bill. And Brian One plus Brian Two. And sometimes Michael with the burned-out eyebrow and Stumpy The Wandering Jew with the branded hand and the whole canting crew would hunker down about the battered table before the crispy grate, tipping bottomless bumpers of warm beer they’d brewed that very afternoon and cracking farts. Once Puggy Malone carved a B and a T into the table with a shiny chive he kept in his boot. Meeks crouched under the table and listened to their chirping about frigates broken on the rocks and bottles of fine usquebaugh washed out by the tide and the deadlights dancing off Finley’s Cove where the noble Grace O’Malley had been known to harbor now and again and running the bar in a mad blow last spring and the barley was short this year and Mistress Sall the hempen-widow was so broken kneed and belly up and the oranges wanted to make an orange king and the acorns wanted an acorn king and Jenny who was yoked to poor old Kev kept a foul custom house and one dark night spied old Kev blowing off a betty on the ground sills and blast if she didn’t crash the cull right there on the spot and little Humphrey got clicked in the whirligigs by a dell in a nanny-house down on Pester Street and Sharper John always cleared his duns in gun money georges and everyone toasted the Cause ’cause the Cause was great and always was.

Mums was dead. Long gone dead. And James, too, burnt up in the Castlecomer mining blaze. And so many others, Bridget by a spleen wind, Pegg by worms, Oliver by bladder in the throat, Veronica by pox, baby Cara by chin cough, unfortunate Brendan by the steps and the string, and Donal, everyone’s favorite, carried away forever and a day by the plantations.

Leaving only the last, the little lonely Meeks.

The seat of the chair in which Puggy always sat always smelled of his seat.

Miss Madden’s Flyaway Class was conducted out under the Breaker Tree where Meeks and Tace and Kate and Freddie and Brenda and Sticky Micky and Long Pins learned about conjuring integers (four plus three equals seven and five from seven equals three) and taming those slippery letters (CAT and LOVE and even FLORIDA) in the mud with a stick and listening to tales about the old days when life was impossible hard and short and everywhere fangs and claws and how once when Miss Madden herself was strolling out after midnight she came upon a whole family of fairies dancing in a circle. And another time in the same gull a gathering of the little people counting their piles of yellow boys. The sights to behold when you cared to polish your glaziers. The world was bursting with wonders strange and prodigal.

Tace lived with her parents in a wooden house down by the weir. Her mother was Kathleen. Her father was Cian. Her mother’s voice was so soft it sounded like the speech rose petals would make if they could talk. Her father hardly ever spoke at all. They kept cows in the lea and pigs in the mud near the house. Sometimes Cian came up to the cottage and got fuddled with Mr Connell and the crew. Cian liked to arm wrestle for shillings at the drinking table. Kathleen had a drained white face and dark eyes that always looked directly at you and raw hands from all the village laundry she took in and she taught Meeks needlepoint and how to make lace and said she had never seen lace as beautiful as the lace borning out of Meeks’ own nimble finger ends. Kathleen also knew how to read. She had learned from her half-brother who was a monk up at the Clondun Abbey. She read aloud from scripture every day. Meeks liked the sound of the words dropping from her lips. They were like sweet music in the crowded air. While on her daily walks to Tunbridge, Kathleen, like Miss Madden, was often startled by encounters with abracadabras. Once she saw the seven angels of god clear as day cavorting in a pasture and another time legions of angels hovering protectively above the human tide. There was a separate angel for each thought and inside every living person was another living creature called a soul that could never be harmed or killed. That creature was the part of you that lived forever even outside skin and bones. Kathleen talked about the goodness of Jesus and the magics he performed like lifting dead people out of dirt and opening blind men’s eyes and letting water run out of jars like wine and then walking on the water itself like taking a stroll along the Cashel Rock and performing all these feats out in the plain air because catholics weren’t allowed in indoor schools because god didn’t care if he got wet or not, so Meeks guessed she was probably catholic since she was outdoors all the time. She asked Mr Connell once if she were catholic and he answered with a laugh so loud it hurt her ears and told her that the Connells were once craw thumpers of the highest order but over the ages their shine had dimmed and they had lost their place in the line before the gate. So she figured Jesus probably wouldn’t hear her prayers no matter what she said and probably her soul would be plunged forever into the bad place.

When Mr Connell came at night to give her a tuck-in kiss his mouth was sour with all the beer medicine and the pricklies on his face scratched her cheeks so bad she wanted to cry out but she didn’t. Then later he stuck himself inside her and the pricklies seemed stuck inside too and she wanted to cry again though she didn’t because this was loving and loving wasn’t supposed to hurt. So she didn’t cry until after the third tuck-in when Mr Connell had finally left and she broke into a fit of tears and sobbing and she couldn’t stop. She cried long and hard and lost her breath and became afraid she wouldn’t ever be able to find it until suddenly all at once she simply stopped and she never cried about anything ever again.

Meeks and Tace played with balls made of clay and wooden tipcats and knucklebones, too. They played until they got all sweaty and ran out of breath. Out in the lea they hollowed out their own secret cave in the soft soil of a hillside, patiently scooping out the damp earth until they had made just enough room for only the two of them. They papered the walls with handfuls of the long dried stems of what they thought was foxtail or oat grass but they weren’t sure. Then they lay on their backs and decorated the ceiling with the white flowering tops of wild carrot plants. When the cave was complete they spent hours in there together lying on their backs hiding from boys and making up stories about long-ago castles and kings and princesses and dragons who got killed with giant swords and killed all the English bugs too. They laughed and hugged each other a lot.

That night Mr Connell came to her room and gave her a tuck-in kiss.

Then one day the bailiff came and put his hard hands on Mr Connell. Mr Connell leaned over and whispered in the bailiff’s ear. Then Mr Connell whispered in Nunkie’s ear and then in Stumpy’s ear, too. Then the bailiff took Mr Connell away. That night Meeks stayed at Tace’s house and Kathleen made everyone mutton stew and boxty and they all played fool’s slide until Tace stubbed her toe and wouldn’t stop whining until Kathleen let her drink all that was left of the small beer. When Meeks returned home the next day Mr Connell was back and tipping from his favorite tankard and pretending he’d never been gone. Meeks pretended he hadn’t been gone either.

That night Mr Connell came to her room and gave her a tuck-in kiss.

One night Mr Connell and the whole clanging gang came barging in and woke Meeks up with their big voices and big laughter. They were all sopping wet and appeared to be in their altitudes though none smelled of spirits. They were dragging behind them a heavy oak chest with metal handles and a camel top decorated with carvings of exotic beasts and illegible letters. It too was wet and covered with wet strands of seaweed. Before they broke open the chest they sent Meeks up to her room so she couldn’t see what was inside. But she’d seen those trunks many times before. She knew what was inside.

Night. Room. Tuck-in kiss.

Then early one frosty morning when snow had crept in under cover of darkness and the air itself had turned hard and brittle, Meeks came up from a deep sleep into a state of such puzzlement she barely comprehended where she found herself. She held her frame quite still and listened sharp. Silence, thick and heavy, fell ceaselessly between the walls. The house itself seemed to be speaking and it said curiously, I am empty. No familiar coughs rattling from the other rooms. No heavy steps down the complaining stairs or across the cracked floor. No comforting clatter of pots and pans from the pantry. She closed her eyes and continued to listen. The silence continued to fall. Abruptly, she sat up in the bed and tilted her head to one side and, holding her breath as long as she possibly could, assumed a posture of fierce attention. Then all at once she was up and rushing down the stairs and across the crooked ground floor and into the kitchen itself. There was not a soul in attendance. No water aboil on the hob. No flame alive in the hearth. Mr Connell’s morning tankard was still dry, still at rest upon the shelf. Discreetly she made her way back up the creaking stairs and paused for a moment before Mr Connell’s door.

She bent over, listening. She heard not a sound. She rapped timidly. “Mr Connell,” she said in a whisper. There was no reply. She rapped again. Still no response. As prudently as she could manage, she lifted the latch and slowly, very slowly, pushed open the door. Mr Connell was still in his bed and lying flat on his back. His dark eyes were open wide and larger than usual, stricken by whatever last sight they had just recorded. His mouth was agape, too, forming an almost perfect O, as if just about to fashion the most perfect word. The inside of the mouth was dark and empty. Cautiously, she approached the rumpled bed. “Mr Connell,” she said. The eyes were dry and utterly motionless. They resembled beached sea creatures. The right hand was lying twisted and upside-down atop the blanket like a gnarled piece of sculpture placed in the exact wrong position. She touched the thumb. It was as cold as stone. She jerked her fingers hastily backward, as if just having touched a flame, afraid for an instant of contracting his condition. This is annihilation, she thought. This is what annihilation looks like. This is what annihilation feels like. She pondered for a while. That didn’t seem so bad, she said to herself.

Such was life at that time on the steep coastal cliffs of the north country.

MISS HAYWOOD’S HALL FOR FRIENDS OF FEMALES WAS AN EXCEEDINGLY well-proportioned building both in height and width and was composed almost entirely of a distinctive black iron so thoroughly ornamented and finely wrought as to seem less a proper physical structure than a flat drawing rendered on paper by a talented hand employing an exceedingly sharp quill. The interior was well appointed and equally well adorned and as dark as could be imagined but still agreeably trim. Concentrated throughout the two main floors and conjoined rooms were more young girls than Meeks had ever encountered before, solemn girls in matching blue shifts and yellow headdress marching in orderly file in and out of doors, up and down stairs, and around and about an enclosed inner yard lacking any passageway either in or out. The Hall was attached by one dark frightful corridor to the adjoining Christ Church with its dark cold stone and high pointy towers. God, she learned, was a shy being who hid in the shadows and only spoke to priests and nuns and nurses and tutors. Children’s ears were improper receptacles for His word which first had to be washed by a purifying passage through adult mouths. The Hall abided by the ancient saw that a maid should be seen but not heard so the only sounds commonly noted in the building were the thrilling of the bells signifying the commencement and conclusion of each class and sometimes, as common as once a week, even more so in winter, the high silvery tinkle of the alarum bell announcing the arrival of a new deposit to be claimed from the baby hatch in the wall beside the main entrance.

The girls occupied their days in reading, writing, and lessons in the domestic arts such as weaving, spinning, and sewing. Often, as they sat at their labors, the various instructors enriched their time with tales from their lives in the world outside the walls of the Hall, a fond favorite being the Mrs Flanagan’s colorful accounts of her family’s frequent excursions to the great Rumville, viz., London, where she encountered a dizzying maze of crowded streets, a jumble of cute gingerbread shops, a forest of stinky ships, and the imposing Tower with the jewels inside and the royal guards outside, but what everyone wanted to hear about and hear often was her family’s brush with glory, in particular, the account of her great-grandparents’ personal visit to the royal palace itself, when her great-grandfather, the late Oscar Flanagan, god tend his soul, who had been at the time an officer in the Royal Navy, a lieutenant aboard the Nonpareil, that had been engaged in the great battle against the Spanish Armada where he had been grievously wounded and then granted, along with his peers, a celebratory audience with the Queen herself to which great-grandma Flanagan had also been fortunate enough to be invited and, as it had been related within the family down through the years, when Mrs Flanagan had been escorted into the presence of the Queen she greeted Her Majesty with a deep curtsy and actually kissed Her Highness’ small delicate hand—“you wouldn’t have believed there was enough strength in those fivers to grasp a scepter, let alone an entire empire.” Mrs Flanagan had also reported that all the magnificoes in the palace had been quite kind and soft-spoken and attired in finery of impressive softness and rich unimaginable color. From that moment on the desire to be such a queen took ineradicable root in Meeks’ mind. She dreamed of sitting upon a golden throne herself while throngs of the grateful pressed politely forward to kiss her own dainty hand. And even though she was unaware of having betrayed the minutest word of her regal aspirations to a single soul, the other girls took to pestering her without cease and repeatedly addressing her as Queen Meeks.

The girls were served two meals a day consisting of one cup of pump water and one bowl of cheer. Cheer was a boiled slurry of barley and water wanting both flavor and sustenance. On Sunday each also received in addition the treat of half a hard roll. They rarely endured a week free of the belly worms. It was a rare night that passed without the accompaniment of the sounds of muted sobbing.

Each girl was assigned a cot with a flock mattress animate with a full covey of misses’ companions and a coarse coverlet of such flimsiness all took to sleeping in the rough, viz., fully clothed. Meeks slept rather poorly, if at all, during her initial stay in this establishment, the newness of the place and its general noise and disorder contributing to such a consistent unease that even the slightest state of repose remained quite unattainable. She spent much of the hours of darkness mousing about the corridors, usually ending up in the nursery with one of the abandoned babes in her arms. She enjoyed comforting these bantlings and liked to pretend that under her imaginary attention the imaginary blows the world so enjoyed inflicting would be somehow imaginarily deflected. So she liked to pretend.

Miss Haywood was an old hard-used woman with a gray wrinkled face and twisty old lady fingers and a soft wind-through-the-trees speaking voice that reminded Meeks of Kathleen’s fond address. She liked her well and asked often to speak with her on trivial matters simply for the pleasure of sharing her company for a spell. They spoke often of the trials of children and the general miseries of life. She wished she were as old as Miss Haywood and knew as much. Who she decidedly did not like was the Regentess “Sweet” Mary Malone, a humorless votary of rule, cruelty’s concubine, who zealously patrolled the Hall within a body not much larger than that of one of the children under her charge. Visitors frequently confused her for a resident orphan until subsequently noting the deformities of adulthood, the stunted claws for hands, the scrambled mushed-in face, the voice like a bag of nails plunged into the ear. She genuinely enjoyed making children cry. She couldn’t regard a day as a wholesale success until at least one child, and profitably two or three more, had broken down into a fit of spasms and teary sobs, especially in front of the others. From the time of Meeks’ arrival, Miss Mary seemed to take a special interest in this bedraggled waif who, once cleansed of grime and properly clothed, revealed herself to be a child of possible merit though the attainment of such quality would necessitate an arduous journey down a long rugged road. Miss Mary began her task with the application of a series of harsh juniper lectures and the imposition of exacting chores the other children were excluded from. Without assistance Meeks was required to tote the cumbersome stacks of bibles from the storage closet at the start of prayer and then back again at the conclusion. She was forced to mop the corridors each night and scrub the pots every morning. And learn to keep a wary eye on the pile of cordage by the stove and the level of water in the cistern by the sink and replenish when appropriate. The demands and insults persisted without abatement month after month until one morning, just before roll, all the girls on line teasing her with cries of “Teacher’s cousin,” Meeks, all claims to control perfectly abandoned, simply leaped atop the largest, loudest girl among the taunting crowd, a strapping bully by the name of Nasty Nessa, and knocked her promptly to the boards where she gave her cheeks such a cuffing that the sight of the untapped claret flowing freely from nose and mouth provoked in Nessa such a pique of pious anger that she had Meeks’ nub gripped tight between all ten fingers before she was even aware of what she had done. By the time Miss Malone separated the two, Meeks’ face had already darkened to a violent shade of alarming purple. That turn-up earned Meeks a week in the tuck with only one bowl of cheer per day. The tuck was a tight closet off the deep end of the second floor that reeked of old mops and soiled rags and where squealing rats scampered gaily across your hocks in the dark. When Meeks emerged from her confinement she resembled nothing less than a bobbed trot and did not speak to anyone for days.

Miss Mary spent most of her hours, when she wasn’t roaming the Hall in search of stray delinquents, sequestered behind the big oak door of her private office, doing whatever it was adults did in private to add luster to their dull parts. Whenever Meeks was summoned to Miss Mary’s quarters she found the tiny woman enthroned within a carved chair much too large for her diminutive form and behind a ridiculously large desk devoid of papers, quill, or ornament of any kind. She had a habit of staring directly at Meeks through enormous black eyes in a boldface manner that weighed on the girl like pressing weights. On the austere wall behind Miss Mary hung an incongruously fine gold frame enclosing an ill-daubed painting obscured beneath so many layers of accumulated filth Meeks had never been able to discern clearly what mysterious image could possibly be buried under all those violent smears. After hours of absorbing contemplation as Miss Mary droned on about her failure to keep her ears adequately scrubbed or her ill carriage at attendance or her jogging during Recitation, Meeks had at last concluded the puzzle of the picture could be satisfactorily explained by regarding its assortment of smudges and blobs as a failed attempt at illustrating a swamped ship beset by a heavy storm from which there were likely few survivors. Once the through stitch was completed, the picture was barely granted another glance.

Finally, despite the School’s oppressive insistence upon the profit to be found in the quality of goodness, being good, doing good, proselytizing goodness, such a road was for Meeks a hard and rocky one. Delight, for some inscrutable reason, was more naturally to be found in straying from the devout path. She lied to the mistresses, she cheated on her examinations, she stole from the other girls. The pleasure such deceits gave her was secretive and almost sensual. But one day, having just concluded her weekly chiving, Meeks was inexplicably mastered by an access of courage and found herself brazenly inquiring outright as to why Miss Mary cared for her so little.

“Because I do not like you,” Miss Mary replied.

“Pray, why not?”

“Because you’re a wicked girl and wickedness requires chastisement.”

“But what have I done deserving of the least chastising?”

From the top drawer of her desk Miss Mary removed a thin length of polished hazel, her correcting stick always at the ready. She clasped it in her fist such as Mr Connell had gripped a spoon.

“Show me your hands.”

Meeks extended her arms.

“Palms up.”

Meeks turned over her hands. Whack! The stick flashed through the air quick as the striking of a snake. The sting caught Meeks across the fleshy ridges of her lower knuckles. She saw a flash of light burst across her vision and wanted to cry out but held herself mute though she could not keep the hot tears starting from her eyes.

Miss Mary permitted herself a small smile. “Now I expect no further discourtesies from you, my child. Do you understand? Or we shall have a rain of tears to freshen our week. We do not tolerate insubordination in this household. We do not. Ever. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I shall expect from now on the behavior from you befitting that of a mere gentlewoman. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Very good, child. You may return to the workroom.”

“Yes, ma’am.” And though it strained every particle of her being to do so, she bowed and offered a polite curtsy before she left.

That night, returning to the dormitory, Meeks discovered a new girl assigned to the cot next to hers. She had strong black curly hair and shiny berry eyes and a fast way of walking and a fast way of talking and a heedless fast way of seeming not to care about much of anything but her own solitariness in the world. Her name was Aisling but said everyone called her Ash. She’d already worked her way through two households. In the first the Mrs was a crookback who lay abed the day so Ash ran her heels off dawn to dark. In the second, from which she’d just returned, there were three sons all with saucy fingers and easy drawers and again she’d run her heels off dawn to dark. Not only her first lesson in family gymnastics but her first lesson in family. She’d had no siblings she could recall and, try as she might, she’d never been able to conjure the slightest evidence of any parent whatsoever. It was told she’d been left as an infant in the baby hatch with a strip of dirty red cloth pinned to her apron and most likely a gypsy since, marking her dark skin, everyone proclaimed her so. Meeks told her such was her good hap, it being dreadful enough just to be blessed with a single parent. At night Ash cried with such unrestrained passion that finally Meeks was forced to draw back the cover and allow the trembling child to snuggle in beside her where she remained in such a perplexed state until morn when she fell into a pacified slumber. They slept in the same cot from that night onward and their affections naturally grew. In the teaching room they positioned their wheels side by side and each day tried to see who could spin the greatest quantity of yarn. They took their meals at the same table. They took their baths in the same tub. They soon discovered they claimed a similar chronology, having entered this world in the same month of the same year with probably only days separating their births. Once they began comparing the details of their difficult courses through the jumble gut lane of this life, the discourse began to flow naturally without stoppage from morn to dark and then beyond. They ventured freely upon whichever topic came to hand, eventually arriving at the sharing of sisterly secrets. They decided who was the most cruel Regentess (“Sweet” Mary, by far), the most impossible girl (Nasty Nessa, of course), the most pleasing house boy (gentle Lyle, who brought in the cow juice from the barn). They marveled over their matching losses of both parents, the blow especially severe on Ash’s side, having occurred so early in her life, and her deliverance, even as an infant, unto this horrid house with all its subsequent indignities. They spoke often of the Holy Bible and the pleasure taken in its absorbing stories, either in hearing them read aloud or reading them privately to themselves.

Ash’s favorite passages were the ones where the bible people were either eating their victuals or listening to god telling them to eat their victuals. She especially enjoyed the scene about the loaves and the fishes and the starving multitudes being relieved. She never tired of hearing that one being recounted again and again. Meeks’ cherished preferences were for all the verses dealing with Judith and Delilah and the eternally incomparable Jezebel. “But they threw her from the window,” Ash protested. “Dogs ate her feet.” “She was the Queen,” Meeks reminded her. “Of all of the land of Israel.”

That night Meeks tore several pages from the Old Testament, explaining, “They’re the ‘begotting’ pages. Who’s tupping who. We’ll never look at ’em again.” She twisted the paper into crumpled cylinders and then, one by one, stuck the end of each page into the tip of a candle flame, catching the smoldering ashes in a bowl normally used for cheer she’d stolen from the dining hall. She then spit into the bowl and with her finger stirred the mixture into a thick black paste which she studiously applied to the skin around her eyes. “How do I look?” she asked when she was finished. “Like the Queen of Baal,” Ash replied.

“May the blessings of the dew anoint thy toes,” Meeks declared.

When Meeks appeared at table the following morning with her huge raccoon eyes, the sight caused such a stir “Sweet” Mary herself was drawn from her paneled sanctuary to see what was the fuss. Immediately she shushed the girls, returned all to their proper seats, and commanded Meeks to wash “that crust” from her face. Then another spell in the tuck for her.

By the time Meeks finally emerged from captivity, she and Ash had not seen one another for what had seemed an impossibly long interim and so could not restrain themselves from indulging in enthusiastic embrace. They could barely share a glance without breaking into an indecorous smile.

By the second day of their reunion, they found themselves yielding to fresh explorations of their intimate anatomies, viz., the pressing of their mouths upon exposed zones of sensitive flesh. It wasn’t at all clear who was the first to initiate the practice but once begun both jumped into the game with fervent passion. They discovered the pleasures of the lips and found they favored the habit, so many pleasing spots to be touched. Since the night was the only period they were granted any privacy whatsoever, once fallen into the custom of ardent caresses, they rarely slept and were perpetually fatigued. They trudged through the day like farm workers, sometimes even falling asleep at their wheels. But despite the harsh scoldings and occasional corporal punishments, they could not be diverted from their nocturnal industries.

“Do you believe me handsome?” Ash asked one night as they lay in Meeks’ bed with their arms about each other.

“Very. Why do you wonder?”

“W