jacqueline field grew tired of writing these "penny dreadfuls," she said. for her next book, she wished to write a biography of william godwin--god rest his soul--a man with a sublime taste in women, who grasped the fundamental impediments to human perfectibility: monopoly, monarchy + marriage. jacqueline was herself a novelist of no inconsiderable repute, though none in her small village--set to drift alone out on the yorkshire moors--knew her as such, for she published--as was the convention of the times--under a male alias: jack heathland. heathland novels were consumed by well-bred ladies in the backs of carriages where no one could see them feasting on fables of dilapidated castles, rakish don juans and yes, murder even. yet they were more than cheap dime novels. they were manifestoes on woman's emancipation, achieved not through the clean surgical partition of reason and romance, but by interweaving them through the soul. and yet for all the libertinism on display within their pages, their author was none so lucky, for jackie--as she was known by her husband paul--had been declared an hysteric. in the early years of their marriage, she had frightened him by taking his manhood in her hands and mouth when they would picnic down by the creek and again at night, she would ride atop him like a county show horse. none of this, mind you, did he object to in the moment. it was only after he had negotiated a three-book deal with scribner's (with a hefty advance, or so she was told by her lady's maid), did he think to call in dr. sprocken, a german emigre equipped with self-written monographs on the fairer sex's "wandering womb." until her "sensitivities and unwholesome proclivities dissipate", the good doctor informed her husband as the three sat down to tea, she should be carefully monitored--"for her own good," he reassured them. and so jackie the linen closet was cleared of its inventory and provisioned with all she might need to read, relax and write. which she did, though not without wonder and anger and resentment for a life out on the moors where jackie might wander, be lost and be free. paul, in a typical display of his professed benevolence, allowed her to walk the moorland once a day, though only when securely harnessed. the "jacket," as he called it, was made of buffalo hide--"from the states"--and smelled of its chemical treatment and burnt hair. its heavy corpus wrapped itself around her and through the back was tied the tail end of a long rope whose hundreds of yards of length was kept tidily in the cellar so that whenever she was allowed to go for her walk, the servants would be dispatched to open the cellar gates so that the rope might follow her out. it did not matter which direction jackie went; the rope never grew a single yard longer.

the situation as intolerable as it was, produced considerable resistance on jackie's part who swore at paul and called him names and insulted his manhood and his virtue. who decried him as a man who would abuse his wife, as provisionally minded, as a "regressive little toadstool." dr. sprocken was dispatched for and came immediately post haste. after the three of them had sat down to tea, the doctor leaned over to her husband and suggested to him that there was an experimental new drug out of germany, "concocted, they tell me, by a romanian jew, if you can imagine...it's called amphetamine, and its benefits to the idle lady cannot be overstated." in fact, he went on, it produces such a tremendous feeling of vim and vigor that many soon drop all their recalcitrance and become themselves idea images of mother and wive. many say they hardly need to sleep more than an hour a night. that said (as he licked the sweetbread from off his fingers) it is a regiment best accompanied by plenty of outdoor activity and exercise.

this immediately pricked jackie's ears who thereafter swore to paul that she would be mindful and diligent if only he would allow her to take rides out on the moors--"unharnessed," she insisted. paul, calculating in his mind the number of words his wife produced in an hour multiplied by the hours she slept at night, consented. if she were to focus on her wifely duties and adhere to the course of treatment as prescribed, she might be allowed such an excursion. jackie bit her lip. she would ride as far as she could possibly go, she dreamed. she would go on forever.

she is to start off with a low dose, the doctor prescribed: 50mg twice a day, taken with food, if possible.

but when the maids would bring up lunch of game stew and sandwiches to the linen closet where she worked, she threw the plates and bowls into the hallway so that they broke and shattered on the floor and jackie would stand upright against the wall and laugh at the mess which she then got down on hands and knees to help scrub up, chattering to the servants as one might her best friend, embracing them as sisters, confiding in them all her hopes and dreams. she said she wanted nothing but water, and they were to keep her hydrated hourly as she worked. jackie wrote two new novels for scribners in three months in a quarter of the time they had been promised. she insisted the manuscripts be gifted to the publisher with large red bows. upon receipt, scribners sent along a messenger with a paper contract to say that they would by the next three after that and that they would double the advance if they could be produced by end of the year.

paul, for his part, never let an opportunity go by. in the nearby village it was widely known that the drapier and his wife had two insouciant sons in need of a charge. paul sent along an offer to them, promising room and board in exchange for somewhat unconventional services. his wife, he instructed them upon their arrival in the foyer, was to be allowed no more than hour of sleep a night until she had met her contractual obligations. the two lads were each blocks of unchiseled marble, towering and yet unemerged from their stone mass. dispatched in shifts, the lads made do with what they had though they had no interest in books or literature and had never read the novels of "jack heathland," all for lack of literacy. they were sweet boys, jackie thought, though hideously dull. at first she engaged them in cards, but she did not have the patience while under the influence of her new treatment. in fact, she bristled harder under all the old constraints on her time and attention. what had been at one point unbearable soon became degenerative. she screamed at paul late into the night, demanding her moorland rides, but he simply called up one of the lads who would drag her to the linen closet where she would be jostled awake until three in the morning, at which point she would be allowed a single hour of sleep before being shaken again. 

it got to the point where the tremors never stopped really. shaken until she passed out. shaken until she woke up again. the pen was placed immediately in hand, though she would have to wait a full hour until the tremors subsided enough for her to work. the work, of course, was brilliant, and she wept as she wrote it and even the lads wept in turn when she read it back to them. the new work transgressed the formal and generic conventions of the gothic. somehow, for all the heightened intensities of those cascading weeks, the extremities of morality and character had fallen away. she drew out less the contradictions of her villains and heroines, settling them into more mild spectrums of human emotion and behavior until it all seemed so incredibly plausible, so minutely observed, so...so...so "real." she and her captive captors hardly knew what to make of it, the plain scenes of domestic anguish, the familial pathos. the lads knew it from their own childhoods, had witnessed it between their mother and father. jackie cried for them and held their hands and wondered aloud how many lads within the british isles had seen it, suffered from it, watched their mothers unravel and come apart at the seems, or perhaps worse yet, reconstitute themselves into a jacket no one would ever wear, tan and hide themselves into their own bisons-back harness.

it is hard to say when i first appear upon the scene. i suppose i am there all along, truth be told, though nobody would think to look for me. i am the silent ward. i am the daimon under glass. i slip into the bedsheets at nice and riffle my bed to the top, breathing in, breathing out alongside her. there were times she woke to find me there in the room with her, only i was where she'd been sleeping and she had been sent to sit in the chair at the far end of the room. she would lay there in bed, watching herself watch me in her place, ceding territory, clearing the field. for i, who am otherwise well renowned these isels over as the author jack heathland, appeared so strange to myself, so that i could not imagine myself in this body, with these weighted breasts, these wedged hips. the poor girl had been taking dictation all her life and been made to suffer for it. she did not choose me anymore than i chose her. the point is: i emerged and bore myself whole, like athena ripped from the head of zeus, at the exact moment she needed me. hers was a life set by the limits of the leash. no revolution would free her, so i send her diligently back every morning to scribble away at our journals, to pick up and refashion the prior night's dreams. 

as for me, i was set upon another quest. let it never be said: the heart wants what the heart wants, and i took to the woman's husband with a quiet yet undeniable infatuation. yes, there was something queer to the bones about the whole thing. the way he would talk to her, talk down to her, pull her around by the leash, rustle her from her bed at night, hold firm the arm into which went one, two, three injections of the serum. there was the appearance of near full and total control, and such pleasure i could detect roll through his eyes the moments he would bring her up and down, at his whim, as his schedule dictated. drive another novel out of her, like a stagecoach master at the whip. i longed to beat him myself and suck the blood from off his wounded lips, reply as only one man could for another, relieve him of the need to be in control, to be master, to be on top.

i began by leaving him little messages: ribbons from his wife's hair wrapped around the newel posts, wrapped around each the columns of his four-poster bed, choking the necks of his little cocker spaniels. when he asked his wife about them, poor thing, knew nothing of the matter and went back to her writing. is she in your sights at all times, he would ask the two lads, who assured him she was as best they could manage though they could not truthfully account for all the seconds of the day. he ordered the chamber maids to take down the ribbons wherever they saw them, and gave no more mind to it. he had, i admit, little by way of concentrative force.

i had only to wait until our saturday constitution, when he slipped into his wife's studio, sent the lads away on an errand, and locked the door behind him. the whole affair proceeded without incident. his wife, attune to the cues and signals of his appetite, assumed the position by the window. he wiggled his way behind her and commenced his fornications. i myself stood behind him, watching him thrust and pull and jerk. she bore it and looked ever out the windows, staring headlong into the brights lights of the yellow gorse blossoms, searching skyward for the peregrine in flight, imagining the blind voles scuttling from bush to bush, dreaming of the rustled orange of a burn making its way to consume them. he paid her no mind at all, and so within their mutual absence, i inserted myself. or rather, i inserted the tip of my ring finger. a simple brush with greatness, so faint and woven into the coital throws i doubt he even noticed. but he noticed when i did it again, and i could see it wash over his face: the pleasures of his fulfillment, barely uttered above a whisper his entire life long, now here within him, aching to be free.

but it proved too much for the man. he recoiled from the spot, throwing his wife off him with such a force that her face smashed into the window and though she sat there with cheek in hand, fumbling about for purchase, he wasted no time in upbraiding her, castigating her for her lascivious and unspeakable conduct. he had had enough, he declared, of this sort of thing. he didn't care what the good german doctor thought: the amphetamines treatments were to cease and desist immediately, and she was to return to her "studio" and resume a normal, day-to-day practice. the publishers had been well compensated. they can wait for the final manuscripts, as long as it all takes.

and the moors? she asked, indifferent to all but. am i to ride?

absolutely not, he thundered. you think i'm about to let my wife out galloping in the rain after exhibiting such indecent improprieties. what if you were to come upon someone? a lowly shepherd or school boy? could you hardly be trusted not to mount them like a damned dragoon!

the blow was twofold: one to her, dreams dashed and ground like porcelain beneath the foot. you could almost hear the grinding, the rendering powder, the utter decimation. i feared for a moment she might no breath again, and if i say i could feel the choked sobs coming up her throat, could swallow them as if they were my own, such is only to say that she bore her grief like the madonna bore her virtue or the mona lisa her smile--manifest and in the open. the second blow was to me, who realized perhaps for the first time that no special exemption would be made to me. no matter my androgyne consciousness, my productivity, my sales. i would be afforded no special place, no privileges, in this arrangement. i was tethered to her, bound hand to hand. where she went, i went, and where she was forbidden to go, well, you get the picture. paul would never love me. would never love us. there was, at that moment, only one thing left to do.

on the piano forte was a small bust of callimachus that paul had bought his wife while on pilgrimage in rome. i hefted it into my hand and struck him over the head with it. if i had been a hydrangea and bitten him he would not have been more surprised, and from the floor his eyes grew wide from the shock of his own blood, warm and sticky, around a pool of which he pivoted his body which grew tense and clutched for purchase, his fingers mutedly clawing about as if plucking the strings of a mandolin. from her perch by the window, jacqueline slumped over, watching as if in a dream at the scene. she raised no objections when i lifted the bust once more.

at which point, what is there to say really? the lads, for their part, raised no objections to the site of us doused in blood. they did not run to the local magistrate. they did not inform the gardener or the head cook. in their shock and awe, they too understood the essence of the thing: that there is a liberty in our disorientation, a freedom found only guideless in the wild. we cannot be liable for the steps of madness we welcome. no one would blame the man set upon by wolves for imagining them devils in disguise.the two lumbering dolts merely stood there at the front door of the estate as jacqueline and i mounted a steed, kissed the rain and raced headlong into the moors.