The Bound Heart (19 page)

The light filtered through the window, which overlooked the back garden. It was that early morning light. The kind that somehow seemed to have promise in its color as it came over the horizon. The low angle as it radiated through the window made the red silk wall paper shine like a deep rich camellia, a deep rich yet soft red. The color was surprisingly comforting to sleep in.

Jamie stretched. His bedroom, his real bedroom, was on the second floor. He’d had this room when Sensei was alive.

He’d lived here as a young boy and man before moving to his own house. He came to the house, after he’d gotten into a fight at the brothel that left him unconscious. He woke up here in this very room, but on a single cot. A small, dirty bundle of his cloths sat on a chair near the door, and on the dresser were the lengths of rope he’d gotten from Sensei.

Sensei would come to The Split with his friend who spoke no English and had a very particular need that Big Suzie looked after. Sensei would negotiate for his friend and keep an eye open, sit in the courtyard and tie knots.

At nine, Sensei’s world had been like entry into heaven. A strange twist after all the windows he’d broken and tantrums he’d thrown at the Split Tart.

It had taken many slaps to his head and many head shaking for him to learn the etiquette of the house. The Japanese ways. Between Kobayashi-sensei and Okazaki-san, he had become civilized. He had become not just a westerner who understood the Japanese aesthetic, but also one who embraced it.

As far as a westerner who was, for all intents, an uneducated man, he was a highly cultured man in a very narrow area. He spoke understandable and passable Japanese. He had enough manners not to embarrass himself too much and yet was still very much a man from the west.

Arguably, no westerner truly understood the Japanese. No person really understood a culture they didn’t grow up in. A fact, that men like himself who had similar relationships with other countries in the orient and the Middle East would agree with.

A door closed and he heard the distinct sound of geta, the wooden shoes the Japanese wore, make their clipped sound on stone. It was Okazaki heading to the kitchen to make breakfast.

Jamie pushed back the covers and sat on the side of the bed. Under his feet was a soft, silk carpet. The silk was from China, Kobayashi was so proud to point out. The pile had been clipped to form petals and leaves across the ornate botanical design in a rich ocean blue with greens and pink cherry blossom flowers.

At the washstand, he poured cool water and shaved, dampened back his hair.

He dressed then reached for his jacket and stopped. Instead, he took out a Japanese male kimono jacket, slipped it on and tied it closed.

For some reason, he wanted Olive to see the man he had made himself into.

The man he was proud to have become. He was a Nipponophile, a man expert in matters Japanese. Yes, he had the rope, he had his erotic art; but in the process, he had learnt Japanese; he’d live in a Japanese household and socialized with Japanese expats. He’d traveled to Japan and, as an adult, had become a collector of woodblock prints.

He had made himself an artist and a cultured man. His trade of bookbinding was so far from the breadth of who he was. She’d admired him as that man. He wanted her to….

What did he want? He was not a man who courted love, he already had her passion, her admiration… what more did he want?

No answer came except for a ripple through his chest. A current in a language he didn’t understand.

Maybe he just wanted someone to see how far he’d come. Someone who knew where he’d come from as intimately as Olive would be able to when she found out where he’d come from.

Yes, and he wanted to show her that he appreciated the beauty of textiles. That he could be someone to understand and foster her interests.

Downstairs, he stopped at the kitchen door.

“Oh-Hai-Oh.” His Japanese greeting of good morning was answered by Okazaki as he walked into the kitchen.

“Oh-Hai-Oh,” Okazaki responded.

Olive sat at the table eating. She stood as soon as she saw him.

“Good morning. Should I leave? I thought you’d eat in the dining room?”

“We eat casually, Olive. Sit down.”

Her eyes traveled over him. Spots of red blotched her neck, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Her hands ran down her bodice and skirt. Then she sat down.

“What did you just say?”

“Oh-Hai-Oh? It means good morning.”

She nodded but still didn’t look at him, and she went back to eating her rice and grilled fish.

“What do you think of the Japanese breakfast?”

Olive looked up and grinned.

“I heard about kippers once. This is what I imagine rich people eat for breakfast. Food that makes your body feel full, but not heavy and slow. I’ve had porridge or a slice of bread for more years than I can count with no change.”

Okazaki brought over his meal but didn’t sit down herself. She would have eaten before either of them came down. And despite him and before him, Sensei had tried to persuade her to sit with them. She preferred to be the creator.

The only time they all three sat together was when they talked rope. When they planned a new sequence or worked on rope ties.

After breakfast, Olive and he took mugs of tea and went into the back garden.

The sun was out and shafted its way through the surrounding buildings, slicing up the shrubs and stone pathways with light.

Jamie guided them over to a low, stone wall and leaned back against it with his tea in hand as Olive joined him.

“You’re very lucky to live here.” Her voice was soft as she looked over the garden.

It was one of those rare mornings when the London pea soup wasn’t hiding the sun from the sky. Instead, an expanse of blue sky hung above them.

“I’ve been very lucky in my life.”

She turned and placed her tea on the wall.

“What are you wearing?” Her fingers curled into her palm.

“Would you like to touch the fabric?’

She reached out even as she met his gaze and grinned at him.

“Am I that transparent?”

He nodded yes. More, he wanted to say. Much more than she could possible imagine.

Her fingers felt the fabric.

“It’s very beautiful.” Her voice was so wistful he wanted to take it off and give it to her, wanted her to have a cupboard full of clothes that were made of fabrics that she’d love.

“Olive, I have a proposal for you.”

She stepped back and picked up her cup, brought it close to her mouth as she blew on the surface.

“I don’t want you to pay me for sex.”

“No!” The tea, still close to the rim of the cup spilt over his hands as jerked at her words. “That’s not what I was going to suggest.”

“Good, because if I wanted that way out of my troubles, there were more than enough times to do that in the past.”

Jamie put his tea down, pulled out a handkerchief, and dried the tea from his fingers.

“I’m pleased to hear that. No, I have something more professional in mind.”

“What do you mean professional.” The fingers gripping her cup were white.

“Olive, what’s wrong?”

She pushed off the wall and walked a few steps over to the small hedge running around a pond.

He put his tea down and moved next to her. Took her tea from her hands, slid a finger under her chin, and tilted her face to look at his.

“Don’t you want to stay here, Olive? Are you unhappy?”

Her hand came up and pulled his away from her face.

“I don’t belong here. Look at me. Look at you.”

Her hand reached out and ran over the fabric of his kimono jacket.

“Is this silk?”

“Yes.”

“I can imagine it embroidered with a rope pattern. Here.” Her finger circled on him. “Then here.” She trailed her finger around his chest under his arm. “And around the back.” She lifted her hand but stayed standing close. “Not the same on both sides.” Her voice dropped. “That would be predictable.”

“I’d love to see that.” His voice had gone thick. Her touches lit a fire trail of sensation.

“I could do it for you.” She let out a big sigh. Stepped back and her face got a look of resigned pragmatism.

“Look at me, Jamie. I look like I should be coming in and emptying the coal from the fires. I don’t belong in this exotic, wealthy world of yours. I should have understood that when I first saw your house, and when Madeline came out of it all wrapped in velvet while I stood there in my boots, my brace, and old clothes.”

“That’s all on the outside, Olive. We’ll deal with it today. Right now, I have a business arrangement for you.”

She was shaking her head and the crease between her eyebrows deepening.

“Just hear me out. There are things about me and my world that make what I am proposing and your place in the course of things quite reasonable.”

Her eyes rolled; she really didn’t believe him.

“It doesn’t matter how you present it, Jamie; the only way girls like me live in places like this is if we sell sex.

This was not like Olive. She wasn’t one to fall into the negative.

“Who gave you all these ideas?”

Her hands twisted. Then he knew. She’d been home. He knew her sister didn’t need to know anymore.

“I don’t pay for sex Olive and I don’t think that’s what is between us is it?”

She shook her head ‘no’.

Jamie slipped his hand into hers and brought her back to the stone wall, sat her down on it, gave her back her tea, and picked up his own.

“I want to teach you the world of the rope; pay you to be my model and train you.”

“I just said I don’t want to be paid so you can have sex with me, Jamie. I give myself where I choose and when I choose.”

“It’s not like that, Olive. The rope we have done together has shown me you have a natural feel and love of the rope. I want to build on that; and if it works, I want you to be my model in a very important competition in Paris.”

Her breath sucked in.

That wonderfully transparent face looked at him wanting to believe him. But you didn’t grow up in the streets and leave what you knew behind.

“Paris?” Her teeth worried on her lips, all her hope and doubt chomping at that wonderful slice of flesh.

“You’d stay with me here.”

“As your…”

“Lover.”

The crease in her forehead returned.

“I want you to stay because you want to be with me. My model can live anywhere.”

He waited for that crease between her brows to ease then continued.

“I have work to do and you need work and you have a natural talent that would help me. You’d work as my model. If for some reason we were no longer lovers you would still work with me as my model.”

“Your model.” She brought the tea to her mouth and played with the rim of the mug with her lips.

“Yes.” He leaned closer. Reached out and slipped his hand under her chin, the tips of his fingers slipped under her hair, under the long thick plait and the warmth it held against the base of her skull. Ran his thumb over those wonderful lips. Leaned in and kissed her with slow, soft touches to her lips. Their tongues slid against each other. Her breath puffed hot as he lifted away a fraction.

She was the one he’d been hoping to find for Paris, he was sure of it. The one to take him to the next level with the rope.

Technical knowledge took you only so far. He had creativity; he could apply that solid knowledge base to ties, sequences of ties, and even flowing suspension where the holds moved from one suspended position to another. But there was more.

For the first time with Olive, he had a fleeting sense of it; Sensei and Okazaki had spoken about it.

Like a master magician who could wow audiences with his tricks, some part of him sought the ultimate trick, perhaps the search for real magic. He had a similar holy grail he was seeking with rope.

Olive looked at him uncertainly painted over every feature; she was unconvinced, his stubborn girl.

Nevertheless, her integrity of spirit was what he admired, that drew him. Her courage to express without filter what was on the inside.

It would be up to him to show her more of what the rope meant to him outside the bedroom; why he was moving deeper into that world.

“Okazaki will help you. She was my teacher, Kobayashi-sensei’s model, and later his assistant and companion.”

Her eyes popped wide.

“Mrs. Okazaki’s done what we’ve done? With your teacher? Everything?”

It was hard not to smile at her surprise. At the tone of horror.

“Yes, much more. Remember we have been playing with rope as part of sex. We haven’t worked with rope for rope’s sake. We haven’t entered the world of Rope Art.”

“Rope Art…” She pursed her lips again. “I’m not sure, Jamie. I just don’t think I’d fit in. I’m not like Evie and Madeline… I sew, I run errands, I work. There’s no use me staying here just to be asked to move on at some point.”

His jaw tightened.

Clearly, this was going to take a little more persuasion.

“Let’s deal with your concerns one by one. Do you think I belong here? Okazaki, does she belong here?”

“Yes, of course. This is your home.”

He lifted his hand and motioned about them.

“This house was left to me. Sensei was a rice-farmer’s son, Okazaki was a geisha, and I am a brothel brat.”

Her head swung around at that. “A brothel brat?”

Never had his background filled a face with so much hope.

His mouth curled into his usual half grin and Olive found hers following suit.

“Don’t look so pleased with my humble beginnings.”

He gave her shoulder a little nudge with his as their hips leaned against the low stone wall.

“Is that really true? Or are you trying to make me feel better?”

He nodded and took a sip of his tea.

“Oh, yes, it’ true.” The softness in his mouth faded.

No matter how fortunate his passage out of that world, it would have been hard. Perhaps a different woman would feel sorry for him. She didn’t; she admired him. Admired who he was and what he’d done even before she knew how high and steep that climb actually was.

“Where? Which brothel?”

“Curious?” He looked at her then; he’d be able to see that she wasn’t joking. That she genuinely wanted to know. Needed to know. She needed to find a bridge from her world, something that would make it feel like she could actually be here; that somewhere in this remarkable world, there might be a role or a place for her.

You had to grow up in her world to know there were no fairy tales or magic solutions. You lived life, you fought back, and you survived. If you were lucky, you might have some moments of happiness, but you prepared yourself for them to be fleeting.

If Jamie had grown up as close to the squalor and mud as she had, he’d understand that. It also made sense of the hardness that would capture him from time to time. The walls he kept around himself even when they were intimate together. The rules of what they could and could not do in that act.

“The Split Tart. I was born there.”

“That’s not far from where I live.”

He nodded. “Yes, I know.”

“We might have passed in the street.”

“I left when I was nine.”

“Most likely I wasn’t born then.” She grinned and he bumped her with his shoulder again.

“Hey, just remember who wields the rope.”

“Are you trying to confuse me, Jamie? Shouldn’t you be threatening rather than promising?”

“You’re in dire trouble now, Olive.”

They sat in comfortable silence for a while. The occasional sparrow flew out of a nest in the eaves above the kitchen and then back again.

“Do you go there now?”

His face closed up.

“I don’t often speak of my background, Olive. I told you because you need to know that there is a way out for you. But it’s going to be a climb.

“I’m not an educated man as men of station are, but I am a cultured man, not in all areas, but in a very specialized area. I speak Japanese. I have been immersed in Japanese culture, living here and traveling to Japan with my teacher. The rope and the photo plates I make have established a reputation with collectors far outside of England.”

She nodded.

“You traveled to the Orient?”

“Yes, did you hear the rest of what I said?”

“Yes, Jamie, I just don’t see how I fit in.”

“You have an unusual and natural talent with the rope.”

Her face screwed up. “I just stand there.”

“You are not as passive as you make out. Olive, we communicate through that process; through touch, movements, and something invisible.”

“But that’s the sex; the way you make me feel.”

“Yes, but take away the sex and you have a very powerful connection around the rope. What I do is both erotic art and a lineage.

In the art, I try to create beauty, create fantasies, which speak to the landscape of us as sexual beings.”

“And all of that funded this?” It seemed hard to believe. Hard to think that what her sisters sold for bread and a bit of meat, could buy a house and lifestyle like Jamie had.

“Every society has its artists, its needs, its desire to see things a certain way, a different way than usual. What I do is art, Olive; what we will make will be art. To the right people, that art is worth a substantial amount of money.”

The only way she could understand that was to think in terms of embroidery. There were embroidered tapestries in large churches and houses that people paid a great deal of money for, expensive fashion houses that charged more than she’d make in a lifetime for articles of embroidered clothing.

“You also said it was a lineage.”

“Yes. There are different ways to use rope and groups of people who follow different paths but we can talk more about that if we start working together.”

Olive took a sip of the tea and looked out over the garden.

She wasn’t a dumb person, but it was hard to understand what he was saying. That art paid was something she could appreciate. That tying someone in rope was art, was harder.

“You don’t look as interested as I expected.”

Olive pushed away from the wall. This was like a dream place, so far from her life of a couple of days ago.

“But what we’d do for them, these people you are talking about… it’s a kind of sex in public.”

He shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest.

“I’m not going to have sex with you in front of anyone, Olive. I wouldn’t do that for money, and I don’t expect you to either.

“Erotic art is sexual; and like we have done, it can be a real and pleasurable part of sexual life, but it’s much more than that. It’s about the flow of power; it’s about trust. When we start to tie for work, and not for pleasure, that will be more apparent to you.”

“But I would be naked, like Madeline and like the girls in your photos? Will you take photos of me too?”

“Yes, at some point.” A tightness had set into his jaw and his lips thinned as she spoke.

She remembered Mr. Russel’s hungry gaze as he saw the photo plates on the counter at The Velvet Basement when Evie first showed her what Jamie did. Did she want her pictures there?

Yet, she remembered her own response to the images. The heat and want they drew out in her.

Those times with other men, the sex was somehow flat, and always hurried. Those men had very little interest in her needs or any desire to take their time and explore. A quick squeeze of her breasts, beer-feted breath, and thick fingers that poked as if to confirm where her opening was, and then in they went and off they went.

But not Jamie, it seemed as if he could see the invisible way her mind struggled with what her body wanted. The way certain positions and ties would make her feel. Dark, forbidden, and wrong things, but also comforting things, exciting things.

“Have you ever been to an art gallery, Olive?”

Heat washed her neck.

“No, of course not.”

How did he expect her to be able to afford to go there?

“Not all of us are as cultured as you.”

“Fine, that’s what we’ll do today. I’d hoped we could settle an agreement together this morning and start work. But I don’t want you thinking I am luring you into some sordid production line for men to have self-pleasuring photos.”

Her brows creased and she stood up taller. He shouldn’t be able to read her mind.

“You know”—her hand waved around then—”all this, your house, and the oriental things are very beautiful; but I can easily go back to my boarding house and find work. Yesterday, I had word of a clothing factory looking for workers.”

Jamie threw the dregs of his tea into the hedge and put the mug down.

“Let’s sort one thing out between us, Olive. Say what you mean. I know you don’t want to go back to the boarding house, so don’t imply that you are seriously considering it. Say that you would rather go back there and live that hellish life we both walked away from than be a whore.”

Heat flashed across her chest.

“I will never be a whore. What I have, I give freely or not at all. I will not trade in my body.”

“Firstly, I recognize that about you. I respect that you have come as far as you have and haven’t had to earn on you back. Secondly, every worker trades their time and body for money.”

“You’re mixing my words.”

“No, I’m trying to show you the difference.”

Jamie turned to face her. His face was serious, passionate, and fully focused.

“There’s no hard line between sensual or erotic art and pornography. People have debated about it for centuries. The Greeks put erotic art on their ceramics, on their walls. We display it in prestigious galleries and homes.

“Do people find what I do sexually simulating? I hope so. But I also hope that it shows more about who we are as sensual beings than what society would have us say exists. I hope it might point to the communication, the exchanges between people in different situations. I hope it points to something past pleasure, past the act itself.

“A lazy or ignorant mind will only see what fits with their own world; they will not challenge themselves to a greater understanding of human nature and their own natures. Exploring and working with those perceptions is not whoring, Olive.”

“I don’t really understand, Jamie. But I think you just said I have a lazy mind unless I agree with you!”

Blast him. She felt stupid not understanding what he was saying.

However, it was the most she had heard from him ever, the closest she’d come to knowing what he thought about anything. Yet, it was too far from what she knew of how things worked.

However, she did know one thing; she loved the rope. It might make her a freak or a deviant, but it was what it was.

The rope. It made her sing, made her head all light and made her feel like the world was floating away, and she was something bigger than just herself.

“Jamie, in my world, art and making art is for people who don’t know hardship. They have an easy life that looks for the next pretty thing to be consumed and then forgotten.”

“I have a good occupation, Olive. I could live a good working man’s life as a bookbinder. But I found a passion and a gift. I am very good at what I do and I enjoy it. I want to go deeper into the world it unfolds for me and explore that something at the other side of pleasure.

“It’s a mental shift, Olive. One that takes you out of the conventional, ordinary world and its social rules and morals and into a new set of rules, a set of rules that is about expressing what’s in here.” His finger tapped at her chest. “Making it real in a way that people, who see what you do, understand something or see something differently.

“If you are interested in hearing the rest of my proposition, we can speak over dinner. I also I suggest you speak with Mrs. Okazaki about it.”

Her hand went to her throat.

Jamie walked off toward the house. “I’ll meet you in the foyer at two o’clock.”

“I have nothing to wear.”

“You will.”

He spun around and walked backward for a few steps, arms out stretched. “A brothel brat, Olive, following his passion. Think about it.”

He looked like the most exotic man she had ever seen. The beautiful fabric of his Japanese jacket, his hair tied back, and the wonderful hard face, hands with calluses, a chest that rippled with lean muscular strength harder than any man she had touched. The difficult moody Mr. Edwards was still in there, but he was also something else. This man with his crooked smile, his oriental clothes, and secret world, how had he survived the world he was born in? She had a regular working mom and, when he was about, a father. But Jamie had grown up in one of the roughest brothels in Whitechapel. That he had dark areas, that he had rules… was understandable.