The Red(55)

"Thank you," she said, dipping into a curtsy. She rushed past the men and down the passageway. Torches lit her way, although she didn't know where her way led. Cimon? Who was Cimon? The man in the painting? The prisoner? She was there for Malcolm, but who knew what role he'd decided to play in this carnal Wonderland.

She heard low moans coming from the rooms she passed. They weren't moans of pleasure but of profoundest suffering. This was a prison. She understood that. And somewhere in this prison was Malcolm, waiting for her. The panic in her heart was real. Her lungs pounded with it. Her dress felt tight across her chest. Her breasts ached horribly, and she wondered if it was because her panicked breathing was constricting her blood flow. They felt congested, swollen. Ignoring her pain, she ran down the dust-choked corridor until she came to the very end. 

The cell was not guarded and the iron door wasn't locked. She looked around to see if anyone would stop her from entering. She saw no one. She took a torch from a wall sconce and entered through the open door.

"Malcolm?" she whispered. The room was dark and dank and cold. She heard the rattling of a chain on the stone floor and she inched toward the sound. "Malcolm? Oh, God, Malcolm … "

It was him, though he hardly looked himself. He lay naked but for a loincloth on the cold floor, his knees pulled to his chest and his hair the white of dirty snow. His body was skeletal. She could see every bone and every sinew and every joint. The withered face was unmistakably her Malcolm, his black eyes glinting like flint. He had not lost his will to live, though it seemed he had lost everything else. His only possession was the iron shackle on his ankle that bound him by a thick chain of heavy links to the wall. Mona put the torch into the wall sconce and knelt on the floor by his head. She touched his face tenderly and wept.

"What's happening?" she asked. "What have they done to you?"

He opened his lips but no sound came out. She looked for water, for wine, for anything to wet his tongue. The dungeon was empty but for his broken body.

"Starved," he whispered.

"Oh, God." Mona gathered his shivering body to hers. She could have counted his ribs with her fingers in the dark he was so thin. She wrapped him as best she could in her thick skirts.

"Food," he said, and it sounded like he was trying to ask her a question.

"I have nothing," she said. "They searched me."

He nodded, resigned to his death, and closed his eyes.

She rocked him against her like a baby in her arms. He was so frail, so helpless, it made her heart ache. The pain in her breasts grew unbearable. She wept in sorrow and in pain. Malcolm rested his head on her chest and she groaned under a fresh wave of agony. Something was happening. She felt the front of her dress grow damp and warm. Was Malcolm bleeding on her? Frantically, she pushed the bodice of the dress down. She saw no blood, only her breasts, red and swollen and her nipples distended. The fluid was leaking from her breasts. White fluid, not red.

At once she understood the painting and the meaning of Roman Charity. It wasn't a painting of a prostitute paying a conjugal visit to a prisoner. It was a painting of a woman feeding a starving prisoner from her own breasts. Without a second thought she took her breast in her hand and lifted it to his mouth.

"Suck," she told him, but he seemed too weak to hear her. She tilted his head gently forward and cradled him in her arms like a child. The guards had searched her body for food but they couldn't take the food from inside her body. Malcolm slowly parted his lips. She pressed her nipple into his mouth, and this time he was able to latch onto her breast. She wrapped her skirts around him even more, hiding this private act from prying eyes lest they rip her away from him and the nourishment that would keep him alive. As he nursed from her breast, her pain eased. She kissed his forehead, his hollowed cheeks as he drank from her body. As the minutes passed, he seemed to gain strength. His thin hand clutched her bare shoulder as he drank more deeply of her. By the firelight of the torch, his hair darkened from white to gray and slowly, ever so slowly, to black again.

When he'd emptied one breast, she shifted him in her arms, pressing her other breast into his mouth. He latched on far more quickly this time and she wept with relief. He would live. She had saved him.

"What crime did you commit?" she whispered. "Why are you here?"




 

 

"I loved a woman I shouldn't have loved," he said, so quietly she wouldn't have heard him but for the echo of his words off the stone walls.

"And you were imprisoned because of that? Starved?"

He nodded and took her nipple into his mouth again and suckled.