Pearl of the Hareem

By Faye Rossignol

"Here I am – the girl who hit Constantinople like a sexual earthquake!" Kidnapped in Vienna in 1904, shipped to the Orient and sold into slavery by the most ruthless rogue in the land, though she does not yet know it, the beautiful young American Pearl Keefer is on her way to becoming the most famous courtesan of her day. Her new home is the Sultan's Hareem, and it is there that the concubines and slave girls teach her all their ancient secrets. Her magical talent for the pleasuring of men is honed to the heights of artistry. Not even a death sentence at the hands (and whips) of Bull, the sadistic head eunuch, can halt her lust for life ... nor her life of lust.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Faye Rossignol
• Release date: Sep 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311106322

Faye Rossignol

Faye Rossignol - who is (or was) she?Search for Faye Rossignol on Google and three attractive ladies bearing her name are listed (at the time of writing, which is 2014). None of them is "our" Faye Rossignol, which suggests that the name is, in any case, a nom-de-plume. "Rossignol" was French slang in the 19th Century for the female pudendum - and our Faye would most certainly have been aware of that! In fact, little or nothing is known of the life (or possible death) of this female (or was she male?) writer. Her seventeen manuscripts were discovered on Saturday, September 19th, 1988, just after dawn. They lay in a skip filled with builder's rubble in London's fabulously wealthy and upmarket Eaton Square. Despite that, it is clear that they were not simply thrown out at so much junk; they were intended to be discovered and, eventually, to achieve the publication they so richly deserve. How can we assume that? For a start, they were heavily wrapped in a waterproof oilcloth before being completely heat-sealed in two layers of heavy-duty polythene; and the outer layer was of the UV-resistant kind so that they would have survived exposure on a garbage tip, even in direct sunlight, without degradation. And they were carefully placed right on top of a full skip - in plain view of any passer-by of average height. Whoever dumped them was probably still in Eaton Square when they were spotted and rescued. Alas, the luck that any bibliographer might have enjoyed ended right there and then.They contained not a single handwritten word that might have helped trace them to the hand that wrote them. Each manuscript was neatly typed using a daisywheel printer, so we know that the writer had access to the primitive word-processors of the early-to-mid-eighties (and it would surely have taken that many years for "Faye" to have written all seventeen volumes). The paper was in standard A4 sheets of various brands, all widely sold throughout the country. In short, there is little hope of tracing "her" through either the paper or the method of printing.Various names have been suggested for the true author, including the satirist William Donaldson (1935-2005) and the politician the Right Honourable Enoch Powell (1912-98). Donaldson (most famous as the author of The Henry Root Letters) is suspected because he once lived in a brothel run by his girlfriend in the nearby Fulham Road and because of the prankish nature of the manuscripts' discovery. And Enoch Powell because anybody taking a late-afternoon stroll around that part of Belgravia in the 1980s and '90s was almost certain to see the British Warm overcoat and the black Homburg hat that both clad the man and trumpeted his sartorial fanfare; one saw them well before those large, limpid, ice-pale eyes loomed out of the circumambient fog of fashionable London, mesmerizing pedestrians to step off the kerb and lower their gaze until he had floated by. He was the very spirit of the place, and perhaps death itself has been unable to prevent his apparition even today? Of the two, we must lean toward Donaldson or some satirist poured into a similar mould. The addresses given by "Faye" in various Introductions in the books - Bushey Arches ... Bushey Park ... Much Hadham ... Crouch End ... Effingham (all genuine places in England) - point to that sort of humour, which is too playful for old Enoch.But perhaps Faye really is a woman after all. Many of her most ardent fans would dearly love to have it proved. A Scarlet Woman? Here one can paraphrase the doggerel about the Scarlet Pimpernel:They seek her here.They seek him there.Her fans they seek "Faye" everywhere.Has she a hole or has he a pole?That damned elusive Rossignol!When all's said and done, we are left (most fortunately) with the writing. Despite its subject matter, the literary merit of "Faye's" work was soon recognised by, it so happens, a beneficed clergyman in the Church of England. He, however, wishes to remain anonymous. Indeed, everyone connected with the rescue and publication of "her" works, is by choice anonymous. The media feeding-frenzy that would be unleashed were even one of them to be named in public would divert all attention away from the books, whose merits are great enough for them to speak for themselves. If "Faye" herself desired to remain unsung, how could lesser mortals muscle in openly by name and bask in the light that "she" had shunned? It would be unconscionable. In short: Shallow-minded seekers after any sort of "celebrity" link must learn to grow up and content themselves, instead, with these seventeen bright jewels of modern erotic fiction.(Shortly after www.Fayerossignol.org/asm went online an anonymous surfer submitted an image found among items left by his late father, who operated a photo booth on New York's Coney Island. Its attractions included a six-foot image of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, with a hole where the face would be. People would poke their heads through the hole and have their photograph taken. The name, place, and date were then added to the print. ["And," our surfer adds, "Dad made a fortune for supplying pictures with falsified dates to most of the adulterers in New York."] If this is, indeed "our" own dear Faye, it is the only known picture of her to have surfaced so far.)

Book preview

Introduction

Pearl Keefer was one of the most famous courtesans in turn-of-the-century Istanbul, or Constantinople, as she preferred to call it; and later in Paris. Her autobiography, though not exactly a lie, is a tale of outrageous exaggeration – or what we now call hype. She wrote it in English during the year she worked as a fille de joie at the French Hareem (1904). She had it translated into French and published it on the very day she moved into her palatial villa in Paris, overlooking the Longchamps racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne – not far from the Rothschild mansion. It was June, 1905.

Her tale was specifically designed to promote her tail – tp catch the attention of sporting gentlemen, randy aristocrats, and lecherous plutocrats, and provoke them into visiting her villa and paying the most outrageous sums for the privilege of a night between her thighs.

Here I am, she was saying in effect, the girl who hit Constantinople like a sexual earthquake. Come and see what all that excitement was about! Come and experience it for yourself!

And come they did! They kept her maid busy changing her sheets until the early 1920s, when, a sprightly forty-two-year-old who admitted to thirty-eight and hardly looked even that, she bought an island in the Aegean and retired there to collect art and toyboys with all the enthusiasm you might expect of her. She died shortly before the outbreak of the second world war – with a certain smile on her face as the Paris obituaries coyly expressed it. Among her papers was discovered the original English draft of her tale; and this, as far as I know, is its first publication in that language.

She certainly understood men – at least, the sort of men who were her targets. Her picture of the Orient as the Near and Middle East were then called, comes straight out of the Arabian Nights and owes little or nothing to reality. There was no market in slave-girls in Istanbul in 1904 – at least, not of the kind Pearl depicts. No doubt, then as now, brothel owners traded girls among themselves, but such transactions were more likely to take place in some dingy back street caf’ than in the kind of palatial slave-girl market Miss Keefer gives us.

Her account of life in the harem, or hareem is it was then spelled, is also highly coloured. The Old Seraglio of the Sultan himself, in the days when seraglios were seraglios, had room for at most eighty females of all ages – and remember, a harem is really part of the household, the entire female household, not a kind of private brothel for the man of the house; this latter view of it is a European fantasy upon which Pearl Keefer is happy to build.

The high-class house of pleasure known as the French Hareem, however, was real. And so was Zarkos – in fact, he owned it. And, like many rich crooks in Istanbul, he had a bodyguard of Ethiopian mercenaries – though probably no more than six. Taking care of their sexual needs was a problem, of course; he solved it for his own gang, and those of his closest associates, in the way Pearl describes, using the filles de joie of the French Hareem.

We have independent verification of the Monday night ritual in the memoirs of the other Walter, which I edited and published recently under the title, A Victorian Lover of Women. Walter spent an entire week in the French Hareem and chronicled its activities in loving detail; but he didn’t realize (and nor did I until I came to edit Pearl’s papers) that the girls had taken him for a ride in more than one sense! Rather than admit they were simply spreading their thighs for a motley gang of bodyguards, kept by various thugs and mobsters in the city, they invented the more romantic tale of a great Pasha and his seventy-two splendid warriors. Pearl, who had a copy of Walter’s memoirs in her library, was happy to take up the baton he passed to her and embellish it still further.

It is, of course, impossible to disentangle fact from fantasy now. What probably happened is that Pearl Keefer, the still-virgin daughter of an American businessman in Cairo, was, indeed, seduced by Zarkos, just as she describes it in her opening scene. Whether Edward Kinloch-Shand ever existed one cannot say. Perhaps some foolhardy Englishman attempted to intervene when Zarkos reduced Pearl to tears in that Viennese café ... perhaps she then allowed her lively imagination to take over from that. At all events, he comes in very handy to show how utterly ruthless Zarkos was – and all in the first half-dozen pages! After which we can get down to a steady diet of sexual overindulgence, all in the best traditions of erotic fiction.

In reality, Zarkos probably took her to Istanbul, seduced her, kept her as his mistress for a while, and then sent her on to the French Hareem. There, being a lively and resourceful young woman, she swiftly realized that all the best sex takes place in the mind. The vagina of the girl you could buy for five dinars on the Pera waterfront was probably of the same size and juiciness as the one it would cost you thirty times as much to enjoy up at the French Hareem; all the important differences were in the minds of the men who were willing to pay that much. She would have called them delusions rather than mere differences.

Pearl of the Hareem is a calculated attempt to stretch those delusions to their uttermost limit – to make Pearl Keefer seem as far above the high-priced courtesans of the French Hareem as they were above the waterfront tarts. That it succeeded, and kept her in undreamed-of luxury for more than two decades, is in my view a tribute to the enduring wisdom of women concerning the enduring folly of men.

Chapter 1

Pearl never denied that the first step into sin was hers; but from that fateful moment on, she became the helpless plaything of the sinfulness of others. Once she said yes to Zarkos her destiny was in his hands – which were, as it turned out, the most restless, avaricious, merciless hands in the entire Orient.

He had been charming enough to her in Cairo, where he had come to see her father on a matter of business. He seemed to be everything an innocent, sheltered young girl of nineteen could desire – slim, lithe, darkly handsome, suave, attentive ... oh, those big soulful eyes which explored her charms with such frank admiration! It had been like stepping into a warm bath to be in his company – in Cairo.

Of course he had twigged at once that all was not well between her and her father, and he had been quick to exploit the rift for all it was worth. And of course she did not know that every time he left Constantinople on matters of business he always returned with a new European girl for his hareem. His promises of a fast and exciting life, travelling incessantly between the festive capitals of Europe, wearing only the most luxurious clothes, being simply festooned with costly jewellery, and enjoying his undying devotion – these and similar pledges had been honed to perfection over the last two decades; for he was now forty-three and had seduced his first young girl in Paris in 1884, twenty years ago.

He had developed a set routine. He always took the girl back East on the Orient Express, which they joined at Vienna; by the time they arrived at Constantinople, forty hours later, she was completely broken to his will and resigned to her fate. And that process of wearing her down always began here, in this elegant little café in the Prater. His first move was to point out to her that, although she might have been completely innocent as to what his proposition – the unspoken half of it – really meant, the rest of the world would never believe her. Indeed, in the eyes of that world she was already a fallen woman. He would plug away at this theme until he saw the tears brimming in her eyes and then he’d immediately set about softening the blow with soothing words and emollient promises. And so he would keep it up all the way to their destination – hot and cold, soothing and harsh, gentle and furious – until the poor girl was emotionally exhausted.

But with Pearl something went wrong. She had just begun to cry when Fate slipped a wild card into Zarkos’s marked deck; the young gentleman at the neighbouring table now stood up and played it – literally in the form of his carte de visite, which he laid firmly on the table before her: Edward Kinloch-Shand, she read – with an address at The Albany, London, and memberships of The Guards and the Etonians’ clubs. And as for you, he said quietly to Zarkos, you greasy little Oriental tyke, if you aren’t out of my sight in half a minute, I shall have to deal with you.

Now Zarkos was a well-built fellow; he had fought his way up through the ratpacks of Tatavla – and no one can do that without killing a few dozen rivals along the way. But the Tatavla of Istanbul is one thing; an elegant café terrace in Vienna, a city where he liked to pass himself off as a civilized and cultivated gentleman, was quite another. Discretion, he decided, was the order of the day – of this particular day.

There would be plenty of other days when he could kill this absurd English puppy and take back the silly little American girl, whom he now regarded as his absolute property. So he bowed stiffly and turned to go. After only two paces he spun around and stared at the young man again. Edward Kinloch-Shand, he said. He did not so much as glance at Pearl.

Look how he walks! she murmured as they watched him all the way to the entrance. I should have seen it at once. How could I have been so blind?

Seen what? the Englishman asked.

He dresses like a civilized man but his walk is that of a tiger at the zoo. He’s a pure carnivore! To her distress something within her almost admired the beast; there was even an impulse to run after him – it was small and easily quelled, but it was there, nonetheless.

Yes, well ... The Englishman cleared his throat. Are you sort-of all right now, Miss ... er?

Oh, excuse me! She laughed and introduced herself: Miss Pearl Keefer. As a matter of fact, I’m not all right. I can’t even pay for this coffee.

Ah, I say! Dashed awkward, what, he replied. I can hardly offer to lend money to an unmarried lady! Have you a brother, Miss Keefer?

She shook her head.

A father, then. May I lend your father ... what shall we say? A hundred marks? That should cover this and your cab fare home.

She smiled weakly at him. May I ask you to sit down, Mr Kinloch-Shand? It is not as simple as that, I’m afraid.

She told him everything – beginning with the fact that her father was an American merchant based in Cairo, and her mother was half-French, half-Arab ...

D’you speak Arabic? he asked eagerly – in Arabic.

Better almost than English, she replied in the same tongue.

He clapped his hands with delight and suddenly that icy English reserve, which would otherwise have taken weeks to melt, was quite evaporated. Ten minutes later, chatting away in fluent Arabic, they took a cab into the heart of Vienna. There they purchased a few overnight things and enough fresh clothing to see her through the next two days – which just left them time to catch the Orient Express. Edward, too, it transpired, was on his way to Constantinople. He had a good friend there, he told Pearl – a certain Nubar Petrosian, a dealer in petroleum oil. I’m sure he needs a good governess for his children, or a piano tutor, or something. He’ll look after you well – and not in the way Zarkos intended! he assured her.

They were so deep in happy conversation that neither of them noticed Zarkos stepping aboard the same train, just two carriages beyond theirs.

Even so they took all the precautions they could think of. They occupied adjoining compartments and left the connecting door slightly ajar. Pearl locked and bolted her door so that even the conductor could not enter it directly – only by way of Edward’s stateroom, where they decided to take all their meals.

It was the most luxurious train Pearl had ever seen, with cut glass, polished rosewood and delicate inlays, rococo ceilings, richly patterned moquette upholstery, deep carpets, and crisp damask table linen. Just like home, Edward said with a smile as they seated themselves against the window.

The train moved majestically out of the Stadtbahnhof at once. Almost immediately it crossed the Donau Canal and then the mighty Danube itself. From the high steel viaduct the city was a fairyland of reflected sunlight. Pearl gazed happily at her gallant rescuer. He was her very ideal of the parfit, gentil knight, and she knew at last what the poets had been talking about all these centuries when they spoke of the majesty and mystery of love. 

* * *

She was still in that ecstatic mood the following evening when they stepped off the train at Constanza and boarded the equally luxurious steamer that would take them the final twelve hours down the Black Sea to Constantinople. They stood out on deck beneath the stars. He smoked a manly cigar, she sipped a very feminine liqueur, and together they marvelled at the beauty of the world, the kindliness of Fate, and the power of the love that now united them unto death.

If we’d caught the train tomorrow, he told her, we’d have gone overland all the way – and missed all this.

It’s our guardian angel, darling, she murmured, snuggling against him. I’m sure we have the same one. He’s watching over us now. And no harm can ever ...

At that moment Edward pulled violently away from her. She staggered a little, opened her eyes, caught her balance, clutched the rail, drew herself upright, and looked about to see what was the matter.

What was the matter was that Edward was nowhere in sight.

Her confusion had lasted barely two seconds – which explains why she heard his cry for help, from somewhere below her, a moment before she heard the actual splash.

She tried to call out his name but there was no air in her lungs. She drew a deep breath – and that proved a mistake, too, for the air she breathed was sickly sweet and cloying. A second later she fell unconscious into the arms of Zarkos.

* * *

Ainé, the little slave girl, worked away diligently. While the chloroform was still heavy in the veins of the pale-skinned Beauty, she plucked out every last underarm hair and rubbed in the salve that would take away the irritation. The sleeping Beauty (the only name Ainé could imagine for her) stirred uneasily when she turned her attention to those disgusting hairs lower down, beneath her belly and around the Mound of Joys. What barbarians those Europeans were! How could they walk around with that degrading fur on them, like she-bears? Ainé shuddered as she tweaked them out, deftly, swiftly. She dipped her nimble fingers in resin after every half-dozen or so, to prevent them from slipping on the fine strands. Soon she had the Beauty looking as pure and clean as on the day of her birth.

Now it was time to part the Beauty’s thighs wide and complete the task among those delicate folds that guard the Well of All Happiness. She wondered if she should do it herself or wait for Zarkos. If she undid the shackles and the Beauty awoke and struggled free ... no! She shivered. The cruel lashes that would follow swiftly on such a disaster didn’t bear thinking about. She decided she would wait for Zarkos.

It was not a long wait. The cruel despot was so pleased with himself he looked into the stateroom three or four times every hour, just to gloat over his captive, his new property, his new slave. Also he wanted to be sure nobody could warn her what thrilling fate now lay in store. The little slave girl would already have guessed, of course, for he, Zarkos, never had his European girls plucked until he was well and truly finished with them; Ainé might find some way of alerting Pearl – through broken French, snatches of Arabic ... even in mime. He grinned savagely at the thought – yes, it could certainly be conveyed in mime!

Ainé sat patiently and waited, calmly appraising the good and bad points of the naked Beauty before her. There was very little you could say was bad – and most of that had already been plucked away. Her long, fair hair, which Ainé had combed right out and which reached almost to her waist, was so alluring. And those violet eyes, which Ainé had seen when she lifted the Beauty’s eyelids to observe how deeply she was out ... oh, they would melt the heart of many a man; but it was a bleak, rather than a poetic judgement – considering the life that now awaited the poor creature.

The lips were a bit of a mystery. The rest of her face was delicate and fine, the face of a reserved and modest young woman; but the lips were full and sensuous, the lips of a wanton, even of a gluttonous wanton. And the firm chin beneath it was that of a third type of woman, strong and stubborn – a woman who could endure much if she could see a worthwhile goal ahead.

Ainé smiled sadly at this last judgement, for she realized it was mere wishful thinking. No one, neither man nor woman, no matter how strong and stubborn, no matter what they were prepared to endure, no one had ever got the better of Zarkos. Constantinople had ghosts aplenty to testify to that!

The man himself came in at that moment. Lithe and silent though he was, Ainé had developed a sixth sense for his comings and goings. He found her plucking out the last two visible hairs from Pearl’s Mound of Joy, which she had left for this precise moment.

Good girl! he said affably. You’ve done an excellent job, little angel. I’m very pleased. They spoke in Arabic, the only language the girl possessed.

You never knew with Zarkos. He could be screaming his head off at you and you’d be safe from harm; or he could be praising you to the skies, telling you how beautiful you were, and how much you pleased him – and that might be the most dangerous moment of all. Or he might actually mean every word. You could never tell.

Thank you, master, she said humbly. I need to work in between her thighs now.

Yes, of course, he said. Let me help you move her.

There were two ornate brass bedsteads in the stateroom. Until now Pearl had been tied to one of them, her arms spreadeagled to the head posts, her feet tethered to the central bar at the foot of the bed. Now Zarkos undid her shackles, one at a time, and moved her round until she lay across the bed, with her wrists tied to the side beam nearest the stateroom door and her derrière balanced nicely on the opposite edge, nearest the second bed.

This is how we managed the last one, isn’t it, he went on, still in his mild tone. What was her name?

Madeleine, master.

Oh yes! He sighed at the memory and then laughed. But she was no longer a virgin by then, of course. I fucked the tail off that one. We’ll get a better price for this.

As he spoke he moved the other bed closer, to the point where they could lift Pearl’s heels and shackle them to its side beam, as wide apart as they’d go. Then, for good measure, he took a broad leather belt from a nearby drawer and, leaning over her from her head end, bound her midriff to the bed; thus he made it impossible even for her to squirm. Is she a virgin? he asked the little slave girl, who was already squatting between the spreadeagled thighs, preparing to complete her task.

Yes, master. Her Veil of Innocence is completely intact.

No little splits at all? No doubt about it?

Nothing I can see, master.

By God, if there is, I’ll skin you alive, you little worm – for leading me on like that. Dark as thunder suddenly, he moved round the bed in four agile paces, saying, Take up that sponge and squeeze it over her face.

Poor little Ainé, her heart suddenly pounding with fear, leaped to obey.

But she had been right. Pearl’s maidenhead was absolutely unmarked.

Oh yes! he murmured ecstatically. "What a perfect little oyster! Never been touched! You can see it’s virgin land. Oh, let me but kiss it!"

He kissed and licked and nuzzled that dainty fig, while Ainé schooled herself to show no disgust – not that Zarkos should do such a thing but that he should do it to a girl so coarse and foul that she still had hair down there! But, thanks be to God, Zarkos was so delighted with the Beauty’s secret folds that he forgot his previous anger and began to praise her, Ainé, to the skies again.

The Beauty stirred and came blearily awake, mumbling what? or where? or who? – or a little bit of all three.

A delightful little joke occurred to Zarkos. Continuing his praise of the little slave girl he said, In fact, Ainé, I’m so pleased with you, I’m going to do you the greatest honour I can bestow on any woman. I’m going to make you a present of my precious life juices. Stand up – no, no! Vicious petulance flared again briefly. Face her, with your back to me!

Ainé did as she was bid, and waited patiently for him to take her.

Unbutton your bodice and step out of your drawers, he commanded.

It was all the clothing she had on. While she obeyed, he took off his trousers and hung them neatly over Pearl’s right leg, then his shirt, which he hung over her left. And Pearl herself just lay there, wide-eyed by now and speechless – and, as she suddenly discovered, unable to move