Yearn by Tobsha Learner Read Free Book Online Page B

I could not find a rational explanation except to acknowledge that the sex magic had worked and Otheothea had seen through her enemy’s eyes in order to locate the stolen crops.
    Naturally the notion that such a ritual might indeed be empowering is deeply disturbing to me. I cannot afford such methods of promotion to become available to either my contemporaries or descendants. This kind of alchemy is not fit for either Christian or Englishman . . . and yet, it is mesmerizing.
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    By the time D’Arcy had finished reading dawn was already creeping in under the curtains and the fire in the hearth was reduced to smoldering embers. He closed the journal. Already he felt like an entirely different man from the one who had sat down to study the journal eight hours before. He had been transformed. He felt as if his notion of perception, the borders of reality, even his understanding of what religious worship might be had been blown apart. The discovery of the journal was more than just an extraordinary piece of luck that would doubtless propel his biography into a league of its own. It had also stirred D’Arcy to new heights of aspiration: to control the gaze of your enemy, to actually leave your body and enter another? These adventures promised to be as much a thaumaturgy of the senses as the orgy itself. And what if the ritual actually worked? He sat there staring across the familiar planes and shapes of his study and yet he was in Polynesia, lying naked and satiated in a jungle clearing by the smoldering remains of a log fire, his spirit having flown from his body and then returned, restored, renewed, the doors of perception yawning open. If only he had that power—to be able to see through the eyes of anyone he liked for an hour, to experience what they were seeing. What would he do with such a gift?
    Just then his eye fell upon Tuttle’s white glove, which he had placed at the base of Sir Joseph Banks’s marble bust as a kind of trophy or offering. Inspired by the sight, a small trickle of an idea started glinting in his consciousness, an idea of revenge, of empowerment, an idea that might reverse forever the calamitous set of circumstances he now found himself in. If D’Arcy had such a gift, even for an hour, he would be able to find out at exactly what stage Tuttle was in his book. He would be able to read the actual pages, gauge whether Tuttle’s biography would be a real threat to his own. He would triumph no matter what.
    Physically exhausted but with his mind racing with excitement, D’Arcy threw himself down on the daybed in a corner of the study. Strategies danced like dervishes about him. His plan would have to be extremely well executed. To conduct a ritual like that in London would not only be potentially ruinous (if it were ever discovered), it would also no doubt be illegal. And yet the advantage gained would be tenfold. Not only would he be able to thwart Tuttle’s publication (a concept that was as delicious to him as any fought duel), he would also have undergone the same experience as Joseph Banks himself, and the idea of being thus fused forever to his great idol was almost as irresistible.
    He lay there imagining all the consequences—himself basking in the fame of scandalous celebrity, the book sales, the sheer pleasure of trumping Tuttle in the reviews, the covert pleasure of being in his skin for an hour, perusing his notes. . . . His mind was made up; he had no choice. It was as if the very discovery of the journal—the way it had organically arrived in his hands, the arbitrariness of Harry the sweep’s appearance, the coincidence of D’Arcy having stayed in that afternoon when the chimneys were being cleaned—was destined; he was compelled to commit body and soul to the journal. He had to perform the magic.
    But now, having persuaded himself, he was confronted with the bleak reality of planning