She retrieved the soap, shampoo, toothbrush, and toothpaste.
Apparently Barry found her pleasant to the eye because he kept staring at her until she had left the room.
Lady Irene’s husband had never appreciated her naked body as much as every casual stranger who saw Flame now.
When she returned, sopping wet and dripping on the floor, he was still in her cell, waiting for her. There was a towel lying on her bed.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay.” Her ass was sore. It felt like it was bruised to the bone. Walking hurt.
“No sniffles? Sneezing? Coughing?”
“No.”
“We don’t want any kennel cough. Let me know immediately if there’s any change in your health.”
She nodded. “Do you provide food?” She was hungry. Her last meal was lunch the previous day. Lady Irene ate lightly but regularly. She was not accustomed to missing meals.
“Not unless instructed. We’ve received no instruction about nutrition yet.”
“Is there any chance that I could get a book to read?” The prospect of spending the day in her windowless, featureless cell was bleak. The light was on now. She hoped that Barry would leave it on.
“That’s your owner’s prerogative, not mine.”
A television would clearly be out of the question.
There was a moment of silence, then he said, “I heard a rumor that you volunteered for slavery. Is that right?”
She nodded. “It was an impulse.” A self-destructive impulse, akin to jumping off a bridge or stepping in front of a train.
“You were a lady? In the peerage? Married to a lord?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“Me, neither,” she said. “It was an impulse.”
“I have to lock you in,” he said. “We have to leave a slave as we find her.” Presumably that meant that he would turn out her light, too. He stepped toward the door.
“Wait,” she said.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if you could help me with something.”
“Maybe. What?”
She lowered her eyes and stared at the floor. “I… I don’t have much experience. I want to please my owner.”
“That’s a good idea.” His voice was dry. He’d seen the bruises on her ass and assumed that she’d already failed to please him.
“I don’t know how to… How to please a man … service him … with my mouth. I’ve never had to do that and I heard that men like it.”
“You want to know how to give him a blow job? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“What’s to know? Don’t bite him. And don’t blow. Kiss and lick and suck until he comes. Use your hands, too. Jerk him off into your mouth. It’s way harder to get him to come if you don’t jerk him off. And swallow. Don’t gag or spit it back out. Just swallow his jizz and lick him clean afterward. That’s a nice touch, cleaning him up.”
“That sounds easy enough.”
“I guess it is. Even stupid girls figure it out.”
“Can I try it?”
“What do you mean?” He stared at her and raised an eyebrow. “With me? Now?”
“Yes. Please.”
He looked around as though the owner might be standing behind him. They were alone.
“Okay. Make it quick, then.”
She dropped to her knees in front of him and unbuckled his pants. He was erect already. She didn’t know if he were bigger than other men or not – she had never seen a cock this close – but he looked enormous. She grabbed him tentatively and licked his shiny purple head experimentally.
He tasted a little salty, but not too bad.
She tried again.
“Tighter,” he said. “Hold me tighter and put some spit into it. A blowjob should be sloppy. It’s all right if saliva is running down your chin and dripping on your tits. It shows enthusiasm. You’re letting a man know how great his dick is. You can’t go wrong as long as you’re making him feel like a stud.”
She threw herself into the task, licking him, shoving him as far down her throat as she could take him, sucking with gusto.
He began groaning and his words grew effortful. “Good…god!… You… natural… wonderful… pump me… with fist… fast… Goooood-God! … God! … God!”
She was the one on her knees but he was the one praying to God.
She felt him begin to pulse with her hand first, and then against her lips, and then he was spraying great, thick gobs across her tongue. She thrust all civilized thoughts out of her mind and began swallowing and swallowing.
His contractions continued sporadically for longer than she expected. She always thought that a man spurted into a woman and that was the end. Now she realized that a man’s orgasm was a prolonged process.
Too late, she understood why James had wanted to keep lying on top of her for a while after he was done. It was because he wasn’t.
When Barry’s cock began to soften in her mouth she remembered what he’d said and licked him clean.
When she released him, he sagged against the bed.
“Thank you for the instruction,” she said.
It took a moment for him to stop gasping. Then he said, “You’re welcome.”
He rested for a couple of minutes.
She waited on her knees – the picture of subservience – and thought about a different meaning for the words, kennel service.
“You never did that before?” he asked.
“Never. I just did what you told me.”
“Are all ladies such quick studies?”
“I’m not a lady. Just a slave.”
He grinned. “Yeah, right. Well, don’t worry. You’re going to do fine with old Dodge.”
Dodge wasn’t that old. Maybe in his early forties, but he was more than a decade older than the kennelman.
“I still have to lock you in,” he said. “And I can’t give you any books or food.”
“That’s all right. I understand.”
“I don’t think that you’ll have much problem getting treats from your owner, though.”
She felt a surge of pride. She’d done well. “I’ll see what I can do.”
He left her light on. She didn’t know if that was standard procedure or a treat in gratitude for the blowjob. She liked the idea that she had earned a boon.
She brushed out her hair and applied makeup using the mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door.
The woman slaver had told her that slaves should wear their makeup heavy, but Flame decided to maintain her lady face until Dodge indicated that he wanted something different.
He could have bought one of the more experienced slaves, but he’d paid a lot to get a lady that he could fuck. She felt obliged to give him his money’s worth.
* * *
“I could kill you, you know. I could handcuff you and then get a knife from the kitchen – the big butcher knife – and carve you into pieces. Nobody would stop me.”
The woman standing at the door of Flame’s cell was petite. No slave; her grey-speckled, curly hair was pinned on the top of her head, baring the nape of her neck for the world to see that it was unmarked. The corners of her eyes were wrinkled into crow’s feet. She was no older than Dodge but she had not aged as well as he had. Women seldom aged as well as men.
“I could slice your tits off and spill your bowels over the floor and wear your scalp for a wig and I wouldn’t be arrested for it. Nobody would care.”
Her husband would care. He would lose a piece of property that was worth a hundred-thousand plaqs. But the authorities wouldn’t lift a finger. Mrs. Dodge was right about that. Flame’s well-being was of no more concern to them than if Mrs. Dodge took a sledge hammer to her own china cabinet.
She pulled half a loaf of bread, a chunk of cheese, and a meaty hambone out of a sack and threw each of them at Flame. The cheese bounced off her breast onto the floor and the bread misse
d her completely and bounced off the wall onto the bed. The hambone almost nailed her in the head but Flame managed to get a hand up and deflected it onto the floor with the cheese.
“Maybe I poisoned your dinner. Think about that when you’re eating it.”
The woman slammed the door when she left.
Flame didn’t hear the lock click closed. Most likely Mrs. Dodge was hoping that she would avail herself of the opportunity to escape and flee back to Calam Shire.
She would not. Everyone knew that runaway slaves never got far and Flame had no desire to be nailed akimbo to the jailhouse wall. Those poor wretches took days to die.
She wasn’t that self-destructive.
As she picked the bits of dirt out of the cheese and ham, she thought about Mrs. Dodge.
She didn’t blame Mrs. Dodge for hating her. Every lady hated her husband’s slaves. When she had been Irene, she had hated James’ slaves with as much passion as Mrs. Dodge hated her. But a lady didn’t express her hate. Not like Mrs. Dodge did. Doing so would lower the lady to the slave’s level while simultaneously giving the slave a degree of humanity that she didn’t warrant.
If you hate your husband’s car, you don’t abuse it, you ask your husband to buy a new one.
It was a trial for a lady because most husbands required that their slaves perform routine chores around the house. It was a necessary part of the fiction that the slaves were purchased for the house rather than to satisfy the husband’s lust.
Normally, the ladies in the house avoided the areas where the slaves worked during the times that they would be working. Irene had almost never seen James’ slaves. And she certainly had never seen them nude.
What kind of woman would visit her husband’s kennels? No lady. Well, maybe Lady Fern, the sadistic lesbian who was as likely to use her husband’s slaves as he was. But Fern was no lady, despite her title.
Maybe old Dodge was punishing his wife for something and that was why he had ordered her to bring food to the slave.
If so, it was certainly a cruel and unusual punishment. For both Mrs. Dodge and her.
When she was gnawing the meat off the hambone, she suspected that she was also eating Mrs. Dodge’s saliva. She smelled it carefully, but couldn’t detect the odor of urine of feces.
At least Mrs. Dodge was that much of a lady.
Some hours later, Mrs. Dodge returned. This time she was carrying a green print dress and flat shoes. She hurled those at Flame – the dress fluttered ineffectively through the air but the shoes struck her solidly in the chest – and said, “Report to the back door of the house in five minutes for your afternoon duties.”
The dress was a standard cotton housedress that slaves were given when they were required to come to the house. The shoes were the usual low flats.
There was no underwear.
As a lady, Irene had always seen the slave’s housedress as a demeaning garment that covered the slave’s body with a shapeless, poorly-tailored sack that made the slave almost sexless.
Now, as a slave, feeling the housedress from the inside, Flame saw it entirely differently, though no less demeaning. It was nothing but a curtain to hide rampant sexuality from public view. And, like a curtain, it could be raised in a flash to bare the naked flesh underneath for quick and convenient use.
She had never realized that if James had cornered one of his slaves in the laundry or pantry, he could have raised her skirt, fucked her, and dropped it back over her in less time than it would have taken Irene to unlace the bodice on her dress.
She wondered if James had ever done that.
She wondered if Dodge were going to do that to her this evening.
The life of a slave was far less predictable than the life of a lady. That’s what she had wanted and that’s what she was getting. Unpredictability by the shovelful. Which included getting a rock-hard cock shoved into her hot, steamy cunt at any time without warning.
The standard layout for houses with kennels was for slaves to move between them by one of two paths. For daily activities, the slave exited the kennel by a door to the outside and entered the house through an exterior door – in this house, a door directly into the kitchen as opposed to James’ manor, which had a kitchen courtyard with doors to both the kitchen and the service hallway.
For special events – slaves providing entertainment in the drawing room after dinner, for example – they used a covered corridor between the kennel’s pleasure room and the drawing room or parlor in the house.
In James’ manor, that corridor had been sunken below ground level; in the Dodge house, it was above ground and had the appearance of a high stone garden wall.
Because Mrs. Dodge had requested Flame’s presence for “legitimate” service, Flame was expected to go outside and enter directly into the kitchen.
There were no windows in the kennel. When she opened the door to the outside, she was surprised to find that it was raining – not a drizzle, but a downpour.
She sprinted from the kennel to the house as fast as she could but she couldn’t avoid getting wet. When she entered the kitchen, the light cotton was clinging to her legs, breasts, and buttocks.
Mrs. Dodge looked at her in disgust but didn’t deign to comment.
“You’ll butterfly a chicken for dinner. You will serve it with asparagus with orange sauce, roasted new potatoes, and a tomato-sweet pepper-onion salad. We’ll have crème caramel for desert. We eat at six.”
Flame stared at Mrs. Dodge in horror.
“Well? What are you waiting for? Get that chicken marinating.”
Flame shook her head slowly.
“Are you refusing to work?” Mrs. Dodge’s voice was low and menacing.
The punishment for refusing to work could be as severe as the owner wished. Disfigurement, mutilation, or even death was not unheard of.
Flame fell to her knees in terror. “Please. I want to do it but I can’t.”
Mrs. Dodge kicked her, swift and sharp, in the ribs. It hurt. “What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I can’t cook. I don’t know how to cook. I’ve never cooked a meal in my life.”
Mrs. Dodge kicked her in the ribs again. “Useless cunt.”
Actually, Flame’s cunt was the one part that Mr. Dodge found most useful.
“What can you do?”
“Embroider. Tat. I can paint in watercolors and oils. I play the flute and clavier. Some of my lyric poetry is pretty good.”
“Useless cunt.” Mrs. Dodge kicked her a third time.
“Please. I want to learn to cook. Please. Show me how so I’ll be able to do it the next time.”
“You don’t know how badly I want to cut your tits off and make you fry them in butter for your own dinner.”
Flame knew. She had wanted to do horrible things to James’ slaves, too. But Mrs. Dodge wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t destroy property that was worth a hundred-thousand plaqs. Or so Flame hoped.
“However much Frank paid for you, it was way too much, I’m sure of that.” Mrs. Dodge kicked her again.
Flame’s ribs were suffering acute pain. If Mrs. Dodge kicked much harder, she might break them. It could happen. Flame realized that Mrs. Dodge had no idea that she was kicking a hundred-thousand plaq slave around her kitchen. She probably thought that her husband had paid ten or fifteen thousand for her.
Flame should have guessed that Mrs. Dodge would be ignorant of her value. James had never told her how much he paid for his slaves, either. Irene never knew that a slave could cost more than a hundred thousand. If the cost of Feather were any indication, James might have paid nearly half a million for his stable.
Flame’s mind boggled at the thought.
Her more immediate concern was that Mrs. Dodge might kill her if she thought that she wasn’t worth very much.
“Please let me learn to cook. Please. I’m begging you.” She was begging for her life. Literally.
“I’m not teaching you to cook. You need something to do? You get a bucket a
nd a scrub brush from the laundry and you scrub this floor. You start scrubbing in here and you keep scrubbing until every inch of tile in this whole house is clean enough to eat off. And it better be because you’re going to be eating off it tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” The servile gratitude in Flame’s voice was sincere.
Flame didn’t rise to her feet, but scrambled across the floor to get out of the kitchen as quickly as she could.
Mrs. Dodge hurried her on her way with a parting kick to her butt. She connected hard. It hurt because Flame was still bruised from Mr. Dodge’s paddling last night. Flame squealed in pain.
She found the bucket and filled it with hot water in the set tub.
When she returned to the kitchen she asked, “Do I just use water, or should I put some soap or something in it?”
“Stupid, useless cunt. Put in a cup of vinegar.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Flame returned to the laundry room and found a bottle of vinegar under the sink. She didn’t have a cup measure, so she poured a generous amount into the bucket.
The tiles were hard on her knees but she ignored that and scrubbed with vigor. While she was scrubbing, she kept an eye on Mrs. Dodge’s boot.
Recipes. Of course. Mrs. Dodge had laid out recipes on the counter and consulted them as she cooked. If Flame had realized that, she would have tried to follow them rather than admitting to Mrs. Dodge that she was helpless in the kitchen.
She saw Mrs. Dodge add spices to oil in a bowl and then put the chicken into it and leave it there. That must be the marinating that she had mentioned.
Next, she chopped vegetables. Two tomatoes, a long red pepper, and half an onion went into a bowl. Mrs. Dodge poured oil and vinegar into another, smaller bowl and whisked in various herbs and spices. When it was well mixed, she poured it over the vegetables.
Then she left the room.
It was easier for Flame to clean the floor when she didn’t have to dodge around Mrs. Dodge’s kicks.
Her knees and back were aching by the time she finished the kitchen floor but she couldn’t stop. She still had the service hallway, laundry, and bathrooms to clean. The remaining rooms had rugs over wood flooring. She was sure that she’d be cleaning those, too, before long. But not with a scrub brush and vinegar water. Most likely with a vacuum cleaner.
Slave of the Aristocracy: Book One – On the Auction Block Page 5
