* * *
Screaming woke Irene. Not her screaming, but screaming from the common room beyond the door.
The shrieking and giggling of the other slaves when Lord Cranford wanted pleasure in the middle of the night often woke her.
These, though, were not screams of pleasure, but of terror.
She tumbled out of bed and staggered toward the door. She had been sleeping in Lord Cranford’s pleasure room for a month and could navigate around the furniture by feel and memory. As she got closer to the door, her pounding heart forced enough blood through her veins to wake her up completely and put her on her guard.
She thought that maybe the kennels were on fire. She felt the door to see if it was hot. It was not. Then she put her ear to the wood and heard a gruff man shouting, “What cell is she in? Which cell?”
“She’s not in the cells!” Melons’ voice was easy to identify.
Irene heard a blow and a crash.
“You!” the man’s voice said. “I know she’s here. Where is she?”
“That door! She’s in that room!” That was Numnums.
Irene backed along the wall, sidling away from the door. She cleared it just in time to avoid being hit as it flew open and smashed against the wall next to her.
A large man was illuminated by the light from the kitchen. He was holding a butcher knife in his hand.
The man rushed to the bed in the middle of the big room, saw that the bed was empty and looked around, searching for Irene.
She slammed the door closed, plunging the room into darkness, and then scrambled away as quietly as possible. Her bare feet made little noise on the hardwood floor.
The assassin had made a serious strategic error when he had failed to turn on the lights before rushing to the bed. The room was a big space filled with furniture that was scattered about in the middle of the floor so that it could be used for sex from any side. He could not safely hurry through the darkness.
Irene slowly, silently worked her way around the room, identifying chairs, low tables, and benches by feel.
The assassin also navigated through the inky blackness by feel, mostly with his toes and shins. Irene could track his progress by thumps, scrapes, and grunts. He was trying to get back to the entrance door so that he could open it far enough to find the light switch, but he wasn’t plotting a true course. Much of the furniture in the room was positioned at angles, so he couldn’t use it as a guide to the orientation of the walls. He wasn’t going to hit the wall anywhere near the door.
Irene’s heart was thumping, pumping blood through her body with great force, demanding a large volume of oxygen. She opened her mouth wide and breathed as gently as she could, lest gasping give her position away.
She didn’t dare attack the man. Even if he was an assassin sent by Sir Drake to murder her, he was a free man. A slave would be crucified for assaulting a free man, even in self-defense.
Undoubtedly the assassin felt relatively safe, believing that her fear of a lingering crucifixion would be greater than her fear of being stabbed to death quickly.
He didn’t know that she had already killed a man, a scion of the aristocracy, no less. Even so, his logic was not wrong. A half-dozen slaves, assuming that they were still alive, had seen the man come into Irene’s room. If he were killed in here and she were still alive, the sheriff would have more than enough evidence to justify crucifying her.
She couldn’t expect the other slaves to keep silent. If they tried in any way to help her escape the consequences of injuring or killing a free man, they would join her on the wall.
Even the defense of a slave’s owner was not justification for the slave killing a free man. Everybody was familiar with several cases where a slave had intervened when someone was attacking her owner because it made for a dramatic story. In fact, a ballad about one of those cases had become a popular folk song. The lyrics told of a slave who was nailed to the wall, even though she had saved her owner’s life. As a gesture of gratitude, the owner was permitted to strangle her with a garrote as soon as the last nail had been driven home.
Irene had no interest in receiving that mercy. She didn’t want to die at all.
This pleasure room had two doors, as was standard in kennels. One that led to the rest of the kennels and one opened onto a corridor that led to the billiard room in the manor. She reached the door to the corridor at the same time as the assassin hit the wall. The thump of his body against plaster-covered concrete sounded different than his crashes into furniture.
She heard him scraping along the wall, looking for the door. He would find the light switch quickly enough. She didn’t bother with silence any more. She opened the door to the corridor quickly and shut it hard to make sure that it latched.
A minute later, the room blazed with light. The assassin looked directly at the door on the other wall and then ran to it. His target would be trapped in the corridor because the door at the manor end of the corridor would be locked from the other side. No owner would risk his slaves coming from his kennels into his manor without his knowledge and permission.
Irene wasn’t in the corridor. As soon as the assassin’s footsteps thumped away, she rose from behind a whipping bench and ran across the room, grabbing a housedress, shoes, and her hooded cloak from beside her bed on the way.
Lord Cranford’s slaves were huddled together in a corner of the common room. They were alive, but there was blood pooled on the floor by their feet. At least one of them had been cut. Maybe one had been killed; Irene didn’t pause to take a head count.
The slaves looked at her as she ran past but didn’t cry out.
Irene fled into the night.
* * *
Irene didn’t dare hide in the garden. She had already tricked the assassin by hiding once so he would be wary of a repeat of that stratagem. On the other hand, he might not be alone. There was no car parked on the driveway outside the kennels but he had to have a car somewhere. He couldn’t carry her severed head through the city streets on foot, not even at three in the morning.
She couldn’t leave the grounds until she was certain that the assassin didn’t have a partner waiting in a getaway car that was on the street.
Normally the slave gates at the back of the manor are locked. No one can get in or out without a key. Tonight, though, the small gate, the one for people on foot, was ajar. Irene could see by the illumination of the nearest streetlight that the lock had been broken. Something had been inserted in the keyhole and twisted with enough force that the mechanism had failed and the bolt had withdrawn.
She peeked through the crack between the gate and the jamb. As she expected, a car, a black Empire Sedan, was parked at the curb. It was silent – the engine was not running – and dark.
She couldn’t see anyone inside.
She slipped the housedress over her head and wrapped the cloak about her, putting the hood over her head, but she didn’t take the time to put her shoes on. She crouched low so that, if someone were hiding in the car, they wouldn’t see her. Then she slowly opened the gate, just far enough to fit through, and duck-walked out onto the sidewalk.
She didn’t know where the assassin was, but he had to have realized that she wasn’t in the corridor by now. He was probably searching the kennels again. Though the slaves would have told him that she had left, he wouldn’t be able to trust them. Then, once he was sure that she was not longer in the kennels, he would have to search the garden.
Neither would take long.
She continued to crouch down as she walked away from the car. When she was a hundred feet down the street, she stood up and kept going.
It was a cold night, not freezing, but cold enough to make her shiver, even when she was wearing her cloak.
As soon as she rounded the corner at the end of the street, she paused to slip her shoes on. That would have helped if her feet hadn’t already been chilled.
She walked for several blocks, working her way uphill on the logic that the assassin would expect her to fle
e downtown where there was more likely to be the occasional person – a baker starting the bread for the day or party-goers finally calling it a night.
This neighborhood, two-thirds of the way up Norbit Hill, was filled with lords’ and earls’ manors. All were fenced and gated. But alleys ran behind the manors so that provisions could be delivered and garbage collected without disrupting the aesthetics of the street.
When she judged that she had walked far enough to give a lone assassin an unmanageable search radius, she slipped into an alley, crawled behind a garbage bin, pulled her cloak tightly around her body, and waited for dawn.
She was freezing and exhausted, but grateful still to be alive.
If Lord Cranford’s slaves hadn’t raised such a commotion when their kennels were invaded, she would have had her throat cut in her sleep. She was grateful to them for that and hoped that none of them were hurt too badly.
The blood that she’d seen on the floor weighed heavily on her mind.
* * *
Irene had no doubt that Sir Drake had sent the assassin to kill her. Nobody else had a motive. Hiding had failed so her next strategy would be to lock herself into a fortress.
Sir Drake had other enemies, both common and highborn but she was distinguished from them because she was utterly vulnerable. She could be killed with impunity.
But if Sir Drake was resorting to hiring cutthroats to break into manors in the dark of night, he might well be tempted to settle more than one score. He might now be willing to take a chance and attack the aristocrats who had helped her against him.
Lord Fortson’s manor – her old home – was less than a mile from where she was hiding.
She waited until well after dawn, until there was enough traffic through the neighborhood that she wouldn’t stand out, and then walked to the Fortson manor.
She kept the hood of her cloak raised to hide her face and resisted the urge to look over her shoulder constantly, but she did pause at the end of each block and turn to survey the streets in all directions, looking for any approaching threat.
She saw nothing, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t being watched.
When she rang the doorbell, Lord Fortson’s long-term house slave, Sud, admitted her. “Lady Fortson! Come in.”
“Not Lady Fortson. Just Irene.” They’d had this same conversation the only other time that she’d come to her husband’s manor since she’d sold herself into slavery.
“You can’t say that, now,” Sud replied. “I heard that you were still married to Lord Fortson. That makes you Lady Fortson as far as I’m concerned.”
Irene was too tired to argue. She stepped over the threshold and removed her cloak.
“Where have you been?” Sud asked. “You’re freezing in that light cloak and little housedress. You get up to your room and get yourself into some proper warm clothes while I call Lord Fortson and tell him that his wife is home.”
“My room?”
“You know where it is. It’s just like you left it a year ago. Lord Fortson wouldn’t let anyone touch it. He just closed the door and told everyone to stay out. Now you get along. I’m sure that your husband will come home right away when he hears that you’re here.”
Irene was amused to hear the house slave take such liberties. If she were truly a lady, no slave would ever order her around with such casual insolence lest she be caned half to death.
“When Lord Fortson returns, tell him that he can find me in his kennels.”
“No, Lady Fortson. That wouldn’t be right. Lord Fortson doesn’t want to see his wife in his slave kennels.”
“Well, I’m a slave, so if he cares to see me at all, that’s where he’s going to find me.”
Sud didn’t follow her through the manor to the back door, but rushed to a telephone in the foyer and began dialing.
Two naked slaves were sitting in the common room in the kennels.
“Who are you?” one asked when Irene entered.
“Irene. Who are you?”
“Spark. Are you Lord Fortson’s slave?” Spark was confused because a new slave was usually brought by her owner into the kennels naked and leashed.
“I might be on loan to him,” Irene said.
“Why? There isn’t an entertainment scheduled tonight, is there?”
“I don’t know. It wouldn’t be for an entertainment. It would be a long-term loan.”
“I never heard of a long-term loan. If he wants you for a long term, why wouldn’t he buy you?”
That was a question that Irene had been asking herself for a year. “He doesn’t want to buy me,” was the only answer that she knew.
The other slave sitting beside Spark said, “Irene’s not a slave name. It’s the name of Lord Fortson’s wife.”
“That, too,” Irene said.
“Are you Lady Fortson?”
“I’m a slave.” Irene turned and parted her hair so that the others could see the registration number tattooed on the nape of her neck.
The other three slaves had no reply. They were confused by Irene’s ambiguous status.
Irene made her status clear by shucking her shoes and housedress. Her cunt, shaved bald in the style of pleasure slaves, confirmed her low position.
“Is there a free cell?”
“I’ll show you,” a new voice said.
Irene turned to see a forth slave standing at the end of the corridor that led to the cells. “Sapphire!”
Sapphire had been Irene’s mentor at her first entertainment a year ago. She was one of the plainest pleasure slaves that Irene had met. Though her face and figure were considerably above average compared to most women, pleasure slaves were selected for their beauty. Sapphire’s narrow, hawkish face did not fit well into the pageant of beauties that paraded across the auction block every month.
It didn’t help that one of her owners had taken a cane to her back many times, cutting her to the bone and leaving her flesh rutted and furrowed.
“I’m Ember in these kennels.”
“I’m Irene.”
“I heard that you’d been given your own name back. And now you’re back in your husband’s kennels.”
“If he’ll have me.”
Sapphire – Ember – cocked her head. “Do you think he might not?”
“I haven’t asked him yet.”
“Let me show you to a cell,” Ember said.
Irene gathered her dress and shoes and followed Ember to one of the two vacant cells in the kennels.
“I never had a chance to thank you for saving me from Baronet Grenfeld at that entertainment last year,” Irene said. “I would have been treated severely if not for your intervention.”
“I didn’t do much, as I remember,” Ember said. “Just offered my services.”
“You offered your services in order to distract the others while Grenfeld treated me as badly as he could. I helped that you took his audience away from him.”
“He was an asshole, wasn’t he?”
“He sure was. But not the worst that I’ve encountered.” At least, Grenfeld never tried to kill her.
Ember winced. “Yeah. I know about bad owners.” She had the disfigured back to prove it.
“How long have you been owned by Lord Fortson?”
“He bought me from Lord Hoffman shortly after I met you at Dodge’s first entertainment. He seems to think that I helped you more than I did that night. He treats me well. Only a couple of gentlemen have owned me longer than he has.”
That implied that he’d owned Ember for a full year.
Irene recalled that Sapphire had told her that she had been owned by two dozen gentlemen. And that she’d been born into slavery, meaning that she would have been sold for the first time at the age of fifteen. In the sixteen years that she had been a pleasure slave, she had been sold almost twice a year on average.
Irene, herself, had been sold five times in the past fourteen months. Six if you counted the last time when she was sold twice within two hours. She didn�
�t know what it would be like to be owned by the same gentleman for a full year.
She was no longer feeling chill. Slave kennels were kept warm, not so much for the slave’s comfort as for the gentlemen who stripped their own clothes off in the pleasure room.
She chatted with Ember for a bit longer, and then lay down on the cot in her new cell to take a nap before confronting her husband.
* * *
“Irene?”
She opened her eyes to see James looking down at her.
“Good morning, Lord Fortson.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to call your husband.” He sounded irritated.
“I want to be your slave. I’ll call you whatever you wish. And you can call me anything that you want.”
“You own yourself. I won’t buy you from your trust.” His irritation was hardening into anger.
This was not the way that she had hoped their conversation would go. But the only other conversation that she had had with him had turned to anger, too. It seemed like there was nothing that she could say that would make him happy.
“I’m not offering to sell myself to you. I’ll never sell myself again.”
“Good.”
“I’m offering to lend myself to you. My trust will lend me to you for as long as I wish.”
“As long as you wish? That’s a peculiar arrangement for a slave. To serve at her own whim rather than her owner’s. It hardly seems like slavery at all.”
“My circumstances are peculiar. You should know that. You worked damn hard to create these peculiar circumstances.”
“Why do you want to lend yourself to me?” His tone was harsh. Blunt.
She understood that she had to give him the right answer, but she didn’t know what he wanted to hear. She decided to tell the truth. She wasn’t much of a liar under the best of circumstances.
“Someone is trying to kill me. I was hiding in Lord Cranford’s kennels but an assassin found me. A man came into the kennels with a knife in the middle of the night. If I’d been sleeping in a cell, he would have killed me in my cot, but I was sleeping in the pleasure room so I heard him searching the rest of the kennels. He terrified the other slaves and they were screaming. I managed to run away before he caught me.”
A League of Ladies (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 5) Page 11
