When the Countess interrupted us, so briefly, I found I was actually unsteady on my feet. I sank onto the edge of the bed. As soon as she had gone Herman took advantage of that, moving in upon the forbidden territory. His body language was unmistakable by now: if what he wanted wasn’t going to be offered up freely it would be taken by force. Only a maiden would be innocent enough to think his pleading and his need were all about love, not power and avarice. Only a virgin could be naive enough not to realise where this would inevitably end. Only a girl like Lisa would not think twice about where her own desire was taking her, or the consequences of her new-found appetite. I ran my hands over his chest; I should have been fending him off but I was kneading his flesh. I writhed in his arms, rubbing my body against his. He had my thighs parted, my gown hitched up to reveal the line of my bare leg, his own bulk pressing in on my sex and turning its softness to juicy pulp. Even as the notes poured from my throat a part of me was aware of the stony hardness of his erection, trapped by his breeches but pressing into me greedily.
My consciousness was fractured into kaleidoscope colours. The performance. The emotion. The words. The cock. The aching need between my legs. We hit the last few exultant phrases with our voices intertwined like our limbs, and he surged upon me and held the last note.
The curtain did not fall. The lights did not go out.
Breathless, I stared into his eyes. Elliot’s eyes; not Herman’s. I saw the slightest widening as he acknowledged something was wrong. The music swept on to its conclusion.
Oh hell, I thought, we were going to be left frozen on stage, in silence.
But the orchestra was better than I could have given them credit for. As the main drape hung obstinately unmoving, high over the stage, the musicians picked up the music almost seamlessly from an earlier phrase and swept on into another round. As far as the audience was concerned it was only Herman and Lisa who had frozen in place.
Elliot raised his eyebrows as if to say, The show must go on. Then he kissed me. I tasted the pine-pitch tang of the lozenges he’d been eating. It was the first time our lips had met on or off stage, and six months of dreaming and denial grounded themselves like lightning with that one kiss, the colours dancing behind my eyes. For that moment the world seemed to collapse in around us, but it was all too brief. He kissed deep and sweet but he didn’t linger, making it look good for the audience. As his lips left they tore away from me a groan of pleasure that only he heard. His eyes held mine for another second, searchingly. He must have discerned the bravado to match his own. I could feel his chest heaving as his lips descended to my throat, his gasps gusting hot on my skin; he was fighting to recover his breath after the duet, and my breasts heaved too as I laboured for air. I rolled my head back, letting my hair fall across the bedspread. Part of me was praying for the curtain to drop. Part of me was praying that it wouldn’t.
Elliot groaned, his erection grinding into me through our clothes. He must have been as frantic as I was. From my upside-down position, I glimpsed in the wing Leo slumped over the stage controls and at his shoulder a slim figure with an expression full of years of loneliness and need, watching us on stage – watching as if finally something had brought him to the point of release.
Elliot bit my breasts with tremulous urgency, through the material of my gown. I dragged my fingertips across his hair. The music swirled around us, lifting us on its furious tide. They weren’t going to stop, I realised. The curtain wasn’t going to fall. We were going to have to carry on acting our parts. I felt a kind of holy terror – not of Elliot, but of what we were doing. The ritual we were enacting. The forces focused upon us, along with all those eyes. I’ve been nervous before going on stage, but never like this, and never had it been combined with such a hot desire.
Then Elliot hitched himself upon one elbow and reached between us to his breeches. Stage costumes might look elaborate with buttons and laces, but in reality they are all Velcro and press studs, designed to pull off as simply and quickly as possible. It was easy for him to open his trousers and free himself. It was easy, under the disguise of those stark shadows and the rumpled folds of my gown, for him to pull aside the sodden gusset of my knickers and angle his beautiful stiff cock into my waiting wetness. They must have thought out there that we were wonderful actors: my spasm of shock, his lurch as he embedded himself into me, the look of poised awe and intent upon our faces before he began to thrust.
And it might seem odd but that moment as his cock split me open felt like my gift to Lisa, to the sweet foolish girl sacrificed so cruelly for her love. It was the moment that made it worthwhile. But don’t think I’m trying to excuse myself by saying I’d let the character take possession of me. Her desire and mine had a single object, but my lust – a primitive desperate need to be opened and rived asunder by this man – was my own. To be fucked by Elliot Wells, to feel his hips roll on me and his wonderful cock deep and hard inside me, was everything I had dreamed of in my most private fantasies. That we were doing it before witnesses only forced me to accept my culpability and thrilled me to the core.
See how much I want him. See how he pleasures me. See how my need for his cock overwhelms my sense of decency. Watch as he fucks me senseless, you voyeurs. Have you ever seen anything so elemental?
After that I did not worry about the audience; singers and actors are after all exhibitionists at heart. I even forgot to worry about Tim, who must have been watching as his wife fucked with another man, wrapping her bare thighs around his hips, sinking her fingers into the cloth at his back. Without an inch of obscene skin showing, we still demonstrated in the most graphic manner two people frenziedly screwing each other. Man on woman, sweat flying, mouths open with ecstasy, hands tugging at one another and the bedding, my ankles hammering his calves. His thrusts were deep and forceful, like some thundering drumbeat underlying the music. Were they aroused, the watchers? Did men stiffen and women spread in their scarlet velvet seats, hot with culture? They must have suspected, surely. Some of them must have realised. They might even have been able to hear my cries over the music’s final crescendo and Elliot’s deep groan as he followed me into orgasm and spurted his come deep within me.
Then the curtain fell.
And in the wings the shadow smiled, before fading away.
And Their Flying Machines
UNABLE TO SLEEP, Charlotte went up to the Flight Deck.
She’d tried to sleep. She’d tried to distract herself by playing patience, and by talking to her friend Louisa about the upcoming season, and by attending tea dances and tennis parties and the Hambletons’ charity ball ‘in support of our heroes’, but nothing had worked. For three days she’d had the sick feeling of anticipation in her stomach, and now it was so bad she couldn’t even doze off for more than half an hour at a time. She’d awake sweating and frightened, sure that she’d missed the alarm klaxon that every nerve was tuned to. The klaxon that would summon the pilots to their ornithopters.
It was thirty floors up the interior of the Peak to the Flight Deck. She could have taken the lift, but it was the middle of the night and she felt it too cruel to waken the attendant. Besides, the exercise was a distraction, the struggle a blessing. She watched her flying boots take the stairs, one riser at a time. She made herself go slowly. She remembered the first time she’d ventured up here, when she’d been wearing a white summer dress down to her ankles and little white calfskin boots with scalloped heels. She wouldn’t, she reminded herself, have been able to climb thirty storeys back then, not in that dress and those boots.
Then, she’d taken the clanking wrought-iron lift and emerged blinking from the gaslit dimness of the interior tunnels into the wide cavern that was the Flight Deck. Past the ranks of ornithopters and the clusters of busy engineers the flight apron gaped onto empty sky; only the tips of the surrounding hills were visible, lit by the evening light. A single ornithopter flickered into view as it swept westwards in its patrol circle.
She paused inside the doorway,
taking it all in. The pilots in their blue leather overalls, checking their machines over or striding away to well-earned R&R. The engineers, far more numerous, in brown, intent upon the machines. The sense of tension, the scurrying, the babble of conversation and orders and the clang of metal. The sweet familiar smell of machine oil.
The ornithopters themselves were less familiar. They were military standard models, bigger than her own Skylark Celestial and weighted down by their twin blunt-muzzled aether cannons. Charlotte bit her lip. An ornithopter at rest was hardly a beautiful thing; nothing like the shimmering darting dragonfly that it became in flight. But these machines looked positively brutal. They were grey where the paint had been burnt off and pocked with projectile holes.
She turned to the first man to pass randomly within range. ‘Could you possibly tell me where I might find Chief Engineer McGregor?’
He looked surprised, and his eyes swept her up and down, but he pointed to a knot of men who were working beneath one of the flying machines. ‘He’s the one in the waistcoat, miss.’
Thanking him, she followed his pointing finger. The men were trying to hoist an engine into the ornithopter’s empty carcass. Neither engine nor vehicle body looked particularly new. Most of the men wore brown boiler suits. The only man obviously wearing a waistcoat was squatted on his haunches, peering up into the machine’s belly and instructing the engineers as bolts were tightened in order.
‘Excuse me? Mr McGregor?’ she asked when there seemed to be a momentary, triumphant lull. The men, who hadn’t even noticed her until now, went quiet, staring over their shoulders.
‘Chief McGregor,’ he said, not looking round but reaching up to wipe a bleed nipple with a rag.
‘I’m Charlotte Laindon-Royse. I wrote to you.’
He manoeuvred out from under the machine and stood, wiping his hands on the rag. Suddenly he was quite tall, and broad-shouldered to go with it. His hair was swept back and ran to greying curls behind his ears. His eyes were cool. ‘The Honourable Charlotte Laindon-Royse,’ he said, speaking with a noticeable brogue, and Charlotte remembered her headed notepaper with an inner wince. ‘I remember. But I don’t remember writing back.’
A few of the young men sniggered audibly.
‘I only need a few minutes.’ She could feel her pale cheeks flushing.
‘Minutes? They’re in short supply around here.’ He glanced around the Flight Deck. ‘Along with everything else.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I came to offer to help you with that.’
For a moment he studied her face. ‘Five minutes,’ he pronounced, throwing his rag to the nearest man. ‘Get this engine secured, lads.’ He extended his hand to the right. ‘My office, miss.’
His office was a room of leaded glass at the end of the hangar. Inside it was hung with wooden blinds. There was a desk, a narrow cot bed, the innards of at least two ornithopters and a huge quantity of mess; the place seemed to be used as a dump for everything that had no place in the pristinely ordered Flight Deck. He had to lift a battery pack off a chair to offer her somewhere to sit. He remained standing, and folded his arms.
‘Well, Miss Laindon-Royse?’
He was what her father would praise as a ‘salt-of-the-earth workman’; one of that breed of educated practical men that had created Victoria City – technological wonder of the age – from a spire of raw rock, and helped build the Empire. He made Charlotte feel like a child. She took her courage in both hands.
‘I want to volunteer as a pilot.’
Credit to the man, he neither laughed nor choked, though his eyebrows went up. ‘Oh,’ he said, glancing towards the hangar then frowning.
She hurried on: ‘I can fly. I have my own ornithopter; a Celestial. And I won the Ladies’ Race and a silver medal at the airshow last year.’
‘I see.’ His knotted brows didn’t part. ‘Very … nice.’
She flushed anew. ‘I think that’s worth something, don’t you?’
‘You think it qualifies you as a fighter pilot?’
‘Of course not.’ She wished she hadn’t sat down; she felt at too much of a disadvantage. ‘But you’re desperate for pilots. It’s in all the newspapers. I could be trained up. I want to do my bit – before it’s too late.’
‘Well, I’m sure that there’s plenty of useful war work that you could volunteer for –’
‘What? Knitting socks and boiling soup? A lot of use that’ll be if the enemy take Victoria! It’s vital to keep up the air defences, everyone knows that. You need pilots.’
‘I need fighter pilots.’
‘And all those men in the Volunteer Air Corps, they were fighter pilots before they joined up, were they?’
He exhaled, clearly restraining himself from snapping at her. She left him no space.
‘They want to defend their country. That’s enough for them and it’s enough for me. I don’t want to just sit here helplessly waiting to see what happens.’
‘And do you know what the casualty rate is among pilots?’
‘That’s why you need more of us, isn’t it?’
His jaw tightened. ‘And you want to end your days in a smashed and burning ornithopter on some God-forsaken hillside, do you? Because that’s what happens to most of my men. I can count on one hand the number of pilots who’ve been with me since the start of the war, Miss Laindon-Royse. The chances of your getting through unscathed are ridiculously low – this is not a job for a lady.’
‘What are my chances if the enemy break the line and reach the Peak?’ She thrust her chin out. ‘How unscathed do you think we ladies will remain then?’
The Chief Engineer ground the heel of his hand into his forehead, leaving an oily streak, and changed tack. ‘Well why haven’t you approached the Volunteer Air Corps if you’re so keen? Lord Atherstone might have a place for you.’
Charlotte bit her lip. His grey eyes bored into her. ‘Lord Atherstone is my fiancé,’ she admitted.
Out of nowhere the ghost of a smile touched his face, like sun on a winter mountainside. ‘I can see him having problems with that, then.’
She averted her face slightly.
‘What does your father think of this?’
‘I’m twenty-one.’
He hid the flicker of surprise not quite well enough. ‘Well, good for you, but I’m not asking you to marry me.’
‘I’m legally an adult. I can take this decision myself.’
‘And what would Lord Laindon say if his daughter was brought back charred and limbless? Or not brought back at all?’
‘I want to do my part,’ she repeated quietly but fervently. ‘I can fly. I’m wasted doing anything else.’
He shook his head. Then, to her utter amazement, said, ‘All right, lass. Show me what you can do.’
She stared, her heart starting to thump as it caught up with the tidings. ‘I’ll have to go fetch my –’
‘You do, do you? If the raid klaxons go off you think you’ll have time to pop home and get your toy?’ His mouth pulled sideways. ‘You’ll suit up and take one of my scouts. Now.’
Turning away, he searched down a coat rack laden with grimy flying suits and selected one. ‘Probably the smallest,’ he said, throwing it at her. ‘Get it on.’
Charlotte blinked, holding the heavy padded leather out from her clean dress. ‘Excuse me …’
‘Shy, are you? Not the most useful trait in a fighter pilot.’
She was going red. ‘You could –’
‘Yes, you’re right. I could convert my office to a ladies’ changing room for the duration.’ He pulled a fob watch from his waistcoat pocket. ‘One minute or you’re wasting my time.’
She bared her teeth, flung the flying suit over the desk and went to work on her dress fastenings. Luckily it was a summer outfit, with the minimum of buttons. It came off quickly. Chief McGregor watched coolly as she loosened her waistband and dropped her underskirt to the floor, revealing long white drawers and stockings.
Faintly, from outs
ide, came a joyous whoop: someone had noticed and such light relief was truly welcome. Charlotte clenched her teeth and ignored them. She had no time to change her tightly laced boots so she shrugged the leather suit on over the lot: footwear, bloomers and lacy chemise. It was so big that it didn’t even snag on her heels. And it smelled strongly and malely of sweat; the musk made her head swim. Conflicting emotions – humiliation and pride, outrage and fear and hope – washed through her from all directions, creating chaotic eddies.
Tightening the straps in a desperate attempt to make the baggy garment wearable, she glared at the Chief Engineer, her cheeks crimson but her lip mutinous.
He lifted one sardonic brow. ‘Well, you might have a weight advantage,’ he allowed.
‘Helmet?’ she demanded, pinning up her hair.
He threw her one from a pile. ‘This way then.’
He led her out to the smallest ornithopter in the row. They had an audience now of grinning men, but he barked at them and they retreated to their duties. ‘In you get,’ he instructed. ‘Take her out; show me some moves. I want to see a one-eighty drop roll. Don’t go beyond the harbour perimeter.’
Charlotte found this the easiest part of the whole process. Once she was buckled into the seat, she felt her confidence surge back. She knew how to fly. Nothing else in her life might be under her control, but this machine was. Nevertheless she was cautious at first, and a minute later glad she’d been so because with its armour this ornithopter was heavier than her own, with a higher stall-speed and pedals that were awkwardly stiff. Once she was used to them she was able to put the machine through its paces. Keeping in sight of the Flight Deck she spun and tumbled under the summer sky, looped the patrol ornithopter and finally scudded back onto the apron. She knew she’d acquitted herself well. She walked back towards Chief McGregor and his group with her cheeks glowing with excitement rather than offended pride, her blood singing in her veins. Even having to hitch up the flying suit did not dent her sense of vindication.
Dark Enchantment Page 4
