by Regina Green
“Was that when you got married?” I asked.
Flo nodded. “I stayed in Paris for awhile, yes, and married an English art student and then there was a terrible period where people were rioting in the streets and the Germans besieged the city… and I returned to England about twelve years ago, half-starved. I felt lucky to have escaped with my life.”
“But not with Mr. Hendrick.”
She laughed. “No. Mr. Hendrick was just one of the mistakes of my youth. He was a layabout, really. He was idle, he drank, he slept around. It wasn’t a conventional marriage, believe me. He did give me a name. You’ll find, Phoebe, that when you have Mrs. attached to your name, you can get away with a lot.”
We were silent for awhile. I looked at her face in the dim light, but she still seemed enigmatic to me, far away, even though we had been so close physically.
“Have you ever loved a man?” I asked.
This seemed to make her uneasy. There was a long pause.
“If I had, it would have to be Master Jake.”
I swallowed. “Aren’t you upset, seeing him… with me?”
She shook her head, though her face was still in half darkness, eyes downcast.
“I’m not upset,” she said curtly. “The point is that Master Jake doesn’t want to be with just one woman. There will always be others. So when you see that, you realize that he gives each person he loves their own separate place in his life. No one stands out above the rest. Even if it seems like you do, at first.”
I could tell she was trying not to be hurtful, but her words made me shiver.
“So we’re not special to him at all?”
“No, we’re each special,” she corrected me gently. “Master Jake is like that. He likes seeing his lovers together … you may have noticed! He enjoys us all.”
She got up, naked, and collected a plate of food from the sideboard. She brought it over to me. The room was lightening. I ate in bed, propped against pillows, her eyes on me. I sipped my sweetened tea. I smiled at her. She smiled back, finally picking up her gown but seeming to enjoy my gaze on her solid, powerful body, in no hurry to cover up.
“You’re doing well here, Phoebe,” she said reassuringly. “We all like you.”
I blushed, a flush that seemed to pass through my whole body.
“I feel… wicked,” I admitted. “You know? To go to bed with so many people… It’s so…”
I left the thought unfinished.
“But you love it,” Flo said softly. Dressed again in her light gown, she stood at the slightly open window, breathing in the morning air. Down below I heard the clop of the horses’ hooves as Ben led them out for their morning walk.
“What happens today, Flo?” I asked. I felt very quiet, submissive, almost like a child.
She pulled a roll of cloth tape out of her pocket. Beckoning me to the sideboard, which I leaned against, she started measuring my legs, my waist, my chest. I held still, trying not to fidget, but her hands were arousing me again. I leaned into her starchy warmth, thinking of my aunt, my mother, feeling close to tears. It was the first attack of homesickness I’d had, if you can call it that. The first sense that I’d lost something by coming here, a sense of safety, protection, familiarity. I’d always be trying to get it back.
She scribbled some figures down in a little notebook, then tucked it away.
“You’ll be in uniform soon,” she said.
“Will things get more normal then?” I asked, trying not to sound anxious.
She met my eyes. “No, Phoebe. Not really.”
“Oh.”
“I’m to take you to Master Jake now.”
Still, she did not move, and I kept looking at her face, seeking something, maybe some fondness or reassurance.
“Do you miss Ben?” she asked abruptly. I wondered why she cared.
“Well…” I thought for a moment. “No, I suppose I don’t really miss him now. He was sweet to me in the carriage. He was the first to… you know. Be with me. He played with my breasts, the way you do. He was gentle.”
“But he wasn’t your first lover, was he?”
I shook my head, lowering my eyes. Her gaze was direct and a little too curious. I felt the urge to tell her, to get it off my chest. It might connect us.
But somehow I couldn’t.
I was still naked, I realized. I didn’t really want to dress. I wanted to stay in this now-cozy room with Flo and get pleasured again. I didn’t know how to ask her, though, and I felt ashamed.
She took something else out of her pocket and handed it to me. “Put these on,” she said, her voice deepening and slightly throaty. It was a pair of white lace stockings, such as I’d never worn. I slipped them over my feet wonderingly, smoothing them up each leg and onto my thigh. The combination of the white stockings and my dark bush was interesting, to say the least… I looked up at Flo and I knew she was thinking the same thing. My heart speeded up.
“I’m supposed to take you to Master Jake,” she said again, her voice trembling slightly. “But I can frig you one more time if you want.”
I nodded, barely breathing, and she turned me around and bent me over, my face pressing into the sideboard. Her fingers thrust into my cunt repetitively, greedily. She kept one firm hand on my bottom, steadying me.
I wanted her to tell me I was bad, disgusting, but she didn’t say those things. Still, I felt them. Perhaps Jake would say them later, I thought. Her quietness and control made my ragged cries all the more embarrassing. I bucked against her, needing her to fill me. My thighs felt wet with my own juices. Finally she pulled out and spanked me hard. “Oh!” I screamed. She tugged my hair, entering me again with what felt like four fingers. I spasmed around her hand.
I leaned against her and she stroked my damp hair. Her nipples were erect through the thin fabric of her robe, and I was naked except for the stockings. I felt that we had gone further than Jake would have wanted us to, certainly further than I ever expected to with a woman. I was deliciously satisfied, yet a sense of guilt and unease nagged at me. What we’d done felt forbidden and strange, and I was worried that I would have to pay for it somehow. I was also worried at the feelings that were stirred up when she touched me. She’d touched me deeper than Jake or Ben—strangely, she and her lover, Mr. Tootle, both older and outwardly less desirable partners, had shaken me up the most.
“You’re beautiful, Phoebe,” Flo said, and it helped to hear her speak to me.
“I don’t understand,” I blurted out. “I thought I’d just be Jake’s mistress…”
“Not mine?” she said, and laughed dryly.
My cheeks burned. “It still doesn’t seem right, what you do to me in here. It’s nothing I could ever tell anyone!”
She seemed amused again.
“These are erotic secrets, Phoebe,” Flo said. “Everyone has them. Do you think Ben goes around telling people that Jake buggers him?”
I shook my head, silent.
“But you don’t think Ben is depraved, do you? Or Jake?”
I shook my head again.
“Still, what about love?” I said finally. “If nothing’s ever said… I think I need to feel loved, too, in the end. I mean, if I feel love for someone, it’s uncomfortable that I can’t say it. I would be foolish if I was the only one feeling it and saying it. Will it always be like this?”
I sounded like a naïve, plaintive young schoolgirl. I hung my head.
Flo leaned over and kissed me on the lips.
“You’re still able to fall in love quickly, my dear. Because you’re young and this is the first time you’re experiencing intense pleasures. Don’t assume that we don’t love you. That’s my advice. Let things unfold as they will.”
Then Flo took hold of me and pushed me gently yet firmly out of my room, down the hall, and up a long flight of stairs, her hand on my lower back. My legs in their white stockings trembled and the coolness of the air on my naked flesh made me shiver. I felt like a slave being delivered to her mast
er for punishment—though in this case, I knew it would be erotic punishment.
We finally entered a warm, book-lined room at the top of the house, with a fire burning in the grate. Jake sat in an armchair. He gave me a long, searching look as I walked unsteadily over to him. Flo’s hands pushed me down to my knees on the soft carpet.
Without even a second thought, I unbuttoned Jake’s trousers and took him in my mouth.
SEVEN—Jake
Something was definitely amiss with me.
Phoebe had become everything I’d hoped. Her mouth felt delicious as she enclosed me. I leaned back... sighed... and should have been completely relaxed.
But I kept thinking about Ben. Not being near him for two days had brought about a strange, gnawing feeling of anxiety. Was he gone? Could he have slipped away? Flo had told me earlier that she had pleasured him in the kitchen the previous evening. I’d been relieved at that—that he’d gotten some comfort. “And if you like,” Flo had murmured, “I can bring him to my room tonight. That way, you could be waiting in the room next door...”
Ah, but I remembered the room next door. Those monastic little rooms on that first floor! Sometimes as a child I had been punished for some innocent misdemeanor by being locked in one of them for hours. My parents believed in punishments like that. The rooms were kept deliberately austere, I’d always thought, lacking warmth and character. No pictures. No rugs on the floor. They were always cold. I’d shivered on a hard bed, hugging my knees. It was what my father did instead of whipping me—I always felt he’d have liked to thrash me (that was the word he’d use), but my mother prevented it. She didn’t prevent him from thrashing the servants, though. Nor could she stop him from rutting with any housemaid he fancied, usually with the door open so that any passerby, including his wife or young son, could see. It was shameless, but not untypical of the times.
You see, I realized rather young that my father was a cruel man. So much of my life has been spent in trying not to be my father, trying not to be cruel. There was a way that pleasure could shade into cruelty, I knew. I stayed at one side of that line, just by the edge, sometimes. For example, although I should have liked to have enjoyed boys carnally—I didn’t let myself do it. I didn’t let myself associate with rent boys (I knew all the terms, of course, what went on in London between men of my class and younger men of “lower orders”). I did allow myself to buy the pleasures of women because somehow it was easier to do that, more socially accepted and condoned. And I justified the practice by saying that I always showed the woman a good time as well. With women it was just so easy: they wanted to please; conversely, it was easy to make them do what you wanted. I didn’t mind playing those games, but that’s all they were to me: games. And truth be told, I slept with most of those women just so that I could watch Ben have them as well, and then in those blurry, exciting moments, it was more ... understandable that I should want to take my pleasure with him, too.
Because although I knew he thought I was a great ladies’ man, the quality of my pleasure was rather slight in these encounters. It was amusing, really, and pleased my vanity to see how wrought up some of these girls got in their moments of climax, but I cared nothing for them. I think Ben thought I cared more for them than I did. He saw me as a man of vast appetites, and it’s true that I performed well with these women and that they stirred lust in me. But lust is very boring after a while. The excitement I felt each time I pushed inside Ben’s body in the carriage was hundreds of times greater than when I’d fucked these women, who were mostly relieved to be with someone pleasant to look at who knew what he was doing. I satisfied them. And I paid them. But because I paid them—usually more than they asked—they would peel off agreeably at the end of the night, and I would be left alone with Ben, left free to return home to my sanctuary in the country. I was glad I didn’t have a house in London. There would be too much scrutiny: I’d have to marry then, and that was something that I had strong, even violent, feelings about.
By now Phoebe had brought me to the edge and was looking up at me with her deep blue eyes. Wanting. Wanting me to fuck her, I was sure.
Flo had taught her a great deal. I suspected that Flo had taught her more than I had. She still wouldn’t ask for it—she was a nice girl and expected me to make the obvious moves. I didn’t want her to see that I had had enough already; and that after two or three days in my house my lust for her had already waned so deeply. She would be expecting quite the opposite: a growing dependency, a deepening of lust into love. But that’s not how it went for me, with women. Besides the one time...
Perhaps it had been cruel to bring her here. I gently moved her aside so that I could stand up. With detachment, I noted her new stockings, her creamy legs, her bare bum presenting itself as she leaned over my armchair. I’m sure she felt she was irresistible, and I knew that any man of my acquaintance would have been thrilled to fuck her at that moment.
I felt strangely peaceful as I held her hips, my erect member slipping inside her. God, she was wet. Her moans sounded almost painful, frenzied. I knew how intense Flo’s lovemaking had probably been. Now she was ripe for some really heavy-duty fucking. I sensed it. And yet, I felt hollow and empty as I filled her with deep, slow thrusts. I was glad that my body had not failed me, had not given away my lack of enthusiasm. I slapped her arse gently, knowing that she would probably have loved the intense, cutting strokes of a cane or the deceptively soft caress of a cat o’ nine tails. I had no appetite for that, but someone would.
Just the handful of slaps on her reddening bottom had completely unhinged her.
“God! Oh God! Jake! Yes! I love you!”
She screamed into the cushions and seemed to swoon, her cunt contracting against me. I held my position, feeling my jism leave me in slow spurts. I wanted to remember this moment somehow. After this, I would return to Cook (who I had fucked in the kitchen the day before with real passion) and Ben, whom I intended to take to bed later that day. I could not continue wasting my time with Phoebe, a girl I was at most mildly fond of and amused by, who I admired, even, for her youthful “spunk” (I smiled at the word) but whom I would never love the way I loved the other two. The other two had proven themselves loyal to me again and again.
Flo had comforted me when my parents died and later, when I had been deeply distraught over a failed love affair. (That was before Ben’s time.) Ben had roused my interest from the first moment I saw him perched atop another man’s carriage, idly stroking the horse in front of him with his whip, grooming him, almost. Light, swaying, his look amused and oddly sweet. I’d played it cool, pretended to his indifferent middle-aged master that I needed a new coachman when I had a perfectly fine fellow from the village who’d done it for years without a hitch. But Ben was impossible to pass up. He was only the second person of my own sex I had ever slept with (though I’m sure he would have been very surprised to know that). Over the last five years, I’d watched him grow from a shy, skinny boy to a confident yet watchful young man. Slim, wiry, taut muscles, scant hair on his body, his chestnut-colored mop close-cropped yet delicious to me every time his head brushed my bare chest. And it wasn’t often that our lovemaking was deeply intimate, that we really let go with each other. Same with Flo; there was always a distance there, despite the heat. But I liked that. I needed it.
Phoebe was more like a puppy. Her buttocks were beautiful plump globes, it was true, and I had enjoyed the sensations of taking her. But there was something relentless and tiring about her sexual nature. Instead of challenging me to teach her more intense pleasures, I felt like some other man (or woman, even) would do a better job with her.
I eyed the tight, nut-brown hole of her anus as I pulled stickily away from her. She was eager to be buggered, had begged me for it several times the previous day. She probably could not believe that I didn’t particularly want to bugger her, or to be the first to do so. She clearly needed it badly. Perhaps that was her mistake: she always showed me how much she wanted the sex. I understoo
d her need to be mastered, to be claimed. To “give it all” to someone. But I wasn’t that person, the person she needed to surrender to. There would be someone out there—many someones, no doubt—who would be delighted by Phoebe. (And I knew Ben had tender feelings for her, so this would be a delicate operation, wouldn’t it, transferring Phoebe to another household, so to speak...) But luckily, the person whom I had in mind for Phoebe lived nearby. Edward. I had known him for a very long time, since we were boys in school together. He and I had been very close once, long ago. And his sister, Jane, as well.
Phoebe had curled up in the armchair now, dozing. She was smiling, satiated for now at least. I covered her with a rug and went over to my desk, picking up a pen. It would work out for the best, I thought, and I would make it happen. I was good at setting things in motion and usually they fell to my advantage, though not always. There was a part of me, you see, that was still a young boy sitting by himself in an empty room with a locked door—no books, no amusements—shivering, hugging his knees, waiting for the door to open and not knowing which parent would be setting him free.
EIGHT
Edward Webster and I had met at school, public school of course, where we had both been packed off at the age of seven. We began growing closer around the age of twelve. I had had no friends growing up—it was a devilishly lonely existence, but childhood then wasn’t supposed to be a happy time. School was unpleasant in the main, but I was glad to leave my parents. This sounds so stark, doesn’t it? Yet Edward, I believe, felt the same. His great frustration was being separated from his sister Jane, who was being tutored at home.
They were neighbors of ours, it turned out, living about three miles away in a house called Crawford Hall. My parents were not friendly people, so Edward and I had never met socially. I had glimpsed him in the village once or twice, a little blond boy, very proper, with his equally blonde sister. They were prettily turned out, those two, and everyone said they were such “nice” children. I was a morose child and didn’t feel much interest at the time.
