“Was there something special you came to get, sir?” I was asked.
“A trinket, that is all. It is on her dressing table, so she said.”
I had a letch to see the bedroom where Miriam had first been fucked and began to take my way upstairs. The house was not as I envisaged it at all, but such a feeling is common and I threw it off. The main bedroom was ornate: a huge four-poster bed stood centred to the outer wall. Upon the dressing table a pair of scissors lay. The maid had hovered on the stairs below. I called her up. Within her sight I picked them up and laid them down again.
“Those were not what you wanted, sir?”
“Oh, Lord, no. Fearsome things, are they not?”
“Mistress uses them sir, a lot for cutting out.”
“But nothing else?” I laughed. Her eyes looked blank. “Carrie is not then here today,” I said as casually as one might and picked a flask of perfume up as if to say it was the thing I sought.
“I'm Carrie, sir.”
“Ah. Then I beg your pardon. With growing age one gets confused sometimes. Have you been here long, Carrie?”
“In the Mistress's service, sir, for nigh on three years now.”
“I see. And long you will remain, I trust. What a lovely bed that is,” I ventured, though I knew the truth by then.
“Its her favourite of the house, sir, that. She said to me once that I could lie on it and try it, but I wouldn't dare, of course.”
“You were not tempted?” I spoke lightly, seemed distracted did not gaze at her. I did not wish to scare the girl who patently was as dried-out as a husk.
“Not my place to do that, sir, oh no.”
“There, my dear, a sovereign for your honesty. One does not come across the like of such good girls too often.”
I pressed it into her hand. She gazed at it in great surprise. I had a feeling that she had scarce held one before. We passed beyond. She closed the bedroom door behind us. We descended. I gazed around as though in great appreciation of the place.
“You must have much to do here, Carrie, by yourself. Did Miss Miriam not once have a manservant also? Charlie was his name, I do believe.”
“Charlie? I ain't never heard of him, sir, no, I ain't. Not in my years, I ain't.”
“Tut-tut. My memory is all to pieces. I was thinking of another house.”
“Yes, sir, I know it happens. I have done the same myself. But thank you for the money, sir. There weren't no need.”
“Rewards should be accorded, Carrie. Well”-goodbye.”
“Goodbye.” Back into her nothingness she went. The door closed like a barrier upon the world. The windows took on their blankness once again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Miriam is resting,” Caroline advised me as soon as I entered the house.
I have heard it said that the people of Japan communicate as much by facial expression as they do by words. If so, they are not alone in that. When two are close, such as Caroline and I, the words are but the surface things; the undertow is in the eyes. The current is felt and tested- known.
“Well-what did you find out?” she asked me then, and grinned. Adelaide then joined us. Collusion was our friend. I described my visit. Adelaide gazed at us both and whispered, “Then she lied-I thought she did.”
“You story-you drank in each word!” joked Caroline to her, but then took on a serious mien. “She described it far too well,” she said.
“Precisely, dear. She wrote it in her mind, then spoke the words. No doubt she has not been fucked for twenty years. Maybe a little less,” I conceded with a grin.
“What is to do with her-the poor, poor thing?”
Caroline turned to my sister as she spoke. Their eyes communicated well enough, as do those of the “mysterious East.”
“Yes, I think so-if he is willing,” Adelaide laughed, though not a further word had then been said.
“What are you two beautiful terrors at?” I asked, as men do when they wish to give pretence of not having understood the occasional transparencies of women.
“We shall see to her. Make yourself ready. It was the table I did not believe,” said Caroline. She caught me off balance for a moment and was pleased. “She does not have a large table in a drawing room, you oaf. When she was buggered. You remember that? I know, because I visited her once, quite briefly.”
“Oh, yes!” Damnation, though, I had missed that point, so engrossed had I been with the vision of her bottom rearing up. My own suspicions had sparked at Carrie's final tale and the too neat ending to the thing. Then I had coursed back through her narrative and wondered at the lack of fire that Miriam had shown when she was freed. Not only that. She had come a shade too quickly to “rude words” that otherwise she would have been too modest to express.
“She is waiting for something to happen now,” said Adelaide and moved her fingers upwards to her gown, unbuttoning her corsage as she spoke. Her nipples showed. She flicked them with her fingers. “Oh, I feel like it,” she said. Her eyes were bold. She flung her arms around me, kissed me.
“Wait,” said Caroline, “we have to prepare her first. Give us ten minutes, darling, then come up.”
I have known for long that there are certain strange conditions of the mind that must be appeased. All have their foibles, much as they would hide them from Society. I recall a chap-an artist of considerable merit-who one day in confiding mood leaned across a table where we sat and said in hollow, nervous tone to me that he had a letch to be pissed upon by women.
“Am I strange?” he asked, and looked most fearful that I might say yes.
“Good heavens, Bertie, no,” I said as much as if he had told me that he read The Morning Post and not The Times. I opined (thought not in truth at all) that I knew several men who entertained the same desire, and that nothing curious was found in it at all. The poor chap looked relieved.
“It's the warm splashing and the way they spurt it down on you,” he said, “I love a woman splashing on my cock.”
He said nothing about fucking, so I did not speak of that I have heard tell of some who birch their daughters and their wives and leave them writhing on their beds- not having attended to them afterwards at all. Such curiosities, I suppose, could fill a book of moderate proportions-and I myself have as many flaws as others do, if flaws they be counted as. In our games heretofore, Caroline or Adelaide, or Caroline's Mama, had bound me sometimes and made me kneel to them.
It is a curious feeling to be tied when one is in safe hands. I have little doubt, after such experiences when I was made to sniff at drawers and such, was held in darkness underneath a drooped-down skirt, bent on my knees-I have little doubt, I say, that the very germ of submissiveness lies in us all and waits to be encouraged. There is a sense of obedience that humbles one and at the same time enthralls the very soul.
“It is a fact,” says Caroline to me sometimes, “that young girls may be made to do all sorts of naughty things by an admixture of authority and persuasiveness. Both youths and girls entertain, however dimly, the desire to be made to yield and to do that which they would not otherwise do. In the very doing is the naughtiness. It is a subtle thing and yet it almost always works. A girl who is openly lewd would not be sported with for long. Resistance is desired by he who bares her bottom first. As for herself, she counterpoints it with such grains of submissiveness as seem appropriate and required.”
“There are few who do not moan when the cock is first put to them,” said I.
“That, too, is true, but in that moment reality obtains. When her bottom cheeks are first sprung apart or her thighs are opened, a sense of apprehension seizes her. Then it is that the coaxing words are needed and should come forth. You like it most, though, when I aid you, do you not?”