Читать книгу By His Command - Justine Elyot - Страница 5

There was a scene, or so he said, in which the relationship between Cruel Bastard and Stoic Maid was established, and this was the one he wanted to try out first. It was to take place in the drawing room.

‘I don’t have the script,’ I objected.

‘It doesn’t matter. I know roughly how it goes. All you have to do is be obedient and do as you’re told, without being sulky or bratty about it. That’s the maid’s character. She takes everything, but there’s an unspoken strength in her that makes her obedience a form of defiance. “Do your worst,” she’s saying. “You can’t ever break me.” Do you think you can play that?’

‘I can try.’

‘OK. I’ll be by the fire – we’ll have to imagine it’s lit – drinking the ruby port I happened to bring with me. You come in and stand in front of me and I give you my opening spiel. Clear?’

‘Why don’t I get to wear the black and whites?’

I was still in no more than drawers and chemise and, to be honest, the October night being what October nights are, I was rather wishing we didn’t have to just imagine the lighting of the fire.

‘I prefer you like that. Artistic license. Now, no more quibbling, Miss, or you’ll be quibbling with my riding crop.’ Which he had also brought with him.

He went into the drawing room, leaving me in the hall.

I waited a minute or two for him to pour the port, hoping he’d be careful with the crystal. But I don’t know why I thought he wouldn’t – he was, after all, one of the world’s foremost collectors of Victoriana. He was the last man to be careless with it.

What should I do to get in role? I wondered if Jasper could give me any tips – he used to be an actor. But it was an easy enough part to play. It was the part I always played with him.

So I straightened my back and knocked on the door.

‘Come.’

I almost laughed, wondering if it was a command. We’d tried that one, but my orgasmic timing was, more often than not, a bit off. Bad Sarah. Maybe I’d perfect it sometime soon …

I opened the door and couldn’t help a blatantly lustful checking-out of Jasper, who lolled in the armchair in his waistcoat and riding boots, looking like the hottest combination imaginable of Darcy, Rochester and Heathcliff.

His eyes flashed a warning and I bent mine to the ground. It was the only way I’d be able to get through this without jumping on him.

‘So you’re the new maid,’ he said. ‘Walters.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘They tell me at the agency that you’re a hard worker who isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Is that true?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And that you are dutiful and obedient to a fault.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, if this is true, you will suit me admirably. But you must excuse me – I am by nature a suspicious man and I have great difficulty in accepting what I am told without a demonstration. It occurs to me that the agency may have exaggerated your virtues.’

‘No, indeed, sir, I hope not.’ I lifted my eyes to his and the expression of intent, rapturous cruelty on his face took my breath away.

‘Very well, then. You will show me your obedience and your capacity for hard work. Remove your dress.’

I blinked uncertainly at him, and he waved a hand as if to say, ‘This is how we get round the difficulty of your attire.’ I did as he said, stood and waited for the next command.

‘Good heavens.’ He chuckled and took a sip of his port. ‘You have impressed me, Walters. Most maids would have fled the room in confusion. Well, well. Now step forwards and let me inspect you at closer quarters.’

God, I wished he’d light the fire. We were allowed to, on cold days, and a scuttle full of coal stood nearby. But I supposed Colin wouldn’t like it, especially if we left ashes to sweep up the next morning. Perhaps next time we could bring one of those portable heaters.

My nipples were stiff and sore with the cold and they dented the light material of my chemise very noticeably.

‘What are these?’ he asked, waving his hand close to where they stood to attention.

‘Sir?’ I couldn’t quite believe he was asking this – at least, in my role I couldn’t. What would a maid say? This maid had to be obedient, though, and I clung to that.

‘These? What are they?’

‘Nipples, sir.’

‘Yes, nipples. Why are they in such a shameful state, Walters?’

‘It’s cold, sir.’

‘Cold, is it? Well, in that case, you need to warm up. Run on the spot, Walters.’

‘Sir?’

‘Yes – you know. Running, but on the spot. Well, come on then.’

It was a bit weird, but I knew Jasper had this kink for semi-clothed exercise sessions, so I picked up my feet and did as I was told.

‘Get those knees right up, Walters.’

If I lifted them any higher they’d bang my breasts, which were bouncing rather painfully, the chemise offering no support whatsoever. But it did warm me up, at least. He was right about that.

He didn’t let me stop until I was puffing and hot-faced, having resorted to crossing my arms over my breasts to keep them under control.

‘That will do now, Walters. There. Warmer?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Take your arms away from your chest and prove it. Oh. They are still in quite the same condition they were before. But you can’t attribute it to cold now, surely. So what is your explanation?’

‘I … have no explanation, sir,’ I muttered.

‘Put your arms by your sides,’ he ordered, ‘and kneel in front of me. I must examine this phenomenon properly.’

I knelt between his knees, which he obligingly spread for me, and kept my back straight and my chin up as he indicated I should.

His palms passed gently over the tips of my nipples, rubbing the fabric of my chemise against them. They were so sensitive I felt the gush between my thighs at once.

‘Your predecessor, Larkin,’ he said softly, ‘used to exhibit the same tendency. In her case, the explanation was that she was an unconscionable slut. Is that true of you?’

‘I hope not, sir.’

‘Ah.’ He pinched and tweaked them so that I gasped. ‘You hope not. There we have your answer. You hope not, but you are. Just as much a slut as she ever was. Well, Walters, that is good, for we can now be on an honest footing with one another. But I’m afraid I must show you now how sluttish tendencies are dealt with in this house.’

‘Oh.’ It wasn’t the most stoical of little whimpers, but I had an idea of what was coming, and it wasn’t the good, solid, bent-over-the-chair-arm shagging I was hoping for.

‘My riding crop is on the corner table. Kindly bring it to me.’

I wanted to hesitate, to make pleading puppy-dog eyes, but I remembered that I was Walters, and Walters did as she was told at all times with serene grace.

I picked it up by the handle and a shudder went through me. Jasper’s fist would be wrapped around it soon and the devilish plaited length of it would be brought to bear upon my defenceless bottom. What else was a riding crop good for? Did anyone use them for actual horse riding?

It felt alien in my hand and I was thankful to get rid of it and hand it over to Jasper, who laid it in his lap for a moment and looked me over.

‘Turn around,’ he said.

I obeyed.

‘Do you know what I’m going to do with this riding crop?’ he asked. I heard him raise the glass to his lips again then set it down.

‘I, uh, I’m not sure, sir.’

I really wanted to hear him tell me.

‘I’m going to punish you with it,’ he said. ‘I’m going to lay as many strokes as your tempting little posterior can take, until you are perfectly soundly thrashed and sore. Then you might think twice before showing me your saucy swollen nipples, like any whore in an alleyway. You are going to learn modesty, Walters. Kindly arrange yourself over the arm of that chair, bottom uppermost.’

It seemed mad not to protest, but Walters would look him calmly in the eye and acquiesce, so that was what I did.

I strained and stretched my calves and thighs, pushing my bottom out so the cotton of the drawers was tight and thin over my curves.

‘I suppose you’ve been thrashed before?’ he said, coming to stand beside me. He placed the flat tip of the crop on the broadest part of my bum and brushed it, almost soothingly, up and down the crease. To tell the truth, it stopped being soothing and started being extremely arousing pretty quickly.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You girls need it, don’t you? You need to be kept in check and taught your place.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Tell me about your last whipping, Walters. Who administered it?’

Damn, he was going to make me use my imagination, just at the point where I was ready to sink into mindless sensation.

‘The housekeeper, sir, at my last place.’

‘Oh, the housekeeper. A lady. An older lady, I trust, of strict moral probity.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What was your transgression?’

‘There was no transgression, sir. She whipped all us maids before church every Sunday, just to keep us decent, as she said.’

‘What a marvellous woman. To keep you decent. Yes, that’s a very fine routine. I may well adopt it myself. If this woman is ever in want of a place, you must recommend me to her.’

‘I will, sir.’

‘Tell me how she organised these Sunday-morning affairs. What did she use and how did she go about her disciplinary business?’

‘For these, she used a stiff leather strap that hung in the scullery at all times. For serious misdemeanours, she inclined to the birch rod, but for regular whippings it was always the strap.’

‘Ah, yes, I am myself a keen aficionado of the birch rod.’

I knew that. I knew it very well.

‘She would line us up, sir, after the master’s breakfast things were washed up, in the kitchen. All the male staff were allowed to stay and watch, too, which was the worst of it. Much worse than the pain.’

‘Oh? I will bear that in mind.’

‘I’d rather you didn’t, sir.’

He tapped my bottom sharply.

‘Your preferences are irrelevant. If I decide that you need witnesses to your shame, then witnesses there shall be.’

I hoped that this was Cruel Film Bastard and not Jasper talking. I didn’t think I would ever be ready for that – bad enough during the summer when Will stumbled upon me, bound and thrashed, in Jasper’s grounds. I squirmed in protest, helping the little bloom of heat from the crop to fade.

‘Come on, then. You and your fellows lined up in the kitchen, with the male staff looking on. What happened then?’

‘We were called forward in reverse order of seniority. The scullery maid got it first. In turn, we bent over the big deal table and the housekeeper lifted our skirts and petticoats. The more senior you were, the more strokes you got. The scullery maid got ten, on the seat of her drawers.’

‘Drawers were kept up?’

‘Oh, yes. The men were there! But if it was a proper punishment, it was given in the housekeeper’s office and the drawers came down then.’

‘A private whipping on the bare?’

‘Not private, sir. The other maids were called in to watch, for purposes of instruction.’

‘Ah, very good. So – where were you in terms of seniority?’

‘I was the senior parlourmaid, sir. I came last.’

‘And how many strokes did you get?’

‘Between twenty and thirty, sir, depending on how much time we had left before getting ready for church.’

‘You must have hoped for the ritual to go on longer than the housekeeper intended, every week.’

‘I did indeed, sir. She had a very strong arm and she laid a firm stroke. It was no easy thing to sit on those hard church benches and listen to the sermon afterwards.’

‘I am sure of that. Well, Walters, you will not find it easy to sit on your hard chair in the kitchen tonight either. Keep that bottom high. How long is it since you were whipped?’

‘But a fortnight, sir.’

‘Then your skin will be tender and ready for the crop.’

It was longer than a fortnight in truth. It had been six weeks since my fond farewell spanking in the bedroom of our Riviera villa. ‘Something to remember him by’. It had certainly made the plane journey memorable, shifting constantly in my seat to try and ease my bruised sit-spot.

‘May I ask how many strokes you intend to give, sir?’

‘You may not.’

It was a test of my character’s stoicism, I knew, but I always hated it when a whipping was open-ended. I needed to know from the start how to stretch out my endurance, how to school my body to release its endorphins at the right rate.

There was always my safeword – not that poor old Walters had one of those. I wondered for a moment if such a thing had existed in the sketchily researched Victorian BDSM underworld. Or had it been assumed that women, as property, could be taken beyond their endurance with impunity? It wasn’t a comfortable thought.

Even less comfortable was the first shocking stroke, making me jolt to the side in an effort to protect my bum from another of the same.

‘No,’ he said. ‘You will not break position, Walters. You will learn. This lesson will not end until you are taking each stroke in silence and without moving.’

This was something we had worked on over the summer. I had never quite achieved it. I was vocal when it came to pain and that was just the way it was. Sometimes Jasper wanted to hear me yell and sometimes he wanted to test me. Cruel Bastard insisted on the latter technique – typical, I supposed, of a cruel bastard.

Jasper wasn’t Cruel Bastard, though, and he deliberately lightened his stroke so that the pain was of that manageable kind that soon turns into a glow of pleasure. I gave silent thanks as each fall of the crop stoked the sensual fire on my eagerly proffered bottom.

‘Yes, this is good, this is true obedience,’ he said. He had worked out that he could make his stroke harder now without reducing my enjoyment. ‘You are not a sniveller like Larkin before you. She would have been bawling by now. It’s part of the reason I gave her to one of the fellows at my Club. She was far too easy to bring to tears. You will be different.’

He had covered both cheeks now with scalding welts. The tight cotton chafed my swollen, punished skin. It felt almost too tender to be borne.

He turned his attention to my upper thighs with strokes that were laconic but cruel. Earlier, they would have made me squeal, but now they made me sigh, very quietly, the tiniest of exhalations, for I did not want to reveal my shameful responses to him. In due course, however, the sighing turned to panting and I knew myself to be well roasted – if not overdone.

He stopped and laid the crop gently on the curve of my bottom, rubbing at its tight, sore surface.

‘I thought to break you,’ he said. ‘But you are stronger than you look, Walters. I may have to rethink my strategy.’

After a short silence, he said sharply, ‘Well?’

‘Well, sir?’

‘You have not thanked me for correcting you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Tell me that you deserved it.’

‘I deserved it all, and more, sir.’

‘Eh? “And more”? What’s this?’

He came around in front of me and rubbed the end of the crop along my mouth and over my face.

‘Have I mistaken you? Are you one of those unnatural girls who enjoy this kind of treatment? Eh? Can I give you away as a whore to one of my flagellant friends?’

‘No, sir, no. I thought only to please you.’

‘To please me?’ His smile was a slow one, curving into wickedness. ‘Larkin liked to please me, Walters. Are you another such?’

‘I … do not know Larkin, sir.’

‘No, you do not know her. Do you know what she would allow me to do after a whipping?’

‘No, sir.’

‘She would part her legs still further, so that the split at the crotch revealed what lay within. It was an invitation, Walters. Do you know what she was inviting?’

‘Sir?’

‘Are you an innocent, Walters? I don’t think so.’

‘She invited you to sin with her? Sins of the flesh?’

‘Exactly so. Sins of the flesh. Have you ever done anything like that?’

God, more bloody storytelling practice when all I wanted was for him to put his hand between the layers of cotton and touch me, rub me, fondle me, feel me, make me come, oh, yes …

But I had to get my head together instead and fabricate some scullery fumble or other.

‘I … I’d rather not say, sir.’

‘Oh, you have! Well, you will tell me all about it, Walters, or I shall fetch my cane from the study and then we will see how long your eyes remain dry.’

He laid on a smart stroke of the crop, making me jolt with surprise and suck in a breath.

‘Ow!’

‘I’m waiting.’

‘The master’s eldest son, sir,’ I said.

‘He took your maidenhead?’

‘No, sir, it never went that far.’ I tried to cast my memory back to what I had read of My Secret Life and the stories of liberties taken with maidservants. Jasper had a first edition, but I had not been allowed to touch it. Probably the pages were gummed together with nineteenth-century jizz.

‘How far did it go?’

‘He would try to catch me alone, sir, at all times of the day. He would tell me at first how pretty he thought me and how lucky the men below stairs were to have a chance of courting me. Flattering me, as it were, sir. Buttering me up.’

‘Buttering up a buttered bun,’ said Jasper.

‘Sir!’ I exclaimed, knowing a little too much rude Victorian slang. ‘At first I thought him harmless enough, just a young fellow with an eye for the girls.’

‘How old was he?’

‘He was at that time eighteen years old, sir, and just back from boarding school. I was bent over the grate polishing the coal scuttle in his bedroom, sir, when he came in and put his arms around my waist and began to kiss the back of my neck.’

‘Did you fight him off?’

‘In truth, sir … no, I did not. I liked the lad and I had thought of him a lot since he had started paying these compliments to me.’

‘You allowed him licence with you? How much licence?’

‘I would let him touch my breast, sir. I would let him lift my skirts and touch me there too.’

‘Touch you there? Until you spent?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I whispered.

‘But you saved your maidenhead?’

‘Yes, sir, for after a week of private assignations had passed, he began to court a young lady from a neighbouring town and I was heartbroken.’

‘The assignations ended?’

‘Not quite. I still let him … when he came upon me, alone, sometimes … I could not give him up. But I held out when it came to my virtue.’

Jasper snorted. ‘Virtue. What virtue is there in a thin sliver of flesh? You had given him very much more than you should have done already.’

‘I know, sir. I am ashamed.’

‘Ashamed, are you?’

‘But I have learned my lesson. I shall not give my heart again.’

‘But your body?’

I wondered what the best answer would be to that. I didn’t know how Jasper’s film was going to develop. Would Walters allow her master to touch her intimately? I decided, in a flash, that Walters was a sensual woman who wished to be bedded, but who did not wish to give anything of herself to any man. She would want Cruel Bastard to think he was forcing her. She would make him think that he was taking something she did not want to give. But he would be quite deceived.

‘My body does not belong to me,’ I said. ‘I am in your service.’

Jasper gave a little gasp, of admiration, I think.

‘That is an excellent answer,’ he said, and I think he addressed me rather than Walters. ‘Excellent. Perfect.’ He swallowed.

The tension in the air was affecting us both. Sweat beaded on my upper lip and I was grateful that Jasper had moved back behind me and was not watching my face.

I wondered if he had any inkling of my reading of the character, or if he thought I was being sullenly defiant. Either way, the scene would work.

‘In that case,’ he said, recovering his tone of authority, which had wavered a little, ‘I will use my property as I see fit. Part your legs, Walters.’

I spread them and, as he had described in his talk of Larkin, the split cloth revealed my most private parts to him.

‘I can see how red you are,’ he said. ‘Although, that much was clear through that thin cotton. But to see it uncovered …’

His fingertips brushed my skin, settling themselves around my lower lips, which were lightly downed with pubic hair, since I hadn’t been expecting him. It was more Victorian that way anyway.

‘This is what your young master got to toy with?’ he said, running one finger up and down each lip in turn.

My clitoris was straining for his touch, throbbing with need. It had been making its presence insistently felt since about the third stroke of the crop.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You let him put his fingers inside and get them good and wet and sticky, did you?’

He suited his actions to words, treating my clit to a judicious fingering.

‘Many times, sir,’ I whimpered. ‘Many times a day.’

‘Did you ever suck his prick?’

‘Yes, I did, sir, I did. I drank him down, sir.’

The rubbing grew firmer and he planted a thumb between my bottom cheeks, the better to hold me in position.

‘Even though you knew he cared nothing for you?’

‘Even so, sir. If he asked it of me, I did it. I could not refuse.’

‘You can’t refuse?’

I was strung as tight as I could be now, gritting my teeth against the enormity of sensation.

‘Whatever you ask … sir … anything … you … want … ohhh.’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he whispered, stroking me through it, bending low over me so that his cheek touched mine. ‘She belongs to me.’

I did, body and soul, but I didn’t want him to know it. I was too mixed up in my own heat and stickiness to disentangle the threads of what happened to me and what happened to Walters. We had, for that moment of undoing, become one.

Cruel Bastard had left the building, though, because Jasper lifted me gently to my feet and held me close, kissing my hair, caressing my still-hot bottom through the slit in my drawers, making me feel his heartbeat pound against my own.

‘It’s so good to be back,’ he said.

‘What, back in the Victorian museum?’ I said, with a yawn and a slight giggle.

‘You know what I mean.’

I thought I did, and it was a monumental admission. He was glad to be back home, but he wasn’t home – he was with me.

Did that make me his home?