Angela's Trial and Tribulations (4 page)

His thoughts turned to Amanda. Mrs Swift was also a very intelligent woman as well as a beautiful one. In other times he would have been content with her alone but these days, since it was almost expected that a man use his servants, he indulged himself. They didn't speak of it and on the occasions he did ask Jane to his bed, he always contrived that his wife was out of the house at one of her ‘social do's'. He had begun to worry about her of late, though. She seemed to be more than a little preoccupied but when he taxed her with it, she had said it was nothing. “Woman trouble,” she had said and he had hastily dropped the subject.

Angela dropped the mayor off at the imposing front entrance to the town hall and then took the gig round to the garages at the back, as he had ordered. There she found a half dozen other girls all still harnessed to their gigs, all backed into the space allotted to them and chatting informally.

She joined them and stood there, waiting to be invited into the conversation. They ignored her for a while but then curiosity got the better of them. “You the mayor's new girl?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “Angela Martin.” “I'm Penny, deputy mayor.”

“And I'm Caroline, city treasurer.”

The rest gave their names and masters and then Penny spoke again. “You that special girl?”

“Special?” Angela laughed. “Oh no. There's nothing special about me. I'm just a librarian - or rather I was,” she said ruefully. “I spoke out of turn and here I am.”

“No you're that special girl all right. The one they're all talking about. I can see it in your face.”

But Angela was insistent though courteous. She smiled again, “No, really. Just a girl like you all are. But aren't you all so pretty!”

She was right, they were, with firm lithe bodies and lovely faces - the top executives of the city could have their pick of the prisoners and there were plenty to choose from in the pens at the various depots around the city, but she was more of a mind to deflect the subject away from her. She didn't know what they were talking about but in any case, she had never sought praise and had always been embarrassed when anyone complimented her about anything. This was her standard ploy in such cases: turn the conversation to the other person and offer him or her a compliment.

The conversation drifted onto their masters and the goings on in their households and Angela fell silent. She had never taken part in gossip, well aware that it often led to no good and so while she listened, she said nothing. She was astounded to hear though that the deputy mayor was wont to take boys into his bed and that the parks and gardens superintendent fucked a different girl every night - and none of them his wife. She had been relegated to a back bedroom, according to his pony-girl and had to take a back seat in everything unless he needed to parade her in public when she had to smile and pretend all was well. Well, it was probably all made up, she thought and put the little tidbits of information right out of her mind.

Then came the call. The mayor wishes to go out in half an hour and the treasurer shortly thereafter. The two girls perked up, asked their fellows to make sure they were properly spruced up and made their way back around to the front of the building to await their respective masters. As they moved off, Caroline warned Angela about gossip. “Most of what they say is manufactured...”

Angela was not the sort to be critical of others nor was she sanctimonious about what she perceived to be right. “I think it's better to ignore gossip, too. Sometimes it leads to great heartache,” was all she said.

They assembled at the front of the town hall, Angela in front since the mayor was to be the first to be leaving the building. They stood there proudly, shoulders back, naked breasts thrust out, legs together and bellies sucked in while visitors going into and out of the building looked them over curiously - or lecherously. Naked females were not all that common that a randy young male wasn't turned on by their lithe bodies - especially these pony girls who were always the pick of the bunch anyway.

The mayor came out on time. He had a thing about punctuality and Angela looked him over curiously in the light of her new knowledge about what he might be requiring of her. The very idea that she might have to have sex with him, just because she was assigned to him as his pony-girl was a strange concept to her. It rather smacked of slavery, she thought and then reflected on that ancient institution. Well, was this really all that different? Not when the last vestiges of their dignity and of their rights as citizens had apparently been stripped from them with their clothes. No, she decided. It wasn't. She was a slave in all but name, at least for the duration of her sentence.

“The Royal Bank, Angela?”

“Certainly, Mr Mayor,” she said and stepped off, entering the traffic in the busy street while the mayor sat back, gloating over his good fortune in acquiring this crème de- la crème of prisoners. He had had the court record sent to his office and had frowned over the findings. He thought the decision more than a little strange since her defence that she had only made the remark as a joke and in passing had been backed up by her colleague. He also found Judge Rowbottom's sentence excessive but he wasn't going to do anything about it. Not considering the plans he had for this girl.

Alas, it is given to none of us to see into the future. Things were unfolding that the mayor had no inkling of and which, once they had emerged and played out their parts in human history, were going to change things even more.

Now she stood at the kerb outside the bank. Again people, fully clothed and perfectly normal people stared at her nakedness as they passed. It was all part of her punishment and she had to bear it with equanimity, even aplomb. To see their eyes move down her body from her face to her naked breasts; down her flat muscular belly to her groin - her so naked groin where her nude vulva only barely hid the secrets delights of her vagina; then down her well-formed thighs and then back up again. More than a few stopped to stare at her, ogling her naked beauty in this so public of places right in the heart of the central business district of the city.

She had decided to brazen it out and smiled back at them. Not lewdly and not even provocatively. Her smile was demure, as if she was fully clothed and walking in the street beside them. Many were taken aback by her attitude. How could a girl look so normal. So pure and chaste while she stood stark naked in the public street, they wondered.

By now she had developed a lovely tan all over her body from her days working nude out in the sun. Not too dark. The authorities were well aware of the dangers of skin cancer and sprayed the girls with a block to prevent almost all the ultra-violet rays from penetrating. But enough got through to turn them from milk-white to a light tan and it made them even more beautiful.

And so she spent her day. Most of it was in standing and waiting while the mayor transacted his business around the city; just a small part of it was spent in actually running ahead of the gig, taking her boss to his various appointments.

Once home, Jane came down after a while and released her from the gauntlets that held her so securely to the gig's poles. “Come on, you can help me bathe the master and dress him for dinner...”

“What about Mrs Swift?”

Jane grinned. “She has to fend for herself. We women are nothing now, don't you realise it?”

They went up to James' suite and ran the water into the huge spa bath and then took out the dinner suit he would be wearing this evening, brushed it and made sure it was properly pressed. His dress shirt and bow tie followed and then Jane asked Angela to polish his black shoes.

The mayor arrived soon after and they undressed him. He was used to this personal service being performed for him by Jane and Angela's predecessor but now he watched her carefully as his body was slowly stripped of its clothes. On her reactions during the next few minutes would he decide how to proceed with this girl.

She was punctilious. Her face gave away nothing as his still athletic body was revealed to her. He could see no hint of whether she approved or disapproved of what they were doing to him nor of his body as a sexual object. Jane handed him up into the spa and then got in beside him, gesturing to Angela to do the same. Then the two of them soaped him and massaged his body under the water but neither touched his penis. He had warned Jane in advance that until further notice, his bathing was to be a perfectly correct affair. She had raised her eyebrows at him but when he shook his head she had merely nodded and gone on with her duties.

Her mind was racing however. It all had something to do with the new girl, but what? Never before had he behaved like this with a new servant and since she had been with him for three years (of a four year sentence for aggravated impertinence) she had seen a number of pony girls come and go.

In truth, Angela found the mayor's body very appealing. His regular exercise, performed hard and under the best trainer, had kept him lean and hard and he was as fit and tanned naked as he looked fully clothed. She didn't at all mind soaping his body and later, as he lay naked on the rubbing table and Jane instructed her in the art of massage, she found his skin under her hands, to be quite delightful. She wondered again at the revelation that he might be calling on her as one of his concubines. So far he had been most proper. Oh he had touched her but almost perfunctorily and his penis hadn't even twitched as they had undressed him, bathed him and then massaged him.

She wasn't to know that it had been only by dint of enormous effort on his part to control it that it had not erected of its own volition. All his girls: Jane and the various pony-girls he had had over the years, had all been beautiful, slender and athletic, just the way he liked them, but Angela had something else. She was beautiful, perhaps more so than any of the others and her body was quite perfect but it was something more. Something indefinable: perhaps an aura that seemed to surround her. An inner beauty that radiated from her; an ingenuousness that no degree of humiliation and physical chastisement could destroy. It was this that James had recognised without being able to define it and it was this he wanted to protect and nurture.

She met Amanda Swift that evening at dinner. There were just the two of them but they always dressed formally, part of an old tradition and they always had a sherry beforehand although that was all. The mayor drank wine sparingly on formal occasions but not otherwise.

He had asked Angela to present herself during this pleasant half hour with his wife. “So, James, this is the new girl.” Amanda too had heard the city gossip about this paragon but she was not the sort to embarrass the girl in front of her, restricting herself to the simple ‘girl',

“This is her, my dear. Exquisite, isn't she?”

“She is. Come here, my dear, let me see you.” She smiled at Angela as she stood before the wife of the man who, if all rumours were correct, was soon going to take her to his bed. Angela returned the smile deferentially and bowed her head but Amanda took her by the chin and raised it again. “You have no need to bow to me, child. I am but a woman like you ...”

“Amanda!”

“Well, James, it's true. If I said those words outside this room, I could be arrested as this girl was, and sentenced to exactly the same penalty as she. Impertinence! Well!”

“Amanda, please. I don't want to see you arrested. One day you will go too far. Anyway, you approve of my latest pony-girl?”

“If we must have such things, yes. She is perfect...”

Angela was dismissed but she said nothing of the conversation to Jane. Gossip was a no-no but in any case she knew just how dangerous were Amanda Swift's words - at least for her. But she wondered. That the wife of the most powerful man in the city harboured such dangerous thoughts and dared to voice them - in front of a prisoner. It was weird stuff.

During the meal, while Jane and Angela, naked still, served their master and mistress (well she was that, at least nominally), the conversation across the table was lively, about current affairs and the latest town hall politics. Angela realised Amanda was a very intelligent woman and she mourned once again that able women were now barred from public involvement in such things. Perhaps the leaders of the Women's Lib. Movement had gone too far too fast but women surely did have something to offer, she thought.

That night, she was pleased to find she was to share the attic room with Jane and that the beds they were to sleep in were indeed as real as Jane had intimated. No more straw to itch your body, even if it did keep you warm. The sheets were coarse but adequate and they even had a pillow. She fell asleep almost immediately and dreamt about the mayor making long and passionate love to her.

Her days were spent in like manner but when the mayor had no public duties on a weekend, she spent the time gardening with him and his wife. This was a passion for James Swift. It was both a relaxation and a joy and every single annual in his garden had been planted by him or Amanda and as far as possible, they tended the garden themselves. Now Angela knelt, naked of course, on hands and knees between them, weeding the rose garden silently while he and his wife talked. Mostly it was about the garden but other things interspersed themselves at times. She was one of them.

“You haven't taken her yet, James?” she said suddenly after a silence.

He sat back on his haunches and looked at her strangely. Then he spoke. Softly and without heat. “You've never ever raised this subject before... ? I thought I had always been discreet... ?”