Damsels in Distress (12 page)

‘I’m sorry I volunteered you for this shame, Ginny,’ Penelope said softly as Virginia loosened the laces of her corset. ‘I don’t know of what I was thinking.’

The two women had returned to the bedroom where they removed their gowns. Farquar Salisbury had decided it was time for them to be completely naked, and neither had been about to argue.

‘You were thinking that you simply could not bear it,’ Virginia said with a shrug. Do not be too hard on yourself, Penny. I was nothing loath to escape those last three strokes myself. Anyway, I got you into this, remember?’

Penelope could now undo the front of her stays, and the ladies swapped places so she could loosen the laces of Virginia’s corset. Both young women were standing; throbbing, tender bottoms ensured that neither wished to sit, even on the soft bed coverlet.

‘You warned me what a diabolical little bastard Farquar was. I did not believe you. Well, it seems we are now in this together at any event.’

Virginia’s corset came off and both removed their camisoles. They stood for a moment and regarded one another with tender affection, the shame they might otherwise have felt at being naked in each other’s presence having quite paled into insignificance by their recent experience, and their knowledge of what was to come.

Penelope looked at her friend and realised with a shock that she found Ginny’s naked body almost unbearably appealing. Virginia’s sweet face was still red and some strands of her fine brown hair had escaped the bun she kept it in, and stuck to her cheeks with partly dried tears. Lifting her hand, Penelope stroked Virginia’s shapely breasts gently. ‘You know, you are really beautiful,’ she said softly.

In return Virginia brushed her fingers against the roundness of Penelope’s tummy. ‘So are you, Penny,’ she said hoarsely. ‘But Master Salisbury and his friend are waiting for us, and my poor bottom dare not risk his displeasure. I think we had better go.’

‘Eeny, meeny, miny, mo…’ Farquar drawled, relishing every moment, ‘catch a lady by her toe…’

Virginia and Penelope stood, on his orders, with their hands on their heads, and Farquar Salisbury had never, ever, seen a finer sight. The ladies were naked with the exception of their stockings, and a velvet choker around Virginia’s graceful throat. The two women’s bodies were even more beautiful than he had dared imagine, and choosing which one to explore first an impossibility. Thus he had recourse to the rhyme.

‘If she squeals, let her go, eeny, meeny, miny, mo…’

His pointing finger came to rest on Virginia. She swallowed hard but it was Penelope who looked at the floor despondently.

‘I say, so this is my one, Salisbury?’ Horace giggled excitedly. ‘Tender little morsel, ain’t she? I bet she buggers like butter on a summer’s day!’ He fairly leapt across the room and grabbing Penelope by the ear, hauled her off to one of the bedrooms.

Farquar looked at Virginia. Virginia glanced at Farquar.

‘The pater had his faults,’ he said, ‘but the old man certainly had taste.’

‘How… how do you want me?’ Virginia asked in a hoarse whisper, blushing bright red.

‘Back over the table, I think,’ Farquar said pensively. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added, seeing her lick her lips nervously, ‘I shan’t bugger you. Not this time, anyway. No, I fancy another tunnel. Now, Mrs Chisholm, if you would be so good as to bend over and spread your legs for me.’

Hesitant as a doe, Virginia moved over to the table and bent over it, between the two piles of books, and reluctantly opened her legs.

‘Put your hands together at the small of your back.’

Farquar was not sure why he bound her hands behind her, other than the notion seemed appealing. The naked women let him tie her, though she let out a few frightened sounding gasps.

Much as Farquar longed to spend time fondling Mrs Chisholm’s plump, well-welted bottom, his erection had been rigid to the point of discomfort for too long for him to dally. His fingers moved from the hot, cane-scored skin of Virginia’s bottom to the hot, slippery lips between her legs. As he did so her gasps of discomfort turned into moans of something else.

Unbuttoning his breeches took but a second. His cock felt as if it had been forged from iron. Farquar placed the head against her cunny lips and with a groan of pleasure, slid it in.

It had been his desire and his intention to fuck Virginia as rigorously as he had thrashed her, but this noble ambition, it rapidly became apparent, was utterly beyond him. Virginia’s cunt was hot and tight and so slickly welcoming that it seemed almost to be sucking at his manhood, and after a few thrusts he felt his crisis beginning.

The lady in question was writhing like a thing possessed on the table and making strange, rather startling, gurgling sounds as he rammed his bursting member further in, then he gave a moan as he felt his jism hose out, and to his astonishment, in apparent response Virginia started screaming incoherently and bucking convulsively beneath him.

‘I have to say, ooh… ah… ladies, that it has… oof… been a very pleasant afternoon…’ Farquar took another sip of claret, just managing to swallow it before he had to groan with pleasure again.

The boys had set the armchairs opposite each other before charging their glasses with Chateau Montrose. Each lit a cigar, though Farquar suspected that Horace was not really enjoying his much, as he puffed at it very infrequently. This may have been due to the distraction however, of having Virginia, who was kneeling between his legs, sucking away at his prick.

Farquar pulled at his own cigar with pleasure, but it was not that that made him groan with desire. Pretty Penelope Simpson, well whipped and freshly buggered, was kneeling naked before him and sucking him off diligently.

He looked at Virginia’s naked back and watched her head rhythmically bobbing. He let his gaze run down her lovely pale-skinned back and rest on her chubby, welted bottom.

He looked down, at Penny’s bobbing blonde head, failing to suppress another grunt of pleasure as her wicked tongue teased his cock-head. He took another sip of the Montrose. He looked up at Ginny’s striped bottom. He looked down at Penelope’s pretty head. His excitement was building again. He would have been happy to stay like that forever, but Miss Simpson was too accomplished at her task and he was too aroused.

He looked at Virginia’s shapely naked form. He looked down at Penelope’s busily bobbing head. He took a sip of wine and then a puff of his cigar.

Mr Farquar Salisbury, prefect of school house, had a problem. The fact was, he
really
did not want to go back to school.

It was yet so early that the gaslights still glowed yellow as the carriage disappeared into the morning mist. Watching from her bedroom window Elouise sighed sadly. Charles was off at the crack of dawn again and he would, no doubt, not be back until very late. His family owned the bank. Surely he did not need to get in before the tellers? She could not help feeling he was avoiding her, and that this was her fault in some way.

It was not that married life was really such a disappointment, she told herself without conviction, as Biddy helped to lace her tight into her corsets. Charles was a good man, a kind man, and she loved him very much. True, there was a certain distance in their relations, but then there always had been. She had imagined they would get closer after marriage, but if anything he seemed even more remote. Since the first night they had even slept in separate rooms.

That most intimate part of marriage, which she had hoped would bring them together, seemed rather to have driven them apart. The truth was that little had happened on their wedding night. She had been shy and he seemed mortified by his own failing. Whether he blamed her, or was ashamed of himself, from that night he had seemed determined to stay away.

‘Will you be going out ma’am?’

‘Not this morning, Biddy. I want to look through the box room; Mr Cameron said there is a lot of rubbish in there. If we can throw some of it out we might finally get those trunks of mine off the upstairs landing.’

Biddy accompanied her up the stairs with evident enthusiasm. The landing in question housed the room the maid shared with her husband, Joe the footman. The couple had undoubtedly been more inconvenienced by Elouise’s overflow of trunks than had the grander folk who dwelt below.

‘Good heavens.’ Elouise blinked in astonishment at the jumble of objects that packed the surprisingly large room. ‘So this is where everything was put when the Great Exhibition was closed!’

Indeed, this scarcely seemed much of an exaggeration. So full of curios and venerable furnishings was the room that the two young women could only enter at all with considerable difficulty.

‘Well, Biddy,’ Elouise said wryly as she picked a rather mangy stuffed pine martin from the top of a bureau brimming with old papers, ‘it seems we have ourselves rather a task.’

It was a dusty morning’s work in the box room. Elouise might have been far too well brought up to perspire, yet the politest commentator must have conceded that her perfect porcelain complexion had soon taken on a distinctly healthy glow. The room was simply too full of fascinating curios for her to stand by instructing Biddy, as her mother would no doubt have said she should. At twenty-two Elouise had not quite lost that girlish curiosity and tendency to excitement that had long been her dear mama’s despair. She delved into long lost drawers and burrowed into overflowing boxes, exclaiming delightedly at dusty ships in bottles and boxes of mounted butterflies. From time to time she would put aside some treasure to keep; an old diary here and a beautifully worked patchwork quilt there.

It was almost time for luncheon when she came across the cane.

‘Look, Biddy, this is a bit thin for a walking stick, isn’t it?’ She bent the flexible yellow rod experimentally between her hands, and Biddy licked her lips, an odd look in the maid’s eye.

‘Oh lor, ma’am, that’s not a walking stick cane. That’s rattan. It’s a swishing stick, that is!’

‘A swishing stick?’ Elouise asked, puzzled.

Biddy shook her head in wonderment. ‘Have you really never seen one, ma’am? Did your parents or your governess never…’

Understanding dawned. ‘Oh! Oh no, Biddy, my mother did not believe in it. She comes from a Quaker family. It was all long improving lectures for me.’ She grinned at the servant. ‘Sometimes I thought I would rather have been whipped!’

The two young women shared a giggle, and Elouise placed the cane on top of one of the boxes of things that were destined to go.

‘Oh crikey, ma’am, don’t put it there,’ Biddy advised. ‘If my Joe sees it when he comes to get the boxes it will give him ideas.’

‘Ideas? Biddy, what do you mean? You don’t mean that Joe beats you?’

Elouise looked at the maid, shocked. Biddy was an attractive girl of twenty-five. Pretty in a plump way with brown curls held neatly in place by a lace maid’s cap. There was a pink glow on her plump cheeks and her dark brown eyes were shining. It seemed to Elouise that she was wondering whether she should say more. The idea of that brute Joe beating his pretty wife filled Elouise with indignation. What utter beasts men could be! ‘Please, Biddy, you can tell me, you know. I shan’t tell Mr Cameron if you do not wish me to.’

‘Well, miss,’ Biddy said at last. ‘Not like that, not the way you are thinking. He does spank me, and he takes the belt to me sometimes, but only ’cos…’

Elouise watched in astonishment as the maid’s blush spread and deepened until her whole face was a bright, embarrassed pink.

‘Well, ’cos I like it.’ Biddy’s voice was a whisper now.

‘Like it? Biddy, whatever can you mean?’

The maid shook her head slowly. ‘No, not
like
it, exactly. I don’t like it when it stings, but,’ she looked up, her eyes glistening with excitement, ‘oh miss, I love it when he just grabs me in his strong arms and puts me over his knee. And then there’s after…’

‘But Joe, does he, I mean…?’ Elouise picked up the cane again, more gingerly this time as if holding something charged with powerful magic, a witchdoctor’s staff perhaps, or a conjurer’s magic wand.

Biddy chuckled. ‘Oh yes, miss. Joe loves it too. A bit too much, sometimes. A lot of men like doing that sort of thing.’ Her eyes were wide with surprise. ‘Didn’t you know?’

‘No, Biddy,’ Elouise said, a little dreamily, for she was thinking of something else, ‘I didn’t know.’ She took the cane and wrapped it in the patchwork quilt, and then taking a handkerchief from her sleeve she wiped her brow, for it seemed to have gotten rather close in the room all of a sudden. Elouise gave the maid a shy smile. ‘But I do now.’

She took her treasures back to her room. Biddy carried the books and some jade jewellery but she kept hold of the quilt – and what was inside it.

‘Biddy,’ she said, as the two young women put the various objects in her wardrobe, ‘do you think, I mean, would you mind…’ the maid was looking at her curiously but not, she judged, unsympathetically, ‘could you… would you, tell me about other things that… that gentlemen like?’

Charles was late again. The clock in the church across the square struck ten and there was still no sign of him. Elouise went to the bedroom window again, too agitated to sit still. What if he did not come back until the early hours? What if he had decided to stay the night at his club? Then she would have to try again another night, but that prospect was too awful to consider; she was sure she would never summon the courage to go through this again.