House Rules (25 page)

Footsteps and a faint clinking of chains announced the arrival of Gretchen, whom he had not seen since they were parted after the night in the barn. Although she no longer wore the steel face-mask, she too had been put into leg-irons. There was no outward sign of the woman who had been so strongly aroused by being left bound and helpless. She was dressed for work, a smaller and blonder version of Richard himself. He could see by her unnaturally erect carriage that she wore the saddle strap again. He wondered if the twin plugs had been left inside her as well. She sat down carefully in the chair, keeping her back straight as she ate her breakfast.

‘Good morning,’ she said to them both. To Gertrude, she added, ‘Madame is ready for her breakfast.’

The maid nodded and began to load a tray with coffee, toast and butter. Gretchen said nothing more until she had gone out.

‘We will be working today as Madame’s assistants. She told me she plans to keep you here and have you work at the bank.’

Richard said nothing of his resolve to leave as soon as possible. Pointing to Gretchen’s leg-irons, he asked instead if they would all be wearing them henceforth.

Gretchen replied that today was out of the ordinary. Normally, she said, she wore only her saddle strap at work. She said she would never dream of running away from Madame. But Madame had decreed that she be shackled as a reminder not to disobey.

Remembering Hannelore Bern’s reaction to what they had done during their confinement together, he didn’t need to ask what form the disobedience had taken. He asked, ‘What about Gertrude? What has she done to make Madame angry?’

‘Oh,’ Gretchen said, ‘she has done nothing. She wears her leg-irons all day whenever she is to be left alone in the house. The chauffeur will be attending to his duties in the city, and Gertrude will be alone here all day. She will be locked in, but the leg-irons are an added incentive not to run away. I do not think she would run away in any case. She likes her work here with Madame.’

Richard thought he detected irony in the reference to ‘work’.

‘What does she do here?’ he asked. ‘I mean, aside from maid’s work.’

‘She dresses Madame and looks after her wardrobe, she cleans the house, and she performs certain other duties for Madame.’ Gretchen reddened at these last words.

‘What other duties?’ Richard prompted.

Gretchen hesitated, obviously choosing her words carefully. She looked over her shoulder to be sure they were alone before speaking. ‘She performs … intimate services. For Madame.’ She reddened further.

‘You mean lesbian lovemaking?’ Richard said, thinking of the relation between Helena and Margaret.

‘Please, not so loud.’ Gretchen looked over her shoulder fearfully before nodding.

Richard continued without heeding her signs of alarm, ‘So Gertrude is the lesbian part of the household, while you are the resident masochist?’

Alarmed, Gretchen put her finger to her lips.

‘Well, are you?’ Richard asked.

She nodded.

‘Tell me about it,’ he said.

Gretchen bridled. ‘You have no right to ask me these things. You are only another servant. Madame makes you wear women’s clothes and take her orders, just like the rest of us.’

‘You’re right about the orders, but the clothes are nothing to do with Madame. This is how I arrived. Of my own free will,’ Richard told her. ‘But you might as well tell me. You know you’re going to anyway. As you said, we’re all fellow workers – sufferers, if you like.’

‘Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains,’ Gretchen said sneeringly.

‘So you don’t want to lose your chains?’ Richard asked.

‘Yes … No … You are confusing me.’

‘So tell me about it,’ he said, more gently. He could see that she wanted to talk to someone. And he might learn something from her that would help him to get away.

‘Gertrude,’ Gretchen said, beginning her revelations by talking about someone else, ‘is the more passive part of the partnership, though that hardly describes her adequately. She is only passive in comparison with Madame, and only because Madame herself wants to be the one who gives all the orders. If she had her way, Gertrude would be making the beast with two backs every time she saw Madame.’

He thought he detected malice in the description, but didn’t want to interrupt Gretchen now that she was talking.

‘So Madame – wisely, I think – makes her keep her distance and exercise moderation. Otherwise she would have no time to do anything else.’

Or anyone else, Richard thought.

‘As you said, I am the resident masochist,’ Gretchen said with a faint blush. She managed to convey that being a masochist was somehow superior to being a sweaty lesbian nymphomaniac. ‘Madame punishes Gertrude with the whip. The whip is my reward.’

‘It didn’t look that way the last time I saw you beaten,’ Richard said.

‘Ah, but there are ways of being whipped, and ways of being whipped. When Madame takes the trouble to use the whip erotically, there is no greater pleasure in the world. It is not wholly a matter of severity. Intent has as much to do with it. When Madame wants to tease or arouse me with the whip, I wonder why anyone bothers to aspire to heaven. Especially as the heaven to which they aspire is such a sexless place.’

Richard had to agree with her reasoning. Otherwise he would not be here either. Or at Margaret’s, he added silently.

‘Last night, for example,’ Gretchen began.

But at that point Gertrude came back into the kitchen, and she turned the conversation to the more mundane matter of going to the city.

Hannelore herself came in a few minutes later, and they got up to follow her. Richard and Gretchen got into the car wearing their leg-irons. The chauffeur paid no more attention to them than he did to the car. He probably saw this every day, Richard guessed.

The car deposited them at the private entrance at the rear of the bank. Richard and the two women went inside while the chauffeur parked the car. Richard felt self-conscious, but Gretchen behaved normally. He tried to emulate her sang-froid. And he wondered if anyone in the front office had any idea what was going on in the director’s office. If word ever got out, there would be an extremely unpleasant reaction on the part of the conservative Swiss. The idea of mixing sex with finance would be deeply disturbing to them.

And there, suddenly before him, was the way out. The whole game depended on a willingness on the part of every player to abide by the two main rules: secrecy and acquiescence. Break either or both of these rules, and Hannelore Bern’s hold over him would cease to exist. She might manage to restrain him physically, as now with the leg-irons, but not at every moment. Sooner or later her vigilance would slacken.

There was no one in Hannelore’s office when they arrived. She simply walked into the room, and they followed. Hannelore seated herself at her desk and lifted the telephone. ‘Do not disturb me until I ring,’ she ordered the front office. She settled down to deal with the paperwork that always accumulates overnight. Richard and Gretchen were left to their own devices. Gretchen took herself off to the file room, beckoning Richard to follow.

‘It would be better if you had something to do,’ Gretchen said. ‘Madame doesn’t like to be disturbed while she is catching up on incoming correspondence. And she has a strong aversion to idleness. I will show you the filing system, and later you can help me.’

Richard nodded, glancing around the smaller room that adjoined Hannelore’s office. It was lined on three sides with tall filing cabinets. On the fourth side, near the door, was the console with video monitors that obviously served the closed-circuit security cameras. Richard saw the view outside the main entrance. Several cameras presented a constantly shifting picture from the main lobby and the public spaces. Other screens showed the vault and the secure rooms with their rows of locked boxes. Richard guessed that the cash he had delivered was in one of them. There were pictures of the inside of several offices, some occupied and some not.

There were several blank screens. Richard moved to the console and studied the controls. There were switches which controlled the operation of each camera, and small joysticks which were used to pan and zoom individual cameras. It was all very neat, each control labelled and the entire console clean and new.

‘Gretchen,’ Richard said, ‘do you know how to operate this equipment?’

‘What?’ Gretchen looked up. ‘Oh, you mean the video surveillance cameras. Yes. Madame sometimes likes to look at the different operations, and I operate the system as she directs. It is very sophisticated. For instance, we can video any area of the building and store it on tape. In fact, that is the normal practice, since no one can monitor all the cameras. The tapes are stored and later one of the security guards will view them at random in case something was missed.’

‘What are these blank screens for?’ Richard asked.

‘Two of them are spare: if one or more of the operating cameras goes down, we can switch to them. And two are used to scan Madame’s office during the hours she is away, in case anyone decides to break into the confidential files she keeps here. Those two cameras are not wired into the security guards’ console. The tapes are kept here so that Madame or I can review them. Sometimes she tapes interviews with prospective clients. She does that with all of the couriers who operate the cash delivery system with Margaret Wagner. I would guess that you were videoed when you made your delivery. The tape would be here somewhere.’

Richard remembered the striptease Hannelore had forced them to do, and suddenly he knew how he would break away from Hannelore. And how he would ensure that she would never try to track him down or bother him again. That was an important consideration. People with as much money as Hannelore were never good to have as enemies unless one had some way to keep them from exercising their power. Richard knew that Hannelore would not appreciate him leaving, and would be inclined to cause trouble for him or Helena or Ingrid – or all three.

But he said nothing of all this to Gretchen. They filed the documents for the most part in silence, Richard doing the ones in the lower drawers that Gretchen would have found uncomfortable in her saddle strap. They worked undisturbed until lunch time.

Hannelore summoned them both into her office. She had disposed of most of the correspondence from the previous day and was looking carnivorous when Gretchen and Richard emerged from the file storage room. Richard noticed the riding crop lying on her desk at the same time as Gretchen did. He heard her low gasp as she saw the lash. At the same time Richard felt a sharp thrill in his belly and cock as he imagined what was going to happen.

‘Take off your clothes, Gretchen,’ she ordered.

Richard was taken by surprise. He had not expected the moment to come so soon. It looked as if the afternoon’s activity would be just what he needed. Gretchen began at once to strip. Richard had to act quickly. He cast about for an excuse to get back to the file room and activate the cameras in Hannelore’s office. The only thing he could think of on the spur of the moment was the old schoolboy trick. Suddenly he had to go to the toilet. Hannelore impatiently waved him away. Her attention was mainly on Gretchen, watching as the young woman undid the buttons of her blouse.

Once inside the file room, Richard quickly switched on the cameras in Hannelore’s office. As they warmed up, he sought fresh tape cartridges for them, and fed them into the slots with hands that shook from his need to hurry. The blank screens turned from black to grey, flickered, and steadied down into two views of the outer office. One camera was aimed too high. Richard corrected that with the joystick, then set both to automatic scan. As he watched Gretchen unhooking her brassiere, he noticed that the cameras were set so that one scanned the desk area while the other panned around the room. That might miss some of the action, but it would have to do. He hurried back to Hannelore’s office.

Gretchen was standing before Hannelore, naked except for her tights and saddle strap. Hannelore bent down to unlock Gretchen’s leg-irons. The young woman then peeled her tights down her legs. She blushed pinkly when she heard Richard’s step behind her, but Hannelore held her gaze and silently commanded her to continue.

The leather strap between Gretchen’s legs was slightly damp. Richard guessed that she was already wet and excited. The strap would of course have parted her long since. Gretchen’s hand strayed to her mons veneris, where she rubbed the strap against her body, rotating her hips slightly.

‘It seems our little Gretchen is already excited, does it not?’ Hannelore smiled mockingly as Gretchen’s blush deepened. Gretchen snatched her hand away as if the strap had burnt her, and then didn’t know where to put it.

‘Gretchen,’ Hannelore said, ‘put these handcuffs on Richard. It wouldn’t do if he interfered, would it?’

As before, Richard stood quietly while his hands were cuffed behind his back.

Hannelore picked up the riding crop. Gretchen’s eyes followed her hand as she raised it and beckoned Gretchen close to the desk. ‘Bend over,’ she commanded the young woman. ‘You know what we are going to do.’

Gretchen bent over the desk, placing her hands flat on the top. She never took her eyes from the whip. Hannelore moved beside her and tapped her knees with the shaft of the whip. Gretchen moved her feet further from the desk until her bottom was fully exposed.

Richard admired the taut muscles in her long legs as she presented herself for punishment. But Hannelore was not yet satisfied. She tapped Gretchen’s legs again, between the thighs, indicating she was to spread them apart. When Richard looked this time, he fancied he could see the pink rosebud of her arsehole. Gretchen’s cunt lips were fully exposed at the apex of her thighs as she held her bottom up in the air. The strap was dark with her juices where it passed between her labia. She was breathing heavily, and Richard could see that her nipples were taut and crinkly. Gretchen moved her hips, rubbing against the strap so that it pressed deeply between her lips. The strap must have been tight against her clitoris, for she caught her breath on a gasp as she moved.