One Week in the Private House (11 page)

She had lost count of the number of embraces she was pulled into; the countless hungry mouths that had
sought
her lips, the countless hands, some rough and some gentle, that had roamed across her body, pinched her nipples, slapped her bottom, and fumbled at the wetness between her legs. She had surrendered to every caress, her mind reeling with the constant stream of compliments and lewd suggestions whispered into her ears, her body responding with small, trembling orgasms as the Master's minions vied to touch his latest consort.

At last they had reached the dais, and Jem had lowered her tingling sex on to the velvet cushions of the seat that had been reserved for her alongside Headman's ornate throne. At last she had had a chance to survey her surroundings, and she had found herself gazing down at a sea of semi-naked revellers. It had seemed as though every inhabitant of the Private House had gathered for the party. Hundreds of men and women, clad in colourful, exaggerated, revealing costumes, had been seated at long tables; many more, wearing even fewer clothes, had been scurrying between the tables with trays of food and wine, or standing to attention as human torch-bearers at the bases of the stone columns, or waiting in the side-aisles to make their appearance during the entertainments.

For the first few hours, while the main courses of dinner had been served, a sense of decorum had been maintained. The waiters and waitresses, certainly, had been treated as fair game from the very start of the banquet, and the dinners had missed no opportunity to grab and caress the breasts, bottoms and penises that the waiting staff could not help but offer whenever they had approached a table to ladle soup or pour champagne. The diners themselves, however, had taken their lead from the top table, and had restrained the urge to indulge their passions to the full.

The entrance of the entertainers had proved to be the turning point. Jem, who by this time had moved to sit on Headman's lap and had been busy manipulating the prodigious length of his tool while nibbling a strawberry that he held between his teeth, had suddenly noticed a lull in the cacophony. Turning, she had watched the entertainers, cloaked in scarlet, as they had stepped in silent procession to the clear space in the centre of the hall. In the gallery musicians began to play, quietly at first but with a pulsating beat. And the first of the entertainers had started to disrobe.

The striptease had been artfully contrived; the tall creature who had removed every item of clothing, except for a bow tie, black boots, and a red G-string, was the master of ceremonies, and Jem had been unable to tell which sex he or she belonged to. Some of the other entertainers had been easier to classify as they had slowly revealed their bodies at the start of each act: one of the men, a short, curly-haired satyr, had had an organ of massively priapic proportions; two of the women, apparently identical twins, had proudly revealed quivering breasts the size of footballs supported by shelf-like corsets that narrowed to impossibly thin waists. Most of the entertainers had simply been beautiful: lithe, muscular young people who had performed sexual gymnastics of increasingly bewildering complexity.

Audience participation had been encouraged: both guests and servants had been drawn into the entertainers' antics. There had been several games: the master of ceremonies had urged guests with agile tongues to attempt to excite the clitoris of a haughty-looking Amazon he called The Ice Queen, and a queue of men and women had come to kneel before her throne and bury their faces between her spread thighs. In another competition, waitresses had been lined up and instructed to remain still while a team of clowns inserted vibrating dildos into their vaginas; the winner had been the waitress whose tray had rattled least, and her prizes had been the dildo and a seat at the top table.

The acts had become more and more convoluted. As the waiters had cleared the tables, and the guests had begun to improvise their own tableaux of interlocking bodies, the master of ceremonies had announced a lion-taming act. Six flame-haired gymnasts, their bodies painted with
leopard
's spots, had been put through their sexual paces as the music rose to a crescendo.

The orgy had paused when the music had suddenly ceased. And the master of ceremonies had announced the climactic act of the evening: a human sacrifice. He had asked the audience for a volunteer: he wanted a young woman, he had said, who would be flogged into insensibility and then ritually stabbed. And then he had looked straight towards Jem.

Safe now in her bed, Jem still shuddered as she remembered the chill that had gripped her heart at that moment. Have they discovered me, she had thought wildly. Do they know I'm a spy? Are they really going to execute me?

But the master of ceremonies had merely been looking towards the Master for approval to continue; having received a nod from Headman, his eyes had started to rove across the audience. There had been volunteers: women had shrieked, torn off the remains of their gaudy gowns, and scrambled forwards. The master of ceremonies had ignored them. He - Jem was sure now that he was a man - had stalked among the silent guests, searching out the shrinking violets, the youngest, prettiest women with downcast eyes and shivering limbs. He had wanted, it seemed, only a truly unwilling victim. He had stopped in front of a cowering beauty; and had grasped a handful of her long blonde curls.

She had started to protest only when two muscular youths had started to chain her to the wooden frame that had been wheeled into the centre of the hall. By the time she was spreadeagled, her feet barely touching the floor and her arms stretched above her head, her sobs had been the only sounds that could be heard in the electric silence. The executioner, a huge man with muscles that rippled beneath his oiled ebony skin, had then made his entrance. His face had been concealed behind a black mask, and in his hand he had carried a snake of black leather.

For ten minutes, while the blonde writhed desperately in her chains, the executioner demonstrated his skill with the whip. He had cracked it back and forth above his head, each report as deafening as a gunshot and each echoed by a yelp from his prospective victim. He had used the whip as a lasso, and had plucked bottles from the hands of in-
^e
briated revellers. He hkd flicked the whip with such accuracy that he had extinguished cigarettes with its tip.

Each demonstration had drawn cheers and applause from the audience, and the clamour had quietened only when the masked giant had at last positioned himself at the side of the wooden frame. He had waited until the entire audience had remembered his deadly intention; he had waited until, once again, the only sounds in the hall had been the sobs and pleas of the blonde captive. Then he had raised the whip and struck.

The girl had screamed; several people in the audience had screamed too. But as far as Jem had been able to see, the girl's body had not been marked. As the whip had whistled again, and again, and the blonde had flinched and yelped at each stroke, and yet no angry stripes had appeared on her, Jem had begun to suspect that the whole thing was a charade. Some of the audience, too, had started to catcall and whistle.

And then Jem had seen it: a deep pink blush had started to suffuse the blonde's undulating buttocks. The big black man had been employing all of his considerable skill merely to skim and flick those rounded, tempting, swivelling targets. The girl had stopped yelling, and each stroke had begun to elicit a gasp of shock instead of a cry of pain. With sweat streaming down his torso, the masked man had shifted his position, delivering a series of upward cuts that had grazed the undersides of the girl's breasts. And then he had moved again, to stand behind her, and he had continued the upward strokes, each of which had flicked between her widely spread legs so that the tip of the whip had just touched the insides of her thighs, and the undersides of her buttocks, and the soft flesh of her sex. The hall had been silent but for the barely audible swish of black leather and the girl's regular moans. The executioner had been killing her with kindness, and the raucous
crescendo
of gasps that had started to issue from her throat had seemed to indicate that she had been near to orgasm. At that point the master of ceremonies had intervened.

The flogging is satisfactory,' he had announced.
⁴
A round of applause, please, for the masked executioner .. • Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen. And now, the ritual stabbing. As you will see, the executioner has a formidable dagger. Shall he plunge it into the body of our sacrificial victim? Yes? Or perhaps ...' and here he had paused, and opened his arms to indicate the top table,'... perhaps you, Master, would care to deliver the
coup de graceT

And as Terence Headman had started to rise from his throne, Jem had realised that unless she acted immediately, she might lose whatever slight influence she had gained over him. She had tightened her grip on his upright manhood. 'This dagger's mine,' she had whispered as she bit his ear, 'and you can do all of that to me, later.'

Headman had hesitated, but Jem had not stopped fondling the engorged bulb at the top of his stem; he had laughed quietly, and had made a gesture to indicate that the executioner had his permission to continue. As the giant, urged on by the cheers of the crowd, had stabbed his dagger of black flesh between the blonde's reddened arse-cheeks, Jem had matched his strokes with the movements of her hands, and had whispered into the Master's ear a vivid description of how she would spread her legs and stick out her bottom for him and for him alone.

The strategy had worked. From that moment there had been no doubt, if there had been any previously, that Headman desired to do with Jem every single one of the sexual exercises that they had watched during the banquet. In fact the problem had turned out to be preventing him from carrying her off immediately to his chamber. Jem had reasoned that she would have to ration herself: Headman must not be allowed to slake his lust for her, in case he then abandoned her, thus preventing her from carrying out her undercover operation. And so Jem had prevaricated, insisting that she wanted to stay until the banquet ended, Pointing out that Headman had a duty to stay too, suggesting that they should have just one more little drink,
^a
nd giving many little kisses and squeezes to his ever-erect Prick.

Towards the end of evening, long after midnight, when ttiost of the revellers had disappeared under the tables in an indiscriminate jumble of sexual activity, a waiter ap-peared beside Headman's throne. Jem, on her knees between Headman's legs, had looked up: the young man, his face flushed and his nipples bright red from the tweakings they had received, had pushed his pelvis forward. His hands had been tied behind his back and, like many of the waiters, the tray that he had been carrying had been secured to the front of his thighs by straps that ran over his shoulders, round his waist, and up the cleavage of his bottom. His penis, half erect and glistening wetly from the recent attentions of one of the guests, had lain twitching on the hairy sac of his scrotum, which in turn had been resting on the surface of the tray. Surrounding his manhood Jem had seen an array of coloured liqueurs in small glasses, and a bowl containing transparent phials of liquid. Jem had reached up to fondle his left buttock, and had pulled back her head to release Headman's organ from her mouth. 'Master,' she had said, as seductively as she could, 'this will feel even better if we both try a little amyl.' And before he had had time to protest she had squirmed on to his lap, and had kissed him, and had broken an ampoule under their noses.

And after that, Jem thought, I really don't remember very much. But we didn't do anything except fall asleep, which means that Headman hasn't had me yet, and so, I hope, he still wants me, and therefore, I think, everything's going according to plan.

She threw back the covers and looked at her room for the first time. In shape it was a quarter-circle, with windows in the curved wall. The Round Tower, Jem thought; it seems to be where Headman hangs out, and I guess this room's part of it too. The walls are made of stone blocks; can this be part of a medieval castle? Is all of the House as old as this? Only one way to find out, Jem told herself, and jumped, naked, out of bed.

She crossed an expanse of Persian carpet to inspect her face in the dressing table mirror. She didn't like what she saw, but the dressing table contained an arsenal of cosmetics, and she set about repointing the cracks in the facade. Through the arches of the window she could see, stretching away to right and left, the rooftops of the two main wings of the House; they looked old, but more recent than the stonework of the tower. Between them, in the distance, were the manicured lawns and flower beds of a formal garden, crisscrossed with gravel paths and dotted with summerhouses, fantastic pavilions, pergolas and banks of shrubs. Brightly-dressed figures meandered along the paths in the hazy sunshine.

Jem set off on another expedition across the chamber, and reached a door. She opened it and peered out into a deserted corridor. That was no good; she'd been hoping for a bathroom. She went to the other side of the room, and tried the only other door: this one led into a bathroom. It was a thin room, and much smaller than the bedchamber; only about as large as a normal bathroom, in fact.

When she returned to the bedchamber, the room was no longer deserted. A maid with downcast eyes and clasped hands was standing in the middle of the carpet. Jem could tell she was a maid by her uniform: the white mob-cap that failed to contain her light brown hair, and the white apron that she wore over her short black skirt. She looked up as Jem approached, and gave a hesitant smile and a quick curtsey.