The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) (26 page)

So most of the time I sat alone and entertained myself with embroidery or arranging and rearranging the flowers in my room. The Duc bought me a piano but I did not know how to play it. From time to time, I tried but the ugly sounds I wrought from the instrument were worse than no sound at all. Even my little puppy would run from the room when I opened the piano lid.

My life was quite different from Arlette’s. How enviable her situation seemed! She might have had money worries from time to time now that her looks were fading, but her house was always full of friends and laughter. I lived in a mausoleum, taken out from time to time like a doll.

Oh, how he wanted me to be like a doll. Arlette had explained to me that what the Duc loved most of all was a naive young creature he could bend to his will. He did not expect me to be cultured or witty with him. I had only to look sweet and appear excited when he arrived to see me. In return, he would give me diamonds like a grandfather gives his daughter sweets.

Except I didn’t only have to smile and seem happy, of course.

Much as he loved to dress me up, the Duc loved to undress me too. And the more layers he stripped away from me, the less a gentleman he became. He liked to bend me around his manhood as though I was a sapling. When he had finished with me, I would be scratched and bruised. He especially liked to see bruises on the inside of my pale pink thighs.

And there was worse. One night the Duc told me to dress up, for we were going out together. Ordinarily, I did not mind going out with the Duc, because it was far less onerous than staying in. At least if we were in a restaurant, he could not insist on pretending to suckle from my breast. Or expect me to sit on his prick for hours on end, while he pinched my nipples and slapped my cheeks. My favourite evenings with the Duc – if any of them can be called favourites – were those when we went to a theatre and a restaurant. The Duc would always order wine for me and I found alcohol to be a wonderful elixir for deadening both physical sensations and emotions. Sometimes, if I was very lucky the Duc would drink so much that he would not be able to get an erection, or, best of all, fall asleep in the carriage on our way back to the house.

But that night we were not going to a restaurant. The Duc instructed the carriage driver to take us to the Forêt de Meudon, fifteen miles or so outside the city, where a friend of his had a country estate. I had heard of the man in question. He was someone that Arlette would not allow over her threshold. When I asked Elaine why Arlette had such a strong aversion, Elaine shuddered and said, ‘She’s not the only one.’ But they didn’t elaborate and now I was on my way to the man’s house without a proper understanding of the horror that would come.

During my time with the Duc I had felt miserable most of the time and degraded on a daily basis, but I had never felt especially frightened. Still, I felt anxious as we passed through the iron gates of the Château Meudon. The path was bordered on each side by dense woodland. I had the strange sensation of being watched from behind the trees.

At the end of the driveway, the Duc himself helped me down from the carriage. I could tell that he was excited. He was smiling his terrible smile.

A footman let us into the house, but I knew immediately that this was not going to be like any dinner party we had attended together before. While we stood in the hallway and another servant helped us with our belongings, I heard the sound of raucous laughter, followed by anguished shrieking, before a naked woman shot out of a doorway further down the corridor, with a half-dressed man in hot pursuit.

I held back. I was startled and instinctively alarmed by the woman’s obvious distress.

‘Come along,’ said the Duc, offering me his arm.

‘But—’

He took my hand and placed it on his forearm. He smiled at me, all teeth.

Part of the role I played for the Duc was that of an innocent, but when he wanted me to do something that did not appeal to me in the least, he was not above reminding me that I was not in fact a princess but a common prostitute. I had an awful feeling that I would have to face that truth again if I asked to be excused from the gathering.

Chapter 37

It was an orgy.

If a newspaper editor, such as the one who courted me so extravagantly he almost lost his wife and his house, might have seen the men in that salon, he would have cried out in delight at the story he could write. As I glanced round the room, I saw half the most important men in France. There were politicians, soldiers, aristocrats and landowners. I held my fan to my face as I looked round. I thought perhaps I even saw our country’s leader, with a young woman sitting in his lap.

There was so much naked flesh on display. Though the footmen who let us into the house had been dressed in a smart uniform, beyond the heavy studded doors it was an altogether different matter. None of the staff here were clothed, although they were adorned, in ways that made it obvious which of the naked bodies were guests and which were there only to serve their desires. They all wore collars, of the kind you would put on a dog. Of the kind I refused to put on my own dog because they seemed so very barbaric.

The Duc accepted a glass of champagne from a young woman, letting his eyes travel down her body without any sense of shame. As she turned to serve someone else, he slapped her on the bottom.

I took a glass of champagne for myself, hoping that its magical medicinal qualities would do their work on me quickly. I did not see any woman I recognised in that room. No fellow courtesan. I longed for a friendly face who I might interrogate as to what the evening would hold.

The party’s host was touring the room, greeting his friends and admiring the women they had brought with them. I watched as he took some girl’s chin in his hand and turned it this way and that as though he were admiring a horse he might buy if she were the right price. He squeezed one of her breasts as he talked to her lover. I was surprised he didn’t lift up her skirt to check what was beneath.

My only hope was in the Duc’s jealousy. Since we had become lovers, he had been adamant that I should not associate with any man other than him. I certainly could not, as Arlette often did, entertain male friends without a chaperone. I prayed that the Duc would be equally horrified by the thought of any other man touching me here.

Indeed he was.

‘Are you not going to share your girl?’ the host asked him.

‘Not with you,’ said the Duc. ‘Not with any of you poor fools. We are here merely to observe.’

‘Voyeurs,’ said the host. ‘What fun you’ll have.’

‘Perhaps we’ll pick up some ideas,’ the Duc added with a laugh that turned my stomach.

There was to be entertainment in addition to the naked servants. The host clapped his hands and bade us to sit down on the stiff-backed chairs that encircled the room, just as at any smart Parisian soirée. There were not quite enough seats, however, and so the Duc insisted I sat upon his knee. He held me in place a little too tightly.

The host clapped his hands again and a young man entered the room. He was dressed in an Arabian costume. He carried with him a long curved sword. After he had impressed us with his juggling tricks for several minutes, a young woman joined him. She too was dressed as something from Arabia. Her face was veiled.

They danced together for a while. Their
pas de deux
was as beautifully choreographed as anything I had seen at the ballet. They acted their love for each other so well, it could only be because it had its roots in the truth.

I relaxed just a little. Perhaps the evening would not be so awful as I had thought. The dancing was tasteful. But then the boy used the sword to carefully slice the girl’s clothes from her body. Three swishes of the sabre and she was naked as the day she was born.

Now the attention of the room was firmly on her and her alone, the female dancer took up a position in front of the host. She danced close enough that he could reach out and stroke her bosom. Then she stepped away and leaned over backwards, making of her body a bridge. In that attitude, she undulated as though she had fewer bones than the rest of us.

And with each undulation she produced, from her vagina, a golden ball.

The audience was delighted. The Duc applauded raucously. The dancer skipped towards him and laid him a golden egg of his own.

Then her partner rejoined her. They moved together again. The girl avoided the sword by the smallest distance every time her partner turned her round until, suddenly, the young man seemed to be about to run her through. I flicked open my fan; I couldn’t bear to see what happened. But quick as a flash, he turned his sword and, holding the blade, thrust the handle right up the girl’s vagina. The assembled women all gasped in horror. The Duc cheered loudly. As finales go, it was a horrible one. I was relieved, of course, that the girl was not sliced in two, but her humiliation stung me as keenly as any real cut.

The girl stayed on her hands and knees, panting, with the sword sticking out of her like a tail, while her dancing partner accepted the applause of the audience.

‘I liked that,’ said the Duc. ‘I think I would find the sight of you with a handle in your pussy most becoming too.’

I quickly excused myself.

Later that evening, I found the dancer in one of the bedrooms. She was alone, making repairs to her hair.

The girl said her name was Celeste. She wasn’t French. I could tell that at once. Her accent was as exotic as her dancing. She was from Hungary. Her parents were itinerants, who came to France every year for the grape harvest. This year they had left her behind.

‘My lord took a fancy to me while I was working in his vineyard. He offered my father more money than he’d ever seen if he could keep me here. My ma had just had another baby. One more mouth to feed. It made sense to leave me here in France.’

‘And do you miss your family?’ I asked her. I knew how badly I missed mine.

‘Not really. I thought it would be better to be here than under the same roof as my papa. At least he couldn’t fiddle with me any more. But it turns out my lord is even worse. Wants to do everything my father did to me and then some. There’s days I can’t hardly sit down.’

I remembered Arlette, talking about the Duc.

‘But I tells myself that it keeps a roof over my head and I hope my pa has spent the money on my new baby brother.’

‘You’re a good girl,’ I said.

I felt so sorry for her. She was clearly very young. Younger even than I had been when Arlette found me in the Bois de Boulogne. But her whole life had been one of misery and debauch. I, at least, had my happy childhood to look back on when I found myself in the depths of despair.

‘He has a dungeon here,’ Celeste said then, dropping her voice to a whisper. ‘Back in his grandfather’s time, they used to throw thieves and beggars in there. Now he uses it for himself. It’s like his playroom.’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘You don’t want to imagine,’ Celeste assured me. ‘I can tell you it ain’t nothing good.’

She lifted her skirt and showed me her backside, which was criss-crossed with thin bloody lines.

‘See?’

‘My God!’

I winced at her pain. She must have covered the marks with make-up when she danced.

‘You must escape here,’ I said.

‘How am I ever going to do that? I’ve got nothing. I’ve got no money. I haven’t anywhere to go.’

‘Here,’ I said, taking off an ear-clip. ‘Have this. It is worth enough for you to rent a small cottage while you try to find honest work.’

Celeste held the earring in her hand. Her eyes widened as she looked at it.

‘This is real, ain’t it?’

‘Of course. Don’t part with it for less than five thousand francs.’

‘I’d better hide it,’ she said. And with that, she popped the earring straight up her vagina. The opposite of her golden ball trick.

I grasped her hand. ‘Get out,’ I said. ‘Please leave as soon as you can.’

Soon after that, I told the Duc that I was feeling unwell. I was surprised and very relieved when he agreed that we should go back to Paris. Later I would discover it was only because he was tired of having to defend me from the attentions of his friends. He wanted me naked and submissive for himself. That night he had me in a thousand ways.

I do not know what happened to that poor girl, Celeste. Of course, I have an idea but I put it from my mind. I did not want to think that I might have done something more to save her from her fate, as Arlette had saved me from freezing to death the year my mother died. In reality, I could have done nothing more than offer to take her place.

Chapter 38

Just four days after Steven’s birthday came my own. I was turning thirty. A momentous occasion for any woman. At thirty, my mother had a husband and two children. She had a mortgage on a four-bedroomed house and a family dog called Winston. At the same age, my own life was remarkably ungrounded. I had nothing to keep me anywhere, if I was honest. I had no mortgage. No husband. No babies. Not even a pet. It goes without saying that the thought of turning thirty without any of those things in place gave me pause. What should my life look like?