CHAPTER TEN: THE PRIDE OF THE CHURCHILLS

In order to understand what happened next, I should have told my readers that, as we trundled up Constitution Hill, down Piccadilly, across Trafalgar Square, along The Stand, down Fleet Street and up Ludgate Hill, all I could think about were the unresolved issues of the length and location of the Service and the bloody ‘chair’. That no one else, particularly Bigge, was fussing about these subjects was because – in order to get some peace and quiet and in the hope that Searcy would find a solution in time - I’d told everyone (except Searcy and Algy) that the Dean had at last agreed to a short open air Service, which The Queen would attend seated on an upholstered gilt throne at the base of the steps. He hadn’t – and therein lay my problem.

The area in front of the Cathedral was a dense mass of people in specially erected stands, fronted by a line of Gentlemen-at-Arms; I spotted Johnny Dawson using his halberd to keep himself upright following a heavy session at the Verulam that we’d shared the night before. As the lead postilion of our carriage started to make the turn in front of the statue of Queen Anne, ranged around which were all the mounted foreign royalty, I could see the Bishop of London in a gold-encrusted cope and mitre. One pace to his rear was the damned Dean and his accursed chair, with four beefy sacristans ready to take up their royal burden. They were all waiting for us at the end of a red carpet which had been laid from the foot of the steps and disappeared up into the gloom of Wren’s masterpiece.

“What an unusual looking throne,” I heard Vicky say to her daughter. If only she knew how unusual, I thought as my early breakfast gurgled ominously beneath my sporran.

To either side of the red carpet, all the way up to the portico, was a densely packed selection of the good and the great of the Church and the City, behind whom were two Guards bands and, perched precariously above them on raised platforms, were a brace of red cassocked and white surpliced choirs, whose job was to sing a Te Deum whilst Vicky was hauled up the steps.

As the carriage halted in front of the prelates - and in desperation at the prospect of what was to come - I asked Searcy in an undertone if he had, even at this very late hour, solved the problem. He murmured something but it was drowned out by the bands which, at that exact moment, noisily struck up the National Anthem. Before I could repeat my question, we both had to dismount from the box preparatory to opening the carriage door and handing down its Defender into the care of Her Church of England. My heart was beating fit to burst as Searcy clutched the door handle whilst, opposite him, I stood ready to unfold the steps and help Our Sovereign Lady descend. A stiffish breeze blew up the back of my kilt (mercifully, I had refused to dress à l’écossais beneath the ridiculous pleated skirt) but that was the least of my worries. What the hell was going to happen when The Queen realised that – contrary to Bigge’s order to me - she was to be carried into the Cathedral, like a bag of maize slung between four coolies, and then subjected to an hour of turgid liturgical praise. Images of the Gentlemen-at-Arms hauling me off to the Tower, followed shortly afterwards by my summary execution for lèse-majesté, flashed before my eyes.

I came back to reality with a jolt as I realised that Searcy had his own problem, for he was struggling with the carriage’s door handle which appeared not to want to turn. As the last bars of the ‘God Save The Queen’ crashed out from the bands I stepped forward to confer.

“Leave it to me, Colonel,” he hissed. Then he looked up at The Queen who leant forward. “I’m very much afraid, Your Majesty, that I am unable to open this door. The handle appears to have jammed.” Alix tittered and Vicky gave her a stern look.

“Really? How tiresome. Well, there’s nothing to be done now. Tell the Bishop that we will attend the Service from here. Alix, my dear, remind me when we return to the Palace to have words with the Crown Equerry…”

“Colonel, could you possibly oblige?” Searcy whispered as he gave me an almost imperceptible wink, whilst Vicky settled back into her seat. Rather than tackle the dreadful Dean, I decided to do as The Queen had commanded and impart the glad tidings to the bearded Bishop.90

“My Lord,” I said giving the old boy a head nod, “Her Majesty is unable to leave her carriage and commands that the Service be held here. The Te Deum will suffice.”

Before he could argue I turned on my heel, returned to the landau, then Searcy and I both mounted back onto the box where we sat staring straight ahead. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the Bishop confer briefly with the Dean, who looked as though he was about to call down the wrath of God, but then sighed and signalled to the choir master. The rest, as they say, is history. The choir sang the Te Deum, the Dean intoned The Lord’s Prayer and the Bishop bellowed out a special Jubilee incantation. In fifteen minutes it was all over. The remainder of the Procession went off, thank God, without incident. However, it was only once we were back in the Buck House Guard Room, and peeling off the absurd tartan garb we’d been obliged to wear, that I was able to ask Searcy what had happened.

“Simple, Colonel. Ivan has a friend who is a ‘friend’ of the Head Coachman in the Royal Mews. Don’t ask me how, but I was able to obtain this,” he held up a key, “and whilst I appeared to be turning the handle I actually locked the carriage door. Of course, I had to reverse the action when we got back here but, fortunately, I learnt how to ‘palm’ keys and coins from Mo, who – you will remember – was very skilled at that sort of thing.”

“Praise be to Allah, is all I can say to that. Under the circumstances, Searcy, I think that, before we return to Stratton Street, you and I should repair to the Verulam where I intend that we down a bumper of fizz to the old boy’s memory and your ingenuity. I hope his shade won’t mind my sayin’ that his conjurin’ skills have saved my bacon.”

That was the good news. On the downside, although nothing was said to me afterwards, neither Croppy Ewart nor I featured in the Diamond Jubilee Honours List that was published at the end of the month. It would seem that, under the circumstances, Her Majesty (or, more likely, Bigge) had not been amused.

Back in the real world of London Society I garnered a certain amount of interest for my role in the royal pantomime, but most of our friends and acquaintances had already switched their attention to the Duchess of Devonshire’s Diamond Jubilee Costume Ball and the dinner parties that were to precede it. As I’ve already mentioned, we were bidden to La Churchill’s who, so C-G said, was going to the ball dressed as the Empress Theodora, wife of some Byzantine despot, in an outfit made for her by Worth in Paris. The enormous bill had doubtless been paid for by one of Lady C’s many well-heeled admirers if not the Duchy of Cornwall itself.

Since we’d received our invitation there had been a great deal of rather tiresome discussion at Stratton Street about what we were going to wear. The invitation stipulated that guests were to come dressed in ‘allegorical or historical costumes dated earlier than 1820’. However, somewhat typically, most of the women, so Searcy’s intelligence service informed us, intended to come dressed as Queens, whether or not their characters fulfilled the directive’s criteria: our hostess was to be Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra; Alix would be dressed as Queen Marguerite de Valois; The Duchess of Connaught as Anne of Austria; Lady Colebrooke as Roxana, wife of Alexander the Great; Daisy Pless had spent a fortune, so Searcy told us, on a jewel encrusted gown that was supposed to turn her into the Queen of Sheba; and at least three were, unbeknownst to each other but not Searcy, to be rigged out in eye-catching oriental outfits as Cleopatra. Only a few independent minded souls, including the Churchill girls, were dressing as Watteau shepherdesses or Hals hausfraus or were daring enough to come as Sapphic Valkyries, cradle-snatching Titanias or the storytelling tart, Scheherazade.91 One woman, a Mrs Wolverton, was reputed to be dressing as Britannia in a helmet, shield, Union flag train and an armoured breast plate.

And what were the men going to be wearing whilst the women tried to outdo each other? Not surprisingly, Searcy also had plenty of Nehemiah-sourced information on that score: Bertie was planning to squeeze his enormous bulk into doublet and hose in the guise of a seventeenth-century Grand Prior of the Order of St John, whilst others were ordering costumes from Savile Row ranging from Nelson and Napoleon to Merlin the Magician and Menelaus, King of Sparta, via an assortment of British and European crowned heads. All-in-all, the Double Duchess’ party kept an army of seamstresses and tailors – not to mention jewellers, armourers, boot and shoe makers, fan and head-dress makers - busy on both side of the Channel for months.

Which left just one question: as what characters were my beloved and I to appear? Needless to say, given her antecedents, Charlotte-Georgina had ordered a costume from a young frock designer in Paris called Porrige,92 to match a (school of) Lely portrait of her ancestress, Belle de Poitrine, the first Duchess of Whitehall. In consequence, she ordered me to get rigged out as Belle’s mount, the Merry Monarch. This was a considerable relief given that she could have chosen to be Queen Guinevere, as did Lady Rodney, and insist that I dress in a full suit of armour as King Arthur.93 I’d still got a decent pair of pins, unlike the Heir Apparent, so the prospect of having to wear baggy britches, silk stocking, high heeled shoes, a horsehair wig and a feathered hat did not particularly bother me.

The day of the party, the 2nd July, duly dawned and was largely occupied with preparations for ‘the Ball’. Given that most of the guests lived only a short carriage drive from Devonshire House, and we were next door, it was mutually agreed that early dinners would be held, at which evening dress would be worn, then everyone would go home to change for the masquerade which was scheduled to start at ten. It was in simple white tie and tails, therefore, that I met the dratted son and heir of the late, insufferable and poxed-to-the-eyeballs Lord Randolph Churchill.

Lady C had assembled a dinner party of twenty at which young Winston, resplendent in 4th Hussars Mess Dress, acted as host. Because of his duties in this capacity, I didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him after the opening pleasantries, but I did get a good chance to observe the little bugger and to listen to him, for he was not shy at expressing his opinions on a whole range of subjects about which he probably had slight knowledge and little experience.

Of medium height, clean shaven and moon faced, Cornet Churchill was fortunate in that he looked more like his mother than his pop-eyed father. However, where she was striking he was merely pleasant looking; it was already clear from his figure that, if he wasn’t careful, he was likely to run to fat in later years. Perhaps his most pronounced characteristic was his voice, which was a sonorous baritone marred by a strange impediment of which he was clearly very conscious. With this vocal flaw, public speaking was clearly a non-starter and, in consequence, I concluded that he was highly unlikely to follow his father into politics, hence perhaps his interest, when he tired of soldiering, in becoming a member of the Fourth Estate. His willingness to express trenchant but ill-informed views would certainly stand him in good stead in Grub Street.

He’d been opinionated enough during dinner, but over the port and brandy he became positively pedagogic. This was either brave or foolhardy, considering that ranged around him were senior politicians, leading figures from the worlds of literature and art – and me – all of whom were old enough to be his father (indeed, at least one of them might have been, given his mother’s morals).

“I have not been to the university,” he announced in response to a remark made by John Gorst,94 “and in my experience it is wasted on the young.” Note: Churchill was only twenty-three at this time. “Once they have left Eton or Harrow, instead of going to the varsity our young men should learn a craft and do healthy manual labour with plenty of poetry, songs, dancing, drill and gymnastics in their spare time.” God, I thought, he sounded just like Baden-Powell. “They can thus let off their steam on something useful. It is only when they are really thirsty for knowledge, longing to hear about things, that I would let them go to the university. It would be a favour, a coveted privilege, only to be given to those who had either proved their worth in factory or field or whose qualities and zeal were pre-eminent…”

Pompous rubbish, of course. In my opinion the function of the so-called seats of learning is to provide a secure environment in which the under graduates can get pissed and a secluded setting in which the deviant dons can slobber over well-muscled young bodies lounging naked at Parson’s Pleasure or straining at oar and bat. Gorst clearly agreed with me, for he harrumphed loudly but said nothing.

Not content with airing his views on education, Churchill then moved on to alcohol – he abhorred both the excessive use of it and the imposition of total abstention – before settling down to a long and thoroughly tedious analysis of the situation on the North-West Frontier, a place to which he’d never been.

“Now take the noble Pathan,” he announced to his elders and betters. I’d rather not, I thought. “The state of continual tumult in which they exist has produced a habit of mind which recks little of injuries, holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity. The tribesmen on the border afford the spectacle of a people who fight without passion and kill one another without loss of temper. Such a disposition, combined with an absolute lack of reverence for all forms of law and authority and a complete assurance of equality, is the cause of their frequent quarrels with us. A trifle rouses their animosity. They make a sudden attack on one of our frontier posts. They are repulsed. From their point of view the incident is closed. There has been a fair fight in which they have had the worst fortune. What puzzles them is that we should regard so small an affair in a serious light and they are surprised and aggrieved that we are not content with the victory, but must needs invade their territories and impose punishments. When they fight amongst themselves they bear little malice and the combatants not infrequently make friends over the corpses of their comrades or suspend operations for a festival or a horse race. At the end of the contest, cordial relations are at once re-established. We do not understand this. Nor do we understand the superstitions and the dread religion which rules their lives. But we must if we are ever to establish peace and security on India’s north-western border.”

Churchill had managed to state what was blindingly obvious to anyone with experience of the region but, in so doing, he had made himself sound as though he’d been there for years. What was to follow made him appear to be a Professor of Comparative Theology. It was a maddeningly good performance by a pretentious subaltern of limited education.

“It is, thank heaven, difficult if not impossible for us to fully appreciate the force which religious fanaticism exercises among the ignorant, warlike and oriental population which inhabits the foothills of the Himalayas. Several generations have elapsed since we in the West have drawn the sword in religious controversy. Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, always exerts a modifying influence on men’s passions and protects them from the most violent forms of fanatical fever. But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword and, ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the peoples of all other creeds, to this form of madness. It takes but a cry for ‘holy war’ for the Pathans to fling aside the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity and the fear of death itself. All rational considerations are forgotten. Seizing their weapons the Pathans become Ghazis – as dangerous and as sensible as mad dogs: fit only to be treated as such.”

He’s right there, I thought, but didn’t say so. Anyway, he didn’t give me a chance, for his pontificating on the subject of the followers of the Prophet rolled on relentlessly.

“Whilst the more generous spirits among the tribesmen become convulsed in an ecstasy of religious bloodthirstiness, poorer and more material souls seize on the hopes of plunder and the joy of fighting. Thus whole nations under the baleful influence of the Prophet Mahommed are roused to arms: the Turks wreak havoc in the Balkans, the Arabs of the Soudan break our squares – and a rising on the Indian frontier can and will, if it is not halted, spread far and wide like a pernicious contagion. In each and every case where civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism, where the religion of blood and war confronts that of peace, we must respond.” He thumped the table. “That is why, gentlemen, when, as will soon happen, a spark struck by the Mad Mullah ignites the tinderbox that is the Swat Valley I will journey from any of the four corners of the world to join Sir Bindon Blood on his noble mission to subdue the Ghazis.”95 But without me, I prayed silently.

I think he would have gone on in a similar vein all night, had it not been for Her Ladyship’s butler who conveyed a message from the drawing room that it was time we all went home to get changed. Two hours later, Atash drove C-G and me the short distance from our front door to the portico of Devonshire House. Actually, we could easily have walked but the pavement was already crowded with gawpers and riff-raff watching the quality arrive and C-G didn’t think we’d be safe. Besides which, she intended to make an ‘entrance’ and that would be easier from our open barouche than if we hobbled in à pied.

For those of my readers who have not been inside the Devonshires’ London hovel I will now describe it. Behind the high wall and sphynx topped gates that border Piccadilly, the frontage of the large house itself is plain. Inside, it’s quite a different matter. We entered through a low ceilinged and colonnaded hall that resembled nothing so much as a florist’s shop, filled as it was with hot-house flowers and ferns from Chatsworth. This lobby led to the so-called crystal staircase, a vast, gently curving affair with wide treads and a glass handrail (hence the name) which occupied the whole of the garden front’s semi-circular apse. At the base of the staircase was a large marble urn on a pedestal, filled with exotic plants – C-G said they were water lilies - and around it was ranged an equally exotic Hungarian orchestra murdering the latest Sullivan ditties. Here we waited in a scrum, that would not have been out of place at my alma mater, until we were summoned up the stairs to the piano nobile where the Double Duchess and her semi-comatose husband were waiting to greet us.96 As we ascended to the presentation, I saw through the large sash windows that in the garden, which stretched all the way down to Berkeley Square, a jumbo-sized tent had been erected to provide enough room for the seven hundred of her closest friends whom the Duchess had invited; the trees and shrubberies were festooned, so I heard later, with twelve thousand lamps.

Once we had negotiated the ducal pair at the top of the staircase, we were directed by footmen in fancy dress to a vast suite of double-height and lavishly gilded State rooms, all of which had been cleared of furniture, except for side chairs. These competed for floor space with yet more flowers, none of which were artificial, whilst - by contrast - the walls were entirely shrouded in a magnificent collection of Old Master fakes. We were by no means the first to arrive and the enfilade of rooms was already pullulating with bewigged, beribboned and bejewelled guests.

Some of the characters they were portraying were easily recognisable: Reuben Sassoon, who I’d last encountered at Tranby Croft, was – given his origins - appropriately dressed as the Caliph of Baghdad although, for some inexplicable reason, his daughter was dressed as a Japanese geisha. Quite why Georgina Dudley, who didn’t as far as I knew have a drop of the Lost Tribes in her veins, had decided to dress at Queen Esther was a mystery; it would have been a role more suited to Hannah Rosebery, had she not been dead for the past seven years. Prince Victor Duleep Singh, sporting what remained of his family’s fabled collection of jewels (minus, of course, the Koh-i-Noor which Searcy had sneaked out of India next to his balls),97 was attired aspirationally as the Moghul Emperor Akbar, whilst the Portugoose corridor-creeper par excellence, Louis Soveral, came as a seventeenth-century version of himself, complete with a bulging cod piece. Thanks to a basket of oranges and her ample, bouncing top hamper, one of the wild Wyndham women was obviously Nellie Gwynn, a fact she reinforced by giving me a roguish grin as she passed.98

“Percy’s girls are a scandal,” sniffed C-G in a carrying voice.

Other guests were less easily identifiable, although their accessories – bows, spears, owls, crescent moons, armour and so on – provided clues to their identities. Indeed, most of the women’s elaborate, Paris-made frocks were about as faithful to their originals as the ghastly Albert Memorial was to medieval architecture. As we paraded through the rooms, Charlotte-Georgina and I played a game of ‘spot the identity’.

If it hadn’t been for their asps, most of the Cleopatras – with the stunning exception of Mrs Arthur Paget, who looked as though she’d raided the Egyptian Room in the British Museum - would have been unidentifiable as such: Gwladys de Grey didn’t even sport the essential serpent. I understandably mistook Margot Asquith for the Gyppo Queen, coiled as she was in papier mâché snakes, only to be told by her in acerbic tones that she was an Oriental snake-charmer. Mrs Hope-Vere, who was similarly serpent-accoutred, was, apparently, Medusa.99 Sibyl Westmorland wore a simple white shift and, on her shoulder, a fucking great big stuffed shite hawk with wings outstretched and its beak pointing at her cleavage; we never did find out who she was supposed to be, but the taxidermy caused her (and everyone in her vicinity) grief all evening.100

Despite a coronet of diamond moonbeams, a sautoir of diamond stars, strange silver udder covers in the shape of moon rays and an orb topped with a crescent moon, neither of us were able to identify Harriet Gerard’s character. C-G, who’s an opera buff, hazarded the idea that she was a character out of that Austrian fellow’s masonic pantomime, but it emerged later that she was supposed to be Astarte, Goddess of the Moon. However, C-G guessed (correctly as it turned out) that Doreen Long, who was also covered in moons and stars, was Urania, Goddess of Astronomy.101 An easier subject was Sullivan’s night time comfort, the Yankee songbird, Fanny Ronalds,102 who was so covered in musical notation that her large gilded harp was quite superfluous when it came to the matter of her identity. I got it at the first go: Euterpe, the Muse of Music. I was, however, a bit stumped by Mrs Leslie, who was clad in a tight fitting breastplate topped with a winged helmet and armed with a shield and spear.

“She’s Boudicca,” I whispered to C-G.

“Nonsense, Jasper, she’s Brunhilde and look, over there, the de Courcel sisters are two more Valkyries and there’s another one. Isn’t that Mrs Reginald Talbot?”103 I neither knew nor cared: opera, particularly the works of Ludwig’s Nemesis,104 never was my strong point.

In my experience, a costume ball is great fun for about the first twenty minutes. Then, once you’ve seen everyone and enthused over the appropriateness of their frocks, the event simply becomes tedious as you have to traipse around for hours with nothing much to do, clad in an itchy wig and hot, unseasonal hose. However, I’d long since worked out a solution to this problem and always took with me something looser and lighter into which to change once supper was over: on this occasion I’d brought the Berber robes I’d acquired in the Soudan.

As I had anticipated, the Double Duchess’s Ball was no different to any other fancy dress party, except that the Wales’, Fat Mary and the entire Wales brood had to be received,105 then we had to be photographed in the garden marquee and, finally, we had to watch the parade of ‘the four Courts and the two Groups’,106 with Britannia bringing up the rear, all of whom promenaded the length of the ballroom before making their obeisances to Bertie & Co. Only when these chores had been completed could we sit down to the simple supper supplied (at C-G’s suggestion to Louisa) by Searcy catering business.107

Needless to say, dancing was not the point of the evening although the party calling itself the Elizabethan Court rather unsuccessfully attempted a galliard and that of Catherine the Great performed a rather better executed minuet. It was unfortunate that the assembled Valkyries tried to reproduce ‘the Ride’, during which the de Courcel sisters inadvertently (or it may have been deliberately) impaled Mrs Reginald Talbot on their spears. Matters were made even worse when Mr Fitzwilliam, dressed as Nelson, damned near lost his other eye on a spear point when he tried single-handed (and I use the description with historical accuracy) to prise the three women apart. However, the cup for the biggest cock-up of the evening should have been awarded to Lady Catherine Scott, playing Mary Queen of Scots, who mistakenly picked up the wrong head when she and Bertie’s recently ex-squeeze, the ‘Babbling Brooke’ dressed as Marie Antoinette,108 inadvertently exchanged decapitated têtes in the powder room.

Which brings me to my own problem with mistaken identity at this gaudy party. Earlier in the evening I’d spied Brother Joe Wolseley, improbably (or should that be appropriately?) dressed as The Mahdi, chatting with the Empress Theodora, otherwise known as Lady Randy. I decided to take the first opportunity to reiterate to him that, in the light of young Winston’s opinions on the prospects for peace in the region, I still had absolutely no intention whatsoever of being sent to India. But when, after supper, I took a tour of the rooms to find him, he was nowhere to be seen. I concluded that he’d got bored and gone home.

Anyway, by the time coffee had been served, I was about ready to expire from the discomfort of the Merry Monarch’s full bottomed wig. So, with C-G safely in conversation with The Lady of the Lake (Mrs Hall Walker), I decided to take the opportunity to change into my loose fitting robes. A scantily clad footman, decked out as an Egyptian slave, directed me to a cloakroom where I found my bag and, five minutes later, I emerged as a Berber, with the lower half of my face hidden in the fold of my turban in the approved fashion of the tribe. During the evening thus far I hadn’t investigated the furthest reaches of the garden, although I’d seen from the staircase that shady bowers had been erected beyond the main marquee for the usual purposes of assignations and marital infidelity. As it was by now dark, I was no longer Charles II and I was reasonably certain that C-G would not stir from her table in the ballroom, I headed out of the house in search of amusement. But, somewhat to my disappointment, most of the rose-encrusted nooks seemed to be empty. I was about to turn on my heel and head back to my beloved when I heard a woman’s voice call out in a low sort of purr.

“Joe? Is that you?”

It was unmistakably Her Randy Ladyship – for no one else in Society speaks like an untamed Yankee-born feline - and, in the dark, she’d clearly mistaken me for my fellow member of the Brotherhood, the Commander-in-Chief. Mistaken identity had worked pleasurably for me once before, in Simla with the pride of the cantonment, Mrs Margery Haddon,109 so why shouldn’t it work again? If I was careful, I thought, there was no reason why I couldn’t have some fun at the expense of both Lady R and Brother Joe. I walked purposefully in the direction of her voice coming from the one bower in which I hadn’t yet to looked. It was pretty dark inside, but I could just make out a large, robed form seated at the back of the recess.

“Jennie?” I enquired, my voice muffled by the turban.

“Joe! At last, you’ve come…”

Not yet, I haven’t, I thought as I sank down beside her and made a lunge for her lips. They parted and I was soon exploring her dental work. As she leant back I tried to slip my right hand around her waist whilst I headed for the hem of her skirt with my left. Then I hit a snag: the voluminous costume she was wearing precluded my plan of attack, which had been a quick ‘smash and grab’ raid. Indeed, the chances of any serious intimacy, beyond the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with which I was already engaged, would have meant having to haul up half-a-hundredweight of her heavily embroidered, thigh-hugging, floor length fake Byzantine outfit. It was immediately apparent to me that Her Ladyship would have to make the running, as breaking and entering into my costume would be child’s play. I disengaged my lips and murmured as much in her nearest ear.

Without a word she set to with my robes and it was only a matter of seconds before they were bunched up around my waist, she’d pulled down my underwear and had my old friend the duty sentry clamped between her teeth. I knew from previous experience that she was an expert and it wasn’t long before I started to moan with pleasure as she used her lips to enfold my family jewels. Somewhat distractingly, whilst she was hard at work on my nether regions, her jewel-encrusted Imperial crown bounced rhythmically and rather painfully off my left thigh. I’m not sure how long we were thus engaged, although I do remember that she brought me to the point of no return on at least three occasions, when, outside the bower, a gruff military voice that I instantly recognised called her name…