Quite a few people are responsible for this work. It has a story.
Three years ago, I had just taken up my first appointment as a lecturer at a small university by a seaside town in Britain. I’d just turned thirty, and had been lucky in life. I wanted for little, but had just ended a relationship with my girlfriend of twelve years.
It was taking me a while to get used to being without Samantha. We had been close. Aged around eighteen we met at university, got drunk together, made love, lived together, and as years passed, we began to know each other’s minds and bodies like the back of our hands.
Marriage and mortgage were becoming our main talking points. I was the nicest guy she had met, she told me, and I had not met any other girl quite like her.
But one day she began feeling her life was still unfulfilled. She was twenty-nine. It bothered her. She wanted to go her own way. She wanted to travel, to experience new things. And so that’s what she did.
The bug was in her for a long time. I got postcards every few months, from Australia, Asia, and Latin America, where she either worked or backpacked, or stayed with new friends. For the last year Amsterdam has been her base. She works there for several months as a tour operator. She says she misses me but she believes she took the right decision.
Anyway, after she left I slowly settled into a reticent lifestyle, giving lectures on French Literature and History in the day. Life was lonely, spent occasionally flirting with Jeanette, a nice homely secretary in the department, and I’d generally meet up with Marianne every other evening.
Marianne was a bespectacled feminist and an enthusiastic but nervous lecturer. She was giving a course on the Spanish Cinema. I took an interest in some of her interests, and life rolled on quietly for several months until the start of the summer term.
A week in to which the students’ photocopier downstairs in the French department broke. A notice was taped on telling them that they would temporarily have to do their copying in the library. All of them accepted this as law, except for one - Natalie.
Natalie was a very attractive, twenty-one-year-old blonde from Toulouse and had transferred to the university from another city-based university. She had to spend a year abroad as part of her course.
She had gone back to sunny Toulouse to recover, and with a glowing tan, she reluctantly arrived back in Britain to start the term, and complete her course requirements.
Rather than go to the library to use the other copier, Natalie discovered it was quicker and more convenient to go upstairs, find a photocopier in one of the lecturer’s empty offices and to do her copying there.
As a bonus, she would not have to use her photocopying card and saved money. She chose the machine in my office and started copying away to her heart’s content.
Our first encounter was on a Thursday afternoon.
The previous evening I had been gorging on Spanish wines and tortillas, watching the 1960s Luis Bunuel film Belle de Jour, made in France, with Marianne.
We had discussed it tipsily for quite a while. I didn’t like it. I felt it was just an old, self-consciously erotic film that dabbled with sadomasochistic themes while trying to attach some deeper meaning to itself for the sake of it at the end.
Marianne disagreed. She thought it was great. She also confessed that, while she had never really experienced any lesbian or dominatrix tendencies, the pretty blonde masochist and heroine of the film was the one and only woman who had ever aroused them in her. She told me this as if uncovering one of her deepest and darkest secrets. She got a bit flirtatious, too. I told her she could confide in me, but I still didn’t think the film was that good.
It was on that Thursday afternoon the next day that I came across Natalie for the first time, using the photocopier in my office.
She dazzled me. She was beautiful.
She had long blonde hair and wore tight, faded jeans over a neat bottom and slender legs. She had a pair of sunglasses perched on her head. On top, she had a hippy-style blouse and an ornate, brass-ringed belt hung around her hips.
For some reason she threw my mind back to the young blonde heroine in the film and the conversation with Marianne the previous evening. She wasn’t like her, though. Natalie was more voluptuous than elegant. Though slender, she had a round, full bum and wide hips.
Her face was similar to the heroine, but lacked the serene demureness. She had a perkier nose, very full lips, angular cheekbones, and a glowing tan. She continued doing her copies while I headed for my desk, looking up at me without a smile.
I watched her for a moment or two, preparing to tell her off but suspended in a kind of dumb, aesthetic appreciation. She’s French, I told myself; maybe this is a cultural thing.
She was chewing gum thoughtfully. She finished her copies, still watching me with a sort of pouting curiosity. Then without saying a word, she strolled out of the room.
It happened again the following afternoon. It was Friday, and again I sat back with my eyebrows slightly raised, simply staring at her.
Her smile, after a while, gave her away. I was a sucker for a pretty face, she had decided. It wasn’t just a cultural thing; she’d discovered she could exploit me by exploiting her own looks. In French, she lazily asked me what I was doing on the weekend, as casually as if I were another student. I told her I had work to catch up on and that I needed to do lots and lots of photocopying. She shrugged, and said she’d see me next week.
The photocopier downstairs had been fixed by Monday, but on the next Thursday afternoon I was sitting at my desk, quite immersed in correcting an essay, when she turned up again.
This time her appearance didn’t just leave me dumbfounded. She had dressed for the occasion, and dressed to impress. It was unbelievable. Granted it was hot outside, but nonetheless, all the other students, male and female, stuck to their semi-uniform jeans, baggy T-shirts, sweaters, overcoats and boots - all except Natalie.
She sauntered into my room, swaying her hips like a lazy pendulum, closing the door. Her sunglasses were down over her eyes.
She had snugly encased her splendid bottom in a tight black miniskirt. On top she wore a skin-tight black tank-top. Her breasts budded out as if resentful of being covered over, and her nipples were clearly outlined like trapped peanuts. She also wore a thin gold chain around her neck, her throat and shoulders looking as fit and supple as a ballerina’s. She was a Hollywood starlet on the way to a casting couch.
What an earth did people think when she went around the provincial streets of this academic town?
Her straw-blonde hair was tied back in a bun, and unlike the previous Friday, she wore lipstick and eye shadow. I looked at her shapely legs. She wore pumps and a gold chain around one ankle.
She looked at me from behind her tinted shades, and ignoring me, headed straight for the photocopier. I eyed her in silence for a few moments, my jaw hanging. I just could not understand what someone who looked the way she looked was doing in this dreary town, in my dreary, book-lined office.
Again I started preparing a carefully worded remonstrance. I wanted to make it as light-hearted as possible. This could all be a wind up, I thought; be charming but stay on top.
I took a few papers and stood behind her, acting as if I were in a queue for the machine. I smelled her perfume. She was a head shorter than me, and my eyes strayed over her body. She noticed. She wore no bra. I was sure she wore no panties either.
She was chewing gum again. Without looking up she asked me if I was married, or if I had a girlfriend. I shook my head. She was surprised. She didn’t have a partner in this little town either, and had not met anyone she liked very much. She looked down at the copies coming out of the machine, and started to hum.
‘I’m not supposed to be doing this, am I?’ She smiled mischievously, looking up. ‘But you don’t mind...’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘I can tell. You like me. You want me to come here to do my copies all the time.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was silent for a moment, and then I laughed. ‘I think you’re very cheeky...’ I started, but she giggled.
‘Is that why you like to look at my bum when I turn around?’ she said.
I fell silent again. She was swaying her hips and humming while watching the photocopier. She looked up. Her swaying and her accent had made my heart quicken. But her sunglasses irritated me; I couldn’t see her eyes and couldn’t tell what her game was. ‘One of these days someone’s going to put you over their knee and give you a good spanking,’ I warned playfully, although deep down I meant it and dreamt of being that lucky person.
She fell silent, then giggled again. ‘Spank me?’ she whispered. ‘Nobody here would do that.’ She turned to the copier, humming again.
I was silent. She looked at me, then very slowly raised her sunglasses, perched them on her head, leant forward slightly, and to my astonishment, slowly hitched up her sexy miniskirt.
‘Professor Wilde,’ she continued huskily, ‘would you want to spank this?’
The skirt seemed to roll up like a tight blind, forming a band around her narrow waist. She had shiny, painted fingernails, and massaged her pert bottom gently.
I gazed down at her in disbelief. Her bottom was gorgeous, and I was right; she wore no panties. I gulped, entranced. Her shapely buttocks were like a perfect peach, and showed the very clear outline of a bikini bottom on tanned thighs. She turned slightly, and her pussy was shaved! She was showing off her deliciously naked pussy to me!
I looked up incredulously, and her face shone with triumphant impertinence. I looked down at her impeccable French rump for a few seconds again, and seeing my gaze she tautened her buttocks, stretching over the photocopier, clearly conscious of how sensual her pose. She was offering me a better look.
On her left buttock she had a small tattoo. It was a heart encircled with chains, and above it the name Laurianne was etched in gothic letters.
‘You like the view?’ she asked. ‘So, what is the problem, professor?’
It was a turning point. I had to make a choice about where things stood, so I pulled my hand back very suddenly and slapped my palm fiercely across her buttocks.
She gasped softly, more out of shock than anything. I waited a second or two, then slapped again. She squealed, and then sighed a sexy coo of Gallic female pleasure.
There were footsteps and voices passing outside my door. I froze and looked over my shoulder, and she immediately pulled down her skirt. We both waited silently, watching each other.
‘That is bizarre,’ she whispered. ‘Nobody is usually here except you at this time.’
‘It’s Jeanette and Professor Keating,’ I said quietly. ‘They’re leaving.’ The footsteps and chatter faded away down a flight of stairs as she straightened her top around her breasts and told me she understood why I lived alone. Solitude was preferable to being with someone you did not want to be with - like her ex-boyfriend.
I was admiring the healthy golden hew of her skin and the liveliness of her blue eyes, and then it happened. Some of her papers slipped to the floor. She dropped quickly to pick them up, and rising, inadvertently bumped my crotch with her forehead.
Her sunglasses fell off, and seeing them on the floor she dropped again, this time slowly brushing her face against my groin, marking the front of my trousers with her lustrous lipstick. I doubled slightly, totally unsure of how to react.
She rose, brushed her hand over the bulge of my erect penis, and smiled at me with the calmest complicity. We stared at each other. We knew what would happen next.
I pulled her to me, cupped her face and kissed her. She wore no bra. I fondled her breasts, peeled down her top, pulled her skirt back up, and started groping voraciously.
She unbuckled my belt, and my trousers fell to my ankles. She grasped my cock and began rubbing. I stooped and kissed her breasts like a starving man. She stopped me, took out her chewing gum, steered me towards my desk, and then I fucked her hard and hurriedly against it.
It heralded the beginning of a three month relationship that was almost entirely sexual. I poured guilt on myself for getting involved. I was also terrified of losing my job. I had visions of appearing in a newspaper and never being able to teach again.
We’d make love in my office at first. She started giving me blowjobs while footsteps and voices could be heard in the corridor outside, then after a week or so she spotted the gown and mortarboard hanging on the back of my door. Baring her buttocks she dared me to spank her, so I did. We found a cane and started using that, too.
The town was too small and nosy for us to go out anywhere together, and I think this was what began killing the relationship; Natalie wanted to be seen. Going to college each day was a kind of fashion event for her. She’d experiment with clothing, and as our relationship continued her clothes became more and more provocative. She wanted to be proud, to flaunt her affair with a young professor. She loved taking risks, and this became draining.
I needed someone to confide in so I told Marianne, but it didn’t help. Marianne made me feel like a monster about it and increased my concerns by continually stressing how serious the consequences would be if I got caught. So gradually Natalie and I began to bicker as the months passed.
She wasn’t a very communicative person, and what she did say would often leave me confused, curious, jealous or insecure. To surprise her once I told her about the Buñuel film, about how she vaguely resembled the heroine and about Marianne’s feelings for the character. I playfully suggested all three of us go to bed together.
To my surprise she didn’t object, until I pointed Marianne out to her one day and she frowned with dissatisfaction. How could I have such bad taste?
Slowly though, aspects of her life became revealed.
Her boyfriend had been handsome but brutish, so she went off men. She hated studying, she didn’t want to live in wet and cold Britain any more, and she had a female friend in Toulouse who was a photographer and artist. Laurianne de Agora was her name. She was a genius, and Natalie modelled for her. She had made a fair amount of money through modelling, although she would prefer to be an actress. She also liked dancing.
The snippets of details about her friend in Toulouse made me jealous. Natalie worshipped the woman. She kept her picture, and Laurianne was about eight or nine years older than her and an attractive brunette, of a sultry Spanish appearance. Natalie had clippings of her modelling assignments, her portfolio mainly conventional lingerie. But her friend’s pictures of her were nudes and erotica, with a masochist theme. She looked stunning in them. There was something between them, I felt. They were so comfortable and clearly enjoyed working together. But it was none of my business, she told me.
As the summer holidays approached I started making plans for us to travel abroad. I pictured us basking on beaches, shopping, sightseeing, dining out freely and continuing our lovemaking each night. But it was then that she dropped her bombshell.
She wanted to end the relationship. She missed her friend, and wanted to go back to France.
I took it gracefully. We still keep in touch.
She dropped out of college in France and moved in with her friend. She set her sights on acting, and appeared on calendars and in a few girlie magazines. She danced at a club and on pop videos, but couldn’t get into mainstream acting at all, which was sad because she was beautiful and talented.
Her friend, meanwhile, added holistic massage to her skills, and they both now live in a rustic hillside chalet near Lausanne, Switzerland. Natalie still writes and sends the odd photo of herself, and has invited me to visit her.
Her departure from my life blew a hole through me at the time. I decided I still needed to go away, so I picked a destination out of a hat. It happened to be Lisbon, Portugal.
The city was remarkably beautiful, but the sight of so many tourists, and so many happy couples, only brought home my sense of loneliness. I decided to hire a car and go exploring.
The guidebook led me to the town of Sintra, up in the hills beside Lisbon. It was a breathtaking area, steeped in history and natural beauty. I headed off on winding roads through rich, verdant forests and rolling hills.
At one point I was running out of petrol. The area was dotted with quintas, stately homes and farmhouses that had formerly belonged to nobility. Apparently many of them had been converted into hotels and bed and breakfasts run by aristocratic descendants. I drove past a few, the advertising outside and the standardised menus off-putting. Eventually, though, I spotted one rather isolated looking quinta with no big signs by the entrance, so I gave it a try.
It turned out to be a home and not a hotel. An elderly woman lived there alone. I apologised, my Portuguese lapsing into French. She laughed, chatted with me in an odd French accent and invited me in.
She turned out to be a very sweet woman, and luckily did not automatically assume that the man at her door was a psychopath or an escaped lunatic. Instead she asked me about myself. She was cooking, and offered me dinner.
It was a rustic place with a kind of impoverished grandeur. Goats were loosely tethered in the backyard, cats spread themselves on sofas, and a dog lazily licked its private parts on the porch in the evening breeze. She offered me a drink and took a polite interest in my French teaching.
Paintings lined the hallway, and she took evident pleasure in showing them to me. The first two made me fall silent.
They were of two very pretty blondes, who looked a little like Natalie. The first had the name Genevieve de Montfort inscribed below; the other was simply called Emelie.
Next to them was a handsome man of dark appearance with piercing blue eyes. His portrait had a distinctly Byronic quality. He was called Rodolfo de Agora, and he wore some sort of uniform with decorations.
Beside him was a dark-haired female with captivating eyes and a sensual mouth. She was called Elise de Tranville.
The old lady informed me that some of them were ancestors of hers, but unfortunately records did not reveal from which of them she was descended. Archives suggested that in their lifetime a number of scandalous rumours were floating around about them.
While her husband had died and her family moved away, her origins could be traced back to both French and Portuguese nobility, she said proudly. The portraits were painted at around the time of the French Revolution, and the dark-haired gentleman had left them their family name - de Agora.
This historical theme really got the ball rolling, as I had often planned to write a novel set during the French Revolution. She wanted to help and became excited.
Two of those painted - Elise and Genevieve - kept journals during that period, she told me. They had not been published, and were still with her family.
I became curious, partly given the academic value of such journals and partly with a sense of the financial value they might represent. So I asked to see them. But they were no longer with her; her son had taken them to Geneva, where he worked as a financial consultant. He considered them too valuable to leave with her.
There were, however, some copies made. The journals were getting much the worse for wear by the turn of the century, and in 1921 her grandfather had them typed up. Two photocopies were later made and they were with her.
Apparently, due to the fading of the family fortunes her grandfather contemplated publishing them, but censorship and decency laws and the sensitivity of their nature prevented him. So, the journals never saw the light of day.
I became increasingly curious as to what exactly would be considered worthy of censorship, given the age of the texts. The old lady didn’t know, as like many other generations of her family, she was never allowed to read them. And when finally the opportunity arose her eyesight had waned, as had her interest. She had an inkling of what they might be about, though, she laughed mischievously... because of the other paintings.
We dined together, and after coffee I began to worry about the time. It was then that she suggested I sleep over. Her generous hospitality was so great that I felt guilty as well as odd, but I really fancied the chance of reading the copies of the journals that night, so I accepted, and as the evening came to an end I was thrilled when she finally said she would get them for me. She needed to fetch them from the basement and asked me to accompany her.
The basement was reached by a long flight of steps, and as she turned on the light she laughed and told me to take a look at the other paintings, whereupon I fell silent again. Painted over two hundred years ago, they were an assortment of nude and erotic works that would be considered broadminded even by today’s standards. They involved subjects reminiscent of the females in the paintings upstairs, as well as a range of others. Their condition was poor, though.
The old lady smiled to me as I gazed at them, then handed me a bundle of yellowish, dog-eared papers tied loosely together.
I didn’t sleep that night.
The journals threw me into a sort of feverishness shortly after I began reading, and it continued long into the early hours.
As I started I assumed they would more or less blend the everyday lives of people of their classes with some notable, perhaps, fresh accounts of the revolution that would be of academic interest, but instead I found two extremely intimate accounts by two very passionate women. Their experiences merged with each other’s, so the same incidents were described from two perspectives.
As they were, though, they were disconnected and deeply personal. They were also in antiquated French. So it occurred to me that they could be translated and put together as one book, forming a whole, and with an omniscient narrator.
The next morning I raved excitedly about the project, and the old lady laughed at my enthusiasm. However, permission would need to be sought from her son, the holder of the original copies. She gave me his details before I left and allowed me to hold on to one of the photocopied versions.
I faxed him as soon as I got home, outlining a brief proposal, and to my surprise he not only faxed me back twenty minutes later telling me to go to hell, but also telephoned me later to make threats. Unlike other members of his family he had actually read the journals, he explained heatedly. They were scandalous and depraved, he judged, and it was for this reason that he decided they were not to be sold or reproduced in any form. For the sake of heritage they had been preserved as best as possible, but would forever remain in a family vault. I complained over his reaction and he immediately threatened me with legal action, or worse.
So I grudgingly let it all go. The photocopied journals remained on a shelf in my study and were later transferred to a box in the loft. I got on with work at the university, but it became hard, and I thought it was the latent effects of the break-up with Natalie. It was difficult settling back to a quiet life in a tiny town without our wild afternoon adventures.
I thought I might also be missing Samantha, or that I was trapped in an immature reluctance to deal with a dull life. Embarrassingly I started flirting more frequently, with Jeanette, with female students, and with a waitress.
Marianne warned me to take it easy, and then one night as we watched another arty film I drank too much and ended up making love to her.
It wasn’t so bad. Without her glasses and with a little care she wasn’t unattractive, and a relationship developed between us for the next year. She was a calming and caring influence. I had been neglecting things around the home, and despite her strong feminist leaning, she felt sorry for me and started helping out. I even gave her the keys Samantha had left behind.
Life went on, and then Marianne began to change. She used contact lenses instead of glasses and wore make-up. She let her hair grow long and had it styled. She’d been going to the gym and there was a distinct femininity about her clothes. It was a complete transformation, and she looked good.
So it hurt when she announced her plans. She’d decided to resign and take up a post teaching English in Barcelona. I was dumped again, it seemed.
And then I got a call from Switzerland, from Madame de Agora’s son, Eduardo. It took me a while to remember who he was, and then he asked if I still had the copy of the journals. He had retired and regretted his belligerent dismissal of my approach about writing the book. Since retirement he had become an avid reader, and his literary views had changed. He apologised for having been so judgemental, and asked if I’d still be interested in carrying out the proposal I’d made, to which, somewhat surprised, I agreed.
I completed the book not long ago, and noted that something must have been happening to me while I worked. I no longer feel like the same person as when I started. It’s as if I haven’t been sure of whether the stupor in which the characters held me has somehow taken me over, or if I belong more in it than out of it...
I’ve called Samantha, and I’ve accepted her invitation to stay with her in Amsterdam for a while. I’ve also called Marianne and she’s invited me over to Spain.
Lastly I got in touch with Natalie, for the first time in eight months. She says she would be delighted if I went over there too. She’s told her artist friend about me, and two weeks ago she sent me another photo. She looks as stunning as ever, and wondered if I remembered the day she came in to use my photocopier.
Count Guillaume de Tranville chewed on his lip and tapped his foot. His anticipation was making him restless as he leaned over the wall of one of the two turrets at the front of his home, Chateau Tranville, a small castle and former mediaeval fortress in the Loire Valley that the de Tranvilles had possessed since the inhabitants of the nearest town, Rency, could remember.
Guillaume de Tranville was waiting to see a familiar coach winding along the country road and heading for the narrow stone bridge at the castle’s entrance. The count was a widower in his early fifties and had dressed more attentively than usual that day. He was a ruddily handsome man of medium height, with cropped iron-grey hair beneath his wig. He also had cloudy, grey-blue eyes that managed to hide not only the traces of grief that were still buried in him since the death of his wife some six years past, but also the knots of anxiety caused by the turn of events that had befallen France.
The radical upheavals in Paris after the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 had been too distant to disturb de Tranville in his quiet, provincial abode, and he had not felt it necessary to leave the country along with many of his friends that year.
But the bloody purges that swept through the land from the summer of 1793 now wracked him with worry. He would often spend his nights pacing nervously up and down in his bedchamber, unable to find sleep.
The Reign of Terror, and the betrayals, arrests and executions of noblemen suspected of being counter-revolutionaries presented him with far greater danger than ever before. So many of his well-to-do friends and acquaintances in Paris and the provinces had been rounded up like cattle and butchered simply because of their aristocratic blood and a handful of wild allegations by resentful commoners calling themselves officials.
And he knew the same fate could befall him. Only seven months earlier his harmless, dear old friend, the Marquis de Montvert, had been executed along with all but one member of his family.
De Tranville remained reluctant to flee France, though, as apparent as the dangers of the revolution now were. His fears had become too well counterbalanced by both the love he felt for his ancestral home and his adulterous relationship with a local woman who would not agree to leave with him, should he ever ask her to.
She was a buxom, discreetly licentious brunette, and the wife of the local town mayor. She had indulged in numerous affairs during her fourteen-year marriage and the count prized her as a seasoned and urbane lover. They had begun their afternoon liaisons the previous year, and as the relationship grew so his sense of personal safety waned.
But at nights the fears flooded back and his dreams became interspersed with visions of his old friends being hounded by predatory bureaucrats, chained in stinking dungeons and decapitated before jubilant, bloodthirsty mobs.
But the turbulent times were far from the count’s mind on that warm April afternoon in the year of 1794, as he eagerly awaited his mistress. Her arrival was seldom punctual and there was still no sight of her. But he could see his dark-haired stepdaughter Elise, walking with their new lodger Genevieve. The sweet young blonde was the daughter of his close friend, de Montvert, guillotined in Lyons seven months earlier.
Watching Elise walking with Genevieve on the other side of the bridge sent a shiver through the count; the previous day he was gazing at the portrait of his wife in the library. When Elise’s mother had been taken from the world suddenly by pneumonia six winters ago, she left the count too devastated to pay much attention to her sulky teenage daughter. But the girl had truly blossomed. She was now even more darkly beautiful than the sultry beauty he married eight years before.
It was strange how life could rob him of his wife and now replace her with these two beauties. Together they seemed like night and day, and either of them could stir the passions of even the most lackadaisical of men. They were his, though neither belonged to him in blood, and neither belonged to him in bed.
For a fleeting moment he imagined himself being the lover of both young women. He studied them and pictured himself showering kisses on the napes of each of their graceful necks, caressing Genevieve’s fair, svelte and silky body, nibbling the inside of Elise’s warm limbs.
He imagined how he might one day find Genevieve doing something wrong, and chastise her in the library, sweeping his palm down vigorously on those virgin buttocks, as he had once done with Elise, not so long ago. Then he tried to chase the thoughts away as quickly as he always did when they occurred.
The last time he had punished Elise was a sensitive matter for him. It was two years ago and she had just turned twenty at the time. He had hired a new kitchen maid, a delightful slip of a girl, with long fair hair and doll’s eyes. Genevieve vaguely reminded him of her, and he had only just started to enjoy her young body himself after instructing her to bring him his breakfast of warm chocolate and cakes each morning. He asked her to sit with him awhile on the first morning, and she did so with an enchanting smile. His loins stirred as he watched her coy face and glimpsed the upper slopes of her creamy breasts above her corset, and seeing his manhood rise beneath his nightshirt she had no qualms about taking it in her hand, as if examining some unusual object.
Despite her virginal looks the maid seemed to be acquainted with such practices. She rubbed it pleasingly and took it in her mouth, and the count was delighted in what seemed to be the start of a pleasant adventure for each morning.
But soon after he discovered the perverse relationship that had developed between the girl and Elise. The little nymph would have been such a delight, but how had she become entangled in those strange incidents with Elise?
What wicked spirits had possessed his stepdaughter at that time, and why would she be applying such cruel and intimate treatment to not only another young wench, but to the beauty he had handpicked strictly with his own pleasures in mind?
He’d had to dismiss the comely maid, with much regret and despite her sobbing tale of innocence. He recalled how lovely he had found her and her caressing lips on that first morning... and how voluptuous he found Elise’s naked body as he thrashed her in his library.
The punishment had seemed to do the trick, for in the two years since he had encountered no further evidence of Elise’s lusts and inclinations towards other maids.
It was also strange how mother and daughter could be so alike, he reflected. The hot-blooded woman with long blue-black hair and dark nature seemed to have been reborn in his stepdaughter, Elise. It was not just her looks. The girl carried herself with the same natural poise and confidence in her own desirability. And it was uncanny how, along with her beauty, she had the same way of instinctively instilling fear into servants and peasants alike. It was more than just the firmness of her voice or the coldness of her tone. There was something in the eyes. The same flickering flames when anger gripped her or when she was up to mischief.
How could someone as wilful as Elise now become so close to a girl as gentle as Genevieve de Montvert? As personalities went the golden-haired guest seemed to have little in common with Elise... except youthful beauty, of course.
The count’s keen eye noted the shapeliness of Genevieve’s slighter contours each time they met, and though they were not as pronounced as those of Elise, they belied the innocence of her soft eyes and announced to the world that the fruit of her womanhood was full and ready.
Unable to resist the distraction, the count again began to imagine being the lover of the girls. He imagined them naked, which was not hard to do with Elise, for he had seen her so and the delicious vision remained embedded.
From afar he studied Genevieve intently, savouring her beauty, but his musings were caught short, for a coach was moving along the road leading to Chateau Tranville. It was the wife of the local town mayor arriving at last, so he hastily chased his improper thoughts of the girls away.
Genevieve did not notice the approach of Madame Margaret Coubette’s coach as she strolled with Elise. Her thoughts were too preoccupied with her companion. Her shock over the arrest of her family had overwhelmed her, but now, seven months on, she was becoming more and more absorbed by the world of de Tranville’s chateau and his stepdaughter.
Seven months before a faithful elderly maid, Madeleine, managed to hide her when a revolutionary committee led a mob to her home. They took away her parents and her elder brother, Gustav. Madeleine hid her in a broom cupboard while they ransacked the de Montvert estate, and it was the last she saw of her family. The terrible news of their execution was broken to her one week after Madeleine took her by coach to Count de Tranville.
And while mourning their loss over the following days, a further loss was added. Madeleine died too, the strain of the times proving too much for her aged heart.
It took Genevieve quite some time to adjust to her new life, the count seeming distant while Elise was new to her in all ways. She was deeply shy of her at first. The thoughtful young lady was singularly attractive, but there was something so daunting in the boldness of her tone and manner.
As the months passed, though, so too did her shyness. They began to talk more freely and Genevieve became enchanted by the courteous and generous nature of her dark-haired companion, as well as the frequent compliments she paid to her own fair beauty.
It was thus, that by that afternoon in April, the two girls had found themselves enjoyably locked in conversations on a subject that was now at the top of Genevieve’s interests - love. She had so many questions to ask and was intrigued by Elise’s curious views.
‘But why do you distrust men so?’ she laughed softly as they walked together.
‘Men are simply cruel boys that temporarily pretend to be poets,’ Elise replied curtly. ‘When they like a woman they capture her heart with beautiful ideas and words,’ she explained, staring mirthfully into Genevieve’s clear eyes. ‘But just like spoilt boys they need to be entertained or else they get bored and roam away in search of other amusements. As boys become men they soon learn that their greatest pleasures derive from what is done to their bodies... by us, by themselves and by other men too, sometimes.’ Elise whispered with mock indignation. ‘At least, that is what I have seen, and learned.’
‘But that is love of the senses, not true love,’ Genevieve said.
‘There is no distinction,’ Elise continued in a hushed tone, taking Genevieve’s arm. ‘Love is nothing more than the satisfying of the most primitive pleasures with the person one desires at the time. It is a transient thing, as you will see for yourself soon,’ she added abruptly, and turned Genevieve’s waist firmly to make her face the path leading back to the castle.
Genevieve gazed at Elise bemusedly for a moment, but remained silent. Feeling a sudden quickening of her heart she remembered that, as Elise left her room the night before, she had used the same words.
Talk of love between Genevieve and Elise had grown more intense after the visit of the son of one of Count de Tranville’s friends, a young Portuguese gentleman called Rodolfo, two months before. While the two girls dined with de Tranville and Rodolfo, Genevieve found herself frequently blushing as she gazed at the handsome foreigner, even though he addressed himself mainly to the count.
Through dinner she timidly stole glances at him, his healthy bronzed skin and the shiny blackness of his hair. And when Rodolfo addressed her occasionally, his wintry-blue eyes made her feel as if her insides were on fire. Elise had looked at her continually during the evening with a whimsical smile, but the glances she exchanged with him were decidedly chilly.
News that Rodolfo would be visiting again had prompted Genevieve to speak to Elise the previous evening, not just of love in general, but of the feelings for the young man she’d experienced during that dinner. The two girls chatted each night in Genevieve’s room, usually after they’d bathed, and took turns in brushing each other’s hair.
Genevieve had been sitting on a leather trestle by the warm wood fire in her room, freshly bathed, enjoying the feel of her nakedness beneath her cool light shift and the strokes of Elise’s brush through her silky hair. It was then that she confessed her feelings towards Rodolfo during the dinner. ‘I have never felt so nervous,’ she reflected. ‘My hands were actually trembling. I wonder if that’s what love is.’
‘Rodolfo is a man who takes his pleasure as and when he pleases, he is unlikely to be content with just one woman,’ Elise snapped, and seeing the sting of her words in Genevieve’s eyes, she laughed. ‘He delights in breaking the hearts of sweet little things that know nothing of love, like you.
‘Let us see... if I were you and you were Rodolfo, how would you kiss me, for example?’ She was smiling broadly, revealing neat white teeth.
‘Kiss you?’ Genevieve started in puzzlement.
‘Yes. Have you ever kissed a man?’ Elise raised Genevieve gently to her feet. She stood about half a head taller and her elegant hands gently brushed Genevieve’s blonde hair behind her neck and over her shoulders.
Feeling artful fingers squeezing into her soft flesh, Genevieve giggled at the game. ‘You are so dashing, Rodolfo,’ she found herself saying playfully, and to her own surprise she allowed her hands to gently stroke Elise’s hair in return. She tried to imagine Rodolfo standing before her.
‘Kiss me as you would kiss Rodolfo,’ Elise commanded in a determined whisper, and Genevieve closed her eyes and moved her lips gingerly to hers, finding them as soft as petals but as warm as fire.
‘That is how you would kiss a child or a friend good day,’ Elise scolded mockingly, in a hushed voice, then tugged Genevieve’s limp body sharply and tightly to her, her hands like pincers as they clamped on her shoulders, and Genevieve felt her friend’s succulent lips pressed to hers. Elise’s tongue probed into Genevieve’s mouth, and as she held the blonde girl her firm breasts and stiff nipples pressed tightly against her. Genevieve felt her own nipples harden and tingle at the touch, and her heartbeat quickened.
‘That is how he would probably kiss you, my silly darling,’ Elise whispered as she pulled away. Intense warmth had radiated between them, leaving Genevieve glowing, heat and moisture gathering between her thighs.
‘You do not love Rodolfo and he does not love you,’ Elise whispered, her face so close that Genevieve could feel the warmth of her breath. ‘You just think you do.’
Releasing her grip, Elise traced a circle on the side of one of Genevieve’s thighs and then, with a cruel grin, she pinched her bottom sharply, making the blonde squeal and push Elise away.
‘There is much you must learn in life, my sweetheart,’ Elise laughed softly, withdrawing and slightly narrowing her eyes. ‘But at least you have learned what a proper kiss feels like, and tomorrow you must see something very, very interesting. Something that should put an end to your silly thoughts of dashing Rodolfo.’ Warmth had returned to her eyes, and she pulled Genevieve to her again, kissed her once more, bade her goodnight and left the room.
Genevieve turned and threw herself on her bed, still feeling the pinch on her bottom as if something had bitten her, but only to intensify the rhythm that had started pulsing between her thighs.
When Elise had listened to Genevieve confessing her feelings for the handsome man who dined with the count two months earlier, it was not simply cruelty that inspired her to describe Rodolfo de Agora as a man who could not be content with just one woman. During the dinner she observed with detached amusement as Genevieve’s cheeks turned crimson each time Rodolfo addressed her. Together they would certainly make an attractive couple, she reflected. Sitting opposite the young man, Genevieve looked more delightful than ever. With her long blonde locks, the girl’s blushing face radiated a summery beauty, while the flickering candles on the table brought out the fineness of her cheekbones and the sparkle in her blue eyes. How could a dashing young stag like Rodolfo not lose his heart to such a sweet young doe as Genevieve?
Something in his manner, however, told her that he did not quite fit the princely role. From the frequency and nature of his glances, it seemed clear that he was charmed by Genevieve’s beauty, but there was also too much confidence and quiet thoughtfulness in his look. Rodolfo’s eyes were not those of someone smitten, but those of someone who observes and compares, rather like her own. They were predatory eyes that roved too much. He was a false prince, she concluded.
His eyes would flicker every few minutes over both of them, resting at times on Genevieve and at times on her. He was assessing them. She could feel it when he looked at her, his eyes pausing at her face, flickering over her lips and straying down to her cleavage and the swell of her breasts above her bodice.
She would meet his eye. He was drawn to her, it was clear. When their eyes met he would smile and his eyes would move on, usually back to Genevieve. She was attracted to him. She knew it. But his eyes were more for her friend. They hovered over her just that little bit more.
That night Elise passed Genevieve’s bedchamber, but instead of entering as usual she continued to the guest’s bedchamber. Curiosity, among other urges, was pulling without any indication of where it would lead her. She wanted to see the man’s avaricious eyes once again, and have them devouring her as they had during dinner.
Wearing nothing but her shift and with her black hair loose around her shoulders, she trod softly along the dark landing to Rodolfo’s door, where she paused and listened. There was silence, except for an occasional faint rustling sound. A dim light escaped beneath the door, and she entered without knocking.
The room was dimly lit by a candle next to the guest’s four-poster bed, and by the embers of a fire. She saw him on the bed, lying in flickering shadow, and let out a soft gasp.
He lay naked, his muscular limbs stretched out languidly. His eyes met hers, and in one hand he was holding his cock. It was disproportionately large, stretching lazily out of a bush of black curls. He smiled at her, stroking his half erect member.
Elise gazed at it for long moments. She had only seen two cocks in her life, and neither remotely compared with the one before her. It seemed double the size of either and would have seemed more appropriate if attached to a horse.
‘At last,’ he said quietly. ‘Come in and close the door.’
Elise did as she was bidden, as if in a trance. She did not know what had drawn her to the room, or what to expect.
‘Come closer. I’ve been waiting for you.’ He raised himself onto his elbows, releasing his cock and letting it flop heavily against his thigh. Elise was now standing within arm’s length of the bed, his eyes still fixed on hers, which were still fixed on his penis.
‘And what about your lovely friend?’ he continued. ‘I was hoping the both of you would come along.’
‘It’s huge... why is it like that?’ Elise murmured, spellbound.
‘It’s what you girls did to me. I haven’t been able to get either of you out of my mind since dinner.’
Then suddenly, seeing life pulsing in Rodolfo’s huge limb, Elise felt an urge to step back. It seemed to be rearing towards her, beckoning her. But as she wavered he stretched out lithely and grabbed her wrist, then rose from the bed and stood facing her.
‘If you do anything to me I’ll cry out,’ she blurted, panicking suddenly. ‘I’ll scream for help.’
‘Some might find it a little strange to find you here,’ he pointed out, unconcerned by her weak threat. ‘I knew you would come, however.’ His hands rose to her face, which he cupped and stroked. ‘You have such lovely lips. Now get down on your knees,’ he commanded, his hands on her shoulders, firmly pressing downwards. She realised what he had in mind; he wanted her to do what the count’s mistress did and she had secretly watched so often. She tried to shake off his grasp, but he strengthened his hold and pressed harder. ‘On your knees.’
Again she found herself doing as ordered, as if in a trance. His stern command excited her. She knelt, alarmed by the stiff limb that nudged her chin as she sank down, thinking of what she had seen the count’s mistress doing during her afternoon visits. It was her turn now. She was going to suck a man, just as Madame Coubette sucked her stepfather.
Rodolfo moved his hand under her chin, and squeezing her cheeks, he eased the head of his monstrous cock between her moist, slightly parted lips. Nervously she felt his helmet filling her, forcing her jaws to widen, pushing against the roof and back of her mouth. Its veined underside rubbed over her tongue, warm and throbbing. She tightened her lips, and as she had seen Madame Coubette doing, gently bobbed her head backwards and forwards.
‘That’s it,’ Rodolfo sniggered dryly. ‘That’s very nice... very nice indeed. Have you done this often?’
Elise tried to shake her head as she continued to bob back and forth rhythmically, letting it plough in and out of her mouth, her lips clamped tightly to it. Her trepidation faded, and gradually she felt strangely powerful; the huge male thing, stretching her lips apart, was somehow hers. It was hers to control. She let it plop out of her mouth, and gazing at it, probed her tongue to its tip. She teased it with a lingering lick and smiled up at Rodolfo, who gasped as his hot seed suddenly erupted, covering Elise’s chin in sticky cream as she pulled her head back, shocked by the potency of his ejaculation.
‘What a delightful, naughty girl you are, Elise,’ he groaned, letting out a deep sigh. Then he helped her to her feet. ‘I very much hope to have the pleasure again some time.’
Elise elegantly dabbed her sleeve over her mouth, looked up into his dark eyes, and then down at his member. His limb had lost its power and now looked pacified. She had tamed and broken it like a wild horse.
‘Tell me, is Genevieve quite as delightful a cock sucker as you?’ he asked arrogantly, casually cupping her breasts through her shift.
‘I don’t know,’ Elise replied coolly. ‘Perhaps you’ll find out one day.’
‘I certainly hope so. You know, as I watched her at dinner, I felt I could almost fall for that girl.’
‘And did you feel yourself almost fall for me, too?’
‘In a way.’ Rodolfo looked at her pensively. ‘In a way, I suppose I might have done.’
Elise looked into his infuriatingly conceited expression, and something frightened her and made her heart stir.
She hastily left the room.
After her impromptu encounter with Rodolfo, the taste of the man’s cock remained on her mind for a long time more than it had been in her mouth. For many days she tingled with quiet satisfaction and pride.
The affair between Count de Tranville and Madame Coubette had not been as discreet as the count supposed. Their liaisons, passionate and ritualistic, were only thinly concealed at the castle. They had long become the covert study of his manipulative stepdaughter.
She studied them from a regular vantage point - the landing that overlooked the castle’s large hall and drawing room, the count’s impulsiveness often leading him to enjoy his mistress there, only moments after her arrival.
Elise had been drawn by his groans mingling with Madame Coubette’s cooing. She would crouch at the banisters of the landing each time Madame Coubette visited, keen to see the sight of the two lovers.
‘Love is nothing more than the satisfying of the most primitive pleasures with the person one desires at the time,’ she had said to Genevieve as she walked with the pretty girl on the castle lawns. ‘It is a transient thing.’ With the words she echoed the promise she made the previous night when she had played Rodolfo in her improvised game. Now, as she had promised, she was to take her to see something interesting, something that would open her eyes to the darker side of love.
All kinds of designs had been awakening in Elise. There was something so tender about Genevieve that excited but irked her. Desire and wilfulness filled her as she looked at her fair companion. Elise subdued her excitement as she slipped her arm around Genevieve’s trim waist and led her towards the chateau. Casually she allowed her hand to rest around Genevieve’s ribs, her fingers settling on the soft swell that formed the lower cup of one of the girl’s breasts. She monitored the warmth of the girl’s body and the detectably quickened pace of her heart, and smiled to herself. The cute doe was stirring with each subtle trick of the huntress. It was strange how all seemed to slip so easily into plan.
In Genevieve’s virginal eyes Elise could see the girl’s soul yearning secretly for someone strong to take her in hand. She wanted to be used by someone and as someone else pleased. She wanted to be bestowed with pleasures that she had never experienced yet quietly cried out for... to none but Elise.
Inside the chateau the girls found the count standing before the fireplace. He greeted them briskly. Madame Coubette had just arrived and burst into a smile as they entered.
‘Elise, as beautiful as ever and growing more like her mother every day!’ she chimed. Kissing Elise’s cheek, the handsome woman beamed at her and then turned to Genevieve. ‘And what a delightful young friend you have.’
‘Genevieve is the daughter of the late Marquis de Montvert,’ the count explained. ‘I don’t think you have been introduced yet. The de Montverts, old friends of mine, have fallen victim to these mad times. Genevieve is now my charge.’
‘My poor orphaned angel,’ sighed Coubette, her elegant face at once assuming an expression of deep pity. Her silk-gloved hand rose and lightly settled on Genevieve’s cheek. She studied the girl’s eyes, her fingers drifting against her cheekbone and cupping her chin.
‘De Montvert and I had been the closest of friends.’ The count frowned. ‘Nobody is safe these days.’
‘Oh, what a tragedy... and that such a beautiful young thing should be visited by such great sorrow.’ Coubette’s hand was still on Genevieve’s cheek, and the girl looked up at the tall woman. An elaborate wig covered her hair, sparkling here and there with small gemstones, but what struck Genevieve most was the size of the woman’s breasts and hips. She was so trim of waist, yet so large of bosom and rump.
‘I do hope you’re taking good care of your friend,’ Madame Coubette said, turning to Elise.
‘Why, naturally.’ Briskly Elise took hold of Genevieve’s arm, and Madame Coubette’s lively eyes flickered over them thoughtfully.
‘Perhaps, it might be opportune to let you young ladies know of a decision I have been weighing up for some time,’ the count interrupted. ‘The situation in France, as you may know, is becoming too dangerous. Over the last few months I have been in contact with friends outside, in England and in Portugal. In fact, my close Portuguese friend, the Conde de Agora, recently sent his son to visit us to discuss the safest itinerary and timing of a journey to that land. Rodolfo, he came to dinner, as you girls know.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Elise replied, and Genevieve blushed at the mention of his name.
‘I am now of the opinion that leaving France will be inevitable for us. I have in mind the end of this month as the date of our departure. As it happens, Rodolfo, at his father’s request, has kindly agreed to help us on our trip serving as both guide and escort.’
Madame Coubette’s eyes turned cold.
‘I would also like to let you know of my decision to invite you, Madame Coubette, along with us. I know it might seem like a strange proposal with little notice, but in the period of our friendship I have learned to trust you as a dear companion. It is not easy for a man to raise two young ladies. Your wisdom and assistance would be invaluable. It would be a temporary arrangement, and?’
‘And my husband?’ Madame Coubette interrupted.
‘Naturally, you would be providing me with a service,’ the count replied. ‘A valuable service, and I would be willing to make it well worth its while for both you and your husband.’
Madame Coubette gazed at him in angry silence.
‘It is something I would like you to consider,’ the count added. ‘It is no longer safe for the girls or me to remain in the country and I’d like very much for you to come with us.’ He sensed Madame Coubette’s hostility and turned to the girls. ‘I believe you were going to your rooms?’ he said.
Obediently Elise and Genevieve nodded, took leave of Madame Coubette, and headed upstairs.
The count and Madame Coubette remained silent as the girls left.
‘So, you’ve decided it’s time to leave,’ Madame Coubette said when the girls were out of earshot, her eyes glinting with contempt.
‘I have little choice. But I want you to come with us.’
‘As you know I am far from being an aristocrat, or any kind of lady for that matter, and I am in absolutely no kind of peril. I have a hardworking husband, plenty of friends, plenty of leisure time... a very good life. Why on earth should I want to throw all that up to go away with you? Would you marry me? Would you make me Countess de Tranville?’
‘You know that’s not possible, and you know you don’t feel anything for that miserable old cockroach that calls himself your husband. The whole thing can be arranged, I’m sure.’
‘And I’ll just follow you to wherever your cowardice leads?’ Madame Coubette mocked. ‘Abandon my home, country, husband and position, for you? Or just until you feel it’s time to find another, younger pussy to play with, perhaps? ‘
As the two girls turned the corner at the top of the stairs Genevieve followed Elise’s hushed instructions. She fell softly to her hands and knees, as did her companion.
Elise placed her arm around Genevieve’s shoulder, signalled to her to be silent with a slender finger touched to her lips, and together they peered through the banisters, looking down through the open door of the drawing room at the developing row between the count and his voluptuous guest.
‘Don’t start this again,’ the count growled wearily.
‘Tell me, sir, is my pussy the only one that pleases you?’ the woman goaded. ‘But what might the pussy be like in Portugal?’
The count guffawed. ‘Must you always be driven by your jealousies?’
She smiled at him and moved a gloved hand to the front of his breeches. Deftly, and without taking her eyes from his, she located his member. ‘And look at this. I only have to mention the pussy in that country and the horse is ready to bolt from its stable!’ In a deft move she unfastened his breeches, glanced at him, and then lowered to her knees before him. His breeches slid down to his ankles and exposed pale legs. His erect penis curved upward, pointing directly at Madame Coubette’s face. She took it between both palms and stretched back the skin so that the purplish head rose and inflated a few centimetres before her lips. ‘My dear sir,’ she purred, before engulfing it in her mouth.
Genevieve’s heart began beating quicker. The count’s manhood, exposed thus, bewildered her. It seemed fearsome, even from a distance. Its shadowy veins glistened wetly as it emerged and disappeared inside the woman’s avaricious maw. Genevieve glanced uncertainly at Elise, and found her friend smiling back at her.
‘An essential skill for lovers,’ Elise whispered, and placed her hand on Genevieve’s thigh.
Allowing the count’s wet cock to slide from her mouth, Madame Coubette smiled up at him, slightly out of breath. ‘Come to think of it, why would you go to Portugal for your new pussy, when you have two gorgeous young pussies here with which to indulge yourself? Neither is blood of yours, though you act as though they are. Surely you’ve considered seducing them both? Surely you’d like to fuck them? What red-blooded male wouldn’t?’
‘Be quiet,’ the count growled. ‘Watch what you say.’
‘And that Elise,’ the woman went on, provoking him. ‘Why, I don’t think you’d find as lusty a bitch in all the brothels in France. Don’t you notice the way she looks at you? I know the fantasies of young females, and I’d swear she’d give anything to be kneeling where I am now, sucking your aristocratic cock instead of me. Wouldn’t you like that? Wouldn’t you like it to be Elise kneeling here right now, paying homage to your cock with those sweet young lips?’
Genevieve was sure she heard the faintest of sighs coming from her companion. She glanced at her quickly, but there was no time to look for long because of the shock of what suddenly happened downstairs. An abrupt thwack resounded and was immediately followed by a yelp of indignation. It was, evidently, the count’s response to Madame Coubette’s provocation, and Genevieve looked back to the quarrelsome pair below.
The woman was prostrate on her front before the count, her wig several feet away, her hair, a tangled auburn mop, covered her face. Wounded more in pride than in pain, she slowly arched her spine to raise herself, and her large bottom lifted voluptuously as she turned her face to his.
He stood frowning over her, unconcerned by the blow that had knocked her flat; he knew she wasn’t hurt, for the brunt of the impact had fallen on the wig. His hands were on his hips and his cock, semi-erect and now drooping, pointed down at her.
‘If you talk to me like a whore from the streets, I’ll treat you as such,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you that before, and I’ve also told you not to talk of Elise in that way.’
Through the tangles of hair Madame Coubette’s eyes burned. Their glow amidst her reddened cheeks made her whole face come alive. She was a seething beast, enraged at being so crudely brought to heel. She turned away from him and crawled towards her wig, her buttocks undulating beneath her dress. Reaching the hairpiece she turned back to him with a sneer. ‘I’ll talk as I please,’ she hissed. ‘And I am a whore from the streets, but I can tell you, Elise is a bigger whore than me.’
De Tranville leapt at the crouching woman, snatched at the dress and fiercely tore it apart. Then with the same vicious frenzy he ripped away the petticoat beneath, leaving bare the white cheeks of her bottom. At the sight he thrust her to the floor, lashing at her nakedness with his palm. Cutting through the air fierce slaps resounded on her bared flesh, and were echoed by sighs and whimpers from her.
Genevieve felt herself swoon. De Tranville’s rage seemed to fill the room below, yet it seemed somehow dank with passion. Blotches of red surfaced angrily on Madame Coubette’s pallid bottom cheeks, but soon her protests melted. The blows were softening. She laid flat on her front, humiliated, her lower half stripped, her flushed cheek to the carpet. De Tranville rested on his haunches, breathing heavily.
Genevieve pushed her head forward with curiosity, her cheeks pressed to the ornately twisting columns of wood that made up the balustrade. The woman was now saying something.
‘Fuck me... fuck me now,’ she mumbled. ‘Fuck me.’
De Tranville gazed at her coldly. She lifted herself back onto her knees and elbows, offering him her bottom, and he watched her parting the cleft between her legs for him.
‘Fuck me,’ she pleaded, and the count roughly clasped the tangle of hair at the back of her head and drove into her. She gasped, and keeping her hair gripped in one fist de Tranville began rutting in and out of her ferociously.
Genevieve turned to Elise, again aware of her friend. She could feel her rustling, trembling. She was busy doing something, it seemed, and Genevieve let out a faint gasp of shock. Elise was not just being a spectator. She was squatting on her calves, her bare knees spread wide, the folds of her skirt and cotton slip pulled up around her waist. She wore no knickers, and one hand was lost in the shiny black triangle of curls between her legs, her fingers rubbing in a quiet frenzy. Genevieve watched, her mouth open, as Elise’s fingers traced up and down the ruby lips between her thighs.
Genevieve gulped and tore her eyes back to the scene below. The shameful noises there seemed to be subsiding. With a final groan the count threw himself heavily over Madame Coubette, bringing them both down to the carpet. Madame Coubette murmured words that Genevieve was unable to discern, and as she tried she felt Elise’s hand tug on her arm.
‘Time to go,’ the sultry girl whispered, her cheeks decidedly flushed.
Genevieve tiptoed along the landing and noticed Elise was breathing heavily, her eyes gleaming darkly with playfulness.
‘You look thoroughly startled,’ Elise said quietly, closing the bedroom door behind them. ‘I hope that little surprise didn’t prove too much. And your dress, why, you’re all crumpled.’
Genevieve’s heart was still thumping as Elise stepped behind her and stooped to pad away the wrinkles around the bottom of her dress. The soft beats of the girl’s hand on her thighs and calves seemed strangely soothing.
How despicably and roughly the count had treated his guest, she reflected. And yet, the ruder the treatment the more satisfied Madame Coubette had seemed to become. The shameful encounter still held her in a trance, her mouth dry, her hands clammy, her loins throbbing again just like the night when Elise had kissed her, pretending to be Rodolfo. She shyly pressed her thighs together, Elise still padding her skirts.
‘So, what do you think?’ Elise whispered, straightening up. She bore the same smile she had that previous night, a pearly smile of mischief carved on sultry beauty.
‘It was certainly a shock,’ Genevieve admitted. ‘A huge shock.’
Elise giggled softly. ‘And how did you feel? Did you enjoy the spectacle? Wouldn’t you like Rodolfo to do that to you?’ Genevieve shrugged awkwardly, and Elise stepped behind her and with a jolt, caught her hips, making her gasp with surprise. ‘Wouldn’t you like Rodolfo to take you like that? Like a stallion enjoying his mare?’ Mockingly she ground her pelvis against Genevieve’s buttocks, and the girl giggled nervously. They were standing close to the four-poster bed, and with another thrust Genevieve lost her balance and with Elise’s hands still on her hips, tumbled onto the bed.
‘I don’t know,’ she muttered from under Elise, who rose and strolled towards the room’s latticed windows. She gazed out for a moment, then casually loosened the cord that held back one of the heavy curtains, and the room became shadowy as it fell across the window.
‘Is it true that the count is going to take us to Portugal, and that Rodolfo is going with us?’ Genevieve asked.
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ Elise said dryly, then drew the other curtain, the room now lit by only one beam of sunlight through the gap between them. She sauntered pensively back to the bed, the cords of the curtains dangling in her hands. Genevieve watched her blankly.
‘He seemed so rough with her... is it always like that?’ she asked timidly.
‘No, not always.’ Elise laid the cords on the bed and unbuttoned the bodice of her dress.
‘The... um... the count seemed enchanted when she kissed, um, his...’ Genevieve went on distractedly.
‘Of course; it’s one of the most pleasing things a man can experience.’ Elise pulled open her bodice and stood bare-breasted in front of the spellbound girl, then let the dress drop to the floor. She stood there quietly, looking deeply into Genevieve’s eyes, and let her hands cup her breasts and run over her nipples. They were large and pointed stiffly. ‘I become so hot when I watch them together.’ She raised her hands from her breasts to push her raven hair off her shoulders. Her full breasts swayed provocatively with her movements. ‘It’s as if my body catches fire.’ She unfastened the buttons at the waist of her white cotton slip, her eyes on Genevieve’s, then let it drift to the floor and stood naked for the first time in front of her lovely friend.
The sight held the supine girl speechless as she shyly looked at her friend’s toned body, utterly shocked that she wore nothing appropriate beneath her dress, and by the admission that she’d spied on the count and his mistress before.
Elise turned and moved gracefully to the wardrobe. Her bottom formed a perfect oval and seemed to glow with sensual warmth. She met Genevieve’s eyes as she moved back to the bed with a bundle of clothes in her arms.
‘This dress is a little small for me now,’ she said. ‘I chose it two years ago but I’ve never worn it. Try it on. It’s time you considered your clothing more... especially if you’re to meet Rodolfo again. Come on, get undressed.’
Somewhat bewildered by the turn of events, and as though in a dream, Genevieve began unbuttoning her blouse. She slowly opened it and shivered, the outline of her nipples pressing into her white cotton camisole.
Elise got on the bed and straddled Genevieve’s waist, her firm breasts hovering a few inches from her face. ‘Come on,’ Elise whispered urgently, and unbuttoned Genevieve’s skirt and petticoat, her fingers cool against Genevieve’s bare hip.
‘Why is it such a pleasing thing?’ she asked.
‘Lift your bottom,’ Elise commanded, and as Genevieve obeyed she pulled down her skirt, petticoat and knickers in one go, leaving her naked from the waist down.
‘Why is it so pleasing for a man?’ she asked again, modestly crossing her arms over her breasts.
‘It’s a secret pleasure,’ Elise told her cryptically. ‘Pleasures that can only be experienced and not explained.’
Elise moved and sat at the foot of the bed, resting back against one of the ornate posts. Genevieve continued to gaze in nervous awe at the naked beauty of her friend.
‘As a matter of fact, I forgot to tell you,’ Elise went on conspiratorially. ‘Rodolfo and I shared the very same pleasure only recently. The night he was here.’
Genevieve’s cheeks turned crimson. She instantly forgot about how cool she felt and how strange it was to be virtually naked before her friend. Casually, Elise stroked the dark curls of her own pubis. ‘I wouldn’t worry your pretty little head about it too much, though,’ she said. ‘As I kissed him he professed how taken he was with you. Your problem, though, will be that you will never be able to keep him,’ Elise mocked with unnecessary cruelty. ‘There are too many temptations for him. Too many who know how to please him better. There is so much you must learn, poor naïve Genevieve.’
‘What must I learn?’ the girl asked, propping herself on her elbows, acutely aware of her nakedness, and her friend’s, and the strangeness of it. She swallowed nervously; there was something that felt good about it. She did not want to reach for her clothes. There was something so hungry in Elise’s dark eyes, and it made her feel vulnerable.
She glanced furtively at Elise’s idly moving hand, at the index finger tracing a circle at the top of the pink lips. Her other hand moved slowly over her ribcage, cupping her left breast, allowing the nipple to peep between massaging fingers. Then opening her eyes and observing Genevieve’s confused expression, Elise laughed quietly.
‘Lie back,’ she ordered, and Genevieve instinctively fell back against the pillows, and as she did she felt Elise’s warm body rising over her again. ‘Pretend I’m Rodolfo,’ she whispered, and then she leant down to kiss the befuddled girl.
Genevieve closed her eyes, the soft lips of her friend drifting over her face and throat. Her body pulsed with forbidden excitement, her heart ready to burst.
Elise cupped Genevieve’s firm breasts, shuffled down a little, and took a nipple between her lips. Genevieve shivered, and instinctively pressed a hand to the back of Elise’s head. Elise kissed the other budding breast, furtively watching her companion tremble under her lascivious attention from beneath lowered lashes. Then she moved again and her tongue passed over her flat tummy until it reached the soft nest of blonde curls she sought.
With her eyes tightly closed, Genevieve held her breath and felt her heart ready to explode. Her pussy was wet, she knew. Elise paused, and then licked lightly a few times, drawing a sob from her friend. Elise paused again, watching her responses, and then locating Genevieve’s clitoris with her fingertips, she targeted it with her tongue. Another soft whimper and spasm drifted from Genevieve’s breathless frame.
Elise raised her face, her chin and lips glistening. She had coaxed her young friend through her first small orgasm. It had been remarkably easy to achieve, and she did it with great care, aiming to whet the pretty blonde’s appetite rather than dull it.
Count de Tranville lifted himself from Madame Coubette. He craved a glass of wine and pulled his breeches up from around his ankles.
Finding the skirt he had ripped from the woman, he noted that he had indeed torn it. She would be unable to wear it again without careful repair.
Her verbal attacks on Elise were not new, but they always annoyed him. From finding his charge involved with his pretty kitchen maid, he knew that a wild spirit lurked within the beautiful girl.
But how could Madame Coubette know of this? Women’s intuition, he concluded. But could other people also sense Elise’s dark nature? And what sort of gossip might his mistress be spreading? It was her insinuations that there was something between him and Elise that worried him most, however... and now between him and Genevieve, too. It was hard enough resisting the temptation of the two youthful beauties, without having to listen to intimations from the fiercely jealous woman. Anger mixed with disdain as he gazed down at her bare posterior. He would need to get a maid to fix her skirt before she went home.
Madame Coubette was still an attractive woman, but she was becoming an increasing irritant. The sensuous woman who had enchanted him a year before was fading, and a frightful shrew was replacing her.
Of course he might enjoy other women in Portugal, or wherever, but what did it have to do with her? He mentally admonished himself for allowing the married whore to feel she could be something akin to his wife. It was not wise. Should he have invited her on the trip with him? Probably not. No, definitely not, he decided. In fact, it was probably time to get rid of her.
Madame Coubette stirred and stood up, somewhat unsteadily. ‘Put this on and then go up to Elise’s room and find something to wear so I can get it repaired,’ he suggested, passing her the damaged skirt. ‘It is too damaged to go home in. Tell Elise you had an accident of some kind. I’m sure she’ll find you something of hers to wear, and I can then get someone to mend it.’
‘I can’t come to Portugal, you know that, don’t you?’ she said firmly, putting on and fastening the skirt. ‘And if you do go, we probably won’t see each other again.’
‘I’ll be back,’ he said determinedly. ‘Once this madness is over, I will return.’
‘Don’t make idle promises. You’ll never keep them.’
‘We’re living in terrible times. Times that call for sacrifices of one kind or another. I’ve asked you to come with me. I will already be sacrificing my home and country because I have no choice. You have a choice and it’s best that you consider it well.’
‘I have given you over a year of my life. You have given me nothing in return and now you take leave of me as if I were?’
‘Just consider my predicament and consider my offer,’ the count interrupted, losing his patience.
‘No,’ his mistress hissed back, surprising him with her vehemence, ‘you consider my offer. You will stay here in France and there will be no more mention of leaving. If you go there will be trouble. I’ll get you arrested before you leave.’
Genevieve still tingled all over. Though feeling shy, she felt a warm delight in her near nakedness. She felt so vulnerable and yet so free, too. She wanted Elise to touch her again, to repeat what she had just done.
But Elise was now beside the bed, holding the curtain cords. ‘Stand up,’ she ordered. ‘It’s time for your next lesson.’
Without thinking Genevieve obeyed again, a feeling of lightness permeating her body. Elise made her turn her back, stroked the girl’s long blonde hair, and then pulled her arms behind her.
‘Lovers play games, Genevieve,’ she whispered. ‘And a man’s game is essentially that of power.’
Genevieve trembled a little, feeling the thick cord being wound and knotted tightly around her wrists. What was her friend up to now?
‘Wuh-what are you doing?’ she asked.
‘As I said, it is time for your next lesson. A lesson in power and control.’ Elise lifted the second cord. ‘Now open your mouth,’ she ordered.
Partly in fear, partly in fascination, Genevieve complied and felt the cord passing over her lips and lodging between her teeth. Elise tied it behind her head, forming a gag. ‘Now get on your knees,’ she commanded, pushing her to the floor.
Genevieve did as she was told, but Elise pushed her further so that her head sank forward and rested on the soft bed. She fidgeted apprehensively, a sudden panic gripping her, aware of her exposure and complete vulnerability.
‘Relax,’ Elise murmured, her hand following the delicious shape of Genevieve’s bottom. ‘Now, power is a man’s favourite thing, and learning to submit to the whims of others is part of the lesson you must learn. Men love whores and slaves, and you must learn to become a whore and a slave if you want to win their affections.’
The hand withdrew, and then suddenly slapped Genevieve sharply on her buttocks. She swallowed the shriek of shock and pain that tried to force itself through the gag. Heat surged through her bottom as if she’d been scalded.
‘What a man’s pleasures are might not always be understandable to you, but learning to enjoy them is the challenge,’ Elise said, stroking Genevieve’s bottom again, but just as the kneeling girl felt the pain subsiding a second swipe fizzed through the air, the slap landing on her right buttock. It scorched more than the first, sending a raging heat over the surface of her skin and resonating deeply.
Tears welled in her eyes. She pulled at the cord in vain, but along with the pain, she realised, came the pleasurable throbbing Elise’s tongue had only just partially abated. Her pussy was tingling again, warming and dampening. The pain in her buttocks mingled with it, inflaming it like a fan. She spread her knees discreetly wider, preparing to receive the next slap.
A zing resounded with the slap of a taut palm against the lower curve of her buttocks, making her writhe once more. The scalding sensation spread further. Something was welling up inside amid the pain and humiliation.
Elise noted the surreptitious movement of the lovely girl’s knees, and sniggered. ‘So, now the mare is hungry to be fucked,’ she goaded. ‘But not yet.’
Taking Genevieve by the shoulders she lifted her so that she was once more upright on her knees. She loosened the gag so that it slipped down around her neck and stepped before the girl. Her cool hands cupped Genevieve’s flushed face, and she sat on the warm spot just vacated by the kneeling girl. ‘That was the second part of today’s lesson,’ she told her plaything. ‘And now for the third.’
Elise brushed aside the blonde fringe from Genevieve’s damp brow, and the kneeling girl gazed at Elise’s taut stomach and the dark triangle of curls nestled between her parted thighs. The sitting girl rubbed the glistening lips hiding there, and without a word she slowly parted them, her fingertips locating her clitoris.
‘You have now seen the toy men have between their legs,’ she said huskily, her free hand stroking Genevieve’s hair. ‘This is ours, and it needs to be kissed and adored. Kiss it for me, my dear Genevieve.’
Genevieve looked up into her friend’s eyes, and then down to the moist, beckoning pussy before her. She closed her eyes and moved her face tentatively to the moist lips. Nervously she ran her tongue over the damp and fragrant flesh, but instantly felt her face being pressed deeper, urged by the hands of her friend. She felt wetness spreading over her lips, nose, and cheeks. Elise moaned. ‘That’s it,’ she encouraged dreamily. ‘That’s it.’ She took Genevieve’s head in her hands and guided her mouth over her clitoris. With fingers urgently entwined in Genevieve’s hair she bared her pleasure button to the girl with the other hand. Genevieve tongued it obediently, conscious now of the extent of the pleasure Elise was experiencing...
A noise suddenly startled them both. Genevieve tried to withdraw, to see what was happening, but a fierce swat and intense pain erupted on her bottom once more and she yelped loudly. Tears blurred her vision. Elise had not moved, but shock was etched on her face.
‘I told you so!’ Madame Coubette gloated.
‘Silence!’ the count thundered, his glazed eyes giving him the countenance of a madman. ‘This is not Elise’s doing,’ he growled at his mistress in defence of his stepdaughter, with a display of bullish conviction he didn’t actually believe. ‘It can’t be.’ He glared at Genevieve. ‘What on earth are you doing to my stepdaughter? Both of you will be punished tomorrow morning,’ he went on to Elise before poor Genevieve could even think of a response, let alone impart one, ‘giving you time between now and then to dwell on your disgraceful behaviour. Bring her at ten o’clock sharp. You know where!’
Elise stood and hastily untied the cord around Genevieve’s wrists. He watched them for a moment, and then left with Madame Coubette in his trail, who looked back at Elise and smiled...
Genevieve’s legs were trembling as she followed Elise into the library. She had never been in there before. It was the count’s preserve and out of bounds. Her eyes flitted over the book-lined walls of the austere room, alighting on a portrait hanging over the large fireplace of a beautiful dark-haired woman.
The fire was lit, and the count paced to and fro before it, his hands behind his back. To the left of the fireplace was his writing desk and chair, and to the right was a leather armchair.
Elise seemed very composed, surprising Genevieve. Perhaps there was nothing much to fear, after all.
The count turned to face them, and Elise stopped just in front of him. She stood proudly, mirroring his stance, her hands behind her back, her shoulders set proudly. Genevieve took her place beside her, and on the armchair she noticed a leather riding-crop with a loop at the tip.
The count wore no wig, and she observed his short greying hair and brown eyes, seeking some trace of compassion. But there was none to be found, his stare cold with determination.
Genevieve stole a sideways glance at Elise, who still seemed to be in perfect control of her emotions. How could she be so calm and collected?
‘I find it hard to believe that one of the de Montvert stock could turn out to be such a depraved little hussy,’ the count said to Genevieve. ‘You have brought depravity to my home and corrupted the girl I have raised as my own for seven years.’
Genevieve couldn’t believe the unjust severity of the charge. Her heart began thumping as she vainly sought some way of explaining what the count had witnessed without blaming Elise. But her guardian turned away from her and addressed his stepdaughter.
‘You know what to expect,’ he said.
Genevieve heard a rustle and looked at Elise, shocked as the girl unbuttoned her bodice and removed her clothes.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself for allowing this wretch to corrupt you in such a way,’ he went on. ‘As you know, there is only one way to deal with this sort of disgraceful behaviour.’
The count turned again to Genevieve. ‘Take off your clothes, too,’ he ordered, and a wave of panic flooded her, a hot flush colouring her cheeks. ‘And hurry up about it!’
The poor girl reddened and anxiously began fumbling with the buttons of her bodice. Elise, meanwhile, was already naked, the fire dancing on her creamy thighs. Her proud breasts swayed firmly as she kicked her dress and underwear to one side, and moved to the armchair.
Not wanting to incur the count’s wrath any more than she already had, Genevieve hastened to undress too. Despite the heat of the fire she shivered and crossed her arms over her breasts, her nipples hardening.
The count manoeuvred the armchair to face the fireplace, and then the writing desk too.
‘Over the chair with you, Elise,’ he instructed, and his stepdaughter bent gracefully, her hands placed firmly on its arms as she bent over its back.
Gazing at the shapely buttocks, Genevieve could make out the pink cleft of her sex, the same wet lips she had been introduced to the day before, causing all this trouble now. It glistened with moisture, inviting her...
Count de Tranville held the crop. He lifted his arm, and then brought it down with a sharp sweep across Elise’s bottom. Genevieve’s heart jumped at the sound of the assault, and she watched as her friend’s lovely bottom twitched in a brief spasm at the impact. She looked in horror at a burning red line striping Elise’s poor buttocks. A second strike followed, sweeping down with the same ferocity. This time a faint yelp came from the bent girl as her buttocks quivered again.
‘Enough,’ the count panted after administering a third cruel swat.
Elise raised herself slowly from her position. Her face glowed red and perspiration beaded her forehead.
Genevieve gazed at the girl’s heaving breasts and then tried to cast a look of sympathy to her, but Elise’s shining eyes turned immediately to the count. He turned to face Genevieve.
‘Now you,’ he said. ‘Take her place over the armchair.’
Genevieve felt her legs trembling almost uncontrollably, but the pulsing rhythm was between her thighs again. She couldn’t move.
‘I knew a little hussy like you would have problems taking her medicine,’ Count de Tranville said, then without warning he grabbed her wrist and as she squealed an incoherent protest he pressed her facedown across the desk instead.
‘No!’ Genevieve managed to shriek, shaking with chagrin, her cheeks aflame. Tears welled in her eyes and she struggled to raise herself, but a sharp push from the count pressed her back down on the desktop, and his hand remained between her shoulders, pinning her to the polished surface.
‘Hold her hands,’ Count de Tranville ordered Elise, and she obediently grasped Genevieve’s wrists and pulled them to the desk’s edge. Speechlessly Genevieve searched her friend’s eyes for some empathy, and was shocked to find none. Her buttocks, exposed to the count, suddenly felt chilly and unbearably vulnerable. What was he doing behind her...?
The vicious leather crop whistled through the air and sank into Genevieve’s buttocks, making her howl as it scorched a path across them and made her squirm frantically against the hands holding her. She had never been punished so severely in her young life before, but the pain in her bottom, far from being unbearable, was fanning the delicious heat already simmering there.
When Elise told Genevieve that Rodolfo was a man who could not be content with just one woman, she could hardly have been more right, and he would have been the first to confess this. Nature had bestowed Rodolfo with gifts that many men would envy. He was rich, handsome, and possessed an athletic frame. He was also very well endowed.
But, while Rodolfo was a man to delight many a woman in bed, he had also grown difficult to satisfy. He had enjoyed sleeping with so many in Portugal, Spain and France, that at the age of twenty-five an ennui began to affect him. So to rectify this he had taken to experimenting with other practices.
Wild parties in Paris took his fancy for a while, but he eventually grew tired of them. And while from time to time even men offered themselves to his curiosity, he never really felt much interest in such a departure. So currently he found contentment sleeping with a number of pretty women at the same time, usually in the better Parisian brothels.
It was for these reasons that when Rodolfo awoke in his apartment in Paris, naked beneath his goose feather quilt, he was not startled to feel the warmth and weight of two soft bodies moulding against him. He threw back the quilt and stared at the two girls sprawled beside him, and it took a moment to recall their names - Claudine and Juliette, that was it.
Both were blonde, and whilst Claudine was naked Juliette slept in her black corset. Claudine, the slighter of the two, rested her head on his stomach, while Juliette nestled in the crook of his arm.
Claudine and Juliette, he mused... the young and destitute former mistresses of an executed aristocrat. He had found them in a Paris brothel, and taken by the beauty of the fallen pair, so totally at odds with the shabby den in which they resided, he took them home with him.
It was strange how similar the two were. They had almost the same shade of blonde hair; their skin had a similar olive hue, and there was not that much difference in their shape or size.
It was lucky for them that he found them only recently after they started working in the seedy brothel, before the delicacy of their beauty had been completely erased by their labours among the grubby hands and lusty loins of countless miserly commoners.
What a state France was in, he contemplated, and then his thoughts drifted to his visit to the Count de Tranville.
At first deep reluctance had filled him when he received his father’s instruction to assist the count in fleeing the country. But the sight of the man’s two beautiful charges quickly changed his mind. What was there to keep him in Paris, anyway?
And what a treat Elise had turned out to be! And Genevieve... he was sure he had never seen such a beautiful girl before. Thoughts of the two made him stir, and he looked at the two sleeping girls beside him. What was he to do with them? When they were not making love, the two were the best servants he’d ever had. Neither complained of anything, and both did whatever they were told.
Then it occurred to him to take them with him. But what would he tell Count de Tranville and his father? Why, he would introduce them as yet more imperilled aristocrats whom he was gallantly rescuing. Claudine could be the countess of somewhere, Juliette the baroness of somewhere else. Splendid!
Having made the decision he relaxed into his pillows and smiled. Yes, it would be too great a shame to leave France without them.
After the thrashing received from the count, Genevieve fled to her bedchamber in tears. The punishment left her perplexed and at a loss to understand her own feelings. She felt fury at her guardian for being so unfair and so brutal, but at the same time she acknowledged the pleasure the blows had awoken.
Her feelings toward Elise similarly confused her. On the one hand she resented the assistance she’d given him in the administration of the punishment - a punishment far more protracted than the one Elise had to endure, and a punishment for which Elise had been responsible in the first place - but on the other hand the memories of the pleasures she’d experienced earlier at her hand remained.
The following day Elise complained of a headache and asked for her meals to be brought to her bedroom. She also issued instructions that she was not to be disturbed by anyone, including Genevieve.
Genevieve felt despair at the announcement. What was the matter with her friend and why couldn’t she visit her? She began to feel lonely. She breakfasted alone and wondered what to do for the rest of the day, hoping Elise might feel better as it wore on.
But as the afternoon came Elise still had not emerged, and glumly Genevieve decided to take a walk alone. Without a fixed itinerary she wandered across the lawns and headed for the woods beyond. A path cut through the trees and she followed it for some time.
She soon began to relax. It was lovely in the woods, and the singing birds and the rustle of the wind through branches lulled her. Her thoughts slowly returned to Elise and then to Rodolfo.
It now seemed so long since she had seen the man. It was difficult to remember just how he looked. Especially after the games she had played with Elise.
The dark hair and powerful eyes of the man and her friend merged, so that Rodolfo suddenly loomed in her mind like a sorceress and Elise became a dashing foreign gentlemen. She would see Rodolfo again soon, though, she remembered.
What would he feel for her? Would a man capable of so casually doing what he had done with Elise be capable of ever loving her? And would she please him? After all, what did she really have to offer? Nothing any more, except her heart and love.
Genevieve came across a rutted road cutting through the woods, and caught sight of a small house. She had walked for quite some time now, and was beginning to feel tired and thirsty. Perhaps the occupants would allow her a drink and a little time to rest.
But from first impressions the house appeared to be deserted. Slightly nervously she tapped on its heavy oak door, but there was no reply. Again she knocked, harder this time, but again there was no reply. She waited for a minute or so before deciding that there was probably nobody there, but just as she turned away the door creaked open.
‘Can I help you, mademoiselle?’ a soft voice asked.
Genevieve turned back to see a young blonde girl of about her age standing before her.
‘Is everything all right, mademoiselle?’ the girl asked.
‘Yes,’ Genevieve replied, after a pause, slightly taken aback by the loveliness of the girl. ‘I’ve been walking in the woods for a long time and was wondering if I could perhaps ask for a drink to quench my thirst.’
‘Of course you can,’ the girl chimed sweetly, a bright smile lighting up her clear face. ‘Please, come in.’
As Genevieve accepted the invitation she remained quiet, for there was something about the girl that fascinated her. She could hardly take her eyes from her lovely face.
Sitting at the scrubbed table, Genevieve watched the girl fetch her a drink of milk, and kindly place a plate of bread and cheese before her too, noting how quiet the house was and sensing the girl was its only resident.
As Genevieve enjoyed the frugal but tasty snack and cool drink she gazed at the surroundings. It was obviously not a prosperous place. The wooden floorboards were clean but loose and in need of repair, and the walls had evidently not been painted for many years. On a few hooks there were dusty traps and snares that had clearly not been used for a long time and now served as ornaments.
She thanked the girl warmly for the refreshment and gazed at her, taken with her good looks despite her worn, woollen skirt that had been patched many times. It was probably the only one the girl had. Quietly, the girl took a mop and began cleaning the floor, but the worn skirt and blouse did not hide altogether what was obviously a shapely and beautiful body beneath. And then it dawned on Genevieve why she was so fascinated by the girl; there was something peculiarly familiar about her, like looking at herself. They could be mistaken for sisters or cousins, Genevieve realised. They had the same soft features, the same light blonde hair, and the same pale blue eyes. Her figure, slim and graceful, was like hers too. Even her voice had the same soft ring. Genevieve felt a deep fondness for the girl.
‘Why is it so quiet here,’ she asked, still watching the girl. ‘There’s not a soul around. Do you live here all by yourself?’
‘I do, yes.’ The girl stopped mopping, and with an innocent smile turned to Genevieve. ‘Many have left this area, with it being so close to the Tranville chateau. The word is that the revolutionaries could call on the count at any time, and who knows what would happen to him, or to anyone thought to be a friend to him.’
It was true, it dawned on Genevieve. She had been so lost in her friendship with Elise and life at the chateau that she hadn’t really noticed the gradually thinning local population.
Why was her guardian’s home so empty? It had not seemed so at first, when she arrived there. But where were all the servants? She ran through those remaining in her mind; the elderly cook, two old maids that doubled as chambermaids, the old man she occasionally saw walking horses early in the morning... so few for such a large place. There was a coachman too, but even he was aged. Why, the place was almost empty apart from these ageing, quiet spectres.
And what of the revolution that was tearing up the country and that had taken her family? At the chateau it seemed not to be going on at all. Within the sturdy old building there was hardly ever mention of it, neither from her guardian or Elise.
The fear of it, if it existed, could only be apparent in the emptiness of their world and the absence of those who might otherwise share it. Since the visit of Rodolfo, the count had entertained no other guests, save Madame Coubette.
The girl’s large eyes sparkled brightly and her face glowed pink. Genevieve gazed at her mouth, her teeth pearly white and neat, and when she talked she would occasionally moisten her lips with a darting glide of her tongue.
‘I am alone now,’ the girl went on. ‘My husband left me not long ago. This place was his, and he left it to me. So, I suppose I should be grateful to him for that. Anyway, he drank too much, and he said I didn’t love him enough. He didn’t think there was any future for him here. He said he might come back one day, but I doubt it.’
Pity for the girl suddenly mingled with Genevieve’s affection. ‘But you’re so young to be on your own,’ she said. ‘I would never have imagined you to be married. Why, you can’t be any older than me. Do you miss him?’
‘No,’ the girl replied, shaking her head. ‘I didn’t love him. It was a mistake from the start.’
‘Then why did you marry him?’
‘I had liked him at first, though I soon regretted it,’ the girl replied matter-of-factly. ‘There was little choice after I lost my job at the chateau, though.’
‘You worked there?’ Genevieve asked, surprised by the news.
‘Only for a short time,’ the girl muttered slowly. ‘I was a kitchen maid.’
‘And what happened?’ Genevieve asked.
‘Well, the count took me on as a kitchen maid, but I soon found out that he had other things in mind. He’s a distinguished man, and was very kind to me, and one day, as I brought him his breakfast, he made his fondness for me very clear. I’m sure he would have carried on being kind to me, if it wasn’t for Mademoiselle Elise.’
At the mention of Elise, Genevieve felt her heart quicken and her curiosity sharpen. The name caused something to stir in the blonde girl, too, she saw. She seemed suddenly to be on the verge of tears. ‘What do you mean?’ Genevieve probed.
‘Elise...’ the girl sighed. ‘She took an interest in me. Almost from the start. She played all sorts of games with my heart. Games that were cruel and that I didn’t understand. At times it was wonderful, but at other times I felt she was wicked through and through... but she won my heart.’
The girl seemed lost. A tear trickled down her cheek, and she wiped it away quickly with her sleeve.
‘Are you trying to tell me that you were... were lovers?’ Genevieve asked, aghast, staring deeply into the girl’s damp eyes.
The blonde maid looked back wistfully at Genevieve. ‘At first I thought we were, yes,’ she admitted. ‘But for some reason Elise soon stopped being my lover and became cruel and distant.’
The girl stared down at her feet and then looked back up at Genevieve. ‘In any case,’ she continued, ‘the count put a stop to it and sent me away. I was penniless and alone until I met my husband. It’s probably just as well, because the chateau is a scary place. They say the ghosts of his wife and his ancestors haunt it. I suppose I’m lucky to be out of there.’
‘Oh,’ Genevieve said absently, ‘but it’s since become my only home.’
‘Then, I’d urge you to be careful,’ the girl advised, stepping closer and putting her hand on Genevieve’s shoulder. ‘If I may say so, you are very beautiful, and seem to be kind of heart too. That place is dangerous, I think. Dangerous for you.’
It was getting late and Genevieve realised she needed to be making her way home. ‘Can I come back and see you?’ she asked, realising how much she had enjoyed the brief time she’d spent with the girl.
‘Of course, mademoiselle,’ the girl beamed, brightening up at the prospect of having some occasional company, ‘I would be very happy for you to visit me.’
‘And I don’t yet know your name?’ Genevieve prompted.
‘It’s Emelie, mademoiselle,’ the girl told her.
‘Emelie,’ Genevieve echoed. ‘That’s a lovely name.’ She smiled at the girl. ‘And don’t call me mademoiselle,’ she said gently. ‘My name is Genevieve.
‘Now, I’d better be going.’
‘It’s getting colder outside, I think,’ the girl said, peering out through one of the small windows. ‘I’m going to light a fire soon and prepare a broth. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to stay for the night? There is room for you.’
Genevieve gazed into the girl’s eyes thoughtfully. How pretty they were. ‘No, thank you,’ she responded. ‘They would wonder where I was. Another time, perhaps.’
‘Then perhaps you might like to borrow a cloak to take with you.’
Genevieve accepted the thoughtful offer and Emelie hurried to another room, returning with a heavy woollen mantel and wrapping it tenderly around Genevieve’s shoulders.
‘What fine hair you have,’ she said, gently pushing back the golden locks of Genevieve’s hair over the collar of the cloak. Affectionately Genevieve took Emelie’s hands as she finished fastening the cloak at her throat, without thinking she kissed the girl’s cheek, and as she did the girl turned her face and met her lips with her own.
Emelie gave the kiss intimately, with her eyes closed, and as Genevieve’s mouth lingered on hers, she subconsciously allowed her lips to part, surprised to feel Emelie’s tongue grazing hers. It probed nervously and she allowed it to roam inquisitively for a few seconds, as if to signal that the unusual response to her farewell kiss had been noted, her heartbeat quickening.
Then, reluctantly pulling away, Genevieve gazed at the girl. ‘I really must be going now, but I’ll come again soon,’ she whispered.
‘Be careful,’ Emelie called, standing at her front door, waving as Genevieve set off on her way.
The trace of the girl’s lips remained with Genevieve as she walked quickly through the woods. It was getting chilly, but she felt gratefully warm beneath the cloak. What a lovely new friend she had found. The memory of Emelie’s prettiness and soft nature made her smile. It would have been so delightfully cosy to remain there.
She pictured herself sitting by a warm fire next to the girl, chatting into the night. Then she thought of the kiss again. What had inspired her to do something like that with a stranger, and to let the stranger return her kiss like she had?
Then for a moment she felt like turning back, but she feared her hosts at the chateau would worry about her absence.
Much of what Emelie had said left her worried and curious, though. What if it were true that the revolutionaries could descend on the chateau and arrest them at any time?
And what about the experiences the girl had been through at the hands of the count and his stepdaughter? She remembered the count’s erect member as Madame Coubette knelt at his feet, and tried to imagine him doing the same to fair Emelie as she took him his breakfast.
And what had Elise done to her that still seemed to haunt her so? It had sounded as if Elise had been very cruel indeed.
Was Elise trying to do the same to her now? Had she decided to make her Emelie’s replacement? If so, what sort of fate awaited her? But whatever was to be, it appeared she had found a new friend, she reflected.
Before she knew it, it was getting towards dusk and she decided to increase her pace. The singing of the birds had been replaced by other less familiar and somewhat disconcerting sounds, and she wanted to get home. This time she kept to the road, and after a little while she heard a noise behind her and turned to see a coach and horses approaching, and she recognised it at once as Madame Coubette’s.
The prospect of meeting the woman again was not in the least bit welcome, for she recalled how the woman was present when the count discovered her and Elise together. There was, however, little chance of avoiding the coach.
It soon caught up and halted, the near door swinging open. ‘Why, if it isn’t the fair young Genevieve,’ crowed Madame Coubette. ‘What are you doing out here by yourself?’
‘I was just taking a walk,’ Genevieve replied shyly, ‘but I got a little distracted and didn’t realise how late it’s getting.’ She didn’t see any reason to tell the woman about her new friend.
Madame Coubette wore a brocaded gold dress, studded here and there with bright stones. It was cut low to reveal her ample cleavage, and on the generous upper slope of one breast Genevieve could see a small tattooed design that, at a glance, looked like a star. Above her powdered visage the woman wore her usual white wig. ‘Don’t you know it’s not safe for you to be out here alone any more?’ she said. ‘It’s getting dark and cold, too. Come, get in and ride with me. I’m on my way to the chateau to see the count.’
Genevieve found herself blushing as she climbed up; what could she say after spying the spectacle of the woman and the count? And what would Madame Coubette be thinking after witnessing the shameful spectacle of her and Elise together?
‘I hope the count did not punish you too severely yesterday morning,’ the woman said without preamble. ‘He often has too quick and hot a temper, and a heavy hand.’ Genevieve remained silent, sitting beside Madame Coubette. ‘Perhaps,’ the woman continued, ‘your pretty little derrière is still sore. Like most men, he does not understand we ladies.’ She casually laid a hand on Genevieve’s knee and squeezed. ‘He’s lucky that I understand him, though. That’s why we’re such close friends, despite our backgrounds.’
Coyly, Genevieve glanced at the woman. She radiated an elegant voluptuousness. It was enticing and yet daunting. She thought how she had at times heard talk of courtesans and women of pleasure, and though she had never met any, she imagined they would be something not so far removed from the ornate woman beside her.
Madame Coubette returned the inspection, her look indecipherable and invasive, and it made Genevieve lower her eyes.
‘Don’t be so shy of me, my darling,’ the woman chided. ‘Your little liaison with Elise seems perfectly charming to me. We girls have all sorts of passions of which men know nothing. There are things we can share with each other that men simply don’t understand. Men have created the world and they are the masters of it. It is for this reason that we must please them. We are their toys and we learn how to make them happy. But when it comes to our pleasures... oh, it is so often only another woman that understands.’
Madame Coubette moved closer to Genevieve and the hand on her knee massaged gently, making Genevieve uncomfortable. ‘I-I don’t understand what you mean,’ she stuttered defensively. ‘And I think you may have the wrong idea; Elise and I are good friends and we were only playing a game.’
‘Oh, of course you were,’ the woman mocked, her eyes sparkling mischievously. ‘But tell me, are you just Elise’s whore, or are you available to outside offers too?’ Genevieve couldn’t believe her ears, but the woman went on before she could relay her indignation. ‘I mean, do you have a going rate? A list of services offered, perhaps?’ Anger gripped Genevieve, but she was rendered utterly speechless by the woman’s outrageous musings. ‘How much would you charge, for example, to provide a little tongue work on a lady like me?’
The hand on Genevieve’s knee moved and clamped through her dress between her thighs, the fingers finding and latching to the lips of her sex, and the harsh assault sent a bewildering, unexpected tremor through her.
Then with the poor girl stunned and distracted by the speed and unexpectedness of the assault, the woman gripped her blonde hair with her free hand and tugged back, arching Genevieve’s slender neck and making her squeal at the vicious discomfort, involuntarily thrusting her breasts forward.
Madame Coubette’s countenance was now extremely alarming as she undid the rough cloak around Genevieve’s shoulders and gazed hungrily down at her bare throat and cleavage. The girl’s breasts swelled as she breathed anxiously, her tight bodice rendering their creamy upper slopes available to the woman’s greedy eyes.
‘It is best that you know and understand this well, my little orphaned slut,’ the woman whispered harshly, her face close to Genevieve’s. ‘As far as your guardian is concerned, I am his mistress and the only mistress and lady of the de Tranville estate. I am all he could want, and I have been as close to being his wife as any woman will ever be. I have worked hard to make it that way, so you’re whoring in the wrong place.’
Genevieve stared at Madame Coubette in utter shock.
‘And if you’re going to try and curry favour with anyone, you’d do well to start with me and stop your little pussy-kissing games with Elise. With her you are wasting your time, but I will teach and reward you.’
‘Let go of me!’ Genevieve suddenly found her voice. ‘You are the whore, not me!’ She shook her head to try and dislodge the fingers gripping her roots, only succeeding in increasing the sharp pain. But Madame Coubette merely cackled her amusement at the futile mini-rebellion, and feeling the struggling girl’s warmth through her dress, she thrust her hand even harder against it.
‘You’re very ripe,’ she mocked. ‘You see, we’re going to get on very well together.’
‘Let go of me!’ Genevieve yelled again, but the arrogant woman merely laughed and clamped her mouth to her exposed throat, while increasing the pressure between her legs even more. Genevieve could feel the woman’s fingers probing insistently, trying to press the cloth of her dress and underwear into her. She squirmed desperately, trying to get free of the hold despite the pain it caused her.
‘Please, leave me alone, I want to get out,’ she begged desperately, trying to lean away from the lips that devoured her throat and were moving down towards her cleavage.
‘Very well,’ the woman said, taking her by surprise, and with two taps on the ceiling she ordered the coachman to stop, whereupon Genevieve was surprised to see they weren’t too far from the chateau, ‘if that’s what you think you want. But this is only a temporary reprieve. I will have you, believe me.’
Genevieve opened the coach door and stepped down quickly, slamming it behind her.
‘Remember what I’ve said, my precious little thing,’ Madame Coubette called as the coach moved off again. ‘I know your game, and as a novice, you’d be better off with an experienced agent like me.’