Being talkative would delay the inevitable, so Freya encouraged him. “I’m flattered, sir, that you promise to visit me again. Let’s see, shall we, whether we suit each other. No need to commit yourself until later. Perhaps we could start with you explaining what you like. You can be quite honest. If you require some special service I’m not prepared to give, and there are plenty of those, in fact, I shall tell you frankly, explain my reasons, and send you off to visit one of the other girls. I’ll even recommend one specifically skilled at whatever special pleasure you require.”
“Oh, I’m not after anything fancy or crooked,” grinned the boy. “I suppose I’ve not had time to find out what I like yet, so I’m quite satisfied with the straightforward stuff if that’s what you’d call it.”
It was evening, and a warm one, unusual at that time of year. She had the casement a little open, with the thrust of Eden’s last late river traffic like a gentle burr of background noise on the mild air. A horse neighed from the Bridge, and she heard the rumble of wheels hurrying before the gate closed, voices and the clatter of shutters going up. A dog yelped. The Corn slopped its banks, a wherryman shouted, a torch hissed directly below. Within the room, a wax taper was alight on the low table beside the bed, but the boy suddenly stretched out his hand and cupped the flame, extinguishing it. “Listen,” he said, his voice a cheerful murmur in the darkness, “boys tend to be pretty sensitive about their pricks and compare them with their brothers and friends from an early age. So of course, I know, more or less where mine stands. Or doesn’t stand, as the case may be, which I suppose will be up to you.”
It was certainly standing fairly noticeably as he spoke. “So it turns out,” he continued, “that my penis is acceptably average. A little larger than some perhaps, but not as thick and stubby as some others. I mean, you’ll presumably know even more about that than I do.” This was not the sort of conversation Freya was used to. “Now, as it happens,” the boy rambled on, “the average prick, and that includes my own, is not by nature an academic sort of animal, apart from a very few eccentric deviations I suppose, but I’ve found mine remains usually predictable.” He waited a moment, but when she said nothing, he chattered on. “So, madam, let me introduce you to our reliable friend – an average prick – averagely skilled and averagely able – with very little experience as yet – but more than willing to adapt and learn a few tricks more.” He nodded. “My own name, by the way, is Ruffstan.”
“Then I’m happy to meet you,” she said, wondering which end she should be talking to. “I think we shall get along fine.”
“Oh I expect a lot more than fine,” said the boy. “I suppose I ought to confess, madam, although this isn’t my first occasion, there haven’t been too many opportunities as yet. I’m sixteen. I wasn’t going to tell you that, but after all, if we’re going to be friends, it’s not a crime being young, is it? The first time I did, it was very exciting for me, but it was so quick I just sort of collapsed. The next two were better. I’m hoping to improve as I go along.”
“You can call me Freya.” She remembered too late that all the girls gave false names. At the very beginning she had told everyone that her name was Amba, but over the past year and more she had never given that opportunity to anyone.
“My name’s Ruffstan,” said the boy happily. “I expect you’ll see a lot of me. In more ways than one.” He began to fumble.
At this stage in the proceedings, Freya’s mind usually wandered. There were some new silks in from the lower islands, great wondrous bundles on the carvel, last one before the winter winds made sailing impossible. She had been down to the docks just two days gone. The gold thread was particularly fine. Gold tissue, gold-embroidered brocades and golden dyed satins. Expensive, of course, but if you have to clothe yourself to please men, make both respectable and less respectable women envious, flout the more mundane laws concerning the strictures of modest dressing according to one’s station – which everyone disobeyed anyway – and shock the church into its usual moral outrage, then expensive gowns were essential. The Lower Island created beauty in fabric.
Her attention suddenly snapped back. “Can I put it in, now?” asked the boy, as if requesting permission to speak at the dining table or go to the privy.
“Impatient?” She smiled. “You’ve paid for an hour. I imagine insertion now will mean a quick ending. And since I doubt we’ve passed more than ten minutes, what next?”
“We can do it all again,” said the boy, grinning widely and flashing all those teeth. “I’m hoping for five or six goes at it, you know, by the time the hour’s up.”
“Five or six?”
“I don’t want to tire you out,” he said politely. “I mean, we’ll stick to five if you like. But I was rather hoping for seven. I mean, there won’t be any difficulty. Finish one, and it just pops straight up again, all ready for the next time.”
“I thought you said you were average,” Freya murmured.
He nodded eagerly. “Isn’t that what everyone does? I hope I’m not falling behind expectations. You’re the one who knows all about it, mistress. Can you tell me what I should do?”
“Just lie back and enjoy yourself, I suppose,” she suggested. “You seem to be managing quite well without help.”
“Well,” he explained, “you fiddling about with me like that is all very nice of course, though you’re a little more gentle than I might like. But I usually do that to myself, and I’m not nearly so gentle. And that’s what I mean. I can do it to myself. So with you, I was hoping for something more – specific. What I can’t do alone.”
“Then come on in,”
The southern islands were often ahead of other countries in other matters too. Glass, for instance. Chapel windows could be glorious and unsurpassed, but glass anywhere else was a luxury. Yet on the islands, some workers made glass into amazing things like cups and bowls. But there was little chance of her affording glass in any shape, so instead, she remembered the length of rich indigo satin for a new and luxurious gown which she had recently ordered. It had cost her three customers, but with very little else to sparkle in her life, she had decided that perhaps indigo satin might prove inspiring. So the ships brought their traders, and Freya was already well used to bargaining until the price seemed acceptable.
“Excuse me,” said the boy. “Am I doing this right? You don’t seem to be enjoying it much.”
Her wandering attention was momentarily diverted. “How many already?” she mumbled. “Are we on the second time around yet?”
“No,” he said disapprovingly. “It’s still the first one, and you weren’t paying attention. Where were you?”
“On the docks, waiting for the ships to unload,” she admitted.
“Then I’m failing badly,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me where I’m going wrong.”
He was spread, long, muscular and naked below the waist, propped up on one elbow and regarding Freya with a very severe expression. It was a comfortable bed. But the cover attracted stains, and she had long since decided that she should change it for a darker colour. Or, she wondered, would those particular stains show even more against dark red? And did it even matter? “Oh dear,” she sighed. “I’m back to fabrics.”
“Flesh,” said the boy, “is much more fun than materials. Look, when I press your breast, it leaves a little dent, and then it slowly comes back into place. Sort of pops up and goes rosy. I can do the same to your thigh. Look. Another little dent. But if you press my prick, it gets bigger. No dents at all.”
“Is there a bone inside?” she wondered, though without touching.
He shook his head. “I don’t know, but it all curls up and goes soft sometimes, so I don’t think so.”
“Well,” she conceded, “I suppose we should get back to work and make sure it doesn’t curl up soft just yet.”
“Do you like being touched here? Like that?” asked Ruffstan. He had ejaculated five astonishing times and each time with an echoing roar of triumph that
sounded more like a battle cry, that he had reluctantly wriggled back into his hose, codpiece and boots, and left the room, promising to return as soon as he could afford it.
She still imagined that the boy had been Tom’s gift.
Tom sat elegantly on the side of her rumpled bed and frowned. “He would have been ideal for any of the girls. Better with some, perhaps. I should have sent the dear boy to Sosanna. But I sent him to you. “Did you enjoy him, Symon’s friend?”
She laughed out loud. “Enjoy? Of course not. He was young and sweet and silly. He asked for education and received it. But he amused me. Is that enough enjoyment for you?”
Tom stretched one wrist from the silken mahogany fur edging of a very luxurious sleeve and regarded his rings. Four on one hand. He said, “It is you who need the education, Symon’s girl. Not the boy. And if he needed educating, then you are hardly the one who could teach him.”
Freya felt absurdly insulted. “Am I so stupid?”
“Yes,” Tom said. He shook his beautifully cut hair, arched eyebrows and small tidy ears, frowned, and leaned back. “Far too stupid, my dear, and far too intelligent. You are not the stuff of whores, neither by inclination nor by personality. You never will be. It is not in you, my dear, and cannot be born within the boredom and complaint of your interminable days. The boy I sent was a delight, yet you found no delight in him – only patronising amusement.” He blinked at her over the stretched and elegant fingers, and the glitter of his expensive rings. “You were tricked into the stewes,” he nodded. “But it is your own stupidity which keeps you here. The poppy has you trapped.”
She whispered. “You’re right.”
“Then leave,” Tom said. “Marry. Or does your youthful folly and romantic memory convince you, wrongly of course, that you should love your husband? How absurd, my dear. Friendship is superior and may lead to a form of love as long as the man neither beats nor ignores you.” Tom was as pretty as his clothes, but everything he said changed his face. His expression carried more words than his voice did.
“I can’t believe in any sudden fortune, or the wheel speeding up. I was a happy child with Jak. Then he disappeared, just like Symon has. Feep died. Then – you know. what. And I’m here.”
“And did you enjoy your revenge more than the whoring?”
“I did.” That was a lie. She had been sick afterwards.
Tom stood and turned away. “Ambition is something that leads us to make more of our lives and think ourselves greater. What is it, I wonder,” he said as he opened the door, and Freya heard his last words from out in the corridor, “that creates the opposite? What makes a girl want less and think herself smaller. What makes her believe she can never deserve better. And instead of ambition, she thinks she is a beetle, doomed to end in this spider’s web.”
Freya dreamed of Tom’s words. “What’s it like,” she asked Hawisa, “to give up the poppy? Is it painful? Can it be done? How long does it take?”
“Don’t have no idea. Never seen no one manage it.” Hawisa shook her head, the several layers of chin following one by one. “Folks takes more as time passes. They don’t never take less.”
Chapter Three
It was when he saw her the second time that he decided.
The servants were stirring, shutters were lowered all along the road, gardeners carried spades over their shoulders, thumping out amongst the hedges, each household was waking to its duties. Doors opened, pages hurried out clutching messages, chamber pots were emptied into the gutters, girls with buckets and brushes were kneeling to scrub the doorsteps. Sir Kallivan let Freya go. “I’ve seen you before. You were a shop-girl. Now a whore.” The skin of his narrow face, drawn tight over his cheekbones, was so pale it did not flush or show his anger. But he was furious, and since the gutter-slut could be held accountable, whether or not she was guilty, he held to her shoulders, shaking her.
On the stairs and in her own domain, Freya was able to twist, throwing him off. “Sir Kallivan, I believe. You will leave these premises, sir, and you will never return.”
Tom had already told her. “The lordly creep you despise so bitterly, Symon’s friend. Kallivan, and ghost pale. He looks to hurt the younger girls. He’s been banned, forbidden as a hard-on in a snow-storm.”
And he was leaving. But as Freya watched him stride to the front door, flung open for him by the waiting page, Kallivan turned briefly, shouting back over his shoulder.
Freya hurried back up the steps, but the words echoed in her mind. “Be ready slut. You’ll suffer for this.”
Collapsing on her bed, she kicked off the stained sheet and buried her face in the pillow. Her room was not too small, and her bed was comfortable. But now, as frequently, she hated it all. It was not sweet comfort, it was blatant symbolism and she once more hated herself for not having left it long ago. She forgave herself, knowing she stayed for the drugs. But the drugs were not so simple, for this was not just an addiction to the poppy drink. It was also an addiction to friends. And now, hearing her, they were her friends who rushed in. Sossanna, Edda, Maggs, and even Tom, ready to sympathise and make her laugh.
“You’ve seen the ghostly demon again, my dear?” Tom said, grinning.
And she laughed obediently. “But he threatened me,” she said.
“We threatened him,” answered Tom.
“But he’s the king’s grandson,” Maggs reminded them. “He has a lot more power than a harlot and a brothel.”
“I doubt it.” Still grinning, Tom turned to Freya. “My gift hasn’t arrived yet, Symon’s girl,” he told her. “Any day now, perhaps. It could even be tomorrow.”
An hour later, Kallivan strode his mistress’s new deeply patterned rug. “The brat was grandly dressed, but a whore as clear as the day.”
“Then you are simply wrong, Kallivan,” Jak’s stepmother told her lover. “How do you know which of all the sluts arranged to have you thrown out?”
Turning, and standing stiff legged, hands clasped behind his back, he gazed at his mistress with considerable dislike. “You are choosing to call me a fool, Valeria?”
She nodded with a smirk. “Indeed I am, sir. The little slut who tried to get young Jak into bed with her? Pathetic Godfrey’s bastard daughter? What authority would she have in the grandest whorehouse in Eden? And what does it matter? It’s Jak himself that’s important. Why is there no confirmation of his death then? Or have you failed in that as well, my dear, and do not even know it?”
He paused just one moment, then reached forwards and slapped the lady hard, first across one cheek, and then, as she stared open mouthed at him, across the other.
The dowager did not cry, although she had bitten her lip. Very slowly, she smiled. Her lip was cracked where bitten, and one tiny drop of blood beaded her mouth. She licked it off, and her smile widened. She was sitting, hands neat in her lap, looking up at him.
Very softly, he said, “You are a sow, madam. A veritable sow.”
“Indeed I am, my dear. Which makes you the rutting boar, does it not?” He did not answer, so she straightened her skirts and slowly stood, still watching him intently. “Bed, Kallivan?”
As he nodded, she led him quickly from the room.
Afterwards she lay naked, watching him. Both spread across the sagging mattress and its creased and rumpled linen. She was breathless. The soft excess of her thighs flattened, and her breasts fell outwards over her ribs. His own body was thin and lean, white as the sheet, his chest flat and hairless, the nipples sunken, and his eyes were closed as he murmured, “Sore, Valeria?”
The lady leaned across, kissed his cheek and giggled. “Naturally. It’s just as well, Kallivan, that I’ve no living husband to notice the cuts and bruises across my nether parts. Your riding crop is just a little too sharp, you know.”
“I’ll use my sword next time. It’s sharper.”
“Naughty boy. But it’s that wretched step-son of mine you should have used your sword on.”
Sir Kallivan opened his ey
es, leaned up on one elbow, and looked down on the woman beside him with a slight sneer. “Quiet, bitch. I’ve told you, the boy is dead. I’m heartily tired of his name constantly flung in my face. Enough, or I’ll fetch my whip from the stables.”
“A promise, my love?”
Lying back suddenly, he stared up at the bedraggled lining and unravelling tassels of the old brocade tester. “You are tiresome, Valeria. You whine, you sulk, you demand. You bore me.” He yawned. “I’ve a need to enliven the dull drudgery of life. My father-in-law also bores me. I should be free to do what I wish to that insipid little wife of mine.” He turned suddenly and gazed at the dowager. “Then I should not need you at all, my dear.”
Valeria pouted, as he had expected. “Be careful, Kallivan,” she said. “Playing the bully is one thing, but I’ll not take your nasty temper beyond bed-play. And I know too much about you. Be very careful.”
His gaze returned to the tassels and the dust entwined ceiling beams beyond. He spoke softly, as if to himself. “You are lucky, madam,” he murmured. “You welcome our games, the mumming and play-acting. But I limit pain. I hold my hand, as you know. What, I wonder, would you say should I move beyond the limits and beyond the play. I could so easily kill you, you know, my dear.” He did not turn to look at her, but clearly anticipated her reaction, and smiled slightly, barely altering the turn of his lips. “I could enjoy myself a little more before that death of course,” he continued. “I have a knife handle specially designed – let us say – for insertion. A whip I use on my horse but more often in the bedchamber. A belt with a buckle so cleverly spiked, pure silver naturally, that flicked across the buttocks it leaves a pattern quite exquisitely unique.”
The Mill Page 3