Innocence Examined

by Emily Tilton

  Sir Gerald laughed. “Fairleigh, I have not the slightest idea what my friend Charlie just said, but I am glad that he seems happy.”

  Fairleigh replied, smiling, “If I am not mistaken, Mr. Vance just said that he looks forward greatly to Miss Hollins’ first observation this evening.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The shameful news arrived in a note from Sir Gerald, passed by Mary, Anne’s lady’s maid, to Anne, in her and Charlotte’s bedchamber.

  Anne, my dear, please tell Charlotte that Mr. Vance and I request the pleasure of your lady’s maid Mary’s company, and person, tonight at a little ceremony in the drawing room after dinner. Please prepare Mary to be enjoyed fully by Mr. Vance and by me, and make it clear to her that if she plays the reluctant, prudish miss we will not hesitate to thrash her until she yields herself to our masculine authority. You yourself, and Charlotte, will attend Mary at the ceremony and provide the pleasures of your own persons as Mr. Vance and I see fit. Mary is to be entirely naked, and you and Charlotte will bind her to the special divan with the straps to render her available to our cocks. Before we fuck Mary, you and Charlotte, dressed only in your chemises, will excite the girl with your fingers and lips, to prepare her for the pleasures of the men who will fuck her.

  Fondly,

  G

  P.S. The purpose of this ceremony is to initiate Miss Caroline into her new role in our household. From henceforth she will be what Dr. Brown calls an innocent observer. This means that she will watch Mr. Vance and me fuck you and Charlotte (and, tonight, Mary—and of course at other times whomever else we wish to fuck) when I decide that her presence is appropriate. A Dr. Fairleigh, whom I am sure you will find very amiable, has also come to join us as our household physician, with special responsibility for Caroline’s training in her new capacity; he also will be present tonight at the fucking of Mary.

  “Charlotte,” Anne said, “come read this. I fear you will get no joy of it, but…”

  Anne watched the pink suffuse Charlotte’s lovely face as she read, and heard her friend’s breath grow labored.

  “But it is monstrous!” Charlotte exclaimed.

  “Yes,” Anne admitted, “but…”

  “You cannot persuade me, Anne, that you find it…”

  “Can you deny that you enjoy it when you open my cunny for Charles’ cock? I have heard you say a hundred times, while you kissed him, ‘Fuck that naughty girl, sir.’”

  Charlotte’s face twisted into the expression of one who would deny the undeniable, her mouth shifted bewitchingly to the left side in a little sidelong pout. Anne kissed her and whispered, “I, for one, cannot deny that it has lit a fire in my cunny.”

  “But, Mary! Your own maid!”

  “Well, it is hardly new. You know I caught her with Sir Gerald’s cock in her mouth two weeks ago.”

  “And you spanked her for it!”

  “With Sir Gerald’s permission, and in his presence—after he spent down her throat while I had to watch.”

  It was too true that Sir Gerald and Mr. Vance had fucked other girls in Anne’s and Charlotte’s presence before. Charlotte did seem to Anne nevertheless to be justified in drawing a distinction, however, because on previous occasions those girls had simply fallen in the gentlemen’s way, whether in the course of Mary’s duties in her lady’s chamber, or, more often, as part of one of the general debauches the two couples attended once a fortnight or so.

  The previous Saturday, for instance, Sir Gerald had given Anne’s backside to the earl of Leicester while he fucked the countess in the ballroom of Leicester Palace. Not five feet away from that little scene, the marquess of Worcester had been gamahuching Charlotte while Mr. Andrews, the chancellor of the Exchequer, thrust himself eagerly into her mouth. Mr. Vance, meanwhile, was himself in the countess of Leicester’s mouth even as Sir Gerald thrust vigorously into her cunny.

  The earl had praised the delights of Anne’s arsehole in terms that made her blush to think of them now: “You, Miss Loomis,” he said, “make me wish I could set up an establishment like Sir Gerald’s. Were this bottom mine to fuck whenever I pleased, I should ride out upon it noon and night, and its owner should wear diamonds all the rest of the time.”

  Strangely, though the thought of trying to find a grander place in society through the talents she had so rapidly gained here in Cadogan Square often occupied her mind, Anne felt no real urge to leave Sir Gerald. Since the fateful day when she had stepped into his carriage, knowing that what he would ask of her would certainly be the same sort of shameful thing the Hartwells, who had employed her as a governess, did in their bedchamber that made Mrs. Hartwell moan so loud at night, she had not fallen in love with the man who ordered her to her knees before him and filled her mouth with his manhood. But she knew beyond any doubt that the way Sir Gerald treated her, red as it turned her face many times a day and painful as it often was for her bottom when he punished her or had her there, answered a craving she had never even admitted.

  She had certainly never admitted it to Mr. Hartwell, even when he caught her listening at the door and caned her for it. But neither had she admitted it to Sir Gerald himself, because it seemed so much more delicious to play the reluctant virgin. Indeed, she had never truly admitted it even to Charlotte, for she knew that Charlotte had the same craving, and that her friend had even greater difficulty in confessing it. Anne thought perhaps that Charlotte had never even admitted to herself how much Mr. Vance’s wicked treatment of her answered her soul’s and body’s yearnings. At least, Anne reflected, she herself could whisper in the night, “Thank you, Sir Gerald.”

  Now, with Charlotte at their vanity table, reading the lewd note from him, Anne said, “We must make haste, I fear. It is already four o’clock.” She rang for Mary.

  “Oh!” said Charlotte. “I… I shall go, and…”

  “You shall not go, my dear,” Anne said firmly. “We have a long night ahead of us, and you, Mary, and I must all understand one another.”

  When Mary arrived, Anne had her sit, to the servant’s confusion, in Anne’s own chair. Anne sat on the bed and Charlotte sat in her chair at the long vanity table, so that the three girls’ conference was quite close.

  “I don’t understand, miss,” Mary said. “I thought I was coming to dress you for dinner. It’s not right for me to sit in your own chair like this.”

  “Well,” Anne said, “it’s not right, as such things as that go, for you to undergo what you must undergo tonight in the drawing room.”

  Mary, a very pretty little thing of twenty-two, with ash blond hair done up in a bun, opened her eyes wide in alarm. “What do you mean, miss?” she whispered. “I know it was wicked, what Sir Gerald made me do with his… his thing, and I know you were right to spank me for it. But I promise I’ll stay out of his way from now on, and if he calls me I will come to you, as you said.”

  Charlotte sighed. “Oh, Mary,” she said. “If only it were that simple.”

  “You know,” Anne continued, “how when you came to work here you were given extra pay—much more than other lady’s maids get.”

  Mary nodded solemnly. “Indeed, miss, so that I would keep my mouth shut about what the gentlemen do with you and Miss Charlotte. And I have! The other day when I was in the shops, a man told me he would pay me a guinea if I told him the secrets of the house.”

  “And you went straight to Sir Gerald,” Anne said kindly. “I know. You’re a very good girl, Mary.”

  “Thank you, miss. And that’s why I don’t like to sit here in your chair—I knows my place.”

  “Mary,” Charlotte said, “I am afraid that that is not as true as Miss Anne and I would like it to be.” Mary started to protest, but Charlotte interrupted, holding her hand up in a very soft gesture of suppression. “And that is not your fault in the slightest, but rather ours. Today, though, we must ask of you—for we are commanded so by Sir Gerald, and by Mr. Vance—to become more fully a part of the household than you have ever been before.”


  Mary had no idea, of course, what precisely Charlotte meant, Anne could see, but something about Charlotte’s tone, perhaps, in combination with the things Mary had seen and heard in Cadogan Square, clearly gave her to suspect that it must have a great deal to do with Sir Gerald’s ‘thing,’ as she had put it so innocently a moment before. Mary blushed to the roots of her hair and whispered, “What must I do?”

  “Mary,” Anne asked, “have you lain with a man?”

  “What, miss?” Mary’s face showed shocked modesty, but her confusion at what Charlotte had just intimated seemed to stand in the way of the pretense, and a guilty conscience shone forth: Anne knew in an instant the answer to her question.

  “You heard me, Mary. When we interviewed you for this position, after Mr. Vance brought you here, I remember you told us of a young man with whom you had been keeping company, but no longer did, at that time?”

  Charlotte said confidently, “Bill, I believe his name was.”

  Mary’s blush had faded a little, but now it returned in full force. She remained mute, her eyes turning desperately from Charlotte to Anne and back again, pleading to be let off the necessity of admitting her shame.

  “I can see in your face, Mary,” Anne said, knowing that she must be pitiless with the girl, for her own good and her own pleasure in the rites of the evening, “that you and Bill lay together. His cock entered your cunny. Was it very painful?”

  “Oh, miss!” Mary said, bursting into tears.

  Charlotte cast an anguished glance at Anne. Anne knew that her friend must see the same necessity Anne did, of bringing Mary around to the pleasures of the household in as short order as they could, but Anne also knew that Charlotte hated to see anyone cry, let alone a girl who depended for her living upon Charlotte herself. “It is alright, Mary,” she said gently. “We are your friends. It hurt very much for me, the first time with Mr. Vance.”

  “It did not, so much, for me,” said Anne candidly, trying to create an atmosphere of confidence among them. “What about you, Mary? How many times did Bill fuck you?”

  “Only twice,” Mary said miserably, looking down at her hands, clasped in the lap of her maid’s uniform. “Once in the evening, in the barn, and then the next morning he climbed into my window, and he… he fucked me again, and it was much nicer, but then… then…”

  “Did he tell you he would not see you anymore?” Charlotte asked tenderly.

  Mary nodded. “I come to London to look for him, but I couldn’t find him, and then Mr. Vance come along and saw me…” She looked at Charlotte with an anguished expression.

  Charlotte gave a sad little smile. “Did Mr. Vance fuck you, Mary?”

  Mary nodded again. “He pulled me into an alley and pushed me up against the wall, and told me he would find me a place if my… my cunny was nice and tight.” She gave a little sob.

  Charlotte reached out and embraced her. “Do not worry, Mary,” she said. “I am not angry in the slightest. Mr. Vance is like that, and I have learned to cease lamenting it.”

  “This evening,” Anne said. “I am afraid, Mary, that you will receive a much more thorough lesson in the ways of Mr. Vance and Sir Gerald than you had even in that alley, and in the pantry when you sucked Sir Gerald’s cock.”

  Charlotte released Mary from her arms, and Mary looked with wide eyes, but more composure, at Anne. “What do you mean, miss?”

  “I fear,” Anne said, “that after dinner you are to be bound upon the special divan in the drawing room and shared by Sir Gerald and Mr. Vance.”

  “Shared, miss?” Mary’s voice quavered terribly.

  “With their cocks, Mary,” Charlotte whispered, the words almost a tiny sob. “And we are to be your attendants, to prepare you and to assist in this wicked deed.”

  “B-but… Miss Anne,” Mary stammered, “how can a girl be ‘shared’ like that?”

  Anne could read in the girl’s face that she had an inkling, but refused to allow herself to understand that she had guessed correctly.

  “You will see, Mary,” Anne said, as gently as she could.

  “Must I, miss?” Mary asked, pleading. “Must I do it?”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said, weeping now herself. “You must. If you refuse, you are to be thrashed until you consent.”

  “You wouldn’t, Miss Charlotte!” Mary cried. “You are too good! You will help me escape!”

  “No,” Anne said, “she will not. Even if perhaps she had the inclination to help you thus, Mary, she would have me to reckon with. If you were to escape, Miss Charlotte’s and my lives would end, for you would take the guineas and sell the story.”

  “I wouldn’t!”

  “You do not think you would; I can easily believe that,” Anne said, her own masterful streak coming out and drowning her guilt in its flood of lubricious heat. “But I know the realities of this world. You will not escape this house, Mary. You must choose to go over the divan as a willing victim with your bottom ungraced by the marks of the cane, or as a slightly less willing victim with as many of those terrible stripes as is required to render you amenable to the cocks of our gentlemen.”

  At that, Mary bowed her head and nodded slowly. She would acknowledge her masters’ natural rights, just as Anne and Charlotte did.

  But Anne found she wanted more of the little maid, and she spoke in low voice, “Mary, we know you feel just as we do. You say you do not wish it, and yet in your heart, and in your cunny, you wish it very much, do you not?”

  Mary nodded again, hesitantly.

  Charlotte seemed to catch Anne’s mood. “Tell us, Mary,” she said very softly. “Tell us that you will go over the divan willingly.”

  “Yes,” Mary whispered.

  “Tell us that you wish it, really, in your heart and your cunny.”

  “Yes, miss. I… I know it is ever so wicked, but I do wish it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  James was dressed for dinner by his valet, who had just arrived from James’ own rooms in the Royal College. Now he sat in his new bedchamber, on the third floor of Sir Gerald’s house in Cadogan Square, contemplating the evening to come, and the way his circumstances seemed to have changed in the blink of an eye. The previous day at this time, he had been in conversation with Dr. Grey, hearing for the first time about Dr. Brown’s essay. Then, though he suspected he might find that essay rather more persuasive than Dr. Grey claimed to find it, he’d had no inkling that he would allow it to change his life, nor that reading it would put him in a position to fall in love with the lovely, charming, fascinatingly lewd young woman whose erotic education it now appeared James would oversee.

  How very unlikely it all seemed, now: that a baronet should have been persuaded to set up this sort of household; that a girl like Caroline Hollins should be a ward of the baronet; that he, James, should be sent to observe Dr. Brown for that consultation. James supposed there could be an alternate perspective, as well: Dr. Brown had engineered James’ complete conversion to the way of life of the natural man.

  Had Dr. Brown known that James would receive his ideas so favorably? James had been discreet, surely, about his previous amorous activities in London—certainly Dr. Grey could have known nothing of his visits to Mrs. Taylor’s, where girls were flogged (and where men might themselves be flogged, though that practice had no interest for James). Still less could anyone know about his first erotic encounter, James’ courtship of Nancy Givens down in Shropshire, wherein he had learned to please a girl, and also to spank her, though Nancy had finally married a wealthy farmer.

  Yes, James had tasted the delights of the natural man exercising his right of the phallus on those occasions, but how could Dr. Brown have known? At Mrs. Taylor’s, the men muffled their faces, and the light upon the crowd of observers was very low, in contrast to the brilliant limelight focused upon the stage where Mrs. Taylor or one of her men birched or whipped the young ladies to the cheers of the audience of men whom James supposed Dr. Brown would call ‘natural’ for their frank
embrace of the masculine right to flagellate any girl a man chose to flagellate.

  James felt rather as if he were going mad, but he could not say that he did not enjoy the lunacy. In the course of his investigations of these matters that it seemed Dr. Brown had penetrated more deeply than any other medical inquirer of whom James knew, he had grasped the same essential, natural truth as Dr. Brown: that men fuck and women are fucked. Some divine order had bestowed upon James Fairleigh a cock and upon Caroline Hollins a cunt. How could that not mean exactly what Dr. Brown said it meant, that if James should be lucky enough to acquire Caroline, he should fuck her just as he pleased? Was not the ecstasy that God, or the origin of species, had decreed he should feel, in triumphing over a girl’s modesty, and in fucking her in a lordly manner, exactly the warrant Dr. Brown theorized it to be, to take Caroline for his own and to fuck her thus?

  Civilization and manners cried out against it, perhaps. Did the theory not tend towards the primitive? Was it not the way of the pagans and the barbarians, who had their slave girls to serve their lusts and did not confuse such service with the marriage bed?

  But, James considered, here in 1862 such men as he still needed the release the barbarians had found with their slave girls, and they must wander the parlors and drawing rooms of society without the satisfaction of those lusts so strong they threatened to undo his reason. And such girls as Caroline must pretend that their cunts did not burn beneath their petticoats for the touch of a commanding hand like James’ own. James went down to dinner thinking that Dr. Brown might warrant a place in the pantheon of the greatest thinkers of the ages.

  In the parlor, he found Carruthers and Vance, along with Miss Loomis and Miss Dalrymple.

  “Dr. Fairleigh, I should like to introduce to you Vance’s and my fucking pieces,” said Sir Gerald.