The Persian Girl

by Felix Baron

  ‘More, I think.’

  Maude took a turn, imitating her Mistress.

  ‘I think the full length should be wetted,’ Isabel decided. She knotted a fist in Maude’s hair, knocking the girl’s cap to the floor. Isabel pressed down, not that Maude seemed reluctant. The girl’s lips parted, formed an ‘O’ and slithered down half the length of my shaft.

  ‘All the way,’ Isabel told her.

  Maude’s head shook. Isabel drew her back up. ‘Can’t,’ Maude explained.

  ‘Of course you can! It’s simply a matter of breathing through your nose. Watch me!’

  My dear wife swooped, not pausing until her lips brushed my pubic hair. ‘’E ’at?’ she asked.

  Maude tried again, with great diligence. By the time Isabel had demonstrated her technique a dozen times, with Maude doing her utmost to imitate her, the maid achieved her goal. It seemed that swallowing cock induces salivation, for both were drooling – running at the mouth. I, of course, was feeling remarkably lustful but, as pleasant as the exercise was, the alternating of their mouths slowed things down. I was sure I wouldn’t achieve release that way.

  ‘There is a theory,’ I croaked, ‘of the healing powers of opposites. Light dispels darkness. Water douses fire. Yin heals yang.’

  ‘Yin is the female essence, and yang the male, no?’ Isabel asked. ‘How would you apply this theory, in such a case as this?’

  ‘By the close juxtaposition of the male and female parts,’ I explained.

  ‘I see. Maude, mount your Master.’

  ‘Yes, Madam,’ was the chit’s eager response. Facing me, she threw a leg across my lap. Isabel steered my shaft. Maude lowered herself. My dome sank into her. She twisted her hips and pushed down. My stem began to disappear but when it still had half its length to go, the maid paused. ‘That’s as much as I can take, Madam,’ she explained. ‘The Master is too big.’

  It was clear to me that she was lying. She was delightfully tight, but I’ve known tighter. Her maidenhead wasn’t the problem. I’d felt no trace of the barrier that had likely been rent when she was of a much more tender age. No, this pretence was part of their scheming, the sweet vixens!

  ‘I shall assist you,’ Isabel announced. She removed the jacket of her sleeping suit, baring the beauty of her mature breasts. My cock twitched inside Maude in response. I’ve examined every inch of my dear wife’s body, in detail and often. Even so, her nakedness never fails to stir me.

  Isabel marched to the sideboard and bent at her waist to open the lowest drawer. I sucked a breath. Her bosom is never more attractive than when pendant and the trousers of her pyjamas rode low on her shapely hips. Her position threatened to dislodge them entirely.

  She returned with one of my riding crops. ‘Bend forward,’ she told Maude.

  The girl gave me an apologetic look and leaned to rest her cheek on my shoulder. Isabel inspected the raised curves of her maid’s young bottom.

  ‘So you think you can’t take any more?’ she asked.

  The crop whistled and landed with a resounding crack. Maude gasped and jerked at me. Another inch of my flesh sank into hers. Six more blows had her pubes pressed to mine but Isabel wasn’t content, and nor was I. Each time the crop landed, Maude gyrated. Her internal muscles clenched and relaxed. She juddered. My neck grew wet with her tears and slobbering. I was beginning to feel sorry for the girl when she convulsed, contracted fiercely, and yelped.

  Now that it had become obvious that pain had been the source of her pleasure, I let myself release. I was still jetting when Maude slithered off me.

  Isabel is a firm believer in, ‘Spill not thy seed upon the ground.’ Her mouth ensured that mine wasn’t allowed to.

  Two

  I WAS INFORMED that a gentleman had left his card but no message. When I examined the pasteboard I understood why. The name on it was spurious and the address fictitious. Her Majesty’s Confidential Office is fond of such games. Sir George Armbruster, the secretary of that office, calls such messages his ‘surreptitious summonses’.

  As I had been instructed, though it seemed like foolishness to me, I took a hansom to Burlington Arcade. Strolling up it, I made sure I wasn’t being followed.

  It was quite irritating. I’ve danced with Dervishes; taught as a Sufi; entered the Holy of Holies as a hajji, and walked the breadth of Sind in the guise of a Buddhist monk. I certainly needed no instruction on how to cross London discreetly.

  Nevertheless, I took another cab, to Jermyn Street, disappeared down back alleys and finally emerged in Lavender Square. A secret knock on the door to the servants’ quarters of number 47 gained me access to a panelled room, where I flirted with a pretty young maid until Sir George deigned to see me.

  ‘Richard,’ he boomed, ‘what do you know about a fellow called Pasha Benim ben Midras?’

  ‘Educated Balliol, honours in ancient languages; sixth degree Scottish Rite Freemason; scion of a cadet branch of the Imperial House of Osman and a man of considerable influence in the Province of Van, in South Eastern Turkey.’

  ‘Oh? Y’heard of the man, then. Reliable, would you say?’

  ‘Hates Russia, so our faithful ally in that regard. He’d put Turkish interests before ours, of course.’

  ‘Quite, quite. He sent you a message.’

  ‘Oh?’ I waited.

  ‘Peculiar, really.’

  I waited some more.

  ‘Wouldn’t have paid much mind to it, ’cept for what happened to our man in Paris.’

  Questions never get much out of Sir George, so I said nothing in the hope that my silence would draw him out.

  ‘This Pasha chappy, sent packages with his note.’ Sir George rose, went to the next room and returned draped in silvery mottled fur. ‘Recognise this?’

  ‘Siberian wolf.’ I took it from him and held it up. The pelt was better than seven feet long, not counting the tail. ‘I didn’t know they grew that big,’ I remarked.

  ‘Your Pasha claims he shot it.’

  ‘He was in Siberia? That doesn’t sound like him. He’s a man as likes his creature comforts.’

  ‘No. He claims he killed the beast not a bowshot from his palace.’

  ‘There are wolves in Turkey, but not Siberian and especially, not of such a size.’

  ‘What d’ye think he meant, then?’

  ‘Siberian wolf? A threat from Russia, most likely.’

  ‘Then why the deuce didn’t he say so?’

  I wasn’t about to explain the workings of subtle oriental minds to as obtuse an Englishman as Sir George. I simply shrugged. ‘You mentioned “packages”?’

  ‘A thousand guineas, in gold.’

  ‘And sent to me, by name?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘It seems that Pasha Ben Midras perceives a threat, from Russia, and is willing to finance a visit from me to help him with it. Does Her Majesty’s Confidential Office concur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll set off for Turkey post-haste. By the way, you mentioned something happening to an agent of yours, in Paris. What was it?’

  ‘He was taking an early stroll in the Bois de Boulogne when he was attacked and mauled to death by an enormous wild dog.’

  I packed my new sabre, my ‘Dragoon’ Colt .44, a change of clothes, and the thousand guineas into my trunk. My ‘Arkansas Toothpick’, a blade similar to that made famous by Colonel James Bowie, my linen and my toiletries, went into a carpetbag. I dressed in black broadcloth, suitable for the American clergyman I’d decided to travel as. There was a concealed pocket in my jacket for my two-shot .25 calibre Derringer. I carried a swordstick with a spring-release sheath and a twenty-inch blade, ‘As furnished to discerning gentlemen, world-wide, by Smith and Smith, of High Holborn.’ It had a brass ferule and a heavy knob, shaped like a ram’s head, so it was a fair weapon even without its secret. The handle concealed a compartment, just big enough to hold five gold guineas.

  My preparations were as complete as I could make them.

>   Isabel bade me a tearful farewell and I was off in a hired growler, heading for Leigh-on-Sea. My chartered steam yacht picked me up at midnight, at high tide, from behind cockle shed number seven. It took me across the North Sea, through the Northern Canal and into Amsterdam.

  Two hours after I’d disembarked, a porter was stowing my baggage in one of a steam train’s luxurious private carriages. I had four berths to choose from, two above two, on opposite sides of the door, running width-wise. The upper berths were no more than five feet above the floor, leaving little headroom in the lower ones, so I decided I’d sleep higher rather than lower. A sturdy pull-down table was fixed to the outer wall, below a window, with two plain chairs tucked under it.

  After another hour we pulled away. I composed myself for a tedious journey, for at least as far as Breslau, in Silesia.

  As it happened, my tedium was delightfully relieved by the time we reached Liège.

  Three

  THE DINING CAR was only half-full that evening but Abigail Smythe asked if she and her two pretty charges might join me at my table. ‘These European trains are so full of foreigners and you, being an American and a man of the cloth, well, you Americans aren’t really foreign, are you. You being a large person, and all. We’d feel safer in your company, wouldn’t we, girls?’

  Her ‘girls’ agreed, enthusiastically.

  I kept a grin off my face. Abigail presented herself as a governess, escorting her young pupils, Hope and Grace. She gave their ages as fifteen and sixteen. For the duration of that meal, I doubt a single true word passed her lips. I’d never heard of an English governess who wasn’t of good family but in reduced circumstances. Abigail’s manner of speech denied any ‘good family’ in her background. Had I been the American clergyman I feigned to be, I might have been fooled but I’d been raised in a class where governesses were as commonplace as scullery maids. I’d tupped more than my share, in my youth. Besides, young Hope had an uncommonly wide mouth and a turned-up button nose, features I found erotic but hardly indicative of a refined bloodline.

  Both girls’ faces had been artfully painted to make them seem more youthful. The dusting of powder failed to conceal the subtle creases at the corners of their eyes. By the appearance of their hands, I judged them to be in their early twenties.

  I had no doubt but that I was being set up for some cunning swindle. Its nature would no doubt reveal itself in due course. Meanwhile, all three girls were pretty and I had no other amusement to hand.

  The meal passed without incident. No mention was made of an inheritance that it would require my aid, and a small investment on my part, to secure. No decks of marked cards emerged from the oversized matching reticules the three carried. Those bags confirmed my suspicions. Although they were capacious, they seemed to be empty, or close to it. I’ve never known a woman to carry a bag that wasn’t so stuffed she had to commandeer her escort’s pockets to accommodate extra gewgaws.

  Breakfast was much the same, except for a pretty and well-rehearsed little squabble between the ‘girls’ as to which of them would sit by my side. I did my best to look pleasantly abashed by the compliment.

  At lunch, Abigail asked my advice about the safest way a lady, or a gentleman, might conceal any valuables while travelling in foreign parts. I affected ignorance. Hope made some suggestions that a more sophisticated man than ‘Reverend Longfellow’ might have taken for risqué innuendo. He, of course, being so naive, simply looked blank.

  Perhaps because of my obvious ‘innocence’, or because I’d revealed that my purse wasn’t cleverly concealed, the vixens moved in on their prey that very evening.

  ‘Bratwurst with sauerkraut,’ Abigail sneered. ‘Perhaps a little wine would make our supper more palatable. What say you, Reverend?’

  ‘Wine?’ I blinked from Hope to Grace like an owl.

  ‘Their parents allow the girls a thimbleful, on special occasions.’

  ‘In that case, by all means. “Take a little wine, for thy stomach’s sake.” May I seek your advice on the choice, Miss Abigail? We don’t see a lot of European wines back in Kalamazoo. Something mild, if you please?’

  Abigail suggested a port. As the Reverend Longfellow, I affected not to know the difference between fortified and unfortified wine. Hope, the younger girl, sitting beside me, made sure to keep my glass topped up.

  As myself, I can down a full bottle of port, followed by a couple of large brandies, and still shoot the pip out of an ace of spades at thirty paces. As the Reverend Longfellow, two glasses had me slurring my words. After three, my eyes were unfocused and I swayed with the train.

  Abigail, sitting opposite me, exclaimed, ‘What on Earth is that!’ and leaned to peer from the window.

  I turned my head but maintained watch on the table via its reflection in the glass. Hope, deliberately and with precision, took the bottle of port and poured a generous measure directly into my lap.

  We all four exploded from the table, the girls squealing and I staggering. Hope begged my pardon.

  Abigail reproached Hope with, ‘Clumsy little fool!’

  The girl burst into crocodile tears. All three tugged at me. I was drawn in a flurry of female consternation, looking foolish and bewildered, to their carriage. There, confused, I suffered my boots and stockings to be pulled off, followed by my wine-soaked trousers and sticky drawers. Grace disappeared with both garments and a muttered, ‘Find a valet.’

  It had been nicely executed. I had to admire their efficiency. In a matter of minutes, two of them had their clerical guest seemingly helpless and compromised, while the third made off with his keys, headed without a doubt, for his carriage.

  But their charade was not yet done.

  Abigail said, ‘The girl must be disciplined. As the aggrieved party, you shall be the witness to it, Sir.’ She turned on Hope. ‘Assume the position, you naughty girl!’

  Hope bent over the little pull-down table. Abigail threw the chit’s skirts and petticoats up over her head and pulled her drawers down to her ankles.

  I blinked at a ripe, rounded and neatly divided little bottom.

  The ‘governess’ swished a schoolmaster’s cane, the kind with a curled handle. ‘A dozen, do you think, Reverend?’

  I made a noise in my throat.

  ‘Quite right, she deserves twice that for her clumsiness.’ Abigail pushed her sleeves up to her elbows and swung with a will.

  Hope emitted muffled shrieks, shook her legs and wriggled her bum as Abigail’s weapon drew line after fiery line across the pink firmness of her charming target. I, of course, reacted. By the time Abigail had counted to twenty, my staff had risen and was projecting before me, well beyond my shirt-tails.

  Abigail grinned at my wagging stalk. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested, ‘if Hope were to assuage the need I see you suffer from, Reverend, you might be moved to forgive her transgression?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Her maidenhead must be preserved against her nuptials, but …’ She took me in hand and directed my cock’s head into the burning cleft in Hope’s bottom.

  The girl’s rear passage resisted some, but not as a virgin bum would have.

  Hope squealed, ‘I am undone!’ and rotated her hips to further enhance her undoing.

  I thrust with a will and was still at it when the door opened. Grace had returned with her reticule bulging and her free hand behind her. The girl was squirming with suppressed excitement. She tossed her bag on to the lower berth to the left. It chinked.

  I half-turned, bearing the impaled Hope with me. ‘What’s in your bag, Grace?’ I demanded. ‘Open it up and show me.’

  Instead, she showed me what was in her other hand – my revolver. A loaded Dragoon is a heavy beast. It took both of her hands to hold it trained on me.

  ‘Silly girl!’ I said. A smart thrust of my hips propelled Hope off my cock and into her ‘sister’. Reaching over the sprawling girl, I plucked my pistol from Grace’s fingers.

  ‘You have to cock it,’ I told her. />
  ‘You can’t peach on us,’ Abigail claimed. ‘How’s a Reverend gentleman to explain being robbed while distracted on account of he was buggering an innocent young girl? You shop us and we’ll shop you.’

  In my natural voice, I said, ‘You might shop me, by all means. Consider, though. I’m no Yankee clergyman. I’m an officer and an English gentleman with credentials that are verifiable at any British embassy or consulate, and I’m wealthy, to boot. You three, on the other hand, are whores and swindlers, likely known to the constabulary. As you have discovered, I have the means to pay bribes and fines. I doubt you do.’

  Abigail changed her tactics. ‘Look, Mister, whoever you are and whatever your game is, we was just having a bit of a lark with you. We didn’t mean no ’arm.’

  ‘And no harm has been done,’ I assured her.

  ‘What then?’ she asked. ‘Forgive and forget?’

  I looked down at Hope, sprawled on the floor with a nice display of limbs even though her bottom was now covered. ‘This girl and I have unfinished business.’

  Abigail grinned. ‘And you still horny as a rhinoceros in Spring, ain’t you? Well, my Hope don’t never lift her skirts ’less there’s a bob or two in it for her.’

  ‘Come now! I doubt there’s a depravity known to man that the three of you haven’t enjoyed, just for wicked pleasure of it. Own up that you’re a lascivious trio of trollops and I’m sure we’ll come to terms.’

  ‘Well …’

  Grace interrupted. ‘And if we ’fess up to being three right randy sluts, what then?’

  ‘I propose a fête. We won’t reach Breslau for three full days. At the next halt, we’ll stock up on provisions – a ham perhaps, or a roast fowl and some sweetmeats for you girls, plus a dozen bottles of bubbly. We’ll lock the door and gorge our carnal appetites for three days and three nights. What do you say?’

  Hope rolled over and looked up at Abigail. ‘Can we, Abby? Can we?’

  Grace asked, ‘Will there be chocolates?’

  ‘Chocolates, Turkish Delight, caramels, liquorice comfits, all the bon-bons you could wish for, if they’re available. Abigail,’ I said, ‘I am a generous man if a woman pleases me.’