Inigo took my hand and stroked my fingers up the shaft, which felt very warm and hard and surprisingly silken. “Touch your tongue to it,” he said.
Remove yourself…
I closed my eyes and leaned forward, feeling a woozy sense of disbelief that I was actually doing this, and extended my tongue until the tip of it met hot, smooth skin. I’ve done it, I thought, but before I could pull away, Inigo closed a hand around my head and gently restrained me.
“Pretend you’re a cat licking something delectable,” he said. “Start down here at the bottom.”
I drew in a steadying breath and licked the erect organ upward from the base, surprised to find its warm, fleshy taste not at all unpleasant.
“Don’t let your hands be idle,” Inigo said, guiding my right hand to the slippery head and tucking my left under his bulging “stones,” as Elic had called them, to a stretch of firm flesh which he told me was actually the root of the shaft. “Rub it gently, in rhythm with your tongue… That’s right…”
I wondered what Domenico Vitturi was thinking as he sat there watching me from across the pool. How did it make him feel, seeing me with my mouth on Inigo’s sex? Did it please him? Trouble him? Did it arouse him as much as it aroused me?
I had expected to be disgusted by this act, but in fact, I found it strangely exciting. My nipples grew stiff and prickly beneath my sodden shift; my sex felt hotly inflamed.
“You’re doing very well,” Inigo murmured in a voice that sounded slightly winded. He had a length of my hair wrapped around his fist as he leaned back on a braced arm, hips rocking.
I licked and caressed him, gratified on a primal level by his quickening thrusts and harsh breathing. I did this to him, I thought. He is consumed by pleasure because of me.
Sibylla’s moans drew my gaze to the couple at the other end of the pool. Elic’s thrusts had grown sharp and hectic. “Hold still. Aye…” He reared over her, growling low in his throat.
“I’m about to come, too,” Inigo rasped. I glanced up to see his head thrown back, the muscles of his neck and torso straining.
“Not with Hannah,” Vitturi said sharply. “Bianca, you finish him.”
I stepped aside for the other woman, who grasped his shaft and kissed the tip. “Shall I swallow it?” she asked Inigo.
Vitturi answered for him, saying “Nay. I want Mistress Leeds to see.”
Inigo nodded to Bianca, who pumped him with her fist as she suckled him. “Now,” he gasped. Stepping back, she gave him a few swift strokes, whereupon a burst of milky fluid shot from the tip of his sex. More spurts followed, all of them spattering Bianca’s breasts, at which she was aiming his member.
I watched in astonishment as she leaned down to lick the last few drops that dribbled out. Inigo stroked her hair, then he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to clean his spendings off her.
So ended our first lesson in the arts of the bedchamber, whereupon we climbed out of the pool and prepared to return to the castle. The air felt terribly chilly after the warmth of the water, and I shivered as I wrung out the skirt of my sodden shift.
As my fellow novices searched for their underpinnings among the piles of discarded finery, Inigo told them they needn’t put everything back on, that the staff of Grotte Cachée were accustomed to their guests going about in a state of dishabille. Lucy, Sibylla, and Bianca merely donned their nice, dry shifts and gathered up the rest of their clothes, while I stood with my arms wrapped around myself, shaking from head to foot and dreading the long, chilly walk back to my chamber.
I started as I felt something heavy being lain upon my shoulders—Domenico Vitturi’s black satin overgown. I turned to find him standing behind me, his expression impenetrable as he wrapped me in the capelike garment.
“Nay, signore, ’twill get wet,” I said. “I would hate to ruin such a beautiful—”
“The next time you are instructed to undress, I suggest you do so,” he said without looking at me. “My patience has its limits.”
Before I could summon a response to that, he turned and walked away.
Inigo and Elic gathered up our clothing to carry back to the castle, an unexpectedly gallant gesture. As we left the bathhouse, Vitturi closed a hand over Sibylla’s shoulder and spoke quietly into her ear.
“Sì, signore.” She told the rest of us she was going to linger there for a bit, and would see us in the morning.
“Buona notte,” Bianca said with a sly little smile.
As I followed Elic, Inigo, and the two novices down the footpath to the castle, Bianca said, with amusement in her voice, “Don Domenico, it make him, how you say, eccitato to watch us take our lesson, sì?”
Tossing me a grin over her shoulder, Lucy said, “Methinks ’twas watching Hannah that excited him so. Gave him quite the cockstand, seeing her lick that splendid lob—I saw him shift his breeches to hide it—but at the same time, he looked none too pleased, never mind he’d ordered her to do it. I don’t think I’ll ever understand that man.”
“He have too much of the black bile,” Bianca said. “It make him malinconico.”
I paused to look behind me. The bathhouse still glowed from the light of all those candles. Through its wide, arched doorway, I saw Vitturi leaning against one of the statues, guiding the rhythmic movements of Sibylla’s head as she knelt before him.
He lifted his own head to rest it against the column. His eyes closed, then quickly opened.
He’d seen me. Our gazes locked for a breathless moment. I turned and hurried back up the path.
As I was brushing out my hair that night, there came a knock at my bedchamber door. I draped a shawl over my night rail and opened the door to find Domenico Vitturi standing there.
“Signore,” I said, reflexively pulling the shawl around me.
“Mistress,” he said with a bow, taking in my nightclothes and unbound hair as he straightened up. His doublet was unbuttoned over his shirt, as if he’d thrown it on hastily on his way out of his own chamber. With a glance at the room behind me, he said, “May I?”
I stepped aside, clutching the shawl over my chest. He entered the room and perused it with an expression of idle curiosity, his gaze lingering on the ornate tapestries lining the walls. “Beautiful.”
“Aye, they—” My throat clutched. “They are exquisite.”
He looked at me. “What would you do if I were to offer you an income of ten thousand pounds a year for the rest of your life, with no conditions at all save that you leave here tomorrow and return to England?”
I hesitated only a moment before saying “I would turn it down, signore.”
He came toward me until he was standing so close that I could feel the warmth emanating from him. There was only one candle lit in the room, and it was behind him, casting his face into shadow.
He said, “Then what if I were to tell you to get undressed and lie upon that bed?”
I held his gaze unblinkingly, the blood roaring in my ears. He didn’t look away.
The shawl slipped down to puddle on the floor. My night rail closed down the front with half a dozen little ribbon bows, which I began clumsily untying. When the third bow came loose, the gown slid off one shoulder.
As I was plucking at the fourth, Vitturi took my hands and lowered them to my sides. Gathering my great rippling mane of hair behind me, he reached for the half-undone fourth bow, rubbed the satin ribbon between his fingers.
His throat moved.
I waited, my heart pounding.
He retied the bow, then pulled up the side of the gown that had slipped down and set about retying the rest.
Without looking up, he said, “What I had you do tonight in the bathhouse, with Inigo…There was a reason for that.”
Was there a hint of contrition in his tone, or was it just a fancy of my imagination?
“I realize I must learn to pleasure a man in the French manner,” I said.
With a fractional shake of the head, he said, “I told you to d
o it to see if you would.” He tied the top ribbon, retrieved my shawl from the floor, shook it out, and wrapped it around me.
Turning away with a sigh, he said, “Why are you here, Mistress Leeds?”
“To become a courtesan,” I said, as if it were obvious.
He glanced at me over his shoulder, looked away with a scowl. “Possibly.”
I held my breath.
Rubbing the back of his neck, he said, “I don’t know what to think. You bewilder me. The pieces of you…they don’t add up to a whole that makes any sense to me.”
As I was struggling to summon a response to that, he crossed to the door, saying “You’d better get to sleep if you’re to be ready in time for your morning lesson. The dancing master is a temperamental sort. He doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
“I won’t be late. Buona notte, signore.”
He paused in the doorway to look back at me, almost smiling. “Buona notte, Mistress Leeds. Sleep well.”
UCY!” I CALLED, tapping on her bedchamber door the following morning. “Are you in there? We’re all waiting for you downstairs. The dancing master’s screeching mad.”
I waited a moment, then knocked again. Upon hearing only silence, I opened the door and stepped into the room, which was cool and dark, the shutters and curtains being closed against the morning sun. By the light from the sconces in the hallway, I saw that Lucy’s bedchamber was as lavishly appointed as my own, with a beautifully carved tester bed, its curtains pulled closed all around.
“Lucy?” I said.
There came a somnolent grunt from beyond the curtains.
With a groan of exasperation, I stalked to the bed and whipped the curtains aside. “Lucy, you’ve got to get up and get dressed and come downstairs right now.”
Rubbing her eyes, she said groggily, “In the middle of the night?”
“The middle of the… Lucy, ’tis a quarter past… Oh,” I said upon seeing the man lying facedown next to her under be-tumbled sheets. No doubt she’d gotten very little sleep the night before.
Her bedmate hauled his head off the pillow to blink at me, and that was when I noticed his sleep-mussed sandy hair and the devilishly handsome face that Lucy had been mooning over ever since we’d set out from London.
“Mistress Leeds,” Jonas Knowles said with a drowsily lecherous smile. “Take off that dreary frock and join us.”
“Master Knowles?” I said. “Lucy, what on earth is he doing here? Don Domenico will be furious if he finds out you’ve been—”
“You won’t tell him, will you?” Lucy, naked but for a snarled mantle of flaxen hair, sat up and pressed her palms together in an attitude of supplication. “I pray you, Hannah, we’ll both be in such a pickle if—”
“Of course I won’t tell, but you were mad to have…” I squinted in the semidarkness at her wrists, which were braceleted with knotted ropes. A strip of black fabric was looped around her neck. A gag? A blindfold? “What the devil…Were you tied up? Did he force himself on you?”
Knowles snorted in bemusement. “Cuds me, is she serious?”
“Hannah, you really are too much,” Lucy said through a yawn. “I asked him to do it. ’Tis lovely, being tied up and ravished.”
“Climb in and I’ll show you,” Knowles told me, patting the bed in invitation. “Better yet, you and Lucy can tie me up and use me any way you like, no matter how vile or degrading. I’ve always dreamed of being bound and gagged and mastered, and to have not one but two lusty little lightskirts forcing me to submit to their every nasty whim. Oh, I know, Luce!” He sat up excitedly. “You can ask Elle to join in, and the three of you could—”
“Aye, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? He’s mad for Elle,” Lucy told me with a forbearing little chuckle. “I do believe he’d give his right arm to bed her.”
Far from denying it, as I’d expected, seeing as he’d just awakened in the bed of another woman, he said, “I’d give every appendage I’ve got, save the one that matters most.” He grabbed his crotch, just in case I hadn’t grasped his meaning. “Go fetch her, would you, poppet?”
“Not till I’ve eaten,” Lucy said. “I’m famished. I suppose I shall have to find the larder and help myself. ’Twill be hours till they serve breakfast.”
“Breakfast is over,” I said. “’Tis a quarter past eight. Our dancing lesson was supposed to have started—”
“A quarter past eight?” Knowles bolted out of bed, utterly naked, tore the curtains aside, and grabbed a shirt off the floor. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” He yanked the shirt over his head and struggled into his breeches, tumbling to the floor in the process. “I was supposed to be in the courtyard at dawn.”
“Jonas is hunting boars with the duke and his men this morning,” Lucy explained as she tugged at the rope around her left wrist.
“I know which direction they’re headed, so perhaps I can catch up with them,” Knowles said as he snatched up the remainder of his cast-off garments. “Buckingham will be livid if he finds out why I was late.” Hurrying to the door with his trailing wad of clothing, he said, “Prithee, Mistress Leeds, you cannot breathe a word of this to a soul, I beg you. The duke will cut me loose and send me home in disgrace if it gets back to him that I spent the night with Lucy.”
“Is he that opposed to adultery?” I asked.
Knowles blinked at me. “Ah. Adultery. Aye, he, er… he takes a very dim view of it, very dim indeed.”
“I shall keep your secret,” I assured him. “But may I suggest that in the future—”
“Thank you!” he called out as he raced down the hall. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am forever in your debt!”
Shaking my head, I asked Lucy, “Are all of the duke’s retainers in such thrall to him?”
“Jonas is His Grace’s favorite,” she said through her teeth as she tried to bite through the knotted rope. “’Zounds! Can you help me with these bloody things?” she asked, extending her arms in my direction.
“His favorite?” I said as I worked on the knot, which Knowles had tied more thoroughly than I felt was truly necessary. “He took my—Guy Goodchild’s place in the duke’s affections, then?”
“Aye, and after the way Goodchild betrayed him, His Grace is determined to keep those closest to him on a short leash.”
I nodded pensively as I freed her left wrist and started on the right.
Misinterpreting my brooding expression, Lucy said, “You mustn’t judge Jonas, Hannah. He’s a landless younger son with no prospects save preferment at court, for which he’s entirely dependent upon the Duke of Buckingham’s patronage. You and I are in much the same position, you know. Jonas is no more beholden to His Grace than you and I are to Don Domenico.”
It was a concept I needed no help in comprehending, for had not my uncle’s advancement to the rank of emissary to the Spanish court been due in large part to his friendship with Buckingham? Would that he had never become the favorite of such a powerful man. Then he would not be chained up in the Tower of London, awaiting his execution.
Most of our tutelage focused on those skills in which a first-rate courtesan was expected to be proficient when mingling in public with the gentlemen of Venice. During our dancing class that morning in the great hall, Lucy, Bianca, and I were taught the branle, courante, and galliard. Sibylla already being an accomplished dancer, Vitturi directed her instead, via a message delivered by a footman, to meet Elic and Inigo in la Chambre des Voiles et des Miroirs.
The Chamber of Veils and Mirrors, more commonly referred to as the Training Room, was where much, but not all, of our sexual instruction was to take place. Located in the southeast tower, it featured, I had been told, an “observation area” from which Vitturi and others could view the novices’ erotic tutelage without being seen. It was a prospect that appalled me but didn’t seem to bother my three fellow novices in the least.
“Just Sibylla?” I asked Lucy as we aped the movements of Monsieur Fluet, our fussy, temperamental little da
ncing master. “What can two men do with just one woman?”
“Could be a bit of fore and aft, but I hope not—not if they plan to do it to all of us.”
“What is that—fore and aft?”
“One in the quim and one in the bum.”
“Nay. Is that even possible?”
“Aye. Some women claim to love it. As for me, I can’t stand the feel of a cock in my arse, so I’ve never even done it Greek style—not for more than a second or two—let alone Greek and regular at the same time. I have been with two men, though, two footmen in my cousin’s house.”
“Verily?” I couldn’t resist the urge to question her about it. “What was it like? What did you do with them?”
“The first time,” she said, “I took one in the mouth whilst the other fucked me from behind. The one I was sucking, Jack—bright red hair, lovely eyes—he shot off real quick, filled my mouth with spunk. But the other one, Harry—tall, black-haired brute—he didn’t come at all, not in me, anyway. After Jack fetches in my mouth, Harry pulls out of me, throws Jack facedown over a sack of flour—we were in the pantry—and buggers him senseless.”
“Buggers?”
“Fucks him in the arse,” Lucy said. “Surely you know about sodomites. Men who fancy other men?”
“Well, aye. I just didn’t know what they… did with each other.”
“’Tisn’t just arse-fucking,” she said. “They use their mouths, their hands…After that first time in the pantry, Jack and Harry would let me watch them when I had the itch. Nothing gets me wet like two big, strapping bucks fucking and sucking and working each other off. Jack fancied quim as well as cock, and there were times he’d fuck me after Harry gave it to him in the arse—or I’d lick his spigot while Harry was doing him.”
“My word.”
“Once,” Lucy said, “they got into a tiff over something, and they didn’t touch or even talk to each other for days, each of them waiting for the other one to admit he was in the wrong. Well, I was having none of that. I was bored, living in hiding, and constantly fearful that my beastly husband would find me and drag me back home. Playing with Jack and Harry was my only real diversion, and I wanted it back. I told them only a duel could settle it—dueling cocks. I had them meet me in the stable that night and made them strip down but for their boots and gloves. I told them to fight it out right there, and the first one to spend would have to tell the other he’d been wrong and he was sorry. The only rule was they had to keep their hands off each other’s privy parts.”
In the Garden of Sin Page 6