Irene let them talk over each other for a minute before holding up her hand. “I’ll answer all your questions, but you have to ask them one at a time. How about we let Professor Preston go first?”
They were still asking questions two hours later when Irene had to stop the interrogation. “I have to go. My driver is waiting for me. But this isn’t why I came here. I want to ask you about the history of slavery.”
“Next time, then?” Elaine asked.
“You will come back, won’t you?” Mike asked.
“We can come to you, if you’d rather meet somewhere else,” Elaine said.
“No. This is fine.” Irene had no intention of welcoming them into Lord Cranford’s pleasure room.
“Tomorrow? Can you come by tomorrow at ten?”
“If I can’t get Lord Cranford’s driver again, I can take a cab.”
“Don’t worry about that. I have a car. I can pick you up,” Mike said.
An arrangement was struck.
When Irene returned to Lord Cranford’s kennels, two of his slaves, Tatas and Numnums were laughing.
“The lord’s guests have settled in for the long haul,” Numnums said. “The baronet gives whole speeches to Lord Cranford before he plays each card. They’ve been at it all afternoon and they’ve barely begun the third game of hearts.”
“Lady Annabelle’s still sitting on that huge butt plug. Hasn’t budged in hours.”
“Her asshole must be aching something awful.”
“It’ll be stretched so loose that she’ll be able to take Brutus up the ass this evening.”
Tatas’ words were prophetic. Two hours later when the Lazards finally left, a good hour after dinner should have been served, Irene was summoned to the Cranford’s bedroom.
Melons helped Irene strap a large dildo named Ramsey to her hips and cover it with at thick coat of lube.
Irene was amused that Lady Annabelle had a name for every one of her dildos. Ramsey wasn’t quite as big as Brutus, but it was bigger than Remo, her usual butt dildo. Ramsey had enough girth to make anal penetration uncomfortable. To increase the sensation, it was covered in rounded bumps that would keep stretching the sphincter in different places as it thrust in and out.
As soon as Melons left, Annabelle waddled gingerly into the bedroom, clinging to Lord Cranford’s arm. She didn’t undress, just bent over in the middle of the room and flipped her dress over her back to bare her ass.
Her asshole was gaping wide.
“Ram her good, Irene,” Lord Cranford instructed.
She did.
Annabelle screamed constantly until she came hard. As Irene unstrapped the big dildo, Annabelle sank to her knees, turned her face toward the ceiling and waited for Lord Cranford to jerk off on her face.
Both of them considered that a satisfying end to a day well spent.
* * *
“Today is my turn,” Irene said before the two professors could begin interrogating her again. “My first question is simple. I’ve been told that no slave was ever before been owned by a trust and made manager of that trust. Is that true?”
Elaine nodded. “Mike and I were so intrigued by your situation that we spent half the night going through old records. As nearly as we can determine, this is the first time in history that a slave has been given control over her own fate.”
“It’s an extraordinary thing,” Mike said. “The entire legal structure of slavery was designed to ensure that this could never happen. A slave could never stop being a slave and would always be owned by someone who had absolute power to command her according to his will.”
“In the same way that a slave could never be married. But you managed to pull that rabbit out of the hat as well,” Elaine said. “The only word for your situation is astounding.”
“But it’s happened,” Irene said. “And if it can happen once, it can happen again.”
“God, no,” Mike said. “Lord Fortson managed to find two loopholes in the law and stretch them to accommodate him but I’m sure that the Assembly of Lords is going to draft a new edict to close those loopholes as quickly as possible.”
“They’re going to make sure that you’re the last slave who ever owns herself, even indirectly,” Elaine said.
“I’d rather see the opposite,” Irene said.
“What do you mean?” Elaine asked.
“Right now, pleasure slaves are sold into labor when their service is no longer desired. I’d like to see every pleasure slave have a chance to buy herself at the end of her service.”
“How would that work?” Mike asked. “I mean, in practical terms.”
Irene had been thinking about this ever since she had been made manager of the trust that owned her. “Just like me. Every pleasure slave, when pressed or adjudicated into slavery, would have a trust established in her name as part of the terms of her enslavement. Every month during her service, her owner would be required to deposit a nominal amount into her trust. It would accumulate slowly. By the time she reaches the age where she is no longer desired as a pleasure slave, that trust could bid on her in the labor auction. If successful then she would be made manager of her own trust, just like I was.”
Mike thought about that for a minute. “I see what you’re saying. It would only work because labor slaves sell for so much less than pleasure slaves. No pleasure slave would have a hope of ever buying herself at a pleasure auction. But when she is no longer desired and is demoted to the labor market, she would have no problem being able to afford to buy herself.”
“The aristocracy would never allow it,” Elaine said. “It’s not a matter of law or economics. It’s contrary to the entire history of slavery. It’s philosophically absurd.”
“Why?” Irene asked.
“You’d have to understand the history of slavery,” Elaine said.
“I’m listening.”
Elaine looked at Irene. She had little appetite for giving private lessons on the history of slavery. But she really wanted to know more about Irene’s personal history and she wasn’t going to get that without giving Irene what she wanted in return.
“Okay. Who created the tradition of pleasure slaves?” Elaine asked.
“Wealthy, aristocratic men,” Irene said.
“No. That’s the assumption that everyone makes, but it’s false. It was started by their wives.”
“I don’t believe that. Ladies hate pleasure slaves. Their husbands fuck slaves. It’s institutionalized adultery. If the wives had their way, there wouldn’t be a pleasure slave left on the continent. I know because I was one of those wives.”
“We have good documentation about the beginning of slavery,” Elaine said, “so we know the truth. It’s not at all what is taught in high school and college history classes. Most history professors don’t bother studying the history of slavery because they would rather study the grand politics of the aristocracy, not their mundane domestic arrangements.
“You have to go back to the Foundation War. You know that it lasted for over a century. What do you think happened to prisoners captured during that war? They couldn’t be returned because they’d support the enemy’s war effort, either as soldiers or as productive labor. Neither side wanted to kill them outright because they didn’t want their own people who were taken prisoner to be killed in retaliation. And neither side could afford to keep them in prison camps until the end of the war because there was no end in sight. In fact, most people believed that the war would never end. So both sides enslaved their prisoners and made them help in the war effort. The first slaves were all labor slaves.
“But something else was going on. The war was a brutal, never-ending series of relatively ineffective raids. The supply lines were too long to support such a distant war. Every time either side made a successful incursion into enemy territory, they stretched the supply lines to the breaking point and could only hold the captured region for a few months or a couple of years at most before their supplies were exhausted and the enemy re-took the land.
&
nbsp; “While the soldiers occupied enemy territory, they entertained themselves with captured women. The men were young, they were far from home, they hadn’t seen their wives in years. There was no way to stop them from raping the women that they captured and no obvious reason to deny them the spoils of their victories. Of course, the officers, all from the aristocratic class that emerged during the first decade of war, had first pick of the women. It was not a pretty practice, but it was practical.
“Eventually, they came home. Officers typically served a twenty-year term – much longer than the five years that enlisted men served. Whereas the enlisted men returned with little to show but their wounds, the officers returned with substantial wealth. Not only were they better paid, but also they were entitled to anything of value that they captured. That was how they were rewarded when they waged successful campaigns against the enemy.”
Irene knew the basic history of the Foundation War, but she had never heard about enslaved prisoners or rape or the spoils of war. That all sounded tawdry. “So the officers began bringing back pleasure slaves.”
“No,” Elaine said. “They didn’t. And that was the problem. The slaves went into the labor market. The men brought only their well-developed appetites for frequent and varied sex home to their wives.
“Consider that officers enlisted at the age of sixteen and returned home at the age of thirty-six. Their tradition was for officers to marry in the month before they were deployed. There was no end of women eager to marry them, even though they wouldn’t see their husbands again for twenty years because they would live a life of luxury on the wealth that their husbands sent home to them. The advantage for the husband was to have a well-established home when he returned. That was particularly important if he was wounded in battle.
“First, remember that this was a time when the primary mode of transportation was walking and the active front was hundreds of miles away. Very few officers saw their wives even once when they were deployed for twenty years.
“Second, remember that this was before medicine give us contraceptives and vaccinations against sexual diseases. Women were very cautious about sex.
“For the better part of their lives, these men had never had a woman refuse any sexual demand. For those same twenty years, their wives had been nurturing romantic fantasies about how their husbands would come back from the war, still deeply in love with them, sweep them off their feet, smother them in kisses and delicately bed them every three or four weeks.
“Neither side was prepared for the reality of the soldier’s return. What the gentlemen wanted, their wives were loath to provide. But the gentlemen were not to be refused.
“The ladies of the time were enthusiastic diarists. We have whole libraries of their diaries. The misunderstandings between the horny returning officers and their romantically pining wives makes for some of the most tragic and comedic reading that you’re likely to find, if you don’t mind learning their archaic language.
“It didn’t take long for the wives to realize that the only way that their husbands would leave them alone and stop demanding every sexual perversion imaginable was if they had another outlet for their lust. Ladies began demanding that their husbands buy slaves on the labor market to help their servants cook and clean. They insisted that their husbands buy only attractive young women because they wanted their manors to be well appointed.
“Needless to say, the husbands didn’t argue about that. They built slave kennels, filled them with house slaves, and stopped badgering their wives to provide any more than the minimal sexual activity required to produce a family. Coincidentally, that was almost exactly the kind and frequency of sex that the women had been fantasizing about for most of their lives.
“The wives’ only demand was that the women be sterilized when they were enslaved. The wives had no appetite for seeing nurseries built in their husbands’ kennels. Five hundred years ago, sterilization was a crude, painful, bloody operation. But doctors had plenty of slaves to practice on, and they soon developed ways to render women’s uteruses unfit for conception.”
Elaine stopped talking.
It was Irene’s turn to be shocked into silence. After a minute to digest what she had heard, she said, “But surely those first ladies didn’t like their husbands running out to the kennels to rut with their slaves every day.”
“They didn’t like it. But they didn’t like being bullied into providing sexual services for their husbands, either. Don’t forget, these men weren’t modern aristocrats. They were accustomed to raping women. They didn’t spend much time or effort worrying about whether the woman was having a good time or not. Five hundred years ago, ladies were happy enough to make their bargain with the devil. Today, the tradition is too well established to change it, even though modern gentlemen are much more considerate lovers.”
Irene raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been a pleasure slave for over a year. You can take it from me, that not all gentlemen are all that considerate.”
“Did you feel like you were being raped when you were serving as a pleasure slave?” Mike asked.
“No. Actually, there were two men who really did rape me when I was a pleasure slave. For that to happen, they had to be men who didn’t have the authority to use me sexually, but forced me anyway.
“One was a sociopath who was a friend of my owner. He force himself on me without my owner’s knowledge. He was escalating the violence of our encounters had reached the point that he was almost killing me. He would have killed me before long but I found a way to stop him.
“The other was a young man who lost control of himself and forced his way into my apartment. When it was over, I was able to intimidate him into never trying that with me again. I don’t know if he went on to rape other women or not. I doubt it. I think that he took that one episode as an experiment that failed miserably.
“All the rest of my encounters with my owners and their guests have been at least tolerable and often quite pleasurable. Sexual encounters, I mean. I certainly took no pleasure from the encounters where I was punished. Or when I was tortured just for my owner’s amusement.”
“That would be with Professor Krauss,” Elaine said with a frown. She pointed to her bookshelf where The Fine Art of Torture by Ragnar Krauss and Slave Irene occupied a prominent place.
“That was a challenging three months.”
“I understood that from reading your book,” Mike said.
Irene spoke with Mike and Elaine for the remainder of the day. She learned a lot more about the development of the traditional pleasure slaves over the centuries while the academics, in turn, learned much about the current experience of slavery. They had spoken to pleasure slaves before, of course, but had never found one who could directly compare the experience of slavery with that of being a lady of the peerage.
When she finally returned to Lord Cranford’s kennels, she had been given much to think about.
Both of the academics had suggested that they co-author a series of papers together. Irene was willing to do it as long as she kept learning what she needed to know to modify the tradition of slavery for pleasure.
* * *
The following day, when Professor Cable drove Irene back to the Cranford manor after another productive meeting, he asked, “Do you think that I might, sometime, see the inside of your kennel?”
“It’s Lord Cranford’s kennel,” she replied. “I’ll ask him if he minds.”
“That would be terrific. I’ve never actually been inside slave kennels. When I’ve interviewed slaves, they’ve told me about them, but it’s kind of embarrassing that I’m supposed to be an expert on slavery and I’ve never seen kennels for myself.”
That evening, she asked and Lord Cranford didn’t mind. Probably because he was in a mellow mood. She had just finished giving him a partial blowjob and then finished him off between her tits so that Lady Annabelle could lick them both clean.
That kind of fun makes them all happy.
The next day,
Irene, Elaine, and Mike spent several hours discussing the impact of the end of the Foundation War and the foundation of the regional governments on the slave markets. The loss of prisoners of war as a source of slaves created a severe shortage that was mostly. All of the regions had to dramatically lower the threshold for crimes serious enough to warrant enslavement and structure the bankruptcy laws to make slaving profitable in order to make up the shortfall.
Irene was appalled that the injustices that she had seen during her year of slavery had been deliberately built into the institution simply so that, five hundred years ago, wives wouldn’t have to give their husbands as much sex as they demanded.
It was time for a change.
When Professor Cable drove Irene home, she directed him through the slave gate and had him park on the driveway outside the kennels.
His mouth dropped open when she kicked her shoes off and stripped off her dress inside the door. “A pleasure slave doesn’t wear clothes inside the kennels unless her owner makes a specific request for something special. Usually lingerie. The exception is a whiphand. That’s a slave who is given the task of keeping order among the other slaves. Whiphands wear abbreviated corsets so that they have a place to hang their whips. But their breasts are not covered and the corset ends above the waist, so they remain available for convenient use.”
“I see,” he said in his most professorial voice, struggling to maintain his professionalism in the face of his colleague’s naked sexuality.
She found his prudishness quite entertaining.
She was even more entertained when she introduced him to Cranford’s bevy of naked, well-endowed slaves. They were as impressed by the intelligent young professor as he was by their naked pulchritude. The more they fawned over him, the harder he had to struggle to camouflage his lust. He acted more professorial by the minute while the slaves grew more attracted to him in equal proportion.
Irene took her time to enjoy the show before she finally took pity on the professor and gave him a tour of the cells where the slaves slept, attended to their personal needs, and were sometimes confined for punishment; explained the common room with its basic kitchen facilities; and ended in the pleasure room with its extensive array of furniture and equipment, all intended for erotic pleasure.
A League of Ladies (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 5) Page 6