‘I … It was just a bit of fun,’ he said. Adam relished the rapid rise and fall of his chest, thinking he might actually enjoy watching the idiot get his comeuppance.
‘No fun for me,’ pouted Evie. ‘You was wasted. I had to go home without a proper orgasm. ’Cept that one you gave me with your tongue, but that don’t count.’
‘I’m not into pain,’ he wailed.
‘I won’t hurt you, sweetie,’ she said with a beaming smile. She reached a false-nailed hand up to muss his already-mussed hair. ‘It’s not proper pain, anyway. It’s pleasure-pain. Try it. You’ll see.’
‘He’s not an actor,’ objected Sebastian. ‘He doesn’t have the paperwork.’
‘He don’t have to act. He just has to get whipped and –stuff. He doesn’t have to put his cock in anyone either, so we don’t need the medical. Oh, go on, Seb.’
‘I’m tempted … We can’t force him, though. It’s assault.’
They both subjected Trevelyan to the full force of their persuasions, Evie wheedling, Sebastian cajoling until he agreed to take the place of the injured submissive.
‘Just think what a story you’ll have,’ said Sebastian, smiling, as Trevelyan began to shed his urban hipster uniform.
Adam’s sense of Schadenfreude grew to monumental proportions as he watched Trevelyan buckled into a harness and collar, then oiled by an enthusiastic Evie.
She rubbed the sheeny lotion into Trevelyan’s pale buttocks, giving him a running commentary.
‘You’re nowhere near as fit as Cal,’ she told him, gratifyingly for Adam. ‘He’s got a fucking amazing body. Yours is average.’ She frowned. ‘At best. But you’ve got a lovely little bum, really soft and tender. It’ll mark better’n Cal’s, I bet. I have to whack seven bells out of him before I get a good stripe.’
‘You don’t seem the type,’ said Trevelyan with a fearful laugh.
‘What, the mistressy type? It’s fun, that’s all. I can dish it out and I can take it. I’m lucky like that.’
‘Which do you prefer?’
‘Depends who’s the other half of the equation,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Totally depends on that.’
Kasia came over, waving some script notes.
‘OK, guys, we need to be clear on what’s going to happen. Evie, you take this guy, I can’t pronounce his name, for a walk around the garden on a leash. You give his bum a good whack every now and then, right? Then you make him do doggy tricks – sit, lie down, that kind of thing. Can you handle that?’
She stared hard at Trevelyan, who nodded.
‘We’ll do that, then move on to the next bit. So, here’s the leash …’ She attached it to Trevelyan’s collar, handing the looped end to Evie. ‘You start from the cherry tree over there. Take your places. Oh – you forgot the cock ring.’
‘The what?’ yelped Trevelyan.
Adam laughed to himself, watching Evie squeeze a tight circle of rubber over the tip of Trevelyan’s hardening cock.
‘That squeezes!’ he complained.
‘Gets you hard, though, don’t it? Come on, Trev. You need wood, love.’
She cupped her small hand around the journalist’s burgeoning prick and the laughter died in Adam’s throat. Evie’s palm exerted gentle pressure on her target until he grew, stiff and proud, to the full length.
Only then did she tug on the lead and pull him over beneath the flowering cherry tree, the pair of them standing amidst the fallen blossom like a hellfire depiction of Sin in the Garden of Eden.
A clapperboard snapped into action and Trevelyan contorted his features immediately into what he must have considered the closest approximation to a submissive expression. His tongue hung out like a dog’s, with forlorn eyes to match.
‘Lassie, come home,’ muttered Adam scornfully.
‘On your knees!’ said Evie coldly, her local burr subsumed by a heavily faked approximation of Received Pronunciation.
Trevelyan sank to the ground, looking up at his mistress.
‘Do you dare to look at me?’ she said, giving his face the lightest of slaps then grabbing his hair and forcing his chin downwards. ‘Look at that instead. That shameful erection. Who’s that for, boy? Eh?’
‘For you, uh, mistress.’
‘Yes, for me. Do you know what that tells me about you, boy? Do you?’
‘No, mistress.’
‘It tells me that you are a miserable little piece of filth who loves to be abused and humiliated. The more I do it, the more it turns you on. You can’t deny it, can you?’
‘No.’ Trevelyan looked stunned, as if an epiphany had just been delivered. Perhaps, Adam thought, this was his natural bent and he had simply never discovered it.
Evie lashed the whip over his curved back.
‘No what?’
‘No, mistress.’
‘Good. Now, crawl for me, around the garden, towards the post.’
Trevelyan fell forward on to all fours and began to move slowly over the grass. Every so often Evie yanked at his collar so that he yelped, or laid the whip across his bare buttocks.
‘That’s just a taster,’ she yelled, disturbingly sergeant major-like.
Adam could not decide whether he found this new version of her palatable or not. On the one hand, she certainly poured well into the latex. On the other, her stentorian bark, with its ersatz clippedness, did little to lure him into sinful imaginings. Which was a mercy, given the frequency with which they plagued him these days.
He watched as poor – or was it poor, given his flushed cheek and bright eye? – Trevelyan was whipped around the lawns, gasping and barking, his cock straining inside its ring in a way that looked painful to Adam.
When they reached ‘the post’ – an X-shaped piece of wood, cemented into the ground – Evie yanked on Trevelyan’s leash and ordered him to kneel up.
‘Sit up and beg,’ she said.
He lifted his chin and extruded his tongue, panting hard, putting out his hands before him like paws.
‘Good boy,’ purred Evie, sounding more like herself. ‘Now roll over.’
He fell sideways on the grass, his cock in full view of the camera.
‘Lie down. No, idiot, on your stomach. Dogs don’t lie on their backs, do they?’
Trevelyan crouched on the grass, his belly low, his legs and arms bent. His back and bottom bore faint lash marks.
‘That’s good, boy. I think you’ve earned yourself a treat. On your knees again.’
Sebastian shouted ‘Cut!’ and Trevelyan flopped down, breathing deeply.
‘You know what comes next, Evie?’ called Kasia.
‘Yeah. Read the script last night, once Flopper ’ere bailed on me.’ She prodded Trevelyan’s thigh with a pointed toe. ‘You’re getting your comeuppance for that,’ she told him.
He shut his eyes, in a kind of rapture, but his interlude didn’t last long.
The clapperboard intruded once more, and Evie dragged him to his feet by his upper arm.
Before long, he was bound to the wooden cross, facing outwards, his arms and legs tightly tied inside lengths of stout rope. Harnessed and collared, he had no way of accessing his cock, which was harder than ever.
Adam held his breath, watching Evie creep closer to her helpless victim. When she bent and blew a sweet breath on Trevelyan’s cock head, Adam felt his own tool swell in sympathy. Perhaps submission was not so alien to him after all.
He exhaled, his face stretching in agonised desire as he watched Evie’s tongue tip dart out and lick a zigzag trail up Trevelyan’s shaft. At the top, she pushed it into the frenulum then gave the purple bulb a catlike lick, around once, before breathing on it again and drawing back.
Trevelyan looked as if he might die.
‘You’d like me to suck it for you, wouldn’t you, boy?’
He nodded, as far as the constraints of his collar would allow.
‘Bad luck.’
She took up the whip and he yelped in alarm, but all she did was draw its knotted st
rands up and down, from his thighs to his belly and back, stroking him.
Then she held it the other way, using its blunt handle to push against the creases of his thighs, massaging them firmly, then moving it behind his testicles and manipulating the tight little sacs until he was crimson-faced and gasping.
‘Please,’ he wailed.
‘You’re getting this up your arse later,’ she said, and he sobbed. ‘That’s after I’ve worked it over your bum cheeks. Shit, sorry, Seb. Lapsed.’
‘It’s OK, we’ll cut that line and re-do it with the proper accent later. Carry on.’
‘Cheers, mate.’ She turned back to Trevelyan, her voice once more sculpted ice.
‘You’ll feel it up there,’ she said. ‘Have you ever been buggered, boy?’
‘No, mistress.’
‘I expect you’re looking forward to it, then?’
There was a loaded silence. Adam swallowed. He knew what he would say and it would be emphatically negative.
Trevelyan’s admission came out as a whisper.
‘Yes, mistress.’
‘Oh, I’m so pleased to hear it. Good boy. You deserve doggy treats.’
She wrapped her latex-gloved hand around his cock and began to tug at it, without finesse, but Trevelyan was past caring about subtle technique.
It took no more than a few jerks of his swollen cock for his semen to spurt out, covering Evie’s gloves with trails of pearly white.
Trevelyan’s head fell forward, his hair plastered to his brow, his eyelids lowered.
Adam shut his eyes tight against the blasphemous visual comparison forming in his mind. No, he must not think it. He must never think it.
Evie’s ferocious yell caused his eyes to fly back open.
‘Not even a word of thanks for your mistress?’
Poor Trevelyan tried manfully to raise his head and utter some broken words of gratitude, but it was never going to be enough for Evie.
She flicked the whip with vicious accuracy across his flank and he moaned and gasped.
‘I’m going to have to punish you for that, you realise? Where are your manners? We’ll have to work on them, won’t we?’
She released Trevelyan from his bonds, only to turn him the other way and re-tether him. Now his back and buttocks were perfectly presented for the chastisement Evie had in mind.
‘You ever been whipped before?’ she asked him gruffly.
He shook his head.
‘OK, I won’t go in all guns blazing. But it’ll hurt. If it gets too much, you say “Pax”, OK? Repeat it after me.’
‘Pax,’ he said.
Evie went to stand a little way away from the cross, swishing the thongs this way and that, rehearsing her aim.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Ready? It’s a sound thrashing for you, my lad. This’ll be a bit more than a kiss.’
Fascinated dread coursed through Adam’s veins as Evie drew the whip back, preparing for the first stroke. It was as if he experienced Trevelyan’s anxiety by proxy.
The lash fell with a swoop and a fierce snap and Adam winced at Trevelyan’s bellow. Angry waves of red rose on his body, soon joined by more as Evie found her stride and plied the whip with a will.
Snakes of scarlet crept across Trevelyan’s skin, sometimes intersecting, sometimes rising in welts. Soon he was sweating and shiny and the strokes must have hurt more, that salty emission sinking into the sting and doubling it.
But he didn’t call “Pax”, even when his bottom and back were more red than white.
Eventually Evie’s arm tired and she paused for breath, her latex-covered breasts rising and falling.
‘Boy’s got stamina,’ she said to camera. ‘I think he’s found his niche.’
Amid ribald laughter, she tiptoed up to Trevelyan and put an arm around his waist.
‘Are you all right, lover?’
Adam’s insides tore with jealousy. Why was it not his ear into which she murmured words of sweet concern? The hateful Trevelyan got to experience pleasure even when she avenged herself against him. How had he earned this luck?
He must have given her some kind of green light, because she stepped back and picked up the whip again.
Surely she was not going to subject him to more flogging? She must have come close to breaking his skin as it was.
But no. She collected a bottle of lubricant from the sidelines and set to work pushing her rubber fingers, coated in grease, between Trevelyan’s twitching buttocks. She worked slowly, the cameras on zoom, making sure that they got plenty of shots of his spread cheeks and exposed anus before sliding a finger inside.
Trevelyan rutted compulsively against his wooden prison, grunting like a man possessed. Evie continued to work on him until finally she judged him ready to accept the oiled whip handle. Carefully, inch by inch, the shiny black handle disappeared between Trevelyan’s parted globes. His hips twisted and his legs struggled to kick but the object continued in its inexorable journey until it was seated to the strands, then Evie began to thrust.
She shoved and rotated and manipulated the whip handle inside Trevelyan’s back passage until he began to twitch and utter hoarse expletives.
‘Going to come with a whip up your arse, are you, boy?’ she asked sweetly. ‘Going to show everyone what a dirty little slut you are?’
He roared and sobbed.
Adam put his hand to his crotch, horrified by his own level of arousal.
Evie laughed, softly but triumphantly, and kept up the pressure until Trevelyan was no more than a weeping mass of orgasmic flesh.
She pulled out the whip handle, threw it to the ground and circled his hips with her arms.
‘Bloody good for a newbie,’ she said, kissing his shoulders and neck. ‘You done a great job, Trev. I’m proud of you.’
Again, the words cut Adam like knives.
He almost broke his cover and strode on to the set, but remembered his sanity just in time. How on earth would it profit him to expose himself as a hopeless voyeur? It would only consolidate a reputation already held.
Trevelyan was untied from the cross and showered with food, drink and praise. It was time for Adam to get away from here. Julia Shields wasn’t going to be best pleased with the turn her little exposé had taken, but he could hardly be blamed for it.
Chapter Nine
ACCORDING TO J.E. Lydford, the amount of pagan practices thought to flourish in Saxonhurst after the Civil War merited the appointment of the most hardline clergyman available, one Tribulation Smith. This austere preacher was charged with the mission of bringing Saxonhurst to Puritan virtue. Judging by the way the modern village carried on, he had met with little success, Adam parenthesised.
The tragedy by the ruined barn was precipitated by a love affair.
‘Oh,’ said Adam, shaking his head. ‘’Twas ever thus.’
Tribulation Smith had called the local witchfinder to the village to assist him in flushing out the agents of Satan in their midst. The witchfinder had pointed out one Evangeline Lillie as suitable for burning atop a pile of faggots, but it seemed Smith had disagreed and refused to allow her death.
Instead, he had married her.
Adam closed the book, his mind whirling. Always these Evangelines, sewn up in the chaotic history of this village. Evangeline the witch, whose spell had even fallen on a Puritan preacher of the severest tendencies – he felt uneasy at the parallel with his own infatuation.
Three weeks after Trevelyan’s pornographic debut, he was no closer to achieving anything. Evie remained maddeningly just out of reach, seeming to come close to him during their Bible sessions, then withdrawing, teasing, always full of excuses and apologies.
He had organised and advertised a number of church events – a youth group, a ceilidh, even a bingo night (despite his own disapproval of gambling) – but nobody seemed to take the remotest interest.
At least he had a congregation now, even if it was only Evie and Julia Shields.
But as he shut his book and p
ut it on the bedside table, he felt the acuity of his failure. This village threatened to defeat him. Even worse, it was impacting on his faith. It was a poisonous place, a well of corruption. What chance did he stand?
He prayed in the dark until consciousness slipped away, and then he was somewhere else, somewhere that was still Saxonhurst, and yet so very different.
The low, thatched cottages with their warped-looking beams still stood around the green, but on that green were stocks and a pillory, and in the pillory was a man, a young and handsome man, but Adam sensed a strong antipathy towards this character without knowing why.
He stood at the edge of the grass, watching while villagers threw rotten vegetables rather half-heartedly.
‘With a will!’ he suddenly roared. ‘Go to it. This man is godless and ye should shun his example.’
The villagers didn’t want to pelt the softening fruit, but they were scared of something. Of – him?
They wore jerkins and leggings and dirty-looking linen shirts, as if taking part in a historical re-enactment.
As Adam watched, he became aware of another man standing beside him. The man turned to him.
‘And these women of whom you spake? Where shall I find them?’
‘They inhabit a cottage at the fringe of the village. Three crones and a younger woman. But there is a maiden there also, whom I believe can be saved if the corrupting influences are removed.’
‘Think ye so? That is for me to determine, Reverend.’
‘They are all in thrall to one John Calderwood, who is in hiding, fearing his satanic alliances will be unmasked.’
Adam and his guest walked along the sun-bleached track to the village edge, arriving finally at a cottage Adam had not seen before, yet seemed to recognise.
It was a squat dwelling with only one shuttered window, rough and dilapidated. Outside, a tethered goat bleated fiercely in a scrappy chaos of overgrowth.
‘Aye, a coven, you can be sure,’ said the witchfinder with relish.
They hammered at the door, which was eventually answered by a very elderly lady, crabbed and bent, the epitome of the conventional imagining of a witch.
She stared at Adam and his guest, before calling behind her, ‘’Tis the preacher and another.’
Saxonhurst Secrets Page 10