“No. You don’t understand. He’s a knight. I can’t insult him. If I do a good job, he’ll send his friends to me. If I can cultivate a reputation among the aristocracy, then I’ll never have to worry about money again.”
“I do understand. I know about Sir Anthony. He has a reputation. He’s always hovering on the edge of bankruptcy. Talk to his business manager. Get paid up front.”
“I can’t do that. I don’t have his business manger’s name.”
“Don’t put any money into that car until you do.”
“Sir Anthony is going to be back in a month. I can’t wait. If he comes back and the car’s not ready, then I’ll lose his custom. And all of his friends’ business, too.”
“His custom isn’t worth as much as you might think. He doesn’t have that many friends.”
Jim was looking angry now. “What do you know about him, anyway?”
“My first owner used to entertain Sir Anthony sometimes.”
“You mean he fucked you?”
“Yes, he fucked me.”
“Well, letting a man screw you is a lot different than doing business with him. You don’t know the first thing about running a garage so you can stay out of my business.”
“As you wish.” Irene said no more on the subject. But she feared that it was only a matter of time until Sir Anthony screwed Jim worse than he’d ever screwed a pleasure slave.
“What I wish is to see you down on your knees, sucking my cock.”
Irene smiled. “That would be my pleasure.” It had only been about fifteen minutes since Jim had fucked her, but she was sure that she could make him come again. She stood beside the bed and offered her hand. “I could do it while you lie in bed, but I won’t be on my knees like you asked. For that, you need to sit up. Or stand.”
He ignored her hand, pushed himself upright, and swung his legs around so that he was sitting on the edge of the bed.
She sank to her knees and began licking his limp cock. It was still moist with her juices and his cum, but she ignored that. She was well accustomed to cleaning the evidence of recent sexual activity off a man’s cock with her tongue.
She brought him to a full erection within a couple of minutes and then began working on him in earnest.
He soon forgot about Sir Anthony and his Imperial Interceptor.
She was a master cocksucker.
* * *
At the end of the month, Jack took Irene to another meeting of her owners in the back room of the Split Willow Pub.
It began quietly enough. Jack asked Irene, as their bookkeeper, to explain the state of their finances. She told them that they currently had a hundred and ninety plaquettes sterling in the bank. Their rent was due in three days. If each of the owners paid seventy-five plaqs, that would cover rent, food, and miscellaneous expenses for the coming month. It was likely that the monthly cost would be approximately that but she would have a better idea as more months passed.
There was some grumbling.
Jack asked if anyone was under the impression that a slave could be housed and fed for free.
Someone asked what the slave ate.
Irene said that she ate a bowl of porridge with milk in the morning and a piece of chicken, pork, or fish; a potato; and a serving of vegetable in the evening. She did not eat lunch. She ate the evening meal only with the permission of whichever owner had her for that day. She noted that on some evenings the owner provided a meal so that helped stretch the food. She also noted that she shared the evening meal with the owner if he so desired, which happened a few times a month.
She explained that all receipts were kept and were available for inspection any time any owner wished to see them.
She patted her flat stomach. “I think you can see that I’m not getting fat at your expense.”
There was some laugher at that, which lightened the mood.
Then one of the men, a garrulous fellow named Caleb, shouted, “I have business matter to discuss.”
“What is it?” Jack asked.
“I think we should breed her. She doesn’t have to be an expense. She can breed more slaves and we can sell them for a pretty pile of sterling.”
Irene was stunned. She never dreamed that these men might try to breed her. She could imagine no fate worse than giving birth to children that would be taken from her and sold.
A few of the other men jumped on the idea with enthusiasm. They looked like men seized with gold fever, fantasies of fortunes to be gained filling their imaginations.
Jack looked at her and raised an eyebrow.
She shook her head. This was not a good idea.
“How much can we get for a slave?” Luke asked. “Has anyone here ever been to a slave auction?”
“One of us has,” Willy said. “The slave has.”
“Hey, Irene,” Caleb said, “how much do slaves sell for at auction?”
All the men fell silent and waited for her response.
“It depends on the slave. Prices vary a lot.”
“What’s the top end? What’s the most you’ve seen?”
“The most? I saw one slave sold for a hundred and fifteen thousand.” She didn’t mention that it was her former husband, Lord Fortson, who paid that outrageous price. “And I saw another sold for a hundred thousand.” She didn’t mention that it was she, herself, who was sold for that.
There was an instance of stunned silence, then a clamor that threatened to shake the planks from the walls.
Irene held up her hand and waited for the men to acknowledge her. After several minutes of excited discussion, the men noticed and shushed each other.
“But I have to explain. Both of those ladies were aristocrats who were newly sold into slavery. That made them novelties and the commanded an exceptionally high price. None of the other slaves in the auction came anywhere close to that. A bred slave would be less desirable. The best price that a bred slave would command would be twenty-five to thirty thousand.”
“That’s still a lot of money,” Caleb said. “You could drop one a year and that would pay for your upkeep and put a tidy sum in our pockets to boot.”
There was more general discussion.
Irene raised her hand and waited.
It took longer for the discussion to fade this time. Every man in the room had ideas about how they would run their slave breeding business, from setting up kennels on cheap land in the country, to keeping the best and starting a breeding herd. Several of the men thought that the key to success would be to scale up in size as quickly as possible.
When she finally got their attention again, she said, “There’s a few things that you have to understand about the business of breeding slaves. First, bred slaves are rare. Most slaves at auction are either adjudicated or pressed into slavery. There’s a reason for that. It’s very hard to turn slave breeding into a profitable business.”
The men were listening, now.
“Your first problem is that only girls can be sold as pleasure slaves. Boys go straight to the labor market. Labor slaves sell for a few hundred plaqs at best. Every boy that I produce will cost you far more in food and housing than you’ll ever recover.
“Second, only the prettiest girls sell at action. Ugly girls go to the labor market as well. In fact, if you go to an auction, you’ll see only beautiful women. Even average-looking women don’t get sold for pleasure. So, even if I produce girls, two-thirds of them will cost you more to raise than you’ll get in return.
“Third, a slave has to be at least fifteen years old before she can be sold. So you won’t see anything but expenses for the next sixteen years. And that will be a lot of expenses if you keep me pregnant and I produce a dozen children before the first one is sold.
“Fourth, if I’m pregnant all the time, I won’t be much good to you as a pleasure slave. Those of you who don’t mind fucking a pregnant woman will still have fun, but if a huge belly turns you off, then you may not enjoy fucking me so much. And you’ll want to do it doggy style
during the last few months to make sure that you don’t damage the baby.
“Fifth, you’ll never be able to sell me at a profit if I’m all stretched out by multiple pregnancies. You’ll be betting all the money that you’ve spent so far and all that you’re going to have to spend during the next fifteen years that you’ll get a good price for my children.
“The bottom line is that if you want to make money off slaves, you do it by buying and selling them, not by breeding them. You got me at a bargain price and you will make money when you sell me as long as you don’t do anything to lower my value. You could look for other bargains like me. But you’re going to have to learn a lot about the value of slaves before you start playing at that game.”
“You make it sound like nobody ever makes any money from breeding slaves.” Caleb sounded angry and disbelieving.
A few other men backed him up by shouting derisive questions that were more rhetorical than sincere.
“Owners who make money from slave mills have to break the law. The first thing that they do is to kill every male baby as soon as it’s born. They can’t afford to let males live. They never register the male births as slaves. You can kill an adult slave any time you want and nobody will pay the slightest attention, but child slaves are a different matter. It’s illegal to kill them and it’s illegal to use them sexually. This isn’t for the protection of the slaves; it’s for the protection of the slave owners. If the law let owners abuse children, then there would be a great outcry and a move to prohibit slavery altogether.
“Slave mills also delay registering girl slaves until they’re a couple of years old so they can see if they are likely to grow up to be pretty. Ugly two-year old girls are also killed. The trick to that is not to register the girl at birth but to wait until you want to keep her. Then you register another infant and switch the two-year old for the infant’s paperwork. To pull that trick, you have to have a good supply of infants being born. And you have to sell seventeen-year-old girls as being fifteen.
“So you have to ask yourselves, do you have the stomach for murdering five out of every six children that I bear? And, do you trust every other one of you not to report your crimes to the sheriff?”
That ended the discussion of breeding Irene for profit.
She never heard it mentioned again.
* * *
Two days after the meeting, George came around at five o’clock.
“I thought this was Matt’s day,” Irene said. She kept a schedule handy so she knew how to prepare for each of the owners.
“I traded days with him. I’m taking you to meet Adele, my brother’s daughter. You said that you could help her.”
“I promise to do as much as I can, but I may not be able to do much. First, I have to know what’s going on.”
“Good enough. Get dressed.”
They walked for a half hour to get to his brother’s house. The air was chill, but they walked briskly enough that Irene wasn’t overly uncomfortable. Typically, slaves were owned by wealthy men. They were not provided with coats but when the weather was dangerously cold, they were given a car and driver if they had to be sent out on an errand.
Irene’s owners would never give her a car for errands, so she wondered if she should ask them for a coat. It was a matter of her being able to serve them all winter without risking frostbite. Pleasure slaves would lose a lot of value if they lost fingers and toes.
George said nothing all the way there. He was naturally quiet, but Irene had the impression that he was also frightened.
The house was small but detached. The yard was neat and the house looked to be in good repair.
George didn’t bother knocking. He was expected and let himself and Irene in.
“Frank! We’re here.”
Irene had never heard him raise his voice before. She was surprised to hear how loud he could be when he put his mind to it.
The man who came out of a back room looked to be about ten years older than George.
Irene wondered if there were other siblings between these two men.
“So you’re a slave?” Frank said.
“Yes. I was enslaved last year. Before that I was a housewife.”
“How’d that happen?”
“Bad judgment.”
“Yeah? So if you don’t got good judgment, you think you can give my Adele good advice?”
“I’ve learned a few things from my own mistakes.”
“Well, I guess we got nothing to lose, now. Adele’s in her room.” He pointed back the way he had come. “Come on,” he said to George. “Let’s grab a beer.”
Irene was left alone to find her way to Adele’s room.
It wasn’t hard. There were only two bedrooms and Adele’s door was open.
Adele was a stunning young lady with smooth, clear skin; long black hair woven into a braid that was piled on top of her head; and a near-perfect figure. Irene guessed her age at about twenty.
“I’m Irene.”
“You’re a slave.”
“Yes.”
Adele appraised her from head to toe.
“Ugly dress.”
“This is what pleasure slaves wear when they’re out in public.”
“What do they wear when they’re not?”
“Nothing. I’m naked ninety percent of the time.”
“Why don’t they give you a pretty dress when you go out?”
“I guess so that women don’t get jealous. It’s bad enough to know that pleasure slaves have sex with their husbands. They don’t want their faces rubbed in it.”
Adele looked thoughtful. “I like pretty dresses. I wouldn’t want to have to wear that.”
“Me, neither. But I don’t have a choice. What I want is irrelevant to everyone.”
“So Uncle George brought you here to convince me not to be a slave? That’s stupid. I already don’t want to be a slave.”
“Do you think that it’s likely that you’ll be forced into slavery?”
Adele was quiet for a bit before saying, “I don’t know.”
“There are only two ways to be forced into slavery: be convicted of a crime or go bankrupt. Is one of those likely?”
“I haven’t committed any crimes.”
“That leaves bankruptcy.”
Adele’s shell cracked. Her mouth quivered and tears began flowing down her cheeks.
“How much money do you owe?” Irene asked.
“Nine thousand plaqs.”
“Who do you owe it to?”
“Sir Drake. He’s a knight.”
“I know. I’ve met him.” Irene didn’t bother to say that, as a slave, she’d been fucked by him. That was implied. Sir Drake was the wealthiest knight in the city. Unlike most other knights, he worked hard to take care of his business interests. He had a reputation as a boring moneygrubber.
“I thought that he was nice, but he isn’t nice at all.”
“How did you get involved with him?”
“I met his son at university. I’m in my third year. I’m majoring in sociology. Geoffrey was in my class in cultural dynamics last year. He’s rich and handsome. All the girls wanted to go out with him. I was real happy when he asked me to go to the horse races at Silver Downs. But I needed a dress. You know how women dress at those kinds of events. Fancy gowns. The cheapest one that I could find was eight-hundred plaqs.”
Irene understood. When she had been an aristocrat, she had never worn a dress that cost less than three thousand plaqs to a social event. At Silver Downs on a Sunday afternoon, even an eight-hundred plaq gown would make Adele look like somebody’s poor relation.
Adele hung her head. “I used the money that I was saving to pay my tuition for the semester. I shouldn’t have done it, but I really wanted to see what it was like to be out there with all the high and mighty. It was like magic. Geoffrey even introduced me to a lord.”
Irene wondered which one. There were only seventy-five lords in the city and she’d met most of them at one time or an
other. But she didn’t interrupt Adele’s tale.
“Geoffrey said that he was thrilled to have such a beautiful girl to take to the races. He wanted to take me to a ball, next.”
Adele didn’t know that a ball was nothing special. Aristocrats were always going to some ball or another. It was a weekly entertainment.
“But I needed another dress to go to the ball. I couldn’t wear the same one as to the races. That would have humiliated Geoffrey. I didn’t tell him that I couldn’t afford another fancy dress, but he must have guessed because he said that he wanted to buy me a present. He took me shopping and bought me a dress that cost almost three thousand plaqs. It was gorgeous. I shouldn’t have accepted it, but it was a gift and he really wanted to take me to the ball. He was almost begging me.”
Irene could see how the trap was closing on Adele. She didn’t really need to hear what happened next but she let Adele continue anyway.
“After the ball was a dinner party. Sir Drake took me aside to have a private word in the library. He said that he understood that I didn’t have enough money to keep up with Geoffrey, but he wanted his son to be happy. He offered to lend me two thousand plaqs.
“I needed it. I didn’t have the money left for my tuition and I couldn’t drop out of the university. Nobody in my family ever went to university before. My parents had sacrificed so much to send me there.
“I thought that I’d be able to pay it back. Sir Drake said that he wouldn’t want any interest. The loan wouldn’t cost me anything. He only asked that I pay it back as soon as I could. I thought that he meant that I could graduate and get a job and pay it back from my salary.”
Irene knew what Adele didn’t want to admit, that she was hoping that Geoffrey would propose and the loan would be forgotten. For a girl as beautiful as Adele, it wasn’t a ridiculous fantasy. Knighthoods were not strictly hereditary. Commoners could slip into the lowest rank of the aristocracy as knights or their ladies if they were lucky.
“Geoffrey took me out for three months. Sir Drake lent me a total of nine thousand plaqs. Then Geoffrey stopped going out with me. We didn’t break up. He just stopped calling. I tried calling him a couple of times but whoever answered the phone just said that he wasn’t available.”
Owners by the Dozen (Slave of the Aristocracy Book 4) Page 5