Gothic Blue

by Portia Da Costa

  ‘Oh Lindi,’ gasped Jonathan, getting her message. ‘You’re so beautiful.’ She felt him raising her skirt then sliding his hand inside the loose cotton of her knickers. ‘And so wet,’ he went on, his middle finger finding the core of her.

  As he palpated her delicately, and she kicked her legs and climaxed, the mobile phone slid off the settee, unnoticed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Open House

  SOME TIME LATER, a familiar beeping roused Belinda from drifting, non-thinking sensual stupor.

  The mobile! Good grief! Someone was ringing them! It ought to have been impossible – the batteries were flat – but a call had come through anyway. Rolling to the edge of the settee, away from Jonathan’s dozing form, Belinda slithered inelegantly on to the floor and picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello?’ she said cautiously, tugging at her French knickers which were tangled around her knees.

  ‘Belinda?’ queried the caller. ‘It’s Paula. Where the devil are you? I’ve been trying to call you but getting the “not switched on” message. What’s happened to you? Have you fallen off the edge of the earth?’

  What has happened to us? thought Belinda, at the sound of her friend’s pleasant, extraordinarily normal voice. How do you describe to someone that you’re shacked up in a weird old priory with a 200-year-old Middle European nobleman, and you’ve had enough sex in two days to last six months?

  ‘Well, it’s a long story,’ she began, lifting her hips so she could pull the knickers up over her bottom. ‘But basically, we broke down in the middle of the night and took shelter in the grounds of this old priory … and now the owner’s asked us to stay with him for a while. As his house guests.’

  Why am I telling her that? Belinda mused, instead of making arrangements to meet.

  ‘You jammy things!’ exclaimed the distant Paula, sounding so clear she could have been right there in the room. ‘Does this mean the rendezvous is off? I can go to Aunt Lizzie’s for a few extra days instead, if you like?’

  ‘No! Don’t do that!’ Belinda said quickly, as behind her Jonathan yawned and stretched. ‘Why not come here – to Sedgewick Priory. It’s fantastic and there’s loads of room. I’m sure Count André won’t mind. It’s open house here. And there’s a fabulous garden. A river. A folly, even.’

  ‘Wow! It sounds amazing,’ replied Paula, audibly impressed. ‘Who’s this Count André? He sounds a bit exotic to me … Is he a hunk?’

  Belinda considered the question. Was André a hunk? Sort of, perhaps, though certainly not by conventional standards.

  ‘He’s very nice, actually. A perfect gentleman.’

  ‘Obviously not too much of a gentleman, from the sound of your voice.’ Paula laughed. ‘What’s he look like? How old is he?’

  ‘An angel’ and ‘about two hundred and thirty’ were the answers, but instead Belinda simply said, ‘He’s very good-looking. Sort of thoughtful … with blue eyes and streaky, blondish hair.’ She thought hard. ‘I’ve no idea how old he is really, but he looks around the thirty-something mark.’

  ‘He sounds divine!’ said Paula. ‘Are you sure he wouldn’t mind if I just turned up?’

  ‘Not in the slightest, I’m sure of it,’ answered Belinda, realising that she was sure. She had a feeling that André would grant her whatever she desired, possibly without her even having to ask him.

  ‘OK then,’ said Paula, sounding pleased and excited. ‘Gimme directions, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can. This is far too good an opportunity to miss.’ She paused and made a little ‘mmmm’ of satisfaction. ‘Count André, eh? Good grief, I can hardly wait!’

  Belinda was instantly aware of a dilemma. How could she give directions if she didn’t know where she was? They had been entirely lost the other night, even before they had abandoned the car. And there had certainly been no Sedgewick Priory on the map.

  ‘Give me the phone,’ said a voice behind her, making her nearly drop the mobile. It had been Jonathan, yet he had sounded quite peculiar. Expressionless, almost robotic. And when she turned to him, Belinda saw a face that matched the spaced-out voice. Jonathan was reaching for the phone, but he was not looking at it, or at her, or at anything else. He looked as if he was in a trance, but at a loss for anything better to do, she handed him the mobile.

  What followed was the most eerie thing Belinda had ever seen – and that was saying something, given the weirdness of the last two days.

  Jonathan delivered a set of clear and very detailed instructions on how to get to the priory from the last town they had passed through. And throughout them he neither moved a muscle nor blinked his eyes once. Belinda heard Paula ask a question, and he replied, ‘Just a guess …’, continuing to stare into some inner middle distance. Without another word, he handed the phone back to Belinda.

  ‘Is Jonathan OK?’ queried Paula. ‘He sounds a bit out of it.’

  ‘He’s just tired,’ said Belinda, watching in perfect astonishment as Jonathan lay back again and promptly went to sleep. ‘It’s the driving and the heat. That’s one of the reasons I want to stay here. So he can have a nice relaxing time.’

  ‘Sounds great to me,’ said Paula cheerfully.

  They chatted for a few minutes more, then said goodbye, the plan being that Paula would join them after visiting her aunt.

  The instant the call was over, the mobile phone went completely dead in Belinda’s hand. No ready signal, no dial tone, no nothing. She gave it a shake then dropped it on the settee, feeling vaguely scared of it. Turning to Jonathan, she found him still fast asleep.

  This is creepy, she thought, reaching out to brush a love-lick of hair that was dangling on his forehead. Just who the hell was it that had given those directions? It certainly hadn’t been Jonathan, she was quite sure of it.

  Isidora Katori was shaking with excitement, although she strongly doubted that the average observer would have noticed.

  Her powers serving her as well as ever, she had taken a route south from the city, letting her instincts choose the roads and the turnings. After an hour or two behind the wheel, she had felt an urge to pull off for a while, take refreshment and consider her next move, and a pleasant country pub with a beer garden had beckoned.

  Not one for bucolic pursuits at the best of times, she had nevertheless experienced a growing anticipation as she sat in the shade with a cool drink and a light lunch. Her psychic awareness had sharpened to a degree that was almost painful when a young woman, carrying a lunch and a drink of her own, had asked politely if she could share the same table as there was nowhere else available in the sun.

  Hiding her interest, Isidora had said, ‘Of course’, and after a few moments her new companion had taken a mobile phone from her bag.

  The conversation that followed had been exactly the set of clues Isidora had been waiting for, and it had taken all her considerable self-control not to shout out in triumph as she had listened with her enhanced hearing to its contents.

  He was here! Less than thirty miles away! And this rather ordinary young woman, with her phone and her shoulder bag, was expected as a guest in his house. It was high time to make some introductions.

  ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ said Isidora to her dining companion, gracing the woman with her most brilliant of smiles. ‘I do so love this part of the country, don’t you?’ She edged a little closer, along the wooden seat, towards her victim. ‘By the way, my name is Isidora … What’s yours?’

  Jonathan had slept for half an hour after the strange phone call, and it was only when Oren entered the library, carrying sandwiches and a jug of juice, that he woke up and looked around, his face puzzled.

  Belinda – who had been nosing around the library and discovering erotic literature which made her own recent exploits seem profoundly naïve – moved to sit down beside him as Oren served their lunch.

  ‘I had the weirdest dream,’ said Jonathan, when the blond servant had discreetly made his exit. ‘It was really vivid … Gives me the shakes just to
think about it, although there nothing much actually happened.’

  ‘What do you remember?’ Belinda reached for a sandwich, and, taking a bite, realised they were smoked salmon, a delicacy she had only very rarely indulged in.

  ‘Well, I was in this stone-lined room, sort of round –’ He paused to sample his own sandwich, and his eyebrows shot up in appreciative surprise. ‘Anyway, it was dark, but there were candles burning all around. And there were draperies of some sort.’ He finished the sandwich. ‘These are brilliant!’

  ‘But what happened in the dream?’ prompted Belinda, recognising an uncannily accurate description of André’s tower room.

  ‘Someone held this card up, with blue writing on it. And I had to read it out aloud. That’s all I remember.’ He took another sandwich, put it on his plate, then added a couple more.

  ‘What did it say? The blue writing?’

  ‘No idea!’ said Jonathan blithely between bites. ‘I don’t remember a single word.’

  I do, thought Belinda, eating her own sandwich but too preoccupied to appreciate its deliciousness. She herself could remember those directions almost perfectly, and the ghostly way they had been issued from Jonathan’s lips.

  After their lunch, Belinda and Jonathan ventured out into the park for a walk.

  Belinda said nothing to Jonathan, but the incident in the library had spooked her. André had intervened in their lives again and prevented them from leaving his house, but there didn’t seem to be any way to go back on their decision and leave. The mobile phone was dead again and there seemed to be nowhere to charge it, so they couldn’t contact Paula and make a new plan. They were trapped here until she turned up to release them.

  Jonathan took his sketching gear from the Mini and Belinda had a book from the library – one of the risqué ones she had been looking at earlier – and they set off in the direction of the river. No one appeared on the steps to stop them as they left, so it seemed it was all right that they explore.

  ‘How old do you think André is?’ asked Belinda, a while later. They had walked all the way across the park and found a path through the woods, and were now settled on the bank beside the stream. Belinda had a suspicion that this was the very site where Jonathan had watched Feltris and Elisa make love, but she didn’t say anything. She just smiled at the way his gaze darted to one particular spot, and his expression became both dreamy and excited.

  ‘I dunno … Thirty. Thirty-five. Something like that,’ he said after a while. ‘I only saw him for a few minutes, And I was half-asleep anyway.’ He gave her a puzzled look. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘No particular reason,’ she said quickly, opening her book. ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Well, he’s definitely older than us,’ observed Jonathan, as if that was the end of the matter. Holding up his pencil, he closed his left eye and measured the size of an object on the far side of the river, already deeply absorbed in his drawing.

  You can say that again, thought Belinda, turning her attention to what lay on the page before her. She had discovered this treasure of perversion while Jonathan had been dozing, and been so intrigued – and shocked – by it that she had been compelled to bring the outrageous thing with her.

  Not an entirely unsophisticated woman, Belinda was aware of some of the weirder practices people indulged in for pleasure. She and Jonathan had experimented a little when they had first got together, but they had never tried what was depicted in this lavishly-produced volume – the dark, cryptic delights of erotic punishment. It was all new to her, but the images were affecting.

  The content consisted almost entirely of photographs of women being spanked. Some were from the very earliest days of photographic art, before the turn of the century, and some were from far more recent eras.

  Paradoxically, it was the older, fuzzier prints that were most exciting. The women in them were swathed in voluminous layers of frilly underwear, much like the garments she was wearing now, and often trussed into tight corsets too. But in every case, their pale bottoms were exposed. Rounded cheeks appeared out of peepholes in the most decorous of knee-length drawers, or were visible only between rolled-up petticoats and the dark tops of snugly-gartered stockings.

  Other girls and women were more lewdly presented, with legs raised or stretched apart in a variety of uncomfortable-looking poses, suggesting it was not only their bottoms that were being smacked. Seeing these willing victims – for almost all the faces visible were smiling, and others were clearly only feigning distress – Belinda found herself thinking again of last night on the terrace. Suddenly she wished André had spanked her when he could have done – when her bare bottom was pushed rudely out towards him.

  She had never been punished for pleasure, but now she wanted to be, desperately. She glanced at Jonathan but he was engrossed in his drawing.

  Returning to the book, she found that each successive page made her more and more excited, but one photo made her jaw drop in astonishment.

  It was a picture of André – André chastising the bottom of a half-dressed, dark-haired girl. He was laying about her vigorously with what looked like a strip of leather; his face stern yet his eyes bright and lusty. The girl appeared to be sobbing, and her pretty mouth was twisted in an exaggerated moué of suffering, but between her legs there was a clearly visible glint. She was wet because her buttocks were being lashed.

  Belinda came to a quick decision. ‘I’m going for a bit of a wander,’ she said casually to Jonathan. ‘I won’t be long.’ She paused, watching to see how he would react. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ he replied, looking up and giving her a quick grin, then looking down again. ‘I’ll be fine.’ His pencil moved across the paper with a swift fluidic purpose, and Belinda knew he was totally absorbed.

  Striking off down a path that paralleled the riverbank, Belinda walked as quickly as was practicable. She felt hyped-up, manic, and extremely naughty; and the leather-covered book seemed to burn her where it was tucked beneath her arm.

  After five minutes, she found a little hollow just a few yards from the river. The mossy turf underfoot was soft and rather dry, and bushes around her provided a semblance of secluded privacy. A shaft of sunlight shining down through the canopy of trees provided just the right degree of illumination.

  When she lay down, on her side, Belinda suddenly felt shy. Her actions felt calculated, sneaky, rather grubby. Why did masturbation always seem unsavoury when it was planned?

  It didn’t bother you the other night out here, did it? she demanded of herself, as she opened the book at the photograph of André. She thought again of the way she had wet herself in the clearing and of how the forbidden act had felt so voluptuous, then she grinned as her qualms dissolved like mist.

  André looked extraordinarily handsome in the antique photograph. His long tied-back hair seemed a little anomalous for the date in the corner of the picture – 1899 – but his striped trousers, double-breasted waistcoat and high starched collar made him very much the fashionable gentleman of that age. And his rolled-up shirt-sleeves showed he obviously meant business. His arm was a poem of grace; a raised arc of readiness. Belinda could almost hear the leather swishing through the air.

  When she turned her attention to the girl in the picture, she suddenly felt a wash of disorientating giddiness. She rubbed her eyes, then looked again, not believing what she saw.

  The clothes and the pose were the same as they had been earlier; the flounces, the lace, the exposed buttocks, the flexed, entreating body. But the long dark hair and the slightly Latin face were gone, and in their place was a short, anachronistically elfin hairstyle and features that were impossibly familiar.

  How? How on earth? Rolling on to her back, Belinda felt the book slip from her fingers, the pages rustle, and the covers clop shut and conceal the picture that couldn’t exist.

  Suddenly, she felt herself falling, when there was physically nowhere to fall, and she realised that she needed to see more
than just an image.

  * * *

  A knock on the door woke her.

  Had she been dreaming? She felt very strange. Very peculiar. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, but then she remembered. She was at Count André’s house, the home of her handsome new benefactor. The exquisite continental nobleman for whom she would do anything: because he was kind and she simply adored him.

  Belinda looked down at her booted feet, her stockinged calves and the hem of the most dainty and frilly petticoat she had ever seen. She had never been able to afford anything so pretty for herself, but Count André had lavished her with a positive mountain of expensive lingerie: chemises, bodices, corsets, petticoats, drawers – every extravagant frippery of lace, embroidery, and ribbonwork she could imagine. His only stipulation was that she wore them to be seen in – that she wore them at his special, private parties.

  Thinking of the evening ahead, Belinda quivered.

  ‘Just one or two friends who might appreciate you,’ he had said, stroking her face as she sat on his lap. ‘You are a jewel, my darling. You know how I love to flaunt you.’ His gentle hand had begun to stray downward then. ‘I feel like a king when I see the envy in their eyes.’ Still descending, his hand had settled on her breast, squeezing it through the delicate lawn of her chemise, then sliding downward across the firm, unyielding panels of her corset before dipping into the open drawers she wore below. ‘I love to watch them covet you. Your magnificent breasts, your pearly bottom, your beautiful quim … I love their jealousy. The way they wish themselves in my place, so they could have use of you every day and every night.’

  And yet Count André did permit his friends certain liberties. Belinda supposed he only did it to increase their envy, but he often allowed them to touch her. To play with her; intimately. To chastise her bottom and to cause her pain and shame. The idea was, she deduced, that what they could have for only a short time, they were bound to desire even more.

  Tonight, Count André was holding open house for several of his most valued friends. They would have good wine, fine food, and entertainment. An erotic diversion of which she was the chief ingredient.