“A novice is better, anyway,” stated Bonnifly.
“You may be right. She looks to be a hot wench, and from what Marnock said, she was a whore in Oxford— before becoming a virgin on the London stage!”
“He lied!” gasped Lenore, clutching her torn bodice around her. “Gilbert Marnock raped me in Oxford! I was never his willingly!”
“Ah, so you admit you’ve lain with him?” Wilsingame’s short, unpleasant laugh chilled her. “Yet you returned my gifts as if you were some mewling virgin newly come to town! Well, tonight we shall play games with the Iron Virgin! Tell me now, Mistress Chastity, how many men have you known?”
“Three!” flashed Lenore. “And you shall not be my fourth!”
Wilsingame’s contemptuous laugh seemed to linger in the air as he brushed past Bonnifly and clattered down the stairs.
“Your bath, mistress,” whined Elsie, who had dried her eyes on her apron. “We don’t want it to get cold, you might catch a distemper!”
“I will not bathe while this man watches!” stormed Lenore, backing away, clutching her torn bodice with both hands.
“Please, mistress,” coaxed the old serving-woman, trying to take hold of her hand. “His lordship will dismiss me if you refuse to bathe!”
“Then jump out this window after me when I smash this small chair through the panes,” muttered Lenore in a voice too low for Bonnifly to hear. She took her right hand from her bodice and rested it casually on the back of a small straight chair. One spring and she could be at the window smashing with the chair. No matter if she was cut by broken glass, if she could but leap through . . . !
The old serving-woman shook her gray head sadly. “You heard me say I’ve seven small ones at home, for my sister just died leaving me her brood, and there’s few will hire one so old as me—I must find work where I can. For years I did work for ‘Mother’ Moseley, making up the featherbeds for her young ladies to tumble in—but she dismissed me because I was no longer young and spry enough. ’Tis lucky I am to find any work at all.”
“Then trip Bonnifly as I smash the window, and I’ll find work for you myself—at better pay,” muttered Lenore.
Elsie looked tempted, but she hesitated. “I am afraid, mistress.”
From the doorway Bonnifly guessed her intention and leered at Lenore. “That chair will not break through the window, mistress, but if ye try it, I promise I’ll have ye first—on yon big bed—before the rest of them have ye downstairs! ’Twill be my reward for preventing your escape.”
Lenore removed her hand carefully from the back of the small chair. Bonnifly was probably right, the little chair was too frail to break the stoutly nailed casement before Bonnifly would be upon her. He was a big hulking man, and she had no desire to push him too far, for she had no doubt at all that he would make good his threat and not be pulled off of her, not even by Wilsingame, until he had achieved his purpose. No, she’d best take her chances downstairs. Perhaps, she thought forlornly, she could find a way to slip past them, make it out the front door onto the Bridge, and throw herself on the mercy of some passerby—if there were any crossing the Bridge at this time of night.
“Please take your bath and put the pretty dress on, mistress,” pleaded old Elsie. “ ’Twill not aid your cause to wear a torn dress!”
No, that it would not. “I will wear the dress,” agreed Lenore with spirit. “Since your master has seen fit to destroy mine! But I will don it behind the hangings of yon bed. And I will bathe only if you”— she glared at the serving-woman—“will hold those hangings betwixt this man’s evil gaze and the tub!”
“Mistress, mistress—”
“If you do not do it,” said Lenore in as brutal a tone as she could muster, “I will take these sharp fingernails of mine—see them?” She held them up. “And I will tear at my face and neck and breasts until I am all scratched and bleeding. And I will tangle and rend my hair so that I will look like a woman who has slept in the gutter for a week, instead of the ‘juicy morsel’ my Lord Wilsingame expects!”
So white and determined was her face that the serving-woman fell back in alarm. “I’d best do as she says, Mister Bonnifly,” she muttered. “Else she might do herself some injury and then Lord Wilsingame would blame us that we let her mar her beauty!”
In the doorway, Bonnifly shrugged. His nasty gaze said he would be viewing her naked body soon enough.
Looking resigned at this duty, Elsie the serving-woman held out the heavy bed-draperies as a shield behind which Lenore disrobed, pinned up her long hair, and stepped into the warm water. It felt good, and she sank down into a sitting position with her knees drawn up before her because of the shortness of the metal tub. She saw that she had been provided with expensive scented soap (“Soap like ‘Mother’ Moseley’s girls use,” bragged Elsie proudly) and she lathered it soberly down her white arms and across her breasts.
She bathed slowly, moodily, remembering another bath—one taken on a day of sun and wind in the raw wilds of Dartmoor. She had stood naked on a rock in the sunshine in a clear swift-running mountain brook, and Geoffrey, his gray eyes alight and laughing, had dipped water from the stream with his hat and poured it over her bare shoulders until her white body glistened and her round breasts pinked with the coldness of it and her pink nipples hardened under his provocative touch. He had bathed her with loving hands and dried her tenderly with his shirt. He had kissed her bare back and her gleaming shoulders, and his lips had roved exploringly over her breasts and stomach. And then his arms had tightened and he had taken her to him and there beside the gurgling brook they had lain together in the soft grass, their arms and limbs intimately entwined as he led her on to passion and fulfilled all her dreams of womanhood.
Tears misted her violet eyes. Love to her was a sacred thing, worth fighting for, worth dying for. All these years she had endured hardship and humiliation when she could easily have become somebody’s kept doxie, making men pay dearly for her favors. She had done that because she felt her body was her own and should be freely given —not bartered or sold. Nor would she easily brook the taking of her by force.
She thought of Emma, who had been so young and so pretty and so full of foolish dreams when first she’d seen her in Killigrew’s outer chamber—now Emma was broken and spiritless. Poor Emma, who had been used for cruel sport and tortured to frighten the young virgins Wilsingame “bought” from “Mother” Moseley into submission.
Well, she would not be used so! The hurtful memories of her beautiful days with Geoffrey—those days that had opened the floodgates of her heart and then when he had gone become an ice jam locked around that heart—came back to taunt her. She would not see Geoffrey again; he was dead or he’d have returned with the King—and perhaps he’d never loved her. No need to live for him.
And Flora had written that young Lorena was “lovelier than even you could have dreamed” and that all the best catches in the village were but waiting for her to grow up. A sad smile crossed Lenore’s face. That lovely young daughter she had not seen since she was a baby ... At first they’d been kept apart because she feared to endanger her child, feared she might end up in prison or a harsh orphanage, her young life ruined. And then when she received her royal pardon, she’d written lying letters of her new affluence, her success—lies she’d meant to make come true—and her stupid pride had kept her from going back to Twainmere to visit her, for Lorena would see at once that her mother was but one step from the almshouse.
No, she need not live for her daughter....
Sitting pensively in the soapy water, she brooded—and suddenly Bonnifly’s big hand jerked away the bed-hangings from Elsie’s grasp and he laughed down at her.
With an angry shriek, Lenore brought up both her hands filled with soapy water and dashed it into Bonnifly’s grinning face. The soapy water struck him in the eyes and he fell back, rubbing at them, unable to see.
“Lor, mistress,” muttered the shocked serving-woman. “Ye’d best mend your manners,
or they’ll do terrible things to ye downstairs! They’ll brook no interference with their sport. One poor girl fought them and kept fighting, and they did hurt her so bad she later died!” She stopped abruptly, as if fearful she had said too much. “I do but warn you,” she muttered. “Even poor little Emma, who was afraid to deny them anything—”
“I am not Emma,” cut in Lenore curtly.
She rose and suffered Elsie to pour a pitcher of warm water over her body to rinse off the soap. Her head was lifted now, her chin held high, for she had made up her mind. An arrogant naked figure, lovely as a water sprite and gleaming in the candlelight, she stepped from the bath and toweled herself dry with clean linen cloths. Then she climbed into the dainty black silk chemise trimmed in lace that Elsie had brought, sat down on the bed and smoothed on her long lovely legs a pair of sheer black silk stockings, and fastened them with the garters of silver tinsel that lay at hand.
Never in the theatre had she worn underthings or stockings so fine—and perhaps it was fitting that she should, for this, her last performance.
She looked up with an odd little smile. “Dress me well, Elsie,” she said grimly, “for I would look my best this night.”
Elsie gave her a frightened, uncertain look from her watery eyes. Could it be that this beauty’s mind had come unhinged from fright? Here she was about to become the single victim of a mass sport—mauled by a pack from whose rough caresses she would emerge as the others had, trembling and screaming with fear and pain—and she wanted to look her best for the ordeal?
Lenore stood up. The black chemise was cut artfully low so that the tops of her white breasts gleamed. She no longer cared that Bonnifly, the soap cleared from his eyes, was staring at her hungrily. Let him rest his covetous gaze on what he would never possess!
CHAPTER 30
“And now to comb out your long hair," crooned the serving-woman. “I used to comb hair for ‘Mother’ Moseley’s young ladies—ah, but you’ve prettier hair than any of them!”
Lenore, sitting bolt upright on the small chair she had intended to use to smash the window, suffered the old woman to comb her hair down around her shoulders.
“We could pile it up but—they would only pull out the pins and it would be worse tangled,” advised the serving-woman. “First you will walk down the stairs—slowly, like a bride, mistress. Milord likes that. Bonnifly will walk with you, and you mustn’t hang back, even if you’re frightened. They’re harder on them that’s scared.”
“No one will have to drag me!”
“If you don’t walk down proper. I’ll plant my boot on your round bottom and send you down amongst them sprawling,” warned Bonnifly in a surly voice. He felt he’d been robbed of his fine private showing and angrily eyed the cooling bath water.
“When you get downstairs,” continued Elsie, “Bonnifly will lead you into the drawing room, and there you’ll take off your clothes—slowly like. The gentlemen like to lounge about on the benches and watch.”
Lenore’s throat felt dry. She kept her gaze steady and serene in the mirror, while her heart pounded. “And then?”
“They may make you dance a bit—first.” Elsie was reluctant to upset the beautiful doll she had been ordered to gown.
“We’ll tell you what to do!” snickered Bonnifly. “For me you’ll—”
“I could fix your hair real cunning like,” Elsie quickly interposed, with a frown at Bonnifly. “'I could put little satin flowers in it. There’s some in the chest there. Oh, I was a real ladies’ hairdresser at ‘Mother’ Moseley’s-—let me show you.”
“I’ve no doubt you’re an expert, Elsie,” said Lenore with a composure she did not feel. “But we will not seek for fashion tonight, since it seems I’m to wear this gown so briefly—we will seek instead for beauty. We will dispense with the flowers. Think you, is this dress cut low enough?” She held it up for critical inspection—it was artfully cut, she saw, and frothing with creamy lace at the top. “I would have it reveal my bosom, which is very white, don’t you think?”
Elsie choked and looked frightened. “ Tis indeed white as milk,” she agreed. “ ’Twill inflame them,” she added timidly.
Lenore peered into the mirror. “I will pinch my cheeks to give them a high color, but my hair—no, my hair is my best feature. I will wear it combed down about my shoulders so that it will swing like a great shining shawl as I walk. Elsie, these shoes I’m wearing won’t do, don’t you have something better?”
“I—I might have,” gasped Elsie. She padded out and brought back a pair of dainty black satin slippers with high red satin heels.
“Ah, that’s better,” purred Lenore, who now stood up in the black silk chemise trimmed with a froth of black lace that barely concealed her nipples.
Awed, Elsie, helped her slip into the clinging black gown trimmed at the bosom with creamy lace. It fitted Lenore’s round breasts and clung to her narrow waist like her own skin and then flared out into a huge billowing skirt. The cream-colored lace frothed around her bare shoulders and hid part of her plunging bosom.
“I like not that lace,” murmured Lenore, frowning as she turned about before the dressing mirror. It was so large she wondered if Wilsingame had got it from some theatre. No matter, it was the last looking-glass in which she would ever see her reflection. “Bring scissors that I may trim it away.”
‘Trim it away?” Elsie gaped at her. Of all the frightened women who had been dragged into this house, none had ever asked to cut their necklines lower.
Lenore nodded. “And a fan—I will need a fan, Elsie. Lord Wilsingame will wish me to appear as a great court lady, not as an abandoned wench from the streets. Am I to go bare-handed like a serving maid? Are there no black gloves?”
Elsie ran out and returned with scissors, a lovely fan of carved ivory and black ostrich plumes with a dainty mirror in its base, and a pair of black silk gloves. She watched in fascination as Lenore promptly cut away the offending froth of lace so that the daring dress now possessed not only a plunging neckline but a regal dignity.
Lenore studied her reflection grimly. All black . . . save for her white shoulders and the pearly tops, of her breasts gleaming pale and her high red heels, she might almost be in mourning. And in a way she was. Mourning for her lost love, her lost lovely life that had somehow slipped through her clever fingers.
She set down the scissors and before Elsie could pick them up again she distracted her by saying, “My hair—it has become tangled again as I turned about, and I want it to fall as truly as running water. Comb it out again while I struggle into these gloves. And be quick about it, for I think I heard the front door open.”
Downstairs there was indeed some commotion. A door slammed and they could hear a hubbub of voices downstairs, and over them all Wilsingame’s booming, “Ah, but ye must stay—at least for a while. We’ve an entertainment planned, and ’tis about to start!”
Lenore controlled a shiver. An entertainment! Herself!
She picked up the black silk gloves, fragile and delicate—and recoiled from their smooth touch. To whom had they belonged, and was their owner dead? Or cast out upon the streets or into some brothel to make her way? She straightened up, getting control of herself again, and eased the tight gloves over her fingers.
For a long moment she stared into the mirror. A vivid beautiful reflection, violet eyes alight, stared back at her. She could hardly believe she was doing this!
“You do be beautiful,” sighed Elsie, laying down the comb and stepping back with a wistful look to view her handiwork.
“Yes, I want Lord Wilsingame to admire me,” said Lenore in a level tone. “This effect should please him, don’t you think?” She picked up the mirrored ostrich feather fan—and with it the scissors—and wafted it gently, careful to conceal the scissors from their gaze.
Elsie stood as if hypnotized, spellbound before this magnificent creation. She nodded her head in dumb approval. “I do think he don’t deserve such,” she muttered huskily. “ �
�Mother’ Moseley would pay a packet to get hold of you!”
“But ‘Mother’ Moseley shall not have me, Elsie!”
Elsie’s eyes widened. So that was this beautiful wench’s game! She meant to win Wilsingame! She gazed at Lenore in admiration. None had so far done it, but . . . none had looked like Lenore!
From the doorway, Bonnifly, too, watched her—with avid soap-reddened eyes. She must keep his heavy hands from her—somehow. She turned arrogantly to Elsie. “I do not wish to have Bonnifly jerk me downstairs as if I were some kitchen wench squalling at her fate,” she said in a cold voice. “Go and tell Lord Wilsingame that I wish to make a grand entrance. Tell him I wish to trail down the stairs all alone—without Bonnifly to mar the picture. Go and tell him how I look, Elsie. Make him grant me this request.”
Elsie bobbed her head and scuttled away. She’d give odds she was looking at her new mistress here! And when she whispered to Lord Wilsingame that the saucy wench upstairs wanted only to please him ...!
Lenore waited, wafting her fan and turning about to keep Bonnifly’s eyes occupied, to keep him from thinking about where the scissors might now repose. Downstairs there was a shuffle of boots and a clank of spurs. She could hear Wilsingame call, “Bring her down, Bonnifly.” Bonnifly surged forward to seize her, and Lenore stepped back to elude him. “You heard me say I wanted to go down alone!”
“What ye want don’t matter!” grated Bonnifly, grabbing her by her left arm. In her right reposed the plumed and mirrored fan—and concealed in it the precious scissors. She had studied them well as she trimmed away the creamy lace—one plunge into her breast should be enough!
Bonnifly had dragged her protesting to the door when Elsie came running back. “The master says ye’re to let her come down the stairs alone, Mister Bonnifly. If she’s bent on bein’ tractable, he don’t want her upset again. He says you’re to stand well back—he don’t want the scene destroyed. He wants to impress his guest!”
Bonnifly let Lenore’s arm go with a curse and lounged sulkily back in the doorway, and Lenore came out on the landing. A long flight of stairs yawned at her satin-shod feet. She drew a ragged breath. Life, which she had been so willing to throw away a moment ago, seemed suddenly sweet and dear to her.
This Towering Passion Page 48