The Lord's Scandalous Bride

by Emily Tilton

  “Samuel!” But her lips twitched, and now she looked at Susan with an air almost of guilt that, really, now that she knew Susan must endure precisely the same freedom of speech, Esther didn’t mind very much at all.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On the Union Pacific train from Chicago to Council Bluffs, where they would cross the Missouri to Omaha on the new Union Pacific Bridge and be in the real West at last, Samuel said, Susan was instructed after luncheon to recommence her tale. Samuel had checked for telegrams at the station, but found nothing from Michael Sullivan though, he assured Nele, Sullivan knew the route they must travel and would certainly cable soon.

  “Mr. Oldham told me he had suffered a reverse upon change…”

  “That’s the stock exchange,” Samuel said to the mystified Esther.

  “…and though I am not sure it was true, he was as I have said a very kind man, and he paid for a further month in Mrs. Wantage’s house and left me with a little money to keep me until I could find another arrangement. Soon enough, though I made that money last as well as I could, I began to feel desperate, since I had no idea at all what I could do unless it should be to make my way at last to a house of ill fame.”

  Nele looked at Esther and Samuel, who seemed entirely immersed in Susan’s tale, Esther with her mouth hanging slightly open in shock. What a storyteller his girl was! Nele had not the slightest doubt that every word she spoke held in it the absolute truth of her experience, but Nele had begun to appreciate that Susan had the extraordinary gift possessed by only the very best narrators, of shaping her words to her audience and her occasion. Where the day before she would have hesitated and stammered—intentionally, of course—over house of ill fame, today in the bright sunlight that streamed in over the fields of Iowa she spoke it out, and skirted along the edge of decency. Perhaps she had determined to answer Samuel’s and Nele’s shameful teasing at the luggage area with a story that might even earn her a correction for want of delicacy—perhaps indeed she craved such a punishment.

  In any case, Nele’s cock had stiffened already, as he sat next to her on the velvet seat of the Union Pacific Pullman coach—newer and even more luxurious than their last. He couldn’t help looking forward eagerly to another night of railway fucking, his cock inside Susan’s sweet cunny and her perfect bottom held securely against his hips as he thrust, with the sound of Captain Allen doing the same to his wife above them to season the delight. Could he dare have Susan’s arse tonight, he wondered, or would that cause her to cry out and make the porter or even the conductor pay an embarrassing visit?

  “Thankfully, I had grown quite close to my fellow lodger Dora. When I told her of my plight, she told me that her own gentleman, Mr. Withers, had recently told her that Lord Granby was in town, and had renewed his practice of gathering in several pretty girls for a season of pleasure. Dora said that the last time Lord Granby had spent a season in town the girls he chose were made to engage in the most shameful conduct, but that for all that Lord Granby bought them nice things and kept them well during the time they spent in his house. Dora assured me that Mr. Withers could communicate to Lord Granby the news that I would like to make one of his seraglio. She wished she had a less terrible proposition to keep me from coming upon the town, but she thought it possible—and indeed this notion turned out to be the truth, for Sir David did acquire me from Lord Granby—that another, kinder gentleman might wish to keep me, should he be taken with my charms as a bride of Lord Granby, as we five girls were called at the debauches his lordship staged to display us and to share us with his wealthy friends.”

  Esther’s face, Nele could see, had turned bright red. “Share?” she whispered, looking into Susan’s eyes. “Wh-what does that… mean?” She turned to Samuel, as if knowing somehow that he represented the only person present who might decide whether such an idea were fit for his wife’s mind to contemplate.

  Captain Allen said matter-of-factly, “Mrs. Loomis means that this Lord Granby enjoyed awarding her intimate favors to other men of his acquaintance, and watching those men possess her.”

  Esther seemed to breathe rather harder at this intelligence. She looked at Susan, who had developed two pink spots on her cheeks, and whose eyes seemed to shine a little. “Truly?” she asked.

  “Truly,” Susan said, so softly that her voice could hardly be heard over the rattle of the train. She glanced at Nele, her lips pursed, and Nele’s heart swelled with love at the thought that his girl hoped he would not take amiss the degradation to which her misfortunes had driven her, though she must also know by now how much it excited him.

  “I’m sure,” he said, “that Susan will come to that portion of the story in good time.” He smiled at Susan, and she seemed to give a little sigh of relief to see his expression, her own mouth turning up at the corners though her face remained grave, as if she wished them all to know how very seriously she took the task of reformation she and Nele had undertaken.

  “The very next day after I told Dora that I thought I must accept her offer to speak with Mr. Withers,” she continued. “Lord Granby sent his butler to my room in the boardinghouse to verify that I met his lordship’s requirements. That was terrible, and indeed I think that nothing that befell me in Lord Granby’s house surpassed it.”

  They had come at last to a part of the tale Nele had not yet heard. He found Susan’s words so arousing, despite their continued modesty, that he had to shift upon the seat to allow his cock more room to grow. To his surprise, he watched Samuel take Esther’s little lace-gloved hand in his and draw it to his lap, curling her fingers around the significant bulge there. Samuel winked at Nele, then, and let his wife withdraw her hand, the color of her face even more lively at what she had clearly felt between her husband’s serge-clad thighs.

  “And what did the butler do to verify that?” Samuel asked.

  Susan looked at Nele, and he nodded. “I think a good deal more detail is required if I am to determine how to correct you, my dear, so as to return you to the path of virtue.”

  “He began,” she said, looking down at her hands in her lap, “by telling me frankly that if I wished to have a hope of acquiring what he called his lordship’s assistance, I must do exactly as he said. Mr. Gage—that was Lord Granby’s butler’s name—was not a cruel man, but he was quite portly, and rather ugly, and he treated his lordship’s girls as if we were pieces of crystal to be inspected, kept clean, and used properly. He told me that he would examine my naked body thoroughly, and inspect all my charms very closely. Then he told me that he would try me, along all the paths of pleasure a girl such as I must expect a man to employ, as he took his ease with her.”

  “No!” Esther whispered.

  “Indeed,” Susan replied. “And so he did. I undressed before him, with my fingers trembling upon my laces and hooks. He told me to stand before him as he sat upon a stool, and he ran his hands up and down my body to feel the firmness of my flesh. He was continually praising me, but only as a horse-trader might praise an animal who would fetch a high price. Then he told me to lie upon the bed, on my back, and to spread my legs and raise them, holding them in my hands. He came and looked very closely at me, and then he told me that he must ascertain my susceptibility to wanton feeling, and he began to fondle me, until I had no choice but to show myself to be the lewd girl Mr. Greatrex had told me I was.”

  Esther’s brow had developed a deep furrow, and now she bit her lip. She shot a desperate little glance at her husband; Nele couldn’t decide whether the look meant that she wished he might examine her that way, or perhaps that Samuel did, in fact, examine her that way regularly. The thought that Nele himself might make it a regular practice appealed to him very greatly.

  “Then he tried me, with his manhood. I must kneel before him, and show my skill, as he enforced with the greatest rigor my attendance upon his pleasure. He made me get back onto the bed, now upon my belly and offer my hind part to him, raised up and spread open. He climbed up behind me and possessed me in bot
h places, though only for a few minutes, and without reaching his release. Then he told me that I must dress, pack my things, and come with him to Lord Granby’s house.”

  “I believe,” Nele said thoughtfully, “that you must be punished, Susan, for the despair that led you to assent to that interview.”

  Susan turned to him and sighed. Her lips made a tight line, and she nodded slightly. “Yes, my lord. I should have found another way, even if it meant leaving London and returning to the country and disgrace.”

  Nele couldn’t help bending down to kiss her then. “If only I could take you over my knee here upon the train,” he said softly.

  Samuel cleared his throat, so that Nele looked over at him curiously. “Mr. Loomis, I believe I have a solution you may wish to employ. I require Esther to carry with her in her reticule a certain disciplinary instrument that allows me to correct her even on those occasions where a spanking is impossible.”

  Nele turned his eyes to Esther. Some of her blush had faded at the end of Susan’s tale of the butler, but now it returned in full force. “Samuel, please,” she whispered.

  “Esther, please take your reminder out of your reticule and show it to Mr. Loomis,” Samuel said sternly.

  Nele watched her open the little bag with trembling fingers, having no idea what to expect. Certainly he did not expect the thing Esther finally produced: three inches of thick black India rubber, with a flared base. Susan gave a little gasp, and her hands twisted a bit in her lap at the sight.

  Nele looked at Samuel. The captain said, “Perhaps the ladies should retire to the necessary, where Esther may assist in inserting the reminder where it will, I promise, do Susan a world of good?”

  “Susan,” Nele said, “are you prepared to accept this correction? You will wear it until bedtime, and you will sleep with it. When I have you tonight, it will, I think, make the experience more difficult for you.”

  “Indeed,” Samuel said. “Would you agree with Mr. Loomis, Esther?”

  Esther had turned her eyes to her own lap. She nodded silently.

  Nele turned back to Susan. She seemed to have lost the power of speech for the moment. “Well, my dear?” he asked rather sternly.

  “I am prepared, my lord,” she whispered.

  “Very well,” Nele said. “Go with Mrs. Allen now. You will finish your story with the reminder inside your bottom, making you think of how it has all ended.” She looked into his eyes then with such love that it seemed terribly hard to believe that he had just decreed she must have a rubber plug in her backside for the next several hours. Then she rose, and Esther rose, and they departed for the really quite large bathroom at the end of the coach.

  “That’s a wonderful girl you have there, Mr. Loomis,” Samuel said. “Do you mind me asking if you’re going to marry her?”

  “I don’t mind at all, captain,” Nele said. “Only I don’t know the answer. Will not it look strange to wed a girl to whom you’re already supposed to be wed? That’s the matter that gives me pause. We must arrive as Lord and Lady Lourcy, must we not?”

  Samuel chuckled. “There’s society, and there’s nature, and there’s what really matters, isn’t there? I think I may have a solution for you, but let me think about it a while longer, if you don’t mind.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  When Susan and Esther returned, Susan knew that her eyes must seem very bright to Nele as she gingerly resumed her seat upon the velvet bench. She gasped a bit, and then turned slightly on her hip. The modesty of her gray gown, with its voluminous skirts, seemed to her not only to increase the arousing piquancy of the knowledge that she now, thanks to Esther’s giggling and red-faced assistance, had the naughty rubber reminder in her bottom, but to drive that cunny-warming arousal to an almost distressing fever pitch. How could ordinary wool and linen conceal a discipline of such lewdness?

  The plug felt big in her little bottom, and Nele had commanded that it be put there. Later, after dinner, in the berth, he would put his cock in her cunny, and the thought of how very full she would be, with her protector’s hard cock in front and the plug she wore as punishment behind, made her wits very difficult to gather when he said, now, “Do you find your reminder effective, Susan? Do you think it will keep you in mind of the need to reform?”

  She blushed of course, and she felt her bottom clench helplessly around the hard thing she must have inside it because he had said so, in order to teach Susan to be a good girl for him. “Yes, my lord,” she whispered.

  “I believe we have an hour before our reservation in the dining car, Susan. Time enough to tell the remainder of the story of your time with Lord Granby, do you think?”

  “Yes, my lord,” she said a little more confidently. In telling her shameful story to the Allens, Susan had begun to realize that she didn’t actually mind having to reveal the degradations she had undergone. The effect the tale had on their new friends, together with the kind way Esther and Samuel treated her—though of course Samuel’s stern ways made a different sort of kindness than his wife’s—seemed to her to have completed a process that began the night she had started to relate the story to Nele.

  To confess all to Nele had felt both more intimate and more terrifying, as she grew used to putting the events of the past two years of lasciviousness into the refined terms she had spent the first eighteen years of her life learning to employ, in hope of finding a husband or at least a good situation as a governess. Knowing that he intended to chastise her both for her past deeds of lewdness and for any fault in speech or in arousal she committed as she told the tale had kept Susan from finding a voice in which to frame the things she narrated, and forced her to think constantly of the possible consequences.

  Now, though, as she directed her story to this new audience of the Allens—with Nele’s clear approval, as revealed in the breathtaking smile he seemed to turn on her over and over as they traveled across this amazing country, even as he spoke words of shame and lust that made her face glow—Susan felt she not only returned to the path of virtue in obeying her protector’s command to lay all her wanton past bare before him but also gained a marvelous new power. As Mrs. Loomis, Susan Grant could shape her words into a sort of net to catch people of good will and similar inclinations within a spell of gossamer, voluptuous threads—phrases, sentences, episodes.

  She wondered suddenly whether Captain and Mrs. Allen of San Francisco acted so very lewdly—if under the guise of respectability—at home. She felt a secret smile creep onto her lips as she began to compose the beginning of the next part of the tale, at the thought that perhaps the advent of Susan Grant, fallen girl, also known as Mrs. Loomis, apparently morally upstanding Englishwoman of the upper middle class, had added some of the spice of the British libertine world in which Nele and she had moved to their straitlaced American lives. America, she had always been told, was a place of liberty where morals had gone by the wayside, but it appeared that the flow of licentiousness might have occurred in the opposite direction.

  She called the first scene with Lord Granby to mind, began to try to find refined words for acts that had lacked any refinement beyond the quality of the furniture upon which she had been made to enact them. She had said that the episode with Mr. Gage represented the low point of her tale, but her initial meeting with Lord Granby came very close. A strange light dawned inside her as she found the connecting thread of words: she had, while she told the story of Mr. Gage’s visit to her room, all unawares begun to see her main character, the girl named Susan Grant, as a heroine.

  She knew she needed much more time to make sense of this sudden realization, but the beginning of it seemed to her to add a new, wonderful force to her story, as she—the heroine with three inches of thick India rubber inside her bottom, reminding her of her duty—said, “Mr. Gage drove me to the servants’ entrance at the back of Granby House in Mayfair.” To resolve Esther’s confusion she added with a smile, “That’s the grandest part of London: coaches with coats of arms and footmen in livery
with gold brocade. I had never seen anything like it, but when I went in the back the servants’ part of the house—below stairs, as it’s called—it didn’t seem anywhere near as grand.”

  She took a deep breath, seeing on the faces of her listeners that she had drawn them into the world of her story: elegant Mayfair, but in a house run by the wickedest gentleman who ever lived.

  “As soon as I came in, though, the housekeeper Mrs. Jones stood before me, and said that I must go up to the front drawing room, because Lord Granby was most anxious to…” Susan paused, staging her hesitance to speak the word Mrs. Jones had spoken then. “…I shall not say the word the housekeeper said then, but suffice it to say that it was the coarse term for the possession of a girl by a man.”

  Susan looked meaningfully at Esther. “No!” Esther breathed back, very satisfactorily. “The housekeeper said that?”

  “Mrs. Allen?” Samuel said. “Am I to understand that you know what word Mrs. Loomis means?” On his face Susan saw nothing but pleasantry though the captain had made his tone reproachful.

  “Captain Allen, you know very well who taught me that word, and when, and where,” Esther said, her eyes flashing a little defiance now. “You also know how very often I must hear it from your lips without being able to say it myself for fear of a spanking.”

  Nele laughed. “And now, it appears, Mrs. Loomis and I know who taught it to you, Mrs. Allen. I should dearly love to hear your story, too.”

  Samuel laughed, too. “I shall have her tell it to you some time, though I doubt she will be able to match Mrs. Loomis’ consummate skill with a naughty tale. Please go on, Mrs. Loomis!”

  Susan nodded. “Now you must understand as I continue that although I shall try not to use any of the lewd terms that were employed in the common conversation in that house, both below stairs and above, my ears underwent a constant stream of those shameful expressions from morning until midnight, and beyond—for Lord Granby’s brides often must keep long, voluptuous vigil, as I am sure you may well imagine. In the morning, for example, we were told upon waking that we must clean ourselves thoroughly, and we were every day given the instruction with specific reference to the parts we must wash—that is, of course, the parts in which his lordship took the keenest interest. When we retired, we were told in great detail by his lordship what awaited those same parts on the morrow, for Lord Granby was the sort of man who liked to plan his pleasures with minute attention.