by Emily Tilton
“That will perhaps explain why my first interview with him, which began less than a minute, I believe, after my entrance into his house, happened in the shocking manner it did. His lordship, I suppose, had made a plan for my introduction into his seraglio down to the minute, and through no fault of my own I had arrived a few minutes late to the voluptuous ceremony he had planned. When, in great confusion, I arrived in the drawing room, having heard upon my way sounds that did nothing for my peace of mind, I found his lordship without any clothing at all and a snakeskin lash in his hand, whipping the bare bottoms of four girls who knelt each upon her own punishment block. The girls wept and cried out; their little bottoms gave evidence that they had already suffered very greatly from his lordship’s temper.
“‘Ah,’ he said, not ceasing to deal lash after lash to one or another of the already well-disciplined bottoms, which seemed to clench and relax helplessly as they underwent their cruel ordeal at the nobleman’s hand, ‘you are Sue, I presume? Get your clothes off, girl, and meet your sister brides.’ I had not the slightest force of will, then, and I suppose that even if I had I would not have had the foolishness to insist that my name was Susan and not Sue, and thus it was that I became Sue until the night Mr. Loomis asked me what I preferred.”
Susan looked at Nele, and the love rushed to her heart at the twisted smile he gave her. He said nothing, but inclined his head, and somehow she simply knew that he too had sensed that she had become a heroine.
“His lordship told me—in the coarsest terms, I hope you will not forget—that I was not to greet my fellow members of his little harem in any way I had been used to gain the acquaintance of another girl. He told me that when I had removed every stitch of clothing I must get to know those parts in which he himself took the most interest, and must begin to learn to use my lips and tongue to prepare another girl for his lordship’s use of her, just as my new sister brides must prepare me.
“As I have said, the lateness of my arrival made for a haste and severity about the proceedings that I suppose might not have arisen but for his lordship’s impatience. If Mr. Gage had had me to Granby House in good time, perhaps his lordship would not have grown peremptory about my disrobing; would not have ripped gown and stays and petticoats from my body; would not have roughly led me to the blocks over which the punished bottoms lay, the knees well parted as his lordship always preferred, and the pale, tender ovals terribly streaked with red; would not have pressed me to my knees and pushed my face where I must for the first time do the duty the great poetess of the Greek isles, they say, demanded of her pupils, as my new acquaintances sighed and trembled, and at last cried out—as his lordship, behind me, roughly had his way with the places his butler had enjoyed only an hour since. I am ashamed, especially before Mr. Loomis, to admit it, but I must not hide anything: I had come by that time to appreciate the voluptuous mastery exercised even by a man so poor in virtue as Lord Granby, and so it was not long before I, too, cried out, though my cries were muffled by the shameful occupation to which his lordship had pressed my mouth.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Nele looked at Esther, who had eyes only for Susan’s lovely face, turned down now to her hands upon a lap slightly canted to the side so as, Nele could tell, to make the India rubber reminder less distracting. The American girl’s mouth hung slightly open, and she was breathing quickly. Her hands lay at her sides, clenched into little fists, as if she held them there with a terrible force of will.
“Esther?” Samuel asked softly. “Would you like to make another girl’s acquaintance that way? I believe I would like to require it of you.” Again Nele had the delightful impression that Susan’s story had brought both their new American friends to consider voluptuous pleasures that had never entered into their thoughts and fancies previously.
Esther turned slowly to look up at her husband, and then she cast a very quick glance at Susan before she met Samuel’s eyes again. The meaning seemed very plain: If it were Miss Susan Grant, yes, I should like to make her acquaintance with my face between her thighs.
But Esther’s voice trembled as she spoke despite the desire Nele could see in her face. “As you wish, captain,” she said softly.
“Should I possess you, while you learn to please another girl?”
Nele could not help fomenting this naughtiest of thoughts. To Susan he said, “Should we perhaps possess both of you girls, as you learn to please each other?”
It was Susan’s turn to look up at Esther with a mischievous smile. “As you wish, my lord,” she said. “Certainly it was a mode of enjoyment in which I was made to take part in several times in Lord Granby’s house, as his friends, to whom he would loan his brides, commanded. Often two of us would have to lie upon his lordship’s dining room table, making one another’s acquaintance, while each gentleman did with each girl as he pleased.”
Samuel looked down at Esther’s shocked face and chuckled. He took his watch from its pocket, opened the case, and said, “I think it just as well that it’s time for supper, do not you, Mr. Loomis? And afterward, of course, there is bed to think of.”
* * *
Long into the rattling, chugging night Nele fucked Susan, loving the way she squirmed at each thrust, as the plug in her bottom came up against his loins and the tightness of her velvet cunt around his cock reminded him as well as her that he was punishing her for allowing herself to be taken to Granby House. Even with the blanket gripped firmly in her teeth and the marvelous noise of the train, Susan’s whimpers came so loudly from the sweet body Nele had commanded be entirely naked for him tonight, watching her blush as she must remove her shift in the railway berth, that he felt sure Esther and Samuel heard in the berth above how resolutely Nele drove into his girl’s cunt, seeking spend after spend there.
Or they would have if Esther herself were not making similar sounds. Nele wondered if Samuel had decided to have his wife’s bottom that night, so loud and plaintive did her cries sound. As he fucked Susan, the vision came to him of Samuel and himself putting their girls on a bed, head to tail, and watching minutely as they must kiss each other’s private pout, where the wetness flowed with great abandon. Then, with a nod to one another, Samuel and Nele would get upon the bed themselves, behind their girls, and open their bottoms to prepare the pink, wrinkled buttons inside the sweet valleys for the entrance of their masters’ stiffness. Then the double riding and the muffled cries; the grunts of the men; the bottoms held still for hard thrusting; the command that each girl watch the other’s backside have its fucking.
He spent at this image so strongly that he thought it would be he, rather than the girls, who brought the conductor’s censure, but—thank heaven—at that moment the train began a great curve with a screaming of wheels that could well have muffled the passion of a hundred spending couples.
* * *
They reached Omaha the next morning, crossing the Missouri River on the gleaming new bridge in the morning light. Samuel left the train for a few minutes and returned with a worried expression upon his face. He handed Nele a telegram when the girls had gone to breakfast in the dining car.
CAPTAIN SAMUEL ALLEN
TO CALL AT OMAHA RAILWAY STATION
QUILL REPORTS CALLAHAN SENT MEN TO OGDEN WITH DESCRIPTION LOURCY AND COMPANION STOP ORDERS TO KILL STOP CABLE TRAIN NUMBER WE WILL MEET YOU OGDEN STOP SULLIVAN
Nele looked at Samuel inquiringly. “Ogden?” he asked.
“In Utah, where the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific meet.” Samuel replied. “It’s near Promontory.”
“Where they drove the spike?”
Samuel nodded slowly, as if lost in thought. “I don’t think there’s much danger, but we’ll have to find a way to put a stop to it. I’ve had an idea, but I don’t want to burden you with it. I’ll tell you in Ogden, if the occasion arises.”
“You cabled Mr. Sullivan.”
“I did. So now there’s nothing for it but to go to breakfast, and then hear more of Susan’s tale.” H
e winked.
* * *
After breakfast, seated comfortably again upon the berths retransformed by the skillful Pullman porter into the velvet-covered bench seats—a process that Nele, childishly in his own eyes but unable to help the feeling nonetheless, still found quite marvelous—Susan recommenced her story.
“Truly it was not long that I spent in the house of Lord Granby before he had transferred my favors to Sir David Newburgh, and the next stage of my fall began, but in that month I had the opportunity to experience more debauchery than I had ever imagined men were capable of devising. His lordship had parties, which he called débuts, nearly every night, and though the company at each one was nearly the same as the last, at every party we were made to come out, as he called it, walking down the grand stairway without any clothes upon our young bodies, while the assembled gentlemen—and at times even a lady—called out to Lord Granby what they thought of our charms, and urged him to begin the night by having this or that girl in this or that fashion.
“His lordship adored this bawdiness, and he would always carry out one of his friends’ suggestions to begin the evening. At my first début, for example, a man named Mr. Vance proposed to Lord Granby that I should be caned and then enjoyed over the whipping block, while my cries were stopped by the virilities of whatever men his lordship cared to reward with the favor.”
“And did it happen thus?” Esther asked, her eyes wide.
“It did,” Susan confirmed. “I was made to serve the hardness of several men while his lordship gave me twelve terrible strokes with his favorite cane, instructing me all the while that I must learn obedience, and urging the gentlemen who used my mouth to hold my head firmly and thrust as deep as they liked.”
Esther bit her lip. She gave Susan a pleading look that Nele thought he understood. Susan, too, understood it, for she said, “Esther, dear, please do not feel ashamed that you find what befell me at Granby House exciting. Even at the time I, too, could not help the way my body responded even as his lordship corrected my naked bottom so cruelly. To think of it now…” she smiled tenderly at her new friend, “…I must not say, for fear that my protector will punish me.”
“Indeed,” Nele said. “I would very much like to, Susan, but you tell your tale flawlessly.”
Susan turned to him with a radiant smile. “Thank you, my… Mr. Loomis. Do you, too, find yourself excited by these things?” She spoke so coyly that Nele could not help grinning almost foolishly at the thought that he had under his protection so wonderful a creature.
“You know I do, Mrs. Loomis. Do please continue.”
Susan turned back to the Allens. “Sir David Newburgh, though I did not know his name then, made one of the number of men who muffled my cries as I was caned. Several weeks of these nearly ceaseless parties—for you must understand that they began at sunset and did not end until well after sunrise—were to pass before Sir David made the proposition that so enchanted Lord Granby. I shall not bore you with the details of those weeks…”
Samuel threw back his head and laughed. “Samuel!” Esther said reproachfully.
“…and indeed,” Susan continued, smiling. “I do not believe I could find enough elegant diction to express those details.”
Esther began to giggle, but at that moment, to Nele’s surprise, two men in dark suits halted next to the facing seats the Allens and the ‘Loomises’ occupied. Even more to his surprise, he saw that they held something in their right hands, beneath their coats. It took Nele, who had never seen a pistol wielded outside an engraving of the American West, a very long moment to understand that the strange metal tubes emerging from the shoddily woven wool were the barrels of revolvers.
At least—he thought he would later be able to think with pride—he didn’t do something foolishly English like exclaiming, “I say! Are those Colt revolvers? How very dashing!” despite undeniably wishing very much to say that sort of thing. Nele, like most English boys of his age, had grown up on tales of Indian wars and train robberies.
Rather, he knew immediately that Samuel’s information from Mr. Sullivan had been incomplete. Whoever Callahan might be, he had sent men to Omaha, Nebraska, or hired men in Omaha via telegram, as well as sending them to Promontory, Utah.
Samuel said, “Let’s leave the ladies out of this, boys.” Nele, who had frankly not had the slightest idea how to react to the imminent threat, so far outside his experience did it lie, and who had really first had the impulse to laugh at the notion that gunmen on a train in Nebraska or Wyoming or wherever this never-ending railroad had gotten them now might be threatening him with a Colt revolver—or was it a Remington?—instantly knew, thanks to his new American friend, how to feel. Captain Samuel Allen of the Grand Army of the Republic had obviously faced death by musket ball or bullet so many times that to Nele’s ears his voice almost sounded grateful to these bandits—bandits? henchmen? varmints? Nele hardly knew what word from his Wild West stories applied—that he actually welcomed the opportunity to meet his old friend, the barrel of a gun, again. Only to involve women was so damned impolite.
“‘Fraid I can’t do that, captain,” said the slightly taller of the two nearly indistinguishable gunmen. “‘Specially seein’ as the one with this Johnny Bull here is the reason we’re inconveniencin’ you today.” He looked straight at Susan. “Now come along, missy, and there don’t have to be any trouble at all. No one wants to hurt you, as I hear tell, unless they have to.”
“There isn’t the slightest chance you’ll get away with this,” Nele ventured. “Leave us alone and say you couldn’t find us on the train.”
The gunmen looked at him almost regretfully. “‘Fraid that just ain’t so, yer lordship. See, we paid the conductor some very good money to look the other way, and Jem and I are old hands at jumpin’ off a movin’ train.”
Samuel cleared his throat. The gunmen looked at him inquisitively, and Nele suddenly realized that he had pitched his appeal in entirely the wrong key. “You work for Mr. Callahan, I presume?”
“That’s right.” The slightly shorter—perhaps also slightly more mustachioed, in that extraordinary mutton-chop style that seemed favored here despite being long out of fashion in England—gunman said. Nele caught a hint of eagerness in his tone.
“I think,” Samuel said. “Mr. Callahan may not know that I am involved in the matter. Perhaps I can offer you gentlemen fifty dollars apiece simply to enjoy yourselves on our journey to Promontory, where I think I can adjust things both to your satisfaction and Mr. Callahan’s?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Two days later they arrived in Ogden. By mutual agreement of Nele and Samuel there had been no lewdness during those days; when the time came for the porter to make the berths, Esther and Susan were sent to bed while their men stayed wakeful to talk and to keep watch by turns. Samuel professed not to think Susan was in any danger now that the men with the guns—how very strange to have become part of a tale of the Wild West!—had in view a prospect of making a good deal more money from him than they would from the earl of Mercester. Still, he said, it wouldn’t do not to be watchful.
In truth Susan didn’t mind being allowed to rest from her voluptuous labors both in telling her story and in serving Nele. Nothing compared, of course, to the feeling that as he fucked her his pleasure in her knew no bounds—not even these extraordinary skies of the American West that seemed to soar to an infinite height. No matter how rigorous his demands or how sore she was in the morning could ever make her disobey when he told her she must remove her shift because the time had come round again, for Nele to have a fuck and for Susan to be fucked.
But the past few nights of her protector’s attentions had reminded Susan of her time at Granby House in more ways than the telling of that story alone could: Nele’s cock, after all, was of exceptional size and rigidity in her experience, and he loved to thrust very deep inside Susan’s cunny. After the previous night, with the terrible plug in place, Susan hadn’t been sure even taking the blan
ket between her teeth could quiet her enough to prevent a visit from the porter, should Nele decide to fuck her that night.
Nele, however, seemed to have turned solemn and grave the day after the appearance of the gunmen, and Susan wondered why, even as she felt a good deal of gratitude for the reprieve his mood had given her between her thighs and her bottom-cheeks. She imagined it must have to do with the conversations he was having with Samuel, which Susan thought must concern the business upon which Nele would enter as himself—Lord Nele Lourcy, new bank director, late of Merry Olde England now of the Golden Gate, keeping his social end up.
And, Susan supposed, keeper of a fashionable mistress somewhere in the city? Or even an unfashionable one, discreetly kept and discreetly visited once a month?
She refused to allow her mind the scope to travel in that direction. Nele would protect her in San Francisco, and now she had Esther as well. Susan’s foolish dreams and desires about what might happen in their new world made no difference at all; she would be safe, and the earl would give up trying to remove her from Nele’s side. She had already begun to fall in love with her new country—with the decisiveness of men like Samuel, the open smiles on the porters’ faces, and the prairies she saw from the train window, wide with the promise of the future.