by Emily Tilton
Five figures stood waiting for them on the platform at Ogden Union station. Susan knew that they must have come there for the Allens and the Loomises because Samuel, leading their little party with the porters behind them wheeling a luggage cart and the gunmen warily watching a few yards further back, strode up to the tall, dark-haired man, accompanied by a woman who looked very much like Esther, and said, “Michael! So glad you’re here!”
Then the introductions took place: Michael and Amelia Sullivan, Travis—the bounty-hunter! (though he wore the same sort of respectable suit now as the other men and only the wink he gave Susan betrayed anything of his colorful past)—and Maggie Quill, and, to Susan’s confusion, a man in a clerical collar, whom Mr. Sullivan introduced as Father Stearns, and whose accent betrayed him as an Englishman of Nele’s own class.
Susan looked at Nele in confusion, and he smiled back at her gently but also with a slightly uneasy air, as if he knew he must now do something he had never done before, and thought he might not get exactly right. To see a sign of such vulnerability upon Nele’s face—truly not of weakness, she thought, but of willingness to pursue better aims even if they removed him from his accustomed manners and practices—made Susan feel a little giddy with her affection for him. She smiled up at him, trying to tell him with her eyes that whatever he must do, she would do whatever she could to help, even if it meant confessing his sins and returning to the fold, because she knew he loved her.
Nele turned to Samuel, then, for a moment, and Samuel nodded. Something prearranged, then: something they had discussed on the train while she and Esther had slept, as it seemed impossible not to sleep when the train swayed like a cradle under you, and the noise enveloped you, and the dark outside spangled with a million stars somehow made you feel that, despite everything, to have found the man who sat upon the edge of the berth murmuring quietly had made you the luckiest girl in England or America.
Nele said to her, reaching for her hand, “Come and take a walk with me, Miss Grant.”
Thus, a little way down the platform in Ogden, Utah, did Lord Nele Lourcy ask for Sue the trollop’s hand in marriage. When they returned to the little party, Esther had tears in her eyes. As she embraced Susan, she whispered in her ear with something between a giggle and a sob, “Goodness knows what sort of wedding night you’ll have, my dear.”
The gunmen seemed very mystified indeed by the proceedings, until Samuel strolled over to them, allowing Susan and Nele time to receive the congratulations of the whole party. Nele said in her ear, “Samuel’s going to cable the man in San Francisco who’s working for Robert—a Mr. Callahan—and buy him off. Reverend Stearns will write to my father once we’re wed, and that will be an end of it.”
Susan felt a little sob rise into her own throat. How could joy and sorrow mingle so thoroughly? “An end of your prospects, you mean, my lord. I am so sorry, and I wish I were a better girl so that I might refuse you and let you go back to England.”
Then Nele pulled her aside, away from the Sullivans and the Quills and Esther and Reverend Stearns, who were busy debating the arrangements for the wedding, which the women were insisting could not happen immediately as Samuel had planned it and arranged it, but must wait until they had reached San Francisco.
“Susan Grant,” Nele said quietly and solemnly. “Miss Grant, I do not want to go back to England. I do not think I shall ever want that, but if you should ever pine for your home—”
“My lord,” she protested, “you know I never shall!”
“If you ever should, though, or if perhaps I ever should, we shall return as Lord and Lady Lourcy, and we shall be received at Panton, at Mowton, and at Mercester House. Until Robert is prepared to countenance that sort of return for us, I profess myself not merely ready but also eager to be a milord in San Francisco, with my milady by my side—a milady whom I find utterly suitable to be at the side of a Californian milord.”
“A trollop, you mean, milord?” Susan whispered, finally feeling the weight of sorrow lift from her heart.
“My trollop, yes,” Nele said, leaning down to murmur in her ear. “My naughty trollop with the sweet, bare cunt that I cannot wait to taste again.”
* * *
In the end, Esther won Samuel and Nele over to the idea of slipping from the Oakland terminal across the bay into San Francisco and up Nob Hill to the Allens’ home with no one the wiser. Samuel had extracted from Callahan, via telegram, the assurance that his money, local as it was to the Golden Gate, would triumph over any Johnny Bull’s. So although Samuel had arranged for Reverend Stearns to marry Susan and Nele right there in Ogden, so as to make it impossible for Robert to argue to Callahan or to anyone else that Susan must be removed from the scene, there seemed little reason not to gratify Esther’s wish, vociferously seconded by the marvelous Maggie Quill, who it seemed had ridden across the West with her bounty hunter without benefit of clergy, that Susan should be married in Grace Church, where Esther and Samuel themselves had wed two years before.
“And you’ll feel right at home, there,” Esther said. “Reverend Stearns is English, and all our friends who have been to England say that the churches over there are just like Grace.”
“Well,” Samuel said as they settled back into their new seats aboard the even more luxurious Central Pacific Pullman coach. “I think they also say, my dear, that the English don’t sing as loud as we do.”
Reverend Stearns laughed. “I can vouch for the truth of that, my lord,” he said to Nele and Susan.
Susan had worried very much that the priest would know enough of her past to frown at her, and even to frown at Nele because of her, but it appeared that to have a nobleman in the West represented a grand enough thing for a clergyman of the Church of England that she need not worry. At one point she even caught Reverend Stearns looking speculatively at her. For a moment she thought of Mr. Greatrex, but she felt immediately that something about this cleric was entirely different from the cruel man who had begun her fall: Reverend Stearns might wish to fuck her, Susan thought with a blush, but he would never blame her for that desire.
* * *
Lord Nele Lourcy married Susan Grant at Grace Church on Nob Hill, on 15 October 1874. The only persons in attendance were the Allens, the Sullivans, and the Quills, but it was a very merry party, Susan thought, nonetheless. With the help of Captain Allen, Nele had chosen a site for their house, close to the Allens and the Sullivans, that morning; construction would begin in the spring and until the house was finished Lord and Lady Lourcy would lodge with the Allens, where Esther gave Susan a wedding breakfast so splendid and festive that she burst into tears at the sight of the table, though it was only laid for eight.
Though Susan and Nele had not shared a bed, truly, since the night on the train with the plug in her bottom, they stayed up very late in the Allens’ parlor the night before their little wedding, talking of the all the wonders they had seen in America, and of the plan Susan had formed for something she wished to occur at the wedding breakfast and from which Nele could not dissuade her, hard as he tried.
“For I know, my lord, that you truly will take as much pleasure in it as I, and do not we know that the Sullivans and the Quills speak freely of these matters, as we did with the Allens at the hotel in New York, and on the train? If you feel that our new friends will take it amiss, go to Samuel now and ask, but I am morally certain that he will approve my plan.”
That had settled the matter quite handily, for Nele had come to see Captain Allen as his model in all things pertaining to becoming an American gentleman. Nele did go to Samuel, who was wakeful in his study going over the books he had neglected in his month’s absence from the West, and Samuel did, as Nele told her, approve heartily of the plan. “Although,” Nele reported him as saying, “it will make for some very red faces. Mrs. Sullivan is a schoolteacher, you must understand—though certainly the naughtiest schoolteacher I have ever met. Goodness, the stories Michael tells me of what they get up to!”
Ch
apter Twenty-Five
Susan stood, her cheeks already pink, and began the speech she had insisted she wished to give upon her wedding day. Nele still could hardly believe she had proposed such a thing, but he could not deny that it would make for a most spectacular confirmation of everything that had happened to them in the last month. From the dining room of the earl of Hobberly to the dining room of Captain Allen of San Francisco: the creation of a new path of virtue, to govern their lives from henceforth, here upon the shores of the Pacific.
When the meal had nearly ended, and the servants had brought in the wedding cake and then at Samuel’s command left the dining room and shut the doors behind them, Nele stood at his place. After the conversation around the table had died down in recognition of the bridegroom’s prerogative to address the party, he said, “My heart moves me now to make a toast to my most excellent bride, but I shall do it in a fashion that I suspect no such toast has ever before followed. As Samuel and Esther know, and I do not doubt have informed you, Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan, and you, Mr. and Mrs. Quill, Lady Lourcy…” a round of applause greeted this denomination of his wife, “…has a rather interesting past, of which she was engaged in telling me before we arrived in America, and then, later, telling Samuel and Esther as well, while we traveled across your marvelous land.” More gentle applause ensued, and a cry of “Hear, hear,” from Mr. Quill.
“I have decided,” Nele said, looking from one to another of the guests, and then at Susan herself, “that she shall finish the tale right now, in your hearing, as the proper prelude to my toast and to our wedding night.” He saw Amelia Sullivan shoot a rather shocked glance at her sister Esther. Esther’s cheeks had gone pink, but Samuel had clearly warned her, and she looked back at Amelia, nodding as if to reassure her. “I have been very gratified to hear,” Nele continued, “that all of Lady Lourcy’s and my new friends in this room have adopted what I consider an admirable freedom about amorous matters.”
Now Amelia had turned to her husband Michael, as if to see whether he found the subject shocking. Tall, dark Michael grasped her hand where it lay atop the table and smiled to show that he approved of a bridegroom addressing these subjects with as much frankness as he pleased, when the company knew that all of their number practiced the sort of marital arrangement all six of the San Franciscans practiced, as Nele had heard minutely from Samuel: the husband assuming his role as master of his wife, punishing her for her faults with his firm hand upon her bare backside and claiming his conjugal rights whenever and however he wished. Moreover, Samuel had assured him that Esther, Amelia, and Maggie were often required to recite in each other’s presence the spankings and whippings they had most recently received, in order to encourage them to reform their conduct through the healthy evocation of shame.
For her part, Maggie Quill’s lips twitched with a half-smile as her eyes went from Nele to Susan, and then up to her husband Travis at her right; he looked back at her with a broad grin. Samuel had told him truly, Nele thought, about Travis and Maggie: their time riding the West, with all its wild liberties, had made them most willing to try voluptuous novelties like the one Susan had begged him to require of her.
More confident now that even if the girls’ blushes should burn like fire while Susan carried out her plan, everyone would remember this day fondly for many years to come, Nele continued, “I therefore command my wife Lady Susan Lourcy to rise and tell of how she passed from the power of Lord Granby to that of Sir David Newburgh, and in particular of how she came to be entirely bare between her lovely thighs.”
The gasps from all the women and the flames in all their cheeks seemed to make Susan’s smile all the broader as she looked at them with mischief in her eyes. Marriage, though Nele would have thought the opposite might well be true, seemed to become his bride very well indeed; from the security of her lovely blue wedding dress, on loan from Esther, she could, he saw, be ever assured that her voluptuous nature would only bind Nele to her more closely. To master her as his wife and to see how that mastery pleased her despite her protestations—it was a path of virtue that might well, Nele thought, combine society’s claims with those of nature.
“Finally,” Nele said, “I require her to tell of how she came to Hobberly Castle, where I first laid eyes upon her, and upon the smooth pout of the sweet treasure that now belongs to me by law as well as by the natural right I have asserted, as her protector, to my utmost satisfaction.”
He sat, and Susan rose, slowly and as if in state. Around the table, amused smiles occupied the faces of the men, who exchanged glances with one another, while the girls exchanged wide-eyed, hot-cheeked looks of astonishment.
“My lord,” Susan said, turning to him where he sat next to her, looking up admiringly at her perfect face, with the fine golden hair visible again in its elegant chignon with tiny white flowers carefully woven in, now that she had removed her veil, “thank you for commanding me, at my own request, to finish the story of how I came to be in your power.” She wore a grave expression upon her face, but Nele knew from the way her eyes danced upon him, upon the table, upon their new friends, that she had been right: only this strange sort of toast could truly honor their love.
“I have told my husband…” here her grave face broke for a moment into a joy so radiant that Nele’s heart skipped a beat, “…and Captain and Mrs. Allen of how, in the house of Lord Granby, my no-longer-maiden charms were employed for the pleasure of his lordship, whether his lordship possessed me himself or watched others doing so.”
Amelia looked down at the place where her dinner plate had been, her cheeks aflame. Nele saw her bite her lip, and he thought Michael squeezed her hand as well, as if perhaps the goings-on at Lord Granby’s might perhaps fall into a range of conversation the Sullivans had had, or even a naughty book they had read and discussed.
“I have said that Sir David Newburgh had the opportunity there to employ my mouth for his pleasure. Now I must tell that Sir David, being an antiquarian, had a great desire to try the experiment of imitating a practice he had seen depicted on an ancient vase, as quite probably being a common usage among the women of pleasure of the Hellenes.” Shock turned to frank curiosity around the table. “He showed an illustration he had made, from the vase, to Lord Granby when I happened to be kneeling nearby without any clothing on, waiting for Lord Granby to command me to pleasure him or another gentleman, or perhaps to get over the punishment block or a gentleman’s lap for a chastisement, as Lord Granby called it though there was never any fault for which we were chastised. The illustration seemed to take Lord Granby’s fancy most extremely, and he called me over to look at it, there and then proposing that I should be given to Sir David on a sort of loan, if he would consent to do to me the thing depicted on the vase and in the illustration, and I should undergo the procedure immediately, with the assistance of another of Lord Granby’s girls.”
“What was the procedure?” Maggie asked in her broad Western accent, as if unable to stop herself from the interruption.
“Hush, Maggie,” Travis said. “For shame.” He looked around at the company. “I apologize, Lady Lourcy, for my wife. Maggie, you’ll have a whipping for that before we go home, as I’m sure you can guess, with our friends watching.” Maggie’s mouth twisted with a little defiance, and her face went red, but it seemed she was no stranger to being spanked with others watching.
“You can do it right here,” Samuel said. “Bend her over the table and Esther can raise her skirts for her. I can vouch for his lordship not minding. But…” the captain turned to Susan, “…I think we’d all like to hear the rest of the toast, first!”
Susan smiled for an instant, again in that radiant way that Nele now found he thought he probably couldn’t live without. “Another girl used scissors to trim the curls that covered the district of Venus, as Sir David called it. Then I was made to stand with my legs spread. The other girl, in back of me, helped support me, in case I should faint, which I must confess seemed to me very likely, for Sir Davi
d, having called for a candle, now sat upon a very low stool, between my legs, and carefully singed away all the hair of that district.”
“No!” Amelia exclaimed, then looked, wide-eyed at her husband.
He smiled back and, as if knowing that the game had proceeded round the table to him, he said in his lilting Irish brogue, “I think you need a spanking over the table, too, my dear, for that interruption.”
“But Michael…” Amelia was smiling too, though, and Nele could see that punishment in the Sullivan house had a less disciplinary character than it seemed to for the Allens and the Quills. Indeed, Nele began to wonder whether under her proper appearance Amelia might conceal a voluptuous nature even more fiery than her sister’s.
“Sir David took me home, and enjoyed the bareness of me there most fully, but though I found him kind and I even came to enjoy the various and sundry enjoyments in which he engaged me, copying them from ancient pottery—and ancient poetry—he was called unexpectedly to India, and could not of course bring me with him. He provided for me in a fashion, indeed in a much better fashion than he intended, for it was thus that I met Lord Nele, by sending me to the earl of Hobberly, who keeps fallen girls as maids, though their true employment is in what the earl calls the comfort of his guests.”
She smiled down at Nele. “And the very first guest I was sent to make comfortable in his chamber was my bridegroom. And now I beg of him to finish my tale, and to bring to me my just reward, by showing all of you how it happened.” Her cheeks, which had remained unstained to that point, now blushed like ivory seen in a beautiful sunset—the kind of sunset whose light now streamed into the Allens’ dining room.