A Gentlemen's Agreement (8 page)

He looked around. “Are you all
alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then stop talking like an idiot.
Get off our knees and sit down in a chair.”

He stepped out of the room and
then returned with a picnic basket. The most wonderful odors in the world
drifted out of it. Her mouth filled with drool.

“Eat up,” he said, handing it to
her.

“Sir? I can’t eat today.”

“I told you to stop talking like
an idiot. I own you. I can feed you anything I like any time I like and you
damn well better eat it or I’ll have my
whiphand
take
a strap to you.”

She opened the basket.

She hadn’t seen food like this
since she had sold herself into slavery. Her last owner, a commoner, ate well,
but he didn’t eat like a lord.

She tried to be dainty as she
devoured the roast quail, asparagus with orange sauce, roasted new potatoes,
and cucumber salad, but failed. The most that she could do was to force
herself
to take the plate out of the basket and use the
knife and fork provided. She wanted to dig into the basket with both hands and
shove the food directly into her mouth.

The food was fresh and still hot.
These weren’t leftovers; someone had been cooking the meal since early this
morning.

“Thank you so much,” she said when
the plate was clean. “That was the best-tasting food that I ever ate.”

Lord Snow laughed in delight.
“Starvation would make offal palatable.”

“That was no offal,” she said. A
small burped erupted from her throat. She blushed bright red at her
indiscretion. “Excuse me.”

Lord Snow grinned. “You are
excused. But it’s my honor to thank you for the entertainment last night. It
was splendid. My friends will remember it for a long, long time.”

“I’m happy to hear you say that.
But they voted against me. They voted that it had not been their most
pleasurable entertainment.”

“You know damn well that was a
bullshit vote.”

She knew no such thing. She hadn’t
attended enough entertainments to judge them objectively.

“In that gold outfit, you were the
sexiest thing that most of them had ever seen. They were frustrated as hell
because they weren’t allowed to rip your clothes off and hump you like a bitch
in heat. But even that wouldn’t have made them vote against you if that damned
Lawrence hadn’t stirred them up. He made them feel like they had to prove that you
weren’t in charge. It was a bullshit vote. Believe me, they loved your
entertainment. I loved your entertainment. I can hardly wait to see what you
come up with next time. Which will be on Saturday.”

Irene was barely listening. He
lost her attention when he made her think about having her clothes ripped off
and getting humped like a bitch in heat. God, she wanted that so badly she could
barely stand it. She’d have gladly forgone the picnic basket if Lord Snow had
been wiling to fuck her long and hard instead of feeding her.

She had to drag her attention back
to the topic at hand. “Saturday?”

“Right. Saturday. I’m hosting a
dinner for twenty-one couples. I’ll ask Lady Snow to borrow a couple more
slaves if you think they are necessary to entertain that many. It’s a special
dinner so I’d like everything to go well.”

“We have five slaves, not counting
me, so that would be less than one slave for every four gentlemen. I think we
will need at least three more. I like to have at least one slave per three
gentlemen.”

“I have six slaves, not counting
you. I want Nickel included in the entertainments. My kennel isn’t large enough
to justify a
whiphand
who isn’t also available to
service my guests.”

“She isn’t going to like that,
much.”

“Do I care?”

“Of course not. I’ll find a place
for her.”

“I’ll inform her myself. Don’t
worry. She’ll know that it’s not on your initiative that she’ll be entertaining
my guests. It’ll be on my direct instruction.”

“Thank you. She’ll be more eager
to participate if she understands that.” Irene knew that Nickel was going to
blame her regardless, and would look for some way to get revenge. She would
have to deal with that sooner or later.

Lord Snow looked at her for a
time. “I’m not sure why your entertainment worked so well. It did. No question that
it did. I’ve never seen guests look so content at the end of an evening. But
I’m not sure that I understand why starving the slaves made a difference. Slaves
are always eager to please and there are only so many ways to have sex with one.
A gentleman can get a blowjob any time he wants. Any gentleman can order a
slave to get on her hands and knees while he fucks her. No slave would dare
show anything less than complete enthusiasm. Two days of food deprivation made
it special in some way that I can’t pin down. How did you know that?”

“I didn’t know for sure that it would.
I was scared stiff that the entertainment would fall flat. That’s why I was
willing to endure the punishment of further starvation if it didn’t work. So
that you would know that I tried my best and was willing to put myself on the
line.”

“I knew that you would try your
best anyway. And it didn’t fall flat. But you must have had some inkling, some
instinct, that starvation would make the slaves act in some special way.”

“I had hopes. Slaves are almost
always working to avoid punishment. I wanted to change that. When they were
starving, the food was a reward. Slaves don’t get many rewards and it showed. There’s
a big difference between falling to your knees in front of a man because you’re
afraid that he’ll beat you and sucking up to him because you’re hoping for a
treat.

“The slaves couldn’t help but
express that difference in all kinds of subtle ways, from fawning at a man’s
feet to kissing his fingers. They were more willing to be forward.
To beg for favors.
The gentlemen liked it because it’s
something that they don’t normally see. They don’t often get their fingers
kissed and they certainly don’t get much sincere gratitude from slaves.

“I guess I’d say that I tried to
change the slaves from property to pets. And a gentleman has to love a
slobbering pet more than he loves a piece of available meat.” She smiled. “The
slaves were happy to demean themselves more than they ever had before. It was
fun for me to see, too.”

Lord Snow screwed his mouth into a
wry smile. “Maybe the slaves felt that the guests were rewarding them, but they
must have felt that you were punishing them by depriving them of food for two
days. Especially when they hadn’t done anything wrong.”

Irene shrugged. “They don’t like
me much right now. That’s for sure. They’re going to be disappointed that you
fed me. They were really looking forward to seeing me suffer a more wretched
hunger than I’d made them endure.”

“Don’t tell them that I fed you.
Let them think that you’re still suffering.”

“I won’t tell them, but they’re
going to figure it out pretty quick. They’re not stupid. They’re going to
notice that I smell of food and that I’m not looking quite so keenly at any
crumbs left on the table after dinner.”

“It’s hell to be in charge,” Lord
Snow said.

“I’ll live with it.” Irene smiled.

“Okay. Breakfast is over. Send
Nickel in.”

Half an hour later, when Irene was
sitting at the table with the other slaves, listening to Nickel service Lord
Snow, she was thinking desperately about ways to entertain twenty-one
gentlemen, less than a week from now.

If Lord Snow borrowed three, then
she’d have nine slaves to work with. She should be able to come up with
something interesting.

The other slaves at the table had
nothing to say to her. They only glared at her while they listened to Lord Snow
use and abuse Nickel in the adjoining room.

Irene wondered how she was going
to work the
whiphand
into the entertainment without
getting her own cunt tenderized on some trumped-up accusation.

* * *

On Tuesday morning, Irene found Tamarind alone in the
kitchen.

“Not up at the manor?”

“No, ma’am. Lord and Lady Snow are
hosting a dinner tonight, so there’s not much for the slaves to do. The others
offered to work in the garden. They like getting some air.”

Since her promotion to director of
entertainments, the other slaves had started calling her
ma’am
. Irene knew that they meant it ironically, even
disrespectfully, but she thought it best not to make a point of it.

“How did you become a slave?”
Irene was curious about the history of all the other slaves in the kennel.

“The usual way,” Tamarind said. “I
was adjudicated.” Punished by the court when she was convicted of a crime.

“What did you do wrong?”

“I got caught.”

Irene was annoyed by her
evasiveness. “What were you doing when you got caught?”

“Running. Running as fast and as
far as I could.”

“Running from what?”

“The police, of course.”

Irene sighed. “If you don’t want
to tell me, you don’t have to.”

“Okay.”

There was a strained silence for a
minute.

“I heard that you’re going to
organize another entertainment on Saturday,” Tamarind said.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to starve us
again?”

“No. We already did that. Every
entertainment has to be different. We won’t be starving again.” Irene was
careful to use the inclusive pronoun. She wanted the slaves to remember that
she had starved just as much as any of them.
In fact, a
little more.
She didn’t get any canapés during the entertainment.

“What are you going to do to us
this time?”

“I don’t know, yet. I still have
to think of something good.”

She smiled at Tamarind but didn’t
get a smile in return.

“You got any ideas?” Irene asked
after a moment.

“No. You’re the director of
entertainment.”

“So I better think of something
good before Saturday, or I’ll be in the soup. We’re going to borrow a few more
slaves because there’ll be twenty-one guests and I like to keep the ratio under
three-to-one. I don’t like to see the gentlemen waiting. If they get cranky,
it’ll be bad for all of us.”

Tamarind nodded at that. She’d
seen cranky gentlemen before and she didn’t like it.

There were a couple minutes of
silence while Irene thought about her problem. Designing a run-of-the-mill
entertainment – a buffet of slaves – would be easy, but she’d
already set a high bar and was going to have to clear it every time or Lord
Snow would be disappointed.

“I stole a car,” Tamarind said.

Irene looked up at her in
surprise.

“That’s why I was adjudicated into
slavery. I stole a car.”

Irene frowned. “Was that your
first offense?”

“Yes.”

“Someone told me that people don’t
get adjudicated on their first offense. That it wasn’t until their third
conviction that they were considered incorrigible.” That made sense to Irene.
Slavery was a severe punishment. It not only deprived a person of their
freedom, but it condemned them to an early death.

“It depends on the crime,”
Tamarind said. “If it’s serious enough, a person is adjudicated on her first
offense.”

“You didn’t injure anyone, did
you? When you stole the car?”

“No. I didn’t have to do anything
violent. The doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. I hopped in
and started driving. I just wanted a little fun. I took a drive up along the
beach. Waved at my friends. Had a good time.
Until the cops
started chasing me.
Then I drove down the freeway. I got as far as
Seagate before I ran out of gas.”

“So running from the police was
why you were adjudicated?”

“No. I was adjudicated because it
was an earl’s car. A crime against an aristocrat merits adjudication even if
it’s a first offense. I should have known. A commoner would never leave his
keys in the ignition. Aristocrats figure that no one would dare steal their cars
so they’re careless about things like that. I wasn’t thinking. I should have
known. It’s my own fault that I got adjudicated.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen. The judge could have
shown leniency. Adjudication is automatic for an adult who commits a crime
against an aristocrat but judges have discretion about adjudication for minors.
Judge McCray used his discretion to make me a slave. He said that he wanted to
send a message so he put me on the block.” She smiled. “I got the message. If
the aristocrat had been only a knight, the judge would have let me go. But he
was an earl. Worse, he took the trouble to come and watch the trial. That’s
who
the message was for. The judge was telling the earl that
he was so important that I had to pay for inconveniencing him by being enslaved
even though I was only fifteen.”

“That’s terrible.”

She shrugged. “I thought so. But
it doesn’t matter what a slave thinks, so I stopped worrying about it a long
time ago.”

“So you’ve been a slave since you
were fifteen?”

“For almost half my life. I’m
twenty-nine now. I know that because I was sold three months ago. Slaves don’t
get birthday parties, but they get to hear how old they are every time they’re
put on the block. I’ve heard my age announced twenty-three times since I was
first sold.”

It was a grim way to count the
years toward the day when she would be considered too old to be a pleasure
slave and be sent to a labor auction.

Tamarind noted the unhappy look on
Irene’s face. “Hey, don’t let me get you down. It’s not so bad. Most of my
owners have been good men. I’ve never been sold to the professor, so that’s
lucky.”

“The professor?”

“Don’t you know about the
professor? I thought everyone knew about him. He’s a sadist.
Proud
of it.
He tortures his slaves. That’s how he amuses himself. Non-stop
torture. You don’t ever want to get sold to the professor.” She leaned close
and said, in a low voice, “If you make your owner unhappy, if he wants to
really punish you, he’ll sell you to the professor. It’s worse than getting
sold to a brothel and you don’t want that, either.”