Mistress of Night and Dawn (30 page)

Despite the nature of his submissive posture, there was an obvious strength about him that didn’t just come from his physicality. There was nothing feeble about the persona that he projected. His manner resembled that of a soldier kneeling in front of a monarch.

Standing in front of him unshowered, barefooted and still in her nightgown, Aurelia felt shorter and more foolish than ever before. She desperately wanted him to stand up.

She was not averse to the idea of dominating another, although she couldn’t quite imagine causing a person pain, which she knew was sometimes involved in such activities. But if ever she mentally put herself in the role of a dominant, then she always imagined lording it over someone who was slighter than her either in stature or in presence.

She’d seen slaves and servants at the Ball and they hadn’t seemed like this man. They’d seemed small both in size and in personality. Aurelia could have easily ordered one of them about, but she was not sure if she could do the same with the man at her feet.

She coughed and looked around at Madame Denoux for some sign of what she was expected to do next.

‘He’s awaiting your instruction,’ Madame replied.

Aurelia looked down again at the back of the kneeling man. She was possessed by an instinctive desire to run her fingertips over the curve of his spine.

‘May I touch you?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Mistress,’ he replied without looking up. The tone of his voice was familiar. A dull memory struggled to surface in the back of her mind like a diver coming up for air. She knew him from somewhere.

Aurelia trailed the pads of her fingertips over his skin as if she could read his identity through his rippling muscles. He shivered in response to her touch and his response sparked a jolt of excitement within Aurelia. She brushed her hand through his dark-blond hair and then along the length of his jaw until she reached his chin and lifted his head so that she could meet his eyes with her own.

Then she remembered. ‘Persephone,’ she whispered. ‘PJ.’

‘At your service, Mistress,’ he replied, grinning.

The last time she had seen him he had been dressed as Peter Pan and hand in hand with Siv at the party in the Bristol chapel, shortly before she had made love with Andrei for the first time. Reminded of Siv, Aurelia felt a pang of guilt. She missed her friend. Once she became Mistress of the Ball, would she be in a position to have her back by her side?

‘You’re the connection between the Network and the funfair?’ she asked him.

He nodded. Aurelia was still clasping his chin and when he moved his head, the stubble on his jaw scratched against her fingertips. His hair was only just beginning to grow and the sensation was soft as well as prickly.

‘Shave,’ she said to him. ‘I want you to remain shaved.’

Uttering that first simple command made her heart beat faster. She was trembling, but trying not to show it. Giving an order to another human being was at the same time deeply exciting because it seemed to Aurelia to be so forbidden, but it was frightening for precisely the same reason.

She exhaled with relief when he immediately stood up and walked to the bathing area. He knelt down and began to splash water over his face.

Madame Denoux approached her.

‘You’ll need to provide him with a blade,’ she whispered into Aurelia’s ear. Aurelia blushed when she realised her error. She knelt down and fished through the compartment cleverly concealed underneath the futon where she kept her personal belongings until she found a clean razor and a pocket mirror and she handed both to PJ with all of the authority that she could muster.

‘Well,’ said Madame Denoux drily, ‘you appear to be getting the hang of it.’

Aurelia followed her to the door.

‘Wait,’ she hissed under her breath in an attempt to avoid letting PJ know how far out of her depth she was. ‘What shall I do with him?’

‘That’s up to you to work out. Walter will be assisting you with some of the finer details.’

More questions bubbled to Aurelia’s lips, but Madame Denoux had already walked through the door. Her long, deep-blue velvet dress swished around her ankles as she skipped across the paving stones that led from the pagoda to the Network’s offices.

Aurelia let out a sigh and tried to banish the worries that crowded her mind. She needed to get on with the task at hand. Though at first it had been difficult to resign herself to being ordered around by others and truly find peace in submission, she already missed the ease and relaxation that came from simply following directions.

PJ was still kneeling on the hard stone floor and scraping the razor over his face, although by now she knew that his knees must be hurting and his face already smooth. She caught his wrist with her hand to stop him.

‘Stand up,’ she said.

PJ complied immediately. As he stood, the hem of his toga caught beneath his toes and slipped from his waist to his ankles, exposing the full length of his naked body. His knees buckled as he bent down to retrieve it.

‘No,’ Aurelia snapped. ‘Leave it.’

He straightened up again, though this time with less surety in his movement, unnerved by his own nudity.

Observing the flush that crept into his cheeks, Aurelia stood stock still with her legs spread apart in the provocative pose that she had so often seen Siv adopt when she was at her most aggressive and let her eyes deliberately roam over his body.

He was shorter than Andrei, a little leaner and much more muscular. Wide in the shoulders and narrow in the waist with the strong thighs that come from regular exercise.

PJ did not have the perfectly symmetrical model’s body that Tristan possessed, nor the overwhelming height and bulk of Andrei, but there was something distinctly appealing about the inherent imbalance in his physique that aroused her. As the flush on his cheeks deepened in response to her stare, his cock began to stiffen. Aurelia watched as he developed an erection that was straight and long and jutted out from his body at an impudent angle as if it had a mind of his own and refused to be governed by his thoughts.

He grew harder as he became more embarrassed and Aurelia took advantage of this interesting quirk in his psyche by making him walk laps around the room and watching his cock and balls bouncing awkwardly with each step.

She soon grew bored of this game, though, and commanded him to stop and face the wall as she bathed and dressed herself in the most regal attire that she could find amongst the rack of clothing that had appeared overnight now that she was tasked with dressing herself and no longer had her attendants to pick her costumes out for her.

She selected a floor-length, sheer robe in deep red, which closed with a single tie beneath her breasts but swept open to reveal the rest of her body when she walked. Wearing it made Aurelia feel both queen-like and deeply sexual. That feeling faded rapidly when she turned away from her makeshift wardrobe, glanced at PJ’s back and remembered that she was at least temporarily in charge of him for the rest of the day. Perhaps even the foreseeable future. She had no idea what to do with him and so she turned to the place where she had begun.

And so Aurelia’s understanding of domination began in the same way as her understanding of submission had. With the Bonsai tree. She explained to him how to care for the plant just as Florence had all those weeks ago and then left him to it as she considered what tasks she might occupy him with next.

She was relieved when Walter arrived that afternoon. PJ was now busily trimming a hedgerow outside and Aurelia was resting on her fold-out chair beneath the pagoda overseeing his activity when she saw the older dominant begin to cross the gardens towards her.

He was accompanied by two attendants, one of whom had a firm hold on the crook of his elbow to guide him and the other who was carrying a large suitcase in each hand. It was the first time that Aurelia had seen Walter affected in any way by his blindness and the sight shocked her.

‘Hello, Mistress,’ he said to Aurelia when he was within speaking distance. It was a greeting of recognition rather than subservience. Although he had needed help to cross the garden, he seemed to know exactly where she was situated and how her body was positioned and the way that he managed to meet her eyes with his own sightless pupils was unnerving.

His attendants had entered the glass-walled room and begun expertly and rapidly to set up an array of equipment, some of which Aurelia had seen before and some of which she was fairly certain she had been on the receiving end of without being fully aware of which tools and devices were being used on her.

A padded table had been erected, a little like a massage bench but with an additional lower section for an individual’s knees to rest on, and on a bench to one side lay a paddle, whips with tails of various different lengths and materials, leather cuffs, bundles of coloured rope, nipple clamps and other items that she was unable to identify with any certainty.

PJ was summoned and instructed to bathe. Aurelia watched the warm water splashing over his limbs and the droplets that beaded and dribbled down his shoulder blades and she longed to take the sponge from his hand and run it over his body.

She stopped herself, uncertain as to the protocol. Could she serve and dominate at the same time? Was the act of dominating someone a service since the submissive so often found pleasure or release from it? Could she be both a dominant and a submissive, or was she neither and simply able to choose to take on either role at any given time? Aurelia wasn’t sure, and the more she tried to puzzle it out the more confused she became. She filed the questions away for her next debriefing session with her training guardians.

‘Get up,’ Aurelia said to PJ once he had finished cleaning and drying himself, trying to imbue her voice with coldness although it didn’t come naturally. The shape of the bench forced his legs apart and his buttocks into the air so that from Aurelia’s viewpoint his cock and balls were clearly visible, dangling between his thighs like ripe fruit hanging from a tree.

Walter used the young man’s body as a canvas to demonstrate his arts, beginning with a gentle flogging and, as the hours grew longer, moving into basic rope ties. Aurelia observed with interest PJ’s reaction to it all – the way that he relaxed or tensed in response to different sorts of stimuli, the subtle differences in the sounds that he produced when moaning in pleasure or in pain.

That was the first of many technical sessions with Walter. Aurelia’s mind was already primed for the meditative state that now came to her so easily when she performed any task that she considered to be submissive in nature and she was surprised to find that wielding a whip, drumming fire sticks or dripping wax over PJ had the same mental effect. When playing with his body she felt both exquisitely focused, but also deliriously carried away on the wings of sensation, maintaining just enough presence of mind to keep an eye on his arousal and safety.

At night he slept at the foot of the futon like a dog and Aurelia found that the awkwardness she had initially felt in his presence faded away and was replaced by a protective urge and a sense of peace that surrounded her when PJ was nearby. She spent many evenings stroking the nape of his neck as he curled up at her feet, as she might pet an animal. Whenever she took a few hours off to refresh her mind and enjoy the rainy Seattle streets, she would always find him in the same place and position she had left him in on her return.

When she had reached this state of contentment, her nightly lovers returned, only this time they fucked her in front of PJ, who was prohibited from taking part in the proceedings but forced to watch as men or women filled every one of Aurelia’s openings in succession until she was left shivering in the throes of orgasms that became more powerful when they were witnessed, as if the sense of her simultaneous dominance and submission increased her arousal tenfold by satisfying her opposing cravings at once.

It was PJ who pointed out to her the appearance of the twin dragon’s wings that now decorated her back, sprouting from her spine and spreading across her shoulder blades.

There was no mirror in the pagoda room besides the small vanity mirror that PJ used for shaving, so Aurelia was only able to see the tattoos that were within her normal range of sight. She made a mental note to request a full-length mirror from Madame Denoux or Miss Greysuit the next time one of them appeared to take stock of her training. She never had to do so; as if her mind was being read from a distance, a full-length mirror had been installed by the following morning, a step away from her futon.

Her training, she thought, as she watched PJ undertake his twice-daily ritual of shaving to ensure that his face was always smooth for her. Was she still training? Or had her life become an endless procession of fucks, her days to be spent in a glass-walled prison within a Japanese garden?

Moana had always been a child of the sea.

It was the one and only thing that she had inherited from her parents, who had emigrated from London to New Zealand in the winter of 1947. Although she hadn’t yet been born at the time, it was later said that Moana’s love of water came from those six weeks aboard the
Rangitata
, most of it spent on the upper decks navigating the turbulence inside the belly of her mother who endured most of the long journey vomiting overboard, overcome by rolling waves and morning sickness. Her father had fallen overboard drunk and drowned on the way.

They had docked in Auckland and there they had stayed. Having travelled that far, and now husbandless, her mother refused to go any further, and Moana had been born eight months later and, although she didn’t have a drop of Maori blood in her, she was named after the ocean and promptly placed into a Catholic boarding school as soon as she was old enough to be enrolled. Her mother visited her once a week, but each time they set eyes on each other Moana saw only the woman who had abandoned her and her mother saw only the waves that had swept her husband away.

She first heard about the Ball through Iris.