Notebooks of the Young Wife (14 page)

Molly’s own healing lotion had done wonders for my admittedly less drastic state, so I took up the jar that had been set out ready. I sniffed witch-hazel with a hint of wintergreen, fondly imagining a folk remedy from times when a chastised bottom was a not uncommon affliction, at least among children and servants. Then a good dollop scooped onto the centre of each buttock was quickly spread to cover the whole.

‘There, sweetie, just let that soak in for a few minutes.’ I stroked the girl’s neck till the shoulders began to relax, while allowing the other hand to stray to the crotch of the boy close beside me. Except for the fact that it kicked at my touch, the thing in his trousers was as rigid as an iron pipe. If the patently female spread of cunt and arse before us was jacking him that hard, once I’d soothed the ravaged mounds he should be ready for a spot of therapeutic penetration. Two-way, so to speak: it would do Molly a power of good and give me the satisfaction of having him up to his balls in a third party bum at my instigation. Which might help put some distance between me and the events of the night.

So I set to work without more delay. Faced with a bottom decidedly the worse for wear, I had found from experience that it was better to be brisk. To let oneself focus unduly on the extreme tenderness of the flesh was likely to induce a hesitant clumsiness that worked counter to the sympathetic intention. Firm without being rough was the rule and I stuck to it, shutting my ears to Molly’s petulant complaints while the boy kept a grip on her legs. They soon died away, as I knew they would. For one thing the lotion was doing its work and for another the after-effects of whipping were visibly juicing the parted labia.

I tested the erotic temperature with a couple of fingers into the slippery interior, and was rewarded by a hoarse moan. It was, however, a different place I had in mind for the rampant lad at my side, and to ease his way I anointed the tight rim between the buttocks.

‘Oh yes, yes,’ breathed the maid, and pushed up her behind. I tapped the bulge in his trousers and the boy unzipped at once. What emerged wasn’t the biggest specimen I’d met but it stood at a full ninety degrees to the slim body, and had a way of looking almost over-engorged, as if fit to burst from the pressure within. Feeling like the ringmaster of a circus of performing organs, I eased Molly’s body down toward the table’s edge and guided the shaft forward until its head nuzzled up to the brown pucker.

‘Go boy, go,’ I whispered in his ear, while slipping a hand inside his trousers to fondle the taut bum. With one push the glans was out of sight and a very few more had his thighs pressing against the birched cheeks. That was when my little scheme went wrong. One moment I was directing operations with a relative, if horny, detachment, the next a molten stab of lust hit my clitoris, shot up the spinal cord and exploded in the brain. It wasn’t pleasure, it was pure demand, and brooked no refusal. That’s my excuse for what happened next, though I am aware it has the ring of a piece of special pleading.

Grabbing the boy’s thighs, I yanked him out of the speared arse, swung him round and hauled down my trousers. Hips thrust forward, I thumbed open my cunt and shoved myself onto the end of his cock. I don’t flatter myself I was the efficient cause of it rather than the last and least link in a chain, but as the purple-headed beast nosed me it spat a jet of white, and another that welled up to dribble down my vulva. I remember to this day the lights that fizzed in my head like fireworks, and I remember the orgasmic jerking of my lower half. For a second or two, for a minute, I can’t say. All that remains beyond, fragmentally, is a careering passage, clothing clutched, that made the stairs and up them to the safety of a locked door at the back.

I must have been spared a prolonged bout of self-examination, for the next thing I recall was an insistent rapping that broke into my heavy doze. The words ‘phone call’ were decipherable through the muffling of the heavy door, and with a splash of cold water to the face I was fit enough to follow Laura down the stairs and into the library. There she left me to make my own way into the study, where I lifted the antiquated receiver and announced my presence.

‘Okay, I got the message. Behind those thick rims she’s quite the chat-up merchant. I think I’m gonna be back if I can find an excuse. But you are not going to like it. Talk about a merry dance.’

‘Tamsin, I shan’t know whether I like it or not until I become aware of its contents. And that won’t happen until you read the thing out to me.’ The morning’s excesses had put the scheduled call quite out of my mind; suddenly, though, I was consumed with impatience to know what the American academic had seen fit to tell us.

‘Easy, boss, I’m coming to it. The first thing is that Belle Torman is in Brittany and the second that she’s got the Notebooks with her. For safekeeping, she says. Some nerve that, from the lady who nicked them in the first place. I mean to say—’

‘Yes, Tams, and the third thing, if you could bring yourself to get to the point?’

‘Sorry, boss. She won’t say where she is exactly, only that if it’s imperative – that’s the word,
imperative
– to see the things straightaway then there’s a phone number. I didn’t try it, thought I’d better leave that to you. Dr T certainly doesn’t make life easy.’

‘Okay, give it me in case, but I’ve had another idea. Can I call you back? Soon, half an hour tops.’

Before the promised thirty minutes was over I was making my way back upstairs, elation vying with apprehension that I’d gone a step too far. Then in my room, there he was, rising from the bed and holding out the paddle. I must have looked a complete fool grinning from ear to ear, but he was grinning too as I sat for him to drop over my lap. I attacked the cotton seat for a while and when I stood him up and pulled down the trousers he was in fine erect form. I took hold of the pulsing shaft and looked up at his face.

‘Well, boy, I just stuck my neck right out and booked a trip abroad. For the two of us. Not exactly a holiday, but among the people we’re going to visit a thing like this is just for starters.’ I waggled the leather oval and he nodded knowingly. ‘So what do you reckon? Are you up for it?’

‘Yes, Miss. Please, Miss.’ There was no hesitation and relief washed over me. I squeezed the cock in my hand and a drop oozed from its end. I hadn’t blown it after all.

‘Terrific. Now back over and let me give those chubbies the roasting we know they deserve...’

The rest of the afternoon dragged by, though heavy rain cleared for a spell to permit the distraction of a waterproofed expedition into the dripping woods. Having chanced my arm, with initial success, I was eager to bring the business through to a conclusion. I had ignored the contact route we’d been offered and on a hunch phoned Judith at the Archive. It was becoming rather a habit to intrude on the seclusion of her eyrie at the top of the old library stacks, but when I confided my idea she was only too willing to help. I can no longer remember who told me of the one-time convent in the old town of Vannes that had brought her perverse love-affair with the rattan cane to its first flowering, but the information lodged in my mind and it was a fair inference that a devotee of s/m manuscripts who’d gone to Brittany would be found in that very place.

Judith told me of her own arrival some five years before in Rue des Vierges, unannounced and thence rather more into the thick of things than she was quite ready for. However, were I able to find the occupant in, then I might get a more official introduction to the Order to which it was a gateway. I turned down her offer to drop a line to the Thérèse in residence for my mind was already made up: I wanted
us
there pronto, before any mere note would have had the time to drop through the letterbox of the number ten in question. So I called Tamsin and paced back and fore while she established that if we left from Waterloo early in the morning we could be whisked to our destination from Paris before the end of the afternoon. That was what one called a high-speed railway. All that remained was for the exemplary PA to book the tickets and come to Ardingley End in time to run us to an evening train to town. That was before settling in herself for a country weekend devoted to supervising the packing and loading of the late Monty’s collection of pornography. It was a good thing she was devoted to her work.

After what seemed an age the boy was folded into the back seat of the Porsche on top of our bags, and we were delivered to the station in time to find facing seats at one end of a carriage otherwise quite full. We were thus comfortably installed but I found myself at rather a loss. It was as though, having taken the plunge into an expedition
à deux
, there wasn’t anything left to say. We both stared out of the window and I was thankful when the train began almost at once to move. And after a while even more thankful, if surprised, when the boy delved into his bag and came up with a volume that he began to read, seemingly with close attention. It was encased in a worn leather binding and I could gain no hint of what its contents might be without staring more pointedly than I cared to. Instead I followed his example and pulled out from my briefcase some papers that would at least give the appearance of providing some diversion.

At St Pancras a cab swallowed our luggage for the short journey, at the end of which I pressed a key into the hand of the new bookworm and pointed out the back stair to the flat. Without a word he took charge of the things while the driver took me off to collect the reserved tickets. As often his expression had given little away, but when I came back he was stretched out on the sofa with his shoes off, as if well at ease in the new surroundings. More so than I, in fact, who had recourse to a fresh bottle of Glen Grant for a nightcap somewhat stiffer than was customary. I’m afraid to say that I then left him sucking at the neck of the preferred bottle of beer on what was to be his makeshift bed, my will to face down the awkwardness I was feeling having failed me. Sexual frolics seemed completely out of the question. The difficulties I could – would – face the following day, when I had the sustaining framework of the mission to retrieve the works of the self-styled
uxor studiosa
.
We
, of course, not
I
, was how I should have been thinking. But then that was rather peculiarly
my
problem.

However the early morning brought a new perspective to things. A matching pair in black, rather as for the excursion to Miss Faversham’s, we forwent breakfast in order to indulge ourselves on the Parisian leg of the journey. I had plumped for first-class tickets, a move that would require some creative accounting in the quarterly expenses, but one that was a big hit with my travelling companion. In the sparsely peopled carriage we had free run of two pairs of facing seats, but the boy slid in beside me after tossing our bags over onto the others. Thus we tucked in companionably into the ‘full English’ that seemed to set a fitting seal on our venture into foreign parts, and while we sped through the flat lands of northern France he began to make brief references to the former life of which I knew next to nothing.

It was not for me to comment, I felt, nor even react except to make the noises that signalled he had my attention. Our positions allowed me to keep my eyes on the passing fields as he spoke, and indeed allowed his not to meet mine. There was mention of a week below deck on an ancient coaster as stowaway-cum-assistant to a boozy AB, and of two months crossing parts of Central Europe with a thumb and a bedroll. There was more in similar vein on the theme of accommodation, prompted by our comfortable surroundings and the earlier contrasts with it.

‘Ace,’ he said, downing the remains of his coffee and leaning back. ‘I could get used to this.’ Something in the voice made me turn my head and when I caught his eye he grinned and let out a half-stifled giggle. I remember looking sternly at him but he simply said, ‘I mean it, Miss.’ At once the half-formed thought that I was being spun a set of travellers’ tales felt unworthy of the occasion. For the remaining hour to Paris we settled into a silence that seemed mutually comfortable. The boy opened his book with no attempt at apology or excuse, and after glimpsing the words
Governess
and
Memoirs
in the running title I was quite happy to let the mind drift as the countryside sped by the window. Now there was a topic that could be picked up later.

We braved another taxi to cross the city, and by noon were in place on the TGV that would take us directly to Vannes and the purloined Notebooks. It occurred to me that their author would have found it scarcely credible that almost three centuries hence devotees with a mere taste of her writings would cross the Channel in pursuit of them. But it was no more than her due, and I was confident she would not let us down. Lifted by a wave of optimism I looked at the boy, and when he lifted his head, raised an eyebrow at his reading material. Tamsin had taken the trouble to put us facing across a table once more, and since there were a mere handful of occupants in the whole compartment, we were spread over the four seats on the left side with the opposite singles empty.

‘Strict, she was. Very.’ He pursed his lips. ‘The cane, never thought twice. On the slightest excuse.’ I took the proffered volume and opened it. The subtitle promised the detailed reminiscences of a disciplinarian who, for reasons of propriety, must conceal her identity. Apparently a first edition from 1893, it was not a work I was familiar with. ‘She had a horse made specially. Thick straps all over. But after a bit they weren’t needed.’