The Eunuch's Ward (The String Quartet) (16 page)

‘Not entirely planned?’ I asked. That was an old trick of my mother’s. Whenever she found herself thrown into a tight-knit circle, she’d said, she’d wait for a hint of scandal, an allusion to a juicy gossip and ask a leading question. It worked every time, apparently. People would fall all over themselves to tell her all about it, the ice would be broken and it was all plain sailing from then on.

She was right.

‘You can say that again,’ said the boy with red hair. His name was Tod. ‘Rumour has it that it’s the history teacher...’

‘Priest?! Gerry Priest?!’ cried Amanda, the girl in dungarees very much like my own pair that was now drying on the porch of the bungalow. ‘I thought that he was gay.’

‘You think that anyone who doesn’t swear and call everyone ‘you guys’ must be gay. Take a break... sorry, I didn’t catch your name...’ The other lad was quite good looking.

‘Nat,’ I said and considered shaking hands but he’d already turned back to his task.

‘I’ll help you wheel it all out to the gift shop. The gardeners can easily help themselves from there.’

I hadn’t caught his name either. ‘Thank you. We should rope the horses to the cart and let them pull the weight.’

The trio laughed.

‘You’d think that, wouldn’t you? The poor horses must be bored stiff with all that good living,’ said Tod. ‘They’d probably welcome a bit of work. But, Mrs. Bowen would hang me by my balls if I did something as sensible as that.’

Don’t know about the horses, but he couldn’t have described me better if he tried.

Or so it felt at the time.

Chapter 14

My mobile chirped as we were unloading the last of the bags of manure.

‘Boyfriend?’ asked the handsome boy. By that time I’d managed to work out that his name was Matt.

I nodded with far more hope than certainty.

As it happened, it really was Hugh. Calling him my boyfriend was a liberty, but who knew?

‘Taking off in about twenty minutes. ETA to the flat, approximately two hours. Carrying goodies, will share. How about it? XXX’

I replied with the Sanctuary’s post code.

If I’d ever needed a prompt reply it was then. Only, it didn’t materialise. One hour later I was put on feeding duty, and there still was no reply.

‘What’s with the face?’ asked Matt. ‘The boyfriend not behaving?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I’ll be only too glad to deputise.’

I smiled at him. ‘Can I take a rain cheque?’

‘You and any other city girl that I’ve ever met,’ he pulled a face.

‘I’m probably as unlike any other city girl that you’ve ever met as you can get.’

Matt blushed. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean anything...’

‘It’s all right, Matt. I know you didn’t. As you said, boyfriend troubles. I’m grumpy, that’s all.’

According to my new friends, casual volunteers like them and me were always released by 4 pm, leaving the experienced seniors and the staff to get the Centre ready for the night. It was ten minutes past 4 already and Mrs. Brackett was jangling her keys as a reminder that we should work faster. I was dreading the prospect of returning to the bungalow waiting for a text or a call.

So humiliating.

I filled the last of the bays with pre-packed grain mix and slipped the smallest of the ponies a carrot that I’d nicked in the shop when I went to get myself a drink.

‘I’m done, Mrs. Brackett. It was...’

I didn’t get to finish the sentence and to this day I have no idea what I was going to say. My mobile went off.

‘Can you meet me at the Upper Fold Airfield in half an hour or shall I call for a taxi? XXX’

The airport postcode was added like an afterthought.

I jumped up in the air like a field player who’d just scored the winning goal, then broke into a sprint.

‘Bye, you lot. Bye, Mrs. Brackett. See you,’ I shouted. I had no idea if anyone answered, nor did I care much. At the fence I stopped just long enough to type out the answer.
‘See you there in the longest half an hour of my life. XXX’

There was a stile that promised to save me at least a couple of minutes of walking all the way to the gate. At the bungalow, I left my grandmother’s wellies on the porch and dashed off to the wet room upstairs. A five minute shower wasn’t anywhere near enough to remove all the grime that I’d collected during the day, but that was the most that I could spare. I didn’t even bother with hair conditioner, there wasn’t enough time to let it work. Still damp after a brief encounter with the towel, I threw the filthy clothes into the washing basket, pulled on the underwear, a fresh pair of shorts and a clean top. I still stank, but there was nothing that I could do about that.

Once I fed the post code into my SatNav, I had five minutes to make the trip that according to the gadget required twenty.

Two minutes less than twenty as it turned out. Not that I’d covered myself in glory along the way. I’d left a couple of cyclists and a horse rider with stories to tell to their nearest and dearest that evening.

A suspicious looking character with much more hair on his chest than on the top of his head pointed me to the hangar.

‘You can drive in if you’re expected,’ he mumbled and walked off.

There were three small aircraft in the hangar and a lot of people milling around them, but only one of the men waved and ran towards me. Hugh looked cool and fresh in his khaki shirt and under-the-knee shorts.

‘Stay where you are,’ I stretched out my arm to prevent him from coming within the sniffing distance. ‘I stink.’

He laughed and pulled me to him in a good, big hug. ‘Hmmm... yes. Your cologne is a bit of an acquired taste. Come and see my baby.’ He pulled me towards a sleek, white craft with a lozenge shaped emblem on the side and the tail. HCJ. ‘Nat, meet my five-seater Cessna Mustang. My favourite for short trips and convivial company.’

‘What’s J for?’

‘Jetting,’ he smiled. ‘Hugh Carrington Jetting. Desperately uninspired. That place where you’re staying, will I be able to cook there?’ He picked up two bags off a large platform trolley and carried them to the Evora. ‘Nice car.’

‘I would have preferred the Elise, but none of my minders could fit into the passenger seat.’

He laughed again. ‘Which was exactly why you preferred it. Aren’t you now glad that you’ve got Evora instead?’

* * *

We were both starving hungry. After a hurried, duty tour of the house, Hugh familiarised himself with the kitchen. He left no cupboard or a drawer unopened. In the meantime, I was charged with unpacking the larger and heavier of the two bags. I smiled when he slipped the other one, the overnighter I assumed, behind one of the two potted laurel trees that served as a portal to the kitchen. He was leaving it to me to decide on sleeping arrangements. Well, he was going to have a long wait. I wasn’t planning on a great deal of sleep tonight.

‘I was thinking of a buffet table,’ he said over his shoulder as he picked a knife off the magnetic strip. ‘I only need 10 minutes, if that.’

I wasn’t sure what kind of plates to bring out. I could have asked, of course, that would have been a sensible thing to do. Only now that we were playing house instead of indulging in tumultuous sexual acrobatics on the kitchen table, I had a feeling that some boundaries were being drawn and that I didn’t want to cross them. To be on the safe side I stuck two sets into the plate warmer, a soup bowl, a dinner plate and a side plate each. I had no idea where my grandmother kept table linen, this simply wasn’t a kind of a house where you could just go and look for something at a likely place. I had seen a stack of glass placemats and a pack of cream-coloured paper napkins in one of the drawers, so I used them instead. The same bottom drawer also contained a couple of table candlesticks with barely used real wax candles in them. I brought those along, too. Once I unpacked most of the contents I added a cheese board and a few ceramic dishes suitable for serving pâté, olives, capers and a pickled fruit.

‘I’ve never heard of any of those cheeses,’ I thought that was a nice, safe subject to talk about.

‘No, you wouldn’t have done,’ Hugh was lifting blanched vegetables out of the boiling water. ‘There’s a family of cheese makers that I know. They produce three different kinds from their own ewes. I’m friends with the eldest son, we went to the flying school together. He brought me this whole lot at lunchtime. The mussels,’ he pointed to the large colander where the just cleaned mussels were draining in the sink, ‘they were still clinging to the rocks at 10 am today.’

‘No wine for us?’ I asked when Hugh added wine to the stock and the mussels got their two minutes boil in the liquid. The smell was wonderful. My tummy was ringing serious warning bells.

‘I’ve left it aboard. You can’t drink, so... There’s some freshly squeezed grape juice in the bag.’

‘I’ll be eighteen in December...’ I stopped as abruptly as I started. Two years ago almost to the day I’d said ‘I’ll be sixteen in December’ to Mungo Steen and never heard from him again.

‘Not long to wait then,’ Hugh smiled at me as he brought the steaming saucepan straight to the table. ‘The soup bowls will be warm enough by now?’

I nodded and took them out of the warmer. I took out the rest of the tableware too. There was nothing but the mussels hot on the menu.

Neither of us lit the candles. He talked about his Cessnas and Hawkers, I told him about my day at the Sanctuary. I praised the food out loud and inwardly wandered why he was so distant. Lovely and kind, funny and amusing, but restrained. He was twelve, almost thirteen years older than me. Maybe I seemed like a silly little schoolgirl to him. Maybe I was just a silly little schoolgirl who’d run away from home on a whim, a poor little rich girl turning a molehill into a mountain.

I had to stop myself from going there. I’d promised myself that I wasn’t going to think of my father, his business problems and his absurd idea of a solution to the situation.

‘What’s up?’ We had no desert and none of the fruit in the orangery was quite ready for picking. Hugh had been beating himself up over the oversight, then resorted to a bar of my grandmother’s cooking chocolate that he’d found in a kitchen cupboard.

‘Seeing that you’ve done all the cooking,’ I was thinking on my feet, literally, for I left my seat and was munching on the last of the asparagus standing by the table, ‘it’s only fair that you should clear up and load the dishwasher as well,’ I smiled a lot more cheekily than I felt. ‘Sorry for being rude but the stable smell is getting to me. It’s in my very pores. I’ve just got to scrape it off.’

Without looking at him, I ran upstairs to the en suite with the yellow bedroom.

* * *

The door to the wet room opened as the shampoo suds started dripping down my back and shoulders.

‘In the interest of the environment we can just as well share the shower.’

Chapter 15

His fingers dug deep into my hair and firmly massaged my scalp, pushing the swelling foam off my face. They rotated down my neck making it feel like a swathe of charmeuse silk , continued over the shoulders and down my back. At a maddeningly steady pace, he collected more suds from my hair and spread them all over my buttocks and my thighs, his fingers reaching in between my legs but never even touching the area that was ablaze for the touch. It wasn’t before he worked the soap in between my toes that he returned to my torso and with his hands looking like two huge white gloves, encircled my breasts. My nipples suddenly bosomed into two purple orchids, sending a beautiful ache throughout my insides. Of their own volition my hands reached to the back, bringing him close, closer and then closer still to me until his erection pressed into me. I stepped on my toes, wriggled a little, helping the tough monster to nestle in between my buttocks. The feel of his naked hardness was deliciously novel. Acting on a command from somewhere within me, my buttocks clenched, squeezing the cock between them, massaging it as my soles danced up and down, up and down.

‘Love the hairstyle,’ Hugh murmured into my ear. His fingers gave my artistic pubic crescent an appreciative rub, then moved further down, sliding very slowly over my clitoral hood and in between the lips underneath it.

My breath suddenly turned into a series of quick short gasps, and my posterior went mad, furiously clasping his cock in an iron grip.

‘Please,’ I whispered, ‘please.’

Grinning, Hugh turned me around to face him, one arm around my waist, the other one fiddling with the shower controls. The warm, sumptuous stream of water turned into a powerful jet, engulfing us both in a fierce, cool outpour. The suds that at first eddied down the drain hole in thick heads of foam soon disappeared, leaving my hair to drain profusely down my back and breasts. Hugh reached for a large bath towel, dried us both perfunctorily with it and lifted me in his arms.

‘Two things,’ I whispered. ‘One, I don’t want you to distract me. I want to feel the pain. I want to remember it.’

‘And?’

‘I won’t last. I’ll come even before you could say...’

‘I don’t think that I’ll be saying anything very much. Shall I use the condom?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m on the pill,’ I said with some pride. That had been the first adult decision that I’d ever made for myself.

He lowered me on the bed, and exactly as once before, he lifted my buttocks, parted my knees and bestowed a long, fleshy kiss onto my hymen. I could feel the tip his tongue circle around, waking up every single nerve there, then move onto the clitoris and flirt with it lusciously and agonisingly slowly.