The Red Velvet Horse (Siren Publishing Allure) (2 page)

I bathed in a chipped enamel tub drawn up in front of a coal fire, soaping my pale skin with a nervous hand, and rinsing my long chestnut hair in a small quantity of ale to make it shine.

The thought of what I would have to do at Sophie’s house of prostitution made me feel sick and queasy inside. Nevertheless, I had no choice in the matter.

“The gentleman’s already upstairs and waiting for you,” Sophie said, as soon as I presented myself at her door. So alike was she with the indomitable Raisa that I suspected they might be in some way related, perhaps sisters?

“Pinch a little color into your cheeks,” she instructed. While I complied, she circled around examining me with a critical eye and clicking tongue.

“If there were time, I’d try and find you a more suitable gown.” She looked with disapproval at my slightly threadbare skirt and blouse.

“This is my first time,” I confided nervously. I wrung my hands together and bit down on my lower lip.

“Well that’s a bit difficult to believe, dearie,” she joked, but not unkindly, with a lewd wink.

“I mean with a stranger…for money,” I stammered.

“It’s no different, m' dear,” she assured me. “Just be sweet and do everything he wants.”

The bedchamber was dominated by a brass bed and lit by a single oil lamp. “Come over here, I won’t bite,” a rasping voice greeted me from an armchair in the far corner, where a curlicue of cigar smoke drifted upwards towards the high ceiling.

He was a shriveled up little monkey of a man, this first client of mine, with glittering black eyes and an incongruously bushy moustache.

I did as I was bid, turning this way and that while he examined me like a prize heifer at a county fair.

“My but you’re a bonzer little lass,” he announced appreciatively with just a hint of an Australian accent. He immediately began to fondle my breasts and belly while wheezing through flailing nostrils.

“Now take off your bodice,” he ordered with a great lasciviousness of manner. When I obeyed, he licked and sucked at my breasts until much to my horror, I felt a dull ache of desire kindle deep within my groin.

Next, he instructed me to remove my skirt and petticoats, leaving me standing before him in just my drawers, boots, and knee-high stockings.

“Come here lass and let me feel your sweet little quim.” He slipped his gnarled fingers into the leg of my voluminous underwear and massaged my cunny until my breathing grew labored with desire.

Then after much fondling of my belly, breasts, and bottom he bent me over the bed and entered me with his long wiry cock in one well-aimed thrust.

“Ow,” I gasped despite myself as shuddering waves of muscle-tensing excitement coursed through me.

Of all the possible outcomes of this forced visit to a brothel, I could never have foreseen this one. As quivering, moaning, and quite feverish with excitement I gyrated my eager hips around with utter abandon.

“Gawd, but that was a bonzer piece of ass,” he groaned, after we had both spent with noisy ebullience. And was soon positioning me for another romp that would last even longer and be more explosive at its finale.

So it was that I became a prostitute who actually enjoyed the jiggering and poking I was subjected to each night at Sophie’s dockside brothel. While feeling unspeakable shame that I had sunk so low.

* * * *

“Hannah Wilks starts off as this quiet little widow,” April explained to Holt, while they worked on the window display for Christmas. “And ends up not only working in a brothel, but actually enjoying it.”

She swirled a strand of tinsel around a potted silver fir tree, and stacked a pile of presents in a Currier & Ives style sleigh.

A bleak drizzle was trying hard to snow, and from the naked branches of a beech tree a lone cardinal whistled out his song.

With eyes full of mischief, she suddenly tickled Holt under the armpits and grabbed his crotch without warning, before escaping to the storeroom, willing him to follow.

“I’m going to get you for that April,” he obliged in a mock-angry tone, and she could hear him locking the door and drawing the blinds before joining her on the camp bed.

“I mean it. I’m going to spank your butt.” His voice was thick with lascivious intent. And, as April struggled and giggled until she was helpless, he pulled her across his lap, raised her skirt, and gave her a long sensuous spanking on top of her flimsy tap panties.

She was a tall woman, so was able to position herself comfortably for the spanking with her hands and toes on the floor. Holt steadied her with a hand tucked around her hip and swatted away first at one cheek, then the other.

He caressed her ass between spanks and patted the backs of her thighs. April moaned and felt her cunt engorge with passion. She wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer, and would soon reach a blistering orgasm without any sort of genital stimulation. Such was the extent of her excitement when getting her bottom spanked.

She knew Holt sensed this, and eased up on the spanking to try and prolong her pleasure. She groaned and tossed her head from side to side like an unruly mare, and clenched her buttocks furiously.

He rubbed her upper back to calm her and held her legs.

“It’s no use…I can’t last…” she gasped, and he immediately tugged down her panties, leaving them straddled just below her ass. Then he caressed both cheeks before spanking her to orgasm. She thrilled as the powerful contractions ripped through her body and convulsed beneath his hand.

* * * *

Pleasantly exhausted after her amorous adventure, April relaxed on the bus ride home. As they climbed the hill, she could see the massive stone face of Grouse Mountain looming to the north. The lights of its ski run looked like a stairway to heaven. And that’s exactly what she had thought it was, as a child.

At home, Spice wound himself around her legs and purred like a burr saw. She picked him up. “I know you’re happy to see me fella. Now what are we going to have for supper?”

After they had eaten, she returned to Hannah Wilks' unusual story. It was too bad the young woman had been forced into prostitution. For once that happened, it was difficult to break away from the relatively “easy” money this sordid profession offered.

The fact that Hannah had become terrifically aroused while servicing her clients would make it even harder for her to escape its lucrative yet degrading clutches.

However, as the story unfolded, and April moved the reading lamp closer, screwing up her eyes to better see the faded handwriting, Hannah would prove her wrong.

With the earnings from Sophie’s, I am able to retain my lodgings at Raisa’s, buy new clothes, and still put a few coins aside. So that these ill-gotten wages will soon buy my way out of this shame that dogs me every waking minute.

This heartfelt revelation was followed by a gap of several months. During which time Hannah had, true to her word, moved to a respectable boarding house overlooking the beach in English Bay.

It is an idyllic spring in British Columbia, and everywhere I look, there are bright yellow broom flowers, trees swollen with cherry blossoms, and scented magnolias.

My new lodgings are run by a Mrs. Muirhead, who although a staunch Presbyterian, is nevertheless of a fairly cheerful disposition.

But alas, this most agreeable existence cannot last as my small financial resource is rapidly dwindling. And it is, therefore, with the utmost reluctance that I must seek employment.

I manage to secure the position of seamstress at a small tailoring establishment on Granville Street. The hours are long, but not as lengthy as if I was a maid.

The shop caters to a select group of privileged Vancouverites and is owned by a Mr. William Rudge, a craggy-faced gentleman, who has a perpetual drip hanging from the tip of his long beaked nose.

And so, life settles into a predictable pattern of work, home, and church with very little time left over for recreation. Although when the weather is fine, I pack a picnic basket and go to the seashore, which after all, is only a few yards away.

At present, I travel to work by tramcar, but plan to buy a bicycle once my financial situation permits the expenditure. For this is such a popular mode of transport in the city that six-foot-wide cycle-paths run between the gutters and wooden sidewalks on many of the busier streets.

Spice had jumped up on April’s lap while she was reading and competed with the papers for attention. “I love you best,” she assured him. She had now reached a point in the document so scarred with age, it was virtually unreadable. “Time to call it a night,” she said.

But then her interest was captured by the next entry:

Midsummer’s Day 1898––I continue to form a strong attraction to the conductor on the Robson Street tramcar. Feeling at once disappointed if he is not on the tram, and relieved as well. He is tall and dark-haired, no more than three and twenty with the most compelling green eyes. It is not only his good looks, which entrance me, but his extreme pleasantness of manner as well.

* * * *

“I want to get a better sense of the world Hannah knew.” April glanced around the Green Man Bistro, packed with the lunchtime crowd. “The type of house she lived in, the clothes she wore, and how Vancouver looked then.”

“The City Archives would be the best place to start,” Holt advised. “The shop won’t be busy this afternoon, it’s only Monday. Why don’t you go over there now?”

Old maps of Vancouver lined the walls, and April scrutinized them for a while before moving onto sepia-tinted photographs of city streets whose only resemblance to the present were their names.

Men looking very formal in suits, ties and trilbies, walked beside long-skirted women wearing high-necked blouses, opulent hats, and carrying parasols.

So this is how Hannah would have been dressed, April mused. She thumbed her way through a stack of prints until she reached one of a tramcar at the intersection of Georgia and Granville Streets. There was a conductor standing on the running board on the open-sided car to collect fares. He looked very smart in a navy-blue uniform and peaked cap.

* * * *

His name is Tom. I heard the driver call him that as we rounded the corner of Robson and Burrard Streets, almost knocking over a careless cyclist who veered right onto the tracks.

And oh, how I hugged this new knowledge to my fluttering breast with the utmost satisfaction, as images of those sparkling green eyes and thick dark hair cavorted across my mind’s eye.

Tom…Tom…my own darling Tom…

Then I ruminated on how a name at once so ordinary, could suddenly be transformed into pure magic.

A lapse of several months followed this blissful observation. April wondered if the relevant pages had been lost, or if Hannah had simply not put pen to paper again until the following July.

We are suffering through the most blistering of heat waves. Temperatures soar well into the nineties, and the seaside is crammed so thick with bathers that one can scarcely see a grain of sand.

April handled the fragile pages gingerly, careful not to disturb Spice who was purring happily on her lap.

Life for Hannah appeared to be running smoothly. She still lived at the same lodgings run by Mrs. Muirhead. And she mentioned her employment in the tailor’s shop briefly, alluding to it as being long and tedious but not too over taxing.

No wonder she looked forward to the ride home from work on a tramcar with a handsome conductor, April decided.

But what had happened to her budding attraction with the charming Tom, she wondered? And then after several pages of script that detailed Hannah’s dreary existence in a weary, yet accepting way, she found the answer. It seemed that Tom had been moved to another route, leaving her
“Quite bereft with sadness and a profound disappointment.”

So perhaps that was why she had stopped writing for so long? Too depressed to continue with the telling of her sorry saga that consisted of only work and sleep. Except that is, for a church service on Sunday mornings.

And it was there, in the small Methodist Chapel on Bidwell Street, that she had met Ned Beasley, a dapper little widower with bright eyes and a ready smile.

Mr. Beasley is most friendly and chats with me every Sunday on the sidewalk in front of the church, Hannah reported with some enthusiasm. He has invited me for dinner next Friday. A few months later, Ned proposed.

I am torn two ways. On the one hand, I don’t know how much longer I can work in the tailor’s shop. My eyes grow painful and my back and fingers near to breaking. And all for a mere pittance that hardly holds me together. Yet marriage to Mr. Beasley I do not relish. For while he is a pleasant enough gentleman, and certainly secure financially being a wine merchant and successful at that trade, I feel no attraction towards him, either physically or mentally.

So Hannah would have to choose, April brooded, between working twelve hours a day, six days a week in a tailor’s shop, or a loveless marriage of convenience to the uninspiring Ned.

She wavered from one polarity to the other. First deciding that marriage was the sensible course of action for herself, then just as quickly veering away from this carnal sanctuary and determining to remain in the tailor’s shop, or perhaps seeking more suitable employment elsewhere.