The Maid #3
Please the Duke. The children with the striking blue eyes. Matilda, patting her belly like a strongbox. Mrs. Marshton herself, once upon a time, in exactly the same position and parlaying it into power—
She was saying—she could not possibly be saying—that if I let His Grace breed me, like the others, I might one day have the parlor and the fifty pounds and the county tugging its cap?
More than fifty. If he breeds you and you bear his child, it would be at least eighty pounds a year!
“I see, from your wide eyes and rapid breathing, that you take my meaning.” She rose, went to her writing desk, and unlocked the bottom drawer with a key from her chatelaine.
What she drew out was a small book, leather-bound, its spine soft with age and use.
She held it out to me. “Here. Consider this the first of your training materials.”
My hands took it before my honor could object. The cover was stamped in worn gilt letters: A Harlot’s Guide to the Forbidden and Delightful Arts.
“Missus—!”
“I think you’ll find,” she said serenely, “that His Grace prefers a partner who knows exactly how to enjoy herself. Now, why don’t you take yourself up to your room and read a while? Enjoy yourself like a good girl. And do let me know if you have any questions.”
I did not remember leaving the parlor. I remember the corridor, and the back stairs, and the blood roaring in my ears, and my own door shutting behind me, and then I was sitting on my narrow bed with the little book burning a hole in my apron, my cheeks aflame, my heart going like a smith’s hammer.
I should have thrown it in the fire, but I lit my candle instead.
The book was old—older than Gran, maybe older than the Hall—written in a careful, archaic hand, like a monk’s manuscript, if monks concerned themselves with such matters.
And oh, the illustrations. The very first page I opened to showed a woman kneeling before a standing man, her mouth—I slammed the book shut.
I opened it again. The Supplicant Swan, the heading read, page twelve.
I read the whole entry. Then I read it again.
The description was written—and this astonished me more than the picture—from the woman’s point of view.
Not what she must do, but what she would feel.
The weight and the heat of it, the power of holding a man’s pleasure quite literally upon her tongue.
The author wrote of the act like it was a delicacy the woman was enjoying.
I turned pages with trembling fingers. The Burning Bush—a woman seated upon a table, legs spread, a man standing between them. Named thusly because it is said it will make both occupants speak to God.
The woman in the illustration had her head thrown back, and the look upon her face was not endurance. It was rapture.
I had understood, in a vague way, what passed between men and women. Gran’s lessons on the subject had been brief and grim: a wife’s duty, a maiden’s peril. Endure it for babies, avoid it for honor.
No one—no one—had ever told me it was for the woman, too.
There was an entire entry on the pleasures a man’s mouth might give a lady.
There was a passage on oils, and on posterior pleasures, which I read three times with my hand pressed over my lips.
There was page after page of women—drawn women, described women—arching and shuddering and delighting, and somewhere in the middle of it all I realized my thighs were pressed tight together and there was an ache between them like a struck bell.
My nightgown was around my hips before I’d decided anything of the sort.
Churning butter, page fifty-one. Seeking self-pleasure, the woman curls her middle two fingers into her channel, seeking the position of ecstasy.
I touched myself the way the book said a woman might—slowly, and with patience, as one coaxes a fire from an ember—and oh. Oh.
The ember caught. My fingers found the little pearl the Guide named with such reverence, and my whole body jolted like I’d touched a stove, except the burn was sweet, and I did it again, and again, my other hand pressed over my mouth to keep the sounds in, the book falling open on my pillow to the woman on the table with her head thrown back.
I thought of the Duke—whom I had never seen from more than a distance, with his broad shoulders and the children’s deep blue eyes. I thought of him teaching me the pages of this book one by one, patient and wicked, the way he must have taught the others.
I thought of what he did to Matilda, to the blacksmith’s sister, to pretty Mrs. Marshton more than a dozen years ago—and my fingers moved faster, and the ache wound tighter, and the thought that finished me, the thought that broke over me like a wave and left me shaking and gasping into my palm, was this:
He could breed me like a mare, and pay me for the privilege.
I lay in the guttering candlelight for a long time after, boneless and damp and amazed at myself.
Then I blew out the candle, tucked A Harlot’s Guide beneath my pillow, and fell asleep with my hand still resting over my own galloping heart.
I knew exactly what I was going to do.
The next morning, I left off my stays.
It was a small sin, easily hidden—or rather, not hidden at all, which was entirely the point.
Gran had always insisted a decent girl kept herself trussed and tidy, and for nineteen years I had obeyed.
But the Lord had seen fit to give me a bosom like my mother’s—heavy and full and frankly wasted on decency—and without the stays to flatten them, my breasts sat soft and unbound beneath my prim gray bodice, swaying gently with every step, straining against the neat row of buttons whenever I drew breath.
I felt scandalous. I felt magnificent.
I also felt the eyes.
The footmen walked into doorframes with gratifying regularity that first week.
The butler developed a sudden fascination with the ceiling.
And Mrs. Marshton, passing me in the corridor with her arms full of ledgers, stopped, looked me up and down with the practiced eye of a woman who had once run this exact campaign herself, and winked.
By that afternoon, my duties had changed.
Where before I’d been sent to air out distant guest rooms, now I was polishing the library shelves while His Grace read his correspondence.
Dusting the gallery while he took his morning walk through it.
Tending the fire in the small parlor where he liked his afternoon coffee.
Wherever the Duke of Maidenhair happened to be, there I was, reaching up to high shelves so that my bodice pulled tight, or bending low over a grate with my skirts drawn snug behind, sashaying past his chair with a basket of kindling balanced on one hip like a dairymaid in a naughty engraving.
I was not subtle. Subtlety, I had decided, was for girls who could afford to wait.
And he noticed.
Oh, he noticed. I never once caught him staring outright—he was too practiced for that—but I could feel his attention following me about a room like sunlight through a window.
Once, when I bent forward to slowly pick up a dropped rag, my breasts dangled forward, and I swore I heard a stifled groan from him.
Then there was the time I, kneeling at the hearth, glanced up through my lashes and found him watching me over the top of his newspaper, one brow raised, an approving little grin tucked into his silvered beard. He turned the page and said nothing.
My cheeks burned the rest of the day. Not with shame. I was almost certain it wasn’t shame anymore.
Matilda, of course, was furious.
“Some of us,” she hissed at me in the servants’ hall, jostling my elbow so my soup slopped, “know our place.”
“Some of us,” I said sweetly, “lay there like a stick of wood.”
I oughtn’t have said it—I’d never admitted to overhearing that particular conversation—and the way her face went white, then red, then white again was wicked of me to enjoy.
But I was discovering, week by week, that I enjoyed being wicked.
Because every night, I went up to my little room, latched the door, lit my candle, and continued my education.
I read the Guide the way Gran read her Bible—devoutly, nightly, and with complete faith.
I studied the Supplicant Swan until I could have recited it.
I traced the illustration of the Burning Bush and imagined the table was the Duke’s great desk in the study.
I read the entry on the Invasion of Brussels with my knees pressed together and my breath coming in little sips, imagining a bearded mouth in place of my fingers.
And when I came to the pages on breeding—on a woman mounted and filled and kept—I churned butter, as the Guide so charmingly put it, until I had to bite my pillow to keep from waking the house.
I imagined him teaching me every page. Patient, wicked…thorough.
Soon, I promised myself, curled damp and trembling around the little book. Soon.
Sooner than I thought, as it happened.
It was a Tuesday evening when Mrs. Marshton pressed the silver tray into my hands. On it sat a single crystal glass of brandy, amber and glowing in the lamplight.
“His Grace takes his brandy in the study at nine,” she said. Then she reached out, unfastened the top button of my bodice with brisk, motherly efficiency, and patted my cheek. “There. Off you go, my girl.”
The study door was ajar. The Duke sat in a great leather chair by the fire, coat off, cravat loosened, a book open in one hand. He did not look up as I entered, but I saw the corner of his mouth move.
“On the table, if you please,” he said mildly.
The table stood beside his chair. There was no way to set the tray down without leaning across him—which, I understood with a delicious drop of my stomach, was precisely why he’d chosen it.
I leaned. Slowly.
My unbound breasts swung forward against the strained gray wool, scant inches from his face, and I heard—distinctly—the breath he drew through his nose, slow and deep, like a man savoring the first course of a very long dinner.
“Your brandy, Your Grace,” I whispered.