Indigo - The Swordswoman's Tale - Chapter 6

Chapter 6

An Intimate Geopgraphy, by candlelight - Demure & yet Not - Marvellous Gardens - The Consequences of Stiff Clothing - The Smell of Clean - Meditiation upon divers Wherewithals - Names no Schoogirl should know - What was meant

I cannot sleep. I cannot sleep; my mind is filled with thoughts like flickering heat lightning, constantly murmuring of a rumored storm somewhere over the horizon. I cannot sleep, and so I light a lone candle and take up the pen and paper that are never far from me, these days. It seems that only by exercising the very thing that denies me might I get any rest at all, this night.

For all of this tumult (and it is like some deranged clockworks wound up and set loose within my thoughts; it is as if I am on the verge of smelling Cindy’s sweet and cloying perfume, of hearing the happy peal of Jack’s Jess’s laughter, of seeing the burning eyes of that disgraceful priest, that awful crow of Codlatan’s about whom I have not spared a single coherent thought since that day so many years ago I was finally quit of him). All of it has been stirred up by this very act of writing, by the words I set down - was it only this afternoon? I look up, in the flickering shadows, and the things of this room, of my life here and now, seem distant and queer. It is as if I do not know where I am. I have spent fully half my time since my retreat doing precisely this: sitting, at my desk, or upright in my bed, spilling words in ink on paper, calling up the shades of people long since dead, the ghostly memories of conversations spoken years ago, in rooms long since lost, forgotten, destroyed. Small wonder my sleep, then, is so very troubled.

Half my time; the rest, of course, has been spent much like this, as well: lying, in a bed, on a settee, on a rug or carpet or the bare floor, my bare flesh pressed against the flesh of Lucy, or Eliza. Or both. My girls. My girls: the warm weight oppressive but not uncomfortably so; pleasant, for the air now holds only a trace of the day’s heat, an echo only, in these small dead hours of the night. The sticky sleekness of Eliza’s sweat, cooled somewhat, adhering the small of her back rather firmly to my thigh. If I were to move, my skin would peel away from hers, and it would sting, and it would stir her. Disturb her. And so I do not move. Her sister does, though; her head turns restlessly on the pillows, and one hand reaches up to stroke her sister’s hip. Now she is still again, and her breathing once more roughens as she drops back into the deeps of sleep. But the tremor has traveled, from Lucy to Eliza: the crinkle as she stirs of a chemise, laundered this morning, not removed in all we got up to but rucked up still about her breasts, up under her arms, one of which now reaches over me, has just reached over my knees as her head lolls from her sister’s thigh to fall back against the bolster we had gleefully kicked to the foot of the bed - how many hours ago? She snores. Her hair, pale moonstruck gold in this dark room, is spread over my feet, and her sister’s feet. I have just put back the candle. I lifted it, carefully, to carefully hold it over them, to let its lambent glow lick their smooth round curves and warm the pale blue shadows of their skin, bringing to life the reds and yellows, the colors of good summer wine, the flesh of peaches, of pears, rich autumn leaves, gold and amber and rubies. I drank them all in with thirsty eyes. The hollows and curves of their hidden places, secret, hidden no longer. Lucy’s cunny, folded in on itself now, a simple cleft, a crease in her creamy skin with no hint at all of the extravagant night-blooming flower whose velvety red petals I spread with my fingers and whose musky dew I sipped, not an hour ago. She seems almost demure - if that word could ever be applied to anything between thighs so bare and lewdly spread. Lucy is a restless sleeper, and insists the past few nights have been too warm for bedclothes or nightgowns of any sort; she lies naked atop whichever bed she finds for herself when sleep arrives, and in the morning has kicked pillows and bolsters and blankets all to the floor.

Two nights ago, I awoke suddenly to see her standing before the tall windows in the room they have taken as their own, one hand on the latch, cold moonlight limning her nipples, her hips, her cheek and her knee, and snarled in her golden hair. I stepped up silently behind her, thinking to warm her chilled skin (protestations aside, it does get cold here at night, even in a summer this late and hot and dry), and she started awake when my arms went about her, and for a moment I thought she would flee, would cry out, would turn and pummel me, so tense did her body become. Instead, after one long frozen moment, she melted into my embrace, and chuckled when I kissed the cool skin in that unnamed place where the throat becomes the shoulder. She turned in my arms and pressed herself to me, sealed her body to mine as she turned her face up so that she might seal her lips to mine, and then, her tongue having tasted as much of my mouth as it could, she began almost desperately to suckle at my breasts, one and then the other, grunting and slurping, her lips and teeth searing my nipples - and through them the back of my neck, my clenching jaw, even the fingers I tangled in her hair - with short but savage bursts of not unwanted pain. I felt her fingers steal between my legs, and they found me slick and open and suddenly slipped within. I gasped, and then I moaned, and this girl who had but moments before been dreaming before the windows dropped to her knees and peeled me open and began to eat me hungrily, and the force of her and the tremors that shivered through me shook me so that I set my feet as if for fencing, leaned one hand against the dry old wood of the window frame and braced the other upon the back of her head to urge her on and in, and when at last I could hold back no longer my cries awoke Eliza, who climbed sleepily from the high bed and came to hold me, pressed her sleep-warm breasts against my now-chilled back. When Lucy stood, smiling, her face gleaming in the dark, Eliza leaned forward and licked my spendings from her sister’s lips.

...Here and now, Eliza stirs again. Lost in my recollection I let my legs fall open, and my hips shifted restlessly as if Lucy’s mouth were still glued to my pussy. It appears not to have been enough to wake her. She has rolled back on her side, her hand lifting from my shins to reach across her sister’s belly; her head rolls from the bolster back onto her sister’s thigh. Lucy sighs. The small tangle of hair above her demurely wanton cunny stirs with her sister’s dreaming breath.

I meant, of course, not to write so much of what has happened this past week as to continue my shadow history. I have made a brave start, I think: but where to, now? Whose ghosts shall I next conjure? Mistress Edna Hobart, and her School? Myra, and her mother, the Lady Frances? My trip with them to the Continent? My aunt, and my uncle who was not my uncle? I feel them all tugging at me: I can close my eyes and I am there, at Mistress Hobart’s: it is dark, but for a single candle, and Myra and I lie to either side of Miss Pirie as she reads to us. I can hear her voice even now, a quiet, smiling whisper: “In pity to our sex sure thou wert sent, that we might love, and yet be innocent; for sure no crime with thee we can commit; or if we should - thy form excuses it.” I wonder: do I have, in this house, a copy of Luisa Sigea? “I am viewing this field of Meleva with curious longing; it is neither wide nor spacious, but full of the sweetest delights; inexhaustible Meleva shall herein waste away the force of thy Tarow... But I am well aware that no pleasure can accrue to thee from a maiden as I am, nor to me from thee either, even though thou wast really as a marvellous garden of all delicacies and attractions...” My marvellous little gardens, Miss Pirie called us.

The small hours of the morning: it has been one week since Molly was killed.

...I do not know what Eliza was reading in the library this afternoon, where I found her. I did not register the words printed on the pages from which I lifted her cool, limp hands, for my thoughts then were then quite tightly focussed on other things. I led her with courtier’s kisses lavished on her knuckles and the pale undersides of her wrists down the back stairs and into the garden, filled with the heat and the light of the slowly setting sun. There I unlaced her and yanked apart stays until the stiff black shell of the dress she wore cracked in half and peeled away from the soft white skin of her back, which bore in faint reddened imprints the dress’s design pricked out in satin and in velvet, and the cruel marks of the grommets and stays at the back of her neck and between her shoulderblades; even the lacey pattern of the straps and yoke of the chemise she wore underneath, crinkled and gone sour within the unforgiving strictures of that dress. I tugged her chemise free and lifted it over her head and tossed it aside even as that great black dress fell slowly as a collapsing trifle past her hips and thighs; I pulled it further down, prodding her to step out of it, her stockinged feet slipping a little on the satin of the skirts; I knelt before her and untied the ribbons of those stockings, the soles of them blackened and worn through from walking slipperless through this great old house of mine, and I tugged them from her long, slim legs and left her naked in my garden, her hair still piled atop her head in a clumsy coiffure en cadennetes, her mouth open in surprise all the while, and her eyes wide, taking in the sight of what my maid was doing to her sister there beneath the swing. And then I did to her all the things I’d murmured that I’d do as I stripped her bare, and only once in the whole time did she say anything at all: when at last I stood, to make room for Clarissa’s greedy mouth; when she suddenly realized Lucy was kneeling behind her, spreading her buttocks with sticky fingers and a hungry tongue - then her eyes grew wide, and she reached out with one hand, unsteady: “No,” she said, “oh, please, no--” But I stopped her words with kisses, and she clung to me, her fists knotted in my shirt, and she bit my lip, and then her own, the second time she orgasmed.

Then, later, because we were lazy, and sated, and hooks and eyes and laces were too much for our slippery fingers and sleepy eyes, I told Clarissa (servant now, and no longer playmate) to fetch us fresh chemises along with a simple picnic dinner: bread and fresh grapes, pears in vinegar, cold roast fowl from the night previous and a bottle of green summer’s wine from the cold room, and a bottle of sack for me. When Clarissa brought it all to us, and blankets to lay it upon, Eliza (sulky, I think, at the sudden intrusion of one of the boys from the kitchen, who’d helped Clarissa carry it all) snatched one of the chemises from Clarissa’s hands and pulled it on: the one she yet wears, in fact. But Lucy lay back still naked on the blanket, preening for the boy; her sister; Clarissa; all of us: her arms spread wide, her breasts not yet grown fully in spread almost flat by her arched back, her bare little feet tucked one over the other, her mad, chaotic hair undone and spread like a fan beneath her head, the same unearthly color as that écu beneath her belly, above her thighs, glowing uncertainly in the lowering light. “I shall most certainly not,” she said, to Clarissa’s proffered garments. “Never again. I shall stay naked the rest of my days. And nights.”

“Don’t be a little fool,” said Eliza.

“Clothing is wicked,” said Lucy. “Papa said so.”

“He said no such thing.”

“He did. He did. He told us we must never wear bloomers nor knickers, for the cloth rubs and stimulates and would bring on the furor.”

“Lucy!”

Lucy wrapped her arms about her pretty little breasts and spread her legs, and her pale blue eyes were full of wickedness as she stirred her hips restlessly on the blanket. I could see the insides of her thighs still gleamed faintly from our kisses, and her spendings. “I could not stand to be rubbed and stimulated any further,” she said, and pouted. “My skin is all on fire,” she said, and unfolded her arms to take a little breast in each hand, dallying about her nipples with her fingers almost absent-mindedly. “I don’t doubt that if I were to put that awful heavy cloth on, it would rub and stimulate until my bubbies should burst into flame.”

“You mustn’t say such things,” says Eliza, who snatched up another chemise and threw it at Lucy.

“What do you mean?” says Lucy, who showed no signs of putting it on.

“She means,” I said, smiling to watch her flirt so shamelessly, “that words like ‘bubbies’ ain’t exactly lady-like.”

“You’ll catch a chill,” said Eliza, which was, perhaps, absurd; there is nothing especially warm about a chemise.

“Then you shall keep me warm!” cried Lucy, who leaped up and sprang on her sister, pulling her down, giggling and kissing her, tugging at Eliza’s chemise and trying to pull it off. But Eliza was having none of it, shaking her head and trying to pull away. “No,” she cried. “No. Please. Don’t.”

And so I promised to put on a chemise myself, if Lucy would sit still and wear one and eat quietly and leave her sister alone. I did: I scooped up the third freshly laundered chemise Clarissa had brought, for me, despite the fact I’d only intended to crawl back into my pantaloons and blouse; it felt stiff in my wine-dulled fingers, but still it stirred some memory deep within me. I stood there and held it to my nose for a long moment. The scent is indescribable: it is clean; it is fresh; it is cool cotton lawn with a hint of soap. It is the smell all clean things are compared to, and found wanting. I had suggested this little charade as something of a joke, a lark to distract the girls, but I was curiously moved when I lifted the thing above my head and wormed my way into it, settled the wide plain straps on either shoulder, and smoothed the rough short skirt still creased from the laundry against my hips and buttocks. I stood there, lost for a moment in some other place, and time - and then Lucy laughed again, and said that it was so very odd to see me dressed as a proper girl. And so I turned girlishly, and pirouetted in some grotesque parody of girlish glee. Or so it seemed to me; Lucy clapped her hands delightedly, and Eliza smiled to see it. I blew kisses to them, sashayed coquettishly from side to side, pretended to be dismayed that my chemise was too short, and that I had no drawers to cover myself. Then I fell to the blanket and drank more wine. Giggling, they fell upon me, one to either side, bowling me over onto my back to tickle me and feed me grapes and pears and torn bread, and more wine.

“You do look most peculiar,” Eliza said to me, “in a woman’s undergarment.”

“I feel most peculiar,” I said.

“I say she is now our new sister,” said Lucy, popping a sharply sour piece of pear between my lips, and licking at the vinegar that dribbled from the corner of my mouth.

“It is so much nicer than your ratty pantaloons,” said Eliza. Though I recall she looked away as she said it.

“My pantaloons,” I said, pulling my mouth away from Lucy’s, “are comfortable. My legs are cold.” My legs are cold now, though the warmth that has stirred thickly in my loins grows more insistent as I write these words.

It seems that to find sleep tonight, I am not to write of what happened so long ago, for my restless thoughts keep circling back to what happened this afternoon and evening. Very well: Lucy never did put on a chemise, or the simple dress whose skirts Clarissa had burrowed beneath, so much earlier today. Her nipples were stiff with the growing chill, cold little pebbles that I pinched between my fingers. She shivered, but she laughed. Inside, as Lucy, shrieking, pelted down the hall to clamber into my bed, Eliza caught my hand in hers and held me back. I turned, but she would not look up at me, just pulled me closer and closer yet, her hands brushing the cotton lawn along my flanks, my hips, and then my buttocks. She did not look me in the eyes, even as she tilted her head up for a kiss, and then another kiss, and another, and then her hands, no longer cool, pale, limp, resting motionless on the pages of some book, but desperate creatures seeking to feed upon my flesh, plunging under the hem of my chemise to clench my buttocks, my thigh, my back, scrabbling up along my belly to my breasts, as if to rend me open then and there, to fuck me with such a force, a violence, a finality, that there would be nothing left. I held her tightly and she clung to me, her burning face pressed tightly to my throat, and I felt the hot trickle of tears. “I hate you,” she said, and her voice was calm and quite deliberate.

“I know,” I said.

Her shoulders shook once, with a sob she could not release. I took her chin in my hand and tilted up her head against her will. I looked her in the eyes, to find them grey and green and full of tears. I kissed them away.

“Thank you,” she whispered, so softly I almost did not hear the words, though I felt the breath of their passing against my skin.

“Your sister is an impatient girl,” was the only answer I could make.

I do not know quite what possessed me to pull the old wherewithals from their trunk. I suppose it might have something to do with writing this morning of that mad old priest, and my childhood fascination with his damned prick. Odd, perhaps, that while they play very little part in my bedded sport, I have collected so many through the years: of polished wood, of marble and of glass; the hilt of Jeanne’s old Elishat sword, wrapped in worn leather thongs; a Stiléan godemiche, with a velvet cover. Blast! I almost said the word aloud, and instead I scribble it. At some point wax was spilled upon the godemiche. Soft, pearly yellow runnels curl about it, as if it were a real, live yard and had spent itself in the course of our enjoyment. It is cool now, of course, and not so stiff. When I picked the wax away faint stains from the grease were left on the dulled velvet sacking. I spilled it, I think, when I lifted the candle to look at my girls.

...Their eyes had grown wide at this unexpected cornucopia. Lucy snatched up the dildoe made of glass and held it before the candle, watching her fingers through its cool green length, wavery and full of tiny trapped bubbles; Eliza did not touch any of them, not yet - but though her smile was uncertain, it was yet a smile.

“What are these?” she asked.

“Wherewithals,” says I, kneeling bare-assed in that chemise at the foot of my bed. “‘Especial friends.’ Dildoes. The only part of a man you’d ever want to dally with.”

Lucy looks up sharply at that. “What,” she said, “do you mean that these are..?”

“Pricks,” I said. “Pegoes. Yards. The member, the hose, the sinew, the lover’s lance. Old John Thomas One-Eye, his dead weight cut away. Rag Yagghe’s dart, rendered up for nothing less than your own enjoyment.”

“They are wicked things,” said Eliza, as I was fairly certain she would.

“Do you trust me?” I asks her, very serious.

And she looks at me, and her eyes are very serious indeed. “Why,” she asks. “Why do you ask me that?”

“After all I’ve done,” I said. “After these seven days past. Do you trust me?”

Eliza sat at the head of the bed, leaning back against the pillows, one arm spread along them as if ready to sweep her sister into a protective embrace, her long bare legs folded together and her hips turned on one side to hide herself away. Lucy sat on the edge of the bed, still naked, the green glass dildoe still in her hands, her back to her sister’s buttocks, looking over her shoulder at Eliza, then at me. Eliza’s eyes had gone from serious to fierce. “Have we any choice?” she asked.

I leaned forward, planting my hands on the counterpane mere inches from her crossed shins, her ankles tucked one over the other, and I faced those eyes with my own. “You will always have a choice,” I said. And then (and I admit I was conceding the field a little, by letting her know something of what I meant to do, rather than pressing for her unconditional acceptance) I smiled and said, “If you trust me, I will show you how wicked these things can be.”

At that she looked away - but not with nodding, once, slightly. Her lips parted in a shallow sigh.

“Lucy,” I said, not taking my eyes from Eliza’s face, “your sister must be made ready.”

Lucy nodded, and set the dildoe to one side, still smiling, but somehow more solemn. She climbed up onto the bed and knelt over Eliza and kissed her mouth, and I did not move but waited there, watching as they kissed, until Eliza slowly unhooked one ankle and lifted one knee, rolling her hips over and spreading her thighs as her chemise rode up and up, and Lucy’s hand stole down to find her sister’s cunny.

I climbed from the bed and lit a brazier, blowing the coals to life. Eliza murmured something as Lucy nibbled at her throat. I turned to my commode and poured water from the pitcher into the bowl, which I set in the ring atop the brazier - where it balanced uncertainly. Eliza moaned. “Lucy,” I warned. “I told you make her ready, not use her all up. Don’t be selfish.”

Lucy’s giggles were muffled by her sister’s breast.

“What are you doing?” asked Eliza.

“Warming it up,” I said. I lifted the godemiche and slipped it from its velvet sacking. It was cool then, as it is now, and soft and pliant to the touch. I squeezed it a little, eyeing the waxed seams to make certain that none of the oil within was leaking out; there having been some time since it had last been used, I did not want it to burst. But all seemed well. I slipped it into the water, then climbed back onto the bed. Lucy had completed her brief journey down Eliza’s body: on her knees, her hips high in the air, her face buried in her sister’s sex, her hands resting on Eliza’s thighs. She is so wanton, so beautiful. So tempting. I wanted to take up a dildoe, any dildoe, and sink it into her cunny then and there, up to the hilt in her pretty pouting womanhood that floated in the air before me, between her slender thighs spread wide to brace her, beneath her small round buttocks, tantalizing, glistening. Maddening. But that was not what I had in mind. It was not without some effort, mind: but I contented myself with spreading her wet lips with my thumbs and laying a kiss there and smiling as she squealed. I kissed her deeply, sucked up the sweet musk of her, the faintly sour smell of her sweat and a hint of grass from my garden, rubbed into one grubby little heel. I kissed her cunny, and felt her back arch at the touch of my lips, her hips sway to urge my tongue on, to do to her what her mouth and tongue were doing to Eliza. I wanted to. I wanted to go on. I did not. “How is she?” I asked, rocking back on my heels, licking my lips.

Lucy looked back at me, then rolled over on her side, between Eliza’s thighs, her head in Eliza’s lap. “Lovely,” she said. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Well?” said Eliza, playing with Lucy’s hair and not quite looking at me, a shallow and distracted smile on her face.

“Now,” I said, lifting my arms, “Lucy must make me ready.”

Lucy popped up eagerly and surged at me, trying to kiss me; I stopped her with an upraised hand. “Not like that,” I said. She bit my finger, playfully. “Take off my chemise.” I held out my arms. She snatched at the hem and lifted it, roughly, catching the yoke under my chin so that I had to turn my head to work it free. She threw it into the corner and then, suddenly tender, put one little hand on my cheek, her finger barely brushing my lips. I licked it, and held up the Elishat codpiece. “Now buckle this about my waist.” Her eyes grew wide, her smile puzzled, but still a smile.

Eliza stirred restlessly. “What are you going to do?” One hand strayed over her cunny, and toyed a moment with her écu, then suddenly tugged at the hem of her chemise, pulling it down over her belly.

“All will become clear,” I said. Lucy was leaning into me, pressing herself to me as she reached around my waist to wrap the thin leather belt about my hips. I closed my eyes and smelled her hair, damp with sweat, still leaking heat from the faded sun, and I pressed my cheek against hers. She backed away, looking down, her hands fumbling with the unfamiliar buckle. I let them fumble and watched her, watched Eliza, my heart swelling with something unnameable. My heart? My cunt, my belly, my throat, my mouth. My eyes. My hands. My hips, that already longed to pump long and clean and clear into them, into Lucy, into Eliza, until their faces turned up and away from mine and towards something we all can see but briefly, and never remember afterwards. My heart, I think, had little to do with it.

At last I said, “Like this,” and took the ends of the belt from her hands and knotted the one through the other, tucking it away against my skin. The third strand was left dangling. She touched it, running her fingers along its length until she came to the wide-mouthed ring which hangs directly over the sex. She tickled me through that ring, playing lightly over my hair, over my pussy already hot and soaked with what I wanted. I shook my head and did not shiver. “No,” I said. “Not yet.”

“Now?” said Eliza. “Now?” (“Who?” I heard echoing in her voice, “who? who?”) “Now what?”

I kissed Lucy, and stood, and reached out to pluck the godemiche from its hot bath. It had warmed through, as hot as blood, and was now quite firm. I do not know what trick it is - the oil, or the skin from which it is constructed: some say the godemiche can only be made from the intestines of the catamount of Punjistan, and infused oils blessed by the spittle of a holy rafsan-johnnie; I think that’s flowery patter to puff up sheep’s guts and some mineral oil that does not sour or grow stale. To be honest, the how of it all rarely crosses my mind unless I am about to use it, and at that point the last thing I wish is to quibble. I slipped it, a warm, almost living thing, into its soft worn velvet sheath, and took up the little buckler I modified some years ago to hold it, somewhat upright, between the ring of the codpiece and the mound of my sex. Lucy had gone back to her sister again, was lying beside her, tugging the yoke of her chemise aside to suckle at one breast as she gently played with Eliza’s cunny. “Lucy,” I said, sternly. “Lucy, girl, I still need your help.”

They looked up at me, standing there, my parodic prick in one hand, and their eyes grew wide, but for different reasons. Lucy’s pale cornflower blue were full of surprise, and not a little delight. Eliza’s dusky storm-tossed green were also surprised, but touched with shock and consternation.

“Do you still trust me?” I said.

But she had already nodded, earlier. Once. Slightly. It was too late to back out, now. And Lucy had left her, was clambering off the bed and dashing to me. She clapped her hands and bounced upon the balls of her feet. “It’s wonderful!” she said. “You have a prick!”

“Stand behind me,” I said, “and reach between my thighs. Pull the strap through, pull it snug, and tie it off at the buckle there.” I never looked away from Eliza as I said it, and she never looked away from me. Lucy pressed close against my back, closer than she needed to. She kissed my shoulder. I could feel her nipples harden against my skin, her breasts swelling with a breath. The crispy tangle of her écu tickled my thighs. She reached around me to push the strap between my thighs. “That’s not how I told you to do it,” I said.

She stood on her toes to murmur, “This is more fun,” directly into my ear. She moved around to my side, kissing my shoulder again, pulling the strap taut. The buckler caught awkwardly, and I adjusted it as she fed the strap through the buckle. “Tighter,” I said, and she pulled it tighter. I checked the buckle. The godemiche wobbled as I let it go, but stayed upright. Lucy touched it, ran her fingers along its velvet skin, pushed down on it. It gave a little, and bobbed right back when she took her hand away. “What is it?” she asked.

“A godemiche,” I said.

“And what is it for?”

“I’m going to put this in your sister’s cunny,” I said, “and fuck her silly.” I reached between my legs, beneath the ring, and ran my fingers along myself. They came out wet and oily. I rubbed them along the length of my fake prick. “But first, we must make it ready, too.”

“How?” asked Lucy.

I answered her by grabbing her about her waist and picking her up, dropping her on her back on the bed. She shrieked and giggled. Eliza merely shrieked, swarming up to protect her sister out of reflex. Laughing, I plunged my hand between Lucy’s legs and she shrieked and giggled all the harder. Eliza rocked back on her heels. Lucy was wetter even than I had been, and I slipped a finger easily inside her, quickly, stirring the pot a little as her hips stirred to my touch. And then I pulled back from her, and rubbed my wetter and more oily fingers again along the godemiche. “It must be wet,” I said. “Wet and ready for your sister. It’s not. Not yet.”

“What must we do?” said Lucy.

“You must kiss it,” I said.

“Like this?” said Lucy, sitting up on the bed.

“Don’t,” said Eliza.

Lucy took the godemiche in one hand and pulled me closer, closing her eyes. She brought it to her mouth and licked the tip of it, tasting the velvet, tasting me, tasting herself. And then she opened her mouth and sucked in its head, which I never expected to see her do unbidden.

“No,” said Eliza. “Lucy, you mustn’t.”

“It’s for you,” said Lucy. She kissed the tip of the godemiche. “It must be made ready for you.”

“No,” said Eliza.

I looked at her, and did not ask a third time if she trusted me. She got up on her knees and crawled across to the edge of the bed, beside her sister, who was licking the length of my false prick. Eliza took Lucy’s head in her hands, and shook her own. Lucy sat back, and Eliza kissed her, and opened her mouth to her, and smoothed her hair with one gentle hand. “I will,” she said. Firmly. —And then Eliza grabbed the belt of the Elishat codpiece and yanked me closer to the edge of the bed, and with her other hand she guided the godemiche into her mouth. She bobbed it between her lips twice or thrice, and then began licking its length, darkening the worn nap with her spittle. Blessing it. Lucy sat beside her and offered her own benediction: two wetly shining fingers she slid along the length, pausing to let Eliza kiss them, and then to kiss Eliza.

It was time. Oh, it was past time. “Lucy, sit behind your sister,” I said, and she did so. “Lean back against that bolster. Spread your legs,” I said to Eliza, and she did so. “Is she ready?” I asked, and Lucy reached around her sister and felt her sex, and Eliza melted back into Lucy’s embrace, shivering a little, her eyes shut tight as she laid her head on her sister’s breast, and her sister lay back against the bolster.

“You are so lovely,” murmured Lucy to Eliza.

“I’m frightened,” whispered Eliza.

I paused, my knees on the edge of the bed. “Have you?” I asked. Neither girl looked up at me. “Eliza. Has someone - has a man ever done this to you? Has this been done to you before?”

She opened her legs even further, tangling her feet with Lucy’s. Her sex was red and open and panting, weeping. Lucy’s arms wrapped tightly about her. “Would it matter,” said Eliza, not looking at me, “if it has?”

“Yes,” I said, leaning my weight on the bed. Placing one hand beside their hips and hovering over them. “I would start carefully and easily if it has not.”

She squeezed her eyes shut again and bit her lip, and nodded. “It has,” she said, her voice barely audible.

I was as good as my word.

The godemiche slipped with some little effort cleanly into her in one smooth, long thrust, until the ring of the codpiece was pressed against her, until my belly was pressed against hers, until my nose touched hers and my lips brushed hers and I could with a simple turn of my head kiss her sister, which I did. We lay there a moment, unmoving: Lucy, lying back against the bolster, her legs spread wide, her arms about Eliza, her hands at her soft breasts; Eliza, lying back in Lucy’s arms, her head back against Lucy’s shoulder, her feet braced against Lucy’s on the slippery bedsheets; and me, atop Eliza, within her, inside her. Fucking her. I pulled back, drawing almost the whole length of the godemiche out of her, and watched her mouth work as she felt it moving in her, the length of it, the warmth, so firm and full and yet soft, too. Alive, almost. Watched Lucy watch her, her eyes alive with wondering, at what it must feel like, what it must be doing to her sister. She brought one hand to Eliza’s face and cupped her cheek, laid one finger along her lips. I pumped forward again, driving it all inside her. And back. And forth, and back. In and out as her hips began to move with my thrusts, and she began to gasp, wordlessly. Her arms wrapped around my waist and held me as Lucy’s held her. In and out, finally, as I’d wanted to be doing ever since I’d laid out those wherewithals now clattering to the floor with the heightening ferocity of our sex. It seems like it had been hours; it had, perhaps, been a quarter of one. A sixth. Ten minutes.

And how long has it taken me to write of it? An hour? Two? It seems like moments, but the candle is half as tall as it was when I began, and the room is cooler, though I am quite warm within. And still not the least bit sleepy. My mind still races, faster now. Though Lucy and Eliza have no trouble sleeping, still; have turned on their sides to face each other, beautiful mirrors entwined, heads lying on thighs and arms about hips in a lovely, innocent pastiche of the carnal delight the Stiléans call soixante-neuf: the six and the nine.

Then, though: mere hours ago: preliminary salvos fired and opening engagement made: I managed to mutter, “Lucy, let go,” and she did, as I muttered, “Eliza, hold on, tightly,” and she did, as I rocked back on my heels, lifting her up and away from her sister, guiding her hips with one hand so that she did not fall away, so that we did not become separated. Sitting now, me on my heels, my thighs together, Eliza on my lap, her legs spread and unfolded slightly so her knees could rest upon the bed, the hem of her chemise falling down her body to flutter about her hips, hiding my hands away. Sitting upright, the both of us, her arms about me, the godemiche buried deep within her, stilled for just this moment; her breasts now above mine, her face above mine, though her mouth was in reach. I kissed it, and she kissed right back, opened her lips and let loose her tongue to meet mine as her hands swarmed along my skin, desperate creatures again, hungry, dangerous. I felt her nails. Lucy sat up behind her, and pressed close against Eliza’s back, her hands gentle - if sticky - on my hips.

“’Liza?” she asked. “How does it feel? What is it like?”

“Oh,” said Eliza. “Oh.” I lifted her hips with my hands and felt her, almost as if it were a part of me within her, and not some proxy of cloth and sheep’s gut; felt dimly the very walls of her sliding past, filled and stroked by the slick, worn nap of old velvet, filled and warmed by the long thick sausage filled almost to bursting with oil as thick and hot as blood. I let go her hips, and she settled of her own accord, the godemiche sinking deep within her again. Delighted with this new power, Eliza raised herself, and lowered herself; raised and lowered again, building momentum as she filled herself with me at her own pace.

“How does it feel?” asked Lucy again.

“Do you like it?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said, breathless, “oh, yes. It almost hurts. But... it doesn’t.”

I thought that an odd thing to say. “It almost hurts?”

“It feels delicious,” she said.

“I want to try it,” said Lucy.

“In time,” I said. “Your turn will come.” And Lucy kissed me, hugging her sister tightly between us, and then Eliza turned her head and kissed her, and pressed her sister’s hand to her breast, through the thin cotton of the chemise she yet wore. And then Eliza looked at me, bucking her hips more quickly now, her head bobbing a little as she kept her eyes fixed on mine while her hips began to fuck in earnest, the muscles in her thighs tensing and relaxing, hollowing and growing full as she lifted and fell, lifted and fell, filled herself up and lifted herself almost free, and with a small and wicked smile she said, “It is the spear, burning in the belly of Maghteh Ewyk.” And if I did not stop to remark on it then, I do now: Eliza, it seems, knows something of the Hunter’s Mysteries. Another question to add to the growing list of mysteries about my girls, questions I shall most likely never have answered, if I am honest with myself, and with our chances, with what shall most likely happen within this month, or the next at the very latest. Then, though; then I smiled, and kissed her. “Better,” I asked, “than Benen Cares?”

“Meleva Honey-Sipper,” she said.

“Powsmorel,” I said. “Rennyas.”

“Liuitin Lorgai Nochta,” she said. “Lywganow.”

“Nagothvos and Rosenruth. Howldrehevelagas.”

“Rundiamhair,” she said. All of these names no schoolgirl should know. What books, I wonder, thinking of Miss Pirie, of Luisa Sigea and of L’Escole des Filles passed from bed to bed in the night - what books do they read now in those schools, that she should know these names? “Gotacheireog,” she said, her accent passable. “Maighdean. Though,” and she laughed, her hips moving faster, her belly bucking, her breasts bumping mine, her nails digging into the flesh of my buttocks, “not, not anymore.”

“You weren’t when you came into my bed,” I said. “...Unless you were lying to me.”

“Nyhanow,” she said, suddenly serious, “Nyhanow Benen Noweth.”

“Bealdatha,” I said. “Lywganow.”

“I... I said that one. Already. Oh.”

“Uguldamak,” I said - an evil omen, perhaps; I think of Her in that guise, weeping over the dead. Uguldamak does not belong in a bed with girls like this. Like me. “Uyluk Çorak,” I said. Eliza frowned. “One of Her oldest names,” I said. “An Archeioi name. She walks with bulls and serpents, and wears a pretty band about, about Her left thigh. High up, so Her skirts hide it, and only Her lovers, those She favors above all others, might see it. Uyluk Çorak.”

“Oilek,” she said, “Oh. Oiluk Choruk.”

“Uyluk Çorak.”

“Uyluk. Uyluk Shorak. Oh. Oh.”

“Lucy,” I said. “Move aside. I must lay your sister down.” For it was time: Eliza’s eyes were closed now, her mouth open, her breaths were almost grunts, almost pants, her hands were heavy on my hips, and if her nails had still been dug into my flesh she would have drawn blood. She was pounding the godemiche into herself, slamming it, and slamming the ring of the codpiece against my sex, which was not pleasant. I caught her back with one arm as I leaned forward and she toppled from my lap, and I laid her on the bed where her sister had been, half-propped upon the bolster, and as her legs fell open I hooked my other arm behind her knee and lifted it, a little. Her eyes flew open at this. “Trust me,” I said. “You have so far.” Raising myself up above her, I hooked her other knee likewise. “Lift them,” I said. “Raise them up. To my shoulders.” Biting her lip, she did. Her feet high in the air, her thighs against my breasts, my godemiche poised within her cunny. Our angle, of course, had changed. And she could feel that. “Lucy,” I said. “Come lie beside your sister.”

Lucy did, pressing close, kissing Eliza, her feet rubbing restlessly against my calf. I took a deep breath, and pulled my hips up, and then I sank the godemiche within her, deeply. Deeper than it had yet gone. Pressing differently, in different ways. The spear now truly burning deep within the belly of Maghteth Ewyk. Eliza grunted with the thrust, and groaned, and I did then think of hunting deer in winter: of the sound a blade makes as it punches through skin, of the patter of hot, rich blood eating through the frozen crust of snow. I drove my spear within her again, and again. Harder. Deeper. Faster. She groaned with the force of it, her face screwed up with intensity: intense desire, intense pleasure, intense concentration, intense pain. She was overwhelmed. She did not know that her sister kissed her cheek and held her close and licked her ear. All she knew was the godemiche deep within her and how it felt driving into her, over and over; all she knew was her pussy stretched open and wrapped around a warm, firm thing, her lips pulsing, her nubbin burning, her belly rammed full of light. She said things, many things: she called out to Meleva again, and Benen Cares, though Her other names seemed beyond her. I might well have missed them. She moaned something in schoolgirl’s Stiléan. “Take me,” she said. It might have been “Break me.” Or “Make me.” “Do it!” she cried. And I? I felt nothing. My body was a smoothly running clockworks that would never wind down. All I felt was the desire to see her, to know that she was almost there. To watch for that moment when her face turned away from me and the rest of this world. I needed more than anything to see that. But her head began tossing back and forth, her feet to kick, one of them sliding free from my shoulder. She began to hit me, hard, on my shoulders. “No, no,” she cried, “no! Stop! No! Oh, oh no!” Something had shifted in her face: her eyes were now squeezed shut in dismay and not passion, her mouth open in pain and not joy. I pulled back, and pulled out - plop! - and leaned back away from her. She rolled over on her side, drawing her bare legs up to her chest, wrapping her arms about them. Breathing heavily. “You hurt her!” cried Lucy, glaring at me, fiercely.

“No,” said Eliza, “no.” Lucy leaned over and kissed her, and stroked her hair. “No,” said Eliza. “It was wonderful. It was just - too much. I couldn’t - I couldn’t. Not any more.”

“But it hurt?” said Lucy, in a small voice.

“Yes,” said Eliza. She frowned. “No. It was wonderful. But it was... it was too much.”

...I can tell you that at that moment I was kneeling on my bed; that I could feel the rough nap of the topmost blanket on the tops of my feet, pressed against it by my weight, which sat mostly over my heels; I can tell you that the green glass dildoe was cool against my left shin; my hips still can recall the cant of the godemiche, in that Elishat codpiece; the ghost of its straps still cuts across my skin there, and along my buttocks; I can summon up the weight of our exertions in my chest, and the sound my blood made, roaring in my ears, and I can remember how my sight was blurred a little by its pulsing, and that even the tip of that godemiche trembled to its rhythm; I can tell you that my skin was sheathed in sweat like some loose and slippery garment, a slick second skin that gathered in drops and runnels where my arms brushed my breasts and flanks, down my back where it flowed in squeezings from my hair, pooling in the hollowed notch of my clavicle, soaking the bedclothes beneath my knees where it ran together from my thighs and calves. I can tell you what they looked like, the sight of them burned into my memory by the light of the candles blazing on the night-table, the stand, the commode, the mirror-candles shining from within the silvered mirror: Eliza so spent, so wasted, her legs curled up and her chemise pulled down in an almost pitiable attempt to pull herself back from where she’d almost been; Lucy curled around her, her golden hair spilled down as she kissed Eliza’s cheek to tangle with her sister’s hair, so very like it in color and in texture that the one cannot be told from the other, her hands wrapped about her sister’s hands, hands that have invaded her sister’s sex, have done things they would never have dreamed of doing - or if dreamed, if dreamed, would never have done, would never have known how to do, or what, had it not been for me, for things I have done, for actions I have taken. I can tell you all of this, but I cannot tell you whether at that moment in time - not just that moment, but throughout my ferocious fucking - I cannot tell you if even once I thought what I now cannot help but be consumed by: my fire-lit ride along the Wandike one week ago; my devouring need to find these girls, these daughters of a minor noble, this mad obsession, to fling them into the dust and wrench from them what meagre satisfaction I could. The spear, burning in the belly of Maghteh Ewyk; Uguldamak, howling. I do not know. I cannot tell you if I set out to hurt her, to brutalize her; rend her, rape her as I raped her then, with my hands, with my mouth, with her father’s death. I cannot tell you if it occurred to me then to grab Lucy, to lift her and drop her on her belly, bent over the edge of the bed as I stood behind her and stabbed her, impaled her, fucked her pretty pouting pussy until she cried out, and looked away...

It seems so clear to me now that of course that is what I must have done. Have thought. Have wanted.

But I have no memory of it. It is as if...

It is as if I were empty; cored out; dry. Poured forth. Burnt clean. Thoughtless, affectless, emotionless, I sat back on my heels and watched as Lucy kissed her sister, and stroked her hair, and held her, and asked her to describe what she had felt. What I had done. And Eliza said nothing. Murmured that she was, would be, all right. That it had been wonderful. There was nothing she could say.

After some long and indeterminable time I stood, and removed the codpiece. I dropped the godemiche there, on the night-table, where I spilled wax on it. But later. Then; then I blew out candles one by one and climbed back into my own bed, and they did not know. How could they? I did not know. I smiled to look at them, in my bed.

...This is not what I set out to write, an hour ago; two. These were not the thoughts I thought were flitting through my mind.

“Shall I?” asked Lucy, in a small voice. Her head pillowed in Eliza’s lap; Eliza’s, already drowsing, pillowed in hers. “Shall I?”

“Tomorrow,” I said then, smiling still. “Your turn will come.” I was already thinking once more of Jack’s Jess. Considering, then, what I should write next.

One week of this has gone by. Seven days. This month of Fructidor is almost half gone. The year is almost up.

I find I am in no mood to write further at the moment.

The End

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The passage quoted is not, as indicated, from Nicholas Chorier’s Dialogues of Luisa Sigea, but (with some small modification) from Donald Thomas’s translation of L’Escole des Filles.

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