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Homepage 3 Plus.

This will be the last story published on this website until early in the New Year because I’m going to spend the next few weeks in the rolling hills of Central Wales in a cottage where there is no electricity nor a phone line no matter about access to the internet.

In an effort to assuage my readers, assuming that there are any, the accompanying story is both long and multi-layered.

First, a word about the excessive use of Sir Toby and Lady Felicity’s titles in the story.

Decades ago when The Labour Party was about to get back into office the Tories sneakily decided to make hundreds of Tory worthies ‘Lords’ so as to take over the House of Lords by sheer numbers.

The Labour Party’s Prime-Minister-To-Be retaliated by saying that if they, the Tories, went through with it they, the Labour Party, when they got into power, would make every second family-head in the entire country “a Lord, and how do you like them apples?”

The Tories backed off, of course, and we all admired the Prime-Minister-to-be for showing such spunk and cleverness but since then, next to nothing – although they’ve had plenty of time in office – and the stupidity of still having a non-elected House of Lords in the twenty-first century festers on.

How long will it be before we have an Earl Blair of Islington and a Lord Brown of – well, who cares? – but, come to think on it, is that the key?

That Lord business was the first incident that caused deep unrest in right-thinking – that is ‘left leaning’ – people throughout the country and the second one was when Charles, The Prince Of Wales, told his household staff that they had to address him not as, “Sir” but as, “Your Royal Highness” at all times from then on. Including, I presume, when they were holding His Royal Highness’s head over His Royal Highness’s toilet to help His Royal Highness throw up into His Royal Highness’s bowl.

That story might be apocryphal but it came from several good sources.

Incidentally, that little beleaguered country, Wales, last had a native Prince close to a thousand years ago and he was killed by, you’ve guessed it, the English. To top all, those same English knaves, and their successors, never had enough sense to put even a token part of the Welsh flag into the United Kingdom flag, the Union Jack, even though the other united countries – England, Scotland and Ireland – are fully represented.

Well, after that arrogant, egotistical stupidity by Charles all and every servant in the employ of titled people took to calling them by their titles, even en passant as it were, and from then on stand-alone personal pronouns, for the Upstairs members of the households, ceased to exist and that made for orders like this to become common: “Her Ladyship wants Her Ladyship’s favourite horse to be saddled with Her Ladyship’s favourite saddle and then brought around in ten minutes and His Lordship’s farrier is to be there because Her Ladyship wants to be sure that Her Ladyship’s horse is well shod because Her Ladyship’s favourite horse threw a shoe the last time that Her Ladyship rode Her Ladyship’s favorite horse and Her Ladyship had to walk nearly a mile to get to Her Ladyship’s home. Also, His Lordship’s farrier is to bring Her Ladyship’s stool with him so as to be ready to help Her Ladyship get mounted on Her Ladyship’s favourite horse.”

I can only presume that the servant/staff members are allowed to get away with this derisive reverse-politeness ploy only because it seems that it must be impossible for each titled person to hear his/her title over-used, ever.

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Monday, January 4th 2010

I was confident that I’d be able to publish this next story last December from London (as promised above) but when I got there I found that I’d been misinformed and that it was impossible for me, technically, to publish it from over there (my PC was turned off and it seems that ‘My Documents’ are not hovering in a ‘cloud’ over the servers in Oregon and points west like e-mails are!) so – I do apologize and here it is and I’ll try to not miss any more Mondays.

THE TU                                             THE TURKISH RUG AND ITS RUNNER.

ROY GARDE

When Sir Tobias and Lady Felicity Everly got married she was just eighteen and a half years old.

That she’d marry well, and soon, had been a given for several years by then because with puberty she’d become one of those exceedingly rare young women whose beauty literally takes men’s breath away. It went so far that when she entered a room all the men in it couldn’t keep from staring at her and the ones who were still – uh, let’s say – whose juices were still flowing, found it hard to control their impulse to stand up in deference to it.

Her parents, Lord and Lady Fairbands of Northampton, had held great hopes that she’d marry well because they were land-rich but cash-poor and so when Sir Tobias came calling on her they pulled out all the stops for him because he was land-rich and mansion-rich and town house-rich and – rich.

Besides that, he had an impressively high position within the government but, unfortunately, to go with all those positives he also had a well-deserved reputation for philandering. However, when it became indisputable that he was truly smitten with Felicity her parents chose to ‘have heard no such rumours.’

On their honeymoon Sir Tobias Everly turned out to be Sir Tobias Everhard and besides getting to be sore and bruised, inside and out, his new wife got close to zero tenderness and very little love play from him. The combination turned her off having sex and made her give up on trying to enhance his pleasure, against all of the advice that had come at her from many different sources, and from then on she just stayed still for him and accepted him and her fate.

She figured, and fervently hoped, that after the honeymoon his passion would ease off and then, once he’d realized that she wasn’t responding to his efforts, he’d become more reasonable with his demands but it didn’t bother him in the slightest because it was her wonderful body, per se, and her womanhood, per se, that he made love to. He mistreated it, and her gender, year after year, by insisting on mounting it, and her gender, every evening before dressing for dinner and again when the three of them went to bed at night and once more every morning and he even came home for lunch from his job in Whitehall whenever he could so as to be able to take it, and her gender, upstairs soon after they’d eaten.

All through her three pregnancies he, some would say ‘perversely,’ insisted on maintaining full access to it, and to her gender – both of which were enormously enhanced and that increased his pleasure enormously (logically, he told himself, seeing that it was his own child that was in bed with them) – although he knew enough to leave her alone for a few weeks after each birth. He’d dream up an “urgent request from the PM to stay close to 10 Downing Street” which let him stay in his flat in Central London during those forced détentes from ‘it’ but not, by any means, from her gender.

“She gets as much loving as any six regular married women and mothers of her age,” said her personal maid, Daisy, who was also the upstairs maid due to Her Ladyship’s slightly pathetic attempt to get the world to see that she was a frugal housewife, one afternoon as she was allowing Percival (Percy) Hodges – Sir Toby’s recently hired valet – to get rove up her for the second time that day – the first time had been on the carpet in the shared antechamber while she was waiting for her mistress to wake up and the second time was with her bending over the leather arm-chair in the upper reception room – and he’d stopped his vicious, because-he-was-getting-near-the-end, thrusting at her, which would have hurt her if it wasn’t for the cushioning effect of her ample buttocks, to ask her how could she possibly know that and she answered, “I know it all too well and at first hand too because the covers and the sheets of their bed tell the story clearly and I have to strip them every day and let them soak for hours and then wash them carefully by hand to get the stains out.”

While he was holding still, marveling at her statement and wondering whether or not to believe it, she seized the chance to go on to say, “But even so, for some reason she still suffers from that pinched look that women who aren’t getting enough good loving always have. Ho! I should know all about that because it was the same for me before you came to work here, Percy dear. I looked like that for years- Ooooh! – – – – Ow – – – Ow – – – Ow – – – Ow – – – Ahhhhhhhhhhh – – – – – – – – – There – – – – – – – – – All right, dear? – – – – – – – – – There. Ooooooh. Well now, that was really nice – – – – – Wow, I’ll say it was! You really are good at it, Percy dear, and I’m amazed with what you can do with your hands while you’re getting on with it.

“Oh, uh, let me take that off for you, dear, we don’t want your nasty stuff to spill onto the carpet, do we? – – There, now let me wipe you with my apron – there. All right, you can tuck it away now dear.

“Oh, upon my word, Percy, I really can’t tell you how much I like doing it with you and – Ha! Like Sir Toby but not like Her Ladyship – neither of us can get enough of it, right? It was good for you too, dear, wasn’t it? I can tell.”

“Sure it was,” he answered as they were checking each other’s clothing, just to be sure, “but tell me, Daisy, how do you know that she doesn’t like getting fuc-  –  uh  – doesn’t like making love with him? Surely to Christ she doesn’t tell you things like that?”

“Please don’t blaspheme dear. No, of course she doesn’t, but often times I’m with her in her dressing room when he comes upstairs looking for her and he gives her what he thinks is a signal that I don’t understand that means that he’ll be waiting for her in the big bed and that he doesn’t want to be kept waiting. Well, when he’s turned away she always makes a face at his back and when he’s gone out of the room she mutters something like, “What a monster!” or, “What a horrid, nasty, randy beast of a man!” and often, “Poor me, why did I ever get married and have to put up with this?”

As Daisy was about to make for the door – he’d have to hold back for a few minutes because it wouldn’t do for them to be seen leaving a closed room at the same time – she said, “And yet you know, it can’t be her fault that she doesn’t want to do it with him because when I’m toweling her dry after her bath every morning I can tell that she likes having her breasts touched and when I get to her crotch I have to remember to be – uh, what is it again? – Ah yes, ‘be meticulous about what you’re doing. You must get into every nook and cranny down there, you hear me?’ is what she tells me often. Well now, what does that tell you, hey? She not only opens up her legs a whole lot farther than necessary to let me dry her but she also closes her eyes and breathes shallow-like until I’ve finished which suggests, to me at least, that she gets a big kick out of it. Also, she gets me to trim her pubic hair every week to keep its heart shape which is a bit much, don’t you think?”

He didn’t answer because he was too busy internally visualizing being the one who was tending to those intimate needs of hers.

A few weeks later, on a weekday morning, Percy went to the master bedroom at close to eleven o’clock and when he didn’t get any response to his knock he went on in and was well inside the large room before he became aware that Her Ladyship was still in bed.

She’d disregarded the knock on her door, thinking that whoever it was would go away, and when she’d heard the door open and then close she figured that it had to be Daisy but then she’d heard his sharp intake of breath and she took a look and then half sat up and said, irritably, “What are you doing? How dare you?  Get out right now.”

He averted his eyes and said, “Sorry, Your Ladyship, but Sir Tobias told me that he‘d left a suit of his on a chair in here that needs to be dry cleaned for a social engagement of his tonight. Uh, I can see it over there so may I take it? I do apologize but the man from the dry cleaners is waiting down stairs and there’ll only be enough time to get it done and returned on time if I take it to him right now.”

“Oh. Well then, I suppose you’d better. Very well then, take it with you but next time send Daisy in to get his things, you hear me?”

“Yes Ma’am, and I would have this time only, begging your pardon Ma’am I’m sure, this is Daisy’s day off.”

She grunted and then waved him away dismissively and his very presence was wiped from her mind so thoroughly that he no longer existed for her and she lay back down in the bed – annoyed with the interruption of her nice, floating semi-dream and hoping to get right back into it – and by doing so she altered the configuration of her lower intestines and some gas took the opportunity to escape from her body. It was very a gentle fart, to be sure, but Percy heard it clearly and he fought to suppress a smirk as the distance between their two very different worlds diminished a little.

And then, a much bigger leveling agent showed up because, as he was walking past the bed with the suit that needed cleaning, he happened to be in exactly the right position to see all that was in the offing when she, evidently not wanting to play Dutch ovens, lifted the sheet that was covering her naked body – her husband wouldn’t let her wear anything in bed, ever – and she flapped it several times in an effort to disperse her odorous emission before it could cling to the sheets, or to her body, and by doing so he got to see her lovely breasts and her tight belly and her sculpted pubic hair every time that she repeated the fanning action.

When she figured that she’d dealt with the situation she let the sheet fall wherever it chose, it was a warm day so it was her only covering, and when it had come to rest it left her left breast uncovered and so, staying on the alert peripherally for any movement of her eye lids, he slowed to admire it and he saw that it was nothing less than perfect and stood firm and proud all on its own.

He was astonished with himself because never before had any one particular woman had this effect on him but, even so, he made a vow that someday he was going to get himself a beautiful woman who had similarly wonderful tits – Daisy’s were large but they only looked good when she was wearing an up-lifting bra and they only felt good when she was leaning away from him which was one of the reasons why he liked doing it to her in the doggy position whenever possible – and who had a body to match.

When he’d turned away, after the last precious second that he’d dared to allow his eyes to feast on her beauty, what Daisy had told him about her not getting properly serviced by Sir Toby came back to him and so he figured that there just might be a faint hope of his being invited to join her in this very bed one day. After all, he told himself, she was deprived of good loving wasn’t she and he could supply that for sure, and, furthermore, she was here, living in the same house that he did, and so why not modify his thinking from ‘impossible’ to ‘how make it happen’?

Out in the passageway he asked himself, “Why ever not?” She needed a man who knew and loved all parts of a woman’s body and he prided himself on his expertise with women because he’d learned all about them and how to approach and treat each wondrous part properly through being lucky enough to have been, after his father died and had orphaned him soon after he’d reached his fourteenth birthday, the only male member of the large family of relatives that he’d been sent to live with that was made up of highly sensual women and girls who – through living in semi-isolation out in the country – were starved for affection. They all wanted to use his innocent maleness and so, to cut down on the incessant squabbling and the in-fighting, they’d finally agreed to share him equally and had set up a procedure in which he joined them in their lonely beds following a strictly policed schedule that was fair to everybody. Two of his aunts had been married and divorced so they were able to teach him not just the basics but several variations of the act, and many different types of love play, and he, in turn, taught his spinster aunt and his cousins those same things and they all remained very open to experimentation and so, when some new position or method proved to be worthy, he then shared it with each succeeding bed partner.

He was getting so much good loving, and for so long, that he became blasé about it and so, after high school and when he got to be eighteen, he accepted the offer of an old school-friend of his, who lived in town, to become an extra steward on a big yacht that was about to go on a six month cruise around Europe and the Mediterranean and which needed more staff in a hurry – he didn’t see fit to tell Percy that he’d get a large bonus if he successfully recruited him nor that, when he promised “all the sex that you can handle” to sweeten the pot, he didn’t mean the kind that Percy thought he meant – because the latest charter was by the CEO of a big manufacturing company that had recently been taken over and who wanted to use some of the outrageously large severance payment, that he’d taken with him in a Golden Handshake that he’d drawn up himself years before, to invite a half dozen of the men who had been his long time cronies, all with large pay-offs too, along with their wives, to go on a long cruise with him and his own wife and he’d insisted that the ratio of stewards to guests had to be one to one.

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When the passengers came on board Percy saw that the wives were mostly elderly – which, in itself, didn’t discourage him altogether because one of his aunts had been over sixty and she’d never failed to delight him between the sheets – and, seeing that they all had their husbands with them, that would, he feared, dampen the chances that any of them would want to risk having entanglements in their lives. It looked to him that there’d be absolutely no shenanigans at sea and he almost quit on the spot because he knew that he’d suffer much more from enforced chastity than even his most happily married fellow crew members – who, of course, had had to leave their wives behind – would do, and the thought of being without a woman for all those months, except for shore leave, appalled him.

He shouldn’t have worried.

Before he’d taken over as Captain of the for-charter pleasure yacht that Percy had signed up for Robert Humphries had been the captain of a series of cargo ships and some of them took on a few passengers. He had always tried to stay away from them because he didn’t much like mingling with non-seafaring folks – the land-lubbers infuriated him when they called decks, ‘floors’; and overheads, ‘ceilings’; and scuttles, ‘windows’, and; cabins, ‘rooms’; and, passageways, ‘corridors’; and etc. and, besides that, most of them were prone to suffer inordinately from sea sickness, which he couldn’t understand because it had never affected him and so, because he belonged to the “What doesn’t kill ’em will make ‘em stronger” school of thought, he didn’t so much as consider changing his ship’s course to avoid storms at sea nor areas that were renowned for having perpetually rough waters like the Bay of Biscay.

However, on his very first cruise, what should have been a nice and easy two weeks for him – it involved his taking a half dozen VIP’s in the publishing business, and their wives, to visit several ports on England’s east coast and then cross the North Sea to visit some Scandinavian ones – turned into a near disaster that made him change his mind about sea-sickness being semi-benign and no concern of his.

There’d been no mention of gale force winds coming out of the northwest on his Mariner’s Warning radio and so he’d taken the usual course to get to his first port of call, Yarmouth, but when they got to be just over halfway there the wind got up to near gale force and he’d had to change course and head out to sea, away from a lee shore, and he’d ordered all the sails lowered at the last possible moment and he used the diesel engine to give them enough headway to maintain position.

The seas got rough, of course, and every passenger got sick and couldn’t eat and they stayed in their cabins. Consequently all of the stewards had to work very hard to clean up vomit from the carpets and the bathroom floors and to change soiled bedding and, etc. and to try to coax their charges into drinking beef broth with crackers to avoid having them dehydrate to the point of harming themselves.

After two days of their being tossed and turned the wind died down and the seas began to behave themselves and soon after that the passengers began to emerge on deck.

All, that is, except one.

Her name was Bea Harris and she had been the secretary of the Managing Director of the publishing company until his wife found out that when he’d called to tell her that he had to work late in his office that night what he should have said was that he wanted to wallow late in Bea’s orifice that night. When the divorce had gone through he’d married her and, to everybody’s surprise, the marriage had lasted for better than fifteen years already.

She’d long known that she was susceptible to sea-sickness, she’d let herself be persuaded to go out on their friend’s thirty footer several times a year but only in sheltered waters and then only if the weather forecast promised “Waves of one to two feet, or less,” because if they got bigger than that she’d have to stay down below and couldn’t join in the drinking nor eating back aft in the cockpit. Knowing that, she didn’t really want to go on a cruise ever but she figured that a two hundred-odd footer had to be far more stable than a thirty footer and she’d been assured that ‘mill pond’ was what the English Channel and the North Sea would be like at that time of the year.

When the ship had started rolling and pitching she went to her cabin and, to her dismay, she found that its floor was heaving and rolling too so she took to her bed post haste and she suffered just as all the others did but when the storm eventually blew away her sickness didn’t go with it and she still couldn’t eat not drink anything at all.

There was a nurse on board, the wife of the Chief Engineer who liked life at sea and, besides that, she liked being able to keep her eye on him, which was very necessary.

She’d been horribly sea-sick herself the first few days but, as a crew member, she wasn’t allowed to cower in her cabin like the others and she’d recovered fully when the others had and so when Bea’s husband told her that his wife was still in bed and looking green and wasn’t able to keep even beef broth down, she went to her cabin to check her out.

It soon became obvious to the nurse that Bea was already in serious trouble from dehydration and the dry heaving that she was still suffering from didn’t help matters at all.

Nausea that won’t quit is one of the worst feelings that humans can be subjected to – strangely, it’s the exact same ghastly, all-permeating feeling whether it comes from sea-sickness or from drinking too much alcohol or from food poisoning, or what ever – and it might well be the feeling that we will all have in our last few minutes on earth and because of it, seeing that nothing can be worse, we’ll all accept death a little easier.

The nurse got to be alarmed and, knowing that the only real cure for sea-sickness is to sit under a big oak tree and sip tea, she asked her husband to tell the Captain that he had to head for the nearest port.

The Captain had, at first, refused point blank so when her husband reported back that he, the Captain, had said that she’d have to wait until they’d arrived at the scheduled port of call, Yarmouth, which would take only around four hours longer to get to than the closest harbor, which was Lowestoft, she stormed up to the bridge and told him that if he’d come and see the patient for himself he’d change his mind on the spot.

Which he did and which he did.

They radioed ahead for an ambulance to be waiting and Bea was duly stretcher-ed off the ship and taken straight to hospital where she was given IV’s and sedatives.

All of the other passengers chose to not go back to sea in the ship, they’d all been scared-witless, so to say, of sailing – they’d been forced to acknowledge their frailty in the face of the enormity of the force that had come up out of nowhere – and they opted to spend the rest of their two weeks holiday in Stratford-on-Avon which is well inland and where the only boats are the nice little row-boats and flat bottomed punts that are for hire up river and can be returned down river.

The owners of the yacht were understandably furious with their new Captain but, when they’d calmed down, they had to acknowledge that he was hardly at fault so they decided to keep him on, but –

He knew that for the rest of his career that – ‘but’ – would remain an operative word.

All of that had happened years before Percy joined the ship but, even so, various lawyers were still fighting over payment and compensation and, of course, their fees had climbed much higher than the total cost of the aborted cruise.

From then on the Captain had taken no end of pains to see to it that his passengers were shielded from rough seas – he’d make sure that his nurse personally watched every one of them take the maximum recommended number of Dramamine tablets long before the ship left it’s birth and again, at appropriate intervals, throughout the cruise. And, whereas before he’d always chosen the most economical course to steer and wouldn’t have thought of avoiding seas that were renowned for being rough nearly year round, after that incident he always hugged the coast when he was up in the North Sea and, when he had to go south to, say, Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, he’d go out into the Atlantic to avoid the Bay of Biscay

When Percy was on his first trip as a member of the yacht’s crew its first two ports of call were supposed to be The Azores and then Lisbon but when they were well out in the Atlantic and all of the passengers had found their ‘sea-legs’ and were enjoying themselves the nurse reported to the Captain that they had a woman on board who was just as sick as Bea Harris had been and who, like her, didn’t respond to any treatment at all and was badly in need of being put ashore ASAP.

The Captain couldn’t believe his bad luck and, after doing some salty cussing, he looked at the charts and at his position on his GPS and was partially mollified when he saw that The Azores was the nearest port to him anyway even though it would take two full days of sailing to get there.

He told the nurse that and asked her to please do all that she could do for the woman – her name was Jane Burrows and she was the second wife of the CEO, James Bowers, who was paying for everything – and that she, the nurse, had carte-blanche to do anything that would make her patient more comfortable and, at all costs, see her through the next two days. He told her that his Head Office, when notified by radio, would arrange for an expert to meet the ship who could deal with her dehydration and maybe, “Even though it will take a miracle,” give her something steadying that might help persuade her husband to not abort the entire cruise.

Since her close to devastating experience with Bea the nurse had learned several things about treating semi-comatose patients who were dehydrated due to severe sea-sickness. In cases when there was a very real danger of the patient getting to be seriously affected by it, and that included her present one, the ultimate treatment was to inject fresh water into the patient’s colon and let it sit in there, using a plug to stop involuntary evacuation, for two hours and then, after some of it had been absorbed, repeat.

The nurse told her Captain that she’d been doing that all day long by then and she asked him if she could have someone stay with her patient 24/7 and keep on injecting her – that was all that was keeping the poor woman alive she said and she went on to tell him that she couldn’t keep doing it herself because of fatigue and because she had many other duties that needed attending to – and the captain thought for a while and then suggested that she pick the most junior steward, “It goes without saying that he’s gay, and that, combined with his youth, will help ensure that there’ll be very few, uh, improprieties, or any ‘taking advantage’ of the poor woman when he was alone with her in her cabin.”

The nurse asked him to please inform the patient’s husband, the CEO, of the situation and to suggest to him that he sleep in another cabin because his poor wife’s dry-heaving and general wretchedness would keep him up all night and, besides that, his being there would make it awkward for her new attendant to carry out his tasks.

The captain volunteered to give up his own cabin to the CEO – he figured that it would probably only be for two days and nights and he could sleep in his day cabin behind the bridge until then – and then he had Percy called up to the bridge and after it had been explained to him how important the task was that he was going to be given – failure would mean that the cruise could well end when they got to the Azores – he was ordered to stay with the patient 24/7 and follow the routines that the nurse was going to give him.

The nurse took him to the cabin and she told him, and then showed him, what needed to be done, which was mainly, besides forcing water into her colon every two hours, to see to it that when instinct made her try to sit up and lean to one side, when she was about to do some more dry-heaving, that she didn’t fall off the bed and land on her head. He also had to keep wetting her lips and had to see to it that there were always clean towels to hand and, at all times and most importantly, to not let her hurt herself in any way.

She then left him to get on with it and, in fact, was happy to not have to stay close to him for a second longer than was absolutely necessary because she had very little time indeed for any and all stewards.

What had happened to make her be that prejudiced towards stewards was several years earlier when she was on her first cruise as Ship’s Nurse with her Chief Engineer husband, she’d had to go back to their cabin one morning because she needed some tongue depressors that she’d left in one of her suitcases and when she got to the door she found that it was locked from the inside.

That puzzled her, of course, and so she knocked and called his name and he called right back and asked her to “give me a minute, dear.”

When he opened the door a steward, in uniform, pushed past her and left in a hurry.

Her husband, understandably somewhat shamefaced, explained that the steward who had just left had been on other ships with him and he’d called him to bring some coffee so that they could do some reminiscing and then, because it’s against the ship’s rules for officers to fraternize with lower deck crew members, he’d locked the door to ensure privacy while they talked about old times.

His wife didn’t buy that for a second but she decided to go back to her sick bay – without making any comments and without looking around to see if there were any coffee cups, used ones, in the cabin, or any incriminating evidence – to do some heavy thinking.

She had married late, due to having been way over-weight in her twenties and thirties, and, due to her being way over-weight again now that her marriage was safely in hand, she wanted, desperately, to stay married because of the prestige that came from being the wife of a Chief Engineer and because of the immense amount of satisfaction that his amazing virility gave her. It sometimes seemed to her that the man couldn’t get enough good loving for himself, and thus ditto for her, ever.

By lunchtime she’d decided to pretend that the incident hadn’t happened as long as he, himself, didn’t bring it up, and so, as usual after she’d eaten in the officer’s mess, she went to their cabin and she nodded to him and then got undressed and waited to see if he’d join her on the bed, also as usual,

He did just that and, while he was busy getting her into the right mood, she took a minute or two to ponder on what might have been going on in that same bed that morning. However, he was such an expert with his mouth and lips that soon she lost her ability to think about anything that would keep her from reveling in the blood-surging series of climaxes that he, as usual, generated in her.

Afterwards, when they were both resting, she knew that she’d done the right thing, and she also knew that she’d continue to keep silent about it so that the marvelous time that she’d just been given would keep on coming at her regularly, but then her thoughts came back as to just what could have been going on between the two men and she determined to find out about stewards and the phenomenon known as homo- and bi-sexuality.

She’d been astonished, on her first cruise, at seeing the prancing and the mincing and the limp-wristed antics of – “All of them? It can’t be all of them, surely?”  “Yes, all of them. It goes with the job description.” – of the stewards on board.

She hadn’t minded deeply back then because she’d thought that none of them were rivals of hers, seeing that she was already married, but she was sorry for them in that they were voluntarily relinquishing the substantial power and privileges that come with being born male that she, herself, would have loved to wield and to experience.

However, from the moment that she’d seen that one of them had been with her husband in her cabin she’d been forced to realize that they were all rivals of hers and so she despised them all and wanted nothing to do with any of them but still, wisely, she figured that the expression ‘know thine enemy’ was very relevant and it made her want to find out what drove them to follow their nasty preferences.

If Percy had been a member of the crew at that same time she would have certainly asked him about what drove all of the stewards on their desperate and doomed quest to find something better than making love with a woman and he could have told her what she needed to know because he’d have already taken the time to question his friend about it. However, what he couldn’t have explained to her, ever, was the one big, unanswerable question which is how can any man – only occasionally otherwise there’s no mystery – lie down on or for or with another man and then deny being homosexual himself and truly believe it?

When his school friend had told him that he’d find all of the sex that he could possibly want if he signed up for the cruise it was because he’d assumed – from remembering that Percy had, at least once, joined in on a group jerk-off one evening back when they were both Juniors in high school – that he was gay too.

Percy had indeed joined in on one of those sessions but as an experiment and in an attempt to be one of the gang but when he got to understand, when they were all well into it, that he was expected to let someone else’s hand take over for him while he had to reach to one side and do the same for that guy. As soon as he got to understand that he knew that he couldn’t ever force his hand to do it and so he eased away from the group and went home.

When Percy went on board for the first time his friend took him down to the Stewards’ mess and he found an empty locker for him and showed him the bunk that would be his.

Percy noticed that his mess mates were all youngish looking and on the thin side but otherwise they behaved more or less normally and they larked around like any other youths and young men did.

However, when he started to listen to their conversations he was baffled because just about every other sentence of theirs seemed to be in a code that he didn’t understand and the other sentences were mostly mean-spiritedly bitchy and almost invariably brought on fits of giggling all around.

The rest of the first morning was filled up with getting kitted-out and learning his duties and the lay-out of the ship and in the afternoon the passengers came onboard and the dockyard workers swung their luggage up and the deck hands carried it to the cabins and the stewards unpacked it and then, later, met their future charges.

They sailed on the tide and for all the rest of that day, and the next one, everyone, passengers and crew, were very subdued and stayed in their cabins, if they could, and if they didn’t have private cabins, they found quiet, warm spots to try to come to terms with their queasiness.

Everything changed for the better, on the third day, for everyone on board but especially for those in the stewards’ mess. For all of the others it was because they’d found that when the ship’s rolling motion stopped making them feel sick they began to like it and could then enjoy being at sea and getting acquainted with the ship’s diversions and attractions.

However, from that day on the deck hands and the stoker/mechanics and some others on the crew – having, obviously, severed ties with their women on shore – began to seek outlets for their needs and urges and some of them already had long established ‘ties’ with the stewards and so they took steps to renew their acquaintances.

Because there were only thirteen stewards – Percy, of course, had early on made it very clear to all and sundry that he wouldn’t be taking part in their ‘games’ – to go around their services had to be shared and the most common one was getting a friendly blow-job while on watch, in the case of the lookouts or the men on the wheel or the mechanics in the engine room, etc. who couldn’t lie down but could keep doing their jobs while ‘getting relief,’ and the next most common one was, off watch, rigging a sheet over one of the bottom bunks in the stewards’ mess and then getting it on with the aid of that little bit of privacy. It didn’t bother the other members of the mess because if they weren’t doing it too, in one of the other beds, they were someplace else making some other members of the crew happy.

Not only that, unfortunately for Percy, when general intermingling became the order of the day, his mess mates – now making many liaisons every day and night – took on, more and more, the mannerisms of women.

Percy wasn’t sure but he figured that they got to be in competition with each other as to which of them could be the mincy-est, flaunty-est, prancing-est, limp-wrist-iest, lisping-est poof of them all.

There were rules about the wearing of uniform and the non-wearing of make-up and jewelry while on duty but the second that they came off duty those rules stopped being operative and the uniforms came off and the outrageous, all colours of the rainbow clothes came on along with necklaces and rings and broaches and make-up.

Percy could put up with that nonsense for only two days and nights after the ship sailed and although he had to eat in the mess he spent most of his free time, and slept at night, in the ship’s purser’s office. He’d met the man one afternoon on the upper deck on the third day at sea when they’d both needed some fresh air and they’d started talking. The purser knew all about his predicament because he’d had to mess with stewards on one of his ships before he’d been promoted and had been given a cabin of his own to go with the title.

While Percy was revolted by the on-going spectacles in his mess he was also a bit intrigued and he decided to take the opportunity to find out more about the phenomenon of gayness and so he asked his old high-school friend – it wasn’t easy to catch him with spare time to talk, what with his being on-duty in the main dining room at all three meal times or engaged in one of his many assignations in his bunk behind a hanging sheet or away keeping an appointment on his knees somewhere – for more details.

Until he asked him that question – what does being gay entail? – his friend hadn’t noticed that Percy was not filling the designated role of a sea-going steward, i.e. ‘collaring’ for all and sundry, and he was astonished when he finally had to believe him.

“But . . . God in heaven! . . . Jesus man, collaring cock is what it’s all about for all of us! It’s not just a sideline to being a steward, it’s the main reason, no, it’s the only reason that we take this bad paying, miserable job. None of us would ever go to sea if it wasn’t for the positive fact that we know that we’ll get as many men wanting us as we can possibly – uh – handle.”

Percy was fascinated so he offered him a cigarette to keep him from leaving right away and then he asked about what happened when they went ashore.

“Well, that’s the best part sometimes – no, no – that’s not quite right, it’s the cream on the cake because we’re always welcome wherever we go. Men come from all over when word gets out that we’ll be coming to their port. We never have to buy our own meals nor drinks and we can pick and chose whose eye signals to acknowledge and then follow him somewhere.

“But listen, what we all like best is when we go to a place that has a big harbour like Gib or Malta or Naples and we see that a navy ship is visiting too. That’s the Royal Navy or the US one and if there’s a carrier there we burst into cheers because that’s the best.”

“What happens if there’s a carrier there?”

“Well, there’s a sea of white uniforms everywhere you look and although they pretend that they despise us when we’re out on the street in daylight when we’re all cozy in a bar somewhere there’s nothing they won’t do to butter up to us and, always, they soon ask us to go with them somewhere private. So, that’s OK for the afternoons but at around eight o’clock the local rich men, they’re called ‘Barons’ by the sailors, come to our tables and they buy drinks for everyone and then they ask us if we’d like to go to a party at their house in the suburbs. They ask lots of the sailors too until there’s about two of them to every one of us and you’ll never believe what we all get up to.”

“Like what?”

“ ‘Like what?’ Well shit, like – oh, yes – you really don’t know anything about it, do you? Well, let’s see, everybody’s a bit shy at first but after a couple of stiff drinks the inhibitions drop away and clothes come off and soon there are blow jobs going on all over the room and then straight forward humping by everybody and it goes on until no more erections show up for action and then we all get drunk and then the ‘Baron’ calls for cabs and we go back to our ships completely worn out and very sore but happy and as gay as larks. Wow! Life can’t offer anything better than being able to take your time blowing one sailor or a marine while another one’s getting rove up you. Believe me on that, Percy.

“And oh yes. Hear this – sometimes the rich guys want to go on dates with some of us and then it’s first class all the way until the ship sails. Hoooo, boy!

“Uh, but listen up and tell me something, will you, Percy? What’s the fuck’s the matter with you, man? Why in hell don’t you turn queer right now seeing that that it’s so easy? It’s even expected of you when you have this job. I guarantee that you’ll get more good loving than you’ve ever dreamed of. No, really, man, you can’t lose! You’re sitting on a gold mine and you don’t know it!”

He leaned back with a smile on his face from fond memories but then he saw the big clock up on the wall and he jumped to his feet as he said, “Ooh, look at the time! I’ve got to take tea and scones to – uh – to one of the ship’s officers at four o’clock every day and I get to blow him when we’ve finished eating and drinking. I can’t tell you which officer it is – we have to be very discrete, you know, like Priests and Doctors – but I will tell you this, when he locks his cabin door behind us no one ever dares to disturb him!”

All that is what Percy could have told the ship’s nurse if he’d gone on an earlier cruise.

Percy was relieved to see that his patient, Jane Bowers, in spite of having a ravaged face that was caused from four straight days of feeling wretched, was otherwise presentable and looked to be no more than forty odd years old.

He made an effort to communicate with her as he was wetting her lips but she didn’t so much as say hello to him in return.

He got bored quickly and so he went over to the bedside table on the other side of the bed from where he was sitting and where a half dozen books were stacked and he found that they were all dry-as-dust financial tomes.

He then took a look at the woman’s bedside table and was delighted to see that she was a detective-story buff and he selected a recently published one and started in on reading it.

He had just gotten past the first chapter when she groaned a bit louder that her norm and then sat up and started in on some dry-heaving paroxysms and then she threw herself to the side of the bed as the nurse had told him that she would.

He jumped to catch her and it was then that a strange thing indeed happened.

Because the silk pajama top that she was wearing had come unbuttoned, when he’d flung his left arm under her body, his forearm came in solid contact with her naked breasts and, at the same time, his right hand landed on the small of her back, to further steady her, and that, too, was uncovered because the silk had ridden up.

The double contacts of flesh to flesh saw to it that a much stronger force than sea-sickness was brought to bear and, because of that, she was positive sure that not only wasn’t it the nurse who was handling her but it was a man who was definitely not her husband because this one’s touches were heavily into the tender loving care business and so she grabbed at the arm to keep in contact with it and thus with the calmness that was beginning to envelope her.

Percy had no way of knowing it but she’d found that she’d stopped being sick to the depth of her being, for the first time in many days, and she felt that there was hope for her and she was, almost, ready to go on living as the blessed healing process continued and after a while she actually began to feel that she’d soon be able to – dare she say it even silently to herself ? – drink some lemonade, or some such, and then eat something to allay the terrible about-to-consume-itself feeling that her stomach, empty for days on end by then, was sending out.

Percy stoically continued to support her but, thinking that she was close to being comatose still, he decided to make the best out of a bad situation and he ventured to move his left arm so that his hand could cup one of her breasts and, a moment later, he moved his other hand down until it could fondle her ultra-smooth buttocks and that changed his attitude immediately. The boring and onerous job had taken on a distinctly better slant.

However, his expeditionary middle finger soon located the cork plug, en passant, and that effectively killed his amorousness and so, seeing that she was already uncovered, he decided to give her an injection of water right away even though it lacked a half hour or so of the time that the nurse had prescribed.

He lifted her body back up and over to the center of the bed and then, following his instructions, he lifted her up so that he could slip the bed pan under her and then he helped her to sit up until she was balanced properly and then he reached on in and pulled the plug out of her.

There was just a little run off – a good sign, the nurse had told him, “The less that comes back out of her the better.” – and when the tinkling had stopped he lifted her off the bed pan and he put her face down on the bed and then he slipped a pillow under her hips and then filled the bulb of the adapted douching instrument with water and then he pushed the probing tube into her anus, just so, and squeezed all the water into her colon.

He then waited for the five minutes that had been called for and then he eased the probe out and quickly and smoothly replaced it with the plug.

She had stayed very aware of what was going on and she continued to feel better all the time that he was touching her and so when he’d put her on her side and had pulled the covers up she sneaked a look to see who it was and she vaguely remembered him as being the steward, the only one who didn’t mince and flutter about the place, who filled water glasses and took away used plates after each course and who used one of those silly little silver brush and tray sets to sweep up bread crumbs.

However, her relief was short lived because, the moment that he stopped touching her, her nausea started to come back at her and that made her ask him if he’d please hold her hand.

Percy put down his book again and, hope flooding back in, he moved his chair nearer to her and he took her hand in his and then, without a great deal of malice intended, he also held her forearm with his free hand.

He wasn’t to know that the tender skin of her forearm was one of her most erogenous zones but she sure did and, far more importantly, her body did too and so, finding that her nausea was in full retreat again and desperately wanting to ensure that it went all the way away and then stayed away, she forced herself to drop her natural inhibitions and she managed to find the strength to pull at his right hand until it got to be resting on her bare breast and then, ecstatic by the immediate curative effect of that, she threw the covers aside and then she pulled at that same hand until it was down on her belly which was the seat of her discomfort.

Percy took advantage of her trust to move in on her and he gave her a massage, modified to take into account the fact that that she couldn’t lie on her back because of the plug and, when he’d done enough to get her to start purring with pleasure, she told him, lucid for the first time in days, that she wanted him to stay with her until they entered harbour when she could “get off this accursed ship and onto solid ground even if it’s only a deserted rocky island.”

Because he had seen all and had touched some of her naked body it didn’t make sense to her to pretend that he hadn’t, especially after she’d found that when one of his hands had been massaging a tendon that was in her upper thigh she’d felt calmness spread throughout her body and had even been able to soothe her ravaged throat by sipping from a glass of orange juice that was on her bedside table. She figured that if one of his hands could do that for her then surely full body contact would drive away her nausea entirely, and, also, she wanted to both reward him and, at all costs, keep up his interest in her, so she asked him to please get undressed and join her in the bed, “After touching me nearly all over you must be as hard as ‘an oaken beam’ as my first husband, the Egyptologist, used to put it, so please do.”

He very much wanted to do so, of course, so he did some thinking and then he asked her to listen to the plan that he’d come up with that would let him legitimately lock her door because if did so without being authorized and someone tried to come in, or if he left it so that a key could open it and he was caught in a compromising position with her, he’d be flung into the brig – if there was such a thing. She understood his problem and she told him to do what he thought best and so, to get a head start and to get the unpleasant part out of the way, he put her up on the bedpan again and pulled the plug and when she’d finished voiding he washed and dried her and then covered her up.

He then went to find the nurse and he told her that her patient was feeling better and had taken some liquid by mouth and so she didn’t need any more of it pumped into her and that she now wanted to sleep undisturbed and so, to that end, could he lock her door from the inside to be sure that she wasn’t disturbed by anyone?

The nurse was overjoyed to hear his news and she immediately agreed to his proposal and said that she’d go straight to tell the Captain and he’d make sure that Jane’s husband knew that he was to keep away from their cabin altogether until further notice.

Percy was prescient enough to ask that a choice selection of food from the passenger’s kitchen be sent along to the cabin in a few hours, “to tempt her to eat when she wakes up” and the nurse agreed to that too.

When Percy got back to the cabin he found that Jane was curled up and was feeling terrible again and so he locked the door and held her close for a few minutes, until the nausea eased off, and then he got undressed and joined her in the bed and the second that he got inside her she felt completely well again and was pleased to be able to cooperate with him. It amazed her to find that, even in her present circumstances, the amount of pleasure that she was given was unprecedented in her entire experience and she knew that it was his expertise as much as his curative powers that did it for her.

What he helped himself to in the way of pleasure was also good because he was so sensitive to the feelings of the woman he was with it meant that, in her case, he learned a great deal about how her gratefulness melded with her need.

When a tray of choice meats and cheeses and pates and olives, and the like, was brought to her door he got her to call out that it was to be left on the floor outside and, when the passageway was clear, he brought it in and, as long as he kept his hand between her legs, she was astonished to find that she was actually able to eat some of it.

When they got to the Azores Jane went ashore with the whole group, and when her husband told her that it was up to her if she wanted him to cancel the cruise and have all of them fly home in solidarity with her predicament she wouldn’t hear of it and was adamant about having it continue.

When the Captain was informed that the cruise was to go on as planned he was very pleased indeed and, in celebration, he called for his tea and scones to be brought to him right then instead of waiting until four o’clock as was usual for him.

However, sure enough, as soon as the Atlantic rollers made the ship roll and buck again Jane, who had half hoped that she’d found her sea legs due to her ‘magical’ cure, had to take to her bed and, in short order, Percy was once again assigned to be her constant companion.

They kept on finding new things about how to best treat her ailment and when really rough seas made all the other passengers stay in their cabins, and give up on all thoughts of eating, Jane got through the worst of it just fine by lying full on Percy to get the benefits that came from having full body contact with him.

She saw to it that – apart from the times that the whole group was ashore, of course – he was permanently assigned to her cabin and from Gibraltar on it was assumed by everyone, with no new orders needed, that he was to leave the stewards’ mess as soon as the ship sailed from any and all ports and go to her cabin in order to be able to ‘hold her hand.’

After they’d stopped in at Malaga and Cartagena and Valencia they headed out to Majorca and on that trip the couple finally lost some of the urgency of their – uh – couplings and he asked her about her husband and why didn’t he show much interest in her welfare except for when doing so was unavoidable?

She told him that he didn’t much care about her condition at any time because he was certainly shacked up with a woman called Barbara Holmes who was the wife – fifteen years younger that Jane just as she’d been twenty years younger than he was when he’d broken up her first marriage – of the company’s CFO who had been jumped up to that position as recompense for being expected to let his wife go to lunch with his boss – and spend an hour or two with her after lunch every day in his locked office – and he’d also been given a corner office and a competent assistant who was, unknown to him, getting the same high salary and the same bonuses and who saw to it that his boss, titular, didn’t let the company run into ruin.

Their all round welcome and win-win-win-win status quo was maintained successfully for the whole cruise and consequently Percy was in bed with Jane when his alarm woke him on the last day of it as they were sailing up the Thames Estuary and he got up to watch the shoreline go by.

She woke up too and she started crying when it came to her that this would be the last chance that they’d have to be together in bed and, when she got herself back under control, she brazenly exposed all that she had to get him to come back to bed – that had always gotten a positive result for her up to then and it did so again – for a grand finale.

It was bitter sweet, indeed.

When all of the passengers were ready to go ashore she signaled to Percy and they slipped into a cubby hole for a last kiss and then she handed him an envelope with money in it and she begged him to not mis-interpret her gesture.

He knew exactly what she meant and so he didn’t take offence and he slipped the envelope into his pocket and thanked her and then he escorted her back up to the gangway.

She looked for him as she was standing on the jetty with her husband, waiting for their limo, and when she’d picked out his face she allowed a tiny smile to show and then she turned away but not before he saw the smile fade away and give way to slumping, drawn sadness.

He found that there were twenty, fifty pound notes in the envelope and when he was given his back wages he found that the company had given him the hourly rate of a fully experienced steward and they’d also given him a full share of the substantial amount of the ‘20% Gratuity’ that was added to every bar bill over the entire cruise and a proportion of the ‘tips’ too although he’d done next to nothing to earn any of it. Also, not only was the bonus that they’d given him more than double what the other stewards had been given, there was another check, for five hundred pounds, that had come directly from the Captain and another one of one hundred pounds from the nurse. They all knew that if he hadn’t worked his magic with the CEO’s wife the cruise might well have ended in The Azores and the very thought of the time that they’d have had to stay ashore, unpaid, while waiting for another booking to come along and the huge amount of paper work, and the inevitable lawyers’ fees that cancellation would have engendered, made them all, even the desk jockeys in their offices, feel sea-sick.

His Captain, ex-captain, promised him all kinds of extra money if he’d sign on for another cruise and, as he told him, he didn’t much care how he’d worked his magic he just wanted to have him available on board his ship always.

However, the nurse certainly did want to know, she sensed that learning his secret would mean huge monetary gains and fame for her or, at the very least, a much easier life, but he didn’t tell her because he didn’t know how to put it into words and be believed.

He’d realized, that very morning when he was wallowing in and on Jane for the last time and trying to get her to stop crying before someone heard her, that it was hardly likely to have been his expert swordsmanship that had drawn her to him. It had to have been something that his cousins and his aunts had, by being so nice to him throughout his important formative years, not only made him love everything about women but had also seen to it that it got to permeate his very being and, consequently, show up in his touches. He guessed that whatever that something was it had to tell women that he loved everything about them and that their being over-weight or overly thin or plain or having bad hair and/or poor skin and what they thought of as being ugly breasts due to being over-large or too small and/or an over large nose and/or uneven teeth, and/or all the rest of it, didn’t matter a bit to him because he responded to their womanliness and only to that and, consequently, all that had to be revealing itself instantly through his hands and fingers.

The nurse wouldn’t give up and so he told her that the only thing that he could do was to show her.

He got her to sit in a chair in the empty sick bay and he stood behind her and he ran his fingers through her hair and then started in on kneading her scalp and in seconds she began letting out, “Ooooh! Aaaaah! That’s sooooo goooood. Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop, you hear? Oooooh, yessss.”

He did stop though because after a few minutes it got to be boring for him because there was no flesh in the offing but she didn’t have time, nor the inclination, to do any complaining about his stopping because what he did was to move his attention to her neck and that was much, much better for them both.

When he eventually moved his fingers down to her shoulders she reached to open up more buttons to give him a bigger area to work on and when she’d been cooing with pleasure for a while he did what he’d wanted to do ever since he’d first seen her and her mammoth breasts – he undid her bra and then reached down and in and did some smoothing to what he found there and then he did some purposeful weighing of them, in turn, and reveled in doing so because he was being given free access to more, much more, woman than he’d had for a full six months.

As he knew would happen beforehand, she didn’t get alarmed at all because it felt very right to her when he was merely feeling her breasts up but after he’d weighed them both, and by so doing had somehow managed to transfer effective ownership of them to himself, she knew that she wouldn’t limit his access to her whole body if he wanted because, at that moment, it seemed to be there solely to provide pleasure for him and, by doing so, receive, receive, receive even more of it.

He could have easily gotten her to lie down for him and he would have loved to do so too, seeing that he always wanted to get to know everything that there is to know about all women all the time, but he’d been thoroughly depleted by Jane and enough had to be enough.

When the amount of pleasure that she’d been getting from what he was doing to her breasts, along with some anticipation for what might yet be, had over-whelmed her he stopped touching her and he rearranged her uniform top and then slipped away.

It was several minutes before she came back to earth enough to find that he was gone and then she got overwhelmed again but this time it was with regret for what might have been happening to her at that very minute, and, dream on, all through subsequent cruises. Her last thought about him before going back to doing her paper work was, “My God! He’s a steward! If he’d agreed to come back to sea with us both me and my husband would be having affairs with Stewards!” He was quite sure that he wasn’t going back to sea ever – the thought of having to spend real time in that steward’s mess, or a similar one, made that decision easy for him – and so he wondered what he could do with the close to fifteen thousand pounds that he had at hand.

The problem got to be solved for him, easily.

—————————————————————————————-

When Percy got back home he was horrified to find that a huge solar and wind power manufacturing plant was being built just a few miles from their house and he also found that three of his cousins were about to get married to construction workers from the site and that one of his aunts had already gotten married to one of them – in a registry office, sensibly enough – and two other aunts and a cousin had boyfriends from there too and so it seemed to him that he was shut out.

However, to his vast relief, it turned out that he was shut out only in that restrictions regarding his sharing their beds was conditional on, and agreed to by all parties, on his not letting that fact become general knowledge, and so, when their various fiancés had left – after playing sticky fingers with them in separate, steamy rooms for what had seemed like hours before finally getting up the courage to plead for permission to slip a condom on and then, gratefully, put it to use – the real action began. They all remembered very well the quality of loving that he could provide and that the two things couldn’t be compared.

Being given almost free access to all of that marvelous flesh again made him mellow out fully and it also made him feel lackadaisical again and so the affianced girls had very little difficulty with getting him to volunteer to ‘help’ them with paying for their weddings – the lists of the items that they needed went on and on – and, seeing that the bride’s family is traditionally expected to foot the bills and seeing that he was, even though he was the youngest of them all, Grand Patriarch of the family, it wasn’t all that long before his fifteen thousand ‘hard earned’ pounds had melted away.

As soon as all of the weddings were over and done with he started looking for what was out there in the way of a job.

He up and left for the big city when he’d been assured by an employment agency that it wouldn’t be difficult to find a suitable job for him on the strength of the extraordinarily flattering, rave recommendation from the shipping company but when he showed up at their office he found that they’d changed their minds and they wanted him to join their newly formed Temp Agency. They explained that he’d be sent around the country to replace sick or vacationing staff members of affluent families and that while none of the jobs would last much longer than three months none would be shorter than one month either.

For the next four years that is what he did for a living and he never failed to bring back strong recommendations from the womenfolk of each assignment regarding his competence.

He knew instinctively to try avoid getting involved with any of the women that he came in contact with who were under the age of thirty – his upbringing made that relatively easy for him in that all women were as one to him – and he never failed to marvel at how complete indifference could change into full, unbridled intimacy a few seconds after that suited the woman’s new-found circumstances.

Nor did he ever cease marveling at the vast differences between the rich and ordinary working people where the expenditure of vast sums of money for fripperies was accepted without breaking stride but the very mention of giving their servants anything more than cost of living raises every year, no matter how justified, caused conniptions universally.

He was solely tempted to accept offers of permanent employment several times, always generated by the rapport that had built up between him and a woman who had some influence in the family, but only once did he seriously considered doing so and that was with a family who had either a house or an apartment in a half dozen different countries and one of them was a marvelous beach house in southern Spain. He found that he loved knowing that the sun was shining right then and would be shining the next day and every day and the more he discovered about the natives’ way of living, especially their food and wine, the more he liked it and he even found that because their language is spoken exactly as it is written it wasn’t difficult for him to learn key phrases. So, when it got to be time to move on he did so with great reluctance but he was helped in that because when the family got back to their main home in Ireland it rained heavily and non-stop for five straight days.

He eventually tired of having to be constantly traveling and so he asked to be taken off Temp work and one of the permanent jobs that was on offer was at Sir Tobias Everly’s mansion that was in the Green Belt in the North of London that had, he was told, a staff of fifteen and so, when he found out that the mansion was nicely isolated from the nearest town, called Barnet, he asked to be considered for the job because, from his past experience of fond memory, he figured that there might well be some lonely and cut off female members of the staff  who would be glad of his services.

He did mean extra-curricular ones that were not included in his job description.

——————————————————————————————-

When, a scant few weeks later, he’d left Lady Felicity’s bedroom, soiled suit in hand and firm erection very much in evidence, and with a resolve about beauty that was very new to him, he handed over the suit to the waiting delivery man and then hot footed up to his room because he knew that Daisy was there and, when he’d dealt with his most immediate problem and his brain could function properly again, he began plotting, big time.

He eventually figured that the way to get into Madam’s bed and next to Madam’s truly marvelous body was through her personal maid so he stopped using Daisy to solely, and selfishly, ease his needs and from then on, for a whole week, he concentrated on satisfying her so thoroughly every time that they coupled-up that, as he’d planned, she became so enthralled with him that she would do anything that he asked of her.

It was fairly easy for him to get to that point because she was a very sensual girl and she too had been brought up on a farm and she had played serious and serial ‘doctor’ games with many family members, some of whom were two or three times her age, from the age of eight on and had lost her virginity long before puberty and, as a direct result of all of that attention, her libido had strengthened and blossomed and so from then on merely getting felt up by any male anywhere and anytime was enough to send her into spread-legged ecstasy. She found it difficult to combat that but she knew that she had to master it if she wanted to hold down a job and she succeeded only by staying away from men.

When she was taken on as a maid by the Everly family she forced herself to observe, un-natural for her, strict chastity and she suffered cruelly from it for several long years but one handshake from Percy ended that and she made a determined play for him and, although she was a little over-weight and plain of face, she didn’t have to try very hard at all.

It made no never-minds to her how or what he did to her as long as he did it regularly and so he usually opted for doggy-fashion – as already mentioned but also because by doing it that way he got thoroughly drained every time and also because; he didn’t have to put up with her nearly constant kissing and praises and; because of the convenience factor, they merely needed something stable that was at the right height for her to support her upper body to allow him to get on with it and, finally, after she’d seen the wisdom in his suggestion that she stop wearing panties, doing it that way meant that the act could be easily and successfully accomplished in a matter of minutes.

Unlike Sir Toby he’d had little need for beauty in the woman who was available to him – up to then, that is – and he’d only needed ‘woman’ and so Daisy had carried out that role for him nicely

For most women, using that method on a regular basis gets old quickly because it calls for passivity and for very little cooperation on their part but Daisy’s blood was so hot that, although she couldn’t do much cooperating, she’d have several orgasms as it was going on and that was what her body craved.

For most men, there would be an off-putting draw-back with that trait of hers because every time that she had one she couldn’t keep from shuddering and convulsing which would force them to pull out and wait it out but it didn’t bother Percy a bit because one of his aunts had had the same over-reaction to being stimulated and she, to encourage him to stay coupled until she’d eased off and thus be present and ready to give her more of the same, had taught him how to derive pleasure from her convulsions, internal and external, and thus continue to get pleasure for himself during her upheavals.

His aunt’s name was Hanna and in her youth she’d dated as often as any of her school friends but when the dating with any one particular boy had progressed beyond kissing and friendly feeling of her breasts to outright groping that would be the last date with that boy because as soon as his fingers got to touch base she’d lose control of her body and of her voice.

Understandably, the guy would snatch his hand away and flee in embarrassment.

That unhappy state stayed with her until she was twenty-one when she met a man, Stan, who loved her so much that he was thrilled and content to be getting prolonged kisses from her and that went on for many months and when he’d bought her an engagement ring she’d undo her bra for him and he’d revel in having free access to her breasts but he never even thought of trying to get more.

On their honeymoon he, of course, wanted a whole lot more, indeed he wanted all that she had and when he started in on getting it he was, as you’d guess, much put out when she started convulsing and shouting out strings of unintelligible words around one minute after he’d done a little serious exploring.

They persevered through the night and made some progress but, not wanting to have other hotel guests on their floor call Security, they tried going at it extremely slowly but that wasn’t successful because it made the experience seem more like a scientific experiment that didn’t call for much involvement by either of them and then they tried going at it really fast and he did indeed get off that way but there was precious little pleasure in it for him and none at all for her although she did suffer a lot of pain through not getting aroused. Thank you for asking.

Luckily, for them both, he was older than she was and much more experienced in just about everything other than sex and he was also nearly twice as heavy as she was and he eventually managed to use both of those attributes to find ways to deal with the situation.

To stop her from shouting out they agreed that she should try putting the end of a hand towel into her mouth, which worked well, and to stop her entire body from convulsing when he was driving into her – when she got to be properly stirred up she’d easily muster enough energy to buck him clear off her – he learned to capture her arms by holding her elbows tightly and to control her legs by crossing his ankles over hers and he used his weight to pin her hips down to the mattress, which when combined, negated her ability to buck him, ignominiously, up into the air. He also had to press his head hard against hers to stop her from heaving it around like a semi-tethered cannon ball.

That became the MO that they used for the rest of their honeymoon and for several months after they got home – although she didn’t have to gag herself then because there was no one around to hear her shouts – and he’d simply keep on driving right through her heavings and her writhings until he’d climaxed and because she’d have had several orgasms for herself as he was striving mightily to get one of his own neither of them felt deprived in any way.

One Sunday afternoon, it was a lazy, rainy day and that morning they’d slept way past the time that she’d have been able to get to church on time, and they’d gone back to bed after having brunch and, by coincidence and poor management, they’d both climaxed at the same time and he was thus able to quit having to hold her down and, after recovering, he found that he could handle her breasts all that he wanted, and also have some nice, deep kisses, with no danger of getting his tongue bitten off, and, in the process, he found that he very much liked having the full body contact that comes from being allowed to wallow in and on a woman’s totally welcoming, through being fully satiated, body.

The next time that they were going at it, in a real effort to get more of the same, he decided that, instead of driving through her convulsions as had been the norm for him up to then, he’d try resting in place and wait one of them out with her with the hope of eventually finding a way of coordinating with her so well that they’d climax at the same time again and – hopefully – there’d be more lovely wallowing and sweet kisses and the rest.

Revelation!

This is how that happy event came about: Just as he’d decided earlier, he stopped moving when she was close to climaxing and he lifted his head, to be able to look at her face and maybe get to see the lust that had to be showing in it gradually fade to bliss, and by so doing it allowed her head to start thrashing around and that, it turn, somehow made her belly muscles – all the rest of her was pinned down – writhe and roil in unison with its movements and that affected her uterus which pulled at her filled-up vagina and although that gave her some extra pleasure it worked wonders for the owner of the said vagina filler.

It was exquisite for them both as it was going on and, it turned out, it was also marvelous in another way for them – every one of her roilings gave her a very welcome, and heretofore unknown, extra degree of pleasure that, itself, generated more roiling and they also gave him enough exciting twitches to stay interested in having it continue but not enough excitement to make him have to start obeying Mother Nature and begin driving in and out to search for completion.

The result – a self-perpetuating love-fest that went on for as long as they both wanted it to or until they had to get up and be somewhere else.

While the revelation was still fresh for them they saw less and less of their friends and relations who became alarmed when they continued to see their blessed-out faces – after all, their friends had agreed among themselves, their honeymoon had ended months earlier and it wasn’t feasible that they’d want to spend all of their time together seeing that the bloom must have worn off long before – but there was nothing that they could do to get the couple to come visiting again.

The only limitation that Hanna put on her husband was to control the time that they were allowed to seek out, and then stay in, their newly discovered blessed state on Saturday nights. She’d set up an alarm clock to alert them when fifteen minutes had gone by and he’d know from that that it was time for him to lock her head in place again to stop the roilings and then drive into her and get it done so that she could calm down and get some sleep afterwards.

The reason for that was that, if they’d fully indulged themselves on Saturday nights, when she was in church the next morning it only took several coughs; or her having to bend down to pick up a dropped hymnal; or the like, to revive deep, residual feelings in her and it would be all that she could do to hide her need to go into exquisite convulsions from her fellow, ninety per cent of whom were also farmer’s wives, pew occupiers. If it did happen, in spite of her precautions, she’d drop to her knees and lean forward onto the hymnal book shelf and pray intently while it was having its way with her and she’d stay there, no matter what, until she felt able to sit up straight again.

It was often a close thing and so she knew that she had to begin to either limit her husband’s access to her the night before even more, like, perhaps, to no time at all; or stop going to church altogether, God forbid; or join a Pentecostal church where her falling about the place and shouting out nonsense would be accepted as the norm and was merely her, seemingly bona fide and much welcomed as a spectacle by all and sundry, efforts to cast out Satan.

Hanna’s and Stan’s marriage lasted for better than thirty years and it might well have gone on for ever – seeing the amount of bliss-time, stress-free-time they shared on a regular basis – if a threshing-bailing machine hadn’t somehow jerked itself into gear and ran him down at oats’ harvesting time one year.

She found it hard indeed to cope with going from complete fulfillment to close to nothing at all overnight and so when, years later, her nephew Percy showed up, ready for plucking, she bided her time until all of the female relatives that she’d been forced to move in with on being widowed had chaotically tried to staked their claims to health-giving transfers of his male fluids and when, as she knew it would have to, her fair roster proposal was seen to be the right way to go they tentatively asked her if she’d like her name to be put on it, fully expecting her to decline, she pointed out to them that as the proposer she was entitled to pick her time slot before anyone else and she demanded to be allotted every Wednesday night from ten until eight the next morning.

When Percy dutifully showed up at the designated time he found that she was already in her bed and that the only light in the room was provided by a dim bedside lamp.

He got undressed and when she pulled back the covers for him he saw that her breasts couldn’t have provided much pleasure to any man for many years by then and that her face had both a serene look on it and a warm and welcoming one too. Because it was still all new to him he only needed ‘woman’ and he was happy about having found yet another one in the house that he was beginning to call ‘home.’

He didn’t expect much from her and he didn’t get any when she’d turned onto her back and had invited him to mount her. She was wise enough to know that she couldn’t even begin to compete with her sisters and her other relatives as far as flashing fair female flesh was concerned and so she made zero attempt to influence him by letting him see how firm her belly and her upper thighs were but, anyway, all of that would be as of naught, she knew well, when she brought her big guns to bear. He closed with her and she was very pleased how well his body melded to hers and any apprehension that she had immediately changed to approbation.

When he was all the way into her she asked him to stop moving for a minute and then she then locked him in place, using her strong belly muscles, so that he’d have to hold still and let her tell him the story of how she and her Stan had found out how to reach, and hold, self-perpetuating ecstasy.

He knew a good thing when he heard one and so he did a lot of practicing and made rapid progress and, because of the wonder of what she introduced him to that night, from then on if, in his future, he ever dwelled on how he’d become not just fascinated with the pleasures that women can give men but fixated with it he’d have had to acknowledge that it all began in earnest on the first night that he spent with his Aunt Hanna.

She also showed him how to meld his body with hers, AFTER they’d enjoyed a whole lot of bliss, so well that for hours after neither of them knew which was woman and which was man and didn’t much care either until one of them had to disengage for one mundane reason or another.

Only his Aunt Hanna had the ability to sustain the marvelous cycle that made the phenomenon happen although he never stopped hoping to find another woman who could do so.

—————————————————————————-

Following up on his master plan for Daisy, he started to insist that they were to always wait, no matter how horny either one of them was feeling, until they could find some real privacy and could lie down on a soft surface to do it and, although at first she didn’t like having to wait, when she had enjoyed his special attention in the horizontal position several times she found strength enough to stop complaining and to willingly wait for the next opportunity to meet his new conditions.

They proceeded happily like that for several weeks but then, sensing that something big was in the offing, she began to want, badly, to be with him for a whole night and because they couldn’t use her room – she shared it with the downstairs maid – and because if she’d been caught coming from or going to his room up in the attic at any time of day or night both of them would have been fired on the spot, between them, they came up with a clever way to accomplish her stated needs.

They decided to wait until her next day off, which was always on Tuesdays, and the night before she’d tell the housekeeper that she was going to spend it with relatives in town and when she was out of sight of the house she’d turn back and take the back lane to be able to sneak into the basement and then make her way up the back stairs to Percy’s room.

He’d slip up for a quicky several times through the day but at night – after Sir Toby had told him that he wouldn’t be needed again – from the moment that they both got naked until the alarm went off, in the morning, he hardly ever let her come down to earth and she had zero hope of remembering how often she’d climaxed although the number of tied-off condoms (Six. He used them for their main purpose but also to keep her fresh for his other enterprises that followed, it seemed to her, in next to no time) that she’d had to gather up from the floor on both sides of the bed in the early morning gave her a figure to start multiplying with. With long practice they eventually managed to follow his Aunt Hannah’s method of giving each other ‘perpetual bliss’ and they got closer and closer because of it.

She’d never had such good loving nor, more importantly for her, had she ever been fully satiated before, and so, along about three o’clock, when that had happened to her, she was delighted to find that her body no longer writhed and heaved and she could then lie still and appreciate more fully his administrations although it gave him pause and he stayed in two minds as whether he approved.

Just as he’d planned, doing that for her turned her into being totally devoted to him and from then on she would, unhesitatingly and willingly, obey his every wish.

With that established he knew that he could then get on with the major part of his plan.

He clearly remembered Daisy’s claim about Her Ladyship liking to be touched and he intended to incorporate that need into his general plan which centered around his being allowed to give Madam regular massages knowing that, with his expertise and her proclivities it was quite possible that he’d soon be promoted to giving her very irregular massages indeed.

He kept that central plot in his head and he worked it into several possible scenarios – for instance, the first one that he came up with was having Daisy go on duty one Wednesday morning still carrying the odours of his semen along with her own emanations and the resulting, distinctive smell, very well known by all women and the reason that they buy so much perfume ‘just in case,’ would have been very evident from being stirred up by him only minutes before she went to her mistress’s bedroom, and then wait to see what transpired – and another one, quickly abandoned, was for Daisy to take her order about drying out ‘every nook and cranny’ further each time until it was an essential part of her morning duties and one day he’d happen upon her when she was in a highly receptive mood and – – – – .

But then life took a hand in a delightful way that solved his problem nicely.

When Daisy showed up for work, on the next Wednesday morning, she had douched and washed thoroughly but she was still in the deeply mellow state – because Percy had gotten amorous again after seeing her bottom wobble when she was getting out of bed – that shows, for all to see, that she was a totally satisfied woman and because of it her demeanor bordered on the beatific. Her Ladyship couldn’t have failed to notice it and she told Daisy that she now knew very well why she always left the house on her day off because clearly she was seeing someone and only an ardent lover could get a woman into that state, it was something that she longed to find out about for herself and how it felt, and she went on to demand all the details of what she’d been up to in bed the night before because she was so envious that she could hardly contain herself.

But then, as Daisy was struggling to find an answer for her, Her Ladyship’s bowels told her that she’d better hop into the bathroom quickly and she did so, post haste.
Daisy was left alone and she worried about what to say when Her Ladyship came back out and so she decided that she’d better go and find Percy and ask for advice. As she was looking for him it occurred to her that he might want to hear about what Her Ladyship had just said not just to tell her what to say but because he might be able to think up a way to exploit it.

When she told him what had been said he recognized the opportunity at once and that this was a far better way in for him than any of his half made-up plans and so he thought hard and then rehearsed her carefully in what she was to say and so, when she went back, she was ready for any and every question.

When Lady Felicity heard her bedroom door open and close she called out from the bathroom, where she was sitting on the toilet, “Uh, is that you Daisy?” knowing full well that it had to be her because no-one else would dare come into her bedroom without knocking and then waiting for an invitation to enter, except for her husband and it was far too early for him to have returned. “Where on earth have you been? I’ve called you twice. Well, all right, all right, don’t tell me the boring reason but whatever it was don’t do it again, you hear me? Well now, I’ve finished so come in here and do your job.”

The reason why she needed Daisy’s help was because with all three of her pregnancies Her Ladyship had suffered tremendously from constipation and her Gynecologist had recommended various medicines but, to protect the fetus, they were all too mild and so when they didn’t work he suggested that she have an enema every morning. He gave her the first one and she was – uh – very relieved and demanded that she be given one every morning from then on and although she was easily the most prestigious, and by far the richest, patient that he had he wasn’t about to visit her that often for such a mundane task so the next morning he showed Daisy how to do it and when it was obvious that she was competent enough he let her take over for him. As all doctors do, to maintain their status and to be able to keep sending in their bills, he gave Daisy a batch of forms, he called it a ‘Patient History Log,’ in which she had to fill in the blanks alongside a list of questions pertaining to the quantity and ‘quality’ of ‘material discharged’ after every enema. He took the filled in forms from her on his weekly visit but he threw them away when he got back to his office without even glancing at them.

When Her Ladyship got to be, in spite of her best efforts, pregnant again for the third time (she was very put out but not very surprised seeing that she was awash in her husband’s sperm most of the time) her problems progressed a little in that besides being just as constipated as she’d been at the end of her first two pregnancies she’d also developed a nasty rash between her legs. Her doctor advised her that she should get a bidet installed and then stop using toilet paper altogether. When it had been installed, after each enema Daisy had to help her on to it and then clean her with its jets of warm water and a gentle, clear soap, and then dry her by using a hair dryer that was switched to ‘low.’

Even though Her Ladyship didn’t have to care for her children – the only time that she saw them, except for special occasions like birthdays, was when their nanny brought them all to the dining room at around seven-thirty to kiss their parents and to say goodnight – but, nevertheless, she was determined to never get pregnant again so she paid her gynecologist extra, a good deal extra – unbeknownst to Sir Toby, of course, who would certainly have forbidden it – to tie her tubes immediately after she’d given birth.

Incidentally, that was the same Doctor who had been given, separately and surreptitiously, generous bribes from both Sir Toby and Her Ladyship to put in extra stitches after each delivery so, just as you’d think, she valued having them as patients.

When she’d delivered her baby her problem had cleared up nicely so she didn’t need any more enemas but she’d found that she liked having Daisy pamper her in the other ways so much – understandably from her point of view because it turned a disagreeable chore into an almost acceptable one – that she got her to keep on doing the last two parts – washing her and then air-drying her – after her regular, ordinary evacuations. She insisted on continuing the air-drying part to be sure that the nasty rash didn’t come back and make her less than perfect for her husband – who, after all, was the one who paid all of her bills without complaint and she wanted that to continue indefinitely, of course – and to get that done she’d then move over and sit on the end of the chaise-langue that had been put there for that very purpose and she’d spread her legs to let Daisy get at her with the warm air jet.

It was true that she was a little ashamed of her self-indulgence and so, every morning, when she was ready to call Daisy to come and turn the taps of the bidet on, to get the right temperature before she moved over to it, and then be ready to apply the soap, she tried hard to block her mind from slipping back to the time when she was around two years old and she’d be sitting on a commode and she’d have succeeded at her task and it got to be time to call out to her beloved nanny, “Barbo, I’ve finished.” and then, when she’d been cleaned up and re-diapered, see Barbo examine her deposit before taking it away as she exclaimed, “Wow! Aren’t you a clever little girl? Well done, my precious.”

On the morning that Percy and Daisy’s plot was to be put into play Daisy ‘did her job’ and was putting away the hair-dryer when Her Ladyship said, “Can you see where I put my panties?  – – – Ah, yes – – Good – Let me lean on you while – – – there. Well now, let me look at you again. Yes, that strange aura that I noticed is still there. Not quite as strong but definitely still there. I’m intrigued by it. I want to know what has happened to cause such a change for the better in you. Why, you were positively beaming earlier on. Let’s go into my dressing room and while you’re doing my hair you can tell me what it’s all about. It’s something to do with a young man, that I’m sure of.”

When they had both moved to the dressing room and Daisy was combing out Her Ladyship’s night tangles she was asked again for an explanation regarding the distinct ‘aura’ and she replied, “Well, Ma’am, yes. It was a young man and it’s one who you know already. It was Percival Hodges, Sir Toby’s valet, and what happened is this: He saw how I nearly always have a – uh – he called it a ‘hang dog’ expression and he told me that it was almost certainly due to tension. He told me that he’s a prenall – uh – a phrenallagy – uh –

“Is the word you’re looking for, ‘phrenologist,’ ? ”

“Ah, yes, thank you, Ma’am. A ‘phrenologist’ and so he offered to check out my skull earlier this morning. That’s what they do – ah, but you know that already – well anyway after about two minutes of his probing fingers my headache went away, just like that, and then he told me that he’s a licensed masseur too and he – ”

“Wait. I think I know where this is going. Did he take any liberties with you?”

“Oh no, Ma’am. Nothing like that. It’s true that I was skeptical at first, just like you are, but like I said, he’s a licensed masseur, and he has it -” she nearly made a huge mistake then but she recovered by saying – “Uh, he told me that he’s going to have his license framed and then he’ll hang it in his room. When he saw that I was hesitant about letting a man touch me he said that I was not to worry because I should know that he’d get the license taken away from him if there was the slightest hint that he’d used it – uh – inappropriately and he valued it too much to let that happen.

“So, when I heard that I let him work on my neck and it was magic! He sought out what he called ‘tension spots’ in the muscles and he took away all of the aches and pains in two or three minutes – – – – There. All the kinks and tangles are out so shall I give you a French twist or a bob or what, Ma’am?”

“Uh, the French twist, I think. But do go on. What came next with this licensed masseur of yours?”

“Oh, that’s the best part! He moved down to my shoulders and – well – he did something like this, here and over here – – – – and this, here – – – – only much better, of course, more professional and his fingers dig in and search out tension better. D’you see, Ma’am?”

“Ah, yes I do. Indeed I do. What did you say his name is? He’s my husband’s valet right?”

“Yes ma’am. His name is Percy – uh – that is, his name is Percival.”

“Percival! Well, I can’t call him that – we called my Great Uncle, Lord Bremmington, ‘Uncle Percival’ – what’s his other name?”

“Uh, it’s ‘Hodges,’ Ma’am.”

“Ah, Hodges. Yes that will do. Tell this Hodges to come and see me when you’ve finished with my hair and make-up and that he’s to bring his license with him. – – – – Uh, come to think of it, you’d better not weave my hair. Just leave it loose. The better for his, ‘probing fingers to search out tension,’ right?”

When she’d finished making-up her mistress Daisy went in search of Percy again and when she told him that he’d been summoned into her presence he loved hearing it and demanded that she give him all the details and he got excited from remembering what he’d seen of her breath-taking nakedness that time in her bedroom and knowing, from what Daisy had told him, that there was a high probability that he was going to see it again and up close and, not only that, with a bit of luck he’d be able to touch some of it too. After a minute’s thought he decided that he’d better not be too eager when he’d, inevitably, brought Her Ladyship down to his level and so he looked Daisy in the eye and gave her the look and then he motioned towards the leather armchair and, as she was getting into position for him, he went over and locked the door of the room. By the time that he got back to her she was ready to receive him and he lifted up her dress and her slip and piled them on her back and then he used her as savagely as he knew how so as to not keep Her Ladyship waiting a moment longer than was necessary.

She’d switched on her radio so she didn’t hear him when he knocked so he opened the door and went in and called out and was rewarded with, “Is that you Hodges? I’m in my dressing room so come through.”

He found her sitting in front of the large mirror and she gestured into it to get him to come closer and then she said, “Daisy tells me that you’re a licensed masseur, Hodges. Is that right?”

“Yes ma’am. It is,” he lied.

“I told her to have you bring the license with you. I presume that she told you that, so – where is it?”

“Uh – she must have misunderstood me, Ma’am, I’m afraid. I’ve sent it to be framed but when that’s been done and I get it back I’ll certainly show it to you.”

“Oh, well all right, be sure you do that. Now, tell me about this phrenology skill of yours. Do you have a license to practice that too?”

“Ah, another misunderstanding Ma’am. I have a strong interest in Phrenology but I’ve only studied the subject in library books.”

“Oh. Well never mind, especially seeing that it’s been disproved as a science anyway, but let’s put that aside for now and shall we start by having you explore my skull? Do I have to hold my head in a certain way for you?”

“Don’t give it another thought, Ma’am. I’ll position it as I go along.”

He got on with it, making his moves as they occurred to him and making up comments on the topology of her skull as seemed appropriate because he knew absolutely nothing about the art of phrenology except for what he’d read in a magazine article when he’d been in a dentist’s office several years earlier. However, he was confident enough to continue because he loved touching any and all parts of any and all women and that love was always evident in his touches.

It seemed to him that Lady Felicity would have let him explore and press and rub and finger her scalp all morning long but he had higher goals so after ten minutes or so he murmured, “There, that’s done. Now let’s work on your neck, shall we, Ma’am?”

“Mmmmm hmm yes. Please do. You’re quite good at this, aren’t you?”

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

Here he was on surer ground, soft flesh was involved, and he delighted in searching out, and isolating for special attention, muscles and tendons and then the joints of her upper spine and then the base of her skull and he took his time and, again, she felt transported.

“There,” he said when he was impatient to move on again and that time he didn’t ask permission to move down to her shoulders but simply told her that he was going to do so and then he moved her silken robe away, on both sides, to be able to get at them better.

An entirely different kettle of fish.

As soon as he got all of his fingers and thumbs working on her she started moaning and groaning with pleasure. What he’d done to her head had been merely pleasant and what he’d done to her neck had been wonderful for her in that she recognized it for what she’d expected, and had hoped for, from her husband, ever since their wedding night but she’d never been given any of it and so getting it now made her very, very grateful but then, when he got started on her shoulders her massed, pent-up needs got to be fully released and she was completely swept away by it and she hoped that he would never stop.

Then came a highly welcome bonus for him – he’d started slowly and gently but when some roughness was called for he did so and the design of her robe saw to it that the combined effect of that, along with her added reactions to his probes and clenches, made it began to slip further and further down her body and, after checking in the mirror to see that her eyes were still closed, he was free to look down all that he wanted at her marvelous breasts which gradually became more and more exposed until her robe got caught up on her now distended nipples. The sight was even more pleasing than the first time that he’d seen them because gravity made them a bit less than perfect and thus more approachable by mortals.

It was a very pleasing sight and he congratulated himself on his good sense in getting Daisy to bend over for him just before he answered Her Ladyship’s call because, in spite of that, he was beginning to feel some stirring going on down there.

Besides being able to make his fingers transfer some of the affinity that his whole being felt for women’s bodies – which was multiplied many times over for this particular one – he was also technically good at shoulders because he’d been told, at an early age, that most women like having their shoulders manhandled and flexed and, as long as it was done in a non-threatening way, they thought of it as being innocuous. So, he’d done a lot of it over the years and although his efforts had, in the past, always led, inevitably and smoothly, to more intimate contact with the recipient he didn’t dare try anything that bold with Her Ladyship. He’d wisely determined that when he’d gotten that far with her he’d hold back until she was the one who ‘suggested’ that they move on to his giving her a full body massage.

However, he couldn’t maintain the status quo indefinitely so, after not getting any ‘suggestions’ from her after ten minutes or so, even though it must have been obvious to her by then that her shoulders and upper arms had been thoroughly loosened and freed up already he re-arranged her robe and then he ventured, “There. I think we’ve done, Ma’am. – – – – Ma’am?”

She didn’t respond until he took his hands away altogether and that brought her out of her reverie to find out why the marvelous stimulation had stopped.

She asked, “What’s this? What happened?” and she opened her eyes and saw that Percy was standing behind her and it took her a few seconds to recollect the circumstances and when she’d done so her attitude towards him changed immediately from her ‘Marie Antoinette’ one – Bonaparte’s Empress who thought nothing of getting naked in front of male servants because she believed that they were inferior beings who couldn’t possibly think that they were worthy enough for their presence to be even acknowledged by her – to warm gratitude for being the one who, in a very short time, had awakened and released her sensuality in full force from its twelve-long-years-long hiatus.

“I think that your shoulders are loose enough now Ma’am. Unless, of course, you want me to pay more attention to them but it won’t help them much anymore today because of the law of diminishing returns.”

“Oh! Well, I don’t know what that means but I do want more – uh – massaging, but – uh – what else is there that you can do for me, you clever man?”

“Well, I’m a full body masseur, Ma’am, so I could do your arms and hands or your feet and your lower legs or your back. Whatever you want.”

“Ah, give me a minute to think on it – – – Yes, well, my back gives me trouble occasionally so what do we have to do to get you to work on that for me?”

“Uh, we’d have to move to a flat surface like a table or a bed and then you’d simply have to lie face down on it but, I hope you understand this Ma’am, you’ll have to uncover your back for me otherwise it won’t be a half as effective.”

“My word, really? Well, yes, I can see the truth in that – it stands to reason, in fact. Very well – – – Uh, we can use my bed because it is certainly handy. Well, uh, Hodges, please call Daisy to come here and then tell her what we have to do and when she’s made me ready I’ll call you. Yes? Will that serve?”

“It will indeed, Ma’am.”

He walked over to the door and he called out, “DAISY – DAIS- ah, there you are. Please help Her Ladyship over to the bed and then take her – uh – her what-do-you-call-it – uh, yes, her silk robe off and get her to lie face down on a big beach towel if you have one handy or, if not, on two regular towels. Position her so that she’s about six inches in from the edge of the mattress on this side and with her arms extended upwards. OK?”

. . . . . . . .

“Mr. Hodges, I’m ready for you now. Please come in.”

Both Daisy and Percy were thrilled to hear her ‘Mr.” and her “Please” both of which were unprecedented.

When he got there he saw that she was in position and was wearing only a pair of silk French cami-knickers whose material was so fine that the lower parts fluttered occasionally for no apparent reason, the windows were all curtained and the air-conditioning wasn’t turned on, and by doing so they revealed and then covered up again tantalizing slivers of choice buttock.

He opened the bag that he’d hurriedly filled and brought with him earlier and he took out some fragrant oil and a louffer that was made from a coarse sea-sponge and a pair of plastic surgeon gloves that he exhibited for form’s sake but that he had no intention of wearing.

He warmed his hands by rubbing them together and then he put some oil on one of them and then rubbed them together again to spread it and then he sat on the side of the bed and he began his labor of – blessed relief, for her and of true delight for him.

At his first touch she shivered and then she told Daisy that she was excused and then she relaxed as only a pampered hedonist can and he started off by working on her arms and then in the upper areas of her spine that he hadn’t been able to get at when she’d been sitting down and he gradually moved down to the small of her back and he spent a lot of time checking her spine alignment and he gave a running commentary on that because he knew that professional masseurs always stressed its importance and that chiropractors swear, and practically live, by it.

Then he shut up and let his hands do the talking as he jumped over, reluctantly, the sacrosanct area of her knicker- covered buttocks that was off limits – up to then, that is, although he was positive sure that that the barrier wouldn’t be in place for long – and he moved his attention to her feet and ankles and calves but after giving extra attention to her Achilles’ tendons – he knew that that always felt good for everybody both when it was being done and, later, when they were being used again for walking – he didn’t dwell there for more than a minute or two because neither party could get nearly as much benefit from it as they could, and would, get from the next part of his routine.

It became time to do some talking again then because he had to set his patient up for the end-game.

“Now we come to the treatment of the two longest tendons in our bodies. They’re called the – uh – the ‘Spreebertin Tendons’ – he’d made that up on the spot – and they’re responsible for getting us to keep our balance when we’re walking and also to stay upright when we’re standing still. Even though they’re essential for our wellbeing very few people know that they even exist. For this reason we masseurs always pay a good deal of attention to them and we start where they begin – here at the inner knee and we follow them, massaging all the way, like this – – – to ease the tremendous amount of tension that is always present in them if they haven’t been given treatment. Do you feel how tight it is now, Ma’am? Yes – – – and all the way up to here – – – in your upper thigh.

“Well now, let me slip a pillow under your hips because that will help me get at the tendons better. Lift up please – – there. Well, now. Let’s do this leg first and then we’ll do the other one. From here – – – – – – like this – – – – – – up to here – – – – – –

“There. Uh – once more I think but perhaps a little deeper this time – – – – – – – – – – – – There.”

He’d done her left leg first, the one that was farthest away from him, and his hands and fingers were at a disadvantage and so his thumbs had had to do most of the work and he purposely hadn’t tried all that hard to gain advantage anyway but when he moved over to her right leg, at the knee, all of his fingers could come into play and that, he knew well, would make all the difference in the world.

The first part of his probing didn’t afford much of anything to either party – except for rising anticipation, perhaps – but when he got up to within a few inches of her crotch she started moaning in a low hum that grew with his every advance and when his fingers had eased past the embroidered edge of her French Cami-knickers the hum became a prolonged groan. On hearing that he paused to take some deep breaths and then he made his fingers go on up, inside her knickers, following the tendon deep into her upper thigh.

Because he’d necessarily moved aside her silken knickers to get at the beginning, or the end, of the tendon and because he’d earlier put a pillow under her he could then see some of her buttocks, and all of her pink-rose-bud of an anus and some straggly pubic hairs that were doing a poor job of concealing the underside of her plump labia, and it was a marvelous sight for him – how not?

To seal the deal, he trapped a few of those pubic hairs between his fingers and her skin and by continuing to massage the tendon the hairs got to be pulled slightly and the pain that that caused was exquisite and because it was transferred to her labia it was impossible for her body to decide if the resulting sensations were pleasurable or not and so she responded positively to that by calling out “Oh, yes. Yes. Yes.” as she lifted up her hips some more to give his fingers more room to operate in.

He realized that by doing that she’d given him carte-blanche to proceed and after he’d visited with her clitoris and had given it the reverent touches that it had been longing for over all of her adult life he soon made her feel that her whole being was concentrated between her legs. He then slipped her knickers down to her knees and got to work finding out what she liked having done to her buttocks – that, it turned out, was everything, including kissing and slurping and, especially, light biting – and then he got her to turn over and, although she kept her eyes shut tightly the whole time, she was the one who insisted, by pushing at the elasticized top, that the farce had to end and that he was to take her knickers off completely so as to let her open her legs all the way for him.

He applied his tongue to what his fingers had been doing up to then and never had he seen such writhing of hips in appreciation.

On and off – that is whenever she went in and out of the throes of completion – he indulged himself by kissing her breasts and her belly, and wherever else he chose – although he didn’t dare give her soul kisses because, enigmatically, although it was OK for him to kiss her crotch it was far too soon to encroach that far on her husband’s prerogatives and he also figured that at that point actual penetration came under the same category.

It – all of it – was what she’d suspected was in the offing for her all along – what woman with her history and all of the free time that she had wouldn’t do so seeing that the myriad magazines and novels that she read, and even local newspapers lately, are full of descriptions of what can be anticipated and advice in case it isn’t forthcoming? – and so she let herself go and she became satiated after her third climax .

When he could raise no more response with his best efforts he reluctantly stood up and called Daisy back in and together they replaced her Cami-knickers and put a nightdress on her and then they put her in bed and covered her up.

When they were outside in the corridor Daisy saw the urgency on Percy’s face and so she knew where they were headed and what he was going to do to her when they got there and that puzzled her so she whispered, “But Percy dear, from the state that you put her in you could have done it to her without a problem. Why didn’t you?”

“Why? Jesus, girl! It’s no fun at all when the woman is comatose. It would be like fucking a hole in the mattress. And anyway, when it’s time for that to happen I want her to be very aware and beg me for it. Uh, listen, Daisy. I’m having difficulty with walking so, seeing that nobody’s around, be a darling and squeeze this for me – ah, yes. That’s it. Thank you, lil’ darling.”

The next morning, as he’d fully expected, he was summoned to Her Ladyship’s chambers again and he found her lying on the bed with a cover over her.

When she’d sent Daisy away she said, “You know, Mr. Hodges, what you did for me yesterday was really – uh – very satisfying indeed, as you must have seen for yourself, but you’ll be astonished to hear what else it did for me. Let me tell you about it although I want you to promise that you’ll keep it to yourself as, I think, you have to anyway seeing that you’re a professional person who is fully licensed. Will You? Good, because you see, I’ve got to tell someone or I’ll burst.

“Well then, here it is. Not only was being in – uh – in your care just wonderful in its own right but when Toby, my husband, came to me in this bed after lunch – I’d told Daisy to tell him that I wasn’t hungry and so I wouldn’t eat with him – I was still very much in the, uh, in the mood that you’d put me in with your – uh – your massages and so when he, as usual, dispensed with the preliminaries and, uh, and started pounding away at me with all his might I was astonished to find that that was exactly what I wanted from him! Just before I gave myself up to the moment I remember saying to myself that you two are compatible as far as I’m concerned. D’you see? You were the aperitif, although it’s much, much more than that, and he’s the entrée. You see? And wait, there’s more. Wonder of wonders, I had another lovely climax just before he had his and because of it I made his last few strokes so memorable for him that he had to lie still and full out on top of me for a long time afterwards and then, when he could talk again, he couldn’t stop thanking me for what I’d done for him. And then – Yes, there’s still more, can you believe it? Wooo! I still can’t hardly believe it myself – when he’d finished getting dressed to go back to his office he came over to me and gave me a wonderful kiss and he said lots of nice things and then he said, ‘I don’t know what it was that you ate and drank this morning but please be sure that you take the same things before I get home tonight, please. I don’t remember ever having that much pleasure from making love. Thank you very much, darling.’ And then he kissed me nicely again and said some more sweet things before he left.

“My word! He’s never done any of that before, ever.

“But wait, hard to believe I know but there’s still more – it must be accumulative because when he got home he made me come back up here to bed for him and as soon as he touched me I realized that I wanted to be used brutally again and when he did just that it was wonderful again. The same thing happened yet again when he brought me up to bed after dinner and – can you believe it? – again when he woke me up for more of the same!

“It was marvelous and it’s all because of you and your clever fingers. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.

“However, lamentably, the reservoir was dry for this morning’s session and so I had to simply endure his brutality just like I’ve done ever since we got married.

“So, you clever, clever man, this is what I just came up with. We must, of course, obey Sir Toby, right? I must – uh – what was it? . . . Ah, yes. I must ‘take more of whatever I took yesterday.’

“So. Can we get started right now, please?”

With that she flung the sheet aside to reveal that she was wearing only her cami-knickers – which she’d kept on so as to not shock Daisy – and she invited Percy to close with her by lifting her arms to him and when he leant over to get started by kissing her breasts she stopped him and then lifted her head up and kissed him full on the lips.

He’d thought that he’d have to wait several days at least before getting that far and then only when she was in full-out heat and wouldn’t pay it any mind later so he upgraded her to an ‘advanced course’ and he deftly and tentatively slipped her a little tongue and when she’d gotten over her shock she found that it was a new sensation that was very pleasant for her and she quickly got proficient at reciprocating and then she tried some experimenting and learned how to initiate it and how to change from that to passively accepting it and relishing that sensation until it got to be time for her to use hers again.

Being an expert at recognizing a woman’s potential her liking for French kissing let him know that just about all things possible between a man and a woman would not only be allowed but eagerly accepted by her and so when he’d gone through his preliminary routines and she was so far into it that she started calling him, “You darling, darling sweet man,” the next time that he’d made her go off into her own closed world he eased away and got undressed and, as he knew would happen, when she got back to earth she loved finding that full body contact gave her yet another new experience and as she was getting close to having yet another climax it came to her that she could intensify it for herself in the regular, time-proven manner – the fact that his penis was very evident might have helped her to come to that decision – and so she made the moves to get him to mount her and he resisted in fear until he remembered that she’d had her tubes tied and so he let himself sink into her and was transported because he’d been waiting for that moment since he’d first seen her naked.

She quickly found out that an expert lover could and did take the act to heretofore unimagined heights – by searching out certain places that she didn’t know that she had and by altering the depth of his strokes and by changing his rhythm, and so on, and, not only that, could and did make it go on and on and on by unselfishly holding back and welcoming and acknowledging necessary pauses while she went off on trips and by being there for her, when she came back down, ready to recommence, going slowly for a while until speed was once again called for – and when she could take no more of it he arranged it so that they climaxed together and with that she went completely limp and out of it.

When he found the strength to disengage and get off her he called for Daisy and together they carried her to the bidet to give her a douche and then a sponge bath and then they pulled on her cami-knickers and her robe and then they put her back in bed and covered her with a sheet and left her, still close to being comatose.

Outside, in the corridor, Daisy saw that they were going the wrong way to get to the room where they could get it on and it was then that she realized fully that she had a formidable new rival and, she figured, it followed that her rival would almost certainly take most of the loving that was rightly hers but she didn’t dare alienate him so she whispered, “I thought you were going to wait until she begged for it before you were going to do it to her. What happened?”

“She begged and she got pegged.”

Having Percy come to Her Ladyship’s bedroom in the morning to give her a massage became the regular routine from then on and so Daisy had to be content to wait for her share of loving until the weekends, when Sir Toby was home, and on Tuesday nights.

After Percy had come into Her Ladyship’s life, and into her bed, she matured rapidly and so she no longer needed to let nostalgia play a big part in her life – she was, by then, living a very full life indeed, thank you, and didn’t need to hang on to childhood experiences although she found it hard to give up on being able to call Daisy/Barbo to her side by shouting, “I’ve finished.” – and so she’d started to wipe her own bottom and to flush immediately after doing so. However, she still required Daisy to adjust the temperature of the water in the bidet and then, when she’d moved over to it and was in position, to turn on the jets and then give her crotch a thorough washing with soap and, when that was done, she’d dab at herself with a towel and then go over to a chaise loungue and open up so that Daisy could dry the whole area with the hair-dryer. She insisted on continuing to follow that procedure to be sure that she was as fresh as was possible ‘down there’ in case her husband took it into his mind to pay it a friendly visit one day with his mouth even though he’d never done so since she’d known him. He’d once hinted that he’d been exposed to something ‘unfortunate’ at one time in his life – she’d known before she’d even met him that he had a reputation of being a womanizer and had insisted that he ‘cease and desist’ before she’d agreed to marry him – and so he was, he said, “no longer all that attracted to that part of your body” except to penetrate it, of course. Also, since she’d met Percy she didn’t want to take a chance on getting another rash that might well make him balk at going down on her himself, which was, by then, by far the favorite thing in her life.

——————————————————————————————–

Her husband, Sir Toby, had indeed had an ‘unfortunate experience’ and at a comparatively early time in his career as a lover. His father, the third Baron Mannerly of Ponsembly, was both eccentric and severely ‘pussy-struck’ – he’d forced himself to use that modification of the actual term that is in general use which is, of course, ‘cunt-struck,’ because as he aged he’d begun to lose his inhibitions and he’d pained his wife and her sisters once by using the common term in front of them in a joke and had learned from that and had trained himself, through repetition, to say ‘pussy-struck’ – and he presumed that his son, also named Tobias, would be too – but there, if asked he would have said that he thought that all men were unless they were stupid or too old or incapacitated – so he took him to his favorite brothel on his sixteenth birthday.

The young Tobias was treated very well on that first visit and he was allowed to ‘sample’ several of the youngest girls, and to wallow all that he wanted, which formed his character for life, and he went back there whenever he had the funds. When he came of age his trust fund became his in its entirety and the income that it generated made him secure for life and so he upgraded from going to prostitutes to having courtesans come to him.

He’d heard of but had never tried cunnilingus – he’d often been warned of the very real potential dangers of doing it with whores – but when he saw how immaculately clean his new bed companions were, and how wonderfully they smelled, he soon became an expert at it and that continued until one fateful night when he’d called his then favorite one to come to his flat and although it was ‘that time of the month’ for her she didn’t want to risk alienating him by refusing him and so she used an old whore’s trick which is to fit a diaphragm and thus block blood flow.

Unfortunately, it also traps semen instead of letting it get to be assimilated by the woman’s body and, besides that, her diaphragm was old and warped and so it was a poor fit and, consequently, when he went down on her a half hour after having used her once – and after not letting her clean herself up in the meantime because, as was usual for him by then, he’d done a whole lot of wallowing – he got himself a horrible mouthful of his own semen that was mixed with some of her blood along with a nose full of the pungent secretion that women, who have been recently stirred up, secrete.

He’d never forgotten it and he never got over it and he vowed that he’d not only never try anything out of the norm with a professional woman ever again neither would he ever go visiting ‘down there’ again with any woman, ‘just in case.’

When he finally gave in to his parents’ nagging about having heirs they were overjoyed and his mother got started at once on finding a suitable bride for him.

Their choice, and perforce, his, turned out to be Lady Felicity Willoughby, daughter of a Lord and niece of an Earl, and after a customary courtship they were wed.

On the first night of their honeymoon, on a private island in the West Indies, Tobias the younger, found himself in a quandary.

When he’d been with a prostitute or with a courtesan, he was paying for their time, and for their complacency, so he’d felt zero compunction against simply bulling his way into whichever one he was with because that’s what she was there for and the doing of it was what he was paying for. But when the woman who was in his bed was his wife he couldn’t bring himself to accept that she, a well-brought up and well-connected young virgin, could possibly want to have him penetrate her delicacy with what is, let’s face it, a very ugly and scary erect penis.

He knew well that he had to resolve his problem, and very soon too, and so, after doing some kissing and caressing and some mild exploring it came to him that he should get her involved in her own deflowering and so he thought up a way that would positively demonstrate to all and sundry – that is, to her – that she actually wanted the nasty deed to be done to her and so he moved until he was hovering over her and then he told her that it could go no further unless she used both of her hands to guide him.

“But how?” she asked, faintly but gamely.

“If you truly want it to happen you have to use the fingers of your left hand to separate your labia and the right one to guide the head of it up to your entrance.”

She’d been told that this moment would arrive and what would happen when it did and she was excited and eager to find out if all the hype about it was justified but even so she wished that she’d thought to wear at least one glove – as the joke has it, “Why are you wearing gloves, dear?” “Well, I suppose I’ll have to handle the beastly thing!” – but she forced herself to sanction the deed by following his instructions and after that it got done in short order.

He’d hurt her but she figured that she’d get through it until she realized that he hadn’t pulled out of her and, a scant ten minutes later, she felt him grow inside her and when he started moving in and out again through the remnants of her hymen the pain that it caused really let her know that it had truly been torn to shreds and that she was now, and would be for evermore, a woman.

She got through his second pummeling and when he’d pulled out and had moved off her she thought that she’d be allowed to get some sleep and perhaps start healing but it was not to be. He was insatiable and she got very little sleep that night and what little she got over the next two weeks came when she was at poolside in a chaise langue and he couldn’t get at her.

She got pregnant on their honeymoon – as she guessed might well be the case because there was no way that he could have had that big a supply of condoms – and, over the years, his eagerness to do some coupling four or five times in every twenty four hours didn’t ease off at all and so the necessary intervals that birthing three children brought with them – also having ‘those’ days every month which she, unlike most women, actually learned to look forwards to and which she tried to extend as long as was possible – felt like to her like a prisoner’s temporary reprieve from hard labor.

—————————————————————–

The next day was a Monday and so when Daisy let Percy into her bedroom Her Ladyship told Daisy that instead of leaving this time she was to stay and listen to what she was going to say.

She put on her haughty look, the one that she wore when she had to ‘dismiss without references’ someone on her staff, before she told them that she’d found out, “From the Housekeeper but don’t worry, I’ve told her to keep quiet about and that I’ll deal with it.” that they were lovers and, when they’d gotten over their surprise at being found out and were both patently and properly contrite, she dropped her stern manner and then admonished Percy by saying, “Really, Hodges, am I to think that I’m not enough woman for you?

“And as for you, Daisy,” she went on, “I’m really disappointed in you, but, that aside, I sincerely hope that you two have been making love to each other since Hodges first came to work for my husband and not since he’s been giving me – uh – massages because that would be most disloyal. Do you agree?”

They both nodded agreement and Percy assured her that they’d ‘been together’ since his second day on the job because, practically on sight, they’d found ‘instant rapport.’

“Good, I’m glad to hear it,” said Her Ladyship, and then, “Well now, I’ve been worried about something else for more than a month now. It’s been troubling me for all of that time but, after finding out that you two obviously – uh – know each other well, a possible solution to my problem came to me as I was lying in bed this morning.

“This it what I came up with so pay careful attention to what I’m going to say.

“What if you, Percy, keep coming here every weekday morning and get me – uh – nicely set up with your massages and in the mood for my husband, but when you have to – uh – what was it that you called the act once? – ah, yes – when you have to ‘get it off’ maybe you could ‘get it off’ in Daisy and by doing that, and not in me, that would increase my – uh – my fervor when my husband comes to my bed for sex after lunch because I wouldn’t have experienced – uh – getting – uh – flooded by you. You see? The thing of it is that you’re so much more of an expert than he is and so the poor dear can no longer trigger me into – uh – helping him to – uh – receive more pleasure from doing it by – uh – reciprocating more. D’you see what I’m getting at here? D’you think that it might work?”

Percy was so relieved at not getting dismissed out of hand – knowing women so well he also knew how much store they put into faithfulness even when they themselves were cheating on their own husbands or lovers – fell over himself in agreeing with her, “Wow! What a clever idea Ma’am.” – that’s not what he called her when they were alone together but Daisy was in the room with them -“it’s well worth a try. Shall we start this morning?”

“Of course we shall. What’s to stop us? So, go and lock the door and let’s get on with it.

“Daisy, I think it best if you wait in my dressing room until we call you. Do you agree – uh – Hodges?” – that is not what she called him when they were in bed either – “or should she stay here and perhaps help us?”

“How could she do that Ma’am? A threesome, you mean?”

“Ho! A ‘threesome’ you say? My goodness, is there a pragmatic word for everything?”

“For things to do with having sex, yes, there is because it’s practiced so often by so many. Uh, I tell you what. Why don’t we, this first time, let her sit on the chair over there and just watch and we’ll see what develops?”

“Good idea. Should she get undressed and thus – uh – ready for you, do you think?”

“Well, we could let her decide that for herself, no?”

“All right then, let’s get started.”

They both began to get undressed and as they were doing so Her Ladyship said, “My word, you’ll never know how much I miss these lovely sessions with you on weekends and on the other days that HE doesn’t have to go to work.”

When they were lying on the bed and he was about to move in on her she went on, “You know, in a just world we could – Ooooh! – Hey now, Hodgey-Podgy, I wasn’t ready for that. You impetuous man. Just for that I’ll – ”

“Ow! Felibaby, you little monkey. Well then – – – there! How do you like that, hey?”

Daisy watched and listened and was amazed at what they got up to and she made mental notes until she got too hot and horny to watch anymore so she turned her head away and stared out of the window and she wondered if Felibaby would let them do it on her bed, when the time came, and stay and watch or would she make them lie on the carpet and go into the dressing room and close the door, firmly.

What Felibaby did was determined for her because when she’d been given three orgasms and had rested, and had come back from the bathroom where she’d used the bidet, she was startled and amazed to find that they were already getting on with it but in a very strange way indeed – what had happened was that neither Percy nor Daisy could wait any longer and because neither of them had dared to suggest that they do it in Her Ladyship’s bed they’d opted to take up the position that would let him get off in the fastest way that they knew – it was strange, to Her Ladyship that is, because she’d never seen nor even heard that it could be done that way. She saw that Daisy had her feet on the ground and was leaning over the bed and Percy was pumping away at her from behind.

Felibaby waited until they’d finished and until Percy had eased out of Daisy and had collapsed onto the bed before saying, “Oh, Hodgy-Podgy, I’m very disappointed in you. Why haven’t you told me that it can be done with the man behind the woman like that? Uh – tell me, please – does that position have a humorous name too?”

“Yes. It’s called ‘Doing it doggy fashion.’ Or, more simply, ‘From behind.’ ”

“Ha! ‘Doggy fashion!’ How droll and how terribly rural. ‘Doggy-fashion!’ I just love it! Well, we certainly have to add it to our itinerary and I can’t hardly wait to try it. I want to do it the very next time that my husband stays in town, you hear me? Ha! – ‘Doggy fashion.’ My word, what fun you’ve brought into my life. Thank you. Thank you both, in fact. Uh, it doesn’t hurt, I hope. Does it, Daisy? And is it good for the woman too?”

Inevitably, such familiarity between the three of them led to the lowering of barriers and in a matter of days the term ‘threesome’ covered their activities very well indeed.

All three of them would get naked and get onto the big bed and although Percy and Daisy were always careful to see to it that Her Ladyship had been put into the mood, firmly, before they ‘took liberties’ with her, when that happy state had been arrived at it was close to ‘anything goes.’ Just about the only ground rule that had to be followed was that although Percy had carte blanch to penetrate Her Ladyship whenever the fancy took him it could only be for long enough to get all of the way into Her Ladyship and then he had to withdraw and, when he had to seek relief urgently, Daisy would be there for him.

————————————————————————–

One day, Percy had been given an arduous task by Sir Toby – restoring a suede top coat that had been rained on – and it had to done by hand, inch by inch, and had to be done that same day because Sir Toby was leaving early the next morning on a two-week long business trip to Paris and he wanted to take the cleaned coat with him. Because of that Percy hadn’t been able to go up to Her Ladyship’s bedroom to ‘massage’ her when her husband had gone off to work.

Her Ladyship and Daisy had tried to get something going with each other but it wasn’t anywhere near the same and so Her Ladyship had sent Daisy away after a half hour of trying to find the motivation to do more than merely touch and kiss each other and, feeling frustrated, she decided to go in search of Percy.

She eventually traced him down to the scullery where he was working diligently on the coat – he’d been allowed, by the cook, to work in the room because it was too early for the staff to want to use it to deal with the pots and pans that would be needed to prepare lunch – and when Her Ladyship got there she gave him ‘the signal’ and when he whispered that he didn’t dare not finish his task she whispered back that in that case she’d settle for a just couple of orgasms in the Library because she badly needed relief and she needed it ‘now.’

He was in no position to refuse Her Ladyship, least of all when she was vertical, so he reluctantly hung up the coat and put all of his stuff into its box and he put the box in a corner and he got up to the library a few minutes after Her Ladyship had done so.

She told him to lock the door and then she showed him that she wasn’t wearing panties under her robe and then she went over to one of the leather armchairs and she bent over it and wiggled her bottom at him.

Percy lifted her robe and her slip up and he folded them onto her back and then he got down on his knees behind her and did his oral duty but, in spite of his best efforts, he couldn’t give her a climax from that weird angle. That made her even more frustrated and so she told him to stop and when they were face to face she whispered that her needs were greater than ever and so she told him to find something soft that she could lie down on so that, “You can get at me better.”

There were only two pieces of carpeting in the room and they were an old, tattered and torn, badly faded, eight feet long Turkish rug and its eight feet long runner.

Percy, in a hurry to get back to work to save his job, decided that it would have to do and when he walked over to it he saw that it was made up of three three-feet wide panels and that the seams were coming loose and, in general, the whole thing was in a sorry state.

He rubbed his hand over the top of it and was disappointed to find that that it was far too rough for Her Ladyship’s soft bottom to rest on and then he remembered that he’d seen a documentary on Turkish carpet making and how ten year old children were forced to work all hours on weaving and knotting them and so he examined it more closely and he saw that the knots were on the top! He looked at the underside and was astonished to find that not only was that part luxuriously soft but that it wasn’t a bit faded and that it practically glowed with colour.

He didn’t have time to ask Her Ladyship about the anomaly so he folded the three panels lengthwise and then, just in case, he pulled the runner over and turned it over too – and found that its knots had been on top too and that the underside was as brilliantly colourful as the rug was  – and then he put it, ‘upside down,’ on top of the folded rug.

He then went and got Her Ladyship’s robe and he laid it over the folded rugs and they both got undressed and he helped her to lie down and they got on with it.

She didn’t want him to get into trouble with her husband – because where would she find a replacement who was equally discrete and talented and competent in bed? – so she told him that she’d settled for just two orgasms.

When he’d delivered them, and had collected one for himself, she let him go back to work after he’d helped her up and over to a chair. He retrieved her robe for her and then he replaced the carpet and its runner where and how he’d found them.

The next morning, because Sir Toby had already left on his trip Her Ladyship had put no restrictions on Percy and, when they were all three resting after some strenuous but fulfilling activity in which Daisy was denied any meaningful penetration at all, he asked her about the Turkish rug and runner and she said that she’d asked her husband to get rid of them many times but he always told her no and that it had been in his family’s possession, and in that same spot in the library, for better than a hundred years.

She went on to say that after he, Percy, had left her in the library the day before she’d taken another look at them and she’d seen that they were worn out and tattered and torn and, in her opinion, completely un-repairable.

She told him that she didn’t want the nasty things in her house any longer and so she’d measured both of them and had gotten onto the internet and had bought suitable replacements which were going to be delivered that very afternoon.

Both Percy and Daisy had often seen that sales people always fell over themselves to try to stay in Her Ladyship’s good graces and so they were never surprised a bit about the extraordinary good service that she always got.

Percy asked her what was she going to do with the existing carpet and runner and Her Ladyship said that the people who brought the replacement carpets, “would take them away with them, of course. What else?”

Percy asked, tongue in cheek, “In that case, will it be all right with you if I take them for myself when I go down?”

“Of course, but what on earth for? You’ve seen them for yourself. They’re tattered and torn, right?”

He was very excited with his good luck and he didn’t want to explain why he wanted them, she might well change her mind if he did, so to divert her attention, he repeated her ‘Tattered and torn’ phrase and then began to sing the old Royal Navy song whose tune a famous English pop and rock singer purloined for himself without, as far as he knew, acknowledgement. It goes:

“O-h-h-h Maggie, Maggie May they have taken you away and no more down Lime Street will you roam.”

(‘Lime Street’ is a street in Devonport/Plymouth that was long famous for its seedy pubs and seedier prostitutes.)

And its chorus goes on, in part, describing her famous grey knickers:

“O-h-h-h, they were tattered and were torn and the arse piece it was w-o-r-n, those dear old drawers that Maggie used to wear.”

Her Ladyship was delighted with the song and she asked him if he knew anymore and he trotted out several of them, all hilarious, but the one that she liked best was the one whose chorus goes:

“T-h-e-r-e – w-e-r-e – cats on the roof tops, cats on the tiles,

Cats with syphilis, cats with piles,

Cats with their a-r-s-e-h-o-l-e-s . . . wreathed in smiles

As they reveled in the joys of fornica . . .tion.”

When she’d finished laughing they went back to their love-making and when they’d had enough – that is, when Her Ladyship was satiated – he got dressed, after resting for a while, and then went downstairs and lost no time in collecting the fore mentioned rugs.

He took them to his room and when he’d situated several broomsticks on chair seats to prop the rug up against the wall with, with the knots side facing the wall, of course, and had laid out the runner in the same way on the other wall he exalted in the wondrous colours that made his poky quarters glow.

However, after a few days with them there he realized that they were far too good to keep all to himself and so he tried to come up with a more appropriate place to display them.

When it got to be Daisy’s day off she sneaked up to his room, as usual, and when she got in there and had switched the light on she was mesmerized by the splendour that she found. The rugs seemed to glow.

Percy came up a few hours later, after leaving Her Ladyship satiated and with lots of his semen inside her, and when Daisy saw that there’d be no loving for her until much later, she tried to get him to promise to keep the rugs until they got married and then take the truly wondrous things to the home that he’d promised to provide for her.

“Can’t be done,” he said as he sat down besides her and then reached over to take out one of her breasts for the pleasing contrast it made with the ones that he’d been playing with a little earlier, “they’re far too good for us. Keeping them for ourselves would cause endless problems when someone else saw them and then we’d probably have to give them back even though these two rich bastards don’t deserve them.”

While she was going on and on about her favorite subject – the house that he’d promised her when they’d had the marriage that he’d promised her – the room-suffusing colours kept grabbing her attention and consequently she found it difficult to concentrate on how she wanted to furnish the living room and, consequently, she found it much easier to agree with him as to the rugs being far too good for small rooms and so, it followed, they’d have to go elsewhere.

When he was about to go back to work she offered to work on repairing the rugs. She told him that her mother was a seamstress and she’d learned a lot from her about needlework although she’d also learned that doing it full time wasn’t in her future, thank you. Because of that training by her mother she knew a thing or two about invisible darning and repairs in general and she told him that too.

“Sure. Good,” he said as he was going out the door, “go ahead if you want to.”

She also knew about how to soak ordinary cotton in black coffee over night so as to not only ‘age’ it but to make it easier on the seamstress because if it was damp the stitches could be left fairly loose in that as it dried it tightened and made for a good job. She had to experiment to find the best way do all of the darning and joining of the panels, from the underside obviously, so as to both strengthen the whole thing and so that none of the repairs could be seen.

When she’d finished, on the following Tuesday, she got Percy to ‘obtain’ some four-feet pieces of lathe and when he gave them to her she attached two of them to the top of the middle panel of the rug, at the back, and then she fitted thin pieces of wooden paneling to the lathes, to support the top panel and hold it vertical, so that then, by attaching strings to the lathes, the rug could be bent in the middle and hung on hooks in the corner of two walls – four feet on each side of the angle – well enough so that it stayed even all around. The runner only needed minor attention from her before she attached the other two lathes to it and then that too could be hung in place underneath the big rug.

Because the full surfaces of the rug and the runner were now presented flat and straight the effect was even more dazzling than before and that reinforced their decision to find a more appropriate place to hang them permanently where more people could enjoy them – ‘bask in them’ wasn’t too strong a phrase.

——————————————————————————————-

When Edwards, the Butler, pulled out of Mrs. Williams, the Housekeeper, she thanked him sincerely and profusely for his virile performance which was mainly due to the fact that she hadn’t been able to give him the signal to come to her room and stay the night, as she always did when Sir Toby wasn’t at home, because of a ‘woman’s thing.’ She was adamant about limiting him, Fred Edwards, to only unsatisfying ‘short times’ or ‘quickies’ with her when Sir Toby was home because she feared that perhaps he’d send for his Housekeeper and/or his Butler in the middle of the night, for some reason, and if they’d been discovered together in her room that would have been the end of both of their jobs.

He’d been ardent enough, although gentlemanly as always, to almost make up for the détente, which had pleased her and, when she’d recovered her composure, she did what she thought of as being a woman’s rightful task which was to wipe him with the dampened hand towel that she always kept to hand – doing that also ensured that she wouldn’t have to change her sheets after his every visit because of ‘nastiness’ – and when they’d settled down and he was cuddling up to her in the spoon position she’d allow him to take one of her breasts in hand but nothing more because although she encouraged him to be enterprising and even innovative on the lead up to getting the deed done once it had been accomplished she’d let him loll on her for only a few minutes before bucking him off and then she’d allow him another few minutes of cuddling before she’d thank him and disengage and then, depending on whether or not Sir Toby was home or not, she’d either send him away or settle down to sleep.

On that particular night they, i.e. she, got back to what had been their biggest concern for months. That was, of course, the disgraceful way that Her Ladyship was blatantly co-habiting with both Percy, the lowly valet, and with Daisy, the even lowlier upstairs maid, although neither of them were sure about how Daisy fitted into the unholy alliance. However, they had a good idea what Percy was up to in her Ladyship’s bedroom every weekday morning and had seen how Her Ladyship would go so far as to sometimes send what she thought to be discrete nods to Percy, in public! And, to top all, he, Edwards, had heard them going at it behind the locked library door on the day before Sir Toby had gone off on his latest trip.

Edwards had been keeping some good news for her that he knew would keep him forever in her good graces – that is, maybe start inviting him to her bed for all-nighters whether or not Sir Toby was home, and continue indefinitely to delight him by uncomplainingly and patiently getting him ready to perform by doing the only thing that worked for him seeing that he didn’t hold with using Viagara because he, and she agreed with him on this, thought that it was flying in the face of Mother Nature – and, when there was a pause in her disparaging comments on present day gentry, he squeezed what he had in his hand, to hold her attention and thus still her tongue, and then he sprung it on her.

“That ‘lamentable state of affairs’ that you just mentioned won’t be going on for much longer, and I can tell you that for sure, Ruby dear. In fact it won’t last one hour after Sir Toby gets back tomorrow!”

That got her attention all right and so she held his hand where it was so as to not dislodge it as she turned onto her back – the last thing that she wanted to do after hearing his surprising and very welcome statement was to disappoint him because that might cause him to change his line of thought or to lose the thread – and she asked him to explain.

He knew the strength of his position so, before answering her question, he lifted his hand from her breast and put it on her belly and then he moved it on down until his fingers were raking through her abundant pubic hair and then, after waiting until he was sure that she was going to tolerate his impertinence, he started separating and playing with her nicely plump labia. He got away with that too, but then he made the mistake of going too far when he asked her to be a darling and “reach down and comfort my teaticles because they’re sore and aching after that long work-out that they just had.”

“God in heaven! You men will be the death of me!” She flung his hand away and said, “Tell me at once what you’ve found out, you hear me, Fred Edwards? And listen to this too: any more nonsense out of you and it’ll be many a month before you get to be invited back to this bed.”

“Oh! Uh, I’m really sorry, Ruby, really. It won’t happen again, honest . . . Well now, what happened was that the day after Sir Toby had gone off on his latest trip Jimmy sent to tell me that there was a delivery of carpets for the Library and the lorry was parked at the service entrance already and was it all right for him to give the men the go-ahead to bring them in?

“Well, no one had told me about no carpets coming so I went down and looked at their paperwork and I saw that, sure enough, Her Ladyship had picked two of them out for the Library on that there internet thing and so it was legit, right? Correct?”

“Get on with it, man!”

“Right. So anyway, being curious, I escorted them, and the new rolled-up carpets, to the Library and they had what they called ‘a lay-out plan’ that showed where they had to go and, bugger me, if it wasn’t at the far end where those old Turkish rugs are and have been since long before either of us was even born. But then, word of God, when I took a look for them, there they were, gone!

“Well, what was I to do? I decided that it would be best to let them put the new carpets down – I’ve got to admit that I think that they look a hundred times better than those raggedy old things ever did – and then I showed the men out and then I told Daisy to go and tell Her Ladyship that her new carpets had arrived and were in place.

“So – that’s where things stand as of now, and Ruby, you know as well as I do how much store Sir Toby put in them there old Turkish rugs – how he left orders that the maids weren’t to go anywhere near them with a vacuum cleaner and could only use a damp mop on the surrounding floor, right? – so there’ll be rare old fireworks when I tell him what’s what a minute after he gets here tomorrow. Right?”

The housekeeper needed several minutes to absorb and understand his ‘where things stand as of now’ and when she got the whole picture she let out a great whoop and she sat up and leaned over to kiss her bedmate and then she laid herself back down and said, “Oh! You lovely, clever man! What a wonderful thing to have happened. Whee! Things will be back to normal in this house in next to no time. Wow! . . . . . Uh, give me your hand, Fred dear – there – now move closer so that I can – yes. Ooooh, there, there, you poor, soft, dear little things, Mama loves you.”

After a few moments of gloating it came to her that he was only now telling her about something that had happened about two weeks before so she snatched her comforting hand away from him and she sat up and demanded an explanation.

He didn’t want to tell the real reason for the delay, which was because he’d figured that although telling her about it at once it would have made her happy in the short term if he saved it up until the night before Sir Toby came back it would be such welcome news for her that she might well rescind her silly rule and let him stay the night in her bed always from then on so he thought hard and he came up with: “Ruby, you know how happy we are, and the whole staff too, when Sir Toby is away, right? Well then, I knew that you’d be feeling a bit low tonight knowing that he’ll be coming back tomorrow so I kept it as a surprise for you. To cheer you up. Yes?”

She didn’t buy it for a second but her near euphoria over-rode her skepticism and she said, “Fred, it really is wonderful news and so I want us to celebrate this marvelous occasion properly. It’s too late now because we’ve – uh – done it already but when you come to me tomorrow night for another all-nighter I promise to let you do anything that you want because of how clever you are.”

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

“Including – ?”

“Oh, I should have known – well, yes. That too. It’ll be, ‘Highway Sixty-Nine Revisited,’ sure enough.”

———————————————————————————-

She had no idea why he’d given his favorite thing to do in bed that strange name, she figured that it must have come from the title of a Bob Dylan record of fond but vague memory, and although she liked doing it too – very much indeed after he’d done enough at his end to over-ride her initial repugnance and could cooperate appropriately – she didn’t want him to know that because she thought of it as being unladylike so she only allowed it to happen on his birthday and on New Year’s Eve and when he’d done something extra nice for her. Apart from that one thing she’d always taken charge in bed from the very start and she’d always stayed there too. That is, right up to the time when Nature unarguably hands that role to the male.

Her room would be in darkness when he’d slip into it and it would stay that way until she decided otherwise. He could get completely undressed only if she’d done so already and it was only after she’d reached over to kiss him on the mouth that he could move her onto her back and then kiss her in the same way and, even then, it wasn’t until she’d given him a touch of her tongue that he was allowed to do that in return although when she did so it gave him license to let gravity aid his tongue, along with his saliva, to fill her mouth and, although she was careful to keep it from him, she reveled in, and marveled at, the astonishing amount of pleasure that she got out of it. When she’d had enough of that she’d play with the hairs on his chest and that gave him permission to do whatever he wanted to her breasts and when his enthusiasm slackened she’d move her hand down to his belly hair and that gave him leave to grope her properly. When she opened her legs all the way he knew that it was an invitation to go and dine down there and when he’d given her an orgasm that way he’d climb back up and put his head on the pillow and then, in her own good time, she’d go down and ‘oblige’ him with her mouth until he got to be uncomfortably erect and it was at that time that she had enough sense to let him take over and call the shots.

For, ‘Highway Sixty-Nine Revisited’ she’d proceed as normal up until she was getting close to an orgasm and then she’d say to herself, “To hell with being a lady,” and she’d push his head away and wait until he was in the center of the bed with his head on the pillow and she’d do a one hundred and eighty degree turn and then straddle him so that her head was down by his calves and then, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to see the lust on her face, she’d say, “Now” and he’d reach over and switch the bedside light on – he’d told her emphatically and often that being able to see what was going on was not just nice but essential – and then she’d start crawling backwards, very slowly. As all men know, being able to see that going on – the woman is as open as she can possibly be with everything that she has on full display – is the single most erotic sight that there is and the excitement builds as she gets closer even though that seems impossible.

Fred Edwards would keep very still and would have to use cast-iron control to not engage with her as soon as she got within range and when she was getting on with her task he limited himself to giving little kisses to the general area until she’d lifted clear because if he got her too excited she sometimes raked him with her teeth.

—————————————————————————-

When Sir Toby had been welcomed home by his butler – and the chauffer had driven the car around back where a footman would unload and then take the luggage up to his room – he walked inside his front door and immediately headed for the stairs with the intention of bedding his wife before the minute hand of the huge clock in the hallway had jerked forwards two or three times – the courtesans that he’d been allotted in Paris had all been surly and were careless about their personal hygiene and not very attractive and so he’d merely used them rather than enjoyed them and he badly wanted to restore his faith in womankind by being with a compliant perfect example of it – but Edwards thwarted him by telling him that, “I’m sorry Sir Tobias but there’s something in the Library that you have to see right this minute.”

Sir Toby was both annoyed and puzzled but he saw that his butler, who was a very serious man at all times, was extra serious right then so, of course, he complied and led the way to the Library.

Two or three clicks of the clock’s big hand later he pushed his way into his wife’s sitting room and, close to being apoplectic, he shouted, “What have you done with my carpets?”

“What, those old things? The ones in the Library? Have you seen the new ones? They’re perfect for that spot. And, by the way, what ever happened to: ‘Hello dear, how are you?’ ”

“Good God in heaven! ‘Those old things!’ she calls them, ‘Those old things!’ They’ve been in my fami – – – You stupid woman, have you any idea what they’re worth? At auction the opening bid would have to be at least fifty thousand pounds and they’d sell for several times that much, do you hear me? They’re unique.

“Now stop your nonsense and answer me, where are they? What have you done with them?”

Hearing the value that he’d quoted made her change her attitude PDQ and she cringed away from his wrath and murmured something unintelligible because she needed time to think.

She really and truly didn’t want to upset her beautiful arrangement with Percy and Daisy that nicely side-stepped her husband’s inadequacies because it was a win-win-win-win situation, and she was by far the biggest winner no matter how you looked at it, but, also, she blanched in the face of his fury and realized that he could well say something that was impossible to take back and that could even oust her from his life and from her cherished position as Lady of the Manor, surrounded by servants, so she reluctantly decided that she’d have to throw Percy to the wolves.

“Uh, when your valet – Hodges is it? – found out that I was going to replace the old ones he – uh – he got Daisy to ask me if he could take them. Oh, dear, I’m such a fool but don’t you see, Toby dear? I didn’t know that they were valuable and that’s why I told him that he could have them. Oh dear, please don’t be angry with me. I’m so sorry, but seeing that they were so tattered and torn” – even in her terror she wished that she could sing the chorus that contained those words to him right then because she knew that he’d love the whole thing – “I presumed that they were worthless.”

Her tears didn’t move him a bit and before she’d finished her explanation he was already using his Blackberry to find the number of, and then to call, his card playing friend the Chief Constable of the County.

When he got him on the phone he explained something of what was up and then he told him the approximate amount of money that was involved, which got his full attention, and then he asked him to send his best man and that he shouldn’t use a police car and that he wasn’t to switch a siren on in case the culprit decided to run for it.

Sir Toby then went down stairs and called for Edwards, his butler, and he asked him where his valet was and was told that he had gone up to his, Sir Toby’s, rooms to unpack his bags. Sir Toby then delighted his butler by telling him that Hodges was to stay where he was until the police had questioned him.

The Chief Constable, knowing full well on which side of his bread the butter was spread, promptly sent his Detective Superintendent to deal with the case and, when he got there, he lost no time in setting up a base of operations – he was given the Butler’s and the Housekeeper’s shared private dining room – where, after getting a detailed description of the lamentable turn of events from Sir Toby, he’d be able to question the staff one at a time.

Her Ladyship was first and because, in the mean time, she hadn’t come up with a bright idea that might have allowed her much prized status quo to continue she could only reiterate what she’d already told her husband – that his valet had asked her, through Daisy, of course, if he could have the old rugs.

The detective cannily asked her to try to remember the exact words that Daisy had used when she’d passed on Hodges’s request to be given the old carpets.

Understandably, she chose not to remember the exact words that were exchanged and she made some up to make it seem that Hodges had, through Daisy, done the cajoling and had, evidently, taken advantage of her lack of knowledge about the rugs’ value to enrich himself.

The Superintendent realized that the crucial point was what had passed between Her Ladyship and Hodges, via Daisy, and so he asked her to repeat, into the microphone, her version of how the conversation had gone. When she’d done so he thanked her and let go because he didn’t dare question her more closely.

Next up for an interview, or questioning, was Daisy and she got to be so flummoxed when she’d gotten to understand that her Percy was under suspicion that from then on her answers were unintelligible or worthless.

When she was allowed to go she walked to the back stairs and then ran up them to warn her beloved.

Next came the butler who was so positive sure who had stolen the rugs that the detective had to give up on questioning him because of his pig-headed, overwhelming bias.

Same for the Housekeeper and for the self-same reason although she repeatedly murmured dark things like – “our supposed betters carrying on in a disgraceful manner.”

He made mental notes of what she was saying but he saw to it that her disparaging remarks about her employers would never leave the room. That was because, having had a lot of experience with dealing with the Gentry and not wanting to have to complete the time needed to get his pension wearing a uniform and directing traffic at the intersection of Main Street and Elm Avenue, he’d had a switch with an extension cord fitted to the recording machine and, whenever he had to deal with the staff or friends of important people, he kept it in his hand and was able to use it to surreptitiously switch off the machine, ‘click,’ when gossip pertaining to ‘our betters’ came up. He knew that, no matter whether it was true or not, letting anyone else hear it would make it twist and turn and, inevitably, come back around and bite him in the arse.

Hodges was called up next and he came in as if he didn’t have a care in the world, which he didn’t. His feet had hardly ever touched the ground for many weeks by then even though he still couldn’t quite grasp the good luck that had descended upon him and his world – regarding being given total access to the wonder that was incorporated in Her Ladyship’s body – and he had no reason to suspect that his good luck was in danger of ending unceremoniously and soon.

When the central, all important, question came up as to what were the exact words that he’d told Daisy to use to Her Ladyship regarding the disposal of the said carpets, he was taken aback.

He sensed danger for the first time but not as to whether he’d committed a crime but as to whether his new-found idyllic situation was about to disintegrate seeing that surely she, Felibaby, couldn’t have lied to this Detective about what had actually happened.

He himself had no reason to lie and so he quoted, to the best of his memory, what he had said to her directly, including the part that went, “But why do you want them? They’re tattered and torn!”

“Please tell me, Mr. Hodges, did this conversation with Her Ladyship take place face to face or, as she states, through an intermediate, namely, her maid, Daisy?”

“Jesus! That’s a strange thing to ask me.” He took a minute to think and when the implication of, “as she states,” became clear to him he got angry and he also reverted to courseness in self defense.

“Yes, mate, it was directly, face to face, and come to that, it might well have been belly – “Click’ – to fucking belly too.”

The Detective, suitably taken aback by the blatant ‘belly to belly’ bit, suspected that he was hearing the truth so, when he’d collected his thoughts, what came next was the question of whether or not he’d taken advantage of Her Ladyship’s ignorance and had then smuggled the rugs out and had sold them.

He decided to meet it head on, “Mr. Hodges, I suggest to you that you knew all along about the high, the very high, value of the two carpets in question and you took them so as to sell them for illegal and dishonest monetary gain.”

“Wow, hold on now! How’s that again? Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. You’re asking me if I stole the rugs and then sold them? Right?”

“Well, yes. That’s the gist – – – uh – that’s what it comes down to, yes.”

“Well, first off, mate, it’s only now, this minute, that I found out that they were worth anything at all regarding resale value. I wanted them because they’re beautiful in their own right and because they were being neglected and unappreciated where they were. Them’s the only reasons.”

“I want to believe you, Mr. Hodges, in fact I’m inclined to believe you, but still, the fact is that the rugs remain missing. And, concomitant to that, I think that you should know that on the authorization of Sir Tobias and Her Ladyship your room has been searched. However, no rugs were found so – where did you hide them?”

“I didn’t hide nothi- . . . But hold on a fucking minute here. Did you just say that Her Ladyship authorized the searching of my room?”

“Ooooh, this is getting hairy,” said the Detective to himself as he sensed more danger and kept his finger on the muting switch.

“Well, you know, she has every legal right to do that. It’s her house, after all, and you’re in her employ. Isn’t that true? . . . Oh my word. What’s the matter? You’ve gone as white as a sheet? Don’t you feel well?”

“No matter about that – are you telling me that that lying – “Click” but perhaps too late – bitch has shopped me?”

“ ‘Shopped you.’ What do you mean by that?”

“It’s a Union term, it means . . . shit! Did she tell you and her fucking – “Click” – arsehole – “click” – of a husband that she thinks that I stole the fucking rugs?”

“I can’t answer that but can’t you see that if there’s a perfectly innocuous reason behind your action there’s no need for you to get upset like this?”

“How’s that again – perfectly what?” He chose to appear to be obtuse in self-defense.

“Innocuous – it means a simple and satisfactory explanation.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like the truth . . . . Mr. Hodges, enough of these evasions, all ready. You’ve just admitted that you took the rugs so I’m asking you this directly – did you somehow spirit them out of these premises or did you hide them intending to take them away at a later date?”

“Neither of those two things. I’m not a fucking thief and never have been.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Very well then. Please answer my next question straight forwardly – where are those two rugs at this moment?”

“Come with me and I’ll show you where the fucking rugs are at this fucking moment.”

He led the way down the passageway to the servants’ dining room and when he’d opened the door he reached in and switched the overhead lights on and then he stood aside to allow the Detective to get the full effect when he walked inside.

When the policeman had basked in the glory that filled the whole room for a while he backed out of it and wanted to apologize to Percy but – there he was, gone.

He’d gone to find the rock in his life – Daisy.

The detective walked upstairs and found a footman and he asked him to please find Sir Tobias and tell him that the rugs had been found, safe and sound, and would he please come down to the Main Hall.

Sir Tobias happened to be with Her Ladyship in the sitting room that they shared – he was far too disturbed to so much as think about taking her to bed (they were both disturbed but for very different reasons) – and so when they heard the good news they were elated (for very different reasons) and they lost no time in going down the stairs.

When the Detective had led them to where the rugs were hanging – he had to precede them down the stairs and along the passageway because neither of them had any idea as to where their servants’ dining room was – he imitated Percy’s actions with the door and the light switch and then stepped aside to allow them to go inside on their own.

They too marveled at the warmth of colour and the glow of opulence that came at them and, when the effect had lessened a little, neither of them could bring themselves to accept that these marvelous tapestries were the rugs that had been gathering dust in the Library for many decades. However, when Sir Toby had walked over and had lifted the corner of one of them they could then see for themselves that the reverse was both faded and familiar.

They were both far too overcome with remorse – and with shame – to send for Percy right away to apologize to him so they went back upstairs and on the way he told the footman to bring him a carafe of whiskey. She had to order a large gin and tonic for herself seeing that her husband was far too upset to remember to ask her if she wanted anything.

Sir Toby’s shame, about having jumped to a wrong conclusion before even confronting Hodges and giving him a chance to explain his case, was heavily laced with humiliation because he was forced to acknowledge to himself that for over a hundred years he, and his ancestors before him, had stupidly deprived themselves of the rugs’ beauty and warmth and marvelous colours and pleasing presence. To add to his woes was the almost certain fact that what had happened would soon become – that is, if it wasn’t already – common knowledge and he’d be a laughing stock: viz – his recently hired valet clearly knew more about matters concerning issues of fundamental quality than he did.

Her Ladyship’s shame was interlaced with very real regret about having betrayed her lover and through her mind ran an almost continuous lament as she wondered if he would ever forgive her and whether the wonderful sessions that they’d enjoyed would ever recommence. The very thought of having to endure her husband’s daily multiple coupling requirements without the benefit of being primed for them by Percy was close to being insupportable to her.

“But there,” she reassured herself, shakily, “I know my Hodgy-Podgy well enough to know that he’ll be at me ‘like a stoat in heat,’ as he used to put it, as soon as I let him see some of my choicest parts again.”

When he’d lowered the amount of whiskey in the carafe by half, and she’d finished her gin, he took a deep breath and squared his shoulders and then he asked her to ring the bell for Daisy and, “When she comes, tell her to go and find Hodges and have him come up here.”

She rang the bell but it wasn’t Daisy who answered. It was the downstairs maid.

On being asked as to the whereabouts of Daisy she could only say that she had no idea where she was and that all that she knew was that the butler had told her to answer Her Ladyship’s bell when it had rung in the kitchen.

Her Ladyship got a strange feeling in her belly on hearing that and, full of foreboding, she leaned back in her chair to find some support as she let her husband decide on the next move.

He hadn’t liked the answer either so he told the girl to go and find the butler and ask him to see to it that both Daisy and Hodges were to come upstairs at once.

They waited and waited and it was the Butler himself who showed up eventually and he told them that he’d had the house searched from top to bottom and hadn’t found hide nor hair of either of them and, also, their belongings from their two rooms were gone.

He held an envelope in his hand and as he offered it he said, hesitantly, “This was found on the bedside table in Hodge’s room, sir. It’s addressed to you, sir, although I’m distressed to have to warn you that an unfortunate descriptive term has been – uh – added to your name and to your – uh – to your awards.”

He handed the sealed envelope over and Sir Toby read:

“For the attention of,

Sir Tobi-asshole Ever-erect; BART; KGB; OBE; CUC; KOLD.

And,

Lady Facil Ever-liar.”

His face went ashen and Lady Felicia leaned over and took the envelope from his hand and read it for herself.

It was even worse than what she’d feared but she mustered the strength to be able to come up with: “Burn it without opening it, darling. It’s just scurrilous filth from a pair of thieves who planned to steal from us and have fled.”

“You’re quite right in one thing at least, my dear. It must be burned at once even though we both know what’s inside it don’t we? What’s written on the envelope says it all, doesn’t it? – Especially if you know what the Spanish word ‘facil’ means in English.

“Here Edwards, take this and put a match to it please . . . . Yes, right here and now so that we can see that it’s done properly.”

. . . . . . .

“There. Good. Now, take the ashes away with you, if you please.

“Very well, sir, and what shall I do about the rugs?”

“Uh, let’s see – – – – ah, yes. Send the new ones back where they came from at once and leave the Turkish ones where they are for a week or two to let the shame of the whole episode sink into everybody who was involved.

“Oh, Edwards, another thing. Seeing that I don’t have a valet anymore, send up a footman to help me pack and tell the chauffeur to have the Rolls ready about a half hour from now. I have a large amount of urgent business to take care of that will keep me in the City for – well – I don’t know for how long.”

“TOBY! What are you saying? . . . You only just got home . . . Oh Toby, nooooooooooo.”

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