A Gentlemen's Agreement (4 page)

“No, ma’am.”

“Well what is it then? What
happened when Irene asked for some sugar?”

“I gave her some.”

“Quite a bit?”

“Quite a bit. Maybe a little more
than I intended.”

“I can see how that can happen. I
often give a little more of my strap than I intend. Now you lie down on that
table and spread your legs and we’ll see how much strap you get.”

Peach began quivering. She shook
her head violently.

“Are you refusing to obey an
order?”

Peach’s eyes grew wide. “No,
ma’am.” She hoisted herself up on the kitchen table and lay down on her back.

“Spread those legs wide.”

She spread her legs to open her
cunt.

“Wider.”

She spread them
wider.

“Hands over your
head.”

Peach slowly
extended her hands over her head.

“Tamarind, Cherry, hold her leg.
Apple, Lime, get her other one.” The four slaves grabbed her ankles and pulled
them apart. “Irene, you hold her hands.”

Irene grabbed her wrists and
looked down into her face. Peach was gritting her teeth in anticipation of the
coming pain. Her mouth was drawn into a grim line and her eyes were glaring at
Irene in pure hatred.

Irene smiled at her.

Peach refused to look when Nickel
unclipped the strap from her corset. She stood beside the table near Peach’s
chest, raised the
strap
and brought it down on Peach’s
cunt. The leather slapped evenly down the length of her vulva from one end of
her slit to the other.

Peach grunted and jerked hard,
almost pulling her wrists away from Irene’s hands.

“Hold her tight,” Nickel said. She
struck again and again and again.

The strokes were hard but not
delivered with her full strength. Each one stung viciously, but most important,
they accumulated. As Peach’s vulva became more bruised, it became
more tender
. The inner and outer lips filled with blood from
innumerable tiny internal bleeds and swelled to more than double their normal
size. Her clit, normally highly sensitive, became a little nub of pure agony.

Peach fought desperately to hold
back her screams, to find some inner reserve of stoicism that would give her
strength to endure her agony in silence, but she could not. By the fifteenth
stroke, her strength broke under the weight of the accumulated damage. She
began to scream and scream as the strokes kept falling.

Irene quailed at the brutality of
the punishment, but she forced herself to keep smiling at Peach. Hating her
would help Peach endure.

Finally, Nickel clipped the strap
back to her corset.

The slaves did not have to be told
to release Peach. She drew her legs together, but could not close them
completely without compressing her badly bruised and swollen sex.

She put her hands about her chest
and hugged herself while she cried, great wracking sobs.

“There’s going to be an
entertainment tonight,” Nickel said to Peach. “You’re going to get the mattress
for any gentleman who wants to service in the good old-fashioned missionary
position. I’m going to tell them that I tenderized your cunt just for them. I’ll
make sure that they understand that a chance to fuck a
freshly-tenderized
cunt is a special delicacy. You can expect a jolly good pounding all night long.
Plan on feeling every thrust like you never felt it before. It’s going to be a
long evening for you.”

Peach sobbed.

“You know what you should do while
you’re getting royally fucked by all those men for so many hours?”

Peach didn’t respond.

“You should thank every single one
of them for helping me punish you properly because if you’d succeeded in
goading Irene into a fight, you’d be suffering a lot worse than a cunt
strapping. A hell of a lot worse.”

Nickel left the room.

The slaves looked at each other.
The dominant expression on their faces was relief that it hadn’t been them on
the kitchen table; and that it wouldn’t be them on the mattress tonight
servicing man after man with a bruised and swollen cunt.

* * *

“What do ladies do?”

Cherry and Irene were alone in the
kitchen.

Lord Snow was enjoying Peach in
the pleasure room. She would not be enjoying him as much as he was enjoying her.
Nickel had tenderized her cunt two days ago, but the additional bruising that
she had sustained during that evening’s entertainment and Lord Snow’s interest
in using her a couple of times every day since had kept her from healing
quickly. It seemed that gentlemen did like the extra moaning and squirming that
an acutely sensitive cunt elicited. They didn’t much care if the activity of
the slave was a result of horniness or pain.

Irene could only hope that she
never gave Nickel cause to inflict the same punishment on her.

The other three slaves were at the
house, performing their nominal housekeeping duties. Which meant that Lord and
Lady Snow were dining alone tonight. On nights when they hosted dinner guests,
they wouldn’t trust slave labor, but would hire professional cooks, waiters,
and housekeepers. On those nights, the slaves would be left alone to rest and
marshal their strength for arduous after-dinner entertainment.

Peach should be grateful that she
wouldn’t be the center of attention at another entertainment while her cunt was
still tender. It was ordeal enough for Lord Snow alone to find her so
desirable.

“Well?” Cherry prompted.

“What was the question?”

“I asked what ladies do.”

Irene shrugged. “They do their
duty. They’re their fathers’ daughters and their husbands’ wives. In her father’s
manor, a lady helps her mother keep the house. In her husbands’ manor, she bears
children and keeps her own house.”

“Did you have children?”

“No. If I had children, I never
would have sold myself into slavery. That wouldn’t have been fair to them.”

“Did your husband ask you to sell
yourself into slavery?”

Irene barked a short, bitter
laugh. “Hardly. He almost stroked out when I climbed up onto that stage. I’ve
never seen a face so red. He was furious. He probably still is.” She smiled.
“It’s one of my more satisfying memories.” She had never before done anything
that had made her husband pay such close attention to her.

“Did you hate him?” Cherry’s eyes
grew round.

“No. No, I didn’t. I loved him. I
thought that I was giving him something special. I was giving him myself as a
slave. But he didn’t want me. He didn’t even bid on me.”

“If he was that angry at you, I
guess he wouldn’t, would he?”

“If I were as wise then as you are
now, I never would have sold myself.”

Cherry was silent for a minute. “I
guess you regret that, now.”

It was Irene’s turn to think in
silence for a bit. Finally, she said, “No. No, I don’t regret it at all.
There’s a lot that I don’t like about being a slave. A lot. But there was a lot
that I didn’t like about being a lady, either. So far, I think I made the
better choice. It might be the choice between the frying pan and the fire, but
if that was the only choice that I had, then I didn’t make a bad one.”

“I don’t understand that at all.”

“No, I don’t guess you would.
Everyone has asked me the same question and I have never been able to explain
it. I’m going to stop trying.”

“I guess that I don’t understand
because I don’t understand why being a lady was so bad. Your husband didn’t
beat you, did he?”

Irene was shocked. “No. I’ve never
heard of a gentleman beating his wife. It would be unthinkable.”

“Is that because he has slaves to
beat?”

“Maybe. Most gentlemen own at
least one slave. But that’s not the reason. If a gentleman wanted to hurt his
wife, he wouldn’t beat his slave; he’d treat the slave better. No wife cries
when her husband beats his slave but her heart breaks when she thinks that a
slave is having a better life than she is.”

Cherry looked at Irene curiously.
“When you were a lady, did you cry when your husband went out to his slave
kennel?”

“No. That’s a hurt that a lady has
to hide. She can’t admit that she knows that her husband is fucking his slaves.
She always knows, she’s not stupid, but she has to pretend that it’s not really
happening.
That her husband is different than everyone else.
Otherwise life would be unbearable.”

Irene thought for a moment and
then smiled sadly.

“Maybe that was my problem. Maybe
I couldn’t keep pretending that James wasn’t fucking his slaves so my life did
become unbearable. Maybe that’s why I wanted to be a slave that he fucked
rather than the wife that he didn’t.”

“Didn’t he fuck you? I thought
that was what husbands and wives do.”

“Sometimes. Not as much as
gentlemen and slaves.”

“Why? You’re just as pretty as any
slave.”

That stopped Irene in her tracks.
Why had James only made love to her on rare occasions but visited the slaves in
his kennel every day? It didn’t take long for her to figure out the answer.
“Because husbands don’t fuck their wives. They make love to them. They have to
ask their wives for permission. They have to seduce them. Then, they can do only
the things that might give the wife pleasure. Treat her with respect. It’s
completely different than fucking a slave. They can take a slave any time they
want, any way they want, and walk away when they’re done. They don’t have to
give a single thought to the slave’s feelings. But when they make love to their
wives, they have to put her feelings first.”

“If you’d told your husband that
he could have sex with you any time he wanted, any way he wanted, do you think
that he would have spent more time with you and less time with his slaves?”

“I never considered that. I mean,
I literally couldn’t have conceived of saying such a thing to James. It would
have been … inconceivable. My mind couldn’t have held that thought. I couldn’t
have forced the words out of my mouth. I was a lady. A lady would never, ever
say such a thing. Ask her husband to treat her like a slave in their bedroom?
It was easier for me to sell myself and become an actual slave than it would
have been to humiliate myself by acting like a slave sometimes.”

“Ladies are weird,” Cherry said.

For the first time in her life,
Irene could see ladies as other people did. Cherry was right. There was a lot
about being a lady that was weird. Unnatural.

She didn’t want to talk about this
any more. “What about you?” she asked Cherry.

“What about me?”

“How did you become a slave?”

“Bankruptcy when I was nineteen. I
grew up poor. My father was a laborer and didn’t get hired very often. My
mother took work as a housekeeper when she could get it. There are a lot of
laborers and housekeepers in the world and only so many rich people to hire
them. Most of the money that my parents earned went to pay the rent on a
two-bedroom apartment. We didn’t always have food. We kids scrounged garbage.
We got as many clothes from rich people’s trash as we bought.

“That changed when I was old
enough to get credit. Our landlord offered to lend me a few
plaqs
.
Pay him back when I could. Low interest. Everyone told me not to take it. The
poor have a saying: ‘Debt is slavery.’ I thought that it was just something
they said, but it turned out to be a carved-in-stone truth. For a year, I was
beautiful. I had three pretty dresses. My hair was done up like a lady’s. I
could buy makeup. I went out. Sometimes rich boys took me out. Not gentlemen,
but boys from better neighborhoods who had jobs. To us, anyone who had a
full-time job was rich. Sometimes I went out with the boys that I grew up with.
On those nights, I paid the tab with my borrowed money.

“When my landlord offered more
money, I took it, too. I kept the IOUs in a cardboard box under our bed. One
day, the landlord asked when I was going to pay him back. I was floored. I
didn’t have a job. I earned no wages. He said that he’d been carrying me for a
year and that I couldn’t expect him to wait forever.

“I added up the IOUs. I owed
almost three thousand
plaqs
. Three thousand! I
couldn’t imagine that much money. I couldn’t believe that I’d spent that much.
I looked for a job but nobody was hiring. I begged the landlord to give me some
time. He was willing to take sexual favors as payments on the interest but not for
the nut. He let me ride for six months that way. By my letting him ride me.

“After six months, a messenger
delivered a legal paper that said that I had to pay my debts in full within one
month or be found in default. I put the paper in the box with the IOUs and kept
letting my landlord fuck me any time he wanted. I hoped that everything would turn
out all right by some magic.

“Early one morning, the deputies
came to my house and took me into custody. I was still in my nightgown. I asked
to be allowed to get dressed but they said that I wouldn’t need even a
nightgown where I was going.

“The next day I was tattooed and
sold at auction.

“A knight, Sir
Cotslake
,
bought me for twenty-three thousand
plaqs
. I was
astounded. I was worth a fortune. My family could have lived on that for four
or five years. But they couldn’t sell me. Only my landlord could sell me because
he was the one who had lent me enough money to allow him to press me into his
ownership.”

Irene was appalled. She knew that
women were pressed into ownership when they were declared bankrupt but she had
never bothered trying to find out exactly how it was done.

“What happened to the money?”

“It paid for my debts.”

“Your debts were three thousand.
You sold for
twenty-three-thousand
. What happened to
the twenty-thousand extra?”