Bound in Moonlight (10 page)

One

London
June 19, 1817

H
AVE YOU ANY objection to being raped?” inquired the silver-haired, nattily attired Sir Charles Upcott as he dipped his quill in a cut-glass inkwell.

Caroline Keating stared at Sir Charles, barrister and baronet, across the marble and ormolu desk that was the focal point of his imposing Regent Street office. Taken aback by the query—indeed, deeply dismayed by it—she said, “Is it not in the nature of . . . such an act for the lady to object?”

Sir Charles glanced at her over the top of his spectacles and wrote something on a sheet of foolscap. “Should you be chosen to go on the block, the gentleman who purchases you—your master—may subject you to any number of secret proclivities that he would be loath to reveal to his wife or mistress. He may have wondered, for example, how it would feel to force himself on an unwilling female—something no civilized man would do in the normal course of events, even to a lady of limited virtue. But even civilized men have their dark fancies. As I explained at the outset, Miss Keating, your master may enjoy you in any manner he sees fit during the seven days in which you are his property, short of causing injury so severe as to require the attention of a physician—although there will, of course, be a physician on hand at all times.”

“But if I am, indeed, forbidden to resist my . . . the man who . . . buys me, how
could
he force himself on me? He would have no cause to do so—indeed, no opportunity—were I to submit willingly every time . . . he requires it.”

Without looking up from his note-taking, Sir Charles said, “He may order you to resist. Or he may employ such brutishness in the act, or encourage it on the part of others, that you will naturally resist.”

“Others?” Caroline asked in a thin voice.

“He will be at liberty to lend you out, as it were, to another gentleman at the château, or to several at once if the fancy strikes him. A slave must be prepared for any contingency.”

“But did not you say that I would be forbidden to . . . give myself to any man but my master during the week of my servitude?”

Looking up with a sigh, Sir Charles said,“Unless it is at the
behest
of your master. Should he command it, you must do it, unquestioningly and without reluctance. It is really a very elegantly simple arrangement.”

“But why would he encourage someone else to . . . ?”

“Usually it is so that he can watch.”

Watch?
Caroline blinked at the barrister. And violent ravishment . . . by more than one man! Good Lord, what else did she not know about the “secret proclivities” of ostensibly civilized gentlemen?

Sir Charles removed his spectacles and sat back in his chair with a squeak of leather, studying her with quiet speculation. No doubt he was pondering the wisdom of selecting such a naïve creature as she to go under the hammer two weeks hence at some mysterious, isolated château in France.

“Miss Keating,” he said,“I am required by the party I represent in this matter to ask you these questions in order to ensure your aptitude for sexual enslavement. I must warn you, however, that if you offer even one negative response, you will not be chosen—and as I'm sure Lord Rexton explained when he recruited you last night, there is a great deal of money at stake, thousands of pounds.”

Caroline turned to gaze through a window curtained in sun-hazed silk billowing on a warm breeze. This time yesterday morning, she'd been standing in a crush of onlookers on the north bank of the Thames watching the opening ceremony of Waterloo Bridge and reflecting that she didn't even have the halfpenny they were charging for a toll.

Sir Charles allowed her a few moments to contemplate the magnitude of her plight, then put his spectacles back on. “As to the question of rape?”

“All right,” she said on a sigh, recalling the deal she'd struck yesterday afternoon with Bram Hugget, the street sweeper who'd been begging for a kiss for weeks.

“Just one,” she'd said, “but it will cost you a halfpenny.”

He'd scratched his stubbly boulder of a jaw. “Only if I get to feel them diddies, too.”

She'd clenched her teeth against the urge to weep and scream. “Over my clothes, not under. You've a minute to be done with it.”

“Miss Keating?”

She looked toward Sir Charles, regarding her expectantly, his quill poised over the inkwell.

“Fellatio?” he said.

She frowned in bewilderment.

“Oral copulation. Are you willing to perform it?”

“Oral? Do you mean kissing?”

Sir Charles withdrew from a drawer a leather folio, which he untied and opened, revealing a stack of pictures. He sorted through them, chose one, and handed it across the desk to Caroline.

It was a tinted engraving executed in loose, jaunty pen-strokes of a man, fully clothed, and two plump, naked women. The man lay on a bed with his feet on the floor and his breeches wide open, kneading the breasts of a woman who was squatting on his face. The other woman knelt between his outspread legs, sucking on his erect organ as she fondled both him and herself.

Caroline stared in unblinking shock.

“Lord Rexton gave me to believe that you were a lady of some experience in these matters,” said Sir Charles. “When he recruited you yesterday, did you not tell him that you'd been ruined through a liaison with a soldier?”

Finding her voice, she said, “It was a very brief liaison.”

“How brief ?”

“One night.”

“How long ago?”

“Somewhat over two years.”

Frowning, he dipped his quill and noted this information.

Thousands of pounds.

“My . . . my experience is limited,” she said, sitting forward, “but I assure you, Sir Charles, that I will not balk at—”

“Yes or no to performing fellatio,Miss Keating?”

She swallowed hard as she returned the picture to the barrister. “Yes.”

“Are you willing to have relations in the Greek manner?”

“I'm sorry, sir. I do not know what that is.”

With an expression of weary forbearance, Sir Charles chose another engraving from the stack and handed it to her.

A man and a woman, both naked, were coupling on an elaborately draped bed, she with her bottom raised high, he taking her from behind. Caroline had to study the picture for a moment before she realized that he was penetrating her in an aperture other than that intended by nature.

“Oh,” she said quietly.

Sir Charles regarded her expectantly over his spectacles.

“Is it painful?” she asked.

“That depends largely on whether the gentleman wishes it to be so. Yes or no?”

She handed the picture back, nodding listlessly.

“Are you willing to suffer such physical punishments as spanking, birching, and caning?”

She hesitated, wondering with a surge of dread what punishment had to do with copulation. “Why . . . why would a man want to do such things?”

“Because it arouses him. There are some—many, in fact—who find carnal pleasure in inflicting such punishments.” He produced another engraving, this one depicting a terrified-looking young woman lying facedown astride a narrow bench, her petticoats canted up to reveal a bare posterior ribboned with welts. To the side of her stood a dapper, maliciously grinning gentleman stroking his exposed erection with one hand as he raised a length of bamboo with the other.

Caroline's stomach clenched as she fought the urge to bolt up out of the chair and flee the room.

“Well?” prompted Sir Charles.

She thrust the picture back at him, bombarded by the memory of all those beatings her father had dealt to her and her brothers, hundreds of them over the years, for infractions as trivial as forgetting a line of a psalm or erring in a mathematical calculation. Hanging in the little schoolroom on the third floor of the castle-like rectory in which she'd been reared were a broad leather strap, a bamboo cane, and a perforated wooden paddle, all well worn. She couldn't remember a time when she wasn't mottled with bruises from his sudden, impulsive batterings, mostly on her back, sometimes her chest or legs—but never on the face or arms, where they might have been visible to the Reverend Mr. Keating's parishioners. He was cruel and pitiless and probably half-mad—from the French disease, her brothers whispered, acquired during his reckless youth—but he was far from stupid. Caroline had promised herself, when Aubrey rescued her from the dismal gaol that was her family home, that no man would ever strike her again.

“Miss Keating? Yes or no?”

The air left her lungs on a whispered, “Yes.”

“I beg your—”

“Yes,”
she said, feeling perilously close to tears.“Yes.Yes.Yes to all of it.”

“Still, I am required to elicit clear and unequivocal consent to each particular act, lest you protest later that you weren't adequately warned as to what might be done to you. You are willing to be bound, gagged, blindfolded?”

“Yes.”

“Are you willing to perform sexual acts before an audience?”

“Yes.”

“Are you willing to engage in sexual activity with another female?”

Dear God.
“Yes.”

“Do you achieve orgasm,Miss Keating?”

Heat swept in a wave from her throat up to her hairline.

“I shall take that for an affirmative,” said the barrister as his pen scratched over the foolscap. “You enjoy sexual relations, then?”

“I . . . I did so on the one occasion when I engaged in them.”

“Your age?”

“Twenty.”

“Height?”

“Five feet, six inches.”

“Weight?”

“I couldn't say with certainty anymore.”

“Eight stone at the most,” he muttered as he wrote. “Complexion pallid but unblemished. Hair golden blond.”

“I was wondering, about my hair . . .”

“Mm?”

“I thought I might henna it, if that would be permissible.”

“In order to help disguise your appearance? Some of the ladies do change their hair color and employ cosmetics for that purpose. I must say, it would be a shame in your case, but you are within your rights to do so if you wish.”

“Thank you.”

Setting his pen aside, Sir Charles slid off his spectacles and scrutinized her thoughtfully.

“Will I do?” she asked in as even a voice as she could muster.

“It is a pity you've been deflowered,Miss Keating. An intact maidenhead is highly prized in a slave. Virgins tend to command the highest prices, debauchees nearly so—the innocent on the one hand and the unabashedly wanton on the other. You, unfortunately, are neither. But then, great beauty is also a factor of some consequence, which will serve to your advantage. And you are, if not entirely untarnished, nearly so, with a guileless manner of the type that certain gentlemen find irresistible.”

He closed the folio of lewd pictures and returned it to the drawer, then took out what looked like a visiting card and handed it to her. Engraved on heavy cream stock were the name and address of a Dr. Humphrey Coates.

Sir Charles said, “You will report to Dr. Coates tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock for a physical examination. This is to ensure that you are of an adequate constitution to endure the rigors of Slave Week and to pronounce you free of disfigurement and disease. Incidentally, the gentlemen who attend Slave Week are also required to submit to an examination by Dr. Coates in order to ensure that they do not suffer from any maladies of a private nature that they might pass on to their slaves. Assuming you pass inspection, Dr. Coates will provide you with a means to prevent you from getting with child, and I will arrange for you to—”

“That's possible?” An unwed pregnancy had been one of the perils that Caroline had lain awake all night fretting about. “To . . . have relations without conceiving?”

“There are two devices that serve this purpose, a sheath of sheep-gut for the gentleman and a vinegar-soaked sponge for the lady. As it wouldn't do to inconvenience your master, you will be given a sponge, which you will be required to wear internally at all times, removing it only to clean and refresh with vinegar during your morning bath. Should you neglect this precaution and find yourself afterward in a delicate condition, it will be on your head entirely. By the terms of your contract, you will be forbidden to communicate with your master or to name him as the father.”

“Contract?”

“As I
had
been explaining,” he continued wearily, “pending a positive report as to your physical condition by Dr. Coates, I am willing to approve you to go on the block. In that eventuality, you will return here to execute a binding legal contract setting forth the rules by which you must abide during your week of enslavement. Primary among them is the requirement of utter and absolute obedience to your master, to whose every command you must submit without hesitation or protest of any kind. Should you fail in this even once, you will be sent home with nothing but your traveling expenses.” Sir Charles recited this information in a disinterested drone, as if he'd done so scores of times, which she supposed he had.

He said, “Your master will be free to enjoy you in any manner he sees fit, so long as he abides by the rules of behavior stipulated in his contract. Should he fail in this, you will be taken from him and re-auctioned to another gentleman, in which case you will receive both purchase prices. Should you sustain an injury at the hand of your master, and if Dr. Coates determines it to be adequately severe, you will be released from servitude, but your master will still be required to pay you the agreed-upon sum in its entirety. Should you be uninjured and request release from your contract at any point before the end of the week, or if you violate the rules of your enslavement, you will be sent back to London immediately at no expense to yourself. However, in that eventuality, you will be deemed to be in violation of your contract, and your master's financial obligations thereunder will be null and void. Do you understand what I have just explained?”