Hester Waring's Marriage (14 page)

They watched the distant storm for a long time engaging in much imaginative byplay until Hester gave a series of little screams when the thunder rolled and the lightning cracked. This enabled Tom to offer her a great deal of manly protection which involved him in putting his arms around her and encouraging her to hide her face in his chest when the thunder grew really loud.

This was yet another experience for her which proved strangely satisfactory to them both so that they quite forgot to notice that great curtains of rain were coming nearer and nearer.

By the time that they did so, it was too late. Their enjoyment had led them to end up some way from the carriage, the better to see the spectacle. In a moment they were drenched, which, for some reason neither of them understood, they found the biggest joke of the night.

An even bigger joke was to rescue their rug, the picnic things, Hester's parasol and Tom's light silk coat, all of which had been rapidly drenched in the torrential downpour. Far from quenching their excitement, for both of them had been on the verge of breaking their bargain, it added to it, and if Hester did not fully understand where matters were rapidly leading, Tom had no doubts at all.

Still laughing, they ran to the carriage. Tom almost threw Hester into it, and, whipping up the horses, he drove them home as rapidly as he could. Hester, who had always been afraid of storms, found herself strangely exhilarated by this one.

She clung to Tom while the carriage careered through the evening, thunder and lightning rioting overhead.

‘Hang on, Mrs Dilhorne, we'll soon get you safely home.'

Improbably her response was to laugh. The downpour was relentless. Water streamed from Hester's hair and her clothing was sodden. Their evening trip had been transformed into something almost resembling a swim. Tom turned his head towards her and his eyes shone as the lightning flashed across the sky.

‘Not frightened, Mrs Dilhorne?' he shouted above the thunder.

‘No!'

And that was the truth. So long as she was with him she was not frightened. There were only the two of them in the whole wild world. Hester almost wished that this mad ride might never end. She clutched at Tom's arm and he turned again to reassure her. Her face told him that no reassurance was needed. The exhilaration which gripped him was affecting Hester, too.

They were at one in their joy of themselves and of the wild night. The few months which they had lived together had brought them to this moment of shared pleasure. All deceit, all trickery had leached out of Tom. If he had married Hester partly to scream defiance at the world from which she came, he would make her his true wife this night because she was Hester and he was Tom, and Exclusives and Emancipists, his past and hers, were alike irrelevant.

For Hester what was happening was almost like some powerful dream. The happiness which the past weeks had brought her, the gradual loss of her fear of her strange husband and its replacement by affection, which was rapidly turning into a passionate love which she did not yet know how to express, was something which she had never thought to experience.

She had told him that she was not afraid and that was the truth. Once she would have been, but that was before she had known him. Common sense might say that she
ought to fear him, but whatever he was to others, to her he was the man who had delivered her from the prison in which she had lived for over twenty years. Unconsidered, passed over, slighted, left to starve or be condemned to become a prostitute, like Tom the external factors of their world meant nothing to her in the face of what she was coming to feel for him.

Their journey was nearly over. The villa loomed before them, white in the darkness.

O
ne last giant crack of thunder heralded their arrival. Tom helped Hester down, and then swung her off her feet, calling for his stable hand to take the horses and the carriage round to the mews.

The lad ran out, mouth open and, staring at Tom, watched him stride into the house cradling Hester in his arms.

Tom took the stairs at a run, water streaming from him. Mrs Hackett, unseen by them, opened her door and watched him carry Hester upstairs into her room, kissing her at every step he took. Her face was rigid with disapproval of their laughter. Then Tom emerged to run into his own room—to reappear almost immediately on the landing, a brandy bottle in his hand and towels over his shoulder.

He knocked on Hester's door and entered to find her trying to dry her streaming curls. She stared at him: the water was running down his face from his sodden hair, and—like hers—his face was alight with mischief. He strode to her dressing-table and poured a large tot of brandy into her water glass and thrust it towards her.

‘Drink this, Mrs Dilhorne. Make you feel better.'

Hester felt as though some restraining hand which had held her back all her life had been removed. She took the glass from him, and remembering her father, tossed the drink back in one swallow—then choked and spluttered, the alcohol burning her throat and sending a warm river down to her stomach. Eyes as well as hair streaming, she turned to Tom who was laughing at the expression on her face.

‘Bravely done, Mrs Dilhorne!'

He advanced on her, brandishing one of the towels, ‘Here, let me dry you, Mrs Dilhorne.'

She should be refusing him, retreating from him, reminding him of their bargain, but Hester found that the strangest excitement was gripping her. Far from coming out with a maidenly ‘Oh, no, Mr Dilhorne, I am quite capable of drying myself', she was welcoming his intrusive hands and the feel of them on her body.

Worse—or was it better?—the closeness of his body to hers which should have had her recoiling in disgust from him, was bringing on a fit of the giggles instead. Somehow Tom drying Hester involved him not only in towelling her hair, but in loosening and removing her clothes, and oddly enough in removing his as well!

‘They are so very wet, Mrs Dilhorne, mustn't risk a fever.'

A statement which, far from frightening Hester as it would once have done, provoked her to an unreasoning amusement so that presently he had succeeded in wrapping them both, now quite naked, in one of the giant towels which he had brought with him.

That was not all, however. In the middle of doing these immodest things to her he also announced briskly, ‘You will take an ague, Mrs Dilhorne, if you continue to shiver so. Allow me to assist you to re-cover yourself.'

Tom's re-covering Hester meant that he stroked her all over. True, he was doing it very gently, but now the shivering was not being caused by her being chilled, but by the effect his hands were having on her.

At first his stroking was quite innocent, but slowly he moved from a chaste massage of her back and shoulders, to one which encompassed her flanks and then her breasts. His thumbs on her nipples raised and quickened them in the oddest fashion. The pleasure that this induced had Hester not only crying out, but also leaning on him for support—which merely served to afford him even more opportunities to pet and caress her, all with muttered assurances that she would soon be warm again, he could guarantee that!

The melting sensation inside Hester grew stronger and stronger. She welcomed his impudent hands, and when they deserted her breasts she felt annoyed, only to discover that he had transferred them to the inner side of her thighs, and then to her most secret parts of all, still stroking and caressing.

He had also become silent, and instead of caressing her with his voice, he was kissing her face and shoulders and finally her deserted breasts, which found that his artful mouth on them was even more satisfactory than his hands had been in giving her pleasure.

All of these attentions produced a sensation inside Hester which was so powerful that she thought that she was literally about to burst. All sense of shame, of modesty, had deserted her.

She found that she was pressing herself against him and all that she could think to say was, ‘Oh, please, Tom, please.'

What further she wanted him to do to her she could not think, except that somehow, she knew that there was more
to come and that she wanted it. To compound her immodesty, she seemed to have lost control of herself to the degree that when she was not asking him to do something to her, she was stroking and caressing him!

Hester was not entirely sure what to do to please him as he was pleasing her. She only knew that his breathing, too, was becoming quite ragged, so she must be doing something right, which was a relief to the passionate maenad Mrs Tom Dilhorne, late Miss Hester Waring, had turned into.

His hands were suddenly in her drying hair and he had taken her right breast into his mouth and was teasing it with his tongue so that she was writhing against him. She was lost to everything, propriety, maidenly modesty, bargains arranged before marriage, and codes of conduct involving young gentlewomen, Exclusives and Emancipists.

She only knew that her whole body was craving for fulfilment, and that the man whose hard erect sex she could feel against her naked stomach was the one person in the world from whom she wanted it.

His mouth had deserted her breast and he was kissing her, first down her willing and yielding body to where the ache for fulfilment was at its strongest, so that she cried out, and then up, up, to her ear.

He was whispering into it, his voice hoarse with desire, ‘Warmer, now, Mrs Dilhorne? Still want to keep to our bargain?'

She should be thrusting him away, shocked, but instead her hands clutched at him with such ferocity that her nails scored his back.

‘Gently, Mrs Dilhorne, gently,' he murmured, and lowered her on to her bed, the two of them still half-smothered in the towel.

Fright flared briefly in Hester's eyes when she felt the
bed and took a little of his weight. Instantly aware of her reaction, he rolled away from her, and gave her a look so purely wicked that she giggled involuntarily when she felt his lips travelling down from her ear to her throat, down to her stomach leaving a trail of fire.

‘Has anyone ever told you how sweetly you smell, Mrs Dilhorne? Captain Parker, for instance?'

Hester could not prevent herself from laughing. Her passionate response of a moment ago returned and she responded to each caress with caresses of her own, so that when his tongue entered her mouth to tease hers, she not only wantonly welcomed him, but used her own tongue to tease him back.

She felt that she was about to dissolve. The brandy, the excitement of the storm, mirroring their own, the enclosing towel, and now the unmistakable attentions which Tom was paying her, began to have their effect.

Her last thought as he threw off the restraining towel and began to make love to her in earnest was, Can this really be prim Hester Waring drowning in a sea of passion?

‘Don't be frightened,' he whispered when he prepared to enter her, her body open and willing before him, ‘I may hurt you a little to begin with, but afterwards, why afterwards, I promise you, you will enjoy yourself and we shall die the little death together.'

He was right again, Hester found, for by the time that the pain of first entry was on her, she was almost past normal sensation. She only knew while they mounted towards fulfilment, her hands on his back, his on her flanks, that if between them they had broken their contract of non-involved marriage, she did not care, no, not at all.

Thought departed: she was lost in a sensation so exquisite that she was crying out her joy, and afterwards she
melted into the sleep of fulfilled exhaustion in her lover's arms, the lover who was her husband, who had married her as a jest, and had now found that the joke was on him.

 

Hester awoke the next morning to remember that some time during the night, they had made love yet again, but this time slowly, oh, so tantalisingly slowly, the pleasure being long drawn out, so that her cries and Tom's mingled at the point of release. After that they had achieved a half-reclining position in which Tom held her cradled in his right arm, with her head on his chest.

She looked up to find that he was already awake; seeing that she was also stirring, he gave her a quick kiss on the top of her head. After what had passed during the night, and her own passionate response to it, she felt a little shy, but the comfort of his warm body, the reassurance of his hard arm and his matter-of-fact acceptance of their situation made any reservations she might have had seem absurd.

She fell into a contented half doze. A little while later Tom slipped out of bed and left her and she began to wonder if she had dreamed it all. Her body told her, No! An emphatic no! She further wondered if he would return. Her bed felt strangely empty without him. She slept again, only to wake when the door opened and he came in.

He was wearing a military-style dressing-gown, ornamented with gilt frogs, much braid and epaulettes. Above it his knowing face was oddly incongruous. She began to smile.

He came over and sat by her on the bed. ‘Why are you smiling, Mrs Dilhorne?'

‘You look just like a member of the dandy set.'

‘When I wear this, woman, I'll have you know I
am
a member of the dandy set!'

Quite without her willing it, as though they had a life of their own, she lifted her arms and pulled his head down to hers.

There was some brief scuffling and a touch of intricate manoeuvring on his part, at the end of which it seemed right and proper that his left hand was in her hair, cradling her head, his right hand was under her body, and his mouth was on her breast. He paid it some urgent attention.

Hester's breathing, which had become shallow, turned into a series of rising gasps as other parts of her body were explored and then into a repetition of his name on a rising crescendo.

Some further deeply interesting action, initiated by Tom, which resulted in yet another explosion of pleasure, highly satisfactory to them both, took a little time before he collapsed across her, his face in the pillow, and it was her turn to stroke his head until she fell asleep in mid-stroke.

Waking, she found him fully in bed with her again. ‘What happened to your dressing-gown, Mr Dilhorne?'

‘Lost it, Mrs D., but I shall find it again.'

‘Not too soon, Mr D., I trust.'

His answer was to take her into his arms, not to make love to her, but to hold her while he whispered into her ear, ‘You make an adept mistress, Mrs Dilhorne. You learn quickly.'

‘Taught by a master, Mr Dilhorne.'

‘That's good. You show me a proper respect.'

His muffled laughter joined hers until she fell into a doze again, wondering as she did so how easy it had become, easier than staying awake.

Consciousness returned again. He was still with her, stroking her hair, and gently kissing her cheek. ‘Happy, Mrs Dilhorne? Enjoying yourself?'

She looked at him gravely and examined her condition. It surprised her.

‘I'm hungry,' she announced. ‘Very hungry.'

‘Hard work, loving. Well, we'll remedy that for you.'

He was out of the bed in one smooth movement, and was slipping on his dressing-gown. ‘Wait here. Don't go away, mind.'

Now where should I be going? thought Hester drowsily. With nothing on and loved into immobility, for she had no doubt that it was love and it was far nicer than anyone had ever led her to believe, and funny, too. The joy of it all touched her face with a soft hand, the corners of her mouth curled up, and it was thus Tom found her when he returned, a tray in his hand with a great Chinese bowl on it, a spoon and a capacious napkin.

‘Sit up, Mrs Dilhorne.'

Hester yawned, sat up and let him drape the napkin around her neck. The bowl contained hot bread and milk, and something else, something rather pleasant which she could not identify. Tom sat on the bed, by her side, and, holding her in one arm, began to spoon the liquid into her mouth as though she were a child again. She had never felt so loved and spoiled in all her life.

‘Nice, Mr Dilhorne. What's in it?'

‘Bread and milk, my love.'

She slapped gently at his hand. ‘I know that. What else?'

‘Well, I wouldn't be saying there's not some rum in it. Got to keep your strength up.'

Hester licked the spoon greedily, and swallowed before teasing him gently. ‘Well, what would you be saying, Mr Dilhorne, if you weren't saying that?'

‘That if you look at me like that once more, I shan't be answerable for the consequences. By the by, I've told Mrs
Hackett that you are not very well, and that you are spending the day in bed.'

‘And you, Mr Dilhorne? What will you be doing?'

‘Spending it with you, Mrs Dilhorne. Unless you want me to send for Captain Parker. In which case it will be my duty to shoot him dead before giving you what you deserve.'

She had finished her milk broth. He lifted the bowl to the bedside table, and she murmured softly, ‘What do I deserve, Mr Dilhorne?'

‘This.'

This took some little time, and involved a great deal of kissing, stroking and thrusting on Tom's part, and not a little sighing and groaning on Hester's, to say nothing of exchanged endearments. Afterwards he lay propped on one arm, watching her, rosy and fulfilled, looking less like poor half-starved Hester Waring, and more like some flushed nymph from a Boucher painting.

‘How do you like being Mrs Dilhorne, Mrs Dilhorne?'

She considered. ‘Pleasant, if a trifle exhausting at times. I'm relieved I shan't be expected to get up today. And you,' she queried him, eyes alight, ‘when do you go to your work, Mr Dilhorne?'

‘Tomorrow, Mrs Dilhorne, tomorrow. The day after if you're lucky.'