Parlor Games (2 page)

She glanced around the room and listened for any sign of Mrs. Erskine’s return. Hearing nothing, she carefully positioned herself so the yellowish gaslight was behind her and placed the viewer to her eyes.

No sooner had she focused on the image than she hastily removed the viewer, thinking her eyes had deceived her. Expecting a picture of Greek ruins or maybe of Tuscan landscapes, instead she had seen a three-dimensional image of two women. Naked women. Women who were entwined in a private embrace.

She put the viewer back up to her eyes, this time gawping openmouthed at the wanton pose of the women. It was more shocking even than the painting on the wall. This picture was real. It was no artist’s fantasy, but a picture of real women, doing real things to each other.

The women’s hands were on each other’s breasts and pussies, caressing each other in the most intimate fashion. What disturbed her most was that they were clearly enjoying themselves, looking intently into each other’s faces with lust-drugged eyes.

She could hardly drag her eyes away from the photograph. What would it be like to have a woman do that to her? The wicked thought caused her own pussy to prickle with heat and a dampness to form under her skirts.

Her face hot with embarrassment mingled with excitement, she was about to replace the viewer on the sideboard when she noticed a prettily inlaid walnut box just the right size for holding the stereoscope photographs. Lifting the lid, she found a number of photographs tidily arrayed inside.

The temptation was more than she could resist. Keeping a nervous ear out for Mrs. Erskine, she pulled the first photograph from the box and placed it in the holder.

The new image was even more shocking than the last one had been. In front of her eyes, as clear as day, was the image of a man standing, his trousers around his knees, while a scantily dressed woman knelt at his feet. Her hands were on his naked buttocks and his member was buried in her mouth.

Her own pussy was tingling at the naughty sight. She stroked it through her skirts with one hand, but it only made the tingling more insistent.

With shaking hands, she took out the next photograph, and again peered intently into the eyepiece. It was the same couple, but this time the image showed them in a yet more intimate embrace.

The man, dressed only in his shirttails, was sitting on a sofa looking straight at Sarah. His hands gripped the woman’s waist as she sat astride his cock, his member half buried in her pussy. The woman’s hands caressed her breasts as her eyes stared defiantly at Sarah, as if daring her to find fault with her actions.

Shifting her gaze slightly, she studied the room the couple were in. The rolled-arm sofa and the highly patterned wall looked eerily familiar. Moving the stereoscope viewer away from her eyes, she realized with a start exactly why. She was in that very room she could see in the image.

She looked around uneasily. Right here, right in this very sitting room, men and women fucked each other in front of a camera. Maybe she should not wait for Mrs. Erskine and inquire after employment. This was clearly not a suitable house hold for a curate’s daughter.

Still, her curiosity was stronger than her sense of unease, and the tingling in her pussy was greater than both together. She pulled yet one more photograph from the box and placed it in the viewer.

This image was the most shocking yet. A woman braced herself on the floor, resting on knees and elbows while a man penetrated her from behind. But his cock was not pleasuring her cunt, it was deep in her ass with her gaping pussy clearly visible below. The man rode her as he would a pony, legs astride her waist, his hands entwined around her hair as he bent over her.

What made her gasp with shock, though, was the third person in the act. He had one foot on the floor, with the other on the woman’s back, and his huge member had just entered the other man. It was a picture of a man fucking a man fucking a woman.

This was
definitely
not a suitable house hold for a curate’s daughter. A bit shakily, Sarah carefully placed the viewer back beside the silver tray and returned the stereoscopic photographs back into their oaken box. She really ought not wait for Mrs. Erskine to come and interview her.

Perched back on the edge of the sofa again, she was caught in the grips of indecision. Was it any of her business if Mrs. Erskine had a boxful of unusual and disturbing images in her sitting room? If her curiosity had not been aroused and she had not peeped at them, she would never have known of their existence.

Besides, Mrs. Erskine held out the tantalizing promise of employment. If she were to leave now, without seeing her, what would she do then? Go on the streets as Emma had done, selling her body for a crust of bread, and never be seen again?

She felt in her pocket, knowing already how little money she would find. She was down to her last few pennies. In only a matter of days she would have no choice—she would have to sell her body or starve.

Better that she work for Mrs. Erskine, however unusual the woman’s tastes were and what ever she had to do to earn her keep, than go on the streets.

Yes, life was still worth living and Mrs. Erskine’s house hold was better than the streets. There was no choice to be made. She had to wait. She sat quietly on the sofa for some time, but Mrs. Erskine still did not appear. Made nervous with idling, eventually she stood up again and moved about the room, seeking something to distract her mind from the coming interview.

Her feet were irresistibly drawn back to the same corner of the room she had been in before. She would not touch the naughty stereoscope again, but there was a pile of journals on the sideboard. Surely Mrs. Erskine would not object to her leafing through one of them while she waited.

She picked up the topmost one, entitled
The Oyster
, and retired back to the sofa, away from the naughty temptation of the stereoscope.

Her mother had been a governess before she married her father, and had taught Sarah to read. She had learned her lessons well, and could pick out the text with ease.

The story told about a pretty servant girl who had fallen on difficult times in the city and wanted to go back on a steam train to her faithful sweetheart in the country. Fortunately she was alone in the carriage when the guard arrived to take her ticket. Unable to pay, she admired the guard’s uniform, told him what a handsome man he was, then sucked his member till he spent in her mouth.

The guard let her stay on the train, and in the end she was re united with her faithful sweetheart.

The illustrations that accompanied the story were as saucy as the words, and the prickling in her pussy had returned tenfold. Listening closely to make sure that she was quite alone, she pulled her skirts up to her knees, let her knees fall wide apart, and slipped her hand in between her thighs.

Her pussy was wet and slippery and her fingers felt so good that she had to slide them up and down over herself.

As she looked at the etching of the young girl on her knees in the railway carriage with the guard’s member in her mouth, she rubbed herself gently, imagining that she was the girl in the railway carriage and sucking on a handsome railway guard’s cock.

Her eyes drifted shut as she indulged in her naughty daydream.

“You like the book?”

Her eyes flew open and with a gasp of horror she took her hand out from under her skirts and closed her legs tightly together. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. She was so horrified at being caught touching herself that she was nearly in tears.

The man standing in front of her seemed not in the least perturbed. “You don’t have to answer me. I can see that you did.” He picked the book from her hands and studied the illustration she had been looking at. “You like the idea of sucking a man’s cock?” He came closer to her, his groin on a level with her mouth. “Tom Wilde at your ser vice. I am all yours. Please indulge your fantasies.”

“Go away.” Blinking furiously to hold back her tears, she pushed him away so he stumbled and nearly fell. “Go away and leave me alone.”

He sat down on the sofa beside her, and took hold of her hand so she could not get free of him. “Never fear, I shall pay you well.” Capturing her hand, he laid it on his groin. His erect member was obvious even through his trousers. “See what you have done to me already? I’m more than ready for your mouth and tongue.”

She snatched her hand away as if he had put them on hot coals. Her fingers were wet from where she had been stroking her pussy and she wiped them surreptitiously on her skirts. “That is disgusting,” she said, rising hastily from the sofa to escape him. “I will not listen to such filthy talk. You are not a gentleman to proposition me in such a dirty manner.”

He gave a humph of disbelief as he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back down and onto his lap. “Come now, sweetheart, you did not think those pictures were so disgusting just a few moments ago, did you?” He ran his hands over her breasts, making her nipples tingle under his touch. “This is hardly the place for you to have a crisis of conscience.”

His free manner shocked and frightened her. All the men at the milliner’s shop had treated her with the respect due to a curate’s daughter. They would never have laid violent hands on her, or kissed her bare neck, or stroked her legs through her petticoats as he was doing. “Let me go,” she cried, struggling to get free again. “Take your hands off me.”

In answer to her entreaties he only pulled her closer into his lap until she was sitting astride him, his member pressing into the cleft between her buttocks. “I have offered to pay you well. What else do you want? Do not think you can bamboozle me with tales of your innocence,” he added in a warning tone. “Mrs. Erskine’s establishment is hardly a place where one would find a genuine shrinking violet, and I have no time for your teasing.”

She stopped struggling and looked at him, the knowledge of what sort of establishment Mrs. Erskine ran only now beginning to dawn on her. “I don’t understand you,” she said desperately, hoping against hope that her sudden suspicions were unfounded. “What kind of a place is this?”

Tom shook his head. It was hard to believe such naïveté in this day and age. Did she think he was a fool? “What do you think it is? It’s a brothel. An elegant brothel a cut above most of the others in London, but still a brothel. A place,” he added brutally, “where men come and have their cocks sucked by willing young women like you.”

Her eyes widened at his brutal words and she gave a gasp of horror. “No, it can’t be. You’re lying.”

He gestured around him at the paintings on the walls, at the book of explicit drawings that she had been poring over so eagerly. “Look around you. What respectable establishment has paintings of naked people cavorting on the walls, or picture books of men and women copulating in every position you could imagine, and a few you’d never thought of before? Where else could you see stereoscopic images of actual men and women fucking each other senseless? What else could it possibly be?”

She had huddled into herself, her shawl pulled tightly across her shoulders, withdrawing from his touch as if it were poison. “I thought…I thought maybe the salon was owned by a lady with…with singular tastes.”

“Singular tastes.” A bark of laughter escaped him. “That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Only it’s not Mrs. Erskine’s tastes that are singular, but those of her clients. She caters to all sorts here.”

Her face looked utterly woebegone. “I was hoping she would offer me employment.”

A tear ran down her cheek. Damn it, but he wanted the girl. Irritated though he was with her refusal, he could not help but pity her as well, she looked so miserable. He picked her up off his lap and set her aside on the sofa to remove temptation from his immediate vicinity. “You’re a beautiful girl. I’m sure she will.”

Her stance was so rigid she looked like she would break in two. “You do not understand. I am untouched, a virgin. Even if she does offer me employment, it will not be as a scullery maid, but as a whore.” Her voice caught on the words. “I will be nothing more than a whore.”

He shrugged. Why did women make such a fuss over trifles? He’d been damned glad to get rid of his virginity at the age of fifteen—even though it had been to the no longer terribly youthful landlady of the house where he boarded. “Turn her down then, if your purity is so damn precious to you.” Mrs. Erskine was not the most savory woman of his acquaintance, but as far as he knew she had never stooped to kidnapping unwilling girls to work in her coffee house. Times were hard enough that she didn’t need to.

“You do not understand.” Her face was wild, like that of a tiny kitten held at bay in a corner by a vicious dog. “She will offer me employment as a whore and I do not know if I will have the strength to refuse.”

He only half heard her, his mind focused on the click-clack of shoes coming down the corridor. Mrs. Erskine, he had no doubt, coming to check out her latest wares. Damn the woman. Both of them. He could take a thrashing along with the best of them, but he preferred to avoid being beaten senseless when he could.

He looked wildly around the room, which offered little in the way of hiding places. The only possibility of escaping the house without a sound drubbing was the sofa. He dropped to his knees and felt underneath it. It would be a tight fit, but luckily he was lean enough to be able to squeeze underneath.

The footsteps were coming closer. He put his finger to his lips. “Shhh, you haven’t seen me,” he said, as he lay facedown on the floor and scooted under the sofa.

Just in time. No sooner had he wriggled underneath than he heard the door latch open. Footsteps muted by the carpet approached his hiding place, and with an oomph that nearly drove the breath out of his chest, a heavy weight settled on the sofa.

“You are the girl that wants employment?” It was Mrs. Erskine. He would recognize that gravelly voice anywhere.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You are a virgin?”

He could not hear the answer to that question, but it must have satisfied Mrs. Erskine.

“You understand what kind of a house I run here?”

Silence, then a whispered, “Yes, ma’am.”

“And you are still willing to seek employment, knowing that?”

“I have nothing else, ma’am.”

“Well then, that’s settled.” To his relief, the weight rose off the sofa and he could breathe again. “Come with me and I will show you to your new quarters.”

With leaden feet, Sarah followed Mrs. Erskine to a sitting room on the upper floor. The die was cast and there was no going back. She was a whore now. In order to feed her body, she had sold her soul.

Never again would she be able to see her family—her mother or her sisters. Her existence would bring nothing but shame on them. From now on, she would be as dead to them. Far better for them to think she had died and gone to heaven than for them to discover the awful truth—that she was living in hell.

A petite woman with a heart-shaped face and violet eyes, dressed in a low-cut gown of deep red, rose from the sofa to greet them with a dazzling smile and a fetching shake of her pale brown ringlets.

So this, Sarah thought to herself, is what a whore looks like. She would not have thought a common whore could be so elegant.

Mrs. Erskine gestured Sarah forward. “Polly, this is Sarah, our newest recruit. Show her around, if you please. She can have Angelina’s old room, and what ever dresses we have that can be made to fit her.”

Polly curtsied, bending forward to show off even more of her cleavage. “Yes, ma’am.”

Mrs. Erskine unbent far enough to smile at Polly. “Sarah’s a milliner—if she can make hats, she can alter the dresses herself. I will expect her to be ready for tomorrow’s games. See to it that she is.” And without a further word to either of them, she swept out as majestically as she had entered.

“There’s no need to look like the devil will come down the chimney any moment now and steal your soul away to hell,” Polly whispered to Sarah with a giggle as soon as Mrs. Erskine had closed the door behind her. “It’s not a brothel. Not really.”

Sarah stared blankly at her. Surely the gentleman in the sitting room was not mistaken. Besides, everything around her screamed “brothel.” The sitting room had thick wool carpet, patterned wallpaper, red velvet window dressings tied back with tasseled braids, and even a grand piano in one corner. It was grander even than the parson’s house where she had been invited once to have tea, while her father, the curate, was still alive. Not that the parson would have had such shocking paintings on his walls, or such obscene statues with oversized phalluses in the corners.

“Mrs. Erskine doesn’t make us sleep with the gents if we don’t want to,” Polly went on. “We just have to play games with ’em and tease ’em, and make ’em want it bad. They like that. That’s how she makes her money.” She took Sarah by the hand. “Come and I’ll show you to your room.”

She led Sarah along a narrow hall, gesturing at the openings hung with velvet curtains of differing colors. “This is where we girls live.” A pair of dark blue curtains was drawn back on one of the openings. Pulling the door behind them open, she gestured Sarah inside. “Here’s Angelina’s old room. It’s yours now. Sarah’s room.”

Sarah stood in the open doorway and gasped. “This is
my
room? Just for me?” It was far larger than the bedroom she had shared with all her five sisters in her father’s cottage, and as sumptuous as the sitting room they had just passed through. The floor was covered with dark blue and red Turkish carpets, the bedstead was shiny brass, and the counterpane real silk in a beautiful shade of pale blue. Even the washstand was made of mahogany and had a marble top.

Not a brothel, indeed. What a foolish taradiddle that was, as transparent as the gauze drapes over the bed. She threw Polly a disbelieving look. “Why do I get such a beautiful bedroom all to myself if I don’t have to bring the gents in here?”

“We have to tease the gents for Mrs. Erskine, and she gives us food and lodging for it, but not a penny in our hands. Anything else is up to us.” Polly giggled again and danced a few steps on the Turkish rug. “We bring the gents in here if we feel like it and give Mrs. Erskine a cut of the takings. That’s how
we
makes
our
money.”

A faint ray of hope began to shine in Sarah’s breast for the first time since she had sold her soul to Mrs. Erskine for a place to lay her head. Polly’s happiness and cheery welcome had dissipated the worst of her gloomy despair. Maybe being a fallen woman would not be altogether as bad as she had feared. Maybe, just maybe, it might even have a few good points. Polly certainly seemed perfectly content with her lot. “Food and lodging just for teasing gentlemen?” Could she but secure her food and lodging, she would have no need for money.

Polly leaned her elbows on the dressing table. “It’s enough for some of the girls, but I have ambitions,” she confided. “This sort of life won’t last forever, and when you’re too old to entice the gents, you need some money of your own to fall back on or it’s the streets all over again.”

“Ambitions?” Her own did not stretch much further than survival. What ambitions could a whore have beyond that? Her father had always taught her that a single misstep in a woman’s life was irretrievable, and that once a woman became a whore, her die was cast.

“Some of the girls are looking for a keeper, but I don’t want to be beholden to one man. I want enough money to set myself up in a business all my own. A tavern out in the country where I could grow my own vegetables and keep a few hens.” A dreamy look stole over Polly’s face. “That would be heaven. I’d fuck any number of gentlemen for that.

“But enough dreaming.” She sat down on the sofa in Sarah’s room with a bounce. “Now to business. Tell me, can you play cards?”

Cards? Sarah gulped. Mrs. Erskine had not mentioned anything about cards. “Only Go Fish. My papa did not approve of gambling.”

“So much the better. You will lose quickly and that will make you a popular partner with the gentlemen. You can sew, though?”

At last something she could be proud of. “I am trained a milliner.” Though she did not like to boast to Polly, she could sew better than most.

Polly bounced off the sofa again. “Come and take a look at the dresses, then, and see which ones you take a fancy to.”

She led Sarah to a storage room at the end of the hallway where a dozen dresses of all colors of the rainbow were hanging. On the shelves behind lay a confusion of dainty cotton chemises and drawers trimmed with lace.

Sarah’s mouth gaped open. Was she meant to wear such fine things? Nothing had touched her skin before but coarse linen in the summer and heavy flannel for the winter. Such fine garments were for rich ladies who owned their own carriage, not for poor girls like her.

Polly prodded her impatiently. “You’d better get a hurry on and choose a handful. Mrs. Erskine wants you ready by tomorrow.”

Tom crept through the gloomy hallway to his dark corner once more. He had struggled with his conscience all night, but in the end it had made him return.

The young woman he had met here yesterday weighed on his mind. She was young and gently bred, the daughter of a curate, and he had left her here in the power of a noted bawd. It would be on his head if her sweet innocence was corrupted and turned to debauchery.

He should have swept her out of the salon and taken her far away from Mrs. Erskine’s bawdy house. With the contacts he had all over London, he could have helped her to find respectable employment. Sweet and gentle as she looked, she was sure to be a delightful nursemaid, bathing babies and helping little children to spell out their lessons. Even if nothing else could be found, she was pretty enough to stand behind a shop counter and sell ladies’ gloves and other feminine trinkets.

Such a sweet daisy as she was would surely hold out against the lure of sin for as long as she was able. Her defense would be stout—she would not yet have succumbed to vice.

Her innocence deserved a white knight to protect it. He would be her white knight—he would find her and rescue her before she fell headlong into the pit of corruption that was Mrs. Erskine’s bawdy house.

Sarah clutched Polly’s arm with a death grip as she walked into the brightly lit salon with the other coffee house girls. Despite the layers of frothy undergarments she was wearing, she felt horribly exposed. Her satin skirts, cut short to show her ankles, swished around her calves, her bodice dropped so low that her breasts were half falling out of it, and her arms and shoulders were bare. Only the fear of being thrown onto the streets stopped her from turning tail and fleeing back to the safety of her room.

A group of gentlemen in frock coats stood at the far end by the fire, watching their approach avidly. Some of them, hats in hand, started forward to meet the girls as they entered.

A shiver went down her spine as the men approached and she stopped dead, clutching Polly’s arm as if it were her lifeline. “Do not leave me,” she whispered.

“Don’t be a goose,” Polly whispered back, giving her a little pinch on the arm and dragging her forward. “Just remember what I told you. Act like a lady, be nice to the gents, and everything will work out fine.”

A pair of gentlemen made a beeline for the two girls. One of them took Polly’s arm with a possessive air while the other, a portly gentleman whose waistcoat barely buttoned up over his large belly, made a stiff bow at Sarah. “May I?” he asked, offering her his pudgy arm.

Polly dropped Sarah’s arm to cling to her partner’s with both hands, and gave the fat gentleman a roguish wink. “This is Sarah. She’s new here tonight.”

“How new?” he queried anxiously.

“New to the whole game,” Polly confirmed.

Sarah’s gent took her arm and placed it in the crook of his. “Then I am glad to be the first to make your acquaintance, Sarah.” His tongue rolled over her name as if it were a sweet treat. “My name is Sir Richard Eddington. You may call me Dickon.”

He smelled of sweat and small beer. “I am p-pleased to meet you,” she stammered.