Mary Curtin was twisting her neck this way and that, trying to see everything at once, until she realized that the driver was smiling to himself. She was acting like an innocent fresh from the bogs, which indeed she was, but she shouldn't be advertising the fact. She felt her cheeks burn as she composed her face and stared straight ahead through the windscreen.
"It's a fine, big place," she said defiantly, because he was still smiling to himself.
"It is that," he agreed, "the best was none too good for the English oppressors. And the same is now true of these American film stars."
His tone suggested that American film stars and English oppressors had the same status in his view of things. He was only displaying his ignorance, and Mary felt obliged to correct it.
"Pamela von Bellinghausen isn't a film star any longer," she said. "She retired years ago. It's her husband that's still in the cinema, and he's what they call a director."
"Thank you for clearing up my error, me that's been working my ass off for the pair of them these six months," he said with heavy sarcasm. "The nuns let you read all about film stars at the convent school, did they?"
Mary was blushing again, knowing she'd made an even bigger fool of herself. She was a fool to start with, trying to get the better of this smooth-tongued Dubliner with his mod haircut and his American clothes. But she wasn't about to give up.
"Mr. Maloney-"
"It's Bobbie, darling, as I thought I'd made you to understand."
"Mister Maloney, I'll thank you to save your indecent language for the pubs."
He looked genuinely puzzled. "What indecent language, darling girl?"
"I wouldn't sully my lips repeating it, but if you can't even remember the filthy words you use because you're such a depraved individual, then you might have the courtesy to think twice before you even open your mouth."
"Ass, is it? You're all a-flutter with indignation at me for saying ass?"
"Please!"
"Well, me love, we'd better turn this imagine American automobile around right now and run you back to the convent, where the rude edges of this rough world won't scrape your fine sensitivity. You'd better be warned from the start that every other word out of your elegant new mistress's mouth would make a navvy burn with shame and run off with his hands clapped to his ears."
"Mr. Maloney, what rich American film stars who aren't even Catholics do and say should have no bearing on the way you conduct yourself in the presence of a young lady. But it's obvious from the accent and the slang you've tried so hard to pick up that you're too pathetically far gone for me to be wasting my breath on you, so I'll thank you to keep your remarks to yourself in future."
Maloney, indignant, tried to say several things at once, but he contented himself with a muttered "Mother of God!"
She hoped she hadn't offended him too badly. He was the handsomest young man she'd ever seen. It was true that she hadn't seen many of them, that the comparison was therefore invalid, but she was certain that Maloney would have stood out in a crowd of young men. He had white teeth that sparkled with his quick smiles, black eyes that flashed and twinkled with animation. His body was tall and straight and muscular, and more than once she'd been forced to steer her mind away from speculations about what he would look like naked.
She'd never seen a man or boy naked, she had only the whispered, giggly misinformation passed on by her equally ignorant schoolmates to go by, and maybe that's why she found these impure thoughts so tempting. Also, she'd never before spent this much time alone in the company of a man anywhere near her own age before. She was just eighteen. Maloney had informed her, with a forgivable touch of superiority in his voice, that he was all of nineteen. Before this, the only man she'd seen from one week to the next was Father Finnerty, and he was all of sixty-five.
It seemed that they'd been driving for hours through the grounds of the estate that had so aroused her admiration, with its sheep grazing on the lawn and its peacocks strutting about and its half-glimpsed, naked statuary. But now the drive was over. They had stopped on a sweeping, graveled way in front of a house so big she had to crane her neck back to see the roof of it.
Maloney shocked her by taking her hand. When he spoke, his face was alarmingly close. She felt a little dizzy when she looked into his eyes from so short a distance. She had trouble catching her breath.
"This is the truth I'm telling you now, so you'd better listen carefully. This fine American lady of yours really does use some awful shocking language, and it'll be the best thing for you to pretend you don't even take notice of it, because she's got a bit of a cruel streak to her. If she sees a weak spot in you, she'll pounce on it for her own amusement. So you're best pretending that nothing you see or hear shocks or upsets you. Now darling, that's all I've got to say on the subject."
Before she could pull her hand away or lecture him for his familiarity, he had pulled his hand away and was getting out of the car to collect her luggage from the boot. She thought about his words, and then she herself alighted.
Her legs were unsteady. This was the first time she'd ever ridden in a car, and she had mixed feelings about the experience. But she felt that part of the unsteadiness was due to Bobbie's-to Mr. Maloney's-nearness, to the sincerity in his eyes and the earnestness of his fine, deep voice.
She followed Maloney up the broad stairs and into an entrance hall that was big enough to hold a church. What it did contain was more naked statues, and her eyes skittered from one to another in embarrassment as she hurried to keep up with the tall driver. The male statues weren't wearing the usual fig-leaves, and she tried hard to keep from looking at the tri-lobed appendages between their legs. What had the good sisters been thinking of when they'd sent her to a place like this? She would have to pass by these things every day-maybe even dust them and clean them. How could she avoid the temptation of looking directly at them?
She squeaked with dismay when she ran right into Maloney's back. It was like running into a wall, he was so solid and firmly planted where he stood.
"Are you all right?" he asked, taking her arm, and she was grateful that he didn't laugh at her.
"Y-yes," she said, nodding. "I'm sorry."
"Don't apologize, it's not every day I have the good fortune of being rammed by such a fine young pair of...." He coughed and looked away, leaving her to puzzle over what he had meant.
They were halted before an immense double door. Maloney had paused to knock on it, and now he opened it as a woman's voice called from within.
"It's Miss Curtin, Ma'am, herself that's come from the convent school to be your maid."
She noted that Maloney's Americanized accent dropped when he was talking to an American, but she had no time to wonder about it as she heard a sultry, well-modulated voice call from within, "Thank you, Robert. That will be all. Come in, dear, don't just stand there."
Pamela von Bellinghausen overwhelmed her as she glided forward. She was every bit as lovely as she'd been in her movies, the last made a dozen years ago; and in the flesh, her beauty had far greater impact. She was the most elegant and beautiful woman that Mary had ever seen, and she found herself staring, open-mouthed.
She wore black tights and a leotard that clung to her body like a shadow and concealed it only slightly more effectively. Every line, every curve was outlined and accentuated by the clinging garments. Even the shape of her braless nipples was revealed and the mounded V between her legs. She was long and lithe, she walked with the grace of a big cat, and she seemed totally unaware of what amounted to her nakedness.
She was dark, with eyes like ripe olives and black hair that hung to her waist in a Stygian shimmer. Her face was oval, the fine bone structure clearly visible under the taut, youthful skin. Her chin was faintly cleft, her lips were full and sensuous. Mary found it hard not to look at the brazen outlines of her breasts, like firm little apples.
"Are you all right?" Pamela asked.
"I ... yes'm."
"You look kind of green around the edges, kiddo."
"I never rode in an automobile before, Ma'am."
"You're not going to throw up on the rug, are you?"
"No'm."
"Not that I especially give a shit about the rug, but it would get us off on the wrong foot, wouldn't it? Come over here and sit down, sweetie. What's your name?"
"Curtin, Ma'am. Mary Elizabeth Curtin."
"And they call you Molly, right? Please sit down. Don't tell me you never sat in a chair before, either."
"No, Ma'am. I mean to say, yes, I have sat in a chair before, and no, they called me Mary Elizabeth at the convent school, Ma'am," she said, dropping to sit rigidly straight onan elegantly flimsy antique. She kept her knees together and her hands folded in the approved convent-school style. Shit, indeed. She had to admit that was shocking, all right, but she congratulated herself on not looking shocked; scared, perhaps, but not shocked.
"Well, I'm going to call you Molly, if you don't have any objections. Tell me about yourself."
Mary watched, fascinated, as Pamela fitted a cigarette into a silver holder and lighted it. She'd never seen a woman smoke before, except in the movies, but she decided to withhold that bit of information.
"I'm an orphan, Ma'am, since I was six, and I've been at the convent school since then, because my parents provided for me. But now the money has somehow run out-this was all explained to me by a solicitor, but I didn't understand it-and now that I'm old enough to make my way, I have to find employment. My parents had planned that I should go on to the university, and so I'm not well prepared for anything else but being a maid. I made high marks in Latin composition and in Gaelic, but I guess those accomplishments aren't much use to you."
"You never can tell. That's kind of a sad story, kiddo."
"Well, to be telling you the honest truth, I'm happy to see the last of the convent school," Mary said. "The other girls had homes to go to on holiday, but I've seen little else than the four dismal walls of the place."
"Jesus," Pamela mused. "Built like a brick shithouse, and locked up with a bunch of horny nuns."
"I beg your pardon?" Mary asked. The convent had been built of bricks, that was true enough, but the meaning of the word horny eluded her, unless it meant rough and insensitive, like a horny hand, and indeed some of the sisters had been just like that.
"Forget it, kiddo. I guess the first thing we have to do is to find out if the maid's uniforms are going to fit you, although I doubt it, with those bazooms. The girl they were made for had about as much tits as a sparrow-less than me, even, if you can believe that-but then she went and got herself knocked up, will wonders never cease."
Mary's comprehension had left the track at bazooms, then regained it at tits; and if she hadn't known what tits were, Pamela had underlined her words by cupping her own in her two hands and jiggling them. Mary was scandalized, too shocked even to wonder what was wrong with being knocked up. In English slang, familiar to her from movies and radio, to knock up someone meant merely to come calling on them.
Pamela had gone to fetch something, leaving Mary alone in her confusion and shame and giving her an incredibly uncensored view of her rippling buttocks in the immodest tights. Now she returned from the far side of the room with some clothing.
"Well, let's go," Pamela said with a hint of impatience in her husky voice.
"Go?" Mary echoed.
"Your clothes. I want to see if these things will fit you."
Confused and embarrassed, Mary stood and took the clothing that Pamela offered. There didn't seem to be much of it, barely a handful of black and white silk. She stared at Pamela and Pamela merely stared back, an ironic and faintly contemptuous smile beginning to curve her full lips.
It was obvious that Pamela wanted her to try on this maid's uniform in her presence. It was equally obvious that she would soon make a cutting remark if Mary didn't comply with her wishes, and Mary was terrified of that prospect. She'd already made enough of a fool out of herself for one day. Even though disrobing in front of another person like this went against every thing she'd ever been taught, it was obviously something that rich and sophisticated American film stars like Pamela could do without a second thought. Fighting back her fear, she began to unbutton her coat with numb, nervous fingers.
She tried to avoid Pamela's eye as she put aside the blue Jacket of her school uniform and began to unbutton her white blouse, but she was acutely conscious of the woman's eyes on her. Pamela stood hipshot, arms folded, like an impatient audience at a show. Mary knew she was blushing as she put aside the blouse and fumbled with the fastening of her skirt. When her skirt was off, she turned to inspect the garments that Pamela had provided.
"You'll never fit them over that slip, petticoat, whatever you call it," Pamela asserted. "To say nothing of your shoes and socks. Just take everything off. I'm a girl, too, remember."
Mary gave her an agonized look. "But it's not right ... I mean, the nuns always said it was wrong to display your body to anyone."
"They have to say that, it's in their contract," Pamela laughed. Then her mood switched abruptly, and a touch of ice entered her voice, "Just hurry up and strip, sweetie. I don't have all day to find out if these things are going to fit you or not."
Mary couldn't go back to the convent, not now. She'd tasted freedom from that dreary place, and she couldn't give it up. She wanted to work for Pamela, who was beautiful, worldly, sophisticated-everything she wanted to be. If she didn't grit her teeth and do as she was told in this minor matter, she'd probably find herself back in the convent tomorrow. She pulled the petticoat over her head, then sat to remove her shoes and her woolly, knee-length stockings.
"That's one hell of a bra," Pamela said. "Is it designed to stop arrows?"
Before Mary could gather her wits to reply, Pamela was behind her chair and undoing the three hooks of her bra. Her hands jerked involuntarily upward to hold the garment, but she forced herself to keep them down. She closed her eyes, not daring to breathe as Pamela peeled the cups away from her breasts.
"Beautiful," Pamela murmured. "They stick right up and say hello, don't they?"
A wild giggle escaped Mary's lips before she even knew it was coming. She felt wicked, positively depraved-and the feeling, contrary to everything she'd imagined, was delicious. She cast a shy glance at Pamela to see if she was looking, and Pamela was. For a moment she detected a look in Pamela's eyes that she'd never seen before, a look almost like that of hunger, but Pamela quickly composed her features.
"The-" Pamela had to pause to clear her throat-"the panties, too."
"Well, I guess there's not much point in keeping them on at his stage of the game," Mary sighed, and got up to push her underpants down.
Once it was over with, she found that her embarrassment was gone. It seemed perfectly natural to stand here completely nude while Pamela eyed her with open, obvious admiration. She knew that she was a fine-looking girl, but no one had ever told her so, no one had ever looked at her the way Pamela was looking. Coming from such a beautiful woman, the compliment was irresistible.
"Well, don't just stand there," Pamela said after a long moment had passed-and there was little conviction in her voice when she said it-"Try on the uniform."
"Yes'm," Mary said, conscious of Pamela's eyes glued to her body as she bent to pick up the garments the older woman had given her. "There's not much of it, is there?"
"My husband's idea," Pamela explained with a faint touch of distaste in her voice. "He thinks it amuses the guests, having his servants done up like the inmates of a French whorehouse."
The silk skirt was short, barely covering the black panties that were part of the outfit. If she bent over, Mary realized, the skirt wouldn't cover her at all. A shockingly low-cut bodice went with it, and the material was as sheer as that of Pamela's leotard. A flouncy little apron, more for show than utility, completed the uniform. She turned slowly before Pamela's critical gaze.
"Do you think that top is going to bust open?" Pamela asked.
"It's a bit tight," Mary admitted.
"Well, we'll see about having it let out a little bit," Pamela said, touching her lightly on the shoulder-and Mary was surprised to note that her employer's hand was trembling slightly. "And we'll have to get you fitted for shoes and stockings. It's really quite stunning, though, the black against your fair skin and red hair. In the meantime, I suppose you can wear your own clothes. The housekeeper, Mrs. O'Malley, will explain your duties and show you your room."
"Is anything wrong, Mrs. von Bellinghausen? You look quite pale."
"I need a drink," Pamela said tersely. "Run along now, Molly, and find Mrs. O'Malley. She's probably in the kitchen."
CHAPTER TWO
Mary lay on her comfortable bed, staring up at the oddly angled ceiling and reliving all the events of this glamorous and wonderful day while she luxuriated in her unprecedented privacy.
Others might have called this room a cell, a closet, with its single tiny window and its cramped ceiling; there was barely room for the bed and the dresser and the washstand. But to Mary, who had never slept in a room with fewer than twenty other girls-or what was worse, alone in a room designed for twenty while the other nineteen were off on their holidays-to Mary, it was heaven.
Most wonderful of all, it had a mirror; and not just a mirror, but a full-length mirror that enabled her to see all of herself at a glance. Such a thing would have scandalized the sisters at the convent school. The only mirrors there were on the wall of the lavatory, dim little things that barely enabled you to see if your face was clean, and any girl caught lingering over them too long was severely disciplined. One girl, Theresa O"Toole, had been caned fiercely for the possession of a little pocket mirror in which she used to admire herself. A big, bright, full-length mirror was the kind of sinful luxury that Mary had never even dared to dream about before.
The thought of it made her bounce up to a kneeling position on the bed, even though lying flat had felt so good after her long, exciting day. There she was, her glorious red hair unbound and wild, in a way that would have given the nuns heart failure. But Pamela liked it that way, not in the simple braids she'd always worn. Even her simple blue jacket and chaste white blouse looked ... well, sexy was the word for it, even though she'd never before thought of applying that word to herself, when she wore her hair like this.
She knelt up straighter to study herself. Her eyes were bottle-green, her nose slightly up-tilted and sprayed with a fine splash of freckles. Her chin was a little bigger, her upper lip a shade longer than she would have liked, but she had to admit that it wasn't a bad face at all. Certainly she was no Pamela von Bellinghausen, but Pamela was one in a million: she wouldn't have been a world-famous film star if she'd looked like any girl out of a crowd. Pamela Bliss, she'd called herself then, probably because her married name wouldn't fit on a marquee.
She couldn't wait to meet Pamela's even more famous husband, even though the prospect frightened her a little. He had a reputation as a temperamental, eccentric genius, a reputation that had filtered even as far down as the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Lough Swillie, Eire, via bootlegged movie magazines and sensational tabloid newspapers. Even Mary Elizabeth Curtin, so thoroughly isolated from the twentieth century that she might have just stepped out of a time capsule sealed in the seventeenth, knew how he had driven stars to tearful fits and even nervous breakdowns with his outbursts of temper.
He had been in Ireland for five years now, filming a spectacular version of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, starring Joy Piper and Abel Gentry. She might meet them, too, or at least catch a glimpse of them in this great imagine house, and the thought of Abel Gentry made her feel strangely squirmy and warm inside.
She realized that she ought to be undressing for bed, in order to be bright and alert for her first full day on the job, and she was suddenly stricken by an unexpected onset of modesty. There was no place in the room where she could disrobe without seeing herself in the mirror that filled the inside of the door.
"You're a fool, Mary," she told herself firmly. "You think nothing of taking off every stitch in front of a total stranger, and you're afraid of seeing yourself."
Thinking about that now, she couldn't imagine where she'd found the nerve to do it. But it hadn't been so much due to her nerve as to the force of Pamela's personality. The older woman had rolled over her objections with the irresistible force of a bulldozer. Thinking of it now, she blushed.
That episode still puzzled her. She couldn't believe that it was common practice for American employers to require their servants to strip naked for them, although she'd heard stranger stories about rich Americans. Even more puzzling had been Pamela's reaction. She had trembled, she'd turned pale, her breathing had been audibly ragged-for all the world like the shameful symptoms she had tried to overcome in the presence of handsome Robert Maloney.
Back at the convent school, it was whispered that there were several girls who did unspeakable, sinful things with one another. Mary had no first-hand evidence of this, she didn't even know the girls well who were supposedly involved, and the whispered stories were lurid and largely unbelievable-but even so, there was a grain of truth in all of it, she knew that. Girls in isolation sometimes think strange thoughts, entertain curious emotions. She hated to admit it, but she herself had developed a very odd feeling about an older girl, a beautiful, athletic blonde girl named Fionna McHarg. But those were schoolgirl aberrations. A grown woman-a married woman, at that-couldn't have such feelings, could she? Father Finnerty had been furiously angry when she'd hinted about her feelings for Fionna in confession, when she told how she sometimes couldn't help but touch herself in forbidden places when she thought about Fionna. It hadn't cured her. It had merely forced her to stop confessing those particular sins, increasing her feelings of guilt and un-worthiness immensely. She hadn't made an honest confession in two years, all because of her feelings for Fionna and Father Finnerty's reaction to them. She had received communion with mortal sins on her soul. She was going to burn in hell for all eternity.
She was ashamed of herself for attributing such motives to Pamela. She had a dirty, sinful mind, and it was proven by the fact that she was now getting damp between the legs from thinking about Fionna again. Next thing, she'd be touching herself. She crossed herself and whispered a quick "Hail Mary" to take her thoughts elsewhere.
It was getting late, her mind was racing all over the place, and she still wasn't prepared for bed. She thought about turning off the light to change into her nightgown, but she rejected that thought. Nobody was watching. The Lord had given her this body, and it was a sin to be ashamed of the sight of it. Nevertheless, she studiously avoided looking at the mirror as she began to take off her clothes and arrange them neatly on hangers in the tiny closet.
She heard a noise. It was probably just the creaking of the great old house as it settled in the night, but it startled her and she looked over her shoulder. She gasped, taken unaware by the sight of her own nudity in the shameful mirror. Her body was beautiful, just as fully developed and shapely as the bodies of those. starlets in the smuggled tabloids from London, and this was the first time she'd really gotten a look at it.
As if hypnotized by the beauty of her own image, she turned slowly and stared at herself. She couldn't believe it. She was a woman, a long, lithe, lovely woman with a figure that made Pamela von Bellinghausen look skinny and undeveloped. Maybe that was the explanation: Pamela had been simply jealous.
She moved closer to the mirror, consciously standing straighter and pulling her shoulders back to make her breasts thrust out more prominently. She'd always been somewhat ashamed of them, at least for the past year or so, when they'd grown so alarmingly big. This was the first time she saw how gracefully they curved, how firmly they stood forth. She caressed them, and the nipples began to harden, warning her to take her hands away. But her hands lingered a moment longer as warm tingles began to trickle through her body.
Her eyes dropped lower, over the flatness of her belly, the bold flare of her hips, to the shrub of fine, red-gold hair on her pubic mound. Her hand followed her eyes, toying with the curls but she didn't dare to move it any lower. Her breath was already short, she could feel the dampness between her legs increasing until a wet trickle seeped down the sensitive skin of her inner thigh.
"No," she murmured. "I mustn't. It's wrong, it's so wrong, it. . . "
But her hand ignored her. As if they had developed their own skill, stronger by far than her own, her fingers crawled lower through the fleecy curls. Her bare feet shifted a little wider on the uncarpeted floor. She gasped, biting into the fullness of her lower lip as she felt her fingertips press the feverishly hard button of her throbbing clitoris. Another trickle of warm stickiness crawled down her leg from the frenzied lubrication of her pulsing vagina.
How sinful this was, how degenerate! She wasn't cringing in her bed, not daring to breathe for fear of alerting the other girls to what she was doing. She wasn't reaching under the coarse flannel of her bulky nightgown to touch the source of forbidden pleasure. She was standing nude before a mirror no less, with the light on, fondling herself openly and brazenly ... and deliciously.
Her other hand snaked its way upward to cup the soft weight of her left breast. Her fingertips swirled around the large, dark aureole, drawing concentric circles that drew ever closer to the erect nubbin of her itching nipple.
Now she gave herself up completely to thoughts of Fionna. Her excitement had developed the momentum of a glacier, and she knew it would be no use to pray, to think of other things. She would pray later, she would beg forgiveness later. Now she could only exist for the touch of her hands, for the glowing electricity that spread from the quivering jelly of her cunt.
She thought of kissing Fionna, of running her fingers through her night-black hair ... but Fionna was blonde. The hard, muscularly feminine body pressing against her in her imagination, returning her want and need with a vengeance, was the sinuous body of Pamela von Bellinghausen.
Suddenly Pamela's dark eyes became the dark eyes of Robert Maloney, the coarse hair of his chest was rubbing her feverish nipples, his hard, strong hands were kneading the flesh of her buttocks as he pressed a dim and unimaginable projection against her from his muscular loins. She whimpered in confusion, not knowing what she wanted any longer, but not really caring as she imagined them alternately kissing and fondling her, imagined herself returning their caresses and stroking bodies hard and soft.
The thought of Maloney frightened her. It would be strange and different. He would want to put his vaguely visualized thing into her, and it would hurt, it would make her bleed. But Pamela would be soft and undemanding, Pamela would be like her, Pamela would kiss her lips and her nose and her closed eyes and her cheeks and her ears. Then Pamela would move lower to her smooth shoulders and neck and caress them with her tongue. Meanwhile, her hands would move along Mary's chest, fondling the mighty breasts and making the nipples stand on high. Mary imagined how Pamela's oral finger would snake out of her mouth and touch the nipples, turning them moist with saliva.
Mary sank back on the bed, spreading her legs wantonly wide, gazing at the inflamed gash of her oozing crotch as she stroked deftly and lightly and quickly with her glistening fingers, probing ever harder against the tough membrane that partly occluded her itching vagina and prevented her from scratching it as deeply as she longed to.
Maloney would settle that problem for her, would settle it with the thrusting of his rigid thing-his dick, she thought, using the naughty word that bold girls like Caitlin O'Mara used when they whispered and giggled even at the Mass itself. Yes, he would push his dick inside her, a big thing like a hard sausage, Caitlin said, bigger than a dog's dick and hairless, and it would scratch that intolerable itch she could never reach. Back and forth he would go, in and out, thrust and return, bouncing a great hairy sac of balls against her buttocks while she drummed a wild tattoo on his strong back with her heels and her fists, urging him on, urging him to make love to her!
She also tried to imagine dining on Maloney's dick, but she couldn't picture it well enough. Caitlin said that men loved it when women did that, she'd found a book from Paris under her brother's bed-about a girl who went around sucking all the men's dicks and driving them wild with pleasure. Creamy stuff spurted out, and the girl would swallow it eagerly, she loved the taste of it. Mary had shuddered with horror. "Your husband will be after wanting you to do that when you're married, so you'd best get used to the idea," Caitlin had said, "else he'll go off and get it from the whores, what he can't get from you, and they'll give him a horrible disease and you'll both get horrid itchy scabs and go insane, and that'll be the end of you, all because you won't let him put his dick in your mouth."
She recalled how Caitlin had told her of how whores must take on any male who has the hankering, provided he's got the money to pay for her services. Caitlin had depicted huge men with stubby little dicks and ugly, smelly old derelicts who would rather make it with a woman than drink some cheap swill that they'd bought with pennies they'd panhandled from folks with money. Occasionally, they saved enough so they could make it with a whore, and between the two of them there would be enough germs to fill a room. "The whore is only in it for the money," she remembered Caitlin saying, "so she doesn't care whose dick is inside her, as long as there's coins jingling in his pocket."
Mary tried to get the pictures out of her mind, letting her thoughts return to Pamela and her wandering digits.
Mary gasped with a spasm of pain as she stretched her own hymen a little farther than she'd ever done before in order to push her finger just as deep as she possibly could. The pain didn't seem important, because now she was actually touching the source and center of that intolerable itch the way Maloney's dick would, the way Pamela's fingers would.
She no longer needed the added stimulus of looking at herself in the mirror. She lay back on the bed, gazing at the ceiling without even seeing it as all her senses became embroiled in the sensations that roared through her body from her flailing wrist and probing fingers.
She twisted and writhed on the bed, disarranging the bedclothes wildly without realizing it, completely lost in the pleasure she was giving herself. The wonderful privacy she was enjoying made her cast caution to the winds, and she moaned aloud in time to her strokes, as she'd always wanted to do at the dormitory of the convent school but had never dared to do.
Her vision of Maloney had faded, and now she was dedicating her orgy of masturbation entirely to Pamela. It was Pamela's finger probing her vagina, Pamela's thumb rubbing her bone-hard clitoris, Pamela's tongue tangling with her as they rolled and squirmed on the bed and struggled to blend their bodies together. This was just the way she used to masturbate when thinking of Fionna, but it had never been this good, not ever, because of the fear that had constrained her, the fear that one of the other girls in the dormitory would discover what she was doing and inform on her. In her innocence, she had always believed that she was the only sinner in the dormitory, the only girl so far carried away by base, animal lusts that she would actually touch her private parts in the darkness and the secrecy of the night and play with them.
Her legs were spread as wide as she could spread them, and the strong young tendons of her inner thighs stood out like cables, forming a V that pointed the way to her steaming depths, where her hand pumped and rubbed in a frenzy as she felt herself moving closer and closer to a height of pleasure that she'd never achieved before. She arched her back like a bow, lashing herself from side to side with her long red hair as she twisted her head this way and that in a near-agony of pleasure.
With her free hand, she squeezed her nipples until they hurt, trying to relieve their aching hardness, and each touch sent lightning-bolts of ecstasy straight down to the boiling center of her sensuality. She imagined Pamela actually biting them with her dazzling white teeth, and though the image was scary, it inflamed her passion even more.
She'd never been able to do it before, but without even pausing to think about what she was doing, she managed to squeeze two of her dainty fingers into the pulsating tunnel of her clasping hole. It didn't hurt at all. It only redoubled her pleasure as she pushed them in and out, spattering her thighs with scalding droplets of the juice that was bubbling up from her depths to lubricate her fiery sex center.
"Make love to me, Pamela," she moaned aloud, wishing with all her might that she could turn the masturbatory vision into stark reality. "Make love to me with your fingers, it feels so good, do me nice and fast and then stick another finger inside of me!"
This time she had over-reached herself, and she gasped with pain and dismay when she tried to fit yet a third finger inside her clutching love hole. But not even the momentary pain she'd felt could do a thing to bring her excitement down from the dizzying height it had achieved. She was exploding, breaking free from her body's cage, melting the bars with the heat from the volcanic core of her sexuality and flying free for the first time in her life.
She couldn't help thinking the blasphemous thought that this was exactly like the ecstasies and visions she'd read about in the lives of the saints, the ecstasy she herself had previously tried to achieve by prayer and fasting, by kneeling for hours on a cold stone floor to mortify her flesh for the greater glory of God. This was like the ecstatic vision of St. Theresa, her body pierced by an angel with a flaming arrow-but it was no angel, no arrow, it was the fingers of Pamela von Bellinghausen she imagined were piercing her in a very specific place. How could this be? How could those tales of saintly visions conform so precisely to the way she felt now? Could it be that sex was a debased and perverted form of religious ecstasy, cleverly designed by the Devil to counterfeit the emotions of the saints?
But the thought went through her mind as quickly as a breeze riffling over a field of wheat, and it left as little trace of its passing. She was far too involved in the sensations of the flesh to pursue analytical thought. Her cunt and her hand were doing all her thinking for her with their frictive lubricity, they were driving her on to a brand new plateau that went beyond her wildest imaginations or religious ecstasy, a level of pleasure that she'd never even dreamed of before.
Time passed unnoticed, and then she became aware of an acute pain in her waist and her hand-they had cramped from her unprecedented exertions. She felt the pain because the pleasure had ebbed, had spread and diffused itself and become a warm afterglow. She felt wonderful, but the feverish intensity that had gripped her was gone, the earth was revolving again, all the clocks in the world had started once more. She became aware that she was bathed in sweat, that she was breathing like a blown horse. She massaged her cramped hand and found that it was coated with the juice that had splashed all over the lower part of her body.
"Holy Mother of God," she murmured, "What was I doing? What was I thinking of? Sweet Jesus, forgive me!"
She looked around her in horror, avoiding the sight in the mirror of the lascivious, widespread wanton on the bed. She had to take a bath. She had to change the sheets. But before she did anything else, she had to get down on her knees and pray for the forgiveness of her sin, to swear to God and His Holy Mother that it would never happen again, not ever, not as long as she lived.
CHAPTER THREE
There was plenty of work to be done at the von Bellinghausens', even with three maids and a housekeeper and a snotty English butler named Chicherley to share it. And, of course, it was the three maids who did most of the work, with the newest getting the heaviest load of all. In addition to the household staff, there was a gardener and his assistants, an American named Larsen who served as a general handyman and jack of all trades, and the chauffeur, Maloney. She didn't see much of them, although she spent a lot of time hoping to see Maloney and even deliberately trying to run into him or at least catch a glimpse of him. She refused to admit to herself that she was consciously doing this.
She had read somewhere about the year-round crew of painters that spend their time painting the Golden Gate Bridge, which she believed was in Brooklyn. No sooner do they get from one end of the bridge to the other than it needs to be painted all over again, starting from where they began.
The mansion that the Bellinghausens had leased for the duration of their stay in Ireland was like that. It was so vast, it had so many rooms, that you had to start dusting and vacuuming it again as soon as you'd finished it. And the windows! Mrs. O'Malley, the housekeeper, had informed her that she would start work cleaning them next week, and she feared it was going to turn out to be her life's work. There must have been a good two hundred of them, averaging twelve panes of glass each. That meant twenty-four-hundred panes of glass, and, saints preserve us!, two sides to each of them, meaning a grand total of forty-eight-hundred panes of glass that had to be swabbed and scrubbed until they were, in Mrs. O'Malley's word, invisible to the naked eye. All of this donkey work, mind you, had to be done in a silly outfit that made her look like a bunny at a Playboy club, and that seemed adding insult to injury at first; but she soon forgot all about being self-conscious and adjusted to the long, hard grind of drudgery.
Her education was progressing apace. She had never heard of Playboy bunnies before, would have laughed scornfully at anyone who tried to convince her that such creatures actually existed even in the decadent, immoral United States, but she'd seen pictures of them in the American magazines that were scattered here and there about the house.
Bunnies, of course, were the least of it. No American magazine seemed complete without a picture of a shameless, immoral young woman displaying her private parts to the world at large. In the pictures, some of the girls were actually touching themselves where girls should never touch themselves, where Mary had vowed never to touch herself again. She made an effort to ignore such filth when she found it, but often the temptation was too great, and she would leaf through them until she found a picture that made her cheeks burn and her breath quicken.
The Americans, she discovered, were much less open in their depictions of naked men.
Even in the magazines that seemed to be directed at a female readership-although what sort of females would read such things, she couldn't imagine-there were no clear, close pictures of men's dicks. Men with their dicks hanging out always kept coyly to the background of the pictures; and none of the dicks were stiff and red and swollen and sticking right up straight, the way Caitlin described her brother's dick when she'd peeked in on him and found him playing with it.
Of course, Caitlin could be lying, but Mary was inclined to believe her. She couldn't imagine being penetrated by any of the limp hoses she saw in the pictures in the American magazines. There must have been some American tribal taboo about showing a stiff dick in a magazine picture.
When she'd first come across these magazines, which were openly, even prominently displayed in most of the guest bedrooms of the great house, Mary believed that she'd taken employment in a den of iniquity, that the von Bellinghausens were depraved sex maniacs, even by loose American standards. It took her a while to discover that all of the magazines contained interviews with or articles about Erich von Bellinghausen. He would apparently talk your arm off at the drop of a hat, ranting on and on about symbols and levels of meaning and points of reference and tone and texture and lots of other stuff that sounded like crazy gibberish to Mary. She couldn't square this arty, high-flown talk with pictures of naked whores who would play with themselves in front of a camera, and she wondered what sort of strange people would buy these magazines. Did the same people who understood von Bellinghausen's impenetrable jargon enjoy looking at the pictures, or did they just buy the magazines for the pictures and ignore the other nonsense?
An even more grotesque touch was provided by the pictures of von Bellinghausen himself. On one page would be a ravishing blonde with her hand in her crotch, on the next page would be the famous director. He looked like a toad. He had no hair at all, he was built like a fire-hydrant, and he had apparently inherited all of his suits from the late Premier Khruschev. The odd juxtaposition of images reminded Mary of the story of the Frog Prince, or Beauty and the Beast, and she liked to fantasize that von Bellinghausen would be transformed into Abel Gentry if one of the naked harlots would kiss him. In her bolder fantasies, she tried to imagine him naked in bed with Pamela, and she simply couldn't. Did he really have a dick and a pair of balls somewhere inside those baggy suits? And if he did, did he actually stick his dick into his lithe, lovely wife and hump his pudgy body to thrust it in and out of her? She couldn't believe it.
Mary had seen dogs copulating, and horses, and cattle, although she'd never worked up enough boldness to linger at such scenes and study them as closely as she'd really wanted to, even when she was alone. And when she wasn't alone there would usually be some nun around who would do her best to distract her attention and hustle her along. Sister Rose had taken a stick to a pair of humping dogs once, and Mary had thought that was terribly cruel.
Anyway, she supposed that people did it just as the lower animals did, with the woman on all fours and the man bending over her back. In such a position, von Bellinghausen's stomach would certainly get in the way, unless he had an abnormally long dick. Maybe they couldn't really screw at all, and he made Pamela suck on it. The image excited her, it stuck in her mind, and she had to pray extra hard to get rid of it. Her mind always returned to it, though, the image of the ugly troll forcing the lovely Pamela to perform such an unspeakable perversion. Her daydreams would build upon it, and she had nothing to do but daydream while she went about her dull, mechanical tasks. In her fantasies, Pamela had been forced into marriage with Erich because he knew a shameful secret about her: she had once been in love with a young girl with red hair and fair skin, and she and the girl had gone to bed naked together and had stroked each other and kissed each other and played with each other's cunt. Just as their excitement was reaching its peak, Erich had burst in with his camera, chuckling evilly. He had captured them on film, and he would sell the pictures to one of the immoral magazines that were always interviewing him unless Pamela consented to marry him and suck his dick. Tearfully, Pamela had agreed. The red-haired girl, her own true love, was banished, and Pamela was dragged weeping to the altar, or to whatever passed for an altar among heathen Protestants. She thought she was doomed to a bleak life as the love-slave of an evil troll. But then, in Ireland, she hired a beautiful young girl who was the very image of her lost love. Pamela struggled against the temptation, but one night crept into the girl's room.
"Forgive me for disturbing your ladyship when you're busy gazing out the window and, thinking such grand thoughts as us other poor mortals wouldn't understand at all, but could I be troubling you to do a bit of dusting? If it doesn't interfere with your other pressing social engagements?"
"Mother of God, Mrs. O'Malley! You startled the life out of me!"
"It's life that I'm trying to startle into you, you lazy, idle bogtrotter, you misbegotten offspring of a black Protestant and an English informer! Do you think that these rich American heretics and atheists are paying you more money every week than the last five generations of your family have seen in the whole of their entire lives so that you can lounge about and gaze out the dirty windows? It's straight back to the convent school, where the good sisters will beat you black and blue for your lazy ways...."
And so on and so on and so on, while Mary trembled and interjected frightened apologies and promises to be the soul of energy and the model of industry ever after. When at last the housekeeper's anger, or her desire for Mary's humiliation, had run its course, the chastened girl went back to her dusting with vigor and tried to occupy her mind with the silent recitation of prayers.
Somewhere in the gap between a Hail Mary and an Our Father, Erich von Bellinghausen bounced back into her thoughts. She had yet to meet the great man in the flesh. He was off in the countryside, shooting the scenes where the Londoners flee the plague-stricken city in droves to live in the open and steal food from terrorized farmers. But the word around the household was that he would be back this weekend. There was a good chance that he wasn't as ugly as his pictures or as dull as the articles about him. Maybe he was charming and-well, not handsome, certainly, but great and-likeable, maybe his belly wasn't too big to prevent him from fucking his wife, and maybe there were a dozen good reasons why she had married him. But she doubted it.
Of Pamela herself, Mary had been privileged to catch only rare glimpses since their first embarrassing interview. Her habits were those of an empress. She would awaken at noon, or later, and ring for Bridgit, her personal maid, who would bring her breakfast and draw her first bath of the day and lay out her first set of clothing, usually the tights and leotards she'd worn at Mary's interview. She would bathe, breakfast, spend an hour exercising to maintain her willowy figure, and don different clothes, an outfit to go riding, perhaps, or something sensible and tweedy for a shopping excursion into Dublin. After tea it would be still another bath and a change into some breathtakingly elegant gown for a social event that would keep her out till three or four in the morning, when Mary would have been long abed-abed-abed but often awake, listening for the sound of her return. On those evenings when she stayed home, Pamela would seclude herself in her screening room to view films from her private collection, occasionally ringing for fresh ice or more cigarettes. Downstairs watching the television with Mrs. O'Malley and the other maids, Mary would pray that the others might be occupied when the ring came, leaving her to answer it, but they never were. Bridgit was jealous of her position as Pamela's personal maid, and it seemed that she would be up and running before the bell even rang.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Pamela's Jaguar would roar into deep-throated life and scream off into the darkness. On those mysterious nights, she wouldn't return until five or six or even later, and Mary would drag herself wearily through the day while wondering where she had been, and why. She would picture her walking naked on a beach in moonlight, longing for the red-haired girl who had been her only real love.
At last the routine-if such a strange way of life could be called a routine-was interrupted by the news that Pamela would that night be entertaining a distinguished-no, not merely distinguished, fabulous, mythical-guest, none other than Joy Piper, sex-goddess of the universe, whose naked image was as well-known to unlettered Africans and inscrutable Japanese as it was to young girls raised within the four dismal walls of an Irish convent. Meeting an Eskimo walrus-hunter or an Arab sheik, Mary Elizabeth Curtin would have had as common ground for conversation the details of Joy Piper's scandalous romances, turbulent marriages, and sensational divorces. Seeing with her own eyes any divorced woman would have been a remarkable event in Mary's life; but actually seeing Joy Piper, who had accomplished it five times in the full glare of world-wide publicity-it would be like meeting a creature from another planet.Mary was so excited that she broke a vase, forgot to show up for lunch, put the wrong towels in the wrong guest room, and was six times threatened with instant dismissal for wandering aimlessly in a daze. The sixth time she broke into uncontrollable tears, inspiring Mrs. O'Malley to suggest in a kindly way that she retire to her room, as she must be coming down with a fever, at which prospect Mary's sobs had escalated nearly to hysteria. It was only by pleading, by very nearly getting down on her knees and begging, that she persuaded the housekeeper to withdraw her well-meant offer so that she wouldn't miss the arrival of the nonpareil.
It happened this way, Mary was vacuuming the carpet in the cathedral-like entranceway, not expecting the arrival of the star for hours yet. The chimes of the front door bonged. It was Chicherley's duty to answer this summons, but Mary knew for a fact that Chicherley was in the kitchen, a good country mile away, lingering over his mid-afternoon whiskey with a racing form. Undoubtedly, the caller was some ignorant peasant fresh from the bogs who didn't know enough to use the service entrance or was too stupid to find it, and Mary felt competent to deal firmly with such unsophisticates. Having been in the von Bellinghausens' employ for a full week, she could have patronized the Queen of England with ease.
"All right, all right, you needn't wake the dead nor the butler neither, ye ignorant gombeen!" Mary declaimed when the chimes pealed a second time as she strode briskly to the door, not even bothering to switch off the vacuum. "It's only two hands and two legs I've got, and I can't be cleaning this great fine house while simultaneously running to the front door at the behest of every wandering tinker who-" here she flung wide the door-"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! It's yourself?"
Literally, she staggered back from the door, her hand clutching her throat. Joy Piper, grand as a treasure galleon under full sail in her furs and silks and jewels, swept forward and scooped the panic-stricken girl into her arms, panicking her even more. She couldn't speak. She couldn't breathe. The room seemed to tilt. Joy Piper's beautiful face, more beautiful than any black-and-white picture in a much-read London tabloid could hint at, swam before her eyes.
"What's the matter, kid? Are you having a fit? You want I should stick a spoon under your tongue or something?" the fast-talking sexgoddess rattled in her nasal Yank accent.
Mary couldn't talk. Her teeth chattered. She stared wildly at the honey-blonde hair, the rose-white skin, the big blue eyes that gazed into hers with deep concern. Joy was surrounding her with soft silver fur and lithe arms, gassing her with a cloud of ineffable perfume, pressing that monumental bosom against her. She closed her eyes, struggling for control against the dizziness that seemed about to overwhelm her. Horrified, she realized that she was clutching Joy Piper in her arms even as Joy held her to support her, but she couldn't step back or unlock the embrace. She began to tremble.
"Jesus, kid, I believe I've scared the shit out of you, that's the problem. Is that it?"
Jerkily, Mary managed a nod.
"I'm only another human being like yourself, honest. I won't bite you or anything. I'm just another working girl."
Joy accompanied her soothing words by patting Mary on the back and giving her a sisterly kiss on the forehead, but these innocent and friendly gestures only served to increase the girl's already acute embarrassment. Certain thoughts about Joy Piper that she hadn't even dared articulate to herself swam unbidden from the sinful depths of her subconscious.
The thoughts had been lurking down there a long time, long before she'd ever dreamed of actually meeting the American actress, and had been sparked by the fancied resemblance of Joy Piper to the leggy blonde girl who had occupied her mind so often at the convent school, Fionna McHarg. Though she was thoroughly ashamed of herself, she found herself relaxing in such a way that she leaned more firmly against the glamorous visitor, and she grew dizzy as she gazed directly into the actress's big blue eyes.
"You all right now?" Joy asked in a low, soothing voice, smiling the sultry smile that women from the four corners of the world tried unsuccessfully to imitate. As if on sudden impulse, an overflowing of friendliness and sympathy, she kissed Mary again-this time right on the lips.
"Y-yes. I guess so. I feel such a fool."
"That's okay. It's all this goddamn media hype, it drives me up the wall sometimes that people can't see me as just an ordinary person, with ordinary needs, you know, and desires," she said, soothing Mary with a stroking motion, strokes that went all the way down to her firm young buttocks.
Mary goggled to hear this goddess utter the blasphemous word goddamn with a lack of self-consciousness that not even Caitlin O'Mara had mastered. She knew, from what Maloney had told her, and from subsequent conversations with the other maids, that such shameful words were bandied about freely by the visitors to this house, but this was her first actual experience of that particular word. Strangely, it didn't seem as sinful as it might have, nor was she as scandalized as she should have been. She feared that the fine edge of moral perception that the nuns had honed in her was being dulled in this godless atmosphere.
She sprang back guiltily as she heard the vacuum cleaner switch off-and was it her fevered and uncontrollable imagination, or did Joy Piper herself spring back with an equally guilty look in her lovely blue eyes? The look, if she had indeed seen it, was gone before she could study and analyze it, and now Chicherley took charge of the situation by welcoming the famous guest and guiding her away, leaving Mary shaken and dazed by an experience she didn't entirely understand.
CHAPTER FOUR
Mary picked lethargically at her herrings and fried potatoes while Mrs. O'Malley and the other maids gossiped volubly about the grand new arrival. Even Bridgit, a tall, cool blonde of nineteen who was normally glacial in her aloofness to petty human concerns, was obviously excited; and Mavis, a voluble little sparrow of a girl who normally couldn't sit still or keep quiet from one minute to the next, was on the verge of bursting with the stories she had to tell about Joy Piper, about the regal clothing she'd brought, about the immortal words she'd dropped.
The guest had been put in Mavis's charge, and Mary hadn't seen her for the rest of the day. Now it was tea-time, she would have no further legitimate reason to come in contact with Joy, and the evening stretched grim and desolate before her.
She would retire early. She would try to sleep, hopeless as she knew that would prove to be. All this chatter was getting on her nerves-and yes, she admitted it to herself, she was disappointed and jealous that she hadn't been assigned as Joy Piper's personal maid for the brief duration of her stay. Mavis's unendurable gossip was making her more jealous by the minute. Had Joy actually walked unconcernedly naked through the room on her way to the bath? It annoyed her that Mavis, the narrow-minded little bigot, should find this act so reprehensible.
" ... parading her naked backside right before me eyes, with no more concern for my moral sensibilities than if I was some dog or cat," Mavis was saying.
"It's herself you should be comparing to the dogs and the cats," Mrs. O'Malley chimed in. "Why should she be worried about such things as common decency in front of the-likes of you, when they say she takes off every stitch in those films of hers?"
"I never saw her take off her clothes in a film," Bridgit said.
"Nor will you, not while we've got a God-fearing government in this country that doesn't spare the scissors when it comes to dealing with such foreign filth," Mrs. O'Malley said. "This isn't America, thank God, nor Sweden, where any coarse tart with a great bulging pair of boobs can bounce them about for all to see in films and magazines."
"Why did she bring twenty changes of clothes with her for a three-day visit, if she wants to walk about naked?" Mavis demanded. "She's got more imagine gowns than the pope himself."
"Bite your tongue!" Mrs. O'Malley cried.
"Why should I do that? Are you trying to tell me the pope doesn't have a imagine gown for every occasion?"
"Whether he does or he doesn't, that's not what they're called at all, and it's probably a mortal sin to go mentioning the" pope's vestments in the same breath with the gaudy costumery of some Hollywood harlot," Mrs. O'Malley said.
"I think I'll go on up to bed," Mary said, rising. Remembering the housekeeper's earlier concern for her health, she added, "I'm still feeling a bit poorly."
"Gowns are gowns, whether the pope wears them or a Hollywood harlot wears them," Mavis persisted. "I was drawing attention to their number and quality, not to their purpose or their religious significance."
"Sure, it's a fine time you'll have splitting hairs with the Devil while he drags you screaming and kicking down to the lowest pit of hell for such talk," Mrs. O'Malley declared.
So absorbed were they in their dispute, that they didn't even notice that Mary had risen. She took her dishes to the sink and washed them off. She considered excusing herself once more, but they were going at it hammer and tongs now, with Mavis volubly denying any intention of labeling the pope a transvestite while Mrs. O'Malley gleefully described the torments awaiting her in the next world for having made such a charge. Mary quietly left the room.
As Mary trudged up the back stairs, she realized that she hadn't been lying, she didn't feel at all well. Perhaps the emotional excitement of the day, coupled with the inability to sleep well that she'd experienced since coming here, was beginning to take its toll on her constitution. She'd always been an exuberantly healthy girl, but her life up until now had been spent in dull surroundings. Here it was one shock after another, constant agitation, ever-renewing newness.
She told herself that a good night's rest would set her right, and she tried hard to overlook the fact that such a good night's rest had been impossible with Pamela von Bellinghausen under the same roof, that it might be twice as impossible with Joy Piper to think about as well. She also tried to ignore the fact that her sleeplessness had been due to something more than a normal excitement over such famous and glamorous people. This afternoon, Joy's touch and her kiss had excited her-excited her in a sexual way. Part of her weariness, she knew, was due to sexual frustration.
She paused at the third-floor landing of the back stairs. Was she going to bed to masturbate? Was that the subconscious purpose that compelled her, and was all the rest of it a lame excuse? If that were true, she was ashamed of herself, but she no longer had a clear idea of her own motives and desires. It would have been very easy for her now to slump to the floor and cry her heart out.
She tried hard to think of something else, and the thought occurred to her that Joy's bedroom, like Pamela's, was on the third floor. At last report, the two movie queens had been soaking up gin and exchanging obscene reminiscences in the drawing room downstairs. Now was a perfect opportunity to pop into Joy's room and get a look for herself at all the fine clothes that Mavis had sneeringly praised, an opportunity she might not get again during Joy's brief stay.
Without giving her treacherous conscience the chance to explore the possible motivation of this idea, she slipped out into the hallway and sprinted for the bedroom that Joy had been given. She refused to notice how quickly her weariness vanished in this questionable undertaking.
The door was closed. She hesitated. What if Joy were inside, having taken it into her head to change into a fancier gown for the remainder of the evening?
She knocked loudly on the door. "Miss Piper!" she called. "Miss Piper!"
She smiled, pleased with herself. Had Joy come to the door, she would have explained that she'd answered the summons of the bell, which, she would have explained, sometimes rang of its own accord, due to mechanical malfunction, and that was true enough. Larsen, the American handyman, had been trying to repair the system for some time now, without much success.
Even so, it took courage to open the door, and she sagged against it as she closed it behind her, realizing that she had been forgetting to breathe for a long time.
It was a grand room, not a hole under the ceiling like her own. It was a suite, actually, where a family of twelve-to use Mrs. O'Malley's hyperbolic description-could have lived their lives out in individual comfort and privacy. The bathroom itself, with its sunken tub and its fine carpeting, was at least three times as big as Mary's room. The great canopied bed was the largest that she'd ever seen in her life.
She bounced on the bed, noting how soft it was, and noting with amazement that she could see herself from every conceivable angle in the mirrors scattered about the room. Even the ceiling held mirrors, tilted so that the canopy didn't interfere with a view of the bed's occupant. She lay back to check this out and, sure enough, there she was sprawled at her ease on a bed meant for a movie star.
And why not? She was every bit as good-looking as any of the women she'd yet seen in those American magazines, many of them described as actresses and models and starlets. The difference, of course, was that she would never pose naked for some photographer, nor even take off her clothes in a movie, as Joy Piper often did. But in her estimation, if she weren't a decent, God-fearing young lady, if she were the sort of person who thought nothing of making such an immodest display of herself, she would make all of those high-priced tarts look underdeveloped. Not Joy Piper, perhaps, but certainly your average, run-of-the-mill movie star would have looked sickly and wan compared to Mary.
She struck a pose like those in the magazines, lying back with her arms flung over her head, raising one black-stockinged knee. Parting her lips slightly, she adjusted her features to a consciously sultry expression and stared at her image in one of the overhead mirrors. The effect was remarkable. If she hadn't been wearing the silly maid's uniform, she could easily have stepped right out of the centerfold of one of those immoral books. Not even her braids, worn now in a coronet on her finely shaped head as Pamela had recommended, seemed out of place. The style made her look regal rather than immature.
Feeling incalculably wicked, she undid her bodice and slipped it down from her milk-white, faintly freckled shoulders. None of her bras had been suitable for the uniform she now wore, showing white through the sheer black material and displaying straps where they shouldn't have, so Pamela had provided her with some lacy little confections that did little more than conceal her large aureoles. Unfastening it, she slipped that down, too.
"Saints preserve us!" she breathed, for what she saw reclining on the bed now was the very image of a magazine harlot-but far more elegant than even the best of them could ever hope to be.
She realized that, with her hair done in this fashion, she was not unlike Deborah Kerr in Quo Vadis, an American film that the nuns approved; an Irish Deborah Kerr, to be sure, with somewhat more chin and less nose than the English actress, but the resemblance was there for anyone to see and marvel at.
Next she lifted her skirt, exposing the mounded vee between her creamy thighs. Her copious white panties, like her bras, had been found unsuitable for her costuming by Pamela, and now she wore a little black wisp of a thing that didn't entirely conceal her pubic hair. Instead of exposing her panties when she bent over, as she had feared, she now exposed a considerable portion of her bare buttocks; but that was something she had conditioned herself not to think about. Fishnet stockings covered her long, lithe legs, supported by a black garter belt that, after a moment's hesitation, she now unsnapped.
She slipped off her uniform entirely. The panties followed. She stretched, reveling in the sensuous feel of the satin coverlet against her bare skin, not yet daring to view her nude body in the mirror that tilted toward her from a corner of the ceiling. She succeeded in not thinking about what she was doing, or why.
She turned her head quickly, and was shocked by what she now saw in the mirror. Except for her shoes and her stockings and the garter belt, she was as naked as the day she'd been born. She realized that the expression of wide-eyed amazement on her face was inappropriate to the role she was trying to play, and she pushed her lips into a beckoning pout as she half-lowered her eyelids and spread her legs a trifle wider to expose her fleecy womanhood more fully.
"This is a wicked place indeed, and it's a wicked girl you are, Mary Elizabeth Curtin," she murmured, but her heart really wasn't in the denunciation. She was too pleased with the way she looked, too proud of her ability to outshine any of the bare-skinned trollops she'd viewed in the licentious magazines.
She rolled over on her belly for a back view, raising one leg saucily and eying herself over her shoulder. She thought that there were far too many freckles on her buttocks and her shoulders, but she consoled herself with the thought that they could easily be concealed with makeup for movies and photographs.
"It's out of my mind entirely I must be going," she whispered. "I could never do that. It would be wrong, it would be indecent. It doesn't do any harm to play at it, like a game, but-"
Her musings were interrupted by a footstep in the hall.
Without pausing to think about it, she was in motion, gathering up her things and rolling off the bed and sprinting for the bathroom in a furious flurry of activity. She made it without a moment to spare. She didn't even dare to close the bathroom door entirely as she crouched shuddering behind it, because the door to the hall was already opening.
Her mind raced like an engine gone out of control as she sought an excuse that would explain her presence, but nothing that came to her mind made the slightest bit of sense. No excuse at all would serve if it was Mrs. O'Malley, who knew perfectly well that she had no reason for being here. If the person at the door proved to be Joy, she might breeze past her with a line of prattle about opening the windows or checking the bathroom taps-but that would require boldness and self-assurance, and she was now reduced to a shivering, nervous wreck. Her only hope, and a slim one it was indeed, was that it might be Mavis. She could at least throw herself on Mavis's mercy, buttering her up a bit by saying that her eloquent descriptions of Joy's finery had inspired her with an uncontrollable urge to see it for herself.
But even that slim hope expired when she remembered a fact that had slipped her mind entirely, she was stark naked. Whoever it was, if she headed straight for the bathroom now, Mary was completely undone. She looked at her garments, hopelessly wrong side out, and at her fingers, trembling uncontrollably. She didn't stand a chance of untangling her garments and rearranging them over her body in a semblance of order.
"Oh, the lazy cow! Is that what she calls making a bed?"
That was unquestionably the voice of Pamela von Bellinghausen, dashing all her hopes, no specious explanation would satisfy her. She was too shrewd, too cynical. She would assume that Mary had come here to rip something off and sack her on the spot.
"What do you care?" That was the voice of Joy Piper. "We're only going to mess it up anyway, right?"
"Sure, and why clean ashtrays if you plan to put out cigarettes in them, or wash dishes when you're only going to eat off them again in a few hours. Christ! You'd get along fine with this bunch of slobs. You could all sit around together in the parlor and admire the pigs and the goats. I'd like to make her fanny burn, the lazy little devil."
"Your sadomasochistic streak is showing, dear," Joy giggled.
"That's Erich's department, and don't remind me of him, thanks. If he gets drunk enough this weekend, he'll probably proposition one of these little soldiers of Mary to walk over his fat, naked body for him, and she'll naturally head straight for the nearest priest, and we'll have to pay through the nose to hush it all up. The crazy outfits he had designed for them are bad enough.
"I just love them," Joy purred.
"You would, you horny broad."
A long silence followed, interspersed here and there with the sounds of kissing and clothes being slid off bodies. As there was no keyhole in the bathroom door, Mary could not see what was going on in the luxurious bed; she could only imagine.
Even though she did have her ideas about loving another woman, she didn't know if she could ever turn it into realism. Somehow or other, she felt physical feelings between women were wrong. And she wasn't going to let herself be seduced by the lusty ladies in the von Bellinghausens' home.
CHAPTER FIVE
"How have things been with you and Abel Gentry on the set?" Pamela inquired of the beautiful blonde.
"Oh, absolutely super!" replied the stunning female. "And they're even better off the set."
Joy lay back on the bed, pondering the male film idol who many women thought was Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds rolled into one muscular hunk of handsome man.
"Evidently, my dear Miss Piper," Pamela commented, "you and Abel have been having yourselves a great time off-screen, too."
"You bet, doll. Let me tell you about it."
Mary pictured the handsome face and form of Abel Gentry as she stood behind the bathroom door. She could feel her sexual center begin to moisten as she pressed her ear to the door.
"One day, after what seemed like a dozen hours of filming, we were both pretty pooped and decided to get some sleep in our dressing rooms, which happened to be next to one another.
"But on the way there, Abel chanced to put his hand on my backside, and it reawakened us both as if we had had a full night's sleep.
"Abel asked me if I'd mind him coming into my dressing room, and I replied, 'Not in the least, you luscious fellow.'"
Mary was really getting into this conversation as her hand began to stroke her bare breasts, the nipples now extremely hard to the touch. And she knew that there was so much more of the delightful tale to come, and she tried to picture the ultra-masculine film star talking to her as he had to Joy Piper.
"We went into my room, which, as you well know, is equipped with a queen-size bed-just for a film queen like myself," Joy smiled as she looked into Pamela's beautiful eyes.
"I took off whatever clothing I had on and draped it over a chair, with Abel doing-likewise. As he turned toward me, I saw that his penis was really starting to thicken and lengthen and redden. And I really knew what a stunner I was to turn on a guy like him as quickly as I did. Why, I hadn't even touched him when his rod almost fully engorged with his sexual excitement."
"Umm, sounds delicious," Pamela interjected. "Tell me more-much more."
"I will, Pam. I will," Joy assured her.
And Mary whispered, "More, more, tell her more," as her fingers began to stroke her pubic mound and her slick labia.
"I sat down on the edge of the bed, and Abel came toward me, his throbbing manhood leading the way.
"He stood before me, that handsome purple penis-head well in line with my mouth. Then he inched toward me and I could feel the heat of the glans less than an inch from my lips.
"I snaked out my tongue and licked at the glistening pre-seminal fluid exuding from the tiny hole. It tasted really nice, and I knew I wanted to take gobs of the sperm itself down my throat.
"Abel moved closer to me and I threw my arms around his tight buns and let him enter my mouth with a few inches of his sexy prong.
"My tongue was slobbering all around it, and I'm sure that the warmth of my oral cavern was making him hotter than hell. I gave him tiny bites with my teeth and heard him moan as the sensations of my worship at his font of manliness tore through his entirety.
"My nails scratched along his backside, and I found that we were both enjoying the sensations of this sexual magic.
"I spread his muscular ass-cheeks and probed at the entrance to his tight rectum with my finger, exciting him by moving part of the digit inside. I took one hand away and began to squeeze his testicles, feeling their heft in my palm. I could feel the oodles of semen inside the sac, and knew the sticky stuff would be headed into my body before too long.
"My senses were so impressed by his nuts that I knew I wanted to lap them and have them inside of my mouth. So I released his immense penis from my oral grasp and pressed it up against his belly to give my lips, tongue and teeth an easy target of his dangling testicles.
"I lapped the nuts inside their hairy bag, fully enjoying the masculine aroma of his crotch. My oral finger darted toward his sperm-loaded repository, coating it with my saliva."
Pamela and Mary were each juicing from Joy's sex-talk, and Joy herself wasn't exactly dry as she recalled her lovemaking with Abel Gentry.
"And it wasn't long before I had the entire sac in my mouth, nibbling on it with my teeth and stroking it all around with my tongue and my hand. My other hand, mind you, was still toying with his anus, my middle finger pushing in-and-out in the motions of sex.
"I hummed a little ditty on his nuts, and I could feel him tense his body almost as if he were ready to climax.
"That was my signal to get back on that delectable rod of his, which was now leaking pre-cum onto the hand that I had surrounded it with.
"So, with one hand toying with his balls and the other at his backside, my lips once again enclosed the tip of his manhood and my tongue licked at the gleaming, purpled glans.
"More and more of his shaft followed the tip into my mouth, and I could feel the stiffness at the entrance to my throat.
"I wanted all of him inside my head, Pamela. I was so excited by what the sight of my body had done to him that I had to repay him for showing me such appreciation."
"It wasn't just your body that was turning him on, Joy," Pamela noted. "With those dexterous digits of yours, it sounds-like you did a good job of getting him to his sexual pinnacle."
"Right, Pam. You know, the taste of Abel's staff stays with me, and I just can't get the enjoyment of it all out of my mind ... or my taste buds. I'd rather suck on a man than eat a lobster."
"They both get about the same deep shade of red," Pamela chuckled.
"You bet, Pam. But let me get to the-uh-climax," Joy tittered.
"I started to deep-throat Abel in a manner that Linda Lovelace would have been awfully proud of. I took that massive penis of his all the way into me. I could feel his pubic hairs tickling my nose, and his nuts were pressed flush against my chin. Ooh, it was such a delicious feeling!"
"I can imagine, Joy. I can imagine," interjected Pamela.
Mary was imagining, too. Her middle finger was ditched inside her love tunnel and she was stroking herself so that her sexual juices were leaking onto her hand and down her thighs. She was trying to depict herself with Abel Gentry's dong pushed far into her mouth. As she had such a poor idea of what a penis looked like to begin with, it was easier to picture its entire length already inside her head, where she could not view it.
"With my digits in motion and his body forcing his dick in and out of my throat, I knew from experience that the moment of jism-ejection was but a moment away." Joy smiled.
"I removed my fingers from his ball-bag and began to stroke the few inches of him that would be visible on the out-stroke.
"His body tensed and I could feel the power of his testicles firing hot sperm through his lengthy shaft and down into my throat.
"The taste was so boilingly delicious that I wished he would shoot wad after wad of the sticky stuff into me for maybe an hour or so; that's how much I enjoyed it. But I just had to let the five hot spurts keep me happy until we got into some other aspects of beautiful sex."
"I wonder what those might be," Pamela said, a huge grin on her face.
"Ho-ho," Joy replied.
"Um-um," Mary moaned in a low tone, her finger moving in and out of her hot vagina.
"Abel knew that although he had gotten off," Joy stated, "my loins were still throbbing for release. So he traded places with me, having me sit on the bed-nude as a jaybird, of course-while he got to his knees and nestled his head right in my crotch. I laid back to give him a better tonguing angle, and his hands came up and cupped my breasts, his thumbs tweaking each nipple.
"I could feel his tongue lapping at my labia, making them thicken even more with the blood pulsing through my south-side lips and moving inside like a mini-erection, exciting me almost as if it were an actual penis. I could feel my insides clutching down on his tongue, attempting to swallow it up inside of me.
"In just a little bit, my body spasmed in orgasm, and I was sated ... for awhile.
"But as Abel stood up, I saw that his erection had returned and he was board-stiff.
"I remained in the prone position, letting him mount me. The daylight between our bodies rapidly evaporated as his penis caught my downstairs lips head-on and entered my warm, intimate portals. The beauty of his handsome face and body complemented the feel of him powering his prong inside of me, making me sigh with total appreciation.
"I could sense my sexual recesses touching his length in scores of places, making him grow thicker and longer with each and every stroke.
"I was amazed, to be truthful, that he could be ready to unleash another load so soon after shooting off in my mouth. But this man was not just any man; he was Abel Gentry, male superstar ... and stud. He was capable of virtually anything.
"The way he was pounding his loins into mine, you'd think he had bionic powers. That he might be able to get an erection on command. That he might be capable of screwing from now through doomsday. That ... oh, well, you know what I mean, Pam."
"There aren't too many like that, Joy. But Abel Gentry just has to be one of them. You must be awfully proud of your co-star," Pamela suggested.
"In more ways than one. He's a fabulous actor. He combines the suave manner of Clark Gable with the daring way of Errol Flynn. And the rugged good looks of Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds. Why, just ask any film enthusiast-particularly if it's a female-and she'll be inclined to agree. But what many of his fans don't know is that he's got a comic streak in him that could well rival Woody Allen's, even though they're like night and day when it comes to personality.
"And, as I've been saying, Abel proved to me that he's super when it comes to the old in-and-out and other aspects of s-e-x.
"Like when he was making it with me, he seemed to never lose his strength. He was moving inside of me like a freight train, often gyrating his pecker in circular motions to really get me juiced up inside the old quim.
"The friction between our bods was fascinating, and I could barely believe how good it felt. But then ... this was Abel Gentry, a man very unlike many of filmdom's men.
"In moments, we climaxed simultaneously. He was playing my vibrating body with the skill of a first violinist, and unleashing boiling gobs of his beautiful semen into me, making the sensations explode within my mind in a scene I had never ... ever visualized before...."
At that moment, Pamela and Joy heard highly audible moans coming from behind the bathroom door. All conversation ceased as the two beautiful bodies walked toward it.
CHAPTER SIX
Mary Elizabeth was jolted out of her reverie when the door to the bathroom collided with her voluptuous buttocks.
"Oh!" she squealed as she caught sight of the two nude females eyeing her.
"What are you-uh-doing here?" Joy asked, gazing admiringly at the equally naked young girl.
"I'm just looking at the taps and seeing if they work because the bell to summon the servants doesn't work, your ladyship, as Larsen would tell you himself, I'm sure, and now, begging your pardon, I think I'd better be off," Mary babbled in one breath, dodging for the door but unable to get beyond the beauteous pair.
Mary looked around wildly for her clothes, but she didn't see them. She tried to cover her breasts and her sexual center, and she found that two hands were grossly inadequate for the task as she hunched over and half turned away from the gazes of the lovely women.
Pamela led the young lady out to the bedroom, Joy following closely behind, admiring the fleshy ass cheeks of the pert teenager.
"Why did you take your clothes off, Molly, if you were simply looking at the taps?" Mrs. von Bellinghausen inquired.
"Well, I ... it's a terribly vain thing I was doing, I know, but you see, I wanted to get a look at myself in the altogether in one of Joy's mirrors, like those shameless women in the American magazines," Mary said, deciding to adhere strictly to the truth so that later lies might be believed. "I never was allowed any kind of a mirror in the convent school, you know, so I'm almost a stranger to myself."
"It's nice that this lovely young creature is finally getting to know the beautiful, ample figure that God gave her," Pamela commented, smiling toward Joy.
"Yes, indeed," Joy replied, then asked Mary, "Well, my dear, I'm sure you liked what you saw." Then Joy placed her hand on the girl's bare shoulder.
"And that's all there is to it, and now I'd like to be going on about my business, if it's all right with you," Mary said.
"No, you don't, sweetie," Joy said, tightening her grasp just enough to restrain Mary.
Joy sat her down on the bed, and took the spot to her left side while Pamela was quickly at her right.
At that very moment, a tiny knock was heard at the door, and Joy asked who it was.
"It is I ... Mavis, m'lady," responded her little charge. "I have some tea for you and Mrs. von Bellinghausen."
"Do come in, my dearest," Joy said. "We're in the bedroom."
The door opened and the tiny servant girl walked to the bedroom entryway, gasping as she saw the naked threesome sitting on the bed.
"Oh, excuse me ... I'll just leave the tea and be off, m'lady," Mavis begged nervously.
"Oh, no, you won't!" Pamela said, the strength in her voice indicating the words were more a command than a suggestion.
"Take off that sexy little uniform and let's get a look at that neat little bod of yours," Joy suggested.
Mavis stood stone-still, but then began to remove the skimpy outfit. When she seemed to be moving with too much hesitation for Pamela to appreciate, the older woman glared at her, and her speed in undoing her garb picked up, to be sure.
When she was nude, the clothing lying in a small pile at her feet, the two women gazed longingly at her large, firm breasts and the incredibly large aureoles and nipples that tipped each one. They also viewed her amazingly hairy sex mound, tipped by a veritable forest of jet-black, glossy curls.
Mary had never especially liked Mavis, but now her heart went out to the poor girl.
Joy moved over and let Mavis sit between her and Mary. The bed now looked like a dirty old man's dream fantasy, with four lovely ladies of a variety of ages, each with an attractive face, a delectable set of breasts, a succulent pubic thatch and much, much more.
Joy stroked Mavis's night-black tresses and moved her face toward the young girl's ear-lobe. Her tongue came out and licked at the lobe and then went into the ear canal itself.
The sound of the talented oral finger flicking around filled Mavis's brain with lust, helping to slightly counteract her nervousness at the situation she was in.
Meanwhile, Pamela placed her hand on Mary's cheek and turned the teenager's face toward her own. She kissed Mary's nose gently, then her eyes and cheeks and forehead and lips. She could feel Mary warming a bit, but she could still see that the young girl-like Mavis-was also very tense.
Pamela moved her lips away from Mary's and said aloud, "These two young ladies are a bit nervous, so perhaps we should take it easy with them. Nothing too heavy. Okay, Joy?"
"Natch," Joy responded. "Just kissing and petting lovely little Mavis will keep me happy for the meantime."
Joy began to lick Mavis's soft cheek, each time using a longer stroke of her wet tongue. In a while, she was licking the girl as a dog might, lapping from the jawbone nearly to the eye. The saltiness of Mavis's young skin turned Joy on, and she lapped eventually onto the teenager's neck, seeming to want to coat the girl with her loving saliva.
Mavis's mouth opened slightly as she was enjoying the sensation of the starlet's tongue against her face. Joy noticed the movement and raised her head so she could stick her oral digit into the entrance to the young girl's mouth-cavern.
And she wasn't very surprised when the maid returned the gesture by dueling with her tongue, the feeling of the match igniting the fires within the two of them.
Joy reached for one of Mavis's ample breasts, her flat hand making circular motions on the nipple to make it harder and harder. With Mavis's readiness, Joy didn't have much trouble getting the mini-erection taut.
Then her palm moved to the other tit-mound, and it was just a few strokes away from its pinnacle.
When the nipples were both at their hardest, Joy ducked her head to lap at one of them with her dexterous mouth-finger. As one of Joy's hands stroked the girl's back, the other went to the young female's unattended breast and began to stroke the nipple again, and to squeeze the boob and fondle its every curve.
Mavis moaned from the film star's efforts, and she occasionally dropped her lips to kiss Joy's working head just inches below.
Pamela had her arms around Mary, tightly squeezing the girl to her. She realized it was the girl's inexperience combined with her tenseness that led Mary to hold the erstwhile actress with far less intensity than Pamela would have ordinarily desired.
She touched the teenager's lips with her own ultra-moist ones, and attempted to place her tongue between them. At first, Mary resisted, but opened her mouth slightly so Pamela could lick her clenched teeth, laving the pearly whites with her warm saliva. In moments, Mary's mouth was open wide, and she felt Pamela's oral digit dart inside and run circle after circle around her own.
She could feel her south-side lips moisten as her upper ones were being worked over by the lady of the house.
Pamela began to stroke along Mary's voluptuous chest, feeling the nipples become a wee bit harder with each and every touch.
As Joy did with Mavis, Pamela dipped her head and busied herself with one of the girl's boobs. But instead of fondling the other breast, she moved her hand down to Mary's soft, smooth thighs, where her fingers stroked up and back, running from the teenager's knee to her crotch. Pamela could see the girl's glistening labia peeking out beneath her gleaming pubic hair, and she moved her fingers down to caress the warm area. She didn't insert a finger inside, but instead ran a digit up and down slowly on the vertical slot.
"Urn ... um ... " Mary murmured, the sensations traveling through her body with ever-increasing intensity.
Before long, Mary's body was vibrating like the strings of a violin, played by the skillful fingers of Pamela.
Then, the older woman tried to move Mary's hand toward her own love mound, but Mary pulled back, afraid of becoming too involved in a world she was tempted toward, yet unsure she wanted any part of.
Mavis, meanwhile, was lying back on the bed, her dark hair and Joy's blonde tresses entangled interestingly. Joy's silken thigh was moving between the teenager's legs, rubbing against her crotch, which was becoming slicker by the moment.
While Joy's gam did its work on Mavis's bush, the starlet's fingers were between their beautiful bodies, moving into her own vagina and trying to time her orgasm to Mavis's.
With Mavis being comparatively inexperienced, Joy was not at all sure when the teenager would climax. She was used to far more seasoned lovers who fit in much better in Pamela's league than in Mavis's and Mary's.
But Joy gave it her best shot, moving her leg against Mavis's lower torso and her digit within her hot sexual grotto. She had her senses honed to a sharp edge as she attempted to determine the youngster's precise moment of sexual release.
And from the murmurs and motions of Mavis, she could tell that it wasn't too far off.
Joy's mind was so embroiled in exciting Mavis that she forgot herself for a few seconds and almost fingered herself to climax before Mavis's come.
But she realized what she was doing and slowed down her digital stroking.
Soon, though, she felt the physical intensity rising to its apex in Mavis's body, and she timed her own release quite well. The two voluptuous bodies moved in unison, each feeling as though a myriad of tiny explosions had gone off inside.
As the pair of beautiful, bosomy bods finished unleashing their simultaneous orgasms, they lay back together, resting from the wondrous sensations they had just experienced.
The only female unsatisfied now was Pamela, who lamented, "Great. Everybody's gotten off but me. What am I going to do, finger myself to a come with you three beauties around!? "
"Don't worry your pretty head about it," Joy commented. "I'll take care of you in a few minutes. Why don't you two young ladies get dressed and return to your chores so that I can make Mrs. von Bellinghausen happy again."
Mavis reached down for her clothes, her perky little backside catching the rapt attention of both Pamela and Joy. Mary, noticing how flushed the other young girl was from her bout with Joy, ran toward her and held her in her arms, the two nude bodies separated only by the skimpy servant's outfit in Mavis's hands.
Mary thought herself momentarily insane, but she seemed to push her big bosom and her crotch against Mavis's like parts, feeling an intense feeling of warmth wherever their bounteous figures came together. Mary found it much easier to hold Mavis-even though she was not at all sure whether she cared for the girl-than she did Pamela. Perhaps it was because she felt that since they were both about the same age and both somewhat unused to the ways of sex, they could feel more comfortable with one another.
Joy and Pamela watched the teenagers hug and kiss, and then Mary, catching herself suddenly, broke the embrace and searched out her clothing.
As the two girls dressed, the older pair watched, truly impressed by the two innocent bodies being covered in such sex-oriented outfits right before their admiring eyes.
The two teenaged maids exited, and Joy went to work on Pamela, grinding on her pelvis-to-pelvis until the older woman cried out with the pleasures of her long-and desperately-sought come.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Not long after the female foursome had had their fun in Joy's room, the starlet summoned Mary to her room.
She was fascinated by the young girl's beauty, but found the teenager to be so impressionable that she attempted to become a friend to her, and perhaps, a confidant.
Mary was very happy to spend time with Joy, who, on occasion, tried to seduce her into the ways of woman-to-woman love. Sometimes Mary accepted, other times not. But Joy never went too far with the young girl.
Mary asked Joy dozens of questions about what it was like to be a famous actress. Joy answered all of the teenager's queries honestly, but tread lightly on the topic of Abel Gentry and her several ex-husbands. She didn't want to blow the girl's mind to bits with tales of sexual interlockings. Anyway, she knew that Mary had heard of her bang-up time with Abel Gentry, as Joy had told Pamela all about it the other day while Mary was hidden.
"Did you always want to be an actress?" Mary inquired of Joy.
"Not always," Joy answered. "In fact, up through my teenage years, I wanted to work in a circus."
The two females giggled and Joy told of how she had visited the circus year after year, picturing herself in a variety of guises.
"I was always very impressed with the stilt walkers. They seemed to trod around the three rings with such ease and dexterity. But a klutz like me would probably tumble forward after the very first step."
"I doubt that you're a klutz, Miss Piper. And I think you might have made a very talented stilt walker, just as you are an excellent actress," Mary claimed.
"Perhaps, dear. And please call me Joy ... okay?"
"Okay, Miss ... uh ... I mean Joy ... Did you ever want to be a clown?"
"For years and years, young lady. I used to love to watch the cute clowns bop one another on the head and on the rear end with rubber bats, crawl under each other's legs and sprout flowers and things from their hats. I used to get a big kick out of the clown doctor, who would pull large rubber snakes and huge safety pins and such out of the clown patient's body and then patch him up with a giant-size stapler."
"Sounds like a bunch of fun, Joy. I've never been lucky enough to visit the circus, only having heard about it from other girls at the convent. The nuns there never took us to one," Mary lamented.
"That is a shame, little one. Well, let me try to fill you in on what you've been missing...
"Besides the stilt walkers and the clowns, there are the trapeze artists. They swing and somersault through the air, catching one another in mid-flight. It's all very dangerous, and even more so if they don't use a net beneath them. Many trapeze artists have been crippled or even killed by working without a net. Some trapeze artists realize that a lot of the dangers that are-believe it or not-attractive to some members of the audience, are lost with a net. So they'll do tricks using the net, such as tumbling off their swings into the net and being catapulted right back up to that very same swing. A neat trick, eh?"
"You bet, Joy. Do girls fly on the trapeze also?" Mary asked.
"Yes, ma'am. And they usually wear skimpy outfits, which keeps every male eye in the audience on their-uh-moves. And a number of female eyes, too, but let's not discuss that now," Joy chuckled aloud.
Mary was slightly embarrassed, so Joy spoke about the trapeze artists in a nonsexual sense.
"Often, you'll see a male trapeze artist holding onto the swing with his feet, while he holds a rope or some such in his mouth. A female trapeze artist will be biting on the other end-with nothing beneath her but the net far below-and she'll be spinning like a top. You'd think she'd get dizzy, but she doesn't. Shows you what years of training can do.
"I guess I wanted to be a trapeze artist once also, but my nerves probably couldn't stand all of the dangers.
"Another act you would find amazing is the balancing act. You often see entire families participate in such acts, from mothers and fathers down to their teeniest of children. Kids are taught young when they're born into circus families, and are experts at an early age. They're often taught so young, in fact, that they don't get the chance to develop stage fright.
"You often see circus daddies place lengthy poles atop their heads. Then their wives or their children climb to the top of the poles and stand on them. Why, you'll even see fathers climb up another pole-the first pole still topping their craniums ... with the wife or child aboard. It's all quite amazing, to be sure..."
"Sounds it," Mary chimed in. "Sounds dangerous, too!"
"Many circus stunts are extremely dangerous, Mary, but many years of practice build up the performer's skill to its peak, and accidents are usually rare.
"One of the most well-known circus acts was and is the Great Wallendas. They perform on the high wire, balancing on it atop one another's shoulders. The European family often worked net-less, and a number of the Wallendas have died in falls from the high wire. Quite a while back, the father, Karl Wallenda, was killed in a fall from on high with two or three other members of the troupe. Through the long years of the existence of the Great Wallendas, a number of its stars have been injured or died in falls. It's some way to make a living, but the spectacle seems to thrill audiences year after year after year."
"I think I'd prefer to work on the ground if I were a circus performer. Then everything would be safe," commented Mary.
"Yes and no, Mary. A particularly dangerous act-often the keynote of every circus performance-is the lion-taming stunt. Usually one man-or, perhaps, one woman-is enclosed in a cage with not one, not two, but close to ten-count 'em, ten lions or tigers. And the animal trainer puts these once-ferocious animals through their paces as if they were lovable pussycats.
"Occasionally, you'll see them take a little swipe at their master, but you've seen domestic cats do that, too.
"The master has the striped beauties fly through rings of fire, showing no fear whatsoever. And he or she has them lie down next to each other as if they're puppies going to sleep. The animal trainer makes it all look so easy, but there are occasional mishaps."
"Let's skip over those, okay, Joy? I think I can imagine. Are all the animals in the circus dangerous?" the teenager inquired.
"No, Mary," Joy responded with a smile. "Elephants, as gigantic as they are, may be trained to balance on their heads, hold a lovely lady on their backs or even in their mouths without harming her, and to stand up behind one another with the precision of the Rockettes. It's absolutely amazing how graceful a multi-ton elephant can be made to look.
"Poodles also play a big part in circus life, particularly when they go up against midgets who are about the same size as when the dogs stand on their hind legs.
"There are also beautiful trained ponies at the circus, who gallop around the three rings with acrobats doing flips on them.
"It's a little tough on the animal, whose head must be secured close to its body so that it doesn't buck while the acrobat is flipping around.
"I guess I like it better when the poodles are doing flip-flops on the ponies' backs. Seems like less pain for the pony, so to speak...
"Recently, the world of Hollywood has infiltrated the circus, particularly Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus, also known as the Greatest Show on Earth.
"You'll see a cast of hundreds putting on a western, indicative of the western influence found in the clothing many Americans-uh-cotton to nowadays."
"Cotton to ... what does that mean, Joy?"
"It's a sort of a colloquialism meaning 'to take a liking to,' Mary. A lot of Americans are buying western-style boots, ten-gallon hats, western skirts and pants with chaps and-oh-a lot more...
"And a lot of Americans are taking to country and western music, making like they're westerners even though they were born and bred in New York City or Boston or Los Angeles. They all like to think they were brought up in Fort Worth or Dallas or Houston or. . . "
"Sounds like a cute craze, Joy," Mary commented, her eyes wide with admiration of all Joy had seen and sensed in her lifetime.
"But getting back to the circus," Joy continued, "I guess I never really got much more involved than being a spectator, eating my cotton candy and popcorn and cracking my toy whip like I was in there with those lions and tigers.
"I guess some of the acts seemed too dangerous for me to become involved in, while others-like being a clown-were too anonymous. With all that clown makeup on, nobody knows who the heck you are under it all. And clowns-like comedians-are supposed to be sad on the inside while they make everyone else laugh with their surface smiles and pranks. Emmett Kelly, one of the world's most famous clowns, was one of the few that people knew by name. But how many people knew what he looked like without his clown makeup? Darn few, I'd guess! That's the problem with being a clown.
"P.T. Barnum used to put together a circus that thrilled children of all ages, as they say. He had midgets and other freaks, but a number of really talented types, including singer Jenny Lind and little Tom Thumb.
"A cute story about Barnum is that he once had such a crowd of people waiting to get into a circus tent that he wondered what to do about getting those already on the inside outside so he could get those on the outside inside.
"His clever maneuver was to put up a sign that showed an arrow and said, "To The Egress'. . .
"A lot of folks thought that the egress was a strange animal from another continent, so they followed the arrow.
"That Phineas Taylor Barnum was some sly chap. 'Egress' means exit, and the curious circus-goers found themselves outside the tent, precisely where the nineteenth-century showman wanted them."
Joy loved talking to Mary, and she could see that the girl was truly enjoying her monologue. But Joy was tiring a bit, and mentioned to Mary that she'd like to catch a few winks.
Mary understood, and left the room. But she was somewhat sure that Joy was a person whom she enjoyed being with and could trust. But she still wasn't pleased with Joy's occasional sexual maneuvers toward her, even though she did give in, at times.
Perhaps that's why she's been through so many husbands, Mary said within the private confines of her mind. She-likes women more than she does men. If only I could get over my own strange physical feelings for women. If only I had never laid eyes on Fionna McHarg.
Mary could feel Joy's eyes on her scantily-clad body as she headed for the ... egress.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Robert Maloney lay alone on the bed in his garage apartment, desolately playing with himself. It was a sin, that's what it was, some of the most devastating women in the universe going unplugged in the big house not a hundred yards away, and he was reduced to pulling his pudding like some pasty-faced seminarian who wouldn't know which end of a girl to stick it in.
Not that Maloney himself would have hesitated to stick it in either end, come to think of it, but the point was that he was a man of the world and a handsome devil to boot, the sort of fellow who should long ago have given up this nasty habit.
He took his hairy hand away, resolving to play with it no more. He would only feel worse after he came, lonely and depressed. His hand was no substitute at all for a juicy slash.
God knew there were enough of them up there, and he'd imagined himself plowing them by the dozen when he'd taken on this job. The chauffeur's position had seemed like a wet dream come true when he'd accepted it-a beautiful American film star, left alone by her ugly husband for long, lonely weeks at a time. That was the kind of situation that pornographic novels were made of. Add the handsome young chauffeur, available for any service ... but it just hadn't worked out that way. There must be something wrong with Pamela von Bellinghausen. She didn't act like any of the American film stars he'd read about in the press. As far as he could see, she didn't make it with anybody, nor did any of the friends she invited to her grand home.
He sat up and lit a cigarette, acutely aware that his penis was just as hard and hungry as ever. He refused to look at it or touch it. He tried to think decent thoughts, but none occurred to him.
He ought to go up to the house and give Bridgit a quick one. She was the only normal woman in the place, the only one who responded to his advances. She was so normal she almost scared him. He'd only given her a kiss in the pantry, planning to work his way to more interesting games by gradual degrees, but the girl had started climbing out of her pants before he was finished kissing her. He'd been forced to screw her right then and there in the pantry, where anyone could have discovered them.
No, he didn't want to repeat that experience. He would have to wait until this evening, when she could slip away from the big house unnoticed and join him in his bed. It would be a long wait.
He wished someone would find a job for him, to take his mind off his throbbing member but they'd been as quiet as mice in the big house since Joy Piper had arrived. Joy Piper, now there was a lady he'd love to plow! It would make a fine tale to tell at the pubs, too, that he'd plowed the famous movie queen whose intimate charms were well known by anyone who read those American stroke books. He had memorized every inch of her skin from those magazine pictures, and there wasn't a single square inch that displeased him. He would have been happy to do her in the armpit, or between the toes, or anywhere else she might imagine. But she hadn't responded at all to his most charming smiles and most elegant deportment.
If he had his pick of any of the women up there, though, he believed that Mary Curtin would have been his first choice. Beautiful as Joy was, the fact remained that Mary was younger. Her skin was finger-textured. Her waist was slimmer. Her tits were bigger. And if he was any judge of women at all, she was still a virgin. Having sex with Mary Curtin wouldn't have made any kind of tale at all to tell in the pubs, of course, but the personal satisfaction he would derive from doing it would almost make up for that shortcoming.
He wouldn't have thrown Pamela out of bed either, although he'd given up hoping where she was concerned. She treated him like a piece of furniture. Being married to an ugly little toad like her husband must have soured her on all men. She didn't know what she was missing, poor thing.
Then there was Mavis, a bouncy little bundle if ever he'd seen one. She looked like she was ripe for a roll in the hay. But, as with Mary, he never got a chance to get near her. Whenever he did, there was always the chance that Bridgit would come upon them, and he didn't want to risk his arrangement with Bridgit to go chasing after some other girl who might not come across. Not until he got tired of Bridgit, at least.
He got up and paced the room restlessly. These thoughts were doing him no good at all. He might as well masturbate and get it over with.
He was just starting to put that thought into practice when a knock at the door nearly scared him out of his skin.
"Who is it?" he roared, sounding more angry than shocked.
The door opened before he could cover himself or even take his hand off his rod. Bridgit slipped in, paler than usual and panting for breath. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped as she saw him standing there with his hand on his hardness.
"Just getting it ready for you, darling," he said, recovering his composure before she did and moving forward to shut the door behind her. "It rose up like a flagpole when it sensed you were on your way, so I just stripped down in order not to waste a moment of our valuable time. You do the same now."
"Bobbie, no, I ... oohh," she moaned as he drew her against him and pressed his stiff, naked staff against her silk-sheathed belly. "I didn't come for that! I have to tell you-"
"Never mind what you came for, now you're here and-you want only one thing, isn't that right?"
"No!" she cried, squirming as he began to work his way through the zippers and clasps of her skimpy little uniform. "I have to tell you about the horrible things that were going on in the big house. It was a regular orgy that they were having up there, like nothing I've ever dreamed of or heard of."
"Is that so?" Maloney asked, interested enough to stop undressing her.
She pulled away and made a halfhearted effort to straighten her clothes, then sat down primly on the edge of his bed. She avoided looking at his stiff prod.
"Give me a cigarette, Bobbie, I need something to steady me nerves."
He gave her one and lit it. He saw that her hand was shaking. She seemed genuinely alarmed. It was almost enough to distract him completely from the thought of porking her. He sat down on the bed beside her and slipped his arm around her shoulders.
"Now what's all this talk of orgies, darling? How can a bunch of girls have an orgy with no men up there to make it interesting for them?"
"That's what I'm after trying to tell you! It was just the four of them, her ladyship and Joy Piper and Mary and Mavis, wallowing around stark naked on a big bed, feeling and kissing and hugging like men and women would."
"Go on with you!" Maloney laughed.
"It's the truth, so help me God! I didn't believe it myself, even when I saw it with my own eyes, but that's what they were doing."
"Aah, it's a dream you were having. Just take your clothes off, love, and I'll show you how it's done in the real world."
"No!" Bridgit cried, shoving him violently when he began again to work at her uniform. "You have to believe me Bobbie."
"Sure, I believe you, then. Take your clothes off."
Bridgit glared at him. Her skin and hair were very pale, offsetting dark blue eyes that got darker when she was angry. They seemed almost black now.
"All right, all right!" Maloney cried, throwing up his hands. "Tell me all about this orgy, but you can see I'm not lying about wanting you. I'm going near out of my mind, and how can I concentrate on your interesting report when my prick is throbbing like a thumb stuck in a refrigerator door?"
Her eyes dropped. He knew that Bridgit couldn't resist an erection. She reached out to touch it, then pulled her hand quickly back. Her resistance had evaporated, and she didn't struggle as he managed to remove her blouse and her bra. He was surprised to note that her nipples were erected, and he leaned forward to kiss one of them.
"Stop it, Bobbie," she said without conviction. "I want to tell you."
"So tell me, then. Don't mind me at all. I'll just go on with what I'm doing, but I'm all ears for your fascinating story," he said, fondling and kissing her naked breasts.
"Well. I heard noises coming from Joy Piper's bedroom, moans ... and groans like a woman in fearful pain, and the door was partly open so ... so ... oh, Bobbie."
"Go on, darling," Maloney murmured, pulling her skirt and her panties away from her long legs and pushing her gently back on the bed.
"And so I peeked in, and there was Mary Elizabeth Curtin letting herself be kissed and fondled by Mrs. von Bellinghausen. And on the very same bed was the infamous Joy Piper, having a heck of a party with young Mavis, squeezing her and kissing her and rubbing her leg between the girl's legs. And she-Joy, that is-had her hand between them, and I think she had it up inside of herself. It was an unbelievable sight. . . "
"You mean, fingering her cunt?" Bridgit squealed with shock, pulling away from him. "I'll hear no more of that foul talk, Bobbie, and if..."
"Sweet Jesus, it's information I want, not a lecture on my shortcomings!" Maloney cried. "A cunt is a cunt is a cunt. Was she rubbing up against Mavis's cunt while she was fingering her own cunt!? "
"Yes, that's what she was doing, if you must continue to be so crude about it.
"Mary and Joy and Mavis all seemed to have orgasms, but I don't think Mrs. von Bellinghausen did. But I think I heard Ms. Piper say something to her about taking care of her after the two servant girls left.
"But what you should have seen was the way Mary Elizabeth threw her naked body against Mavis's, pressing her breasts and her crotch up against the other girl like some young hussy trying to make it with a man. I never knew that Mary even cared to speak to Mavis, much less to try to make some strange sort of unnatural love with her."
Maloney had to believe her. She wouldn't make up a story like that. He'd heard of such things, but he'd always supposed that the women who indulged in such games would be recognizable as lesbians a mile away. There was nothing unfeminine about any of the girls named by Bridgit-except, of course, that they had all given him the cold shoulder. That seemed to be the clincher. It explained everything. No wonder they hadn't succumbed to his charms. They were a bunch of slimy perverts. His self-respect, deflated by his inability to succeed with any of the girls in the big house, began to rise again.
"Bobbie," Bridgit whispered. "Have you forgotten about me?"
"Forgotten you? Jesus, the only normal woman in an hour's walk? Never let that be said, Bridgit darling."
He turned back to her. She lay with her legs wantonly spread on his bed, a slim girl whose voluptuous curves weren't obvious when she was clothed. Her tits weren't as big as Joy's or Mary's, but they were big enough for all normal purposes, fine, rubbery mouthfuls that Maloney slurped between his lips and began to tongue excitedly.
Something about her story had excited Maloney even more than he had been. He told himself that the thought of four naked women wallowing in lesbian lust was revolting and hateful, but the fact remained that the image in his mind excited him. He would have liked to have seen it for himself. More than that, he would like to burst in on it and show them what a real man could do for them. Maybe that was the problem. Pamela's husband was an ugly toad. Joy had been married to a succession of Hollywood faggots. Mary and Mavis were probably virgins. None of them knew any better. They just needed to be shown-and, by God, he was the man to show them!
Bridgit gasped with delight as he slipped his rock-hard cock into her dripping, oozing receptacle. No question about it, she was one girl who knew what she wanted and knew where to get it. She wrapped her lithe legs around his back and pushed her crotch up to meet his deep, hammering thrusts as he worked off both his sexual need and his anger at the other girls.
Bridgit had always been a hot piece, but she seemed hotter than ever today. She met his open-mouthed kisses with a hunger that seemed more than normal. Maloney wondered if she could have been aroused by the sight of the lesbian orgy. He didn't like the thought.
"Is that why you're so hot for it today, darling, thinking of those girls on the bed?" he whispered in her ear.
"Don't talk, Bobbie, just fuck me," she grunted, her words forced out in an odd rhythm by the vibrations of their eager screwing.
He slowed down a little, gaining control over the tingling surges of his excitement. He drew his probe out all the way to the limit of the lips of her vagina, then paused there for a moment before sliding it deeply in again, and paused again before withdrawing even more slowly.
"Come on and tell me, Bridgit, love. I want to know how you felt when you saw those wanton hussies kissing each other all over."
The slim blonde giggled, and that was answer enough for him. He felt threatened, as if I'll the lesbian orgy in the mansion were a contagion that might claim Bridgit and cut him out in the cold entirely. It seemed another good reason for showing all those girls what a real man could do.
"Well ... I wouldn't do it myself, mind you, but it seemed to me that they were having themselves a wonderful time" the blonde giggled.
"Disgusting!" Malone spat. "Doesn't this feel better? Doesn't it? Tell me the truth now, love."
"Ahhh ... yes, Bobbie, yes, there's nothing like this!" she groaned as he gave his thrusting meat a corkscrewing twist in the depths of her lubricious loins. "Of course, I never tried . ... "
"And, damn it, you won't!" he snapped, pulling her buttocks up with both hands to facilitate the spearing of his rigid tool. "You'd burn in hell for sure."
"Aah, it's that I'll be doing anyway," she moaned, twisting her face away from his kisses but still pushing up her hips to meet his hard, hungry thrusting. "What difference does it make if it's a man or a woman, it's all the same sinful conduct."
Her words annoyed him, but he couldn't stay angry with her for long, not now that her sexual recesses were fully awakened and slithering wildly around his piston-stroking cock. He kissed her again, so hard that their teeth clicked together, and her tongue once again began tangling with his.
He didn't know where he'd gotten the stamina he'd shown after his long, frustrating afternoon of itching for a piece of ass, but his continence was beginning to go now in a shimmery tingle that surged in his loins and spread slowly outward to his toes and fingers.
He hovered at the edge for a time, willing the moment to last forever, but his plunging phallus was beyond control. It throbbed again and again as hot jets of semen pumped outward to splurge themselves in the wet clasp of her womanhood. His hips twisted erratically as he tried to crawl inside her, to blend their bodies and break down their bones, but the moment of completion had already become a part of the past.
CHAPTER NINE
Mary's brief episode with lesbianism made her mind flip-flop with thoughts of lovemaking with men and women. Her status in life though, did not change. The next morning it was business as usual, with floors to be waxed and bookshelves to be dusted and all the rest of the household drudgery to be done, beneath the watchful eagle eye of Mrs. O'Malley.
Mary was more than a little disappointed. On waking in her attic room that morning, she'd bounced out of bed and run to the mirror, expecting to see the haggard visage of a dissipated voluptuary. But it was only her own face staring back, slightly puffy from sleep but just as pink and healthy and wholesome as ever. She had expected, without precisely formulating the expectation in words, that her whole life would be changed by her partial surrender to sin. But sinful or virtuous, she was still only a maid.
Pamela von Bellinghausen underlined that fact in a chance meeting this morning. She had expected a wink, a secret smile, perhaps a passing touch of the hand-but her employer had merely nodded with casual indifference to her stammered greeting and gone on about her business.
It seemed terribly unfair. Having nearly sold her soul to the Devil, she ought to get something out of the deal, a bit of the luxury and idleness that sinners like Pamela and Joy wallowed in; but here she was, breaking her back over a wax mop, for all the world no different from the wholly innocent girl she'd been yesterday.
The compensations were of a different sort. Last night Joy had urged her to come to her room again this afternoon-after Joy had lingered over her noon breakfast in bed, of course. The prospect had been exciting last night. Now the assignation seemed more of a nuisance, something that had to be crammed edgewise into a busy schedule. Tired and grouchy now, she could work up little enthusiasm for the date, even when she consciously directed her mind to inventory the blonde's matchless charms.
At lunch, Mavis was her old self. It was the first time Mary had seen her since the other night. Again she expected some secret sign, but none was forthcoming. Nor was there the slightest evidence of newly hatched wickedness on the pretty face that had been pressed so close to her own that night. The conversation at the table turned to politics, and Mavis sent Mrs. O'Malley into a howling rage by suggesting that the IRA were baby-butchering hoodlums who all ought to be taken out and shot down like dogs. It was the same sort of conversation they had every day at lunch, and Mary began to wonder if the orgy of last night had been only a feverish dream.
The conversation became so heated that Mrs. O'Malley was forced to take to her bed. Red-faced and gasping for breath, she charged Mary with the novel task of doing her marketing for her before she tottered from the room, calling down the wrath of God on Protestants and Orangemen masquerading as decent Catholic girls.
Mary was excited and flustered at the prospect of performing this responsible function. She studied the crumpled, illegible list that Mrs. O'Malley had thrust into her hand before retiring from the field, and she prayed that she wouldn't make a botch of the job. She had never before dealt with city tradesmen, and she knew that they would take advantage of her inexperience to cheat her blind.
Nevertheless, she was immensely pleased to be given this duty. It would be the first time she had left the grounds of the estate since coming here. It would be a change from the daily round of predictable toil. She would have to skip her date with Joy, but she was certain that they would have time for one another that evening.
She was so absorbed in the job of deciphering the list that she barely acknowledged Maloney's cheery greeting as he held open the door of the car for her. She responded in abstracted monosyllables to his witty sallies as they drove off. Rebuffed, he began to amuse himself by singing his own exaggerated version of Bridgit's tale of lesbian lovemaking. Mary found it a distracting annoyance, and she shot him several sharp glances that he pretended not to notice. Maloney sang:
"Here's to the wound that never heals, The more you lick it, the better it feels."
"For the love of God, Mr. Maloney," she burst out, "Would you please have the decency to let a poor girl do her work in peace and quiet, and let me concentrate on puzzling out this list?"
Unperturbed, Maloney sang: "And not all the soap and water in hell Will ever get rid of its lovely smell."
"I asked you-"
"It's a charming little ditty, don't you think?" Maloney interrupted, giving her a broad grin and a wink.
"Charming or not, that's beside the point, and no song at all would sound charming if the singer had a voice like a cat that's been stepped on. Now I'll thank you to shut your gob while I unscramble Mrs. O'Malley's hieroglyphics."
"Ah, you've become quite the fine lady since last we spoke," Maloney mused, gazing ahead at the unwinding road. "No time at all for a poor lad like meself, like all the other fine ladies in the house. I have to content myself with pulling my pudding in my dingy little garret over the garage while you fine ladies indulge in your aristocratic pleasures."
"I don't understand a word that you're saying, Mr. Maloney," she said quite honestly, "Nor do I want to make the effort that would be required to ask you to explain yourself. It would only serve to prolong a conversation I find bothersome. So you pay attention to your driving, and I'll pay attention to deciphering Mrs. O'Malley's handwriting, and that way we'll both be earning our pay with a clean conscience."
"That's a fine thing to be able to say, that you've earned your money with a clean conscience," Maloney said. "I suppose it's something that a conscientious young lady like yourself is able to say every night before she commences her prayers, am I right?"
"Of course," Mary said absent-mindedly, and she immediately felt a twinge of annoyance for having let him draw her out that far. She compressed her lips tightly as she returned her attention fully to Mrs. O'Malley's scrawl.
"Now it all depends, being able to say a thing like that at the end of a hard day's work, on what you're being paid to do," Maloney continued. "Some people earn their pay in funny ways, particularly those such as are employed by funny people."
Maloney's patter was becoming intolerable. She heaved a deep sigh and looked away from him out the window. This didn't look like the way to town as she remembered it, but of course she'd been in a state of high excitement on the day she'd come to the von Bellinghausen estate.
"I've heard it said, for instance, that some rich fellows hire these long-legged, blonde secretaries to take dictation, when what they're really taking all day long is a mouthful of dick."
"Mr. Maloney!" Mary cried, injecting a glacial freeze into her tone. "Don't take advantage of the fact that my attention is elsewhere to indulge your delight in obscene vulgarities."
"And then some other rich fellows, or so I've heard it said anyway, will hire a maid to tidy up the house for them, and then will require her services in bed whenever the spirit moves them," Maloney went on, ignoring her protest.
Mary paid closer attention to the landscape. They had left the paved road and were toiling up a dirt road that was little more than a path between unkempt and overgrown meadows.
Surely this wasn't the road they'd taken the other day.
"Where are we going?" she demanded.
"Nowadays, of course, when things have come to such a strange state of affairs that you need a textbook on sexual perversions to figure out who is doing what to whom at any given moment, the employee-employer relationship takes on some curious twists indeed," Maloney continued in the same mild tone.
"I don't know where your conversation is leading, Mr. Maloney, any more than I know where your driving is," she snapped. "Will you kindly either come to the point of what it is you're trying to say, or else leave off your rambling discourse long enough to tell me where it is you think you're going?"
"Well, now, I can satisfy your curiosity on both points at one and the same time," Maloney said, braking the car so abruptly that she lurched forward from her seat and nearly hit the windscreen. "The road ends here, and so does my speech."
He cut the engine and pocketed the keys. Before she could begin to speculate about his intentions, he turned and folded her in his arms, pulling her toward him. She struggled, twisting her head this way and that, but Maloney patiently waited his opportunity and then plastered his lips firmly to hers.
Mary fought. She tensed her body like a steel spring and beat at him clumsily with her fists. She had no room to swing her arms, though, and no room at all to bring her knees into play. He persisted in clamping his mouth to hers. His face was like sandpaper, and he smelled strongly of whisky and tobacco and tweed and perspiration. Her stomach churned.
She tried to bite his lip, but he suddenly clamped her chin in fingers like a steel vise. It hurt, and it gave her the distinct impression that he was using only a fraction of the strength in his big, rough hand.
"Now give us a nice kiss, Mary, the kind you give to your girlfriends," Maloney said in a friendly, reasonable voice, "or I'll crush your jaw like an eggshell."
"No-please-you're hurting-" she began to protest, but he brought his smiling lips against hers with a force that rattled her teeth.
He had scared her thoroughly. His soft voice and his smiling face convinced her that he meant business, far more than any amount of shouts and curses might have done. She sensed a boiling undercurrent of hatred beneath his calm exterior, a capacity for violence in his strong hands. She didn't dare try to bite him.
Scared though she was, she couldn't fake a response. He disgusted her. The smell, the feel, the taste and the sight of him sickened her when she compared him with Joy or Mavis or Pamela. He was hard where they were soft, rough where they were smooth. She kept herself as stiff and unyielding as a board while he worked his lips against hers.
"We're getting out of the car now, your ladyship," he said, pulling back from her cold kiss, "Where you can take your clothes off without having to be afraid of busybodies who might happen along the road. Not that anyone islikely to, but I've got your tender feelings uppermost in my mind, and I want to spare you any unpleasantness. like for instance, it would hurt me deeply to have to go and tell everybody about the scandalous goings-on in Joy Piper's bedroom the other night."
"How-how do you know?" she gasped.
"Not all the girls in that household are shameless sisters of Sappho, thanks be to God, and the only normal one had her eye to the keyhole while you disgusting perverts were making it on the bed and fondling each other."
"Bridgit?"
"Now, I shouldn't tell you that, but it doesn't take any great power of deduction to figure it out, does it? Yes, the same Bridgit who came hotfooting it to my bed with the tale and to wash all that f ilthiness out of her mind with a healthy dose of sex the way God intended it. Which is what you're going to get, too. All in the interest of curing your slimy perversion, of course. It's a noble fellow I am indeed, overcoming my revulsion for your loathesome habits in order to show you the way it ought to be done."
"You're insane," Mary said. "Drive me at once where I'm supposed to be going, or I'll tell Mrs. von Bellinghausen. And I'll tell the police."
Maloney laughed. "What's happening here is your word against mine. What happened last night is my word and Bridgit's, too, for I'll say that I was sharing the keyhole with her. Your imagine female lovers won't lift a finger to help you, they'll be too busy figuring out ways of covering themselves. You'll do just as I tell you. And so will all the rest of them, when I get around to telling them what I know."
Mary knew nothing about the law in such cases, but she strongly suspected that Maloney was right. She could never go to any policeman to complain about him, not with such a terrible sin on her conscience that would be brought to light when they picked him up. They might not believe him. Maybe what she and Pamela and Joy and Mavis had done wasn't even against the law. But whatever the legal implications might be, she could never bear the shame of having it brought to light. Maloney was safe. He could do whatever he wanted with her, and he knew it.
She stumbled out of the car as he opened the door, and he followed quickly behind her. He encircled her arm in his powerful hand and drew her forward along a narrow path in the dense underbrush. Soon the car and the road were out of sight. When they came to a little clearing, he turned her to face him.
"Take your clothes off now, darling, every last stitch. And do it nice and slowly while I watch," he said, releasing her arm and stepping back a pace.
Mary thought she saw her chance, and she was sure she would get only one. The instant he released her and stepped back, she turned and ran. But there was no place to run to. She found herself hurtling toward what seemed a wall of tangled briers. She hesitated for just a split second as she swept it with her eyes, looking for the least difficult place to plunge through, and that was long enough for Maloney to catch up with her. She was whirled violently around, and the next thing she knew she was sprawling on the ground from the force of his open-handed blow.
When he spoke, his voice seemed to have acquired a hollow echo, "Now you don't think I'm such a fool as to take you someplace where you could walk off at your pleasure, do you? I've planned this nicely, darling. Even if you got away from me, you'd never fight your way through these bushes and hedges with your clothes in one piece. And wouldn't that make a pleasant sight-yourself staggering up to some farmhouse without a stitch on your back, begging for assistance? The chances are you'd happen upon some clan of inbred degenerates and that'd be the last we'd ever hear of you. So just take your clothes off like a good girl and compose yourself to learning a lesson in love, and then we'll go on about the marketing like civilized people and be home before anyone knows we're gone. Isn't that a nicer way altogether to spend such a pleasant day?"
"You son of a bitch," Mary muttered, using one of Joy Piper's favorite words.
Maloney raised a huge fist. "No more of that talk, darling, or you'll be spouting your filthy Yank obscenities without the aid of your teeth. Now, get your clothes off."
Mary lurched to her feet. She willed herself not to touch her throbbing jawbone, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of knowing how badly his blow had hurt her. The glade swam momentarily in her eyes and she tottered on her feet, but she soon recovered her balance.
She had changed from her libidinous maid's uniform before setting out for town to a plain white blouse and a blue top. Although it wasn't necessary, she had even changed to more modest under things than those required by the eccentric whim of Erich von Bellinghausen. She wore her old white bra and a pair of flesh-colored pantyhose.
She was acutely aware of Maloney's dark eyes feasting on her body as she unzipped the top. She tried to minimize the forward thrust of her big breasts as she reached back to the zipper, but it was useless. They seemed to jiggle more provocatively than ever to her every movement.
She slipped the blue garment off and laid it carefully over the least prickly-looking bush in the vicinity. She tried to keep her eyes off Maloney, but she couldn't resist sneaking a glance at him now and then. He stood with arms folded, gloating, and a frightening bulge had appeared in his whipcord trousers. As soon as she had put aside her top, he took off his tweed jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt.
"Take your time, Mary darling," he crooned. "I want to relish each separate sight as it comes into view."
She tried to shut her ears to his words as her stiff fingers fumbled with the buttons of her white blouse. She wished she could just snatch her clothes off and deny him the pleasure of watching a striptease, but she couldn't bring herself to do it, nor would her rebellious fingers hurry the job they found almost beyond their ability. It seemed to take a year to undo all the buttons that had never before given her a moment's trouble.
Her next glance gave her the frightening spectacle of Maloney, naked from the waist up. His chest was like a pair of shields, his belly was like a washboard, and he was as hairy as a gorilla. It was obvious, from the sharp line where the hair ended at his neck, that he had to shave his throat so the coarse black hair wouldn't show above his shirt-collar. His body was horrifyingly different from those that had given her so much gentle pleasure yesterday. She felt as if she were in the presence of an entirely different species, some animal or creature from outer space who wouldn't even be able to comprehend her pleas for mercy, much less accede to them. Her knees began to tremble.
Her blouse was set aside now. She made several efforts to unfasten her bra, but she just couldn't do it. She was physically incapable of the task, and her fingers twitched uncontrollably each time she tried. She had been fighting hard not to do it, but now she burst into sobs.
"Please," she managed to choke between sobs, "I didn't do anything to hurt anyone. Maybe what I did was wrong, maybe it was sinful, but it's God's place to punish me for it, not yours. I did only what felt right and natural at the time."
"There, there, Mavourneen," he soothed as he stepped out of his trousers. "There's nothing at all to cry about. What's all this talk of hurting and punishment? It's a fine good time I'm about to give you, the very same that all the girls in me hometown used to get down on their knees and beg for. But now that I've got a clearer view of your body, I can tell that you hurt the whole human race by giving up your charms to such pointless and unnatural pleasures. It's a fine, healthy, normal girl you are, and I'm about to show you what fun you've been missing with your dirty little games."
She saw now that Maloney had transcended egotism and achieved a kind of insanity beyond it. There was no chance of reasoning with him. He saw himself as the instrument chosen by God for the pleasure of women. This wasn't rape to him. He sincerely believed he was doing her a favor. Her despair was total.
She backed involuntarily away as he peeled his undershorts to reveal the main armament of this bestial aggression. It was larger by far than she'd dreamed. It was red and angry and horrible, with a cruel knob like a purple plum at the end of it. She could already feel it ripping and tearing its way into her softest parts, and she screamed in abject terror.
"Darling, darling," he crooned, and the awful thing swung from side to side like the blind head of a deadly serpent poised to strike as he walked toward her, "you've nothing at all to be afraid of, I'll be just as gentle as a lamb with you, you'd think you were lying cradled in your own dear mother's arms when I touch you."
"Get away!" Mary shrieked, backing away from him. "You're mad! I don't want you! I think you're ugly, I think you're horrible, you make me want to vomit!"
"Ah, sure, you have a clever way of disguising your true feelings," he sighed, drawing closer, "but I can see through your act. You're just twitching your tail with pleasure at the sight of me tool."
He had been moving slowly, but now at the last moment he sprang forward, anticipating her impulse to flight. His hard, smelly, hairy nakedness engulfed her. She was trapped, surrounded. She felt the hard stiffness of his dick probing her bare belly, and it felt hot as a furnace.
"I'll take care of this little item," he said, expertly undoing the catches of her bra and snatching it away before she could think to hold on to it. "And now for your pants, and it's as good as done."
He rolled down the top of her pantyhose with the skill of an ape peeling a banana. She jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow that he didn't even seem to feel and turned in his arms to run, but her pantyhose hobbled her. She would have fallen to the ground, but instead she floated to it, supported by Maloney's muscular arms.
It was too late to try to jam her legs together. His thick fingers were already working clumsily at her box. He sucked at one of her breasts with hungry insistence, sucked until the soft flesh ached and she squealed with pain.
"Now, darling, I'm not hurting you, you just take it where it belongs all nice and sweet, or I'll roll you over and stick it in your ass, and I'm certain you wouldn't like that one bit," he said, still using his loathsomely amiable tone of voice. "You just relax and stop being the virgin snow maiden. Just pretend it's one of your lady lovers playing with your cute little cunt, and before you know it I'll take you to paradise on the end of my cock."
He rolled on top of her, crushing the breath from her body. Now she could feel the blunt head of his awful instrument prodding and poking at her softest places. She struggled to put her legs together, but he was lying with all the weight of his hip on one of them, his hips were between them, there was no way she could defend herself.
"Darling, you'll love it so much you'll want to kiss it when I'm done with you, and I won't deny you that pleasure," he gasped, his face red and sweating now as he struggled to restrain his excitement and fumbled with his hand to bring his erection in direct contact with her hole, "No indeed, I'll let you kiss it all you want and suck it inside your pretty mouth when I'm finished, and that'll get it hard once more, and then we're off to the races again. It's a fine afternoon's fun I've got planned out for us, you won't be disappointed at all."
"Your mother must be proud of you, you dirty beast," she sobbed.
For the first time she had the satisfaction of breaking through his facade of smiles and light, friendly banter, but it was a small satisfaction. The mask dropped away and she saw a look in his eyes that chilled her to the core of her bones. "I'll not have a dirty little twat-lap-ping slut like you speak of me mother," he snarled. "I'll bash your filthy face for you if you speak another word of her."
Never before had Mary been presented with such a delicious temptation to self-destruction. She could end this torment and have the satisfaction of flaying this mother-loving monster with a few short, well-chosen words. But she had no doubt that it would mean the end of her, that it would be her last little pleasure on earth. Somehow she found the strength to bite back the words.
"Ah, there we are, right into your sweet little hole at last, and isn't it the pleasure I said it would be?" he demanded between clenched teeth as the head of his penis forced its way into the tight clasp of her outer petals.
"You're hurting me, Bobbie, don't do it," she sobbed. "Please don't do it. Sweet Jesus, have mercy!"
"Ah, maybe your sweet Jesus would, seeing as how we're told he never made love to a woman, but you're dealing now with a different man altogether," he laughed, bulling his way forward into the dry, tight passage without regard for the pain that he himself must have been feeling. "You'll love it, I guarantee it, just wait and see."
She squeezed her eyes shut and snatched her breath irregularly through her open mouth. All things had an end to them. Even this would come to an end. She thought of the time that Sister Agnes had beaten her with a switch, the same Sister Agnes who had later been taken off to a special home when her beatings for minor infractions got totally out of hand. She had thought that would never end. But it was over now, it was over a long time ago, she had not a mark to show for it. Not even that had lasted forever. Nor would this.
She thought of all the things that could be worse than this. She thought about holding her hand over a burning candle. That would hurt far worse than this, and yet a Roman, Gaius Mucius Scaevola, had done that very thing to show the barbarians how tough a Roman could be and turn them back from the gates of the city. She thought of St. Theresa with her flagellation and her hair shirt. She thought of St. Lawrence, asking the Indians to turn his other side to the fire because he could feel no more pain on the side they'd been burning. She thought of her Savior, pierced in the side with a spear. The pain that she was experiencing was nothing, she was being vain and foolish to think of it as pain at all, and soon he would get it over with and she could go on about her marketing.
"You love it, don't you, darling," he gasped, his breath ragged as he pumped his hard hips in the spread angle of her legs, "don't you just love it?"
She was silent. It wasn't as bad as it had been. The wet stickiness of her blood was lubricating the bulging rod as it slipped in and out of her. His inward strokes seemed to fill her like a stuffed fowl, punching her belly up from the bottom and filling her throat with bile.
"Tell me, tell me how much you love it," Maloney whispered, accelerating his plunging tempo and pulling her buttocks up with both his powerful hands, pulling her loins up to meet his so he could drive the spike even deeper than before.
"When in God's name are you going to be finished?" she asked lifelessly.
"Ah, who the hell are you to speak of God, you bitch, you whore, you pig!" he gasped in rhythm with his pounding strokes. "You'll know when I'm finished, because you'll be screaming with pleasure long before then, you'll be begging for more, you'll be blessing the name of Robert Maloney, you dirty lesbian bitch! I'm fucking you, you slut, and you love it, you love it, I know it, take it, take it, take it, there, yes, there, like that, take it! In ... in ... in! Out ... out ... out! Oh, God, I can do this all day, I'll do it till you scream with pleasure, I can do it till the cows come home, 'till your dirty lesbian sluts wonder whatever became of their little redheaded plaything, I'll show them all, I'll screw them all, I'll give them what they really need, they'll all be mine, mine, mine! Unff! Ah! Ugh! Yeah, take that little twist, darling, see, I can do tricks with it, I can make it stand up on its hind legs and tickle places in your twat you never thought were even there, you dirty little tramp!"
On an on he babbled until she wanted to scream just to drown his words from her ears. Her teeth rattled from the insistent, hammering rhythm of his balling. His hipbones banged down on hers until they were so sore that each touch was a more exquisite agony than the pain in her crotch. His fingernails dug into the crease of her ass, biting right into the soft flesh, and soon the tip of one of his fingers added a fresh indignity to her torment by powering right into her anus. She tried to twist away, but he followed her with it, shoving it deeper.
"All the girls love it, darling, it's the touch that gets them off, just relax and enjoy it," he gasped, pushing her cunt tighter around his cock with the embedded finger and making her scream with the unexpected pain.
"Yes!" he cried. "Yes yes yes! Oh, darling tramp, oh, lovely whore, oh, you stinking, rotten woman, you're doing it to me, you're doing it to me, I'm going, going ... aarghh!"
Except for his breathing, he might have been dead. He lay limp on her for a long, long time, until she wondered if he were asleep. The pressure within her gradually dwindled. She gritted her teeth against the pain she knew it would cause and contracted the muscles of her vagina. The once powerful, brutal prong plopped out of her, a dinky little worm beneath her contempt. She shivered as the blood and semen that smeared her inner thighs grew cold and clammy.
"Now you're through," she said. "Get off me, and let me wipe the filth from myself."
Surprisingly, he laughed. Ponderously, he rolled off her and lay on his back, his hands behind his neck, a grin on his impish face, for all the world like some Swede relaxing on a bathing beach.
As she rose painfully erect and looked down at him, she was amazed to find that she could work up no real hatred for him. He had hurt her, he had invaded her innermost privacy, he had forced her against her will. But, ghastly as she found the idea, there was something engaging about him. He was like a small boy or a cute puppy, not at all evil, not entirely responsible for his actions. He wasn't a real, thinking, feeling human being, the way women, were. Even a good dog will bite. She had handled him the wrong way. She would do better in the future.
She tore up fistfuls of grass and wiped the mess from her belly and legs. There wasn't nearly so much blood as she'd imagined. Her vagina was sore, but the pain was bearable. It was over now, as she'd known it would be.
He got up, cleaning his penis as she had cleaned herself. "Off to market now, eh?" he said, a twinkle in his eyes. "We don't want to be late and give them the wrong idea about what we've been doing, do we now, darling?"
"No, " she said.
"But we'll make up for lost time tonight, when you come to my room," he said, adding with a touch of ice in his voice, "as you'd better, if you know what's good for you."
CHAPTER TEN
The rest of the afternoon was a delight. The city, the shops, the people were exciting. The shopkeepers were affable, they knew just what Mrs. O'Malley wanted and they were even capable of deciphering her handwriting.
Maloney, thank God, was as quiet as that man could ever be. He sang no more songs, dirty or otherwise, and what comments he did make were helpful and informative. He was the model servant, waiting patiently while she shopped, carrying the bundles without waiting to be asked, opening doors for her, injecting just the right words when a merchant seemed about to supply her with more than the housekeeper required.
Never once on the long drive back did he refer to what had happened or renew his threatening invitation for tonight. She wasn't worried about that. She would spend the night in Pamela's room, or in Joy's, and there wasn't a damned thing he could do about it. He couldn't touch her, not here in this house, and she would arrange never to be alone with him again. If Mrs. O'Malley ever again charged her with such an errand, she would fake a fainting spell, plead her monthlies, or, in the absence of any better excuse, arrange to fall down the stairs and break her leg. Maloney had done his worst, and he wouldn't get another chance.
Mrs. O'Malley, recovered from the rigors of political disputation, superintended the unpacking of each bag with beady eyes. She was eager to find fault, but there was none to find. At the end of it, she gave Mary a grudging smile and told her she'd done as well as an inexperienced and slightly scatterbrained girl could be expected to do. Mary wished now that she had botched the job. She had done so well that Mrs. O'Malley might delegate all future shopping to her.
The housekeeper told her she could go and rest if she wanted to, and Mary delightedly accepted the offer. She was eager to bathe and examine the damage, and she went up to the top floor by the quickest route, the main stairs. She met Joy Piper coming down.
Joy looked like an angel on a brief visit to earth. Her hair was like unraveled sunlight. Her white gown was simple and Grecian. Her bare arms and shoulders were finer than anything that had ever been done in marble by anybody.
"So where were you, kid?" she asked in her throaty voice with its distressing overtones of Yank nasality.
"I ... I..." Mary trembled. Her lower lip quavered.
"It's okay," Joy said, embracing her and thumping her back, "It's okay, sweetie. What's the matter, huh?"
"It's just ... I'm sorry I wasn't here. I'm so sorry. Mrs. O'Malley sent me shopping."
"Don't think about it. I was kind of hung over from all that messing around anyhow," Joy said. "Maybe we can make it tomorrow."
"T-tomorrow?" Mary echoed. "I was hoping we could talk ... tonight . ... "
"Yeah, so was I, but Pam is taking me along to a party for some British film people, and it's one of those things I can't pass up, much as I'd like to. I'll need all the friends I can get once this dog that Erich is shooting is released on the unsuspecting world."
"Why is he shooting dogs?" Mary asked.
"That's just movie talk, sweetie, don't worry about it," Joy said, patting her cheek reassuringly. "I gotta run now. Maybe I'll catch you tomorrow, okay?"
"Okay," Mary said uncertainly as the vision of loveliness swept down the stairs and breezed out of the house.
She was alone. Pamela and Joy were off to a party, and she felt like Cinderella. But Maloney was no fairy godmother, nor a Prince Charming either, and she would have to deal with him on her own.
She trudged heavily up the stairs to her room, where she took a long and leisurely bath, soaping and scrubbing until the smell of Maloney and his maleness was only an unhappy memory. She chewed over the problem in her mind while she bathed. She wouldn't go to Maloney's room, that was sure. But with the ladies gone, he might just take it into his crazy head to invade the big house and come looking for her. There was a lock on her door, but it seemed a flimsy thing indeed when she matched it in her mind against Maloney's size and strength.
As she toweled herself down in her bedroom, an inspiration struck her. She would spend the night with Mavis. If Maloney's rantings could be believed, she was on his list, too, and they could present a united front against him. Besides, she wanted more than just an ally. She wanted a woman to spend the night with, someone soft and sweet who would wash the taste of Maloney's vileness out of her mind. Mavis was just what she needed.
Content with her plans for the evening, or as content as she could be with Maloney lurking out in his garage and waiting for nightfall, she lay down on the bed to rest her eyes for a bit. The next thing she knew, it was dark in her room.
Confused and disoriented, she snapped on the bedside lamp and saw that it was nearly ten o'clock. She'd slept right through supper, and no one had even bothered to wake her for it. Perhaps Mrs. O'Malley had thought her rest more important, after her busy day. Or perhaps they had tried to wake her and failed. That seemed reasonable. She felt as if she'd been clubbed over the head, and what she wanted to do most now was to slip under the covers and go straight back to sleep.
She fought against that urge. It was late, late enough for Maloney to have become exasperated with frustration and come looking for her. Maybe he was on his way now. She could imagine him tiptoeing up the back stairs even as she lay there. She looked at the door, expecting to see the knob turn before her eyes. It didn't, but something almost as horrible was revealed, the door was unbolted.
She sprang from the bed and shot the bolt, sagging against the door and listening. She thought she heard something. It could be only the creaks of the old house as it settled itself more comfortably; it could be the sound of the wind prowling about the eaves. Or it could be Maloney, coming to rape her again.
This would never do. She had to get out of this room and go to Mavis, but now she was afraid to step into the hall for fear of meeting her nemesis. She started to say a little prayer under her breath, but she cut it off short. A fine prayer that would have been, asking God to let her get safely to her new friend's bedroom! God might get so annoyed with a prayer like that that. He'd send Maloney's ten brothers along with him to see that they did a thorough job on her.
She went quickly to the dresser and dug out her flannel nightgown. She slipped into it quickly, and it made her feel safer to have her nakedness covered, even though she knew that the feeling was unreasonable. But as soon as she had it on, it seemed that she could think more clearly, and she was no longer thoroughly demoralized at the idea of going out into the hall.
She padded to the door on bare feet and stood with her ear pressed to the cool wood for a long moment. She heard nothing that could be clearly classified as an alien footfall, so she silently slid back the bolt and let the door ease open. The hall was empty.
With her heart in her throat, she stepped out into the dark hall and began the long journey to Mavis's room. This mansion had been built as a series of afterthoughts, each addition at a slightly different level than the others, each new roof sloped at a slightly different angle. The result was that the floor generally referred to as the attic was a gloomy warren of confusing corridors, tiny rooms alternating with spacious lofts, unexpected stairways and doors that opened onto brick walls. Mavis's room lay on the far side of the house, and it could be reached only through the heart of the labyrinth.
It seemed to Mary that she wandered for a very long time. Once her journey was well underway, she thought of going back to her room for an electric torch; but going back, she decided, would be just as difficult as going forward, so she pressed on into the darkness. Few parts of the attic had been electrified. Even when she came to a corridor or room that she could have lighted, she didn't, knowing that the light would shine forth like a beacon to Maloney. He might think that she was showing a light to signal him to come for her.
At last she reached the door she sought. No light showed around it, but that was to be expected. Mavis wasn't the sort to lie awake reading half the night. She put her ear to the door and held her breath. She heard nothing. She tried the knob, but the door was locked. Hesitantly, she scrabbled on one of the panels with her fingernails.
She waited, but there was no answering sound from within. She knocked lightly. Still nothing. She knocked louder, then strained her ears against the silence, but she might just as well have been knocking at the door of a tomb.
The thought chilled her. She suddenly felt terribly alone and exposed in the dark hallway, a long, long way from the psychological safety of her own little room.
"Mavis, for the love of God!" she whispered as loudly as she dared. "It's me. Mary. Open up and let me in."
This time she was sure she heard a creaking sound within, the sound that the springs of Mavis's bed might make as she rolled over and sat up. She rapped on the door more firmly than before.
"Go away, whoever you are," Mavis said, just loudly enough to be heard outside the door.
"Mavis! Let me in. It's Mary Elizabeth Curtin. I must talk to you."
Mary heard another creak and the whisper of bare feet on the floor. When Mavis spoke again, she was whispering at the crack of the door.
"Go away, Mary. I'm tired. I want no more of your immoral, indecent, ungodly games. Be off with you, and let a decent girl get her well-deserved rest!"
"Mavis, I only want to talk to you," Mary lied. "It's desperately important. You're in danger."
"I'm in danger of losing me immortal soul to a bunch of perverts, that's the only danger I'm in, except that I'm also in danger of losing me temper if you don't bugger off," Mavis snapped. "I'm done with the lot of you. That's that. You caught me in a weak moment yesterday, you and your two bedizened sisters in Sodom, but I've spent a hard day of examining my conscience and praying for guidance, and now I've got the strength to tell you to screw off."
"Mavis, please! It's not a story I'm telling you. Something awful happened to me today, it might happen to you next, and I've got to tell you about it."
"There's nothing you've got to tell me, Mary Elizabeth Curtin, except goodbye, which is the very thing I plan to tell Mrs. von Belly-kisser first thing in the morning, or as soon thereafter as she drags her wretched body out of her sinful bed. As for myself, I'm off to cover up my ears with the pillow, and you can pound on the door like those that came to tempt Lot in the Bible until you're blue in the face, and I won't hear a bit of it. Goodnight to you!"
"Mavis!" Mary cried aloud, but she heard Mavis thumping back to bed and throwing herself on it with theatrical emphasis. "Open the door, please, and let me tell you what happened."
There was no response at all. Mary knocked again, and knocked louder, until at last she succeeded in scaring herself by the volume of noise she was making. When she quieted her ragged breathing, the silence sounded more ominous than ever.
She wouldn't beg. If that's what Mavis wanted, then she could have it. She only hoped that Maloney would catch up with her before she carried out her resolution to leave the place.
So much for Mavis, but that didn't solve her problem. It was impossible now to go back through the dismal, drafty corridors to her own lonely room. She was too scared. But where else could she go? Mrs. O'Malley might protect her, but Mrs. O'Malley would want a thorough explanation from anyone who knocked her out of bed at midnight, she was sure of that, and giving a thorough explanation was almost as terrifying as confronting Maloney himself.
She could go to Joy's room and await her return. That seemed the best solution of all. She was sure that Joy would be glad to see her, and the locks on the door were far more formidable than those of her own room. It seemed an ideal solution. Now the only problem was steeling her courage for the trip downstairs, forcibly blotting from her imagination the images that welled up of Maloney meeting her on the dark stairway.
She turned and gave one last try, rapping softly on the door and calling, "Mavis?" but there was no response at all.
"Mary? Is that you?"
The voice came not from Mavis's room, but from the dim corridor behind her, and she felt every muscle in her body jerking a different way as she spun and put her back flat to the door. The voice had been that of a woman, but that hadn't diluted the initial shock at all.
She peered into the dimness and saw a tall white figure floating toward her. Her imagination was off and running, and for one mad moment she seriously believed that it might be the ghost of an English oppressor who hadn't gotten his fill of murdering and torturing her people in his lifetime.
Inspected at closer range, the figure was unmistakably that of a woman, and presumably a living one. The long, flowing, blonde hair continued to baffle her until she connected it with Bridgit, who normally wore it done up in a coronet braid. Mary moved forward to her instinctively, babbling with relief.
"I'm sorry I startled you," Bridgit said softly.
Looking into her eyes, Mary saw a curious expression of guilt and fear. It took her a moment to figure out why Bridgit should be guilty and afraid in her presence. Other events had wiped from her mind Maloney's story of how Bridgit had spied on them last night. She certainly had reason to be guilty and afraid. Bridgit was none other than the dirty informer who'd gotten her into this mess. Mary took a step back, and the million words she wanted to say collided all at once in her throat to produce a noise like the growl of a wildcat.
"Get away from me, you bitch!" Mary hissed. "It's you that turned that devil after me, exaggerating totally what your prying eyes viewed."
"Please forgive me, Mary!" Bridgit cried, taking her arms in her hands. "It's the truth you say, he is a devil, and it was himself sent me to spy on our mistress and tell him all I saw. He threatened to cut me up in little pieces and feed me to the dogs if I didn't do what he told me. But what mischief has he done? Has he threatened you?"
"Threatened me? Threatened me! The filthy bog-trotter ripped the clothes from my back and raped me!" Mary cried, and her voice broke as she unexpectedly found herself crying. "He said he'd turn us all over to the police if I resisted him."
"Ah, the beast!" Bridgit wailed, drawing Mary to her. "Sure, it was a vile and unnatural thing that you seemed to be doing, but that doesn't condone Maloney's behavior at all. He forced me, too, and it became like a drug that I couldn't get enough of. I tried to fight it, but all he has to do is look at me or crook his little finger and I turn into a quivering mass of jelly. I had to do what he said, believe me, I couldn't help myself."
Mary didn't have much sympathy for this explanation. She couldn't imagine a woman actually liking what Maloney had done, nor could she understand why Bridgit felt obliged to obey him. But Bridgit was the only one offering comfort in this lonely, scary house, and she snuggled closer to the slim blonde. Bridgit patted her back and murmured consolingly.
"And what are you doing now," Bridgit asked at last, "trying to tempt poor Mavis into more depravity and perversion? You should be asleep in your bed, not prowling the halls trying to stir up more wickedness."
"Ooh!" Mary cried, almost speechless with indignation. "It was protection I was seeking, if it's any of your business at all, which it's not, protection from your own partner in lust, who told me to come to the garage tonight or else he'd come hunting for me. And what are you doing, might I ask, looking for Maloney in the hope that he might crook his finger and turn you into jelly?"
"The terrible noise you were making at Mavis's door aroused me from my bed," Bridgit said stiffly, drawing back. "But now, as I see, it's nothing but a little lovers' quarrel. I'll return to my bed in the hope that you'll moderate your impersonation of an alley-cat in heat, as there are decent, hardworking people around here who need a good night's sleep to do their work in the morning."
Bridgit turned away, leaving Mary sputtering with anger. But as she began to fade into the dimness, fear quickly returned to wash away her rage.
"Wait!" Mary cried.
Bridgit paused and turned. "What is it."
"I-I'm sorry. Don't leave me."
"I have to leave you and be off to my bed, which is what you should do. Don't be afraid. Devil that he is, Maloney is more talk than action, and he wouldn't dare come into the house at night."
"I can't go back there. I just can't," Mary insisted.
"Well, we can't stand here in the hall all night," Bridgit said.
"Could I sleep in your room? Please? I'm scared out of my wits, I'd be dead from fear by morning if I went back there, honestly, and Mavis won't let me in and there's nobody else to turn to but yourself, who got me into all this by telling your tall tales to that fiend," Mary poured out in one breath.
Bridgit gave her a searching look. "Well. It's too soft a heart I've always had, and I doubt that I could turn a scabby leper away from my room if he looked half as pitiful and demoralized as you do. But none of your funny business, mind! Let it be clearly understood right here and now that I'm a decent, God-fearing girl who has no sympathy at all for your foul perversions, and it's the back of my hand you'll feel to your sorrow if you take advantage of my kindness and hospitality."
"Thank you, Bridgit, bless you," Mary said, quickly following her, biting back her rage at the prissy little speech and restraining the urge to tell Bridgit that she had no desire to spit on the best part of her, whatever that might be. "You have nothing at all to be afraid of, I promise you. I was seduced by those evil women as thoroughly as you were by Maloney, and I have just as little power to resist them as you do to resist him."
Bridgit gave a little snort of disbelief, but she didn't press her luck by launching into another lecture, and Mary overlooked it in the interest of finding a safe harbor.
It seemed that they had quite a long way to travel before they reached Bridgit's door. Mary began to wonder if the blonde had really heard her from her bedroom, or if she'd been abroad for some other purpose. She was so fearful that she even suspected Maloney himself might have sent her forth as bait, that he might be waiting for her in Bridgit's room. But Bridgit's little room, made cosier than hers by a hundred little touches that testified to her longer tenure, was empty. As soon as the door was shut and locked behind them, Mary found her fears beginning to evaporate.
"It's only one bed I've got," Bridgit said, "and so I'll have to insist that you stay strictly to your side of it."
Mary tried not to snicker at her prudery. Then she saw in a flash how low she'd sunk, that she should think Bridgit's praiseworthy moral scruples laughable. Bridgit was truly an almost saintly person, taking a depraved person like herself into her bed, seeming to know Mary's habits as she did from personal observation. From the verge of laughter, Mary switched abruptly to the verge of tears.
Bridgit was very slim and fine-boned. There seemed to be not much of her for her voluminous robe to conceal. Her skin was so fair as to be translucent, just as her hair was such a pale shade of blonde as to be almost white. Her eyes were a curious shade of dark blue, almost violet, and they had an Oriental tilt to them that intensified her normal expression of cool detachment. First laughter, then tears, and now an utterly inappropriate upsurge of sexual arousal-Mary's emotions had become a roller-coaster ride that scared her almost as much as Maloney did.
Bridgit slipped between the sheets and slid over until she was right up against the wall. Even so, that left scant room for a big girl like Mary, but she resolved to compress herself into a tiny bundle and lie stiff and immobile all night, not wishing to offend her benefactor by the slightest touch.
She gave Bridgit a shy smile of gratitude as she slid into bed beside her. "Goodnight."
"Goodnight to you," Bridgit said coolly, snapping off the light.
"And thank you."
"Think nothing of it," Bridgit said, shifting restlessly. Her hand dropped accidentally against Mary's thigh.
Mary stared upward into the darkness, pretending that she was a corpse laid out on her bier and trying to act accordingly. Bridgit's uneven breathing told her that her blonde bed-mate was still awake. Despite her cool, collected exterior, she was probably scared out of her wits to have what she considered a certified lesbian in the same bed with her. Mary renewed her resolution to lie motionless and give no hint of offense.
She thought about praying, but she found it impossible to tune her mind to the old familiar wavelength. There was no patron saint of Sapphists that she'd ever heard of, no one in heaven who would even understand her sin. The female saints had mostly been nuns, sworn to chastity, living together in convents where they foreswore the pleasures of the flesh. Christ Himself had always been pictured to her as a manly Fellow, going about preaching in the company of His twelve stalwart apostles, spurning the company of women; hardly the sort of people who would sympathize with her temptation. Maybe it would be more appropriate to pray to the Devil, who was surely an expert on these matters, and beseech him to leave her alone. That sounded suspiciously like heresy to her, but she couldn't even verify that suspicion by talking it over with a priest. They had a knack for digging your motives out of you, and she knew that any priest she talked to would soon have her spilling the beans.
Bridgit's hand still rested on her thigh. The gentle creature, innocent that she was, probably had no idea at all what acute discomfort this was causing Mary. If Mary spoke up and mentioned it, Bridgit would no doubt be scandalized, horrified. She might even order her from her room.
Mary tried not to think about the hand, even though the palm was resting firmly on her flesh midway up her thigh and the fingers were drooped over between her legs. It just rested there, as if it had been resting for all eternity, and Mary fought desperately against the urge to move ever so slightly so that the fingers would come closer to her tingling twat. She could pass it off as an accident or pretend to be asleep if Bridgit moved her hand away. But then the hand would be gone altogether, and she wouldn't have even this scant and frustrating pleasure.
Bridgit shifted. She murmured, as if in sleep. Her hand slipped ever so slightly higher, a scant fraction of a millimeter, not nearly high enough, but high enough to be more interesting.
Mary didn't even whisper. She merely mouthed the name, putting scarcely enough breath into it to move a feather that might have been resting on her lips, "Bridgit?"
She listened. Either Bridgit was an abnormally quiet breather, or else she had suspended the process entirely. Was it her fevered, sinful imagination playing tricks on her, or had the formerly limp hand begun to exert the faintest hint of pressure on her thigh?
This had to stop. Perhaps Bridgit was playing a particularly cruel joke on her. Perhaps-although this hypothesis presupposed a mind so weird as to be frightening-Bridgit was subjecting Mary's erotic impulse to a test before she dared to drop off to sleep beside her. Either way it had to stop, because Mary's erotic impulses were hammering at their cage and threatening to break the bars at any moment.
Bridgit sighed. Her hand moved once more. Now her fingertips lay just beneath Mary's pubic bone. They were pressing the flannel against the screaming nerve ends of her softest and most sensitive flesh.
Before she could even sense the impulse coming, Mary's hand darted impulsively down and took Bridgit's wrist in a light grasp, trying to push her intrusive hand aside. But Bridgit's hand refused to be pushed. Mary exerted more pressure, and Bridgit's hand closed like a claw on her thigh. The fingers twitched against her sex.
"What ... ? " Mary gasped. "No," Bridgit said, "No, please, you mustn't."
"I'm not-"
"You promised you wouldn't, you swore you wouldn't," Bridgit moaned. "For the love of God, Mary, don't do it!"
"Do what?"
"Play with me ... arouse me ... kiss me ... make love to me ... don't you dare do it!"
Bridgit whined, her fingers insistently pressing the flannel against Mary's hypersensitive love tunnel.
The revelation that Bridgit, always so calm and aloof and self-contained, was a stark, raving maniac took a while to dawn on Mary. She realized that no word the blonde had spoken this evening had any relation whatsoever to her real emotions and intentions. She had brought Mary to her room and her bed for one purpose only, the purpose of making love. Perhaps she had been on her way to Mavis's room, or even to Mary's own, with that idea in mind when the commotion in the hallway had attracted her.
"It's not a pleasant sensation at all, Bridgit, having that flannel shoved into my private parts that are still sore from Mr. Maloney's unwelcome attentions," Mary said. "If you want to play games like that, put your hand under my nightgown."
"No," Bridgit said. "Don't make me. Please!"
The words were scarcely leaving her mouth before she slipped her hand down under the edge of Mary's nightgown and slid it quickly up her bare leg to fondle her tingling vagina.
"Be careful," Mary said, wincing at the touch even though it had not yet given her any pain.
She half turned and slipped her own hand under Bridgit's voluminous white gown. She moved slowly, not wanting to scare the poor, crazed creature, and she relished the feel of her skin. It was as smooth and tightly textured as marble, soft as silk, yet snugly covering firm, sinuous muscles. She was shocked to find a pool of liquid fire between the cool blonde's legs. Her depths gave like the thin skin of an over-ripe fruit, bathing her fingers in sticky syrup at the first touch.
"Holy Mother!" Bridgit cried. "I can't help myself, you're too strong for me, I won't fight!"
The small part of Mary's mind that was still functioning wondered whether Maloney had actually raped Bridgit, or whether he had merely touched her and had her unconditional surrender thrust upon him. Maybe it was Bridgit who had given him such a perniciously wrong image of women, who had taught him to forge ahead and disregard all protest.
But that was the last coherent thought she was able to struggle with. Her hole became the center of thought and feeling and all sensation as Bridgit manipulated it gently, skillfully and eagerly. Either she had done this before, or else she had practiced extensively on her own.
Mary tried to be equally gentle, but Bridgit didn't want that. Her back arched like a bow as she raised her hips from the bed and gyrated her pelvis, mashing and squashing her steaming slash against Mary's hand.
"Don't do it with me," Bridgit almost shrieked. "Please don't do it with me!"
Mary rolled over on top of her, feeling that that maneuver was the right thing to do. She pressed her fingers and her thumb together in a stiff bundle. She held the back of her hand against her pubic bone, so that the rigid fingers struck out perpendicular to her body. She lowered her hips into the widespread angle of Bridgit's legs and pushed the tips of her fingers into the girl's juicy quim.
"Oh, no, no, no," Bridgit moaned, "it's too big, you're tearing me up, don't do it, I can't stand it!"
The image of Maloney's face swam up before her eyes to mock her. She would never have believed that she would find herself playing his role on the very same day he'd taken her so cruelly by force. Bridgit's words and her tone of voice were not at all different from the words and the tone of voice she'd used in protesting Maloney's rape. But Bridgit's body was speaking far more clearly and authoritatively than her voice, and its message was directly opposed to her words. Had her body somehow betrayed her and given a similar message to Maloney?
She held her hand stiff and still, pushing forward from the hips as a man would do. Her fingers sank deep into Bridgit's slithering, clasping quish. It roiled and coiled around her like a liquid tentacle, pressing and caressing and urging her deeper and deeper, until, unbelievably, her whole hand was buried to the wrist in the blonde's sex canal.
"Do me ... do me ... do me..." Bridgit muttered, rocking her pelvis to sheathe and unsheathe the embedded hand with the tight clasp of her incredibly flexible gash.
Mary pulled back, again from the hips, withdrawing the bundle of fingers like a cock. She slid her left arm under Bridgit's slim shoulders to hold her tight against her, and she found that her fingers could caress her apple-firm little breast as they snaked around her body.
She tried to banish Maloney's image from her mind, but it clung there like a bad taste as she duplicated his exertions between Bridgit's lovingly writhing thighs. They shifted upward and twisted around her body, hugging her, and the blonde's little heels dug firmly into the small of her back as she settled down to ride with Mary's accelerating thrusts and returns.
Soon Mary forgot about Maloney and forgot about everything but the squishy, succulent feel of Bridgit's box as it squirmed around her plunging hand and splashed its hot juice out over her wrist. She found that, by makings slight adjustment of her position, she could rub her own clitoris with one of the bones of her wrist while continuing to grind on Bridgit. She began to gasp in time to the blonde's whimpering moans of pleasure as her rigid little nubbin was squashed and released between their colliding bodies.
Still fingering the feverishly aroused nipple of Bridgit's left breast, she lowered her mouth to the right one. It made a dainty and exciting mouthful as she sucked it and lashed her tongue over its sleek surface. Though her breasts were small, Bridgit's nipples were large. They stuck right up like the tips of her little fingers as Mary tweaked them and licked them and sucked them and twiddled them in an ever-mounting frenzy of lust.
"Ungghh! Unghhh! Unghhh!" Bridgit boomed, as if some gong were striking deep, deep down in her chest. Her back arched like a steel spring, incredjbly lifting Mary's weight right up off the bed and holding it up while she vibrated beneath her as if she were being subjected to a lethal current of electricity.
Just as suddenly as she'd risen, Bridgit collapsed, limp, sweating, totally accepting the hammer-thrusts of Mary's hip-powered hand. Then she was up again, shaking more violently than before in every straining muscle, jiggling the hard clutch of her vagina against the fingers that filled it, sending the ecstatic vibration of her orgasm straight through to Mary's twitching clitoris and blasting her into an even higher orbit than her own.
Now Mary could only ride with the sex, all of her strength and concentration required to keep her fingers stiff for Bridgit's continuing pleasure while she babbled and moaned in an excess of ecstasy until their cries and murmurs mingled and became an indistinguishable blend of lust-inspired madness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Robert Maloney had spent the evening studying a stack of American men's magazines that he'd found in the dustbin, and he was now so horny that he could hardly think. Such things were difficult to come by in the local shops, and his find had been a veritable bonanza. He'd never before seen so many beautiful women showing so much skin. When he blinked his eyes, it seemed that images of breasts and butts and boxes had been indelibly burned into his retinas.
No longer able to stand the frustration of looking at the pictures, Maloney had turned to the text. The interviews with Erich von Bellinghausen featured in most of the magazines hadn't held his interest for long. The articles about sporty cars and spiffy clothes had held his attention for a bit longer.
Then he'd turned to the fiction, and he'd been shocked once more to discover that the ostensibly short stories were nothing more than graphic descriptions of sexual interlockings pegged on minimal plots and characterizations.
He had found his hard-on returning, but he had ignored it while his mind worked feverishly. The stories in the book were exactly like the masturbatory fantasies he entertained almost every night in the loneliness of his garage apartment, or like the tall stories he told or heard told in the pubs. Yet the people who wrote these stories weren't just doing it in order to jerk off or amuse their friends, they were being paid princely sums for it by an American magazine that must have money to burn.
Maloney thought hard. If he could only set down his own fantasies on paper ... but why did he even doubt for a minute that he could? He was an Irishman, after all. He had therefore by definition a way with the English language that could charm the birds out of the trees. Telling stories in a sprightly style was a talent that he had undoubtedly acquired with his mother's milk. All the great authors in English, from Shakespeare on, had really been Irishmen.
And these people, after all, wouldn't be asking him to be Swift or Wilde or Joyce or Yeats or even John Millington Synge-all they wanted for their thousands of American dollars were lively little tales about intercourse and oral sex and buggery. He could write a dozen such stories a day with his left hand.
He excitedly began to picture his career. He would have to go to New York or Los Angeles or some such ungodly place, since the Irish postal inspectors would never permit his manuscripts to leave the country. But that would be no hardship, certainly, for he would live in a penthouse with a swimming pool overlooking Times Square. He would have a dozen maids of different ethnic types, each of them so stunning that Joy and Mary would look tubercular by comparison. He would have an automobile for each day of the week, Cadillacs and Lin-colns and Rolls Royces and Ferraris, with yet another beautiful girl to be his chauffeur when he didn't feel like driving himself to all the top-less nightclubs and expensive brothels he would frequent.
The movies, naturally, would come begging him for the rights to make pictures based on his wonderful stories, and he would drive hard bargains that would provide him with things like a private jet plane, a yacht the size of an ocean liner-with an all-girl crew, of course-and first crack at all the female stars of the films they would make from his works. He would make Joy Piper lick his balls while he screwed someone three times more beautiful than she. He would rise at noon, breakfast on whiskey and caviar, spend an hour or so writing, and then spend the rest of the day screwing the sort of girls who posed for the pictures in the magazines that would be clamoring for his works.
Looking at the pictures, reading the stories, and dreaming about his career had made him forget the time entirely. He was shocked to see that it was nearly midnight. Where the devil was Mary Elizabeth Curtin?
He'd told Bridgit not to come to him tonight, telling her that he needed some sleep for a change, in expectation of the voluptuous red-head's nocturnal visit. He wished now that he hadn't been so confident about Mary's compliance-or that he'd been more ambitious-in his present state, he was sure that he could handle both of them with no trouble. Regardless of what Bridgit might say about such a threesome, he knew that she'd go along with it. She'd been aroused, after all, by the sight of the girls on the bed in Joy's room.
As for Mary, he knew that she was putty in his hands. She had a wonderful flair for acting, the way she'd pretended that she hadn't liked what he'd done to her, but he'd seen through her pathetic sham. She'd just been itching for him to make it with her, and she'd loved every minute of it.
But what was the matter with the crazy woman, not coming as he'd told her to? She was shy, that must be it, or she was suffering from some fit of remorse that would evaporate like the morning mist before the sunshine of his smiling face. He could just picture her now, tossing and turning in her bed, tormented by thoughts of the pleasure she'd enjoyed this afternoon but too timid to go forth and enjoy some more of the same.
Normally, Maloney wouldn't have dared venture into the big house, but he knew that Joy and Pamela had gone off somewhere, no doubt to a party thrown by other rich lesbians.
Anyway, he no longer needed to worry about his chauffeur's job. His future as a wealthy American writer of pornographic tales was assured.
He slipped into his clothes and strode boldly forth, into the kitchen of the mansion and up the back stairs. What did it matter if Pamela discovered him? He'd spit in her eye. He had the goods on her, as the Americans would say, and he'd give her a dose of the kind of loving her ridiculous husband had never been able to give her. Just as he'd done with Mary, he'd show her the error of her ways and convert her from her forays-imagined or real-into lesbianism with his hard cock.
Nevertheless, he walked up the stairs on tiptoe, wincing whenever a board creaked under his foot. He had the goods on them, all right, but there was no point in forcing the issue. He'd get around to Pamela and the rest of them in good time. Right now he was interested only in reinforcing Mary's conversion.
He wandered in the attic until he found a door with light seeping out around its edges. It must be Mary's. The dear girl was lying awake with her light on, thinking of him and waiting for him to show up. He knelt at the keyhole, but he could see nothing.
"Mary?" he called very softly. "Mary, it's meself, come to refresh your memory of what lovemaking is all about."
Silence. Maloney stood up, debating with himself for a moment. He shrugged and turned the knob. The door swung open on an empty room.
He walked inside. He couldn't have said whose room it was. He opened the doors leading to the bathroom and the closet, but no one was concealed inside. He stooped and looked under the bed, but she wasn't there, either.
"Damned crazy woman," he muttered. "What does she want to go hiding on me for, when she's burning up inside with desire for me?"
He went back to the closet and inspected the clothes. He was in the right place, certainly. He recognized the chaste blue school outfit that Mary had worn when she'd come from the convent.
"Mary, me love," he called, this time in a voice that must have carried out into the hall. "It's me, darling girl, Maloney himself that gave you such pleasure this afternoon. Come out and see what I've got waiting for you, love, all hard and ready from dreaming of your charms."
Could it be that the damned pervert had forgotten all about their assignation and was even now rolling in the arms of one of her degenerate playmates? It seemed unthinkable, but that was the only explanation that came readily to his mind. Perhaps he hadn't done as good a job on her as he'd thought or perhaps the bad influence of one of the other girls had led her from the true path. Mavis, no doubt, was the culprit, although he had a nagging suspicion that Bridgit might have something to do with it. Maybe Bridgit had suspected the truth and sidetracked Mary out of sheer malice and spite.
He stepped out into the corridor. He had found Mary's bedroom only by chance, and he had no idea where the other girls slept. He was strongly tempted to retrace his steps, to go back to the garage and pull his pud over one of the sexier pictures in those magazines. He rejected the idea. He hadn't come this far to be denied.
He began to walk. Before long, he began to realize that retracing his steps would be impossible. He'd had no idea of the complicated vastness of the place. If he ever found Mary, he'd have to ask her for directions back to his bed after he screwed her.
At long last he came to a door that didn't yield when he tried to turn the knob. It might be a bedroom. He put his ear to the door, but he could hear nothing. He tapped lightly. Still nothing. He tapped a little more loudly. This would make a fine story, standing all night in front of the locked door of a storage closet and-
The door whipped open and a female voice snapped, "Haven't you got it through your thick head that-"
It was Mavis Higgins, and her words choked off as she realized to whom she was addressing them. Maloney grinned down at her as he blocked the door with his body.
"What the hell do you want? What are you doing up here? Go away now, or I'll scream!"
"Now who will you scream for, darling? Will you scream for Bridgit and Mary, who are at this moment wrapped up in a lovey-dovey bundle together and wouldn't notice it if the house was to burn down about their ears? Or is it Mrs. O'Malley you'd want, who's drunk herself into swinish oblivion and is now rattling every window in the house with her lusty snores? The two fine movie stars whose bodies you love to lick are off somewhere else getting them licked tonight. So you'll have to make do with me, and the only screaming you do will be for sheer pleasure, once I get my cock stuck into your sweet little pussy."
Mavis's eyes widened with horror as his speech progressed. She sputtered incoherently and tried to shut the door, but Maloney leaned against it and she couldn't budge it an inch.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, but she couldn't meet his eyes or bring any real conviction to her words. "You must be drunk."
"Come here and smell me breath, darling," he laughed.
He reached out and grabbed her around the waist, pulling her hard against his body. She twisted her head this way and that to avoid his kiss, but he gripped her chin in his left hand and held her steady as he clamped his lips down hard against her tightly compressed mouth.
Mavis tried to thrust her knee into his crotch, but he held her too close for that, pushing her back hard against the door. He pushed his staff against her belly, letting her feel the stiff bulge through the chaste flannel nightgown she wore, and the touch of it made her fight with redoubled energy. Maloney at last released her and shoved her into the room, slamming the door and searching for the light switch. A vase crashed against the wall near his head and Mavis began to scream as he found the switch and lighted the room.
He turned, still smiling. She was curled into a tight ball on her bed, having wedged herself right into a corner of the room, and she kept screaming. Maloney leaned casually against the door and smiled at her as he lit a cigarette, even though her screaming was beginning to worry him.
"Hush, darling, you'll lose your voice and won't be able to whisper sweet words in my ear while I'm fucking you," he said. "I told you, there's nobody to hear but us, so all you're doing is giving me a headache with your pointless screeches."
Mavis's eyes darted wildly around the room. She was looking for something to throw, but she couldn't find anything. He snapped the lock behind his back and began to inch forward into the room, making a casual show of smoking his cigarette but actually studying the place for her possible escape routes. There didn't seem to be any.
Disheveled from bed, Mavis looked far better than he'd ever seen her before. In a wild tangle, her black hair seemed to emphasize the fine bone structure of her face. With her cheeks flushed by excitement, her eyes seemed a darker and sultrier shade of blue. Her fine, big bosom moved deliciously against the pink flannel of her nightie as she panted from fear and excitement. She no longer screamed. She just looked at him, terrified.
"Aah, peace and quiet at last," Maloney sighed. "Would you care for a cigarette, mavourneen? Or haven't your lesbian friends corrupted your morals altogether?"
"I ... don't know what you're talking about," Mavis said. She was a rotten liar.
"I'm talking about you and Mary and Pam and Joy and the lascivious orgy you were having the other day. Don't tell me that such things are so common in this house that you've forgotten about it already."
Mavis had no answer for him. Her face drained of color. She didn't even dispute what he said. She hid her face in her arms and began to sob.
Maloney smiled to himself as he ground his cigarette out under his boot. Unhurriedly, he removed his clothes and hung them neatly on a straight chair by the door. Whenever he caught Mavis peeking, he flashed her a bright smile, and she hid her face even deeper.
"Don't be afraid to look," he laughed. "I'm sure that your knowledge of the female anatomy is now as complete as it could possibly be, so what's the harm in adding to your store of information by seeing what a healthy young man looks like? And I'll not only give you an opportunity to see it, but to feel it as well. Perhaps even to kiss it all over, so you can compare it with all the goodies you were having the other day."
"Don't," Mavis sobbed. "Please go away."
"I will when I've finished, darling, I promise," Maloney said, sighing with relief as he pushed down his shorts and freed his almost painfully bulging erection. "I won't keep you more than an hour or so, and I guarantee you'll tell me it was time well spent."
He could see that Mavis was peeking at him from under her arm, apparently fascinated by the sight of his stiffness. He came forward warily.
"Don't," she pleaded.
"And why not? I promise, it's twice as much fun as what you were doing with those other girls. That's what Mary said."
She jerked her head up and stared at him. "What are you talking about?"
"Why, I'm talking about the fine time Mary and I had today, while I was showing her the proper way to make love. She said it was far more enjoyable than messing around with a bunch of girls."
"Then why don't you go to Mary, for God's sake, and leave decent people alone! That was none of my doing that time. The missus made me do it. I had no choice. I didn't like it at all, and I want no part of you, either."
"That's not the way it was told to me," Maloney chuckled, settling down on the bed.
Mavis made a break for it. She uncoiled herself and started to dive off the bed for the door, but he caught her and flipped her back onto the mattress. She clawed and tried to bite. Maloney managed to fend her off with one hand while he pushed and pulled her nightgown up. She was no more than five feet tall and barely weighed a hundred pounds, so she was no match at all for him.
When she realized that her nightgown was being hiked up over her hips, she stopped trying to fight him and struggled to push it back down. He grabbed it at the throat with both hands and ripped it wide open, baring her big breasts. The gown parted farther, revealing her belly and her hairy quim. He tore it completely open and began to pull it from her arms.
"Mother of God, help!" Mavis screamed. "Get away from me, you bastard!"
"Aah, you needn't put up a show of resistance for my sake, darling. I won't think any less of you if you admit you're just aching to have my big penis stuck into your pretty little cunt. Saints above, it's a hairy one you've got. I can't wait to feel it tickling me balls while I jam it into you."
She was completely naked now. As Maloney cast aside the shreds of her nightdress, she tried to cover herself up with the bedclothes, but he tore those away, too. He lunged forward and grabbed her around the waist, forcing her down on the bare mattress. She twisted and writhed like a smooth, slippery fish on a hook, but Maloney kept his grip.
She twisted away from him, pummeling with her elbows. He barely felt her blows. All he could feel was her smooth skin rubbing his feverishly inflamed throbber. Now it was rubbing against the taut skin of her buttocks.
"You want it like the dogs do it, eh?" he muttered. "Back or front, it makes no difference to me, it's all going right in the same place either way."
Mavis screamed even louder when she felt his hardness pushing against her snatch from the rear. He rolled her over all the way, lying on top of her. He grabbed one of her arms and pushed it up hard under her shoulder blades.
"Now if it's a broken arm you want, dear heart, then just keep up your struggles," he crooned. "Otherwise, get up on your knees like a good girl and present your darling cunt for inspection."
Mavis started to scream again, but this time he gripped a fistful of her tangled hair and jammed her face down into the mattress, applying a bit more pressure to the arm he held behind her back.
"Now, you've had your fun, screaming and pretending you don't want it, but the noise is starting to get on my nerves now, and we'll have no more of it. So just shut your gob and stick your ass up like a good girl, or I'll have to start getting a bit rough."
Shuddering, tense as a steel spring, Mavis began to crawl forward on her knees to push her buttocks back and upward. Maloney released her hair and relaxed the pressure on her arm slightly. He reached down to hold his rod with his free hand and guide it against the hairy threshold of her love cave.
"That's fine, just delightful," he murmured. "See, there's nothing to it at all, and when it's over you'll thank me and bless me for it, saving you from a life of degenerate depravity. Maybe when I become a rich man in New York City. I'll bring you over and find you a post in my elegant household."
Mavis didn't even respond to that. She just sobbed and hid her face in the mattress. She had done as he'd told her, though, and that was all that mattered to him now. He looked down and saw the delicious curves of her ass, the deep cleft leading down to the plump peach of her vagina in its bed of tangled black curls. She shuddered again as he pushed his pulsing probe against it.
"Just relax and open up now, or it might hurt a wee bit," he suggested, pushing harder but making little headway against the tight entrance to her sex.
"I ... I can't," she sobbed. "I'm a virgin, Bobbie. Please don't do this."
"Not another one," he laughed. "Well, we'll soon have you cured of that, just as I solved the same problem for poor Mary."
He let go of her arm now, sensing that all the fight was gone from her and knowing he would have no trouble subduing her if she flared up again. He transferred his hand to one of her large breasts, squeezing it gently and rubbing the ample nipple with his fingertips. Her tits were much bigger than Bridgit's, even though she was a smaller girl. They weren't in Mary's league, but he was thoroughly satisfied with them.
With his other hand, he pulled her back against him, pushing his prong harder against the outer petals of her tight gash. She didn't resist, and soon the head was buried inside her virginal quim. She squealed as he pushed harder.
"No, Bobbie, please-it hurts! You're hurting-ahh!" she sobbed.
Suddenly he broke through. It was a dry, tight squeeze, but his rod was sliding inward again, burying its full length inside her.
Slowly he withdrew, and she made no effort at all to push him out or to twist aside when only the head of his cock was resting inside the clasp of her labia. He drove in again, sinking the entire length of the hard, throbbing shaft into her love mound, then withdrew it again, increasing the tempo of his in-and-out movements slowly.
Almost inaudibly, Mavis sighed. He forced himself to restrain a triumphant laugh, knowing that it wasn't a sigh of boredom or anguish. Her sexual recesses were giving her away now, growing warmer and wetter by the minute as he slipped inward and out.
He lowered himself over her naked back and brushed her cheek with his lips. She tried to avert her face, but then as his lips touched her cheek she turned her head back toward him and her mouth came in contact with his. He felt her hips and her belly moving slightly, tentatively, as if the kiss was distracting her from keeping her body as tense and still as she wanted to keep it. He was sure that she was starting to like it.
Her slash was slick and slimy and loose now, only partly due to the blood of her ruptured hymen. It enabled him to screw her just as hard and fast and deep as he wanted to. Both his hands slid over the smooth, perfect contours of her big breasts, and he felt that her nipples were hard and pointed with excitement. He caressed them with his fingertips, making them even harder.
"Sure, I thought you'd get to liking it," he chuckled. "They always do."
Mavis groaned. Part of it was despair, but only part of it, because even while she made the sound of anguish she began writhing her pelvis to meet his thrusts with her crotch. He felt the wet sheath drawing tighter around his penis. She began to caress his hard rod with her tender cunt-flesh as he stroked it in and out.
Her hips pumped back against him wildly now. Her sobs became moans and whimpers as her lips stretched back tightly from her white teeth in a grimace that he interpreted as ecstasy. He stepped up the tempo of his screwing to a bone-rattling pace, and when he felt the first glowing tingles of his orgasm beginning to spread through his loins he made no effort to resist, but flung himself into it and cried out as the hot jets of jism spurted from his dick to spatter deep inside her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Joy returned to the movie location on Sunday afternoon without having found another opportunity to be alone with Mary. Mary hated to see her go, but she was sustained by the promise that Joy would be back again on Friday; and Joy swore that she would make time for Mary in her feverish social schedule.
Friday would be a red-letter day, because it would also mark the first appearance of Erich von Bellinghausen since Mary had taken employment at his house. She was curious to see if he could possibly be as ugly and shabby in person as he looked in his pictures. She hoped that his presence would inhibit Pamela, giving her more time to be alone with Joy, although she as yet had no clue at all as to the domestic arrangements of the von Bellinghausens. Maybe that riddle would be solved if she kept her eyes and ears open. She was eager to learn whether Erich and Pamela made it together, and if so, how they went about doing it.
The morning after her crazy night with Bridgit, Mary noticed some changes in her companions at the breakfast table. Bridgit kept giving her longing looks, presumably turned to jelly by the sight of her, as she said she had been by Maloney, and Mary found it extremely embarrassing. Mavis was quiet, a rare phenomenon, but it was obvious that she was seething inwardly. Her lips were set in a firm line of resolution, indicating to Mary that she was steeling herself to tell off Pamela and give notice. Mrs. O'Malley was the same as ever and didn't seem to notice any change in her subordinates. She regaled them with the reading of a lengthy story from the paper about the latest atrocity in Belfast, interrupting herself with exclamations that the gunmen involved should be proposed for canonization. She didn't remark on the fact that Mavis wasn't rising to the bait.
Later that day, Mary happened to be passing the study just as Mavis emerged from her crucial interview with Pamela. Mavis's cheeks were flushed, her hair and her clothing were disarranged. She looked like the unmade bed of a drunken insomniac.
"So when are you leaving us, then?" Mary asked pleasantly.
"I've reconsidered," Mavis mumbled, and she scurried off before Mary could quiz her properly.
On Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. O'Malley found Mary at work dusting the books in Erich von Bellinghausen's den and told her that she had a visitor.
"A visitor, is it? Who'd come calling on the-likes of me?"
"He's waiting for you in the parlor," said Mrs. O'Malley, repressing a smile and turning to leave.
"The parlor? I'm to receive guests in the parlor? Mrs. O'Malley-"
But the housekeeper had already left, apparently delighted to have so aroused Mary's curiosity. Mary paused at a pier glass to adjust her hair and straighten her skirt. The only kind of guest to come calling on her who would be put in the parlor instead of the kitchen was Joy Piper; anyone else would have been shunted to the kitchen, and Mrs. O'Malley wouldn't have been at all pleased to announce him. Anyway, it wouldn't be Joy; and Mrs. O'Malley had definitely referred to the caller as "he."
Satisfied with her appearance, Mary hurried to the parlor. A wild idea struck her. Suppose Joy had told Abel Gentry, the handsome American movie star about her? Maybe he needed a maid ... and a lover. Maybe Joy had urged him to hire her, so they could be close together while she was on the set of the movie. Maybe-
"Saints in heaven!" Mary cried. "Father Finnerty!"
"The same, dear child," he said, rising. "Although you were no doubt expecting the president of the republic to come calling on you in this grand sitting room."
Father Finnerty, once so imposing, looked somehow small and shabby in this elegant room. Mary had always thought of him as being a large man, and she was shocked to find that he was in fact smaller than he was. She noted that his cuffs were frayed and his black suit was shiny.
"Oh Father, I'm so glad to see you!" she said, and she unexpectedly felt her lower lip trembling and tears coming to her eyes. "You have no idea."
Her impulse was to hug him, and she took a hesitant step forward before she remembered that wasn't the sort of thing you did with a man of the cloth. He sensed her embarrassment and extended his hand to be shaken, a rare thing for a priest to do. As the sisters had explained to her, a priest's hands were consecrated, and were not intended for the vulgar habit of handshaking.
"Well, business took me up to Dublin, and I couldn't come so near to our brightest and fairest young scholar without dropping by to see how she was getting on," he said, patting her hand as he continued to hold it.
"I ... I'm doing just fine, Father. Splendidly. Would you care for some tea, or...."
"No, no, don't make a fuss over me. Just come and sit down here beside me and tell me about your life since you've taken leave of the good sisters at the Convent of the Sacred Heart."
Mary cast him a nervous glance as she sat down on the sofa beside him. He released her hand at last. She wanted desperately to tell him what had happened to her since she'd come here, to tell him of the incidents of seduction she'd had with the other girls and how she'd been raped by Maloney, but she didn't dare. She recalled precisely how hard he'd come down on her when she'd confessed to the sin of carnal desire for Fionna McHarg.
"Sure, with all these movie stars wandering in and out of the place, you must have some fascinating stories to tell an old stick-in-the-mud like myself," Father Finnerty coaxed. "Just coming up to the city has been quite a thrill for me, and a grand place like this, with all these famous people-it takes my breath away altogether."
She wondered if he was putting her on, as Joy would have said. Officially, he would have to take a pretty stern view of people like Erich von Bellinghausen and Joy Piper. But maybe he couldn't help being a simple provincial at heart, someone who delighted in movie stars just like anybody else.
"They ... they're terrible sinful people, Father," Mary managed to squeeze out.
"Why, of course they are! That goes without saying. Jews and Protestants, the lot of them, and not even good Jews and Protestants at that. I knew what sort of people they were when Mrs. O'Malley wrote us and asked if we had a suitable girl for employment here. The idea, of course, is to be like a corked bottle, floating in the ocean. The ocean is all around you, but it's not in you, and your faith is the cork. Once it gets inside you, of course, you sink, but all our preparation was designed to prevent that from happening."
Mary chewed this over for a while. It was true enough, you couldn't spend all your life in a convent, unless of course you had a vocation. You had to be out in the world, dealing with the worldly people in it. She wondered why she'd failed somewhat miserably at her first opportunity-at her first temptation.
"I've had my eye on you since you were just a tiny tot," Father Finnerty continued, patting her knee as he moved closer on the sofa. "If anybody can live among these heathens without picking up their wicked ways, it's you, Mary. I hope you've been going to Mass regularly, and to Confession?"
"I ... well, to tell you the truth..."
"Of course, of course, you're busy settling in, what with one thing and another, getting used to your new routine. But I'll not leave here without extracting a solemn promise from you that you go to Mass on Sunday."
"Yes, Father," Mary said meekly.
"We're living now in a new age of barbarism," he sighed, moving his hand a bit higher on her thigh. "All around us, the nations of the world are lapsing into paganism, with people like this Erich von Bellinghausen as their chief prophets and Joy Piper as their high priestesses. The Irish are again called upon to fulfill their historic mission. It happened all before, of course, when the Roman Empire collapsed and the torch of Christianity flickered on here while it was extinguished throughout Europe. You may think it unimportant for one girl to go to Mass or not, but when you see that you have a part in this vast design, when you realize that your little nation might again become the only spot in the world to preserve the faith, then your decision assumes an awesome significance."
Mary was becoming terribly confused. His words made her feel more wicked and sinful than ever. At the same time his hand, as if the hand belonged to somebody else, was now underneath her skirt. She was sure that he was doing it without thinking, and she didn't dare call it to his attention.
"If Ireland falls to paganism and universal depravity, then it's all over for the world," Father Finnerty went on, slipping one of his fingers inside her panties. "Just as we are now the most Christian nation of Europe, we were once the most enthusiastically pagan. You have no idea of the things that went on before St. Patrick converted the place, because the good sisters edited all that out of ancient epics that you studied in your Gaelic class. These Americans, you'd think that wife-swapping was something they'd just invented, to hear them carry on about it, but it was practiced commonly here in the old days. It was a matter of hospitality. If you paid a visit to someone, you had your choice of his wife or daughter for the night, whichever happened to strike your imagine."
Mary wondered how he could possibly go on talking like this while his finger was absent-mindedly stroking her snizz beneath her panties. Reluctantly, she had to come to the conclusion that it wasn't absent-minded. She gave him a hard stare, which he returned mildly as he continued to work his finger around her moistening mound.
"Wife-swapping wasn't all, either. Incest was the order of the day, hardly more to be commented upon than sneezing. Human sacrifices, too, and witchcraft, and all forms of deviltry. Halloween, you know, was an ancient Irish festival, when the spirits of the dead would all return in the form of animals."
"Father-" Mary began as he slipped his finger right into her hole.
"Don't interrupt now, child, I'm about to make some very important points, and you'll drive them right out of my head if you disrupt my train of thought. You see, they talk about the clergy having a stranglehold on the Irish people now, but even if that were true, which it isn't, it's nothing new at all, and it has nothing to do with the clergy or with the church. It's a characteristic of the Irish people. It started long ago with the Druids, who had a position in society higher even than the kings. The social order existed long before Christianity, and the simple people merely assigned the position to the new priests that the Druids had formerly held."
He pushed his finger all the way inside her vagina now, and Mary gasped as she felt it twisting and turning around inside her.
"Are you all right, child?" he asked with concern.
"I ... oh ... yes ... yes."
"You look a bit hot, maybe you'd best undo that tight bodice," Father Finnerty said, beginning to undo the back of her blouse with his free hand before she could even comment on his suggestion.
While he was working on her blouse, Mary's hand crept over to his lap and stopped as she felt the rock-hard bulge thrusting up in his pants. There could be no mistaking what was going on now. She clasped it through his trousers with her fingers, and she felt the cloth grow wet under her hand.
Meanwhile, Father Finnerty had undone not only her blouse but her bra as well, and now he was cupping her bare tit with his free hand.
"So you see, child, we need the strictest possible form of Christianity in this country to counteract our natural impulses toward lechery and murder and incest and every conceivable form of depravity If the lid were ever let off the cauldron, there'd be hell to pay and then some, you can bet on that. Not even these new African countries fresh out of the trees can look back on a past more savage and ungodly than our own."
His finger working inside her love canal was getting her almost unbearably excited. She spread her legs wide and leaned back on the sofa to let him work on it even better, and she felt him peeling her panties down as she did so.
She wondered what he would do if she unzipped his pants. She did it, freeing a schlong that was even bigger than Maloney's, and he didn't even remark on it.
"So you see, these von Bellinghausens are mere parvenus when it comes to real depravity," Father Finnerty said, pulling her over to straddle his lap and pushing his penis up into her cunt. "We have nothing to fear from the-likes of them. It's our own selves that would amaze the world if we ever let down the barriers and showed them what it truly means to be lustful and depraved."
"Father is this-oh!-is this right?" Mary gasped as her cunt sank down all the way to envelop his big cock and he clutched her breasts with both hands.
"Right or not, I've been wanting to do it day and night for the past five years," he grunted, thrusting up from the couch to fill her even more deeply.
"But I've been wanting to tell you about all of the wicked things going on here-"
"There's no point in telling me, since I can feel well enough that you're no longer the virgin you were when you left us, more's the pity," he gasped in time to his hard strokes as he bounced up and down beneath her on the couch. "But save it for Confession, not forgetting to tell them of course how you tempted a priest away from his vow of celibacy with your new-found wicked ways."
"Oh!" Mary cried, too angry even to speak at this piece of hypocrisy.
Angry though she was, she was enjoying this far more than when Maloney had raped her. It didn't hurt at all, for one thing, and she supposed she had Maloney to thank for that. For another, he hadn't frightened her at all while leading her up to the act. She supposed that had something to do with the position of trust he'd always held for her, something that he was now so grossly misusing.
She saw that it was hard for him to move as much as either of them would have liked while he was sitting on the couch, so she began to help by pushing herself up and down, impaling her scabbard on his rigid rod and powering the sex act with her legs. He sighed with satisfaction as she did that, and he began twisting around to add to the rhythm that she provided.
She became so enthusiastic as she raised and lowered herself on his stiffness that on one upstroke she lost it entirely. She whimpered impatiently, reaching back to grasp it and thrust it in.
"Don't worry, child, I'll get it back in, no trouble at all, there you are," Father Finnerty soothed.
She felt it pushing back into her. She started to sigh with satisfaction, but abruptly she realized that something was very wrong.
"Father," she gasped, "you-you've got it in the wrong place!"
"I know what I'm doing; Now just you relax and open up, and it'll go in smooth as butter."
"Stop! Wait! Stop! You're in the wrong hole, Father-you're hurting me!"
"You're hurting, are you! How do you suppose I feel? You're tighter than a choirboy," Father Finnerty gritted, struggling to bury himself more deeply.
Mary struggled, trying to get away, but he held her tightly by the hips and shoved his cock even deeper into her ass-hole. It felt as if she were being split in half up the middle, as if a red-hot poker were being shoved up her anal chute. The more she struggled, it seemed, the farther she sank on the thick shaft, with Father Finnerty pulling her down with all his strength.
"It's wrong!" she wailed. "Don't do it!"
"Who are you to tell me what's right and wrong? It's no worse than the other way, all things considered, and it's a certain sure method of birth control that hasn't been specifically disapproved of by the Holy Father, the last I heard from him. You'd rather bear me a child who would no doubt grow up to be a werewolf, if there's any truth at all in the old legends, which I suspect there is."
"Anything would be better than this," Mary sobbed as the searing pain rose higher in her rectum.
"There's a trick to it. Just pretend you're answering the call of nature, and it'll slide in just as easily as anything ever slid out of it," he suggested, groping once again with her big breasts and twiddling the nipples between his fingers.
Mary struggled to comply, and she was astounded to discover that he was right. She found herself sitting right in his lap, her buttocks resting on his thighs, with his big pork buried to the hilt in her anus.
"Up now ... and down ... ah ... yes, that's the way, that's the way," he grunted, lifting her up and down on his hard meat, which had been thoroughly lubricated by its immersion in her cunt.
Just as she was beginning to enjoy it, she felt a new sensation, a hard throbbing inside her rectum, and she realized that he was releasing hot gouts of semen deep in the secret recesses of her body.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mary was terribly confused and upset by Father Finnerty's visit. With him, her last dim hope had evaporated. She saw herself as lost to the sinful life that Joy and Pamela and Bridgit and Maloney and the priest had initiated her to. Not even the Church could provide a way out for her.
She realized that it wasn't right, perhaps, to equate Father Finnerty with the whole Church. He was probably just a crazy old man, priest or not, an extreme exception to the rule. But she took her encounter with him as a sign that salvation that way was closed to her.
She resolved to give no more thought to the feelings of guilt that had plagued her. She made a point of no longer saying her prayers, and she found that she didn't even miss them. Just as she had once been a devout Catholic, she resolved now to become an equally devout sinner-just as Father Finnerty claimed her ancestors had been.
The only problem was, that precious few opportunities to sin presented themselves. Hard worked filled up most of the week, with Mary finally confronting the task of doing the windows. The dull, dreary job was made even more difficult than it might have been by Mrs. O'Malley, who would periodically pop up to call her attention to specks and smudges she fancied that she saw on windows that Mary had already done to her own satisfaction. The housekeeper's normal fussiness seemed to escalate as the day approached for the master's arrival. Mary thought it was all wasted effort. After all, why would a man who paid so little attention to his own appearance notice whether his house was clean or not? But she didn't advance this theory to Mrs. O'Malley.
After all this work, she would fall into bed and into unconsciousness each night without a thought of sex. She wouldn't have refused if Mavis or Bridgit or Pamela had come to her room and started something, hut they didn't come. She suspected that Pamela was confining her attentions to Mavis, because Mavis appeared bright-eyed and smiling at the breakfast table every morning and hardly engaged in any arguments at all with Mrs. O'Malley.
Bridgit kept casting longing looks after her but did no more than that. Undoubtedly, she was just itching to be raped again. They hardly got a chance to exchange a word with each other during the days, and at night Mary was too tired to make the long trek to her room. And, attractive though Bridgit was, Mary was slightly repelled by her insanity.
Maloney, to use a phrase Mary had picked up from Pamela's American magazines, was keeping a low profile. Sometimes Mary would catch a glimpse of him through one of the windows she was assiduously scrubbing, but he never seemed to notice her as he went about his business. She got no indication at all that he was planning to carry out his threat to rape every woman in the house, Mrs. O'Malley excepted, or even to give her any more trouble. She began to suspect that Bridgit had been right, that he was more talk than action. Friday arrived, and early in the afternoon Mary whisked the cloth away from the very last window in the house. She felt like celebrating, but she would postpone the celebration until she saw Mrs. O'Malley, who might actually order her to start all over again from the beginning, just like the painters on the Golden Gate Bridge.
As she clanked down to the kitchen with her bucket, the house seemed unnaturally silent. Mrs. O'Malley was wont to accompany her tasks with an endless repertoire of republican ballads. Mavis was seldom quiet, exhorting and reprimanding all the inanimate objects she dealt with; Mary had once heard her scolding the vacuum cleaner for a full half hour. Pamela enjoyed playing rock music at full volume, perhaps to drown out the other two. But today Mary heard nothing.
She was emptying her bucket at the sink when Bridgit appeared, tiptoeing around the edges of the room and casting nervous glances in her direction.
"Would you be giving me a hand, Mary?" she asked in a small voice, an almost little-girlish voice.
"What doing?" Mary inquired, wiping her forearms on a towel as she turned to confront her.
Bridgit tried on a simpery little smile that didn't work too well, and then her eyes skittered nervously away from Mary's direct gaze.
"I have to get half a dozen bottles of wine from the cellar so they can breathe before the great man himself arrives."
Mary didn't know what she was talking about, but that was no novelty in this place, and she'd learned that the best policy was to keep her mouth shut whenever someone came out with a patent absurdity-wine bottles breathing, indeed.
"All right. It seems I've nothing else to do, having cleaned every window in this grand building 'till it sparkles like the day it was installed, if not better," Mary sighed. "Where's everyone got themselves to?"
"Herself drove to town, taking Mrs. O'Malley and Mavis along to do the marketing," Bridgit said. Then she added, nervously and unnecessarily, "We're all alone together."
"You needn't fear for your virtue, Bridgit. I've not the strength to go through that corner of the barnyard again," Mary said, and she surprised herself with her own words and her snappish tone. The week had frazzled her nerves worse than she'd thought.
Bridgit looked suitably chastened, so she saw no need to apologize, but she moderated the severity of her words with a smile, and Bridgit returned it with relief.
This was the first time that Mary had ever visited the wine cellar, and the very name of the place gave her an unreasonable sense of apprehension. Her only previous acquaintance with wine cellars had been through Shakespeare's Richard III and Poe's Cask of Amontillado, neither one of them a high recommendation for the attraction of such places. As she followed Bridgit down the dank stone stairs, she kept thinking about Clarence, drowned in the vat of malmsey, and of Montresor, bricked up behind the wall. She told herself she was being silly, but that didn't help.
The vaulted basement was a labyrinth that matched the attic, and it was cold and clammy to boot. Bridgit seemed to know where she was going, though, and she had in her possession the key to a little oak door that led down into the wine-cellar. Bridget flicked on the light, a bare electric bulb hanging from the ceiling, and they descended into a gloomy, shadowy place where bottles were stored in tall racks. Mary was relieved to see no vat suitable for drowning people in, nor any unfinished gaps in the masonry.
Mary wandered about, studying the dusty bottles without much interest, while Bridgit consulted a list in her hand. She was totally unprepared for the sound of the door slamming.
Her first thought, that a draft had done it, was proved wrong even before she could turn around, because she heard the lock clicking decisively. She screamed when she looked up and saw Maloney at the head of the stairs.
He grinned broadly at her, swaying slightly as he stood. She didn't notice the bottle in his hand until he lifted it to his lips and poured its remaining contents down his throat. Then he hurled the bottle across the room to smash against the far wall.
"I can't stomach this vile dago swill," he announced, wiping his mouth on his shirtsleeve. "When I become a wealthy man, as I well might be if good looks and charming manners count for anything at all in this unjust world, I'll get meself a whisky cellar."
"Unlock that door," Mary ordered, "and mind it doesn't hit you in the behind on your way out of here."
Maloney laughed and lurched down the stairs. Unfortunately, he had sufficient control to keep himself from falling and breaking his neck.
"Ah, darling, you've forgotten all about our cozy little chat the other day," he said, "and after I'd convinced meself that we'd come to a pleasant understanding about the way things are around here. To sum up the conclusions we arrived at, in case your memory needs refreshing, it's meself that gives the orders and you that takes them, and if I don't like the way you jump when I speak, it'll go hard with you."
"Out of my way, you sot!" Mary cried, storming forward with a boldness she didn't feel.
Her charge petered out when he refused to move aside for her, and she whirled on Bridgit. The blonde, normally pale, was white as death, and her expression confirmed Mary's worst suspicions.
"So this is a plot, is it?" Mary demanded. "Your lover got you to lure me down here, did he? Well then, I'll give Mrs. von B. an earful about you as well as him when the time comes. Now tell him to get out of the way, before I lose my temper altogether."
Maloney had descended the last few steps, and she tried to shrug away his hands as they fell on her shoulders, but he gripped her more tightly and spun her around to face him.
"Bridgit's a good girl who knows when she's licked," he snickered. "Although it's you that's done the licking, from the way she tells it, and I think it's about time to see if your tongue is as good as she says it is. It must be good for something besides making a pointless racket and dealing out uncalled-for insults to normal folk."
"Normal folk! It's nine-tenths of the population of Ireland you insult with that remark, you drunken rapist," Mary snapped.
"Off with your clothes now, girl, we've exchanged enough idle pleasantries for one day, and it's time to get down to serious business," Maloney laughed.
She was about to give him a well-deserved kick in the shins when she was distracted by a surprise attack from another quarter, a virtual stab in the back. Bridgit was holding her around the waist and unzipping her immodest black blouse.
"Judas Iscariot!" Mary shrieked. "Behold your daughter!
"I'm sorry, Mary, really I am. Forgive me. He'll kill me if I don't do as he says," Bridgit whined.
"That's right," Maloney said. "But first I'll hand her name in to her parish priest as a practicing lesbian, so he can pin up her name at the church door for all to see and condemn. And it's the same thing I'll do to you, too, Mary mine."
"You're full of shit, Maloney," Mary said, using a favorite phrase of Joy and Pamela. "Your silly threats don't scare me any longer, and it's the master himself I'll report you to when he comes home tonight."
"Ah, and be sure and report what you and his charming wife have been up to in his absence," Maloney laughed. "Give him a thorough account, or else I will."
Mary was silenced for the moment. Ignorant as she was of whatever understanding Erich and Pamela might have, she didn't know how to answer him. It was possible that Maloney knew what he was talking about, since he'd been working here longer than she had.
Bridgit's nimble fingers had divested her of her blouse and bra almost before she knew they were gone, and now the blonde was working at the clasp of her skirt. She tried to turn and resist, but Maloney held her arms while the other girl did his bidding.
"Good girl, Bridgit," he chuckled. "I'll make this she-male put her tongue to work on your body as a special reward. It's something I wouldn't mind watching, since I've heard so much about it."
Twisting around to glare at Bridgit, Mary saw that the blonde was already naked. Maloney had her so firmly beneath his thumb that he didn't even need to tell her what he wanted done; or, morelikely, she was acting in accord with her own desires, which just happened to coincide with Maloney's wishes.
Since their lovemaking had taken place in the dark, this was the first glimpse she'd had of Bridgit in the nude. Under other circumstances, she might have been delighted by the sight. Despite the slightness of her bone structure, she wasn't at all skinny or angular. She was pleasantly rounded everywhere, although there was less of her than there was of Mary. She found that she had to tear her eyes away. Against her will and against her best interests, she was growing aroused from the sight of Bridgit. It would be appalling if Maloney interpreted her hardening nipples and her moistening love mound as evidence of his own charms.
When Bridgit had removed her skirt, Maloney couldn't resist the temptation to roll down her panties himself. It was her opportunity to give him a knee in the balls, and she almost took it. Fear stopped her. She remembered how strong he was. She was alone, with no prospect of any help at all, in the deepest basement of the house, and maybe he was just drunk enough to kill her if she succeeded in enraging him. Bitter as the prospect was, she realized that she had no choice but to do exactly as he told her.
"Ah, there's your pretty little pussy!" he cried. "I've been seeing it in my dreams all week, and hoping it's all rested up and well to give me the kind of rubdown I like."
She screamed and pulled back as he thrust his hand roughly between her legs, but Bridgit held her. She felt Bridgit's firm little breasts pushing against her bare back, and she tried hard to concentrate on that sensation, not on the feel of Maloney's rough fingers as they poked and pried clumsily at her gash.
"Ah, you're nice and wet and ready, darling, just the way I dreamed you'd be," he said. "But I'm afraid you'll just have to keep your hot little twat on ice for a while, as I promised myself to give your mouth the thorough fucking it deserves first."
Mary's stomach churned, and she gagged. He actually planned to perform the frightful act that Caitlin O'Mara had so graphically described to her back at the convent school. Even intercourse would be preferable to that. If he had sex with her, she could just lie back and pretend she was somewhere else, giving him no cooperation or encouragement. But if he actually put his dirty dick in her mouth, she would have to do all the work. It was only by a great effort that she kept herself from begging him not to do it, knowing that such pleas would only spur him on to worse excesses.
He let her go while he began to pull off his shirt, and she took the opportunity to struggle out of Bridgit's grasp and turn on her.
"Ah, you filthy little bitch, to betray me like this after the fine night of love we had, after all the yearning looks you've been casting after me like a lovesick cow all week! It'll be a cold day in hell before I share a bed with you again, you miserable, cock-crazy worm!"
"You raped me!" Bridgit squealed. "I didn't want to do those awful things, you weaseled your way into my bed with your sad story and then took advantage of me when I was half asleep."
"Ladies, ladies," Maloney soothed. "Be calm. You can work out your little disputes to your satisfaction at some other time, but right now I've got a much more pleasurable duty for both your wagging tongues. Come over here, the both of you, and lick me like a lollipop."
Mary turned. Maloney was sitting naked on a crate, his hairy, knobby knees agape and his inflamed dick sticking up as stiff as a flagpole. He had acquired another bottle of the von Bellinghausens' wine, and he paused to drink deeply from it.
like a sleepwalker, Bridgit was moving toward him, her lovely violet eyes transfixed by Maloney's throbbing member and his hairy, dangling balls. She moistened her lips nervously as she got closer.
"You too, Mary. Don't hang back," he said, speaking a little more sharply than he'd done yet. "Wiggle your ass over here before I warm it for you with the flat of my hand."
"Bastard," Mary whispered with hate-choked intensity, but she forced herself to walk toward him as he sat like some mockery of a king on a throne, awaiting the attentions of his slaves.
Bridgit knelt dutifully between his knees, and he fondly stroked her white-blonde coronet of braided hair as she lowered her face to his pulsing penis. She seemed to need no instruction in what she was doing. She had accustomed herself to the warped whims of the chauffeur.
Mary stood nervously over them now. She couldn't take her eyes off Bridgit's pretty face as she pouted out her glistening lips and slipped them gently down over the bulging cap of Maloney's cock. She gave no indication at all that she was displeased with what she was doing. On the contrary, she looked as happy as a puppy sucking at its mother's tit. The sight again made Mary's stomach twist.
Maloney gestured imperiously, and Mary sank to her knees on the floor, to the side of his hairy, muscular leg. She watched Bridgit tickle the shaft of the cock as she pumped her lips delicately on the head, and then she shuddered as Maloney reached down to play with one of her own breasts.
"Your turn now, sweetheart," he chuckled. "Give Mary a turn, dear, she's just dying to try it, you should feel how hard her nipples are. She's as hot as a pistol, it's just that she's afraid to admit it."
That was the truth, but it was still Bridgit's slim nudity that was inflaming her. When the blonde reached out on Maloney's instruction and began to fondle her breast, when she looked shyly into Mary's eyes, Mary hardly knew what she was doing anymore. She felt her head bending under the weight of Maloney's hand on her neck. Her face was drawn closer and closer to the red, angry knob at the end of his swollen penis. She saw a bead of crystalline fluid ooze out to twinkle at its tip.
She gave a last gasp of despair as she lowered her head all the way and let her lips slide over the crown of his engorged phallus. She tried to pretend that it was just a thing, anything at all, merely something stiff and cylindrical with a rubbery feel to it. But that was no good. It was far too hot, too obviously alive and pulsing, and it smelled and tasted strongly of Maloney's rank maleness. She couldn't will herself to refuse to acknowledge the fact that it was his cock, and that it was in her mouth.
"Use your tongue, girl!" Maloney commanded. "Wiggle it about with half the vigor you use when you jabber your intolerable nonsense, and you'll be doing something constructive."
Mary forced herself to do as she was told. There was hardly room in her mouth to move her tongue at all, his hot tool was so big, but she managed to slip it around and slide it against the spongy texture of his phallus. She heard him gasping and moaning with an exaggerated imitation of ecstasy, making fun of the emotion he was presumably trying to achieve, or perhaps rubbing her nose in the unpleasantness he was forcing her to do.
"Tickle it with your dainty fingers, too, the way darling Bridgit does," he sighed. "And mind you be gentle, or your head'll be ringing for a week from the weight of my hand."
Another almost overwhelmingly tempting opportunity presented itself as she reached out and took his balls in her fingers. If she grabbed them and gave them a good, hard twist, and kept twisting, ignoring whatever efforts he might make to force her to release them, she might bring an end forever to Maloney's career as a rapist. It would almost be worth whatever he might do to her in revenge.
But she lacked the courage. Instead of squashing his nuts in her hand, as she so desperately desired to do, she forced her touch to be gentle and caressed the hairy bag with a feather-light touch. As he whispered encouragement, she tickled her way up the shaft and took a firmer hold on it, peeling the skin up and down while she licked her way around the head.
"Delightful, delightful," Maloney murmured, reaching down to stroke her breasts and now that Bridgit had gotten her excitement started, even Maloney's despised touch was exciting. She hated herself for it, but she was growing steadily more aroused from the clumsy fumbling of his. rough fingers on her sensitized nipples.
"Don't hang back, Bridgit, there's more than enough for both of you. Get in there and see if you can find a place to put your loving tongue," he said.
Mary felt herself crowded by the insertion of the blonde's fine head between Maloney's legs, but she didn't object to being crowded at all, not like this. She trembled with lust as Bridgit's cheek brushed hers, as she smelled the delicious odor of her soft and shining hair. She couldn't resist stroking the smooth skin of Bridgit's back, stroking lower and lower until her digits were kneading the other girl's trimly rounded behind.
"Oh ho!" Maloney cried. "It's that kind of games you want to play, is it, you dirty tit-sucker? Well, you go right ahead and be my guest. As long as you work on my cock as well as you're doing, you're welcome to do what you like with each other."
Bridgit had pushed in until she was able to reach the shaft of Maloney's penis with her tongue, and now she licked the length of it while Mary sucked and licked at the knob. Now that she had the okay from her master, Bridgit began to stroke Mary's thigh as well, moving her hand rapidly up to the redhead's burning quish.
Mary was lost as soon as Bridgit's probing fingertips touched her box. She hardly knew what she was doing anymore, and she slobbered and slurped around Maloney's hard meat as if she loved doing it. The fact was, she did love doing it, now that Bridgit was caressing her, now that she could forget exactly what it was she was doing and concentrate on the desirability of the naked blonde squeezing beside her.
Mary's own hand slid lower until it was pressing the hairy mush of Bridgit's quim. Bridgit was just as hot and wet and ready as she'd been the other night, and she began to squirm and writhe with pleasure as Mary diddled her rigid clitoris and squeezed a finger deep into the clasping jelly of her scalding-hot vagina.
"Now it's Bridgit's turn to suck," Maloney announced. "You lick my balls, Mary, and watch how deep dear Bridgit can take it. She's taken well to training, and with a little more practice she'll be able to swallow me whole."
The girls switched their tasks, taking advantage of the transition to give each other a good feel. Bridgit even brushed her lips briefly against Mary's, but neither one of them dared linger over a proper kiss for fear of arousing Maloney's wrath. They only dared that much because he was momentarily distracted by gulping from his bottle.
Bridgit lived up to Maloney's advance billing. Mary was amazed to see how deeply she could take his long, thick cock. The pink ring of her lips pressed farther and farther down the length of the veined shaft until Mary began to wonder where it was all going. At last Bridgit had sucked so much of him into her mouth that her cute little upturned nose was being tickled by his coarse pubic hair. Her cheeks hollowed as she sucked, and she closed her eyes as if in rapture at the feel and taste of it.
Bridgit was now giving Mary's tingling twat a thorough rubdown, and Mary spread her knee wide on the dusty cellar floor to get the most out of it that she possibly could. Bridgit slipped two of her dainty fingers just as deep as she could and lashed Mary's percolating sexual juices to a sizzling foam that spattered out against her thighs while she continued to suck him for all she was worth. As she fingered Mary, she bobbed her head up and down on the thick stem to do herself in the mouth with it.
Maloney pulled Mary's head into his crotch, forcing her to lick his balls while Bridgit sucked him. She was so excited that she no longer objected. The object her tongue was toying with made no difference, as long as Bridgit kept up her determined digital work on her inflamed vagina.
"Now you take it, darling Mary, and see if you can do it half as well as Bridgit," Maloney gasped, pushing the blonde back. "I'm betting you can suck it right down into your throat like a sword-swallower, if you put half your mind to it."
like one in a trance, Mary nodded and leaned forward, pulling Maloney's throbber toward her with her hand. She opened her mouth and slid his hot, dripping cock over her lips. Her other hand was busy in Bridgit's quivering quim, probing her hole deeply while she tickled her clitoris with her thumb.
"Aah, it smells like an explosion in a fish-oil factory down here," Maloney sighed. "It's perfume to my nostrils. I've never seen nor smelled such a pair of hot twats. Maybe that's the secret, getting you to play with each other while you play with me, for I've heard precious little jabber about how naughty and nasty I am since you started. Well, if that'll get you properly hot, that's fine with me. Maybe we can arrange a nice cozy night in bed together, me and the two of you and Mavis and Pamela and Joy, all rolling about and clutching and groping each other, and then I'll fuck the one that pleased me most. Maybe we'll even invite Mrs. O'Malley in, just so nobody will be left out, for I've heard it said that you can't tell any woman's age if she's 'got a bag over her head. I'll be sure to make that one wear a bag over her head. But don't you be shy now, Mary, just suck my cock as deep as you can now, for I've got an extra special present for you, a fine bit of nourishment to warm your stomach, coming right along any minute now."
Mary obeyed, sucking his cock harder, pulling it deeper. She didn't forget to use her tongue, licking all over the superheated surface of his phallus inside her mouth. Bridgit was licking too, bending down to lick his testicles as Mary had done, and both girls were working on each other with their hands as their fingering rose to a veritable frenzy of flailing and lashing.
Mary was startled by a crash of breaking glass. She saw that it was Maloney's wine-bottle, fallen unheeded from his fingers and spreading its contents in a red stain on the dirty floor.
The dropping of the bottle apparently marked the final dissipation of Maloney's self-control, for suddenly he began groaning and moaning like a man in a fit, and in the next instant Mary was startled as the erection in her mouth went off like a geyser. She tried to pull her mouth away from the pumping of thick, creamy fluid, but Maloney grabbed her neck and forced her face down, making her swallow it as the only possible alternative to drowning in it.
She choked and gagged, but she heard him whooping and laughing as his dick spurted more fiery-hot jism into her mouth. She felt it trickling out over her lower lip, there was just so much of it, and still she gulped it down.
But then she forgot all about Maloney's penis and its disgusting discharge as the work that Bridgit had been doing on her gash all this while paid off. Suddenly her loins turned to fire, a fire that spread and engulfed her, and she found that she was soaring above it to a golden level far above Maloney and his pumping phallus.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mary was so shaken, so overcome by confusion and embarrassment, that she scarcely noticed the arrival of the golden people later that afternoon. Von Bellinghausen was there, and Joy, and a dozen others, film stars and hangers-on of every description. But her mind and her heart were not on the gala event. They were blackened by rage at Maloney.
The mad egotist had refused to accept the obvious truth of the fact that she had been aroused by Bridgit. He actually believed that sucking his incomparable dong had given her an orgasm. She wished now that she'd twisted his balls off, as she'd been so sorely tempted to do; that she'd spat the scum in his mocking, simian face.
He would give her another chance, though. He'd promised her that much. He'd raved on and on about what an expert at fellatio she was, how she could blow much better than she could ball, and he'd sworn that she would blow him at least twice a day from now on.
This had to come to an end. She couldn't see how, though. Stabbing him was no good, he might have the strength left to throttle the life out of her before he succumbed to his wound. She would need a gun. Belying everything she'd ever heard about Americans, there were no guns in the von Bellinghausen household. She didn't have the vaguest idea of how to go about acquiring one for herself. Legally, it was probably impossible. Illegally, the IRA no doubt had cornered the market. She might try to sound out Mrs. O'Malley to see if she knew the where-abouts of any terrorist arsenals, but that seemed a slim hope indeed.
Violence, then, was out of the question. Alternatively, she could end it all by leaving. She no longer feared having to go back to the convent school. She had seen a bit of the world now, she had acquired job experience, and she could probably find something to turn her hand to.
But that seemed to mean leaving a paradise perfect in almost every respect except for the serpent, Maloney. She was still very confused, though, about her unsure penchant for lesbianism. And she didn't know what seeing Joy Piper again might do to that drive.
She ought to tell Pamela everything. Maybe she should have done that right after Maloney had first raped her, but she'd held back then, and she was still hesitant. She and Pamela shared little except an interest in sex, and she didn't delude herself that her employer preferred her to any other girl she might happen to fall into bed with. Pamela had proven that this week by not coming once to her room and by saying not a word of what had passed between them. She had the suspicion that Pamela was the sort of person who would solve a problem by eliminating it entirely. If Pamela believed that Mary and Maloney were rocking the boat, she might not hesitate to throw them both overboard, with never a backward glance.
But now she had the opportunity to do what she'd wanted to do in the first place-to tell Joy about it. She was back now, and Mary would go to her as soon as she was alone and tell her all about Maloney. Even if she could do nothing herself, Joy was a woman of the world who would know exactly what ought to be done.
Satisfied with her decision, Mary could only fidget and wait to put it into practice. It was a long wait. The guests kept them running off their feet, demanding everything under the sun and Mary kept confusing orders and bringing the wrong things to the wrong places until she was nearly in tears and Mrs. O'Malley was hoarse from screaming at her. Mavis and Bridgit did no better, but they were flustered by having so many grand people about, not by dark thoughts of murdering Maloney.
At long last, having washed a pile of dishes that would have dwarfed Nelson's Pillar, she had a moment to sit down and relax over a cup of tea. It was late, but she still couldn't go to Joy. Mavis was up in her room, having answered the summons of the star's bell. On top of all her other sources of depression and anxiety, Mary now began to be gnawed by jealousy at the thought of the saucy brunette alone with the dazzling blonde. She began to wonder why Joy hadn't asked for her services as her personal maid on this visit. She wondered what they were doing up there, and imagination was quick to provide her with painful images of bare, sweating limbs writhing lubriciously between crisp sheets.
The ringing of a bell startled her out of her hurtful thoughts, and she looked up to see a light flashing on the board by the pantry. She was alone in the kitchen. The others were off on other errands. She sighed wearily, muttered a few curses under her breath and shuffled out, noting that the bell was being activated in the library.
She entered that room a few minutes later and found none other than the great von Bellinghausen himself. He appeared to be alone, sipping port from a glass, and he was every bit as rumpled and unkempt as he appeared in his magazine pictures.
"Ach, you must be the new one, yes?" he said, looking up over his glasses from a book in his lap.
"Yes, sir. I'm Mary."
"A charming name. Your parents are to be congratulated on their imagination. Do you enjoy working here?"
She hesitated. Maybe this was a chance. She was alone with him, he seemed to have nothing of pressing urgency on his mind-she saw that the book he had been reading appeared to be a collection of pictures of naked women-but she was put off by his indifferent, somewhat mocking tone. She couldn't tell him that Maloney had raped her. He wouldn't care.
"Yes, sir. I enjoy it well enough."
"Good! It is important that everyone do what they enjoy. That is what we are here for, yes? Everything else is kitty-litter. Myself, I enjoy to stand aside and watch. That is why I am such a great film-maker. I have spent my life in the hard and thankless task of paring away all of my senses until the only organ functioning in its pristine state is my eyes. Do you understand this?"
"Yes, sir, I think so."
"Good! You are better than these jackals and hyenas and cockroaches who call themselves critics and students of the cinema. A bunch of mouth-breathing, nose-picking pig-fuckers. Simplicity, that is the only thing worth having, and you have it. Do not become complex."
"No, sir," Mary said, amused to learn that he talked just the way he did in those nonsensical interviews.
"Since you like your work so well, perhaps you would like-ach ! "
His glasses had fallen off his nose to the floor. He looked at Mary, making no move to pick them up, and so she went forward to retrieve them. As she knelt before him to pick them up, she became acutely conscious that he was staring unashamedly right down her bodice. In her skimpy outfit, at this angle, he must have been enjoying a clear view of her breasts. She hurried to get up, smoothing her short skirt down with one hand as she gave him the glasses. He accepted them with his left hand. The right one was in his pocket, and it seemed to be moving back and forth at a steady pace.
He put his glasses aside and said, "Thank you, my dear. I was about to say, since you enjoy your work, perhaps it would give you enjoyment to fetch a book for me from one of the upper shelves. Climbing ladders is not counted among my athletic accomplishments."
"Of course," Mary said, walking briskly to the ladder that hung from one of the book-lined walls. Which book would you be wanting?"
"Up there," he said, gesturing with his free hand. The other hand remained in his pocket, and Mary suspected that he was clutching his dick with it. His motions before had reminded her of Caitlin O'Mara's story about having watched her brother masturbate.
He bent slightly as he came forward, as if his hard cock were giving h im some discomfort. Mary was unnerved, but she didn't see how he could rape her while she was up on a ladder, so she climbed it quickly and surveyed the dingy and illegible bindings on the top shelf.
"Which one is it you want now?" she asked.
"Ach, the title has slipped my mind. Let me think."
She glanced down and was horrified to discover that he was directly below her and looking right up her skirt. She'd almost forgotten how immodest her maid's costume was. Her clinging scanties covered little but the cleft between her cheeks, and that not very well. His hand moved rhythmically in his pocket again. He smiled, revealing a lot of yellow teeth, but his watery blue eyes never left her sweet bottom.
"Let me think," he repeated. "It is on the tip of my tongue."
Exasperated, she snapped: "Would it aid your cogitations at all if I was totake my pants off?"
"Ach, you are an observant young girl!" he chuckled. "You have pierced my little ruse. I thought only to have a little innocent fun, to pass the time by jerking off while I gazed at your voluptuous, alabaster ass. Truly it is a marvel, an ass worthy of Venus herself, who in one of her incarnations was called Venus Callipygia, Venus of the Beautiful Ass."
Unhappily, he removed his hand from his pocket. But Mary was touched by his compliment, and, as long as she wasn't required to touch his disgusting, masculine body, she saw no harm in giving him pleasure. After all, she needed all the friends she could get. Without looking at him, she peeled down her panties with cool unconcern, as if obeying a legitimate order.
"You can look," she said, stepping nimbly out of them, "but don't touch."
"You are a girl after my own heart," he said. "As you may have deduced from what I said before, I have no intention of touching. Touching, doing, acting-these are for peasants. Seeing is all. It takes a true artist to see."
She watched, amazed, as he unzipped his fly and fished his cock out of the constriction of his undershorts. It was a huge thing, even larger than Maloney's, and it was an angry red color. He took her panties from the floor where she had dropped them and wrapped them around its thickness.
As an afterthought, he asked politely: "You do not mind if I use these?"
"Not at all," Mary said. "After all, they came with the uniform, so I guess they're rightfully yours to do with as you please."
"You are a very sensible girl. I must commend my wife upon her skill and intelligence in selecting you."
Mary watched him, her belly pressed to the ladder, and he watched her pert rear end. He began to pump his hand up and down on his cock, swathed now in the black silk of her panties. She spread her legs as wide as she could on the narrow ladder. Her vagina began to itch, but she was ashamed to finger it right in front of him, despite what he was doing.
"Can I do anything?" she asked. "I mean short of touching you? That's nothing personal, you understand, it's just that I can't stand men."
"Delightful!" he cried. "You find them disgusting?"
"Yes, thoroughly."
"Then it follows logically that you must find me disgusting, as I am a man, is this not so?"
"Well, it's not something I would have said of my own accord, you understand, but yes, with all due respect, I do, begging your pardon."
"Then say it, please. It would give me great pleasure to hear you say it."
"You are disgusting," Mary said obligingly.
"Wonderful! Please-I beg of you-I implore you-tell me how disgusting I am, how low and insignificant. You may draw on your experience of all men, but the more personal you are, the better. I hope I am not asking too much of you, goddess."
"Not at all," Mary said, thinking for a moment, watching as he pumped his cock very, very slowly with the black silk. "You're fat, for one thing, disgustingly fat. And you're bald. Your head looks like a pig's ass."
"Goddess! Mistress!" von Bellinghausen cried, ecstatic.
"I think you're a pretentious bore, too, judging by the gibberish you've been speaking to me this evening, and judging by the interviews you've given to those filthy magazines. Any man who would have his face appear in such a magazine is no better than a used feminine napkin, and I'd flush him down the toilet like one if it was in my power to do so."
"Magnificent!" he crowed, jerking faster. "Please, mistress, please, may I beg you to do something for me?"
"All right, but that's not saying I'll do it."
"Of course, of course, forgive me if I seemed to overstep myself. But may I beg you, please, to spread the cheeks of your beautiful ass with your hands? It would give me infinite pleasure, pleasure such as a worm like myself does not deserve in this life or the next, to look at your delightfully delectable ass-hole."
"You're disgusting because you're a pervert, too," Mary said, pushing her ass back slightly and spreading the cheeks with her hands to give him the view he craved.
"Yes," he croaked, beating ever faster, "Yes."
"Your nose looks like a beet," Mary observed. "As a matter-of-fact, your whole sickening face looks like a lumpy bunch of beets. And I've seen nicer eyes on a potato. Your teeth look as if they were fashioned by some ignorant aborigine from the porcelain of an old urinal. You probably smell something awful, too, judging by the looks of you, but I surely wouldn't want to get close enough to find out. You'd have a hard time trying to give away the clothes on your back to naked castaways, but it's a blessing you're wearing them, because I'm sure the sight of your naked body would make me vomit."
"More, please, more! I don't deserve you," he gasped, the motions of his flailing hand now becoming erratic.
"That's the first sensible thing you've said, indeed it is. It's a wonder I stay in this crazy house at all, with a new and more sickening pervert popping up every time I turn a corner. But I must say that you take the cake. The very thought of you will be enough to make me want to retch from now on, and the sight of you is quite overpowering. They broke the mold before they made you, that's a sure thing."
"How can a creature like me live?" Erich wailed.
"That's just the very question I've been asking myself. If I was you, I'd run right out and buy a gun and do away with myself. I've not seen any of your filthy movies, nor do I ever intend to dirty my eyeballs by watching one, but I can imagine how worthless they are, seeing the creator in the flesh."
Mary felt almost as pleased as Erich looked. It wasn't every day that a person got to say exactly what she thought of someone, especially her own employer, in such specific detail. It didn't bother her that her words pleased him. She would have been upset if they had hurt.
Grown bolder now, she took one of her hands away from her ass and moved it forward beneath her belly to finger the itching petals of her love hole. Erich watched, gasping, trying to hold himself back and pump his penis more slowly as he drank in this new sight.
"I don't know how your wife stands you," she continued. "I suppose it's only your money she's interested in. However I don't even want to speculate about the details of your domestic life, as they would disgust me beyond endurance, I'm sure. When I saw your picture, I thought she was like the princess with the frog, only her kiss didn't work, did it? Well, maybe that's because she has better sense than to kiss you at all."
"Yes! Yes!" Erich groaned. "Tell me ... do you think you could help me correct my faults?"
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," Mary said, feeling the sticky liqueur of her gash beginning to seep out over her hand as she rubbed her clitoris in time to Erich's strokes on his rod. "Only an abortion could have done that, before your poor mother dropped you into the unsuspecting world."
"But I promise-I could try to be better-if you would-if you would walk all over me," he gasped, averting his eyes for the first time in embarrassment.
"That would mean I'd have to touch your slimy body with a part of my own beautiful one," Mary retorted. "But I guess that since you are no better than the ground I walk on, I could easily belittle you in that manner."
"Then do so, my dear. I beg of you so humbly to walk all over this disgraceful excuse for a man," Erich implored her.
"Stop playing with yourself!" she ordered him. "That's the most disgusting thing about you. You've been masturbating for the better part of an hour now, and you can't even come. You'll do it when I tell you. And you'll come when I tell you. Do you understand?"
"Yes!" he yelped, his voice quavering.
"And take off the rest of your clothes so I can really stomp on that ridiculous flab hanging off your body."
Erich took his hands away from his cock and dropped the wadded ball of silk to the floor, undressing as quickly as his rotund body could move.
Mary was tempted to ask Erich to eat her. She had a feeling that he would do it with gusto now, especially if she commanded rather than asked. But a glance at his ugly face threw cold water on that idea. Then she thought of Maloney again, and that idea excited her wildly, even if he was a man. It would be wonderful to make Maloney do that, to force his smirking face down between her legs and watch him eat her out, to humiliate him in exactly the same way he'd humiliated her.
As Erich lay flat on his flabby back now, Mary moved her silk-sheathed foot onto his face and moved it all about his fat, flushed features. She pressed the foot down, making him smell the areas between her toes. He took deep whiffs, seeming to fully enjoy the aroma.
When Mary realized he was experiencing more pleasure than pain, she stepped on his gigantic chest with both feet, walking around on him as though he were a doormat.
His cock now looked as red as a boiled lobster from frustration and irritation, and the head bulged purple with its straining charge of lust.
She walked all about his massive frame, giving light kicks to the flab that hung down from him, and enjoying the sight of it jiggling like jello.
Erich's body reddened where Mary scratched his mass with her sharp toenails, and it was difficult at this point to tell whether the huge man's face was showing pleasure or pain, or a combination of both.
Mary's mind suddenly came up with an interesting idea. She daintily extended one foot and touched his quivering phallus with her big toe. She slid it up and down once, twice, and then a leaping streamer of semen spurted up to spatter against her ankle, followed by another and another, until only creamy driblets oozed from his dwindling dong.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As Mary tossed and turned in her sleep that night, she thought about the three penises she had sampled in a variety of ways with her delightful body. There was Bobbie Maloney's baloney, of course, which she could have virtually any hour she desired it. There was Father Finnerty's rod, which she had never expected to see during her entire lifetime. And just hours earlier, there was Erich von Belinghausen's cock. Although she could never think of sucking on it or permitting it to enter her cunt, the film director's hard-on did seem to have its effect on her.
Then Mary thought about the girls in the house, all of whom had been so strange except, of course, for Joy. But Joy was an American film star, and Mary had often read in the magazines how flighty and unfaithful they were.
Visions of penises came into her mind, and she couldn't seem to lose them.
Suddenly, the image of the cock of the dreaded Bobbie Maloney filled her brain, and she knew that he was just a buzz away. She knew that he would do anything and everything sexual that she could ever think of, and he could add a lot of his own tricks. And he probably had a number of them up his pants leg.
Dressed now in flannel nightgown and slippers, Mary tiptoed through the kitchen to the communications board beside the pantry. She stared at it for a moment, her heart in her throat, and then reached up with a trembling hand to take down the handset. She pushed the buzzer that would sound in Maloney's garage apartment.
"Maloney here, at your service," a sleepy voice grumbled.
"Bobbie, it's Mary. Mary Elizabeth Curtin."
"And what might your ladyship be requiring of the chauffeur at this ungodly hour?" he asked with heavy sarcasm. "I'm ... lonely."
"Lonely, is it? A whole household full of lesbian glamor girls you've got up there, and you call me because you're lonely? Go knock up Bridgit. Or Mavis. Leave me be."
"Don't hang up, Bobbie! I don't want them. I realize ... after this afternoon ... that I'm not really like that. I want you.
"I want you, Bobbie. I want to ... suck your dick," she said, thinking about the image of its thickness and length as she spoke.
"Well, now, why didn't you say so in the first place? Just trot right out here and I'll have it all warmed up and ready to eat. Eager lad that he is, he's rising already at the sound of your voice.
"Alright, Bobbie, just let me put on a couple of things and I'll be right over ... expecting to hustle them off right away!" Mary exclaimed, excitement filling her loins already.
When Mary said she wanted to throw on a couple of things, it turned out to be a pair of flat shoes and a skimpy nightgown with nothing on beneath it.
As she entered Bobbie's room, he was lying back on his bed, stark-naked, and stroking his reddening sexual wand.
"It's hard for me to get used to this sudden change of heart," he said, and she noted how the mirror drew his eye like a magnet and held it for a moment while he smoothed his hair.
She took his erecting cock in her hand and lowered her face to his lap. The male aroma of his nuts and the warmth of his thick organ floated up to envelop her like a fog. She slipped her tongue out and began to trace the contours of his pink cock head while her fingers moved slowly and delicately up and down the shaft.
Mary unleashed his rod momentarily to quickly remove her nightgown, and was then back at play with his porker.
She was really getting to enjoy the pleasure that began to trickle through her body like sap in a tree freed from winter's freeze. She abandoned herself to the sensuous feel of his rough hands as they fondled her breasts and slid between her thighs. She spread her legs to let him move his fingers against the quivering flesh of her sex while she parted her lips and sipped them over the pulsing head of his now fully-erect penis.
"I knew you'd love doing it once you got the taste of it," he sighed. "Take it a little deeper, Mary dear, just a tiny bit deeper."
She managed to get her tongue out of the way and accommodate several inches of the thickened shaft in the slick compression of her lips. She continued to jerk gently on his foreskin with her fingers and toyed daintily with his balls while his talented digital work on her vagina flooded her with electric warmth.
"Now it's something that I want you to do for me, Bobbie," she said coyly, letting go of his maleness with a loud plop! of release suction.
"Ah, and what might that be, darling? Can't it wait till you've given me a proper blowjob, now that you've got it so well underway?"
"We have all night," she murmured, snuggling against him. "Now I want you to do it to me, just like I was doing it to you."
A look of surprise crossed his face. "You want me to lick your cunt?"
"Yes, Bobbie. I want you to lick me there," she said breathing in his ear, and thinking about how she had thought about him doing precisely that to her while she was with Erich.
Bobbie slid off the bed to do as Mary requested. Mary felt a new kind of thrill surge through her body. He was so big, so strong, so menacing, and yet now he was kneeling down between her legs like a slave before an empress. She caressed his broad, powerful shoulders, and drew his head in between her thighs. He slipped his hands under her behind as he pressed his lips into her red-gold muff.
The first touch of his lips to her itching vagina made her let out a squeak of surprise. Her reaction forced Bobbie to become almost violently aggressive. He clutched her buttocks tightly in clawed fingers. His tongue thrust out, hard and eager, flapping her swollen clitoris from side to side the way a boxer flaps a punching bag. He opened his mouth wide and clamped it to the source of sticky liqueur that was just beginning to ooze out of her burning hole. He twisted around on his knees for a better angle of approach and began eating her out with the greedy single-mindedness of a rooting-hog. It was as if his body had become possessed by some muff-diving demon.
She shivered and quivered and felt slightly dizzy. His style of cunnilingus was so forceful that it almost hurt, but she loved it. The girls she'd made love to usually treated her vagina as if it were some fragile flower. He was as gentle and delicate as a man chipping rust with a chisel. But despite his lack of tenderness, he was doing something right. He was getting to her ... and good. She felt the ooze seeping down her thighs, the surplus that he couldn't slurp up with his greedy tongue. Involuntary tremors rippled through her belly. She flung her head back and stifled a scream of pure delight as she thrust her box boldly forward against his hungry mouth.
At last she became the aggressor against Maloney. She half rose from the bed, gripping one of his ears in each hand. She pulled his face tight against her crotch. She rubbed her bush against his mouth in a desperate frenzy, shifting her weight from one leg to the other as she swabbed her shimmering quim against his oral channel and his chin and his nose and his eyes, washing him in sticky womanly juices.
"Holy God, Mary, give me a chance to breathe!" he cried, half-heartedly trying to pull back from the fury of her onslaught.
"Eat me, you bastard!" she hissed, nearly twisting his ears off as she bucked harder and harder against his face, screwing herself with his nose. "Get your tongue out there again! Shove it in deeper! Lick me! Suck me! Make me come!"
Maloney sank lower and lower, forcing her to follow him and squat over him, riding him into the floor with her snatch, until her legs ached from the unnatural position and she could no longer vibrate her hips with the same jackhammer insistency. But at last he sank so far he was lying flat on his back. She was able to move again, rubbing and scrubbing his face with her sex while she knelt over him.
She twisted around, never removing her twat from his mouth . His penis was standing up stiff to meet her, bobbing with eagerness, watering at the mouth, rising from its bush like a giant cobra from a black forest. She wasted no time on the kind of preliminaries he enjoyed. She grabbed his butt with both hands and flung herself down on him like a ravenous bitch going down on her dish. He cried out with amazement when he felt the entire length of his prong submerged in the lavish lushness of her moist mouth-flesh. Her nose was buried in his nuts, his pubic hair scratched her chin as she sucked and licked furiously, trying to encourage him by her example.
The result was everything she wished, and then some. Maloney was more powerful than ever before. His hands began to grope, to fumble, to explore. He grabbed her boobs, and she heard him murmur with pleasure as he cupped their heft. He raised his head into the spread angle of her thighs and once more she felt the delicious quivering of his tongue against her quim.
The horny pair ate one another like there would not be a day to follow the night they were loving under, and near-simultaneous orgasm was the result.
Her body vibrated intensely with climax, while his love organ pumped spurt after spurt of boiling jizz into her throat.
While the two still had strength, they decided to leave the twisted world of the von Bellinghausens and go off together to start a life on their own. They spoke briefly about how poorly they had treated each other at their meeting, and how Maloney had taken advantage of her on a few occasions. But now they realized that they cared a great deal for one another, and that, perhaps, their lives were fated to come together.
Mary returned to the main house to pack some clothing, while Maloney did-likewise. She rushed out to meet him as he drove up in the von Bellinghausen car, chauffeuring the lovely young lady to a life they both hoped would be what they were looking for.
Behind remained Erich, with his sick sexual ways, and Pamela, who would continue to be attended by Joy and the scantily-clad little ladies of the house. And perhaps that was the way it was all designed to be!
