Joy V. Sheridan writes

Charity Amour

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE part 2

All eyes, masculine and feminine, were glued to the balcony.

Madame d’Esprit, with imperial glances and with the nuance of an empress of old in her mien, smiled victoriously. She was exhibiting her latest captured fleece, like some remnant - Hellenistic. And that was precisely what she hoped the young woman would do for her: milk the reprobates who tasted at her tables so regularly. Charity would go, after a preliminary introduction all round, to the highest bidder. 

Madame’s eyes might have appeared to be focusing upon her one main objective as she surveyed the sea of faces below, but in truth, she was becoming anxious to conclude the business.

Her loins were beginning to feel once more the need for the dark man who even now slept an intoxicated deep sleep in her own quarters. A thunder of hand-clapping greeted the two women as Madame, in the position of seniority, encouraged Charity to descend the darkened staircase, which was being swiftly illuminated by goldliveried flunkeys bearing flaming torches: the dullness of the girl’s drugged state not being discernable behind the camouflage of the elaborate, jewel-encrusted mask Madame d’Esprit had tied about her eyes. 

Such was the nature of flamboyant theatricality, elusiveness and sequences of titillation being enacted at that time at the Château des Amourettes, that it should really surprise no one that similarly dramatic, intriguing scenes were being prepared elsewhere on the estate. Not one. But two.  

Fibbins, had he stayed with the heavy chaise bearing his lordship, Lord Rispian, accompanied by his two henchmen, would himself have been surprised that the vehicle did not continue its journey to the house, but instead, had turned off up a rutted pathway. Some distance up this track, the coach had finally come to a standstill, well out of sight of any alert or observant guests likewise purportedly en route to the celebrations. 

Fibbins had been missed, but it had been assumed that like so many of his hired kind he had detached himself from the coach when he had needed to attend to a call of nature. They did not quibble that the man was gone. Not without intelligence of his own, gained by the circuitous, well palmed coins his man Mellors distributed amidst the worst paid of Madame d’Esprit’s staff, Lord Rispian had come into possession of the knowledge concerning the misuse Madame was making of the trust he had encharged her with. 

Knowing her of old, he had never considered she would dare cross him in any of his enterprises. Therefore, he intended to surprise his erstwhile mistress with a surprise and untimely visitation.

Indeed, it had been none other than his man, Jarvis, out on a preinvestigative spying mission, whom Molly had encountered. 

Had Lord Rispian kept the same sort of surveillance within the environs of Montérique, however, a very different sort of intelligence would have reached his ears. 

A little before three a.m. the threesome, biding the coachman stay put, headed off towards the Château des Amourettes. On another part of the estate, other eyes and hands were also at work with the business of surveillance. But these intruders were in no respect friendly towards the habitués of that house of pleasure: nor its visitors, nor indeed, to an English Melord such as Lord Rispian. He, after all, had more than a vested interest in the doings of Madame d’Esprit and the house. Of these foraging and furtive men, clad to blend in neatly with their agrarian backdrop, one or two had stared with speculative gaze upon the ghostly thin streamers hanging from a branch here or upon a bush there, puzzling about the tokened meaning of such a thing. 

Back at the Château des Amourettes, John Fibbins - lowered into the bowels of the house - had made himself more than tolerably comfortable with a bottle of choice French wine. There was a handful of other lackeys - coachies and the like - scattered about the confines of the large, subterranean room which served to hold them for the duration of their masters', and in some instances their mistresses’, pleasures. But Fibbins held his tongue and kept his own counsel. 

He wondered if, at some point, he shouldn’t try to make contact with his disguised sister, Molly, to see if she had been able to unravel any of the bindings of mystery concerning Miss Charity Cottrell’s equally enigmatic and mysterious coccoonment. But, enjoying the warmth of the place and the good flavour of the wine, he had been lulled into that state, which says he would be better advised to wait for a summons from His Lordship, Lord Seyton Clover. 

Thinking upon His Lordship made Fibbins wonder: “His Lordship," he mused," Wonder how ’e’s enjoying the doings upstairs...?” 

His Lordship had, from his seductive encounterings with the amorous Madame, been given very little to musings and deducings, for he was, at that precise time - a little to the three a.m.- deeply enslumbered. 

Oblivious to all, bar the relaxation in his limbs which had been achieved by two methods. One, his ardent fucking with the aforementioned Madame d’Esprit, and secondly, the nature of the aphrodisiac he had partaken of. He missed, therefore, all the commotion which was taking place in the ballroom: missed Charity’s artificially manipulated good spirits, her flirtations - Madame had coached her arduously and well in such etiquettes – had no idea whatsoever, that dawn was about to bring light and bring light also, to Lord Seyton Clover’s dimmed consciousness!

Molly, after watching the spectacle upon the balcony and thence straying to the perimeters of the now darkening ballroom, had witnessed sufficiently long to see the lascivious relish with which Charity had been passed from hand to hand. Noting also, the young girl’s apparent enjoyment as this degenerate, or that, felt up the soft wealth of her enormous mammaries. Had seen her laughing, as one hand or another, tickled between the splayed alabaster of thighs she presented for their delectation, upon this lap or that. 

Molly, exasperated by all that she had witnessed, was capable of assessing the monetary nature of Charity’s eventual despoiling. She would go to the highest bidder, once the party was bidden to break up. Despite the lateness of the hour, for it was now after three a.m., Molly felt the adrenaline rushing through her. She would keep alert and awake and would rescue the young woman, even if there was no other to assist her. It irked her sense of justice to see what the evil, calculating, over-made up hussy - Madame d’Esprit – was up to. 

Reassuring herself that her trusted knives were still in a rapid handling position, Molly withdrew towards the entrance of the house. She had to think and she had to think fast. Not that she anticipated encountering too much opposition, for the paid-for and the payers were obviously alike in that they were experiencing the exhaustion of their capricious debaucheries. 

She stepped nimbly over a pair of fallen rakes, their snores even then beginning to compete with the toothsome sawings of the stringed ensemble. It was a cacophony of sound fortunately spared Molly as she headed toward the door. She relocated the wrought iron staircase taking her back down to the kitchens. 

She had decided that she should gather some edibles. For, if her mission to recapture the abducted beauty was successful, they should be in need of sustenance for their journey to freedom.   She shivered. There was something, definitely something, about this...this... Château des Amourettes which, even amidst the gaiety and movement of the night’s entertainments, drew one into a cocoon of immobility; of a process of mummification with regard to good resolve, creating an itching restlessness which seemed impossible to locate and remedy. How she loathed the house, the grounds and all that it represented. Inwardly, - as she found the staircase - she reiterated her earlier feelings: the sooner she was away from the place, so much the better!