Reforming Rebecca Read online

  Below stairs, James himself had initiated Annie, a willing parlor maid, into the delights of love, and later romped with Hetty, a scullery maid. If a young man knew enough to keep quiet, and to spend upon a girl’s belly, or her sweet bottom, or even in her mouth, what was good for the master and the mistress could be good also for the footman and the maid.

  The idea of a footman deflowering the daughter of a duke, however, set all those rules on their ear. Some well-born ladies delighted in welcoming to their rooms not peers of the realm but strong young footmen. James himself had received and accepted an invitation from a marchioness, and the unexpected nature of certain of her desires had opened his eyes very greatly—indeed, as he thought about what he might do to stem the tide of Miss Adams’ disaster, the disciplinary acts requested by Lady Merlon and willingly performed by James came strongly to mind.

  If William had gone to a married Mrs. Adams, in her bedroom, then James would have felt, and acted, very differently. But Miss Adams, natural daughter of the Duke of Panton, required rescuing for her own good and the good of Mr. and Mrs. Rand—and that of James himself.

  James had come to the stable yard with a bin of rubbish, and now he put it down and, going over to the little group, said quietly, “William Daren, I shall only tell you this once.”

  He waited until their guffaws had quieted, and they had noticed the fury in his eyes. “What’s this, then?” William said so saucily that James almost struck him. “You can’t abide another man havin’ a fuck in a pretty little maiden cunny?”

  The laughter returned among the three conversationalists, but James could hear in the mirth that John the coachman had withdrawn his full support, and that Harry the stable boy knew trouble was brewing—both knew, too, how much higher James stood in the estimation of Mr. Thomas, the butler, than did William.

  James said, in the same quiet voice that forced William to listen closely in order to catch his deadly meaning, “So you fucked a peer’s daughter. I can tell she was willing…”

  “You’re damn right she was willing!” William interrupted. “All I had to do was kiss her and she was saying she wanted to see what I had under my breeches!”

  “Shut up, William Daren,” James said. “You shouldn’t have done it, and you know it—and so do you, John, and you, Harry.” He looked at each of them in turn, and saw in their eyes the glimmering of the shame they should feel in such a circumstance.

  William turned sullen. “I didn’t spend in her, if that’s what you’re on about. She’s in no danger—’cept of bein’ a whore, I suppose.”

  James suppressed his sigh of relief at the news that Miss Adams would probably at least be spared the worst possible consequence of this dishonor. “Don’t you speak of her that way. She may be a bastard, but she’s much better in her breeding than you or I will ever be, and don’t you forget it.”

  Again he scanned their eyes, and saw that his words had their effect. Servants in Mr. Rand’s household—even callow ones like William Daren—knew what was owing to their employer and those of the same birth. Mrs. Rand, after all, was the daughter of a viscount, though William—in his liberal leanings—though it better far to be an MP than to be a peer.

  William had fallen silent, his eyes no longer defiantly looking back at James, but turned downward into the dust of the stable yard.

  James spoke evenly, doing his best to ensure that every word should be fully received and meditated upon. “I wish you joy of your fucking, William. But Miss Adams is a sweet young lady, and she must make a good marriage.”

  Now William turned his gaze upward with a sour face. “What do you take me for, mate? I’m not…”

  “I take you for a villain, mate, who can’t keep his mouth shut, and who will try to get his prick between Miss Adams’ thighs again as soon as he can, and that’s what I’m going to put a stop to. If I see you speaking with her again, I shall go straight to Mr. Thomas, and he will go straight to Mr. Rand. If I hear you—any of you—” he looked around again at John and Harry, “—mention her name, unless it’s to say how sweet and virtuous a young lady that Miss Adams is, I shall make sure you can never find a place in a respectable house again. Do you hear me?”

  William’s full lips twitched. “Yes,” he said finally.

  “John? Harry?” They nodded, John clearly feeling abashed and Harry simply afraid.

  James turned without another word and went back to fetch his bin, thinking at a furious rate of what he must do on the other, much more complicated end of this terrible tangle. He must somehow help Miss Adams return to the path of virtue, and his experience with Lady Merlon had given him an idea of how he might do it, but he did not know whether when it came to it he could dare put into action the singular plan that had formed in his mind.

  In the end, though, the end occurred only an hour later when he encountered Miss Adams in the hall and the troubled yet still somehow brazen expression upon her face spurred him in an instant to the words he had contemplated since departing the stable yard, and he acted on instinct and without hesitation. James had come upstairs to deliver the luggage of a Lady Ambers who had come to stay—a redoubtable moral force in liberal circles, whom James felt sure Mrs. Rand had invited in hope of securing assistance in Miss Adams’ coming out. When he shut her ladyship’s guestroom’s door behind him, Miss Adams was just emerging from her own chamber, a letter in her hand. Glancing down, James saw that the address read, William.

  James lifted his eyes to her face. As a well-trained servant, of course, he knew never to meet the gaze of a member of the middle or upper class without first having been addressed by him or her. Nevertheless James thought it imperative in light of that name of infamy, at least when written by Miss Rebecca Adams, William. He marveled for a moment how the name could be so elegantly inscribed, and by such an elegant young lady.

  Then he saw that her heart misgave her; he saw that she had meant to give the note to a member of the staff to take to William, but that on encountering James something had changed. Providence, he thought, had had enough good sense as to put James in her path at that moment, for he read in Miss Adams’ eyes the truth that she knew her peril, though perhaps she felt helpless to arrest her headlong flight into it.

  Chapter Three

  Confronted by the impertinent stare of the other footman—the senior one whom upon her arrival Rebecca had dismissed from her plans as unworthy of the attention she had given William—her heart suddenly quailed. At first she supposed that her discomfiture at his appearance must simply have to do with the disrespectful way he had met her eye, but a moment later, as she did her best to glare back at him, she realized something more lay behind the anxious racing in her chest—the chill of fear: she could see in this young man’s dark eyes that he knew what she had done with William in the little woods.

  “What is your name?” Rebecca said, trying to remain brazen and unashamed. Coquettes, she and Thomasina had agreed, must always be brazen. She attempted to ask the question in such a manner as to suggest that she intended to take up the subject of his impertinence with Mrs. Rand, and she set her brow haughtily to match her tone.

  That lofty brow, and the upturned chin with which she had done her best to accompany the implied threat of having the footman disciplined, however, did not last more than a second, for he seemed utterly unperturbed by it. The face upon which she had read the knowledge of her peccadillo—for it was only a peccadillo, and coquettes always had peccadilloes, it being practically a requirement of that natural path Rebecca had chosen—displayed not simply censure, but something Rebecca found much, much worse to contemplate: disappointment.

  How dare a footman express disappointment in the daughter of a duke, even in the cast of his eye? Perhaps to have surrendered one’s innocence, as the world called it, to another such as he, a servant, constituted the gravest possible peccadillo. How could it be otherwise, when the world seemed fixed on the idea that a girl’s maidenhood must be a treasure practically beyond price? That did no
t give this servant the right to show himself disappointed in Rebecca Adams, offspring of the blood of ancient nobility!

  From Mrs. Rand, perhaps, Rebecca might bear to undergo such a look of mingled pity and reproach, if she should discover the sin. With a sinking feeling, she saw that perhaps that had become more likely than she had thought it, now that this other kind of footman seemed to have learned of what William had done, how he had laid her back upon the bank by the little pond and raised her skirts, and as Rebecca blushed, spread the split in her pantalets to fondle her there, where she had learned at school to caress herself.

  How he had greeted her urgency to see what he had beneath his breeches with what Rebecca had instantly known, with a rise of heat to her face, to be a lustful smile that made her feel a moment’s regret to have made the indecent request. How he had complied, kneeling next to her on the bank and baring himself to confront her with the thing, the terrible thing she had over and over imagined in her little dormitory bed, imagined the husband Thomasina had seen putting into his bride, and, someday, Thomasina’s husband putting into her tender furrow, and Rebecca’s own husband putting into Rebecca upon their wedding night, and the ploughboy putting into the dairymaid’s furrow every day after he came from the fields.

  “Do you not know what it’s called, then?” William had said, as he brandished its shaft, with the odd, fluted tip of it only a few inches from Rebecca’s nose. He had pumped it gently in his fist, and something in the rhythm of his hand and the tension in his body had told her that it gave him pleasure to touch himself like that, as it gave her pleasure to rub the place at the top of her little slit where all the ecstasy seemed to gather and to grow.

  She had shaken her head, and the lustful smile, as she looked up into his face, had grown wider and even more lascivious, so that suddenly she had regretted this assignation and wished herself back in Mrs. Rand’s parlor, reading the novel she had started the previous day, Sunday in the Rand home, unlike at school, being a day when one might even read a novel.

  Rebecca had known, too, that even a coquette—in order to be a coquette—must not sell her virtue cheaply, and had said, “Put it away, now, William. Perhaps I will look at it again another day. I do not wish to know what it is called.”

  But she also knew that she had chosen this path, the natural path for a natural daughter, and she knew she must experience such regrets along it, for vice—she and Thomasina had agreed—had its price just as virtue did. Her show of reluctance, and even her actual regret, must be soon put away.

  “This is my prick,” William had said, turning suddenly wolfish and commanding, “and you are going to have it in your sweet young cunt in a few moments, girl. You’ve not been fucked before, I wager, so it will hurt at first, but then, after a few moments, you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.”

  Part of Rebecca had wanted to do something then to show how brazen and coquettish and shameless she could be. She had almost said she wanted to take the prick into her mouth, for she felt that must be the most shameless possible act, but her heart misgave her and William was content to return his attention to her lower body, under her skirts, until she cried out at his touch.

  William had not seemed to know where to find the extremity of pleasure Rebecca herself could locate, under her night rail and her bedclothes, in the dark of night, but to have a man’s touch there had seemed to make the sensation shoot through her body. The ecstasy had gripped all her limbs in so electric a fashion that she felt some alarm that she might swoon or—worse—attract the gardener’s attention by the noises William wrung from her.

  He had seemed a trifle anxious over the same matter, for he said, as he placed himself between her thighs and began to rub the furrow of what she now knew to call her cunt, “Hush, girl. Hush, you fancy little whore. I’m going to fuck you now.”

  Somehow to be called a whore that way, which should have been the worst thing Rebecca, as a natural child and thus instructed by society that she must be even charier of her dignity than a properly begotten young lady, could imagine, had not offended her, but had rather fired her blood. Along the path of the coquette lay many such moments of insult, perhaps delivered even by the prissy kind of suitor with whom Rebecca could never be happy.

  She didn’t want to be a whore, because she had heard her mother, from whom they had taken her away so early that Rebecca couldn’t remember her, called that too many times. Rebecca knew that her mother was not a whore, but rather a gentleman’s daughter, and so she knew that even respectable young ladies had that worst of monikers thrust upon them when, in the world’s view, they committed peccadilloes like giving birth to a natural daughter. To have the moniker applied to her by someone like Mrs. Rand would, Rebecca knew, presage doom: marriage to an unworthy man who could be persuaded to accept the damaged goods society would label whore.

  But Rebecca wanted to live—and now she wanted to fuck, as she had just learned to call what William had done to her. She had cried out loud when he tore through her maidenhead with a single brutal thrust, and drawn another grunt of admonition from the lusty footman as he began his motions inside her, “Quiet, slut,” but she had also felt some at least of that very new kind of pleasure, before he had pulled the prick from her cunt and she had felt the strange thick wetness upon her pantalets.

  When, later, that wetness had even more strangely stiffened into a stain, Rebecca had known again the regret that had flown away when William had touched her cunt, when he had been fucking her. Red-faced, she had scrubbed the stain out herself at the basin in her chamber, until she had noticed the blood there as well, and decided to burn the garment instead, though her other pair had gone to the laundry and she would have to go without pantalets for a day, then make some excuse for needing another pair.

  Rebecca knew she should, according to society, feel some modest qualm about that, and its seeming absence, as she contemplated walking out with Mrs. Rand the next day with nothing under her chemise, encouraged her. As she watched the garment disappear among the embers in the grate she had for a moment thought her shame might also disappear.

  She had climbed into bed and boldly touched herself between her legs though she had been very sore down there after her first fucking. She had marveled at the openness, and how she could simulate the motions of the prick now with her fingers, though it didn’t feel as nice as her old pursuits in the area of the tiny bud at the top. Quickly the pain had changed somehow into a sort of desperate pleasure, so that she had to cover her mouth with a pillow to muffle her cries as she found the shameless, whorish release she sought.

  But the two-headed emotion she had known as she labored to cleanse her pantalets, the brazen resolve to be unashamed of what she had let the footman do and the shame of having the literal stain upon her honor and her virtue presented there before her eyes, came rushing back as she asked the other footman’s—the very different footman’s—name. Surely he would tell Mr. Rand… but no, surely he wouldn’t?

  How did he know, though? Now she felt the heat come into her face in full force, doubtless turning it bright red even in the rather dim light of the hallway. He could only know from William.

  Suddenly the note in her hand, and the idea that another servant might bring it to William, seemed utterly foolish. The perception that the women of the ton who followed the path of the coquette must have a great deal more acumen than a girl like Rebecca had now, just starting out upon it, rushed in upon her for the first time.

  She and Thomasina had thought themselves so wise, having read so many novels in secret, having talked over so many times how they loved the bad girls in Mr. Trollope’s novels so much more than the good ones. Even one of those unfortunate bad girls, though, Rebecca realized, doomed to discovery and then reform or death, would never have been so foolish as to write such a note to a footman.

  William, dearest, come to my chamber tonight. My cunt longs for your prick. R

  She had thought that to write simply R would make the note somehow a secret
thing, but now all that foolishness seemed to come crashing down, and she found herself putting the hand that held it behind her, knowing however that this other footman must have seen it nonetheless.

  “My name is James, miss,” the footman said, “and I wish to help you.”

  “Help me?” she asked, desperately trying to pretend innocence of what he might mean.

  Then, to her shock, he spoke in an imperative tone that even she, a natural daughter set upon the path of the coquette, had simply never imagined a servant could use. “Go back into your room, now, miss. We must talk.”

  Rebecca’s eyes went wide. It was as if the natural order of providence’s universe had suddenly turned upon its head, and the sky had flashed lightning from the clear blue. Surely such men as this footman could not speak in such a way—their very constitution and human fiber could not allow it. She supposed a servant might have a wife, and might instruct his wife and command her to go here or to go there, but society had regulation. The world had orders and classes. To allow a footman to fuck her violated that regulation, of course, but the issuing of a command to her by such another represented a sort of offense that went far beyond William’s prick deflowering her maiden cunt.

  Far, far worse in Rebecca’s estimation, though, than the issuing of the command was the way she obeyed it. Automatically, as if James’ voice had some special power that might begin in the fact that he could clearly tell Mr. Rand that Rebecca had surrendered her innocence to the under-footman but extended very far beyond the threat that fact represented, she turned and reentered her chamber. She heard him follow close behind, and then she heard him shut the door behind him.

  “Miss Adams,” his deep voice said. “I know it will seem strange, but I must do my best to teach you a lesson, now. You had better take off your gown, and your corset and petticoats—your drawers as well. I will help with your laces. You will have your lesson in your chemise, and you will have it upon your bare bottom.”