‘I … I’d rather not say, sir.’
‘Oh, you have! Well, you will tell me all about it, Walters, or I shall fetch my cane from the study and then we will see how long your eyes remain dry.’
He laid on a smart stroke of the crop, making me jolt with surprise and suck in a breath.
‘Ow!’
‘I’m waiting.’
‘The master’s eldest son, sir,’ I said.
‘He took your maidenhead?’
‘No, sir, it never went that far.’ I tried to cast my memory back to what I had read of My Secret Life and the stories of liberties taken with maidservants. Jasper had a first edition, but I had not been allowed to touch it. Probably the pages were gummed together with nineteenth-century jizz.
‘How far did it go?’
‘He would try to catch me alone, sir, at all times of the day. He would tell me at first how pretty he thought me and how lucky the men below stairs were to have a chance of courting me. Flattering me, as it were, sir. Buttering me up.’
‘Buttering up a buttered bun,’ said Jasper.
‘Sir!’ I exclaimed, knowing a little too much rude Victorian slang. ‘At first I thought him harmless enough, just a young fellow with an eye for the girls.’
‘How old was he?’
‘He was at that time eighteen years old, sir, and just back from boarding school. I was bent over the grate polishing the coal scuttle in his bedroom, sir, when he came in and put his arms around my waist and began to kiss the back of my neck.’
‘Did you fight him off?’
‘In truth, sir … no, I did not. I liked the lad and I had thought of him a lot since he had started paying these compliments to me.’
‘You allowed him licence with you? How much licence?’
‘I would let him touch my breast, sir. I would let him lift my skirts and touch me there too.’
‘Touch you there? Until you spent?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I whispered.
‘But you saved your maidenhead?’
‘Yes, sir, for after a week of private assignations had passed, he began to court a young lady from a neighbouring town and I was heartbroken.’
‘The assignations ended?’
‘Not quite. I still let him … when he came upon me, alone, sometimes … I could not give him up. But I held out when it came to my virtue.’
Jasper snorted. ‘Virtue. What virtue is there in a thin sliver of flesh? You had given him very much more than you should have done already.’
‘I know, sir. I am ashamed.’
‘Ashamed, are you?’
‘But I have learned my lesson. I shall not give my heart again.’
‘But your body?’
I wondered what the best answer would be to that. I didn’t know how Jasper’s film was going to develop. Would Walters allow her master to touch her intimately? I decided, in a flash, that Walters was a sensual woman who wished to be bedded, but who did not wish to give anything of herself to any man. She would want Cruel Bastard to think he was forcing her. She would make him think that he was taking something she did not want to give. But he would be quite deceived.
‘My body does not belong to me,’ I said. ‘I am in your service.’
Jasper gave a little gasp, of admiration, I think.
‘That is an excellent answer,’ he said, and I think he addressed me rather than Walters. ‘Excellent. Perfect.’ He swallowed.
The tension in the air was affecting us both. Sweat beaded on my upper lip and I was grateful that Jasper had moved back behind me and was not watching my face.
I wondered if he had any inkling of my reading of the character, or if he thought I was being sullenly defiant. Either way, the scene would work.
‘In that case,’ he said, recovering his tone of authority, which had wavered a little, ‘I will use my property as I see fit. Part your legs, Walters.’
I spread them and, as he had described in his talk of Larkin, the split cloth revealed my most private parts to him.
‘I can see how red you are,’ he said. ‘Although, that much was clear through that thin cotton. But to see it uncovered …’
His fingertips brushed my skin, settling themselves around my lower lips, which were lightly downed with pubic hair, since I hadn’t been expecting him. It was more Victorian that way anyway.
‘This is what your young master got to toy with?’ he said, running one finger up and down each lip in turn.
My clitoris was straining for his touch, throbbing with need. It had been making its presence insistently felt since about the third stroke of the crop.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You let him put his fingers inside and get them good and wet and sticky, did you?’
He suited his actions to words, treating my clit to a judicious fingering.
‘Many times, sir,’ I whimpered. ‘Many times a day.’
‘Did you ever suck his prick?’
‘Yes, I did, sir, I did. I drank him down, sir.’
The rubbing grew firmer and he planted a thumb between my bottom cheeks, the better to hold me in position.
‘Even though you knew he cared nothing for you?’
‘Even so, sir. If he asked it of me, I did it. I could not refuse.’
‘You can’t refuse?’
I was strung as tight as I could be now, gritting my teeth against the enormity of sensation.
‘Whatever you ask … sir … anything … you … want … ohhh.’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he whispered, stroking me through it, bending low over me so that his cheek touched mine. ‘She belongs to me.’
I did, body and soul, but I didn’t want him to know it. I was too mixed up in my own heat and stickiness to disentangle the threads of what happened to me and what happened to Walters. We had, for that moment of undoing, become one.
Cruel Bastard had left the building, though, because Jasper lifted me gently to my feet and held me close, kissing my hair, caressing my still-hot bottom through the slit in my drawers, making me feel his heartbeat pound against my own.
‘It’s so good to be back,’ he said.
‘What, back in the Victorian museum?’ I said, with a yawn and a slight giggle.
‘You know what I mean.’
I thought I did, and it was a monumental admission. He was glad to be back home, but he wasn’t home – he was with me.
Did that make me his home?
A few days later, my day off arrived and Jasper took me on a trip to London.
He had promised me treats and gifts and general spoiling, but I wasn’t sure what he had in mind when we turned into a narrow cobbled street in Spitalfields and he led me up it.
‘Are you taking me to the Dennis Severs House?’ I asked, excited at the prospect.