Chapter 1: The Golden Girl
Every year as the first chill of Autumn began to bite into Summer's soft, ripe heat, the Duc de Charenton threw an immense fete for himself and those he favoured. The Duc had a reputation for eccentricity, even for cruelty, but only those who attended knew the extent of it. His invited guests witnessed all manner of extravagant displays. The fortunate among them were granted the privilege of partaking in what was offered. The ones whose bodies were offered to his guests, however, those lovely girls and proud young men who were taken into service, ah, they experienced the Duc's "Feast of the Fall" in another fashion altogether.
She was not special nor set apart for particular attention, our Golden Girl, Dorée. Not at first. She was simply one of many young peasants from the surrounding farms sent to the Duc for the evening, for which her step-mother received a silver demi-écu. Dorée was meant to serve in the Duc's chateau, and so she did, for that first night and many to come.
She served as a lamp.
Naked, gilt, and fitted with candles, she was set to stand along the chamber walls, a golden statue of living, sensitive flesh. There numbered a baker's dozen of them, girls and youths, all bound to a night's service that left them confused and humiliated. Dorée, however, was the only one to betray signs of another reaction. She, alone among them, was confused, humiliated...and incredibly aroused.
But let us begin at the beginning of our tale.
******
"Must I go, Maman?"
Dorée cast a pleading glance up at her step-mother, who was examining a silver coin in the banked firelight and murmuring to herself.
"Clipped, it is. Just a bit. Just a bit. It will do. Yes."
"Must I?
"Yes, I said! All the village girls must serve some time or other. It you weren't such a bony sticky thing, the Duc would have had you last year. Now you've filled out, you'll serve nicely. You must go and do whatever is given you to do."
"But the girls who come back from there never speak of it."
"If they never speak of it, you've no cause to think on it."
"The shadow that crosses their eyes, Maman-"
"Enough!" The old woman's voice rose, causing Dorée to flinch back. "You'll not insult the Duc! You're to go up tomorrow morning to present yourself. Do as I say, or join your sister in the streets, I care not."
Dorée bowed her head, thick tawny locks falling to curtain her face. Her eyes, wide and golden-brown as a spaniel's, closed momentarily then opened, distant and dutiful.
"Yes, Maman."
Dorée climbed the ladder to her small attic bedroom. Her limbs heavy were with dread but her eyes were wide-open and sleepless. So, she decided to spend the night in prayer. Clad in her white linens, she knelt down by the window as the light of the full moon spilled in all around her. She tried to present to God above a picture of innocence under threat, in hopes of being spared. But as she knelt for an hour, then two, all she felt was the hardness of the floor beneath her knees and the ache of muscles held constricted in a posture of devotion. A strange chill slipped through her, raising shivering patches of gooseflesh across her moon-bleached skin as if fingers brushed up her spine, though no-one touched her that night. In that state, her prayers faltered until she knew not what she asked.
"Let me be as I am," she whispered. "Let me not be changed as the other girls were changed. Or if I must change, Seigneur, let me become my truest self."
The night was silent. No star flared, no meteor fell in answer to her words. The very wind held its breath and gave no answer. But the silence heard her, and whether it was God who replied or some other power, none can say. Either way, Dorée slipped into slumber at the windowsill, and there she stayed, dreamless and unmoving, until the dawn of the day that would grant her prayer -whether she willed it or no.
An hour after dawn, a tall, thickset, hawk-nosed man arrived to collect Dorée. He loaded her unceremoniously into an open wagon which already held several other girls from her village. Dorée cringed at first to be so exposed. Everyone working in the fields along the way to the manor could see that she was being taken up this year. She glanced fearfully at faces she knew, expecting to see pity or hear cries of derision, but they were all studiously blank or turned away from her. Closed. Unacknowledging. Though the new day was bright and fair and full of birdsong, the girls seemed to catch the mood of the people and stayed quiet, not daring to whisper to each other until they reached the chateau.
Even the back door of this magnificent edifice was imposing. Dorée would have quailed before it and feared to knock if she had been on her own. As it was, she barely had a moment to take in the strange, elaborate device of crossed dagger and chain carved into the door's ebony panels before she was pressed forward by the man behind her. As they were herded in, there were finally gasps and exclamations. A kind of excitement overtook the young women as they noticed the fine oak panelling of the corridor. The ceilings were high and gracious, even in these back hallways, and the tall windowpanes were of glass, rippled but fine and clear enough to see through to the manicured grounds. If the back hallways were so well-appointed, what might the grand dining hall be like? Even if they had to work hard at cleaning the hall, surely it would be worth it to stay in such a fine mansion for an evening. Some began to whisper in dawning anticipation at the possibility of serving the Duc's table while dressed in a fine uniform, surrounded by beauty and luxury.
And then they entered the servant's washing chambers. It was a long, cavernous room without windows, lit by torchlight and all paved in flagstone. Along one side there were already a number of comely young women and, against the opposite wall, a line of virile young men. To her shock, Dorée saw that every one of them was naked, without a single shred of clothing to cover themselves. Some were twisting their bodies, as if seeking to hide behind their own lithe limbs. It was impossible, however, because each was chained with their hands behind their backs and their feet apart, shackled at wrist and ankle to two long parallel wooden boards that were embedded in the wall along the length of the room. The young men were red-faced as their members responded to the presence of so many naked female bodies held out of reach before from them. The girls all appeared to be looking away modestly, though as Dorée watched she noticed a few glance up at the men under shaded eyelids. It was inhuman, Dorée thought, to treat them all in this manner!
Before she could open her mouth in protest, she was seized roughly from behind. All she could see of her assailant was his thick, work-hardened hands clamped around her upper arms. He drove her before him straight across the room and stood her against the far wall, facing it with her hands on the rough stone. He kicked her feet apart a little. Then he began, methodically, to strip her. He did not bother to unlace her dress, but simply tore it at the seams where it was weakest and pulled it down harshly to her hips. The fabric bunched up, stopped by the curve of her buttocks. She tried to squirm away from him, but he caught both of her wrists in one massive hand and hauled her arms over her head, pinning her to the wall. He jammed a thigh up between her legs and hoisted her onto her tiptoes. She tried to struggle free, but all she succeeded in doing was tearing the dress even more. Her captor shifted the leg that pressed between hers just enough to shuck the ripped dress down over her bottom, leaving her in nothing but her stays and chemise. She bucked hard against him with her back, unable to help herself. Clucking his tongue, he pressed the sensitive bare flesh of her underarms, face, and bosom harder against the cold stone wall. With his other hand he gripped the back of her neck and held it firmly to stop her bucking. He held her like that until her instinctive struggles died down and the only movement she made was to tremble with the cold. When he was sure she was listening, he hissed,
"Don't. Move."
There was the sound of a blade being drawn. Dorée froze. Her skin twitched in sudden vulnerability. She knew what he was about to do.
Slowly, he cut the laces of her stays and threw the desecrated garment away. She quailed in her final layer, a thin, soft chemise that came to mid-thigh, until he cut that from her as well. He let the fabric drop away with the perverse suggestion of a gentle caress. She was down to her bare skin.
All of a sudden, Dorée felt it once again: that shiver up her spine, the same as when she knelt in prayer. She heard an amused sound behind her as gooseflesh prickled visibly on her arms.
"It's going to get a lot colder than that, sweetmeat," the guard said. Then he unceremoniously dumped a bucket of water over Dorée's head.
She heard the other girls from her wagon-load scream as the same was done to them, but she held her tongue and stilled her fighting this time. She had gained a sense of what was happening. They were simply being washed. She and the others who'd been brought here were country folk who slept in lofts and fields. They were coated with grime, and probably smelled of the byre. Of course they had to be cleaned up before they served the Duc. The way it was happening -the brutality of it- was unnecessary, but then again, the manor staff didn't have time to accommodate the privacy of every homespun peasant girl. Who was she to judge the ways of nobility? Perhaps it was always done this way, and she just never knew it before. So thinking, Dorée bowed her head under the next deluge. If this is how it was done here, she would endure it. Dorée stood quietly as her body was rubbed down with rough lye soap until her skin turned rosy pink. Her tangled hair, too, was scrubbed and brushed out with little consideration for her comfort. It had seemed a mousy, tawny dun colour before washing, but now that it was clean, it fell in waves that would turn honey-gold when dry.
"That'll be her best feature. She's plain enough but for that golden hair," one of the servants scrubbing her remarked to the other.
"They'll have to call her the Golden Girl, instead of the Golden Boy," the other replied with a braying laugh like a donkey's.
Dorée felt a confused mixture of offense and pride. She knew she was no great beauty -she ought to, given how many times her step-mother had told her! -and it was heaping insult on injury for them to mock her so casually. But at the same time, their praise of her hair and the way the locks she could see around her face gleamed bright in the firelight made something in her breast swell with warmth.
'Vanity, away!' She admonished herself. How could she be proud in the midst of such humiliation? And yet, it seemed that vice could rear its wicked head at any time.
After the bath, Dorée was chained against the wall with the rest of the girls. She was close enough to feel the heat coming off of their bodies, and to hear the sobbing gasps of the young woman next to her.
"Courage, sister," she whispered. "They're just cleaning us up for service. This is surely the worst of it, and it will be over soon."
