The students around me in the lecture hall held their breath. "Feels like when they open the envelope at the Academy Awards," someone near me said.
We were attending Dr. Hightower's graduate seminar, "Art in the Age of Velvet Tea-Gowns." Rosy light from stained glass windows silhouetted the professor standing at the podium in her invariably perfect posture. Her auburn hair was imprisoned in a tight bun, and she wore a high-collared white blouse under a dark gray blazer and a below-the-knee matching skirt with flat-heeled black shoes. Her gaze slowly swept the audience, dramatizing the suspense. The scholar hired only one of her top grad students for her prestigious museum curator internship and we were about to learn her choice for this semester's program.
"Come on!" someone whispered. I was probably the only relaxed student in the room, because as an American attending Imperial College for just the summer, there was no way I would get selected.
Suddenly Dr. Hightower's gaze cut through the rows to exactly where I was sitting, and she said my name in her posh English accent, "Raymond Johnson."
I blurted, "Really?" and heard a smattering of laughter.
"Truly," Dr. Hightower said.
I stood and said, "Ma'am...uh, professor...I feel honored. Thank you!" In contrast to the BBC accents of my fellow students, my Texas twang made me sound like a cowboy.
"She always picks a guy," I heard a woman behind me complain.
"And always a hunk," said another woman under her breath.
Professor Hightower's gaze was still locked on mine, so I didn't turn around to find out who thought I was a hunk. I was flabbergasted at my great luck. Here I was, in London for the first time, and I had managed to land an internship at the British Museum working with a world-renowned art historian. I'd be spending the next two months assisting Dr. Hightower with the research and cataloging of Victorian-era art, clothing, textiles, and crafts donated to the museum. It was going to be somewhat intimidating - no, scratch the word "somewhat" - it was going to be scary working alongside such a famous scholar, and a peeress, no less: The Lady Emmeline Hightower. But what a shiny gold star to stick on my resume in sociology.
My first day on the job. I was seated at a workstation in a curator's studio located on the museum grounds. I was feeling a bit on guard as I awaited my boss, reminding myself to act cultivated in her presence. In walked the professor, pushing a four-wheeled library cart. She was dressed in humdrum attire - call it "prim academic" - but her green eyes shone with enthusiasm.
"Raymond, look what we've been gifted!" Neatly arranged in the cart were a couple dozen matching albums. The plush leather covers of each album had the same title in gold-leaf lettering on the spines:
Aphrodite's Daughters
, plus a volume number in Roman numerals. "It's Victorian-era photography." She grabbed a volume and opened it wide to reveal large-format black-and-white photos of a nude young woman. "Erotic photography! And from what I've seen, the condition of the collection is pristine."
My first peek at 19th-century porn jolted me. A single photo of the same teenage model took up each page. On the left page, she stood, hand on cocked-out hip, nude except for thigh-high white stockings over buttoned boots, her pussy adorned with thick dark hair. She posed in front of a penny-farthing bicycle -- but the bicycle's seat had been replaced by an obscenely large dildo. On the right hand page, she had mounted the bicycle, and the dildo was buried deep inside her. My boss was holding up the images in my face.
I had been on guard? Not for this! My cock had instantly roused and was nosing against my jeans. Not knowing what else to say, I asked "Who was the donor?" and gently pushed the book out of my face.
"Anonymous. Delivered this morning by package express. No return address."
Over the next five work days, my boss and I sat at a large metal desk, wearing powderless nitrile gloves, carefully going through the albums of erotic photos. Of course the images would never end up on display in the British Museum. However, the institution owned storehouses filled with all sorts of stuff preserved for scholarly research that never sees the public eye.
The boss drank Earl Grey tea, and I drank black coffee. We made digital copies of the photos, labeling each image file with a few descriptive words. Some of the frequently recurring models had names inked in the margins or on the photo itself: Evangelina Cuthbert was a favorite. Some models had married names: Mrs. Reginald Fitzsimmons. Mrs. Terrence Williams III. One model, posing as shamelessly as all the others, was even a peer: The Lady Agatha (we researched it, the title was real). Most of the women were nameless, so we assigned them numbers: Model #17, topless, white pantaloons. Model #23, nude, with rocking horse.
Even knowing that Victorian pornography was nothing new to an art historian like Dr. Hightower, I felt awkward perusing the bawdy images while seated almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the straitlaced scholar. Adding to my discomfort was my chronic hard-on. Many of the vintage photos strongly turned me on, which I honestly had not expected. After all, women of the 1800s did not shave their pussies or underarms -- or sometimes, even their legs -- so they looked nothing like modern, air-brushed pornstars. Their breasts weren't plastic. They seemed more...
real
...which lent the images an intimate feel. About a third of the women were Rubenesque, a body type that doesn't attract me much, but most of the models were surprisingly fit, a feature of their youth and a less sedentary era. I like long hair on a woman, and some of the models had hair down to the waist, or even past the hips. A few minutes into each day's work, and I would have to adjust my jeans so that my burgeoning cock could grow along my thigh without getting too crushed. My libido was getting a Victorian education.
"The upper class extolled a rigid morality and anti-sensualism," Dr. Hightower said, "but you can see what actually went on behind that masquerade." She handed me a photo of a nude young woman, literally wearing a masquerade mask, giving head to two men at once. The men were dressed in swallow-tailed coats and had not even removed their top hats. "The whole era was characterized by a secret obsession with sex."
Ha. My secret obsession with sex was overwhelming me. More than once I took a bathroom break "to induce a paroxysm," as they might have put it in the 1800s.
Dr. Hightower learned that I had never read any Victorian erotica. "I insist that you remedy your ignorance," she said. "You're a sociologist, Raymond. The erotica of an era gives a private view of the mindset of the entire age." The next day, she brought me a modern reprint of a pornographic novel, Autobiography of a Flea, first published in 1887. "Consider it a class assignment," she said. The ridiculous plot involved lots of incest, and ended with an orgy of priests and nuns. Both women and men were on display as objects for sex, and nothing more. But I'd be lying if I said the story didn't lead me to a paroxysm.
By now, I was viewing my boss in a new light. But it was not just a shift in my perception. I had grown sure that she was presenting herself differently. She seemed to be softening.
Thawing. It was a gradual progression. On the fourth day, she wore a trace amount of lipstick. Subtle. The last work day of the work week, she set her long red hair free from that awful bun. She did it nonchalantly. I was labeling a digital copy of a vintage photo: Mrs. Clarence Welby with a strap-on dildo, fucking a skinny naked gentleman -- Mr. Clarence Welby? Dr. Hightower undid her bun and suddenly her red hair spilled over her shoulders in a luxuriant cascade.
"Beautiful!" I blurted. "I mean...uh, yeah...your hair is very nice, professor. You should always wear it down."
"Please call me Emma."
"Sure, okay," I said. "And call me Ray. That's what my friends call me."
In the second week, she still wore blouse-blazer-skirt professional attire; but the blouse had taken a deep plunge, showing cleavage, and the shorter skirt reached to just above the knee. She had added eyeliner to her make-up. I detected a faint hint of expensive perfume. A progression, not as subtle. She was nearly old enough to be my mother, but I had developed an unmistakable crush on her.
At the start of the third week of my internship, my boss strolled into the conservator's studio wearing a yellow blouse over a blue denim miniskirt and high heels. My mouth fell open, and not just because she looked gorgeous, but because now she really had morphed into another person altogether.
"Wow!" I said, genuinely taken aback. "Look at you."
"What?"
"You look great."
"I do?" She gave the sexiest little spin-around, making the skirt flare at her hips.
"Emma...uh, how old are you?"
"Do your research, Ray," she said. "But before you find out, how old do you think I am?"
"Hard to say. When you were..." I hesitated. "You know...when you wore those matronly outfits, you looked like you were in your 50s. Today...?" I looked her over with undisguised wolf's eyes. She looked so fuckable! "Today you look like, maybe 31, 32?"
"Ooh, thanks for that." She gave me a bright smile. "Now come with me. We've received a mysterious donation, and I'm dying to find out what it is." She actually took my hand and led me down a long hallway to the back of the building. Not sure if our touching was appropriate, but I loved the sensation of her warm slender fingers in my grip. I stealthily adjusted my bulging cock in my pants, and she pretended not to notice. We stopped before a heavy door with an electronic keypad, and she entered a code.
Inside the spacious room, the far wall opened to a loading dock, two walls held floor-to-ceiling steel cabinets labeled alphanumerically, and the remaining wall held shelves storing a miscellany of items. I saw a bronze censer embedded with rubies the size of shooter marbles, a Tiffany lampshade, and a limestone chair that I think was Egyptian. A knight's dented shield leaned against shipping boxes for a Hewlett-Packard computer and printer. If I wasn't mistaken, the shield was a Templar artifact from the First Crusade.
"Is that real?" I said, pointing at the shield.
She laughed. "I have yet to find any stage props in the British Museum." She stepped toward a sofa-sized pinewood crate at the rear of the room. "This is what we're going to unpack."
I felt her excitement. "What's inside?"
"I told you: it's a mystery. I haven't the foggiest idea."
We got to work with crowbars, prying apart the slats. I learned that the crate had been shipped from a Victorian-era estate in Sussex. The entire estate had been bequeathed to the British Museum all the way back in the 1950s and the curators had already received its extensive art collection decades ago; most of it was now on exhibit or on loan to other museums. But it was not until the estate's dilapidated mansion had recently been torn down that a secret cellar was discovered, and in it, the crate. Since the original bequest still pertained, the crate had been sent to the museum, where it had just arrived - better late than never.
In minutes, our efforts revealed a rectangular structure with ornately carved mahogany bars spaced about 10 inches apart.
"Some kind of cage?" my boss said. "The Victorian elite kept all kinds of live exotic pets - birds, reptiles, monkeys; even big cats, like leopards. They also built decorative cages to display taxidermied animals, say, to create a jungle diorama. It would make a modern-day ecologist weep."
I wasn't listening. The bars were too widely spaced, and the interior was anything but a cage for an animal. The far side of the cage from where I stood held a low mahogany cabinet with drawers. The floor was carpeted with an oriental rug, now dull and moth-eaten, but it had once been elegant. Mounted on the exterior of the bars were blown-glass sconces for holding candles. The front door had a smaller porthole. What creature would be caged in it?
That's when I noticed the leather wrist cuffs. I caught my breath and looked closer and saw they were lined with soft fur. At the opposite end of the cage, fur-lined thigh cuffs were affixed to the bars.
Holy fuck!
This was not a fancy kennel for marmosets or ocelots.
"Emma! This cage is for humans! Look! See the cuffs for the wrists? It's for sexual bondage!"
"Truly?" Her eyes grew big. Was that academic enthusiasm, or was she turned-on by the cage's purpose? "But surely no person could fit in there."
"See the thigh cuffs at the rear? The woman's legs extend behind, they poke out through the bars."
"Why presume it was a woman who was caged?"
"Oh. Right. That was sexist."
