Alouette did not need to shut her eyes, because the Prince was ravishing her from behind. He had her bent over the brothel's elaborate chaise with every layer of her favourite stage-dress peeled inside-out over her back. She only closed her eyes to do as the other girls taught. To conjure up a lover and put him in the place of the client. Then the juices might flow, and it might not hurt so much.
She evoked her 'Rock', the fantastical man of her dreams. The man she pictured in the audience when she stepped trembling onto the stage, a smile curling the scar on his cheek. The one who watched over her as she bathed; and whose deft, strong fingers she imagined in bed on troubled nights, while her sisters worked.
Rock's strength and calm appeared again, overpowering the Prince's rushing, brutal thrust. The young royal overcompensated for a small manhood while Rock -- she imagined -- would fill her deeply, but tenderly. Alouette's fingers reprised her fantastic lover at her bud and soon she burst little sighs, just like the breathy prayers her sisters made to their own phantoms.
Earlier, when the visiting Prince plucked Alouette, their treasure, from her protected place on the stage, the brothel had filled with gloom. In a private chamber, Madame prepared Alouette personally, gently shaving her sex over a porcelain bowl until she looked like the other girls. This rare personal attention should have made her feel special, but instead the moment had a suffocating horror to it. Alouette was a singer. Just a singer.
Madame's thickly painted lips pressed into a hard line when she surveyed the shaven pinkness between Alouette's legs. "If someone -- even someone as important as the Prince -- is to de-flower you, Gentille Alouette, then I will be by your side," she said when the royal party rapped at the bedroom door and Alouette jolted. "You are the beauty that draws in and beguiles our guests," she added. "I will not risk my livelihood for one spoilt royal!"
Now, Alouette's fantasy had gained such a fluid solidity that her fingers grew slick with her arousal and a crisis blossomed between her legs. But her mounting gasps only enflamed the Prince further. He gripped her naked hips and drove harder, until the obscene slapping together of their flesh sounded like a punishment, not love at all. Rock turned to thin, cold air.
She glanced over at Madame, who had offered to service the royal guard, so staying close. Alouette hoped she might intercede, but found her guardian's eyes closed in expertly portrayed bliss as the bodyguard nuzzled between her spread thighs.
Alouette started to panic. They said the Prince might as well carry a pistol between his legs, for the girls who had received his climax always 'disappeared'. There could be no risk of royal bastards turning up at the palace to claim the throne. And Alouette may be inexperienced but she had lived in a brothel all her twenty years. She knew well enough when a man was about to peak.
The Prince started panting, then to Alouette's horror blurted, "Madame! This girl... may receive... the royal seed!" Madame opened one eye. She shook her head emphatically at Alouette, tapping her mouth before arching into a perfectly feigned orgasm for the royal guard.
The Prince's thrusts already frenzied, Alouette leapt off his manhood and spun round, quickly taking the slippery, twitching organ in her mouth. He cried out in surprise and climax and she closed her eyes again, desperately evoking her Rock as thick, hot pulses flooded her tongue. She consumed the next frantic moments as quickly as possible.
Later as the Prince's servants dressed him, with Alouette still on her knees at his feet, Madame smiled and stroked her head like a prized animal. Alouette was happy, too. Despite the chilling between her thighs and the Prince's stubborn taste in her mouth, she wanted to sing for joy that her ordeal was over. However, she had made up her mind. It was time for her to leave home. With her share of monies from this tryst she would seek her own fortunes abroad as a singer. The minute the Prince left, so would Alouette. In the opposite direction.
Unfortunately, the Prince was impressed.
"Madame, this beautiful little songbird will come with me to the palace. You must name your price," he said.
Alouette dug her fingers into her thighs. Nevertheless, she bit her tongue, and let Madame speak for her. She had trusted this woman all her life. Madame knew Alouette only wanted to sing, that her voice was her destiny. But her guardian's hand stopped stroking, and that halting caress chilled her.
"Your majesty." She addressed his jewelled slippers. "This creature is priceless to us. She earns us over a thousand a year. I could not--"
"Very well," the Prince proclaimed. "One hundred thousand it is then, good day."
Within the hour, Alouette was speeding across the icy hinterlands in the last coach of the Prince's entourage, tossed about with the other treasures claimed on his travels. Unlike the courtiers and servants, she travelled in a goods carriage, with a barely adequate, light canvas roof. She clung tight while trying to calm her shivers at the bitter cold, her tears freezing on her cheeks.
It had been a tough love between the women at the brothel, but it was still love. Her erstwhile sisters had wailed from the windows while she was put into the carriage as if into a grave. As they embraced, Madam would not let Alouette see her face, somehow making the betrayal even worse.
Another heaving jolt threatened to toss her from the coach, the horse's hooves thrumming like the devil's own heartbeat, and she scrabbled again for purchase. Then it occurred to her, what was she saving herself for? A life as a concubine? Her songs reduced to the foreplay of a sexual slave? She would stand better odds against the winter... Then her sobbing stopped, her limbs relaxed, and she knew what she needed to do.
She let go.
#
It was dawn when Cephas -- hauling his own laden cart to the village -- was surprised by an unfamiliar outcrop on the road. "Oh, not now," he cursed in a thick plume of breath. If he didn't sell the season's last crop today he would have nothing to see him through the rest of the winter. No seed for next year either. Nontheless he knew he would be too dim witted to pass a soul in need.
Approaching, he surveyed the bundle of red silk suspiciously. He prodded it with his boot, as if it might unfurl and strangle him. He hoped it was just a body. He had not expected to be shocked, and melted, by the sweetest song. Whatever it was, it sang as well as any bird.
He stooped and dusted away snow the snow. A woman, not much more than a girl; her head folded in her arms and singing as if her life depended on it. He peeled back her arm, and her beauty made him flinch.
"Mademoiselle, you are dying!" He muttered as the girl, eyes shut, sang in oblivion to her peril. He rubbed her hands and face, breathed on her, trying to thaw her dreadful icy pallor. Without a further thought, he wrapped her in his coat, buried her amongst his produce and spun his cart round. Back toward his cabin.
Once inside, he wrapped the girl in all the furs he could find and put a weeks' worth of wood on fire. However, when she stopped singing, he knew this wasn't enough. He could only find the tiniest thread of a pulse on her wrist. Was that just the insensitivity of his toughened fingers? He was no doctor, but he trusted his instincts. He needed to raise the girl's temperature, and quickly.
He heated buckets of water in anything he could lay his hands on, and filled his old tin tub. Then -- trembling with the sheer impropriety of what he had to do next -- he unfastened her snow-sodden clothing. Quickly, he unlaced and tugged off the frozen layers as gently as he could, unwrapping the delicate creature's luminous skin to the warming room. The girl felt alarmingly inert as he pulled her dress off over her head, unlaced her corsets and peeled off her stockings. Finally, taking a deep breath for courage, he removed her cold, wet undergarments.
Distressingly chilled in his arms, he carried her over to the tub and lowered her into it, quickly covering her pale nakedness with a tarpaulin. He doused her neck and shoulders in more warm water until she was roused enough to start shivering. Then her renewed, soft humming encouraged him and he took her out of the quickly chilling water, wrapped in the canvas, and dried her vigorously all over.
He watched the ceiling while rubbing blood back into her, as if averting his eye might protect him from the mental pictures his hands made of the forms beneath the stiff cloth -- the tempting resilience of her curves and clefts -- before quickly wrapping her back up in the furs and laying her by the fire.
Then all he could do was wait, shake the echo of her body from his limbs, and the afterimage of her nakedness from his eyes. Despite his precautions, he had seen between her legs. The petals of her sex were shockingly bare. This woman might look like an innocent little bird, but she wore the professional grooming of a whore.
