Isabella Awaening

Being the opening chapter of Isabella Silverto's story of remembrance and awakening in which a funeral brings back memories of a dark family secret and Isabella renews an acquaintance.

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Naples June 1736: The family of Alberto Silverto was in mourning. The family matriarch, and Alberto's aunt on his father's side, Donna Elvira Del Malachi Silverto had finally passed on and the extended family, now scattered widely over the Southern states of what we now call Italy, was gathering in Naples to pay their last respects. For Alberto, his wife Marisa and his now adult children, Gustavo, Maria and Isabella, the event put great pressure on their hospitality. Upwards of forty family members, distant cousins, uncles and aunts, would descend on their home in Palazzo del Coere and consume their bread, wine and whatever nourishment was not locked away. For Maria and Isabella in particular, the event was a great strain but, as good daughters and women of the church, they performed their duty without complaint. The older Maria had married well and her husband, a trader from Palermo, helped provide servants and food. For him, the funeral presented a useful opportunity to make connections with some of the family's more influential members.

Isabella, although also married, was living with her parents after her husband had "failed to return" from one of the former regent's interminable military escapades into the neighbouring province. Whether he had been killed or simply decided that the grass was greener somewhere else was not officially known, but Isabella had her suspicions and was in fact secretly relieved that the preening, prancing oddball was no longer around. Of course, she said no such thing and had dutifully worn her black dress and shawl and officially mourned her departed husband with daily prayers and candles for the requisite year following his disappearance. Her mourning clothes had been packed away these eighteen months when Donna Elvira's funeral caused them to be brought out again. Isabella secretly smiled as the dress was brushed and ironed. She knew she looked good in black.

Her long black hair, almond coloured eyes and sharp wit, not to mention her fair face and figure, had attracted admirers and suitors from near and far during her blossoming from an awkward girlhood in her late teens and early twenties. Only when her father had insisted on a match with Henri Jousta, the youngest son of a wealthy Florentine spice merchant, had Isabella's hopes of true love, or at least exciting romance - and perhaps some traditional Italian wickedness - been dashed. Henri was not to Isabella's taste at all. Short, slightly rotund and given to extravagant facial gestures, he proved to be an unexciting and somewhat irritating husband.

Perhaps worst of all for Isabella, he had very little interest in what the matrons called the "physical side" of the union. Isabella had spent most of her adolescence guiltily fantasizing about such things and after four or five months of marriage was wondering whether or not she had needlessly jeopardised the eternal life of her soul with all that sinful thinking. Henri was neither passionate nor well equipped for such things and spent much of the spring and summer high in the hill regions with his extensive sheep flock, and his shepherds. More than once, Isabella had wondered why her husband insisted on employing so many young shepherds. His military exploits also puzzled Isabella. Every year he would volunteer enthusiastically for one of the local prince's brigades and march happily over the mountain passes to subdue whatever rural province was this year's enemy. Henri always specifically volunteered to lead the brigade made up of the younger villagers and the son's of farmers. His failure to return from the last of these adventures was conveyed to her by an absurdly pretty, lisping youth from his former brigade.

Isabella knew that as soon as her year of mourning was over, her father had petitioned the local Bishop for the annulment of her marriage to Henri and had spent many hours since then plotting her engagement to the offspring of some strategically important trading ally. She sometimes wept at her prospects. At 34, she was now too old for the most eligible of bachelors. The best she could hope for was yet another weak but moneyed second son who, perhaps with luck this time, would at least show some carnal interest.

So, despite the work and the press of relatives, Donna Elvira's funeral came as something of a welcome distraction for Isabella. She piously received the pity of the women and did her best to remain appropriately sad and quiet during the week before the funeral. She was however enlivened to see her brother Gustavo return and take up his old room near hers on the second floor of the house. Gustavo was only a year older than Isabella and they had shared many childhood adventures. Gustavo had become a trader, just as his father had wished, and now sailed the Mediterranean making deals and, most likely, breaking hearts. Like Isabella, Gustavo had his mother's jet-black hair, Roman nose and brown eyes. He had the rugged good looks of their father and more than a hint of the animal nature that Isabella had wished her own lovers would possess. Behind the closed door of Gustavo's old room, away from the mourners, they now hugged and laughed with the joy of seeing each other once again. Questions bubbled from Isabella's mouth –where had he traveled? who had had seen?, was he happy? Gustavo just smiled and held her by the shoulders at arms length. "You are still Isabella the Talkative, I see," he said, "But you grow more beautiful every year!"

Isabella blushed and as Gustavo released her she turned away to wipe her eyes. She knew that her embarrassment, and her excitement at being held and admired by her brother, was rooted in her own adolescent fantasies and from her knowledge of a secret that she alone had kept all these years. She kissed Gustavo quickly on the cheek and left, excusing herself by saying that she had a great deal of work to do and that they would catch up later.

Late that night, Isabella lay on her bed, exhausted from the work of the kitchens and the endless formal socializing with relatives. She remembered Gustavo's words and his touch and the memories of fifteen years ago came flooding back. Memories of a series of events, she now knew, that held the key to all that had befallen her family ever since and of which she was supposedly blessedly ignorant.

It had started with normal adolescent curiosity. Isabella had been a studious young girl with a flair for languages, history and drawing. She had just seen her eighteenth birthday and naturally curious about the ways of men and women. Isabella's family, particularly her mother, had never been secretive or prudish about matters sexual but Isabella had never seen a man naked and, despite the number of nude statues and paintings in the town, was perplexed by the whole concept of a man's sex organ being both alive and soft in his pants and hard and erect when "doing it". The gossipy girls of the town swapped stories and theories which even Isabella, naïve as she was, could tell were often no more than childish supposition. She had resolved to see a live naked man for herself and it was her brother Gustavo, then a boy of nineteen, who was to provide her opportunity.

One afternoon, after Gustavo had returned from school, Isabella hid in a cabinet in the bathroom they shared on the ground floor of the house. It was a large, sunken tiled room with a rough stone floor, terribly cold in winter but cool and pleasant in these summer months. The bathroom was structurally separate from the main house, perhaps a relic of an older dwelling on the site, but a covered portico with a large wooden door joined it to the main house and a narrow stairway led from the rear corner to an alcove on the second floor where Isabella and Gustavo had their bedrooms and their elder sister, Maria, her apartment. Large and deep cabinets and storage boxes lined one wall and the washstand, backed by a large gilt-framed mirror stood opposite the particular grated cabinet where Isabella was hiding. As usual, Gustavo came home and went immediately to bathe away the sweat and dirt of the day. He entered the room whistling and casually stripped, throwing his clothes into the corner for the servants to collect later. He then stood in front of the mirror, his back to Isabella's hiding place. Gustavo was clearly admiring his body, flexing arms and chest and turning to one side and then the other to inspect his profile.

Isabella could clearly see his sex dangling in front of the little sack that held his balls. She gasped a little when she saw it. It was larger than the one on the little statue of David her father kept in his study, and it stuck out from his body more. As she stared, Gustavo started to stroke and rub the end of his sex and Isabella could see it grow in length and girth and stand out even more. Gustavo poured some oil into his hand from the bottle on the shelf above the basin and had closed his eyes as his hand movements became more rhythmic and faster. He groaned softly and swayed his hips in time with his stroke. Isabella was wide eyed. Gustavo's penis filled his fist, its head swollen and shiny with the oil appearing and disappearing as he pumped his hand over the full length. It was pointing almost straight up. Isabella was staring and breathing hard. She was unsure what was happening but she suddenly realised that her own hand was between her legs, rubbing with the same rhythm as Gustavo was pumping his cock in his hand. Gustavo quickened his pace and after only a few minutes, and with a look of divine ecstasy on his face, he arched backwards, pumping his fist even harder as his cock spurted creamy liquid in a graceful arching curve onto the wall and floor. Gustavo's muted groans gave way to panting as he knelt and shakily wiped up his seed with a washcloth. Isabella, meanwhile, had almost blacked out in the closet as a feeling of pleasing warmth had engulfed her own body, spreading out from her cunny to her stomach and legs and chest. She had collapsed, breathing hard, onto the towels piled at the back of the closet. Her hand and tights were wet with her juices and she found it difficult to focus her eyes and catch her breath. She just lay there, feeling warm and very much alive, as Gustavo finished his washing, wrapped his young body in a towel and climbed the stairs to his bedroom.

Isabella retreated to her room and lay on the bed, just as she was doing now, fifteen years later as a grown woman. She now knew exactly what had been going on and smiled, but in those days her mind was racing. She was confused and aroused. Even now, the memory of that first afternoon spying on Gustavo gave Isabella a tingling in her sex. She wondered whether she had the energy to enjoy the special piece of scrimshaw she kept in her underwear drawer. Its eight inches of intricately carved and polished whale ivory had been her faithful companion through many a lonely evening since she was nineteen. The memory of Gustavo masturbating in the bathroom was a frequent prelude to an hour's pleasure with her horn of joy.

By the time she witnessed Gustavo's self-pleasure in the bathroom, Isabella had been well aware of her own body changing and she welcomed the feelings of pleasant warmth she had experienced when rubbing herself, or horse riding, feelings that always promised more and which were often accompanied by thoughts and images that she knew were, if not sinful, then certainly salacious. But it was that first taste of her brother's secret sexual world that was, for Isabella, the start of a life-long delicious obsession with a powerful erotic force within her soul. From that day on, no matter how many times she tried to quell her lustful thoughts or stay her hand when it sort her warm nest in her half-sleep, no matter how much she prayed or sought the help and forgiveness of Mother Mary, Isabella remained a convert to Aphrodite, an apostle of the temple of womanly desire. She had long-since stopped trying to fight it or resolve her guilt. She was a fallen woman. Paradoxically, for all her beauty and burning desires, she had only rarely ever experienced the "real thing", although that fact neither absolved her sin nor took away the pleasure of self-inflicted ecstasy.

After seeing Gustavo pleasure himself before her once, there was nothing Isabella could do to resist a repeat performance. Every week, and sometimes twice a week, she would take up her hiding place in the cabinet and wait for Gustavo to come home. On almost every occasion she was rewarded with a show and she herself became adept at bringing herself to a quick and shuddering climax. There were times when Gustavo did not make his semen appear and others when he took a long time to finish (Isabella enjoyed these longer sessions even more) and there were at least two afternoons when Isabella was afraid that Gustavo knew he was being watched. But she was never found.

After nearly six months of her spying, Isabella was quite a connoisseur of her brother's body. She adored his cock but also admired the thickening hair on his chest his bulging upper arms, his strong thighs and firm buttocks, which became hard like rock as he leant back and shed his seed. Her own explorations of her body were becoming more adventurous. She started to experiment with objects, pushing the handle of her hairbrush into her opening. At first she felt slight pain but persevered until it would slip in and out freely and give her such pleasure that she fantasized about men's cocks filling her and pumping her full of their gooey seed. She started to look at men and boys differently and became sensitive to the looks and subtle unspoken message exchanged between women and their men.

It was around this time that Gustavo's bathroom routine changed in a way that that would reverberate through the family till the current day. Isabella had taken up her usual spying position and was settling down for what she hoped would be a lengthy session. She had brought her hairbrush, removed her tights and arranged a towel to catch her often-copious fluids. Gustavo entered as usual and undressed. He was already partly hard but made no move for the oil bottle and did not touch himself. Instead, he combed his hair, spread out two towels on the stone floor and sat, apparently waiting for something to happen. And it did. Isabella was too shocked at first to fully understand the implications of her sister, Maria, quietly entering the bathroom and locking the door behind her. No words were exchanged between the naked brother and his older sister. She knelt before him on the towels and slipped her bodice from her shoulder, fully exposing her breasts to his gaze. Gustavo stoked her breasts before bending forward to kiss each nipple. Maria loosened her hair, long and dark like Isabella's, and threw her head back as her brother stroked and suckled her beautiful twentyone-year old breasts. Isabella could see that Gustavo was fully erect now and she watched as Maria reached over and took his hard sex in her hand.

Isabella barely comprehended the scene before her. She thought that maybe Maria would stroke Gustavo's cock for him and was immediately jealous, thinking that because of her long vigils in the cabinet that she should have that right, not Maria. She almost burst out of her hiding place to claim her right to her brother's erection. But just then the scene shifted. Maria stood up and shed her long skirt exposing herself to be completely naked underneath. Even Isabella was stunned by her sister's beauty and sexual allure. Her honey coloured skin, long legs and the curve of her tummy and hips, the way her breasts hung and swayed gently. She was a vision of Latin womanhood standing in the pale light from the high frosted window. Even at this realization of her sister's smoldering sexuality, Isabella's first thought was that Maria should know better than to go without woolen tights at this time of year; what would mamma say? Maria knelt again and she and Gustavo kissed deeply as their bodies touched and pressed against each other. Isabella realised that she was witnessing something more than an innocent if furtive testing of the adolescent waters. She remembers thinking "They will go to hell for this – and so will I!"

Stifling again her urge to leap from the cupboard and stop this wickedness, Isabella became entranced as her brother and sister for the next hour engaged in acts of adult lovemaking that Isabella had not even imagined. Maria lay back on the towels and opened her legs and Gustavo bent his head to her sex. He kissed her there and was clearly feasting on her juices as she moaned and gyrated her whole body, eventually rubbing her mound into his face with such ferocity Isabella thought that Gustavo would be suffocated. After a few minutes, Maria let out a low guttural moan and rolled her head backwards and forwards. Isabella recognised the sound and shared Maria's powerful release as she found herself breathing deeply and rubbing herself with great force. Gustavo rose, smiling wickedly, his face wet and shiny from his nose to his chin.

Maria sat up and grabbed him, kissing him deeply and licking her wetness from his face. Much to Isabella's horror, she then returned the favour, engulfing Gustavo's cock in her mouth and moving her head to pump it just as Gustavo would do with his hand. Gustavo held her head as it rose and fell in his lap. He also moaned and was soon pulling her away.

They embraced a while more and touched each other all over with their fingers and tongues, a symphony of gentle caresses, kisses and kneading hands.

Just as Isabella thought they were finished, Maria rolled onto her back and drew Gustavo onto her. She spread her legs as he half-knelt, half lay, over her, his still erect cock resting on her thigh. Isabella saw her take his cock in her hand again and this time guide it directly into her open dampness. They both gasped as he entered her completely. Isabella gasped too as she simultaneously slid the handle of her hairbrush into her own opening.

The lovers rocked as one, their eyes locked and hands still exploring each other. Maria at one point raised her legs high as Gustavo thrust himself in and out of her with great force. Several times Maria's back arched, she moaned deeply and seemed to loose control. Isabella too was experiencing wave after wave of joyous release, her hand and the towel under her being splashed with her warm fluid as she met each wave with harder and quicker thrusts. She imagined it was Gustavo's cock inside her and that it was she, not Maria, he was loving so passionately on the hard floor of the bathroom.

Uncoupling momentarily, the brother and sister changed positions. Maria assumed the posture of an animal on all fours and Gustavo mounted his sister from behind. From where she was watching, Isabella could not see the entry and momentarily wondered if he was putting his cock into her shithole – something she was confused about but had heard was sometimes done. The groaning and thrusting continued unabated and the lovers rested and changed positions every few minutes. Gustavo seemed to have so much energy and his animal-like grunts and barks clearly further aroused Maria who would reply in a similar vein. Just when Isabella thought their lovemaking would go on forever, Gustavo's face went red, his tempo quickened and he thrust his cock even deeper into Maria's open cunny. Suddenly he pulled it out, throbbing and engorged, he let out a long low groan and the muscles of his buttocks clenched in spasms as his seed flew three metres across the room, splashing onto the floor just in front of Isabella's cabinet. His release went on and on, finally subsiding as Maria, holding his balls with one hand, ran her other up the full length and squeezed a final drop of creamy liquid from the tip. She caught it with her tongue and swallowed it with a look of both triumph and satisfaction.