The "Owl's Head Inn" stands at a junction where two lonely highways intersect in the middle of a windswept moor. It sees a fair amount of traffic from trappers, merchants, soldiers, local farmers, and the occasional highwayman. Oliver Evans owned it for years, a widower with two daughters -- Elizabeth and Samantha.
I am Samantha. I like to call myself " The Harlot of Owl's Head Inn" because it sounds more romantic than just plain 'whore', which is what my sister calls me. She would know I guess, because she's the one who pushed me into that profession. Under the circumstances you wouldn't think she'd complain, would you?
We were not noble or wealthy by any means, but we were moderately well off and well raised. We were respectable girls who attended church regularly, went to confession, didn't speak to strange men, and all of that. Elizabeth and I even got along reasonably well until Theodore came along, and that's when the trouble began.
Theodore was a good looking young man in the neighborhood who often came over to the inn for a drink. We both found him very attractive, but as Elizabeth was the one who stood to inherit the inn once our father died, she was the one he married. He wasted no time in planting his seed, and my sister was positively swelling with it only months after the wedding. Swelling? Bloating might be a better word. Even her ankles were blown up to twice their usual size.
Theodore seemed unhappy with the situation. He never looked at my portly sister without an expression of regret for the trim little thing she had once been. It did not escape my notice that he frequently turned an interested eye toward me, just as he had done in the days before his marriage.
Unlike my sister, I still had a narrow waist balanced between ample breasts and hips. At eighteen I was beginning to be noticed by plenty of men who came into the inn and there were frequent inquiries about me. Theodore, who was the head of the house now that our father was gone, took it all in stride but usually with a rather frustrated scowl.
It was Theodore who woke my passions. Otherwise I would probably have married some nice farmer and become as fat and frumpy as my sister. It might have been a more respectable life, but not nearly as much fun. And ironically, although my sister meant for it to shame me, my seemingly unrespectable profession led me to a much more advantageous social position than would otherwise have been available to me. That is what this story is about; how an innkeeper's daughter went from whore to lady in the space of a year.
It started one night when my sister sent me to tell Theodore dinner was almost ready. I found him out in the stable, skulking moodily in the loft, staring down at the horses in an absent sort of way. "Elizabeth says dinner is almost ready." I told him.
As it so often did when he looked at me in recent months, his expression became quite wolfish. "She can wait." he said shortly.
"Fine." I answered, and turned to go back down the ladder.
"Wait. Come here." he said, indicating the section of floor right in front of him.
I was sexually inexperienced, but I wasn't naïve. I knew what the look in his eyes meant. I was inexperienced perhaps, but curious, and maybe there was a part of me that wanted to pay Elizabeth back for being the one he married. I closed the distance between us.
He leaned against the wall in an insolent sort of way and looked me up and down. "You're looking pretty good, Samantha."
"So?" I asked witheringly.
"So. Have you noticed all the young men looking at you?"
"I notice you look at me."
"You're better to look at than Elizabeth is these days." he snorted. "And forget touching her. Not that she was so fond of being touched anyway..."
"It's your fault that she's pregnant." I pointed out.
"She's the one that was in a hurry to have a kid. Not me. Come here." He took a step backward into the shadows.
"I don't know if that's such a good idea." I said, starting to turn away.
