This is a story of erotic fiction intended for an adult audience. It is set in the Victorian era of England. It starts slowly, setting the scene but does become deliciously decadent...
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Jessica looked out the coach's window to the imposing mansion at the base of the long lane. She recalled with a smile her many teenage visits to Lord Redden's home. The manor house was eclipsed from her view as the coach turned down the lane. The tall hedges on either side cast long shadows in the autumn day's late afternoon sun. She remembered the beautiful gardens that lay beyond the hedges to her right and unspoiled forests beyond the hedges on her left. She had never seen the forest in autumn, as all of her previous visits were summer affairs. Her last visit here had been the summer just after her 17th birthday.
She turned and smiled to John, her husband of 18 months. She could not believe her good fortune in gaining such a handsome and cultured gentleman for herself. Tall at two inches over six feet; his blond hair, arresting blue-grey eyes and powerful physique made him look much older than he was. At 22 he was only three years her senior and heir to the ancestral lands of the Brenner family.
Jessica was the eldest of five surviving children, all girls. Her mother had died in the futile childbirth of a stillborn son when Jessica was 14. Her father was a self-made millionaire industrialist. He had literally climbed from rags to riches in only ten short years. Jessica had known privation and hard times as her father's climb had started in her ninth year.
He had been working as a millwright for a mining firm when the mine had closed. Fortunately he had some money set aside. Looking about for something to do, he had invested some of his hard earned money in a wool and dyeing plant lower down in the valley. A well-read man at a time when most were illiterate, he had recognized early the poor quality of the wool from the upper valley and set about to teach some of the herders the knowledge of better animal husbandry gleamed from the local libraries. He had immediate success and the wool from these herds was far superior to all of the wool in that section of the valley the following year.
Soon, more of the herders were coming to him for advice, which he freely gave away, asking only that they brought him their wool first at sheering time. Two years later he had all of the best wool from the area, increasing the wool plant's and the local herder's profits by more than half over their best years.
Her father had a certain knack for management and found companies that were doing poorly that he could buy into or buy outright using the extra money he had earned from the wool, and then would turn them around. Soon most of the industry in the area belonged to, was controlled or was partnered by her father. Within five years he had made his first million, his meteoric rise disrupted only briefly by the death of his wife. Two years later was making almost a million pounds in profits per year! Unheard of riches for all but the loftiest of the gentry!
Without an heir her father had sought to make marriages of conveniences for his family. Jessica had been to a visit at Lord Redden's mansion in her sixteenth year when she had the good fortune to encounter her future husband, John Brenner. The youngest of four boys his father dotted on him. As he was, at the time, not in line to be the heir when he had asked if he could marry Jessica, his father had sought out Jessica's father for a marriage contract of convenience for both families.
For the truth was that the Brenner fortune was slipping through the family's hands. With four boys and three girls to prepare for their place in the world, the fortune would not survive intact being split amongst them, which meant that only one the girls could offer the best dowry and at least two of the boys would have to fend for themselves in the world of commerce! Jessica's dowry was meant to help the youngest son do just that.
Here, Jessica's father's management skills came to the fore. He taught Lord Brenner's serfs some animal husbandry skills, brought in a new estate manager and turned the profits around within a year. With the inclusion of Jessica's dowry, the Brenner fortune was now building and could have provided for all of the seven children.
Darkness clouded her mind as Jessica thought of the three older brothers who had died in such tragic circumstances. Brian, the second son whom she had never met, had gone off to war and never returned; killed on the battlefield only a few weeks before Jessica's betrothal had been announced.
Charles, the eldest son, had also gone to war but had returned. Unfortunately he had contracted Syphilis and unknowingly passed it along to many of the local women before, two years after his return, its source had been traced back to him. He had died with no legal heir seven years after his return from war and six months after Jessica's wedding.
David had also died tragically less than a year after her wedding. Jessica had been there to witness the event. Jessica loved the hunt, whether it was fox hunting or Pheasant shooting, she never missed an opportunity to join in. She had been there just to the left of David on a Pheasant shoot when a bird he had winged fell beyond the fence on his right. He had gone after it himself, hopping the fence and dropping the freshly loaded shotgun, which had fired into his groin. David had died in the most horrific pain less than three days later, the last day spent in total delirium. He left a widowed bride in the late stages of pregnancy who had given the Brenner family yet another girl.
This meant that John was now the heir to the Brenner title and fortune.
Lord Brenner looked to John to produce the next heir, but so far Jessica had not fallen gravid, despite their considerable attempts at doing so! Her friends who had married before and even after her had all fallen gravid and some were now well along on producing a second child in their marriages!
Jessica flushed at the thought of her wedding night...John had not been allowed to partake of the local village maidens due to his elder brother's indiscretions...so he had come to their marriage bed a virgin as had Jessica. She remembered their fumbling first attempts at sex, their mutual discovery of what delighted and what didn't, their growth in sexual exploration and mutual passion and the shared revelations of what heightened these passions. John almost always brought her to orgasm and she ensured he had the greatest pleasures she could provide for him! They had enjoyed immensely learning about sex...and still enjoyed learning new things!
Jessica's thoughts were abruptly terminated as the coach came to a halt in front of the mansion.
