My name is Lady Bathsheba Ottoline Lovecome and this is my diary.
These are not the depressive scratchings of some puffball princess. I'm no dowager driven loopy by indolent indulgence. These are the erotic thoughts, experiences and stories of someone in their prime... but housebound by a self-serving patriarchy. A patriarchy who's trapped his fully adult daughter in his manor house—rather than set her free at university with her friends—while she waits, financially dependent, for a suitable suitor.
Her patriarchy is no doubt, and I hope, reading these pages. I hope you enjoy them, Father. I've been much inspired by your library's top-shelf antiquaries...
Dear Diary (dear Father!) I'm also much inspired by my only companion in Lovecome manor, our gardener, Bill. He's my age, yet a fully independent individual making his own way in the world. Free.
I made this point to him on our first meeting.
"Free am I?" His voice is deep and honeyed. "Financial necessity isn't the same as freedom, Ma'am."
"You simply must call me Bash." I fear I stamped my foot when I declared this. "While we're inmates together we will address each other as equals."
"Very good, Bash." He doffed his cap!
Bill is square-jawed, twice my height and built like a tree. I hope to discover if he's treelike all over before the end of the day. (Specifically is it a log or a twig in his trousers? My investigations so far—quick glances and a delicious slide-by in the kitchen where my bum brushed his front—suggest log. Sigh.) It's a sunny morning now and I scribe this on my flimsily-dressed lap where I sit on a flowery white chair on the lawn. Bill is almost at my feet, preparing a flower bed with much shovelling and grunting. Sweat stains his straining shirt. I curl my toes in the grass. Do you think he will deduce from my bare feet that I'm naked under my dress? I will give him a flash of buttock soon and surprise him. Though he already seems... bothered.
His cheeks are slapped crimson and his pale blue eyes flit glances over my ankles. Each furtive look feels like a lick, hungry to get up my skirt. It squeezes me hotly in my hips and... let me wriggle...yes... has made me shamefully gooey down there. When I cross and re-cross my legs, the top of my thighs slip.
I wonder what he'd think if he could read these words?
Why wonder?
#
Tee hee.
I read you to him, Diary, and now he's smiling stiffly while smoke curls from his ears. I'm going to read every dirty thought I write to this man from now on. I told him this too. He doffed his cap again—a subservient gesture undone by a drilling stare at my hips, as if calling upon some kind of x-ray vision. Poor man, I won't show him what he wants to see until much later. Though I very much like the thought of him picturing my bits.
I know exactly what I want to tell him today. A story of someone I met in Switzerland, the head of my finishing school, a beautiful woman called Belle. I've been playing and replaying her experiences since I woke, and even though she's made me come already, she's left me needy. As you can probably tell.
Belle was an unusual head for a finishing school, being from a very humble background. We were mostly taught to be ladies by actual ladies, including duchesses and countesses. I struck up a friendship with her, perhaps because we looked similar, even if she was older and a more petite, refined version of me: Snow White to my Betty Blue.
She set up the school using her savings, and contacts, from working as a Lady's maid for the queen of a minor European state in the nineteen-sixties. Her country might have been tiny, but it was rich, or at least until King John took the reins along with his wife Queen Charlotte. They raised taxes and milked the locals dry. (Bill is tugging out a stump. How I'd love to milk him dry. Preferably with the tender grip of the milk-hungry place between my legs... I digress.)
#
Three Bells for Belle
by
Lady Lovecome
Belle was from one of those families reduced to poverty. The idle royals taxed so them heavily that often all their crops would be confiscated in lieu of what was owed. The country's produce was internationally famous for its unparalleled quality. It used to grace royal tables all over the world. Now only one royal table enjoyed the fruits of their labour, and what wasn't eaten simply disappeared. It was left to rot for all anyone knew. Many gave up farming all together, for what they didn't have, couldn't be taken.
However poor they were, when the royal housekeeper—A sour-faced, walking whip called Mme Couteau—came looking for new palace servants, people hid. It wasn't a job anyone wanted. She was famously cruel, and people were forced to work eighteen hour shifts for food and lodging (if a straw mattress in a basement dorm counted as lodging). Also, she only chose the prettiest, to feed the king and queen's lascivious appetites. And if an unmarried girl became pregnant with an illegitimate heir, this could mean exile or imprisonment or worse.
Belle hated Mme Couteau, and in a misplaced fit of defiance she refused to hide one morning when the woman came looking for fresh meat. It was a stupid thing to do, but looking back on it, Belle wondered if she knew even then that if she could get to those in charge, somehow, then she could do something about her family's—even her country's—desperate state.
Mme Couteau gasped when she caught Belle's enormous, insolent eye. A sharp smile twitched her cheek. She snapped her fingers, and suddenly Belle was gripped by two guards. As her parents wailed, Belle was marched away from her home.
But Belle was naïve to think she would get anywhere near the king and queen. She was made a pot girl, in charge of collecting and emptying the staff's chamber pots. The castle's plumbing was for royalty -- and Mme Couteau's cohorts -- alone.
It was a pissy, shitty job, yet every day Belle kept herself clean and ordered, just in case she might get a chance to elevate her position in the household. She didn't expect this opportunity to come from Mme Couteau. One cold dawn, while Belle poured pot after pot of steaming filth into the castle's drain, Mme Couteau popped up like the stench made solid. Dressed in stiff, black satin, she wore the gargantuan bunch of castle keys at her waist, permanently dangling at her front like a metal mirkin.
"It is Her Majesty's birthday tomorrow," she clipped. "You are my gift to her. When you hear the servant bell ring three times, present yourself."
"Yes, Madame."
"This is not a promotion."
"No, Madame. What will I—"
"Just... be clean."
The staff dorm sported a wall of a hundred spring-loaded bells, each marked with a room. Pulling a chord in any of the royal chambers would alert the relevant servant. A bell should only ever ring once. More rings meant the royals had been kept waiting and a beating from Mme Couteau would surely follow, administered with a flail of the monstrous palace keys to the girls' buttocks.
However, most nights, and some mornings, a bell would ring multiple times in quick succession, any number from two to six. At Belle's end of the dorm, a cluster of six suspiciously pretty women would jolt at a multiple bell, then one would press her lips and hurry from the dorm to answer the call.
Belle could guess where these beauties were going. The king's appetites were infamous. The queen's too, though there was never a man called to her rooms. Belle didn't know if she was relieved or not that she was gifted to the queen and not the king. She'd never been with a woman, but it was an occasional fantasy for her, and at least there'd be no risk of pregnancy.
Belle spent half the night scrubbing herself and preparing her outfit. The maid's uniforms were desperately impractical: sleeveless, but high-collared, tight bodiced but flaring into short, pleated skirts. Instead of tights they wore black woollen over-knee socks that did more to accentuate their bare thighs than keep them warm. Even their ankle boots were patent leather kitten heels.
When the other girls were called they rarely dressed, just pulled on a bathrobe, or wrapped themselves in a towel. Belle would be different. It was no surprise that the king and queen designed the maid uniform themselves, so Belle would look as good as she could for them.
It wasn't yet dawn when three bells jolted Belle from her short sleep. She rubbed her eyes and peered at the servant's board. She'd missed which bell had rung.
"Queen's bedchamber," whispered the copper-haired girl in the next bed, her brow wrinkled with a sisterly concern. Belle thanked her, dressed and scampered up the servant stairs to the queen's room, fastening the uniform's thirty tiny buttons as she went.
She stood trembling between two smirking guards at the queen's monolithic bedroom door and knocked with a bravado she didn't feel. The door immediately flew open. There, dressed in just her silken nightgown was...
A girl?
Belle had only ever seen the queen on their national coins. She supposed her to be much older. This woman couldn't have been more than a year or two older than Belle, her mid-twenties perhaps. Her hair was long and platinum, and braided to her shoulder. She had the smooth, apple-cheeked complexion of a dairy maid, not a vicious queen. She beamed at Belle, then, as if remembering her station, quickly pouted and looked down her nose.
Belle dropped to her knee in the special curtsy Mme Couteau had taught them, leaving her bowed at the woman's unshod feet. The queen had baby's toes.
"My God, Mme Couteau was right." The queen caught Belle's chin and tipped her face up. "You are exquisite. Everything you look at must feel beautiful." She stooped, peered into Belle, whistled. "Those eyes."
The queen's eyes were like polished steel. Belle felt harpooned by them.
"Bravo." The woman clapped, pirouetted and bounced away. "Come!"
Belle followed through a door into an entirely black marble room bigger than her family's cottage. In the centre glimmered a polished-brass bathtub full of lemony-fragrant water frothing with bubbles. Thick steam turned the morning sunlight, filtered through filigreed shutters, into rays. Belle was so overawed she didn't notice the queen had unfastened the bow on her nightgown and dropped it to her knees.
Belle averted her eye.
"You refuse to honour me with your exquisite gaze?" The queen braced arms on her hips, and tapped her foot. Even from the corner of her eye, Belle could make out the wobble of the woman's large breasts with each tap of her foot.
"I think only of Her Majesty's privacy."
"Look at me."
Belle did as she was bid.
