Part 4: Questions and Illustrations
Augusta gasped, and we both twisted to see who was speaking.
Sarah had slipped up close to us while we were preoccupied with our fucking, and was sitting on the meadow, staring hard at us -- which presumably meant at my legs and balls and Augusta's back and arse. She was smiling faintly, with her hands neatly folded in her lap.
"Sarah!" said Augusta, hastily clambering off me, "Are you
spying
?"
"Hardly, sweet Augusta," Sarah answered. "I made a pleasant stroll in the meadows, and stumbled upon this scene."
"She has a point," I said to Augusta. "We are right out in the open here."
"She did not continue upon her way," Augusta snapped.
"I'm afraid that little Sarah here likes to watch," I told her. "I mean, she likes doing the thing too. But she really only jumped me after she'd watched Jemima and me at it for a while. And she loves mirrors."
"Mr Evans!" Sarah gasped. "A gentleman should not say such things of a lady!"
"Well, a lady might have walked on by rather than stopping to watch her friends screwing -- um,
tupping,
as Jemima would say."
She held her annoyed look for a second, then cracked and giggled. "I fear that you are correct," she said. "I do enjoy too much to watch."
Meanwhile, Augusta had gathered up her robe and was holding it in a fetchingly modest but barely effective way in front of herself as she sat beside me, and she threw mine over my lap and my deflating cock. "We shall be more careful of you in future," she said.
"Forgive me, Augusta, Simon," Sarah said. She scurried over to us, and knelt in front of us. "All this is so new to me -- what is modest and what is not when we are giving ourselves so?" She leant over and kissed me on the cheek. Then she turned to Augusta and repeated the gesture to her, and Augusta smiled briefly.
Then Sarah leant forward again and kissed Augusta on the lips, staying in contact for several seconds. When she leaned back again, I noticed that both of them were looking puzzled. It was certainly an odd gesture; the six girls had been prone to affectionate but brief mutual kisses among themselves for as long as I'd known them, but this was downright sensuous.
"Forgive me," Sarah said again, breaking the brief awkward silence. "I was simply curious."
"I think that such things would be better directed to Simon," Augusta said. "Such passion passes best between a man and a woman."
"Does it?" Sarah replied.
"Hey," I said, "what's this all about?"
"I have been talking to the House, I should admit," Sarah said, "and this led me to some puzzling things."
"Oh," I said to Augusta. "I probably should have warned you all. The House is trying to understand human sex. It may be asking some weird and impertinent questions."
"Questions which lead to more questions, and to ... other strangeness," Sarah said.
"What do you mean?" I asked her.
"I perhaps should best show you," Sarah said, "back at the House."
Augusta and I shrugged at each other, pulled our robes back on, and followed her. She walked purposefully back to the House, and then to her room, where we all sat down on the stools scattered round the place.
"When the House asked me about ... relations between men and women," Sarah began, "I did my best to explain to it what I knew. But it soon became evident that some of its questions implied possibilities of which I was ignorant. For example, it asked of relations between men and men, or women and women."
"Oh," said Augusta. "I have heard whispers of such things, but..." she faded into confusion.
"I too confessed ignorance," said Sarah. "Indeed, I told the House that it might be able to tell me more than I could explain to it."
And I'll bet you sounded a little bit keen about the idea,
I thought. Then it struck me that, if I was right, the House might have understood more about Sarah than she realised. It wasn't human, but it seemed to have a lot more grasp of nuance and human motivation than I for one had originally thought.
"This led the House and I to talk somewhat, about ignorance and knowledge," Sarah went on. "In due course, it explained that it preserves
pictures
of events to which it does not pay actual attention..."
"Oh yeah," I said, "I should warn you all about that, too. The House has cameras... It can get pictures even where it honestly ignores things with its conscious mind."
"So I now understand," Sarah said, as Augusta frowned, looking worried as the implications of what she was hearing sank in. "And so -- I asked if it had pictures of things that might resolve my ignorance."
Oh, did you.
Little Sarah was getting a bit too clever with her voyeuristic impulses, it seemed to me.
"What did it show you?" Augusta asked carefully.
"House," said Sarah, "pray show me the scene from Miss Halstead's chamber that you produced for me earlier..."
In response, one wall of Sarah's room instantly became a screen, and once again, I was watching a view of Miss Halstead's room, with its dark-toned walls. I guessed that this was a little while after I'd last seen Miss Halstead; she was lying on the bed, still looking stunned and quiet but a lot more sane than when I'd last seen her. Georgiana was there too, bustling around, fetching her a beaker of water. She sat beside Miss Halstead as the older woman drank, and stroked her brow. "Come," she said, "you have lain here long enough. You might be refreshed if you bathed, perhaps."
