Unspeakable Shaking Pleasures

by Lucy Debussy

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

"Now as they take their pleasure, I shall take mine..."

A Spanish Inquisitor's daughter breaks out of piety to tap into her talents as a dominatrix. A woman inhabiting a male identity as a sailor explores a heady sexuality that dances across gender lines.

An exacting auctioneer loves putting the bidding paddles to good use, and a journalist follows a travelling circus to discovers a carnal awakening with the man who keeps the aerialists flying...

The erotic stories in this collection each feature women stepping into their sexual power in the most unexpected and delicious ways.

Compellingly immersive, sensual and stunningly written, these tales will speak life to your desires. Delve into their sumptuous beauty and delight your senses.

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 176

Sample

She liked them polished to a shine.

She said she liked to see her reflection in them when they were held up for bidding in the auction house ; the numbers crisp and white, the wood veined, knotted, buffed, brandishing the bidder’s wealth.

Oh, how they loved to oblige her, those clerks, those professional bidders. Such pride they took in their work. Beeswax, butter, leather softener. The ritual of rubbing and cleaning, smoothing and shining the paddles released hormones in them they hadn’t known since they were schoolboys. No one at the auction house thought to ask why she only employed young men. The more pertinent question on everyone’s lips was how a woman of her birth had acquired the position she had – wielding the hammer, as it were. No one knew where she had come from, what her lineage was and whether there was ever a Mr Auctioneer hovering somewhere in her spectral past, for though she was clearly no spinster, the gentlemen of the auction house only ever knew her by the name of Madam.

Madam had a spectacular eye for fashion. She had clung on with curious fervour to the S-bend corset, which thrust her bosom forward into the eye of the beholder, her rear aloft and out, although it had been ten years since that fashion – of the Gibson girl – was first sketched. She wore a high masher collar when she was at the auction throne, peaked at the edges with Belgian lace, stiff as ice, plunging down to revel in the deep valley of her chest, a chest that had aged with the elegance of a Chippendale : soft, noble and full of secrets. Her waist was nipped and she had even been known on occasion to sport a bustle, which, rumour had it, bore a small trapdoor on the seam that ran along the buttock crease, the lifting of which would reveal Madam’s supply of medicinal brandy – essential lubrication, she vowed, lest the rowdy buyers became too much for her delicate throat.

Her fragrance was exquisite. Some of the gentlemen thought she always kept a sugared cherry lolling around her mouth. Others that she bathed in almond milk. One man in feverish confession once said that she used a face powder beloved of the cruel nuns at his convent school. When she passed him in the corridor he always felt the sting of a well-pickled birch smart into his rear.

They bid hard for her and they bid fast.

And how she loved to see them all out front consulting with their clients, waving their shiny paddles in the air, frock coats, the froth of their collars framing carefully cut moustaches and groomed beards. No one ever dared question why the gentlemen of the auction house never, not once, not in a blue moon, not even at the end of a particularly tiring day, ever sat down.

A second before the hammer hit, she’d give a wink with her left eye – the one without the monocle – to the winning gent and he’d know his buyer had trumped up the requisite spondulicks to win the item. On one rare occasion they’d all let a Raeburn go for under a hundred thousand, and no one got their ‘come­uppance’ that day.

But when they did, the pleasure she meted out would ache for hours.

First a letter would arrive at the winning bidder’s room, the paper rolled up tight as a cane : an invitation to Madam’s chambers.

Madam’s private chambers were reached by a corridor that slunk through the basement of the building at approximately the same level the River Fleet had once flowed. The auction house in a past life had been a courtroom ; Madam inhabited the former gaol. Perfumed in furniture polish and spilling over with antique spoils, the only hint to her dwelling’s penal past was a cell, grated with an iron grid of boot-polish black that led off the lounge. It was usually concealed behind one of her Ottoman-era screens, kept, so she said to respectable guests, as a cupboard, a fancy, a curio, a delight, ha ha.

But the gentlemen of the auction house knew differently. They knew that when they turned the hidden corner into Madam’s curio, they would behold a sight that would set the blood in their collared throats racing, send their starched breeches into a state of frenzy, make them wish they had bid higher.

For the higher the price they procured for Madam, the harder she would spank them.

Madam, it turned out, was not only a collector of Spanish fans, French oil paintings, Medici poison jars, but also of certain antiques that never even made it close to her hammer. High was the guide price for these rare objects but firmer was Madam’s will. And Madam’s will, when tickled to covet something, was impossible to deny. In this way she had bought on the basest of black markets for a courtesan’s ransom the original piece of furniture once known as the Berkley Horse. You could see its shape even through the cell grate, if you squinted hard ; if you had gimlet vision that liked to peer into dark spaces.

It was A-lined like an artist’s easel, with legs on one side and a tilted table on the other, a hole carved at the top and one at the midriff for face and genitals to be held in place, strapped with traditional leather belts, the way 1820s flagellants’ would have been when tied by Madam’s great heroine, London’s most celebrated Georgian bircher, Theresa Berkley. Theresa had birched aristocrats, men of war. She had rendered highwaymen unable to let drop their bottoms into their saddles for days on end, and they had paid her handsomely for it. She had smacked the cheeks of actors, peddled her sadism to spies and politicians, wrecked the posteriors of high-ranking master craftsmen and collected silver trinkets from their guilds in lieu of payment. Men had come from all over Europe and beyond to take the ‘English pleasure’ from her. Sometimes at night, when Madam was alone with only her medicinal brandy for comfort, she would take a nip in a Medici poison flask into the chamber, stroke with her noble aged hand that beloved scaffold and whisper into the past, sharing secret sweet nothings with the ghost of old Theresa, swapping stories of the men they had whipped on the table’s polished surface. Its wood was the colour of arabica coffee, its scent somewhere between oak, tobacco and eighty years of ardent sweat that had trickled between its veins and knots.

Sometimes, on being guided into the cell by Madam after a win, and on seeing the beastly structure, the men would tremble. They were allowed to remove their own shoes and stockings. Madam would do the rest, unbuttoning them from their shirts like Christmas gifts, peeling off a glove to run her fingers across their prize hard torsos, sometimes catching the curls on their chests in her colossal diamond ring, not always by accident. She would unbuckle their belts and help herself to a good look, sometimes a good scoop with her palm. She could feel the pulse beating in their ankles and wrists as she strapped them to the board. Madam had a hand for strapping a man tightly. She could taste their port breath in her own mouth. She could see the goosebumps spring to attention.

Once a lucky fellow named Benjamin Oaks had persuaded the Duke of Bath to part with over a million pounds for a small piece of German silverware. Such a feat had called for a bonus, and so that evening Madam had appointed a ladies’ maid to sit underneath the tilted table in her chemise, sucking off Oaks’s embolon as he was spanked. But usually she worked alone.

The gentleman bound, the fur on his peachy buttocks spry and quivering, she would take from his personal effects the wooden paddle he had used to win the auction, so lovingly rubbed and polished and shined for her. She would count aloud on her fingers the number of thousands the lucky gent had managed to claw out of his client, then she would lift her hand into the air.

The sound of the whack seeped into the stone walls. It echoed into the cavity of the ancient River Fleet, and – Madam liked to indulge in a little fancy from time to time – was perhaps there captured and locked forever.

He sighed. He moaned. She spanked again. Again. Again. Whack. His voice was a gravelly roar. She spanked harder, again, again. Sometimes she would pause to wipe the perspiration from the small of the man’s back with her silk handkerchief, a gentle, uncharacteristically tender gesture. Other times she’d just let it run to his ankles, pooling on the floor where eventually it would be met on the other side of the tilted table with a spurt of iridescent liquid, as shiny and precious as any Renaissance pearl she’d had under her hammer.

Afterwards, the gentleman spanked to exhaustion, Madam would turn to another passion of hers.

She was a keen amateur photographer – a passion that tallied with her love of mechanical invention – and she had a collection of fine cameras, plate boxes, daguerreotype stands, velvet curtains to pop one’s head beneath, along with the accoutrements of chemicals, flash powders and silver mirrors that enabled her to calculate the perfect image at any time of day, with any shape of subject. Madam was a perfectionist in everything she did. She was nothing if not thorough.

She would have chosen a selection of the best cameras for the job in advance and laid them out on her tool table – an Eastman Kodak or a folding Rochester. Now she would retrieve the perfect one. If he could see far enough over his shoulder to realise what those clinks and scratches meant, Madam no longer cared. She was sizing up the frame – portrait or landscape, depending – and the aperture that would best capture what she wanted to possess : the texture of the grazes, the depth of shadow in the smarts.

Then, she’d load up a tube of flash and with a hot saltpetre explosion, seize forever – in close-up – those razed buttocks with their avant garde display of blotches. Did Madam ever think to exhibit these treasures, to tout herself as a creator of modern art? Or did her ego never stretch that far? It seems we will never know, for she left behind her no diary, nothing to explain her motives ; only the pictures themselves. By the time of her death she had amassed a collection of over two hundred images. Two hundred pairs of stung buttocks, glaring in black and white and sepia, the monochrome barely disguising the flush. One or two of Madam’s later ‘portraits’ were in full colour, and on these the scarlet came out shockingly.

They were found in a sixteenth-century spice chest in the guts of Madam’s lodgings, not long after the wisp of her soul passed into the same realm as Theresa Berkley’s.

Oh, how Madam would have laughed, how her bosom would have burned with pride, how her un-monocled eye might have winked, if she had lived to know that only yesterday, her sordid gallery of paddled posteriors had gone under someone else’s hammer for only slightly less than a Raeburn.

There were eight sailors who worked in the stokehold. Four ordinary stokers, one chief stoker, one checkman and a petty stokers officer. Marylou was one of the stokers but she called herself Max when she was onboard. She strapped her breasts down with cotton bandages and worked her biceps every evening with cans of tomatoes to keep them hard. She wore short-sleeved shirts to show the bulk of her arms, and sometimes she stuffed a single fol. . .