Given to the Club by Emily Tilton
Chapter 12
Helena
As the other members of the club turned back to their papers, the doorkeeper, Jones, who had indeed come to see me stripped and humiliated, stepped forward at my guardian’s request. I could see in the man’s face that he knew precisely what Gerard wanted: his kind but frankly admiring eyes told me that he had done the same service for many willful young women.
“Don’t make a fuss, miss, if you please,” he said as he began to loosen the straps that held me to the chair. “I have the honor of leading you to the chamber of pleasure.”
As Jones freed me, I turned to see that Gerard had taken a step back, to regard me from behind the chair with his arms folded across his chest. The look in his dark eyes seemed unreadable.
“And what…” I began, my voice sounding so strange to my own ears that I had to stop and swallow hard, then try again. I felt as if I could no longer be the young lady who had that voice, after my guardian had displayed me before his friends and placed the awful governor in my most private place. “And what will… will befall me in…”
I found I couldn’t even say chamber—let alone of pleasure. My face went hot, and then I heard a beeping sound. My eyes went wide as at the same moment I located its source in Gerard’s hand and I felt again the operation of the governor: the way it stopped my private part from growing warm, the mere shadow of a tingle making my forehead crease. The furrow in my brow only deepened as I realized that the device had left, in my thoughts and feelings, the idea of what might occur in the chamber of pleasure—and the notion that my guardian and his club had discovered in me the sort of girl who belonged there.
Desperately I began again, and finished my sentence as best I could, doing everything in my power to turn my face to stone, and knowing that I succeeded hardly at all. “What will happen there, sir?”
Gerard allowed Jones to unfasten the last restraint, the belt that held me down upon the chair, watching in silent satisfaction as the man helped me to my feet. When it appeared my guardian didn’t mean to answer me, I felt my face threaten to pucker into a weak, tearful plea, but to my surprise—and sudden, if small happiness—I managed to keep my composure. I held my eyes upon his handsome, bearded face, hoping my dignified demeanor, despite the degradation of my nudity, would shame him into some concession.
Then I started, for I felt Jones’ hands—and not merely his hands—touch me from behind. I had accepted the man’s help to a standing position without thought, for servants performed such duties regularly, helping one out of a vehicle for instance. I had not really even thought of my nakedness, as I had taken his proffered hand.
The way the man in his doorkeeper’s livery touched me now, however, his hands upon my waist, represented an enormous affront to my modesty—the modesty at least that I had had until this terrible day. So shocked was I that at first I didn’t even feel that the man had something in his hands, which indeed represented the purpose of the touch. I leaped forward, trying to get away, but Jones clearly knew his job very well: he held me firmly around the hips, and then I felt the stout leather belt with which he had already encircled me there, and had already begun to buckle behind me.
“Helena, you minx,” Gerard said, his eyes cold, “hold still for Jones. Young ladies of your kind need restraining, to keep them obedient in the chamber of pleasure.”
I shuddered violently, struggled against the hands that now took hold of my wrists and bound them into the cuffs at the sides of the belt. I felt how even that resistance drew a response from the device between my legs, and I watched my guardian smile at another beep from the device in his hand.
The sound brought me back to my resolve, though, and I remembered the power I had found in myself before they had strapped me into the chair: the power to deny. Perhaps the governor could control my body’s responses, and even tell my captors of their strength. It could not, however, see my true thoughts and feelings.
I stopped struggling, then, and I stood straight despite the horrible bondage into which the doorkeeper had placed me. I looked Gerard straight in the eye.
For a moment my guardian held my gaze without speaking. A small smile curved his lips, of evident satisfaction with my demeanor and my appearance, naked and bound before him. A perverse, answering rush of pride rose in my chest that threatened to send the blood surging to my cheeks again, but I fought it angrily back, and lifted my chin.
“Come along, miss,” Jones said, putting his hand on my elbow. “You’ll see the professor in the chamber, won’t you now?”
Another jolt of muffled arousal between my thighs made my nose twitch, but I didn’t waver in my glare at Gerard.
He spoke at last. “You know what will befall you, now, Helena. You are a clever girl, and Doctor Elias has just demonstrated to you how very badly you need fucking. You simply have not allowed yourself to understand that the man who will deflower you, and fuck you for the first time, in a very few minutes, is I.”
My lips parted, my heart thudding hard in my chest. I had never heard that word before. It sounded sharp and terrible. I had never heard it, and yet the way Gerard had said it made my bottom squirm and another beep come from the controller in his hand. The resistance went out of my muscles, and I let Jones turn me toward the back of the room, and draw me the first step in that direction.
My eyes, directed at the floor, caught a glimpse of my gown and my underthings placed carelessly to the side of the chair. Without considering my bound state, sheerly on maidenly instinct, I turned toward them, sure that I would be allowed to don my clothing now, even if I would be required to remove it again in the odious chamber of pleasure. Gratitude even filled my bosom for a moment at the idea, as weak as the defiant part of my mind found that emotion.
“No, miss,” the doorkeeper said, a tinge of compassionate regret in his tone. “You won’t be needing your clothes no more. Not for a long while anyway.” His strong hand upon my elbow pulled me back around so that I lurched awkwardly, feeling in that instant all the degradation and even the ridiculousness of my nudity here in the morning room of Drake’s.
Around me the finely clothed gentlemen in their armchairs no longer seemed interested in me; they had all become absorbed either in quiet conversations that I knew probably concerned politics or finance, or in the daily journals. I, naked, had been delivered over to the doorkeeper, to follow him to my shameful destiny.
A single sob escaped my lips, even as I felt how the mortifying predicament affected me, down there, and the way my governor suppressed the bodily response. For a moment my right hand, bound to my side, tugged toward my lap, its fingertips stroking the crease of my thigh as if of their own accord. The fingers stretched vainly toward the place where I didn’t feel what I wished to feel, where the masculine control of my most feminine place forbid the pleasure for which I suddenly felt desperate.
The instant I noticed the wanton, instinctive movement, and understood how thoroughly it demonstrated the presence of those degrading needs my guardian spoke of, I jerked my hand away. With a supreme effort of will, I kept myself from looking around me to discern whether any man had seen the movement. Once again I raised my chin, gazing only toward the door as Jones led me away, doing everything in my power to keep my face impassive.
“It’s just down the hall, miss,” said the doorkeeper as we reached the back of the room. I didn’t respond; it seemed the very act of walking upright required all my attention.
I suppose the corridor down which Jones led me truly did not occupy a great deal of distance in the real world. In my troubled mind, though, the journey from the morning room to the two doors at the end of that hall took an eternity.
The carpet underfoot cushioned my bare feet, and I didn’t see any other members of the club. As I approached those doors, however, I began to make out the paintings with which some talented artist among the Drake’s membership had graced them. Every step seemed to occupy more space, and more time, during which those images could humiliate me not only with their lewd meaning but with their effect upon me.
I could not keep my eyes from them, my gaze moving from the painting on the right door to the one on the left and back again, even as my mind told me to focus my attention on the floor instead. I could feel the governor at work between my thighs with every glance at the figure of the young woman in the paintings, fair-haired like me, naked like me, at every glimpse of the ordeal to which the bearded gentleman put her. I knew that each sensation of muted arousal must be visible to my guardian on the silver controller.
But I couldn’t stop looking, for the expression on the naked girl’s face, depicted with such lifelike accuracy that I thought I beheld my own blushing visage, would not let me turn my eyes away. And the gentleman’s handsome face, not unlike Gerard’s, with its arrogant air of command, made my heart thud in my chest.
On the right, under a painted scroll that said merely Pleasure, the clothed, dark-haired gentleman stood over the naked, golden-haired girl. He had placed her on a bed, in much the same posture my guardian had put me in, when he had whipped me with the strap in his study, her bottom raised and her knees parted. I could see her hairless pussy between her thighs, pictured as she was in three-quarters perspective from behind. The artist’s lewd vision had rendered her face, from that angle, just next to the bare pink cleft where I thought I could even discern a glistening pearl of immodest yearning—though the expression upon her face seemed to plead with the gentleman for the sparing of her maidenhood.
He, for his part, obviously had no intention of going back upon his intention of deflowering her immediately. He had his right hand upon her hip, and his left busied itself between his legs, though the artist had spared the viewer’s embarrassment as far as to conceal what if anything might occupy his grasp in the turning of the gentleman’s body. He looked down at her with satisfaction and hunger at once, it seemed to me; satisfaction at the position in which he had placed the girl, and hunger to… to…
To fuck, my mind whispered, the remembered sound of the word making me turn to look at the other painting, on the other door.
I stood now between the doors, and so I had a full sight of the image beneath the scroll that read Discipline. A soft cry of dismay escaped from my throat as I saw how lovingly and cruelly the artist had rendered the consequences of the young lady’s misbehavior.
“Yes, Helena Breverton,” I heard Gerard’s voice say from behind me, only a yard behind me. “That is what happens to girls who show themselves disobedient in the chamber of pleasure—or of course to those who commit treason.”