PART ONE: THE LONGING

In her sleep, Felice's mind whirled with half remembered excitement and guilt. As she tossed and turned in the spacious double bed, her face contorted slightly and she groaned. Her head rolled from side to side, flaying the soft pillows with her magically jet-black shoulder-length hair.

What was she seeing? She knew it was herself, it was not too far past, two years, maybe three, she must have been seventeen, self-willed and stubborn. In her dreams she was always naked, her breasts youthfully upright, almost petulant in their gentle motion as they jutted out from her chest. No, she thought, more defiant. Defiant, because she knew herself to be naked and she had no means of disguising her nakedness: her wrists were roped firmly to the arms of a cold, smoothly polished wooden chair. In her dreams, she remembered that afternoon clearly, remembered waking with a start, realising her nakedness, instinctively reaching to cover herself and discovering too late the rough rope fastening her there. Shocked, she let out a cry, but it went nowhere, emerging just as a muffled grunt. She pushed her tongue into a cloth obstruction and, glancing down, she could tell that it was held immovably in place by a thick strip of dull brown parcel tape which encircled her head, sticking awkwardly to skin and hair alike. She felt her heart sink, this was from the same reel of tape she'd been using earlier, wrapping Christmas presents for the mail, as was the fibrous, twine-like rope which held her prisoner in the chair.

She inwardly laughed with despair and hopeless, recalling the rare, innocent, childlike pleasure of parcel wrapping and contrasting it with this situation in which her adult nature was brought into sharp focus. With difficulty, she slowly moved her tongue around the cloth filling her mouth space. She tried to move her legs, they too were securely tied, one to each chair leg, leaving them parted with a slight breeze passing between them, gently manipulating her pubic hair. It was at that point she realised that too was exposed.

Defiant, though, she felt defiant above all. She did not want Kelvin to see weakness. She had known he would come, she knew he was there in the room with her now. Her father was away on one of his inevitable business trips, so it was always Kelvin who was left in charge. She knew he desired her, she had known since her early teens when her figure, posture and, indeed, behaviour had suggested a more mature creature than the calendar might have allowed. She knew he sometimes crept into her room when he thought she was asleep, to see the delicate bed linen rising and falling on her naked body. She knew he would watch her emerging from the shower, dripping into a luxurious white bath towel. Once, bored, she was idling about the house and discovered the loose tile which enabled him to peer in on more intimate scenes. Armed with this knowledge, she felt a strange new power and drying herself became a ritual of provocation, a teasing and flirtatious performance. With an inward smile, she dreamed of the fire she had fuelled and would not lightly quench.

Maurice Kelvin had been her father's closest and most trusted aide since Felice's mother had walked out once and for all from the spacious - cavernous - Braithwaite home, a genteel 19th century chateau in the Provençale foothills. When Felice finally exploded from the straitjacket of her prim school, isolated in a forgotten backwater of the Swiss countryside, and came home to daddy, Kelvin seemed to watch passively and without judgement as she discovered how convenient - far too convenient - this superficially grand but wind-blown shell of a house was for the bars and parties of Marseilles and the beaches of the Côte d'Azur. Daddy, though rich, was too busy for his fiery green-eyed daughter, with her impatience for experience, the result of a schooling more like imprisonment. So she took his money and used it for her own ends. She grew more in experience during those first months of freedom than she had in the whole of the rest of her life put together.

But still there was Kelvin, loping around the big gloomy house like a grim shadow, falling darkly into her presence whenever she least expected it, never emitting more than a curt nod or a grunted hello. A tall, stocky Scot in his late twenties, with short, aggressive dark hair and a rough-kempt beard, there seemed to be something powerful coiled up in him and Felice often shuddered with excitement and fear at the prospect of it breaking out. He had been with her father's architectural partnership for around ten years and quickly showed such a brilliant combination of loyalty and aptitude for just about any task he was given that he became the only person her father trusted completely enough to handle his personal affairs - a phrase well chosen, as it was usually Kelvin sent out into the night to procure from Marseilles one or more colourful and vibrant prostitutes for his employer, a task he performed with the same ease as if he'd been asked to draw up a currency transfer draft.

It was his addiction to the variety and inventiveness of prostitutes that finally drove her mother to quit her husband for the pleasures of a heavily subsidised retreat in the Greek islands, and Felice began to hate him for that. Yet her mother, the imperious Louise, had always regarded her daughter's dark beauty as a threat as her biological clock ticked on and towards the end little love was shared between them. It was her father's use of the prostitutes that dismayed Felice, rather than his treatment of his wife; he would never have the same girl twice, they would almost always leave, sobbing, in the early hours, driven back into their obscurity by the taciturn Kelvin. But Felice's high moral tone on the subject was secretly tempered by a fascination, an excitement which tapped at her shoulder, beckoned her in. She tried often to shake this from her head, but the night fell into a pattern to which she let herself more and more become enslaved. Inevitably, over supper there would be the usual blazing row with her father as Kelvin departed to engage in his usual night's work. She would storm upstairs, slamming her bedroom door with strength and determination, more to make a point than with any true fury. And as she heard the car pull back onto the gravel drive, the double shunt of car doors shutting, the crunch of two pairs of feet entering her father's web, she found herself pressed to the wall, inexplicably eager to hear all that passed in her father's chamber.

She never once heard a sound from her father, only the snap of locks, the crackle of a chain as it slid snake-like onto bare floorboards, the metallic rush as it was dragged back. Occasionally one of the girls would speak, it was impossible to hear what she was saying, but sometimes there was a note of astonishment, other times one of fear. Felice could have sworn that sometimes she heard girls plead, but for more or for less and of what, she could not know. The voices quickly stopped, replaced by the occasional noise from the back of the throat - it was evident these were different noises from those she had determined as words earlier. She knew the girls' mouths had been stopped in some way, she knew they were unable to unstop them, so they must be chained. She tried to picture the girls, how they might be chained. She thought of them with wrists locked into individual sets of handcuffs, the free end of each being fastened to her father's bedposts. A long length of chain wrapped around their ankles, then looped in a figure of eight between their legs and fastened to the foot board of the bed, she surmised, that would hold them. But how would their mouths be stopped? Tape, perhaps? No, tape would not muffle the voice as completely as this does. A knotted scarf or cloth of some sort, the knot pressed into the mouth and the ends of the cloth tied tightly behind her head? That might work. But despite her imagination working overtime, she felt as frustrated as Kelvin must feel behind the wall of the shower. She wanted to know what had happened to the girls.

The night came, of course, when her enflamed curiosity could stand no more. Peering through slit curtains at the returning car, Felice saw Kelvin's latest acquisition, a slim, dark skinned girl with a fresh, friendly face. At once she knew she had to discover more of what would become of this girl, how that shy and smiling face would be punished and brought to tears by her father, whose nocturnal activities had become to Felice as potent and enigmatic as the ceremonies of the mystics. No sooner had the bedroom door clicked shut behind the pair, rich and poor, old and young, male and profoundly female, Felice silently made her way out into the corridor. Hastening to the door, she first tried the keyhole. Shit, it was plugged. She pressed her ear to the door. The sound was clearer but still revealed nothing. Yet as usual she quickly became engrossed in what she could hear and might have been at the door, listening intently to the ordeal to which the young girl was being submitted, for perhaps an hour or more. The time felt like nothing as Felice visualised the girl's distress. It sounded as if both legs had been chained independently to the foot posts - there had been an insistent rattle near the door, where she knew the foot of her father's bed to be, then a pause, then another, slightly to one side. Felice's spatial awareness for sounds had become very acute over the past few months of eavesdropping. The idea of the young legs chained separately to each bed post sent a thrill through her - it meant that her sex was exposed and that there was no way the girl could resist her father's entry. She almost laughed out loud when she came to this conclusion and felt foolish for imagining that he might ever have wanted a girl's legs chained together.

Without warning, a chill went down her spine. There was a noise from the next room along, a small room she understood to be used for nothing more than storing cleaning equipment. The noise was Kelvin clearing his throat, quietly and unobtrusively, yet it cut through Felice's concentration like a knife, boiling her mind with terrified questions: what if he came out and found her here? What was he doing in there anyway? Would she get away before he realised she was there? She had to get back to her room, she needed to be on the other side of her door, pressing herself against the solid oaken panels which would protect her against this man's ominous presence. Hastily, she swept round in the corridor; in doing so, to her horror, she knocked against a yellow ornamental vase balanced on a small display stand backed onto the wall. Such was the impact that it didn't so much fall as was projected several yards along the corridor where it fell with a clangorous shatter which reverberated around the emptiness of the dark house loudly, making dramatic and solemn music from its high ceilings and sonorous spaces. Within moments, Kelvin appeared in the corridor. Felice was frozen with apprehension and could not take in his sudden appearance; one moment he was not there, the next he was. His exits from the storeroom were obviously expertly planned so no suspicion as to his activities might fall. For a long, long-seeming handful of seconds, Felice looked blankly at the solid shape of the man's imposing frame and felt his eyes burning back into her. She remembered, she was only wearing her night dress. But she felt that Kelvin's sight had gone well beyond that, was embracing her curves, moving between her legs, caressing her buttocks. She stammered out an apology.

"I was coming back from the toilet ... It was dark ... I ... I... Very clumsy of me."

Kelvin remained impassive, again for no more than a split second, but one which felt to Felice like the seasons, she could see his mind working, wondering what she had been doing, whether it was true what she said, or whether she'd been listening to her father, or perhaps whether she'd heard him in the storeroom. She imagined him thinking of her as she twisted her smooth and delightful form in a simulated orgy, standing naked in the shower room, water cascading down her lithe contours, knowing his eyes were on her, him thinking his secret was secure. His mouth opened, "Aye, clumsy, aye." There was no emotion in the voice.

"I'll clear it up, shall I?" she ventured. "I think there's a dustpan and brush in that store room.” He didn't flinch at this, didn't betray himself as she'd thought he might. He simply said, "Don't worry, I can do it, you get back to bed." With that he was gone, back into the shadows. Seconds later he appeared with the brush and silently began clearing away the glass shards. He wasn't even looking at her, as if she had ceased to exist. Relieved, but at the same time slightly put out that her presence didn't have a more dramatic effect on him, she volunteered a faltering "Goodnight" but he merely grunted "aye" in return, without averting his gaze from the task in hand.

In the silence of her room, Felice sat dejectedly on the end of her bed, idly swinging her legs to and fro. What went on in the storeroom? This became almost as all-possessing a question as that of what went on in her father's room. She looked down at her slim, smooth legs as they swung back and forth. A thought hit her, a tiny private thought. She stopped her legs from moving and brought them together. Then she held them together tightly and imagined the chains that would keep them that way.