CHAPTER 1

FIRST VISIT

 

Jayne was dressed in one of her most feminine outfits. Tight guepiere, flowing summer dress, wide-brimmed hat and elbow length gloves - the young woman, her eyes sparkling and her face aglow with animated excitement, was a walking dream of assured invitation. As the Bentley swished through country lanes Jayne glanced sideways at her aunt, no less upright and elegant beside her in the softly-upholstered luxury of the magnificent car. The Bentley was one of Lady J's 'little indulgences', as she called them - and epitomised the aristocrat's philosophy of life. It was now well over twenty years old, but gleamed, purred and whispered along with the quietly assured authority of what Lady J sometimes referred to as 'old money'. Lady J would no more of thought of owning a new Bentley (or worse, a new Rolls Royce - 'the car of the nouveau riche' as she described it to Jayne) than she would of owning, even being seen in, one of those modern characterless if efficient Japanese saloons, all electric windows and adjustable everything. No doubt they had all that the modern driver could desire. No doubt they were wonderful value for money. No doubt they had a multitude of qualities. But they had no class. And class, as Lady J had taught Jayne, was everything - or nearly so. Not class in the narrow snobbish sense, meaning accident of birth. Class in the absolute sense, irrespective of birth: style, dignity, poise.

'Call it what you wish, my dear,' Lady J had once said to Jayne. 'I call it class.'

The gentle summer drive out of London ended at an imposing country house, part of a large estate, and with that sound universally associated with wealth and opulence - the purring scrunch of wide, heavy tyres on tightly rolled gravel - the big Bentley swept to a halt by the porticoed entrance.

As Pelham opened the door for Lady J. and then Jayne, the latter looked around at her surroundings. No word of instruction passed between Lady J and the quiet, loyal manservant. With a polite and silent nod he resumed his seat behind the wheel, the heavy door whispered closed and the big car glided noiselessly - save again for that so satisfying scrunch of rubber on gravel - away.

With barely a word, Lady J. led her niece not to the front door, but to one side of the house, to where large green and solid gates, firmly shut, stood foreboding sentinel across an arched carriage entrance in a high brick wall. Confidently, Lady J opened a small wicket gate in one of the two main doors, and stepped through, bidding Jayne follow.

Within, Jayne found she had entered a large stable yard. In one corner, fenced-off by wooden rails and with the red-brown sand and bark surface of an all-weather ring replacing the yard's traditional cobbles, a tall elegant man patiently schooled a black mare. With Lady J. Jayne watched until he had finished.

'Jayne my dear,' said her aunt as the immaculately dressed stranger came towards them, a groom leading away the beautiful horse, 'you must meet an old associate and acquaintance of mine. He is Don Estanio Xajecbo Cortes y Aradess and he owns the estate we have come to see.' She turned toward the Spaniard:

'Stanis: this is Jayne, of whom you have heard.'

The Spaniard took Jayne's hand, raised it as if to kiss it but abruptly stopped with the young woman's half extended, her hand raised merely to the level of her breasts. Holding her thus, half honoured guest, half captive, he smiled directly into her eyes.

'Ah - so beautiful. I feel I know you already, yet not at all. Your aunt has told me all about you - and nothing about you. But you have come here at last. A promise fulfilled, and a gift not yet opened. Which shall you be?' He paused, and smiled again.

'I am truly honoured,' he concluded with a smiling half-bow. He let go Jayne's gloved hand without raising it to his lips.

As the trio walked toward the house, Jayne pondered the enigmatic little speech. She was intrigued. What was her aunt up to? This would not be the first time Jayne had been introduced to friends of her aunt in apparently innocent circumstances, later to find herself, at her aunt's instruction, required to perform some small act of obedience: an inspection, a presentation - even a demonstration of fortitude. Occasionally, now that her apprenticeship with Stephen was completed, something more than the highly-charged erotic passivity she had learned so painstakingly was called for. Sometimes nothing more than a bared breast. Sometimes her dress removed, hands behind head, feet apart: the familiar pose, perhaps merely for display, perhaps - now that her virginity was taken and her sexual schooling more advanced - for more intimate inspection. And sometimes then bent forward, hands on settee or armchair seat, bottom raised and feet wide planted to allow examination of the full, fat lips and the delicate petals between.

A comment on the glistening silver oil which by this time would inevitably be in evidence within the pink entrance, perhaps even on the outside of the smoothly bald lips themselves. More discussion of the state of those lips and of the careful grooming of the intimate area: the carefully trimmed mound, the closely depilated labia and pudendum. And if the interlocutor was to be particularly favoured, her aunt's gloved hand placed lightly on the inside of a parted thigh - a signal which needed no words. Then knees bent to slacken the taut stretch of the fat lips and open the tight channel. Inner muscles relaxed to permit entry, velvet-skinned knob pushing apart thick, slippery lips, long hard flesh sliding within. Nesting, as her aunt called it: Jayne herself required to remain motionless, still. Even when the rod itself began to move, to slide back and then in again, the coarse hair rasping against the full, slick sensitivity of her cunt lips, lips she was required to keep bald and hairless at all times. Even when the rod filled her and thrust hard, then stayed for a moment, thrust hard home. Then the pumping, deep within, and the hot jet, drilling deep inside her.

She glanced a sidelong glance at Don Estanio. Would she soon find herself kneeling before the dark Spaniard, her gloved hands undoing, unzipping, releasing. She found herself imaging what his erect manhood would look like, felt herself beginning to tingle with that familiar excitement. She imagined her gloved hands (long white satin gloves she wore today, elbow length) she imagined her gloved fingers closing round the hard shaft, peeling back the envelope of soft, thin skin to reveal the shining, straining bulb. Imagined the satisfying intake of breath above her. Knew she would not be permitted to look up, must instead pay homage to the life staff before her. Imagined closing her full, ripe lips over the rich purple plumhead, working her tongue in underneath, as Stephen had taught her. Eyes watering a little as she took in the whole length, sliding the O of her lips, of her opened throat, down the shaft until her nose was tickled by the wiry black hair at the base of the hard, muscled stomach. Imaging the tell-tale, sudden puff of air that always came as a warning. Wondered what the Spaniard's come would taste like. She closed her eyes and swallowed. She would not, of course, spill so much as a drop. Only her shining lips, as she raised her head from its task, might betray the evidence of her lusty meal. But there would be no sign, no indiscreet evidence, left to betray what had transpired. She had been well-trained.

As they walked, past the house now and toward a large brick-walled, slate-tiled building, clearly part of the large stable complex which adjoined the house so integrally, she but half-listened to her aunt. She was saying something about the visit, telling her niece something. Jayne pulled her concentration back to the moment at hand.

'...been brought here to see something beyond anything you thought might even exist' her aunt was saying, her head now turned toward the niece, an eyebrow raised in query. Jayne retreated into tactical ploy, forbearing to speak, merely smiling and inclining her head, acknowledging her aunt's remark without spoken reply. Lady J seemed satisfied.

Wondering precisely what she was to see, Jayne accompanied the tall stranger and her aunt into the large, high roofed building and found herself in what appeared to be an indoor riding school - but one obviously used for exhibition work. At one end a bank of several tiers of spectator seating stood, empty now but clearly designed to permit an audience to watch anything that unfolded in the ring. Ushering Lady J. and her niece to seat themselves at their pleasure, Don Estanio strode off up the arena, to disappear through a side door at the far end, and a few minutes later re-emerged, returned and took a seat beside the two ladies, so incongruously elegantly dressed in the plain surroundings of the indoor arena.

'It will be Marietta and the redhead,' he said to Lady J., who simply nodded her head in acquiescent recognition. Jayne was intrigued and perplexed by the cryptic mystery to which she was a wholly wondering spectator. Familiar enough with the interior of indoor schools from her own riding lessons, Jayne noted that this one was subtly different. There were no half-built jumps, and the other paraphernalia of the normal riding school was missing as well. In addition the oval exercise ring round the perimeter of the school was more formally marked, with small pegs and bright red-and-white plastic ribbon, of the sort used to mark taped-off areas at road accidents and the like, strung taut between them. The sand of the peritrack was beaten flat, firm and carefully raked rather than the deep litter churned by horses' hooves usually found in such places.

As Jayne surveyed her surroundings, two large doors at the far end of the arena swung open, and onto the hard-packed red sand of the oval track emerged two small, light-wheeled chariots of the most extraordinary kind Jayne had ever seen. The chariots themselves were minimalist in the extreme, a rudimentary skeletal frame mounted on a single axle, with two very large diameter lightweight wheels, like very large versions of the wheels one sees on a wheel chair, but without the extra hand-rim. On each chariot sat what Jayne first assumed to be a child, boys probably, dressed in miniature jockey outfits complete with black racing helmets.

But the most extraordinary thing about the chariots was what they were drawn by: between the shafts of each, instead of a horse, stood an above-average height young woman, bizarrely dressed. Each wore tight-fitting front-laced knee-length boots, obviously lightweight and of the finest supple white leather, and on her head a high-plumed head-dress of the sort one might see on a Paris or Las Vegas showgirl. Between head and knee the women were virtually naked. Each wore only a broad waist-corset, covering the area between the lower ribs and the top of the hips and obviously, to judge by the hour-glass figure thus induced, very tightly laced. Above and below the corselet the breasts and the belly below the navel were thus left quite bare. Over the corset, each wore an elaborate harness by which she was clearly securely attached to the chariot she pulled.

The two chariots, each pulled by their respective young woman, moved swiftly to a white line limed across the perimeter path, and stopped side by side. Clearly there was going to be a race. Jayne saw that the outside chariot was pulled by the woman who must be called Marietta - a fact she established only because the other woman was so obviously "the redhead". Although her long red tresses had been pulled back beneath the head-dress, leaving little enough hair visible from the front and at the length of the arena, at the base of her startlingly white, muscular belly a flaming mass of bright flowing ginger hair, unusually long and completely filling the apex of the thighs and indeed trailing up the central groove of the taut belly almost as far as the navel, left no doubt. Surveying the tall redhead, Jayne noted with something between amusement and irritation that the woman's pubic tresses were even more heavily massed and impenetrable than had been her own not inconsiderable ginger thatch, before her aunt introduced her regime of regular trimming and partial depilation.

The chariots halted - then at a signal from Don Estanio came a shout from each of the diminutive charioteers, accompanied simultaneously by the loud double report of two long coach whips being cracked in unison, and the two women hurled themselves forwards in their harnesses. The chariots leapt forward, the whips cracking again and in an instant the two women were racing at full speed towards the three seated at the far end of the arena.

The redhead, with the inside advantage, was first to the turn and, wheels ringing, the extraordinary chariots clattered past. Jayne saw the rest of the redhead's long tresses, tightly plaited and ribboned in the manner of a horse's tail, swinging wildly between the white shoulder blades as she passed. She saw also that as they ran the women lifted their knees unusually high, giving an exaggerated high-stepping gait. Their arms, Jayne saw as they swept past, were secured rigidly to the shafts of the chariots they pulled, and the forward-leaning stance required to use their weight and leg muscles to move the chariot, combined with the way in which the leather side straps fixing the head-dress held the women's heads unnaturally high and back, arched their backs and threw their torsos into prominent relief. Festooned with straps and harness, the virtually naked bodies nonetheless were already gleaming with a sheen of perspiration as the pair pounded past, their bare breasts bouncing as they ran. Jayne noted with curiosity that the breasts of each must have been incredibly firm: while they bounced with each step taken, they did not leap and sway as might have done the bosoms of women with slacker busts forced to run so unnaturally.

'Pony-girls,' explained Lady J. as the girls headed up the back straight and round the top curve. 'Don Estanio runs a stable of some twenty. he is one of the most celebrated trainers. There is a network of enthusiasts not just around the country but across Europe, whose hobby is to keep in training at establishments such as this pony-girls as others keep race horses, and to race them against each other. As you can imagine, it is a pastime conducted with the utmost discretion.'

Swiftly, Lady J. explained more about the extraordinary secret to which she has chosen to make her niece party.

'And the girls?' asked Jayne. 'They must be forced to do this, surely - they don't volunteer?'

'On the contrary,' said Lady J. at once, 'every one is a volunteer - although some are more voluntary than others.

'In other words,' she added, 'some of the girls are the kept mistresses - indeed in some cases love-slaves is not too strong a word - of wealthy patrons. Others, however, are here entirely of their own choosing. There is big prize money staked on the races. A girl here at the behest of, sponsored as it were, a patron runs in the races on his behalf: she is called an Indenture, and the patron collects any and all prize money she wins. A girl who has applied to and been accepted by the Estancia on her own account is called a Licence. The money she wins is split between herself and the Estancia - with the girl keeping the larger share, which she takes with her when she leaves. She will normally sign-on for a season at a time.

'Like football players, the best and most successful racers are often transferred between Estancias - sometimes for very large sums, a proportion of which the girl again gets to keep.'

By this time the two pony-girls had swept past again, still running at a furious pace, the noise of their grunting, panted breath clearly audible over the whirr of the wheels and the rattling of the chariot frames. The redhead was still just in front. Jayne noticed that across the redhead's firm white buttocks, pounding with exquisitely toned working muscles as she ran, there were two vivid purple weals high on the pumping right cheek. Obviously the driver - whom Jayne had by now had a chance to see was not a child but a fully-formed, mature but tiny man, a dwarf - did more than merely crack his whip in the air when he literally gave the red-head the jump at the start of the race. The face of the redhead, Jayne noticed also, was vaguely familiar.

'Many of the Licences were minor but not unknown athletes - usually pent- or heptathletes who have decided they will never quite make the big time of Olympic or professional athletics, and chose this career for a year or more to recoup something in return for the sacrifices they have made in achieving their incredible athletic prowess' remarked Lady J. as the red-head swept by, followed by a runnel-sweated Marietta. As if reading Jayne's mind, she added: 'you might recognise the redhead: last year and the year before she was a regular in international straight competition. Here her privacy is preserved. She is known only by her Fancy name - Heatwave.'

The brief race came swiftly to an end, Heatwave the redhead holding her initial advantage to win by about a length, despite Marietta's diminutive driver plying his whip vigorously back and across each of his pony-girl's pounding buttock cheeks several times up the final back straight. Startled by the sting of the light whip, Marietta had bounded forwards - but Heatwave had heard the slap of the whip on her opponent's flanks, heard Marietta's driver urge her on and, without the need for her own driver even to reach for the tall, fine coach whip mounted on one side of the racing frame, leapt forward herself. Clearly, her athlete's training was an advantage even here, in this bizarre, esoteric and undoubtedly secretive world.

As they finished, each of the women was slowed and then stopped by the driver, the pony girls each leaning back into the shafts to slow the weight of the chariot while at the same almost bouncing on tip-toe with a high, dancing gait, their knees bending almost double, almost touching with each step the stiff-nippled breasts which, because of the extraordinary gait, bounced even more elastically. Obviously, the women had been specially schooled in this unnatural high-step, which in addition to the high knee action also caused - or required - them to throw each rising leg outward, briefly flashing the insides of their thighs and, were one close enough to see in detail, giving a brief glimpse of the full length of the sex-slot between.

The two pony-girls stopped at the far end of the school, and immediately the redhead's driver tugged on the reins at one side, swiftly wheeling the chariot about. Bouncing again with that extraordinary high-stepping gait, the plume of her high head-dress waving, the chariot and its extraordinary motive power disappeared at a slow, measured trot through the double doors which swung silently open, apparently unattended.

Don Estanio, meanwhile, had signalled to the driver of Marietta, who halted his charge and waited while the Maestro strode toward him. There was a brief word, then Don Estanio walked on toward the still open double doors while the pony-girl, her knees and thighs again lifted high with each step, was walked slowly down the school toward Jayne and her aunt.

Lady J. rose and, bidding Jayne follow, stepped down onto the track. Seeing them coming, the diminutive driver reined in his charge and the rig again stopped, the pony-girl standing rigidly to attention, her head high held, only the slowly subsiding heaving of her chest and sweat-soaked flanks evidence of her recent exertion. The two women stepped up in front of the waiting girl.

Jayne saw immediately that the young woman was not, as she had at first thought, bare-breasted. Above the tightly-laced soft leather corselet was what was essentially an open-tipped brassiere of some sort of naturally coloured translucent material which both supported and held the breasts while leaving the nipples bare and exposed. Assuming the other girl to be similarly attired Jayne understood now why the breasts of both had remained so firm as they ran.

Lady J. explained, 'The girls wear these special brassieres while they are working in training - to run so much with unsupported breasts would be unnecessarily uncomfortable, as well as not being particularly good for the shape of the bosom in the longer term. They wear them in seeding races also, although they are usually run completely bare-breasted during gala races, when they are being shown off to best effect and where the unrestrained movement of their bared breasts is part of their attraction.

'It depends on the size and firmness of the bust' she added. 'Some of the larger-breasted girls are always raced either in brassieres similar to this, or with the breasts in a special racing harness - unless the sponsor especially enjoys watching his girl run with bare breasts whatever the effect. Large breasts, especially if less than completely firm which is of course usually the case, bare and with no support - unfettered, as it were - can be quite a handicap when trying to run fast, as you can imagine: but then not all sponsors race their girls simply for speed. They do not mind if she does not win, provided she puts on a good show for themselves and their guests.

'And occasionally, a large-breasted girl will be worked even in training without a brassiere or other support as a punishment. As you can imagine, to be made to run at half or full speed, or at the high-stepping trot, for any length of time with her bosom leaping wildly and unrestrained can be both very embarrassing and acutely uncomfortable for a heavy-breasted woman.'