by Robin Harrington
Ellen looked up, her face breaking into the welcoming smile which always made Henry's heart race. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I'm not quite changed yet. I didn't expect you to be so prompt."
Henry stood for a moment looking at his young wife who was in her shift, her dress, petticoat, corset all cast aside. Ellen's maid, Peggy, was stooped, rolling the top of the left stocking down her mistress's ivory smooth thigh set off by the white tumble of the shift bunched up to her hip. He swallowed, then at last managed to say, "Yes well, as it happens there is something over which I wish to take you to task."
"Take me to task?" Ellen raised her eyebrows, but the inviting smile did not fade.
"Thank you Peggy, I can manage from here. If I'm to be taken to task it would perhaps be best you should go."
The maid dipped a curtsy, gathered up the tumbled garments, glanced at Henry's stern face and left almost at a run.
"I think you frighten her somewhat." Ellen was engaged in taking off her other stocking, "And I also suspect she's a little in love with you. Of course I can hardly blame her, for you can be a somewhat frightening figure, but I'm very much in love with you. Now, Husband, you wish to take me to task. On what matter?"
Henry clasped his hands behind his back and leant forward a little. "This evening I noticed you were not entirely civil to the Rector's wife."
"Mrs Mutton? Really, was I not?" Ellen could see her husband was working hard to suppress a smile.
"Ellen," he said, trying to sound sharp, "you are doing it once more. You know quite well her name is Lamb."
"Of course I do and I only call her Mrs Mutton when we are alone together. Anyway, I'm sure it was you I first heard call her Mrs Mutton. I remember you commenting something about a lamb dressed as mutton. As it was so entirely appropriate I've simply followed your lead."
"I may have, once, a long time ago, but I did not think a trivial remark would become a fixture. Anyway, it's off the point. This evening you were making sport of Mrs Lamb over her dress."
Ellen's smile became one of supreme innocence. "Making sport? I don't think I was." She thought for a moment. "I did comment upon her dress being new, or at least I had not seen it before. She told me it was indeed new, she'd had it made up from a pattern in Bradley's - you know, the draper in Melton."
"And?" Henry persisted. "What further did you say?"
Ellen giggled. "All I said when she told me how she had taken much time and trouble over choosing the pattern, was 'Really? How remarkable'. She took as a compliment, I think."
"But it wasn't a compliment, was it?"
"Henry, you saw it. I didn't know it was still possible to find such patterns. It was a thing from last century. I grant it's a stretch to imagine what would best suit her, her being almost as wide as she is high, but it was, at the very least, an unfortunate choice."
Henry shook his head slightly. "She was our guest. I could not say if she registered the slight, but a slight it was and I registered it."
"And did it make you smile?"
"Perhaps, but I should not have done and you should not have been the occasion of my impropriety. As you well know, Reverend Lamb has always been of considerable support from the time he agreed to marry us. His being seen to befriend us has been most helpful in the county. I grant he is not gifted with sparkling wit, but he is a good man and comes from a very old family in these parts. So it was both clumsy and ungrateful to belittle his wife."
"Oh, if you say so, Husband. But I think you make too much of what was a passing remark and I can't believe the wound to Mrs Mutton was too deep."
Henry caught hold of Ellen's upper arm, turning her to face him. "I see that now you are not taking what I say seriously, so I'll have to find a way to impress upon you just how serious I am."
He sat on the bed and pulled Ellen across his knee, his left arm across her back, pinning her in place.
"Henry! No! You aren't going to spank me, surely. Ow! Oo!"
Two smacks landed on the white material covering her rear. Then two more. Henry paused. He lifted one knee slightly and pulled up the hem of her shift. He gazed for a moment at her pretty bottom, already showing signs of redness from the first slaps. It was a delight to him. He loved how it grew up from her slim thighs, how its two neat rounded parts were divided so exactly, how its skin was so smooth and, in the position he now had her, how available the soft folds of her sex were.
Ellen waited for the next smack. It stung rather than hurt. She gave a half cry and a half laugh. "Henry, you really are horrid to me you know." Then she gave a little buck because his hand had come down considerably harder.
"Horrid, is it? I will show you, Wife, exactly what horrid can be."
He settled to a rhythmic spanking, the slaps landing on one cheek of her backside, then the other, his arm lifting high and coming down hard and fast so he could feel the impact of each smack on his palm. He revelled in the pink, already beginning to turn red, which was spreading across her bum and the little movements of Ellen's thighs and belly against his body each time a wallop landed. She was giving little cries, and he heard her catch her breath after one particularly sharp smack.
"Henry!" she called out, "it's really sore now. I do take what you were saying seriously. I am sorry. Oh my goodness! Ow! Ow! Ow! You have a very hard hand!"
In spite of her pleading it seemed to Ellen that he increased the fierceness of the spanks raining down on her backside. Her bottom had moved from being stimulatingly warm to uncomfortably hot. One particularly hard smack arrived, which made her shout out. The hand did not lift, but she felt it move gently across the simmering skin of her bum before slipping between her legs. She parted her thighs to allow her husband to explore her sex, to feel its wetness, to know how ready for him she was. She moaned as she felt his fingers slide into her.
"It's just unfair," she said. "You've spanked me till I'm throbbing with the sting of it, and now, oh help! Now you're doing this to me."
The hand was withdrawn and another smack arrived.
"Do you like that more?" Henry said.
"Ouch! No, no, I liked your hand where it was just now. But there's another thing which goes there even better, don't you think?"
She stood for a brief moment then fell back onto the bed, her shift round her waist. She slid the top of it off her shoulders, her full breasts springing free of the material. She watched Henry take off his britches, and there was his stiff sex, close enough for her to stretch out and touch the tip. At the same time she pulled his head towards her breasts, and he closed his mouth round one of her nipples. She shut her eyes as his tongue moved round the tip of her breast sending streams of delight running through her, increasing the urgency of her need for him. She moved her left leg towards the further side of the bed and he lowered himself onto her, into her, so her whole being resounded with the power of him moving in her belly, ecstasy building.
"Henry!" she shouted as she felt his ejaculation flow into her. She lifted her hips high, pushing him deeper into her, then the flood of her own orgasm cascaded through her.
They dozed where they lay for a while, until Henry rolled off her and almost immediately Ellen heard him settle to the steady breathing of sleep. She felt a languorous contentment, but was not sleepy, so she lay smiling up into the darkness. Here she was, Lady Dutton, the happy wife of a baronet, with a country estate and a London house. Yet she had begun life as the daughter of a seamstress and a man she could not remember, a man of whom no one ever spoke.
"Fate or simply chance?" she softly asked herself, but she had no answer to her question. Eventually her eyelids drooped, then closed, and she too was lost in sleep.
There was a face, a man's face, close to hers. She could see all the little black hairs on his cheek, chin and top lip, but there was no hair at all on his head. His nose was an odd shape and round one eye was all blue-black. He smelt bad, sour, so different from the clean fresh smell which always came from her mother. Ellen knew, she did not know how she knew, but she knew the man was her father.
"Don't you feed the child, Alice?" the man said. "She stays so skinny. No meat on her. A girl should have meat on her; she should be plump, and round."
"She's all right. She's just growing a lot at her age, that's all." Ellen could not see who was talking because all she could see was the man's big face, but she recognised her mother's voice. "It's her age, she'll fill out later."
"What is she now? I forget."
"She turned six in April."
"Six eh?" the man's voice rasped. "Well that's an age I suppose. Why does she never seem pleased to see me? Give me a kiss Ellen, why don't you?"
Why didn't she? He frightened her. She couldn't say why, but he did. It was his size, his loudness, and something else about him, something dangerous, uncertain. She moved her head slightly and saw her mother's face over the man's shoulder, saw the nod she gave, so she stretched up and put her lips on the prickly stubble of the man's cheek.
"That's right my chick, you kiss your papa." His big, hard lips came against her mouth, the smell was powerful and the kiss hurt. "You love your papa, don't you chick? Yes, I knows you do."
Ellen stirred in her sleep and the image blurred and dissolved. Another one came. The room was upset. A chair on its side on the floor, the table pushed against the wall, things broken and there was noise, shouting and the man - her father - shouting and waving his arms. She was in the corner, crouched down, trying not to be seen, not to be there.
"Oh yes, I might have guessed it!" The man's voice was loud, slurred and full of anger. "Your high and mighty father pushing his nose in where it's not wanted. You're my wife, and I'm head of this household, not him."
"Head of the household is it? Look round, look at your household. You put us here in these two shabby rooms. And what sort of head of the household were you when you were away for nearly two years? I had no notion if you were alive or dead or if I'd ever see you again."
"Well I've been back nearly as long as I went. I'm at the brewery, I win good money at the fighting, standing toe to toe with another man while we hit and hit until one of us goes down. It's a hard way to get a living, and I want more respect from you. Though God knows I should realise by now you can't give me any respect. I doubt you ever did."
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