Bride of the Revolution (3 page)

‘There are always rumours,
maman
! Rumours that the palace is giving away food, that there is wine by the barrel, a gift from the king!' She shook her head and dipped the rag into the small bowl of rainwater and used it, once again, to try and cool her mother's brow.

Unable to believe that any aristo, any blue blood, would look at her, Grace was entirely innocent of her own beauty. On the very brink of maturity she occasionally felt strange stirrings between her thighs; a swelling warmth between the silky raven fronds which protected the still closed gateway to her body.

An unbearable irritation began between the plump folds hidden betwixt her thighs. Intrigued by this, oft times when her mother slept, Grace opened her legs and, with trembling fingers, touched the quivering swell of her little belly and would allow her hands to drift down to the heated soft, silky pleats. These she parted, searching for the source of the irritation.

What she found was a bud of flesh, hard as a little nut, inflamed to a dark flush and jerking eagerly from a tiny veil of fine skin, smooth as silk and bathed in warm creamy fluid which seemed to come from nowhere. When her tentative fingertips touched this, Grace heard herself gasp with wonder. A feeling too glorious to describe surged through her body. Again she rubbed, harder this time and the feeling came again; a wave of glorious sensation which spread like ripples upon a pond, drifting over Grace until she felt that she would go mad if it was not appeased. The bud of flesh burned under her fingertips and she noticed the satin-smooth skin become slicker with the creamy exudation. Her whole body glowed, trembled, shuddered with an indescribable joy. Wave after wave of this pleasure surged through her, until she sank back, exhausted, on the thin pallet upon which she slept.

‘Always there are rumours,' Grace repeated, her pleasant daydream fading.

With a sudden reserve of strength the claw-like hand grasped Grace's wrist and dragged the girl closer. ‘Promise me!' The wizened, sick face glared at the girl in the rainy gloom, the eyes suddenly bright, fervent. ‘You are exactly right for the aristos.'

Grace flung herself to her knees on the dirt floor, hugging her mother's thin shoulders. ‘Do not excite yourself,
maman
! Please! You are very ill and you must save your strength.'

‘Pah!' the older woman scoffed. ‘We both know this is the end for me… You have a…' The light was fading in her mother's eyes, Grace noticed, and she was struck with a dreadful feeling of panic. She would be all alone. No one to whom she could turn.

‘Mother…'

‘Promise me!'

‘I promise,
maman
!'

Her mother gave a sigh, a long sigh of satisfaction, and darkness veiled her eyes. It was as if a light had gone out, and Grace bowed her head over the shrunken body.

Two neighbours helped Grace to bury her mother. The priest said a few words over an unmarked grave and it was all over. Lost and terribly alone, the dark green eyes lustrous with tears, Grace turned to leave.

‘
Ma petite
!' One of the neighbours ran after her, his eyes shining, his hand at his groin adjusting a heavy bulge in his filthy breeches.

Grace turned, her hair hanging in gleaming wet ebony tendrils over her shapely shoulders, cleaned and wetted by the still teeming rain. Her cheeks burned as she watched him rub something between his thighs. ‘
Oui, monsieur
?' Her voice, sad though it was, clear and sweet. ‘
Aidez-vous
?'

‘It is I who can help you,' said the man.

His companion joined him, his head bowed, shy but looking suspicious in Grace's eyes. Bare feet shuffling backwards, huge eyes staring, frightened, framed by lashes dewed with rain, Grace began to stumble away and then to run, looking this way and that for the priest, but he was gone. She was alone, without help, in the rain-drenched cemetery. She was unsure why she was afraid. It was something, she was sure, to do with those strange feelings that came over her when she touched that place between her thighs in the darkness of the night.

‘Do not go!' said the first man. His feet began to move quickly over the muddy ground, gaining on Grace. He was big, large framed, heavy, far taller than she was.

‘Do not be afraid!' said the second man, his shy demeanour gone.

She could hear the slosh of their feet, bare like hers, as they ran after her. She could hear the urgency in their voices, the rasp of their breath above the steady sound of the rain.

‘We only want to offer you a home!' cried the first man. ‘In return for…'

Grace closed her ears. Despite her innocence it was not difficult to imagine what she must do in return, and she could not. She had promised her mother, although the Lord only knew how she was to fulfil that promise.

She took a fearful glance over her shoulder. They were gaining on her. The slap of their feet on the muddy ground made Grace sob; a sound that caught in her tortured throat. Grace's chest hurt. She could scarcely draw breath. They were gaining on her, would catch her.

A huge hand fastened like a vice about her tiny wrist. With a breath she felt must surely be her last she managed a scream of fear. Her flimsy rags, sodden with rain, clung and caressed the length of her creamy body as the man whirled her round.

She could smell them; the odour of garlic and sour wine. Her captor laughed and used his free hand to cup the pouting mound of one of her breasts. His thumb and finger pulled upon the sensitive skin of her nipple and she felt it harden, become painful. Cold rain splattered the upper swell as he tugged down her gown. She felt his hand graze the tiny swell of her belly and felt an all too familiar warmth suffuse her body.

Again she tried to scream, to tug away, fearing her own eager desires. ‘Shut up,
putain
!' he growled, transferring his caresses to muffle her cries.

She was pulled closer and she felt his male flesh lengthening beneath his breeches, stiff and swaying against his belly. It frightened her. Never in her life had she seen a man's body. Her father died before she was born. Neither had she felt this strange thing in the man's breeches.

Her thighs were forced open by the other man and a rough hand cupped the soft fullness between them. She felt her little pouch swell, the inner folds become hot and slick with moisture. The forbidden delight, that which she felt in the lonely darkness of her mother's hovel, became unbearable. Sensual by nature, she bore down upon the cupping fingers, felt a growing heaviness, a filling of her labia which his fingers tugged down and open, a seepage of her hot fluid bathing her churning cunt.

The other man remained behind her, his hands locked about her tiny waist, his fingers tracing the swell of her hips. Grace could feel his male flesh, hard, bare, wetted by the relentless rain, probing the tight ravine between the rounded hillocks of her bottom.

It would have been so easy to allow them their lust. Something told her, some animal need within her, how she could fulfil herself and them. Her breasts were swollen with her own desire; painful with her needs. The buds of her nipples burned as they sprang tightly against the flimsy cloth of her wet and tattered gown.

But she had made a promise.

Flinging back her head, her eyes huge with both desire and fear, she came to her senses and screamed. ‘
Maman
!'

The bigger man, the one who stood before her, gave a rough growl and again thrust his filthy, stinking hand over her mouth.

‘
Merde
! Shut up, you little fool!' His lust fevered eyes shone into hers. He tore at the tatters which served her poorly as clothing. The never-ending rain struck her bare skin. The chill was such that it turned the porcelain paleness to a delicate transparent blue. Pain, cold, fear filled her world and she became pliant, accepting the inevitable. The smaller man bared her taut buttocks. He sank to his knees behind her, caring nothing for the muddy ground. Grace shuddered, but not entirely with loathing as his thin, bony fingers drove into her bottom flesh, parting the firm hillocks.

‘She does not scream,' he murmured.

Grace quivered with shame. He could see her most private parts; her tight bottom hole, the lush black curls of her cunny lips, perhaps even that strange little bud of flesh which gave her so much pleasure when she rubbed it back and forth.

‘A whore, like all women,' grunted his companion, his voice muffled in Grace's shivering breasts.

The rough tip of a thick thumb stroked across the tight pleats of her anus. Grace felt a renewed unbidden surge of pleasure bring a warmth to her belly. It took all her strength not to bear back upon the caress. The naked softness of her sex folds seemed to swell unbearably and pout between her thighs. A flood of heated honey trickled, joining the chill slick of rain, down the inner sides of her thighs.

‘Lift your hands,' growled the bigger man, raising his head from her flushed and swollen breasts. ‘Place them behind your head.'

Mind spinning with the sensations that were growing within her, Grace hesitated for the smallest instant.

‘Your hands!' he hissed again.

Fingers trembling, Grace did as she was bid and linked her hands behind the sodden raven mane of her hair. The position rendered her more vulnerable; at their mercy. A flutter rippled through the pouting and heated folds of her sex. She felt the burning bud of her clitoris jut hard from its silky bed, thrusting from its tiny hood. Unprotected and grossly engorged.

He grinned through the rain as if he knew what she felt, and, in a swift and vicious movement, he tore the rags of her gown from neck to hem.

Grace gasped, but whether this was from fear or her deep, sensual need, she scarcely knew.

The tip of a wet tongue flicked over the clutching little pleats of her rear entrance and she knew that her breathing was quick, harsh; a certain clue of her feelings.

‘Are you a virgin?' grunted the bigger man.

His own breathing was ragged and his spearing thickness, dark male flesh, probed out of his ragged breeches. His thick fingers grazed up and down the rain-wetted flesh, pausing only for a moment to smooth the slick of his pre-issue over the engorged and swollen tip.

Grace, her head lowered demurely, her hands clasped obediently behind the sleek raven fall of hair, said nothing. Naked, humiliated, her plump bottom abused and all but invaded by the smaller of the two men, her mind was a confused whirl of emotions. Her need for satisfaction was becoming unbearable.

‘What does it matter?' she murmured at last, her voice low and without hope. ‘Do you spare virgins?'

The big man laughed. Allowing one hand to remain upon his turgid flesh, he reached out with the other to cup the heaviness of one of her breasts and thumbed the tender hardness of a nipple.

‘We spare no whore, virgin or not,' he rasped, and his fingers closed like a vice upon the pliant paleness of the bared breast.

The pain of his grip brought tears to Grace's eyes. Her legs buckled and she felt the sharpness of broken teeth biting into the soft cushion of her sex lips, pulling them open, and a tongue lapped at the very tip of her nubbin.

‘I submit,' she sighed weakly, as she sank to the muddy ground. ‘Use me in whatever way you wish.'

Beyond the pain, beyond the surging of pleasure, beyond the biting cold and the sough of the wind, Grace heard the urgent gallop of several horses and the clatter of carriage wheels on the cobbled road beyond the cemetery. Voices reached her ears, angry voices, and she felt herself clasped by many hands. She heard the crack of a whip on flesh, cries of pain, and yet she felt nothing. Could she, she wondered, be on the threshold of death? She sank into darkness and knew no more.

Chapter Two

A terrible lethargy stole over her. A warmth centred upon the pit of her soft belly and beneath it in the delicate folds nestling between her thighs, a seeping wetness.

She heard voices, not harsh like the men who tried so hard to violate her, but soft, caressing tones which came and went, whispering over her like gentle waves upon the banks of the Seine. They did not threaten her, these voices, but Grace kept her eyes closed, fearing what she might see, and allowed the ebony lashes to remain closed, although fluttering upon the pale moonstone cheeks. But, obedient in all things, Grace kept her slender fingers fast behind her head, just as the man had ordered her to do on the muddy ground of the cemetery.

‘The poppet!' said a woman's voice admiringly.

‘A poppet? She is filthy,' said a man's voice. He was young, Grace knew that and, perhaps, his youth made him a little afraid. ‘And heaven only knows what those disgusting fellows did to her.' Beyond the jolting of the carriage Grace felt him shudder against her. ‘
Mon Dieu
! She is probably riddled with disease. Don't touch her, madame, I beg of you!'

‘Oh, don't be silly, Philipe!' The woman sounded older, impatient. ‘I am sure we found her before they…' She paused and gave a soft laugh, and Grace felt her slender thighs prised apart. ‘Watch, I shall prove to you…'

Grace gasped. A soft palm was cupped about her pouting mound, the skin as soft as silk, cool and clean as spring water. She bore down, only slightly, just brushing the damp raven curls of her pussy upon the caress. No matter how hard she tried she could not prevent her sex lips from swelling upon the woman's palm.

‘She is not a virgin. She is a whore, did I not tell you? Not an innocent at all.' The carriage yawed from side to side as the young man flung himself into the corner, as far away from Grace as the space would allow.

‘Nonsense. She is sensual, just as I required. Naturally sensual by nature. We shall have such fun with her.' Behind closed lashes Grace watched the hooded eyes become heavier, the smouldering smile become broader, and tried not to shudder in apprehension. A gentle finger and thumb parted her plump sex lips, baring the inner folds. ‘Do you see the delicate pinkness, Philipe? A virgin if ever I saw one!' The woman pinched her nubbin, held it in soft fingers, rubbed the sides of its little shaft, drew back the tiny hood.