Free All I Want Is You by Elizabeth Anthony

backside in some government office in London and gave lots of orders.’
    ‘So he shot about as many Germans as you, then,’ said Betsey. Which put paid to Robert’s smart talk for a while.
    Lady Beatrice was also often seen in the company of an American called Guy Fawcett. Mr Fawcett was a dark, thickset man in his thirties –
a dish
, Betsey called him, but I’d hardly noticed him at all, until one night Margaret woke me. It was around two or three in the morning, I guessed.
    ‘Shh.’ Margaret put her finger to her lips and motioned to me to follow her. Very quietly she opened our bedroom door then led me – I was still in a fog of disturbed dreams – across the carpeted floor of Lady Beatrice’s sitting room. We walked barefoot on tiptoe between the pieces of furniture, I remember, and when we reached Lady Beatrice’s bedroom I saw that a soft glow came from beneath the closed door, showing that a lamp was lit within. Then I heard a sighing noise which puzzled me, and the rhythmic creaking of a bed.
    I didn’t understand what Margaret was intending, but my senses prickled in warning. Margaret bent to look through the keyhole, then moved aside. ‘Your turn,’ she mouthed to me.
    My heart was beating so painfully I could scarcely breathe, but neither could I hurry away as I should have done. I bent to look, and in the shadowy lamplight I saw – oh, my, I saw Lady Beatrice, quite naked, kneeling on the bed beside Guy Fawcett. He lay on his back, naked also; his eyes were tightly closed, he had reached behind him to grip the headrail, and…
    She had him in her mouth.
She had his erect member in her mouth, and was sliding her lips up and down it.
    Guy Fawcett was by no means attractive to me. He was heavily muscular; his chest and limbs were furred with dark hair. Yet I’d never seen an aroused, unclothed man before, and something deep inside me tightened and shook. I watched in horrified awe as Lady Beatrice caressed him with her tongue. And Margaret was watching
me
.
    A sound came from the corridor outside. It was mostlikely just a draught, but Margaret pulled me away and we stole back to our beds, though I think we both lay awake for a long time after that. I was badly disturbed, I longed to touch myself in the way Margaret had shown me, but I knew that was probably what she wanted, so I resisted, though I burned.
    The next day the diplomats left and, in the afternoon, Lady Beatrice went to London, taking Margaret but not me. I tended to Her Ladyship’s clothes, washing the more delicate items myself in grated soap and warm water and airing them in the drying room. I heard them talking avidly about Lady Beatrice below stairs, whispering that she’d had affairs in London with all sorts of men, married or otherwise, and even the discreet Mrs Burdett was heard to mutter that the way she treated the memory of her dead husband, Lord Charlwood, was nothing short of scandalous.
    But I considered anew what she’d been doing with Guy Fawcett in the dead of night, and though what I’d seen still disturbed me, I thought, in Beatrice’s defence: why should she waste her youth mourning for a man who was gone for ever, and whom she had never loved anyway?
    We heard that Nell was being cared for in a charity home run by Anglican nuns just outside Oxford. I still wrote regularly to Mr Maldon, although I no longer believed he read my letters or even received them. I wrote:
Lady Beatrice, Lord Charlwood’s widow, has come to visit. She is very modern. She wears clothes that you areprobably used to in London, and she has asked me to help her with her wardrobe, because I am quite good at sewing, my mother taught me…
    I stopped. I wanted to write,
I saw her. I saw her in bed with a naked man, giving him pleasure with her mouth in a way I would not have thought possible. And I cannot forget it.
    One night, disturbingly, Mr Maldon became Guy Fawcett in my dreams. Lady Beatrice was astride him, coaxing him into intimacy, and