Astoria Park Resumes

"I must say that this is certainly the kind of place that I would be happy to bring friends and business associates. How are the hostesses coming along?"

"They are all very good, I have to acknowledge that when it comes to grooming and deportment, the Constance Armitage Academy has done an excellent job, we just had to knock off some of the aloofness from them, because they had to learn to act like mistresses and not wives. The men will come to the club to get away from their wives, the last thing that they want is for the hostess to act just like the woman that they left at home."

"What about the men who wish to bring their own mistresses with them?"

"While we don't like that because we want them to drink and gamble more than their mistress would like, we can't discourage it. They might just tell their friends and we could lose clientele over that. But then you'll not have that concern, that is unless there is something that you are keeping from me."

"Very good, you seem to have everything under control. Do you have somewhere we can go to celebrate our future success?"

"Come, I have my own private quarters on the third floor." She led him up the stairs to her tastefully furnished rooms, a far cry from her other establishment. No expense had been spared with the décor and furnishings, and this included the magnificently large four-poster bed. "Come, let us celebrate."

-o-0-o-

Only a few more weeks until the end of the third term, and then one more before beginning her final year, Isobel thought as she finished her studies for the day. She could hear the other boarders heading for the dining room and she longed for the home-cooked meals at Astoria Park. Cook really knew how to get the best out of a leg of mutton.

"Come on Izzy, you'll be late for dinner." Her friend Millie called as she headed for the dining hall.

"I wonder what culinary marvel we have for dinner tonight, it had better be better than the swill she dished up last night."

"It couldn't be any worse, surely." They laughed as they joined the line waiting to be served.

Chapter 4

In William's absence Priss, with Ben's help, had taken charge of the sowing operations, arranging the supply of grain to be stored where it was readily available to the crews, and the meals, a hearty breakfast, followed by tea for smoko at nine and lunch at twelve, afternoon smoko at three and finish for the day at dusk. She reasoned that a well-fed crew would be prepared to make a stronger effort than one that was ill-fed. Ben had arranged the hire of additional labour and for the horses to be freshly shod and in prime condition. He had a gang working to see that the seeding drills were greased and ready, the last thing they wanted was for a mechanical failure to delay them. In the evenings they dined together and discussed the progress that had been made.

"I don't want to tempt fate by saying this, but everything is running smoothly," Ben said. "And much of that is down to you. William often said that he would take charge of things but, when it came time for it to happen, we found that he had not. You, when you say that you'll do something, make sure that it is organised as quickly as possible so that there are no last-minute problems. It is a pleasure to work for you."

"It is my pleasure to work with you." Priss placed the emphasis on the word 'with'. "It is also my pleasure, great pleasure, to make love with you. You have made my life more bearable, in fact, I am enjoying my life more than I can ever remember." She stood and walked around the table. He rose to meet her and took her into his arms and kissed her passionately on her lips. He felt her hand between them reaching for his hard penis. Her fingers undid the buttons of his trousers and entered into them, finding his penis and drawing it out. She sighed as she held it in her hand and then she raised the front of her dress and placed his penis between her legs. She had deliberately worn no undergarments and he slid easily into her. Placing his hands under her thighs, he lifted her onto the table. "Yes please." She sighed as he began, saying nothing until he had finished. "Ben, I love you so very much that I can't bear to think of William touching me."

-o-0-o-

Elizabeth and Bella stood as the seamstresses took their measurements. They wore no undergarments and made no effort to hide their nakedness from each other or the workers. Julianne cast an appreciative eye over the young ladies, she had chosen well. Taking dresses from racks she asked them to don the garments. These were designed to enhance their slim waists and well-shaped breasts. There was no need for whalebone supports to pull in the waists or to push up their breasts. "Turn around." She ordered them. They spun easily around, the silk skirts feeling sensuous against their naked flesh, before holding a pose facing her. "Very nice. It would take a strong will to resist you."

"What about undergarments?" Bella asked.

"You will wear none. If a man desires to touch your breasts he should find no hindrance to this. If he should wish to proceed further, there should be no barrier to that, whatever that be."

"So we are not to resist any advances from men?" Elizabeth asked.

"If a satisfactory arrangement has been agreed to, no."

"But these dresses, we will need a maid to unfasten them, will we not?" Elizabeth asked.

"Not necessarily. The gentleman may oblige you if he has the patience, if not, then you merely raise your skirts to permit him access.

"If he chooses not to oblige then I see no reason to oblige him."

"You have no choice in the matter if he pays well enough."

"Will we be able to entertain personal friends?" Bella asked.

"Not at the times that you are working, that is unless he pays you well enough. You will have free time during the day to do what you will, but at these times you will behave in public with proper decorum. What you do behind closed doors is your business, so long as it does not impinge on your ability and willingness to do the job that you are being well paid to do here. Do I make myself clear?"

"Perfectly." Bella said.

"You girls have been chosen especially for this job. If you follow my instructions you have the perfect opportunity to reach the pinnacle of this profession very quickly. Let me tell you something when I started in this profession, there was nothing like this available to me. The only thing that I had going for me was my looks and my desire to succeed. I discovered that to rise above the gutter, where most girls end up, I had to be selective as to my clients. I did not want to be a common whore, I wanted men, important men, to desire me. It took some time to achieve that. Because I have chosen you, and because I will only allow a select clientele, you will have these men desiring you from the very beginning."

William stood on the back veranda looking at the vast fields of green wheat waving in the gentle breeze. "You have done a very good job." He said to Ben. "I'm beginning to feel unwanted here. I have business to attend in Sydney, I might just stay there permanently."

"What about Mrs Astor, will you take her with you?"

"I had not intended to. Why do you ask?"

"It's just Sir, she has been very helpful in arranging for the teams to be here when we need them. She seems to enjoy the responsibility."

"That will make it easier for me to leave her behind. I had been concerned that she would want to come with me." The relief at having his problem so easily reconciled had taken a load off his shoulders. He would not have to sneak out to keep his trysts with Julianne.

"It is as well that she stays, we have the harvest gangs to arrange and then we have to get the wheat to market, and that will require bullock teams and labourers to load the bags onto the drays. Mrs Astor is concerned that we may not have enough money to pay these gangs when they have completed their work. It will require you to arrange payments from your agent once the grain is sold. I understand that the wool clip has been sold. Do you have the money from that sale that we can use?"

William had been counting on that money to assist Julianne with her club. "The usual arrangement is that I wait for thirty days after the sale before I settle the accounts. I can't see that I should not continue to do so."

"Mrs Astor thinks that if the gangs received payment on completion, they will come when we need them in future rather than making us wait for them to complete another job."

"Mrs Astor knows little of how business is done. I will not change on a whim of hers."

"Very well Sir." Ben was worried that this news would upset Priss, but what could he do?

Ben went to his room at the end of the shearers' quarters and immediately regretted it. His mood was made even worse by one of the younger hands. "Mr Robinson, could I have a word with you?"

"Sure Peter, what is it?"

"It's one of the girls, Bessie, she has told me that she is with child and I am the father. She wants to marry me, but, I like her well enough, but I am sure that I am not the father."

"What makes you say that?"

"I been with her once or twice, but she has been in the Master's bed just about every night that he's been home these past six months. I am certain that he is the father. From chatting to some of the other men it would seem as if this sort of thing has happened before."

"What sort of thing?"

"The Master has his way with a girl, this time Bessie, and she finds herself in the family way, and he arranges for one of the lads to wed her."

"What do you suggest that I do about it?"

"Nothing I suppose. I just thought that you, seeing as how you are running this place now, should know what's what around here."

"We have a problem," Ben told Priss. William was off somewhere 'consulting' with some of the female staff. "Young Bessie is with child and William has organised for her to wed Peter, but he is convinced that William is the child's father."

"I know of this. I heard some of the girls talking and discussing whether they would have complied so readily. Most of them said that they would have asked for more than a marriage and being allowed to stay on."

"How many other girls do you think have settled for this arrangement?" Ben asked.

"I do not know, but I am certain that she is not the first." Priss was deep in thought. "I sometimes think that I am to blame for this situation. If he didn't make my skin crawl at his touch, I might have been able to satisfy his urges."

"That is not your fault, please do not think yourself to blame. He asked of you what any decent woman would certainly have refused to give. That is not your fault."

"I know, but I have given myself to you, and we have done many of those things together that I denied him."

"My darling Priss, we have done these things, not because I demanded them of you, but because we both wanted to please the other. There is a difference."

"I know there is, and that is why I have no guilt when you and make love."

"When is William leaving for Sydney?"

"I think he plans to leave in the morning. He no longer discusses his plans with me."

"There is one other thing, he insists that we are to maintain his thirty days from completion to payment."

"Then I will have to speak with the bank manager and see if we can arrange for them to pay the contractors on completion and we repay them on the sale of the goods."

"Do you think that they will do that?"

"Yes, especially when I tell them of our plans to build a village here when the railway comes through our property."

"How do you know that it will?"

"It has to. Astoria Park is on flat land between two ranges of hills. The track builders will not lay the tracks up a slope when flat land is available. Plus the fact there is a ready supply of water for the locomotives."

"You seem to know a lot about this sort of thing."

"My father is a railway engineer responsible for building railways back home in England. In the last letter that I received from him, he has told me that, to service the industries with coal, railways are being laid all across the country, and as speed is the most important consideration, laying tracks with as few gradients as possible is essential. The same will apply here. The bank has got the whiff of substantial profits to be made from this, and if I have read the signs, they will ensure that the railways will pass by here."

"What does William think of this?"

"I have chosen not to discuss it with him. His greed would keep him here and that does not suit our purposes. I want him to stay in Sydney as often as possible, and for as long as possible. He can spend his time and his money on his whore."

"But if he spends money we will not have the money to do what we want to do."

"I have already thought of that. Astoria Park will become a company, and he will be paid an allowance as long as he takes no part in the running of that company."

"Will he go along with that?"

"If he wants his whore, then he will have no option."

"There is one thing that I should tell you."

"And what is that?"

"William told me that he has plans to stay in Sydney permanently."

-o-0-o-

"William." Priss said over breakfast. William was already dressed for the trip to Sydney.

"What is it now?" He was anxious to get underway.

"Will you be coming home with the children for Christmas?"

"If my business in Sydney requires my attention then I will have to stay in town over Christmas."

"But what about the children? I can't have them travelling on their own."

"William has arranged to stay with a friend, and I think that Elizabeth is also staying with a friend. That leaves Isobel, I shall put her on a coach and you can have someone meet it at Goulburn."

"I don't like it, having her travelling alone like that."

"What alternative do I have if I have to stay in town?"

"If you have to stay in town, that is." The tone of her voice acknowledged the fact that he would be staying in town with his whore, rather than spending it sweltering under the hot summer sun at Astoria Park. She could not let him see that she was inwardly overjoyed at his decision.

Chapter 5

The Wellington Club, the new gentleman's club, was the talk of the town. Word quickly spread among the gentry of the services provided, for a price, by the young hostesses. To their wives, they were indulging in games of chance such as baccarat, roulette, and for the less discriminating poker. It was also a place where wagers were settled between bookmakers and their clients. Winners were of course encouraged by their hostess to wager their winnings on the roll of the wheel or turn of the card.

William denied himself such pleasures, for much greater pleasures awaited him, in the early hours of the morning, after the club closed. Juliana would ensure that the takings were safely locked away before mounting the stairs to the apartment that she shared with him. She was pleased with her life for not only was she now wealthy beyond her wildest dreams, but she was sharing that wealth with the man that she was in love with. What more could she want?

"We may have to find more girls." She said to William as she shed her dress.

"Why is that, surely they are not leaving?"

"No, the opposite is the case, we are attracting more customers each day. The problem that we have is that the girls, once they have attracted a customer, are unable to leave him to serve another. Unless we find more we will be losing customers who just cannot wait."

"But, if there are not enough girls to go around, wouldn't that lead to the gentlemen offering more to attract a girl?"

"That will only work if it can be seen that there are almost enough for those present, if it is obvious that there are many more men than girls, they will look elsewhere." Juliana forestalled any further conversation by taking William's manhood in hand and commencing the most enjoyable time for both of them.

On the floor below Elizabeth and Bella were seated on Elizabeth's bed. "Simon and Roderick were in this evening, I do believe that they were not pleased."

"Did they say anything to you?" Elizabeth asked she hadn't spoken with Roderick for some weeks.

"They did not need to, the watched us all evening. I could not leave Sir Nigel's side, he would not let me because he looks on me as his good luck charm."

"It must be almost time for his luck to change." The girls had noticed that a client's good fortune never lasted for long at all. It was only a matter of time before the ball did not fall for them or the cards that they were dealt with were not what they needed to win.

"You do know that the games are rigged, don't you?" Elizabeth said.

"What do you mean?" Bella was shocked at the revelation.

"I have seen the croupier practising on the wheel after he has thrown the ball onto the wheel his hand goes under the table and he seems to be able to slow the wheel so that the ball will land on a chosen number. I tried it out this evening, Sir Nigel would ask me what number he should put his money on, and Henry smiled at me to let me know that it would land on that number, and it did. Yesterday evening when Reginald was playing the wheel, he did the same thing for a while and then he stopped, he did not smile because Reginald stopped asking me for a number. I think that Juliana would like it to be known that my choices invariably won, just to encourage more men to request my services."

"Did Sir Nigel require additional services?"

"Yes, but unfortunately he was unable to oblige me. I had to bring him to climax with my hand. Do you realise that I am getting less pleasure than I was getting before we began to work here? Roderick could be counted on to do it every night, at least twice."

"I know. On my last day off, when I went to Simon, he was positively insatiable, I was sore for days after it."

-o-0-o-

"I have a message from William, it appears that we will be having Christmas without him. There is other news, he has a message from Elizabeth and she is staying in the city. It appears as if she and her friend Bella have found employment. Either he does not know where or he is not telling me. I do not like this one bit, but what can I do? And he has agreed to Wills staying with friends, and that leaves Isobel. He has employed a woman to accompany her on the mail coach as far as Goulburn and has asked me to send someone to bring her from there. This is all very inconvenient for me."

"There is another way that we can solve this problem. Young James, the lad that I have been entrusting with a greater level of responsibility, this would be the perfect opportunity to test his mettle. I will send him in the sulky, and he can bring her back. I know that he will perform this task well, and it will give him confidence in my trust in him."

-o-0-o-

It was the end of the fourth term for Wills and Isobel. Wills had graduated with a modest pass, enough to gain him a place at Cambridge, and was now checking out the scenery of the girl variety on the beach near his friend Thommo's parents' holiday house. "It is a pity that they have to wear those ridiculous bathing suits, there's nothing showing but their hands and feet and their faces."

"We shall have to cut a couple from the herd and work at getting them out of their costumes, won't we?" Wills said. "Your parents are going into town for a couple of days tomorrow, we will have the house to ourselves, won't we?"

"Except for the staff. They will still be here."

"What about the staff? I have seen the way that young kitchen maid has been looking at you."

"Yes, she's a pretty enough young thing," Thommo said, aping something that he had heard his father say. "And I have noticed that she has been looking at me. I might just put my hand up her skirt and see if she is interested. If she is, then we can always see if you can join in. What do you say?"