Golden Girl Ch. 01

Chapter 1: The Golden Girl

Every year as the first chill of Autumn began to bite into Summer's soft, ripe heat, the Duc de Charenton threw an immense fete for himself and those he favoured. The Duc had a reputation for eccentricity, even for cruelty, but only those who attended knew the extent of it. His invited guests witnessed all manner of extravagant displays. The fortunate among them were granted the privilege of partaking in what was offered. The ones whose bodies were offered to his guests, however, those lovely girls and proud young men who were taken into service, ah, they experienced the Duc's "Feast of the Fall" in another fashion altogether.

She was not special nor set apart for particular attention, our Golden Girl, Dorée. Not at first. She was simply one of many young peasants from the surrounding farms sent to the Duc for the evening, for which her step-mother received a silver demi-écu. Dorée was meant to serve in the Duc's chateau, and so she did, for that first night and many to come.

She served as a lamp.

Naked, gilt, and fitted with candles, she was set to stand along the chamber walls, a golden statue of living, sensitive flesh. There numbered a baker's dozen of them, girls and youths, all bound to a night's service that left them confused and humiliated. Dorée, however, was the only one to betray signs of another reaction. She, alone among them, was confused, humiliated...and incredibly aroused.

But let us begin at the beginning of our tale.

******

"Must I go, Maman?"

Dorée cast a pleading glance up at her step-mother, who was examining a silver coin in the banked firelight and murmuring to herself.

"Clipped, it is. Just a bit. Just a bit. It will do. Yes."

"Must I?

"Yes, I said! All the village girls must serve some time or other. It you weren't such a bony sticky thing, the Duc would have had you last year. Now you've filled out, you'll serve nicely. You must go and do whatever is given you to do."

"But the girls who come back from there never speak of it."

"If they never speak of it, you've no cause to think on it."

"The shadow that crosses their eyes, Maman-"

"Enough!" The old woman's voice rose, causing Dorée to flinch back. "You'll not insult the Duc! You're to go up tomorrow morning to present yourself. Do as I say, or join your sister in the streets, I care not."

Dorée bowed her head, thick tawny locks falling to curtain her face. Her eyes, wide and golden-brown as a spaniel's, closed momentarily then opened, distant and dutiful.

"Yes, Maman."

Dorée climbed the ladder to her small attic bedroom. Her limbs heavy were with dread but her eyes were wide-open and sleepless. So, she decided to spend the night in prayer. Clad in her white linens, she knelt down by the window as the light of the full moon spilled in all around her. She tried to present to God above a picture of innocence under threat, in hopes of being spared. But as she knelt for an hour, then two, all she felt was the hardness of the floor beneath her knees and the ache of muscles held constricted in a posture of devotion. A strange chill slipped through her, raising shivering patches of gooseflesh across her moon-bleached skin as if fingers brushed up her spine, though no-one touched her that night. In that state, her prayers faltered until she knew not what she asked.

"Let me be as I am," she whispered. "Let me not be changed as the other girls were changed. Or if I must change, Seigneur, let me become my truest self."

The night was silent. No star flared, no meteor fell in answer to her words. The very wind held its breath and gave no answer. But the silence heard her, and whether it was God who replied or some other power, none can say. Either way, Dorée slipped into slumber at the windowsill, and there she stayed, dreamless and unmoving, until the dawn of the day that would grant her prayer -whether she willed it or no.

An hour after dawn, a tall, thickset, hawk-nosed man arrived to collect Dorée. He loaded her unceremoniously into an open wagon which already held several other girls from her village. Dorée cringed at first to be so exposed. Everyone working in the fields along the way to the manor could see that she was being taken up this year. She glanced fearfully at faces she knew, expecting to see pity or hear cries of derision, but they were all studiously blank or turned away from her. Closed. Unacknowledging. Though the new day was bright and fair and full of birdsong, the girls seemed to catch the mood of the people and stayed quiet, not daring to whisper to each other until they reached the chateau.

Even the back door of this magnificent edifice was imposing. Dorée would have quailed before it and feared to knock if she had been on her own. As it was, she barely had a moment to take in the strange, elaborate device of crossed dagger and chain carved into the door's ebony panels before she was pressed forward by the man behind her. As they were herded in, there were finally gasps and exclamations. A kind of excitement overtook the young women as they noticed the fine oak panelling of the corridor. The ceilings were high and gracious, even in these back hallways, and the tall windowpanes were of glass, rippled but fine and clear enough to see through to the manicured grounds. If the back hallways were so well-appointed, what might the grand dining hall be like? Even if they had to work hard at cleaning the hall, surely it would be worth it to stay in such a fine mansion for an evening. Some began to whisper in dawning anticipation at the possibility of serving the Duc's table while dressed in a fine uniform, surrounded by beauty and luxury.

And then they entered the servant's washing chambers. It was a long, cavernous room without windows, lit by torchlight and all paved in flagstone. Along one side there were already a number of comely young women and, against the opposite wall, a line of virile young men. To her shock, Dorée saw that every one of them was naked, without a single shred of clothing to cover themselves. Some were twisting their bodies, as if seeking to hide behind their own lithe limbs. It was impossible, however, because each was chained with their hands behind their backs and their feet apart, shackled at wrist and ankle to two long parallel wooden boards that were embedded in the wall along the length of the room. The young men were red-faced as their members responded to the presence of so many naked female bodies held out of reach before from them. The girls all appeared to be looking away modestly, though as Dorée watched she noticed a few glance up at the men under shaded eyelids. It was inhuman, Dorée thought, to treat them all in this manner!

Before she could open her mouth in protest, she was seized roughly from behind. All she could see of her assailant was his thick, work-hardened hands clamped around her upper arms. He drove her before him straight across the room and stood her against the far wall, facing it with her hands on the rough stone. He kicked her feet apart a little. Then he began, methodically, to strip her. He did not bother to unlace her dress, but simply tore it at the seams where it was weakest and pulled it down harshly to her hips. The fabric bunched up, stopped by the curve of her buttocks. She tried to squirm away from him, but he caught both of her wrists in one massive hand and hauled her arms over her head, pinning her to the wall. He jammed a thigh up between her legs and hoisted her onto her tiptoes. She tried to struggle free, but all she succeeded in doing was tearing the dress even more. Her captor shifted the leg that pressed between hers just enough to shuck the ripped dress down over her bottom, leaving her in nothing but her stays and chemise. She bucked hard against him with her back, unable to help herself. Clucking his tongue, he pressed the sensitive bare flesh of her underarms, face, and bosom harder against the cold stone wall. With his other hand he gripped the back of her neck and held it firmly to stop her bucking. He held her like that until her instinctive struggles died down and the only movement she made was to tremble with the cold. When he was sure she was listening, he hissed,

"Don't. Move."

There was the sound of a blade being drawn. Dorée froze. Her skin twitched in sudden vulnerability. She knew what he was about to do.

Slowly, he cut the laces of her stays and threw the desecrated garment away. She quailed in her final layer, a thin, soft chemise that came to mid-thigh, until he cut that from her as well. He let the fabric drop away with the perverse suggestion of a gentle caress. She was down to her bare skin.

All of a sudden, Dorée felt it once again: that shiver up her spine, the same as when she knelt in prayer. She heard an amused sound behind her as gooseflesh prickled visibly on her arms.

"It's going to get a lot colder than that, sweetmeat," the guard said. Then he unceremoniously dumped a bucket of water over Dorée's head.

She heard the other girls from her wagon-load scream as the same was done to them, but she held her tongue and stilled her fighting this time. She had gained a sense of what was happening. They were simply being washed. She and the others who'd been brought here were country folk who slept in lofts and fields. They were coated with grime, and probably smelled of the byre. Of course they had to be cleaned up before they served the Duc. The way it was happening -the brutality of it- was unnecessary, but then again, the manor staff didn't have time to accommodate the privacy of every homespun peasant girl. Who was she to judge the ways of nobility? Perhaps it was always done this way, and she just never knew it before. So thinking, Dorée bowed her head under the next deluge. If this is how it was done here, she would endure it. Dorée stood quietly as her body was rubbed down with rough lye soap until her skin turned rosy pink. Her tangled hair, too, was scrubbed and brushed out with little consideration for her comfort. It had seemed a mousy, tawny dun colour before washing, but now that it was clean, it fell in waves that would turn honey-gold when dry.

"That'll be her best feature. She's plain enough but for that golden hair," one of the servants scrubbing her remarked to the other.

"They'll have to call her the Golden Girl, instead of the Golden Boy," the other replied with a braying laugh like a donkey's.

Dorée felt a confused mixture of offense and pride. She knew she was no great beauty -she ought to, given how many times her step-mother had told her! -and it was heaping insult on injury for them to mock her so casually. But at the same time, their praise of her hair and the way the locks she could see around her face gleamed bright in the firelight made something in her breast swell with warmth.

'Vanity, away!' She admonished herself. How could she be proud in the midst of such humiliation? And yet, it seemed that vice could rear its wicked head at any time.

After the bath, Dorée was chained against the wall with the rest of the girls. She was close enough to feel the heat coming off of their bodies, and to hear the sobbing gasps of the young woman next to her.

"Courage, sister," she whispered. "They're just cleaning us up for service. This is surely the worst of it, and it will be over soon."

The other girl, a dark-haired beauty, nodded and sniffled. Then she glanced uncertainly up at the men who strained against their bonds across from them. Dorée followed her gaze and saw that across from her there was a young man so dark and slender that he could have been the black-haired beauty's match in a carriage team. His already-stiff member bobbed higher at the realization that he was seen by her, and his face turned even redder with shame.

"Look away, O, look away! It's tormenting him, can't you see?" Dorée urged her companion, lowering her eyes.

Hearing her words, one of the guards strode over. He lifted Dorée's chin with his baton and turned her face toward the line of men.

"Look your fill, ma petite innocente. You'll see plenty more before the night's through, and not all from so far away."

Despite her raised head, Dorée kept her eyes turned to the side, as if to say, 'You may turn my face to sin, but you will not make me gaze upon it.'

The guard laughed and pulled the baton out from under her chin so hard that her head jerked with it.

"Ha! Hold onto that facade of purity for as long as you can. The Duc will love it."

The servants all were kept chained for what seemed like an eternity -long enough for even the most vigorous of the men to flag in their devotions. There was no way to measure the passage of time precisely without any windows to show the light of day or the darkness of night. In this timeless space, Dorée lost herself in silent prayer and contemplation of the nature of Lust. Though she knew about it in the abstract, it was the first time she had encountered it so starkly, and she was determined to take a spiritual lesson from this strange and all-too-carnal situation.

Before her thoughts had progressed too far, however, there was a scraping at the far end of the room, as of a door opening. She and many of the others turned their heads up to look. A man in the uniform and powdered wig of a Chamberlain entered the room with an air of great importance, surrounded by a small entourage of liveried Footmen wearing the device of the blade and chain. He was clearly charged with managing the household events, as he immediately began to assign duties to the servants via instructions to his Footmen.

"Put this one on the frontispiece. This one, too. These four in the vestibule."

Reaching the gorgeous dark-haired girl next to Dorée and the equally lovely young man across from her, he nodded approvingly and said,

"This handsome pair will serve the high table."

Dorée held her breath, wondering what role she would be assigned.

"Lamp," the chamberlain said, waving a noncommittal hand in her direction. Then down the row he continued, saying, "Lamp, lamp, lamp. All of these ones, lamps. We shall need thirteen of them in the dining hall alone, mixed male and female. Master's orders."

Dorée's head cocked in puzzlement. 'Lamp?' Was she to light the lamps and trim the candle-wicks? Why would that take thirteen servants in the dining room alone? Unless there were a dreadful number of lamps, it shouldn't take more than one or two devoted to such a task.

The Chamberlain continued down the row, assigning some to the table and others to the doors, or to the ballroom, or to the hallways in different wings. None of them were assigned to the usual servants' areas, such as the kitchens, stables, or scullery. From this, Dorée surmised that there must be regular servants here as well, ones better-versed in the actual operations of the chateau. Perhaps youths from the villages were only brought on as extra hands for the Feast to present a fresh and pleasing appearance. That still didn't explain what she would be doing with lamps, though.

As abruptly as the Chamberlain had arrived, so he swept out of the room, leaving behind a good portion of his retinue of Footmen. The guards went down the line unlocking each servant's fetters and removing the chains that bound them with a resounding clatter. Five or six Footmen positioned themselves between the men and women, and called out in turn,

"Frontispiece, to me!"

"Table, to me!"

"Lamps, to me!"

And so on.

Eager to be out of the washing chamber and engaged in her duties, Dorée stepped up to the Footman who had called for lamps. He did not acknowledge her, but only beckoned to the other servants assigned to the same duty. Some, still shy of their nakedness, had to be forced by the guards to step forward. As she waited for them, Dorée cast a sidelong glance at those chosen to serve at the table. She caught sight of the dark-haired couple side-by-side, their hands clasped tight between them.

'Beauty joined with beauty," she thought. 'It is right that their lots are thrown together. But then, why do I regret to lose her company, she who has not even spoken a word to me?'

Nonetheless, Dorée did feel a pang of loss as the lovely matched pair were led through the chateau's inner door, whence the Chamberlain had come, while she and the other lamp servants were led out the back door, to the same servant's hallways where she had entered earlier. The Footman of the lamp group gave her a rough shove forward when she tried to look back and catch one more glimpse of the beautiful couple departing.

He led them through several turns down corridors not much different from those she had walked before. She was surprised to notice that the window-panes cast barred shadows across the floors and the sunlight coming through them was mellow. It was already mid-afternoon. Her stomach grumbled to remind her that she had eaten nothing since breaking her fast at dawn.

Abruptly, the group arrived at the end of a corridor where the door was flung open. Sunlight streamed in, blinding Dorée for a moment and causing her feet to hesitate on the threshold.

"Vas-y, vas-y," the Footman muttered, propelling her forward by her arm.

She stumbled out and saw that they were in an elegant stone-paved courtyard with potted trees trimmed into strange, fantastical shapes. Some even held their summer blooms still, though they were a bit blighted now. The square was fully enclosed, being surrounded on the left and right by porte-cocheres with their doors closed, with the chateau behind her and a long stable directly before her. The footman continued to guide her by the arm towards the stable. The others followed in her wake like ducklings. Dorée shivered as the evening breeze caressed her bare skin. Though the sun was still warm, the air was already beginning to carry autumn's chill. Or perhaps it was just that she was not used to being outside in such a state of deshabille. Her cheeks flamed and she dipped her head, wondering if anyone inside the chateau was watching her among the group of naked servants being herded across the courtyard. She hoped they would be given uniforms soon.

"Inside. Quickly now!" The Footman ordered as they reached the stable door.

"How many of them are there?" Came a low, rumbling voice from the darkness.

"Thirteen, if you can believe it."

"And we've got to do them all by sunset?"

"Well before. The Duc wants them in place twenty minutes before the first guests arrive. Said he wants 'crenellations' in the wax, whatever that is."

"Bon sang! Get them ready, then. I'll stoke the fire."

Dorée hardly had time to wonder about this exchange before she was shoved into the stables. Blinded again, this time by going from daylight to dark, she flung her hands out to feel her way. Her right hand met with the post of a wooden doorframe, though she could feel no door beyond it. With a little encouragement from behind, she stumbled through the doorframe into a small, dark space. She looked around, still blinking to clear her eyes. It seemed to be a stall for a horse, but one that was not in use, nor had been for some time. There was no straw, not even a scrap of it, and no rope or gate hung across the broad doorframe. The only thing it contained was a wide wooden bench attached with chains to the wall and an old bucket underneath it.

"Here, you," said a soft voice from behind Dorée. She whirled in a fright to see a lanky, tow-headed stablehand with patchy stubble coming in on his chin. He bore a tray full of small clay bowls. In a gentle tone, like one he might use for skittish horses, he said,

"Sit down and drink this, now. Be a good girl for me."

Dorée took the nearest bowl and sat down with it cupped in her hands. The contents were warm and smelled so good that her mouth began to water despite herself. She took a sip. It was a porridge of boiled grains in warm milk, sweetened with honey and some other herbal flavouring. Aniseed, perhaps? She didn't care what it was. She gulped the porridge down, grateful for the hearty warmth it spread through her belly. She could hear the stablehand delivering bowls to the stall next to hers, and so on down the stables. As he walked back past her stall, he said,