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Elizabeth Southwater
Copyright remains with author
A Free extract from bdsmbooks.com
In 1764 Edward Clutterbucke and his brother Richard, both ship-owners and City of London merchants, had a terminal quarrel over something apparently as inconsequential as Edward having employed a woman to manage the account-books of their various trading-companies. Edward argued that the two of them needed a Counting House head to oversee the large and growing number of transactions and that as one Mistress Judith Cope, a thirty-year-old widow who had come to him pleading for work, had turned out to have probably the best ‘accompting’ brain in the City, he’d given her the job. He also argued that his decision was unconnected with the fact that she also had a most delectable fundament – backside. Brother Richard didn’t dispute her extraordinary abilities with accounts and even, after examination, agreed that Mistress Cope’s nether regions were ‘perfect and ripe pears’ but he could not and would not employ females of any kind, anywhere, except as domestic servants, bed-servants or, at a pinch, a wife. Edward quite liked women - animals generally, providing they knew their place in relation to men; if Richard noticed his domestic servants – all women of course - or his wife or women at all it was only as objects to be bedded or beaten, both of which activities he enjoyed in a sour way.
The quarrel grew in bitterness at a daily rate while their business competitors waited with baited-breath and cash in hand to pick up the inevitable pieces. They waited almost a year when, to their fury, the brothers suddenly secretly and separately sold their four fine houses in London and Bristol, sold - ‘as found’, such was the precipitate nature of the sale – eight jointly-owned merchant ships – and promptly ceased trading. Edward retained the six-hundred-ton ‘Bird of Dawn’, Richard the newer but smaller ‘Flower’ and, all assets realised and divided down to the last silver quarter-penny - and Edward’s wife packed off as someone else’s maid - both ships left Bristol on the morning-tide of May the ninth 1765. Edward to sail south and then east for India as Master of the ‘Bird’, Richard due West for the Americas as Master of the ‘Flower’. The two men neither spoke with nor had sight of eachother ever again. In India, as he was already an influential member of the then East India Company and knew the country to some extent, Edward founded the Indian branch of the family which prospered - to this day there are Clutterbuckes scattered all over the sub-continent, mostly making money. His brother Richard knew nothing of the Americas but turned up some three years later as a ‘plantation owner’ in the depths of what was one day to become the State of Mississippi: there is just one surviving public reference to him, in a pre-civil-war Confederate newspaper. In England the still-influential remnants of the Clutterbucke family continued in a quiet and wealthy way and still, quietly, owned some twenty acres of the most sought-after real-estate once known as London’s Docklands. One small part of which had been in the family since the time of King John.
In 1999, the sole remaining London Clutterbucke, thirty-two-year-old Elizabeth - ‘Elizabeth’ because all the eldest-daughters have been named so since the time of ‘Good Queen Bess’ – being alone and ‘head’ of the family-line because her five sisters had married various unremarkable men, thirty-two-year-old Elizabeth, boringly wealthy, began in a desultory way to research Internet genealogical sites for traces of her long lost many-times-great-uncle Richard. Had he survived in ‘the Americas’? Was there an American branch of the Clutterbuckes alive and well there after over two hundred and fifty years to add to the well-known Clutterbuckes of Madras and Calcutta? As Elizabeth was searching for ‘Richard Clutterbucke – Southern States of the USA, 1770’s’ so was a Hugo Clutterbucke in Mississippi searching for an eighteenth-century ‘Richard Clutterbucke, about 1770s, England, London or Bristol’: Hugo wanted to discover what more he could about his legendary ancestor Richard… Contact between the two distant cousins Hugo and Elizabeth was almost immediate.
They corresponded, entirely by e-mail and entirely on the subject of Clutterbucke family-history, save for one exchange when he told her he was ‘ugly, two-hundred-fifteen pounds but no fat, forty-three and male’ which she countered with ‘smallish, arrogant, beeeautiful red hair and with a very, very short fuse. Twenties/thirties. Typical Clutterbucke-born female’. There were no other exchanges of a personal nature until she scanned and sent him seven CDs of copies of family documents extending back to 1461 and a single snapshot-photo of herself in London’s Trafalgar Square: he responded by inviting her – almost ordering her – to ‘come and discover’ his ‘neck of the woods’ so that ‘she could stand with him on the steps of ancestor-Richard’s original Mississippi Plantation House’; also by sending her a picture of himself standing on the very steps. His e-mail said “Get on a plane, fly to Jackson, then on to Magnolia: tell me your arrival date/time Magnolia and I’ll meet you and drive you to the house – it’s about fifty miles from the airport. You’re going to stay in Richard Clutterbucke’s original house, my house, our Mississippi family house… In the unreconstructed American South…’ The e-mail ended ‘Do it, Elizabeth’.
Despite the fact that saying ‘do it’ to Elizabeth Clutterbucke was unwise in any circumstances, over the phone when she called him with her ETA-Magnolia she thought he had a bold-sounding, decisive voice – quite in keeping with the rather blurred but bear-like figure in his photo. ‘Quite the typical Clutterbucke-born male’ she chuckled to herself, scowling, ‘in spite of the US Southern accent and twang’. One thing Hugo actually said was “I’m telling you, Elizabeth, there are three founding-families here; the Clutterbuckes are historically most-senior: the other two are going to detonate when they know I have the senior British cousin, a direct descendant of Richard staying here, even if it’s a female… Straight, documented line for four hundred years in England and two hundred and forty in Mississippi. Am I going to have a good time…”
Not if you say things like ‘even if ‘it’s’ a female’ she thought. “By the way, what did you mean by – in your mail – ‘the unreconstructed American South’”, she asked, less amused than she had been.
“Oh, just that we like to keep to some of the old ways” – from which she vaguely imagined he meant perhaps a slow way of life, steamy plantations and beautiful old houses with pillared fronts; that sort of thing. Very exciting, very ‘other worldly…’
The US, the tiny bit of it she saw, proved to be an exciting and different planet and Hugo, in the close heat of Magnolia’s airport proved to be vast, powerful-looking like some aggressive military vehicle, dark, perhaps just a mite too hairy but a basso-profundo charmer. Elizabeth decided at once that she was going to like her American-cousin Hugo, regardless of the bad start. As for Hugo, he decided at once that what he needed to do – because he was very big and very strong and she was small and light and most extraordinarily attractive – and a Clutterbucke-woman – was to pick her up by the waist and jack her up and down on his prick; he didn’t of course, being a Southern gentleman. Then once again there was a little incident that caused her to wonder if he might be a ‘bit of a pain really’: getting into his car, a vehicle he called an ‘SUV’ and the size of a small house, he said
“Back seat, Elizabeth. Middle of the back seat”
It sounded like an order, which made her hackles rise; just for a moment she did the thing all the red-headed Clutterbucke women do when given something that sounds like an order – she stuck her bottom lip out a bit and automatically started to shift into ‘ice-maiden’ mode… But he was her host, she was the guest and she was on his home-territory so she contented herself with a ‘why the back seat?’
“It’s the way we do things here” he growled.
OK, the back seats were higher than the front ones, with a better view of everything so perhaps he was just being gallant… Men being gallant to younger women – rather nice; ‘keeping to the old ways…’ Perhaps she was just mis-interpreting his English-language usage…
‘Gallant?’. Hugo? Yes, well, maybe. ‘The old ways?’. Yes, when they got to it, the house was pillared and old and grand, but only in a small way; yes it was in a picture-book ‘plantation’ but a plantation that had almost reverted to the steamy forest-and-creek it had been when great-uncle Richard had bought it. But… But before they got to the place, driving through a very tiny, ‘historic-looking’ town five miles from it, Elizabeth, perched in the middle of the back seat, saw – a fairly familiar enough sight to her by then – a prosperous-looking, very blonde ‘American Mom’ person opening the back of her enormous truck-like car so that her companion could unload the contents of a supermarket-trolley into it. The woman was maybe sixty, a little overdressed, a good-deal over the ‘plump’ side – gross would have been a better word - but what was absolutely unfamiliar and required a double and triple-take was the companion: female, tallish, much younger – around thirty, slender and in a well-filled tee-shirt, knee-length denim-skirt and gym-shoes – but with her ankles – and her wrists – in chain shackles connected to another chain at her waist. So, not unnaturally, but hesitantly Cousin Elizabeth asked Cousin Hugo – politely – why that should be…
“The big blonde woman? That was Hester Meredith – the Merediths are one of our founding-families…Is she going to be mad when she hears about you…”
“No, the girl, I mean the girl. She had chains on for heaven’s sake – fetters…”
“Oh, she’s from the Home… The Merediths must have replaced one”
“Replaced what? One what?”
“One of her two let-outs…”
“Sorry. ‘The Home’? ‘Let-outs’?”
“’The County Correctional Facility for Females’, the jail” said Hugo, grinning and driving on. “They let the better-behaved ones out on hire if they get to be ‘Fivers’ – that’s trustworthy and quiet… Only to the better, older families of course. Probably that one was chained because she’s a first-time-out. It costs two thousand dollars a day to keep them in jail and it’s from our taxes, so the county saves our money if some of them can be let out on hire… Just a half-hour now…” Then “This is my road, my gates… Those oaks are almost two-hundred years old…”
“Beautiful” said Elizabeth, not really looking because she was mentally running clips from old black-and-white movies of gun-toting sheriffs and chain-gangs, segregation, extreme bigotry… ‘No’ she decided, ‘this is the twenty-first century, Elizabeth dear, so stop being silly…’
“If you want to know about the let-outs from the Home you can talk to Lucy – I got her only a week or so ago - in place of Marybelle. Marybelle was released – done her time… See the creek? The story has it that our ancestor Richard dug that creek… Here, this is the Clutterbucke house. Great - you, my English cousin arriving here after two hundred and seventy years… Dunno why I’m telling you all this; just sit quiet and look at the scenery…”
Elizabeth decided she’d just ignore the very-odd things – a woman in chains for instance – and concentrate on the things that did make sense: Hugo helping the disadvantaged…
“That’s so good of you Hugo” I said. “Giving a job to someone on parole from jail, a criminal…”
There was a silence for a moment, during which he turned his head and looked at her, rather crossly she thought.
“Lucy, you mean? Stupid rather than criminal really; she was seen several times unaccompanied in town – she’s single. Warned, but the silly girl didn’t listen. Got ninety days, done six. Come on, I’ll send her out for your bags… P’raps we’re a bit too easy on you all sometimes…”
“On who? Who ‘all’?”
“Women. But I don’t hold with keeping them in jail. Too expensive. Take Lucy… Ninety days in jail for – hah, you’ve been spotted. Now everyone will want to know who you are, foreign clothes, flown in from the UK – the airport’ll tell them that. Am I going to enjoy this…”
“Go on about Lucy” came from behind him in a very straight voice; a tone he most certainly wouldn’t have allowed except for the fact that this was Elizabeth Clutterbucke and new.
“Right. Ninety days costs the County one-hundred-eighty-thousand-bucks out of our taxes. Crazy. Most of them only need some old fashioned discipline…”
“Like what?” asked his passenger evenly, doing the bit that classic-redheads do the world over; suddenly pale of face, freckles prominent, green-eyes immediately all-innocent-looking and, in this case, being a Clutterbucke-woman, with her bottom lip jutting. Time for anyone near to take cover…
“Sinclair – he’s the Governor of the women’s jail – he agrees with me. ‘Keep ‘em in for a weekend to think about it’ he says, ‘then hire them out. Gives them something useful to do and trains them up as well… What they mostly need is discipline…’
If he’d been a sensitive man, Hugo might have heard, in the ensuing silence from the back seat, a definite ticking. But he didn’t: because he was thinking about the possible shape of Elizabeth Clutterbucke without her smart clothes, wondering about the size and form of her tits and so forth, wondering if it was true about original, Clutterbucke-born females having wide crotches and the inherited ability to make their labia pout: he decided the silence was because she’d not understood what he’d been saying - and so he enlightened her in his growly way;
“I needed a new servant, Lucy was the best of the bunch on offer, would do as well as any and would save the taxpayer if she was usefully employed so Wal Sinclair says ‘OK’, writes off the rest of her sentence, stripes her butt with a cane to set her up - and I drive her home. Everybody happy…”
“He caned her!”. From the back seat, the voice very hard, not a question and not a proper voice for a woman to use to a man. Shit. She really is a Clutterbucke female – and a foreign one from the damn UK… Oh boy.
“He caned her” came the voice again. “A grown woman. And ‘everybody’s happy’. He caned her… Apart from the fact that this prison-governor criminally assaulted her – and you connived in it – and ought to be under arrest with him now, how – pray – is Lucy ‘happy’”.
If a Clutterbucke woman ever asks ‘how, pray’ or ‘what, pray’ the legend has it that if you’re in England, go to France immediately and keep going. In America, cross several State Lines at once – and keep going.
“Dammit woman, Lucy is happy because she’s got a good job – in the Clutterbucke house for god’s sake - because she’s got a man controlling her at last and because she’s had her butt whacked… Hells-teeth, I even asked her…”
“Asked her what, exactly, Mister Clutterbucke?”
“Saying, Miss Clutterbucke ma’am, ‘Now Lucy, you can stay in jail for at least eighty more days and then get turned out, or you can bare your butt for the Governor, bend over and then come and work for me at the house”. At which point, Hugo Clutterbucke pulled the car over onto the shoulder, stopped it and turned round to address Elizabeth. Who for once in her life, felt her furious indignation attacked by something like scare, for Hugo was very big and very obviously determined about whatever-it-was. She had a small difficulty in recognising whatever-it-was as ‘scare’ because it was also very slightly – she would have denied this – it was also a slightly odd, slightly pleasant sort of scare…
“OK, Elizabeth. Sit still. Listen” he said, grinning. “You’re very young, you’re not from hereabouts, you’re a genuine, first-water Clutterbucke and my cousin. You’re a wealthy female – something I don’t approve of but it’s inherited and you could hardly hand over a man’s money if there wasn’t a man… You seem to have a good body, though I haven’t yet had a look…”
“And?” He thought the way she said ‘and?’ was sheer insolence, coming from a female – but she was the young Clutterbucke female from the UK and damn pretty…
“And you need that tongue of yours sorted, as well as a hell of a lot of other things…”
“Before I get out of this thing – this car – and hitch back to the airport – is there anything else, Mister Hugo Clutterbucke, sir?”
“Yup. The Clutterbuckes are going to be Top Founder Family here again. The way I make that happen is to have the top of the original English Clutterbucke family married to me. That’s you, sweetheart. I knew I’d have to change your ways when I brought you here, but you’ll get to be number-two Clutterbucke and you’ll get to be a proper woman at the same time. I’m being very easy with you. So sit straight, Elizabeth and close that pretty mouth please”. “See” he added, “I’m saying ‘please’. In twenty minutes you can see your historic family-house – it’s called ‘Resurgam’ by the way, which means ‘I’ll come back…”
“It means ‘we shall rise again’. It’s Latin. We have schools and such in Europe. Even ‘females’ go to schools in Europe, Mister Clutterbucke. You were saying? Only, do be brief…”
“Huh. You’ve a lot of mouth but you truly are one doll, Elizabeth. In twenty minutes you can see your house, meet Lucy – who I guess will be your first real servant – but first, as soon as I get you there…”
“I’ll phone the police and the nearest British Consul…”
She still had control of her temper and herself, was even visualising media-headlines in support of the women of this awful place, was even thinking of starting something to rescue the Lucys of Meredith County. Five million from the Bristol account would kick it off.
Hugo Clutterbucke moved round in his seat a little more, leaning over it hugely and looked at her directly. He was quite the largest man she’d ever seen – not a great sack but just scaled-up and without, she had to admit to herself, a sign of anything but , well, muscle. A scaled-up human being. If he hadn’t been an ‘unreconstructed’ male chauvinist pig and bigoted and uncivilised and a bastard by anybody’s standards he might have been rather good-looking in a scaled-up bastard way. He had a hand on the back of his seat and it was much too big… He was also smiling which, she thought, was almost obscene in the circumstances.
“No” he said, almost grinning. “I have it in mind to put you over my knee and whup your pretty butt some, just a strap or a sneaker or something; you’re some fine female Elizabeth but I reckon you need your backside reddened, and pretty quick.. Here” he growled, “I reckon it’s dainty to give you a welcome-gift, seeing you’re pretty and feisty and you don’t know how to behave…” The grin got bigger and he passed her a small green leather box. “Seeing you’ve got red hair, I thought green would be right. I want your hair changed though – you’re going to grow it big. You know, what they call ‘big hair’….”
So you’re going to ‘whup my butt’ are you. Just you touch me, Hugo Clutterbucke. So I’m a ‘fine female’ am I? ‘Feisty’ am I? Comes from ‘fist’, Mister Clutterbucke. I’m not about to attack you but I am about to see you in jail. And I know how to behave like a human… Er - these are emeralds. Can’t be. These are emeralds, this is a choker, this is a fantastic choker. Half-inch square flat-cut emeralds. Must have cost… Four rows of huge, matched emeralds. Round my neck, four rows of huge emeralds. All the way round, and a tiny gold lock. He’s mad. What, a hundred thousand pounds?
“Er – this is for me? I – I can’t p-possibly. It’s – it’s beautiful…”
He was joking, it was all a joke. All the business about ‘whupping’ and ‘butts’; ‘whupping a butt’ is beating someone’s bottom isn’t it? He was joking, sending me up because he thought I expected an uncultured, unreconstructed ‘Deep South’ male. You are a mad, mad lovely, generous man Hugo Clutterbucke and I can’t possibly accept it.
“I can’t possibly accept it, Hugo. “
“Sounds like argument, Elizabeth. Won’t have argument from a woman…” He was still grinning. “Even a Clutterbucke woman. Put the damn thing on. Do as I tell you…” he said, turning back to start the car and letting it roll back onto the roadway and driving off. As he did, they both spoke at the same time, Elizabeth as she was yielding to the temptation to lift the impossible emerald collar to her neck…She said “Hugo, I really have no idea what to say. It’s not like me…”
He said, aloud but to himself, concentrating on driving, “Yup, knew it. Going to have to beat your arse as soon as I get you home. Yup…”
“Stop it, you silly man, stop it. Alright, yes, I did expect what you said, the ‘unreconstructed American South’ . It – so you’ve every right to joke, to throw it back at me. I’ve been unforgivably rude and I apologise”. She was giggling and he thought it was like silver bells. ‘Ogod’ she thought, ‘this is a real big generous, amusing man’ and ‘grow up, Elizabeth Southwater’ and just, for a moment she thought about his huge arms around her small self in a beautiful, pillared, colonial house. Servants, even…
He interrupted the thoughts she was determined not to think by saying, driving;
“Now just you sit up Elizabeth. Sit up properly, hands in your lap. My word, you are the most sexual, beatable, fuckable female, Elizabeth Clutterbucke….”
She had it on now, the emerald choker and she was lost in the magnificence of it. It fitted perfectly, enclosing her neck. The lock had tikked. The tiny gold key was in the box.
“Yup” he said. “Lucy can lend me a sneaker. Beat your butt..”
Stop it, you silly, lovely man. “I shall squeal” she said, giggling, sending him up in turn.
“’spect you will… Have to get a chain for those pretty ankles… Just a way down this road – it’s my road. ”
“Of course. A chain…” and she sat there ‘properly’, giggling, hands in her lap, watching the passing scenery turn to dense, moist green vegetation, crowded and unfamiliar trees, trying not to think about Hugo Clutterbucke, about the emeralds and whether or not you could marry your cousin… Don’t be silly Elizabeth, thinking like that is what happens when a lovely, silly great man gives you a hundred-thousand-pounds’-worth-of emeralds…
Also, she thought how nice it would be – it must be the long flights and jet-lag and the car journey – if once she got to the house , she didn’t have to think about any of it. About London, or about the businesses or about share-prices or anything. Thought about how nice it would be if it wasn’t all some dream on her part and that at the house – which she was sure would be beautiful – everything would be perfect and she could just relax and be… Be pampered. Nobody ever pampered me. He’d manage everything, I wouldn’t have to think about anything. No decisions, no bothering over share-values. Just relax for the first time in her life and let things happen. Do what he said. Let this odd, very big and impossible man see to everything. Even see to things when she – very, very rarely, made a mess of something and felt so guilty afterwards.
The steamy greenery outside became more and more easy to watch and Elizabeth allowed her eyes to close sleepily: for no time at all until she forced them open again her mind said ‘just take me home, Hugo, into your beautiful house. Take me home, spank me, pick me up Hugo and just put me to bed. So that everything will be perfect in the morning…’ Which was so ridiculous a thought that she almost forgot to ‘sit straight’. Having thought all those things – and it must have been because of the heat and the unreality of the place and the flights and the car-journey and the fact that she hadn’t eaten properly since leaving London – Elizabeth Clutterbucke remained sitting upright in the back seat, with her hands in her lap and her knees together under her expensive, top-couture dress, with bright diamonds of tears in her green eyes and the impossible choker of huge emeralds locked round her neck. Because, she told herself, she really had been coping with everything, hadn’t she? Alone, in England. The fleeting thought that Hugo Clutterbucke, sitting there with his back to her, could cope with everything, well, that would be very nice wouldn’t it? And to be queen of his beautiful house, that would be very nice too, wouldn’t it?
“House” growled Hugo.
As the house came distantly into view Elizabeth Clutterbucke looked, thought that it was one of the most beautiful houses she’d ever seen - quiet, plush, picture-book house; Elizabeth Clutterbucke ordering the day-to-day. Top lady… Well, top woman, here. Big, handsome, amusing, jokey man – the bastard – to make every day easy. The bastard. In a Clutterbucke house. Being looked-after. No thank you, that’s not me, is it? Yes it is… Anyway it would hurt. What would? Being spanked by Hugo Clutterbucke. Hell I must be more tired than I thought. Wake up, be polite about his house… Do something about this choker – can’t possibly accept it. . ‘Have me married to him’! The cheek of the man – but brilliantly played. Every day. Every night. Entering… Ugh. He’d be huge…
