A Match for the el Maiens Ch. 16

Thank you for comments and feedback. Please make a comment if you have a moment. <3

I am looking for an editor for the novel, I know I need to do some work on it so feedback is highly valued. Just to mention that I sometimes have to cut the paragraphs about. Ch. 13 was initially rejected as Literotica editors asked me to make the long passages of monologue shorter for readers on small screens.

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Arianna opened her eyes and stared at the exquisitely painted bowl full of hot chocolate hovering in Lisette's hands in her eyeline. She sat up with a dreamy smile. Lisette put the bowl on the bedside table and began arranging her pillows behind her for her to lean into, ignoring her half-hearted protests.

Lisette was asking if she wanted to get dressed yet, saying the boys were already breaking their fast with Clair. She relaxed back in the pillows, she would take a few moments at leisure. As Lisette went to pull open the heavy painted curtains and let light drift in through the muslin curtains of her windows, she was already reaching for a scroll on the bedside table.

Her bowl of chocolate was half finished when she heard steps running up the stairs by her room and a hurried tattoo on her door. Clair's voice was coming up to whichever of the boys it was, scolding. Her wide red mouth curved in her smile.

Her door burst open and they both tumbled in, laughing. She held out her arms; they scrambled up onto the big bed, rolling in the quilts and embroidered covers. Arkyll pulled a pillow out from behind her and tried to put it over Hanya's head, Hanya shoved him back in the bed. They rolled up against her body, giggling and struggling, she giggled too as she pushed their kicking little limbs away from her.

"I have said it, you must not disturb your mother, let her rest!" Clair's voice expostulated. Arianna hurriedly shoved her scroll under her pillows, trying to make it look as if she had been enjoying a quiet well-earned doze before the boys came tumbling in. She lifted her head to see him standing in the doorway: tall and lean in some old jodhpurs and riding boots, a white cotton shirt unbuttoned at the throat and a green woollen cardigan. He was resting one tanned hand on the door jamb, his expression apologetic. The boys were snuggling close to her and wrapping their arms about her neck, pretending that they had wanted a kiss not to bounce in the big bed. Their small bodies pressed affectionately to her, shaking with giggles.

"Kiss your mother, your aunt," Clair said. "If you make us late for school, I will not take you to learn riding later. Is it understood?" They made cries of anxiety, rushing to press their soft little mouths to her cheeks and scramble from the bed. He was trying to ask above their shouting that it was not fair, there was not time, while they fell off the bed and rushed to the door, would Arianna be content to spare the boys for the afternoon to have a riding lesson. It would be a pity to spend such a fine day so late in the summer indoors. She pretended to hesitate but her heart leapt. An extra couple of hours in the library!

"I have some correspondence I ought to attend to," she said, leaning back in the pillows with her lids half-closing on blue eyes already veiled over some other matter she was considering.

Before turning to the anxiously calling boys who were already halfway down the stairs, he paused, unable to resist the temptation of letting his eyes drift over her. The soft light fell on the flaxen and cream shades of her big body lounging back in the white linen and silk of her pillows and nightdress, her blue eyes veiled in the abundance of pale sweet curves she was offering to his vision. His eyes narrowed up, he forced them to her eyes. She was smiling so contentedly but her blue eyes were covered by half-closed lids - there was something on the go. Who was it she liked to write to? Firmly he pulled the door of her bedroom on the latch as he went down the stairs after the two boys. He could hear two of his menservants joking with the boys as they came up the stairs.

Later as he ran up the stairs, he saw her door still latched and he knocked casually on it, thinking she must have gone about her morning's business but her voice called out to him. When he went in, she was still lying about in the pillows in her heavy silk nightdress, some scroll in her fingers. She blushed when she saw it was him, hurriedly rolling up the scroll and putting it on her bedside table. Who could she have imagined would come knocking at her bedroom door? The servants would not have knocked. Her breasts heaved in the lace and silk of her nightdress. Clair turned his eyes to the side, unable to repress the thought of putting his mouth to the big soft breasts he could see the shape of, his cock started swelling softly in his breeches.

"Um, I was wondering ... I noticed you had commissioned some report from an Iarvian merchant," he said huskily. Sweet Hell, look at the deep cleavage between her breasts but she had no idea what an effect she had on people. He knew how annoyingly innocent she had been brought up, they had taken great pains to assure him of it when he was obliged to marry her. So why had she blushed? Just to see her own husband in the doorway of her bedroom halfway through the morning?

"What time is it?" she asked, seeming to become aware that the light falling about him was bright and clear. He laughed and said, "that must be a famous novel you are reading, for you to have been so absorbed in it that Lisette has been twice to try to get you up and dressed and you sent her away both times."

"Twice?" she said in surprise, looking to see a tray with a plate of crumbs and a second bowl with the dregs of some hot chocolate in it by her bed. She put a long finger across and pressed it into the crumbs which she lifted to her mouth. Clair watched her wide red mouth closing around her long pale finger to suck on it. He felt his cock stirring harder in his breeches and stood further back out of the doorway, saying, "I will send her to you now. I only thought ... you wanted me to meet you and the merchants. I wondered if the report you commissioned might explain to me why you wish me to meet with some cloth merchants."

Her finger was arrested at her mouth. (Her breasts heaved softly in the folds of her nightdress as she took a deep breath in.) "No," she said slowly. "Probably not." Her eyes swung round on him, her face was harder. He knew there was something to do but he was desperate to shut the door, he could hear someone coming up the stairs.

"I will send Lisette to you," he said hurriedly. His eyes went round, there was Lisette at his elbow coming in the room. Clair watched her cross the room and collect the tray from Arianna's bedside table which she brought back to the door and put outside for the footmen to collect. As she did it, she lifted her eyes to Clair's. Clair narrowed his eyes back at her and she looked with a modest enquiring expression into his face.

Her eyes had a laugh in the back of them, she knew it well why he looked narrowly at her but she maintained the bland expression of the well-behaved servant on her features: My Lord, I prithou. I am no bird-brained lusty stable-maid to whom you cannot entrust the famously gorgeous body I dress and undress every day, standing by in the bath house while your Lady wife runs her ringed fingers around her naked forms to clean herself.

Arianna had seen Clair's eyes narrowed in the frown. She slid her muscular legs out of the bed, saying anxiously, "I prithou pardon me. I have been so slack the day. I should have been ... doing something in the kitchens perhaps?"

He burst out laughing at this. "As if you would not have made a birds' nest of it!" he said mockingly. "Confess it, my dear, you are a dreadful housekeeper!"

She looked cross and tossed her blonde head with the little hairs sticking out of the thick plait in which Lisette put her long hair at night. "Oh well," she said carelessly, sliding her feet into a pair of slippers. "What does it matter? Such boring nonsense."

"Do you think that?" he asked, grinning as he leaned on the door jamb. "Do you not enjoy to live in an harmonious house?"

She thought about the last few weeks with Clair settled in the castle. In the mornings she woke and lay in bed, dreaming of the solution to fascinating equations instead of worrying about what they might all eat that day. Lisette brought her bowl of milky hot chocolate to her room and she drank it still curled up in bed in sleepy happiness.

The children behaved themselves. Arkyll did not come and pester her in the library while she was working, he went every day to school with Hanya and they both did well. Clair even got them to do a little schoolwork with him in the afternoon. He did not seem to mind their childish errors whereas Arianna was impatient, finding it incredible that anyone - even a little one of a few years old, could not add a few simple figures together since she herself could roll six figure sums round her head like a game of marbles.

She had a bit of trouble sneaking about the castle offices to do her work with merchants but Clair was so absorbed in managing the castle and going down to the farm, sorting matters out in the stables, the kennels, with the Guard. It was always possible to find a time when he was not there. She had time because there was not a great procession of cooks and maid-servants, grooms, kennel-hands, footmen and gardeners all coming to ask her sometimes quite surprisingly silly questions about what they should be doing, hanging about her desk with foolish smiles on their faces and even when she had answered their questions persisting in saying, she looked pale, would she not care to come out and walk in the gardens, to come for a ride?

"I prefer someone-else to manage the housekeeping for me," Arianna admitted. She tilted her head to him, blushing again at the strong mid-morning light pouring round him as he stood in the open doorway while she sat on her unmade bed in her nightdress.

She was so lovely, flushed out of the cool proud Lady of the high nobility he normally had to deal with. He hesitated in the doorway, his cock softly swelling in his breeches. He was wondering if she might offer him a little flirt, enough for him to come into the room and give her just some small caress but he felt curiously shy. He started to turn away then he caught Lisette's eye. The maid-servant had a tiny snigger in the corner of her mouth, she stepped behind him to take hold of the door: And? She is your Lady wife. Do you think it is improper to talk with your own wife while I dress her hair? She jerked her head slightly into the room and he stepped in without thinking although when she closed the door behind him, both he and Arianna gave a nervous start. It was with a feeling of brazen impropriety that was exhilarating to his loins that he went to sit in one of the blue and yellow armchairs while Lisette came across to pull out the stool at the dressing-table. Hurriedly, he cast about for some idle thing to say.

"Do you not like it, to feel in charge of the conditions of your life?" he asked. "It makes me feel that I am connected to life, just something small, like to make bread in the kitchens - or do the washing up. Sometimes I just like to wash the dishes. It does not take much, to wash them and then they are clean and ready and the next day they are there to wash again."

She stood up, recovering her poise. She laughed mockingly and said to Lisette: "He would not like it so well if he had to wash the dishes every day all day like Caja."

"That lazy lizard," Clair grumbled then he said with a curiously affectionate duck of the head: "Caja is well enough; he is happy to do some washing up and then sneak out for his disgusting pipe and to steal a bit of my brandy." He had always been indulgent towards Caja, even more than to the other servants. "I do not like my life to become a drudgery," he admitted. "Just every day to do some small thing and to look about me and see that there is harmony and cleanliness, that is a pleasure. To do something small, it reminds me of what life is."

"Is it not enough, to come out onto an open veranda in the wind and snow and ice of a winter's morning and have be so frozen that you cannot but remember you are alive?" she laughed, turning to look at the dress Lisette was holding out of the wardrobe to her.

He lounged back in the armchair and grinned at her. "Yes, I like to feel the weather each day," he said. "Is there not something that you like to do that reminds you of the world and life? You know that Piria has said, if each day we do some small caring task, we will be at home in ourselves and in the world."

She had reached past Lisette and had pulled out of the wardrobe the pale pink skirt of her old dress. Lisette slid her eyes at Clair, Clair's eyes narrowed. As she thought about Piria's philosophy, she pulled the faded dress out and volunteered: "I like to do gardening." He smiled to hear this. "I like to put my hands in the earth and put plants in to grow. I like to see the flowers year by year, coming up in the courtyard because I put them there. Each year, musts't plant the seeds, at the right time, and tend them, then plant out the seedlings and guard them from snails and the like. I enjoy that."

She added: "My father used to like to garden. I used to go with him, when I was little, and plant the vegetables. I prefer flowers." Her head swung away to look at the simple pictures of family which hung on her walls. Her curtains were painted by Hyaline but the pictures in her own room were casual sketches of her brothers, sister and father, of Arkyll, and there was one of Tashka lounging on a sofa with a book in one hand, one arm behind her head and a lazy sparkle in her eye.

Clair looked from the picture of his sister sympathetically at his wife. She rarely spoke of her parents. Her father, who had inherited the vast wealthy lands of Iarve and had never liked to manage them. He had from early on been overshadowed by his ambitious oldest child. Her mother was a flaming beauty who ran affairs at court nearly as scandalous as Clair's own. Lady van Iarve was persuaded briefly back from court by her besotted husband to bear three younger children on the right side of the bed but had left their upbringing to nursery-maids and governesses.

"My dear," Clair said in his husky warm voice, "have your gardens, then, and leave the housekeeping to me." She smiled at him, softly for once. He stood up and then he said, "will you do me a great favour, my Lady?" She looked enquiringly at him. "Will you let Lisette burn that dress you have in your hands which makes you look like a kitchen-maid selling her favours in the larder?" The blush went hot and red up her cheeks. She looked in a hurt astonishment at the faded pale cotton in her hands and then at Lisette. LIsette's eyes dipped in apologetic agreement with his Lordship's sartorial judgement.

Clair said in a husky persuasive voice, "I will go to the dressmakers and choose you a ball gown if you will give up that rag." He added, "I have found a new café where they do a special chocolate cake, I will take you there if you will come with me to choose the cloth for your ball gown." He went to open the door and stood in the doorway with the bright light pouring around his long limbs, one eyebrow raised in his lean tanned face. Her face bunched up in a tearful blushing frown, she tossed the pink cotton dress into Lisette's arms. He turned out of her room and walked along the veranda, looking as he walked at the flowers in the courtyard below which were in mid-summer splendour now around the old fountain and the pear tree.

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The boys did well in their riding lesson and were filled with enthusiasm for this important grown-up activity they were being permitted to take part in. Clair sent them into the stables after their lesson to help groom the ponies and clean the tack they had been using. The grooms knew that he would expect the boys to be made to do a reasonable degree of work, not be indulged. The head groom was a taciturn individual who was disinclined to favour anyone in what he regarded as his rather than the future sworn Lord's stables so Clair felt confident leaving the boys under his eye.

He walked back into the castle, idly smacking a crop on the side of his boot, and turned off towards the offices, intending to check on some assessments of taxes ahead of a meeting with the King's man. As he came past the library he thought he would go in and see if any new novels might have arrived which had not yet been put out in the sitting-room. It also crossed his mind that his Lady wife might be in there writing the mysterious correspondence which appeared to occupy so much of her time.

A surprisingly large number of letters came addressed to her through the castle offices. Sometimes she got letters from her sister Sevianne and her cousin Veeda el Jien, rarely from her oldest brother or her mother, often from her brother Hanya who had never struck him as a literary type. Sometimes letters came with peculiar mercantile seals on the back and he had recently realised there had always been a constant stream of small packets from the University in the H'velst Mountains. Occasionally she gave him news of how Sevianne Inien was progressing in her studies but his brow creased in a puzzled frown as he reflected that the packets had been coming since long before Sevianne went to study there under Arianna's patronage. Arianna did not seem to have news of Sevie's life outside her studies, he got more about this from happy notes she would send with small gifts to Hanya.

He had not been in the castle library for some years. What was it to him if Lady el Jien consoled herself with a book or two? Anything that kept her in his home was better left unquestioned. He had his own books in his room and was accustomed to work in the King's University library. When he was at home he did not usually have time to work on his theory on Northern architecture. The last time he had seen the library it had been a stripped shell with the old collection of books and scrolls taken away to his father's glass-walled palace in Arventa. He had tended to avoid the library as if it were some other animal's lair although he supposed she must have replaced some of what van Sietter took and made a decent collection of knowledge, given the amount she spent on it.

As he opened the door and set foot in the big square room with the dark wood fittings, his eyes widened and his lips moved in a soundless Angels! He would one day be a very wealthy man and his wife kept him in extravagant style, it was not his money that had been spent here and she had immense wealth from the estates which had been her marriage settlement when she came from Iarve. Yet he whistled to think what Arianna had spent to bring their library back to this condition.

There was a hush in the room as if sound were deadened by the densely packed words on the shelves. The room was double-height with a gallery round the top. Every wall was shelved. Clair's eyes flicked from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling. He saw nothing but spines of books and boxes of scrolls.

He walked to the middle of the room and turned slowly round, staring at the massed ranks of knowledge about him. He went to one shelf and ran his eye over the rows and rows of philosophical work, all neatly arranged according to date so that you could almost trace the history and development of thought by going from one title to the next. Other castle or palace libraries arranged their books by colour or size but these books were for use, not show.

He crossed to a section that he thought would be art and architecture, his heart beating faster. Angels! here was a whole set of sketch-books by different artists - a set of studies of the scenes in their local regions, she must have commissioned that specially, what could it have cost? He drew his breath in with a gasp, went on one knee and delicately he eased one of the books out of the set with his strong gentle and experienced fingers. He looked reverently at the lines in the drawings by Stianne, beautiful clean depictions of the Trattai hills with peasants moving in the fields. Of course she would not have been able to get - but yes, she had. The crafty vixen! how had she done it, how could she have persuaded Inien to do some scenes from Soomara. Look at these, they were in watercolour, they were so beautiful! Tears came to his eyes. He loved the art of the Namoon School.