#### ~WARNING: here there be Erotica~
~Read at your own peril~
True Freewrite: 2000+ words, NOT EDITED! UNREVISED!
https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2013/02/13/02/37/painting-81194__340.jpg
[source](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2013/02/13/02/37/painting-81194__340.jpg) Cover
### [The Madness Prompt 28: Rose Pedals](https://steemit.com/freewritemadness/@freewritehouse/the-madness-prompt-28) (Petals, not Pedals, I'm thinking)
### [Lady Graves](https://nanowrimo.org/participants/keangaroo/novels/one-eyed-emil/edit) is my NaNoWriMo novel in progress.
#### Chapter One begins here: [Lady Graves - ch. 1 - NaNoWriMo 2018 - freewritemadness: Day One](https://steemit.com/freewrite/@carolkean/lady-graves-ch-1-nanowrimo-2018-freewritemadness-day-one)
---
Near the end of Chapter 21:
> The revelry continued, leaving Evelyn to wonder how she would ever catch sight of Prince Hal and his bride. Finally, a trumpet blared, and quiet reigned over the court. ... and all were commanded to welcome the newlyweds of the kingdom, Prince Hal and Princess “Evelyn.”
# CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO-ish
### She got a better look
by climbing up a barrel. The Other Evelyn was arrayed in violet and crowned with garlands of Alpine blossoms with a long, light, silver veil floating behind her. Pearls gleamed at her throat. The prince, dressed in velvet and brocade, was a big man with a tall head and a colossal nose.
In all the noise of exulting men, women and children, in all the tossing of petals and leaves like confetti, there was no hope of gaining access to the princess, and no chance that Stangler would allow it anyway.
All of Lindenstein was exulting in a lie! She trembled to think of it. The story of the demise of the real Lady Graves and the rise of the usurper, Vee, was nowhere close to being told. It had only just begun.
An arm circled her waist and smoothly hauled her back down to earth. She caught a whiff of spiced cider and saw Stangler pressed a warm mug into her hands. “Drink,” he said. “You’ll feel better.”
“Spiked, is it?”
“Only with enough of the good things to help you sleep tonight. Without your usual tossing and turning and crying out in your sleep.”
She was here in Lindenstein. She had glimpsed Prince Hal and his so-called Princess Evelyn.
“If you think I could sleep tonight, you must have something truly potent in this cider.”
“Come along.” He linked an arm in hers and guided her toward the stable where Etzel and the carriage were secured. “We’ll get you out of this corset, petticoat and gown and back into--”
“My son!” a voice rang over the muffled roar of the revelers.
Evelyn froze. How had Reginald’s father come to be here?
Standing on the saddle of his horse, facing the throne, Archibald McCall waved his arms in a fury yet kept his balance flawlessly even when the horse snorted and hoofed the ground. “I demand that you tell the truth of what you’ve done with my good son Reginald!”
How could it be? Jumping up and down at the horse’s side, little Emil punctuated the coachman’s words with a well timed boing boing boing.
“Emil!” she cried in unison with Stangler, and they elbowed their way closer.
Archibald McCall’s long, straight torso, with none of the rounded and rotund edges of middle age, would stand out even in a crowd of teenagers. McCall was whip-thin, quick and agile. He was but a coachman, yet his elegant form and confident, unwavering gaze would mark him as nobility. What little hair he had left was light brown, like his son’s. His brass-buttoned livery and the tophat in his white-gloved hand also would draw attention to him even if his impassioned gesticulating and shouting had not.
His shouts were in English, so even if anyone heard him, few were likely to understand.
Quickly, Evelyn worked her way closer to him and waved, calling by the name familiar to her, Archie, while Stangler scooped Emil into his arms. In a glance she could see that he was chiding the little runaway and failing to sound stern or punitive.
“Archie.” She caught his eye and got close enough to extend a hand to him. “Please, please come down. It’s me, Livvy, from Edinburgh." He would recognize the name, if not the face. "We have news of Reginald. We need to talk.”
With a fearless leap, Archibald McCall landed in front of her. He had dark rings under his eyes and a haunted look, so utterly unlike the cool, calm coachman she had left behind on a wintry morning that felt like a hundred years ago.
Stangler passed Emil to her and retrieved her spicy cider from a barrel he had set it on. “Have him drink this,” he said softly in German. “God knows it looks like he needs a good night’s sleep.”
“Archie.” She caught his eye and got close enough to extend a hand to him. “Please, please come down. It’s me, Livvy, from Edinburgh." He would recognize the name, if not the face. "We have news of Reginald. We need to talk.”
With a fearless leap, Archibald McCall landed in front of her. He had dark rings under his eyes and a haunted look, so utterly unlike the cool, calm coachman she had left behind on a wintry morning that felt like a hundred years ago.
Stangler passed Emil to her and retrieved her spicy cider from a barrel he had set it on. “Have him drink this,” he said softly in German. “God knows it looks like he needs a good night’s sleep.”
"Archie, come with us. Nobody will listen to you now and if they do, they will only throw us all in a dungeon. Please, listen." The man looked speechless, unable to do more than listen. "You've got to come with us."
He took the cider she offered him and let her lead him from the sight of the royal couple.
“If only Emil could speak,” Evelyn said. “I can't wait to hear how you two found your way here.”
Archibald was soon too disoriented to recount his adventures, and it fell upon Fritz Lanza to tell that story.
It fell upon Fritz Lanza to tell that story.
On a great Freisian mare he came riding into town, dressed in extra-tall Lederhosen, his wide shoulders stretching his shirt to the limit before falling in soft folds to his narrow waist. The farmhand was princely with his splendid physique, work-hardened muscles, Alpine-high cheekbones, a long, fine nose, a square jaw, and light blond hair. He rode about the town until Emil heard or smelled him and yipped a stream of directives to go, go, go at once to meet the man of the hour.
By now Archibald had been situated at Helga’s camp. He lay sound asleep in a tent while Stangler and the two women held bratwurst on sticks, one in each hand, over a fire. The town clock had chimed midnight but fires dotted the hillsides and meadows and lights burned in the windows, making Lindenstein look more than ever like a fairy tale village.
They exchanged greetings, got Kasta the mare settled, consumed brats with fresh baked buns from one of legions of vendors, and finally got the story of Emil’s latest mission. He had protested vociferously the departure of his master, sniffing and running at every opportunity. Lanza kept him busy but in the night, Emil pulled his stunt of unlatching the door. In the morning, Lanza guessed that the dog would be following the smell of Etzel. He saddled Katza and took off down the road to Lindenstein. At the Feireisen inn, the one he had visited during his investigation of any missing ladies or maids, he learned that a crazy one-eyed dog had run down the road after an even crazier Englishman who raved about his murdered son, insisted that the body must be exhumed and returned to England, and complained that the constable was not only unhelpful but hostile as well. He almost got himself jailed for rabble rousing.
On hearing that a man from Everleigh had been there on a quest to find whatever was left of his son Reginald, Lanza made up his mind that Emil and the Englishman would both be on the road to Lindenstein, Emil to reclaim his master, and Archibald to clear the good name of his son and demand justice.
Lanza had sent word to his family that he’d been summoned to Lindenstein, so there was no worry of a search party being sent out for him.
“Look at you, Emil,” Stangler said. “You could be home safe right now with Herr Lanza, like a good boy. Ach, you are a frecher Hund!”
“And thanks to him, Herr Lanza can find more freche Damen than one man can handle. I wonder how many naughty girls it would take to wear out a strapping farm boy like Fritz,” Evelyn said dryly.
“Oh, I can find that out for you,” Helga said. “Fritz is much more adventurous than the alter arzt known as Stangler.” Alter arzt, old doctor. “He’s a born Naturalist and Explorer and Klaus could take lessons from the boy. Speaking of which, I was just getting ready to head out again help myself to some of that Unfug with the freche Damen.”
Unfug. Mischief. The word sounded as awful as the mental image Evelyn wanted to unsee, that of Helga initiating Fritz into the rites of manhood.
Leave it to Helga to come up with a nickname for Archibald that was just as repugnant: Kahler Bogen, the Bald Arch, or Baldarch. There seemed to be no limit to how schlüpfrig and bawdy Helga could be. It never failed: whenever Evelyn put aside her wincing and cringing and decided to like Helga, the woman would take her capacity to shock to new levels.
“You look troubled, mein Liebling,” Stangler said. “Baldarch got the cider I had prepared for you, but I have more where that came from, if you’d like to get your beauty sleep before the new day dawns.”
“Baldarch! Kahlerbogen! You’re as terrible as Helga.”
“Not even close. Come, I know where she’s off to with Fritz. That is, I can guess, having known her most of my life.”
The scene he led her to, the thing they witnessed from under cover of shadows, was so shocking she could only file it in her mind as a lurid dream. It didn’t really happen. It couldn’t have.
“You are so very sheltered.” Stangler sat by the fire, and her world was familiar and safe once more. “I have no desire pull up the curtains on your innocence and show you the sordid state of the world, but a quirk of fate, an apparent disaster, changed your fortune beyond anything you or I could have imagined. If not for another woman’s treachery you would be in the bed of Prince Hal, possibly carrying his *issue* by now; if not for a naughty dog and an old doctor, you would be rotting in the woods.”
“Helga hates that word, issue, and she hates the institution of marriage, but she loves debauchery as much as that old lecher in the tavern with the burn marks on his hands.”
The scene she tried to unsee came back at her. A tinkling of bells had led them through a meadow and into the woods, with the castle still in sight on one side and the smoke of a campfire drawing them to a clearing, where three logs had been rolled into place around the fire, and three women per log, dressed as witches, sat with their legs wide apart and breasts spilling out of their Dirndls. With one hand pinching and rolling her own nipples, the other hand caressed the mound between her legs, from which a carved linden branch jutted out, and little bells jangled from the outer tip. The bells rang faster and faster, in unison, reaching a frenzied pitch; then, from the shadows, nine men stepped into the circle. Each one chose a “witch” and pulled the stick from inside her, slapped her bum with it, then unlaced his Lederhosen, knelt on the ground, and pummeled the woman until she screamed. The men, too, cried out as if they’d been gored.
It did not happen. She had dreamed it; there was no other way to hold a place in her mind for such a vision.
“What you witnessed,” Stangler said--damn him!--“was one of her pagan rituals, which harms absolutely no one except those who judge and condemn.”
He said these things with a crackling fire between them, the flames lighting his eyes, which shifted now to her Dirndl and the flesh rising like two loaves of bread and spilling over the rim. One hasty move and the twins would escape. That was Helga’s doing, buying costumes from a vendor, with no thought of propriety. All the women were dressed this way, and not a fichu was in sight to cover the exposed flesh.
Evelyn sat up straighter, causing a Dirndl malfunction, which led to the shock of the cool night air touching her like cold fingers, and her nipples responded like soldiers standing to attention.
“Ach, meine Dame!” he whispered. “Someone looks cold. My hands, however, feel like bricks warming in the fire.”
“You will have to prove it. I can’t believe even half of what you say.”
His palms came down cupping her cold, bare breasts; like a stone hitting pond water, his hot flesh against hers sent ripples spreading inside her, the stone sinking down deep, the ripples spreading and spreading again, sending her legs apart and her mouth opening for his lips to join the action. The buzzing tin horns and shouts of the revelers, the torches flickering all round them, marched over the frontier of her mind and ransacked all the virtues she had treasured there. Stangler. His hand traveled lower, under her skirts, sneaking up a slippery slope and probing into the slick dark warmth he had summoned to life. How was it none of the books she read, none of the lectures her mother delivered, nothing her cousins giggled about, had ever prepared her for this? He was on her, over her, inside her, yet fully dressed, both of them. Stangler. She gasped, then sank her teeth into his shoulder, lightly, lightly, trying not to scream his name. Herr Doktor! Niklaus, she tried to murmur, then, coming up for air, she cried out, “Gott in Himmel!”
He smiled. “No one has ever called me that before.”
Her body, ramrod stiff moments before, went soft and liquid. “My face is on fire,” she said.
He shifted to his side, bringing her down with him. She felt a lump between them and explored the laces of his Lederhosen. There. The prisoner was now set free. She had seen these things before; she had seen nine of them only a short time ago; but she had never touched one, never watched one twitch and grow even stiffer and longer with every stroke she administered with curious fingertips. She discovered what felt like two juggling props, the size and heft of those leather bags full of birdseed, but these were more like two boiled eggs floating in liquid in a pouch, and she might have played with them all night, but her other hand gripped a very thick and malleable stick that suddenly exploded; she gasped, pulling back, and watched as he very nearly put out the fire with his gushing--a pulsing, spurting display of something ungodly or perhaps quite divine; it was all too new for her to tell.
Not that she would ever tell anyone what had just happened. Not even Helga spoke of things so verboten--so forbidden--so intimate, so profound. She had an inkling now of what Helga meant by enjoying the perks a husband without being entrapped in a marriage.
Stangler lay on his back, limp, warm, smiling, and guided her to lie on top of him, all of her, all the weight of her body against his. There was no room in her thoughts for anyone but him.
“Happy are we, hidden from the world,” she said, paraphrasing Goethe. “We hold a friend to our heart and with him explore what, through the labyrinth of the heart, wanders in the night.”
“Zum Mond,” he added. “To the Moon. You love to condense the poets, you.”
His kisses were soft, like rose petals, and soon she was dreaming of the giant bear barring the gates to the castle door, but she was here now, in Lindenstein, and the bear looked rather friendly, after all, and Emil was yipping something but she felt the arms of the bear tighten around her, and it was just right.
***
https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/07/06/14/21/goddess-1500599__340.jpg
[source](https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2016/07/06/14/21/goddess-1500599__340.jpg)
word count 2020
Oops, now it has been -just a wee bit - EDITED!
### Thank you for reading!
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