Heavenly Pungent (Redone)

The Party

Of all the guests gathered at Montague Hall for my mother's three days of festivities, Cordelia Rothwell was the only one whose presence counted toward my happiness. We had grown up in adjoining counties, shared a governess for two summers, and built the particular trust of adults who tell each other nearly everything. I say nearly because there was one appetite I had guarded as a miser guards his gold, and it concerned the very part of her body she now thrust toward me with a groan of theatrical despair.

"Good god," said Cordelia. "my feet are most certainly weeping right now."

We had fled the ballroom after the second quadrille, abandoning my mother's sixty guests to take refuge in the salon at the end of the east corridor. The fire had been laid that afternoon and never touched since, so the room held a drowsy warmth. Cordelia sat in the wingback chair with her skirts in ruin around her as I knelt on the ottoman before her.

Her boots were black kid leather, buttoned from instep to ankle, and her feet had been in those boots for approximately ten hours. Ten hours of croquet on the dewy lawn, of standing through toasts, of promenading on gravel, of dancing two sets in a ballroom where the candles had heated it to greenhouse conditions. Kid leather was the worst material in England for a long day because it held every degree of warmth a foot generated and returned it doubled. It made the foot sweat and kept it moist so that by evening, the interior of such a boot became a small humid country of its own.

"The buttons, pray," she said to me, utterly exhausted. "My fingers are quite spent and I cannot bear to bend over again."

My hands were steady as I worked each button free, and when the boot fully loosened, I drew it from her foot.

The air in the room changed instantly, the stench rising to me like an awakened spirit summoned from a bottle. It was a sharp tang, this bright vinegar odor that only sweat left when it has been confined in cotton for hours. It, of course, came strongest from the toes, for her stockings, those white cotton lisle, had done what all cotton did, which was drink up pungent ferment and hold it hostage. At the sole I detected a delicate cheesy note, which was nicely complemented by the smell of kid leather.

I drew in a deep breath then and let it out slowly through my mouth so she would not see my nostrils working.

"Good heavens, that is better," sighed Cordelia as I set the first boot aside and reached for the second. "You are a dear to do this. My maid shall be jealous of you."

"I'm happy to be of service," I said casually, though my prick had begun to stir against my smallclothes.

The second boot joined the first on the floor, and I took her right foot in both my hands.

I pressed my thumbs into her wonderful high arch and worked the warm muscle in slow circles. A gentle, pleasant sound escaped Cordelia that would have been scandalous in the ballroom.

"Oh. Oh, that is wicked. Where did you learn to do that?"

"Reading," I said. "Anatomy is a hobby of mine."

"Your hobbies are very strange, but I shall not complain. Higher, if you please. Toward the toes. Oh..."

I massaged her in earnest then, and we talked as we had always talked, of the party and its guests, of the young man from Shropshire who had attached himself to Cordelia at dinner and spoken of nothing but his hounds. She laid back with her eyes closed now as I ran my thumb along the tendon of her arch, and it made my cock hardened in my trousers until it strained against the wool. It was so obvious that I had to lean forward over her feet so my coat would cover my lap. My resolved had been especially tested when I spread her toes gently to press between them. The odor had bloomed so concentrated and rich that my mouth watered. My prick was pulsing.

"You've gone very quiet," Cordelia said, watching me through her lashes. "And very serious. It is only a foot, Eddie."

"Only a foot," I agreed, hoarse.

She studied me a moment longer, and suddenly mischief moved in her face. The same mischief that had put frogs in my schoolroom desk when we were children. She flexed her foot in my hands for a moment before lifting her leg and pressing her stockinged toes squarely against my nose and mouth. They covered the lower half of my face and she wiggled her toes against my lips.

"Do they offend you, sir?" she demanded in her best duchess voice. "Be honest now. I have been terrified to remove my boots in company all evening. Tell me the truth. Am I a disgrace to my sex?"

I inhaled before I could govern myself, a deep involuntary breath that filled my head of her foot funk. My eyes closed as a groan vibrated the sole of her foot, and I could feel my cock going from stiff to iron, pulsing so violently now that it grew a heartbeat.

I felt Cordelia go still.

Though her toes stayed on my lips, I noticed the laughter had drained from her face. Her eyes had widened then, and I watched her look down to my trousers, which stood away from my body. My coat had fallen open, revealing the wool tented over my prick and the shape of it was tremendous. There was no mistaking it for a fold of cloth.

"Eddie," she said slowly, and her voice had changed keys entirely, from teasing to wondering. "Is that... are you..."

She sat up in the chair with her foot still resting against my face and stared at my lap, my face, and then my lap again. "My feet... My feet have done this to you?"

I have never once managed to lie to Cordelia, and I did not manage it then. Not with her toes on my mouth.

"Yes," I said against her sole.

"You are hard as a fire poker." Her voice rose in astonishment. "From smelling my feet. They reek, Eddie. I have been in those boots since morning. I could strike a match near my toes and half believe it would catch."

"I know," I said, and my voice was wrecked. "I counted the hours."

"You counted..."

She stared at me for a long moment before a slow, wickedly, delighted smile spread across her face. I had never seen this expression on her before. She pressed her toes more firmly against my nose. "Breathe again," she ordered softly. "I want to watch what happens."

I obeyed, for I could not have refused. My chest heaved. My eyes closed and my prick jerked visibly in my trousers. Cordelia, my dear Cordelia, watched every bit of it with her lips parted.

"Good Lord," she whispered. "All these years. All those afternoons you offered to carry my shoes. All those times you sat at the low end of the sofa... Eddie. You wicked, wicked man."

She curled her toes against my cheek and dragged them down over my mouth. My whole body shuddered. "You like this. You truly like this. My disgusting, sweaty, horrible feet."

"Your feet," I managed, "are the finest in England."

"They stink."

"Exquisitely."

She laughed breathlessly, drunk on the discovery, and drew her toes across my lips once more. I was on the verge of exposing myself, no longer able to contain my excitement when the door opened without so much as a knock. Perkins, the family butler, stood on the threshold with a face perfectly blank. If he had opinions of what we were doing, he did not show them.

"Begging your pardon, Mr. Montague," he said. "Your father is asking for you in the library at once."

Cordelia drew her foot away from my face with the unhurried care of a card player reclaiming a winning ace from the table.

"Go," she whispered, once Perkins had turned his back to us. She tucked her feet beneath her chair, hiding those damp stockings from the doorway, though the mischief in her face was entirely unhidden. "But understand me, Eddie. This is an intermission and nothing more. You and I will reconvene when your duty is done, and you will answer my questions. All of them. However many I manage to devise between now and then."

"Delia, I must explain..."

"You will do no such thing. You must go." She flapped her hand at me as though shooing a goose from a garden bed. "I shall return to the ballroom and let the Shropshire boy tell me about his hounds. Consider it penance for my many sins. Find me after."

***

In the library, my father stood with his back to the mantel while Lord Thornbury occupied the good leather chair by the desk. They both had a glass of our port in their fists.

"Edward, there you are. Come in, come in, shut the door." My father gestured with his own glass. "Lord Thornbury has favored us with an early arrival, and he has a proposal to put to us that concerns you directly."

"Several proposals," said Lord Thornbury. "Sit down, boy. This concerns your whole future."

I sat.

"It concerns Honoria," my father said, and beamed.

"My daughter," said Lord Thornbury, as though I might have forgotten the girl's existence. "She is twenty-one, sound in health, and has been raised to manage a great household. I have had my eye on you, young Montague, for quite some time and I find you acceptable. More than acceptable. The settlements I propose are generous, and your father and I have spoken at length by letter these two months past."

"The match," my father said, "would join Montague Hall to Thornbury Park, my boy. Six thousand a year on her side alone, and the land running adjacent. It is a union I have hoped for since you were in short coats."

They looked at me expectantly.

"You honor me," I said. "Honoria is a lovely girl."

"Lovely," Lord Thornbury repeated satisfied, as he launched into the terms.

I shall not record the whole of it, for I attended to very little. The dowry, the portions, the entailments, the question of the London house, all of it washed over me while my mind conducted its own negotiations elsewhere.

I sat with my legs crossed to conceal the stubborn interest of my cock, which had never fully subsided and which stirred afresh each time my memory supplied the exact moment of her discovery, of her voice dropping from teasing into wonder, of her toes curling against my cheek. I watched the fire and I thought about her stockings. I had held them and held them close enough to count the stitches. I thought of her feet and what I wanted to do to those feet when my father's voice snapped me out of my lustful reverie.

"Edward?"

"Forgive me, Father. I am a little distracted tonight due to the festivities."

"Understandable, quite understandable," my father said heartily.

"Tomorrow evening at the ball," Lord Thornbury said, "you will open the dancing with her. Publicly. That will signal the understanding to the county, and we shall settle the papers after the party breaks up. Agreed?"

I looked at these two men, each beaming at me with the confidence of merchants concluding a sale, and I thought of Cordelia's face above her stockinged foot.

"Agreed," I said, because I needed to escape that room more urgently than I have ever needed anything.

We drank to the arrangement, and I shook Lord Thornbury's hand. My father clapped my shoulder and told me I was the luckiest man in three counties. I believe I told him that I was, and in my own private accounting it may even have been true, though not for any reason he would have credited.

***

I found Cordelia in the ballroom, as promised, with the Shropshire boy in full cry about foxhounds. She saw me over his shoulder at once and pressed a hand to her brow, pleading she must excuse herself with a craftiness I admired. She then crossed the room to me with her boots in her hand, carried by their little ribbon loops, and her stockinged feet made no sound on the parquet.

"Walk with me," she said low. "To the orangery off to the west gallery."

I went with her down the west corridor, past the portraits of my gloomy ancestors. I had just left a conversation regarding my betrothal to another woman, and here I am conspiring with my oldest friend regarding my darkest secret. The door to the orangery was narrow and old, closing behind us with a sound like a book shutting.

The glass panes held the last warmth of the day. Evening light lay along the flagstone path between the orange trees in their great pots. The air smelled of citrus leaf and cool damp earth, and the noise of the ball came to us faintly, as if from another country entirely. She set her boots down on the flagstones, then she turned to face me with her arms folded. Her chin lifted, and I saw her expression held equal parts of mischief and genuine hunger for the truth.

"Now then," Cordelia said. "my feet are free of their dungeon for the remainder of the night. You are going to answer my questions, every one of them. Begin at the beginning. How long has this been going on?"

"How long," I repeated, and the glass panes gave my voice back to me softened.

She settled onto a stone bench nearby, beneath the oldest of the orange trees. Her stockinged feet were drawn up.

"Since before I could name it," I said. "That is the honest answer. The first instance of this I can think of was the time I went where the maids set out the household's footwear for cleaning. Boots upon one rack, slippers upon another, the whole reek of leather. I was fifteen when I first stood among those racks, and I found I could tell which pair had been worn longest, which had walked and which had only sat at dinner, all of it by scent alone. I found that the knowledge did not repel me. It did the very opposite. It roused me past all sense, and I went away from that room with my heart going like a hammer."

"Go on," she said, very quietly.

"The science of it, since you will want the science. Sweat is nearly water and nearly nothing, in itself. What a man smells upon a worn boot is the hours. The warmth of the foot is stored in the material of the footwear, especially the toe seam. The seam always holds the worst and the best of it, because that is where the heat pools."

I watched her hands settle upon her own knees.

"And of my feet?" she asked. "When had this affection for my feet began?"

"It started the summer you were seventeen. You went in up into the stream to your knees with your skirts hiked like a dairymaid, and afterward your boots were ruined. Perkins set them by the stable fire to dry, and when I was sent to fetch your shawl, I went to your boots instead. I..." I made myself say it plainly, as a man pays a debt in full coin. "I held your boot to my face and breathed it until my head swam. I put my nose where your toes had been all day. I thought I would die of it, and I have thought of your feet, in one fashion or another, every week of my life since."

Silence, except for the far-off music, had filled her absence of words.

"Every week," she said at last.

"Every week. Often enough, every day."

"And the massage today. Was that charity for my aching feet, or was it appetite?"

"Both but more so appetite, from the first stroke to the last."

"You are blushing," she observed, with wonder rather than mockery. "Eddie. You have recited the chemical science of feet in the voice other men reserve for scripture, and you are blushing over the word appetite."

"You asked how long I have wanted your feet. I have told you the truth of it."

She stared at me.

"Say the rest," she said, and all the play had gone out of her voice. "The part you have never said to anyone. What do you do about it, alone, when you think of them?"

I was absolutely astounded by her boldness.

"I... I would take myself in hand, like any man, and I think of the smell of them. I would finish, and it would be over quick, because the imagining would be so complete. There, you have it. All of it."

"Hm," she said slowly, and her eyes were enormous and dark. "Well, you may have them properly this time. My feet, that is, without the pretense of massage. Kneel down and breathe... take yourself out while you do it too, because I find I want very much to watch what my feet do to you."

I knelt on the flagstone so quickly I bruised my knee and cared nothing for it. She watched as I undid my trousers with shaking fingers. My cock stood out into the cool air of the orangery, dark, flushed, and already leaking at the tip. Cordelia looked at it with the frank, unhurried appraisal of a woman examining a curiosity at an exhibition.

"Eight years," she murmured. "Eight years of that, hiding in your trousers at every party."

She extended her legs to me and I took her ankles in both hand. I then lifted them and the soles of her stockings came up to my face in the evening light. Burying my nose into the seam beneath her toes, I drew the first full breath, my eyes closed of their own accord. My hand went to my cock and began, slowly, to move.

"Tell me what you smell," she said. Her voice had gone husky. "All of it. In the voice you used just now, when you talked of footwear and toe seams."

"Vinegar" I breathed against her foot. "It is sharp with a sweet undercurrent. Your sole smells almost cheesy, where the leather cupped it and trapped the heat... and beneath everything, holding it all together, is that same rank note that was in your boot by the stable fire when I was seventeen. I would know it blind among a hundred women."

"Good God," she whispered.

Her toes curled against my face, and I groaned against them as I stroked myself faster. She watched my hand work over the ridge of my cock with her lower lip caught in her teeth, and her chest was rising and falling quickly. Her thighs were also pressed hard together, and I understood that my breath upon her toes was traveling up her legs and doing its work to her most private place.

"Take the stockings off," she ordered. "I want your nose on my skin."

I rolled the damp cotton down her calves at once, and her bare feet came out into the light. Her high arches were magnificent as they were in the stockings and her long toes were beyond perfection. The balls of her feet was broad and firm while the heels were narrow. The soles were the palest part of her and was notably soft by a life of carriages and carpets.

The smell was much stronger without the stockings. The ferment of her entire day filled my brain in slow drags as I buried my face in her soles. Her toes laid over the bridge of my nose and forehead, wiggling as my hand worked even faster below.

"Eddie, look at you," she breathed, shivering slightly at the touch of my mouth."The heir to Montague Hall, on his knees with his prick in his fist and my stinking foot on his face. I have never in my life seen a man look so happy..."

I was close.

The pressure had gathered itself at the root of me and was climbing. With her scent in every breath, I could barely form a sentence.

"Delia... Let me, or stop me. I want to cum on your feet. Please, may I?"

She blinked twice.

Whatever she had expected from my litany of confessions, it was not that. I watched the surprise cross her face and then turn, visibly, deliciously, into fascination. Her eyes went wide and then narrow into a slow-arriving smile.

"On them?" she asked. "You want to spend on my feet? Truly?"

"More than I have ever wanted anything in my life."

"Then yes," she said, and her voice shook slightly. She then drew her legs up and presented both bare soles to me together, tilting them to catch the light. She spread her toes as well.

I stood up and took my cock in my fist, stroking myself over her offered soles with her scent still riding my upper lip. It took perhaps six strokes more before my spend came out of me in thick white ropes, striping her from heel to toe. The first landed across the ball of her right foot, the second across her bare arches where they pressed together, and the third pooled directly into the crease of her toes. Whatever was left was milked onto the ground before I rested on the bench with a tremor.

Cordelia did not shriek or pull away but instead drew her feet in toward her lap, taking her own right ankle in both hands like a woman holding a rare purchase from an auction. She turned her foot slowly in the dying light.

"Well," she said softly.

She examined it. That was the only honest word for what she did. She turned her ankle this way and that, watching my spend glisten pale and pearlish along the ball of her foot as it slid in a slow trickle down her arch. She spread her toes one at a time, watching it gather and drip from the creases between them before pressing a fingertip into the whiteness. Cordelia then drew a thick strand of it up into the light and looked at the way it stretched.

"It is warm," she murmured, more to herself more than to me. "It slides about so. It is in between every single toe, how did you manage such thorough work?"

She lifted her foot nearer her own face, and I watched her nostrils flare as she took in the combined scent of it and of her own long day. Her eyebrows rose. "And it smells of you now, mixed right in with mine. All over them. Eddie, look what you have done to me. You have practically signed your name on both my feet."

I laughed as I put myself to rights by degrees, reassembling my dignity after this great occasion.

"I want it again," I said after I was finished.

Her eyebrow rose.

"I have decided plainness is the only coin worth spending tonight, so I shall spend it. Eight years, ten if you want to count this from my first experience with yearning, I wanted this kind of evening. Now that I have had it, I find I am not cured of so much as an hour of it. I want this again, Delia. I want it often. I want your boots waiting by my door, your stockings against my face, and your toes at my mouth whenever this house can be fooled into looking elsewhere. There, you cannot complain I never declared myself."

"Bold words from a man on his knees with his shirt tails out."

"I am at my boldest in precisely this position, as you have now witnessed."

Her laugh came low and delighted, making my heart bounce this way and that. Cordelia finally set her foot down and looked at me with her chin propped on her fist. I knew the next thing out of me would be the harder thing, so I said it before my nerve went the way of my spend.

"There is a complication, and you will have it from me before you have it from the servants. My father had me into the library this afternoon. Lord Thornbury came down for this party with a purpose, and the three of us discussed settlements for the better part of an hour. There is a dowry with a great many noughts in it and land adjoining ours in the west. The long and the short of it is that, I am to marry Honoria Thornbury. Tomorrow evening at the ball I shall open the dancing with her, before the whole assembled county, and every dowager in the room will understand precisely what the quadrille means."

I had braced myself for a change in her face but there was none. She received it as she receives news of rain, with a small tilt of the head.

"I know," she said.

"You know?"

"My mother told me at the dressing table before dinner. She had it from Lady Thornbury's maid, who had it from the butler, who had it from Perkins. Half the house knows, Eddie. I have had the whole evening to decide whether to be tragic about it, and I could not work up the appetite."

"You are not concerned?"

"Should I be? Name for me the thing I have lost. You were never going to offer for me. I have known your intentions since the rowing picnic when you were twenty-one and could not meet my eyes over the sandwiches. And I do not recall marriage being mentioned between us at any point. If you imagine I mean to resign my post as keeper of your great secret because a fair girl is to have the name and the house, you have misread me badly."

"Then you will do it again," I said. "Knowing what I am to be."

She leaned forward and took my face in both hands.

"Eddie. I have spent the last few minutes studying your seed as it drips between my toes, and you ask whether there will be a repetition. Yes. As often as we can contrive it. I have never been so thoroughly entertained in my life, and I intend to be entertained for years. You will be a married man with a wife and a friend with wicked feet in whatever orangery is nearest. I see no difficulty in the arithmetic."

The impropriety of this entire conversation was surging through me like warmed brandy. "God help me, neither do I."

"Now," she said, wriggling the toes of the foot still bearing my signature, "tell me about her. Honestly. You have encountered Honoria, what? Twice in your life? Give me the inventory. Inventories are your gift."

"Well, she is very pretty," I said. "That is the honest account. Small and fair, with the Thornbury chin and her mother's eyes. She dresses better than any girl in the county because Thornbury's money is good money. She sings a little and sketches badly but those hobbies, I believe, were left in her adolescence. She is... correct, Delia. Correct the way a banknote is correct."

"And her feet," said Cordelia, with the gravity of a coroner. "Surely, you have thought about them. You must think about everyone's."

"I despise you," I said without hatred, because it was true, and then I made another confession because the whole evening had been built of confessions and one more could not hurt me. "I have thought about them. If I can recall, I noticed them last at the garden party at Thornbury's two summers ago. She caught a pebble in her slipper and sat on the terrace steps to shake it out. I was near enough to see and far enough that nobody thought anything of my looking.

It is a small foot. A very small foot, in white silk and possesses a high in the arch. Her toes are set out the way a row of pearls are. Despite all of this, I have not smelled them, Delia. That is the sum of my knowledge of the woman I am to marry."

Cordelia laughed until she had to hold the bench.

"I see," she managed at last. "I can picture it now... A hundred candles, the county on its chairs, the music striking up as the heir of Montague leading out the lovely Miss Thornbury for the first dance. In your head I reckon, through every figure of the quadrille, there will be one thought, and it will not be her face or the settlements. You will be looking down at her slippers and reckoning how many hours she has had them on, whether the silk has gone damp at the toe by the second figure, and whether there is any chance on this earth that a girl raised by Lady Thornbury ever lets a man near her feet without a bath."

"You are enjoying this far more than I am right now" I said.

"Yes," she admitted earnestly, still chuckling. "You better pray the girl will allow it. But I guess that will be the least of your worries if her feet don't sweat in the way mine do. If she has dry little lavender feet you will die of politeness within the twelvemonth, and I shall be reduced to smuggling my stockings to you by the post."

"Oh, I so very despise in this moment right now."

Cordelia allowed herself to giggle before returning with a degree of seriousness. "Leave the investigation to me in any case. Give me a few hours of her company. Women learn more across a single dressing table than men would in a decade of marriage. By tomorrow I shall know whether her stockings cling at the toe by evening, whether she powders, what her boots carry home from a long day, and whether she has ever in her life been alone with her own feet long enough to form an opinion about them. You shall have a full report, delivered in the voice I now know you favor."

"You would do that for me?"

"I would do a great deal for science, and you are the finest specimen I have yet encountered."

She looked down at last at her own feet, where my spend had begun to dry to a faint sheen, and clicked her tongue.

"I cannot present myself in this condition. Hand me your handkerchief."

I gave it over, and then, when she made to do the work herself, I found my voice.

"Allow me."

She handed it back with great ceremony and put her heel into my palm. I cleaned my dried spend from her foot with more care than I had ever bestowed on anything in my life.

"You are sorry to see it go," she observed.

"Deeply. But I console myself that there will be future encounters."

She took the stocking I held out and drew it on over a foot still faintly tacky, smoothing the cotton up her calf with a look of private amusement.

"I can still feel it on me," she said. "Your signature, that is. Drying on my skin. I shall be the only woman in the supper room wearing it, and I find it I like that way."

"You are a wicked creature, Cordelia Rothwell."

"You made me so in one evening. Now do up my boots and think of England."

***

The county came in by the waggon load, and by nine the Montague ballroom was full capacity.

When Honoria was brought out, my gaze had, naturally, landed on her feet. She stood beside her mother in white silk trimmed in silver with pearls at her throat. She had a rose at her breast, and beneath eight pounds of the best quiet money in England, at the hem of all that correctness, lied a pair of dancing slippers in white satin. They possessed silver rosettes and ribbons crossed twice at the ankle, tied in neat bows.

They were new, I could tell. The satin had that uncreased candour that only unworn shoes possess; the sole was still pale, the rosettes were still tight, and the slippers sat on her feet with the faint stiffness of things not yet shaped to their duty. Her small feet were beautiful in them.

"You are staring at your betrothed," said a voice suddenly at my shoulder, "with the expression of a man doing sums."

"Good evening, Cordelia."

"Good evening, Eddie. You look very fine."

She was in green, a deep bottle green that made her look like trouble in good taste. Her own slippers peeped out beneath the hem when she dropped her curtsy, and I confess I noted them too.

"You have spoken with her today," I said. "At the dressing table. Whatever you learned, you will tell me later?"

"I learned a great deal and I shall tell you all of it, in the orangery, at a price you have already shown yourself willing to pay." She fanned herself once, slowly. "For now, go and be sold, Eddie. Smile for the audience."

I did so and my father soon caught my eye from beside the fireplace. He gave me the nod with which great men launched ships and sons. Lord Thornbury did the same to his daughter. The orchestra laid their bows to the strings and the room, with one vast practiced movement, arranged itself into chairs and standing rows of watching faces. I crossed over to Honoria with my heart performing the figures of a different dance entirely.

"Miss Thornbury."

"Mr. Montague." She dropped a curtsy that belonged in a picture and gave me her hand. Her glove was cool and so was her pulse. "I am told we are to open the ball. I have been told a great many things today. I believe I have been told things that have not yet happened."

"Then we are even, because things about me have been told to you that have not yet happened either."

She laughed. It was a real laugh, which surprised me, a short low note that she caught and folded away again like a letter she had not meant to show. "You are honest, Mr. Montague. That was not in the reports."

"Reports of me are hardly ever accurate." I quipped. Shall we?"

Honoria danced well. I had hoped for it and now that I had it, it changed the whole character of the evening; a woman who danced well gave a man room to think, and I used the allotted room to keep my mind occupied.

When we came together and turned, I looked down, as a man must, to gauge the distance. Her slippers moved through the figures in small precise strokes. I watched everything, from the satin flashing white under the candlelight to the silver rosettes turning this way and that. I watched the whole apparatus of her foot working inside that thin slipper with every step, and to see her foot at work was possibly the best pleasure I was afforded this evening.

I ran the arithmetic against my will. She had most likely dressed at seven, for a mother like Lady Thornbury would allow no later hour to do so. That meant the slippers were on at half past seven, which mean they had been on her feet for two and a half hours in total. By the second figure, inside that close white satin, her toes would be pressing damp against the silk. When she took the slippers off tonight, it would be a smell and it would be specific. It would be the specific, womanly stench of a small fair foot that had worked all evening.

I grew hard in the third figure of all places, at the poule, where the gentleman advances alone. As one could imagine, the circumstance was not, at all, comfortable. I fixed my gaze on a point above the orchestra and thought of other things irrelevant to feet. I brought the rebellion under control by sheer willpower and the grace of a long waistcoat; it allowed me to advanced, retired, and advanced again in perfect civic calm.

"You are very solemn for a man at a party," Honoria said when the figure returned her to me. "Are you counting the steps?"

"I am counting the figures," I said, which was true in every sense but the obvious one. "My father taught me that a man who opens a ball must not miss his cues. It is the only lesson of his I ever mastered."

"That is two honest things you have said me this evening. My mother warned me you would be all politeness."

"Your mother has not seen the real me, only the one on display. Politeness is what I give people I distrust."

"And do you distrust me?"

"I distrust anyone whose slippers are newer than my resolutions."

She laughed again, and let it live a little longer this time. "You are looking at my slippers again."

"I am looking at your slippers constantly. I find them, ironically, the most honest thing in the room. Everything and everyone else here is dressed to say one thing and mean six. Your slippers, however, cannot prevaricate. They either fit or they pinch."

"And do mine fit?"

"They fit you the way the truth fits a witness, Miss Thornbury. Closely, and with consequences."

Whatever she was going to say to that, the music took it away because the trénise came upon us. Her hand was warm now. The glove had gone from cool to warm in the space of two figures, and I thought, with a scholarly thrill I kept strictly off my face, that her feet had made the same journey an hour before her hands did.

During the turn, I faced the room to notice Cordelia at the third pillar with her fan idle. As my eyes swept the crowd in the duty of a dancing man, she caught my gaze and winked. She knew exactly what I was thinking about as I turned the lovely Miss Thornbury under my arm, and then, so help me, she dropped her gaze to Honoria's feet. She lifted it again to mine and raised an eyebrow with the frank insolence of a question we both knew the answer to.

I missed my step by the width of a coat button. I recovered it swiftly as I turned back to Honoria with my blood in my ears.

"You are flushed," she said.

"Yes, the room is an oven. My mother believes candlelight the way other women believe in perfume."

"Mine believes in windows. We open them at home and my father always complains of the draught. My mother says a Thornbury should be afforded the luxuries of weather whenever desired." She was quiet through a bar of music, and then she said in the tone of a woman laying down one card to see what the table does, "You know what tonight means. Everyone in this room knows what tonight means, and they have known since the carriages. I would rather we were the only two people in it who were permitted to say so."

I looked at her then, entirely at her face, and gave her the compliment of my whole attention. "It means the county has decided our business before we have, and that we may either be strangers about it or be friends about it. I would vastly prefer friends, because strangers who are made to dance together look ridiculous, and I am vain enough to want us both to look well."

"Three honest things," she said. "You are out to ruin your reputation entirely."

"I began ruining it the moment I resolved to enjoy this evening," I said charismatically. "Shall we finish the thing handsomely? The finale is upon us."

The finale took us up with bright and quick music. Honoria danced it with colour in her cheeks and her feet struck the floor in small sure strokes. I watched them work openly now, because I had suddenly occurred to me that a man may stare at a woman's feet all he pleased, provided his face was solemn and the occasion was a quadrille. The satin had lost its newness by then. The dancing had creased it at the toe and softened the rosettes. The slipper had fully molded to the shape of the sole and that realization made my chest tightened.

When the music closed, I bowed. Honoria sank in a curtsy, and the room applauded us with the warm relieved applause of two hundred people watching money shake hands with money. Honoria rose and put her hand on my arm, looking up at me with her breath quick from dancing. She was utterly and entirely radiant.

***

Cordelia sat on the low stone bench beneath the oldest tree in the orangery with her slippers set side by side on the flagging. Her stockinged feet were drawn up under the hem of her green gown.

"You missed your step in the trénise," she said at my approach.

"The county missed my step in the trénise because the county was watching my betrothed."

"Including you."

"Yes, including me."

"You were watching her slippers through an entire quadrille. It was fascinating, I dare say, especially when I winked at you. I must be quite the distraction if I made you miss your step."

"Amongst other things, yes, you were quite distracting."

Cordelia chuckled. "Sit down, Eddie."

I sat on the bench beside her, at a respectable distance, in the manner of a man attending a lecture.

"You promised me this afternoon," I said, "that you had learned a great deal and would tell me all of it in the orangery."

"Yes, on the following conditions," she said with a mischievous smile. "Here is how tonight will be conducted. You will kneel there and keep your nose where I put it, and while your face is occupied I will tell you what I learned, in the order I learned it. I will stop whenever I please, because I have discovered that I enjoy this and a woman should always be permitted her pleasures."

"You have discovered a cruelty in yourself."

"I have discovered a desire, which is different. Kneel properly."

I knelt on the cold flagging in my white silk waistcoat, a picture of devotion that would have finished my mother on the spot. Cordelia extended her right foot out of the green hem and I took it in both hands. She had danced nearly every dance of the evening, out of mischief, out of habit, and her foot carried the whole account of it. The silk was damp at the toes and across the ball of the foot. The stench that rose off of them was pure, unadulterated woman and my cock stirred in my evening clothes with prompt obedience.

"There he is," Cordelia said, and I heard the smile arrive. "Now, this afternoon at six, Lady Thornbury sent me up to Honoria's room with the pearls on the grounds that I am the only woman under forty at this party and, therefore, the only one who can be trusted with another woman's clasps. I found Honoria at the glass in her dressing gown, and I found her in a state I can only call holy terror. She was, at that moment, a woman with a private question on her mind. She made me swear before she would say a word. She took both my hands, Eddie, and she said, 'Swear that what I say in this room stays in this room, swear it on whatever you hold sacred'. I swore it on my own reputation, which was very generous of me, as you are about to understand.

Cordelia paused there. She flexed her toes against my nose, a small deliberate flexing, before looking down at me.

"You are making a noise," she observed. "Can you breathe or shall I stop?"

"No," I pleaded. "Continue. Please."

"Very well. She asked me, in a voice I had to lean close to hear, whether I had ever smelled my own feet before. I, of course, told her honestly that I had, because I believe every woman has and no woman admits it. She turned and looked at me, and Eddie, it was the look of a woman finding the door of a room she has been locked out of her whole life. It then came out of her all at once, the way water comes out of a broken dam.

What I have extracted as a whole from the conversation is that your dear Honoria has sniffed her own foul feet and stockings every night since she was eleven years old. She likes it, and it shames her that she likes it. That is, until she noticed the way a certain gentleman looks at feet. She was eager to know before she stood up with him, before the whole county, whether the truth about her would send him running, or whether it might draw him the other way."

I made a sound into the warm silk of her toes that I will not attempt to transcribe. Honoria was born of the same deviancy I was, and the discovery had my cock straining with an urgency that had gone past discomfort and entered the province of theology.

"She then took my hands," Cordelia said, and her voice had changed too; it had gone lower and shorter in breath, and I understood the telling was working on her as well. "and she asked me, in a whisper, whether I thought Mr. Montague could ever be a man who would not mind a wife whose... and then stopped. Eddie, she could not finish the sentence. I finished it for her and told her I thought he would not mind at all. I told her I thought he had spent his whole life waiting for a wife with such feet, and she blushed down to her collarbones."

"You are breaking a confidence," I said into her foot.

"I am, and I will burn in whichever circle condemns confidence breakers. But I would do it again tomorrow because her secret is your secret... I also have a confession of my own, since we appear to be in the season of them. Watching you is my vice now. I found it out these last few days and I have no intention of giving it up. When you groan into my foot I feel it in my own soles, and higher. I have been wet since the second figure of my story, and I am telling you so because I want you to know what your face is doing to me."

She drew her left foot and set it, slowly, against the front of my breeches. The damp sole pressed along the whole length of me, and she watched her own foot do it with the fascination of a child with a new clockwork toy. She moved the silk of her stocking along me a single inch, and I gripped her ankle with both hands.

I was to come right there.

"Now," she said, eyes bright and her breath gone short, "with your nose in my stocking and your bride's secret in your keeping, tell me honestly... will you go to that altar gladly?"

"Gladly..." I said, lifting my face out of the warm dark of her foot. "... is too small a word to describe it."

The Wedding

I woke on my wedding morning with my hands behind my head, reviewing over what was to be the day's schedule. Eleven o'clock, the church. One o'clock, the breakfast. Six o'clock, the last carriage gone. And at some hour after that, in a house I had been given by my father, Honoria Thornbury and I would be alone together for the first time in our lives. Everything I knew, everything she did not know I knew, would lie on the table between us like cards played open-handedly.

Later that morning, after being dressed and prepared, my father found me on the stairs. He looked me over with the eye of a man appraising a horse he has finally got round to buying and said, "Grey. Good." He then clapped my shoulder, which from my father was a sonnet. My mother did something along the same lines, congratulating with a bit more affection than my father. The final person to appraise my outfit was Cordelia, who wore mischief like a bonnet this morning.

"I have come to inspect the goods before the sale concludes," she said, turning me by the shoulder to looked me down and up. "Grey will do. Now attend, because I am in possession of information and I mean to spend lavishly."

"What do you have for me," I asked curiously.

"She has been in her slippers since half past six. I held the watch myself while her maid laced her into them, and I have further intelligence of the first water. Her mother arrived with powder bags for her feet and Honoria refused it. Refused it flat, Eddie, before the maid, the mirror, and God. She told her mother her complexion objected to powder, which is the finest lie I have heard from a bride in a decade of the county's brides. She goes to you unpowdered, my dear Eddie. Consider this my wedding present, and consider yourself in my debt until one of us is dead."

"Cordelia, you have equipped me for this campaign like a quartermaster."

"I have equipped you like a matchmaker, which is what I have been since the ball. Go and be married, and when you write your first letter from the wedding tour, remember that I will be elated of its contents in advance."

By half past ten, the county had filled the parish church which I was to be wedded. I walked up the aisle with my groomsmen, which men I did not associate with often, and took my place. I stood through the psalm with my heart attempting to outdrum the organ. When the doors opened, the organ swelled and the county came to its feet.

My beautiful bride-to-be came up the aisle on her father's arm, dressed in white silk over white silk. As the orange blossom was carried before her, I couldn't help but gaze at the pristine white satin slippers appearing and withdrawing from view from beneath the hem. Honoria, all of her, was utterly resplendent as she walked up that aisle and she did it wth the small careful gait of a woman whose feet were held in a warm grip. Her soles were to be exquisitely fragrant by the end of today, as she would have wore those slippers for some time in this June heat.

Her face behind the veil, when she arrived at my side, was composed. Her hand, when her father gave it into mine, was steady. Her feet, I could see at the hem, were shifting their weight, one and then the other, in the smallest permissible movements. I have never in my life been so moved by a woman standing still.

The service went over me like weather. I said my responses in a voice I did not entirely recognize. Honoria said "I do," in a clear voice pitched for the back pews, and the county sighed as one creature. The ring then went on her finger, and her hand closed on mine at the moment of it.

She leaned, very slightly, at a fraction that only a bride may lean, and said under the first bells, "You have watched my feet through the whole of the service, Edward Montague."

"I have watched nothing else in this church since the doors opened."

The register was signed. The walk was made and the bells went on as the county threw itself upon my father's breakfast. My newly-wedded wife sat beside me at the breakfast while my father toasted the union of two great houses.

She leaned to me and spoke during the toast.

"I have a confession," she said.

"I have looked forward to your confessions for six weeks."

"Six weeks," she said as she turned her head. "That is a curious arithmetic since the ball was six weeks ago. You could not have known I had anything to confess."

"I knew a great deal of things during those six weeks, things that put me in a state I will not describe at a breakfast table."

She was quiet a moment. The toast went on.

"So you are privy of everything I told Cordelia," she said, in a voice pitched for the two of us and the flowers.

"Yes, I am."

"So you two are friends, then?"

"Yes," I told her. "Close friends."

Another stretch of quiet.

"Well, I will make you a plainer confession still," Honoria said, "since we are to be plain with each other from this day. I came gladly. I stood at that church door this morning and would not have turned back if the bishop himself had asked me. I have also been excited for a one particular activity since the ball and tonight I intend to indulge in it."

I looked at my wife, darkly curious. "Indulge how?"

"By taking off my slippers," she said, "in front of my husband, and watching his face while I do so."

I put my hand over hers on the tablecloth. "Then hear my confession in exchange. I have wanted to be married to you since the ball, because I spent ten years believing I should keep this particular part of myself shut away and as of six weeks ago, I have learned that the girl I am to marry shares this part too. I have never been so glad of any purchase my father made with my future. I also came to that altar gladly."

She looked at me for a long moment, and her eyes were bright. Under the table, was unmistakably and deliberately, the toe of a certain white satin slipper pressed against my ankle.

"Then we are both satisfied," she said, "and the county may congratulate itself, since for once it has arranged a marriage correctly."

***

The departure was made at six and in the carriage, my wife asked me to massage her aching feet. I have never attended to any duty with the whole of my heart and both of my hands as I attended to that one.

"You have done this before," said Honoria as she watched me kneaded her heavenly pungent flesh.

"I have studied the subject for a great many years, in the greatest privacy, and I will tell you the whole of my studies if you wish it."

"In the carriage I only want the practice of your expertise," she said. "The whole of it can wait for the house."

The house my father had lent us stood two counties off, near the sea. We came to it around ten at night with candles in every window and a staff that had been drilled for the occasion. A maid took my wife up to change, and when she was finished, the maid came down. The servants then all went to bed and the house went quiet. With absolute enthusiasm for the final phase of the night, I stood in the corridor outside our door with my coat off and my heart going at a rate I would not have admitted to a physician.

I knocked three times.

"Come in," she said.

She was sitting on the bed in a nightgown of white linen. Her blonde hair was down her back and her feet were drawn up under the hem.

"Lock the door," she said.

I locked it.

"Now," she said with her steady voice as her toes curled under the hem at the sound of the key, "Come, husband. Kneel before your bride and take my foot in your hands."

I crossed the room at once, kneeling on the rug before her in my shirtsleeves. I held her right foot in both hands and gave it the survey an honest man gives an estate he has bought sight unseen and found exceeding initial expectation. It was a fine foot. The instep was high and the arch was a proper curve. Her toes were short and straight, with the big toe set like a keystone. The sole was flushed pink from the day and was printed faintly with the seams of her stockings.

I turned it in my hands and pressed my thumb into the ball of it and watched the flesh give and return. She watched me do it with her lip caught in her teeth.

"What do you think," she asked sweetly, "Surely, you have opinions regarding the anatomy of my foot."

I smiled. "There is a callus beginning here, on the outside of the big toe, from the way you walk. There is a pressure mark across the instep where the slipper gripped you all morning. You have been on your feet since half past six, I am certain, and every hour of it is written on them. I intend to read the whole document."

"Read it," she said, and her voice had gone low, "with your nose."

I raised her foot to my face and I inhaled. A warm cheesiness filled me my brain and in the clefts between the toes, her entire day had distilled to a strong vinegary reek. I put my nose to the arch of her and drew the breath of a man drawing on his last reserves. My cock, which had been at half mast since the church door, came up hard against my trousers with the enthusiasm of a dog shown its lead.

"Your face," said Honoria, and her voice was unsteady. "I have imagined your face for six weeks and the reality is indecent."

I freed my cock from my trousers then and took it in my fist, making no ceremony of it because we were past ceremony. Her eyes went down to my hand and stayed there. I held her foot against my face with my left arm and worked my cock with my right, slowly, because I wanted the evening to last a decade. I dragged my nose from her heel to her toes and back again, reading the document thoroughly and entirely.

"Good god," she said, and her voice had gone thick. "I can smell them from here."

I spread her toes with my fingers and put my nose into the cleft between the big toe and its neighbor. The stench there was indescribable; it was sharp, sweet, rank, and warm in that precise order. I groaned against her foot.

Her hand had gone under the hem of the gown while I worked, and I heard the small wet sound of her fingers finding her pussy. I looked up the length of her and saw her hand moving under the linen. Her head was tipped back and her toes were curling in my grip. It was my understanding then, that my wife had come to this night as hungry as I had, and had come to it already damp.

"Tell me what you smell," she said. "I have wanted to hear a man say it honestly since I was old enough to want anything."

"Vinegar," I said, into the cleft of her toes, "and pure cheesy rankness, my dear. The finest natural fragrance in all of England."

She laughed but the laugh broke in the middle because her fingers found their rhythm. We went on that way for a while, and I thought, with the part of my mind not otherwise engaged, that marriage had been terribly undersold to me by every gentleman of my acquaintance.

She took her foot back after some time, drawing the foot out of my hands while she folded herself forward in the chair. It was evident to me that she had done this movement in private many times before and as she lifted her own foot the rest of the way to her face, I watched her nose press into the sole of it. She inhaled deeply, with her eyes on me the entire time. Her nostrils flared and her eyelids fluttered.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, I see. This one is quite fragrant. Quite vinegary, as you said. Cheesy too."

My wife then opened her mouth and took her own big toe in.

I have witnessed a small number of great scenes in my life but none of it prepared me for the sight of Honoria with her own toe in her mouth, with her cheek hollowed and her eyes half closed. Her fingers were still busy under the gown, and the collective sight of it made my cock jerk hard in my fist. I was a breath from finishing on the carpet and had to compose myself, if I had any hope to finish on her soles.

When she drew the toe from her mouth, it was wet and shining in the candlelight. My wife looked at me down the length of her own leg, and she said, "The other one, husband. Take my other foot and suck my toes while I suck mine."

I took her left foot in both hands and took her big toe into my mouth.

The taste was salty and sourness in equal measure as I sealed my lips around the first joint. Her whole leg shivered in my hands and I gave the toe the fullest attention, working it with my tongue. I moved on to the second and the third, and I licked into the clefts between them where the flavor gathered thickest. I took her two small toes together, dimly aware of the shameful noise I was making but could not stop.

Her fingers went faster under the linen. She moaned around her own toe and the moaning travelled down her leg and into the foot in my mouth, which made me suck harder. My lustful vigor fueled hers, which resulted her, too, to suck harder.

My wife finished first.

Her back came off the chair, and the foot in my mouth went rigid. Every toe spread wide and then curled hard as she cried out around her big toe. The sound was lovely and melodious to my ears. Her thighs shook, and her toes began flexing against my palms. I held her left foot through the whole of it, sucking her until she finally came down from her high.

I knelt up then and took my cock in my fist, for I have never been so close to the summit.

She drew her legs up and set her feet together. Her soles were toward me, the toes curling and uncurling as I stroke myself. I could only do it twice before she clapped her soles together around my cock, and the grip of those arches, the sheer heat of them, undid me at once and entirely; I fucked the warm seam my wife had provided until I pulled free of her grip with the last of my discipline. I held her ankles together with one hand while the other worked my cock, coming all over her feet in long white stripes. It was nothing short of ethereal, seeing stripe after stripe land across the balls of her small feet, along the arches, into the clefts of the toes. By the time I was finished, my wife's soles were iced like a pair of wedding cakes.

I fell back on my heels with the room suddenly tilting, and I thought, with what remained of my reason, that I had held out for ten years, and that it had been worth every month.

I then looked up to see my dear Honoria holding her feet up to the candlelight and examined the result. She turned one foot and then the other. She spread her toes, watching my cum gather and run between them. She dragged one toe along the sole of the opposite foot, observing her work before looking at me with her mouth curved.

"So this is what all the veils and carriages were guarding," she said in a low voice, more to herself than me. "It suits me. I thought it would, and it does."

My wife then lifted her right foot in both her hands and, to my utter surprise, extended her tongue, licking one long, slow stripe up the sole of her own foot. From the heel to the toes, that pink little creature went straight through the whole of my spending and accepted it into her mouth. With all the ceremony of someone savoring a delicious first bite, she swallowed and she said, "Mm."

My mouth hung open in complete astonishment and my heart, too, was going like a cavalry charge. I had understood, in that delicate perfect instance, that I had married the only woman in England who loved the stink of her own feet as I loved it, loved them enough to taste them on her own tongue, and loved them enough to taste what a man thought of them. I was aroused past all comprehension and in love past all language, and I said as much to my newly-wedded bride.

"You have been tasting your own feet," I said with a lost of words. "For years."

"Since I was thirteen," she said. "In my bedchambers, at night, when everyone was asleep. I believed I was the only creature in England made this way, and that I should have to be very careful all my life. Then Cordelia told me about you."

"Likewise. You now have a witness," I said, "and a husband who accept you for all you are."

"Yes, I do," she said slightly teary-eyed and soft, "Come here."

I rose up on my knees, took her face in both hands, and kissed her. Her mouth was warm, tasting of her toes and of my cum. It was the finest thing I had ever put my own mouth to, and I told her so against her lips. She laughed into the kiss, and I kissed the laugh out of her until her arms came round my neck.

***

On the first morning of my married life, I woke with my wife's foot in my hand. I want the record to show that I had gone to bed in a respectable posture, both arms round her waist, a gentleman to the last. In the night I surmised some honest deputy took command of my right arm, marched it down the bed, and found her ankle. I had also noticed that Honoria was awake and had been awake long enough to find the scene thoroughly entertaining.

"Good morning, husband," she said. "Shall I ring for the footman, or are you content in the post?"

"I am the footman now," I said. "The situation came with the house, and I mean to hold it for life."

I kissed her ankle and rose.

We dressed, for at eleven o'clock my father arrived with Lord Thornbury, as men of business will, to turn a wedding into a transaction. They brought a portmanteau of papers and spread them on the library table with the air of generals unrolling maps.

For two hours I was a man of affairs and nothing else. Beside matters regarding settlements and jointure, there was the two thousand acres of levels on the eastern marches that Lord Thornbury wanted draining. He had a company formed to drive a branch line through the parish to the harbor, and my father, of course, subscribed to the idea. The plan involved tile drains, catchwater dykes, an embankment along the fleet, and the proposed line of rails sketched in red. Lord Thornbury explained everything to me, and I understood this interaction to be the beginning of my promotion from neighbor to son in his ledger as well as in his heart.

Afterward, they stayed to luncheon. Honoria presided at the head of her own table for the first time, managing my father and hers alike with light but firm hand. When the carriage took the two old men off down the drive at three o'clock, she stood at the window beside me.

"They are pleased with themselves."

"Yes, they quite are." I said. "They have married a drainage scheme and..."

"What?"

I laughed at a very silly thought.

"What?" Honoria asked, faintly amused by my amusement. "What is so funny? You must tell me."

"They are a couple in a sense. My father and yours, are they not?"

She laughed wholeheartedly and held onto me.

"You are silly, my dear husband," she said. "You are silly."

"But have told a lie?"

"No, you have not."

The last matter of the day was conducted upstairs, with the door shut and the maid dismissed. Her shoes were laid out on the chaise in her dressing room, the whole roster, and she stood over them like a colonel over a muster.

"You should know my system," she said, "since you are to be the inspector of it. These kid ones are for short wear, church and calls. They take a foul scent by evening. The satin I keep for dancing go sour in an hour. This pair of brown leather boots are the working stock. A day in these and I am not fit for company."

I knelt at the chaise and put my nose into the throat of one of those brown boots. I drew in a long breath, and I looked up at her

"Madam," I said. "you have been sitting on a fortune."

"I know it," she said. "I have merely been waiting for the market to open."

We instituted the household rule that evening, and it will go in no housekeeping book. Her feet were mine to unwedge at day's end, each and every day. The basin and the soap may stand ready on the washstand but they shall not be used until I have taken my fill. On certain evenings, they shall not be used at all.

***

Later that night, I sat down at my desk and wrote my first letter as a married man.

---

My dear Cordelia,

I am three days married, and I write to you before I write to my banker, which I believe settles the order of my affections for good. You will want the news, and I will set it down plainly because you are the one person on earth to whom plainness is possible... and because you had a hand in the making of all this. I do believe the maker is owed the sight of her finished work.

Honoria has exceeded my expectations, both as my wife and a woman. She has loved the smell of her own feet since she was thirteen, tasting her own toes in her bedchambers at night while her family slept. Much like me, she believed herself the only creature in England so constructed and arranged her whole life around the secret. On our wedding night, we sucked on her toes while taking ourselves in hand. She finished first, with her own big toe in her mouth and I finished across the soles of both her feet. Much like you during our first time, she held them up to the candlelight to study them, and then, Cordelia, she tasted my spend on her bare sole.

I have married my soulmate. I had begun to fear there was no such woman, and now I keep her in my house. I am drunk on her daily and pay nothing for it but the salary of a footman, which I draw in kind.

Write to me. Tell me you are well. Tell me everything, as I have told you everything.

Sincerely,

Your friend, Edward, entirely and for life.

---

Her answer came within the week.

---

My dear Eddie,

Four times I have read your letter, and I must report that the second and third readings were conducted with my hand up my skirts. The fourth with my foot in my face, which I recommend as a posture for such correspondence, since it puts the raw material of one's arousal within nose's reach.

I am surprised. I am aroused. I am glad. Specifically, in that order and the first two at scandalous length.

I knew you were a madman. I did not know you had gone and married a madwoman. When I reached the part about her tongue on her own sole, I had to put the letter down and see to myself. I then picked it up again and read that passage aloud in the dark, then saw to myself again. I am writing you this with my feet unwashed since morning and my nose turned down toward them at every pause.

Does she know about us? About the salon and the orangery? I want her to know me, and I want her to know everything, and more than that. I want to be in a room with the pair of you and watch you both act unrespectable.

I have never been so glad about anything that did not happen to me directly. You have made a match that should be in the prayer book.

Write again. Write often. Tell me what she wears, how long she wears it, and what you do about it. I am your correspondent for life and I intend to be a demanding one.

Sincerely,

Your Cordelia.

---

I wrote back that Honoria knew everything, having given my wife the whole of it from me. Honoria was not in the least upset of this revelation, but in fact, aroused to have another lover of foul feet. She read the last letter I wrote to Cordelia over my shoulder, which was her right and my pleasure. Before I could seal the letter in an envelope, she took my pen and added a line of her own at the foot of my reply.

---

He has told me about the salon. I have wanted to write to you since the ball. My husband is a good man and his nose is a national treasure. When am I to meet again with the woman who equipped him so well?

H. M.

---

Through fall and winter, the letters went south and came back north, twice a week, then three times. I would read them aloud in bed with Honoria's feet against my chest, and she would correct my delivery of the jokes, demanding the indecent passages be read twice. By spring the two of them had dispensed with me as a carrier altogether and were writing directly, woman to woman. Their letters ran longer than mine and were, I am reliably informed, considerably less restrained. I was not wounded by this, for a general need not be present at every skirmish. I knew whose banner these lovely women fought under.

The drainage went forward, and so did the branch line. I spent my day consisted of the dykes, levels, and red ink while my evenings consisted at the feet of my wife in every sense. I record without shame that the winter and spring were the happiest months this Englishman has ever kept.

***

It was Honoria who had settled the matter of the visit. She came to me in May with a letter in her hand.

"Cordelia is to come to us in June and stay as long as she will. I have already told her so, and your consent is a formality I am observing out of affection rather than necessity."

"My dear wife, there is no need to observe for you have my full consent regarding Cordelia's company," I said warmly. "Is that all the news you have?"

"I told her to wear her oldest boots on the road, for I expect her to arrive on our anniversary." Honoria beamed. "Consider this an anniversary gift from your beautiful wife."

Cordelia's acceptance came a week and a half later and was three pages long. "I shall come in June. I shall wear my oldest boots for the journey, and I shall not change them until I am in your drawing room. If that is a scandal then the three of us are past all saving and may as well be hanged for sheep."

The appointed day came in the third week of June, bright and dry, with the dust standing over the road in the afternoon. We saw the carriage at the turn of the drive while Honoria and I stood by the window, and I confess my heart went up in a manner I had not felt since my wedding morning; a friend of one's youth who knew the whole of one was a rarer possession than a wife, and I had somehow contrived to be owed both by the same woman.

The carriage drew up in a crack of gravel and a cloud of dust. When the step came down, Cordelia put out her foot and I looked at the foot. It was in a brown boot that had seen a decade of honest service, creased deep at the ankle. The leather was dark at the toe and the laces frayed. It was a boot that had walked and walked in a several season, including this hot June day. My eyes stayed on it perhaps a second longer than a gentleman's should, and when I raised them I found Honoria watching me look. Her mouth was curved, and she had counted the second exactly.

When Cordelia came down the step, she was more striking than she ever been and when she approached, she embraced me with the grip of an old comrade.

"You look married," she said into my ear. "It suits you very well, Eddie."

She then turned to my wife, and the two of them looked at each other for a long moment, the matchmaker and the match.

"It is wonderful to finally meet again, Cordelia."

"Likewise," said Cordelia. She was beaming ear to ear, like my wife. "I am absolutely honored to be here."

"And I am honored you appeared. I have wanted to thank you in person for a full year and find I still do not know how," said Honoria. "So I shall do it by feeding you, housing you, and never once letting you change your footwear before dinner."

Cordelia laughed from her belly, and Honoria laughed with her. I stood on my own steps between these two women and led them both into the house after Honoria verbally expressed her displeasure with the heat.

We all ate breakfast together, laughed, and talked all the way to dinner, which had not exhausted us in the least. The wine flowed and the talk flowed faster. Cordelia held the table as she had always held every room she entered, but now she held it in concert with my wife, and the two of them played off each other like musicians who had been rehearsing in secret for years.

I watched them. A man in my position may be permitted to watch. Honoria had dressed for the occasion in a gown of pale blue that left her shoulders bare, and Cordelia had come down in something dark green. They sat on either side of me at the long table and passed the port while laughing at jokes they made. I understood tonight that I was now the third wheel in my own marriage, and I found I did not mind it at all.

The servants cleared the last course and withdrew. We then sat with the candles burning low while the windows were open to the June night breeze.

Cordelia said, after a while. "I have been in this house all day and no one has asked me about my boots."

"We were waiting for the proper moment," said my wife.

"And when is the proper moment?"

"After dinner. When the servants are gone and the doors are shut."

Cordelia smiled and set down her glass. "I have been wearing these boots since I left home, the whole time thinking about your letters and wondering whether you meant what you wrote or whether you were merely being kind to a lonely woman with a strange affliction."

"Kindness requires a motive I do not possess," said Honoria. "I am curious and wrote what I meant. My husband has been describing your feet to me for six months and I mean to know whether he is a reliable witness."

She rose from her chair and walked around the table to where Cordelia sat. My wife held out her hand, and Cordelia took it and stood. The two of them regarded each other with the frankness of soldiers meeting before a battle they had both desired.

"Shall we go upstairs?" said Honoria.

"By all means," said Cordelia.

My wife smiled and gestured me to the bedroom.

I followed them at once. I fear that I would have followed them into the sea, if they asked.

We went to the bedroom. Honoria shut the doors and turned the lock. She then drew Cordelia to the chaise by the window and sat her down, kneeling at her feet with the air of a priest approaching an altar.

My wife looked up at me and said, "You may come and unwrapped your anniversary gift."

I knelt beside my wife and undid the laces of Cordelia's boots, drawing the boot off by the heel. The foot that emerged was damp, warm, and pink. She had wore no sock, good god. I admired her glistening sole with a lustful fascination that was apparent and was growing by the minute. The smell struck me suddenly, like that of a wave, and I swam into it. I pressed my face to her pungent sole and breathed her in.

"God," I said.

"He is not here, my dear Eddie," said Cordelia delightfully.

Honoria watched me with bright eyes before saying to me, "Does it smell good?"

"Yes," I said before running my tongue from Cordelia's heel to the ball of her foot.

Cordelia gasped and gripped the arm of the chaise.

"May I?" asked Honoria to Cordelia.

Cordelia's face lit up, pleasantly surprised at the request. "Please."

My wife then unlaced the second boot and drew it off, leaving Cordelia left foot completely barefooted. She then put her nose to Cordelia's other boot and inhaled deep.

"Oh," she said, her eyes fluttering shut. "Oh, goodness. This is truly something."

Honoria began sucking Cordelia's toes on her left foot while I ran my tongue along the arch of the right one. Cordelia made a sound I had never heard from her before, a low moan that came from somewhere deep than her throat.

"Good heavens," she said, and I noticed her hand going beneath her skirts. She began touching herself while we worked her feet, and the slow movements gradually turning frantic made me so erect, I thought I might spend in my trousers from the sight alone.

"Let me," said Honoria.

I did not know what my wife meant at first but it quickly dawned on me when I watched my wife's hand reach up and pushed Cordelia's hand aside. My Honoria, my dear Honoria, then slid her own hand beneath the skirts, and Cordelia's back all but arched off the chaise.

"Oh God," moaned Cordelia softly. "Oh God... oh, oh, yes, there, yes."

She came with her foot in my mouth and my wife's hand between her legs. She made a sound like a sob and another sound like a laugh. Her toes curled against my tongue as her whole body shook, and then she fell back against the cushions to breathe in great ragged pulls.

Honoria finally rose and leaned over her, kissing her full on the mouth like a savage and Cordelia, too, kissed her back with a mad desperation of a woman who had just discovered something she had not known she wanted. Despite my shock, I had no objection to it, for I was aroused beyond all comprehension. When they broke apart, Honoria looked at me with her lips still wet from Cordelia's mouth, and said, "I want to try something."

"What?" I asked her, the anticipation lighting me anew.

"I want to share you with her. I want us both to have you. I want to see her mouth on you and then I want to put my mouth where hers was. I want you to finish on both of us, on our faces, and I want to taste you mixed with her and taste her mixed with you."

I was already standing, already hard and already beyond speech. Undoing my trousers, I let them fall and my cock stood out before me. Both women, my wife and oldest friend, looked at it with expressions I will carry to my grave.

Cordelia slid from the chaise to her knees with Honoria knelt beside her. They both looked up at me.

"May I?" Cordelia said.

"You may," said Honoria. "But you must share."

Cordelia took me in her mouth first, and she was skilled in ways I had not imagined. Her tongue worked the underside of my shaft while her lips sealed round the head. I groaned and put my hand on her hair, watching Honoria watch Cordelia, who was just mere inches away. When Cordelia drew back to breathe, Honoria took her place. My wife then sucked me with an enthusiasm belied all of our previous sexual encounters, and I found myself more madly in love with her than any time before.

They traded back and forth, and I stood before them with my hands in both their hair. I watched their mouths move on me, and I felt the build of something I had never felt before, a pressure that came from more than my cock. It was a fullness that included my heart, my lungs, and the whole of my chest.

"I am going to..." I said.

"Both of us," said Honoria to me and she pulled back with face turned up. Cordelia did the same. They pressed their cheeks together, waiting with their eyes closed and their mouths open.

I spent across both their faces, rope after rope, the first striping Honoria's cheek, Cordelia's brow, then the corner of both their mouths. They stayed completely still until I was empty, and once I was spent, my wife turned to Cordelia. She licked a streak from Cordelia's forehead, and Cordelia licked a streak from Honoria's chin, which eventually turned into a kiss that had my seed passing between their tongues.

I sank to the floor before them but Honoria was not with me yet.

She said, "I have not had my turn."

I realized she had not come. "What would you have?"

She rose and stepped out of her gown, standing before Cordelia and I as bare as Eve before the apple. My wife was beautiful as the first day I met her, and she pushed me back onto the carpet to straddle my face. I stared up at the wet pink of her and the dark curls above as she lowered herself onto my mouth.

"I want to smother you, my dear husband," she said. "In the sweetest, most lovingly way possible."

Cordelia knelt beside us, and soon I heard the two of them make out as I worked my tongue into my wife. The taste of her was familiar now, as it had always tasted in these twelve months of marriage but I had done it with a renewed, aggressive vigor. As a result, Honoria rode my face with skill and abandon, kissing Cordelia with increasing desperation. Her thighs were beginning to shake against my ears. I gripped her hips and pulled her down hard onto my mouth, until she came with a cry that filled the room. Her whole body went rigid then liquid, and soon she flooded my mouth with her release.

When she fell off of me, her hand found mine and then Cordelia's. She brought us together, leaning in to kiss me and Cordelia separately before pulling us both toward each other. Cordelia and I kissed for the first time in our entire lives, and we kissed each other with a passion that we both did not know existed until now. Honoria watched us and did not interrupt us, for she was utterly fascinated at this fiery passion between us, this intense, burning love that was held hostage by our long term friendship. The sight of it, of us in the throes of increasing wonder both aroused and satisfied her.

When Cordelia and I pulled back, a thin thread of saliva connected our sore lips. Honoria then kissed us both again before the three of us came together finally. Our mouths met and parted and met again, and it was the story of three tongues, of three histories, of three futures tangling into one.

"I dare say I am greatly fatigued," said Cordelia eventually.

"Likewise," agreed Honoria. "I do propose we sleep now. Don't you agree, my dear husband?"

I did not answer, for I was already drifting off into the blissful darkness of deep slumber on the carpet.

The Toast

I woke to sunlight and the weight of two bodies on the floor. There was my wife's blonde hair tangling with Cordelia's dark hair across my shoulder. They were both faintly fragrant of last night's sex, and I lay still between them as the sun climbed. If the house were to ever catch fire in this moment, I would be content to burn here.

Later that morning, we acted in the manner of people who have decided to be happy and thought nothing past it. After breakfast, Honoria and I showed Cordelia the grounds, the whole spread of them, from the lawn that ran down to the sea to the walled garden. We then rode horses and walked the horses along the cliff path.

After the ride, while Cordelia washed and changed, my wife found me in the study where I was daydreaming. She came in and shut the door, sitting on the edge of my desk in the way she did when she meant to be taken seriously. My wife looked at me with those steady brown eyes and said, "You have been chewing on a question all morning. Out with it."

"Did last night change anything?"

"Between us?"

"Between any of us. But yes, between us."

She considered this with the gravity she gave to all important matters. "I woke this morning beside my husband and my husband's friend, who is now my new lover, too, and my first thought was that I wanted eggs. My second thought was that I have never been happier in my life."

I smiled.

"Listen to me. I spent my entire life feeling ashamed of what I like, and then I met a man who wrote poetry about what I like in his eyes every time I crossed a room. I married that man, and it has been the great good fortune of my life. Last night I also found out that I am greedy as well. I want you and I want her and I want the three of us as we were on that carpet. I do not consider that a change. I consider it an expansion. The firm has taken on a partner. The original partnership stands."

"That is quite an analogy, my dear wife." I said.

She kissed me passionately and said, in a firm reverent voice, "I love you, Edward Montague. I will love you forever and until death do us part."

I met my wife's gaze. "I love you too, Honoria Montague. I, too, will love you forever and until death do us part."

Cordelia I caught alone after luncheon preparations had begun. She was already in the library, standing at the window with a book she was not reading.

"You have been circling me all afternoon," she said without turning. "Like a horse around a well it is afraid to drink from. What is the matter, Eddie?"

She turned to me.

"Twenty years," I said. "Twenty years of friendship and not one hour of it spent in doubt of what we were to each other. And then one night, and I am sitting here this afternoon wondering whether I have spent something we cannot get back. Whether the friendship can survive being added to."

She walked toward me. Cordelia was serious in a way I had seen perhaps five times in two decades.

She said, "This is the most important friendship I have ever have. Last night, as I lay in your floor with your wife's taste in my mouth and your seed drying on my face, I looked at the ceiling and I thought, 'this is the most important friendship I will ever have, and it has become more... and the more has not cost us the first thing.'"

She leaned forward, so close I could feel her breath on my face.

"You have not lost anything, Eddie," said Cordelia. "and you will never lose me."

She kissed me at last with tongue then, and it was a kiss I melted into like butter did on a stove. It was significantly longer than my kiss with Honoria, but was held no less or more than my love I had for my wife.

"I love you, Cordelia Rothwell."

My dear Cordelia looked at me and smiled gently. "I love you too, Eddie. So very much."

Later on, luncheon was laid and the three of us sat down to cold chicken, ham, and a bottle of claret. For a while we ate and talked of everything and nothing before Honoria set down her fork.

She said, "We should speak of it plainly. All three of us. Now, while we are fed and warm and no one can retreat to another room." My wife looked at Cordelia. "My husband asked me this morning whether last night changed anything. I imagine he asked you the same."

"He did," admitted Cordelia.

"Then we can all agree on this. We are three people who have each had the same conversation and are now going to have it once, together, so that no one spends the rest of their lives wondering what was said in their absence. I will begin. I am in love with my husband. I am also, as of approximately nine o'clock last evening, in love with Cordelia, or at the very least in severe danger of it. I see absolutely no reason to choose between the two of you. I want this arrangement to continue. I want her in our house, in our bed, and at our table. That is my position."

Cordelia looked at her for a long moment and then said, "My position is this. I have accepted my love for Eddie and I have accepted my love for you, which is a shorter thing but no less a real one. If you are both content to have me, I am content to stay. I will need my own room for appearances but other than that, that is my position."

They both looked at me then.

The afternoon sun came through the window and lit the two of them, my wife and my oldest friend. I understood that I was the only man in England sitting exactly where he wanted to be.

"My position," I said, "is that I am the luckiest man alive and that I have spent today terrified of losing the two best things that have ever happened to me. I have been assured by each of them in turn that I have lost nothing, and that I believe them. I want precisely what Honoria has described. My wife in my bed. My dear Cordelia in my bed. The three of us in whatever configuration the evening suggests. I want that and I want the friendship kept whole underneath it all."

"Then it is settled," said my wife. She took up her glass and held it out to the center of the table. "We have stated our positions and the positions agree. Now we seal it, because I am a great believer in sealing things."

Cordelia took up her glass. I took up mine. The three glasses came together over the cold chicken and the ham.

"To this," my wife finally said. "To the three of us, and to whatever it is we have made, which has no proper name and does not need one. To friendship, to marriage. To last night, and to all the nights after it. To the strangest arrangement in the county and the happiest."

I smiled warmly, perhaps the warmest I have ever smiled.