My father was the Earl's engine keeper before he was raised in the peerage, and we lived in the steam house which was separated from the main hall on account of the noise and smell and most importantly, the risk of an explosion.
This danger never worried my father, after all, Stephenson himself had inspected the engine house and the boiler while visiting his lordship. But the fact that we lived in constant danger of being annihilated by the demonic force of a steam boiler explosion marked us out as different in the eyes of both the village and hall.
I learned my numbers and letters on account of the school opened by the Earl's father. But in those days even Owenite radicals like the Baron believed a girl's schooling was more than completed at twelve, and so it was the business of maintaining the engines and its mechanisms that was my true education. A steam engine is powered by the very daemons of hell itself and it is only through the diligent application of stove black to cast iron and polish to brass that those forces are contained in their proper place.
Besides the Hall, the engine house could send drive to various outbuildings connected to the hall and a lodge where the baron used to entertain certain female guests in private out of the sight of his wife. His son used the lodge for the same purpose, keeping his female guests out of the sight of his mother but not his wife. They would walk to the lodge together hand in hand, I never once saw his Lordship visit without the Countess but on the occasion of a house party, her Ladyship and a small group of her friends would often retire to the lodge after their morning ride.
When I was sixteen, I was sent to the hall to work in the office of the land steward. My main task was to regulate the pendulums of the pantelegraph as their slow, majestic beats wrote out the news four times a day and business correspondence at irregular intervals. The synchronizing solenoid was not yet invented and so it was essential that the printing pendulum remained in precise synchronization with the reader, a feat that was accomplished by changing the effective length of the pendulum with a brass wheel.
After each page was printed, it was laid in a drying frame for the land steward to read. Usually, I would take the dry pages to the butler to give to the Earl. But if the news was urgent, the Land Steward would take the pages to the Earl directly.
Each bulletin circulated through the house according to rank passing from the Earl's office to the family sitting room to the servant's hall where a page would read passages selected by the Butler at each meal.
A few weeks after I began this work, the war returned. Almost everyone in the hall and the village had family that had fought in the Peninsular War and many would be called to their regiments to fight again. Everyone in Hall and Village alike waited with anxious breath for news from the continent as the Corsican fiend ran through Europe. I could not take ten steps outside the office without being accosted with demands for news of the war.
The Countess had a half-brother in the Fusiliers and two cousins in the Guards and frequently came into the office to watch as the pendulums slowly filled the sheets with ink. This gave me the idea of setting up the sending pendulum to make a second copy and the need to work out a mechanism that would allow me to synchronize both pendulums at the same time which in turn led to my first patent, the confidential telegraph whereby an operator could use a non-printing pendulum to synchronize an unseen printing pendulum.
I was promoted from office attendant to Lady's mechanic and given charge of all the mechanisms that a modern lady of her station required. These included a vertical bath that directed jets of water at the body from all angles, a flushing toilet, and a vibratory wand. I was also put in charge of all the various driven mechanisms used by her personal staff, these included an interlock sewing engine and the inevitable Babbage tabulation engine.
At 16 and with little knowledge of the world, I had no inkling of the real purpose of the vibratory wand or its lodge companion, the massage bench even after stripping both down to replace the unreliable belts with gears.
This awakening came with a visit to the London Bath House which had recently opened in Pall Mall. The bathhouse is an opulent space decorated with marble and fine Moroccan Zellige mosaic tiles. Women of status and their maids recline nude attended by pretty women in Ottoman silk costumes. Ladies of wealth and standing visit to relax, to talk with friends, and to obtain relief.
The Earl's London house did not have room for an engine house since the authorities did not allow such to be operated within the city of Westminster for private houses. Since there were no mechanisms for me to maintain, I did not accompany her ladyship to London for the season. Having little else to occupy my time, I returned to work the pantelegraphs in the Land Office, a task I could accomplish while reading articles on mechanism design.
Three or four weeks after the family had left for the season, a three-word message in her ladyship's hand appeared: Send Lilly Urgent! I was dispatched immediately by coach with the promise that my clothes would follow in the wagon.
The Bath House drive and steam came from what was originally a boot-making factory off Haver's walk behind and it was to this establishment I was directed to report. Inside, a lone cobbler stitched a shoe by hand while the bulk of the workforce fed furnaces with coal and Babbage tabulators with card.
The entire warehouse was filled with two stories of tabulators, row after row. One tabulator is loud enough, a hundred is deafening. On my second visit, I pulled the cobbler aside and directed him to make a pair of leather ear muffs. When I returned, I was pleased to find him wearing a second pair he had made for his own use.
Fortunately, we did not have to linger in the noisy manufactory for long as we crossed the drive bridge into the bathhouse.
"The heart of the war effort," Her Ladyship said, gesturing towards the manufactory with evident pride. I was somewhat surprised to meet her, not least because she was entirely naked.
"Oh did these dolts not mention," her ladyship began, "this is the London Bath House, everyone who is anyone here goes naked. Sally here will explain what needs to be done, Miss King."
Evidently, I had just become someone and was expected to follow suit. "The rule is to behave exactly as if everyone is dressed, Miss King." Sally advised me, "No need to consider what is respectable, these people are respectability."
I undressed somewhat reluctantly as I pondered the implications of my new title. Sally had been promoted from pantelegraph operator to second Lady's maid, a career path which I might have followed myself, now I outranked her. One thing was certain, it had not been given for nothing and could be taken away as easily as it had been given.
While all guests were naked, there were degrees of nakedness according to rank. Servants carried a small bag containing necessaries for their mistress, gentry carried nothing at all except a cup or a glass they were drinking from. Some of the younger gentry wore bosom rings, the most daring shaving between their legs to show off more jewelry.
Sally deemed my station incompatible with carrying anything and so an attendant was called to carry my toolbag. Ivy had green eyes, a long mane of ginger hair, and spoke in a Derry brogue.
The mechanisms I had been brought to repair were contraptions of poor quality whose belts could hardly be expected to last for very long in the vapors from the baths even if they had been properly built. A pair of vibratory wands was easily fixed by untangling the belts and shortening them. The repair would not last long but it would last long enough for me to make a gear or a chain drive replacement.
The octopus bench was an entirely different matter. While its function was clearly similar to the massage bench in the lodge, this contraption was as ornate as the lodge mechanism was plain. The form was that of a giant octopus whose tentacles caressed the occupant's hands, waist, and feet. Inside, the cause of its malfunction was clear, a belt had somehow wrapped itself around a gear, causing it to shatter its trunnions, the fragments of which had promptly stripped several cogs.
"I am not even sure what this is supposed to do, Sally", I lamented.
Sally pointed to the fresco on the wall above the broken contraption. According to popular rumor, the erotic frescoes of the London Bath House were removed because they offended public decency. The plebian truth being that the moisture of a bath house is a poor match for fresco works and they were already peeling when it opened.
My attention fixed on the contraptions I was engaged to repair, I had barely given the frescoes a second glance. Now looking closely, I saw that the voluptuous naked woman was seating herself on the man's male member. Looking again at the machine, I suddenly realized that what I had imagined being a superfluous waving tentacle was actually designed to grip a facsimile of a male member and impale the occupant.
As my young mind raced towards sudden conclusions concerning the nature of carnal couplings, Ivy returned to ask if the wands were ready for use. I nodded my agreement, warning her that the repairs would not last very long while staring blankly into the massage bench to hide my embarrassment.
Ivy returned a few minutes later with a guest, pulled a curtain across the alcove where the first wand was located, and began pleasuring her client to a loud, shattering climax. Her maid arrived and gave the attendant some coins from a purse and then stopped to talk to Sally to give her a coin.
"What did she give you the money for?" I asked puzzled.
"She didn't give me the money, Miss King. This is for you." Sally replied.
Sally held up a yellow shining guinea. A whole month's wages working the pantelegraph.
"The girls get two. I'm not ashamed to say I've considered joining them more than once."
"It would have been slim pickings these past two weeks." Ivy interrupted, "Here's to you from me with thanks and there will be more thanks coming from the other girls if we can keep working. If you want a personal demonstration just ask for Ivy, your money's no good here," She tossed Sally a yellow coin and was gone.
I looked at Sally bewildered, what was I to do? Fortunately, Sally was older and wiser.
"You sit there looking like you are mending the bench as long as possible while I collect coins for the both of us. You did the work so you get the lion's share, I take four shillings of each pound." Sally said.
This division was equitable and I spent the next few hours carefully disassembling the shattered mechanism and recording the dimensions, pressure angles, pitch, number of teeth, and such of each gear. It was a motley jumble of parts, none quite matched to anything else. As I stared at the mess asking myself how the contraption had ever worked, I suddenly realized the answer. Fortunately, Ivy approached.
"Has this device ever worked?" I asked.
"Not to my knowledge, Miss. I believe it was captured by Napoleon's army at Vitoria. Several have tried. The last two made it worse." Ivy replied.
"You are the expert here," I replied, "How would you want it to work?"
Ivy told me that demonstration would have to wait as the Countess had instructed her that I was to be given a personal demonstration of the wand so as to better understand its use.
The curtain drawn, Ivy shrugged off her shift to reveal a shapely pair of breasts, pierced by bosom rings and with a chain between. I instinctively reached out to touch before stopping myself.
Ivy smiled, placing one of my hands on her breasts and the other between her legs.
'Relax little one," Ivy said softly, "your maidenhead is safe with me, this is all about your pleasure."
Ivy soaped me from head to toe, rinsed me off, and rubbed oil into my body, beginning with my back and shoulders, then working on each arm and leg in turn. I willed myself to relax, to surrender to the pleasure as the gentry had.
The fresco in this alcove was in better condition. Three figures looked out from the wall as if interrupted in the middle of their pleasures. A nude woman reclined on a couch while another woman crouched over, a hand buried between the reclining woman's legs. Meanwhile, the reclining woman was parting the other's dress to display her vulva with one hand and holding the man's cock in another.
I imagined myself as the reclining woman being instructed in the arts of love as Ivy bent over me to run the vibrating wand over my breasts and belly. I had never seen any female parts up close and Ivy murmured with what I took to be satisfaction as my fingers made their inspection. As soon as the wand touched me between my legs, there was no time for thought as the orgasm crashed over me.
Some time later, the Countess took me aside to lay her cards on the table. Sally was sent off to spend time with Ivy, an expensive method of dismissing a servant and clearly done to impress upon me the importance of the enterprise. The war was coming to its bloody climax and the fate of Europe if not the civilized world hung in the balance. Could the octopus bench be repaired within a week?
Perplexed by this juxtaposition of facts, I ignored them and answered the question. The octopus bench could not be repaired as it had never functioned in the first place. It could be made to function by replacing the gear mechanism with a cam wheel.
"How soon?" the Countess gripped me by the wrist as she spoke.
This would depend on resources. If I returned to the Hall, at least two weeks. If the parts could be fabricated by the manufactory, three or four days. But what did this have to do with the war?
The Countess pointed to the bench, "I cannot fathom the intellect that would conceive of such a thing, it was made as a present to the Corsican devil. According to reports, the emperor has dreams about octopuses. In one of these dreams, a virgin is given to an octopus which grows to the size of a ship and then a castle, destroying both."
"So you hope it will win the war?" I asked incredulously.
"Of course not!" the Countess laughed, "But I do expect it might put the superstitious clod off his game and give him something else to think of besides his war plans."
Two days later, French cavalry approaches Belgium and the octopus bench is tested and working. A single tentacle operates the clutch mechanism.
In the first position, the tentacles are all open. In the second, they slowly close around the victim's wrists, ankles, and waist. Once closed, a second cam is triggered and she is slowly but surely deflowered.
Six virgin sacrifices have been chosen, from the highest rank to the lowest, and from all the countries whose armies oppose the emperor's forces.
Six have been chosen, but I will be the first.
