Under a Stern Reign by Raymond Wilde Page A

entrance.
    Alone, the count walked through the streets considering how this would be the last time he saw the place for several years. He stopped at the square, where groups of merchants stood selling their wares before the town hall. Fruit sellers, fishmongers, cobblers, many were there to make some money out of something. Bright colours and twittering sounds came from one stall on a corner of the square, and he approached it.
    An old man was selling colourful caged birds, and the count gazed at the beautiful exotic creatures. They were canaries, parrots and minor birds; birds from the New World, and they talked! Birds that repeated names. ‘Robespierre!’ exclaimed one. ‘Marat!’ squawked another.
    Perhaps it might be nice to buy a few and take them home to impress Elise and Genevieve, he considered. But they would be leaving very soon, he reflected, and it would be silly to start burdening their journey with extra baggage.
    After a while he found a tavern, and by early afternoon he had lunched and, growing melancholy, gone through three bottles of red wine.
    A little later he found another tavern, and talking intermittently with passing locals, he managed to drink three mugs of beer, another bottle of wine and two glasses of a local brandy.
    As the late afternoon drew on, the count, slightly tipsy to say the least, made his way to another tavern that turned out to also be the local brothel. He sat, and was soon approached by two of the hostelry’s wenches. Both were plain and well-used things, but the count was bored and pleased to talk with them. They were keen to take him to a room, but he gazed at them wearily. One was blondish, short and chubby and missing a front tooth. The other was darker, round-faced and heavy-hipped. The count saw nothing to excite him.
    But, as his mind kept going back to his two charges and as he drank even more, he decided to go along with the two whores, so he went to their room.
    He didn’t ask them to undress. Instead he told them both to bend over and lift their skirts, and as the two, side by side, squatted with their flabby bare bottoms in the air, he skewered them both, absentmindedly passing his member from one to the other, slapping and groping their fat buttocks.
    He moved from one to the other, humping one for a few minutes, then humping the other for a few minutes, before finally telling them he’d had enough. He didn’t find the steam to ejaculate into either of them, but he paid them both well.
    By the early evening Count de Tranville was just about sober enough to remember his rendezvous with his coach at the arranged inn. He staggered through the darkening streets, but no coach was to be seen at the front of the designated hostelry, so he decided to go in and carry on drinking until it arrived.
    About half an hour later the coachman arrived to find his employer in a snoring, drunken sleep inside, slumped across an ale-soaked table. He had drunk more than six bottles of wine, four mugs of beer and four brandies by that time.
    The driver carried him to the coach, and de Tranville slumped in one corner as they rattled homeward, gazing with bloodshot, uncomprehending eyes at the passing countryside. His head began reeling with thoughts of the females that were beginning to complicate his life.
    Madame Coubette... she was still attractive, but with the nagging and the jealousies it was clear that she was becoming a problem. It would have to end, but how to do it without too much bitterness?
    How tempting Elise was, he considered. She was truly a delicious feast. Her eyes came back to him. He could see them staring, smouldering beneath the fringe of dark hair. They had weighed him up. They thanked him for the punishment delivered, and then asked for more. They saw the craving inside him, the craving he fought to suppress in the name of decency, the craving that manifested itself and was noted by her as a significant bulge in his breeches. How her sultry