Chapter 1

There’s not much joy to be had in being a handmaiden. The life is as grey as the East Sea. It is endless, flat, and full of dull chores. It is soul-sucking. It is often terrifying and by all accounts, all I should expect to have until I am met with death.

There is one joy, however, in my otherwise pitiful existence, one beautiful light upon my endless grey sea to keep me ambling along, that is, undressing Lady Evelyn every evening after supper, and in particular, removing her stockings from her perfectly sculpted legs.

Oh, how utterly delightful to curl my fingers into the tight welt and tug on on the delicate fabric, to watch her creamy thighs bloom out of blackness, to have my fingers rake across her soft skin, to hear the sifting sound of silk sliding over skin like a hiss of a smooth wave over sand, and of course (the crème de la crème!) to watch the particular way she stretches out and curls her dainty toes as I set them free from their cosy cloister. There is nothing quite like setting Lady Evelyn’s feet free. It exhilarates me. It fills me with knee-weakening thoughts (like, might she enjoy my tongue between her toes?). Oh, how it makes my blood hot. How profoundly wonderful it makes me feel inside.

I should be deathly ashamed of myself for having such naughty thoughts, of course, and for allowing myself to feel such pleasure. I am supposed to always be pure and innocent, in mind, body, and soul. Yet I keep this fantasy alive. Why? Because I must, I suppose. Because it keeps me alive, or at least it’s how I know I still have blood running through my veins. Because it is the only light I have in my otherwise morose existence. What is the harm, after all, if I can keep my naughty thoughts to myself? But therein lies the rub. Naughty thoughts are liable to be rooted out, and Lady Evelyn has a knack for rooting out naughty thoughts. Such is how I discovered that, just like the East Sea, my grey life can be subject to tremendous turmoil.

It happened one summer night when the heavy afternoon rain came down to wash away the heat of the baking day, drowning us in a thunderous noise and a blanketing darkness that made the world seem small.

Lady Evelyn had just come from another upsetting fight with her husband, Lord Sasaki. I was not there to see it, but I could see it in the way her face blushed red as if she had stayed too long out in a biting cold, but it wasn’t cold that had bit her. It was his hand. I could smell the sweet liquor. She had had too much to drink. She often had too much to drink these days. If I ever felt I could speak freely, I’d tell her she ought to lessen the drinking, but I didn’t. In any case, there she was, cheek bitten, full of liquor, pouting with the silence of a dead ingot of lead while I undressed her.

I thought the silence meant she was stewing about the fight. It didn’t occur to me that she could have something else on her mind. Until she spoke up, that is.

“Why do you do that?” She asked, her voice pointed, but only a whisper, barely audible above the din of the rain that rumbled outside. I was in the process of removing her stocking from her left leg. I had just started to slide the welt down over her knee.

My heart jumped. “Madame?”

“You make a funny face whenever you take off my stockings.”

My face went hot. I averted my eyes to the parquet pattern of the varnished oak floor, trying to not let my embarrassment override the sensibility I had left to say what I should say in response.

“I’m very sorry, madame. I’ll refrain from making a funny face from now on.”

I looked at her. Her eyes were narrowed. Her lips were smirking in a crooked puffy way. Lady Evelyn was from England, and if it weren’t for her moon white skin, or the golden colour of her hair (the colour of a rice field just before the threshing), it would be the way her smirk puffed up her lips that gave away her English origin.

“Continue doffing my stockings,” she ordered. “Make whatever face comes naturally.”

“Y-yes, madame,” I said, and, burning with embarrassment and fear, turned my eyes back down to her bent leg, the black knit silk stocking a tauntingly tight veil across the pale moon milkiness of her skin, the oleander flowers that patterned the stocking, the symbol of her husband’s clan, stretching to conform to the elegant shape of her leg. They say that the oleander symbolised the courage of a warrior and fearlessness of death. In my village, it is known to be deadly poison.

I curled my fingers into the top of the stocking welt and I pulled it down over her knee, trying my best to not feel even an inkling of the pleasure that could have resulted in my ‘funny face’ despite her insistence that I do otherwise.

“Slower, Niko,” she said. “Or you’ll tear it.”

I had been rolling the stocking off as swiftly as I could to get through whatever conniving test she was subjecting me to. But I needed to obey my lady, so I went more slowly, and suffered as a consequence. Oh, how soft, how warm her skin. How sensual the sound of the silk sliding across that skin. I held my breath as I pulled the stocking around her ankle, and off her lovely foot. As her foot came free, she curled her toes. I shut my eyes so as to not delight in their nakedness, but, of course, I couldn’t help but paint a picture of them in my mind anyways. I did everything to keep my face as stony as possible, fully aware that Lady Evelyn, as inebriated as she might have been, was watching me very intently, looking for the furnace glow of my heart through the shuttered windows of my eyes, waiting for me to betray my singular secret that I was, at this very moment… exceptionally aroused.

After getting through the task of pulling off her first stocking, I braced myself to do the next, as if to brace against a large wave about to pummel me. The rain came down more heavily now, for which I was happy, because I’m sure that if it hadn’t, Lady Evelyn would have heard my heart pounding against my chest. Not that it mattered. Nor did it matter that my face did not show even the slightest tinge of ‘funniness.’ As soon as I finished removing the stocking, she chuckled and said, through her chuckling, “You find it pleasurable, don’t you? Removing my stockings from my legs.”

I panicked. Fear spidered through my whole being. My face spoke of nothing!

“Madame, I find pleasure in serving you. That is all!” My voice cracked treacherously.

In response to my feeble dissent, she leaned forward to give me more of her sly English smirk. Her eyes glanced downward, and my eyes followed them down to find her hands resting on the top of her naked thighs. I drew a sharp breath.

“Do you, now?” she said, smugness written on her face. “So you do feel pleasure?”

I shrank, sensing that the best strategy now was to do what any subservient creature can do in an impossible position, which was to shrink.

The monsoon rain that had been the veil to the pounding sound of my desire had ceased, and in the quiet aftermath, which was speckled only by the sound of crickets emerging in the garden beyond the moon-glinted window, my mind filled in the silence with all the ways in which Lady Evelyn could weaponise my misbegotten desire.

I said nothing to convey my fear of her and whatever reprisal she had in store for me. I dared not to. Besides, I was too flustered to say anything knowing that my words would be used against me. Instead, I set aside her stockings and fetched her evening peignoir as if she had not just asked me a question that warranted a response.

Fortunately, she seemed to have let the embarrassing matter rest. She said nothing more of it as I helped her into the peignoir. Nor as I brushed her long golden hair. Her mind perhaps had wandered back to her husband. The tears that came down her cheeks said as much, and I did not know what else might occupy her mind, as I did not know much of her life outside of this house. In fact, the only things I knew of her were that she had come to Japan to teach Lord Sasaki English and Western customs, and that she stayed and that they married.

When I finished with the brush, I quietly collected her stockings and the rest of her undergarment for the wash and went quietly to the door.

“Niko, stop,” she said, just as I was about to slide the door shut. I stopped. So did my heart. A sharp dagger of a smile drew across her otherwise angelic face.

“I won’t say anything if you take my stockings to bed with you.”

“Madame?” I croaked.

Her smile grew more dagger-like.

“You heard me. Consider it a gift. A memento of me. Of my legs and the pleasure they provide you.”

I was so beside myself I let out a gasp and ran out the room without bidding my lady goodnight.

Surely this was a twisted game. She was stringing me along like a child might string along a hapless dragonfly. A game I should not have to subject myself to. And I did not have to — she was drunk now. By morning she would have forgotten about having ‘gifted’ me her stockings as a bedside memento. I could simply toss the stockings in with the rest of the laundry like I always do, and nothing would ever come of it, and I could simply trudge along in the daily drudgery of my endless sea.

But… I did not do that. I chose the storm. I chose to take the stockings to bed with me.

That night, I stayed long past the time I should be asleep, contemplating my mistress’s open-ended directive to think pleasurable things. The moon, a diffuse spotlight through the shoji screen of my small compartment, illuminated the object of my obtuse desire, as if to goad it, by which I understood why it is that wolves howl at the moon — hunger had something to do with it.

I was lonely, and I had been for years. It had been so long since I had felt human intimacy that I had strongly considered the possibility that I would never feel it again. Perhaps so long now that madame’s suggestion to take her stockings to bed with me felt very much like the human intimacy that I had been so sorely craving.

I held the stockings close to me. They still carried my lady’s warmth.

It was long after the moon had descended that I finally took action to calm the torment that roiled my insides. As quietly as a dormouse stealing an acorn, I placed her stockings to my face and… I breathed them in. Her perfume, sweet summer roses, entered me deeply. And beneath the perfume, a hint of her bodily odour. My heart palpitated with such excitement that I could barely contain it. The torment inside me did not calm. It roiled stronger, in fact. I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, or what I should now do, but one thing was certain — just as a fish has the instinct to flap around on the shore, I had an instinct to lower my hand down between my legs to my very tense sex that was wet, burning, and begging for relief.

This was not the first time I pleasured myself, but this was the first time I had done so while in possession of another woman’s intimate clothing, soiled no less, still entrained with her scent, which made all the difference. It was as if she were right here with me. I could almost feel her holding me intimately. Caressing me. Entwining her legs with mine so that we were one.

As my desire burned, I did my very best to quench it, rubbing my finger tenderly against my hardening bud, while I held her stockings to my face.

My breathing soon turned to stilted gasps, my fingers became moist and slick from touching my blushing bud. I pressed the stockings against my face. I rubbed it against my nose and mouth and, as my breathing became loud and heavy, I gave in to the dark urge that had risen up from the shadows of my mind to stuff her stockings into my mouth. As depraved as it seemed, somehow I had convinced myself that this was the only logical thing she had meant for me to do with them. Now, I could not breathe without breathing her in, and that really did me in. I painted a full picture of her. I pictured her legs and feet, naked, beautiful, flawless. I pictured all the naughty things I’d do to them. I’d use my tongue. I’d lick. I’d use my teeth. I’d gnaw. I’d use my lips. I’d kiss her in all the places one woman should never kiss another. I’d use the whole of my mouth. I’d lick the bottom of her foot. I’d suck on each of her toes. Oh, how the thoughts made me soar! How it made me feel so very free and alive. Before I knew it, I was overcome with the particular feeling that I dare say captures the state of transcendence Christians call rapture.

At the crest of my rapture, birds that had been roosting in the trees just outside made a terrible noise, rustling the branches as they fluttered off, spiking a fear through my heart that if I had made so much noise as to startle the birds, that I might have stirred my mistress awake.

I quickly pulled her stockings from my mouth, held my breath to listen for any signs that my fear had been realised. Only after an eternity of hearing nothing but her gentle sleep-breathing through the paper thin wall, I breathed a sigh of relief. The warm buzzing feeling of rapture crept back in, but soon enough that rapture was overshadowed by a stomach-wrenching disgust, as if a bright spotlight illuminated my dark fantasy to reveal all the ugly marks I could not see before — my act was not only wrong, it was impure. Sinful. And worst of all, it was exactly what she had expected me to do. Ah. This was her twisted game. Just the sort of twisted game a noble woman would play, preying on the subservient for their entertainment, reasserting their noble place by reminding us how weak and pathetic we are as to imbibe in dirty pleasures. She would revel to know that I was exactly what she considered me — a servant girl inclined to wallow in her hovel.