Chapter 7: Collection

Priscilla Stanford was always a scheming little madam. As a child she always did exactly what she wished, and it was always her companions who were in trouble when things went wrong. Her pale blue eyes, fair complexion, golden red hair, and winning smile got her out of endless scrapes and usually shifted the blame to her unfortunate companions.

When she left school she contrived to get herself appointed as under scullery maid at Belvedere Hall, which had been the stately home of the Earls of Belvedere for some three hundred years. At that time the Earl was fifty-one years older than his new most junior employee, and she had never even seen him. His only son, the Viscount Oxenhome, was some thirty years younger, married but with no children. Priscilla had no illusions about her status, but reasoned that if she played her cards right she could be promoted to parlour maid where she might meet some rich visitor who could be persuaded to take her into his bed, and then blackmailed into taking her up the aisle to a life of luxury.

To give her credit, Priscilla worked hard, as well as conniving and plotting and by 1937 she was under-parlour maid and performed such duties as laying and lighting fires, tidying rooms, and clearing away used crockery from the part of the house inhabited by the family and their guests. She had even spoken to one or two guests, always with deference and a bobbed curtsy.

All of her plans were abruptly changed by the death of the Viscount and his wife in a motoring accident in January 1938. Entertaining was severely curtailed and few guests came to Belvedere Hall. The Earl was utterly devastated by this tragedy which left him with a great nephew as his nearest relative.

The twenty-two year old Priscilla came upon the septuagenarian Earl in his study at six o'clock one morning when she came in to light the fire there. Not even she could tell you what was in her mind, but whether from sympathy or with an eye to the main chance, she put her arms round him and comforted him, letting him cry into her well-developed bosom. Within days she was his established confidante and comforter. It was three weeks before she made her way into his bed, and from then it was only a month before they were married very discretely and she became the Countess Priscilla Belvedere. Within days she had adopted all the hauteur of a born member of the nobility.

Now she was the mistress of Belvedere Hall she decided that the next step was to secure the title for a child of her own. While they naturally had separate bedrooms, she carefully ensured that the Earl slept with her at least once a month, and that he always had an orgasm. As insurance she also slept the next day with a strapping farm hand or groom to acquire some very much more potent semen in her belly. She rarely slept with any of them more than once, and it slowly became apparent to her that she would never conceive the son she wanted to become heir to the title and the estates, which otherwise would go to the Earl's great nephew.

For some years, she was worked very hard to keep the Earl alive, and acquired a considerable taste for virile young men. They featured in her life on an almost daily basis.

Then the old Earl died and his nephew inherited the title and the estate. He allowed her to move into the estate's Dower House, as was traditionally the right of the old Earl's widow.

That stopped her adventures with young men, as a pregnancy would now be difficult to explain, and would serve no purpose. Over time she switched her dalliance to some of her female servants, and especially her own lady's maid.

They were deep in lesbian passion at three o'clock one afternoon when the German SS detail came to the Dower House with a warrant for her arrest. They burst into the summerhouse where the couple were indulging themselves and a soldier dragged her from the bed. Her young maid objected and tried to wrestle her away from the SS detail. For this attempt she was knocked out by a well aimed fist.

The Countess, meanwhile, had grabbed her blouse and jodhpurs and hastily put them on. Once clothed she treated the soldiers exactly as she treated her own servants, as persons of no importance. If she was going with them, it was of her own volition and no matter what the paperwork said, it was her idea, not theirs.

In the staff car, she sat in the back seat and looked through the escort who sat beside her. Despite, or perhaps because of catching her in flagrante in what was regarded as a perverted relationship with a young woman, the escort did not dare to lay a hand on her, though groping, and sometimes much more, of arrested women was standard practice for collection details. Indeed two of the soldiers had stayed behind to amuse themselves with the maidservant.