The Portrait
by Maximilian Cummings
First Part
Charlotte was sixteen. Tomorrow was her birthday when she would be seventeen. She stood, as she had so often stood since she was a little girl, in front of the portrait, ‘her picture’ as she liked to think of it, and gazed at the person portrayed in oils by the artist so many years ago. It hung on the wall of her bedroom, overlooking her bed, in her aunt’s house. She always, as far back as she could remember, came to her aunt’s house in the country around her birthday in August. It was a week long visit her parents always made in the summer and she loved the visit and looked forward to the annual journey. She was very fond of her aunt and her house. And who would not be? A grand Elizabethan mansion in Shropshire set in its own pretty grounds by a river. Places to walk, places to hide, places to paint, places for everything.
The portrait had not always hung in her room. It seemed to have been hung in many rooms in the house as if it had a will of its own, as if the lady in the picture decided where it would be hanging next. She first remembered it in the garden room, a room she had played in as a little girl and had her toys. The picture had looked down on her but she had noticed it, high above her then diminutive figure, a pretty lady with tall fair hair in a blue dress. Another year and she had seen it in the dining room placed on the wall opposite where she had sat. When she saw it there she had smiled, her white baby teeth shining in recognition of the lady in the blue dress.
When she was twelve it watched her comings and goings from the hall as she ran out to play. She had been pleased to see her picture again and made a point of waving at the blue lady every time she ran out or ran in all excited and dirty. She had asked her uncle about the portrait and why it was in different rooms. Her uncle had looked momentarily puzzled and asked which picture Charlotte was talking about and said her aunt sometimes liked to change things. He did not know much about the painting, the house had been in his wife’s family rather than his own. Charlotte had asked her aunt about it but she had smiled and asked her whether she liked the painting? It was, she had explained, of a former mistress of the house.
It was two years later that it had appeared in her bedroom and at that point it seemed to have ended its perambulations. Charlotte had been delighted to see her old friend in her room right at the end of her bed. She took more notice of the detail of the picture now. The lady was in a very old fashioned blue dress of silk with a plunging neckline showing a great deal of cleavage. A daring amount of cleavage, thought a pubescent Charlotte at fifteen, any lower cut and you would have seen her nipples! Her golden hair was mounded up high above her head. The lady was pretty with a wide mouth showing just the hint of a smile, a knowing smile you might have called it, she had high cheekbones displayed with rouge and her blue eyes seemed to be looking at you—or at least that was how Charlotte saw the picture. In the background of the portrait was her aunt’s house with its lawns and terraces sweeping down to the river.
Lady Arabella Struthers was the subject, her aunt had told her on her fifteenth birthday. She had been sitting in her bedroom looking at the portrait when her aunt had come in to wish her a good night. It was good to have a name to go with the picture. Charlotte had tried to find out about Lady Arabella. It seemed she had been quite a lady, at the hub of society in Shropshire in her time; her balls were eagerly anticipated and talked about for weeks afterwards. She was gifted and popular but despite a succession of suitors she had never married. She seemed content to be the lady of the manor, centre of local society and to grow old gracefully, attended by various young girls who came to be her companions.
Charlotte stood in front of the portrait. She had always loved that blue dress; she would love to have tried it on, indeed to have one just like it. Charlotte was dark but she did not think this would matter and it would suit her just as much as it did Lady Arabella. She began to undress and her thoughts turned to her birthday party on the morrow. Her blouse undone she dropped it on a chair and reached behind her to undo the bra strap and release her breasts from their confinement. She sighed and put her hands over her breasts, moulding them in her hands. They were not much to look at, not much to feel, not like Lady Arabella’s ample bosom. Charlotte’s breasts would not fill the dress and, even forced upwards by the dress to show her cleavage to best advantage, would not put on much of a show. Charlotte thought about the incongruity of a fashion that so emphasised a woman’s breasts, endeavouring to reveal as much cleavage as possible without actually revealing the nipples. Perhaps, she thought, the more daring ladies did, as they moved, occasionally reveal the edge of a nipple, the brownness of an areole slipping into view. That would have excited the gentlemen.
She was disappointed in her breasts. They hardly filled her hands. With that thought they dropped to her waist and she undid her jeans pulling them and her pants down her legs. She picked them from the floor and shook them out before folding them and placing them on the top of her blouse and bra. Charlotte turned, naked, to the portrait and pouted, perhaps Lady Arabella only had small breasts at her age. She wondered what she had been like, the lady in her picture, why had she not married? Had a Mr. Darcy, a Mr. Right, never come along? Had he indeed come along but been lost at sea on some great adventure, had he gone off with another woman and broken her heart or, as alas happened in those days, had he just died? Absently Charlotte’s hand stroked down her tummy and across her springing black curls. She yawned, putting her hand to her mouth even though no one was there to see her.
“I do wish I had a dress like that, just to try on,” she said aloud and turned, her pretty dimpled pink bottom now facing the portrait and walked over to her bed. It was a hot night; she decided not to put her nightie on and instead walked over to the window and opened another light. The windows were old, Elizabethan, and had small diamond panes of glass set in lead. Charlotte looked out across the lawns in the moonlight. It was very still.
Charlotte got onto her bed, the bed that had always been in the room, an old double bed of dark polished oak, The night was very hot so she did not pull the covers or even a sheet up over herself. She read for a bit and then glanced at her watch, another hour and it would be her birthday, she turned out her bedside light and lay bathed in the moonlight that poured in through the window. It illuminated her portrait but the moonlight was not enough to give it any colour and it now seemed to be just in shades of black and white, her own body too, stretched out on the bed was in monochrome, white but for her dark bush and the tips of her nipples. She brushed her right nipple, did she feel like playing or should she sleep? She closed her eyes and thought about sex, what it would be like to have a man on top of her, seeking entrance. Her interest in sex stirred but not quite enough and before her hands could begin their play she drifted into sleep.
The grandfather clock in the hall struck midnight.
Charlotte awoke with the feeling she was no longer alone, a soft light shone in the room not just moonlight but a yellow light, the light of candles. Puzzled but not worried, she turned to her right to see a figure seated in the armchair in the corner of the room, moreover a figure she recognised, a figure anachronistically dressed in a flowing blue silk dress with fair hair piled high on her head: the lady from the picture.
“My warmest congratulations, Charlotte, on your seventeenth birthday,” said the lady in an accent that seemed Shropshire yet was somehow different.
“I... thank you,” said Charlotte quite astonished at the visitor, “who... who are you?”
“Why Lady Arabella Struthers of course. Surely you knew that?”
“But how?”
“Oh nothing, nothing you need to bother your head with. I have been watching you, my dear Charlotte, since you were small and what a fine girl you have grown into. Stand now and let me look at you.”
The lady was accustomed to command and Charlotte without thinking got out of bed. As she did so she remembered her nakedness and her hands flew to cover her breasts and sex.
“You needn’t be so modest with me girl, why are we not two women together? Though any man would be pleased to see such charms. Now stand straight, arms to your sides and turn slowly.”
Charlotte did as she was bidden. She found it difficult to refuse Lady Arabella.
“Yes indeed, a fine looking girl as I have observed. What a pretty neck. Chin up, yes better. A pity about those long black curls, though they give you a certain charming wildness. Such smooth limbs but you’ve let the sun catch them, turn them brown; they should be white as snow like your flat stomach. Your bottom is most voluptuous, just perfect, I do hope you stay a good girl it would not do for me to have to paddle those cheeks and redden them!” She laughed, a little light tinkling laugh, which lit up her face. Charlotte could only smile back.
“There, not so alarmed now are we? Now it’s your birthday and I think I heard a wish? You want to try on my dress, this dress?”
Charlotte blushed, “I have always loved your pretty dress.” She looked at it now, not just the part she could see in the painting but in its entirety, it was even finer than she had imagined. As the design intended her eyes were drawn to the deep cleavage formed by the up thrust of Lady Arabella’s breasts. How Charlotte admired that.
“Then you shall!” Lady Arabella was on her feet and undoing clasps and loops until she stepped out of the dress, which lay as heaps of blue silk on the floor. Her chemise followed and the sudden nakedness of the older woman almost shocked Charlotte. She had forgotten that the brassiere was not invented until 1913 and again knickers around 1800. All the lady was wearing were silk, not nylon of course, stockings held up by garters. She gazed at the woman spellbound. Lady Arabella, whether Charlotte’s bottom deserved the term or not, was truly voluptuous. Full of the fleshy curves so beloved of her period in time. He breasts were large but, despite not having benefited from the close embrace of a bra throughout her fifty or more years, were still firm with very little drop. He nipples were large but her areolae small, most convenient for the fashion of the portrait. Below her round, and voluptuously prominent stomach, a riot of golden curls between her ample thighs hid her sex.
“You like what you see?” asked Lady Arabella with a knowing smile, “Not bad though I say it meself, for a woman of my years. Come let us see how comely this dress makes you.”
Until that point Charlotte had not known what to think, was she simply dreaming? Maybe she was. Was Lady Arabella a ghost, an insubstantial haunting of her old house? Though hardly an unpleasant frightening ghost. The touch of Lady Arabella’s hand on her shoulder drew a gasp from Charlotte. Not a mere apparition nor an icy caress but a hand that was as warm as Charlotte’s own.
The dress was placed over Charlotte and it fell about her in waves of rustling silk. Lady Arabella began the process of redoing bows and ties before sweeping her round. Her eyes fell to Charlotte’s bust and she shook her head.
“We need to do something about those.”
The dress was removed. Lady Arabella stood in front of Charlotte looking at her chest.
Charlotte said, “I do wish they were larger, they are so tiny.”
“What we need to do is...”
Before Charlotte could register any protest Lady Arabella had placed the palms of her hands on the outer edges of Charlotte’s rather small breasts and pushed them in and up thereby creating an almost respectable cleavage. Her hands on Charlotte’s breasts were warm.
“Pleasant little bubbies, nothing to be ashamed of at your age, they will grow, never you fear. What we need is a strip of material.”
“I, er, I have a silk scarf.”
Charlotte turned to her chest of drawers and as she did so she moved her chest against the hands clasping her breasts, they seemed reluctant to let go.
“Yes, a piece of silk, get it please.” Charlotte was released.
Lady Arabella wound the scarf tightly around Charlotte’s chest catching only the bottom half of her breasts, the scarf was tied at the back. She then pushed and pulled Charlotte’s small breasts into position, Her hand slipped into Charlotte’s cleavage inside the silk and pulled each breast in turn upwards and inwards increasing their prominence and the valley between them. Charlotte looked down; she now had a cleavage and an expanse of breast showing above the scarf, her nipples half appearing above the silk.
“But my nipples show?”
Lady Arabella tweaked one, pulling the soft pink nipple, and laughed, “But they will not in the dress and nor will the silk.”
Once more the dress was lifted over Charlotte’s head but this time as Lady Arabella adjusted it the bust looked much more appropriate, much more how the dress’s designer had intended it to appear.
“Look at yourself in the glass.”
Charlotte looked at herself in the mirror, she turned this way and that admiring herself, admiring how good she looked in the pretty blue dress she had always wanted to wear. It looked so wonderful in the candlelight. Was she dreaming?
“Yes, yes I think it does indeed suit you as much as it does me. You should really wear silk stockings under the dress for when your pretty calves show but, even standing here naked, I can feel how warm it is tonight. Do you know what I desire? Will you come with me, Charlotte?”
“Of course, Lady Arabella, what do you wish?”
“I desire to swim in the pool down at the river.”
“But it’s dark and what should we wear?”
“Wear? Why nothing of course, clothes would get wet. And as for it being dark, why there is moonlight. You will come?”
Charlotte did not think of refusing, indeed she was not sure she could even if she had wished to decline, it would be exciting to take a midnight dip and to go naked! The idea was strangely exciting, like doing something not actually wrong but a bit naughty. She watched as Lady Arabella rolled her silk stockings down her things and slipped off the garters. They left a mark, a ring around each thigh where they had clasped the soft flesh. It almost looked like the garters were still there.
Lady Arabella once more lifted the dress from her and undid the silk bow. Charlotte’s breasts freed from restraint slipped back to their usual shape and size.
“Oh dear Charlotte, there they go, they are very sweet you know. So sweet I could lick them like honeyed cakes,” she laughed and took Charlotte’s hand, “Come,” and she opened the door onto the dark landing.
Two pairs of bare feet descended the dark oak staircase. Charlotte could feel the shininess of the polish with her toes. It felt odd to be walking around her aunt’s house in the dead of night with no clothes on and even stranger to be hand in hand with another naked woman, a beautiful naked woman from an oil painting! They padded across the marble chequerboard of the hall and opened a door onto the rear stone steps. Outside was as quiet as in the house and as still. Still hand in hand they walked down the cold stone steps and across the gravel, a bit uncomfortable on bare feet, and onto the lawn. The slightly damp grass felt good on Charlotte’s feet, she was not cold as the air was warm and dry. She looked up at the stars in the inky black sky and at the bright moon. She glanced at the moon shadow her figure cast and quickly checked that Lady Arabella also cast a shadow, she did, but that proved nothing. If she was dreaming, well anything, could occur or indeed be! She felt Lady Arabella squeeze her hand.
“Oh the scents of the night, come let’s run.”
Charlotte ran hand in hand with Lady Arabella. It was lovely to feel so free of clothes, to feel the soft grass beneath her feet and the unconstrained motion of her breasts as she ran. She glanced sideways and saw the much more impressive motion of Lady Arabella’s breasts bouncing as she ran. Charlotte thought they looked magnificent.
The pair stopped at the stone steps leading down from the lawn to the riverbank and its pool, Charlotte turned to look back at the house all dark in the moon’s shadow compared to the lightness of the moonlit lawn.
“Oh, this is too wonderful,” said Lady Arabella as she pulled Charlotte to her and hugged her. Charlotte felt the softness of the woman’s breasts mould themselves to her own as she was squeezed in Lady Arabella’s arms.
Lady Arabella released her. “Isn’t this exciting, you do look so pretty in the moonlight, I shall have to kiss you.”
It was not so much a request as a statement and Charlotte felt the soft brush of Lady Arabella’s lips, not as she had expected on her cheek, but on her own lips.
“Come girl down to the pool.” Hand and hand they descended the steps to the grass bank that lead to the pool. The river flowed through a large pool, to say it was a lake would rather overstate its size, which an early owner of the house had formed as a feature. At this end it had stone edging allowing rowing boats to moor and easy access for swimming. Charlotte had swum here in her teens under the watchful eye of her parents or aunt.
Together they sat on the stone edge dangling their legs in the cool water. Cool but not cold. The summer had been hot and had warmed the water of the pool. The river flowed sluggishly through the pool at this time of the year, not enough to cool the waters. The water was refreshing after the hotness of the night air. It was not deep by the edge perhaps two foot so Charlotte simply pushed with her hands and stood in the water. She felt Lady Arabella’s hand on her bottom moulding a cheek in her hand, the hand pushed.
“Go on, further in.”
Charlotte stepped forward, took a breath and launched herself into the water and swam. At first the water seemed cold but her body soon accepted the change in temperature and she enjoyed the sensation of swimming through the soft fresh water feeling her way forward in the dark. It was so very different from the harsh light of the day, the moonlight’s softness made the world seem gentle and mysterious. Charlotte had not appreciated how free it felt to swim without a costume. She had never done that before: never even thought of doing that. Wearing a swimming costume, whether her sensible black all-in-one school costume or one of her pretty bikinis, was what she did without thinking because it was correct and normal. But tonight was not normal; it was a night of surprises and discoveries. Charlotte wondered what else that would be new to her she would experience that night?
She turned and looked back at the silhouette of Lady Arabella still sitting on the edge. She swam back across the water made silver by the moonlight,
“Aren’t you coming in Lady Arabella, the water is lovely?”
“My pardon, I was distracted by watching you swimming, such a pretty sight, your sweet young limbs parting the water, you’re round dimpled bottom peeking out. It reminded me of days past.” She sighed, “Oh yes indeed, I am coming in!”
They swam in the stillness of the night out into the pool towards a small island that had been created in the pool when it was first dug. It was not large having a couple of trees and a patch of grass for picnics and kept mown with some difficulty. Charlotte had been there many times by rowing boat for picnics and it was always a special place to her. Lady Arabella reached the island first and Charlotte saw her stand naked and silver in the moonlight and beckon to her.
“Come lie here with me.”
It was good to sit on the grass of the island and feel it directly with her naked bottom. She looked out over the stillness of the pond. She had been to the island many times before but not at night and not under such strange circumstances. The old house stood across the lawn silent and dark. Charlotte should have been in it, would have been asleep in it had it not been for her unexpected and remarkable visitor. She turned to look at Lady Arabella who had lain down slightly further into the island. She was flat on her back, her knees drawn up a little way but her feet planted apart so her sex, framed by curly hair, was very visible in the moonlight that streamed across the lake. Charlotte was surprised at the sight, surprised at the immodest posture and she stared at the open folds of Lady Arabella’s secret place. She looked up, embarrassed to see that Lady Arabella had seen what she was looking at and was smiling at her.
“A woman’s body is a beautiful thing, is it not?”
Charlotte nodded.
“Have you been with a man?”
The suddenness of the question surprised Charlotte and she blushed again, “I’m sorry, Lady Arabella, but what do you mean, do you mean am I a virgin?”
“Yes, that is exactly my meaning.”
“Of course I am.”
“But do you dream of men in your bed when you play with yourself.”
“I...”
“Come, come girl, all young girls play with their bubbies and fannies.” Lady Arabella wriggled down the grass to lie next to Charlotte. “It is what they do. Have you perhaps then played with a friend?”
“You mean a girl friend?”
“Indeed, have your slim fingers caressed another girl’s bubbies, perhaps stirred the hot pool between her legs and gently slipped your fingers in?”
“No, no of course not.”
“Why? It is the loveliest thing, two women caressing and sharing their secrets. I think you should try. Indeed, yes, I shall show you.”