Dirt on His Hands

Mrs. Charlotte Edgecombe had just purchased a heated bathtub.

It sparkled in its novelty. Its pearly white ceramic body rested on brass feet plated in gold. It had a tap that released cold water and a tap that released hot water, which was heated by means of a gas boiler. Above the tub was a shining brass showerhead that spewed warm water over the bather. It looked so pristine, in fact, that at first she was hesitant to get into it out of fear that she might soil its purity. But when she did, the water washed over her like a scalding hot, foaming sea. The heat was invigorating; it baptized her. She emerged pink, raw, and thoroughly cleansed.

Charlotte liked to be clean. She kept her life in as orderly a state as she kept her body. Ever since her late husband’s death five years ago, Charlotte had been very much mistress of her own world, and she liked it that way. She made sure that the housemaid polished her silver to perfection whenever she entertained guests. She masterminded the aesthetic of the household, making improvements whenever necessary. Everything in her house, from her fashionable silver table set to her manicured, Italian-style garden, was kept perfectly in its place.

She did not, however, seem to mind when her gardener, Tom Baker, tracked mud into the house in his work boots. She did not tell him to clean himself off in the kitchen before entering the house. She did not wrinkle her nose at the scent of sweat and exertion that he exuded after a long day’s work. And she did not object to his dirt-caked fingernails as they caressed her neck, or his sodden clothes as he cast them off onto her bedroom floor. Tom was her exception. He tarnished the exacting hygiene of Charlotte’s life, in all the most gratifying ways. He pinched her and pulled her and pounded her, and she let herself be lost in him when he visited her.

Tom, for his part, was more than happy to oblige Charlotte’s desires. She was a buxom lady, just to his liking. Her body swelled with bounty, and she let him do things to it that no other woman had let him do before: not just to be inside her, but to dominate her. He could hurt her, if he liked–and he did, when he felt like it. He slapped her and bit her and pulled her hair, and she gasped and moaned and begged him for more. She was quite shameless when she was with him, admitting vices to him that she never would have confessed in polite society. Tom understood the strange privilege of the position in which he found himself. She could be open with him about her desires because he was a servant: he was not the kind of person one needed to impress; she required nothing from him; his opinion was of little import. And so she let him undo her, let him break through the clean lines of her life and expose the dirt beneath.

Of course, there were practical benefits to the affair. Charlotte was Tom’s main patron. Her Italian garden required daily upkeep. The hedges had to be pruned, the flowers watered, and the grass trimmed. The fish in the pond next to the fountain needed to be fed. It made for regular employment for Tom, and it came with free lodging in the gardener’s shed behind the house. Tom had moved out of London to the countryside to escape the filth and toil of the slums and the factories. It had not been easy to find a job without experience or references, and Charlotte had been his saving grace. Whether she had hired him because she saw some talent or passion in him, or simply because she liked the way he looked, he did not know, but he did not question it. As soon as he began to live away from the city beneath the blue skies of the countryside, the wheezing cough that had clung to him in the city slums disappeared. He breathed the clean country air, and he could feel it heal him as it passed through his lungs.

It was one evening in late August when Charlotte suggested their most radical game yet. They were lying in bed. Her hands were tied to the posts of her bed frame, and her legs were spread as Tom thrust in and out of her. “Yes,” he muttered to himself, gearing up for orgasm, “yes!” He came inside her with a shudder and a moan, and he felt her tremble beneath him with the intensity of the thrust. He sat over her for a long moment, looking at her breathe in and out heavily: helpless, undone, compliant.

“Peggy and Sheila will be away on Thursday,” she told him presently. Peggy was her housemaid, and Sheila was her cook. “We’ll have the house and the garden all to ourselves.”

He smiled. “I see. And what did you have in mind?”

She looked up at him thoughtfully. She knew exactly what activity she had in mind, but it was daunting to say out loud. “I…I want to be yours entirely,” she told him finally. “The whole day. I want you to do anything you want with me. Anything at all.”

Tom raised his eyebrows. “And what if you don’t like what I want to do with you?”

“All the better.”

He searched her face for a trace of jest or insincerity, but she stared back at him with calm determination. Tom’s mind began to race. Anything he wanted. The possibilities were vast. To hurt her? To humiliate her? To make her submit to him as if she were the servant and he were the master? “I’d like that,” he said.

“Good.”

He untied her hands, and she got up to wash herself off in her new bathtub. The deluge of water cascaded down from the showerhead, washing all traces of the night’s revelry away, the dirt, the sweat, the semen. What did Tom have in store for her? She pondered the possibilities with a thrill of excitement. Anything he wanted, she had told him. Perhaps it had been foolhardy; perhaps she would regret the words come Thursday. Nevertheless, she ached to find out.

***

To work was to be at the mercy of another. Tom was keenly aware of this immutable fact. He had been dominated by the foreman at the textile factory he had worked at in London, and he was under Charlotte’s dominion now. Hers may have been a benevolent dictatorship, but it was a dictatorship nonetheless, except in those fleeting moments when he lay on top of her. Even then, the fact remained: she had a bank account that was full to bursting with all the money she needed to make her comfortable, and he relied absolutely on her generosity. Tom had long been used to the subordinance of his position, but sometimes it itched at him, and he fantasized about what it would be like to be the one owning instead of the one laboring, to sit in his own house and walk in his own garden and know without reservation that he could do anything he wanted with it.

And so, as he worked in the garden all the next week, the thoughts to which Tom’s mind returned were of power. He knew that Charlotte’s offer to him to do “anything he wanted” did not truly negate the powerlessness of his position. He relied too heavily on her favor to be able to think that “anything” really meant anything. Still, he wanted to do something that would seize back some of that power–not just the power that she lent to him as he pounded her into the bed, but a power beyond her designs, beyond her pleasure, beyond perhaps her imagination. But how?

On Wednesday afternoon, as he squatted down to prune the miniature hedges by the main walkway of the garden, Charlotte came to observe his progress. She wore a fashionable white gown with white lace trimming down the skirt, and before she stepped out into the garden, she pinned it up carefully with a silver skirt grip so that it would not drag on the dirty ground. She had brought with her a detailed diagram of her plans for the garden, which she always masterminded with meticulous care. “It should be straighter,” she chided.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. Privately, he disagreed; he liked the way the hedges looked at a wider angle. But, of course, it was her garden.

She showed him the angle to which the hedge should have been trimmed with her white gloved hand. He caught her hand in hers and gave it a kiss, smiling up at her, but she pulled her hand away. “Not now,” she whispered, “These gloves have just been washed!”

Tom bowed his head. “Yes, ma’am,” he repeated, and turned back to his work. At the back of his head, an idea was beginning to form. “I’ll wait until tomorrow, then.”

***

Charlotte awoke the next morning to see Tom sitting on the side of her bed, an impish smile playing across his face and a plate of food in his hands. She smiled back at him. She liked his face when he smiled. It lit up with a steady hardiness, solid and unshakeable. He handed her the plate.

“Cook put this out for you last night. You’ll want to eat. We have a busy morning.” He grinned at her.

Charlotte stretched and took the plate from him. It had two slices of bread and an assortment of ham, cheese, and tomatoes. “Do I get to know what we’ll be doing?”

“No,” he said simply. He took one of the slices of ham from her plate and popped it into his mouth.

She took a piece of bread and a slice of cheese from the plate and began to eat. She smiled meekly, resigning herself for the day to the thrill of willlessness. When she had finished the plate of food, Tom took it from her and set it on the nightstand. He took hold of a fistful of her hair, tilted her head back, and planted a firm kiss on her lips. “Get dressed,” he told her. “Make yourself look nice for me.” He stood up from the bed. “I’ll be waiting for you in the garden.”

“Alright.”

“That’s yes sir today, understood?”

She grinned. “Yes! Yes, sir, that is…”

Tom lingered by the bed. “One more thing. I want you to know…” He hesitated, trying to figure out the best way to phrase the sentiment. “I want you to know that you can tell me to stop at any time. Anything I want, you told me. It’s an enticing game. But if you want the game to end, you just let me know.”

“I will.” He raised his eyebrows. “I will, sir,” she corrected herself.

“Very good.”

Tom meandered toward the garden. It was a warm summer day, and the sun shone down on the walled garden as if it were a garden in a fairy tale. There was a straight path down the middle, lined with miniature hedges, and on either side the manicured grass gave way to circular arrangements of flowers, bright red and yellow on one side and bright purple and pink on the other. At the back of the garden were several fruit trees, an apple and a pear, on either side of a wrought iron bench framed by a lattice of vines. Tom walked over to the bench. As he walked, he noticed several flowers that needed watering and a patch of grass that ought to be trimmed, and he fought back his impulse to work on them. There would be no labor for him today. He sat down on the bench, crossed his legs, and relaxed.

Presently, Charlotte emerged, looking as fresh and pristine as she always did. She wore a pale blue summer gown today, with white lace gloves and a fashionable straw hat pinned up on her head. Her hair was done up in a smooth bun on the top of her head, and her face was expertly makeupped so that it shone with an almost unnatural glow. He gave her a smile and a wave from his perch on the bench. “Go to the gardener’s shed,” he called out to me. “Fetch two buckets and fill them up with water.” She gave him a quizzical look but obeyed without questioning. He watched her struggle to carry the two heavy buckets, and he smiled to himself when she tripped over her skirt, splashing water on it.

He stood up from his seat and motioned for her to walk with him toward the back corner of the garden. She followed slowly, taking care not to trip on the grass in her heeled shoes. It was less developed here by the old stone wall. The grass was sparser and the dirt was looser. Charlotte set down the buckets and waited for Tom’s next move. Tom was staring at her furiously, daring himself to do what he had been planning. This was his chance, he thought to himself–it was now or never.

He stooped down and took a fistful of dirt from the ground. He brought it to one of the buckets and rubbed the dirt and water into his hands until they became mud. Then he stood up and grasped her waist with one hand and her breast with the other. She gasped. He removed his hands, revealing two muddy handprints on her dress, and before she could protest, he took hold of her chin with his left hand and stopped her complaint with a kiss. He pushed her against the wall and muddied his hands again. He ran his hands down her torso, making streaks of mud down her dress. He removed her hat and cast it aside, then unpinned her hair and ran his muddy hands through it. Again he wet his hands, and again he rubbed them clean on her dress, sullying its purity with loud streaks of filth. He gripped her hair and tilted her head up so that she was looking up at him. Then he took a muddy hand and planted it straight on her face.

Tom laughed with glee. His pulse was racing, and the joy of dominance coursed through his veins as he observed Charlotte’s reaction. She was looking up at him with wide eyes and breathing heavily. Patches of mud shone on her face, catching in her eyebrows and eyelashes. It coated her lips and her teeth, and she spat, trying to rid her mouth of the stuff.

Charlotte struggled to form words. What a state I must look, she thought! All the careful labor she had put into perfecting her appearance, all gone down the drain. Would these stains ever come out in the wash? “My…my dress!” She exclaimed at last.

“That’s right,” he murmured to her, “Anything I want, you said. Well, this is how I want you. Dirty.” He slapped her across the face with his open palm, making her gasp and imprinting another patch of brown on her cheek.

Charlotte drew in a sharp breath. She could leave now before he humiliated her further, call the whole game off as a mistake. He had given her that option, and part of her was tempted to use it. But something inside her, a deep-seated masochistic curiosity, rooted her to the spot. She looked Tom in the eye. “Yes, sir,” she said steadily.

Tom smiled widely. He wet his hands again and, gripping her neck with one hand and her wrist with the other, pinned her to the wall. “That’s how I like you,” he repeated. “Helpless.”

“Yes, sir,” she breathed.

“Say it,” he ordered. “Tell me how helpless you are.”

“I…I’m helpless.”

“That’s right.” He kissed her again, muddying his lips on hers. He shoved her to the ground. She collapsed at his feet. “Kiss my shoes,” he instructed.

She looked incredulous. Tom wore sturdy work boots, which were covered in a layer of dust and dirt from his work in the garden. Seeing her hesitation, he took hold of her hair and forced her head close to them. “Well?” He demanded, “What are you waiting for?”

“I…yes sir,” she said in a low voice. She brought her lips to the tip of his boot and gave them a light kiss.

“Harder,” he intoned, “like you mean it.”

She obeyed, pressing her lips into the leather with steady determination.

“Don’t stop.”

She continued kissing up and down his left boot, on the top, the sides, and the laces. She moved her head to his right boot and did the same. The grime on his boots coated her lips, but she did not pause to wipe off her mouth.

“Now with your tongue.” Tom’s tone was harsh, unrelenting. His words seemed to be made of steel–as impossible to bend as a metal rod. He gazed down at Charlotte with furious willpower. There was nothing for it. Charlotte offered a half-hearted murmur of protest, but already her tongue was reaching to lick the top of Tom’s boot. She slid the tip of her tongue along the outer edge of the shoe. “With your whole tongue, not just the tip,” he admonished. Charlotte gave a whimper. She pressed her whole tongue to the boot and dragged it across the top. Her tongue took in all the traces of where the shoe had been–the soil of the garden, the dirt of the path to town. It did not taste bitter, but it felt coarse and unnatural on her tongue. It made her want to cough and spit.

Again, Tom read her thoughts. “Don’t spit it out,” he said. “Not until I tell you to.” Charlotte reined in the impulse obediently. She licked the tops of his boots clean, first his left, then his right. He tilted his right foot up, motioning for her to lick the sole. She did so, although not without a dismayed groan. It was caked with dirt. She whimpered as her tongue took it all in, first the right sole, then the left.

At last, Tom took hold of her hair again and guided her head so that she was sitting up and looking at him. “Stick out your tongue,” he told her. Charlotte obeyed. She looked up at him, trembling and wide-eyed. The traces of dirt on his shoes clung to her tongue, moist with spittle. Tom reached down and traced a finger over her tongue. Yes, he thought to himself, yes! He had her now, hurt and humiliated but still obedient–his absolutely, all for himself. He spat on her face. She flinched but continued looking up at him. He looked into her eyes and was pleased to find an undercurrent of eagerness in them. Not only his by necessity, then, but his by desire. He let go of her hair. “You can spit,” he said.

She accepted the offer gratefully, coughing and sputtering onto the ground, trying to rid her tongue of all debris. He squatted down next to her so that they were on the same plane and ran a hand through her hair. “How are you?” He asked.

Charlotte was so caught up in the moment that at first it was difficult to think of an answer to the question. Was she happy or sad? It did not seem to matter–she was Tom’s. One thing of which she was certain, though, was that she did not want their game to end. “I think…” she began at last, “I think I am content. I want to keep on being yours.” She offered him a smile, and he returned it with a kiss on her muddy lips.

“Good.”

He guided her toward the two buckets of water. She tripped over her sodden dress as she crawled after him. The water in the buckets was murky from the dirt Tom had dipped in them, and Charlotte eyed them nervously. Seeing her expression, he chuckled to himself. He renewed his grip on her hair and forced her head down into one of the buckets so that it was totally submerged, held it there for two long, deliberate seconds, then brought her head up again.

She gasped, invigorated by the cold water, dripping wet from her face to her hair to the collar of her dress. She blinked twice, disoriented by the sudden submergence.

“Take a deep breath,” Tom instructed.

Charlotte obeyed. When Tom saw that she had drawn in as much breath as she could, he forced her head down into the bucket again. Seconds ticked by–two, three, four, five–and he held her steadily. At six seconds she began to struggle, but he held her down for two more seconds–seven, eight–before finally dragging her head up. “Oh…” she whimpered in a low voice, wiping the muddy water out of her eyes. She drew in breath in short, shallow gasps. Her heart beat erratically in her chest, and she looked around her, dazed.

“Breathe in,” Tom said. “Deeper.” She did so. She held her breath, waiting for him to submerge her head in the water again. “Breathe out,” he told her instead. She breathed out. “Now breathe in again…and out…” Charlotte’s heartbeat began to calm as she followed the instructions. “Breathe in…breathe out.” She closed her eyes. “I’m going to put your head in one more time,” he narrated. “Take a deep breath. Are you ready?”

She drew in a deep breath and nodded. He forced her head down once more into the water. This time, he kept it there for only a second before bringing it up again. She exhaled, and before she had a chance to inhale, he submerged her head again. She gave a stir of protest. He held her down fast for one, two, three, four seconds, then brought her head up. She gasped for air. Again he brought her head down into the bucket, where he counted ten long seconds with sadistic patience. She, in turn, expressed her impatience by squirming and wriggling in a futile attempt to free herself from his grasp.