Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Book 5: Chapter 5

With great thanks to Cafterhomme for editing support, innumerable suggestions, and online conversations where these bizarre scenaria were mulled over and formed into something solid from the murky mass that existed in my mind.

Thanks also to Slothargy for the incredible artwork accompanying this tale.

Book 5: Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Dave Potter

And there the relevant manuscripts for this story end. As I said before, Michael’s diary continues, but moves onto other topics and the references to his wife and Lady Caroline are minimal, whilst Brigid’s diary simply ends. Did Michael not approve of her keeping a record of her life, or did she simply feel that there was no longer any need now that she had a voice again? Whatever the truth is, we shall never know. All we do know is that they stayed married until Brigid’s death aged 72 after which Michael lived on alone until his own death ten years later. They had four children together, two sons and two daughters, all of whom married well. All throughout their married lives, they continued to live at Kildare Hall where Brigid served as Lady Caroline’s companion right until she passed away, after which Michael moved to a cottage on the estate. Lady Caroline, of course, lived on for another fifteen years, although she never took on another companion. Michael stayed on as a tutor until all the Kildare children reached maturity, and then he took on a position with Trinity College Dublin, completing his PhD in the Religions of the Classical Lebanon.

As for the other characters, Sally left the employ of Lady Caroline once Clare was rehabilitated and established in her role as Sister Clare’s maid. Clare herself, took on the identity of one Sandra Culley and, after working at Kildare Hall for five years and imposing her vengeance for as long as had been inflicted upon her, she married a gentleman named Simon Lafferty and they moved to England soon afterwards, settling in the city of Liverpool. When she left, Sister Clare was sent back to the convent. Due to the outcry caused by the anonymous criminals who exposed all the Milk Order’s shady secrets, the regime within the convent was much altered, but it was deemed that Sister Clare, a relic of the old days, had been encased in latex for too long for it to be permanently removed and so she continued, along with all the remaining original sisters, silent, anonymous and entirely incommunicado, never once being able to express to people that she was in fact not the Clare that they thought she was. She died, still encased in latex, some twenty-three years later, one of only three remaining latex-clad Milk Sisters by that stage. No one outside the Order attended her funeral.

Then there is Love Hart, the most tragic character of all. Passive, weak-willed Love, was turned into a tool for men’s lusts whilst never being allowed to enjoy pleasure herself. What was to happen to her afterwards? There are suggestions that, when her guardianship passed to her children, Caroline would have tried to get her restored somehow but, perhaps fortunately for Love, she died within two years of Michael and Brigid’s marriage. Cause of death, a heart attack brought on, according to the doctor, by supporting the weight of such enormous breasts and other bodily modifications. Lady Kildare laid her to rest with full pomp and thousands of adoring admirers attended the funeral in Kildare Cathedral, but I think we can say quite safely that, for Love herself, it was most probably a blessed release.

Which leaves us with only one character remaining and she is, frustratingly, perhaps the most important of them all. As both a historian and a storyteller, it has been endlessly irking to me that Lady Caroline Kildare did not keep a diary nor left for posterity her own perspective on events. She is, in effect, voiceless, and yet, at the same time, reading between the lines of both Michael’s and Brigid’s accounts, that she was in many ways the prime mover behind the whole saga. And so, in the absence of an authentic voice, I shall try to piece together the fragments by myself.

It seems that, whilst confident and intelligent at school, Caroline was then but a girl. Her experiences with Michael awakened her, not only sexually, but also to the reality that her beauty and sex appeal gave her a certain power over men, a power that she enjoyed wielding and which, in a society whereby she was stripped of almost every agency, she began to crave.

Of her marriage to Lord Kildare, we can only surmise. Noble girls at that time had little to no say as to their choice of spouse; usually the candidate was presented as a fait accompli by the parents and the girl simply accepted. This may have been the case with Caroline, but the school records show that no fewer than five attendees of the school ball offered her their hand and yet Lord Kildare was the one accepted. Why was this? His noble status and extreme wealth were, of course, factors, but the other suitors were far from being minor personages too. Had her parents merely decided on Kildare and then just informed her, or had she had a role to play too? Certainly, there are no hints that she was displeased with the match, so I feel it safe to assume the latter. And why would a young woman so obviously intelligent and streetwise as her choose a man who was most obviously gay? Well, perhaps because of the freedom that choice presented? Certainly, it seems that she already has a hold over her husband by the fact that the man invited in to give them children is of her choosing. She was, to a degree, forging her own destiny.

Which leads us onto her and Michael Daly. Did she love him? Perhaps so. After all, he was the only man that she knew intimately at this stage. But I suspect, as his diaries attest, that it was his naivety and malleability that also attracted her. Here was another man that she could control and manipulate, and so it transpired. Besides, if she had wanted him all for herself, why on earth invite Sister Brigid into their home, the woman he confessed to loving?

It is my feeling that he spoke to her during their intimate times of what he had seen at the convent and this stirred something quite different in her breast. As a victim of a male-dominated society herself and someone whose sexual appetite was both large and transcending genders, the tales of the Milk Sisters intrigued, excited, and angered her. So, she invited one into her home and then got her to write about it all so she may know first-hand the reality of life behind those high walls.

And having a Milk Sister in her bed again tore her emotions. She empathised with this poor creature and yearned to help her, yet at the same time, loved having a pliant latex doll to play with. So, a solution was required and the plan with Clare and Shona was devised: she would free not one but two nuns from their bondage – and create two sycophantic lackeys in the process – and then punish a sadist for her sins whilst maintaining a Milk Sister to play with in her home.

Or at least, that is my theory.

It still leaves several questions. Firstly, His Lordship. His death was rather convenient, was it not? Who did anonymously inform the authorities about him and John Hart (a man whom Caroline cleared hated with a passion for the hell he subjected her friend to)? And since her plans would have been impossible to execute with Lord Kildare still alive, then she certainly had a motive. But to brand her a murderer is a serious allegation and not one that I am prepared to subscribe to, and so I will merely say that, sometimes, timing can be a happy accident.

Which brings our tale to a close… or almost. When I said that Caroline kept no diary and had no voice, I was not telling the full truth, for she did leave us a record of sorts. Whilst silent on every front, from the day she got married to her death decades later, she meticulously kept a secret record of all her sexual encounters. It is a fascinating read, extending to several volumes which each experience described, critiqued, and marked. Michael would be rather saddened to learn that the best he ever attained was a 5; Brigid managed an 8 on one occasion but was usually a 6 or a 7. Many more scored much higher. Over the course of her life, Caroline had literally hundred of lovers of both sexes and a few somewhere in-between. After the events described in this book, she took to spending more and more time abroad – presumably because of the freedoms allowed there – staying in luxury hotels on the French Riviera or, in the winter, at Alpine resorts, where she would often enjoy a different lover every night. And so, to close this account, I shall leave you with the words of the woman herself as, I believe, she would want to be remembered, in control, sexually fulfilled and free as a bird.

When he came back, I was combing my hair. Except for a pair of the black panties such as one finds commonly in Italian lingerie shops, I was naked. I smiled at him, a little stiffly, a little uncertain.

The water was running. In the bathroom he turned me around admiringly. I was very complaisant and moved readily to his touch. We stood beneath the shower. He nestled himself flat in the meeting of my buttocks. An excruciating douche. He was unable to move, but began to soap my breasts which glistened like seals beneath the flow of water. He scrubs my back. And then went over them with the cloth. ‘It’s good for them,’ he told me. Aureate light was reflected from the ceiling and he had a hard-on I was sure would never disappear.

He wrapped me in an enormous towel, soft as a robe, and carried me to the bed. We lay across it diagonally, and he began to draw the towel apart with care, to remove it as if it were a bandage. His hands floated onto me. The sum of small acts began to unite us, the pure calculus of love. He entered and I exhaled what felt like my final breath.

When it was over I fell asleep without a word.

9/10

21/02/2021

Copyright © 2021, Dave Potter

Final paragraph adapted from A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter

Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Book 5: Chapter 4

With great thanks to Cafterhomme for editing support, innumerable suggestions, and online conversations where these bizarre scenaria were mulled over and formed into something solid from the murky mass that existed in my mind.

Thanks also to Slothargy for the incredible artwork accompanying this tale.

Book 5: Chapter 3

Chapter 4: Father Connolly

Extract taken from the memoirs of Samuel Connolly, Wexford Farm, Lochard, Matabeleland, Rhodesia (written 2039)

I returned from my work among the poor and marginalised in the slums to find a figure waiting in my living room who was quite at the opposite end of the social scale. She was a comely young woman, with long brown hair and smiling eyes. Although dressed casually in the manner of the locals, she was clearly corseted underneath her t-shirt and her breasts were obviously augmented, although that was not so uncommon in Brazil of course.

I recognised her in an instant. She was one of my former pupils at the school next to the convent, in Fr. Daly’s class. Her name then had been Caroline Connellan but I had heard tell that she had since married a lord. I recalled her instantly, because I’d always considered her particularly ravishing and would have loved to have got to know her better in an intimate way but had held back because it was clear that Daly had fallen for her in a big way and was probably jumping in her bed at night for a bit of innocent fun (innocent, since they all wore chastity belts… alas).

“Fr. Connolly,” she said, full of confidence. “You and I need to talk!”

“We do?”

“If you want a future either within the clergy or without it, yes, we do.”

I sat down.

“I know all about you,” she said. “All about what you did to those Milk Sisters. About your confessionals and other private appointments. About how you tricked them into the convent and then sealed them in latex to keep them silent and available for your nefarious purposes. You should hang for your crimes.”

I think that she was rather surprised when I merely nodded in agreement. She had expected resistance and argument, perhaps to just be thrown out of the property. But she did not know of the changes that had overtaken me since that weasel Walsh had ejected me from the convent and had me banished to the ends of the earth. That my time spent among the poor and afflicted had made me look at the world in a different way. That I had seen the result of abuse on the drug addicts and prostitutes whom I now supported and felt ashamed for what we had inflicted on those helpless sisters.

“Hand me the rope then, I am ready,” I said.

That broke the ice some, and we talked into the small hours. I told her about my regrets, and she outlined her plan to give me a degree of atonement.

A month later I was flying out of Rio heading back to Ireland to marry off the man who had been my greatest protégé, whom I had looked upon almost as a son.

To a woman who had once been one of the Milk Sisters that I had tormented.

She did not welcome my presence of course, neither too the maid who had been another of the sisters and the Milk Sister she now tended to who had once been the maid who tormented her. Seeing the fear in the latter’s movements and the sparkle in the eyes of the former, I realised that justice was being meted out and the former victim was enjoying it immensely. When the latex-clad Shona – now called Sister Clare – backed away from my as I approached, knowing full well how I had enjoyed the others in the convent, the former Sister Clare slapped her sharply on her expansive right buttock and rapped, “You should be welcoming the presence of the Holy Father, Clare, not shying away from him like the Devil shies away from Christ. You have earned yourself five paddles for that behaviour and an hour’s delay in your milking!” After that, the anonymous creature was far more open to my embrace. 

The former sister never let her eyes leave me though, wholly untrustworthy of my presence, and I’m sorry to say, her blotchy face exposed, I cannot remember if I ever took advantage of her confessional.

Staying with Lady Caroline, I realised that the idea of justice ran through everything she did. She perceived injustices and inequality and righted them. Well… all bar one. It was also clear that she enjoyed her own personal power. When others – particularly men – ruled over women with a rod of iron, she sought to destroy them, but it was clear that her control over her entire household was absolute, the men included. Even over me. I’d seen her eyeing me in that way from the moment I set foot in the house and knew that she wanted to get to know me better, but it was always going to be on her terms. When we did share a bed, the maid had made sure that My hands were chained to the top two bedposts and my feet to the bottom ones. Lying there, spreadeagled like a starfish, vulnerable and helpless, she entered, unbound and dominant.

And it was only after several hours of satisfying her perverse demands that she allowed me some release. Even so – or perhaps because of this – that night with Lady Caroline Kildare is up there with the most memorable lovemaking experiences of my life.

To fuck me though, was not why I had been invited to her home. Indeed, even the wedding was not the main purpose.

The real purpose came afterwards when I was provided with a room in a small cottage on the estate and given a computer to record every detail I could recall regarding the Milk Sisters. Lady Caroline would come down daily and read what I had read, returning the following day with questions and queries. She wanted to know the names and dates of arrivals, the origins of the maids, details of the customers who paid to have private appointments with the nuns in private and any details of what went on in them. And, when I told her about the CCTV, she would ask which files the films were saved in and then, a week or so later, returned with the files which she asked me to watch and verify identities and locations.

She also confiscated the extensive collection of photographs that I had of all the Milk Sisters both before and after their ordinations, allowing me to keep only those of Sister Janet.

And then, when all was done, she made me resign my vocation and then presented me with a million pounds and a one-way air ticket to Johannesburg. But not before we had committed a daring act. That Sunday, whilst Mass was in session, Caroline and I broke into the convent of the Milk Sisters. We hid under the beds in the novices’ dorm and then waited for them all to return. When that was done, we overpowered the maids using chloroform and then unbound the arms of the novices. We asked if they wanted to be free and, unsurprisingly, they did not refuse. We then went into the office and ransacked the records before proceeding to the main dormitory where we took Sister Janet before the blank faces of her astonished sisters. Then we left with her and the novices, getting away in the cars that were waiting, taking them all to Kildare Hall. I write these words because no one ever found out who orchestrated the Kilkenny Milk Sisters’ breakout, nor what happened to those freed nuns. The CCTV merely showed a man and a woman dressed in black and wearing balaclavas. The Church protested at first, but then when a full dossier of the abuses suffered in the convent along with testimonies from the missing novices and evidence from the official records, they fell silent for the uproar that ensued was enormous.

The uproar that this created is still talked about today.

But not entirely as I and Lady Caroline had hoped. Part of the reaction was that which we had anticipated. People were outraged and raised their voices about the crimes of the Church and abuses of the clergy. Women were free souls and should be treated as such, not locked up like human milk cows.

But another segment of the population disagreed. Women are not men and the two should not be treated the same. To bear milk is surely the greatest honour a woman can have, beside that of bearing children. And besides, these women had all agreed to go into the order because they were wantons, loose in morals and living. 

I bite my tongue even now, knowing I thought the same once, and am still excited by the notion today. 

They asserted: surely a degree of punishment was not only deserved but also necessary. The sad division of our nation along the lines of how to treat its womenfolk. The dollers,  who were already growing in number following the advances made in plastiskin technology – always more preferable to the primitive latex arrangement – now really came out of the woodwork and started their rise in popularity which continued until… well, you know the story but that is for another book.

No, this book is mine, and with the money that Lady Caroline gifted me, I bought a series of farmsteads in Rhodesia. Several months later, in ones and twos, a number of young ladies arrived by air at Johannesburg Airport. All bearing Dutch passports, they came seeking a new life in a new land, and perhaps also husbands. I settled them on the farms that I bought and most achieved their goals.

Notable among them was one ill-looking girl, very pale and weak in frame. Her name was Janneke van der Laan, or at least, that was the name printed on her passport. The last time I had seen that face, it had been four years ago and, back then, it had been much healthier in appearance and had belonged to a sweet girl named Janet Farrelly. Of all the girls I inducted into the Milk Sisters, Sister Janet had always been the one who had left the strongest impression, with her long straight blonde hair, pale eyes, and a snub nose. My heart had broken the day when she and Brigid were ordained. Perhaps that was the moment when my resurrection begun?

Anyway, I travelled with her up country to one of the farms, and there her resurrection began, with me trying to atone for my sins by trying to rebuild that which I had helped destroy. It was not a quick or an easy process, both physically and mentally, and I cannot say that she trusted me immediately.

But time is a great healer. Now, over three decades later, that blonde hair has regrown, and her pale skin is a healthy tan. Her wasted muscles have been made strong again by the outdoor life and her mind has also recovered. Twenty years ago we got married and I am now the father to three children.

I could not be happier.

Book 5: Chapter 5

Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Book 5: Chapter 3

With great thanks to Cafterhomme for editing support, innumerable suggestions, and online conversations where these bizarre scenaria were mulled over and formed into something solid from the murky mass that existed in my mind.

Thanks also to Slothargy for the incredible artwork accompanying this tale.

Book 5: Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Brigid Daly

Michael Daly! Michael feckin’ Daly! When the veil was lifted from my face to reveal the man whom I was being wedded to, whose face should I be confronted with but that of Michael Daly!

I should have guessed of course. Not only has he continually kept on reappearing in my life uninvited, but I always knew that my mistress had a soft spot for him. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love her to bits and am extremely grateful to her for everything that she has done for me, but in an instance I knew that she had planned this, right from the feckin’ beginning. Bringing me here, getting me to write a diary, everything was leading up to this! I had escaped one institution not of my choosing only to be pushed into another.

I guess I’m being unfair here. Michael is ok. I mean, he’s not a bad guy, but he’s just not the guy that I would have chosen… ever. Not before the whole Milk Sisters ordeal and certainly not after. I like strong men, handsome men and well… manly men. And Michael, well, bless him, he’s just a bit of a… shall we say… a sweet soul. He likes books more than working out and he understands theology better than women. He fucks me but he does not satisfy me.

I knew that my mistress had something lined up for me when we returned to the hall, but she would not say what it was exactly. It was only the day before when she told me. “Tomorrow Brigid, your mother and father are coming to Kildare Hall.” Casually, like, as if that were some normal occurrence.

And to make it worse, we were in bed together. We had just finished giving one another the most exquisite pleasure imaginable with our tongues; me on her slit and she on mine. Annoyingly, my arms were still ensconced in the monoglove, but hers were free and she wrapped them around me as she spoke.

“My ma and da?! But why? I mean, they think that I’m a Milk Sister, what on earth will they say when they find out…?!”

“Shhh!” she said, putting her finger to my lips and then replacing it were her own. After we had kissed, she continued: “I told them. Whilst you were out cold in King’s Hospital, I took a little trip to Cork. Having a full-blown Lady of Leisure come to visit quite knocked them for six; indeed, it was a spectacle for the entire street! I explained all, that you had doubted your vocation and so were living with me instead. In fact, they seemed happy; they had never liked you going to that place anyway and said that they wished Michael Daly had come but a few hours earlier because then you could have married him instead.”

“To think, me as the wife of Michael Daly!” I laughed and she laughed with me. Now I know why.

“Well, you will of course be a wife yet,” she continued.

“Aye, one day perhaps.”

“Not one day, Brigid, but tomorrow. That is why your parents are coming.”

I sat up and stared at her. “What?! I am getting married tomorrow?!”

“Yes, of course you are!” she replied, as if it were the most natural thing ever.

“But… why?”

“Because you are of marriageable age, because you are a lady’s companion and thus respectable, and because we need a reason to keep you out of that convent.”

“But I am out and I don’t need a reason…”

“But you do. What if I were to pass away or even marry again to a man who does not like the idea that you resigned your vocation? You could be back in that latex before you know it. However, as a wife, then that is never possible whatever happens.”

I had to agree that there was some logic there but even so… “But who? I mean, who is the groom?”

“Now that, my little pigeon,” she said, kissing me on the nose, “is a surprise!”

And boy, was she right!

Michael feckin’ Daly!

And so now I am Brigid feckin’ Daly!

I was prepared for my wedding night in exactly the fashion that I did not want to be. My corset was tightened and my feet secured to the bed so that my legs were wide open, an open invitation to sex. Worse than that, my arms were cruelly laced into a monoglove and then a gag shoved into my mouth and a blindfold put over my eyes. All in virginal white. I lay in the dark and waited.

And after but a few moments, I heard the door open and my husband come in. He did not speak, but instead walked slowly to the bed. I heard his breathing and felt the bed move as he climbed onto it. Then I felt his breath, warm and smooth. He kissed me lightly on the forehead and I groaned. Then, without touching me elsewhere, he kissed my left nipple, before licking it and playing with it with his tongue. The feeling was exquisite, and I started to buck against my bonds and groaned. He withdrew and did not touch me again until I had subsided. Then he kissed and teased the right nipple. The tension and pleasure were indescribable. Then he withdrew again, and silence reigned. I yearned for his touch, his tongue, his tool…

… his breath!

I felt his breath above my sex. I groaned into my gag to demonstrate my delight. A tongue flicked out and licked me, caressed my precious pierced nubbin. It was exquisite! It was wonderful! He licked and teased and I started to buck uncontrollably again until I could contain it no longer and I exploded in ecstasy.

Panting in bliss, I felt his kiss on my forehead and then his hand removed my gag. “That was wonderful!” I gasped, “but now I want you inside me, please!”

“Another time my pigeon!” said the voice of Lady Caroline, as she removed my blindfold to reveal her smiling face. “Enjoy your wedding night!” she said before retiring.

Five minutes later, my husband arrived.

And that first night set the tone for the whole marriage. On paper Michael and I are married, but in reality there are three people in our marriage and the one that matters most to both of us is the noble lady in whose attendance I sit bound and silenced every day. Sometimes, alas, not often enough, she invites me to her bed and I enjoy hours of passion unmatched. On other occasions I am sure she invites Michael to that same bed, whilst on others still it may be Love Hart, Clare, the anonymous Milk Sister that was once Shona McCaffery, or one of a number of visiting gentlemen or ladies whom she has managed to seduce with merely the flutter of her eyes or the honeyed words of her tongue. 

We all exist to serve her, and she stands above us all noble and perfect. It is not the life that I ever imagined for myself, but there could be worse ones to live out. Like the perpetual hell in the Milk Convent, silent, anonymous, and milked like a human cow. 

No, I am one of the lucky ones, I suppose, and whenever I doubt that, I just look across to my mistress and see her smile and in a moment all those doubts dissipate into thin air.

Book 5: Chapter 4

Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Book 5: Chapter 2

With great thanks to Cafterhomme for editing support, innumerable suggestions, and online conversations where these bizarre scenaria were mulled over and formed into something solid from the murky mass that existed in my mind.

Thanks also to Slothargy for the incredible artwork accompanying this tale.

Book 5: Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Walking down the staircase towards the private chapel in the East Wing of Kildare Hall, my heart was beating ten to the dozen. Wedding?! Marriage?! With me as the groom?!

I won’t lie to you and say that the notion of marriage had never crossed my mind before. At school of course, on that fateful day when Brigid was caught and sent away, I proposed in order to save her… and because I loved her. And many’s the time that I dreamt of wedding Lady Caroline, lifting a white veil to reveal her smiling face, but I knew that such dreams were but that; fantasies. She was nobility and I was not, and some barriers can never be surmounted. But aside from such thoughts, marriage had never been on my agenda. I failed in my attempt to wed my first love and my second was always out of reach and so, instead, I would remain a bachelor, whether in the priesthood or not.

Yet here I was, dressed in a smart, obviously hand-tailored and extremely expensive, outfit, walking towards my own nuptials.

And what was more astonishing, to a girl whom I had never even met!

When Caroline had mentioned me getting married, I had betrayed my disbelief in both my expression and my reply of, “What?!” She had smiled and said calmly, “Michael, darling, what did you expect? For you to stay here near me, we need to make it appropriate in the eyes of society and whilst you are a single man and I a grieving widow, that was never going to be possible. And, since I do not intend to marry again, then it is you who must be led to the altar this time. I’ve thought about and planned this for a long time and I know that this is the best solution, nay, the only solution!”

“But the bride! Who is she? How can I marry a stranger? It is not fair on her!”

“Oh, do not fear on that score, I know that you’ll love her to bits; she’s just your type!”

I leaned in towards her and whispered in her ear, “Caroline, you know that you are the only woman I can ever love!”

“Fiddlesticks!” she exclaimed. “Why, you yourself have talked about adoring another!”

We both glanced at the latex-clad figure of Sister Brigid. I turned back to my love. “And I did… do. But Brigid is… well, that… and I could hardly marry a rubberised nun now, could I?”

“And neither are you expected to. Now, hurry, your bride awaits! Go!”

And so I did, none the wiser as to what was going on.

I breathed in deeply and entered the chapel five minutes before the appointed time. The congregation was, thankfully, tiny: Love Hart sitting serenely and impassively beside Caroline; Brigid and her maid Sally, Woakes who attends to Caroline, a mysterious woman in a poke bonnet with a thick veil obscuring her face, and a new maid whom I had never seen before with a pale blotchy face that suggested she had recently recovered from some terrible malady.

None of those figures however, arrested my attentions as much as the man waiting in front of the altar.

Father Connolly.

He smiled broadly as I strode up the aisle and clasped me warmly on the back. “Michael, so good to see you again; it has been too long! How are you lad?”

I stared back dumbfounded. “Father, I… I thought you were in Brazil or somewhere of that nature!”

“That I was, lad, that I was, but Lady Caroline here had me recalled, and I was glad to do it! I couldn’t be missing the opportunity to marry off my greatest protégé now, could I?”

“But I… you… you wanted me to be a priest, not a husband!”

“Nay Michael, you misunderstood me, that you did. I wanted you to be happy, nothing more, nothing less. I could see that you were a smart lad and needed the chance to study and I could see even more that you had the hots for that young Brigid O’Leary, so you did, not that I blame you, for a comely thing she truly was. So, I engineered the only situation whereby you could have both… in a fashion.”

“But you… you had her sealed in latex and transformed into one of those human milk cow things! How could you…?”

“And the alternative Michael: prison, shame and the rest, was it any worse? No, I am not proud of what we did to her… and those other poor girls, but that is the world that we live in and they sealed their own fates after they sinned as they did. If it had not been me, then it would have been another and at least I showed them some humanity until that bastard Walsh.”

“I don’t know about your humanity but you certainly showed them your cock!” I hissed in his ear.

He smiled and shrugged. “What can I say? I will not lie and, truth be know, I was never cut out for abstinence, not from the drink nor the ladies. I have my needs and they have theirs and well, there is little enough joy in that place, is there not. I am glad that I got out to be honest, much as I did not see it that way at the time; and I am glad that you have a new start now.”

I was about to say more when the organ piped up and the congregation rose. I turned around to see an unknown man in his forties leading a woman dressed in white up the aisle. She moved slowly, her vast crinoline billowing around her, whilst her waist was miniscule. As for her face though, that was totally obscured by a white veil, a veil so thick that I doubted she could see through it. She moved unsurely, clinging onto the man’s arms for balance. I wondered who she might be.

Fr. Connolly intoned the service, not saying the names of either party until it came to the key part.

“Michael Patrick Daly, do you take this Brigid Mary O’Leary to be your lawfully wedded wife? Do you promise to be faithful to her in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love her and to honour her all the days of your life?”

Brigid? But she was in the congregation! What did he mean?

“Well… do you…?”

The congregation laughed and I was jolted back to reality.

“Yes… erm, I mean, I do!”

“And Brigid Mary O’Leary, do you take this Michael Patrick Daly to be your lawfully wedded husband? Do you promise to be faithful to him in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love him and to honour him all the days of your life?”

The veil was lifted to reveal a face. And true enough, it was the face of Brigid O’Leary, the girl I had dreamt of in school, my first true love. But this was not the Brigid of Our Lady of Knock High, nor the Sister Brigid of the Blessed Milk Grotto, nay, she was a different person entirely! Her face shone and her eyes sparkled. Her lips puckered in a way that rejected the notion she had been gagged for over two years. She was a Brigid transfigured! A perfected version of the human original, with skin of plastic, like she had imbibed the latex of her trials and emerged victorious, which I guess she must have! She gazed at me, seemingly as surprised as I was to be looking at her. “I… I do…” stammered that familiar voice I hadn’t heard in so very long

And so, I was married.

At the wedding dinner, which was held in the banqueting hall, all was revealed. The man who had given her away was her father, whilst the veiled lady in the congregation, Brigid’s mother. Lady Caroline had wanted to keep the identity of the bride a secret from me and that was why both the bride and her mother had worn veils.

The Milk Sister in the congregation whom I had assumed to be Brigid was, of course, not her at all. Nor indeed, was she a proper Milk Sister in the strictest sense. Caroline told me of Brigid’s diaries which had revealed how a maid named Shona had bullied and tortured a poor Milk Sister called Clare in the convent and so Caroline had decided to mete out some justice. She had resigned Brigid from her vocation and taken Clare in her place with Shona to look after her. Unbeknownst to the Holy Church though, she had then freed Clare from her pious bondage and forced Shona into it. The tables were now turned and these days Clare was the maid whilst Shona was her charge. I pitied the poor girl encased forever within white latex but had to admit to myself that she had brought such a fate upon herself. I remembered Shona from my days at the convent, and she seemed the vengeful sort, but only after I read some select passages of Brigid’s tale did I agree wholeheartedly in this entrapment. For penance’s sake.

This also accounted for the blotchy face of the maid and for the shiny, transfigured appearance of my wife. Clare had been merely released from her latex skin, but Brigid, who was now Caroline’s official companion, had been subjected with the same revolutionary skin treatment as Love Hart. The results were, I had to say, incredible. Whether she liked it, I could not say, for Caroline kept her gagged most of the time. As her companion, Brigid was expected to adhere to the Leisure Ideal and, whilst in many ways I disagreed with such subjugation of women now that I had seen their vivacious potential across the continent, on the other hand I was not going to cross the woman who had done so much for me. Lastly, I must admit to finding bound women arousing.

Which is a good thing, because later that evening when I retired to our wedding chamber to consummate our nuptials, I found the love of my early life waiting for me in the bed, tightly-laced, her arms secured behind her in a white monoglove and her ankles secured to the bedposts. And, whilst I could have unfastened her, I must confess that I did not, instead sating myself with abandon before finally responding to her demands and unfastening her legs and arms so that we could cuddle up together as man and wife before drifting off into slumberland.

Perversely though, even though I was married to the woman whom I had once prayed to God to join me with, and whom I did love completely, the face that came to my mind as I closed my eyes, was not that of the new, plastic Mrs. Brigid Daly, but instead the elegant and willful Lady Caroline Kildare.

My fate was sealed and I knew it. There was always going to be three people in this marriage.

Book 5: Chapter 3