Crinolines are Dangerous

I stood up and hugged Edith who was crying. I kissed her gently and just held her.

She whispered very quietly:

"A week later my father was dead. It was the day of the memorial service for Amos. My mother and sisters had walked out to the carriage. My father was about to follow when he suddenly clutched his chest and dropped to the hall floor. I was beside him, holding his hand. He looked at me, smiled and said: 'Goodbye Edith,' and then he was gone.

My mother and sisters came back in to see what was keeping him and found him dead. None of them could ever see me. A few months later they sold the house and moved out and I started haunting the owners from then until now."

"I'm sorry, Edith," I said.

She wiped away her tears.

"But you, Geoffrey, have made me happy. I'll always grieve for my father and for my Amos but now I have Geoffrey. You don't know how much I have you now, Geoffrey. You have the money to make this house wholly yours, debt-free but..."

Edith flung her arms around me and kissed me fiercely.

"You've been my prisoner, tied to your bed, or trapped under my crinoline, even when just sitting down. But now? You are really my prisoner, Geoffrey. How?"

Edith kissed me again and pulled me over to the bed.

"You're going to be hidden under my skirts and ridden, Geoffrey. If I am satisfied? Then, perhaps, maybe, I might let you go. Because you are in a secret room that no one knows about, with a ghost, and the door is shut. You know how to open it from the outside. No one else does and no one else knows that this room exists. But the door is shut and you don't know how to open it from the inside. You have money but if you can't get out? What use is it to you? You could die of starvation in here and no one would know."

Edith started unbuttoning her bodice.

"I'm going to change. Strip!"

I stripped and positioned myself on the bed; Edith was wearing her wedding gown again and covered me with yards of white satin. Her skirt went way above my head as she positioned herself to engulf me. Soon I was gasping for breath under layers of skirt and petticoat as Edith rode me.

An hour or so later Edith climbed off me.

"Now we are in the room with my trousseau, I'm going to use some of that."

She held up a pair of cotton pantaloons.

"Unlike the pair I normally wear, these cover my nether regions."

Edith pulled them up with both our legs inside them. My erection, still inside her, was pulled deeper in. Edith tied my wrists into the side ties.

"Now you are in me and can't get out, Geoffrey. But I have a nightdress."

She struggled into yards of long-sleeved and high-necked night dress before pulling it down around my body. My head was poking through the unbuttoned front of the bodice until she hauled up the material and fastened the buttons, hooding me into a white blankness. She positioned my shrouded head beside hers before she started squeezing my sex. I couldn't withdraw. I couldn't escape the ties around my wrists and I couldn't see with my head inside her night dress. I had to surrender completely to whatever Edith wanted to do, and what she wanted was to ride Geoffrey until he was unconscious, worn out with sex.

When I woke up, my head was outside her nightdress, alongside Edith's with my face pressed against her hair.

"You are in a predicament, aren't you Geoffrey?" Edith said before turning her head to kiss me.

"An important part of you is sheathed in me and can't get out. Your wrists are tied to my pantaloons. Your body is trapped in my nightdress. Your head could be hooded anytime. And you're on a bed in a secret room that no one knows about with the only way out closed and you don't know how to open it. You're a ghost's victim and prisoner."

"You could yell for help but no one would hear you on the top floor of an empty house and even if they could, they couldn't find you. And..."

Edith picked up the white silk shawl she had worn with her wedding dress. She wound it round and round my lower face, gagging me before she knotted it tightly.

"...now you can't yell. Shame, isn't it?"

Edith laughed at me as I struggled to try to free my wrists. The noises I was making through my gag couldn't have been heard more than a few feet from the bed.

Edith leant forward and kissed my forehead.

"But I'm teasing you, Geoffrey. You're the only man in a hundred and fifty tears who hasn't run away and the man who took my useless virginity. I love you. You can't escape from me anywhere in this house but I don't think you even want to."

I shook my head. Edith kissed me again.

"Geoffrey. You're mine. But I will let you go, let you out of this room with the money, and let you live in our house. All I want from you is to be my sexual victim whenever I want to. Agreed?"

I nodded my head.

Edith gradually untied me. I was still lying on the bed as she dressed herself in her day dress.

"I don't want you to know how to get out of this room, Geoffrey, so while I open it?"

She threw her wedding dress over me and tied it around me with the satin ribbons. I was a helpless satin bundle.

"And now? The dress bag."

She pulled and pushed me around as she covered the wedding dress with the cotton dress bag. She pulled the drawstring tight and knotted it to the rail at the foot of the bed.

I heard her walk across the room and heard a grinding noise as she operated whatever it was that opened the outer door. She came back to the bed and gradually uncovered me. I got dressed and followed her out of the secret room. In the attic room she stopped.

"We've forgotten the money."

We walked back into the Priest's Hole. The two of us could just lift the chest. We took it downstairs and removed the inner tray. Underneath were twenty thousand gold sovereigns.

"There you are, Geoffrey. My dowry, now paid to you as the one who let me lose my virginity and give me so much pleasure. You can pay off your mortgage and be the sole owner, even if I own you."

Edith does own me. Every night I am hidden under her crinoline and during the day I can suddenly find myself trapped inside it. Crinolines are dangerous.