LADY ANN'S FOLLY: Chapter Eight - Part One

Serving Girl

Lady Ann Neville looked out across the crowded pub and let out a deep and heartfelt sigh.

It was getting packed full of men now, farm workers and Blacklake miners, and the crowd was getting rowdier by the minute.

This wasn’t what she had wanted. It wasn’t like when the original Lady Ann became Burt. She had had a tawdry craving to experience the lower class life of a working class man to the full. Despite her initial consternation, she had very quickly revelled in all that classless debauchery like she was born to it. This Ann had wanted only to experience sexual freedom with Burt. Tending bar as a barmaid had not figured into her fantasies at all; not for a minute.

It wasn’t fair. She’d had everything she ever could have wanted and had thrown it away so casually in her eagerness and overconfidence. Oh why had she ever believed she could control this exchange when she gave up the right of blood to be in charge?

“Mavis!”

She jerked to attention. The cry had come from the huge bald-headed blacksmith.

“Ere Mavis! Hurry up with them beers! We’re parched!”

She stared back at him sourly, wishing she could at least slip upstairs and hide away from this reality that closed in on her but her new father barked in her ear nastily, “Well do it then girl! They won’t pour themselves!”

She went to work anxiously, finishing filling the three tankards as fast as she could but doing it awkwardly and spilling a lot of it.

“What’s wrong with you Mavis?” demanded the landlord. “You’re making a mess everywhere!”

“Sorry,” she replied. “I wasn’t lookin’ what I was doin.” Her voice was layered with the base inflexion of a commoner  and it didn’t matter that it was still a long way from the rich Yorkshire Mavis normally spoke in. There was enough there unbidden now to illustrate how near the time was when her voice would change completely. It made her feel the pinch of her trap all the more.

She picked up the beers and struggled across the bar to where the blacksmith and his two friends sat. The three men whispered something obviously crude at her approach then roared with laughter, eyeing her up like she was hanging meat in the butcher’s window. As neither Burt nor Ann had she been looked upon with such undisguised lust, as though propriety meant nothing. Her feelings on the matter of being a sexual object were either immaterial to these men or expected to fall in concert.

She set down the beers and the blacksmith and the reedy barber reached for theirs while the third man, Artie, gave her a slap on the rear, making her yelp shrilly and bringing on more laughter from anyone close enough to observe.

“Yer lookin right tasty tonight Mavis luv,” cried Artie. “Maybe you’re planning on givin some of that lovin out to those deservin men in the crowd, eh?”

“How dare you?” she snapped, slapping his hand away, but that didn’t stop the man and he grappled her buttocks in his steely fingers hard enough to pinch the soft flesh.

“Nah then Mavis,” he said, “I know you don’t mind men’s attentions. You been givin it away to our Roy here, ain’t you?” He gestured to the thin, short man beside him, the barber, and Ann recoiled in horror. Surely she; that was, Mavis; hadn’t slept with that big-nosed rat-like man – that she wouldn’t be expected to again! But she could see from his discomfort that it hadn’t been like that and the truth of the matter came out of her in a turn of phrase as rich as any the real barmaid had ever spoke. “I didn’t give im nothin! He paid cash money like any other punter.”

All three men laughed but Ann felt wretched to hear how easily that had slipped out.

“Well ow’s about givin me some next luv, eh?” said Artie. He made a ham-fisted grope at her breasts as she tried, ineffectually to swat him back.

“Ey!”

The four of them stopped and looked the way the cry had come.

In the doorway of the pub stood Burt, his face a scowl of determination. “Give over Artie and leave er be, or you’ll ave me to answer to. Ahright?”

Artie shrunk back. Burt’s physical dominance was in no doubt to anyone since the boxing match a week and a half earlier. That was one aspect of his character that no one could look down on. Ann was so relieved she felt a powerful swell of affection toward him and a heat between her thighs that startled her. It was followed by a cocky self-assuredness that made her turn to Artie and say, “That’s right boys. Ye’d better watch yerselves or Burt ere’ll show you what a real man is capable of.”