The Dominafuhrer - THE GODMOTHER

Episode 11 - Der Rittmeister

I peered over Miss Spiteful’s shoulder and, through the dozen or so people standing around, spotted Kurt Millman, or Rittmeister Kurt as he liked to call himself, sitting in an armchair and fondling the bodies of two young women perched on the arms of his chair. He was dressed almost identically as when we had last seen him in Berlin, four years before, in a long black coat, trousers and boots and a white open necked shirt. Only his face, behind his tinted glasses, seemed more ravaged. The shark’s teeth smile flashed again.

“Surely you’re not speechless, Spiteful. I heard that you were saying that we had a lot to talk about when we next met.”

“No,” Miss Spiteful’s voice was low and ice cold. “I said that I would kill you for selling us out to Seraph and the Nazis. I don’t make idle threats.”

A muscle twitched in Kurt’s face as his smile froze but any response was cut off as a man stepped between him and my Mistress. He was in his early thirties, long curly fair hair, Pale faced with a wispy moustache and dressed in a purple jacket, fawn corduroy trousers and a white ruffled shirt. The most striking thing about him however was the same piercing blue eyes as Spalding.

“Now, now.” he said, spreading his arms. “We are all here to enjoy ourselves. Let bygones be bygones.”

Miss Spiteful snorted but held out one of her gloved hands which the man seized and held to his forehead as he sank down to one knee.

“Oh Mistress, it is so good to see you. Thank you so much for crossing the Atlantic to come to my home.”

“Thank you Geoffrey”, Miss Spiteful replied, retrieving her hand and looking around the room. “I will of course respect the fact that I am a guest in your home and behave accordingly, provided that other parties observe the same rules.”

“Of course they will,” our host stood up turned to Kurt. “You will behave, won’t you, Kurt?”

Kurt shrugged and waved his hand but his face curled into a disdainful sneer.                      

“Now let me introduce you to the others,” Geoffrey burbled and grabbed Miss Spiteful’s hand once more to pull her into the centre of the room.

Kelly and I were now able to get away from Spalding who had been pressing himself against our backs and now, looking as innocent as before, was waiting to take our coats from us.

“Everybody!” Geoffrey called out. “This is the famous Miss Spiteful. She will be taking part in our revels and, I can assure you all, that she will be taking it very seriously.”

“I already know a couple of the faces here,” Miss Spiteful said. “Hello Sir Douglas, you look like you had a bad war.”

She was addressing a grey faced man in his fifties, who had been scowling at her since her entrance. He wore a suit that had once cost of a lot money to be hand made but sagged on his frame and bulged around his stomach. Like him, it now looked very old and shabby.

“Britain doesn’t let traitors keep their knighthoods and there’s not much sun in Wandsworth Prison,” he snarled. “Someone betrayed me, Spiteful. I lost my title, my freedom, my fortune, my home, my family and my so called friends. Now I’m just Douglas Bradshaw; ex property tycoon and ex convict.”

Miss Spiteful raised an eyebrow at this catalogue of misfortune but I failed to detect any sympathy in her expression. Come to that, no one else in the room seemed about to shed a tear either. In fact, I’m sure I heard a snigger from Kurt’s direction. Then Miss Spiteful’s eye fixed on someone else. A tweed suited portly man in his sixties with a full head of wavy silver hair over a pasty and flabby face.

“Mein Gott! This gets better and better. Did you find this one in a pulpit or a pub?”

This face I did know. It was at the top of newspapers columns and on television, thundering and railing against the state that Britain had sunk into. Blaming it on degeneracy in films, on television, on stage and in books, magazines and the newspapers, Lord Mayberry, or Lord Morality as he was known, was the voice of middle England against sin. Once a rebel conservative MP, he had become an independent peer on leaving the House of Commons. I wondered what he was doing here.

Watery, pink rimmed eyes glowered at Miss Spiteful, belying the fixed smile on his face.

“I could be doing research for my column“, he muttered.

“As you’ve been frequenting whorehouse for twenty years to my knowledge at least, they’ll need to put Nelson at the top of that column, it’ll be that long,” Miss Spiteful sneered.

Sir Geoffrey hastily steered Miss Spiteful away from yet another confrontation with one of his guests towards a glum looking couple drinking away from the rest of the group. The man was tall and distinguished looking in a double breasted suit while the woman still had an inch or two in him. She was beautiful, raven haired, bright red lipstick and wearing an expensive black costume.

“Mistress Spiteful, I’d like to introduce Denis Wilmington MP and his wife Gisela.”

The man looked as if he had been struck in the face at being identified and his wife turned even paler. Miss Spiteful however stepped forward, smiled pleasantly at the husband and taking the wife’s hands in hers, spoke German to her in a low voice. Gisela Wilmington started in surprise but, by the time Miss Spiteful moved on, a little colour had returned to her face.

“And this is Ken Waveney, the writer,” Sir Geoffrey dragged forward a bespectacled youngish man in a turtle necked sweater who looked like he had been ahead of every one else in getting to the bar. This name also I knew from the newspapers and airwaves but not the face, raging from the left against capitalism or colonialism. In fact, I had heard him on the radio two days previously, condemning the imperialist invasion of Egypt without a mention of the Soviet crushing of freedom in Hungary.

“Ken has brought his young lady; Sarah,” Geoffrey indicated a young leggy girl with a severe black haircut, who was standing with her back against the panelled wall of the room, nursing a drink and looking around with wide eyed bewilderment.

“Everyone appears to have a drink but us,” Miss Spiteful commented grimly and Geoffrey clapped his hands urgently.

“Spalding! Spalding! Drinks for our guests!”

Spalding merely sniffed and scratched his ear but a girl in a maid’s uniform approached Miss Spiteful with a tray of drinks and, after our Mistress had made her selection, came over to Kelly and myself.

“You need to be a bit quicker, Doris,” Spalding said and the girl grinned at him. “Yes, Granddad, but I was hiding from the old boy in the tweed suit. His hands are worse than yours.”

I noticed that she also had piercing blue eyes and, as usual, my curiosity overcame my discretion.

“Spalding, is your family related to the Southcotes? You’ve all got the same blue eyes.”

“This is East Anglia, My Lady,” Spalding laughed. “For one reason or another, this part of the country never saw the population shifts that affected the rest. To travel more than a few miles was to go beyond the edge of the known world. Inbreeding is inevitable and I’m just glad that it comes out as blue eyes and not six fingers or big ears or even dimwits as it has in some places. Everyone in Southcote Village, which you passed through, is related in one way or another and most of them have blue eyes like me. Of course the Southcotes dipped their wicks with the village girls and, occasionally, the boys as well so they have the same characteristics. With Sir Geoffrey, it’s my Grandsons who have to watch their backs but Sir Hartley, honourable as he was, took his droits de seigneur. I was his batman in the Great War, took a bullet for him at Arras and was in hospital when he came on leave without me. My Denise was born; supposedly a month premature, but big and healthy and Sir Hartley wouldn’t look me in me in the eye when I told him.”

“What did you do?” I gasped. Kelly and I were now more fascinated by him than the others in the room.

“Well, I didn’t confront him but, in the next gas attack, the filter was missing from his mask. Still, he was an honourable man. My Denise was sent to a good school, went to University, got to be a Wren Officer in the last war and now she teaches in one of them posh public schools for Girls.”

Miss Spiteful’s thirst having been slaked, Sir Geoffrey was propelling her in the direction of more guests.

“Now you must have of heard of George Harman; the film director.”

 I had. The fat little man, whose freckled pate was fringed with red hair, had come to Britain from Hungary after the war and had made a name for himself by directing well acclaimed dramas for the cinema. On naturalisation as a British citizen, he had anglicized his name but his English was still heavily accented. By his side was a beautiful girl dark haired girl in her twenties who reminded me very much of Solitaire, making my heart ache. She too looked disturbed but there was something else that I could see, an anger smoldering in her dark eyes.

“And this is George’s young protégé; Clarissa Rose whom I’m sure that we will be seeing a lot more of on the screen.” Sir Geoffrey’s introduction did not make Clarissa look any happier and he moved swiftly on to another face that I recognised.

Whether as an RAF Pilot, a Commando in the Desert or a Submarine Commander, Tod Garrod was the star of the war films that rolled out of British studios for years after the fighting was over. (David would drag me to see them all so that he criticise the inaccuracies of service dress or military tactics to the annoyance of those sitting near us. I firmly kept my mouth shut at similar mistakes in German Uniforms or the hilarious errors of grammar when a character was supposed to be speaking in my native language. Having been bombed by the Americans in Korea, David refused to see American War Films but, thankfully his aversion did not extend to John Wayne or James Stewart westerns.) Now the handsome all-British hero looked very nervous and fumbled with his glass, spilling liquid onto the carpet, when his name was announced.

“This is my Ashley,” Sir Geoffrey pulled a blonde curly haired youth, who gazed a hit adoringly, from a group of young people at the back of the room. “He’s studying at RADA.”

“To be a catamite,” Spalding muttered, causing Kelly and me to put our hands over our mouths to stifle our giggles.

I thought Sir Geoffrey was going to kiss Ashley’s open lips but he managed to control himself.

“Kurt you know,” Sir Geoffrey flipped his hand in the direction of the armchair where Kurt was still sitting but with only one girl alongside him now. One could almost see the daggers in the glances that he and our Mistress exchanged.

“Finally, these are the young people who will be serving our evening meals and helping with the entertainment. Justine; Dominic; Sophia; Tara; Pippa and Eva, take a bow.”

The six looked a mixture of sissy boys, aspiring starlets, dancers and young tarts and were the only ones, apart from Lord Mayberry, who didn’t mind being announced.

“Are the servants not going to be helping out?” I enquired of Spalding, who gave me a sour look.

“Not likely, most of them are my relatives and they are all going to be off home by nine tonight. They are going to prepare and cook the food but I’m not going to allow them to get involved in this nonsense. I’ll be in my own bed with a bottle of the Master’s best brandy, my Filmgoer magazines and then I’ll be dreaming what I could do to Diana Dors. We’ll all be back in the morning to do breakfast and clean up your mess but even for the Southcotes, there’s something wrong with all this.”

I looked at him in alarm but Sir Geoffrey was clapping his hands for attention.

“Well now we are all here and have been introduced, I’d just like to welcome everybody and thank you for accepting the invitation. We are going to have three very exciting nights in which I hope you will all get to fulfill most, if not all, of your naughtiest fantasies. The theme tonight will be loosely based on the Hellfire Club, tomorrow we’ll have a Roman orgy and we’ll finish off with Arabian Nights. There are appropriate costumes in your rooms, in your sizes and labeled with your name and the character or role you will be playing and I must emphasize that you are required to wear them. If you could all assemble in the Gallery, that’s on the west side of the entrance hall, at nine, we’ll eat and then get really degenerate to your hearts content. During the day, please feel free to make full use of the estate; there are plenty of places to walk if you still have the energy and nice warm fires and plenty of drink in here if you haven’t.”             

People were making preparations to leave the room when Kurt’s voice cut in.

“Einen moment, bitte Sir Geoffrey. There is one person who has yet to be introduced to Miss Spiteful.” He indicated the girl alongside him on the armchair who then stood up and I saw her face clearly for the first time. Kelly and I both gasped and Miss Spiteful went rigid. My mind whirled as I recognised her as the beautiful young light brown skinned girl whose pictures hung on the wall of Miss Spiteful’s New York apartment. She looked so much like Sugar that they had to be related.

Miss Spiteful had no doubts. “Sherry!” The word came out almost as a groan.

“That is correct.” The shark’s grin was back on Kurt’s face. “Sherry, I would like you to meet Miss Spiteful, your Godmother.”    



To continue this story, click What Happened To Tom



      

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