🔥 The Ladder 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Witch in the West Wing by Maeve Hollow

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after Chapter Twenty of The Witch in the West Wing, two months after the gala. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Same ladder. No law in the room. This time Elsie asks, and she has it in writing. Explicit content — 18+.

The Ladder

It took four porters and a trolley to get the press out of the Rotunda.

Elspeth had insisted. Sixty card drawers wanted cataloguing, and she had declined, in writing, to do it with that woman’s pen scratching at her back. So the whole dark-oak height of it had gone down ninety paces of passage in the second week of December, drawers and shelves and brass rail, and been stood against the north wall of the room that had DIRECTOR on its door. The paint on the word was nine days old.

The ladder had gone with it. It was only a library ladder: beech, eight rungs, a pair of brass wheels at the head. Isolde had thought about it rather more than about any other piece of furniture she had ever owned.

She came up at ten past six with a paper sack that smelled of lime and fried garlic. The reading room had shut at five. The passage lamps were out. There was one green shade burning in the director’s office, and under it, five rungs up, a woman in brown wool trousers was reaching for the top shelf with a box file in each hand and a pencil through her hair.

Isolde stopped on the sill.

It was the very view. She had stood at the foot of that ladder once before, in green silk, with both hands on the rails and not one finger permitted her, and said a number of things in a low voice. It had been the second night of her acquaintance with this woman. She had been two hundred and eighty years old, and had shaken the ladder like a girl.

“You’re hovering,” Elspeth said, without looking round.

“I am admiring. I have brought something called pad thai. The young man assured me that it travels.”

“It doesn’t. Put it on the desk.” A box file went home on the shelf, squared to its neighbor. Then the other. Then Elspeth looked down over her shoulder, and over the top of her spectacles, and Isolde saw her notice where each of them was standing.

It went across her face slowly. Isolde watched it go. She had no door to listen at; she kept it shut, these days, and had come to prefer the weather of that face to any amount of knowing. First the recollection. Then color, up from the collar. Then the chin.

“You’re not going to box me in?”

“I am waiting to be asked. It is a habit I have grown fond of.”

“Huh,” Elspeth said.

She came down two rungs. On the third she turned about, with care, and put her back to the shelves and a hand on either rail, and looked at Isolde from a little above.

“I wrote it down, you know.”

“Wrote what down?”

“What you said. That night. I got home at half past four, and I was so angry I couldn’t see, and after—” Her ears had gone scarlet. “After the other thing, I got up and wrote every word of it in the notebook. So I could be furious at it accurately.”

“I never read that page.”

“I know you didn’t. You’d have been unbearable.” A breath. “Pencil. Then the pins, one at a time. Then my mouth, for a long while, until I’ve stopped being clever with it. Trousers to my knees and no farther, so I can’t stand wide. The third rung. Your tongue, slowly, until I’m running down your chin and I’ve lost every question on the list. No fingers until I ask twice. And you make me say how many.”

Isolde found that she had put the paper sack down on the floor.

“You have it to the word.”

“I’ve got a good memory for things that ruin my week.” Elspeth’s knuckles had whitened on the rails. Her voice was perfectly steady; nine years of steady hands. “You said you’d had a long time to consider improvements. I want the original first. All of it, in order. Then I want the improvements. I’m asking, Isolde. I should have asked the first time. I’ve been annoyed about it for two months.”

There was no law in the room. There had been none since October. She might have crossed that floor and laid hands on this woman at any hour of any day, and nothing in the world would have turned her aside.

“Thank you,” Isolde said, as she had once said it to a kiss, and crossed the floor.

She began with the pencil.

It came out warm. She laid it on the nearest shelf, where it could be found. Then the pins: there were six, and she took her time over each, and felt with her fingertips for the next, until the whole dark unruly weight of that hair came down over her wrists.

“I have wanted to do that since you stood in my archway,” she said. “It had rain in it, and a pencil, and I could do nothing about either.”

“You’re doing something now.”

“I am. Be still.”

Then the mouth. She had opinions about it still. She set one hand on the rail and one at the back of that warm neck and kissed her as she had promised to, for a long while, and with no other object. The upper lip. The lower. The corner that tucked in. Elspeth kissed back like an argument. Isolde let her have the argument, and then slowly, by patience, took it away from her, until the mouth under hers had gone soft and open and had left off making points.

“You’ve—” Elspeth began, some minutes in.

“Yes?”

“I had something. It was going to be good.”

“No doubt. Tell it me later.” She kissed the place under the jaw where a pulse was going. “That is the second article. You have stopped being clever.”

“I’m resting.”

Isolde undid the button of the remarkable trousers. Then the zip, tooth by tooth; she had a great regard for the zip. She drew wool and cotton down together over narrow hips, down the long pale thighs, and stopped at the knee. She tucked the waistband there with some care.

“No farther,” she said.

Elspeth tried her stance, and found that she had none. Her knees would part the width of a hand. She said a short word.

“Just so. Up, now.”

“I’m on the third.”

“You are standing on the third. I said that I should set you on it.” She put both hands to that bare waist, and lifted. Elspeth weighed nothing to speak of. She came up with a gasp, and was sat down on the third rung with the fourth at the small of her back and her hands flung wide to the rails.

Isolde went to her knees on the director’s carpet. It brought those hips level with her face. She had measured it once, by eye, from six feet off, when she was not allowed to check.

She checked.

It was better than candlelight. There was the green lamp, and the dark curls, and below them the whole soft flushed split of her, held close by her own trousers and already wet enough to shine.

“You are soaked,” Isolde observed. “And I have done nothing but take out six pins.”

“You talked. You know what happens when you talk.”

“I do. I intend to go on.”

She put her mouth to the inside of one thigh, high up, where the skin was as fine as the leaf of a psalter. Then the other. Then she laid the flat of her tongue against Elspeth’s cunt and drew it upward, once, slowly, from the bottom to the top.

The ladder rolled four inches along its rail.

“Oh, God,” Elspeth said, to the ceiling.

“Hold fast. It has wheels.”

She did it again. She had said slowly, and she was a woman of her word, lately. With the knees held shut she could not get at all of it, and that was the cruelty she had designed: there was only the long closed seam, and what her tongue could persuade it to give up. She licked her open by degrees. She worked the tip in between the folds and found the small hard knot of her clit and went round it, and round, and never once let it have the thing direct. Above her a pair of hands creaked on the beech. The wheels ticked. A hip came forward, begging, and the trousers checked it.

“I can’t— Isolde, I can’t open my—”

“No. You cannot. That was the whole of the design.”

“It’s a horrible design.”

“I was very pleased with it.” She said it against wet flesh, and felt the shudder go up. “You taste of salt, and of yourself, and a little of my ink still. I should know you blind. Do you remember a single thing on your list?”

“What list?”

“That is the third article,” Isolde said, and sucked.

She had it running down her chin within the minute. It was not a figure of speech. She felt it, warm, and did not wipe it away, and bent again. Elspeth was talking by then, as she always did: curses, and the shelfmarks of several departments, and a broken run of there and don’t and please. Her thighs shook against Isolde’s ears. She was very near, and nothing she could do with her own hips would bring her nearer.

“Fingers.” It came out cracked. “Please. Inside.”

Isolde lifted her mouth a quarter inch.

“That is once.”

“I know it’s once, I wrote it down—” A noise of pure rage. “Isolde. Please. I want your fingers in me. I’m asking twice. I’m asking as nicely as I’m ever going to.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

She drew the rings from her right hand and set them on the shelf beside the pencil. One stayed. It was her mother’s, and she had a notion that it was liked.

There was not room, with the knees so. She made room. She slid two fingers up under and in, to the silver band, into a heat that closed on her like a fist, and Elspeth’s whole body came up off the rung.

“How is that?”

“Tight. It’s— because I can’t— oh, that’s tight—”

“Yes. I could not have told you that part from six feet off. I had to guess.” She curled them, and drew, and set her tongue back where it had been. “I guessed well.”

“Three,” Elspeth said, a dozen strokes on. “Three. Give me the— yes.”

It took her as a wave takes a wall. Isolde felt it with her hand and her mouth together: the clench, and the flood, and the long hard pulses after. The ladder ran a full yard down the press with the pair of them and fetched up against the end stop. Elspeth’s cry went up into the plaster. It had a name in it.

Isolde stayed until the last of it had gone through. Then she rested her wet cheek against a trembling thigh, and felt, with some satisfaction, a hand come down and close in her hair.

“That,” Elspeth said presently, “was the original.”

“To the letter.”

“It held up.” She was still getting her breath. “Improvements. You said.”

“I have three.” Isolde rose. Her knees complained of it; they were thirty-eight, and counting. “The first is that I may now turn you round. May I?”

“Yes. Turn me how?”

“Down. Face to the shelves. Feet on the floor, and your hands on the fifth rung.”

She lifted her down. The trousers were still at the knee; she left them so. Elspeth took hold of the rung above her head and stood with her brow against the fourth, bent a little, bare from the waist to the knee, with her shirt rucked up her back. It was a view Isolde had been given once before, across a reading table, and had not forgotten.

She used both hands. One went up under the shirt and closed on a breast, and found the nipple, and pinched: hard, as it was liked, as it had once been said aloud in a green chair. The other went down behind, between the shut thighs, into the slick of her.

“The second improvement,” she said, at the nape of that neck, “is the rail.”

She pushed three fingers in to the knuckle. The ladder rolled. It carried Elspeth forward a hand’s breadth on its brass wheels, and off her; then the stop held, and it came rolling back, and brought her down onto Isolde’s hand again by her own weight.

“Oh, you— fuck.”

“I need not move at all, you see. I have only to stand.”

“That’s so lazy.”

“It is economy. I was a natural philosopher.” She set her hip against the rail and gave it a little more play. Out, and back. Out, and back. Each return drove her in to the ring. She could hear it, wet and regular as a pendulum, and under it the tick of the wheels, and Elspeth’s breath going to pieces against a beech rung. “You are taking very nearly the whole of my hand. You are doing it yourself. I can see it, Elspeth. I can see where you take me in.”

“Tell me.” It was half a sob. “Tell me I’m— you know. Say it.”

That had been written on her once, under the navel, in ink.

“You are doing it beautifully,” Isolde said, low and exact. “You are very good at this. You asked for all of it in one breath, with your chin up, and you have held to that ladder like a woman at her post. There is nobody in the world I would rather watch.”

The sound that came out of her was not a word. Her hips had found the rhythm of the rail and were working it, shameless, riding back. Isolde pinched again, and bit, lightly, at the turn of the shoulder.

“The third?” Elspeth got out. “What’s the third?”

“The third is not mine to take. You should have to ask.”

A cracked laugh. She had it at once. She was the quickest woman Isolde had ever known.

“Open it. The door. Both ways. I’m asking.”

Isolde opened it.

It came through her like a lamp carried into a dark room. Her own fingers, from within. The stretch of them, and the cold small kiss of the ring. The rung hard under two palms; the trousers binding; a breast in a hand that knew its business. And over all of it that climb, steep and bright and very nearly at its top, with her own voice in its ear saying good.

She had not laid a finger on herself. She had not needed to in a green chair, either.

“Oh,” Isolde said, quite helplessly, into dark hair. “Oh, you are close.”

“So are you. I can feel— that’s you. That’s what my— oh my God, Isolde—”

“With me. Now.”

The ladder went the length of the press. They went with it. She felt it break twice over, hers and hers again, as she had once on a spread of green silk with six dead women looking on; and she held that shaking body up against the rungs with one arm, and was held up by it, and neither of them could have said who cried out first.

It was some time before either moved. The wheels had stopped. A box file had come off the top shelf and lay open on the carpet.

“You can shut it,” Elspeth said at last. Her voice was wrecked.

Isolde shut it. After that there was only a damp back under her cheek, and a heartbeat she had to listen for.

“I’ve got one.”

“One what?”

“Improvement.” Elspeth turned round inside her arm. Her spectacles were crooked. Her mouth was swollen, and her eyes were very bright, and she had the look she wore over a binding she meant to have open. “Yours all stop at me. That’s a flaw in the method. Trousers.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Yours. Knees. And then get up on that rung, Dr. Thorne. I’m told I’m a quick study.”

Isolde looked at her. She had been two hundred and forty-two years in a ring, and had composed a great many speeches. Not one of them had allowed for this, either.

“The pad thai,” she said faintly, “will be cold.”

“It was always going to be cold.”

She undid the zip herself. She thought well of it still.

It was a different matter from the far side. The rung was hard, and narrow, and a good deal less dignified than she had made it sound in the telling. Her own gray wool held her knees as close as a hobble, and there was nothing for her hands but two brass-capped rails. Elspeth knelt on the director’s carpet and looked at her for a long moment over the top of her spectacles. Then she took them off, and folded them, and set them on the shelf beside the rings.

“Slowly,” Elspeth said. “I took notes.”

She had. It was the same long stroke, bottom to top, and the same refusal after it. Isolde heard the sound she made and did not know it for her own. She had been taken apart before a mirror, and on her own floor; she had never been made to keep still for it with her thighs shut and a ladder rolling under her. Every time her hips went after that mouth, the wheels carried her off from it. Every time, it followed, unhurried, and began again.

“Elspeth. I cannot— there is no purchase. I can do nothing.”

“Nope. Horrible design. Ask me for something.”

“Your fingers.”

“That’s once.”

“You are a fiend.” It came out in pieces. “Please. Elspeth. Twice. I am asking twice.”

“How many?”

“Two. No. All that you can spare.”

She was given two, and then three, and the heel of a hand, and a tongue that had learned her in a week and had not forgotten a line. She came with her head against the sixth rung and both fists white on the rails, loudly, in a voice with no drawing room left in it. The ladder went to the end of the press and stayed there.

It was past eight when they ate, on the carpet, out of the paper cartons, with their backs against sixty drawers. Elspeth had her trousers on, and nothing else to speak of. She ate with a pencil through her hair again. Presently she got up, and collected the fallen box file, and squared its contents, and climbed five rungs to put it back where it belonged.

Isolde rose and took hold of the rails, one hand to each.

“This is not touching you,” she said.

“That’s a technicality.”

“I have retired from technicalities.” She steadied the ladder, and looked up, and was looked down at. “I only wished to hold it still.”

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