🔥 Nothing to Declare 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Dollar Princess’s Revenge by Evelyn Ashcombe

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place on the second and third of August, 1895, on Florence and Charles’s wedding journey, after Chapter Twenty and before the Epilogue. It contains spoilers for the whole of The Dollar Princess’s Revenge and very explicit sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

Florence’s side of the honeymoon night train to Venice: a Wagons-Lits compartment with both neighbours bought out by her father, a husband who wants to make her lose count, Burgundy by moonlight, a French customs officer at the door at dawn, and twenty-five minutes of total darkness under the Alps. Explicit content — 18+.

Nothing to Declare

The Rome Express left the Gare de Lyon at a quarter to nine on the second of August, eighteen hundred and ninety-five, with the Earl and Countess of Ravensmere in compartment seven of the second sleeping car, and compartments six and eight standing empty on either side.

That had been her father. He had not explained it. He had handed Charles the tickets on the platform at Ravensmere Road, three of them in one Wagons-Lits envelope, and said, “Middle one’s yours. I bought the other two so you’d get some quiet,” and then studied the station clock with enormous interest until the train came in.

“He means so the Belgians don’t hear you,” Charles said, somewhere south of Fontainebleau.

“He means so nobody hears you,” said Florence. “He’s met me.”

The compartment had been built in Brussels by men who believed a husband and wife ought to be able to cross Europe without once being obliged to look at anybody else. It was seven feet by six. The walls were mahogany, inlaid with garlands of some paler wood, and there was a washstand that folded down out of the panelling, a rack of polished brass for the hatboxes, a small square window with a blind, and two berths, one above the other, which the attendant had made up while they were at dinner and turned down with the precision of a man setting a table. A night-lamp burned in the ceiling under a shade of blue silk. Everything smelled of starched linen and beeswax, and very faintly, under that, of coal.

Florence stood in the middle of it in her travelling dress with her hat in her hand and listened to the wheels.

They had a rhythm. She had noticed it at dinner, under the clink of the glasses: two short beats and a pause, two short beats and a pause, as the carriage went over the joints in the rails. She had been counting it without meaning to since Melun.

Charles locked the door. He did not come away from it. He leaned his shoulders on it and looked at her, and the blue light from the ceiling lay along his cheekbones, and she felt it before he said a word: the change that came over him now, since the cheval glass, when he had something he meant to ask for.

“Is the door shut, my lord?” she said.

It was a joke between them now. It had been an order once. He smiled at it, and the smile went down into her like a swallow of brandy.

“Shut and locked, Lady Ravensmere. And I’ve a request.” He folded his arms. “Clause four. The truth, first and at once.”

“Go on.”

“You count everything.” He said it quite plainly, the way he read out figures. “You counted the minutes on the Embankment with a watch in your hand. You count the turns in a waltz. You count stairs. You counted the days I kept your rule, to the night, without once writing them down. You’re counting the wheels now. I watched you start at dinner.”

She opened her mouth and shut it again.

“I want to make you lose count,” Charles said. “Once. Tonight. Somewhere between here and Italy. That’s my first reflex, and I’m not having a second one about it.”

For a moment Florence did not say anything at all. The train swayed. A signal lamp went by outside the blind, a smear of red, and was gone.

“That,” she said at last, “is a very large ambition for a man with one horse.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got left. I’ve had all the others.”

She put her hat in the rack. She took off her gloves, finger by finger, the way she had once in a carriage on the Embankment, and laid them on the washstand. Then she turned round.

“Very well,” said Florence. “I’ll count. You may try to stop me.”

He undressed her by the light of the blue lamp with the train going under them like a heartbeat.

He was very good at it now. Six weeks of hooks and laces in Wiltshire had made him quick, and the swaying of the carriage only made him slower on purpose, so that every time it threw her against him he stopped, and held her there, and kissed whatever was nearest. Her throat. The top of her shoulder where the bodice came away. The red marks the stays left across her ribs when he drew the laces out, one by one, all the way down. She stood with one hand on the brass rail of the upper berth to keep her feet and let him, and she counted. She counted the hooks of her bodice aloud, under her breath, because he had asked her not to. Fourteen. She counted the eyelets of the stays. Twenty-two.

“You’re doing it on purpose,” he said into the back of her neck.

“I told you I would.”

He laughed, low, and pushed her chemise down off her shoulders and let it fall, and turned her round in his hands.

He did not say anything about her body. He had stopped saying things about it in the state bedroom at Ravensmere, the first afternoon, with the dust coming down through the sunlight; he only looked now, the way he had looked at the white cattleyas in his mother’s glasshouse, as if he could not quite believe the thing had been allowed to go on existing. He looked for a long time. Then he reached past her and put up the blind.

France went by outside, silver. They were in Burgundy, or near it. A long slope of vines in moonlight, rows and rows of them running past like lines on a page, and a village on a hill with one lit window, and then dark trees, and then a river with the moon in it, all going by at fifty miles an hour.

“Nobody can see,” Charles said. “There’s no one out there but the vines.”

“I know.”

“Lie down, then. Facing the window.”

She lay down on the lower berth on her back with her head on the Belgian pillow and France pouring past the glass beside her. He knelt on the floor of the compartment, because there was nowhere else to kneel, and took hold of her knees, and opened them.

“Count,” he said, and put his mouth on her.

She counted.

She counted the strokes of his tongue, aloud, in the voice she used for Frith & Lowell’s clerks. One. The flat of it, slow, the whole length of her. Two. Three. He did not hurry. He never hurried at this any more, not since the boathouse; he had learned that she liked it best when she had to wait for it. Nine. Ten. The tip of it now, circling the small hard place at the top of her, once, twice, and stopping, and circling the other way, and she heard her own voice slip a little on fourteen and brought it back by force. Fifteen.

Outside, the vines ended. A long black wood began.

Twenty-two. Twenty-three. He slid two fingers into her, slowly, all the way, and curled them, and her hips came up off the berth. She did not stop counting. She put her hand flat on the cold window glass beside her head and counted the strokes of his tongue and ignored his fingers altogether, which was like ignoring a fire in the next room. Thirty. Her voice had gone rough. Thirty-one. He made a sound against her that she felt in her spine, a sound of pure enjoyment, as if she had set him a sum he found delicious.

Forty. The wood ended. A town went past, gaslit, empty, a station with its name on a board too fast to read. Forty-four. Forty-five. He closed his lips round her and drew on her, steady and hard, his fingers working inside her in the same slow rhythm as the wheels, two short and a pause, two short and a pause, and she understood with a jolt that he had been listening to the rails as well. That he had matched them. That he had been timing her to the train since Melun.

Fifty-

It came up through her like a wave going up a beach. She heard her own voice break on the number and hang there.

“Fifty,” Charles said against her, not stopping. “Go on. What’s next?”

“Fifty—” Her back arched off the berth. Her hand slid on the glass. “Fifty-one. Fifty-two. Fifty-three, God, Charles—fifty-four—”

She came on fifty-seven. She came with her heels drumming on the mahogany and her thighs locked round his head and his name and the number tangled together in her mouth, and through all of it, every clench of it round his fingers, she held on to the count like a woman holding on to a rope in a flood, and when it was over, and she could breathe, she said it again, clearly, to the ceiling.

“Fifty-seven.”

He lifted his head. His mouth was wet. He was laughing.

“You counted through it.”

“I always will.” She was laughing too, breathless, with her hair coming down over the pillow. “You’ll have to do a great deal better than that, my lord. That was only Burgundy.”

“I’ve the whole of France,” said Charles, “and a mountain.”

She had him afterwards, because she wanted to, and because there was nothing written anywhere any more that said whose turn it was.

She pushed him down on the lower berth and climbed over him in the narrow space, with the upper berth eighteen inches over her head, so that when she sat up on him she had to bow her neck and brace both palms flat on the underside of it. The train did half the work. Every sway of the carriage rocked her on him, forward and back, forward and back, and she did not have to move at all; she only had to sit down on him and let the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits do the rest. He held her hips. He looked up at her with his mouth open and his eyes black in the blue light, and when she began to move as well, against the rhythm of the wheels, across it, he groaned so loudly that she clapped her hand over his mouth and laughed, and remembered that her father had bought the compartments on either side, and took it away again.

“Say it,” she said.

“Flora.”

“Again.”

He said it until he could not, and spent in her with his head thrown back on the pillow and her name breaking in his throat, and she counted that too, every pulse of it, silently, and did not tell him.

They slept in the lower berth. It was not built for two. Charles slept on his side against the wall with his arm across her, and she slept with her back to his chest and the blind still up and her face to the window, and France went by in the dark outside, and the wheels went on counting for her, two short and a pause, all the way to the Alps.

She woke because the train had stopped.

The light at the window was grey. Not the grey of London, which was smoke, but a clean, cold, enormous grey, and when she lifted her head she saw why. There were mountains outside. Not hills, not downs: mountains, close, rising straight up out of a narrow valley on both sides into a sky going pale at the top, with snow still lying in the high folds of them in August and a pine wood hanging on the slope just past the glass. A long low station. A sign on it. MODANE.

She was aware of two things at once. The first was that the air in the compartment was cold. The second was that she was not, because her husband was under the sheet with his head between her thighs.

“Charles.”

He did not answer. He licked her, slowly, the whole length of her, by way of good morning.

“Charles. We’re at the frontier.”

“I know,” came his voice, muffled, from under the linen. “I woke at Saint-Michel. I’ve been very patient.”

Somebody knocked on the door.

Florence went rigid. Under the sheet, Charles did not. He put his tongue to the small hard place at the top of her and circled it, once, as lightly as a man turning a page.

“Douane, madame.” A man’s voice, French, bored, a little hoarse with the hour. “Les bagages, s’il vous plaît.”

She looked down at the long shape under the sheet. It lifted its head an inch. Two grey eyes looked up at her over the curve of her belly, in the thin cold light, and the expression in them was so frankly delighted that she very nearly laughed aloud.

“Answer him,” Charles said, very low. “In the butcher’s voice.” And put his mouth back on her.

She answered him.

“Bonjour, monsieur.” Perfectly level. Perfectly composed. The voice in which she had once disputed a hundredweight of coals. “Nous n’avons rien à déclarer.”

“Il faut quand même ouvrir les valises, madame. C’est le règlement.”

His tongue moved. Slow. Flat. She put her hand over her own mouth for one second, took it away, and spoke again through the door.

“Nos valises sont dans le fourgon, monsieur. Enregistrées jusqu’à Venise.” She had read the ticket. She always read the ticket. “Ici nous avons un nécessaire de toilette et deux cartons à chapeaux.”

He slid two fingers into her. She gripped the edge of the berth.

“Et monsieur?”

Under the sheet, monsieur sucked her clit, steadily, without the least hurry, and she felt her whole body tighten round his fingers and her heels press down into the mattress and the heat start to climb, up from the soles of her feet, the way it had climbed in Burgundy, and she held her voice exactly where it was by an act of will so complete that she could feel it in her jaw.

“Mon mari,” said Florence, to the door, “est très occupé.”

There was a short silence on the other side of the panel. Then a second voice, lower, the attendant’s: a murmur, a word she did not catch, and something that sounded very like a laugh being swallowed. A piece of chalk scraped twice across the outside of the door.

“Bon voyage, madame,” said the customs officer, in a different tone altogether. “Et à monsieur.”

His footsteps went away down the corridor. Another door, further on. Another knock.

Florence let her breath go.

She did not come. She would not. She pulled him up by the hair, hard, out from under the sheet, and he came up her body laughing silently with his face wet and his eyes streaming, and she put her hand flat over his mouth and held it there, and they lay shaking against each other in the narrow berth with the mountains outside the glass and the attendant’s chalk mark on the door, and neither of them could breathe.

“Très occupé,” Charles said into her palm.

“You were.”

“You didn’t—”

“No.” She took her hand away. She looked at him in the grey light, flushed and wild and very pleased with himself, and she felt the climb still sitting in her, held, unspent, right at the top. “I’m saving it.”

“For what?”

The train jerked. The couplings clanked down the whole length of it, one after another, and the station began to slide away. Through the window she could see where they were going: the valley closing in ahead, the line curving toward the foot of the mountain, and in the mountain’s face, dark, enormous, a round black mouth of stone.

There was a rap on the door. The attendant again, brisk now. “Le tunnel, madame, monsieur. Fermez la fenêtre, s’il vous plaît. Vingt-cinq minutes.”

“Twenty-five minutes,” said Florence. “Under a mountain. In the dark.”

She reached up, past his shoulder, to the little brass key of the night-lamp in the ceiling, and looked at him, and turned it off.

“You have until the light,” she said.

The tunnel took them.

It was like being swallowed. One moment there was grey light in the window, and the next there was nothing, nothing at all, a black so complete that she could not see her own hand, and a roar that filled the compartment, the sound of the wheels thrown back at them off solid rock six feet away on every side. The air changed. It went warm and close and smelled of iron and coal smoke and wet stone. The carriage rocked. Somewhere far ahead the engine screamed once, a long thin shriek bouncing back down the bore, and was swallowed too.

She could not see him. She could only feel him, the whole hot length of him pressing her down into the berth, and his breath at her ear.

“Count,” Charles said. His voice came out of the roaring dark an inch from her face. “Out loud. Every one.”

And he pushed into her.

She cried out. Nobody could have heard it. The tunnel ate it whole. She wrapped her legs round him and dug her heels into the backs of his thighs and counted. One. He drew back and drove in again, deep, slow, all the way to the root, and held there. Two. She could not see his face. She had never once had him without seeing his face; even in the dark of the state bedroom at Whitsun there had been a candle. Now there was nothing but the rock and the roar and his weight and his cock filling her, and every stroke landing on her out of the black like something she had not been told was coming. Seven. Eight. She found she was gripping his shoulders hard enough to mark him. Twelve.

He began to move faster. Not fast. Steady. Matching the wheels again, she understood, two short and a pause, two short and a pause, so that the whole train under them and the whole mountain over them and her husband inside her were going at the same pace, and she counted it, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, and her voice was going ragged at the edges and she held it.

He talked to her. He had his mouth at her ear and he talked to her in the dark, low, steady, under the roar, the way she had talked to him once on the floor of her sitting room with her hand round his cock; he told her what she felt like. He told her she was soaked. He told her he could feel her clenching on him every time she said a number, did she know that, every number, as if she were counting with her cunt. He told her that he had wanted to do this since Paris, since Ravensmere Road, since the twenty-second of June, since a conservatory in eighteen eighty-nine. He told her she was the bravest woman he had ever known and that he was going to fuck her until she forgot every figure she had ever learned.

Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty—forty-three.

“There it goes,” Charles said.

“It does not—forty-four—”

He shifted. He got one arm under the small of her back and lifted her hips off the berth, and the angle changed, and the next stroke hit something deep inside her that went off like a lamp.

She came. She had been holding it since Modane and it went through her all at once, with no warning, wrenching, so hard that her heels slipped off his thighs and her head knocked the wall and she heard herself scream into the roar of the mountain, and through all of it, every clench, she clung to the number. Forty-five. She got it out. Forty-six. He did not stop. He did not slow down. He rode her straight through it in the black, steady as the wheels, and she kept counting with her whole body shaking under him, forty-seven, forty-eight, sobbing the numbers, and the second one came up on the heels of the first before the first had finished, and she said forty-nine into his shoulder, and fifty, and fifty, and—

“Fifty,” she said. “Fifty. Charles, it’s fifty, I said fifty, I—”

“What’s next?”

She opened her mouth.

There was nothing in it.

She could not find it. She reached for it the way she had reached for every number since she was four years old in her grandmother’s hardware store counting nails into a paper bag, and it was not there, there was only the dark and the roar and the smell of the rock and his weight and his cock driving into her and the third climax building under the second, enormous, impossible, and she could not remember what came after fifty.

“I don’t know,” Florence said. “I don’t know. I don’t—Charles—I don’t know—”

And the light came.

It came all at once. The roar dropped away behind them like a door slammed, and the window went from black to white to gold, and Italy came pouring into the compartment: sun, enormous, straight from the east, low over a valley full of mist with pines standing up out of it and mountains on either side with the snow on them turned pink, and the light lay right across the berth and across both of them, and she saw his face.

He was looking down at her. He had been looking down at her in the dark the whole time, she understood, without being able to see her, and now he could, and his face as he saw her was the thing she would remember on the last day of her life: wide open, and astonished, and wet, and lit gold from the side by the first sun of Italy.

She came the third time looking straight at it. She came with her eyes wide open and the light on her and her mouth open on no number at all, and he watched her do it, and said her name once, Flora, as if it were the answer to a sum, and followed her with his face pressed into her throat and his whole body shaking, deep inside her, while the train ran out of the mountain into the morning and down the valley toward Turin.

Afterwards she lay with her head on his chest and the sun on both of them and listened to the wheels.

Two short and a pause. Two short and a pause. She was not counting them. She noticed that, after a while, the way one notices that a clock in the next room has stopped. She was simply hearing them.

“Well?” said Charles. He sounded like a man who has been told by his doctor that he will live, and is trying not to be smug about it.

“Well what?”

“You know very well what.”

She lifted her head and looked at him. His hair was standing up. There was a red mark on his shoulder where her nails had been, and another, she suspected, on the back of his neck, and the sun was in his eyes so that he had to squint at her, and he was the most entirely satisfied man she had ever seen.

“I lost it,” she said. “Somewhere after fifty. I don’t know where.”

“I know.”

“I have never once in my life lost count of anything.”

“I know,” said Charles. “That was rather the point.”

She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she sat up, in the narrow berth, in nothing but the Italian morning, and reached down over the edge for her reticule on the floor, and took out her pocket book and the little silver pencil that went with it.

He watched her open it. He watched her turn to the page for the second of August and write in her square black hand, under the date, one line. Then she held it out to him so that he could read it.

Mont Cenis. Lost count.

“You’ve written it down,” he said.

“Of course I’ve written it down. It’s the first time. It ought to be on record.” She closed the book and put it back, and lay down again with her head on his chest, and shut her eyes against the sun. “Wake me at Turin. I want breakfast. And then at Venice, my lord, I want to see what you can do with a gondola.”

He laughed so hard the berth shook.

Out in the corridor, on the door of compartment seven, the attendant’s chalk mark from Modane was still there in the morning light: a single neat cross, which meant, in the language of every customs house on the Continent, that the luggage had been examined and found to contain nothing whatever that need be declared.

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