The Making Of A Mistress- The Heriot Row Years: Erotic Lesbian Romance (Signed eBook) PREORDER-LIVE 23rd NOV

In late-nineties Edinburgh, Victoria Fraser is training to become a piano teacher, with a secure career within reach and little certainty that she wants it. When her friend Bo arranges a well-paid evening playing at a private gathering on Heriot Row, Victoria expects to provide discreet background music. Instead, she finds herself watching Helena Drummond command a room of women with an authority that fascinates her.

Recognising Victoria’s instinct for reading people, Helena offers her a year of instruction. Every Thursday, Victoria will observe the women in her drawing room and learn the discipline behind dominance. She may ask anything. She may touch nobody, including herself.

Under Helena’s exacting guidance, Victoria learns to recognise vulnerability, negotiate boundaries and take responsibility for another woman’s trust. Her musical training gives her patience and precision, but the apprenticeship asks more of her than technical accomplishment.

Then Alison arrives to rebuild Helena’s workshop equipment. Practical, outspoken and absorbed in her craft, the joiner draws Victoria into an attraction neither woman can act upon. Working together brings them close enough to make Victoria’s promise increasingly difficult to keep.

When the year ends, Victoria must put her learning into practice. Her developing relationship with Alison takes her beyond the controlled circumstances of Helena’s house, into the intimacy of sharing a home, admitting uncertainty and discovering what they each want. Her attraction to Helena further complicates the boundaries between pupil, Mistress and lover.

As Victoria begins to establish a life on her own terms, Alison’s craftsmanship and their shared ambitions suggest a venture of their own: La Petite Mort.

Told as the first half of Victoria Fraser’s memoir, The Making of a Mistress: The Heriot Row Years follows the education, desire and love that begin to shape the woman at the heart of the Awakening of Desire series.

- Slow-burn sapphic romance
- Forbidden touch
- Mutual pining
- Mentor and protégée
- Awakening dominance
- Domme/sub relationship
- Opposites attract
- Sexual self-discovery
- Desire and denial
- Voyeurism and exhibitionism
- Found family
- Domestic tenderness
- Building a life together

## Chapter One

The tide was out at Cramond, and the causeway to the island lay bare and shining, a concrete chain the last war had left behind. I freewheeled the last of the esplanade with my music bag across my back, took the lane by the old Kirk at twenty-eight minutes past four, and noted I was two minutes early, a fact which would matter to nobody, except me.

The white cottage sat opposite the Kirk with its gable to the road, as though it had chosen to shun potential visitors since the last brick was put in place and found no reason since to turn back. Six weeks of Tuesdays and Thursdays had taught me its habits. The gate needed lifting before it would open. The path was mossy under the rowan and lethal after rain. And somewhere between the gate and the front door, a curtain in the upstairs window would twitch with all the subtlety of a fire alarm.

It twitched.

I propped my bike against the hedge and didn’t look up. I had been thirteen once myself, although I had chosen to spend it on scales. Or perhaps not chosen, but certainly been strongly persuaded of the merits of that path.

Mr Aitken was at the vegetable beds, forking over the emptied potato patch. He straightened when he heard the gate and gave me the nod he probably gave the postman and, I suspected, the Queen, should the Queen ever cycle out from town with a satchel of Chopin.

“She’s been at it since lunch,” he said. “You’ll have your work cut out finding anything left to teach.”

“I’ll have a dig about and see what I can find.”

That landed. I watched the creases around his eyes deepen. He wiped his brow with a handkerchief held tight in his soil-dark fingers.

“You and I both,” he said with a laugh, and returned to his fork.

The front door opened before I could knock. Mrs Aitken stood with her sleeves pushed up and the smell of hot sugar rolling out past her into the garden.

“Plum,” she said, in place of a greeting. “The tree’s had a year like you wouldn’t believe. In you come, and I’ll put the kettle on. I’ve put aside a couple of jars of my plum preserve for you as well, so remind me before you go or else I’ll forget. I’m at that age now.”

Inside, the hall was dim and cool, and smelt of cut flowers over the sugar. A carriage clock in the snug was taking its time over the afternoon, and the kitchen door stood open, its warmth arriving sugar-heavy, steaming up the window above the sink.

The kitchen was jam. There was no other word for the state of it: two pans going on the stove and an army of sterilised jars queuing on a tea towel. Wasps held a vigil at the window. Through the hall, the piano was working through arpeggios with an unnatural patience for a ten-year-old.

“She’ll not have heard you over herself.” Mrs Aitken lifted a pan off the heat. “Go through. And Victoria, tell her the C sharp is good now. She’ll not believe it from me. I’m only the woman who feeds her.”

“It is good,” I said. “You have a good ear.”

“And a thin door.” She cocked one eyebrow, the corners of her mouth lifting.

The front room held the piano, the good china behind glass, an old leather sofa and two well-loved armchairs. Freya sat on the piano stool with her back straight as a washing board, brown plaits hanging parallel, and didn’t stop until the arpeggio reached its ceiling and came back down.

“Miss Fraser.” She said it to the keys.

“Freya.” I drew the stool from under the window and set it alongside her, close enough to see the hands, far enough not to crowd them. “Your grandmother says the C sharp minor is good.”

Freya considered this, unsmiling as a traffic warden. “It’s better.”

“Play me the waltz.”

The waltz was the small Chopin in A minor, the posthumous one, and it was a good deal of music to ask of a ten-year-old, except that Freya wasn’t a ten-year-old in any sense that mattered at the keys. I had heard her play it a fortnight ago and felt the hair rise on my arms. The child had something I couldn’t remember ever having myself, and I wasn’t sure what to call it. Ease was the closest word I had.

I watched her set her hands now and saw the trouble before a note had sounded. It was in the shoulders. They came up a half-inch as her fingers found the opening chord, the same half-inch a swimmer takes before cold water. I saw it, and said nothing, because you learn more from the fall than the flinch.

The opening went beautifully. The waltz turned on its heel, melancholy and neat, and Freya rode it, and then came the middle section, eight bars marked dolce where the tune stops dancing and starts confiding, and Freya went through it like a woman late for a bus.

“Stop.”

Freya stopped.

“What’s the marking, bar nine?”

“Dolce.”

“Which means?”

“Sweetly.” A pause. “Softly-sweetly.”

“And what would you say that was, just there?”

Freya looked at her hands as though they belonged to a sibling she was tired of covering for. “Efficient,” she said.

I stopped myself from smiling. “The notes were right.”

“The notes are easy there. It goes slow. I don’t need to practise the easy bits.”

It was a respectable lie, except that it was really two, not one, and I had heard both of them before from children and from grown musicians who should have known better. The slow bars weren’t easy. The slow bars were where the piece stopped being fingerwork and became a voice, and a voice can be heard, and being heard was the one thing this child wasn’t prepared to risk in a house where the kettle went on the moment anyone fell quiet.

I didn’t say any of that, though. I might only have been twenty-three, but I wasn’t a fool.

“Budge up,” I said instead.

Freya budged. I took the bass end of the stool and played the eight bars myself, and I committed: I draped the phrase in so much sweetness it could barely walk, swooning on every third beat, the musical equivalent of a Valentine’s card bought at a petrol station.

Freya’s mouth twitched. Then it broke. The giggle escaped before the child could stop it.

“Like that?” I said.

“No.” Freya pressed her lips together and lost. “That was horrible.”

“It was dolce.”

“It was too much.”

“Show me how much, then.”

And Freya, still half-laughing, put her hands back and showed me exactly how much, and the eight bars came out unhurried and honest, because being right mattered more to Freya than being hidden. Out in the hall, the floor gave one small creak and then nothing, which meant Mrs Aitken had stopped walking, to listen.

The trouble had never been in Freya’s hands. It rarely was.

We worked the section twice more, and I was writing the practice note in the margin when the door opened without any knock and a tray arrived, and behind the tray, holding it like a diplomatic passport, came the sister.

“Gran said you’d want tea and juice,” said Abby.

The tray also carried shortbread arranged in a fan and a paper napkin folded into a triangle. Abby herself had just brushed her hair, the static a giveaway, and was wearing, at ten past five on a school day, what I was fairly sure counted as her good top.

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s kind.”

“It’s nothing.” Abby set the tray down as though defusing it, and then failed to leave. She stood by the piano, gathering herself towards something rehearsed on the stairs. “My friend Emma says trainee teachers aren’t real teachers yet.”

“Your friend Emma is right.”

Abby had prepared for several answers and this hadn’t been among them. She rallied. “I told her you were basically a concert pianist.”

“Then you owe Emma an apology.”

“But you play at the school. Freya said you played at the Christmas thing and everyone stopped talking. Even the parents. And parents never stop talking.”

“Abby.” Freya didn’t look up from the score. “You’re breathing on my music.”

“I’m being hospitable.”

“You’re being weird.”

Abby turned a shade to rival her grandmother’s ripest plums and withdrew with tremendous dignity, the paper napkin clenched in one fist, closing the door behind her.

Freya turned the page. “She practised the tray,” she said. “I watched her do a lap of the kitchen with it.”

“The napkin was folded very well.”

“She’s thirteen,” said Freya, as a diagnosis, and there being nothing to add to that, we returned to Chopin.

The lesson ran its ninety minutes and slightly over, because the last ten went on the new piece, which Freya picked up and played almost without effort, as she did most things at a keyboard. At St Mary’s, I spent my days among gifted children. The word was staffroom furniture, a general condition, sometimes inconvenient. But once or twice a year the department went quiet over somebody, and I had come to understand that Freya Mason was going to be one of the quiet ones, and that my own part was to keep the child’s hands honest for a few seasons and then stand aside and be a name in a programme note if I was lucky. I packed the scores away with the feeling I sometimes had out on the causeway: firm ground underfoot, and the water already on its way.

In the kitchen the jam had reached the stage of being decanted, and Mrs Aitken pressed a warm jar on me before I was fully through the door. This was the toll of the house and there was no refusing it.

“For your toast,” said Mrs Aitken. “Or eat it off a spoon like the rest of us, I’ll not judge. How was she?”

“She’s leaving me behind. I have another year of pretending otherwise, maybe two.”

“And you’ll not say that to her.”

“I’ll not say that to her, no. Not yet.”

Mrs Aitken nodded, wiping the jar with a cloth. The jar didn’t need wiping. She was watching me over the top of it, taking a long, honest measure of me, as grandmothers do when they’ve ended up raising children a second time.

“She laughed today,” Mrs Aitken said. “Through in there. During her lesson.”

“She did.”

“That’s twice this month I’ve heard that.” The jar was clean and got wiped again anyway. “Whatever it is you’re teaching her, keep on just the way you are.”

For a moment there was no sound in the kitchen but the buzz of a sugar-drunk wasp. I knew the parents were dead and no more than that, and didn’t ask. I put the jam in my satchel between the Chopin and the Czerny.

“And yourself?” Mrs Aitken’s voice came back up to its working brightness. “When they’ve finished training you. What then?”

“There may be a post at the school next autumn. The head of department has hinted.”

“A post at St Mary’s.” Mrs Aitken said it as you’d read out a raffle prize. “Your mother must be pleased.”

“Everyone is pleased,” I said, and heard, too late, what I had given away. Mrs Aitken, mercifully, was already back at her pans.

The evening had come down with a soft blue haze when I wheeled the bike out through the gate, and the older sister was stationed at the hedge for no apparent reason.

“Oh,” said Abby. “Hi. I was just…”

I waited, with interest, to learn what Abby was just. Nothing arrived. The rest of it was lost in the pink flush climbing her neck and invading the poor girl’s cheeks.

“Good evening, Abby.”

“Do you go past the esplanade?” It came out in one piece, rehearsed like the tray, but fast, before her nerve could go. “Because there’s fireworks Saturday. Off the island. Everyone’s going. Not everyone. People are.”

“I’m working Saturday,” I said, which was true, in that I would be playing background Debussy for a private party in town for actual money, and such was my week that this passed for glamour.

“Right. Obviously. You’d have things.” Abby nodded several more times, until it was on the verge of becoming a twitch, and then, from somewhere, produced a full sentence. “Freya plays better on the days you come.”

It was said just like that, without the tray or the top, and it was kind.

“She plays better on the days she laughs,” I said. “I just happen to be there.”

I swung my leg over onto the bike. At the bend by the Kirk I allowed myself one glance back, and the girl was still at the gate, one hand raised in a wave she’d decided against midway, so that it hung there, half in surrender. I lifted a hand off the handlebar in return and took the hill.

The tide was coming in across the causeway now, sliding over the sand in long dark sheets, the concrete chain going under one link at a time. Far out, the lights of a tanker sat on the water, a row of candles somebody had set there to brighten the evening. I rode the esplanade into the wind and found I wasn’t thinking about the waltz. I was thinking about a half-inch of shoulder, and a laugh arriving in a front room like a window opened, and how I had known before a single note that the trouble would be in bar nine. Nobody had taught me that.

The teaching post would still be there if I went looking for it, waiting like a piece I could already play.