Unobtainium 1: Kate on a Hot Tin Roof by Niall Teasdale Read Free Book Online

will. Then I will not say. Father did not like me saying what I think. I am good at that too.’
    ‘Beautiful, perceptive, and wise beyond your years. Lilian really will like you.’
    20 th April.
    Kate ate breakfast in the dining car very carefully. The thought occurred to Charles that the girl had almost certainly learned to use a knife and fork in the last few days; she was uneasy with the implements and even a little unsure of the food. He had never thought to question what she had been eating for the last few years, but she ate with the air of someone who wanted to bolt down her food and was controlling herself. The black pudding on the plate was particularly perplexing for her. Charles had never liked the stuff, primarily because when he was a child the family cook had always managed to turn it into something akin to shotgun wadding. Kate poked at it, cut off a small piece to try, and then her eyes widened and she tucked into the rest of it with gusto. Charles quietly moved his own slices to Kate’s plate, grinning as he did so.
    The horror of the corset had not been nearly as bad as Charles had thought it would be. Kate was already dressed in thick stockings, a thin, cotton chemise, and a pair of cotton bloomers when she knocked on the connecting door. He was dimly aware that the design of the latter garment still had a split crotch, but there was nothing visible and, as Antonia had said, he had seen her in less. He focussed on that and not the way the chemise actually seemed to make her moderately large breasts more erotic.
    That task was made simpler by having to concentrate on what he could only describe as some form of Chinese puzzle: the laces on the short corset. Kate explained what had to be done, but it still took a good five minutes to get all the tensions right so that the pressure was even all the way down, not too tight, but tight enough. There had been a movement in the latter part of the old century against tight lacing. Wasp waists had been the expression of beauty in a woman, but the tight corsets had resulted in organ damage, fractured ribs, and the tendency to faint. Kate would have had the considerable advantage of having that sort of figure without having to be placed in strict bondage to achieve it.
    Still, Charles had had to comment that ‘There has to be a better way to do this’ when they were finally finished.
    Their surroundings continued to fascinate Kate. It seemed to Charles the most natural thing possible: the girl had seen little more than the inside of her cell for five years and was, obviously, keen to see what was outside it. As they finished breakfast, they were getting closer to Edinburgh and the landscape was changing from the wild Scottish lowland scenery to a more urban form.
    Kate savoured the last mouthful of eggs and black pudding, swallowed, and asked, ‘Are we now at your home?’
    ‘Not yet. We are barely half of the way there, in fact. This is Edinburgh, the jewel of Scotland. Here we change trains to another, slightly smaller one, which will take us to Ullapool. We should be there not long after midday and I have arranged for us to be met there to continue on by road to Rhidorroch.’
    ‘Rhidorroch,’ Kate said, rolling the sound around in her mouth like more of the black pudding. ‘I like it. It is a name you can taste.’
    ‘It’s from Scottish Gaelic, An Ruigh Dhorcha. It’s a deer estate, with lots of land around the hall.’
    ‘ Lots of land?’ Kate asked, her eyes widening.
    ‘Lots.’
    Ullapool, Ross-shire.
    The town of Ullapool had once been a fairly sleepy harbour for fishing boats and with something of a reputation for local music. Then Hunter Hall had discovered the telltale signs of Unobtainium in the rocks around the town and everything had changed. For several decades the scenery around the town had been marred by the huge lift derricks required to lower men into the mines, but they had modernised to fully electric lifts, powered by an