The incredible tale of a black man's journey from Africa to cruel slavery in the Old South. Betrayed, beaten and forced to perform outrageously demeaning acts, he waits for a moment of revenge.
The slave masters are sexually perverse and sadistically inclined. They beat and defile their slaves for sexual titillation, then perform on each other completely immoral acts.
The exposure of slavery at its very worst, at a time when all men were treated, or acted, as dogs.
CHAPTER ONE
Cebo, chieftain of the Mopti, edged forward on his belly, sucking in his breath as his strong right hand gripped the haft of the iron-headed spear. He had trailed the lean, black-maned lion for over three hours, after following the spoor left by the killer beast which had three times within the last moon raided the village of Mopti whose king he was. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun beat scorchingly down upon his sinewy, bronzed body, naked save for loincloth made of a zebra skin and the strong sandals which his beautiful young wife Itulde had fashioned for him with her own hands.
He had come more than two miles from the branch of the Niger River which wound just to the north of his village, in search of this predatory hunter who, having grown old and fearful, now dared to strike down children and women as his prey. It was imperative that he, Cebo, King of the Mandingos, prove his valor to his tribe. Surely his brother, fat and slothful Bulmanayo, would never do so. A mirthless smile curved his lips at the thought. Nay,-likelier that Karmida, that beauteous shrew whom his brother had taken to wife, would herself have taken up the lion spear and followed the murderous beast than Bulmanayo, two years younger than himself and already an old woman, full of fears and superstitions and hesitations.
It was good that there had been no doubt about the succession when, last year, their father had died of the black flux. Old Murbaya had ruled the Mopti for thirty years and his deeds were as valorous as those of any tribal king the Mandingos had ever known ... aye, as valorous even as those of Mfumbe, who ruled the fierce Zulus more than a thousand miles to the south. The old witch doctor Jabkri had proclaimed at once that Cebo, being the elder son, must ascend the throne.
His senses keened as he heard a soft coughing roar beyond and above him. He lay in a grassy knoll, behind which towered a huge baobab tree; scarcely a hundred feet beyond was a small ridge of irregular and jagged rocks, rising perhaps twenty feet above the ground. The fearful called these The Caves of the Dead, for once, many moons ago before even the oldest villager now alive could recall, it had been said that an army of the Ashanti tribe had crept treacherously along this pathway towards the Niger intent on massacring the inhabitants of the little villages along the river so that their ambitious king might extend his sway and, in a great howling of wind and rolling of thunder, there had poured forth demons from The Caves of the Dead and dispersed and slain them.
Cebo smiled again. Such stories were for the children and the old women. Yes, and for his brother too. But this was the best way of proving his right to the crown of the Mandingos, for in the year which had followed he had felt himself unworthy of taking his beloved father's place. He had been more like a moonstruck youth, content to stay in his hut and to make love to Itulde, whom he had wed the very day of his ascension to the throne of the Mopti.
He edged forward now a little, shading his eyes from the sun with his cupped left hand, and he thought he saw a movement out of the nearest cave-like aperture in the rocks beyond and above. What he must do would be to entice the beast to leap down upon him so that he could plant the spear into the soft earth and impale the killer. He had at eighteen killed his first lion and five thereafter till the day he took the crown of the Mandingos. But this past year had been one of comfort and peace and contentment with his lovely bride. All that concerned him was her barrenness, for her mother before her and that mother before in turn had been as fertile as the swift eland. Nor was it for lack of trying as he lay upon the lion skin which served them both as bed and thrust his fierce manhood deep into Itulde's soft and tightening cavern till she drained him of all his seed in that sweet, husky-voiced and shuddering way she had of announcing her own delight.
It was true that she was only nineteen, but then there were wives in the village of Mopti who had borne two or three sons by that time. And, for all he knew, Karmida, his brother's wife, might even now be with child. If aught should befall him to cast him from the throne; if Itulde should die barren, then it would be Bulmanayo who would wear the crown in his stead, and that must not be!
Well he knew that Karmida hated him, had ever since the night-just a month before his coronation-when he had gone down to the river to offer a prayer to the River God Lagosti to give his father back his strength and health. She had crept through the trees, as silent as the adder gliding along the earth, and touched him. When he had whirled, she had smiled at him and loosened her garment and murmured, "Will you not look with favor upon me, Cebo? I could not sleep, and so I came to tell you that my thighs hunger for your manhood."
But even if he had known the least lust for her-and he had not-he could not then have taken her, not with his father's illness weighing upon his mind. This he had told her, and her smile had turned to a look of hatred and contempt and she had turned back along the trail and vanished. Then, two months after his marriage to Itulde, she had cozened fat Bulmanayo into marriage. Oh, she was plump and comely, but her eyes were shifty and her mouth could drip venom as well as honey; but what she had done was to rouse his lethargic brother into thinking that he was a man when all in the village knew that Bulmanayo was a coward, terrified even of the dung beetle which might crawl across the threshold of his hut.
Once again he heard the coughing roar and inched forward a little more towards the ledge of rocks. His body glistened with sweat and the sun consumed it almost instantly. From afar he could hear the cawing of a crow. He must wait until the beast showed itself and then provoke it into the leap to death. Having tasted human blood so often-though its victims had been only two young women and a child-the black-maned killer could surely not be brave enough to seek him out in combat unless it were certain of victory. Now had it killed strong warriors, that would be another story.
And as he lay there, Cebo thought to himself how curious it was that in the past few moons Karmida had been gentle and kind to his wife. Itulde had fallen ill just after her monthly time, and Karmida had insisted upon nursing her and feeding her. Itulde had told him this and he had been puzzled and wary. Perhaps, after all, she was content with his brother and with the importance of being wife to the next in succession to the Mandingo throne. Perhaps wisdom had come to her, and it should, for she was four and twenty, the same age as his brother but old for a woman. For a moment his mind dwelt upon the obscenity of the two of them coupling and then rejected it. He did not even believe that Bulmanayo was any more a man in the embrace of love than at the hunt or by the council fires....
In his hut, fat Bulmanayo lay upon a zebra skin, munching upon kernels of dried corn, and Karmida knelt beside him, her face crafty and her eyes heavy-lidded. "What does my lord and husband think of what I have done?" she murmured seductively as she put forth a hand toll wards the loincloth which the fat young Man-dingo wore.
Bulmanayo, who lay upon his back, stretched and yawned slothfully. "A fine notion if it works. But perhaps Cebo has already planted his seed time enough into the womb of Itulde to get her with child. Even should Cebo be taken by the slavers, his child, not I, would be king. This is our tribal law, woman."
"Have no fear, my noble husband," Karmida smiled but her words were acid with sarcasm. "She is not with child. I have given her ergot, each time before the curse of woman is upon her, and it has come. And these past weeks I have fed her the datura, the powder that is made by crushing the plantain weed. She will not conceive, o my husband."
"You have done well, Karmida. And the Arab has promised you gold?" Bulmanayo put one fat hand to the back of his head and propped himself up to regard his kneeling wife, his thick lips curving in a smirk of pleasure.
"Much gold, o my husband."
"Then he would give as much again for the wife of Cebo, since a female slave as comely as she would be welcome in the harems of the shiekhs or in the great palaces of the lords of the East."
"You speak with great wisdom, as befits one who shall be king of the Mopti," Karmida purred. "The Arab and his men camp in the forest to the north of our village. I myself will go to him and tell him that he must pay me also for Itulde, once Cebo is taken. Then you need fear your brother's taunts no longer, and I, I too, shall be avenged."
"Why do you hate my brother so, woman?" Bulmanayo asked, his beady eyes narrowing with suspicion.
"I hate him because he is king and my husband is not," Kormida lied. "I will do honor to my husband as king of the Mandingos of the Mopti. I will exalt him." Then, leaning towards him, she whispered, "Will my husband permit his worthless wife to please him in the way he desires most of all?"
Bulmanayo sucked in his breath and nodded, his pink tongue wetting his quivering lips.
Karmida sinuously moved on her knees beside him. Her deft fingers loosened the loincloth, then caressed his testicles. She bent her head and her lips nuzzled the dormant tip of his penis. Bulmanayo whimpered like a woman and closed his eyes as his body tautened.
"Lie still, o my husband, o my king to be," Karmida crooned
Another wearying hour had passed, but the black-maned lion still skulked in its protective cave. Cebo ground his teeth with mounting anger at the cowardly beast. Well, he must provoke it now before darkness fell, for then it might well escape and come back to slay again and again. He began to crawl forward. When he reached the end of the grassy knoll, the ledge lay perhaps fifteen feet beyond. Straining his eyes, he could see again the head of the beast in that shadowy entry of that nearest cave. His left hand brushed something and he glanced momentarily at it. It was a sturdy plantain. For a moment his eyes flickered back to the ledge above and beyond, and then he turned his head to stare at the weed and a terrible comprehension gripped. Datura ... it was known by the witch doctors in every village as a seeping poison that would make a woman's womb reject the seed of her mate. Now he knew with terrible certainty why Itulde had fallen ill, why she was barren. That evil bitch Karmida had put datura into the food she had brought his lissome young wife. His fingers dug into the haft of the heavy spear and his eyes blazed with anger. Now he could see it all. It was Karmida's revenge because he had spited her in rejecting her. She had married his fat worthless brother so that she could scheme, so that she could make Bulmanayo share her ambition to be the queen of the Mopti. Well, when he returned from the hunt this sundown, the whole village should know of the treachery of his brother's wife. They would beat her and stone her and drive her forth into the jungle. Even the witch doctor Jafkri would pronounce such a sentence without hesitation.
But then he heard the coughing roar louder than ever, and as he glanced up he saw that the lean, gaunt black-maned beast had emerged from the dark aperture of the cave into the dimming sunlight, crouching there on the edge of the ledge, its baleful yellow eyes staring down at him.
He knelt up quickly, calling out in a hoarse, thirst-parched voice a Mandingo's taunt to a cowardly enemy: "Ho, spawn of hyena dung, do you show yourself at last?" And as he called, he swiftly dug the wooden haft of the spear into the soft earth, gripped it with both hands and his biceps rippled as, with all his strength, he dug the haft as far as it would go.
The lion sprang through the air and for an instant Cebo's heart was in his mouth. He crouched, his hands gripping the shaft, as the beast came down upon him ... down straight upon the head of the spear. A maddened coughing, gurgling sound ripped from the beast. In its death throes, its left paw struck Cebo a glancing blow on the shoulder, the dewclaws tearing the flesh. But the iron head of the spear had found the heart, and the black-maned killer lay on its side, the wooden haft of the spear cracked off by its weight.
Cebo staggered erect, seized the broken haft, and with all his strength tugged the bloody blade free. Then, with a shout of triumph, he made his way back to his village, heedless of the painful-but slight-gash in his shoulder.
CHAPTER TWO
The wiry black-bearded slave trader Mougar ben Ali chuckled with contempt at the ways of infidels and savages. By the beard of the Prophet, wherever one could evoke jealousy and hatred among giaours and blacks alike, a diligent and imaginative true believer could come by a handsome profit. Today's work alone would bring him much gold, and after he had delivered the coffle of shackled slaves to the Portuguese captain whose ship was lying at anchor off Conakry on the Guinea Coast-but two weeks' overland journey from here-he could return to his own little villa in Port Said and there enjoy the fruits of his leisure with some delightful young handmaiden whom he would buy for himself. Perhaps it would be one of the young Furlani virgins, or again a buxom Ashanti wench just out of puberty.
All of this happy prospect because of the simple accident of family hatreds, he thought cynically to himself. That woman Karmida from the village of Mopti had already secretly come to his camp to tell him how he might surprise and enslave Cebo, the young king of that village. Mougar ben Ah had pricked up his ears at this news, for a strong Mandingo male and above all a king who could slay a lion with a spear, would fetch a staggering price from the Portuguese slaver. And yet, having already made his bargain with the woman, she had returned to him only an hour ago to urge him to abduct also a comely Man-dingo girl; not a virgin, true enough, but young and of great beauty-and the wife of this selfsame king Karmida was delivering up to him. Praise to Allah that there was envy among the infidels and the savages; it made for good trading!
Mougar ben Ali beckoned to his lieutenant, a swarthy pockmarked Bedouin named Ishmael ben Nurali, who had for ten prospering years served him well in the capture of prize slaves whose taking called for more skill than a mere raid in force upon a native village. He spoke swiftly, and the Bedouin listened, then turned to his three strong and crafty Senegalese bearers. Long ago, these three had themselves been slaves, captured in a raid on their own village by a rival Arab trader whom, in the course of inimical competition, Mougar ben Ali had himself slain. He had given the bearers their freedom on condition they would work with him; they had sworn on the bones of their fathers to serve him and do what was ordered of them. Thus, they looked aside as to the treachery of delivering their own black brothers up to bondage; and they were as ruthless as the stalking leopard once on the trail of a valuable prize. The Bedouin instructed them how best to overpower and take Cebo prisoner as he returned to his village after the hunt for the killer lion which had menaced the village of Mopti.
Mougar ben Ali had let the woman Karmida play an important part in this capture of Cebo and his woman. He had instructed her to hurry back to Mopti to tell Itulde that Cebo had been severely clawed by the black-maned lion and might not live. Then, when Itulde would hasten towards The Caves of the Dead in search of her mate, two other skillfully trained bearers would seize her and add her to this long, shackled coffle which already numbered over two hundred men, women and children destined for the cargo holds of the Portuguese slave ship and thence either to Havana or Mobile for sale as human cattle costlier by far than their animal counterparts and certain to suffer more insidiously than dumb brutes eventually slaughtered for food. For these human slaves were to feed other, crueler appetites by far than mere hunger ... .
It pleased the Arabian slave dealer to let Karmida go back to her village without telling her that at nightfall, when all in Mopti should be asleep, his raiders would fall upon them and take many more slaves-her, first of all. Thus he would regain the few gold coins he had given this treacherous Mandingo bitch, and Allah Himself would applaud such a just punishment for her act of betrayal against her brother-in-law and his wife...
The three brawny Senegalese waited behind thick hedges along the path on which Cebo trotted back towards Mopti. They saw how proudly he held aloft the bloodied spearhead fixed to the broken haft which he had tugged from the heart of the black-maned lion, and they knew they must take him by stealth. One of them, creeping out from the hedge behind him, struck Cebo a fierce blow across the back of his skull with a club made from the wood of the baobab tree, and felled him to the ground. His two companions bound the young Mandingo hand and foot, then trundled him back to the camp of their master. Meanwhile, the other two bearers lay in wait for Itulde.
The young bride of Cebo, thinking only of her husband's agony, not even thinking to question wily Karmida's news in her devotion and love for Cebo, had sobbingly hurried toward the path near the river so as to follow her husband's trail on to The Caves of the Dead. It was easily, swiftly done. One Senegalese bearer clapped his hand over Itulde's mouth, his companion twisted the young woman's arms behind her back and bound her wrists with a rawhide thong. Then both men lifted her and bore her back to the camp of Mougar ben Ali, taking care to place her in their master's hut so the Mandingo king would not see her and perhaps try to kill the raiders in his attempt to save her.
When the jackal barked at midnight near their camp, Mougar ben Ali and his aide Ishmael ben Nurali exchanged a smile: "It is a good omen," said the Arab as he gave the sign to his men. Thirty bearers with spears and muskets crept towards the sleeping village. Karmida, in betraying Cebo out of her lust for power, had unwittingly let the wily slave trader know that few warriors guarded the village, for the Mandingos of Mopti lived in peace under their ruler. So there was no fear of a pitched battle; the watchful sentry at the edge of the village who might have sounded an alarm was at once silenced by an assegai flung out of a thicket into his broad back...
An hour later, some twenty men, as many women and a dozen children, wrists shackled behind them and united on that communal chain, were herded back to Mougar ben Ali's camp. Among them was Karmida. Her fat young husband Bulmanyo had had a spear thrust through his fat belly, and he had died like a coward, weepingly begging the Senegalese bearer to spare his life. Karmida had been a little surprised at this, but believed it was even better: now she would be queen of the Mopti. But when the slavers' men had dragged her out of her husband's hut and bound her to the others, she had shrieked aloud, "No, no, not me! Why do you chain me? Did I not give you Cebo and Itulde to earn my freedom?" And so the men and women of Mopti spat at her, knowing what evil she had done.
She had shrieked so loudly that the bearers had had to gag her, and when they reached camp, they took her out of the coffle and flung her down in the hut of Mougar ben Ali. Karmida's maddened, tear-blurred eyes fell on Itulde, who lay there near the door, herself bound and gagged. And the wife of Cebo saw the betrayer of her husband and herself come now to her own justice.
"In the morning, let that one be pegged out and given the whip, it will bridle her lying and treacherous tongue," Mougar ben Ali decreed.
"For her I reserve the auction block at Port Said. Who knows, I may even decide to keep her as my own concubine. For the Prophet has said that verily those who dig a pit for others shall fall into it themselves."
The bearers who had brought Karmida to his tent saluted and vanished, and Mougar ben Ali flung himself down on his rude bed, first blowing out the kerosene lamp on the little table beside him. He removed his boots, but kept on his burnous, for a successful slaver must always be wary of attack. Not only was his coffle of prize slaves tempting bait for a rival such as the rogue who had once owned those three sturdy Senegalese hunters of slaves, but its potential wealth could tempt many a warrior tribe into destroying the slavers and themselves taking the coffle to another purchaser.
But as the night was still, Mougar ben Ali's who lay almost side by side, bound and gagged and helpless before him. Itulde closed her eyes, shuddered with despair as she saw his crafty eyes appraise her. But at last his gaze turned to Karmida, and his thin lips twisted in a sadistic, gloating smile. Through her gag, there emerged some muffled words of the lingua franca, a communal tongue he could understand. He understood only too well: she repented her treachery, she besought him to spare her and to give her back her freedom.
It pleased him even more to lie there and to consider with infinite savor what he was going to do, while Karmida's suspense and anguish grew by degrees. He pretended to be asleep, and to snore. Not without amorous sagacity, for he was a true voluptuary, he prolonged the actual moment of his rape till the aching of his prick was intolerable-and even beyond that, proud of his Herculean self-control. In this wise, perhaps an hour went by.
Then very silently Mougar ben Ali eased himself down from his bed and groped with his hands. His fingers first encountered the satiny warm flesh of Cebo's wife, who, waking in terror, uttered a muffled cry and struggled. But it was not Itulde he sought.
Karmida came awake to feel Mougar ben Ali's sinewy fingers ripping from her plump brown-skinned body the gay multicolored tunic which had been part of the payment he had given her for Cebo. Yes, she had asked for gold, and he had even given her a few pieces, even then knowing in the end how he would get them back. Just as he had known that this bitch would have betrayed Cebo for nothing at all, hot as she was to have her fat coward of a mate made king.
Karmida's wrists had been bound behind her back, and her ankles lashed together so tightly that the circulation had stopped. But the Arab did not remove her fettering; it suited his purpose. And now he had stripped her naked. His hands clenched over the uptilting, closely spaced globes of her panting breasts. After lustfully squeezing them for a few moments, he put his right hand to the folds of his burnous, opened them, as well as his coarse under drawers to bare the lean, bony, plump-headed spear of his manhood, whose shaggy hairs covered the scrotum and the gnarled testicles laden with copious gismic fluid. Now Karmida understood his intent; crazed by fear and loathing, she tried to twist herself onto her side, tried to shriek for help-though even had she managed this through her gag, no help would have come.
"Mandingo bitch, I'll pay you," he growled at her partly in Arabic, partly in lingua franca which was universal tongue to many tribes, "Yes, I'll pay you well! Tomorrow when you're pegged out, I'll have Burbo, who's an artist with the lash, make you wriggle like a houri in that paradise which Mahomet promises the faithful. Ah, yes, you'll see! But now this is payment of a kind as well, to show you what a man, not a weakling like your Bulmanayo, does with a bitch who has ideas beyond her station!" His hands reached under her now to grip the tightly spaced ripe oval cheeks of her bottom, as he gouged his prick against the furry thatch of her cunt.
In the darkness, young Itulde could hear the scuffling, and through it her straining eyes made out the figure of the slave dealer crouching over her naked, fettered sister-in-law.
Mougar ben Ali greedily followed Karmida's every squirming twist as she frantically sought to prevent this ignoble and sure-to-be-painful rape. Once, he managed to insert his prickhead just between the soft lips of her quim; but with a desperate strength summoned out of her loathing and shame, Karmida managed to jerk her loins to one side, and his cock slipped out.
But he was in no hurry whatsoever. The musky smell of her, the satiny feel of her writhing nakedness, the thought of how he had paid her back for all her cunning, augmented his rut. It had been long since he had last fucked a woman, and he wished to spin it out to the fullest.
His fingers cruelly sank into the resilient hillocks of her behind, mastering her as again his prick gouged against the thickly fleeced aperture. With a gurgling, stifled cry, Karmida felt the Arab's cock force apart the lips of her vulva as, giving a violent forward thrust, he crammed himself deep into her love chasm. Because her ankles were so tightly bound and she had instinctively clenched her thighs with all her strength to avert this violation, the friction of Mougar ben Ali's ramrod as he pitilessly dug into her was agonizing. Her face twisted this way and that, her eyes bulging and glassy with tears; her nostrils flared and shrank as she jerked her bound wrists under her in a mad effort to arch and twist herself away. But this time, she could not avert his conquest.
Deeply he furrowed and plowed her, drawing back only to thrust home again and ceaselessly again, till Karmida felt herself lacerated and chafed agonizingly by his penetration. Then, with a hoarse shout, Mougar ben Ali felt himself explode, and Karmida, the woman who would have been queen of the Mopti, stiffened and sobbed in her despair and disgust as she felt the hot flood of his profaning seed splash deep into her tortured cunt. . .
Her violator had risen almost at dawn to give final orders for the trek which would end at the harbor where the Portuguese ship awaited them. But first, there was the matter of her punishment, and Mougar ben Ali did not intend to forego this enjoyable interlude, especially because of the value it would have as an example for all the other slaves.
Itulde, weeping, was led out of the Arab's hut by a huge Senegalese guard named Burbo, and another guard helped Burbo shackle Cebo's young bride to the very end of the coffle. Cebo himself could see this, and he uttered a strident cry of soul-agony, his eyes blazed and his chest heaved as he tried to break the strong metal chain. Cebo bore the flogging stoically, but his ions. But Burbo, seizing a sjambok, applied half dozen ferocious slashes of the rhinoceros hide lash over Cebo's back and shoulders, ordering him to submit and not to struggle with the chain. Cebo bore the glogging stoically, but his eyes fixed on the slim, lovely figure of his wife as if memorizing her beauty for all eternity.
Then two of the bearers dragged the still bound and gagged and naked Karmida from the slave dealer's hut. Four thick wooden pegs had been hammered into the ground, and the Senegalese forced Karmida down on her belly and held her while they corded her wrists and ankles to the pegs so that she was left hugely spread-eagled. One of them contemptuously squatted and tore away her gag, and at once Karmida began to babble in the lingua franca: "Have mercy! I do not deserve such punishment, not after what I have done for you, o Mougar ben Ali! You will earn much gold from the captives I have shown you how to take-oh why do you then have me whipped?"
Burbo, the giant Senegalese whose fustigatory artistry Mougar ben Ali had cited to Karmida, stared greedily down at the handsome plump naked victim offered to his talents. Striding into one of the huts nearby, he emerged with a long braided black leather whip affixed to a short, heavy, thick wooden stock. The whip itself was fully six feet in length, with knotted tip. Drawing the long lash back, Burbo made it crack ominously in the air several times over the stretched, shuddering naked body, and Karmida, twisting her contorted face back over her shoulder, uttered a craven scream: "Ohh not with that!! Oh have mercy!"
The Senegalese eyed his master questioningly. "Twenty, but don't cut the skin. I wish her to suffer, but not to be permanently marked," said Mougar ben Ali.
Burbo nodded, took his stance at a proper distance and to the left of the spread-eagled captive. Slowly, gripping the heavy stock in his thick black fingers, he drew back the whip and made the thong hum in the air as he whirled it round and round his head, his eyes never leaving the quivering naked body of the victim as he selected the place for the whip's first terrible caress. Suddenly there was a sickening crack as the black thong was released: with the skill of a virtuoso Burbo had attained Karmida's naked flesh only with the last few inches, which for an instant clung over the upper summits of her satiny naked bottom-cheeks, the knotted tip nipping the edge of one bare hip.
"Eeeeeeeeeeeeahrrrouuuouuuahrrrrrr!! ! Ohhh, mercy, mercy, Mougar ben Ali! Have pity on me!" Karmida shrieked, her body arching up from the pegs to which she was so tightly fixed.
With superb virtuosity and expert cruelty, Burbo played the braided whip across the sufferer's bottom and upper thighs, never once cutting the skin, but inflicting angry, darkening weals all over it. He took care not to crisscross any of the marks on her behind-which would assuredly have torn the skin and drawn blood-yet when he had finished, Karmida lay convulsively jerking and twisting, bathed in sweat, half-fainting, her throat raw from the prolonged, inhuman shriek which the whip had torn from her.
"To my hut with this creature who has demanded payment of our account, Burbo," Mougar ben Ali chuckled. "Salve her hurts, guard her; then, when she can walk, shackle her to the end of the coffle, even beyond Itulde. Now let us make haste to begin the long journey to the ship where, if it is the will of Allah the Most High, we shall have a more pleasant kind of payment, eh, Burbo?"
CHAPTER THREE
The long inland trek to the port of Conarky on the Guinea Coast was an indescribable hell for the young Mandingo king Cebo. He was shackled to the very head of the line in this coffle of captured slaves, while his beautiful young wife Itulde was the very last in that tragic processional of some two hundred destined for the Portuguese slaver. Mougar ben Ali, the Arabian slave dealer, was considerate enough to his victims, pausing several times during the torrid days of the march for a rest and water and food; but the burning sun, the ever-deadly tsetse fly, and the snakes like the deadly mamba, the puff adder and the cobra, which lurked silently in the thickets of heavy grass through which the slaves had to march, took their inevitable toll. By the end of the fortnight, some thirty-four men, women and children had died. Yet Mougar ben Ali was not displeased, for he foresaw that the profits gleaned on those who had survived would more than compensate him for his loss.
It was little comfort to Cebo to learn that his treacherous sister-in-law, Karmida, who had arranged for the slave dealer to abduct him and his wife, had herself become a slave and that his younger brother had been slain. For this proud young killer of lions resented the shackles of servitude, he who had always been free, and most of all he agonized over the fate of his beautiful young bride.
Others along that chained line had passed on to him the news of Karmida's treachery and subsequent fate and how often at night, when Mougur ben Ali rested in his hut, two of the Senegalese bearers dragged her into the hut to serve as the Arab's concubine. They did not harm Itulde, but Cebo was tortured by the thoughts of how he and Itulde would be separated once they were aboard the slaver bound for Havana or Mobile and how they were certain to be separated forever when sold.
And then at last came the fateful day when Cebo and his wretched companions in suffering were marched aboard the Portuguese vessel, while Mougar ben Ali and the captain of the slaver settled their business with the transfer of gold to the coffers of the slave dealer. Mougar ben Ali had decided to take Karmida back with him to Port Said. By now, the plump handsome wife of Bulmanayo had been thoroughly cowed by her black-bearded master; frequent whippings had made her comply with his most lecherous desires. What delighted him was her aptitude in kneeling between his straddled thighs and putting her mouth and tongue to his turgid prick, for he had discovered early in their relationship her talent for this servile manner of lovemaking. Bulmanayo, fat and almost impotent despite his youth, had not been able to service her, and in her feverish and almost insatiable needs, the woman whom Cebo had rejected had roused her husband to potency by dint of sucking and tonguing him.
Cebo learned, again from his fellows, some of whom comprehended a few words of Portuguese, that the vessel in which they were imprisoned was bound for Mobile and the great slave mart there. He had thought of escape often during this trek to the coast, but the Arabian slave dealer had seen to it that at night he was doubly shackled as well as blindfolded, and the same thing had been done to Itulde, for these two slaves were rare prizes and, indeed, the Portuguese captain had paid extraordinarily high prices for them.
But on the first day of the voyage, Cebo's tortured soul was to know the very nadir of black despair and misery, The male slaves had been locked in one section of the hold, communally shackled by a single chain made fast through the loops of their copper anklets which had been fixed on them by the Portuguese captain's blacksmith just before boarding. The women, however, some thirty-two in number, and none older than thirty, were quartered at the other side of the hold. Since the slaver's crew did not fear them, they were left unshackled and, because they were destined for the most part to be sold as bedmates for their future white owners, they were given better food then the men and the youths.
But that evening, just after sundown, Manuel Arrigar, the boatswain, a coarse, bearded ruffian in his early forties who had made many voyages with the same captain, went down into the women's section of the hold with bowls of rice and stew, but with his mind bent on satisfying his brutal lusts. He knew as well as his captain that to take the maidenhead of a young and comely Furlani or Ashanti or Mandingo would be to cut their value in half, but this did not apply to the married captives. And his greedy eyes had studied the shapely brown-skinned body of Itulde from the first moment that she was brought aboard the ship.
Having dispensed the half-dozen bowls of nourishment to the prettiest, he retained the largest for Itulde and moved to her now at one end of the hold as she crouched in the corner, weeping pitifully for the loss of her husband and for the ruination of their lives. She wore only a loincloth, and her round highset titties with their dusky wide coral aurolae had already inflamed him. The dainty crinkly nuggets of her nipples, and the soft tufts of black hair welling out of her armpits made him lick his lips as he moved towards her, a wheedling smile on his ugly face.
He spoke several African dialects, and, knowing her to be a Mandingo, addressed her in her own tongue: "Here, dark-eyed gazelle, see what I have brought you! It is because you have found favor in my eyes."
In the same tongue, Itulde, lifting her face and staring at him with revulsion, exclaimed, "Touch me not, white jackal! If my man were here, he would tear you to pieces as he had done to Hon!"
Manuel Arrigar burst into jeering laughter. He set down the bowl, then seized Itulde and crushed her against his panting chest, his thick lips slavering over her neck and shoulder. What satiny, smooth, warm brown skin the bitch had! He was almost tempted to buy her from the captain, but he knew this could not be. Yet who was to know if he were to enjoy himself for a few moments with her, since she spoke no Portuguese and could not complain of the assault?
Itulde uttered a strangled cry of abhorrence, jamming her palms up against his bearded chin to force him away from her. But he was much too strong and wiry, and his hands now grasped the loincloth and ripped it from her, and she was naked. His fingers greedily clutched the round upstanding hillocks of her behind, as he felt his prick stiffen with rut. She was up against the door of the hold which separated her from her husband, and she was helpless. The other women, staring dully or with curiosity, did not dare intervene. Three of them had already been flogged at the mast for having struck their captors at the moment of being brought aboard the vessel, and they were afraid.
Manuel Arrigar laughed gloatingly as he forced the naked, sobbing young woman up against the door, and, drawing back his right hand, fumbled with his breeches to liberate his aching prick. Itulde, without leverage, crushed back against the door, could not even bring up her knee into his crotch to defend herself. Her buttocks throbbed with pain from the brutal gouging of his fingers, and then she felt the hot turgid head of his cock probe through the black silky curls of her pubis and penetrate between the pink lips of her vulva. Her head tilted back, her eyes mad with horror and loathing, and again she uselessly pushed at his chin with both palms. With an oath, the brutal boatswain crammed his prick deep into her channel, pinning her to the door by that harpoon of rutting flesh. Then his hands began to squeeze and knead her titties, while his fetid mouth crushed her throat and her chin and cheeks and slobbering kisses as he began to fuck her.
Itulde shrieked out the name of her husband, and Cebo, who had already discovered where his wife was and had communicated with her by rapping against the other side of the door, heard her cries for aid. He began to hammer on the door with his fists, cursing and crying out in his Mandingo tongue. Hearing the clamor, the second mate, Felipe Luna, a burly, one-eyed rogue feared for his cruelty to the helpless blacks aboard this vessel, came down the wooden steps into the hold, a belaying pin clutched in his right hand and bellowed for silence.
In his rut, Manuel Arrigar toppled the naked young Mandingo woman to the floor and, mounted over her, accelerated the tempo of his thrusts deep into her womb. Beating her fists against his head, Itulde tried to uproot him, her knees aloft and digging at his hips, but in vain. She had averted her face to one side, tears flowing down her cheeks, and then, as his deeply hilting thrust hurt her, she raked her fingernails across the cheek of her ravisher, drawing blood.
With a bellow of rage, the brutal boatswain gushed his sperm into her sheath, wrenched himself out of her and staggered to his feet, a snarl on his ugly face. He put a hand to his cheek and stared at the blood on it, and then, bending down, his yellow teeth bared in a vicious rictus, seized her by the hair and dragged her to her feet sobbing for mercy.
"I'll teach you to mark me, you African sow!" he roared. Seizing her wrists in his other hand, he forced her up the wooden post at the back of the poopdeck which was used for flogging of rebellious slaves. In a trice, he had her wrists gripped in the iron gyves fixed into the top of the post; and then, seizing a leather cat of nine tails, moved behind her and to her left, shaking out the slithering brown leather thongs on which the fading stains of blood and flecks of human skin appeared. Lifting his arm, he swept the cat across her jutting rounded satiny naked bottom-cheeks, and Itulde writhed like an eel, jerking at her shackled wrists, her head flinging back and her eyes mad with suffering as her mouth gaped in a shrill cry of agony.
Felipe Luna had struck Cebo several times over the back and shoulders in his attempt to silence the rebellious young Mandingo king. But Cebo, who continued to hear his wife's cries of agony as she lay in the foul embrace of her ravisher, paid him no heed. With an angry curse, the second mate raised the belaying pin and struck him viciously across the top of the skull. Cebo's eyes rolled in their sockets to the whites, and he fell limp and unconscious to the floor.
The rest of the crew had gathered to watch the flogging, for the sight of this brown-skinned young beauty at the post was a rare treat indeed. The Mandingo's warm brown skin distinguishes him from his African brothers, and Itulde was one of the most beautiful women of that proud race of conquerors. Livid streaks leaped across the satiny skin of her bottom as Manuel Arrigar pitilessly laid on the cat. She ground herself against the post, bringing salacious comments from the excited spectators. Even the captain himself watched, feeling his prick harden at the sight of her wriggling and weaving and the sound of her panting, hysterical cries for pardon.
Finally, at a particularly vicious lash which swept the cat upwards from the deck so that the tips of the thong darted between her shaking thighs and attacked both her cunt and anus, Itulde's body stiffened and then hung limply from the shackles.
Manuel Arrigar flung down the cat, seized a bucket of brine and doused Itulde's naked body with it. Slowly she came awake, shrieking again in torment as the salty brine bit like acid into the bleeding welts left by the flogging. Then, overcome with his ignoble rut, the boatswain advanced upon her, again bared his turgid prick, and gripping the lividly streaked cheeks of her bottom with his brutal fingers, yawned them apart to bare the puckering rosette of her virgin ass-hole. Deeply he thrust himself, without heeding her plaintive shrieks of agony as he bottom-fucked her.
And when he had finished, he unshackled her and let her sprawl, moaning feebly, to the deck.
Felipe Luna had unshackled the unconscious body of Cebo, and, calling for another member of the crew to aid him, had dragged the Mandingo king up to the deck. They revived him with a bucket of brine in the face, but when Felipe Luna menaced him with the belaying pin and shouted to him in the jargon which served their communication between the slaves and the slavers, Cebo stared uncomprehendingly at him He could neither hear nor speak; the savage blow of the belaying pin had made him a deaf-mute.
At last the second mate realized this, and swore in Portuguese at the ill luck of his blow. He was all for killing the Mandingo and heaving him overboard, but the captain intervened. "You're a fool, Felipe," the Portuguese slaver snarled. "There are many women in Havana and Mobile who will pay well for a black stud like this one. He doesn't have to talk, man. See those muscles, and those strong thighs. I'll warrant you he's got a cock on him like a bull's, so treat him well and give him extra rations."
Two men dragged Cebo to his feet as he tottered, dazed by the injury, his face a blank mask. His eyes strained toward the poop deck, just in time to see his young wife lying sprawled on the timbers, sobbing and writhing in the aftermath of her brutal double violation and flogging. His mouth gaped, but no sound emerged. Tears rolled down his cheeks. The captain, following his gaze, chuckled: "Well, Felipe, lucky for you he didn't lose all his brains with that swipe you gave him. He sees well enough what happened to his bitch. Maybe he'll be docile now. Make sure he's well chained at night, because he could kill with those hands of his."
Itulde slowly raised herself to hands and knees. Fire consumed the raw flesh of her bottom, and her anus and pussy ached and throbbed from the savage probing by Manuel Arrigar.
Before anyone could intercept her, or suspect what she would do, the young wife of the Mandingo king ran towards the rail, clambered atop it, poised herself for a moment and then flung herself into the ocean. A shout of alarm went up, but it was too late. A triangular black fin cut the water swiftly as a giant shark approached, and as the crew crowded against the rail to watch, they saw Itulde's naked brown-skinned body suddenly jerk and then disappear, and heard a last shrill cry of death-agony.
Cebo saw too, and tears coursed down his cheeks, while four men held his arms lest he try to follow his martyred wife.
CHAPTER FOUR
"I'd rather not watch, Father," Philip Mowgridge said as he set down his coffee cup and rose from the table.
"By the Eternal," Daniel Mowgridge growled, as he raised his fist and smashed it down upon the teakwood table till the plates and saucers clattered, "have I spawned a milksop or a man? This is 1846, Philip, and slavery is the very heart of our Alabama profits. And it is well known that the only way to keep order among these blacks is by the whip. My mistake was in sending you off to an Eastern college for all these newfangled ideas of yours."
Daniel Mowgridge was fifty, stocky, with a graying beard and mustache, and he had been a widower for the past twenty-three years, for Elda, his gentle blonde wife, had died a year after giving birth to his only son and heir. His plantation of prime cotton and tobacco totaled some 2500 acres two miles to the northeast of Tuscaloosa, and he was the master of some three hundred slaves.
His father before him had come to Alabama after the cotton and tobacco crops had failed in Georgia and the Carolinas because the planters had not known how to let the land lay fallow between crops. There had been fierce Chickasaws and Chocktaws to challenge the white men, but in 1832, the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek had been signed and the hostile Indians had moved to the West to let the settlers take over the land in this new territory. Tuscaloosa, founded in 1813 after the Creek revolt, had, thirteen year later, become the state capital, and now it was at the height of its wealth and power.
But Daniel Mowgridge, though he had added many acres to his father's holdings, was a troubled and angry man. Even now the legislators were talking about moving the capital to Montgomery. Well, by God, he for one wouldn't stand for that! He was able because of his huge acreage and his diligent fieldworkers to get an excellent price for his cotton and tobacco in Mobile; once they shifted the capital to Montgomery, he could foresee that his market would drop to half.
But that wasn't the worst of it. His only son, the one he'd hoped would take over his plantation and let him have some leisure now, had come back from Boston with the silliest of notions. Something about the Lord's not intending men to be slaves to other men, and giving those nigras a share of the plantation in exchange for good work. Why, if the word got out what Philip was thinking, he would be the laughing-stock of all Alabama. And now, just because he had told
Philip to come along and watch the punishment of two young women who had tried to run away, this milksop was looking squeamish as if he were taken ill of a sea voyage!
The trouble was, he moodily told himself, he ought to have remarried right after Elda's death. But the thing about it was, he had rather enjoyed his freedom, being able to summon those black and mustee wenches from their cabins to his bedchamber and to debauch with them as he would. And with one thing and another and the politics and the constant work to make his nigras produce enough bales of cotton and tobacco to be sent down the river to Mobile and then worrying about how this sickly, frail boy who was his son was going to grow up, he'd been much too busy to think about marrying again. Besides, the other plantation owners were weaker than he and had far less acreage, and they would be the ones to profit from such a marriage, not he. And to tell the truth about it, not one of their daughters had taken his imagine nor could fuck nearly so well as Dulcy, the pretty quadroon he'd bought from Henri Le Gros down in Mobile three years ago.
And that reminded him that it was high time to get down to Mobile and to see good old Henri again. Dulcy had proved nightie, and he'd caught her coupling with a big black buck back in her cabin last November. He'd had the two of them stretched up by the thumbs in the whipping shed, and then he'd gelded the nigra and given him fifty lashes of the blacksnake and rubbed the hot pimentade into the bleeding wounds. Then he'd taken the leather paddle to Dulcy's plump round bottom until she'd nearly fainted, and in his contempt for her, he'd had her sold down the river. The last word was that she was doing her best to please an old, cranky red-necked settler who had only about fifty acres all told and who was even meaner to her than he had ever been. Well, served the slut right!
"Ever since you've come back from Boston, Philip," he looked at his son now with an angry glare, "you've been spouting off your fool mouth about equality and abolition. You can just keep it shut around here, boy. We've had a few Bible-slinging preachers from up North try to send slaves back to Africa, and the last one who came down here was tarred and feathered for his pains. You're a Mowgridge, boy, and you'd better not forget it. I'm the biggest plantation owner in these parts, and I'll not have my reputation soured by a milksop. Now come along to the shed, if you know what's good for you."
Philip Mowgridge, twenty-four, was tall and slim, with curly dark brown hair, a sensitive face and large blue eyes. He was sensitive and idealistic, and he was such a direct contrast to his own father that the latter was disgusted with him. Why, the young fool hadn't covered a wench yet. Not even last week when he'd sent Martha, a buxom twenty-two-year-old mustee, to the boy's room and told her to make sure that she pleased his son. She'd come back crying and told him that young Master Philip had wanted her to leave his room and had told her that he couldn't accept a woman who was given to him, because he wanted to pick his own. Such Goddamned nonsense! So he'd had to console Martha himself, and he'd done it well enough. He smiled to himself, thinking of the episode.
Daniel Mowgridge was sadistic and lecherous, like many of the other planters in the area. But perhaps even more than they because his indomitable perseverance and his hard work had made him the biggest landowner in the county. A man needed relaxation, he always told himself, and since he wasn't married, what else could he do but enjoy the nigra and mustee bitches on his own plantation? But what delighted him most of all the past few years was the sight of a stripped slave girl on the whipping bench or ladder, looking back over her shoulder with tear-filled eyes, her body shrinking under the cowhide, the paddle or the cane. He had found that, according to his mood, he enjoyed wielding the last himself, though on occasion he was quite content to let his overseer, Jabez Fulton, ply it over the bare bottoms and thighs of the malefactors.
Only this morning, before breakfast, Jabez had spoken to him concerning the need for new and particularly sturdy and strapping field-hands. Well, he'd write a note to Henri and let Philip go down to Mobile, and take it to his friend. Henri Le Gros was both gambler and slave dealer, an opportunist and adventurer, and enormously wealthy. They had wenched and wined together many a night in Mobile, and he knew of no better friend. So Henri wouldn't cheat his son on such an errand. The prospect made him brighten. And too, so did the thought that perhaps Henri would take Philip to a cat-house and see that his boy finally became a man. God knows it was high time!
Philip Mowgridge made a gesture of resignation. "All right, Father. If it's so important to you, I'll go. Though I've no stomach for brutality, especially to women."
"When will you get it through your young skull, boy, that a nigra is little better than an animal? Bed her and fuck her when she's nice, whip her ass when she's uppity, and you'll keep a happy balance and get the most out of her. When you can take over this plantation and get the yield of cotton and tobacco that I've had out of it this past decade, then maybe I'll let you tell me some of your college theories. Till then, you'll do as you're told. Which reminds me, I want you to leave on the packet for Mobile tomorrow afternoon, I've a couple of commissions for you to handle down there for me."
"That I'll be glad to do, Father," Philip Mowgridge said.
"I'm glad to hear that. It's bad enough to be alone in the world without having a son who balks like a Georgia mule every time I open my mouth. Now let's not keep Jabez waiting."
Almost affectionately the burly father put his arm around Philip's shoulders, as the two walked out of the kitchen and passed the garden down towards the rows of huts where the slave quarters were. The overseer's house, much larger and made of painted white frame wood, was to the distant left. In front of the water trough, a large slate-colored shed stood, the grim edifice of punishment and justice on the plantation.
Daniel Mowgridge pushed open the door and strode inside, his pulse quickening at the sight before him. Jabez Fulton, a man of forty-six, short and squat and with a cruel thin mouth and beady little eyes, was rolling up his shirtsleeves and smiling viciously at the two cowering young slave girls who knelt in one corner of the shed, in their linsey-woolsey dresses. A tall black Ashan-ti, Moses, stood over them, guarding them till the master and his son should be present to watch the carrying out of the sentence upon them. Each of them had tried to run away and had been apprehended by the overseer himself.
If Jabez Fulton seemed to revel as much at the prospect of administering a whipping as his employer in witnessing it, there was good reason. Jabez Fulton had been a young apprentice on a Jamaica plantation, where his debt-ridden father had been jailed for bankruptcy. As a boy of fourteen, he had gone to work for a brutal master and his blowsy wife. But she had played the wife of Potiphar to his Joseph, and under threat of having her husband flog him mercilessly, had forced him to her bed. There she had inculcated in him the zest for fucking, and he had forgotten how overripe were her charms as he tasted the paradise between her struggling, plump thighs. Their affair had lasted nearly a year until one stormy night, her husband had come home drunk from a tavern and, bawling for his Betsy, had battered down the door of her bedroom and found the two locked in fucking union.
Jabez Fulton, to defend himself against the onslaught of a pitchfork, had wrestled the weapon away from his master and stabbed him through the throat with the tines. Then he had fled, stowing away on a cargo ship bound for the Carolinas. He had found refuge with a Quaker family and had worked diligently for them for five years, but then his restless wandering spirit demanded a new venue. So he had gone to Georgia, and worked a dozen years more, and finally gone to try his luck in Mobile, where he had met Henri Le Gros and been recommended by the Frenchman to Daniel Mowgridge as a potential overseer.
Jabez Fulton really hated women, though he was ferociously in need of them. But in punishing them for their sluttishness-in reality he was avenging his enforced capitulation to Betsy. What he liked best was using the whip on their naked flesh and making them shriek and beg for mercy. Many an attractive young negress or mulatress had crept to his cottage late at night on his order, and, to escape a flogging, had fearfully submitted her body to his brutish rut.
The two culprits who were going to be flogged this morning had ignored his summons to his bed, and for this, Jabez Fulton greedily told himself, they would pay dearly!
He touched his forelock as Daniel Mowgridge and his son entered the shed and took their places in wicker chairs at the back. The shed was wide and solid, and it had several apparatuses which the slaves had learned to fear and with good reason. To the left and in one corner was a metal triangle on which a victim could be straddled and bound, so that the whip could cut between her thighs and the cheeks of her behind, if desired. Nearby was a pair of stocks, heavy and wooden, which yoked the victim's wrists and ankles: before it was placed a low wide heavy wooden stool whose top was sprinkled with pebbles, gravel and thorns. In addition, there was a whipping bench with straps at head and foot and in the middle of the victim's waist. And over a beam in the shed, a heavy rope was thrown to form a kind of pulley, so that, again if desired, the victim's wrists might be bound and she hoisted into the air to kick and wriggle and dangle for the delight of the master as well as of the overseer as he administered the prescribed flogging.
Phillip Mowgridge stared with compassion at the two unfortunate young women. One was a plump young Negress, not more than twenty-two, whose name was Lucy, and who worked in the kitchen for Mammy Jasmine, the huge, genial white-haired Negress who had been cook for both Daniel and his father before him and was still tireless in her late sixties and, according to her boasts, could drain the loins of a young black buck any night in the week.
The other escapee was about nineteen, a mustee, with coffee-colored skin, a slim body and saucy, insolent face, whose name was Cindy.
Lucy and Cindy had sought to run away together, but they had mistakenly gone towards the north and found themselves closed in by the swamp near the Black Warrior River, so that Jabez Fulton had found them quickly with his bloodhounds. The two of them had been marked for Jabez's bed, and the prospect had so horrified the two young women that they had made a pact of running away together.
The overseer, having completed his preparations, turned obsequiously to his master: "Whom shall I start with, Mr. Mowgridge, sir?" he respectfully inquired.
Daniel Mowgridge's eyes glittered as he studied the two kneeling, weeping young women. "Take Lucy first," he at last decreed, for the slim, impudent Cindy had attracted his own imagine and he wished to save her till the last.
Jabez Fulton made a sign, and the tall Ashanti seized the whimpering young Negress, lifted her to her feet and dragged her towards the whipping bench. He swiftly dragged off her linsey-woolsey dress, and she was naked. Her skin was dark brown, her body superbly buxom. Jabez Fulton seized her by her long black hair, twisting it, as he growled, "Lay down on your belly on the bench, and don't fight me if you know what's good for you, Lucy!"
Bursting into tears, the naked young Negress obeyed, and her wrists and ankles were quickly strapped. But Jabez, comprehending that his master shared his perverse lust by the sight of a naked bottom wriggling under a thrashing, did not apply the waist strap, in order to give Lucy's hips more freedom to twist and jerk and weave as they would.
Her buttocks were solidly spaced, with a very sinuous line between them, the cheeks plump and broad, but marvelously firm. Her thighs were a bit fleshy for her tender age, but her calves were softly rounded and her entire body seemed harmoniously feminine. She turned her tearstained face toward the owner of the plantation and pleaded, "Ohh, Master, please, don't thrash me! I didn't mean to run away, truly I didn't!"
"Enough of your jeremiads, bitch," Daniel Mowgridge grumblingly retorted. "Do you think I want all the other plantation owners to learn that my slaves run away? Why, I give you a nice little hut, plenty of firewood in winter, all the cornmeal and bacon you can ask for, and you work in the kitchen and don't even have to go out in the fields. And this is the way you show your gratitude. Jabez, give her twenty with the cowhide paddle and lay them on well, mind you!"
Lucy hysterically begged, "Oh, not the paddle, Massah, please. Not the paddle!"
"If I hear another word out of you, Lucy, I'll have you pimentaded," Daniel Mowgridge warned. Philip glanced at his father and then closed his eyes and bit his lips. The spectacle sickened him. But he felt a curious throbbing between his thighs at the sight of Lucy's voluptuous and generously curvaceous naked body, flinching on the whipping bench as Jabez Fulton took down from a peg in the wall the cowhide paddle, brandished and swept it down a few times with a nasty chuckle.
Then planting himself to the left of the helpless Negress, he raised it up high, poised it in the air a moment and then brought it down with a crashing smack! full across both ripe round bottom globes.
Lucy's body seemed to flatten back into the bench itself at the impact of that violent spank; then her head tilted back and her eyes widened and her mouth gaped in a strident scream of: "Eeeooowww!! Please, Massa, have him stop, he'll kill me with twenty, I won't run away again, honest I won't!"
Daniel Mowgridge had lit a cigar, and the odor of tobacco made his nostrils flicker with sensual enjoyment. He could smell also the musky perfume of the naked young woman on the whipping bench, for there was to her skin an acridity born out of fear of punishment. To him, this olfactory pleasure heightened his lustful joy in witnessing a whipping, and he reminded himself that he hadn't had a good piece of ass in some time now. Perhaps he would have Lucy tonight and comfort her a little if she took her paddling well.
By the tenth spank, Lucy was shrieking with the full force of her young lungs, dragging at her wrist straps and trying to twist and throw herself off the whipping bench as she hysterically begged for pardon. Angry dark red blotches besmirched the shuddering globes of her bare behind.
Daniel Mowgridge stared greedily at those inflamed nether hemispheres, and then decided, since he intended to fuck Lucy tonight, that the remaining strokes should be laid on with less severity. He thereupon made a sign to Jabez Fulton, who nodded comprehendingly. The final strokes were more quickly given, and stung, but did not have the bruising shock of the previous blows. Nonetheless, Lucy wailed and sobbed and promised feverishly to be a good slave long before the last blow smacked against her inflamed and swollen naked behind.
She was left there to writhe and shudder on the whipping bench while Jabez mopped the sweat from his forehead with a dirty handkerchief, hung up the cowhide paddle, and then made a sign to the Ashanti who was guarding slim, impudent Cindy.
But Cindy rose sinuously and of her own accord dragged off her coarse dress and stood naked and shameless before the overseer and the plantation owner and his son. Her eyes sought Daniel Mowgridge's face and her lips curved in a tantalizing smile. For although her heart was thudding with terror, the attractive young mustee was shrewd enough to realize that if she won either Daniel Mowgridge or his son by her body's desirability, she might well escape the vengeance of the brutish Jabez Fulton.
Philip Mowgridge sucked in his breath and then blushed vividly as he averted his eyes. He was indeed a virgin, though he had felt the pangs of lust many a time and had used his hand in the dead of night to ease the burden of his throbbing cock. Yet because he had imbibed almost with his mother's milk a kind of sensitivity which shrank from the brutally coarse world of the plantation and because he had read far too many books and met far too many young people of his own age and temperament, he shrank from the odious couplings between master and slave, which could easily have been his if he had told his father of his desires. The truth was that Philip Mowgridge was virile and agonized in his torment, and much too fastidious to seek out one of the black girls in the slave huts at night to ease the burning gismic content in his balls. Yet now, at the sight of Cindy's nakedness, he felt the uncontrollable urge return and he was ashamed of his feelings at such a time.
She stood proud and haughtily defiant, her titties like ripe hard pears, widely spaced, the nipples dusky, perky and pointed, her navel wide and shallow in the flat sleekness of her belly. Her coffee-satiny skin rippled and quivered with a thousand voluptuous flexions as she moved forward, arms at her sides, braving the glowering stare of her executioner who snarled under his breath, "So you'll play games with the master, is that your little trick, Cindy? You wait, you mustee slut, I'll have your hide for this and I'll have you in bed with me tonight or know the reason why!"
But Cindy counted on winning the favor of the bearded master of the plantation, and in his florid complexion and glittering eyes she saw that she had won her little ruse, and even if she were about to be painfully whipped by Jabez Fulton, this night she and not Lucy would share the master's bed.
She therefore turned to face Daniel Mowgridge and, bowing her head, murmured, "I beg Massa's pardon for trying to run away. I am a stupid girl, Massa, I need a good whupping to teach me I belong with you."
Daniel Mowgridge glanced nervously at his son, but saw that Philip was staring down at the floor. He licked his dry lips, nodded, "All right, Cindy, you're going to be whipped all right, and well whipped, and we'll see about the future. Let me see now, Jabez, put her on the triangle. And I think a good broad strap about twenty-five times should teach her that running away is very stupid."
He stared covetously at the girl's out-thrusting titties, at the sleek haunches, and at the thick crisp black triangle of curly hair which marked her cunt. Her thighs were long and sinuous, flexing and quivering with agility. He licked his lips again, imagining what it would be like to feel her bucking under him. He had already forgotten the weeping Lucy, who still lay tethered to the bench, staring at him plaintively and perhaps, she too, dolefully understanding what had happened to turn him from her charms to Cindy's.
"Thank you, Massa," Cindy murmured in a low humble voice. "I takes my punishment good, you see, I'se real sorry I tried to run away." And with this, of her own accord, she walked over to the triangle, stepped into it, and lifted her arms up to be bound to the peak.
Jabez Fulton was swearing under his breath as he tied her wrists with a rawhide thong and with more brutality than was necessary: "Oh, you're a clever mustee bitch, you are! Think I don't see right through you? You'd rather go to his bed than mine, eh? All right, I've no doubt he'll send for you right enough. But don't forget that I'm the overseer, the one who gives most of the orders round here, as well as dishes out most of the whuppin's! That's what I'm paid for, Cindy, and he's not out here every day to watch you wagglin' your tail at him. Just remember that, you mustee vixen, I'm gonna pay you back for settin' yourself up for him 'stead 'a takin' care 'a me like you ought. Just you mark my words, you'll be comin' to my hut one night, crawlin' to lick my boots, see if you won't!"
Squatting down to thong her slim bare ankles to the legs of the whipping triangle, Jabez Fulton took pains to murmur so that only she would hear him, not the master. Cindy did hear and she shivered, for in truth she was afraid of Fulton. But she rightly reasoned that if she could win Daniel Mowgridge's high esteem, she'd be safe enough from the overseer's vindictive cruelty. Right now, she knew, she had to take a thrashing from him, and it was going to hurt, all right, but maybe she could wiggle her bottom enough to make the master want her in his bed.
As he straightened, the overseer ran his hairy hand over the backs of her thighs, then up between them, fingering her gaping pussylips a moment while she gasped and squirmed at the sensations so unexpectedly roused. She closed her eyes and shivered, pretending that the master had already ordered her to his bedchamber, that she was beside him and about to yield herself willingly to his wants. It would help her, she knew, stand the thrashing Jabez Fulton was about to lay on her bare flesh.
He had taken down a broad but rather thin polished leather strap, taken his stance to the girl's left and awaited Daniel Mowgridge's nod. When it came, the overseer lifted the strap high, then brought it down with an angry Crack! straight across the base of Cindy's oval bottom-cheeks. The young mustee girl caught her breath, lunged forward and fearfully glanced back over her shoulder at Jabez Fulton's smirking face. But then she turned to stare at her master, who faced her. She made her lips curve in a pleading smile, and she tried to stretch her thighs even wider apart so that he could enjoy the sight of her naked privates and lust for her and so console her for the flogging.
The angry Crack-Crack-Crack! of the leather strap on naked girl-flesh was resumed at twenty-second intervals. Jabez Fulton, an expert flogger, concentrated on the lower curves of Cindy's sinuously creased, broadly curved bottom-ovals, drawing cries and sobs and tears from the handsome young culprit. But she kept her eyes constantly fixed in Daniel Mowgridge throughout her whipping, even as she writhed and jerked and lunged forward under a particularly biting cut of the strap. And she could see that the white master was trembling, his face suffused by the blood of rut, and that he could not take his eyes off her straddled loins and the pink twitching lips of her quim; even in her suffering, she joyously told herself that she would have ample compensation before the night was over.
Jabez Fulton, to be sure, knew exactly what the shameless mustee slut was doing and why, but he could hardly comment on the situation. All he could do was express his vindictive rage at Cindy's preference for the plantation owner by making the thrashing as hard as he dared. And the last three or four strokes of her sentence provided him with an ideal chance at retaliation: he swept the leather band up between her straddled thighs so that the tip bit right into her poutingly distended cunt lips, and Cindy's maddened, plunging twists and frantic, poignant screams excited Daniel Mowgridge to the utmost. His teeth were chattering with pent-up lust when the strapping finally ended; his eyes devoured Cindy, writhing and twisting her face drowned in tears, her head bowed, convulsive shudders wrenching her naked body this way and that as she hung straddled and stretched on the heavy apparatus after the official count of lashes had been inflicted.
"Have her brought to me tonight, Jabez," he said in a thick, trembling voice. "As for you, Lucy, if you ever try to run away again, it'll be the cottonfield for you and the same quota of poundage to be picked as the bucks have. You'll feel the paddle every day for sure, girl, so get back to your work now and behave yourself, hear?"
Jabez Fulton grunted his assent to his master's order. He spat disgustedly, realizing that by trying to pay Cindy back and pussy-stinging her for neglecting his cock needs, he had actually helped the tricky bitch heat up Mr. Mowgridge by practically throwing her snatch in his face. He gave Cindy a morose look as he went over to free Lucy from the bench.
Daniel Mowgridge rose, put his hand into the lapel pocket of his frock coat and drew out a fresh Havana panatella, lit it. Then he stared contemptuously at Philip, who was very pale. "Come on, boy, you look as if you're about to puke," he said scornfully. "If I didn't think you would, I'd send Cindy to your bedroom tonight instead of to mine. One day you'll find out that after a wench had had her backside heated up by a paddling or a strapping, her front gets even hotter for a screwing. But that, you bookworm, is a job for a man, and that's why Cindy won't bother you tonight." With a hilarious chuckle, he drew on his cigar and then strode out of the whipping shed.
CHAPTER FIVE
Where the broadening thirty-mile-long funnel of Mobile Bay meets the Gulf Coast, the funnel suddenly narrows to a thin passageway between the off-shore strip of Dauphin Island and a low peninsula. In the year 1702, the great French explorer Jean Baptiste le Boyne, the eminent Sieur de Bienville, had navigated his vessel through the narrows and founded a colony north of the mighty bay. In that era, the settlement had been known as Fort Louis de la Mobile in joint honor of Louis XIV of France and of the friendly Alabama Indiana tribe known as the Mabila.
On Dauphin Island, twenty-eight miles south of the prospering trading mart of the Gulf Coast, Army engineers had built fortifications to defend this colorful and energetic city in the event of attack by any foreign power. But east of Mobile, there was a defense stronger than any man-made fortification, and it was created by nature. This was the delta, an enormous labyrinth of marsh and bayou fabricated by the river's emptying into Mobile Bay. As far as the eye could see, there extended broad reaches of mangrove and saw grass, and when flatboat or paddle-wheel steamer chugged along one of these many streams leading into the voracious maw of the bay, swarms of canvasback, mallard, pintail and shoveler rose in flight in dark clouds that shadowed the delta. From behind the trees and along the edge of these many rivers, the questioning eyes of a white-tail deer contemplated human invasion of its haunts. One found otter, wild turkey and woodcocks, quail and nutria, and sometimes even a black bear would lumber across the marsh. But at night along the delta, near the edge of some bayou, the river men could see rows of blazing eyes, so thick that seemed to be the lights of a town; and as they shoved their poles into the sticky mud at the bottom of the riverbed they would hear splashes and grunts, and the fiery coals would vanish as swarms of alligators plunged beneath the dark, slowly flowing matter.
Mobile now numbered nearly a population of nearly eleven thousand whites and six thousand Negro slaves. Two decades ago, the plantation owners had prospered even more, for then cotton was twenty cents a pound on the market. Flour sold for ten dollars a barrel, and you could buy a "bit" loaf of bread weighing twenty-eight ounces for only thirteen cents. Yet despite this decline in the price of cotton and even of tobacco, Mobile was even more a hub of traffic than back in the Twenties, and one saw finely dressed gentlemen as well as adventurers and itinerant dealers who came to this great port on the Gulf like bits of steel drawn to a magnet. Even as you walked down the streets made of the gunwales of flat-boats (Mobile's first ordinances had held that flatboats which could only come downstream must be broken up after unloading cargo), at once you would see the reason for this greater prosperity which was a paradox against the lowering of the price for basic Southern crops.
For everywhere one saw signs proclaiming slaves for sale, although the majority of the traffic could be found at the northwest corner of Royal and St. Louis Streets. A much smaller salon for the display of house slaves, however, was a block away, near Front Street, and was maintained by Henri Le Gros. His enterprise occupied the entire second floor of an elegantly constructed white wooden building, reinforced with brick and sandstone, but the elegantly furnished chamber in which choice household slaves were displayed was actually only one part of his lucrative business. Once one was known to the French adventurer and gambler and received an engraved card permitting him to Le Gros's establishment, a gentleman of means might take his pleasure in the gambling rooms. Or, if his tastes were for the joys of the flesh, he might well avail himself of the beautiful and talented doxies at the very end of the second floor. There were eight such beauties, each occupying her own specially furnished room with enormous canopied four-poster bed.
Daniel Mowgridge had bought his very first slave from Henri Le Gros, had lost several thousand dollars at the roulette wheel only to recoup it the next day. But the night after his gambling loss had been most pleasantly and inspiringly whiled away in one of those eight ornate, huge beds whose owner had been a fiery black-haired, olive-skinned Creole girl of eighteen who, Mowgridge had enthusiastically reported to his new friend Le Gros, could French a man better than any woman he had ever bedded before, and who was equally adept in assuming the most ingenious positions for the act of what the Tuscaloosa plantation owner whimsically called "getting her pussy poked every which way and every angle of the compass."
Indeed, Mowgridge had been convinced that his night with Cecile, the Creole brunette, had been lucky enough to win him back his earlier loss at the wheel, but, best of all, to earn him the friendship of Henri Le Gros.
The Frenchman was forty-three, wiry, slight of build, no more than five feet eight inches in height. He was decked out like a dandy, wore a flowing cravat and at times was seen to affect ribbons in his carefully combed but inordinately curly black hair. His face was swarthy, but that was from the hot Mobile sun, not Negroid blood. One did not joke at Henri Le Gros's appearance or mannerisms; a dozen men who had either called him "Henriette" because of the ribbons or intimated there might be a nigger in the woodshed of his ancestors had swallowed a foot or two of his Damascus-bladed rapier on the dueling grounds just outside the city. He was feared, respected and hated; he was enormously wealthy, and he was unreasonably ambitious.
Three years ago, one of his best clients had been Jacques Valrieu, the vice president of Mobile's leading bank. Valrieu, a man of fifty with inflammable temper and bad heart, was also a slave to the vices of wining and wenching. He had kept a Creole mistress for nearly twenty years, and she had given him a daughter who looked white as he was, but who in reality had one-eighth Negro blood in her veins.
Since Valrieu's legal wife, a delicate and well-bred girl out of a convent school in Bordeaux, had never been able to give him a child and had died about five years before, the banker was greatly concerned over what would happen to his wealth and land if he should die without recognized heirs. He had speculated a good deal in land, acquiring about twenty-three hundred acres of excellent cotton, tobacco and timber land not far from Tuscaloosa. Henri Le Gros had helped the banker with this investment; he had even hired a manager and overseer for the acreage, taking a very small commission for his own pains. This generous honesty had further won the banker's confidence. Especially after his wife's death, he took to dicing and playing baccarat in the Le Gros gaming rooms, then topping off the evening in one of the right private rooms in the company of one of those delectable young whores whose bed gymnastics contributed so greatly to the profits of Henri le Gros's second-floor tenancy.
Twice, the aging banker suffered a heart attack in one of those rooms dedicated to the sport of Venus and Pan, and the shrewdly opportunistic Le Gros had wheedled Valrieu into making a will that would name his illegitimate daughter as his only living kin. More than that, he had promised the banker that he himself would manage the girl's estate as well as the Tuscaloosa plantation, and would treat her as well as if she were his own. So Valrieu had had a notary draw up a will, particularly after Le Gros had given him the final convincing argument: "No one in this world shall ever know that Danielle, that child your lovely Creole sweet heat gave you, is other than white. I myself swear by my honor to take the secret to my grave!"
And so one night when Jacques Valrieu succumbed to a heart attack while in the act of fucking, dog-fashion, a charming young coppery-haired wanton new to the Frenchman's eight-bedroom roster, Henri Le Gros became in effect the legal guardian of Danielle Valrieu, then almost nineteen.
But he became much more than that. While the girl had been brought up in a convent, which was customary with the daughters of the wealthy (especially those whose legitimacy might be open to question), she had already exhibited some of her mother's earthy proclivities. Indeed, the Mother Superior herself had once caught Danielle in bed with a younger girl. For this sin of the flesh, the lovely dark-brown-haired culprit had been birched in chapel and made to say her orisons aloud for all to hear-that, however, had not purged her of her incipient Sapphic desires.
Henri Le Gros himself was a most adept cock smith, envied by every virile man, for it was reputed throughout Mobile that the French dandy tested each of his new girls before installing her as a regular occupant of one of those eight select chambers where for a sizable fee a gentleman of taste and discretion could retire for fucking and delicious Frenching and even-if he was not too cruel and agreed to pay a supplementary fee-a s'ance of flogging the beauteous damsel of his choice. Also, it was well known that Le Gros generally spent the night in one of those bedrooms if its delightful occupant was not professionally engaged. Soft-spoken, suave and exquisitely gallant, he was as insatiable as he was cultured and imaginative. So it was no wonder that, once learning Danielle Valrieu's innate sensuality, he found it comparatively easy to become her lover and initiator in carnal pleasures between man and maid.
And then, once empowered as lover and mentor, he intimated to the beautiful Creole girl that it was in her own best interests to cooperate with him and be subservient in all things to him lest he expose her as being tainted with Negro blood. On the other hand, he let her know, her cooperation would mean that she would remain as heiress to a great deal of money and a huge plantation which would give her every possible comfort in life and enable her to make the marriage of her choice. Danielle, who in her own way was as cunning as her tutor, agreed that she would keep her part of the bargain...
She dwelt in a little house near Carre Street in the residential section of Mobile. At twenty-two, she was superbly beautiful. Slightly more than medium height, an oval face, high-set cheekbones, large and luminous dark-brown eyes, a full ripe sensual mouth, and supercilious aquiline nose with thin and flaring wings, endowed with a marvelously creamy skin which readily enabled her to keep up the myth of her white blood, she was quixotic and passionate, scheming and cruel as only a woman could be. Perhaps secretly she hated that taint of black blood in her veins and wished by sheer force of domination to prove that she was better than any white. Whatever the reason, Rose, a nineteen-year-old lovely mulatress whom Henri Le Gros had purchased as a slave for Danielle, understood only too well her mistress's sudden and inexplicable seizures of passion and cruelty.
It was nearly noon, yet Danielle was still abed in an elegant green satin negligee which her lover had purchased for her off a ship just in from France. She sat up, propping herself up against the thick pillows, and angrily pulled the bell rope to summon her negligent maid-slave Rosa who had failed to bring her her chocolate and croissants.
The door opened and the lovely young mulatress hastened in with a silver tray. Rosa was about five feet five inches in height, with pale yellow complexion, and the body of a Venus. Her rounded, sweet face was expressive, and her huge dark-brown eyes were in their way as ardent as those of her mistress. Only by a slight thickening of the lips and of the nostrils could one tell, apart from her complexion, that she was not pure white of descent. She wore high-heeled sandals, black silk stockings drawn high on her beautifully rounded thighs and held there by purple rosette garters, a rustling black crinoline dress whose skirt was scandalously short, reaching only to her knees, a trim little lace cap atop her head and a lace apron tied about her middle to proclaim her duties in this household.
"You lazy slut, what's taken you so long?" Danielle Valrieu feverishly complained.
"I beg pardon, Mistress, but I had to go out to the bakery shop and he hadn't opened yet with the croissants," Rosa apologized.
Danielle sent her beautiful mulatress maid-slave a vindictive little look, and then her ripe sensual lips curled in a smile of anticipation, "You know I don't accept excuses, Rosa. Kneel down in the corner with your back to me while I have my breakfast. Then I'll tend to you."
"Yes, M-Mistress," Rosa quavered. She set the tray down on Danielle's lap, and was rewarded for her pains by a vicious slap on the cheek that made her gasp and touch the burning spot that Danielle's soft hand had smitten. Then she turned, dolefully bending her head, walked to the corner near the door, and knelt down and bowed her head in penitence.
Danielle Valrieu stared at her greedily, and then fell to her breakfast with as lusty an appetite as she had for sex ... with both male and female, for the beautiful Creole heiress was as expert a Lesbian as she was a mistress to her guardian.
She ate slowly and with relish, and when she paused to tilt the silver pot into her china cup for her second cup of chocolate, she stared at the kneeling, humbled Rosa in the corner. Then, reaching with her left hand under the pillows, she drew out a little martinet, with a red wooden handle about six inches long and three tapering brown leather thongs attached to the other end, thongs about twenty inches in length, a quarter of an inch thick and as wide, the very tips tapered to add additional sting to the victim's flesh. Then she resumed her breakfast, and only when she had finished and set aside the tray, did she turn again towards her intended victim: "Rosa! Crawl here on your knees, hoist up your skirt and let me see your bottom!" she commanded peremptorily.
With a gasp the lovely young mulatress obeyed that ignominious order; reaching behind her and tucking up her skirt with both hands, she advanced on her knees. Under that skirt she was naked except for her stockings and the gaudy garters, and the thick black triangle of her mount was lasciviously visible.
Danielle's eyes blazed with feline voracity as she swung her beautiful long sleek legs down to the floor, straddled them and then, unfastening her negligee, exposed her even thicker dark-brown pussy fleece. Her body was breathtaking in its sensual and tempting beauty; her titties were closely spaced, round uptilting gourds with wide brownish-coral aurolae and voluptuously pert nipples. Her navel was shallow and wide, and her thighs delightfully long yet just rounded enough to epitomize a sensual femininity. Henri Le Gros could have told you that those thighs were magnificently muscled, satiny and soft and seductive, yet capable of superb strength when clinging in the act of fucking. Her calves were slim and lithe, rippingly muscled columns of creamy, satiny loveliness. In all things she seemed the perfect patrician, the heiress to one of Mobile's richest men. Only Henri Lie Gros knew her secret and could destroy her if he wished.
This too had much to do with Danielle Valrieu's sadistic sensuality. There were times when her lover had left her spent upon rumpled bed, that she morbidly reflected upon the destiny which had made her virtually his slave-for such she was, whether she liked it or not. He had but to proclaim her octoroon state, and she could be sold into slavery, whipped, pilloried and branded or worse, for having posed as a white heiress and having actually come into possessions which no slave was permitted to own. He had been too clever to tell her that outright, for he was a cultured man, but his blandished and refined speech had let her imagination roam as it would, and the prospect was terrifying. And that was why she took out these morbid fits of imagine on poor Rosa, little knowing that Rosa was actually her own distant cousin by blood. The difference was that Rosa was an actual slave and that Henri Le Gros had purposely bought her so that he could make her a member of Danielle's household and thus have one spy in his own charge. And from time to time when Rose went shopping, she paid a short visit to his second-floor establishment and told him whatever he wished to know about her young mistress.
Arrived now before the bed, lovely Rosa looked slowly up into her mistress's flushed face.
"You know what I want you to do, Rosa," Danielle hissed, wriggling her bottom forward to the very edge of the bed and straddling her thighs still more so that the pink lips of her cunt gaped shamelessly. "Love me while I whip you for your naughtiness and laziness!"
Rosa understood only too well. Docilely, she bowed her head and her soft lips found the perfumed curls of Danielle's pussy fur, probed and found the twitching coral portals of that lascivious cunthole, and began to suck gently. A shiver went through the almost naked body of the Creole voluptuary as she seized the martinet in her right hand, gripped Rosa's neck with her left hand, and then commanded: "Be sure to keep your skirt up, you lazy little bitch, or I'll flay the skin off your big bare bottom!"
Rosa had obediently arched up her naked bottom, two splendidly rounded and closely set cheeks, already flinching and tightening under the apprehension of what they were about to receive. She made a soft affirmative murmur as she continued her gamahuching. Then she felt Danielle's fingers dig into her neck and suddenly there was a whistling sound and then a sharp clack as the three leather thongs swept down to cling to the shuddering summits of her naked and proffered bottom.
Rosa moaned and squirmed on her knees, and continued sucking as the martinet rose and fell, half a dozen more times. Her bottom began to burn painfully, and she weaved and twisted it, but always careful not to lower it so that her young mistress might flog her as she wished. When the pain became intolerable, she dug her tongue into Danielle's cunt and began to rub her mistress's clitoris.
"Yes, that's it, go to it, make me come, you little bitch, I'll teach you to be late with my chocolate! There-and there too-and there again!" Danielle hoarsely groaned as her arm rose and fell three times. The tips of the thongs nipped Rosa's upper thighs, and once, in her lunging and squirming, flicked right into the sinuous crease between her red-streaked naked bottom globes, attacking her tender cunt and ass-hole. With a moaning cry of pain, the young mulatress dug her tongue wildly back and forth inside her mistress's cunt, and thus ended her own torment by drawing Danielle Valrieu to a shuddering and sobbing orgasm.
CHAPTER SIX
It was early April when Philip Mowgridge boarded a packet bound for Mobile with ten bales of cotton which his father had had stored over the winter in hopes of bringing a better price. In addition, the plantation owner gave his son a letter addressed to Henri Le Gros, in which he urged the French dandy to select a powerful field hand for his son and to take the price out of the cotton which would also be his to be sold. What Daniel Mowgridge did not tell his son was that in that letter he had suggested that his friend see to it that Philip was initiated into the joys of cunt, for he bitterly complained that thus far Philip had shown no interest whatsoever in the fair sex.
It was a rare adventure for the idealistic, handsome young man, who was put up at the best hotel and could dine on roast pork or excellent beef and elegant French wines. Philip found the culture of Mobile far more exciting than life on a plantation near Tuscaloosa. And the first two days were spent in hiring a carriage and driving through the city to observe its scenic beauties.
On the third day, having arranged to have the bales of cotton conveyed to the warehouse of Henri Le Gros and having dispatched his father's letter by a little Negro boy to whom he gave a dollar, Philip Mowgridge decided to go for a stroll and pay his respects to his father's friend and business partner-for as such had Daniel Mowgridge described the French adventurer, gambler, dandy, swordsman and procurer.
He was about a block away from the establishment of Henri Le Gros when suddenly he heard a woman's scream for help and, turning his head, saw that a runaway carriage was coming down the muddied street, with a beautiful young dark-brown-haired woman uselessly tugging at the reins and in danger of being thrown from the little carriage. Startled to see that she had no Negro driver as was customary, Philip Mowgridge acted on heroic impulse, leaped into the street and, at great risk to his own life and limb, seized the bridle of the champing horse and, coaxing it gently, brought it to a halt amid cheers from the onlookers.
He stared up into the flushed, terrified and lovely face of Danielle Valrieu, who at times displayed her impulsive desire for independence by driving her own ornate little carriage. "Oh, sir, thank you, thank you! I was terribly afraid," she gasped.
Philip Mowgridge bowed and smiled. "It was my pleasure, Miss."
For her part, Danielle Valrieu, now that she had regained her composure and some of her breath, found the handsome black-haired slim young man engagingly attractive, and she gave him a coquettish smile as she identified herself, "I am Danielle Valrieu, and I shall be in your debt forever!"
The plantation owner's son blushed, which Danielle found deliciously ingenuous, used as she was to the cynical and adept Frenchman who had tutored her in the arts of fucking and of dissembling. "Sir, there you have the advantage of me, for I do not even know your name," she purred in a throaty and seductive voice.
"It's Philip Mowgridge, at your service, Miss Valrieu."
"La, Mr. Mowgridge, you're indeed new to Mobile with such courtly manners. I vow I haven't met a gentleman so proficient, no, nor so gallant and intrepid. Will you not take your reward by accepting my invitation to tea this afternoon? I live at Number 73 Carre Street, to the south of the city. Any coachman knows the house of Danielle Valrieu."
Philip Mowgridge's heart was pounding strangely, and he stepped back onto the curb of the street and again bowed. "I shall count it the most fortunate moment of my life," he said in that poetic manner which he had learned at the Eastern college. Danielle Valrieu picked up the reins, clucked at her horse, and gave him a dimpled smile.
He watched her disappear down the street, and drew a deep breath. He had no doubt that his father considered him not only a milksop but unmanly for not having bedded the nigra wenches at the plantation. But a girl like this--that was something else again! Already he could feel his stiff young cock throbbing at the thought of being alone with that voluptuous, creamy-skinned, dark-brown-haired girl. Oh, his father wouldn't have to tell him then what to do, not when he felt himself so irresistibly drawn to Danielle Valrieu ... .
Dapper and smiling, Henri Le Gros rose to receive his friend's son, extending his hand across his desk and offering Philip Mowgridge a gracious smile as the liveried Negro who served as doorman and also at times as bouncer for the bordello of the gambling salon when the Frenchman's clients became drunk and obstreperous, had ushered the plantation owner's son into his private office.
"I've been waiting for you, Philip," Henri Le Gros exclaimed, "and wondered why you hadn't followed directly upon your letter."
"I must apologize for that, M'sieu Le Gros," Philip Mowgridge politely replied, "but I've never been to Mobile before and I confess that the city fascinates me. Besides, my father has spoken so highly of your competence in business affairs, that I was certain you did not need me on hand to carry out the wishes which he expressed in that letter."
"You give me too much credit, young man. Nonetheless, you are right in a sense. I have already acquired for your father a superb field-hand, a Mandingo by the name of Cebo. Regrettably, he revolted aboard ship and was struck with a belaying pin, with the result that he is a deaf-mute. My own doctor has examined him and tells me that such cases are not unusual and that with time or perhaps some sudden shock, his hearing and speech may be restored. Nonetheless, he is superbly intelligent, and as to his strength and his ability to stud," here the Frenchman winked, "your father need have no fear that I have given him a worthless hulk. So much for that, and the price of $800 will be deducted from what I owe him for the cotton which you had conveyed to my warehouse. When you go back to Tuscaloosa, you will take back my personal draft for the difference. But now, as to yourself, Philip. I should like very much while you are here in Mobile to be of some service to you, rather more than as a business associate of your father's. Do you like, perchance, to gamble?"
Philip Mowgridge shook his head. "No, M'sieu Le Gros, that has never interested me. But I would not have you think me a prig and a prude."
"Nor do I!" the Frenchman chuckled. Then, favoring his guest with another broad and meaningful wink, he intimated, "But perhaps I might interest you in taking a turn-oh, in the utmost privacy, to be sure!-with one of my young ladies. I have eight, all of differing beauties and charms, all remarkably proficient in the tender arts of passion. It would be my pleasure to present to you the fair charmer of your choice as my guest of honor."
Philip Mowgridge found himself blushing hotly with anger at this sly and salacious offer. He had no doubt now that his father had put down as much in that letter. "I thank you, no, M'sieu Le Gros," he curtly replied, but with a polite smile on his lips to soften the words of refusal. "I have no interest in purchased love, it is too mechanical and contrived. Besides, I may say with some little pride that I have already met a very charming young lady under very unusual circumstances who has invited me for tea this afternoon."
"Ah? Did she give you her name, by any happy circumstance?"
"Of course M'sieu Le Gros. Her name is Danielle Valrieu. Do you know her?"
"I? Why, no. But I've heard of the name. She was, if memory served me right, the daughter of one of my richest bankers who died some few years ago of a heart attack, I believe. You have done surpassingly well for a novice, Philip, and I congratulate you. May I wish you, then, success with the young lady."
"Thank you, M'sieu Le Gros."
"But first, do me the honor of lunching with me. My chef informs me that he has some superb soft-shelled crabs or, if you prefer, a bouillabaisse. Or, if your imagine is for meat, we have some excellent chops in a divine sauce. My chef is a nigra, but for two years he served a state senator's household and he had culinary magic in his brain and his fingers."
"Thank you for your invitation. I shall be delighted to lunch with you."
* * *
Philip Mowgridge rang the bell of the attractive little house on Carre Street, and after a moment was admitted by one of the loveliest girls he had ever seen. It was, to be sure, none other than the exquisite mustee Rosa, still in her black short skirt and silk hose and high-heeled sandals with the lace-trimmed maid's cap atop her winsome head.
"I-I have an invitation from Miss Valrieu," he said awkwardly.
Rosa smiled and nodded. "Will you come this way, sir? My mistress is eager to see you. She has told me how heroic you were this morning and how you saved her life. I too am grateful to you, Mr. Mowgridge."
Charmed by the mulatress' flawless and gracious speech, Philip found himself flushing again like a schoolboy as he followed the attractive girl into the beautifully furnished salon and was unctuously ushered to a seat on the settee. Rosa dropped him a curtsey and told him that she would presently bring in refreshments, while her mistress completed dressing. He smiled his thanks and sat back to take stock of the certainly costly surroundings. But he could not help glancing at the mulatress as she disappeared, for her long black hair had been tied in a thick sheath which fell to her waist, circled at the middle with a purple ribbon. Nor could he, virgin male that he was, help from staring at Rosa's beautiful legs which the expensive and rare silk hose caressed in a way that brought out the mouthwatering contours of saucily rounded calves, dimpled knees, and gently rounded thighs which disappeared under the clinging and incredibly short black skirt. If he had known that beneath the skirt Rosa was naked and that on her voluptuous bottom were the marks of the martinet inflicted by none other than the young beauty whose life he had saved this morning, he doubtless would have been stupefied and incredulous.
In a few moments, the lovely mulatress entered the salon with a tray on which were posed a silver teapot and Dresden china cups and saucers, and a plate of petit fours. These she set down on a tabouret to one side of the settee, and stopped to pour him tea, adding that her mistress would be out in a moment and wished to make certain of his comfort. But as she stooped, he could see that the bodice of her dress was low-cut, to the point of allowing him to stare openmouthed on the upper curves of her jouncy titties, whose skin was like yellow ivory, and the wide valley of which beckoned his gaze as well as his lips and fingers. He felt his prick stiffen with desire as she straightened. And Rosa, seeing this handsome young man's eyes feast upon her, knew precisely what had attracted his gaze and she too blushed in a most becoming way.
Rosa was a virgin to man, though her young and despotic cousin-mistress had already taken her maidenhead with a French dildo. Nonetheless, the mulatress yearned for the affection of a virile man who could save her from the slavery into which she was bound, for Danielle was capricious and cruel and, being a woman also like herself, savored Rosa's anguish and most of all forbidding her lovely slave from achieving climax though she herself was permitted every lascivious extravagance.
It may be said that at that moment Rosa fell deeply in love with young Philip Mowgridge, and he for his part was sensually roused by her loveliness and the picturesque and unusual attire in which she was adorned. Their eyes met, and he was about to say something brash, when suddenly Danielle swept into the room in her loveliest gown, her hoopskirt swirling and undulating like a buoy upon a stormy sea. She had put on a powdered wig and a beauty patch on her left cheek, and to Philip Mowgridge she was the most beautiful female he had ever seen. Rosa swiftly withdrew, at a furious glance from her mistress, and the two were alone together.
Carefully manipulating her hoopskirt, Danielle Valrieu seated herself beside her guest, and they chatted of this and that. Her voice was a soft alluring contralto, at times rich and imperious, but always beguilingly feminine, and it played on his psyche as on the strings of a sensitive harp. Their meeting lasted only forty minutes, but when he finally kissed her hand rather clumsily-for this was his first time alone with a beautiful girl-he knew that he was passionately in love with her.
Rosa ushered him out, and Philip stammered, "Th-thank you, Rosa. You may tell your mistress that I shall call again tomorrow afternoon at about the same time, unless she has other plans."
Rosa glanced about to make certain that Danielle was not within earshot, and then whispered back, "I'm sure she'll be here, Mr. Philip. But if she isn't, I would be very glad to serve you myself."
Rosa knew very well that she was risking more than a thrashing with the martinet for such a bold and brazen avowal, but she was physically drawn towards the handsome young black-haired son of the Tuscaloosa plantation owner. . .
And so, as Philip Mowgridge walked away from the little house on Carre Street with his head in the clouds, at the back of the house a perfumed, elegantly frock-coated man with ribbons tied to his sparse black curls was letting himself in through a secret door with a key which only he possessed. It was Henri Le Gros.
Danielle was in her bedroom, removing her hoopskirt, when her door swung open and her lover and master entered, a sardonic smile on his face.
"Well, so you've had your first look at young Philip Mowgridge, have you, Danielle?" he chuckled.
His eyes blazed to see her standing in only her chemise and a single petticoat, her legs already bare, and her face colored hotly at the lecherous appraisal in his eyes.
"Yes, it's true. But he did save my life, Henri."
"So he told me. Oh, don't look so crestfallen, my dear. I told him that I'd only heard that you were the daughter of a very famous banker, that was all. Do you think I'm a fool?" His tone sharpened. "Look, fate itself plays into our hands, Danielle, if you'll be as cunning as I've taught you to be. His father is a widower and touching his fifties. He's lonely for a wench, but what I'm lonely for is a merger of the plantation which you inherited from old Valrieu and that of Daniel Mowgridge. Because the two together, under my own manipulation, can help me control the cotton and tobacco markets, and make me grow as powerful as I'll always wish to be. That's why, my dear, you're going to Tuscaloosa and you're going to seduce Philip's father and marry him ... yes, marry him as a trusting young virgin who is attracted to an older and mature and desirable man."
"But Henri-"
"Remember, one word from me and you're nothing but scum!" he broke in brutally, putting a hand on her shoulder and pushing aside the shoulder strap of the chemise, then putting his lips to the naked creamy flesh. "How would you wind up? Not even in one of my eight little bordello rooms, I'm afraid. Oh, you're good enough in bed, but you lack the finesse of a good whore or a courtesan. No, Danielle, you do what I tell you to, and you'll be richer beyond your dreams. As for lovers, you can take Philip if you've a mind to. The father will be so infatuated with you and the son is such a ninny about women that I'm sure you can wrap both around your little finger."
"If you wish, Henri," she said resignedly. "And Rosa?"
"Take her with you as a maid, nothing simpler. Now get that chemise off and into bed. My prick is aching for your cunt, Danielle."
His voice was thick with longing as Danielle pushed aside the other shoulder strap and let the chemise festoon about her bare ankles. It was the work of a moment to whisk away the remaining petticoat and she was divinely naked.
Henri Le Gros opened his breeches, tugged off his boots, and then mounted the bed. His hands gripped her titties, and his tongue delicately flicked along the scented valley of them, while she shivered and closed her eyes. His experienced fingers clutched her bottom-cheeks, and squeezed them as he began to tantalize her by prodding the tip of his prick just against the furry thatch of her cunthole till finally, forgetting all her "virginal" pretense Danniel Valrieu groaned, "Oh God, put it into me, Henri darling, I can't stand it any more-oh darling, yes, all the way-aahhh!"
The cynical Mobile adventurer laughed: "Now I recognize my Danielle!" And with an oath, he thrust himself to his balls and then, as her legs and arms flung round him and locked him to her, he began to fuck her violently, roused to even greater lecherous fury by the thought of how both of them could deceive Philip Mowgridge and his father.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Three days later, Philip Mowgridge boarded the river steamer Elsinore on his way back to Tuscaloosa. To his great delight, beautiful Danielle Valrieu and her maid Rosa accompanied him, as well as the deaf-mute Mandingo slave Cebo, whom Henri Le Gros had purchased from the Portuguese slaver captain a month before and saved for a wealthy buyer such as Philip's father.
With the Mandingo slave, the French dandy took along a pretty young Mandingo girl named Kitara, who would act as interpretess for the handsome young former king of the tribe of Mopti. Kitara was a virgin, light-colored like Cebo himself, and Henri Le Gros had purchased her a year before with the intention of making her his own concubine or having her trained to take over one of the eight luxurious bedrooms at the back of the second floor and cater to his wealthy and profligate clients. She was a gentle and delicate girl, sensible and magnificently intelligent, and he had taught her English and a little French. To his own surprise, he had spared her cherry, being content to take her across his lap and give her a few hand spankings to compel her to suck his cock. Perhaps a last vestige of voluptuous prolongation had motivated him, perhaps he had sought to put off the taking of her maidenhead until he had brought her up as a fine lady and thus her sacrifice would be the more shameful and ignominious for the young girl; but for whatever reason, the fact remained that when she boarded the steamer with the deaf-mute Cebo, she was still innocent of man-though this was only a technicality, since she had already learned to use lips and tongue in the servicing of cock.
Cebo was kept in the hold, and Kitara was given a little narrow room next to him, and allowed to converse with him freely during the journey which took nearly a week. Cebo, still brooding over the death of his young wife Itulde and the betrayal of the two of them by his own younger brother and the latter's wife, had remained disconsolate while in the slave pens at Mobile. But Henri Le Gros, recognizing the worth of such a magnificent specimen of African manhood, had given strict orders that he was not to be flogged or cruelly shackled. Shrewdly the gambler perceived that with Cebo on the Mowgridge plantation, he might have a further ally in wresting control of Daniel Mowgridge's acreage, especially once Danielle had seduced the older man. For this was her mission and Le
Gros had, at the day of sailing, warned her again that she must do everything in her power to make Daniel Mowgridge fall in love with her and wed her; the consequence would be the disclosure of the Negroid blood in her beautiful body.
The laws of Alabama were cruel and strict in those days of slavery; Danielle Valrieu knew that the least she could expect, if it were uncovered that she was actually not white but had posed as one, would be at least fifty lashes at the public whipping post, immediate sale at auction to any bidder and a life of utter degradation and impoverishment. She was too vain, too used to luxury now, too used to being a dominatress and taunting poor Rosa for her own sadistic pleasures to wish to give up such a life. So Le Gros had no need to remind her of the dangers of her situation.
But what she had not counted on was that Daniel's son Philip would fall desperately in love with her. Each day of that trip along the river, he brought to her a sonnet which he had penned in the morning and read it aloud to her till she was struck with the intensity and sincerity of his passionate young desire.
Meanwhile, in the hold of the steamer, lovely young Kitara conversed-if it can be called that-with the stalwart Cebo. Discovering that he could write the symbols of the Mandingo tongue, she had paper and pen brought her by a sailor, and quickly communicated with him in this wise. Slowly and painstakingly, he wrote down his story of the treachery of Bulmanayo and of Itulde's death on the slave ship. Kitara told him that he had already been sold to a very wealthy white plantation owner and that he must accept his slavery as she must her own. Then industriously she began to teach him how to read her lips, and Cebo, possessed of superior intelligence, made quick progress in this study. By the time the steamer docked at the Tuscaloosa wharf, the former king of the Mandingos could understand his lovely young interpretess and had agreed to accept his bondage. Perhaps, too, stricken as he was in his young manhood, he felt desire for this charming and sensitive girl of his own people, though she had come from a village some two hundred miles to the southeast and, like himself, been captured in a raid by an Arabian slave trader upon her village.
Philip handed Danielle down from the gangplank, devouring her with his eyes. He could hardly wait to tell his father that he had at last found the woman whom he loved and whom he was to marry. Danielle had let him kiss her and had told him that his poems had deeply moved her and that she was very fond of him. To the idealistic black-haired young son of the plantation owner, this was tantamount to acceptance of his suit. The burly overseer Jabez Fulton was waiting at the dock to welcome him home and to claim the strong Mandingo who would be in charge of field hands and who should set them an ideal example on how to pick cotton and tobacco. Even Jabez was wide-eyed with amazement at the sight of the massive Mandingo, and the gentle young coffee-skinned young girl beside him, who, dressed in a simple gingham dress and sandals led him by the arm down the gangplank. Jabez Fulton saw Cebo turn to the girl and stare at her mouth, saw her lips move, saw Cebo nod his head. And then, at Philip Mowgridge's sign, Kitara said in a sweet soft voice, "Mr. Overseer, this is the slave Cebo. I have told him that you will take charge of him and that he is to work at your orders. He does not speak and he does not hear, but he can read my lips."
"Why, damme, here's a pretty kettle of fish," the coarse overseer chuckled, his eyes lecherously appraising Kitara's nubile young body till she lowered her eyes in blushing modesty. "So I suppose you'll stay with him in the hut and tell him my orders, eh, Missy? Seems-likely you're a slave yourself, and bound for the master's bed, or my name's not Jabez Fulton."
"Mr. Fulton," Philip Mowgridge coolly interposed, for he had no liking for his father's brutal overseer, "My father's best friend M'sieu Le Gros has explained all this in a letter which I am bringing to him. This slave is very costly and can do magnificent work if he is not beaten or his dignity harmed. As for the girl, she is a gift from my father's friend and she will serve only as the interpreter. Is that understood? It is true that she's a slave, but she doesn't come under your jurisdiction, and I don't want to catch you taking a whip to her or to Cebo either."
"Well, Master Philip," Jabez Fulton said nastily, "seems like your first trip to Mobile has made you too big for your britches, but you're the master's son, well enough, and I'll take orders from you. All right, girl, tell that man of yours to come along and follow me. I'll have to shackle him, no slave rides behind Jabez Fulton in a cart with his hands free, no matter what a letter says."
Kitara turned to the tall and sturdy young
Mandingo, and her lips moved, and Cebo nodded. He followed the overseer, then held out his wrists. "Well, now, that's more like it. I see you've got a trick to the trade, Missy. You tell him if he does what he's told, he and I'll get along fine. As for you-well, you'll have supper with me some evening in my cottage, no doubt."
"There'll be none of that either, Mr. Fulton," again Philip Mowgridge interposed, and the overseer flushed angrily and was about to speak, then shrugged and got into the cart which a young negro boy was driving. Cebo, his wrists shackled, and the chain end made fast to a heavy stapled hook sunk into the side of the cart, squatted, his face an impassive mask, and Kitara sat beside him, her lips moving again as she formed the Mandingo words...
Danielle Valrieu had told the doting young Philip that her reason for visiting Tuscaloosa was to extend Henri Le Gros' good wishes to his father and to bring back, after a discussion with Daniel Mowgridge, news of the coming harvest which would be in September. Unworldly as he was, Philip Mowgridge did not think this strange, and believed that she had actually come on the steamer with him because she was about to agree to become his affianced bride-to-be. That first evening at supper, with liveried black servants bringing in hams and venison and trout, decanters of wine, syllabubs and sponge cakes, Daniel Mowgridge had eyes only for the voluptuous dark brown-haired octoroon whom he accepted as a white heiress. Philip sat glumly across from her, playing with his food, watching his father's animated face, hearing his father's fatuous explanation of life on the plantation, and wished impatiently to be out in the garden under the moon with gorgeous Danielle.
Danielle and her maid Rosa had been quartered in the finest of the guest rooms on the second floor and to the back, at the other end of the corridor from which Daniel Mowgridge's own master bedroom was located. Philip occupied a room on the first floor, not far from the stairway, and with an anguished lover's desolation, he watched the beautiful young heiress ascend the staircase with her hoopskirt swinging liltingly at every step. She turned, her hand on the rail, to look back at him and to wave and smile, and he sighed deeply. Rosa, who was following her mistress, looked back and gave Philip a compassionate little smile, taking care that Danielle did not see the gesture.
The next day, Daniel Mowgridge, in his riding costume, invited his beautiful guest to go horse-riding with him and to inspect the plantation. Philip, again to his discomfiture, was given the order to supervise Cebo's debut in the cotton fields with the other workers, and so he saw his father and Danielle ride off, the two engrossed in each other, and grimaced with a raging despair at the fickleness of this beautiful and glamorous female whose life he had saved and whom he so intensely desired.
A stop for lunch at a wayside inn, and Daniel Mowgridge found himself even more fascinated by his beautiful young companion. Since his wife's death, he had had his fill of black and mustee wenches. Now in a flare up of waning virility, he longed to bed a girl like Danielle. He knew from Henri Le Gros's letter that she was rich and bore one of the finest names in all Mobile. And when he learned that her father had left her nearly as many acres as he himself possessed and located not far from his own holdings, he knitted his bushy eyebrows and pulled reflectively his beard. Yes, a marriage had much to recommend it; besides enjoying a piece of this tasty cunt whenever he chose, he could amalgamate her land with his and perhaps dictate a better price for his cotton and tobacco. It was exactly what his scheming friend Henri Le Gros had been certain Daniel Mowgridge would plan!
Danielle rode sidesaddle, and she had had Rosa help her with her prettiest frock and bonnet, and spray her chemise as well as her naked skin with an elegant French perfume brought in past customs from Havana whence it had come by French vessels bringing slaves, silks and French porcelain ware. Daniel Mowgridge had inhaled this fragrant perfume over the table at the inn, and his desires had grown apace as he stared greedily at the high-breasted, insolent-featured young heiress. She understood his gaze all too well, and she returned it with a coy little smile, realizing that by favoring his attentions, she would be following the advice of her guardian and virtual owner-for such Henri Le Gros was, though she loathed admitting it to herself.
"There's a little creek I want you to see, Mademoiselle Valrieu," Daniel Mowgridge said as he rose from the table and gallantly helped her up. "That is, my dear, if you're not too tired?"
"But of course not, Daniel. May I call you that?"
"You make me feel younger already," he quipped.
She fluttered her lashes at him. "But you're not to say a thing like that, Daniel Mowgridge! Why, you're a fine figure of a man, the sort of man any sensible girl would desire."
"Do you think so, Danielle-may I call you that?"
"But of course. How well they go together those two names, Daniel and Danielle!" the Mobile heiress purred, linking her arm with his.
"Why, by God, so they do! It's almost destiny has brought us together, you adorable creature! But here, you hardly know me and I'm behaving like a schoolboy sneaking out to a slave cottage for his first-I beg your pardon, I didn't mean to say that," his face grew red as he recognized his gaffe.
"Oh come now, Daniel, I'm not so innocent as you think. It's true I've never had a man, but don't you think that a girl who's had a French father and educated to read the latest books, knows a good deal about what men want of a woman?"
He caught his breath at her insolent daring. "By God, you're a girl after my own heart, Danielle," he stammered. "Good. Then you know how I feel, I mean I feel so young now in your presence. You're not bespoken for, are you?"
"Good heavens no, Daniel! Why do you ask?"
"I realize we've known each other scarcely twenty-four hours, Danielle, but by God you're the most beautiful creature I've ever seen. Maybe, well-I'm going too fast. Let me show you that little creek I was telling you about."
She patted his arm and nodded, "You'll always find me ready to talk and honest in my answers, dear Daniel. I already feel at home here, thanks to your hospitality."
They rode some fifteen miles to the northwest, until they came to an exquisite little creek, shaded by poplar and cypress trees, cool and sweet with clear water. Along the bank grew wild azaleas and wood roses, and Danielle gasped at the loveliness of the setting. Their horses were tethered to a poplar tree nearby as he led her down the gradually sloping pathway towards the nearest bank.
"It's so inviting, that I almost wish to take a swim in it," she murmured. "But of course, it wouldn't be proper."
Her words inflamed him. Shudderingly, he stepped closer to her, an arm around her waist, and muttered, "Anything's possible. I own all this land for as far as you can see on every side, Danielle. I'm told you have land too, so why shouldn't we own it together?"
"What do you mean, Daniel?"
"I mean," his voice grew thicker with desire, "I'd like you to think seriously about becoming Mrs. Daniel Mowgridge. I'm not really old, and I'm rich and can give you everything you wish. I'd do my best to make you happy, Danielle."
"I'm sure you would, my dear Daniel. Oh yes, I'll really think about it. But you've really flustered me, you know. Only my second day as a guest in your house and already you wish me to stay with you permanently." She gave him a flirtatious little smile and turned away. But at the same time, she put her hand over his and pressed it firmly against her waist.
"Then I can dare to hope, Danielle?" he asked feverishly.
She nodded. With a groan of delight, Daniel Mowgridge grasped her waist with both hands, and pressed his mouth on hers. At once her arms linked around his neck and she strained upward, pressing her body wantonly against him, till she knew from the hard-rooting protuberance at the fly of his riding breeches that he was randy for her.
"Oh Daniel!" she gasped, pretending to turn her mouth away from his kiss and to be shocked by his lust, "what will you think of me, responding like this? But I can't help myself-la, sir, you sweep a poor girl off her feet and I've had so little experience with men!" That was true enough, she told herself cynically, for only Henri Le Gros had bedded her till now.
"You mean you respond-you want me too, my beautiful Danielle?" He was trembling now as he stared at her, his face dark with the congested blood of his rut.
She nodded with a feigned shyness. "I can't help myself. I do want you, Daniel. More than you know. If I told you, I'd be a shameless hussy and you would never want to marry me."
"By God, that's what I want to do. That's what I meant all along-Oh you darling-you mean you will?" he panted.
"Only if you swear on your honor as a gentleman that you won't change your mind just because I'm helpless and can't hold back against you, my darling," she whispered, touching his cheek with a soft hand.
"You have my word! Oh God! Here and now, here on the bank of the creek with the trees hiding the sunlight from us, the air on our naked skin-oh I want you, my beautiful Danielle, I want to love you, I want to have you!"
"Then you shall, my very darling Daniel, then you shall," she breathed.
He uttered a cry of joy and seized her again in his arms, his mouth slavering at her throat, her chin, her cheeks and eyes till he regained her mouth again in a long brutal kiss. Danielle Valrieu opened her lips and let his tongue thrust in between them, pressing herself tightly against him so that her crotch rubbed to his in acquiescence.
"Take me-oh help me, I don't know what to do, I've ridden horseback like a man, I've fenced like one, but never have been loved by one," she murmured. Thus cunningly did she intimate to him that if he did not find a cherry when he fucked her, its loss would be explained by her ability as an equestrienne.
His fingers began to tremble as he undid the bodice of her frock, and she herself, turning her head away and pretending to blush and to be half-fainting with emotion, helped him with her skirt and with the petticoats till she stood at last in camisole and drawers and stockings and dainty satin garters.
He laid her down gently with his frock coat as her blanket, and knelt down to feast his eyes and let his hands roam over her loveliness. Gently he drew the camisole off her body, and uttered a hoarse, stifled cry as he saw her naked tittied rising and falling, the nipples dark and tumescent. He bowed his head and sucked one of them up between his lips, while her fingers caressed his graying hair and she moaned, "Oh my Daniel, oh my beloved one, my husband, my lover, take me. You've won me, I can't withstand you, I don't want to so long as you don't think me shameless, darling!"
His hands moved down to the waistband of her drawers, and fairly dragged them down to her knees, and he saw the dark brown tufts of her pussy hair, and the soft pink lips beneath, and his prick threatened to burst in its fly. Madly he liberated it, fumbling in his breeches, and then, booted and breeched, his cravette torn off, the buttons of his lace-trimmed silk shirt ripped off in his frantic eagerness, he mounted the beautiful young heiress. She twisted her face away, gasping, "Oh no, you mustn't, Oh Daniel, I've let you go too far, please, be gentle with me, please!"
But even as she spoke, she knew these words would inflame him and they did. With a cry he forced himself against her furry slit, he felt his prickhead pry between the lips, and his hands reached under to grab at her satiny bare bottom cheeks, as she arched up to him, whimpering, "Oh Daniel, I love you, I want you!"
And when he buried himself in her tight young cunt to the balls, Danielle Valrieu uttered a sobbing cry, "Oh my darling, take me, you've won me forever, oh do it to me, make me your wife forever, oh my lover, my husband, my man!"
The cardinals and redwings twittered overhead, curious at this singular couple threshing and squirming about, gasping and moaning below them. The flickering rays of the sun crept through the leafy trees and foliage and touched the naked flesh of Danielle Valrieu with a kind of nimbus.
Her mouth glued to his, her fingernails digging into his shoulder blades, she pretended that she was a virgin, gasping, "Oh you're so big, you hurt me-Oh be easy on me, oh my lover," till he was maddened beyond restraint.
And when he gushed his gism into her, she uttered a cry and whimpered, "Oh my sweet dearest, you've given me a child! Now I fear you must wed me or I'll be damaged beyond repair and I want to be damaged only by you, my darling, masterful Daniel, forever and forever."
"You will be, you gorgeous piece, you sweet filly, you will be," Daniel Mowgridge hoarsely avowed. "Since I'm to wed you, beloved, let me do it again. Can't you feel how hard I still am in that tight warm little love nest of yours?"
"Yes, yes, do it, do it." Danielle Valrieu breathed. She closed her eyes, shivered as she felt him draw back his still stiff cock, and then smiled at him. It was a smile of triumph which the fatuous widower took as a smile of uninhibited love.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When Daniel Mowgridge and the Creole adventuress rode back to the mansion fronted with its magnificent white columns, the sun had already set. But before their arrival, Philip's father and the coy and seductive Danielle had agreed not to announce their marriage till the end of the week, for it would seem too sudden. Nonetheless, Philip was startled to see at the supper table how almost playfully attentive his father was to their beautiful guest and how often their eyes met, and Danielle would color and look away with a soft little laugh of amused satisfaction.
What he could not know, beyond the fact of his father's sudden secret passion for this dark-brown-haired beauty, was that his father had already tasted something of the perverse nature of the seductress from Mobile ... for after they had made love for the second time, Daniel Mowgridge had been so enraptured with the young woman's aptitude despite her profession of virginity, that he had questioned her at great length. Danielle had been prepared for this, and had guilefully assured him that he had been her first man and that her maidenhead had been lost during her teens while on horseback. But what was more, she hinted of some of the forbidden delights which the young girls at the convent school essayed when the lights were out and of the wicked little games which she was wont to enjoy with Rosa, though she did not mention Rosa by name. And since the plantation owner had already discovered by himself the sadistic pleasures of watching a comely negress or mulatress under the lash, his senses were inflamed. On this Danielle Valrieu had counted.
Philip nonetheless pursued his courtship, though with a troubled heart. The next afternoon, the dark-brown-haired heiress rode with him as she had ridden with his father, and by her own capricious and cruel whim, directed her steed towards the very knoll where on the afternoon before, she had so ardently been fucked by his father. Prim and demure, she sat down on the grass, while the idealistic young man, who had never known the masterful glory of fucking, fought a thousand battles with himself to keep from palpating her luscious bubbies or kissing her soft throat or flinging her down on her back, hoisting up her riding skirt and petticoats and fucking down her drawers to assert his maleness once and for all. Instead, he told her of his love and he produced another sonnet which he had written the night before while unable to sleep in his room thinking of her. Danielle kissed him gently on the cheek and stroked his forehead and murmured, "We mustn't hurry things, my dear fellow. I'm very fond of you, you know that, but you must give a girl a chance. I'm indebted to you already for having saved my life, but it would be too simple if I were to throw myself at you." And with that answer, the black-haired son of Daniel Mowgridge had to be content ...
It was Saturday night, and the fat, warmhearted Negress known as Mammy Jasmine had outdone herself in offering a Lucullan feast. Yams, butterbeans, sweet corn and turnip greens vied with her potato pudding, her chicken cooked in sherry and mushrooms, roast pheasant and sweet hickory-smoked ham. Cakes and pies, bowls of tempting raspberries and strawberries mixed, thick with clotted cream, made the festal board groan and Daniel Mowgridge had ordered Ezekiel, his majordomo, a tall Ashanti in his early thirties, to bring out the finest Madeira, port, and hock.
At last coffee was served, and Philip's gray-bearded father rose, patting his belly and belching from having wined and dined too well already. He lifted a silver cup filled with sparkling hock, and he beamed down at Danielle, who had the good grace to lower her eyes and look the very picture of maiden surprise as he announced, "I should have invited a dozen guests, the gentry of Tuscaloosa, for this night. But perhaps it is just as well that only my son and I are here, for here's all my life, yes, and my new life to be."
Philip stiffened in his chair, his eyes widening, not at once understanding his father's words.
Daniel Mowgridge lifted the cup towards his son, "Philip, my son, share this toast in my joy, for I feel as young as you this night. For Mademoiselle Valrieu has done me the honor to agree to become my wife. We've already talked about it, my boy, and you needn't call her 'Mother,' of course. Her first name will do nicely, since it's so near to mine. Well, Phil boy, what do you say to that?"
Philip Mowgridge's mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Then he uttered a stifled groan, pushed back his chair and fled from the room and up the stairs to his room, slamming the door and flinging himself down upon his bed. "You bitch, you teasing taunting bitch, to lure me on so!" he cried aloud to the lonely walls of his room.
"What the devil, what a way to act! A thousand pardons, my beautiful girl," his father said angrily as he turned to the brown eyed dark-haired beauty at the table to his left. "Never mind. He's jealous, that's all. He should have found himself a girl long ago, by God. He's a milksop, and you, perhaps you'll give me a strong son, a boy who, God willing, before I die can see turning into a better man than Phil."
He did not see the look of loathing Danielle turned upon him; she had no wish to bear a child. And Henri Le Gros, her corrupt and secret lover, had trained her well in knowledge of preventing conception. She meant to employ that knowledge now, for the thought of spawning a child by this coarse country bumpkin was anathema to her. She looked longingly at the door through which Philip had fled. And she thought to herself with a mocking little smile of anticipation that Philip was hot for her after all. Well, once she was Daniel's wife, she could see to it that his son could creep into her bedchamber when the old man had gone to sleep. It would be a spicy thrill to pit father against son, particularly in bed...
It was midnight, and the great house was asleep, all except Philip Mowgridge, who tossed and turned, his face wet with tears, rage and hatred in his heart for his own father, but most of all for that sly and cunning harlot who had professed to love him, whose life he had saved, who had spoken of being in his debt and had then flung him aside for the temptation of all those rolling acres of Mowgridge land.
There was a soft tap at his door. He started up, got out of bed slowly and went to the door, wearing only his nightshirt. "Who-who's there?" he hoarsely whispered.
"It's I, Mr. Philip, it's Rosa," he heard a soft husky voice.
Startled, he quickly opened the door and the lovely young mulatress entered, making a sign to him to close it at once.
With trembling fingers he struck a match and lit the little kerosene lamp on the table beside the window. He turned to contemplate the mulatress and he gasped to see her in a thin, almost transparent nightgown, with her hair flowing down to her waist, and her eyes humid and wide and tender with compassion.
"Poor Mr. Philip," she murmured as she approached him. "I could have told you back in Mobile. You mustn't love her, Mr. Philip. I'm only a slave, but there's her blood and mine together-I dare not tell you what it truly is, but you must believe me and promise to say nothing. She's a heartless woman, Mr. Philip. She wants power and wealth and she-likes to twist men around her little finger. But I am not like that I'm very fond of you, and I would be proud and grateful if you'd take me and forget her, if you can."
"Rosa-what are you saying?" he gasped, scarlet with embarrassment. Her lovely titties swelled passionately now, as she moved still closer, wound her satiny arms around his neck. The sweet smell of jasmine was in her hair and on the nightgown, and the warmth and perfume of her subtle flesh. "I'm her slave, Mr. Philip, but I could be yours, too, just as willingly and more so. Aren't I nice to look at and to kiss? I've never been with a man, Mr. Philip, but you're so good and so kind and gentle. I'd be honored if-if it was you the first time."
"No-it can't be-please, Rosa-I don't know what to say to you. I can't understand-I thought she loved me-"
Rosa uttered a forlorn little sign and bowed her head, "I apologize for having disturbed you at so late a time, Mr. Philip. I'll go now. I won't trouble you again," she murmured listlessly; and opening the door, she let herself out and was quickly gone.
But Danielle Valrieu had wakened, having dreamed in the short sleep of being a queen here in Tuscaloosa, so powerful that even Henri Le Gros could no longer claim his hold upon her. Though she had feasted well, she felt a sudden craving for some cold milk and perhaps a piece of that delicious sponge cake to go with it. She called aloud, "Rosa, wake up, where are you? I need you, wake up!"
For Rosa was wont to sleep in the same room as her mistress, and a little cot had been placed at one side of the spacious guest room in which Daniel Mowgridge's bride-to-be was quartered. Receiving no reply, the beautiful heiress angrily slipped out of bed and walked over to the cot. At that same moment the door stealthily opened and Rosa stood outlined in the doorway.
"What the devil? Where have you been, you little slut? Why weren't you here when I called you? Did you go to the privy, perhaps?"
"No, Mistress."
"Get in here with you! Close the door. Now then, where have you been off to. Did you see some fine nigra stud you fancied, perhaps?" Danielle Valrieu said wickedly, baring her teeth in a rictus of sadistic joy.
Rosa shivered with apprehension, but at this moment she despised her young mistress so that she burst out with the truth, cost what it would: "No, Mistress, if you must know, I went to Mr. Philip's room!"
"You did what? Are you out of your mind, Rosa?"
"No, Mistress. He was in love with you, you know. You broke his heart for fair. I thought that maybe I could help him forget that. I want a man, Mistress. Maybe you've never thought I'd want one the way you have yours-"
"Keep your filthy little bitchy mouth shut, if you know what's good for you! You so much as breathe a word about M'sieu Henri and I'll have you flayed alive and your tongue torn out, hear me?" And in her fury, Danielle Valrieu advanced and slapped Rosa viciously across the cheek.
Rosa fell back, her hand to her burning cheek, tears springing to her lovely dilated eyes. "You, you slave, you think you could have a man like that?" Danielle Varieu said scornfully. "I'll have them both, if I please. I'll have the father to my legal bed, and the son as my lover. There, Rosa, what do you think of that, eh? So you're tired of our little games together? What you need is a good thrashing. It's a pity I haven't had time to attend to it since Mobile, but tomorrow I shall. I'll have that ugly-looking overseer bring me up a good whip and I'll lace your bottom and legs till you grovel at my feet and lick them and beg for mercy, Rosa darling."
"You're-you're heartless, you're a monster," Rosa gasped, "You don't love either of them and you know it. You can't love anyone except your own wicked self, unless it's that-"
Again Danielle's hand flashed out, this time across Rosa's other cheek, "Didn't I tell you never to speak his name here? Do you know what it would mean if this fine plantation owner and his namby-pamby son found out about you know who? I'd be a slave, like you-"
"Yes, and it might just do you good!" Rosa bravely interrupted, standing her ground for the first time since she had been forced into bondage to her own blood-cousin. "You've got nigra blood in you just as I have. Of course, yours is a lot less, that's why you look so white and can pass yourself off that way!"
"Have you quite finished?" Danielle sibilantly countered. "Tomorrow morning, I am going to have my new husband take you to the whipping shed. And that big strong Mandingo slave--what's his name? Oh yes, Cebo-ought to suit you, Rosa dear. You've been asking to have a man, so you'll get one, the strongest, biggest stud on the entire plantation. But you needn't think you'll get a chance to tell my trusting husband about the blood we share, Rosa girl. You see, you'll be gagged during your whipping-yes, and during your poking by Cebo too. And I might just as well gag you right this minute and lock you up in the closet overnight to make sure you won't run whining off to your precious Mr. Philip!"
Before Rosa could defend herself, the perverse young dark-brown-haired heiress seized the lovely mulatress by the shoulders and flung her back against the wall, stunning her momentarily. Swiftly following up her advantage, Danielle dragged Rosa down onto the floor. Next, ripping off her own nightgown, she deftly made a fetter of it to bind Rosa's wrists behind the girl's back. Naked and gloating in her joy of domination, Danielle then tore a strip off the bodice of Rosa's nightshift, forced the fabric between the sobbing mulatress's lips; instantly ripping away a broader piece and laying Rosa's lush young titties bare, the Creole adventuress wound it over Rosa's mouth and knotted it tightly behind her victim's neck.
"That's better," she purred vindictively. "And now to roll you into the closet and lock you in till it's time for your thrashing and poking, my too talkative cousin, and I'll enjoy my sleep ever so much more."
Suiting action to word, Danielle pitilessly grasped Rosa's hips, rolled her over and over pausing to slap the mulatress's tear wet cheeks and to threaten her with the scabrous details of the morning's punishment-till she had wedged that voluptuous young form into the back of the closet. Slamming the door and turning the key, she flung herself naked into bed, and began to caress her panting breasts with one hand and to frig her moistening quim till at last with a hoarse cry of rapture, she achieved her onanistic climax, reveling in her growing powers over not only poor Rosa but the father and son whom she had turned into wary enemies of each other. In such a moment of triumph, Danielle could very nearly forget Henri Le Gros.
CHAPTER NINE
The unscrupulous Creole gave poor Rosa, so unjustly condemned, no time to plead in her own behalf the next morning. For Danielle went at once to the bed chamber of the gray-bearded plantation owner, entering just as he was clambering out of bed in his nightshirt and, closing the door, swiftly came to him, cupped his cheeks in her soft hands and kissed him passionately on the mouth. "Oh my beloved, I couldn't sleep all night dreaming of you," she whispered ardently. "How soon can we be married, my beloved, so I shan't spend any more lonesome nights than are absolutely necessary? If you knew how much I thought of what happened at the creek, and how much I want it to happen all the time, whenever you wish it!"
Trembling with desire, for his encounter with the voluptuous creamy-skinned mistress of Henri Le Gros had been the most exciting erotic adventure of his entire life, Daniel Mowgridge hoarsely exclaimed, "By God, I'm of the same mind, you lovely, teasing vixen! I'll have Minister Judson arrange for the ceremony a week from this very day. Will that be soon enough, my darling?"
"Not half soon enough, Daniel-how I long to come to you every night without having anyone scorn me by thinking me wanton," she whispered into his ear, as her slim fingers stroked his neck and shoulders. "But this morning I must ask you as owner of this plantation where I am till now only a privileged guest, to punish and to punish severely, a slave who has sinned grievously."
"What do you mean, Danielle?"
"It's Rosa, my darling. Do you know that I caught the little slut last night sneaking back from the slave huts? I've taken pains to keep her away from men, but the minute she got away from my surveillance, she stole away and had one of your nigger bucks mount her. Yes, she crept in last night when she thought I was asleep, and I had it out of her. I want her whipped, Daniel, thoroughly whipped. And to cure her of that itch between her legs, I want the strongest and the biggest black buck on your plantation to cover her."
"But she's your slave, Danielle, and-" he began.
She stood against him, in her batiste and lace-trimmed nightgown, pressing herself lasciviously against his shuddering body. Her hands again cupped his cheeks and her lips entreatingly merged with his. Then she murmured, "Wouldn't you like to watch? Rosa's a very lovely girl, but she's been wicked. Besides. Since you're going to be my master very soon, you'll also be Rosa's. And if we find that her itch can't be satisfied, she shan't be allowed to pick any nigra she chooses, but I'll make certain that she comforts you when I have my monthly times. Would you like that, Daniel?"
His face darkened with lust. He had already observed the loveliness of the mulatress, and the prospect of enjoying Rosa's favors along with those of his fascinating young wife-to-be was dazzling. In the waning years of his virility, Daniel Mowgridge, perhaps as much as any man alive, yearned to prove for his own ego's sake that he was still very much a cock smith. And Danielle, sensing this already at the creek, intimated to him that she could not have dreamed for a more competent and thrilling lover. Thus duped by her cozening flattery as well as by the perverse delights which she dangled before him as a carrot is dangled before a hungry rabbit, the plantation owner cast aside all scruples and morality, and acceded to her request. "By God, you're right about Rosa! A quality high-yellar piece like that one oughtn't to trifle with any black ape she sets her imagine on! I know what, I'll have the new Mandingo field hand, that Cebo, attend to her. How would that be Danielle?"
"Perfect, my lover! And best of all, you and I shall watch in the whipping shed and see how Cebo whips the nonsense out of Rosa's hide and then gives her more than she bargained for afterwards. Shall we, darling?"
He felt his prick agonizingly stiffen at the images which her carefully calculated words evoked. "Yes, yes, just as you say, darling. Let's have a bit of breakfast first, the wench'll keep till then, don't you think?"
Ten minutes later, Danielle and the plantation owner, summarily dressed, were breakfasting on Mammy Jasmine's hot biscuits and honey, bacon and fluffily scrambled eggs, and steaming strong black coffee.
"Time enough for a second cup of coffee after we've had Rosa attended to, darling," Danielle insisted as she rose from the table and came to his side, then leaned down to kiss the top of his head. "Why don't I send for that girl who interprets for Cebo and tell her what's wanted? I've kept Rosa in my closet tied up and gagged so that she could think all night about what she's going to get and how she deserves it, Daniel darling."
"Excellent idea, my sweet! I'll go directly to the whipping shed, you arrange for it," the plantation owner panted, wiping his greasy mouth with a napkin and bruskly rising from the table. Before he left, he clasped Danielle in his arms and his mouth avidly fused to hers. Delicately she opened her lips, and then let her own nimble pink tongue creep out to flick at his. A violent shudder of rut surged through his body, and he broke off the embrace, his face mottled with lust. "How lucky I am, and how much I've got to thank my friend Henri for," he said thickly. "I'll meet you out there then, my darling."
After he had left the dining room, Danielle Valrieu stood looking after him, a mocking little smile on her face. "That's true, Danielle. You really don't know how lucky you are and how much you do owe to Henri," she said softly.
Then, her nostrils flaring with the anticipation of this sadistic scene which would feed her own perverse appetite as well as the plantation owner's, she hurried out to the slave quarters where the young Mandingo girl Kitara had been given her own little hut next to the one occupied by the former Mandingo king.
"You're the only one who can get him to understand, girl," Danielle Valrieu said to the gentle young slave girl. "So make it very clear to him, you understand? You're not exactly free from a whipping yourself, unless you obey. And I'm to be your new mistress very soon, for Mr. Mowgridge is to make me his wife one week from today."
"I will obey you, Mistress," Kitara docilely murmured, inclining her head respectfully.
"Good! See that you do, then. You'll tell Cebo to go upstairs to my room and to take the girl Rosa he'll find tied and gagged in the closet. He's to put her on the triangle, naked, and give her a good thrashing, you understand? And then it's the master's wish that he cover her-as a stud covers a nigra wench."
Kitara's lovely eyes widened and darkened in solicitous compassion for the mulatress, thus condemned. "What has she done, Mistress?" she asked.
Danielle's hand flashed out viciously, bruising the young girl's cheek. "How dare you be so impertinent, you uppity little bitch! Just because you can make Cebo understand you, doesn't make you a free woman and don't forget it. It's not your business what Rosa has or hasn't done. You're to take orders, understand me? Now be off with you to Cebo and have him bring Rosa at once to the whipping shed, or else you can join her there and I'll have him thrash you too!"
With this, Danielle left Kitara's hut and went at once to the whipping shed where Daniel Mowgridge was already waiting, his eyes sparkling with lubricious anticipation. Meanwhile Kitara had hurriedly gone into the hut next door to explain to Cebo what he must do. The handsome tall and sturdy Mandingo studied her face anxiously, making certain that he could comprehend the meanings of her lips movements. Then he raised both hands and stepped back, expressing his horror at such an edict. "But you must, Cebo, or they will have me whipped too, and you as well," Kitara told him by forming the Mandingo words with her soft sweet lips. "It's the wish of the young mistress. There is no choice for slaves and I'm one as much as you."
Cebo's eyes narrowed, he shook his head dolefully, and then nodded. His lips formed haltingly the Mandingo reply: "I will do it. But that young mistress is evil, I feel it in my heart. She will try to set father against son. I can smell out her wickedness and there will be great sorrow here unless she is revealed for what she is."
And then, again shaking his head in sorrow, the young king of the Mandingos who had slain lions and upheld the honor of his tribe set out on his cruel and unjust errand...
Danielle Valrieu had put on only a filmy green crepe de Chine frock and a silk camisole as well as her white silk stockings held up high on her lissome creamy thighs with red rosettes, and her best high-heeled slippers. She had combed out her dark-brown tresses so that, like Rosa's, they fell nearly to her waist, giving her an unutterable devastating appearance of young femininity. Daniel Mowgridge had donned a frock coat and a thin shirt, for the weather was impressively warm even though it was early morning, Moses, the Ashanti slave who was generally put in charge of prisoners condemned to a whipping, had ostentatiously brought padded footstools for his master and the young Creole beauty so they might sit at their ease and watch Rosa's punishment.
Now Cebo entered carrying the weeping mulatress in his arms, her mouth still gagged and her wrists still bound behind her. Accompanying him was the gentle Kitara whose eyes were filled with tears, but she dared not question the authority of the plantation owner and the woman for whom he had conceived such a reckless infatuation as to deny even a just hearing for poor innocent Rosa.
Cebo lowered Rosa to the ground, and then swiftly unbound her wrists, only to tie them with a rawhide thong to the peak of the heavy triangle.
"Kitara, have Cebo place the bitch so that we can see her bottom," Danielle greedily commanded, and the young Mandingo girl moved to stand before the brawny young former king who was now himself the lowliest of slaves and with movements of her lips communicated Danielle's order. He nodded, glanced back at her with a brooding look, then completed the pinioning of Rosa's wrists. Next squatting down, he made each slim ankle fast to the lower leg of the device. When he rose, the beautiful naked mulatress was tractioned and her legs obscenely spread apart to provide access to both intimate orifices. And finally to complete the preparations, Cebo took hold of the thick sheath of Rosa's black lustrous hair and draped it over her panting titties so that she should not even have that scant protection from the lash.
He turned questioningly to the plantation owner who in turn eyed the beautiful dark-brown-haired Creole. "Thirty-five, with a good solid strap. And Kitara, mind that Cebo sends the strap up between her sluttish legs to make her dance. After that, you know what he's to do to her," Danielle decreed.
"Yes, Mistress," Kitara falteringly retorted. Again she communicated by lip movements to the deaf-mute who nodded again; his eyes narrow and anguished. For he did not wish to harm this beautiful and innocent slave who was to be, he rightly believed, a victim solely for the entertainment of that white harlot who had dulled the wits of the white master with her cruelty and lust.
"Why not take away the gag, my darling," the plantation owner now suggested in a thickened voice," so we can hear her cries?" By that comment alone he proved the undeniable hold which Danielle's vicious sensuality had taken over him. But swiftly she interposed: "Oh no, darling, it's so much more agonizing for her when she can't speak and when she can't beg for pardon, because I've such a tender heart that I might listen to her. And this time she deserves a real thrashing for being such a hussy and daring to mount one of your fine black bucks. Let her be as she is, darling."
He made a gesture of assent, and Danielle
Valrieu breathed a sigh of relief; she was afraid that Rosa, under the whip, might betray not only the falsehood of the charge brought against her but also her own relationship to the beautiful Creole.
Daniel Mowgridge leaned forward, his eyes glittering with lust, as he watched the beautiful young mulatress squirm and tense her muscles in apprehension of what was to follow. The Creole beauty beside him slyly put her hand over his, and their fingers entwined as she leaned closer to him, her face flushed and her own eyes sparkling with sadistic joy. Rosa's pale yellow-ivory skin was flawless, and in this cruelly stretched and tractioned pose, every facet of her voluptuous young virginal beauty was emphasized. The finely turned calves, the suave and dimpled knee hollows, the elegantly rounded thighs which merged into the firm, round, closely set hemispheres of her bottom ... hemispheres which were forced to betray the most intimate secret of her maidenly rosette, because the distension of her legs forced those cheeks to gape salaciously and leave her anus vulnerable to the lash!
The Mandingo had taken down the strap and now planted himself at the girl's left, awaiting a sign from the master. Kitara effaced herself against the farthest wall, closing her eyes, not wishing to be part of this inhuman scene. Daniel Mowgridge raised his right hand and nodded.
Thwack! The strap whistled through the air, adhering to the upper curves of Rosa's naked posterior. Gagged as she was, Rosa nonetheless had clenched her jaw muscles and had resolved to utter no cry for mercy so as to let her cruel mistress and this new white master gloat over her suffering. But as the strap glided off the naked flesh, one could see the angry wide pink weal imprinted across both globes, whose skin was twitching and tightly drawn. One saw also and shiver like the surface of a brook touched by a sudden gust of wind.
The second lash fell across her shoulders, to Danielle's annoyance. And when the third clocked across the middle of Rosa's back, she turned to Kitara and hissed, "Make Cebo understand that I want this bitch thrashed on her bottom and between her legs, and that's all. I want the sluttishness whipped out of her, at her tenderest parts so she won't think of gadding about at night with some nigger!" And then, turning with a sweet and cloying smile to the plantation owner, she murmured, "Don't you agree, Daniel darling?"
She could feel his fingers convulsively tighten against hers as he agreed; "Yes, you're quite right, my darling!" And she knew that she had won him and that he was now her infatuated, blind, unquestioning slave. Henri Le Gros would be very proud of her!
Kitara lifted her hand and came forward quickly to face Cebo; her lips again forming the Mandingo words, she communicated the Creole's order. Cebo nodded, but he gave Danielle such a glance of implacable disgust that it was well for him that she did not see it, engrossed as she was in playing up to the plantation owner, who a week hence was to be her husband.
The strap whistled through the air again and fell with an angry Crack over the base of Rosa's naked behind. The sobbing soft groan was choked back by the gag, as the young mulatress arched forward, the muscles of her thighs flexing violently, and the cheeks of her bottom tightening and opening in spasmodic reflex. Daniel Mowgridge felt his prick harden at the sight, and he gripped Danielle's hand so tightly that she winced with pain. But the inflammatory sight of this sadistic punishment had whetted her own pernicious lust, and so that pain was pleasure for her too.
Cebo wished to hurry the flogging, and the next five or six lashes were swiftly applied from the top to the base of Rosa's quivering and now vividly streaked bare bottom. But again Danielle interrupted the punishment by ordering Kitara to tell Cebo that each lash was to be laid on vigorously and very slowly, so that Rosa might taste to the full the quality of punishment which she had brought upon herself for her harlotry.
The next ten lashes were therefore spaced with each about half a minute apart, landing solidly on the naked and brightly welted posterior. Each now was announced by a sobbing gasp, and by a sudden convulsive lunging forward as Rosa strained to escape the fiery kiss of the leather strap. Towards the last two of this series, she turned her contorted tearstained face back over one shoulder, appealing to Cebo who stared back at her sorrowingly. His mouth moved, but there was no sound. He wished to tell her that he believed her innocent, that he found her desirable, and that he would have given much to have been spared the cruelty and indignity of flogging her.
"I want the last ten up between her legs,"
Danielle imperiously called out in a loud voice vibrant with lust. And this too, Kitara had to communicate to Cebo.
Lowering the strap to the floor, he slowly flicked his wrist and the tip of the leather band disappeared out of sight between the straddled, shaking, naked thighs. At once, Rosa lunged madly from side to side, her head falling back and her eyes turning to the ceiling, and a raucous and wordless cry emanated from the gag.
"That's the way, Cebo! Again, and again like that!" Danielle panted, leaning forward, her face flushed, her titties wildly rising and falling.
And thus the last lashes of that sentence were swept up by Cebo's strong arm between the gaping naked thighs of the unfortunate young mulatress, each time burning and chafing the lips of her tender virgin cunt. Her cries were deafening even through the gag. The triangle creaked with her maddened struggles as she threw herself from side to side, tugging at her bound wrists, trying to wrench her tethered ankles free of the rawhide things.
Her body drooped now, shaken by occasional tremorings, bathed in sweat. Her face was crumpled and twisted with, agony, wet with her tears.
"Good!" Danielle hissed. "Now then, Kitara, tell him to fuck her! Fuck her good and hard, make her cry!"
Kitara stared at the Creole beauty, her face ashen with horror as her mind digested the infamous command. "Quickly, you nigra bitch!" Danielle commanded, "or you'll take Rosa's place on the triangle!"
Tears in her eyes, the young Mandingo girl approached the former king of the Mandingos, who wore only a loincloth. His superb body glistened with sweat from the exertion, and his face was sad and haggard with the pain he felt for having tortured this innocent girl. It seemed to him that in a sense it was like what had been done to Itulde aboard that slave ship, save that this time his arm had directed the torturing lash. Tears were in his eyes as he watched Kitara's lips. He shuddered, glanced at the plantation owner. But by now Daniel Mowgridge was himself overwhelmed with rut: "Do what my future wife tells you to, you ugly devil, or I'll have you gelded and flogged," he bellowed.
Kitara swiftly translated this terrible threat, and Cebo showed his head to acknowledge both his helplessness and his willingness to obey. Then slowly he doffed his loincloth, and he moved to face the weeping Rosa. His eyes stared at her heaving titties, at the sweet smooth goblet of her belly, at the thick black fleece which framed her virgin cunt. His lips moved as he tried to tell her that this was not done of his will; that if he had his way, he would woo her as he had his own Itulde. He strove to speak, but only a dull faint croaking was heard.
"Get on with it, man!" the plantation owner gasped, his left arm around the Creole beauty's waist now, his right hand fumbling at the fly of his breeches.
Cebo felt his mighty prick harden, because despite his compassion for this innocent and unfortunate victim, his manhood could not ignore her tempting young fresh virginal beauty. Rosa stared at him, and then her eyes lowered to see the massive protuberance of his ramrod, and she uttered a shriek and tried to lunge backwards.
But Cebo sorrowfully followed her, his strong hands gripping her waist, as his prick guided its way towards the pink twitching lips of her virgin crevice. In a mad attempt at evasion, she twisted her hips this way and that, but Cebo followed her every maneuver, until at last his mighty ramrod thrust between the petals of her slit. There being no hymen-for Danielle had long ago eliminated that barrier with the artificial phallus-he found himself imbedded to the balls inside her.
Rosa's head fell back, her eyes swimming in tears, upturned towards the ceiling. She jerked at her wrist bonds, tried frenziedly to jerk herself away from that harpooning, but she could not.
"Go to it, fuck her, fuck her, Cebo!" Daniel Mowgridge rose, his lips wet and trembling, his eyes sunken and glowing with an evil light.
Cebo now felt himself ecstatically received in the tight channel of the young mulatress. And having been denied sexual relief for so many months after his brutal separation from his beloved Itulde, he was overcome by nature's instinct. He began to fuck Rosa with great deep eviscerating thrusts, while the naked young mulatress moaned and twisted and sobbed, half-fainting at the smarting agony in her whipped bottom and tender cunt. The chafing friction of his prong exacerbated her love chasm, the lips of which had already been inflamed by the kisses of the tip of that leather strap which had flogged her so mercilessly. And yet, through that pain, the vague beginning of pleasure commenced for her, for she was healthy and ardent and she had long yearned to have a strong man master her and love her.
Slowly therefore, her struggles ceased, and she began to arch herself intuitively against the Mandingo, her body jerking and contracting each time his mighty organ thrust to the hilt inside her quaking sheath.
Daniel Mowgridge could bear no more. "I've got to have you, my darling-I'm crazy for you-please-" he panted, turning to the Creole beauty.
She giggled softly, "Why do you think I didn't put on my drawers this morning, darling? I want you too! There, over by the corner there's a blanket." She led him by the hand, and swiftly, lifting up her frock and the camisole, spread herself down on the blanket shamelessly naked from waist down to stocking tops before him.
Fumbling with his fly, liberating his swollen organ, the plantation owner sank upon her, and she locked her arms around him and drew him down upon her swelling titties.
And while the moaning and sobbing gasps through Rosa's gag announced the young mula-tress's being drawn towards rapture and fulfillment, the hoarse grunts and groans of the plantation owner and the whimpering little sighs of Danielle merged, together with Kitara's soft anguished breathing.
The door of the shed opened. Philip Mowgridge stood there, having come to ask his father about the orders for the field hands this day. He stared in consternation at the sight before him, his eyes turning first from the squirming figure of Rosa who was now nearing her climax, to the coupled bodies of his father and Danielle on the floor beyond. Then, his face twisting in loathing, he closed the door of the whipping shed and strode away, black hell in his heart.
CHAPTER TEN
Because of his contempt for his father and the beautiful Creole girl whom he beloved had used his own profession of love as a stepping stone to reach his father, Philip Mowgridge did not attend his father's wedding to Danielle Valrieu. But the plantation owner had invited many of his associates and their wives so that he could show off his beautiful new bride to all and taunt them over not having sired attractive enough daughters to snare him. Even though there was a bounteous feast after the wedding, several of the rival plantation owners, infuriated by Daniel Mowgridge's denigrating and satirical comments, stiffly rose from his table, ordered their wives to follow their example and marched off in high dudgeon, to his uproarious amusement. The others, who did not own so much acreage as their more indignant friends, and who were afraid of Daniel Mowgridge's power to control prices and dictate growing and harvesting policies as well as how slaves should be treated in the community, swallowed his insults as well as his good food and drink.
During this week of hectic preparation for the wedding, Danielle met Philip only once, and then accidentally down the corridor of the main floor of the mansion. Seeing no one else around, the dark-brown-haired heiress put a hand on his sleeve and murmured, "Philip, darling, don't look so black! Don't you see, your father needs me. You're young, you'll find other girls. You romanticize too much, you see. And I have to have security."
He was icily polite to her, "Madam," he said formally, "what you and my father do is your business. Yes, I made a mistake. I thought that you were truly in love with me as I with you. But I see now how heartless you are and how cruel. To have Rosa thus whipped and then ravished!"
Danielle's eyes widened. She hadn't known till that moment that Philip had interloped upon that scene in the whipping shed. "But you weren't there," she protested.
"I'd come out to find my father so I could get some orders to give Jabez Fulton. I opened the door, and there the two of you were, like animals."
"You talk with a mouthful of sour grapes, dear Philip," she twitted him. She moved closer and murmured, "I can still be very nice to you. It's only because you're still that amazing phenomenon, a virgin male, that you think a girl can't have more than one true love."
She had said exactly the wrong thing, and he bit his lips as he said with loathing in his voice: "Yes, it's true, I've never slept with a woman. I'll admit it to you, since it doesn't matter anymore now. But I'll tell you one thing, I'd a sight rather find a slut out in the fields, one of the slavegirls, than take my father's leavings!"
Her eyes narrowed, and with an oath in French, she slapped him across the mouth, then turned on her heel and walked away, seething with fury. She thought to herself what a young fool he was and how, in good time, he would come whining around her bedroom door, like a dog with it's tongue hanging out, wanting to be forgiven, wanting to sniff at her the way all men would sniff at a bitch. Yes, so she was a bitch, but a clever one. Henri Le Gros had trained her well.
Rosa, the young mulatress whom she had had flogged and fucked by Cebo, was back in her service the next day, warned by the threat of another flogging to keep her mouth shut and to help her young mistress prepare for the wedding. But after Danielle and Philip's father had left the whipping shed, Cebo had done his best to tell Kitara to make it known to the unfortunate mulatress that he begged her forgiveness for having had to whip and then fuck her ... and in the nobility of his manhood, he added that it had been joy for him to hold her in his arms and that he wished that both were free so that he might show her how much he did desire her and how beautiful she was.
The gentle Mandingo girl, while soothing and salving Rosa's quivering naked body, translated the lip-movements of Cebo's speech, and Rosa, crushed by pain and shame at her ordeal, was comforted. She knew that if she dared breath a word to Kitara of who her mistress really was, her own life would doubtless be forfeited. But she could think of one way that would solve this tragic misunderstanding between father and son, which her young Creole mistress's coming between them had brought about.
"Tell Cebo that I do not hold it against him, for he is a slave like myself and had to carry out his orders," Rosa told Kitara. "But tell him that my mistress is an evil woman who enjoys the favors of men and loves to make them rivals and hate one another as if dogs were quarreling over a bone. Tell Cebo that if he can speak in some way through you to the other slaves on this plantation, to urge them to revolt. For I can see that once my mistress becomes the wife of Mr. Mowgridge, she will use the whip for her sport and she will be cruel with them just to show her power. He is an old fool and she is a young woman, and he will do anything she bids him, you mark my words."
Rosa's words were indeed prophetic. Kitara translated them to Cebo, who nodded and then "spoke" by the same method back to the young Mandingo girl. She turned to Rosa and murmured, "Cebo feels as you do. It is not right that good men should be slaves nor their women with them. He was betrayed by his own brother. His wife died on the slave ship coming here. Yes, he will use me as his voice to speak to the other slaves in secret, for if they unite they can become an invincible army that can overthrow tyranny."
And thus, exactly as the scheming Henri Le Gros had predicted, the advent of Danielle
Valrieu upon the Mowgridge plantation was to brew revolt and unrest. Meanwhile, Le Gros had a notary friend of his travel to Tuscaloosa under an incognito and go over the books of the county land agent to see if there were any properties which could be purchased for the payment of delinquent taxes. The French adventurer and gambler was certain that, infatuated as Daniel Mowgridge was, he would neglect his business for Danielle and that it was possible that there would be liens upon his land which could be picked up for a song. Thus he himself would be able to profit. The notary returned to Mobile to tell him the good news that perhaps two hundred acres stood in arrears. But, the land agent had affably told the notary, "Everybody knows Mr. Mowgridge is the biggest landowner around there. Now, none of his neighbors is gonna do an unfriendly thing like paying up the taxes and taking over the property, you can bet your boots. Leastways till the legislature calls the money in, I'm not one to test it on Mr. Mowgridge, not me sir."
And so Danielle's guardian had the notary pay up the taxes and acquire the acreage in the name of Henri Le Gros. To lull the land agent's suspicions, the wily Mobile schemer had the notary remark that the new owner was a dear friend of Daniel Mowgridge and was merely acquiring this property so as to give it back to him by way of a wedding present. There was also a little bribe for the land agent, and so it was done. The first real wedge of deception had been driven between father and son, and Henri Le Gros could eagerly wait for developments.
While the state legislators were violently arguing on the change of capital; more and more it was becoming apparent that Montgomery would win the nomination over Tuscaloosa. Daniel Mowgridge should have been urging all his plantation owner associates to unite so they could influence the lawmakers to the utmost, but he was spending his nights in licentious joys with his beautiful wife. He was like a child with a new toy, and Danielle pretended that it was his virility which made her so immodestly passionate for a young bride. She let him come into her room when she was wearing only drawers and hose and rosettes, so that he saw her naked titties reflected back in the mirror before which she was standing applying rice powder to her cheeks. And often, panting with rut which he could no longer control, Philip's father would reach his hand around her to cup those juicy love globes while he ground his agonized prick against her tantalizingly rounded bottom, till at last she whispered, "Now we don't have time, Daniel dear, to go fiddling around until tonight. We've got to go over and see if all the slaves are behaving themselves. So I'm afraid I'll just have to work you off in a hurry, lover, till it's bedtime." And then, turning and giggling at him, she would unbutton his fly and with her soft hand, frig him till he could no longer control his gism, and she would mop him dry with a cologne-scented handkerchief and tease him for being such an impetuous darling boy. He was a slave to her flesh, he lived but for her, and he did not know what was happening on his own plantation.
But Philip Mowgridge knew very well, though he was powerless. The slaves would not take his orders, only his father's. Though they sensed that he tried to help them, they were mute and unfriendly towards him whenever he sought to question them and urge them to tell him if they had complaints so that he could make life better for them.
For Cebo had already spread the word to his fellows, through gentle Kitara, that the master of this plantation had become blind to all else except his lustful and cruel young wife, and that it was best for them to unite together and to try to gain their freedom. He would lead them, if they chose, but he would wait for the proper time. And so when Philip tried to question one of the slaves in his kindly idealistic way, he was rebuffed because the slave feared that the father might learn from the son what was being planned simply through Philip's hearing their complaints.
For Danielle had now taken over, even from Jabez Fulton. She was the one who decided on punishments. And she planned them to bedazzle and inflame her doting husband. Three weeks after their marriage, she reported to him that she had found a young married couple neglecting their work in the fields to creep away and make love. She wished them punished and made an example of to the other slaves. Daniel Mowgridge hesitated, for he himself had given the young Furlani buck permission to wed the pretty young scullery maid who worked under Mammy Jasmine. She was only sixteen, a happy-go-lucky girl who sang the livelong day, and who obviously adored her sturdy young Cassius who worked out in the cotton field.
Had it not been for his wife's influence, Daniel
Mowgridge would doubtless have contented himself by poking good-natured fun at Cassius and reminding him that a slave didn't have a right to a honeymoon. But under her salacious suggestion that the punishment of Cassius and the girl Sukey could furnish their own nuptial pleasure, he eagerly agreed. The sturdy young Negro and lovely young Negress were stripped naked and put face to face on the triangle. And it was Danielle herself who wished to wield the whip, first flogging the sturdy Furlani male with a broad strap, and then moving round to take a cowhide paddle and apply it to Sukey's bottom. She turned to Daniel, beckoned, calling, "Darling, you aren't going to let me do all the work, are you? Come, you whip Sukey and I'll whip Cassius, and we'll make them fuck and get hot, shall we?"
And once again Philip, coming to the whipping shed in search of his father after being told by the brooding overseer Jabez Fulton that this was where he would find him, once more saw a horrifying scene: Danielle, naked to the waist except for her drawers, hose, rosettes, and high-heeled slippers, applying the strap against the shuddering naked body of the Negro field hand, while his own father, in just his drawers, panting and sweating with exertion and lust, was whacking Sukey's bottom with the cowhide paddle, as both of them urged the sobbing and groaning slaves to "Let's see you fuck the way you do when you're hot in bed when the lights are out, you two!"
Under the punishment, the young Negro had no recourse but to obey; moreover, feeling his young wife's naked body grind and jerk against him as Daniel Mowgridge swept the paddle solidly against her welted bottom, put his penis into a commendable state of rigidity and he was able to accomplish his conjugal duties. And then Danielle and Philip's father dropped the whipping implements, rushed into each other's arms, and fell upon the ground and coupled once again like beasts of the field before the abhorrent gaze of young Philip Mowgridge. An hour later, when Philip met his father and his young stepmother in the dining room, he ignored Danielle and said to his father, "Do you know, Father, that the two of you have become a by-word among the slaves? They gossip about you and they talk about you the way they would about white trash, not their Master and Mistress. At least, before, Father, you were just and fair even if you were hard on them. But now you have them whipped for nothing, and it's that woman's doing."
Danielle leaned close to her husband and whispered, "He's jealous, darling. Did you know that? Your own son is actually jealous of you."
Daniel Mowgridge rose, clenching his fists, "Get the devil out of here with your soft face and your coward's guts," he snarled.
"I don't want us to quarrel," Philip pleaded. "Until she came, you and I could at least argue things out. Now you won't even listen to me. Don't you see what she's doing to you, how she's corrupting you, because she's a cruel and selfish-"
He got no further. Livid with fury, Daniel Mowgridge seized a riding crop and slashed him across the face. "If you don't apologize, boy," he said hoarsely, "you can get to hell off this plantation and stay off."
"Apologize, Father?" Philip was very pale as he held himself erect with an effort. "To whom? To you or to her?"
Again the whip slashed across his face. "To your stepmother, to my wife, boy, that's who? Now let me hear you talk up fast!" the furious plantation owner growled.
Philip Mowgridge gave them both a pitying look, then left the dining room and went back to his own room where he morosely closed and locked the door.
But that same afternoon when his father and the Creole beauty were out in the fields supervising the work of the hands with Jabez Fulton along to point out this or that recalcitrant so that the master and the new young mistress could make special note of the culprits and have them summoned to the whipping post one day, lovely Rosa knocked softly at the door of Philip Mowgridge's room.
Philip opened the door and again was surprised at this unexpected visit from the exquisite young mustee. "You better not be seen talking to me, Rosa," he told her quickly. "I'm in disgrace. Besides which, didn't you learn your lesson from what they did to you that other time when they accused you of sneaking off to some nigger's hut? Only this time, I wouldn't put it past that mistress of yours to have you punished for trying to console me."
"I'd love to, Master Philip, you know I would. I think I love you. I can't help it because you're kind and gentle and good. But that's just why I want to tell you what's happening with the slaves, Mr. Philip. I'm not saying anything against my mistress, because it would sound spiteful. All I'm saying to you, is be careful. The slaves are going to rebel, there may even be an insurrection like that Nat Turner revolt some years ago that everybody's so afraid of. I've heard talk that your father plans to sell some of the slaves down in Mobile to a man who's one of the cruellest there is, I'm told, on poor helpless black people."
"I'm sure that couldn't be true. My father never talked to me about selling the slaves, Rosa."
"I'm not sure, Mr. Philips, but Jake, the coachman, he says there's a big new black buck around from Mrs. Bradley's place, comes to talk to the fellows sometimes and bring them a little tobacco. He's the one that says he's heard your father's told some of the neighbors that he plans to sell a lot of slaves down Mobile way."
What neither Rosa nor Philip Mowgridge knew that this again was the work of Henri Le Gros and that the "black buck from Mrs. Bradley's place" was none other than one of his own henchmen whom he had sent to Tuscaloosa as an agitator to stir up the growing revolt at the Mowgridge plantation ... a revolt which he prayed would destroy both father and son, and give him and Danielle complete control of both estates.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Now it was late August, and Daniel Mowgridge's worst fears had been confirmed. The stupid legislators had done him in for certain, voting after several ballots for Montgomery as the capital of the state. His own political influence would mean very little any more, no matter what his land holdings were. And because he had no political appointments to hand out any longer, he couldn't very well dictate the price of tobacco or cotton, or make his neighbors agree not to sell until they got a certain figure. His power had been cut in half.
The approaching harvest, a month away, was moving badly, too. Jabez Fulton was frankly concerned about it. "Looks like to me they're loafing on the job, Mr. Mowgridge," he reported time and time again. "They go through the motions, but they're not doing an honest day's work like they used to."
"Then whip them," Danielle hissed, her eyes glowing with cruel anticipation. "Better yet, whip their women. The men have tough hides, but let them see their sweethearts on the bench or on the triangle getting the lash, and they'll get the idea they'd better pick more cotton."
And Daniel Mowgridge, completely enslaved and bewitched by this beautiful Delilah, let his sounder judgment be carried away by his young wife's perverse penchant for the last ... because he shared it with her, and because the sight of a comely naked or half-naked slave girl wriggling under the whip and weeping piteously for mercy made them both tremble with carnal lust. More and more, Jabez Fulton ordered punishments and the sullen slaves reported to the whipping shed at his own orders. And because they feared the strength of the young Mandingo deaf-mute Cebo, and yet seemed to respect him more than even a white man, Jabez Fulton let Cebo lay on the whip.
But what Jabez Fulton did not know was that at night, the Mandingo and the gentle young girl of his own nation, Kitara, would visit the hut of a slave who had been flogged, and there Kitara would speak for Cebo: "You see how the white overseer made Cebo lash your girl. It is to turn us against one another. But the time is not ripe to rebel. Cebo will give me the sign and I will tell you all. We must watch that evil woman who has become the wife of the master here. And I'm convinced that she herself did not come here without a purpose, for there are nigros from the other plantations nearby who spread evil words about us here."
Yes, Henri Le Gros's plan was working beautifully now. He had sent his own slaves from Mobile to work under his chosen overseer on the land which beautiful Danielle had inherited from her white banker father. And cunningly these slaves had spread fearsome threats that Daniel Mowgridge, once the crops were harvested in September, meant to get rid of every single slave on his plantation and at any price so that he and his bride could travel in luxury far from this land. Restlessness grew, but Daniel Mowgridge could see only the simpering look on his beautiful young wife's face, could hear only the crack of the whip and the sobbing cry of the naked victim under it, could think only of the nights when he would lie between Danielle's thighs and feel himself a young man again. He was drinking too much and his temper was violent and he saw very little of Philip, who kept to his room much of the time.
But Philip too knew of the danger and was doing his best to bring about a better understanding. He had many an interview with Kitara, saying for them all to be patient, and that he would try to have his father lighten the burdens of the slaves, be more humane to them, even give them a share of the profits and treat them like decent human beings. Kitara communicated these words to Cebo, who gravely stared at the handsome black-haired young son of his master and understood that here was a dreamer for freedom as he himself was. But it would do no good, not so long as that woman ruled the Mowgridge acres...
Now it was a week before the harvest time, the time when all the slaves were given a festival, rewarded for their labors through the hard planting season. All the bacon and even all the coffee and tobacco that they wished, and dancing and music and laughter. But not on this plantation, for Danielle had told her infatuated old husband, "Darling, they're planning something, I can smell it. They don't need rewards, they need more supervision and more of the whip."
And on this Friday night, oppressive and humid, a threat of rain in the air and the rumbling of thunder to the west, seeing that Danielle and her husband were bedded together and both half tipsy with too much port and hock, lovely mulatress Rosa crept again to Philip Mowgridge's room and knocked at his door and demanded entry.
This time he let her in without a word, and she saw that his face was haggard and his eyes were swollen with tears for he knew what was happening, not only to his father, but to the plantation. All this work destroyed, all these decent people strangers and enemies now, and all because of a shallow lying bitch who had tauntingly offered herself to him and then to his father, and made father and son hate each other.
"I know what you're thinking, Mister Philip. You are thinking that your father must be rid of her before he will come to his senses. It's true, but she's become like a necessary drug to him. Oh, Kitara told me what you said to Cebo through her, Mister Philip! If only you could be the owner of this plantation and set us free-"
"Rosa, my dear," he said gently, "even if I were the master here instead of my father, the law in this state would forbid my setting all of you free, however much I wished to do it. If I did manumit you, you would be expelled from Alabama. And the moment you crossed the state line, other slavers would seize you and throw you back into bondage. No, the only hope's that my father will listen to reason when I show him these unpaid bills that Jabez Fulton has given me, when he finds out that some of his best timber acres have been sold for back taxes, and that the market price for his cotton and tobacco isn't going to be what he expects because it isn't prime anymore. Maybe then he'll come to his senses, Rosa."
"Mister Philip, when will you come to yours?" she whispered. And then very boldly, she dared to put her arms around him and pressed her soft sweet mouth to his. "There, you can have me whipped, Mister Philip but I wanted to do that. Ever since I first saw you in the house on Carre Street, I've wanted you to hold me and love me. And you know, Mr. Philip, when she had me whipped that time, and then she had Cebo stud me, she said it was for sneaking around to the huts after a black stud. It was because she saw me here with you, Mister Philip."
"I've thought that out, Rosa, and I've felt guilty ever since that terrible day. How can I ever make it up to you?"
"By letting me love you, Mister Philip. It isn't healthy or right that you shouldn't have had a woman by now. I'm clean and good, and I'm decent and I love you. Please let me do for you, let me be your woman, Mister Philip."
"Rosa, you must not-and you're in your nightgown, suppose Danielle finds out-" he stammered thickly. Because the tension and the agony of this long struggle between his father and himself, and the frustration he had known over the amoral Creole girl, had at least made him feel the true torment of not knowing love.
"She and your father have finished nearly two bottles of wine, Mister Philip," Rosa whispered hastily. "They're in bed together and they'll fall asleep. Please, just this once, Mister Philip! After all, I've been punished for it, so I think I've earned it!"
Now, demandingly, her soft fingers were touching his crotch through his thin nightshirt. He uttered a groan because he could no longer hold back the savage urge, born out of jealousy of his own father. Yes, he wanted a girl to fuck, so why not Rosa? At least she was decent and good and in her way just as lovely as that bitch Danielle!
"Bolt the door," he said hoarsely. And Rosa, with a cry of delight, hastened to do it, then flung off her own nightgown and stood before him proud in her nakedness, her bubbies rising and falling quickly with her ardor. Then she knelt down in that joyous ecstasy of servitude which was so natural to her, being a slave, and she lofted his nightshirt and she put her lips to his prick to give him the kiss of love.
Philip Mowgridge was undone. All his puritanical restraints, the idealistic tenets by which he had so strictly ruled his body, were cast aside. In torment, the molten lava of lust seething through his sinewy and healthy young body, he bent, cupped Rosa's bubbies and panted, "I want you! I want to do everything to you, Rosa! My father says I'm not a man, but a milksop. Help me prove he's wrong!"
She rose swiftly, and his hands gripped her bottom-cheeks, and she felt his stiff hard ramrod prodding into her silky love nest. "You're not a milksop, Mister Philip, oh no!" she breathed rapturously. And then she felt his prickhead pry between the soft moist lips of her cunt and enter her, and she uttered a sobbing little groan of delight and clung to him, for he was truly her first man taken in love. She knew that Cebo's violation of her had been an act of contrition, not of punishment; but for the idealistic young son of Daniel Mowgridge Rosa had long cherished desires of being his equal and his sweet love.
So for this one exquisite hour before the bursting of the storm upon the Mowgridge plantation, Philip and Rosa shared passion, and he acquitted himself superbly between her struggling eager thighs. She did not even care, so joyous was she in being his first woman, whether he impregnated her, and she said as much. She begged him to let his seed flow deeply into her, urging him with sobbing words of "Oh hurt me, Mister Philip, if it'll do any good! Thrust it into me, flood me, all you've got, I want to take it!" And she cajoled him with her soft fingers squeezing his buttocks, fingering his balls, and making him know she gloried in this coupling.
It was an unforgettable hour, and it purged him now, once and for always of the desperate and hopeless love that he had conceived for fickle, shallow Danielle Valrieu...
"Daniel darling, do you know what my hot-blooded little bitch of a maid did last night while she thought we were too tipsy to think about her?" Danielle purred as she adjusted her fur-trimmed negligee about her creamy body and, leaning back in the deep armchair, lifted one flawless, beautifully curved leg and slowly drew on the white silk stocking. He, naked to the waist in his night drawers, bleary-eyed and with a day's growth of unshaven hair on his cheeks, licked his lips avidly. "Oh, let the poor bitch be, you've had your fun with her, admit it, my darling one," he chuckled.
"Ah yes, but this time she's made a man of your son. I caught her this morning lying down on her cot, with such a dreamy smile on her face I knew it couldn't be from just a dream. And sure enough, when I slapped her and made her really come awake and not pretend she was still asleep, she 'fessed up and said she was proud of it, that Mr. Philip had loved her real good. That should ease your mind considerably, Daniel darling. Your son is probably quite a man if he ever gets his mind on a woman."
"Let him have Rosa, you've got me. After all, the poor boy was really once head over heels about you, wasn't he?" Daniel Mowgridge yawned. But the Creole adventuress now saw a way to make certain of Rosa's continued and servile devotion to her. Because if that little high-yellow bitch took it into her head that the young idiot loved her when it was just an itch in his cock that he needed eased-any fool knew that-Rosa might take it into her scheming little mind to blab about their cousinship, and the black blood way back generations ago. And then the jig would really be up. But now if Daniel Mowgridge had a yen for Rosa, and wanted to add her to his harem, why, then, the mulatress couldn't run off to Philip whenever she took a liking to.
"Daniel darling," she purred. "You know, I've kept back a few secrets about myself. You remember how I told you in the convent school we used to play naughy little games, we girls."
"Of course."
"You've never seen girls love each other up, have you?" He shook his head, staring at her with dawning desire, eager for a new joy as yet untasted.
"Well, darling, before I had a strong wonderful man like you to satisfy that little itch in my furry spot right between my legs, Daniel, Rosa satisfied me. How would you like to see her satisfy you too, in bed with both of us?"
"By God-do you think she would?" Daniel Mowgridge gaped.
"She's had a thrashing once, darling. I don't think she'd risk another especially if you warned her not to service your son. She's a sneaky little piece and she might give him some bad ideas about the equality of slaves."
"Goddamn it, you're right, Danielle!" Philip's father glowered. "All I've had since he came back from Boston was this business about abolition and equality of man and man, no matter what side of the fence they're on. All right, put the fear of God into Rosa, darling."
"This time, I want you to be the master of both of us," Danielle purred as she came closer to him and put a hand against his dwindled prick. "I want you to whip her, to make her do all the naughty little things you'd like to see her do to me. Wouldn't you like to see her lick me between my legs and get me all hot for your big hard cock, darling?"
"Danielle! My God, yes, yes!"
"Then listen--let's take her out to the shed this afternoon, when all the field hands are working and no one will be around to hear. We'll have fun with her. And I'll be specially nice to you, dearest."
* * *
Rosa was naked in the stocks, her bare bottom bearing down upon the hard wooden stool with thorns and pebbles and bits of nettle, her wrists and neck yoked tightly in the three holes in the upper part of the device, while her slim ankles were fitted into the smaller two yokes at the bottom piece of the stocks. All the slaves were in the upper fields, getting the last of the cotton ready for baling and then shipment down the river on to Mobile. Even Philip Mowgridge had gone with Jabez Fulton, trying to restore order out of what was growing chaos, seeing the dark looks and hearing the mumbled words as they passed row on row of field hands. "They've got murder in their hearts, Mr. Philip," Jabez Fulton muttered, "and I'm plumb scared, I am."
"I better try to make a last appeal to them. But if my father only got rid of that damnable woman he brought here, she's the cause of all the mutiny and that's for certain," Philip Mowgridge averred...
Daniel Mowgridge had stripped himself down to just his drawers and slippers, and he had begun Rosa's torture with a good switching all over her back and shoulders. But now Danielle, who herself was naked except for camisole and slippers, whispered, "Make her love me up the way I told you. She knows how, my dear husband. Give it to her on her bottom, so she'll rub it all over the nice things she's sitting on. Go ahead! Scream as much as you like now, Rosa, nobody is around to hear you. And you know why you're being punished, girl? For sullenness, and for sneaking off with the master's son without permission."
"I don't care," Rosa defiantly lifted her tortured face, her lips trembling violently, "I'd gladly die for him! He treats me the way he'd treat you, as if I'm white-"
Danielle bent down to her cousin, and whispered fiercely, "Another word about that subject, and I'll have your tongue torn out by the roots! Now you're going to gam me, so Daniel can watch. He's going to switch you till you do, understand?"
The plantation owner lifted the birch switch and swept it down with a wicked hiss and crack over the tops of Rosa's voluptuous young posterior. She uttered a scream as the burning cut made her wriggle and squirm her buttocks over the torturing surface of this punishment stool. She was bent forward, her head at about the level of Danielle's waist. And her perverse mistress had stepped upon a carpenter's two-by-four so as to bring her loins up exactly to the level of Rosa's sobbing mouth. Then, reaching forward with her left hand and yanking at the braid of Rosa's hair, she slapped the mulatress's face and hissed: "Gam me, I said!"
Daniel Mowgridge's heart was thudding so hard he thought he would faint as he lifted the switch and swept it around the small of the girl's naked back, sliding along her belly and tender side. Rosa shrieked, "I will, I'll do it, only stop, I can't stand any more!" Some twenty cruel, darkening, thin red lines from her shoulder blades down to her chink bone showed how perniciously she had already been switched by the plantation owner at his young wife's urging.
"Watch, darling, this is what I make her do after she's been punished properly of course, that was before I found you to be my wonderful lover and my husband," the Creole beauty told the lust-crazed plantation owner. She furled up her camisole with one hand, while her other twisted Rosa's braid. "Do it!" she hissed, and Rosa tearfully began to gamahuch Danielle, while Daniel Mowgridge moved round to watch, intoxicated with rut at this Lesbian demonstration so new to him.
"Make her do the same to you, dear Daniel," his young wife cooed. "Take her hair and yank it the way I do, Daniel, and make her suck your cock. I'll open your drawers for you and get it out for her, shall I?" And with slim knowing fingers, the Creole adventuress unbuttoned his under drawers, and his cock thrust rigidly forward towards Rosa's trembling, tear wet lips. Then it was Danielle who went behind her and, this time taking a martinet, laid on the three leather thongs furiously till Rosa overcame her repugnance and, shrieking that she would obey, sucked off the father of the youth whom only last night she had initiated into the sweet joys of fucking.
"Let's take her to bed now, Daniel," his wife panted. "We'll make her lie between us and service each of us. Never mind the rest of the harvest, this is so much fun. Who cares about money, anyhow, when we've got our love."
Daniel Mowgridge was like a man obsessed.
He helped his wife unlock the stocks and lift the moaning, half-fainting naked girl. They held her between them, and suddenly Rosa's head lifted and, summoning all her strength, she broke away from them and stumbled, turned and set her back to the door. "Mr. Mowgridge, I've got to tell you--I've got to-"
"Be careful, Rosa!" Danielle hissed. She had put back on her frock over her camisole and left her reticule near the door of the shed. She retrieved it now, standing very close to the naked, trembling mulatress, and she murmured very quickly, "If you know when you're well off, Rosa, you'll shut your mouth about Mobile. Look, you can share the master with me, I'm not overly fond of him, and I'll take Philip. But keep your mouth shut, or else!"
"No! I've had enough!" Rosa cried aloud, and she flung herself on her knees before the astounded plantation owner. "You think you've married such a fine stop it, Danielle, what are you doing--oh no-" From her reticule, the perverse Creole girl had taken a long jeweled hatpin, and suddenly she leaned over Rosa and, jerking up the mulatress's hair with her left hand, showed the menacing gleaming bauble to her: "I'll prick you all over with this, Rosa! I'll put you back there on the whipping ladder, and I'll go over every inch of your flesh if you don't close your mouth and show more respect for your master! Now tell him that you're sorry and that you beg him humbly to go to bed with him, Rosa!"
"I won't--I've had enough--I'm going to tell everything--let go of me, Danielle, you shan't, I'll kill you instead--you don't deserve-"
Rosa had risen, imbued with sudden vitality at the realization of how absolutely diabolical her cousin's plot was against this entire household, this little world where so many slaves depended on the kindness of an understanding master. Fear, instead of the harvest of understanding, would be sown with only death and hatred for the reaping. And so, suddenly rising to her feet, she had seized Danielle's hand and tried to wrest away the hatpin.
Daniel Mowgridge watched, his mouth gaping, his eyes glazed with passion, not quite comprehending what he saw before him. "She's trying to kill you, Daniel, but I won't let her," his opportunistic young wife cried out. With a sudden access of rage, she dug her fingernails into one of Rosa's naked titties, while her other hand frantically gripped Rosa's right, as they struggled for possession of the deadly hatpin. The pain was intense and unexpected: Rosa uttered a cry; for a terrible moment her attention wavered from her right hand, as she tried to clutch at her agonized naked tittie, and with a hiss of delight and cruelty, Danielle plunged the hatpin to the hilt in her cousin's heart.
Rosa's eyes rolled to the whites, she uttered a long sobbing sigh, and then she fell lifeless on the floor of the shipping shed.
Danielle swiftly plucked the lethal weapon out of her dead cousin's naked bosom, and rose, shuddering, yet at the same time her loins were flaming with desire as her sadism knew no bounds: "I had to kill her, she would have killed you, you heard her! Hurry, my beloved, let's get back to bed, let's let the slaves think that maybe
Cebo murdered Rosa or maybe the overseer did it, hurry, my darling!"
He stared down at the naked body of that beautiful yellow-ivory-skinned girl who could have told him so much had she been less loyal to her cousin. And then he nodded, opened the door of the shed and looked cautiously out. "It's all right, no one's around, my darling. I want you again, let's get back to bed!" He grasped her by the wrist and led her back to the mansion.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was Kitara who found Rosa's body. She ran like a deer back to the fields, and she stood before the deaf-mute Mandingo. Her lips made signs to him, and his mouth gaped and they could see the muscles of his throat and chest struggle as he strove to speak for the first time since that blow on the slave ship had deprived him of speech and hearing. His eyes questioned her and she nodded. And then his lips moved and Kitara's eyes blazed as she turned to the field hands who had gathered round, ignoring the angry curses of Jabez Fulton and the cracking of his blacksnake whip around their shoulders: "They have murdered Rosa, those two white devils who have forgotten us! It is time to drive them out and to gain our freedom. Cebo will lead us all!"
"What hellish talk are you giving them, girl?" the brutal overseer yanked Kitara by a wrist and dragged her away from the group of mumbling field hands, and flung her down in one of the furrows between the rows of cotton plants: "I'll teach you to talk about rebelling, I'll have it out of your pretty hide. And you too, tonight, you little Mandingo bitch!" Down came the blacksnake whip, wrapping around Kitara's lovely young legs. But even as she screamed and twisted in pain, Cebo had seized the burly overseer by the throat. Gurgling, Jabez Fulton dropped the whip and hammered on the Man-dingo's face and body. But Cebo shook him as a terrier shakes a rat until suddenly the overseer's body went limp. The Mandingo let him drop onto his back on the earth, and then raised his hoe as a sign which Kitara called out, "To the house, down with the white tyrants!"
They moved towards the great house in the distance, waving their hoes, their pickaxes, tasting freedom for the first time, and the giant young Mandingo strode ahead of all of them, Kitara at his side, trying to keep up with him, her eyes shining with pride and love.
Philip Mowgridge had gone to the whipping shed after having ridden in from town, where he had just urged the sheriff to ride back with him and bring some of his armed deputies along not only to stop the possible revolt by show of arms but also to arrest his father's young wife on a charge of inhuman cruelty and inciting revolt. But the sheriff had laughed at him and told him, "You young fool, we'd not be-likely to do such a thing to your paw's woman. But we'll go back with you and we'll shoot us down a mess of niggers if we find the trouble you're dreaming about, boy!" So Philip Mowgridge had realized that even if he called for help, he could expect only the brutal law of the stronger to prevail, and he had ridden back as fast as his weary and lathered horse could gallop to try to head off the disaster which he now foresaw as inevitable.
As he lifted Rosa's dead naked body in his arms, he saw the slaves coming from the fields, brandishing staves, hoes, spades, whatever weapons they could lay their hands upon. And at their head came this giant who had once been a king back in Africa, and he strode proudly, and hurrying beside him was the young Mandingo girl Kitara.
Daniel Mowgridge raised his head, his eyes bloodshot, smelling of sex and whiskey. "What's that, that ruckus out yonder?" he muttered thickly.
Danielle grimaced with distaste. She swung her voluptuous naked body out of the bed, put on her negligee, and glanced down at the marks on her breasts and belly and her inner thighs where his beard had scratched her. She'd taught him to replace Rosa at gamming her, but he was beginning to bore her, the old sex-mad fool. What she really wanted was young Philip, practically a virgin even though Rosa had got her first and last piece out of him. This silly old fool was starting to wheeze and puff as if his heart was going to burst any minute. It was time to pull out and get rid of Daniel-the ruckus he was talking about-yes, she could hear the cries and shouts of their voices.
She drew back the curtains and stared out, and uttered a cry. The slaves gathered, and they stood menacingly in the courtyard. And it seemed to her that Cebo's eyes were peering upward and had detected her as she stood there at the window of Daniel Mowgridge's bedroom.
Let the slaves revolt, let them kill him. Better still, she could kill him herself and in the uproar it would be blamed on the slaves, and they'd all be hanged, the way they did at the Nat Turner rebellion. And then she and Henri would run everything. In her reticule, there was a little pearl-handled derringer in which she always kept one shot just for luck.
"I'm afraid, darling!" she gasped. "We better try to get out of her, Daniel darling!"
"Nonsense, they won't dare break into this house. They can be hanged by law, every last one of them, if they dare it!" Daniel Mowgridge stared uneasily down at the courtyard. Befuddled by too much whiskey and too much rut and too much sadistic pleasure and the indolence of overeating, overdrinking and over-wenching with this unscrupulous adventuress. His mind was fogged.
"It's your son down there, he's leading them against you," Danielle suddenly cried. For Philip had come into the courtyard, and was talking to Kitara, pleading earnestly that they let him try to ease their burden and to have it out with his father once and for all.
"Come, Kitara, tell Cebo to follow me and we will talk to my father together," Philip urged. "You, all you slaves, he is your spokesman and your leader. Let us talk without bloodshed."
Kitara's lips swiftly moved, and the handsome young Mandingo deaf-mute nodded. Then the three of them went forward into the house. The other slaves stood there waiting, looking up towards the curtained window behind which Danielle lurked, her eyes wide, swiftly thinking how to save herself and at the same time end this disgusting marriage.
"Father!" Philip called from the landing of the first floor, "come down and talk to us. It's not too late for an understanding, if you'll only recognize them as men and not as animals!"
"You see, your own son is taking their side, my dearest Daniel," the Creole beauty hissed. "Put on your dressing gown, and come with me. We'll tell Master Philip where to get off, won't we?"
Dazed, tugging at his beard, Daniel Mowgridge stared outside at the milling throng of slaves brandishing their improvised weapons. And the sight sobered him, and perhaps for the first time he began to see how he had let his plantation fall into ruin over his obsession for cunt.
"Maybe it's not too late," he muttered dully. Tugging his dressing gown around him and belting it as best he could, he stumbled out onto the landing and toward the stairs. "I'm coming, boy. But you'd better talk sense, not your goddamn equality," he warned.
Danielle swiftly moved beside him, the little derringer hidden in her reticule. Her right hand held the little gun, her left the handle of the reticule, and it would be so easy in case there was a loud argument or struggle to shoot the old fool.
"Come down here and talk to Cebo," Philip urged. His father glared at him, and slowly walked down the steps, holding tightly onto the rail to steady himself. But Cebo's accusing eyes moved part the gray-bearded plantation owner to the woman on the staircase, and he moved past Philip's father up towards her.
"Stay back, you stupid nigger! Get away from me!" Danielle cried. But Cebo inexorably moved up towards her, step by step. She drew the little derringer out of her reticule, and flung the reticule down at him. It missed him and went sailing to Philip's feet. Philip picked it up and saw the jewelled hatpin, and then he knew how Rosa had died.
"It was she who killed Rosa," he murmured to Kitara. "Destroy her, and you'll save my father's plantation yet. I will not lift a hand to save that creature!"
The Mandingo moved towards Danielle, who stared at him incredulously. She held up the little gun at his heart: "I'll shoot, you nigger devil, you come another step-" And then, in her panic she pulled the trigger. Philip Mowgridge uttered a cry of horror, for blood seemed to spurt from the Mandingo's head. He put a hand wonderingly to the side of his skull, and then, for the first time he spoke, spoke as only Kitara had understood him by the movements of his lips, for he still used the Mandingo words: "Bitch woman, you die!"
He seized Danielle Valrieu by the neck, as Philip shouted to him, "No, No, turn her over to the slaves, let her go to the shipping shed and be dealt with as she would have dealt with them!"
And Kitara swiftly translated this for Cebo, who turned to stare at the agonized and shrinking Creole beauty and then nodded.
He seized her by her wrist and dragged her out and down the stairs, stumbling, pleading with him, and when the plantation owner, again out of infatuation, would have stopped him, Philip strode to his father and declared, "Can't you see yet, Father? Rosa tried to tell me, but even she was afraid of the secret. There's black blood in her, for she and Rosa were cousins. And she was the creature of the man you thought was your best friend, the man you sent me to see in Mobile. Let Cebo give her justice, Father!"
Mad with fear now, Danielle clung with her free hand to the balustrade of the stairs, as Cebo relentlessly dragged her out towards the courtyard. "Oh help me, Daniel, you love me! Philip, you loved me too, you know you did! Don't let them kill me!"
"I'll help you forget her, Father," Philip Mowgridge said softly to his father as he held out his hand. "We'll work together and we'll rebuild this place. All right, we can't free the slaves by law, but we can treat them with more kindness, get more work out of them, more yield. Let's go to work and forget your politics. Let's find our own market and not depend on M'sieu Le Gros." And for the first time father and son stared at each other in a kind of grudging admiration and clasped hands ... .
The howl of the slaves drowned out the shrieks of Danielle Valrieu. She had been stripped naked, and half a dozen blacks had lifted each of her limbs and carried her in the air naked towards the shipping shed. They had tied her onto the triangle, but upside down, her arms widely spread apart, and her wrists tied to the base of the legs, while her ankles were bound together to the peak of the apparatus. All who could crowd into the shipping shed hovered around her, pinching and prodding her, slapping and raking her naked body with their fingernails. Then they began to probe both ass-hole and cunt, to pinch and tweak her nipples, till Danielle hoarsely begged for mercy, promising them gold, jewels, whatever they wished, wenches from Mobile, if they would only spare her.
Outside, Kitara had stanched the wound which the Creole beauty's derringer had made in tearing through Cebo's scalp; the wound that had restored his speech and hearing, out of the emotional shock as well as the bullet itself. He stood looking tenderly down at her, and he murmured to her in the Mandingo tongue, "Perhaps we shall not be free, but you will be my woman as Itulde once was, and we shall have sons, which Itulde could not give me, and it will be a good life together."
Danielle was begging for death now. She had tasted the whip on her bottom and between her legs, and in her horrified terror of all those black slaves, she had abjectly promised to do everything they wished. She had sucked their cocks, Oh God, how many cocks she had sucked while hanging upside down from that damnable triangle, while having a finger rub up and down her ass-hole and another finger prod her tender cunt!
And then some of the women had run from their huts, to the shipping shed, hearing the news of who had been captured and was prisoner there. And they had taken over, while the men watched admiringly. They had stuck pins and thorns into Danielle's titties, into both her ass-hole and her cunt, and now they were tugging her pussy-hairs out, and she was begging them to kill her quickly.
And finally, in her terror of dying, she babbled out the secret she had lived with all these years: "I'm black like you, I'm not really white! I swear it's true, my father was a banker in Mobile, but my mother was a quadroon!"
They did not believe her. No black woman could have been so cruel to her own kind, they reasoned. And so the unfortunate naked Danielle had hours more to suffer before at last death claimed her, so that hers was, by fate's own irony, only a legacy of shackles when all was said and done.
