Wanton, cruel sexual sadism under the guise of religious zeal. Monks and noblemen have their will with the virginal and innocent-whipping, raping, binding, forcing them to commit all manner of degrading oral and anal acts. The story, all too realistic, of the infamous Spanish Inquisition when defilement and degradation were commonplace. Bodies corrupted and minds forever twisted all in the name of perverted self-righteousness and lust for power.
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Archive Note: There is no CHAPTER FIFTEEN in SP-335.
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CHAPTER ONE
It was a hot July afternoon in the year of 1495, in the great Spanish city of Toledo, during the reign of King Ferdinand and his beautiful and ambitious Queen Isabella. It was scarcely three years since Christopher Columbus had discovered America with his three vessels, the Nina the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, a voyage endowed by the Queen herself so that valiant explorer might find a new route to the Indies and bring back treasures of gold and jewels and precious spices and fabulous clothes to laden the coffers of Most Catholic Spain ... It was an hour before the siesta on this sultry, humid July afternoon. When that hour came to its end, the Cathedral bell would toll its fatal knell and at that moment there would begin the horrifying and impressive auto-da-fe. The condemned heretics in their San Benitos would file in abject procession, carrying candles and going barefoot. Some would have nooses around their necks, indicating that they had recanted their heresy and would be spared the agony of the flames at the place of execution by the swift and merciful garrote granted them by the brooding monks in their black robes and cowls.
There were others, whose ridiculous yellow garments showed the symbol of red flames sewn onto the arms, and these were jeered at, for they were still obdurate and would not recant. They would find no mercy from the executioner and his assistants. Thirteen such garments would be worn this day, among them three enticingly lovely young women, one a Moorish girl named Sandriata, who stood accused and judged as guilty of witchcraft and conspiracy against the very realm itself.
A second such female was none other than Dorotea de Sandroval, the orphaned daughter of a minor nobleman who had been put to death on the charge of blasphemy and whose rich estates had been confiscated by the Crown, a goodly portion of which would be turned over to the Inquisition for its worthy labors in ridding Spain of all such dangerous heretics, blasphemers, sorcerers and malefactors whose very existence threatened the security of the Cross as it did that of the banners of Castille, Navarre, and Aragon.
The third woman was a handsome native Spanish female, born in this very city of Toledo. Her name was Ymara Fontana; she was thirty-two, the widow of a Moor. Perhaps she herself was guilty of no crime other than having married in that heretic faith. For the counselors of Ferdinand and Isabella had long inveighed against the dangers of the Moors and the
Jews as ever-present threats to the security of the throne.
"They would spawn heresy and idolatry, Majesties," these wise men had proclaimed in court. "They would sow disruption, dissension and the most insolent and flagrant contempt of all that Your Highnesses have achieved for solidarity of all the Spanish provinces, for the might of Catholicism in Spain. They must be exterminated. Even the faintest trace of lineage must be obliterated, so that never again will Spain be menaced by their lurking, plotting evils."
And so Ymara Fontana shuffled along in the grim line, wearing the yellow San Benito with the circle of red flames sewn to the sleeve of that garment of shame and doom and derision. Her husband had been a chemist, and he had wrought many wonderful cures where even physicians could not succeed. These men, who knew only blood-letting and weird concoctions to drive away the flux and the black vomit and the ague and the chill, had hated Gomez Fontana because of what he had done. And so they had denounced him as a heretic. In those days when Spain was the greatest power in the world save England, such a charge was tantamount to condemnation and awful death, or at the very least imprisonment in the gallies and the lash and excommunication from the church. Gomez Fontana had perished, and now his wife was to perish also, only because as a Toledan of Spanish blood, she had dared mate with a condemned and executed heretic.
But there was more to it than this that met the eye or that the crowd was cognizant of as they hooted and cast mud and stones on that pitiful processional. Ymara Fontana was buxom, tan-skinned, still capable of attracting the lustful eye of a male. After her husband's death, a Spanish count had come stealthily to her house at night and offered his protection if she would but be his mistress. She had laughingly and contemptuously refused him, and now he was here among the throngs that crowded to watch the executions, the whippings, the holy pronciamentos, for he would have his revenge. If he could not have her, the lash would kiss her naked bottom and those sturdy, quivering thighs, would punish her belly and loins and breasts for their wantonness. And then the flames would shrivel them and no man would enjoy the dark, lascivious body which she could have given him so readily.
It was an hour before the siesta. But the city was not sleeping. Nor were those cowled black monks of the Holy Inquisition content merely to pray for the souls of the heretics that one day they might be, when final judgment was passed by Him who died upon the Tree for all mankind, purged of their sins on this earth and enter into a new life. No, for they were cruel, even unto the last hour of mortal life allowed these pitiful captives....
CHAPTER TWO
In the cell of Sandriata, a familiar, masked, slim and young, wearing doublet and hose and with a fine Damascus-tempered steel poignard at his belt, stared greedily at the beautiful Moorish girl.
These familiars, though they were not the sober and strict Jesuits of the Order of the terrible Fra Tomas Torquemada, were nonetheless of incalculable value to the Inquisition in denouncing those whose treason and blasphemous conduct and whose secret plots endangered the beatific regime of the beloved sovereigns of all-powerful Spain.
Sandriata was only eighteen, and her jet-black hair fell in a lustrous cascade almost to her hips. The superb ripeness of her enticing young body was outlined provocatively by the slim shift which was her only covering. Within the hour that shift would be exchanged for the San Benito, the robe of death by fire, without redemption and without reprieve or even the mercy of the executioner's swift, concealed noose.
Of course, she could be pardoned if within the short hour she were to recant her sins and confess to the familiar, whose name was Pedro de Valorced, where she and her confederates had hidden a treasure chest containing silver and gold bouillon and precious jewels. This chest had been stolen from the galleon Santa Madre by a number of renegade Spanish seamen and several crafty Moors who had once been galley slaves on that galleon and had, in return for their freedom, revealed to the traitorous seamen how to find that priceless chest which had been hidden in the cabin of the third mate. Sandriata's father had been one of these Moors, but he had died on the rack before revealing how the theft had been accomplished and how the loot had been hidden away from the soldiers of Fra Torquemada. Indeed, they had made a relentless search for that hidden chest, but so far they had failed to find it.
It was the pride of the Holy Inquisition that it put its victims not to the torture, but rather to the "question." This was a sanctimonious legal point over which the elders of the Church had toiled many a year so as to absolve the conscientious priests from the stigma of murder or violence. To ask a question of a heretic was truly within the faith; to persist in asking it, if the rogue remained silent or were to lie, was only logic, but of course the "question" meant torture. Hence it might be suspended, only to be renewed on a later day when the victim had had time to convalesce and be healed of his or her hurts. Or again, it might be the question simple or the question extraordinary, according to the Judge Advocate's appraisal of the stamina and the age of the prisoner, as well as the sex.
Care was taken by the torturers, directed by the Jesuit friars, not to let any victim being put to the question perish. Hence the accidental death of Sandriata's father had been a smirch on the pride, the self-esteem, and, worst of all, the moral integrity of his questioners. They were thus the more careful with Sandriata, for not only did they not wish her to die under the question, but they wished most of all to find that chest, whose value was almost incalculable. If it should fall into the hands of heretics, it would furnish terrible power against the Most Holy Church as well as the throne.
Sandriata had therefore been arrested in the dead of night, and taken before the grim tribunal. In a room where five black-cowled friars sat, in a room where only one candle lighted the fearful shadows engulfed her, in a room where she could not question them nor know the identity of her accusers, she had been questioned and then she had been threatened with the "question extraordinary." One of them had spelled it out for her, and it would be torment that defied the very mind to conceive. But since she was innocent and virtuous, she had protested her utter ignorance of this plot.
Pedro de Valorced, a wastrel son of a nobleman who had squandered away his dead father's inheritance, had turned about a year ago to employment with the Inquisition in order to further his own personal advantages. He had therefore urged the Chief Inquisitor, a baldheaded, gaunt man in his early fifties named Fra Marcando, not to put the Moorish beauty to the question, but rather to condemn her to death by fire. This he urged in the hope that her terror of this atrocious death and her fear of the loss of her immortal soul would at last open the seal upon her obstinate lips.
And still she had not spoken. Now, a scant hour before the time of execution, she stood before him, her dark-brown eyes flashing contempt and hatred. She understood only too well the reasons for this furtive and stealthy visit.
"I have talked before the priests," she said to him with a sneer, "and they know all that I know, which is nothing. Nada, do you understand me? If I must die because of this, then so be it, for it is only the will of Allah!"
"But it is wrong, Sandriata," he urged. "You are so young and beautiful! Think, that soft velvety brown skin of yours, those delicious limbs blackened by the flames, in a death which will not only be slow but also terribly painful. I do not wish you to die like that, Sandriata."
Thus he pleaded, moving closer to her. Through the slits of his mask, his eyes glittered with lust, for he was tempted by the heavy, round, closely spaced gourds of her breasts, as well as by the lush curves of her hips and bottom-cheeks, the full, ripely curved splendor of her plump thighs.
"Listen, Sandriata, I am your friend. I will save you from the stake, from the fire. Only tell me where that chest is, and I'll set you free this minute. Yes, and you'll have some gold from it, too, and I'll buy you a little house."
"Oh no doubt, Senor" Sandriata mocked him. Then, hawking, she spit into his face. "And you will doubtlessly visit me there. Oh, I know your sort, even if you dare to call me heretic and infidel. No man has had my body, and no man like you ever shall. Better the fire a thousand times over than a filthy Spanish dog like you to defile my virgin body!"
Pedro de Valorced's simperingly handsome face contorted and flushed with anger behind that mask.
"Puta!" he hissed. "I can have you put on the racks, I can have you flogged until the skin is stripped off your breasts, your bottom, your thighs and your back before you go to the fire, and the fire will hurt the more because of that, be very certain!"
"I have no fear of your threats, Senor. You will remember that if I die, you'll never be certain whether or not I ever knew where those worthless baubles and all that gold is hidden. Think about it, while you watch how a courageous Moorish girl dies by Spanish fire, calling on Allah the All-Powerful to save her soul!"
With this she straightened her shoulders and she stared at him in a superb defiance. Her magnificent titties rising and falling, her lips curved in utter scorn.
Uttering an oath under his breath, he stretched out his gloved hands and tore away her shift from her shoulders, leaving her naked. Sandriata uttered a cry of shame, as she recoiled against the stone wall of her dark cell. She clapped a hand over her plump Mount of Venus, which was covered with thick black tufts of soft, silky pussy-curls. Her magnificent bubbies rose and fell turbulently, and her nipples were hardened by her emotions. They were dark coral gems set in narrow, brownish-orange aurolae. His eyes feasted on the shallow, wide niche of her navel, set in that deliciously smooth and delightfully curved brown-sheened goblet which was her virgin belly and upon which no man had ever lain.
"Little bitch, you dirty little Moorish whore," he snarled. "You think to defy me? I'll have you, and then you shall burn at the stake before you have time to enjoy the knowledge of my passion, before you have time to ponder over the loss of the love you might have had had you only been sensible."
In the pocket of his doublet he had concealed a small leather dogwhip which he himself used to punish his hunting hounds when they had failed to find their quarry. He brought it out now, his right hand gripped the short, thick handle and as he advanced on her, his left hand clutched her thick black hair, yanking and twisting it, making her sink down to her knees with a cry of pain. With almost the same movement, lifting his right arm high, he slashed the whip over her titties. Sandriata uttered a cry of pain and hate, and bobbed her head forward as she tried to bite him.
"So! You wish to bite, you rebellious bitch? You shall feel the bite of the whip instead. Your blood is heated? Ah, but to be sure, for you are a Moorish slut! And you'll not boast of your virginity as the fires mount to kiss your body, Sandriata!"
Again and again the whip fell, striping her belly, her naked titties, biting across one softly tufted armpit, while she shrieked aloud in pain. Then again it flailed her thighs, and once when she tried to twist around and escape on one knee, the whip flicked between her gaping legs, straight into the black-thatched crevice of her maidenhood.
He flogged her compulsively, until he was panting hoarsely, and until blood sprang upon the smooth warm brown skin of her titties and inner thighs. Then, shoving her head back as he released her hair, he cast aside the whip and began to fumble with his garments. As he liberated his elongated, stiff and throbbing cock, Sandriata moaned and tried feebly to rise. With another oath he knelt down over her, his hands squeezing her naked titties, forcing her to remain as she was to await him and the imminence of his rut.
With all her strength, she tried to lift up one knee to dash against his groin. But he pinched the inside of her bare thigh until she wriggled to one side and emitted a cry of agony. Then, releasing one of her titties so that he might seize her right wrist in his left hand, he cuffed her viciously across the mouth with his gloved right hand as he thrust himself roughly between her thighs, his cockhead pushing through the thick black silky fronds which shielded her virgin twat.
Frenzied with shame and revulsion, Sandriata tried to jerk loose her wrists, to weave her satiny hips and divert the disaster. But her ravisher was stronger and more expert, for Pedro de Valorced was a notorious lecher and pillager of maidenheads, feared by every servant girl and tavern wench in all of Toledo.
With an exultant cry, he felt his prickhead press though the furry fronds to her maidenhead, dig between the plump pink lips, twitchingly soft, to the entrance to her maiden vulva. Then, with a cry, he forced himself through her maiden seal and pierced it, digging till he was in her to the balls. Sandriata, undone, twisted her face to one side and sobbed hoarsely in her shame and agony of soul.
CHAPTER THREE
Dorotea de Sandroval knelt in prayer on the dirty straw of her cell floor. Her hands were clasped and her long slim tapering fingers were twisted in a very agony of spirit. It was intolerable, impossible for her to believe that a benevolent deity could thus consign her at a mere nineteen years of age to execution by fire. Only a week ago she had stood, pale and trembling, between two helmeted guards who were attached to the secular office of the prison governor, to hear the gaunt-faced Fra Marcando solemnly intone the terrible words of sentence: "My poor ill-advised daughter, since you have not repented of your sins, and since all the terrors of those who are damned to eternal nell nave not sufficed to alter your obstinate spirit, we of the true faith have no choice but to turn you over to the secular arm of justice, and we can only pray that eternal mercy will be granted you for your sins."
This was the cruel and hypocritical formula which the Holy Inquisition used to absolve itself of all charges that it might seek the death of any of its charges. The Chief Inquisitor would argue that such an accusation was unjust and untrue, for after all, was not every effort made to save the soul of the poor sinner who had lacked guidance in the earlier path in life? And then, when all other efforts had failed to persuade, to educate, to teach the righteous course, what other possible recourse could the Church have but to implore leniency when the condemned was given over to the King's justice? It was true that the magistrate on whom good King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella delegated their regal power decreed sentence by the letter of the law: death, or perhaps the galleys for life, or perhaps only a flogging and a fine so heavy that not only the unfortunate victim would be impoverished, but also his heirs for the rest of their days. But in this act, since the Inquisition itself did not pronounce the final sentence of death, the Grand Inquisitor believed that it was guilty of no crime.
But after Fra Marcando pronounced those specious words, poor Dorotea recalled how swiftly they had dealt with her. The magistrate had put on the black headcloth which pronounced death, and had solemnly intoned that, one Dorotea de Sandroval having been found guilty of aiding and abetting a traitor to the Throne and thus agreeing in his blasphemous and unholy acts against Most Catholic Spain, and moreover, having defied her superiors by the incredible statement that if their faith led them to murder so good a man as her father, she would renounce it; for all these crimes, therefore, she was to be put to death at the stake by fire.
But even then there had been one faint hope held out to her. Even as the two soldiers had seized her by the elbows and turned her towards the door through which she must pass to return to her cell until the allotted time of death, a final concession had been granted to her by the lenient magistrate. If she would only tell the magistrate, or the inquisitor himself, where her father's gold and treasures were hidden, it might be possible to commute the death sentence. Perhaps instead she would have only a long term in a convent prison, fortified by the scourge, bread and water and constant prayers to purge her young but very evil soul from its wrongdoing.
But Dorotea knew nothing of such things. She had not even known until the fatal night of her father's arrest that he was not still a favorite at the royal court. Only when her duenna, dona Rosanna Calarto, had brought word to her that her father had been condemned to death, could the unhappy girl believe at last what she had hoped was only a dreadful dream, a nightmare from which she would awaken and be reunited with her beloved father.
Strangely enough, Dorotea thought to herself, they had not put her to the question. They had threatened her with it, they had taken her to the room and there shown her the rack, the strappado, the infamous bench upon which the water question was applied. And so she had languished in this dark, fetid cell, sometimes hearing the rustling of the rats in the straw, all these days and nights, praying for courage and salvation.
She uttered a sobbing cry. She heard the jangling of keys and then the groan of the lock as it turned to admit someone, perhaps only the jailer come to give her the last meal she would have on this earth. But instead, holding a torch in front of him, there was a masked, robust man, his hair thin and streaked with gray, wearing a bejeweled doublet, and a sword scabbarded at his side.
"Leave us," he said to the jailer. "You have been paid enough for that. Let me have but an hour with this young heretic and perhaps I can persuade her to let us know where her father's gold is hidden away. Ah, it grieves me to see so lovely and young a wench scorched by the fire, even though she were to be the devil's daughter her very self."
"Wh-who are you?" Dorotea de Sandroval quavered.
"I am a familiar of the Holy Inquisition, my child. That is all you need to know at the moment. But I am empowered to bring you life instead of the terrible death to which you have been condemned."
"But I am innocent. Oh, I have never been a traitor to the King and Queen, and I have never blasphemied, I swear before Almighty God Himself!" young Dorotea sobbed.
"But can't you see, my poor unfortunate child, that all they want of you is simply to learn where your father's wealth was stored away? Everyone knew that he had much gold, yet suddenly it cannot be found. And you, as his child, are certain to know what inheritance he left you," the masked man said in a conciliatory tone.
"Sir, I have told them everything, and there is nothing more that I can tell you. And my father was innocent. Never was he a traitor to Spain, never have I heard him blaspheme against the Holy Church."
"He is already dead, it is my sorrow to tell you," was the terrible answer.
Dorotea de Sandroval uttered a heartfelt cry. She wrung her hands as she knelt on the hard stone floor, but now her tears were for herself as they welled up in her beautiful dark blue eyes, and for the vicious death to which the Holy Inquisition had condemned her, rather than for her unhappy father. Her mother had died ten years ago, and she and her father had been closer than usually father and daughter are. Now he was gone, and there was no one in the whole world except those poor servants and perhaps her duenna, who might care what happened to her.
When at last she regained her composure to some extent, she groaned, "Oh my God, it would be a blessing if you would tell me when it was and how, good sir!"
"Only yesterday morning, but it was not by fire."
"Thank God for that at least," she murmured, and again burst into tears.
"Take care what you say to me, Dorotea; as a familiar it is my duty to report to the Holy Inquisition what your attitude is and what words you speak. Now tell me the truth. Do you swear that you know nothing of your father's treasure?"
"Oh dear Heaven, I have said so a dozen times before the tribunal itself," the sobbing girl riposted. "Do you think I want to die at the stake? Oh, if I knew, and since gold, all the gold in this nation could not buy back my father's life, do you not think I would tell you where it is to save my own?"
"It is possible, my lovely child, that you might not tell me even if that were so. Because, perhaps, that treasure was to be used in a revolt against the Crown."
"Oh no! I will not believe you now, no matter who you are! My father was the most loyal of subjects to Spain!" she burst out passionately.
"What would you do to live, Dorotea de Sandroval?" he now asked her in a grave tone.
"Why do you ask that, Senor?"
"Because it is in my power to take you from this prison and to hide you until they no longer search for you. Yes, I am a familiar, and that is true enough. But I have not yet told you that I do not always share the vindictive hatred that the tribunal holds against heretics. Take the Moors, for instance. Without them Spain could never have become so rich and powerful as it now is. And now we drive them out, we burn them at the stake, we torture them, we steal the gold which they honorably earned in our midst."
"And yet who are you, who speaks so disparagingly of the tribunal which employs you?"' the girl uneasily asked.
"Not yet will I tell you my name, not until I have taken you safety from this prison. But you must swear that you will not betray me. I have reasons."
"Well," Dorotea sighed tearfully, "I have nothing to lose if I go with you, for to tell the truth, good sir, I have no wish to be burned by the fire until I am dead." She drew a long, shuddering breath. Then, again bursting into stifled sobs as she thought of her father's death, she faltered, "I give you my word, sir, that I will not betray you."
CHAPTER FOUR
On the other side of this prison in Toledo, on a higher floor, the lovely and buxom duenna of Dorotea de Sandoval was being questioned by none other than the terrible Fra Marcando himself. Until this day, Dona Rosanna Calarto had not been apprehended or interrogated by the Holy Inquisition. She had even been allowed up until a few days ago to visit her beautiful young charge Dorotea. Then it had been suggested to the attractive widow that since she was on such affectionate terms with the girl, she might well persuade the latter to put from her mind the fears and terrors of mortal sin and punishment, and to confess freely all that she knew about her father's treasonable activities and where he had hidden the great fortune he had amassed for the purpose of using it against the rulers of Spain.
But when Dona Rosanna had visited Dorotea in her cell for the first time after the unfortunate girl had been given the death sentence, the duenna simply could not bring herself to ask such an infamous question of this beautiful girl over whose welfare she had watched so tenderly for the past five years. Moreover, the duenna herself did not credence the charges of the Holy Inquisition, since she herself had only praise and gratitude for Don Santiago de Sandroval, who had taken her into his household as a duenna for his daughter, paid the small but nagging debts which her dead husband had left upon her, and treated her with the most exquisite courtesy at all times. And then suddenly she had found herself forced to open the door of the house to the pounding of the soldiers' fists late one night, and there were the soldiers of the Inquisition demanding that she dress and come with them at once, on the orders of Fra Marcando himself. They had taken her directly to the prison and, locked in this wide and rather comfortably furnished cell-or rather, it was comfortable by comparison with the ones in which Sandriata and Dorotea were incarcerated.
There was a table and chair, even a comfortable bed instead of a straw pallet, even a little window. Yet she could not appreciate this relative luxury, her mind being still numb with the terror at being seized and told that she was to be examined by the Chief Inquisitor himself. Now she stared out the little window and looked into the prison courtyard. There was a wide square, and in its center what she beheld was hardly comforting. There was a whipping post on one side, to her left, and a pillory in the middle of a platform to her right, each ascended to by a small flight of steps, each guarded by soldiers wearing halberds.
Dona Rosana Calarto was thirty-two. She had been wed at the age of nineteen to a prosperous tavern keeper, Manuel Calarto, then thirty-five. He was a lusty man, bearded and jovial, and at first she had been frightened at his bawdiness and his habit of smacking her on the bottom and laughing uproariously when he had made a lewd joke, which made her blush, married though she was. Brought up in a convent, like most girls in those days, Rosana had almost swooned with shame when her husband had first taken her to bed. He had fucked her joyously, piercing her hymen with a shout of triumph. In fact, to her horror, he had urged that she strip naked, even of the thick nightshift, on her bridal hour. However, after a few weeks, her own earthy nature came to the fore, thanks to his virile lovemaking. At the end, she had as passionate desire to be fucked as he had to fuck her. Unhappily, he had died in a drunken brawl in his tavern, when two soldiers had set at each other with knives over a fancied insult to a blowsy slut over whose charms both had fought and for whose favors both had sought. Trying to separate them so that an officer would not enter the tavern and clap him into irons for permitting such a duel, he had been stabbed in the ribs and died two days later.
The tavern had been seized by the crown on the premise that the owner had instigated this fight between the two soldiers. Thus the duenna found herself penniless, and it was then that kindly Don Santiago de Sandroval had given her shelter in his own house and made her the duenna of Dorotea, giving her also the stately and respected title of Dona. Now, after five years of comfort and respect, the luscious young widow found herself in the hands of the Inquisition.
They'd given her no time to dress properly. All she had been able to put on was a dress over her shift and a cape, her stockings and shoes. Now, twisting her fingers in anguish, her lips moving silently in prayer, she was pacing the floor of this cell, when suddenly the sound of a key grated in the lock, the door swung open, and a tall, gaunt and forbidding-looking man in the cowled robed of a Jesuit friar entered her cell.
Fra Marcando was forty-nine, and at this moment possessed more power than King Ferdinand himself within the confines of this grim, horribly dark and labyrinthine prison. It was honeycombed with cells, and was so arranged that a familiar might secretly enter the cell of a condemned prisoner and sometimes pretend to be a fellow captive, for the purpose of obtaining the vital information which the Inquisition sought. Fra Marcando had begun his days as a young priest in Seville and had then gone to Austria. His parents had been poor, his father a mule driver, and he himself had often been treated with contempt by the villagers because his father had taken to drink after the death of the boy's mother. This contempt had warped Fra Marcando, and he had made the savage vow that some day he would come into power and show everyone that it mattered now what a man's background was, just so long as he had the intelligence and wit and skill to prove himself a thousand times better than they could ever be.
And so the Bishop of Austria, noting the young friar's zeal, had set him to work obtaining confessions from heretics, Moors, and other persons suspected of conspiracy against Spain and the Church. Here Friar Marcando had proved himself so ingenious that he had been summoned to Madrid and there ordained as Fra. Appointed as Inquisitor and sent to the province of
Lucarlos, his was for ten years there the name mothers used to frighten their children into being good.
But he was also corrupt, and there were instances where he had pardoned a confessed heretic for a petty bribe that was not always paid in gold. In Costa del Rios, a little village about fifteen miles from his parish, he had discovered a lovely widow and her three daughters whose husband had been sent to the galleys some years earlier for sedition. The families of such convicted criminals were always kept as suspects on the lists of the Inquisition.
Fra Marcando had lusted for the woman-her husband had died after six months at the oars and under the lash-and he had also lusted for her daughters. So it was easy for him to contrive that she be brought before his court accused of witchcraft. The woman and her three lovely young daughters (who were fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen) helplessly wept as three villagers testified that they had suffered misfortunes to their crops or their herds or to their own persons or those of their families, thanks to the curse of this witch. The widow was thirty-eight and still intensely desirable, and to be sure, her young and delicious daughters were even more lust rousing to the vengeful, lust-happy and powerful Inquisitor.
He decreed that they should be burned at the stake. Then at night, he had visited their cells, each in turn. First he visited the mother. Groveling at his feet, she had begged mercy for the girls, swearing that although she knew the testimony of the villagers was false, she preferred to die as a condemned witch rather than have her innocent and virginal daughters suffer so atrocious a martyrdom. So, smiling benevolently, Fra Marcando had told her, "If you will make public penance in the market place, wearing only your shift and going barefoot, holding a lighted candle, with your three daughters doing similar penance, and then if you will further give over to me that I may distribute to the poor and the needy the gold which you have hidden in your house, I will commute the sentence which sends all four of you to the fire, and instead you shall be taken to the convent of Santa Concepcion."
The widow had babbled her prayers of gratitude and kissed the hand of the Inquisitor and the hem of his gown. But that was not all which he demanded of her. "But you must prove that you are willing to be humble, my daughter," he had been lecherously smiled, "disrobe yourself now and yield your fleshy body to me in further penance."
"But, Father, that is sacrilege-oh no, it is a mortal sin!" she had gasped.
Fra Marcando had shrugged and said, "As you wish, Senora Dolores. In that case, I must tell you that you and your daughters will first be stripped naked in the marketplace and then you will be flogged with knotted cords until the blood runs down your heels, after which, after three nights of penance in the prison of the Hermosidad, all four of you will be bound to the stake and consumed by fire, as fire will consume your immortal soul in the hereafter!"
This threat made the unfortunate widow yield to his lust. Weeping bitterly, she had disrobed, her face scarlet with shame to think that a priest could lust for the flesh. But Fra Marcando had taken a scourge from his belt and how he flogged her bottom and thighs and breasts, forcing her out of her desperate pain to cry out, "Oh in the name of Heaven, Father, take me, do with me what you will!"
"No, my daughter, you must show the utmost humility. You must use the words of lust which you would perhaps to your own husband or to a lover. You must show that you are so contrite that you body is but nothing, and then there is no sin."
The whip had continued to fall, and as she rolled over and over, trying to escape it, the knotted thongs of the scourge had bitten into her furry cunthole, until at last she cried out, "Oh, Father, fuck me, then, oh in the name of pity, fuck me and be done with it, oh, I can't stand it any longer!"
Tucking up his robe, casting away the scourge, the lustful monk had fallen upon her, kneeing apart her thighs, burying his swollen prick in the twitching crevice of her pussy and had fucked her viciously not once but twice.
Then, after he had speciously promised that he would spare her and her daughters and send them to the prison convent instead, he had enjoyed the maidenheads of the three young girls on successive nights. The eldest girl, a spirited, dark auburn-haired beauty, had struggled with him and refused to yield, contemptuously saying, "A priest is no man, and you are no priest if you wish to be a man."
Furious at the insult, he had called in a soldier to strip her to the waist, and tie her wrists above her head to a ring set into the wall of the cell, but facing him. Then, borrowing the soldier's heavy leather belt, he had whipped her titties and belly until she had shriekingly consented to do his bidding.
The other two girls suffered equal shame and torture under the lash. The fourteen-year-old girl, an enchanting, sweet-faced and ingenous brunette whose hair fell to her waist had to lie over his lap for a naked spanking and then kneel between his legs, herself tuck up his robe and, burying her head under it, such at his cock until it was ready to pierce her hymen.
And a week later, the widow and her three daughters marched in a processional of the auto-da-fe and perished at the stake, and Fra Marcando, having searched the poor woman's house, found the hidden gold and put it into his own personal coffers. His only act of mercy, as a reward for the fleshy triumphs he had enjoyed over these four innocent martyrs, was that he had had the executioners strangle them to death before the flames reached them. ...
Dona Rosanna Calarto caught her breath and began to tremble, backing against the wall as she saw a man in a black robe, tall, with great shaggy brows, hawk-like nose, the thin lips of a zealot advance. He was wiry and hairy and he was naked under his robe. From the darkness of the cell, she could see through the open door out into the corridor a group of halberdiers with torches, awaiting the orders of the Chief Inquisitor.
"Leave us," he said to them curtly, closing the door behind him, and then he stood for a long and terrifying moment, contemplating the shrinking body of the frightened duenna.
Rosanna Calarto was back-haired, with a plump, rounded face, large and very lovely hazel eyes and full mouth. Although her figure was perhaps excessively ripe for perfection, she nonetheless retained a firmness and youth which made her intensely appetizing, as did the milky-pale satiny skin, which he already was appraising as he stared at her throat. Her two closely set, large, cantaloupe-like titties rose and fell rapidly as she saw this brooding, dread man move towards her.
"I bid you good day, Rosanna," he greeted her with a cruel familiarity. "You were brought here to tell me more about the sinful girl who was in your charge all these years. Now that she is under sentence of death and within an hour she will go to the stake like the worst heretics, you alone can save her, Rosanna."
"I, Your Worship? But how? In the name of the
Almighty, how?"
"Do not use that holy name so lightly, woman!" he thundered, fixing her with so baleful a look that her trembling increased. "Upon all your hope of salvation in the next world, I conjure you to tell me all that you know about Dorotea de Sandroval."
"But, Your Worship, I swear to you she is innocent. She is good and pure and virtuous. The only sin she has-if it may be called that-is that she loved her father. Would you punish a loyal daughter for such love?"
"Do not play such games of casuistry with me, Rosanna!" he snarled. "Her father was executed as a traitor and a rebel, as a conspirator against the crown. As such, his estates are confiscated, but we have not yet found his gold. I should fail my duty to my sovereigns, Rosanna, if I did not use every method in my power to locate that treasonably amassed wealth so that it might be put to the noble work of advancing the extermination of all such heretics, traitors and blasphemers before the Almighty!"
"I swear to you, Your Worship, that I know absolutely nothing of Don Sandroval's wealth. You cannot believe that he would confide in a mere servant like myself."
"Do not speak so glibly, Rosanna. It is well known from what lowly origin you came and how Don Santiago took you into his house and treated you with graciousness." A thin smile curved his lips. "Ah, yes. And since his wife, after all, died ten years before, I can understand why he took you into his household. You are comely, but I am not at all sure that you are virtuous."
"Oh no! It's not true, I swear it's not. Never once did Don Santiago look upon me with the eyes of desire!" the beautiful ripe-formed duenna gasped.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Chief Inquisitor continued to stare at the frightened woman with his brooding eyes, and he purposely remained silent to augment her suspense which his veiled threats had already aroused. Under the coarse black robe of his order, he could feel his powerful prick throbbing with ferocious impatience. Rosanna Calarto was mouthwateringly tasty, like a roasted squab cooked in Medeira and wine and he meant to savor her to the full this very day.
"I have been most patient with you, Rosanna," he at last spoke in a benign and gentle tone such as he might use in prayer with the poorest of his parishioners. "I have given you every indulgence. Do you see how comfortable this cell is, and the food that was sent to you? Only because I could not believe at first that you were guilty of any conspiracy against the Throne."
"Oh, Reverence, have mercy, in the name of heaven, do have mercy on me!" the unhappy woman cried as she sank to her knees and twisted her fingers together in agonized prayer. "I swear upon my hope of salvation that I know nothing of his treasure. Never once in the five years that I was duenna in his household did Don Santiago ever speak of treasure or of gold. I swear it on the cross, Your Reverence."
"Ah, I am almost inclined to believe you, my dear Rosanna," Fra Marcando favored her with an ironic little smile, "but alas, my child, the Church cannot readily accept the word of an impious woman, a woman who has lived in sin. No, you must first be put to the question, for only then can we extract the real truth."
"Impious? I, Your Reverence? Oh, no! Ask the priest, ask Father Diego, at the little church of the Virgin of Santa Teadora, oh, he'll tell you I have been a devout Catholic, I've gone to mass every Sunday with Don Santiago and his daughter, who have their pew in that very church. Ask him, in the name of Heaven, and don't drive me mad with terror when you talk of the question please!"
"No, this will not do, Rosanna. We know many heretics who try to turn suspicion away from themselves by going faithfully to church, so that all who know them will say, 'Ah, here are good and blessed children of the Holy Faith.' But the truth is, Rosanna, that they blaspheme against their own perverse creed as much as they do against our vengeful Lord, who knows them only too well as bars and hypocrites. That statement will not save you now. Bear in mind that Don Santiago met his death Sunday. We found him a traitor, and if you will not think of yourself, think of the daughter of the nobleman who will be condemned to march in San Benito in penitence, who will be exposed to the jeers and the hooting of the crowd, bound to the stake by the executioner. Think of it, Rosanna, the faggots piled about her and the executioner standing with the torch in readiness. Think of how her flesh will be scorched in that sultry air when the flames approach. Think!"
"Oh God, have pity on us both! Have pity on her, Your Reverence! We are both innocent!" Dona Rosanna wept heartrendingly.
"I'll give you one last chance, Rosanna," he said. "I shall send word to the jailer who guards the cell of Dorotea de Sandroval to hold her in her cell until the very next auto-da-fe. If you will follow me now to my private quarters and make your confession to me as your priest, unheard by any soldier or informer or priest. Are you ready to do that?"
"Oh yes, yes, of course, I want to confess, I want to tell Him I have done no harm! I want to save my young mistress-she's too young to die so horribly!"
"So be it!" Fra Marcando turned, opened the door and called out, "Captain Isarto! You will take two men and go to the cell of one Dorotea de Sandroval, who is being held awaiting execution at the hands of the secular forces, and who is on the floor below. Take her instead to one of the subterranean dungeons and have her chained to the wall to await further interrogation by the Holy Office."
The captain, a young bearded soldier, saluted and gave an order to his men. Then the Chief Inquisitor turned back to stare at the kneeling, weeping duenna, a crafty smile curving his lips. His eyes burned with lust now and they feasted on her luscious body with a lust he soon meant to slake. Just as he meant to put into his own treasury the gold of the late Don Santiago de Sandroval.
"Say your prayers humbly, Dona Rosanna Calarto," he intoned, "I have just pardoned your young mistress from the death which awaited her a short hour from now. However, she has not yet escaped the flames, so remember it well. Now come with me to make your confession."
Almost swooning in her mounting despair over the unknown fate that awaited her, the curvaceous duenna followed the black robed figure of Fra Marcando down the gloomy corridor. Though by now it was midday and a blazing heat beat down upon the city of Toledo, here there was an obscure darkness broken only at intervals by flickering torches set into metal brackets fixed into the stone walls. It was an atmosphere that chilled the blood and made even the strongest of body and heart quail with an unreasoning fear. And purposely the Chief Inquisitor marched ahead of the unfortunate woman at regular pace, without once turning back to regard her, certain as he was that she must follow like one compelled by the magnetic domination of his will, or perhaps like a puppet pulled by the strings of an invisible master puppeteer.
He descended one flight of steps and then another and still a third, till they were in the subterranean region where the special dungeons could be found, all equipped with apparatuses whose persuasive powers could loosen the tongues of the most obstinate. To the very end of this gloomy passageway, which had fewer torches to illumine it than any of the floors above, Fra Marcando led Rosanna Calarto till he turned to the left and, putting his hand on the knob of a heavy wooden door, pushed it open and then bade her enter with a laconic gesture.
There was inky blackness, so she moved forward hesitantly, glancing at him appealingly and with tears running down her cheeks. But from the torch thrust into the bracket just outside the cell, she could see that it contained a wide low bench, a heavy stool, and a wooden sawhorse whose top was angular and sharply ridged.
Seizing the torch, he entered, thrust it into a bracket just inside the door of the cell and then closed the door behind him and bolted it. "On your knees, Rosanna Calarto!" he thundered. "Prepare to shrive your soul and to withhold nothing of the truth! I here shall be both your father confessor and your Grand Inquisitor. I have fulfilled my part of the bargain by saving your young mistress from the stake this very day, so remember it well, woman!"
"I-I will, Your Worship," the lovely mature duenna tremulously responded.
"Now then, my daughter, confess your sins to me as you would to your own parish priest," he ordered. Again she burst into tears. And then, striving to compose herself, though with her voice breaking from time to time, she recited an entire list of petty doings, none of which would have made so much as a single sparrow fall from heaven. She was slothful, she was overly fond of food and of wine, she was vain, she had purchased a mantilla which was really beyond her means, and there were times she had mourned her robust husband because he was not beside her in the night to service her. Finally, when she had recited the very last of these small trifles, she bowed her head and stammered, "Absolve me, Father, for I have sinned."
"I cannot yet say to you, te absolvo, my daughter. You have not yet been frank with me, you have not told the entire truth of your sins. Oh yes, you have categorized and paraded these little peccadilloes before me, but you have held back that which you believed would rouse my ire as it would that of your very Maker," was his sanctimonious retort.
The duenna uttered a cry of consternation, "But Your Reverence, I swear I've told you everything, everything! There's nothing else I can say to you!"
"My poor daughter," he said gently, using all the cunning and malicious skill which the Inquisitors employed to confuse, confound and terrorize their victims, "are you so afraid of your frail flesh that you try to hold back the truth when you may at this very moment be on the very threshold of the terrible and momentous doom, the unimaginable and horrible doom of your immortal soul? I brought you here only so that no one, save you and myself, might commune to learn the truth. I brought you here that I might shrive you and give you penance for those sins which you've committed. But the act of truth, my daughter, would have more truly absolved you than aught else I myself could do as your priest. And now here you are before me on your knees, granted a dispensation and mark of favor which, I can assure you, neither your young mistress nor her heretic father gained, and still you refuse to be honest with me! No, I shall put you to the discipline, my daughter. Tell yourself that you should be grateful to me that I don't at once have the soldiers take you back to the room of interrogation and show you the instruments of the question!"
"Oh no, not that, in the name of our Savior, Your Reverence, I'm innocent, I swear to you, I'm as innocent as is my young mistress Dorotea!"
"You'll do me the courtesy of rising and then disrobing yourself entirely, Rosanna Calarto," he said in a pitilessly harsh voice, folding his arms across his chest and watching her as she shuddered there on her knees before him, still vainly twisting her fingers in the clasp of unreasoning terror.
"Disdisrobe-but-but why, Your Reverence? Oh, surely-" she faltered.
"At once my daughter, or I'll call the soldiers to take you to the interrogation chamber and they themselves will strip you naked for the torturer," he hissed.
Weeping bitterly, Dona Rosanna Calarto rose and began to remove her gown. But in her modesty, affronted even at the thought of being naked before a priest, the unhappy woman turned her back upon Fra Marcando as her trembling fingers tugged the gown over her head and shoulders and let it fall to the floor.
"Vanity, vanity, that is the work of the Devil himself!" the Chief Inquisitor cried out. "Are you so ashamed then, my daughter, of your flesh are you so afraid that I might read upon it the secrets of your sins which you have not yet confessed to me, that you so turn from me? Face me, your confessor and inquisitor, as you dare hope for salvation, and believe me that you are at this moment far from it, my daughter!"
Her tears redoubling, Rosanna Calarto loosened her petticoats, and stood at last before him clad only in shift, hose and shoes. She was violently trembling, for her lusciously opulent body was delineated by the thin cotton shift. This shift was not hemmed with the fine lace which one would have found on the noble person of young Dorotea de Sandroval, but it was then enough to shape out the appetizing contours of her titties and belly, her loins and haunches and thighs.
"Quickly," Fra Marcando's voice was hoarse and rasping, "Off with your shift! You must be naked for the discipline!"
CHAPTER SIX
Rosanna Calarto let the shift fall to the dungeon floor and found herself naked as the day she was born before the gaunt, black-robed Inquisitor. Then, in delayed reaction, she suddenly uttered a sobbing little cry of shame and pressed both her hands over the plump mount of her cunt, completely concealed by the thick black curls which grew over the soft, pouting, pink lips. For she had been chaste all the years in the household of Don Santiago. Not, she secretly admitted to herself, that she hadn't longed to have the kindly and elderly nobleman take carnal notice of her charms, because he'd been a superb figure, of a man even in his fifties, with distinguished gray hair, and his leonine head and courtly bearing.
But alas, he had remained faithful to the memory of his dead wife, and even though she had replaced that aristocratic beauty five years after the latter's death, it had been only in the role of governess to his daughter, not as his bed bitch. But even now, at thirty-two, her pussy still burned with impatience for fucking. The hungry mouth of her quim yearned again for the swollen, hard, dark-veined organ which it still remembered; it could still taste the glistening, spunk-greased head as her husband would urge it steadily forward and deep into her. And the wide-spread lips of her quim would widen even more, passionately clinging to the round gnarled sides of his shaft, clasping it like a sheath as he drove it home to the very balls inside of her. Even now, in her mortal tenor, her nakedness reminded her of her happy marriage nights.
Her flesh remembered, too, how her husband's cock would slip back and forth, churning inside of her a dizzying rise of sensation. Her flesh remembered how fulfillment would come with cumulative force as she shrieked out her passion, panting for breath as her body abandoned itself to spew forth her own love cream which added its own glistening on her husband's pulsating prick. And now, there was even now a tickling in her pussy as her nervous system reminded her that, being naked, she was ready to be fucked. But that absent prick which had so assuaged her in days past was not here now, there was no cock that could stifle the raging anguish in her loins; before her was a man for whom she could feel only the most deeply rooted horror.
And yet, so irrationally, even as she wondered what he was going to do to her, and what punishment she would suffer, Rosanna could not help remembering how her lusty husband had taken her, tumbled her back onto the bed, hoisting up her petticoats, gripping her by the backs of her knees and shoving them up against her titties while in the scandalously indecent position, kneeling towards her, he dug his sturdy ramrod deep into her moist chasm. Oh how she wished, with the fervor of one who now knew only the cringing terror at the brooding silence of the gaunt Chief Inquisitor standing before her, that he were still alive to save her from the perils of this dungeon and of this man whom she feared more than anyone else in all of Spain!
"Your arms at your sides, and surrender yourself," Fra Marcando now sneered. "There is no part of your body I do not know, no part which is not without sin in the eyes of Our Maker Yes, you're a weak vessel, Rosanna Calarto, and you have many flaws, many indeed. Go place yourself astride that sawhorse now, and submit yourself humbly to do proper penance for those sins and flaws in your nature."
With a groan of commingled shame and terror, the handsome naked widow moved towards the sharp ridged sawhorse and gingerly straddled it. She was very careful to stretch herself forward and let her arms dangle down along the front legs. Then she uttered a cry as the sharp wooden angled ridge pressed into the most tender spot of all her body. "Oh, Your Reverence, it hurts me, it hurts me so!"
"And so it is meant to hurt you, Rosanna," he told her as he moved towards her, crouched down and seized her left leg, strapped her ankle with a broad heavy brown thong and buckled it tightly. Then, moving around, he imprisoned her other ankle the same way, so that Rosanna Calarto felt herself straddled indecently, so that the plump fig of her cunt pressed down upon the infernally sharp, narrow wooden ridge along the top of this apparatus which was one of the many "persuasive" accoutrements by which the Holy Inquisition forced the "truth" from its helpless victims.
"I tell you, submit yourself humbly, Rosanna. It is the only way to renounce your wickedness." Fra Marcando thundered as now he strode to the head of the horse, crouched down and strapped her wrists to the front legs, buckling the straps, just as he had done with the ankles. Straightening, he seized a strap which dangled from the middle of the sawhorse and was affixed to its underside, pulled it round the woman's waist and buckled it so viciously tight over her bare white back that she uttered a shriek of pain. Because one again she became aware of the hellish ridge which forced even more cruelly into the sensitive cleft of her cunt hole. "Aiiii, ohh, aahhh, Your Worship, oh have pity on me, it hurts me, it hurts me dreadfully!" she wailed shrilly.
"Good. For only through pain and discipline, my poor misguided daughter, can the wicked flesh and the wayward souls be purged of their combined sins!" was his sanctimonious retort. Now he moved over to the tall wooden stool placed near the sawhorse, over whose top there lay a thick strap of brown leather, with a double thickness at one end to serve as handle for the wielder. This strap was about two and a half feet long, a quarter of an inch thick, about two and three-quarter inches wide, while the last four inches had been artfully slashed to compose five narrow strips which resembled human fingers. It was a derivation of the old Scotch tawse.
Armed with this, the Chief Inquisitor of Toledo took his stance at Rosanna's left, his eyes glittering as they feasted over the spacious hillocks of her milky-skinned bottom-cheeks, which at once contracted violently as the unfortunate duenna was pierced by the shame of being thus exposed naked before the ominous, morose ecclesiastic. Slowly he lifted his arm, suspended the thong in mid-air, then, his lips tightening, he brusquely descended the leather strap so that just the five stinging tips cracked sonorously against the upper summit of Rosanna's right bottom-cheek.
The effect was almost magical and instantaneous. The woman's entire naked body seemed to arch up against the straps, her bottomglobes jerked and swerved violently, then contracted with a long convulsive spasm. Her head rose, her eyes widening and glazing with suffering as her mouth gaped in a shrill shriek of torment. "Eeeeowwouuuuhrrrr!! Ohh, oh do have mercy, Your Worship! I can't bear such pain, oh have pity on me, I'm only a helpless woman, all I know I've told you, I swear it."
Thwack! Again the leather band leaped down, this time kissing the top of Rosanna's left bottom-cheek, and the tips of those cruel fingers imprinted angry, darkening blotches along the white soft flesh. Again she struggled over the sawhorse, her nether rotundities clenching then yawning sporadically to expose the lascivious vista of the perineum, the ambery-shadowy cleft between those luscious ripe bottomglobes, as well as the glimpse of the palpitating pink lips of her cunt framed by the luxuriant curls of black quim hair. Her cry was wordless and inchoate. Her head flung back, as her maddened eyes searched the stone ceiling for some sign of reprieve. There was none, there would be none. No one, save Fra Marcando, could even hear her cries.
"Ah, this is good proof, wholesome proof, that the discipline begins to bear fruit, my child," he unctuously remarked as he applied the lash again. This time the strap fell angrily across both naked bottom-cheeks, and the five tips at the end of the strap darted insidiously against the edge of her right hip. The violent twisting of Rosanna's posterior caused the most agonizing friction of her pussy against the sharp ridge of the sawhorse to which she was so helplessly strapped. And this time her shriek was really deafening and clamorous.
"When you are ready to confess what you have held back from me, my daughter, I will relent, but not till then," he announced to her. Grinning like a fiend, hs dark brooding eyes narrow slits of malevolent rut, the Chief Inquisitor resuemd the flogging of the shrieking duenna. The thick leather strap cracked against her opulent hindquarters, streaking those lusciously pouting, plump and succulent nether globes with angry crimson welts, with darkening splotches and streaks, as he methodically lashed her from the tops of her hips to the base of her wriggling, weaving and lunging behind. Hysterical screams, incoherent and babbling pleas, heart-rendering supplications which were interspersed with choking sobs and floods of new tears, attested to the infernal torment of this whipping. After he had laid on some such twenty-five strokes, he paused a moment, panting, his face furrowed and glistening with sweat. His prick was monstrous as it prodded out against the black robe, and his hairy chest was panting, moist with the dank sweat of lust and exertion.
Now Fra Marcando was in his element, along with his victim in the bowels of this infamous prison for there was no hope for mercy save perhaps death which alone could end the pitiless torments of those incarcerated here and "questioned" by those others who toiled under the cloak of righteousness and in the name of the Most Catholic Majesties of Spain.
"Now then, my daughter, are you of a better mind to make a confession to me and without hiding the truth as you did before?" Fra Marcando hoarsely demanded as he let the strap dangle from his hand and stepped back to contemplate his handiwork. Those once smooth milky bottom-cheeks were violently striped now, livid with a pattern of crisscrossing welts and splotches, and the globes themselves contracted and yawned in the most immodest, uncontrollable way.
"Anything ... I-I'll confess ... only for mercy's sake, h-have mercy ... oh, please, no more ... I-I'm dying! Have pity on me!" the helpless, almost fainting woman moaned.
"Then what have you done with the treasure of Don Santiago de Sandroval? Where is it hidden in that house of his? I warn you, Rosanna try my patience no longer! Or I will have you racked and then flogged again, but this time on your bosom and your belly to loosen your tongue!"
As if to punctuate this heinous threat, he delivered a furious downward leaping stroke which sent the five then stinging strips at the end of the thong right into her tender bottom groove!
It was too much. Madly, her naked body lurched and she jerked and swerved, as she tried to tear herself from the sawhorse. Her face turned back to him, unrecognizably twisted, the eyes mad with unspeakable torture, her mouth gaping to bare her chattering white teeth in a supreme paroxysm of agony.
"Well, Rosanna? I am waiting for your answer!" was his inflexible rasping remark.
"Pity ... spare me ... I don't know where-I don't know-oh no, I don't-I don't know where the gold is. Your Reverence! I s-swear to you I don't-oh please-stop-only stop, I'll do anything you wish, anything!" the duenna wildly babbled, as she arched and squirmed in a mad effort to ease the infernal rubbing of that atrociously sharp ridge against her chafed and throbbing cunthole.
"I'll test you, my daughter, but woe betide you if you fail that test," he chuckled.
Then unstrapping her, helping her totter down from the sawhorse, he commanded, "Now then, go lie on that bench and prepare yourself to yield your sinful body to my demands. Thus alone will you show repentance, my poor daughter."
Stumbling, whimpering, one hand rubbing her tortured cunt, the naked duenna tottered towards the bench and sprawled herself down upon it on her back, uttering a sobbing groan at the torment which the pressure of the wood inflicted on her swollen, whip-streaked bottom-cheeks. Then, with a grim chuckle of triumph, the gaunt Inquisitor flung off his robe. Now he was naked, lean, wiry, his chest thick with sweat-matted grayish hair, and his prick was monstrously erect.
He flung himself upon her with a growl, his hands clenching her panting titties, and with a single mighty thrust, he burrowed himself to the hilt inside her cunt hole. Then, panting and grunting like an animal at his rut, Fra Marcando fucked the half fainting duenna, who abandoned herself, closing her eyes and turning aside her face, groaning when his savage passion aggravated the already chafed and burning lips of her quim. He fucked her with jerking, rapid thrusts, as if he feared that she might disappear, till at last with a mad bellow he flooded her with his gismic drench.
And thus lovely, sensitive Dorotea de Sandroval was betrayed by one who loved her, yet one whose love was not strong enough to withstand the diabolical tortures of the Holy Inquisition!
CHAPTER SEVEN
When at last Fra Marcando languidly raised himself from the abandoned, naked and trembling body of Rosanno Calarto, he stared at her for a greedy moment as she lay there with her face averted and still wet with the tears of shame and suffering. Then he said coldly, "You've shown yourself to be sufficiently docile to me, but that was caused by your fear, Rosanna. But now you will accompany me to the house of your late master, and you will help me search for his treasure. I shall also ask you questions about your young mistress."
As he straightened, he heard the clanging of a male fist upon the dungeon door, and he swore a vile oath in his annoyance at this unwanted interruption.
Swiftly he dragged back on the black hooded robe, and told the duenna to roll over onto her belly, so that it would appear as if he had been interrupted in his task of scourging her to exercise the demons in her flesh.
And so venomously did he warn her not to dare to admit-on pain of the most atrocious torture and eventual death-what carnal pleasures he had taken with her person, that Rosanna Calarto quailed and shook her head, speechless in her terror.
Again there was a clanging of the male fist, and Fra Marcando drew back the bolt of the door and opened it, to find the captain of the guards standing before him.
"Your Worship, the young girl has escaped!" the young captain exclaimed.
"What idiocy is this, Captain Tsarmo? If your news is true, why did you take so long to bring it to me? A good half hour ago I sent you to the cell of Dorotea de Sandoval with orders to take her to one of the lower dungeons!"
"Ten thousand pardons, Your Reverence," the bearded young captain stammered, suddenly very ill at ease. "But just as my men and I were about to carry out your order, the governor of the prison, Don Jaime, commanded that I come at once to his office, as he had just received news of a plot involving some of the heretics awaiting punishment.
"He kept me there and gave me orders on what I was to do to counteract this plot, Your Reverence. Only when I was dismissed did I continue on the errand on which you had sent me. And when I arrived at the cell of this girl, I found the cell empty."
"May the villanious rogue who spirited that girl away suffer eternal damnation!" Fra Marcando angrily declared. "Have you at least begun your search? She and whoever helped her to escape may still be hiding somewhere in this prison."
"And that, Your Worship, it yet another reason why I took so long to come to you. As soon as I had found the cell empty, I sent Corporal Romero here to the sentry officer and Sergeant Latorga to the garrison outside the prison to bid them search for the missing prisoner and to bid them search and arrest not only her but anyone with her. They, however, reported that they had seen no one, Your Reverence."
Fra Marcando bit his lips, then in a more mollified voice remarked: "At least, you showed some intelligence, Captain. Then you will sound the alarm. I relieve you here of your duties at the prison, and you will go into Toledo with a dozen of your most trusted soldiers to seek out that escaped girl and those who aided her in fleeing her just punishment for heresy and blasphemy against not only the Church but the Crown as well. You need not, however, search the house of her father, Don Santiago, for I myself intend to go there at once and take this wretched prisoner, who was once the duenna of the escaped girl, so that she may point out to me the articles of value still remaining in the house of that condemned and executed audience. Such possessions, of course, are forfeited to their glorious majesties Ferdinand and Isabella."
"Very good, Your Reverence. I'll select my men from the garrison, then, with your permission."
"That's your affair entirely, Captain," Fra Marcando said crisply. "You belong to the temporal branch, I to the spiritual. You are but a tool whereby Mother Church shall chastise the wicked deceivers of the faith. Go quickly on your errand, then. But first have one of your men bring a cloak and some shoes to this woman that she may accompany me. And you will tell my secretary, Philip Mondragar, to see that my carriage is ready for the journey to the house of that condemned and executed heretic."
The bearded young captain bowed low, then transmitted his orders to his men. A little while later, one of the soldiers brought a thick black woolen cloak for the still naked and sobbing Rosanna Calarto and a pair of heavy shoes. Fra Marcando ordered her to clothe herself, forgetting the garments that she had already divested herself in her frantic eagerness to save her more torture, as he mockingly remarked: "Such fripperies, my daughter, are part of the devil's snare to lead you into perdition. Forget all your vanity, then, tell yourself humbly that you must follow me to serve in this holy work of exterminating all treasonable heretics who threaten our beloved land!"
And a few moments later, Fra Marcando, still naked under his black robe, took his place inside the carriage "beside the cowed and terrified Rosanna Calarto. As the carriage moved through the gate of the prison which had been opened to permit the passage of the Grand Inquisitor, there began the tolling of the bells from all the cathedrals of Toledo, announcing the horrible auto-da-fe and the judgments to be rendered upon the condemned. It would not be long before there would be smoke blackening the skies with the hideous portent of death at the stake for many whose only crime was that they had defied the will of the Inquisition and believed that their wealth and their estates had kept them immune from harm by the most terrible and secret authority in all Spain, more powerful, indeed, then the rulers of Spain itself. ...
CHAPTER EIGHT
Even as Fra Marcando led the broken, terrified Rosanna Calarto out of her cell to a waiting carriage at the gate of the prison, whence both would be taken to the house of Don Santiago de Sandroval, where the cruel Inquisitor intended to force Rosanna to search for the hidden treasure, the beautiful young Moorish girl Sandriata was being carried away by a masked young nobleman and his two aides.
Pedro de Valorced, the familiar of the Inquisition, had determined not to less this delicious young heretic perish at the stake. What a waste of luscious femininity it would have been, he had told himself, once he had fucked her by brute force.
He had no wish to lose the delightful possibility of enjoying her again and again at his leisure.
An unholy alliance had been established between this dissolute young Spanish courtier and the cadaverous Chief Inquisitor. That alliance had come about because each shared the same unholy secret: physical lust and a corrupt desire for power and wealth.
And that was why the handsome young wastrel, who had heard rumors from those high in the royal court that Fra Marcando would turn his thoughts from the spiritual to the material if there were reward enough in the latter, had some weeks ago visited the gaunt Inquisitor and proposed to betray to him the heretical of many hitherto unsuspected and extremely wealthy families.
Fra Marcando had drawn himself to his full height and sneered at the young courtier: "You then think to bribe me with material gains, Pedro de Valorced?"
"Not entirely so, Your Worship," the slim young nobleman had chuckled, for he had already sensed that the Chief Inquisitor was venal, and he had already seen the gleam of desire in those dark, brooding eyes. "But suppose I were to tell you that there were many lovely young girls in those families who could be put to the question in a private dungeon where only you and a trusted executioner could preside, and where for the sake of their salvation they would do anything to spare their tender flesh from the torture, would that not suffice, Your Reverence? I have many such things to tell you if you will but trust me and appoint me as your familiar."
The Inquisitor had considered him for a long moment. Then, leaning forward from his chair, he had pointed an accusing finger at the young nobleman and growled, "You are a shameless dog, Pedro de Valorced. It was your hope to involve me in this evil scheme because I know that you are penniless. Well then, an informer, yes, even Judas the damned, is said to be worthy of his hire when he betrays. What do you ask, as your thirty pieces of silver, if-and I have not yet said yes to your proposal-I should accept you in league with me against the heretics?"
"Why, as to that, Your Reverence," the young nobleman had smugly declared with a deferential gesture, "I'll rely entirely on Your Reverence's generosity. I shall be content, no matter what you set the price to be."
"It is understood. But let it to be understood also that this is to be done in the name of the holy faith and the good work which pursues the extermination of all blasphemers, heretics and traitors to our beloved Majesties, Ferdinand and Isabella. Do you betray me but once, Pedro de Valorced, do you but trick me a single time and let me learn that you alone have compounded this notion for your own selfish benefits, and you yourself shall face the rack, the water question, the strappado and the stake. I have supreme power as you well know," was the grim reply.
Thus the two of them, so different and yet so alike in their communal aims, had come to their evil bargain and thus far Fra Marcando had been well content. For it was none other than Pedro de Valorced who had accused the pure and blameless Don Santiago de Sandroval and his beautiful, innocent virginal daughter to the Holy Inquisition, as well as a number of other families now languishing in the cells and waiting their turn before the terrible tribunal!
What made the Holy Inquisition most terrifying, even to the innocent, was its method of interrogation, which was without appeal. Not quite five centuries later, to be sure, that same terrifying and unannounced summons was to be used by the fanatical Gestapo of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich.
First, perhaps in the dead of night or of dawn, the soldiers would knock upon the door of a house. The wakened, frightened occupants would be herded out, told curtly that they had been arrested for questioning, and would then be taken away.
Next they would face a group of monks, devout Jesuits over whom the tall, gaunt Fra Marcando would preside.
Then from a side entrance, a masked informer or a familiar would enter the chamber of questioning. He would be the accuser against the unfortunate victim, who would be allowed to know neither his identity nor to confound him with defensive questions.
Eventually out of that chamber would come a broken, helpless, pitiable man or woman or girl, for the most vaunted courage could not withstand the torments of the Holy Inquisition, not when they were reeked with such fiendish imagination and cruel skill at the order of the Grand Inquisitor.
However, Pedro de Valorced was brash and overbearingly proud in his noble heritage; moreover, the threats of creditors and of his former companions to whom he owed money and who had seen him lavish much gold at the gaming tables and at the taverns among the tasty wenches had made him at last determined to recoup all his losses and make this desperate gamble for a fortune-a fortune which would include the lush body of young Sandriata.
Now that he had taken her cherry in her dungeon cell, fucked her by force and tasted the sweet and sadistic joy of rape, he knew that he could not part with her and leave her to die at the stake.
His two friends who were also venal and whose friendship was as fickle as the winds-especially when there was gold concerned-had agreed to help him in the daring plot to smuggle Sandriata out of the prison of the Holy Inquisition. He had promised them a share of the gold from that chest taken from the Spanish galleon.
As a familiar, he knew the existence of the many secret passages hollowed out behind the cells, passages which the Jesuit monks had created so that the informers and the familiars could at will enter the cells of those imprisoned and awaiting trial or the condemned, and reasons with them or trick them into avowals which would reveal the hidden secrets which heretofore the Inquisition had failed in wrestling from them. That was how he had made his way to Sandriata's cell without arousing the suspicion of the guards.
Miguel Saltado and Bartolomeo Cardenas, his roistering companions in a tavern which he had often frequented to sate his thirst for wine and women, had followed him down one of those secret passages.
They had watched him fuck Sandriata, and after he had finished with her, he struck her with his fist. As she sank back unconscious, he put two fingers to his lips and emitted a low whistle.
The two companions at once entered, and at his sigh, bound and gagged the Moorish girl, their eyes glistening at the sight of her delicious nakedness.
"You know what passageway to take, you dogs," he hissed. "I have a carriage waiting there and my coachman has a permit signed by Fra Marcando himself to pass us through all the guards at the gate."
He did not think it necessary to tell his hirelings who had accepted him as an equal and whom he personally considered as scum that he had stolen the parchment from the office of the Chief Inquisitor and himself forged the signature of that ruthless persecutor of heretics.
"Hurry," he urged them, "hurry, you fools, the bell begins to toll for the start of the auto-da-fe. Soon the guards will come here to take this Moorish bitch to the stake!"
The, as he saw them lift and carry the naked, unconscious figure of the girl out into the tunnel behind the cell, he followed them.
It was a long, tortuous way, and it was lighted only by a small torch which he had lit just before entering the tunnel.
Its height forced him to stoop and he grimaced with jealous anger as he saw how the two rogues held Sandriata, one clutching both her thighs and staring at the thick black curls over her deflorated cunt.
CHAPTER NINE
Count Paolo de Cordoba had originally intended to take beautiful Dorotea back to her father's house, but intuition warned him that such a move would be decidedly unwise at this time. It was vital that he hide away the virginal daughter of his old friend Don Santiago where the soldiers of the Inquisition would not think to look for her.
And finally he came upon the notion of placing her openly in his own house, since his rank as a familiar would at once remove him from suspicion, and thus his house would become sanctuary for the terrified and bereaved young beauty.
As she sat beside him in the carriage, Dorotea give way to a crisis of tears, pardonable enough when one understands what torment of mind she must have endured alone in that dark cell in the prison of the Inquisition, awaiting execution by fire, already knowing that her beloved father had unjustly been put to death as a traitor to Spain.
Since the Count was masked, she of course did not yet recognize him, nor had the moment come for him to reveal his identity to her until they were safely in his house among his trusted retinue.
Count Paolo de Cordoba, an arm around the young brunette's shoulders, stared out of the window of the carriage on his own past personal sorrows.
At the age of twenty-three, he had fallen deeply and passionately in love with a voluptuous and extremely intelligent Moorish girl.
His parents had resented the proposed union, and his father had cynically stated, "Oh come now, Paolo, you bear one of the oldest and most honorable names in all Spain. Would you tarnish your inheritance by uniting yourself to an infidel? But if you pay no heed to my advice, think of the children which will come from this marriage, and think of your grieving mother.
Such children will be outcasts, my son, and the blue blood of nobility which you transmit to their veins will not save them from the slander and the jeers of their neighbors and their playmates because they will be born out of the womb of a Saracen. So my advice to you, Paolo, is to bed the bitch, take her as your slut, please yourself with her, then give her some money and marry her off to one of the servants, but don't destroy yourself by taking her as your wife!"
But young Paolo de Cordoba had defied his father's wishes and continued to see his beloved Eunice, telling her that they would be wed after he had overcome the difficulties with his family.
And finally his father had employed a professional thug whom he had met at a tavern by the wharf. And so the thug and two companions had, one night, broken into Eunice's house, carried her off and smuggled her aboard a galleon destined for Panama. Two weeks after the vessel had sailed, a violent storm floundered it and nearly all hands aboard were lost, including Eunice.
When the young nobleman learned of his bride-to-be's death, he broke with his father, and from that day forth his hatred for all the detestable bigotry which was flourishing in Spain was born.
He had never been married, although to be sure, he had taken his pleasure with elegant ladies from time to time as the urge to fuck moved him. But now that he was approaching the twilight of his life, weary of the intrigue of the royal court and the fanatical persecution of all who would not kowtow to the will of the Inquisition, Count Paolo de Cordoba prayed that fate would compensate him for his murdered Eunice by giving him the hand in marriage of lovely, gentle and innocent Doretea de Sandroval.
The carriage at last came to a halt in the courtyard of his magnificent villa, eleven miles northeast of the city of Toledo. The grooms hurried out to unharness the horses and had taken them back to the stables, while his trusted steward, Felipe, hastened to open the door of the carriage and to greet his master.
Dorotea was startled when she recognized the servants of the Count, and she turned to the masked man at her side. "But who are you?" she breathed.
It was the steward who unwittingly revealed the identify of the man who had saved her: "Why, Senorita, this is Count Paolo de Cordoba returning to his house to be welcomed by his faithful servants. Our master has been absent from us long weeks, and we rejoice at his return."
"How now, Felipe, get about your duties!" the Count gruffly rejoined. "See to it that Serafina prepares the best room in the house for my lovely guest, the Lady Dorotea de Sandroval."
"At once, master," Felipe bowed his head deferentially and then obsequiously escorted the still dazed and trembling young brunette into the luxuriously furnished villa where Serafina, a fat gray-haired woman who enjoyed her own importance as housekeeper to the Count, hastened to put Dorotea at ease.
At her swift orders, the cook prepared food and wine, and Dorotea at last began to feel that she was safe, but she had not forgotten and could never forget how her father had died in the same prison from which she had just been rescued.
No one spoke of the black smoke which besmirched the leaden sky over Toledo, for the servants shared their master's loathing for the warped and sadistic tyranny of the Inquisition. They did not voice their opinions, as might be understood, but even though they were under the protection of a familiar of the Inquisition, there was always the danger that one whose views were far less tolerant than their master's might overhear them and denounce them to the dread tribunal.
And Count de Cordoba himself took pains not to express himself in their presence, so that they might not be put to the question to divulge some unguarded remark of his. Nonetheless, knowing his innate kindness, they could infer that they had nothing to fear from him.
After Dorotea had regained somewhat of her strength by partaking of the excellent repast which the goodhearted housekeeper set before her, Paolo de Corboda himself entered the dining room, this time his mask removed. Bowing low to her, he said in a resonant voice, "Be welcome to my house, Senorita Dorotea. You're safe now, and I give you my word you will never go back to that prison."
"I cannot begin to think of repaying you, Count de Cordoba," Dorotea stammered. "And thanks are all too niggardly in voicing the gratitude I feel in that you have saved my life. Yet I do not think I shall ever forget that my father was murdered. Oh heaven, if only I could have gone before Ferdinand and Isabella to plead for him, to tell them how well he had served them all these years!"
"Alas, poor child, it would have availed you nothing. Ferdinand and Isabella hear only what they wish to hear, and Fra Tomas Torquemada had convinced them that the persecution of the innocent is justified by the good work of exterminating traitors and heretics, and is therefore blessed in the eyes of our Lord."
"But how does it happen, Count de Cordoba, that you were in that prison and able to save me?" Dorotea wondered.
"I shall trust you with my secret, for I know you will not reveal it. I am a familiar of the Inquisition. I accepted that post after great reflection, since I myself have ample reason to stand against all that it represents, all its cruelties and tyrannies, its greed for power and wealth. The Inquisition is like a plague which throttles and slowly kills the land, and heaven alone knows when we shall be rid of it. But I told myself that if I, one of the grandees of Spain who stand in high regard with their Majesties, could do what little I could in secret to protect the innocent, then I should think more of myself as a man. Do you think I could have endured the thought of your death at the stake, my lovely girl, when I am certain that you have never in all your life harbored a hateful thought, no, not even against those who put your father to death? Yes, he was murdered, and the reason was that they feared him. He was too kindly and too tolerant, in an age when tolerance is feared far more than is cruelty. Besides, they wished his lands and his gold. But these things are your inheritance and they must not fall to the Crown. Try to think, Dorotea, where your father might have hidden his treasure?"
"But the tribunal asked that, at the time they condemned me, Count de Cordoba," Dorotea said in a low, trembling voice. "And I know nothing, my father never once told me of such things, nor did I ever seek to know them for they did not concern me."
"But now they do because your father is dead and there is no other heir. Let me tell you this, Dorotea. It is the custom, after the Inquisition has pronounced its decree against a heretic or an adjudged traitor, that all his property be confiscated. However, in practical fact it takes from two weeks to a month before an actual search is made of the house and its contents looted-there is no other word to describe the pillaging and the greed. And since I do not think it wise at this moment to go to your father's house, Dorotea, I propose to send Felipe in a few days on some pretext or other there to see what is happening. If no soldiers are yet stationed there, then at night we might visit the house where you were born and look for your father's legacy."
Her face brightened. "Oh yes, I'll gladly do that, because my prayer book is still there. My mother gave it to me as a child, and I want to keep it in memory of her."
"We shall find the prayer book and whatever else belongs to you, I swear," he gave her a courtly bow. "Now, my house is yours, and you need only command my servants for anything you desire. Serafina will attend you as your personal maid whenever you wish it. Do not hesitate to give her orders or to any other of my servants, Senorita."
Dorotea's lovely dark eyes filled with tears; impulsively she put a hand out to touch the wrist of her savior. "How grateful I am to you, Count de Cordoba! And as I've said, I don't know how I can repay you. You must forgive me if I'm still saddened over my father's death, and I do not think I shall be a congenial companion in this beautiful villa of yours."
"Your very beauty makes you congenial, Senorita," was his gallant reply, "And one day, when you can forget some of this horror, I propose to tell you what is in my heart.
Fra Marcando walked slowly through the magnificent salon of Don Santiago de Sandroval with the frightened Rosanna at his side.
He had permitted her to go to the room which had once been hers, and there to dress herself, but ordered that she put on only a shift and robe and sandals, so she might be at once put to the discipline if he discovered that she had tricked him or did not do all she could to find her master's hidden treasure.
Haggard and trembling, the buxom duenna covertly stared at him, watching his every movement, studying the moody changes on his gaunt face, for she understood that her life or death depended on the whim of this cruel, relentless man.
She in her turn was beginning to feel a curious admixture of sensations. Now that she was alone with him, she saw him wearing the black hood and cowl and robe of the religious order of the Jesuits.
She had been brought up as a child to be devout and to respect those who wore the cloth of the priesthood. And yet this very same man had brutally whipped and tortured her, fucked her, using her even more roughly than her own adored and dead husband. And yet he was a priest, he was the Chief Inquisitor, and she knew that he had transgressed his vows by his carnal lust.
The knowledge horrified her with the sacrilege, and so she felt that she had been sinful having tempted him to carnal lust. And yet, beyond all this, a tiny part of her, the part which she could not and would not admit or credence, shudderingly yearned for him ... for Rosanna Calarto was a full-blooded and passionately ripe female who longed for the domination that only a strong and ruthless male could give her itching cunt.
She led him down the long winding stone steps to the cellar, after opening a little door in the corridor which led toward the kitchen and the pantry. It was obscure blackness down there, and she could hear at times the scurrying of the rats.
Once, when this house had been alive and filled with happiness, there had been a cat belonging to the cook who had defied them to come forth. But now the house was theirs.
Rosanna uttered a cry of terror as a rat brushed her feet and vanished into the shadows, and she flung herself against the tall Inquisitor, moaning, "Oh, in the name of heaven, Your Excellency, let me get a torch to light our way, I'm afraid of the rats!"
You have no reason to fear the four-legged creatures, my daughter," he mocked her. "Those who go about on two legs are the most dangerous by far. But you stay here while I get the torch. Don't move from this room, or I will give you the scourge again on your naked body to mortify your vanity and your lust fullness."
With this, he ascended the stone steps and left the duenna in the midst of that gloomy cellar, almost fainting with fear and terror.
It is said that every human being fears one thing more than anything else upon this earth; with Rosanna Calarto it was rats. Had she been bound to a post in the cellar and threatened with being left there alone all night long unless she gave up her immortal soul to Satan himself, she would eagerly have done so, such was her terror of the rodents.
And thus for her it seemed a full eternity until he returned carrying a torch. The grotesque and flickering patterns of light which danced upon the bare stone floor uncovered, to her horrified eyes, a score of the furry beasts which made her flesh crawl with revulsion. But at the sight of the light, they scurried back into their holes, and now all was silent.
Thrusting the torch into a metal bracket into the wall, Fra Marcando observed with gloating satisfaction the trembling anguish of his beautiful companion. She stood there with her hands clasped in fervent prayer, her eyes huge and filled with tears, her lips trembling.
His prick ached and swelled at the very sight of her, and he longed again to taste the lush ripeness of her flesh, to bore himself into that tight warm cunt of hers. As he was still naked under his robe, he could not control the shivering anticipation which rippled through his flesh and which made his cock harden and throb with the pulsations of rut.
And thus his male spear prodded out against the black stuff of the robe till when Rosanna stared at him, she gasped to see the obscene manifestation of his virility.
"Well, think now, rack your brains, Rosanna!" His dry, harsh voice swept her back to reality. "You've been in this cellar before, I should say. So where would your master hide articles of great worth? They must surely be somewhere here. Recollect, search your memory, or you shall have the discipline again to quicken it, Rosanna Calarto!"
"Oh have mercy, Your Eminence!" In her anguish, Rosanna Calarto hoped to soften this terrible, harsh man by lavishing upon him the most ostentatious titles. "I'm only a poor woman, a peasant, and the only importance I ever had in life was to be the companion of the lovely daughter of my good master. He would certainly never have told a simple woman like myself of such things, but surely to his daughter instead, Your Reverence! Oh believe me, I swear it on the Holy Book itself!"
"Be careful, do not blaspheme!" his thick brows knitted with righteous anger. "Enough of all your prattling. Use your energy to better advantage. Now search for me, in all the chests in this cellar. Go look for the treasure!"
"Oh yes, I will, Your Eminence, but please, in the name of heaven don't punish me if I can't find anything, because I know there's nothing here, Your Eminence." she sobbed. And while he stood with folded arms glowering at her, the buxom duenna moved this way and that among the cloth-covered articles of furniture, barrels of wine, the piles of household goods stored in the spacious cellar.
There was only one old wooden chest in the corner, the farthest away, which seemed a likely repository for treasure. As she perceived it, Fra
Marcando saw that it was padlocked. Giving the torch to Rosanna, he seized a heavy iron bar and smashed the lock. But when he opened the chest, he swore violently, for the only treasures were those of books. And then when he picked up one of the musty volumes his face darkened with anger: it was by an author whose works had been condemned by the Holy Church for heresy and blasphemy.
He took down the torch on the wall and held it to the books in the chest until they kindled, and then he stepped back and snarled, "Once again the Inquisition has proved its justice. Don Santiago de Sandroval deserved to die a thousand times over, if only because of these books. He kept treason here as he might house traitors in refuge to plot their wicked crimes against our nation and our church. Come, Rosanna, we must search through the rest of the house!"
And so they spent that entire day and well into the night. The duenna, exhausted and sobbing with her growing fear of his anger at each failure to find the treasure, feverishly searched the rooms of that elegant house where once she had been happy with her young mistress. But they found nothing.
When they went at last into the room which had belonged to Dorotea, Rosanna found the little prayer book, but the Chief Inquisitor impatiently gestured for her to put it back into the drawer. How could he know that hidden in its pages was the cipher map which revealed where the three magnificent diamonds were hidden in the cistern!
Now even his own fatigue demanded that he call a halt to the search. He had brought provisions in the carriage, wine and bread and meat, and he roughly bade the duenna bring them and then serve him. He seated himself at the elegant table in the dining room where once Don Santiago de Sandroval and Dorotea had entertained their guests. The trembling duenna served him hastily, and then she was ordered to eat her own supper swiftly.
His impatience was a gnawing cancer upon him, and he could not spare much more time. For when the terrible Tomas Torquemada returned from Barcelona, he must-be present to greet and honor the man who was the most powerful in all Spain, even over him.
"Now strip naked, bitch!" he harshly commanded after the hasty meal, when he had gone into one of the rooms to quarter himself for the night and made poor Rosanna accompany him.
Weepingly, the duenna submissively obeyed and when she stood trembling and naked before him, head bowed, arms at her sides, he tore off his robe, and she saw that he was hairy and naked and in savage rut.
Plunging the fingers of his left hand into her hair, he dragged her over towards the bed, forced her to bend over the foot of it and then began to spank her plump bottom with the flat of his right hand until she cried out in pain, begging him not to punish her, swearing that she would obey him in everything.
At last, applying three or four more furious spanks, he growled, "Beg me then, you wanton bitch, to bed you, or I'll flay you alive!"
"Oww-aahhrrr, oh please, Your R-Reverence, t-take me, take me and end my suffering," Rosanna Calarto waited. He chuckled, his eyes blazing with lust.
He dragged her round to the side of the bed, roughly ordered her to clamber into it. Then he flung himself upon her, his fingers digging into her blazing, throbbing bottom-cheeks and making her cry out with the pain of his grip.
Thrusting his sinewy prick against the dark-thatched slit of her cunthole, he drove himself to the very balls inside of her warm sheath. And then he fucked her violently. But he was not yet finished with her, for, after he had rested a moment, he commanded her to suck his prick back to life. And when that was done, he made her crouch like a beast on, all fours while, kneeling behind her, he took her a second time. And thus the night was spent in the renunciation of his holy vows, in which he sought for the moment to compensate for the bitter disappointment he had sustained in not finding the treasure of the heretic he himself had sent to death.
CHAPTER TEN
While Fra Marcando was taking his lustful pleasure with poor Rosanna, the lovely young Moorish girl Sandriata found herself a prisoner in the squalid, sparsely furnished little hut of Bartolomeo Cardenas, the hireling of Pedro de Valorced. The Profligate nobleman and Bartolomeo's corny, Miguel Saltado, stared down at the voluptuous naked body of their prize. They had ripped off her cloak and forced her down on the straw pallet in a tiny room near the kitchen.
Cardenas' wife Dulcimana, a fat shrew who had lost her looks and figure long before arriving at this her thirtieth year, had gone to visit her sister in Salamanca some two hundred miles away, and would be gone for a fortnight. Thus this miserable hovel was the perfect place to hide Sandriata, and Pedro de Valorced counted on the brutality of his two henchmen to force the helpless girl to reveal the whereabouts of the stolen seaman's chest.
She was still unconscious, because, when she had come to and tried to struggle inside the carriage, the young nobleman had again struck her brutally with his fist. Now he called, "Bring a jug of water and douse this bitch to waken her! And you, Miguel, here's a gold piece for you. Go buy food and wine for us."
"At once, good master," the bearded rogue agreed. Yet his eyes showed how reluctant he was to leave the naked, lithe, brown-skinned body of Sandriata. He believed that when he had gone, his friend Bartolomeo would fuck her and that he would miss his turn.
The nobleman chuckled, reading the ruffian's thoughts only too well: "How now, fellow," he jeered, "she'll not vanish by the time you're back. See how well she's made, how young and strong those thighs are! I warrant you she could take many a man between them before the night's over. So what if your friend should be first with her? It'll be your turn when you come back, so go, hurry, man!"
As the bearded scoundrel left the hut, the young nobleman unbuckled his doublet and removed his scabbard, then knelt down to study the intoxicating beauty of Sandriata.
Bartolomeo Cardenas came forward with the jug of water and flung in the face of the sprawled, naked, unconscious girl. "Yes, my master, it's a rare piece of cunt, even if it belongs to a heretic," he coarsely sniggered. His beady little eyes fixed on the thick curly black fleece which veiled her cunt, then laved the suave, softly dimpled belly and then the round jutting globes of her superb titties whose steady rise and fall showed that she was still alive. "She's slow to waken, master. Perhaps another jug of water?"
"No, no, I've a far better idea, man," Pedro de Valorced chuckled as he undid his breeches and bared his dark-veined, rigid prick. "She's tight and hot. I'll revive her, though! Then you'll have your turn, and perhaps by then she'll be ready to loosen her tongue just as we shall loosen the tightness between those nice long legs of hers!"
So saying, he knelt down over the naked, unconscious captive, his hands greedily squeezing and kneading her bubbies, trying his hot lips in the hollow of her throat, while the stiff weapon of his ramrod pressed urgently against Sandriata's cunthole.
At this moment, she awoke, her long lashes fluttering, and when she saw the twisted, rut-reddened face of the young masked nobleman above her, she uttered a cry and struck at him with her hands.
With a brutal laugh, he overpowered her, seizing her wrists and forcing them out on either side of her, and at the same time himself just inside the lips of her pussy. "Now then, you Moorish whore," he growled, "you'll give me satisfaction one way or the other. Until we learn where the treasure is, you'll be our prisoner. Don't look so sad, it's better than the fire, don't you think, you hot-pussied little infidel?"
"You dog, you vile traducer, to take me thus when I'm defenseless," Sandriata gasped as she writhed and twisted under him, "Hand me but a dagger and I'll kill all of you for what you've don-Aanhhrr-oh-Senor, you're hurting me-aiiii!"
"That's what I wish to do, you slut!" he panted as he dug himself home to the balls, gloating at the way she twisted and writhed in her ineffectual attempts to free herself from his savage harpoon. The superb and erotic swell of her naked titties added to his furious excitement, and the warm tight clutch of her cuntsheath was indescribably thrilling to the young profligate, in whose veins flowed some of the noblest blood of Spain.
"Do you feel me, you bitch?" he savored his words, "am I not familiar to you, in that cell where you waited for your death?"
"So it was you-" she moaned, and suddenly spat into his face.
"You'll pay for that insult, Sandirata, and with enough interest to make you repent it take my word!" he growled as he felt the magnificently tight warm walls of her cunt clench against his imbedded cock. "I'm glad you're conscious now, for you'll find that all three of us will know how to make you speak!"
"Torture me to death if it pleases you, you filthy Spanish swine," she hissed, wincing as he dug his fingernails into her slim wrists to pin them to the earthen floor. "I'll tell you nothing I don't know! The chest was stolen from the ship, yes, that's true enough, and they told my father of it, but he's dead and the secret gone with him!"
"Oh no, not so fast, you treacherous Moorish puta! He'd have told you, his only child. Whether it takes the lash or the rack or the three of us humping you to keep you busier than a whore on a Saint's Day, you'll lead us to that chest!" the nobleman panted.
Sandriata closed her eyes and passively surrendered herself, knowing only too well how useless struggling against superior odds would be. Very pale, her face twisted with revulsion, she endured the brutal and contemptuous fucking which Pedro de Valorced inflicted upon her, but she gave him nothing in return.
He could enjoy her body, true enough, but she kept herself inviolate by willing with all her might that no response from that body should gratify his rut.
At last, with a vile oath, he lifted himself from her and strode away, his face twisted with frustration and rage. "Little bitch," he snarled, "I know what you are! Once we get the treasure, once you think I'll make a fine lady of you, you'll come crawling on your knees to me and ask me to fuck you! Oh yes, you'll beg to be fucked, Sandriata. You'll want to be my whore, proud to be seen with the son of a true grandee."
"The whelp of a pedigreed animal is not in itself pedigreed, Senor," the Moorish girl taunted him as she opened her eyes and looked scornfully up at him. "Oh yes, I have no doubt that you have blue blood in your veins, but it's diseased with your arrogance, you think because I'm not of your faith, because I'm a Moor and A Saracen, that I must be a whore. Until you took me in the cell, I was a virgin. I was betrothed to the son of a man far more noble than you will ever be, you and all your people who threw us into slavery and delivered us into persecution because we do not knell down and worship your cross."
"Bartolomeo," the young noble man snarled, his face livid with rage at her insults, "take your belt and thrash this bitch a little before you fuck her. I want to see her thrashed and begging for mercy and then thoroughly fucked, hombre, comprende? Show me that she's just a sniveling little Morish pitta, not the fine lady she pretends to be!"
"I'll do that, master," Cardenas grinned as he undid his belt and dropped his breeches, then flung himself down atop the naked Morrish captive. But even as he rubbed his hairy face against her cheeks and chin, Sandriata looked up at the young noble man and sneered, "Senor, I'd much rather have this man possess me a thousand times over than you just once, for at least he's a man and honest and doesn't try to be wht he won't be ever!"
"May Satan gripe your bowels, Bartolomeo, didn't I tell you to thrash her first?" the nobleman growled as he kicked the ruffian in the buttocks.
"Gently there, your lordship," Cardenas leered as he looked up at the slim young dandy. "First things first, after all! My cock tells me it's time to fuck, and after that there'll be plenty of time to take a belt to this wench's sweet ass and titties! Anyhow, you're forgetting our good friend Miguel, and he'll want a piece of her cunt or cut our throats if we hold him back from that. Now then, you little spitfire, claw me and scratch me all you want, you're going to know that you've been fucked by Bartolomeo Cardenas!"
Thrusting his hands under her velvety brown-sheened buttocks, the bearded rogue began to dig himself in and out of Sandriata's sheath. She turned her face to one side and again closed her eyes, her arms stretched out submissively at her sides, and she did not resist until he at last had shot his gism deep into her already sullied love-cavern.
Then he rose, tore the black leather belt from his breeches, then taking it in his right hand, bent down and struck her twice over her belly, then four times more over both round, panting bubbies, drawing an agonized cry of pain from the naked sufferer.
At this moment, Miguel entered with a jug of I wine and a basket of roast chicken, bread and fruit and cheese. "What's this, amigos?" he bellowed. "You have the desert before the feast, and you enjoy it ahead of me? Now that's not fair!"
The young nobleman's lips curled in scorn as he glanced at the other scoundrel whom he'd had to hire in his plot to cheat both the throne and the
Inquisition. Yet he needed their swords and daggers, for their brutality and cunning in the midst of danger, and most of all he needed their persuasive aid with this stubborn Moorish beauty whom he had stolen away from execution at the stake. Without them, he knew he could not gain his goal, for Sandriata had thus far checkmated him at every turn.
And so, with the air of a man who accepts destiny for what it is and adapts himself to it, he chuckled, shrugged, and said, "But we were waiting for you, Miguel. We've just prepared her for you, hombre. Before we dine, go have your fun with her. Then tie her up so she won't escape, and we'll enjoy the feast you've brought and then we'll talk about the chest of gold and silver and jewels stolen from a galleon of Spain."
Miguel Soltado didn't need to be asked twice. He handed over the jug of wine and the basket of food, then divested himself of his clothing and flung himself down over the naked girl, who once more endured silently the vicious and mercifully brief fucking which, excited as he was by her naked loveliness, did not last overly long.
After that he and Bartolomeo rolled her over onto her belly, tugged her wrists behind her back and bound them tightly with a rawhide thong, then lashed her ankles together in the same way. Then they rolled her onto her back on the straw pallet, and both crouched down on either side of her playing with her titties, pinching her belly and inner thighs, tugging the matted gism-stickied silky black hairs of her cunt, obscenely promising her that they would keep her busy when they had satisfied another kind of hunger.
But these three men and even their Moorish captive did not know that fate had already played all of them an ironic trick. One of the seamen who had smuggled that treasure chest off the galleon onto a waiting rowboat back into the harbor, had with his companion lugged the chest to a pawnshop of old Abraham Levi, the money-lender who had given such good advice to the dead Don Santiago de Sandroval. Realizing what a priceless treasure these two seamen had brought him and also the terrible danger which might result from a search by the King's guards or those of the Inquisition, the old Jew had given the thieves wise advice; "Let me bury it in the floor of my shop and give you just enough so that you can have all you wish of drink and wenches. I've never cheated anyone, my name's known throughout Toledo. I'm in greater danger than you if I hide this chest in my shop, for if it's found I shall be burned to the stake, just as surely you will be if you're caught with it. But when the hue and cry is over, and the law thinks of looking elsewhere, come back and claim your wealth. I will give you these tokens as pledges to be redeemed." And he'd handed them each the half of a gold doubloon which he had divided with his jeweler's saw.
Thus far, fate had smiled on these two rogues, but it was about to frown. They went to the tavern to spend the silver which Abraham Levi had given them. But since they'd never been known to have so much wealth, and when one of them asked for a flagon of costly Madeira and the other for the prettiest wench in the tavern, the tavern-keeper grew suspicious.
His eyes glittered with greed when he saw one of the men fling down two silver pieces to pay for the wine. Then, rubbing his hands and fawning upon them, promising the finest room in his abode and his own daughter to fuck, he sold them drugged wine and had them carried out into the back of the tavern where they were knifed and their bodies disposed of.
As to the half-coin found in the purse of each, the tavern-keeper swore an oath against the sacrilege of ruining good money, and tried his best to put the two parts together so that he might keep it for the dowry of his daughter.
Sandriata's father had learned how these two seamen had managed to steal the heavily laden chest from the galleon, and how they had died in the tavern. But he knew no more, and even if he were not dead she could have gleaned nothing.
She lay there bound, enduring the lustful glances of the two rogues while they ate their meal and the menacing looks of the young nobleman, while she tried her best to think of some way of escape.
She knew that because she was a Moor, no Spaniard would aid or comfort her, not in view of the hatred which the Inquisition had sown against her people and the Jews through out the land. And then she thought to herself suddenly of the kindly old bearded man who had once helped her father up in the market place when he had stumbled and grown faint from the sun. He was an old man with a white beard and the look of a patriarch who was a money-lender, a Jew. And she remembered he had a shop along the Calle Verde, in the poorer quarter of the city.
She told herself that if she could only escape and find his shop and ask for his help, he would surely protect her. He, a Jew, who knew what persecution was just as did her own people, would sympathize with her plight and help her.
The wine finished, the last of the chicken, bread and cheese and fruit gone, the two rogues belched and slapped their bellies as they rose from the rude table. Pedro de Valorced, again sniffing disdainfully at having to share this repast with such scum of the streets, also rose, adjusting his doublet and putting his hand to his sword to make certain that he was their better in pedigree as well as arms. "Now let's see if this bitch is ready to talk," he gloated. "You have a cellar in this little hut of yours, don't you, Bartolomeo?"
"I do indeed, your lordship. Shall we take the bitch down there and work her over a bit to make her talk?"
"Certainly, all three of us shall. Well loosen her tongue, never fear! Well, now, Sandriata, I warn you, you'd better be ready to speak now before we really begin to hurt you. There are ways of making a naked bitch like you talk."
"Yes, I'm sure of that, Senor, just as I'm sure that you know them all," the girl bravely replied as the two men bent down and lifted her up in their arms, trundling her down the rickety wooden stairs to the small cellar where Cardenas's shrewish wife kept empty hogsheads and useless trinkets and broken muskets which she and her husband had scavenged from the city's dump heaps.
There was a heavy chest in one corner of the dark cellar, and after the young nobleman had lighted a torch and stuck it into the earthen wall to cast enough light, Sandriata was tied down over the chest on her belly.
A thong was passed over the middle of the chest and round her back and knotted cruelly tight. Then her wrists were bound to one of the handles of the trunk, while her legs were left to straddle the other end and to kick free as they would, showing off the pink lips of her pussy framed by the matted black curls of cunt-hair.
"Now give me your belt, Miguel." Pedro de Valorced demanded, and the grinning ruffian at once handed it over. "All right, you Moorish harlot, I'm going to take the skin off that lovely ass of yours until you tell me what you know of the stolen chest. It would be a pity to ruin such lovely skin over such a trifle that doesn't concern you, bitch! But I'll do it if need be! What say you?"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Miguel and Bartolomeo stood beside the profligate young nobleman, their eyes feasting on the squirming body of the strapped-down naked Moorish captive. "Well, bitch, it's your last chance to speak!" Pedro de Valorced growled.
"So you call that stolen chest a trifle, do you, Senor?" the naked girl mocked him again. "What good will it do to any of you, even if you find it, since it isn't yours to start with?"
"Watch your tongue, you Moorish bitch," he cried, lifting the leather belt in the air.
"Oh yes, beat me if you wish, Senor," she continued to taunt him. "Enjoy the little time you and your friends have left in beautiful Spain. You cannot stay her eonce you steal the gold that belongs to your king. You can kill me, but I won't tell you."
His eyes widened with triumph, and Sandriata, her face twisted back to look over her shoulder at him, realized that her ruse had succeeded. Her last phrase had been calculated as a kind of bait, and he had swallowed it.
For now she had decided on how to effect her escape. She intended to tell him that the chest was hidden in the moneylenders shop, but without giving him the exact whereabouts of that shop. And once they freed her and took her with them, she knew herself to agile and quick enough to break away from them in the crowd of passersby to take refuge in some hiding place where she would be safe until she could again find Abraham Levi.
The greedy young nobleman beamed with satisfaction. "You hear that, amigos?" he turned to his two henchmen. "I'll warrant she didn't mean to let that slip out! So she does know where the chest is, after all. Well now, my lovely infiden, I'm going to give you the belt just to teach you a lesson, wasting all this time. You'll find that it's much easier to tell us the truth than to hold out against us!"
With this, Pedro de Valorced lifted up the belt and brought it down with a vicious smack, diagonally over the huddling, brown-sheened bottomglobes of the naked Moorish girl.
Sandriata shivered and closed her eyes, grinding her teeth together to suppress her outcries. This wild desperate plan took shape in her mind as she lay strapped down over the rough wooden chest, for she realized that she must not yield too quickly lest they believe her story a hoax. And also, she must feed them just enough details to whet their appetites for the treasure so that they would force her to take them to where it was hidden.
The belt rose and fell again and again, whistling through the air, thwacking with a sonorous crash over her squirming naked bottom.
The burning kisses of the leather turned her warm brown-tinted skin to a fiery red before, after about some twenty-five vigorous strokes, Sandriata at last sobbed out, "Ohh, enough, have pity, oh, in the name of Allah the All-Merciful, have pity on a poor helpless girl! I'll tell you, I'll tell you everything, only don't whip me anymore!"
"Now that you sing, your music is more delightful than any song you've sung before," he panted as he stepped back, his eyes devouring the vividly striped flesh of Sandriata's squirming, wriggling naked bottom. "But don't play us false, girl, or you'll feel more than you have already. I'll see to it that splinters are thrust under your toenails and fingernails, and I'll put red-hot needles into your titties and that tender bottom of yours. Oh yes, as a familiar of the Inquisition, I've learned enough to make you pay for any lies you tell us. Just remember that, Sandriata. Very well, then, Miguel, untie that bitch!"
"There's no hurry, really, your lordship," Miguel guffawed. "Isn't she nicely tied down now for fucking, your worship? Watching her lovely ass jump and jerk and twist about while you've been belting her, has made me horny as Old Nick himself, so it has!"
"And me as well," Bartolomeo Cardenas piped up.
The young noble man shrugged. However, his lust for Sandriata was such that an angry jealousy surged him at the thought of having to share with these two ruffians from the city's slums. Yet prudence dictated agreement with them, for he knew he was no match for their combined murderous skills, and a knife does not respect blue blood when it strikes. So, feigning an agreeable smile, he said, "Well, when it comes to that, I confess that I myself have an itch between my legs, amigos. Only, I'll go first, because after all I'm the one who found this bitch for all of us, and don't you forget it!"
"As your lordship says," Miguel made a face and rubbed his prick through his breeches impatiently. "But make a swift end of it, for I'm smoking down below. I shall burst into flame if I don't put out the fire in that tight, hot black-haired little nest of the bitch very soon!"
"Have pity, my lord!" Sandriata turned her tearstained face back over her shoulder to implore mercy. "Senor, I'll tell you, but if you and your men use me so cruelly, I'll never tell!"
"Are you daring to bargain with us, you Moorish whore?" Pedro de Valorced grumbled. "By my faith, I'll teach you not to try that game a second time. Give me back your belt, Miguel!"
"With the greatest of pleasure," Miguel grinned.
"Oh wait, in the name of mercy, noble lord!" Sandriata cried. "I'll take you to where the chest is hidden. And I'll give myself to you, Senor, and be whatever you wish me to be to you, if you'll only save me from those two others!"
"Well now, your lordship, are you going to bargain with this bitch and cut us out of it?" Miguel Saltado angrily demanded as he prepared to let down his breeches and bare his swollen cock. "Don't forget there's been an agreement between all of us, a part of the treasure and whatever spoils are taken. The wench belongs not just to you but to all three of us, isn't that what you agreed to, your worship?"
"To be sure, man," the young nobleman impatiently countered. "But use your brains if you've any left in that stupid head of yours. She can turn stubborn again, as she's just shown, and I for one would rather have the treasure, because with it I could buy two dozen such wenches. And enough for you both, if you've such a mind."
"Si, there's a good deal in what he says, Miguel," Bartolomeo Cardenas advised, his bearded face ugly with unusual concentration. "With all the gold and jewels that are supposed to be in the chest as we've been told, I could ditch my fat old woman and pick myself a lady out of the court of Spain, so I could, and so could you, Miguel. So let the wench be until she's taken us to where the treasure is. Then there's time enough to decide what well do with her." He made a vicious gesture of drawing his finger across his throat and a lewd wink, and Miguel chuckled: "You're right, of course, hombre. Well, your lordship, let the bitch take us there then. It's nightfall, so we won't be so-likely to run into the soldiers on patrol if we leave now."
"Very well. Then cut the slut loose, give her a cloak and some of your wife's clothing, for if you take a naked wench through the streets of Toledo, you'll have every man in the city on your heels," Pedro de Valorced laughingly agreed.
Then he bent down and ran his hand over the Moorish girl's quivering, striped naked bottom and muttered, "And as for you, Sandriata, no tricks. If you're taking us on a wild-goose chase, you'll need to pray to this Allah of yours before we've done with you, that I promise you surely!"
"And so do I, bitch," Miguel Saltado crouched down to cut the rawhide thongs binding the Moorish girl's waist and wrists. Leering at her, he stroked her naked back with his free hand, and slyly moved his fingers down along her side till he could close them against on e of her panting round browned-sheened titties, flattened down against the chest in her helpless posture. "What a pity it would be to kill such a lovely bitch. Now you be good, girl, and maybe we" give you a few pieces and find you a husband. But you'll miss us, I'm certain of that after we've fucked you and shown you what it's like to lie under real men, my beauty!"
IN a few minutes Bartolomeo Cardenas brought back a pair of calecons, drawers made of rough cloth, and a dirty dress which belonged to his wife, as well as her best cloak. Sandriata hastily covered herself and the young nobleman took up the jug of wine, found about half a glass left in it and poured it out for the Moorish girl. "Drink it and give yourself strength, you slut," he commanded." Now where is this chest you speak of?"
"In the shop of a money-lender, Senor. I know the way well."
"So be it. You'll go on my arm, as if you were a great lady." the nobleman remarked. "You, Miguel and Bartolomeo, will follow behind us like a guard of honor. But not too closely. If then we see soldiers, I as a familiar of the Inquisition won't be questioned. But one look at your roguish faces would convince even the lowliest soldier that you both deserve hanging and that as quickly as possible."
"That's not a good joke, your lordship," Miguel grumbled.
"It's what will happen if you double-deal me, either of you." Pedro de Valorced warned.
They left the hut and made their way to the street. It was dark and silent. Sandriata walked slowly, her arm entwined with that of the man who had saved her from the stake, only to bring her to that hovel where the whip and fucking had been her lot. The cool night air revived her, for she was bruised and weakened from the violent assaults and the thrashings which she had to endure, and also the nervous reaction of her fright at the impending death at the stake had begun to work upon her.
The shop of Abraham Levi was about three miles northwest of where they were. As it was nearly midnight, there was danger of being stopped by the patrols. There was further danger because, as the young nobleman well know, notices must already have been posted concerning the escape of one of the heretics condemned to die. So to avert this danger, he made Sandriata wear the Venetian face mask which he himself had worn when he had entered her cell this very afternoon. "In this way," he explained, "you'll appear to be my mistress, whose reputation I protect."
"You do me too much honor, Senor," Sandriata mocked him with a curl of her lovely lips.
"Why, come now, girl, I won't use you badly once we've found the treasure. I've taken a imagine to you, and I'm sure you must have felt it when I fucked you. If you'll be a good girl, I'll take you with me."
"I must think about that, Senor. "
"By all means do. But remember this, if you stay in Spain, you're sure to be taken and then burned. I'd save you that. Aren't my caresses preferable to those of the fire?"
"Let's go this way," Sandriata evaded answering the question. "I think I hear someone coming and it might be soldiers."
The quartet turned quickly and went down a dark alley. But Sandriata's keen eyes, used to the darkness, perceived that they had come upon a dead end except for a wooden gate which was as tall as a full-grown man. Though she did not know what lay on the other side of that gate, it was surely worth the attempt. Turning back to look at the street whence they had come, she suddenly called out, "Look out-I see soldiers!"
The nobleman turned, and so did his two companions. Sandriata broke free and ran like one possessed down the narrow alleyway.
"After her, you cursed fools, she's deceived us!" Pedro de Valorced swore as he clapped his hand on the hilt of his sword. Miguel and Bartolomeo drew their daggers and ran after the girl. But she had got too good a start. As she approached the gate, she grasped the top of it with both hands and then agilely hauled herself up and over it just before they reached her. She had just time enough to see that there was an abandoned garden on the other side, and let herself fall into a bed of what had once been flowers and was now weeds.
Then, scrambling to her feet, she hurried through the garden and past the old wooden house which stood there. It had once been the property of a wealthy merchant whose neighbor had betrayed him to the Holy Inquisition and who had died at the stake for heresy. His property had been forfeit to the King, and the house had long since been looted and left to stand there as a warning to other heretics.
Sandriata ran out into the street and then, drawing a deep breath, began to run like a deer and disappeared around the side of another house as she quickly lost her pursuers. Miguel and Bartolomeo, swearing horrible oaths, at last had to go back to Pedro de Valorced and report that she had made good her escape.
"You utter swine!" he shrieked in exasperation, "She's going to the shop of the money-lender and find the treasure all for herself! See what you've done!"
"But your lordship, you were taken in as much as we were," Miguel protested.
"Aye, that's true, Senor," Bartolomeo added conformation. "You were the one walking with her, you ought to have had sense enough to hold her tight and know it was a trick."
"Do you dare, you dog, to question the son of a grandee?" Pedro de Valorced snarled with his hand at his sword.
"Gently now, hombre," Miguel tried to propitiate them. "Well gain nothing if wee kill one another. Then the girl will really get away and have all the treasure to herself. We must do some thinking. We must all search for her, each going a separate way. She's certainly as lost as we are, and there are three of us. Come now."
And so, for the moment, the three scoundrels who had thus united in the communal bond of greed were granted a few more hours of life.
They little knew what awaited them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sandriata ran swiftly like a deer, her only thought that of saving herself from the three brutal men who had tortured, whipped and fucked her. Having crossed through the garden and out into the next street, she did not turn to look back, but ran as swiftly as she could to put distance between herself and the cruel trio. At last, exhausted, she sank down on her knees in a dark doorway of a little house, trying to regain her composure. Then suddenly her blood ran cold as she heard a faint, dry chuckle, then a cracked, rather feeble voice: "But the night is cold, my daughter, to stay here unless you await some handsome Senor to take you off with him."
She turned quickly and saw a little old man white-haired, supporting himself on a cane, who had hobbled out of the doorway and saw her crouching there. As she fought for breath, she stammered, "Oh please, Senor, I'm not waiting for a man, I'm trying to save myself!"
"You-so young-in need of salvation?" he emitted a cackling little laugh. "Oh surely, for all that the worthy Inquisition tells us, it is not possible that. Toledo is overrun with heretics and those in danger of losing their souls, for that would mean nearly everyone in the city. Come, my daughter, let me see your face."
Trembling, the girl rose and turned to face the old man.
"Que linda! I, alas, can only admire and perceive you with my weak old eyes. If I were some forty years younger, you would not be crouching in my doorway, but instead inside sipping wine with me and conversing and then, perhaps, passing to other even more pleasant occupation." Again he cackled with senile laughter. "But now, how can I help you, my child? Are you not of the Moorish race? Your skin, the cast of your features suggests it."
"I am, Senor. I throw myself on your mercy, because I do not wish to die at the stake as the result of my faith and the color of my skin."
"Tut tut, my child, there is no need to fear me. I'm two and seventy years of age, and my physician tells me I am not longer for this world. Nonetheless, the sight of you warms my bones. I'll help you if I can. Ask of me what you need."
"I seek the house of a moneylender, who once did a great kindness to my poor dead father," Sandriata replied.
"His name, child?"
"Abraham Levi."
"Why, how strange life is, Senorita! As it chances, he is a dear friend of mine. And I will have my carriage take you to his dwelling. But meanwhile, come inside my poor abode and partake of wine with me and a little food. I see that you are weary."
"May Allah the All-Knowing bless you, Senor!" Sandriata gasped in gratitude.
She glanced down the street, but saw no one. Then, her heart lighter than ever before, she accompanied the old man into his house.
An elderly valet, who seemed as ancient as his master, came to the answer of the bell to bring food and wine to the trembling young Moorish girl. Her host, Jaime Viego, was a retired sail maker. As Sandriata regained her strength after the frantic chase she had led her pursuers, he amused her with tales from the past, concluding with, "Yes, my child, if I were younger, I would not leave you thus, and I myself would be setting forth upon some great voyage of discovery! I know that our good Queen has given her aid to a penniless visionary, a certain Cristoforo Columbo. He has had fortune already, but I wish him more, for this Isabella is a woman who will not hesitate to cast a man down into the mire after she has raised him to the stars. She is as fickle as all the Spanish people these days. But no more of this. Ah now, Domenico, what news of the carriage?"
"T'will be ready within the hour, good master," the old servant announced.
"Very good, my child. Now stretch out upon this couch and close your eyes. I will awaken you when it is time. I send with you my young servant Ferdinando as the driver of the carriage. He will see that you are protected, being an excellent swordsman. Though he is a Spaniard, I assure you that he has a kind of gentleness which does not let him worry about heretics, for he regards people as equal within the eyes of heaven."
Sandriata stifled a sob of gratitude as she took the old man's hand and kissed it humbly; then, supple as a cat, she stretched out on the couch and fell fast asleep.
Her pursuers, uttering vile oaths, had lost her trail entirely. Bartolomeo and Miguel began to scold the young nobleman who had brought them to such an ill-fated end to the quest in which they had given him their aid.
"How could you let the girl go, master?" Miguel growled. "Didn't you yourself warn us that she was a tricky bitch? At least you could have had her tied so she couldn't run away. Now how, by all the devils of hell, are we to find her and that treasure chest?"
"Si, how indeed?" Bartolomeo echoed. "And my wife will turn me out of the house when she finds I've brought a slut home with no profit to us. You, Don Pedro, how do you pay us what you promised?"
"Don't be stupid, you idiots! We'll find her, because we must! Let me tell you this, if the Inquisition finds her first, all of us will be in the same kettle of fish, and we'll all scorch in the fire, the same as the bitch," the young wastrel countered.
"How shall we search, good master?" Miguel sarcastically inquired. "Do you wish us to go to the streets and ask the watch whether he has seen a Moorish girl running away. She's found some hiding place, some dark kennel to hide in, and she won't come out again so easily. You should have let me take her, master. I could have strangled her before she could have escaped from me."
"Enough of your insults, Miguel Saltado!" the young nobleman angrily snapped. "We are all in this together, and there is no need for insults!"
"Oh yes, there is, noble Senor," Bartolomeo
Cardenas angrily riposted. "You've cost us a pretty penny with your fine tricky ways. And the way you thrashed her-why, if I'd used that belt on her bare ass, you'd have seen the blood flow and the skin shred off, and by the saints! she'd have talked her head off when I put a bucket of brine on her bleeding tail before I let her up from that chest!"
"Watch your tongue to me, Bartolomeo!" Pedro de Valorced snapped, putting his hand to his sword.
"Is that a purse attached to your belt, your lordship?" Miguel suddenly and ingenuously demanded.
As the young nobleman glanced down, Bartolomeo Cardanos drew his dagger and stabbed the youth between the shoulder blades. Pedro de Valorced uttered a strangled cry and sank to the ground. Hastily Miguel knelt beside the dead body, cut away the purse and opened it. "A few doubloons and a little silver. Not much for all our pains, Bartolomeo. But it's better than to have our necks stretched on the gallows and our bodies on the racks when the Inquisition finishes with us. You know, I think that bastard would have turned us over to the holy fathers after he found his Moorish whore and his treasure chest, without giving us so much as a copper."
"You speak wisely, Miguel. Let's go to the Inn of the Black Bass and buy a flagon of good Granada wine and drink to his soul's salvation and to our own luck in escaping from the clutches of the Inquisition."
And thus Pedro de Valorced, who had been profligate and dissolute and extravagant, who had also been a familiar of the Holy Inquisition, who had sought much gold and the sadistic conquest of the Moorish girl, found an ignoble death in a narrow, dirty little passageway in the poorer quarter of the city of Toledo. He had lost everything now, and what was more, he had besmirched the good name of his family-though to this of course he gave no heed!
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sandrita left the house of the old sail maker, her eyes filled with tears of gratitude as she thought of the kindness which this old man had rendered her without thought of advantage to himself. And he, moreover, was an unbeliever, a Spaniard. He had given her a costly cloak and a new dress, and into the pockets of that cloak had dropped a few gold pieces.
"If my friend can't get you out of Toledo, my dear girl," he told her, "he will at least keep you safely in his house until inquiries can be made. Soldiers of the Inquisition search all Toledo for heretics, and I am certain that you are on their list."
Sandriata then confessed to him that she had been under sentence of death by fire, that she had also been in prison and had been tortured in an effort to persuade her to tell the whereabouts of a certain stolen sea chest with a fortune in gold, silver and jewels. The white-haired old man laughed and shook his head.
"So you see, my daughter, it is not entirely an act of faith, though they would have their auto-da-fe known as such," he said bitterly. "It is greed for gold, the gold which destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. And it is the greed that will destroy us and those who will come after us. But I think old Abraham will find a way for you safely through the gates and into the countryside where there are honest peasants, not these fawning lackeys who seek to curry favor with their kind and queen and who would willingly deliver a helpless girl like yourself into the hands of the torturers. I know that your God is as gentle and good as mine, save that you call him Allah, but in Eternity, my daughter, where I shall of course precede you by scores of years, we shall all of us know the truth. Now Godspeed, and tell your coachman, Ferdinando Estrada, that he's not to let you out of his sight until he is sure you are safe with my old friend Abraham."
And so Sandriata, who was to have died by fire this very afternoon, found herself riding in a coach driven by a handsome, swarthy, black-haired young coachman who, as he handed her into the vehicle, stared at her, but not unpleasantly. Indeed, she blushed to read the admiration in his dark eyes. His skin was almost as dark as hers, though he was Spanish and she Moorish. His beard was short, his eyes were good and clear and true, his mouth firm and not twisted with lust. He was sturdy and young, and she found him strangely comforting.
And so they came at last to the dwelling place of the old Jewish moneylender, who had advised Don
Santiago de Sandroval to convert his wealth into those three priceless diamonds. Ferdinando Estrada got down from the coach and opened the door with a flourish of his plumed hat, a salutation he might have accorded Queen Isabella herself.
"We are here, Senorita. I shall wait for you until I am sure that all is well."
"Thank you, Senor. You are most kind. And when you see your master again, please tell him for me-"
"My master?" the handsome young man burst into hearty laughter. "Has that old devil of a grandfather of mind been telling you such things? Why, I'm his grandson! I simply take the name of Estrada because it was my mother's name and because I'm still an apprentice. When I attain my mastership in the Guild of Shipmakers, I'll take my grandfather's name and be well worthy of it."
"I am sure you are already worthy of it, Senor Ferdinando," Sandriata murmured. He had held her hand a little longer than was necessary in handing her down from the carriage, but the Moorish beauty did not find this at all displeasing. Indeed, a sweet tingling stirred in her thighs and in her titties, because the brutality of fucking by her three abductors had awakened her as a woman, and now, however, she was attuned to the sensitivity of someone who was gentle and tender and who respected her, even though he was a man.
"It's very late, and I think the old man will be asleep. Perhaps you had best wait for me, Senor Ferdinando, till I'm certain he will open for me."
She gently drew away her hand so as not to offend him, and blushed as he bowed low and said to her, "A sus ordones, Senorita!"
She hastened to the door of the house, lifted the brass knocker and struck it thrice. Immediately there was a sign of light through the windows as a servant came bringing a candle, and then the door was opened, and Abraham Levi himself, in nightshirt and yarmulka, stood before her.
"The hour is late, Senorita, if you wish to do business in my shop," he said graciously, mistaking the Moorish girl for a wealthy young noblewoman in the superb cloak which the old sail maker had given to her.
"Oh no, it isn't that! My name is Sandriata. I am told that you were a friend of my father, whom they called 'Morisco Viego.' Do you not recall?"
"Why, certainly-the old Moor. He and I often talked of philosophies and the day when all our gods would permit men to be at peace and put an end to bigotry and hatred," old Abraham Levi mused. "Come in, come in, my daughter. Yes, yes, I know that he is dead and I know how he died. But you were taken too, weren't you?"
"I was. But I escaped from prison and the friend who was so kind to me-your friend too, the old sail maker-said you would help me escape from Toledo."
"Ah, I see that his grandson has brought you here to my humble abode. But come in, come in! It is too late to talk tonight, but tomorrow we shall make plans Go tell that good-for-nothing of a rascally grandson of his not to stay in that carriage beside my door all night, it will draw the attention of the soldiers of the Inquisition. I, my daughter, am a Jew and in as great danger as you at all times. But I will help you all that I dare."
* * *
The next morning, Sandriata woke in a soft bed and uttered a cry before she remembered where she was and how she had come there. The gentle, gray-haired wife of Abraham Levi stood beside her and inquired of her health. Ruth Levi had talked with her husband before the girl had wakened, and both of them had agreed it was best for her as well as for themselves to leave the city of Toledo. But the moneylender wished to find a ship that would take him to Africa, for he felt a kinship with the Moors, since they too were outcasts in this land of royal treachery and religious persecution.
Ferdinando Estrada, dressed as an apprentice, stopped by that afternoon, with a message for both Sandriata and his grandfather's dear friend, Abraham Levi. So the two young people were left in the same room for a moment, while the moneylender and his wife shut themselves up with a friend who had just come to them with news from the prison of the Inquisition. There was a price upon the head of Sandriata and one also on that of Dorotea de Sandroval.
"That must swiften our decision, my good wife," said Abraham Levi slowly. "For such a reward, even a worthy man who has known the pangs of hunger and poverty would be tempted to turn that virtuous, unfortunate child over to those hellish torturers, so that she would suffer unspeakable agonies. No, my beloved Ruth, we shall keep our faith in the new land, and also in our Moorish neighbors, who have also known persecution. Come, we must pack and be off. Ferdinando knows of a small ship outside the little harbor of Guantana, but a day's journey from Toledo;"
When he returned to the room in which Sandriata and the handsome young Ferdinando Estrada sat, staring at one another and strangely fallen silent, he smiled to himself, understanding that each of them had perhaps begun what might be a long and happy association. He cleared his throat discreetly and said, "I have bad news, Ferdinando. We shall take your offer of the little ship and begin our journey at nightfall. It is not only Sandriata whom the Inquisition seeks, but also the daughter of another dear old friend of mine, Don Sandoval. I was the one who told him how to hide his gold from their greedy hands."
Sandriata burst into sobbing laughter. "Treasure! Gold! For this men kill and perjure themselves, abandon their honor, torture helpless women! Yes, I was in prison under sentence of death because I could not tell the Inquisition where my father's treasure was. They thought the treasure was a sea chest stolen from one of the galleons of the Crown, of which neither I nor my poor father knew anything."
Abraham Levi stared at her, his jaw dropping. "A sea chest? Stolen from a galleon? Oh, this is fate or, as you would say, kismet, indeed, my poor child. Two seamen came to me some little time ago, and they had such a chest and they told me also how they had come by it. So I buried it in the cellar of my house, and I gave each of them a broken half of a coin by which they could redeem it."
"If I may speak," Ferdinando Estrada spoke up, "I have also heard news that two seamen were murdered in a tavern and their bodies disposed of. And now it appears that the soldiers are questioning the villainous rogue of an innkeeper who is supposed to have at least seen the murder, if he didn't commit it. It has always been suspected that he killed others for profit, and this one time he may himself have done the deed."
"Jehovah is always just!" the old Jewish moneylender looked up at the ceiling and sighed. "If this is true, then all the wealth in the chest must be spent for the people of Sandriata and for those of my own creed to bring them into freedom from the bondage of this new Egypt, where we are as dogs and rogues and lepers before that symbol of the Cross." He stroked his beard a moment, then nodded. "I think that I am absolved of my pledge of silence, now that those two men are dead, and I think that for the good of the cause, I may break my vow of silence. Come."
Ferdinando Estrada, Sandriata and the old Jew went to the shop and Abraham Levi unearthed the chest. Ferdinando Estrada opened it, then recoiled when he saw its contents. There were pieces of gold and silver, rare glistening gems, piled to overflowing, a fortune almost incalculable to estimate.
"Perhaps it should be given back to the Crown from which it was stolen," Abraham Levi said sadly.
"No!" Ferdinando Estrada boldly objected. "How is that money stored away, old man? It was taken from the colonies, by the lash and the sword, taken from poor Indiana working in the mines, tortured to give up their treasure, and it is gold with blood upon it! Do with it as you have already said, and let it aid those who have suffered from Spanish tyranny. Then alone will the blood be wiped clean. Make haste, lest someone learn of this and have you and your wife betrayed, out of their own greed!"
And so that night Abraham Levi, his wife and Sandriata set out in a carriage, driven again by Ferdinando Estrada. The grandson of the sail maker took a route which he knew to the western gate, where the vigilance was not so great. Quick-thinking, he had procured a pass from a captain for whom he had bought many a drink in a tavern. The treasure chest was safely hidden in the bottom of the seat in the back of the carriage, and when the captain hesitated, scratching his head and glancing at Ferdinando Estrada, the latter leaned down from the coachman's box, saying, "Take this and drink my health, Captain Demarto."
The captain shrugged, opened his hand to receive the bribe, and when he perceived what his hand now contained, he waved to the guards and called, "Open the gate at once, on the business of the King!" A dozen gold pieces and a rare emerald ring worth more than his wages for the next decade were concealed in the hand he now thrust into the pocket of his uniform, and he waved Godspeed to the occupants of the coach. Then he smiled as he went back to his post. There would be much wine, and that flirtatious little Dolores who had snubbed him for Major Colpara would snub him no longer. Just one of those pieces of gold would make the red-haired little bitch open her legs for his prick whenever he wished. ...
The next afternoon, Abraham Levi, his wife, Ferdinando Estrada and Sandriata reached the little port where the ship lay in wait. The young man helped the moneylender and his wife aboard. Two sturdy seamen lifted the chest, while Ferdinando himself supervised it, and it was taken to the little cabin which Abraham Levi and his Ruth would share upon the journey. When this was done, the young apprentice went on deck and found Sandriata, and standing beside her, murmured, "My beautiful one, I am half tempted to go with you, except that you would not have me."
"Why would I not have you?" She looked at him and all her soul was in her eyes. "After what you and your grandfather have done for me, I would be your willing slave."
"Not my slave, but my wife. Alas, I am a Spaniard and you are a Moor."
"But our hearts are as one, dear Ferdinando.
Come with me to Algiers. There you can build your ships, there you can sail for new worlds. And you can be happy with me and I will be all things to you. And as your wife, I will give you children," she murmured.
The young man drew a deep breath, then nodded. Turning to one of the idlers on the wharf, he beckoned. When the man came forward, he whispered to him and handed him two pieces of gold. The man gaped at him, then touched his forelock, then mounted onto the coachbox of the carriage, picked up the reins and called to the horses.
"What have you done now, my love?" Sandriata murmured softly.
"I sent that worthless villain to the house of my grandfather to tell him that he will hear news next from me in Algiers. And I thanked him with all my heart for his kindness to a Moorish girl who has won my hear," the swarthy young man retorted. Then he turned to Sandriata, cupped her cheeks gently with his palms as he touched his lips to hers. Her sinuous arms wound around him, and he felt the pressure of her titties as she gave back her kiss, surrendering all to him in that sweet embrace.....
That night, after the ship's captain had married them, Ferdinando and Sandriata lay naked in the narrow bunk of the little cabin which was all the space that could be found in this little vessel bound for Algiers. Although she had been a pure virgin but some short forty-eight hours before, Sandriata was now a rapturously happy bride, eager for fulfillment. But even as Ferdinando mounted her and was about to dig his prick into the soft black curls which framed the mount of love, she whispered, "Before you take me, my sweet husband, I have confession to make. I am not a virgin, alas, and I would to Allah that I could be now for you."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The next morning, when Fra Marcando awoke to find himself in bed with the cowering, naked duenna, he glanced around alarmedly for a moment, until he remembered he was in the house of Don Santiago de Sandroval. He was sated with the ripe flesh of this bitch, and the only reason that he let her live was that she might help him to find the hidden treasure. But now his stomach was growling for food, and he prowled the house in his black robe and sandals, finding a little wine in the cut-glass decanters in the salon of the man whom he himself had sent ot death so unjustly. In the kitchen there was a stale loaf of bread and a pot in which garbanzos and pieces of tender kid had been cooking when the soldiers of the Inquisition had come to take Rosanna Salarto to prison. He smelled it, grimaced, then heated the unpalatable mess and made a meal of it with the bread and the wine. Then he returned to the bed in which the naked duenna lay, awake with the covers drawn up to her neck. She shivered at the sight of him, as if he were the devil incarnate-which, to her, indeed he was.
"Woman, I didn't bring you here to satisfy your filthy lusts," he snarled. "We must find the treasure, and then I must return to my duties. The great Torquemanda will reach Toledo very soon, and if I am not there to greet him, there will be unpleasantness for both of us. So if you value your life and don't wish to die by fire, get yourself dressed and aid me in the search."
"But, your worship, we looked everywhere!" she sobbed.
Infuriated at her helpless attitude, the gaunt inquisitor flung back the covers and stared at her nakedness. Then, having no weapon at hand, he began to slap at her with his naked hands, slapping her naked belly and titties and inner thighs until she wailed, rolled this way and that, and finally rolled out of bed, but not until a number of good stinging slaps had rained down upon her naked bottom. Finally, when she was clothed and cringing in terror or him, he seized her by the shoulder and, thrusting her in front of him, commanded her to take him through each room of that house which was now forfeit to the Crown.
All through that day they searched and found nothing. Once Mercedes found her young mistress's prayer book, but she did not look into it, or she would have discovered the little cipher which depicted the map showing where the diamonds were hidden. They had been placed behind the rocks in the second tier of the wall around the cistern near the barn. But they were still as far away as paradise from the gaunt monk.
But he would learn the truth.
Only this woman stood in his way. He would take her back to prison and learn the truth.
And good fortune was with him, for an hour after they had set forth upon the road in the darkness of night, he heard the jingling of spurs and the sounds of horses hooves. He cried out, and the leader of the horsemen drew in his mount and stared down in surprise at this guant man in the black robe of a monk.
"It's late for you to be on this road, Father. Can I be of service?"
"Is it you, Captain Isarmo?" Fra Marcanda cried. "What fortune that we meet! You and your men must take this woman and myself back to the prison. I have sought for the treasure of the heretic, so I may turn it over to my king and queen. But she holds back what she will tell me, so she must be questioned by the torturer."
"I will send two of my men back with you, Father," the young captain replied, "but at the moment I have orders from the King which must be carried out."
"What orders?"
"Fra Torquemada returns to Toledo tomorrow night," the captain answered, "and their Most Gracious Majesties themselves have ordered that an auto-da-fe be held in honor of his return on the next day. To that end I've been dispatched to seek and find the two condemned heretics who have escaped and who were sentenced to die at the stake but a few days ago."
"What is this that you tell me?" Fra Marcando stammered. The news that his superior was returning long before he had been expected filled him with dread and made him even more determined to take Rosanna back to the prison where she could be tortured to reveal what she had been concealing all this wasted time.
"I do but tell you, Father, what I have been told.
There was a Moorish girl, and also the daughter of a heretic who had already been put to death, one Santiago de Sandroval. They have not yet been found. You yourself, Your Worship, told me of their disappearance on the eve of their execution. I searched, then I reported to your subordinate, Fra Pedroso. He had me make further search, but now it is vital that I find these women. They must die to do honor to the founder of the Holy Inquisition."
The guant monk gnashed his teeth in rage to hear the captain speak so reverently of the very man in whose shadow he himself stood, the man whose power was greater even than his and who would undoubtedly and without hesitation send him to the torture chamber and the stake if ever he should learn that Fra Marcando had left the prison for the sake of gold and the duenna's naked flesh.
"Where do you seek this Dorotea de Sandroval now?" he demanded.
"First at the house of her father, Your Reverence."
"It will be useless. This woman and I have just come from there. I myself have made a search for the treasure that Don Santiago was rumored to have hidden away, for it is forfeit to Their Majesties. But the girl is not there. Someone smuggled her away; someone who knows much of the Inquisition. It may even be one of the familiars. It is all the more reason that I must reach the prison swiftly, to confer with my subordinate, Fra Pedroso. He will tell me who has been absent from the prison and the tribunal. Come, Captain, I will need only one soldier and one horse. The woman will ride in front of me and I will guard her safely, have no fear. We must be on to Toledo!"
The captain bowed. He then ordered one of the soldiers to turn back to Toledo with the monk and the woman, and another soldier to give up his horse to them.
Fra Marcando, his left hand gripping the scruff of Rosanna's neck, shoved the sobbing woman towards the door of a gloomy subterranean dungeon. His eyes glittered with unholy lust.
"Now you treacherous bitch, you will see what your stubbornness has brought you. I'll rip the skin from that fat body of yours! Oh, you'll talk, never fear, and you'll confess that you've had carnal relations with that heretic. I myself will conduct the interrogation. Expect no mercy. Pray only that you may be given wisdom enough to tell the truth before it is too late. Here, now, Francisco, a prize for you! Take her!"
So saying, he carried her to a low, wide bench, and laid her down on her back, while the head executioner at once untied her wrists only to drag them out at right angles and strap them to heavy wooden pegs set at right angles to the bench. Meanwhile, the young assistant strapped down her legs and corded her ankles to similar pegs, thus gaping her thighs to expose the plump mound of her cunthole and yawn the pink lips apart as if begging for a fuck. Now both masked men moved to either side of the bench and squatted down beside it, while the monk moved forward to watch the torture. Two metal wheels rising about knee high, one end of their diameter concealed under the floor of the dungeon, were connected to each side of the movable bench. One wheel was to the left, the other to the right. The executioners turned the wheels, the bench began to open, and Rosanna's arms were tautened to extreme, till the men could see the distension of the furry, perspiring arm-pits. Her head rose, and a wild shriek of pain attested to her suffering.
"Another turn!" the monk commanded.
Both men bent to their wheels, and a clamorous shriek reverberated through the dungeon as Rosanna
Calarto turned her face from side to side, sweat springing to her forehead, her mouth gaping in a rictus of supreme torment. "Aaaahhrr! Oh God, let me die! Oh, I can't bear it, you're ripping me to pieces. Oh heaven, Oh just and merciful heaven, have mercy! Oh, Fra Marcando, Fra Marcando, I'll do anything you want, I'll let you make love to me, I'll-"
"Gag that bitch!" the monk snarled, white with fury, for although the executioner and his assistant were loyal to him, they would be more loyal still to the dread Torquemada; let it once be told to the terrible founder of the Inquisition that his subordinate had had sport with the duenna, and Fra Marcando could only guess at the fury which this terrible man would know and what punishment would be ordered for him for this yielding to the temptation of fleshly lust.
The executioner rose, went to a little stool and took up a choke pear gag of wood, which by dint of pinching Rosanna's nose and forcing open her mouth, he managed to gag her. Next he tied a cloth over her mouth to contain the object within, so that her eyes stared glassy with tears and the shadows of unspeakable despair.
"I shan't waste any more time on your useless cries and prayers for mercy," Fra Marcando hissed, stooping over her. "We're going to give you a nice little treatment, and after you've had it, perhaps you'll be ready to speak. You're very proud of those titties of yours, aren't you, Rosanna. Perhaps with reason. At your age, they're not at all flaccid or sagging. How nice and firm they are, and just look at those nipples!"
As he spoke, his fingers wandered over the panting bubbies, tugging and tweaking them. Suddenly, he took hold of both nipples with thumb and forefinger and twisted and pinched cruelly. A muffled shriek was heard, and the naked woman's body arched up from the bench rack. "Se how the puta offers up her cunt," the young assistant torturer guffawed as he thrust his forefinger into the pink crevice of Rosanna's quivering pussy.
"Don't give her any pleasure, my good friend, or you'll make this torture a joy for the old bitch. Now then, Francisco, heat the needles!" Fra Marcando demanded.
The chief executioner moved to one side of the dungeon, moved on a wheeled cart with casters, on which stood a brazier. This at once he kindled; then, opening a drawer in the cart, took out two steel needles and thrust them into the hot coals. The two executioners waited, while the tortured woman raised up her head to stare with horror at the brazier. Violent spasms shook her shoulders and arms, sweat glistened in the tufts of her black armpit-hair. Now she shook her head, crazed with horror, mewling through the gag as the two masked torturers pulled on heavy gloves and each of them seized a doubly thick base of a needle with its tapering, white-hot meat point. The young assistant moved to her right tittie and the executioner moved his needle toward the shuddering globe of her left breast. The monk gave a sign, and the two white-hot needles approached to within an inch of the turgid lovebuds, and choking cries were heard through the choke-pear gag as Rosanna felt the intense heat within the sensitive, tender buds.
They eyed the grim Chief Inquisitor, and he nodded. The unfortunate woman tried to flatten herself back against the divided rackbench, but she could not. With slow, sadistic deliberation, each of the torturers approached the tip of the needles towards the palpitating tittiebuds, and then suddenly touched them for a brief instant.
Fra Marcando, who followed every movement of this scene, felt his prick throb and ache at the sight of Rosanna Calarto's intolerable agony. Her adam's apple jerked, her eyes rolled back in their sockets, her nostrils dilated and shrank, and a gurgling, horrid scream was stifled by the gag.
The two torturers withdrew the needles, once more regarding the Chief Inquisitor. Once more he nodded, and once again those needles approached the taughtened buds at the very centers of Rosanna's taughtened bubbies. They could see the flesh beginning to sear and the atrocious smell of scorching human flesh was wafted to their nostrils. She raised her head, eyes rolling back to the whites, then slumped in her bonds unconscious.
"There's no real harm done, Father," Francisco put the needle back into the brazier and knelt down to study the unconscious duenna's left tittie, which he squeezed and palpated with his bony fingers. "It's hardly burned at all. Of course, she'll be sensitive there for a bit."
"You will continue the torture of her breasts, " Fra Marcando coldly decreed. "Use the black leather whip. A dozen lashes to each, very slowly applied. Then as many strokes on her belly, and finally let your assistant apply a half dozen to each inner thigh, finishing up with three good slashes right between those sluttish legs of hers. But first revive her!"
It was left to the young assistant to bring back Rosanna from her swoon. He doused a bucket of brine into her face then, grinning diabolically, he knelt down to put his teeth to the right nipple which he had seared with the needle, and gently bit it several times. Rosanna Calarto's body stirred and she shuddered and jerked as her eyes slowly opened. Her haggard and swollen eyes stared up at the masked demons who brought such intolerable pain to her naked and tender flesh. She tried to speak, but the gag prevented it. Her body was damp and acrid with sweat and the muscles of her straddled thighs jerked under the fine skin.
Francisco had taken down from the wall a short black whip made of hard, toolworked leather, about a foot long, the last three inches of which tapered into a notched tip. Grasping it by the thick end, he delivered a furious slash over the lower curve of her left tittie, and after a deliberately long pause, another over the right globe at exactly the same place. At each cut, the woman's naked body arched from the rack-bench, and frenzied, gurgling shrieks attested to her agony. Nonetheless, she received a full dozen lashes on each tittie and twenty-four on her naked belly, until her face was contorted and drowned with tears, her body twisting and tearing futilely, mad with suffering, her cries choked back by sobs and tears and her own saliva.
Again they revived her with a bucket of brine, and now the young assistant took over the manipulation of the lash, and with almost laving care applied six cuts against each of her inner thighs. Then, planting himself at the very foot of the bench, he raised his arm high and slashed the little whip down straight into her gaping pussy with all his strength. Rosanna Calarto's body lunged, her head raised, then fell back with a thud as a mewling sound emerged from the choke-pear. A second cut fell, with even more vicous force, and finally the last. There was blood oozing from the gaping, swollen pink cunt lips of the naked woman. Fra Marcando made an impatient sign and Francisco bent over the suffering woman, untied the cloth and pulled out the gag.
"Now you slut," Fra Marcando snarled, "are you ready to tell what you kept from me all this time? Or do you wish the spider's caresses? We've other things in store for you, Rosanna, unless you speak."
But her head rolled back and forth on the rack bench, her eyes glazed with suffering. She could hardly speak. Her body kept up an involuntary shaking, for the whipping of her thighs and cunt and titties had left her in indescribable torment which not even this pause could alleviate. At last, she managed to speak, almost incoherently: "I-oh God-oh mercy-I-I know nothing-nothing except what I've already told you-oh m-mercy-I can tell you no more-oh, have pity-oh I cannot suffer much pain-kill me and make an end of it!"
His hands clasped behind his back, Fra Marcando paced the dungeon floor. Seized by fear of the imminent arrival of his pitiless master, and also by vexation at not having found the treasure, he was almost ready to believe Rosanna's pitiful avowal that she knew nothing more. They had, to be sure searched that house from top to bottom. Yet the old heretic was wealthy-everyone knew that-with his fine carriage and his fine brocaded tapestries and his silver scabbard and silk garments for his beautiful daughter. All this cost gold, so the old fool must have hidden it only too well.
Yet he knew there was danger that Rosanna Calarta could stand very little more torture, that she might die if the torturers continued their cruel work. Yet, with Torquemada only a day and a night away, Fra Marcanda had no more time to lose, and he decided to stake all on one final throw.
"Let her be given the strappado!" he pronounced.
"Oh no! Not more torture! Fra Marcando, in the name of pity, spare me! I-I gave myself to you-won't you have a little pity on me now. I swear before these good men and on the Bible that I don't know any more than what I've told you!" Rosanna Calarto began to babble as the two torturers released her from the bench.
Fra Marcando's face twisted and darkened as he heard this remainder that he had transgressed his holy vows. "Gag her again!" he hissed, and it was done.
Now, having released her from the bench, the two men lowered a pulley rope from a ring in the ceiling. It was made fast to her armpits in a kind of noose. Then the burly assistant squatted down and held the other end of the rope, hoisting the naked victim aloft almost to the ceiling, then suddenly released the rope, only to draw on it just when her naked feet touched the floor. This was the question ordinary; three times it was done to her, the rope cutting viciously into her tender armpits, drawing shrieks and cries of intolerable pain. But still she would not speak.
"The strappado extraordinary!" the monk hissed, his face livid with fury.
And this time, the pulley rope was bound to the tethered wrists of the half-conscious naked woman, and she was hoisted until her arms were drawn up unnaturally behind her. Up she went slowly, her body dangling and twisting on the end of that rope, until the executioner's assistant suddenly released it, only to draw it tight again just before she hit the floor. There was a sickening crack as her shoulders and arms were dislocated, and her head fell forward on her bosom. Francisco moved quickly forward, put his cheek to the left tittie of the unconscious woman, Then a look of alarm twisted his brutal face as he looked at Fra Marcando.
"The bitch is dead, Father."
"You fool! You bungler! How could she die from the strappado?"
"Perhaps her heart was weak, Your Eminence. I swear that I exercised no more than the usual degree of the question," the torturer uneasily declared.
But Fra Marcando had already left the dungeon. Now "he had lost not only the secret to the treasure but the body of the duenna as well. He must have a final try at the house of Sandroval before Torquemando reached Toledo.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Fra Pedroso, the monk whom Fra Marcando had appointed his stead to preside in his absence was a crafty man and intended to profit while his superior was away. He meant in some way to indulge his own lusts and, if possible, descredit Fra Marcando.
He sent a message by special courier to Tomas Torquemando himself and then he conspired with Francisco and his young assistant to torture and satiate his lusting body with a handsome widow and her sixteen year old daughter who had been imprisoned on a charge of irreverence against the Inquisition as well as treasonable utterances against the Crown.
Two hours later, in a gloomy room which drew its light from only a small barred window and whose walls were draped with black cloth on which white-cloth crosses had been sewn, two women stood before a narrow table behind which were seated two hooded monks and Fra Pedroso. At the extreme left of this wide room, there was a kind of pulpit, cut off from view by black velvet drapes, in which the informer or familiar would be hidden as he testified against the accused. But they in turn would not be able to identify him or see him, a procedure which had long been in vogue by the Holy Inquisition for the sole purpose of confounding and terrifying those who had fallen into its clutches.
The two monks had already conferred with Fra Pedroso, and all three had agreed on a verdict in advance. He had convinced them of the guilt of these two females and on his intention to steer the interrogation to the point of discovering something much more vital than their mere crimes. Information, indeed, which concerned a heretic already dead and a condemned daughter who had escaped her own just atonement.
And so, it was he who first addressed the two trembling prisoners: "Dona Luz de Belmonte and you, her daughter Juana, are both charged with treasonable utterances against your sovereigns, and, worst of all, disrespect for the holy labors of the Inquisition. Do you admit your guilt?"
"Sir Priest," the arrogant and handsome matron scornfully replied, "If by that you mean that my daughter and I have expressed impatience with the neglect which Ferdinand and Isabella have given our petition for the release of my dead husband's gold and for the long years of loyal service which he gave the Crown, yes, it is true that we are both guilty. If you condemn us for saying that your Inquisition is a mockery of true justice and exists through terror and the ignorance of its victims, then we are equally guilty of that as well."
"You dare to speak such blasphemy here, when the torture chamber is but a few steps away?" Fra Pedroso solemnly demanded.
"I am the widow of a grandee of Spain, and my daughter has blue blood in her veins and should well be a maid of honor at the royal court," was the widow's insolent reply. "Fine me, rebuke me, and I'll do penance in church, but my opinions are my own. They are neither treasonable nor blasphemous, only fact. Do you say that we who live in Spain may not criticize the stupidities and the blunders which human beings commit in one name or another?"
"Be careful, woman!" Fra Pedroso thundered. "Yes, it's true I can't condemn you to the stake, but you and your daughter shall do penance before the cathedral in the next act of faith to be held when our beloved Fra Torquemada returns from Barcelona. You and your daughter shall go naked under your shifts, candle in hand, to kneel and acknowledge your evil tongues. And you shall feel the lash, both of you, on your proud flesh. Commoners will watch the spectacle of a de Belmonte stripped naked and given the whip."
"How dare you insult me so, priest!" Luz de Belmonte gasped, her cheeks reddening at the insult and the salacious image which it provided. "And before my daughter, a maiden, to speak so impertinently of nakedness! For shame!"
"Have a care of your tongue, woman, again I tell you for I am not on trial here," he angrily replied. "Do you apologize humbly for your false remarks and accusations?"
"I will apologize only that if I'm shown that what I said is not true."
"Do you see my problem?" The gloomy friar turned to his two associates. "She's stubborn and rebellious. I believe we can accomplish no more than to let them face the question. The simple question to begin with," then, turning back to the astonished woman, he sarcastically added, "We shall respect your rank, Luz de Belmonte and your daughter's innocence. But I feel that in a little while, after you've tasted the humiliation of chastisement, you both will see the error of your ways."
With this, lifting a silver bell, he shook it in the air. The door swung open and two halberdiers entered.
"These women are to be taken to the chamber of Master Francisco!" he commanded.
The soldiers seized the two condemned beauties despite Luz de Belmonte's indignant cries, while Fra Pedroso led the way down to the subterranean dungeon, the very one in which poor Rosanna had met her untimely end.
"How shall we begin?" the executioner asked.
"The mother," Fra Pedroso decided. "Yes."
With this, he seized Juana's wrist, while she uttered a piercing cry and struggled with him, planting her feet on the stone floor trying to strike him with her fist, calling on her mother to aid her. But the executioner had already clapped one hand over Luz de Belmonte's mouth and grasped both her wrists in his other hand as he rudely forced her towards a wooden post set into the stone floor and at the other end of the grim chamber of interrogation. Arrived at the post, he hauled up her wrists to a metal ring set into the top of the wood, from which a dangling leather thong had already been prepared as a fetter. With expert swiftness he wound the thong round her wrists, knotted it so cunningly that she could not jerk her limbs free from its hold. Thus she was compelled to stand on tiptoe, a pose which set into relief the sumptuous globes of her behind as well as the jutting gourds of her heaving bubbies.
Meanwhile, the assistant had dragged the shrieking and pleading Juana over to a pillory which stood about five feet away from the whipping post, and, swiftly unlocking the top section and opening it, he thrust the girl's head down to the central yoke-hole, forced her wrists into the smaller ones, then swiftly pulled down the top section to lock it into place. Thus Juana was confined and her face turned toward the whipping post, while she herself was fully prepared should the order come for her own chastisement.
The executioner now turned to the array of whipping implements hanging from hooks in the stone wall, putting his hand on this or that one, and waiting for the friar to indicate his pleasure.
"Begin with half a dozen strokes across the woman's back and shoulders, Master Francisco," the friar ordered.
This sly order was purposely given to lull the fears of the widow. Indeed, she believed that her penance would be mild and not nearly so shameful as she had feared, so she stoically resolved to make no outcry and to take the flogging and consider herself mercifully spared. She realized that the Queen herself might well have sent her to a convent where the sisters would scourge her bare body with knotted cords. And since she had already seen all the terrible apparatus in this questioning chamber, she was quite content to experience a mild whipping.
But she had not even divined the cruel intentions of the friar who now winked at the chief executioner as the latter took down a braided leather thong and planted himself behind Luz de Belmonte and at her left. Slowly his right arm rose and fell. Each stroke whistled across the dimpled, rounded shoulders and upper back of the buxom, attractive matron, who ground her teeth and closed her eyes tightly, compressing her mouth to hold back her cries, for she was of tender nature and not used to such harsh treatment. When at last the six lashes had been administered, and her shoulders and back were smarting and throbbing, she was actually proud of herself for having shown such courage. How little she guessed that she had just begun to taste the cruelty of the Inquisition, as well as the lusts of its torturers!
"That, Luz de Belmonte," Fra Pedroso now declared, "was an initial atonement for your shrewish tongue in my presence. But now we shall begin to remit payment for your greater sins, my daughter, for you must be fully absolved before you can leave the prison. When you have declared your humility and your desire to be forgiven, you and your daughter shall appear in public in honor of our great Father Torquemada, to tell all devout believers about the true justice of the Holy Inquisition."
After a lengthy pause, during which the unfortunate woman squirmed uneasily at the whipping post, he now made a sign. With a roar of satanic laughter, the executioner now put his fingers down the neck of the fine gown of the victim, ripping it from her shoulders, and then tore away her chemise.
"Oh my God, what are you doing? Oh no, Father, don't let him do this to me-of merciful heavens-not naked-oh my poor Juana, you mustn't look, oh don't look at your mother, they've stripped me naked-oh, the shame of it, the shame of it, the shame of it!" she shrieked.
For Master Francisco had ripped off not only her chemise but then her silken drawers, leaving the luscious Luz de Belmonte clad in only her hose, garters and shoes, as she tried to twist away, jerking at her bound wrists which were dragged high above her head.
The marks of the lash across her white shoulders and back called attention to the voluptuous tinting of her soft ivory skin. Meanwhile, across from her, face contorted with horrified disbelief, Juana observed her mother's nakedness for the first time.
"And now, a good dozen across the bare back with the leather strap!" the friar decreed.
These lashes having been duly inflicted, each of which drew a muffled cry of pain from the panting naked woman, the executioner stared at his victim with even more greedy eyes. Poor Luz de Belmonte had begun to squirm and to press herself against the heavy wooden post as the burning pain of the thrashing weakened her resistance and tortured her nerves. But even by now she had only begun to taste a slight measure of what was really in store for her.
"Now, we must mortify and chastise the shameful parts," the friar intoned. "Master Francisco, two dozen strokes over that big bottom. Let us chasten this haughty creature's proud spirit by thrashing her as one might a little child!"
The executioner needed no second invitation to decorate those lusciously opulent ivory hillocks with blazing, red, broad welts. The thickness of the leather band he had employed cracked wickedly against Luz de Belmonte's white flesh, drawing wild shrieks of pain from her, making her execute a lascivious dance, jumping from foot to foot, her shoes soon being scuffed off by this maneuver. So she presented to the two executioners and to the friar the delicious spectacle of a ripe-formed woman naked except for hose and garters, bounding about to diminish her all too ripe and vulnerable contours from the burning strap.
By the time the two dozen lashes had been inflicted, her bare behind was swollen and shuddering, emblazoned with purplish, darkening, broad weals, and her cries were wordless, while the tears streamed constantly down her cheeks.
Juana kept crying out in horror at what she saw, and implored the friar to spare her mother. But now there was a respite, while the unfortunate naked matron slumped in her bonds, dangling by her thonged wrists from the ring at the top of the whipping post. A bucket of brine doused over her back, shoulders and bottom seemed to revive her, and the friar now pronounced: "Let the mother occupy herself with pledges of docile and humble conduct for the future, while we interrogate the daughter a little. But for her, use a slim birch, Master Francisco. Let your assistant wield it, for he must gain experience and greater cunning and skill so that, like yourself, he will be able to wage the good fight against the accursed heretics who undermine our land."
The young assistant chuckled at this mark of favor. He approached the frightened young girl. Juana, foreseeing the danger, at once began to kick out wildly, but he laughingly moved to one side and, grasping her gown, tore it from her slender body and with it the chemise as well.
"Oh, Mother! He's making me naked-oh don't let him, Mother-oh please-help me-oh my God, Mother, save me, I don't want to be naked, I don't want him to see me!" the girl screamed as she wriggled this way and that, trying to escape the tugging off of her flouncy drawers. But with a savage tug, this final veil also was torn off, and she like her mother was presented in hose, garters and shoes.
The executioner's assistant uttered a gasp of excited lust at the vision before him. Forced to stand bent over with her neck and wrists held in the yoke-holes of the pillory, Juana de Belmonte presented to him the ravishingly enticing nakedness of a young girl on the very threshold of her young womanhood. Her tawny-sheened skin was warm and exciting, and it was agitated now by constant rippling tremors which surged along her bottom and thighs and calves. Her body was svelte, but her hips were seen to be surprisingly ripe. The cheeks of her bottom were broad ovals, separated by a gradually widening shadowy groove which she instinctively tried to hide from these offending male eyes by contracting all her muscles. Her long and supple thighs were nervously muscled and beautifully chiseled, and her highset sinuous calves promised a suppleness and agility of movement that one day would delight a man in the bed of fucking.
The younger torturer chuckled as he saw a tiny brown birthmark appearing just below the base of her right bottom-cheek. He touched it with his calloused finger, and rubbed it back and forth lasciviously as he licked his lips. The girl screamed out again: "Oh, Mother, he's touching me, oh I'm naked, I want to die for shame!"
"Gently, my little pigeon," the younger torturer muttered, "I'll make you want to be alive, and oh how you'll dance and caper when that sweet ass of yours tastes the kisses of the birch!"
So saying, he went over to the nearest wall and stooped to take out of a brine-filled bucket a slender birch rod, tied with cloth on the handle for a grip. It comprised about six long slender switches, still with twigs and buds on them. It was ideally devised for the flogging of a young girl, whereas the chief executioner would have used a bulkier birch had it been a question of whipping her more opulent mother.
Going over to the girl's left, the assistant now tortured the weeping and pleading girl by rubbing the twigs and buds of the supple rod over the cheeks of her shuddering naked behind, as a kind of foretaste of what was to come. At last, his face flushed, his eyes glittering from the excitement, his swollen prick prominently visible as it strained against the crotch of his tights, he drew back his arm and slashed the rod across the base of Juana's bare behind. A wild cry announced the agony of this slashing, fiery cut, while the naked young girl jerked frantically to escape the vise-like hold of the pillory, but in vain. Just as her mother had done, she tried to dance, the dance of the lash, shifting from foot to foot, as a second, then a third, and finally a fourth cut of the rod whisked horizontally over the tops of her bare young hips.
But naked as she was and bent over by the pillory's grip, young Juana de Belmonte offered to the friar as well as to the chief executioner and the assistant the exquisite sight of her surprisingly thick-haired cunt, the long triangle of black silky tufts which almost entirely covered the dainty pink lips of Juana de Belmonte's virgin pussy.
"Oh in the name of all mercy and humanity," her mother cried from the whipping post, her voice hoarse and trembling, "spare my poor young girl! She's innocent, she's done nothing-oh God, what do you want of us, Father?"
"The truth, my daughter," he insisted as he approached the whipping post. Naked under his black robe and hood, his prick was in a frightful state of agitation. Now he put his left hand to the swollen, twitching buttocks of the groaning sobbing matron, and he felt his prick throb even more angrily. "I believe you were a guest many times at the home of Don Santiago de Sandroval?"
"Yes, yes, I knew Don Santiago, but what in God's name has that to do with this unjust torture, Father?" Luz de Belmonte sobbed. Her face twisted back over her shoulder, she saw her daughter's agonized visage contorted, the eyes wide and glassy with tears, the nostrils flaring and shrinking, the lovely selfish little mouth twisted in a grimace of intolerable suffering and shame. "Oh spare her, Fra Pedroso, spare her and God will bless you for it! What can the poor girl know of Don Santiago?"
"But I wish to know more of him, Luz de Belmonte," he pursued. Once again he passed his left hand over the woman's shuddering bottom, and the twitching of the heat of her naked skin inflamed his vile rut all the more. "Did he ever speak to you of his wealth and of his plans to leave Spain?"
"N-no, F-Father. He never spoke of such things as I can recall ... oh God, please-" because here another shriek from her daughter and the sight of her daughter's head jerking against the yoke of the pillory announced another cruel, whistling slash of the thin birch rod across the lower summits of her daughter's behind." Spare her, spare her. and I'll do anything, only spare her!"
"Hold your hand a moment," the friar curtly ordered the executioner. Stepping very close to the sobbing naked matron, his left hand rose from her bottom and wandered along her smooth dimpled back, delectating in the contact of his flesh against the woman's milky, warm twitching skin. When he reached one of her titties, which he boldly fondled, his thumb and forefinger began to pinch the ripe bud of her nipple until Luz de Belmonte moaned and closed her eyes in shame, to be thus used by these men in the sight of her own daughter.
"Speak now, Luz, and don't be so proud, for you are kept readied for the question until such time as I end the session. And what you've already felt is only the beginning of the many things that can be done to you to loosen your wagging tongue. I command you in the name of the Holy Inquisition, tell the truth, woman, or else your daughter shall feel the birch rod between those long dancing legs of hers! Here, I mean!"
With this the lustful monk lowered his hand down the side of Luz's belly until he had reached the luxuriant patch of black curls which covered her plump cunthole.
"Oh no! Oh no, no, dear God in heaven, no! Oh have mercy, spare her, not that, she's only a young child, have mercy, Father!" her mother wailed.
"Two cuts, well up between her legs!" the monk exclaimed.
There was a whistling hiss and then a cruel, obscene whacking sound. And then another, almost instantly following. Juana de Belmonte yanked savagely at her yoked wrists and neck, hopping from one foot to the other, and the other shoe flew off as she shrieked out her agony: "Eeeyeowwrhh! Ouuu, oh not there, not there!"
"Oh my poor little girl, my Juana, my dearest baby, oh how dreadful-oh Father, don't make her suffer like that! I'll tell you all I know, although it isn't much-I know very little-but spare her!"
"Quickly then, before I have him give her the birch in the same place a dozen times," the friar insisted, his voice trembling with his lust.
"Two months ago, Juana and I were his guests, F-Father," the sobbing matron confided as she squirmed restlessly against the whipping post. All this time the friar's hand remained pressed against her pussy. Now to her horror she felt his forefinger stealthily probe between the plump lips of her vulva. Her face was scarlet and she closed her eyes, but she did not cry out, not wishing to let the two torturers and her daughter know what the priest was doing to her. "He-he said he had lost his love for Spain because of the cruelty and persecution that were happening everywhere. He said that one day he might find a new world where he and his daughter could live in happiness, where there would be a brotherhood of man. That's all I ever heard him say, Father, I swear!"
"Then tell me how he proposed to transfer his estate and wealth to that new world, my daughter?" the Friar insisted. Now his forefinger had entered deeply between the lips of Luz de Belmonte's cunt, and was making its way toward the dainty button of her tickler, making her twist and jerk and clench her thighs convulsively as her bubbies began to rise and fall with increased agitation.
"I don't know, I swear I don't. F-Father, oh believe me!" she panted.
"Let the girl have two more in the same spot," he commanded. And even as the agonized widow tearfully implored him to spare the girl, the young assistant torturer lowered the rod to the floor, then leaped it up between the naked young girl's wriggling legs, attacking not only her tender quim but the equally tender groove of her resilient, wriggling, bare bottom. A strident cry, prolonged and rising, tore the air as the naked young girl danced from foot to foot, chafing her neck and wrists against the yoke-holes of the pillory as she sought madly to free herself. But even as she twisted and writhed and danced, the grinning masked young torturer lowered the birch to the floor again and then swept it up between the lithe, tawny-sheened bare legs, so that the tips of the rod bit home with full force against her virgin cunthole.
"Oohhoeeeouuuuuuu!! ! Ahrm-aiiii!! Oh not there, oh not there, oh please, dear Mother, oh God, Mother, I can't stand it there. Oh please make him stop, Mother!" Juana screamed.
"It is within your power, Luz de Belmonte, to decide whether your daughter receives further discipline. Search your mind and tell me what you know of Don Santiago's plans," Fra Pedroso, ordered. The tip of his forefinger was rubbing against her clitoris, and the naked matron squirmed and gasped as she suddenly felt waves of sensual languor seethe through her loins. The heat left by the strap against her back, shoulders and bottom combined with this sweet torture until she didn't know exactly what insane thing she would do. But then, in guilty shame she felt herself nearly fainting away with sensual lust, sinful though she knew this to be, especially in front of her daughter and the two torturers. But she was so undermined by her emotional agitation and the pain of the whipping that she was now, just as Fra Pedroso understood she would be, completely hysterical and an easy subject for carnal conquest. "Speak quickly, my daughter, or your girl will taste the birch there again and again!" he urged.
"Oh, Father, don't have her beaten any more, oh pity, pity! All I can recall, I swear it's all, was that he said there was some kind of transformation-yes, that was his very word for it, Father. He said that it required a change of much into little to be able to smuggle it out of Spain, and that's all I know, I swear it on the Bible that it's all I know, Father."
There was such a ring of sincerity to the matron's sobbing voice that the friar believed her to be telling the truth. His shrewd mind swiftly weighed the facts which he had discovered thus far. Transformation? That must mean the conversion of great wealth into small items that might be carried about on one's person. Gold? No, hardly. Because if Don Santiago had sold his estate and traded gold for it, he could not possibly have carried bags of gold out of the country in a ship. Moreover, since the heretic had already been executed, he obviously hadn't had the chance to do that smuggling. So the treasure, in whatever converted form it might be, must certainly be hidden somewhere on the estate or nearby. All this was logic. But where to begin, where to search?
"Tell me, Luz de Belmonte," he relentlessly pursued, while the assistant executioner, panting, bathed in sweat, his prick swollen violently against his tights, gripped the birch in readiness to deal poor Juana another swishing, upward-leaping cut. The young torturer's eyes feasted on the darkening, thin welts imprinted on her tawny-satiny behind, watching how she still shifted from foot to foot, wriggling and twisting as the ferocious heat of her whipped pussy and bottomhole agonized her tender young nerves.
The friar pursued the thought uppermost in his wily mind: "Luz, I command you on your hope of salvation in the next life, think back carefully now of that conversation you've just described to me. The one in which he spoke of transformation. Did he give you the slightest clue as to how he proposed to transform his estate into treasure, into objects which he could easily carry with him out of Spain?"
All this time his forefinger had continued to prod and rub her clitoris, which was now swollen and throbbing with tumescence. The half-swooning naked woman shuddered uncontrollably, swaying and held up by the wrist bonds, her head bowed, as wave after wave of sexual agitation began to churn within her tender thighs, within her moistening pussy, "Ohh-I can't-I can't think-oh, F-Father, don't-oh don't touch me-oh God, I'm going mad-oh please, F-Father-" she babbled.
Withdrawing his finger from her cunt, he hissed into the ear, "I haven't finished with you yet, Luz de Belmonte. I'll have you stretched out on the bench and racked. I'll have red-hot needles pierce your nipples, I'll have the torturers take heated wands and flog the insides of your thighs and your naked belly. I'll have them pluck out the thick hair that grows between your naked legs, if you don't try with all your might to reveal to me what it was that Don Santiago said. And your daughter shall be given to the torturers for just as in ancient Rome, it is the law that no virgin may be put to death. So they'll despoil her, Luz de Belmonte, so that she may be executed if we find that she has sinned against the Crown!"
Dazed with horror at these frightful words, Luz de Belmonte babbled hysterically: "He only said one thing, and that it must be precious stones of great prices-yes, that's it, he said that these alone he could take with him and that's all, I swear to you on my daughter's honor, that's all he ever said. I think he was afraid he had said too much already though we were very good friends and he trusted us-oh my God, do have pity on us now, let my poor girl go!"
Fra Pedroso smiled satanically. Suddenly it was all clear. Now he knew how the heretic Don Santiago de Sandroval had turned his fortune into what could be taken out of Spain secretly: Gems, perhaps unusually large pearls, or else sapphires or emeralds or rubies mined in Panama or Mexico. Well, if that was true, where were those gems? They must be somewhere in the house of that heretic, and there must be some sign to lead him to them. Either that or the escaped spawn of the heretic, that girl Dorotea, knew where they were and had the secret in her possession, a secret whose seizure would make him one of the richest men in all Spain. And so greed for wealth warped and tainted his zealously fanatical mind even as it had done with his superior Fra Marcando.
But now there remained the matter of pleasure after business. Now that he had learned all he could out of Luz de Belmonte's fear, there was still her body and that of her lovely young daughter. He and two torturers had shared an unholy secret and they must have the pleasures or the profits with him. He turned to regard them both as they stood rearing their masks and then black and red tights, their faces dark with lust. "I shall have the house searched again. I don't think that Fra Marcando knows what I have learned," he said slowly to both of them. "We'll let him have his time with that duenna. But my turn will come, and I shall not be distracted by any such temptation of the flesh to find the treasure of that accursed heretic. When I do, both of you shall share it with me in return for your silence. It's agreed?"
"Yes, Father," Master Francisco hoarsely answered. And the younger rogue beside him, still gripping the thin birch, nodded, licking his lips and staring hungrily again at the squirming, twisting young naked body in the pillory before him.
"All right, we have a bargain between us," the friar chuckled. "Now, hombre, persuade this tender virgin to seek solace from your rod of wood by accepting instead your rod of flesh!"
Understanding the friar's obscene play on words, the young torturer sniggered and nodded. Stepping back, lowering the supple birch to the floor, he darted it up once again between Juana de Belmonte's naked thighs, attacking the soft tender fruit of her virgin pussy with a stinging slash.
"Owwwooeeeeowwwarrhhhh!! ! ! ! Ohh, not there, oh dearest Mother-oh I can't bear it-I can't bear it anymore-oh my God, make him stop, Mother-why is he whipping me so horribly, what have I done?" the unfortunate girl shrieked.
Her hips now executed a libidinous wriggling this way and that, as she tried by shifting her stockinged feet to alter her stance in the pillory. But all she achieved was to thrust out her tempting naked bottom and to show the glimpse of her hairy virgin cunt in a way that inflamed her torturer's lust all the more. So once again the biting, thin switches danced up between her shaking naked thighs, stinging the tenderest spot of her young virgin anatomy and drawing a wailing howl of "Eowwwwchrrri!! ! Oh please, I'll do anything you want, oh please no more-oh not there, not there between my legs-Oh please, dear mother, mother, oh dear God, make him stop!" The friar's body was trembling with his pentup rut. Both his hands now massaged and squeezed Luz de Belmonte's titties, while his thin lips pressed a burning kiss on her naked shoulder as he muttered, "Tell your daughter to yield or she'll be flayed alive. I promise! And you, you bitch, give yourself to me, or I'll have you racked and then FH have hot needles thrust into your breasts, where my fingers are pinching them!" Even as he spoke, the assistant executioner had directed a new perfidious cut of the switches right up into the tender gape. Luz, her face twisted round, saw the lovely eyes dilate and roll in their sockets to the white, saw the mouth gape in a strident, frenzied shriek.
"Oh darling. Oh my poor Juana, do anything he wants of you-oh my God, I can't bear to watch you suffer so! Juana, beg him for mercy, perhaps he will be kind!" the woman hysterically wailed.
Then, realizing what she had said and done and to what she had condemned her daughter, she bowed her head and burst into convulsive sobs.
"Well now, pretty one," the younger torturer snarled, "you've learned how to be obedient to your mother, haven't you? So do her bidding. Tell me quickly that you'll be my sweeting, and I'll spare you the birch. Otherwise-" and once more that diabolical rod leaped up between Juana's jerking thighs to slash into her already inflamed and burning young virgin cunt.
"Ahhrrroweeeaarrrhh!! ! Oh yes, yes, do anything you want with me, but not there anymore, oh please! Oh I can't stand it, have mercy on me, mercy," the young girl screamed.
He cast aside the birch, advanced to the pillory and unlocked it. Then dragging the weeping, half-fainting naked girl over to the low bench of the rack, the younger torturer flung her down upon it. Tugging down his tights, he bared his swollen, hard-veined prick, with its broadly oblong plum-shaped glans. But for a moment he stood, over the whimpering, hysterical captive, drinking in her suffering and shame. And finally, with a hoarse shout, he flung himself down atop her, kneading apart her struggling thighs. His prick had thrust against the soft mossy tufts of her pussy-hair, forced the swollen lips of her cunt apart and entered with fury up against the virgin seal.
"Oh Mother-aiii-arrhh-oh Mother!" the girl screamed as she tried to beat him off with clenched little fists. But now he had pierced her hymen and was hilting himself to the balls, as his hands gripped her wrists and stretched them out in either side of her in cross, laying down over her and flattening himself upon her as he relentlessly began to fuck the maddened, hysterical young sufferer.
The friar made a sign to the chief executioner, who took his knife and slashed the wrist bonds which held Juana's mother to the whipping post. She slumped to the floor, then slowly lifted her head, her eyes made with agony, her magnificent cantaloupe-like bubbies rising and falling turbulently.
"It is my turn," Master Francisco panted. The friar frowned, then decided that the union he had formed with these two scoundrels was worth more than the question of who would be first with the mother.
"Very well, take the bitch!" he growled.
And when both men were done, the friar removed his robe and, naked under it, his prick savagely erect, replaced the head executioner atop the body of Luz de Belmonte. When he had finished with her, he turned to the sprawled naked young girl near by, on whose black pussy-hair the blood of her sacrificed virginity oozed. Since his prick was still hard with longing, he had no compassion on this pitiful sight, but knelt down, his hands greedily caressing her panting titties. Then he crushed her mouth to silence under his as his prick delved into that narrow channel and knew appeasement And this deed was done in the name of the treasure of Don Santiago de Sandroval.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Count Paolo de Cordoba could not take his eyes of the lovely, anguished face of Dorotea. They had dined together, and his elderly housekeeper had attended the young girl with the same loving care she would have given her own daughter. The sweetness and gentleness of the orphan daughter of Don Santiago had won the heart of all the servants, but most of all that of the Count, who felt himself half his age when he gazed at that delicious face and the supple young body.
"You think you have strength enough for it, Dorotea?" he asked.
"I do. I want to go back to the house. Yes, I know my father's dead and that the Crown has taken over his house and lands. But I want my little prayer book, and some of the other little mementos which my father and mother gave me, so I may remember my father always as a good wonderful man who never hurt anyone and who loved his country better than his country knew.
"We shall go there this very night then. I've just had word that Torquemada will reach Toledo tonight. Once he is back in power here, it will not be safe for anyone to be seen in your father's house. Soldiers will be sent to occupy and arrest all those who come too near it or who ask too many questions. Come quickly, and my housekeeper will give you a warm cloak, for the night has turned chilly."
Half an hour later, the carriage of the Count de Cordoba drew up at the gate of the palatial estate which had once belonged to Don Santiago de Sandroval. The handsome, gray-haired nobleman had brought with him two of his most faithful retainers, young men in their mid-twenties, who drove the coach and its four sturdy Arabian horses. These horses had tremendous endurance and could outdistance any others on the road if need be. Yet they were gentle and had never been given the whip; tonight, however, the two retainers carried whips in the event that speed would become of the upmost necessity, as well it might be if by some luckless chance Torquemada's soldiers had already been sent to guard the estate.
Fortunately, they saw no one on the road. Now as the Count opened the door of the carriage and handed Dorotea down, he called up to the two retainers: "Keep a careful watch. And you, Joseph, hoot like an owl five times if you see soldiers or anyone else approaching. Now take the carriage toward the back of the house behind that clump of trees where it can't be seen from the road. Watch from the hedges, and keep your hands on your daggers, both of you, for this is a desperate moment."
He led Dorotea up the steps of her father's house and she opened the door. Her father had never bolted it in those happy years when he had lived in peace with his neighbors. But now it was deathly still and dark inside the house. The Count had a candle with him and flint, he struck a light and lit the wick and the two of them moved for the salon like ghosts in a dead house. Dorotea's eyes were wet with tears as she remembered what joy she had known here, and also as she remembered how her father had died.
They went up the winding steps. The flickering candle light guided them both to the room where she had been sheltered all those happy years before the black terror of the Holy Inquisition had darkened the land that was once free Spain. She opened the top of the chest of drawers and uttered a cry of joy: "Oh, it's my prayerbook, it's still here, heaven be praised!"
And as she lifted it, opening it at random, a tiny folded piece of parchment fluttered to the floor. The Count's keen eyes noticed it, and he stooped to retrieve it: "What's this?"
"I-I don't know. Perhaps it's a marker-what is it, Count de Cordoba?" She suddenly stared at him, because his forehead was furrowed as he held the candle closer to the unfolded scrap.
"It's a map, Dorotea! It is from you father-his final gift to you. And now I know where his treasure is. Come look. Do you see the signs of water, the drawing as of a wave?"
The girl nodded.
"Beside it, there's a kind of round tunnel, and here are the Latin words for a well and a rock. Now I know. Your father put his treasure in the cistern, behind the rocks which form its outer wall. And here again is the Roman numeral sign of two, which means that it is in the second circle of rocks, just below the top. What ingenuity. Come, hurry, to the cistern! Go there and I will join you, for I shall search in the garden shed for a pickaxe."
Dorotea hurried out of the house and towards the barn. There, at the familiar cistern, where so often as a child she had come to dip a long ladle for the pure cold sweet water that quenched her girlish thirst, she waited for her father's friend.
A few moments later he hurried towards her, a pickaxe in hand. Hold the candle, and don't let it fall," he urged. "The one thing which this cipher map does not tell us is exactly at what place in that second row of rocks the treasure is hidden. But let us pray that your father's courage and kindness will guide our ignorant hands."
He glanced quickly at the markings between the first two rows of rocks which circled the narrow cistern, and then at random he posed the point of the pickaxe and began to strike. Carefully he kept hewing away, while fragments of rock dropped into the water below. Now he had hollowed out a section large enough for a man's hand to thrust inside, and he did so, but there was nothing but more stones. Again he tried, and after a few more minutes, found nothing. Pausing, his heart pounding wildly, he directed the trembling young girl to bring the candle even closer over the top of the cistern and towards the layers of rocks.
Then he uttered a cry of joyous stupefaction: there was a tiny blue cross marked as with crayon on one of the stones directly beyond him. "To the other side now, and hold the candle slowly so I may follow," he urged excitedly.
Then he leaned over while Dorotea, beside him and holding her breath, held with trembling fingers the candle so that the glow fell upon the marking of the cross. Posing the point of his pickaxe against the very center of that marked cross, Count de Cordoba struck with all his might. The sharp point at once seemed to penetrate the stone as if it were mere putty, and he uttered another cry of surprise, as carefully tucking the axe away, he left bare a narrow opening. Shifting the implement to his left hand, he leaned forward and thrust his right hand into the opening. Then he uttered still another cry: "May God be praised, I found it, I've found the treasure!"
Then, before the dazzled eyes of Dorotea, Count Paolo de Cordoba drew out one by one the three huge diamonds which Abraham Levi had procured for Don Santiago's gold.
Suddenly he stiffened. He had just heard the hooting of an owl five times. "Quickly, Dorotea, and go hide in the barn, someone's coming!" he hissed. Then, thrusting the three diamonds into the pocket of his doublet, he drew his sword from his scabbard, and, pick-axe gripped in his left hand, sword in his right, advanced around the side of the house to meet the unknown intruder.
"You, Count de Cordoba, familiar of the Inquisition! What are you doing here? What unholy business are you bent upon?" Fra Marcando cried. Then, coming forward with a dagger in his hand he said, "Wait-now I begin to see. You traitor. It must have been you who spirited Dorotea de Sandroval out of prison."
"Yes, it was I, Fra Marcando. I would not have been true to my manhood and honor had I left that poor girl to perish at the stake in shame and injustice."
"Take care, you are blaspheming, Count de Cordoba! You took the oath of loyalty to the Holy Inquisition, you know its secrets, and you-"
"And I detest and despise the horror which you and your kind have brought to a gentle land," the handsome gray-haired nobleman finished for him. "Yes, at the very first, I too believed that the heretic and the traitor must be cast out. But when I saw kindly old men and women, innocent children and young girls, mothers and daughters and servants to them, butchered and tortured, raped and whipped and put to the rack in the dark cells of the prison at Toledo in the name of piety and all the sanctimonious humbug whose only purpose was the seizure of their possessions so that the Holy Order might grow more powerful and even wealthier than the Crown itself. I began to doubt my choice!"
"You've already said enough to send you to the stake a thousand times over, Count de Cordoba!" Fra Marcando thundered as he strode forward, brandishing the dagger.
"What have you done with Rosanna Calarto?" the Count coldly countered.
"Fool, she died under the question because she was obstinate and stupid. She wouldn't tell me where the treasure was!"
"I have that treasure now in the picket of my doublet, Fra Marchando," the gray-haired nobleman dropped the pickaxe, thrust his left hand into the pocket of his doublet, and drew forth one of the huge diamonds. The eyes of the Chief Inquisitor fixed on it, glazed with avarice, his lips trembling with greed. "In the name of holy salvation," he gasped thickly, "it's worth thousands of gold doubloons!"
"Yes, all that and there are two more like it."
"Are you a fool, Count? Is it your intention to keep those diamonds for yourself?"
"No, but for the rightful heiress, Dorotea de Sandroval. She's in that barn, Fra Marcando. Yes, I took her from the prison, I hid her in my own house, and I found in her prayer book in her own bedroom the very key which told me where these gems were stored until she might take rightful possession of them."
"Oh then thousand devils in all hell! Would that the bitch Rosanna Calarto was still in the dungeon with me!" the friar shrieked in rage. "She spoke to me of the prayer book, but she did not look through it. Oh that damnably stupid bitch, that infernally dull-witted hellcat!"
"And so you've killed her, following the manner of the proverb which warns against killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, eh, my noble friar?" the Count chuckled.
Now, seeing that all was lost, all his dreams evaporated, the Chief Inquisitor flung himself forward with a bellow fury, lifting the bloody dagger high. Stepping back quickly, the gray-haired nobleman neatly ran Fra Marcando through with his shining sword. The black-robed monk stiffened, stared down at the steel which transfixed his chest, and then the life and hate went out of his eyes. And as Count Pablo de Cordoba dragged out the bloody blade, Fra Marcando toppled lifeless to the ground.
It was done. The horror, the greed, the scheming, all had come to nothing.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Count Paolo de Cordoba was naked on the bed in the captain's cabin of the Spanish frigate Felicidad, bound for the Azores. Beside him, young, ivory-naked, her eyes glowing with joy, lay young Dorotea de Sandroval, now the Countess de Cordoba.
After he had slain the evil Chief Inquisitor in self-defense, the Count had driven back with Dorotea to his house. There he had taken his leave of his servants, after first dispensing much gold to his two young and trusted retainers and to the gray-haired housekeeper. And the two young men had driven him on with lovely Dorotea to the port of Muranciana, where he had found a bearded sea captain drinking port in a little inn near the wharf, given him a purse of gold to hire the ship.
This was their third day out on the blue water of the Atlantic, and the third and heavenly night of their nuptials, for the captain had married them as soon as they had boarded his vessel.
Dorotea blushed, lowering her eyes as her virile, mature husband turned to her, his hands caressing her titties and bottom, his lips nuzzling at her ivory throat. "Oh dearest husband," she murmured huskily, "oh, Paolo, why do I feel so shameless? Here you're old enough to be my father, yet I love you as eagerly as I could any handsome youth-ah, no, far more, since you saved my father's good name and avenged his unjust death on those cruel men who had him murdered in the name of the Inquisition."
"You talk like a shameless hussy who needs a sound thrashing, sweet Dorotea," he laughed as he applied a playful slap to her ivory bottom which made her squeal in mock alarm. "This, to tell your husband of but three short days that you love him more dearly than any handsome young scoundrel-why, that's scarcely a proper compliment, my naughty wife. You'll pay dearly for it till we touch harbor in this brave new world we journey to find. And your payment is to begin at once, hot blooded jade that you are. Indeed, if I didn't know myself that you are the same little girl whom I once dangled on my knee, I'd never think you the demure daughter of my dear old friend Don Santiago, so lustful and insatiable have you turned! But now, my darling one, you're not yet twenty, and you have all your life to learn of the many ways between man and maid."
"But I'm impatient, Paolo, since you're so old," she teased him, twisting her forefinger about the matted gray hair of his sturdy chest. "After all, a poor maid must eke out all she can from her old doddard of a spouse before he can no longer service her needs."
"What's that, you impertinent little trollop? For that, I'll punish you as I would have done when I held you on my knee years ago, Dorotea de Cordoba!" he retorted.
Laughingly, he seized her by the shoulders, forced her across his lap. Then, his left hand palming the small of her chiseled white back, he raised his right and delivered a good dozen noisy and stinging slaps over the proudly rounded, ivory-sheened bottom cheeks, while Dorotea pretended to cry and to plead for mercy, kicking up her lovely legs and showing him glimpses of the dark silky ringlets of that bewitching young cunt which had so avidly drained him of his sap on each occasion of their fusion. "Now then, have you learned your lesson, naughty child?" he breathed.
"Oh, yes, my lord and husband," she whispered meekly, though there was a roguish glint in her sparkling eyes. "I've learned a very good lesson."
"And what is it then, pray tell?"
"That whenever I anger or excite you, I'm sure you'll be faithful to me so that no other woman can ever hold you between her legs. Oh, then, hurry my dearest darling, adored Paolo, before you see some other wench aboard this ship whom you imagine more than poor me."
He roared with laughter, reached over to the night table to lift a goblet of wine and take a swig from it, then made her share it with him. Setting it back onto the table, he turned to her, pulled her down atop him, his hands squeezing her deliciously reddened bottom while she wriggled libidinously over him till at last she had fitted his resurgently stiffened prick into the warm hollow of her greedy young cunt.
With a squeal of delight, she pressed herself down to absorb it all, every rampant, rigid inch, into the center of her pulsating channel. She could feel it throbbingly alive inside of her, so that their lives were joined by this miracle of the flesh. Now he was beginning to move under her, frictioning the walls of her churning love-sheath, and she arched her body, thrusting her hips sharply at his burrowing prong as it scraped back and forth against the convulsively tightening walls.
"Ohh-ahh-ohh Paolo, Paolo!" she cried out, her breath coming in frantic gasps as he timed his gyrations with hers, working his cock in and out in steady and relentless friction. She reached down with one hand to caress his balls, coaxing out the sweet nectar that would lave the burningly eager walls of her passion-sheath.
His hands were busy too, adoring the panting ivory titties, squeezing the ripe, resilient buttocks, clamping against her hips to steady her to his cadence, till at last his fingers returned of preference to the lush curves of her behind, sinking in deeply as he felt his orgasmic tides nearing.
Dorotea de Cordoba moaned aloud, thrust her hands under his shoulders, her fingernails scoring his flesh, as her own spasm approached. She felt herself convulse, and then as she cried out wildly again, she felt the torrent of his gismic libation, and her body quaked endlessly in a long, continuous appeasement.
And the cabin was filled with the sighs and moans and gasps of ecstasy, a veritable symphony of love. There was no further thought-there would never be again-of the horrors of the Inquisition as an elderly husband who was yet youthful in amorous powers and a young wife already wise in the ways of satisfying so ardent a mate, pledged their vows exquisitely and passionately again.
EPILOGUE
Paolo and Dorotea de Cordoba were never seen nor heard from again, certainly not in Spain. Some say that they lived out the rest of their lives in the Azores. Some, that they made it, finally, to the new world.
Wherever they ended their years, it is a near certitude that they were long happy and loving years together. And with the treasure of Don Santiago, their fortune throughout those years was assured.
The Holy Inquisition ran its course.
Neither the Count de Cordoba nor his lovely and beautiful wife, Dorotea, ever knew that, in a fit of rage upon his return, Fra Marcando had killed Fra Pedroso for his treachery with the same dagger with which he had attacked Count de Cordoba. Paolo de Cordoba had not only protected himself in 'self-defense' as he thought of it but he had also served as Fra Marcando's executioner. Paolo had been so preoccupied when he had heard the approaching voice that day when he found the treasure that he had not recognized that there were, for a short moment, two arguing voices. Nor had he observed the agonized but muffled scream of Fra Pedroso when Fra Marcando stabbed him to death. Fra Marcando, of course, had learned of Fra Pedroso's various machinations and when he confronted him but a short way from where Count de Cordoba stood, had withstood all the insults and retorting accusations of the younger monk until Fra Pedroso threatened to reveal Marcando's corruption to Torquemada when he arrived from Barcelona.
That, of course, forced Fra Marcando into action and the rest is known.
