Through the ages women have been the sexual slaves of men. In some cases, rich and powerful men have used their positions to bring women crawling to their bodies, begging to service them in any way they desire. Using the whip, bondage, torture and demeaning sexual humiliation, these men transform women into quivering submissive instruments of their desire. In careful and intimate detail, Dr. Willis Lamb presents the story of sex-in-sadism from the early days of civilization. In hopes of promoting greater understanding of the sadomasochistic psyche, Dr. Lamb details every torture, punishment and wanton sexual act. A no holds barred history of sadistic masters and their cringes submissives.
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Today, with the clamor for women's liberation and thorough equality with the male sex, many of us begin to wonder if the sexual distinction between man and woman is ultimately to disappear. Indeed, in the costumes and the "free hair styles" adopted by both sexes these days in so many parts of the civilized world, we may be coming closer towards what facetiously is called "Unisex."
But when we read the long records of history back almost to the dawn of time, we observe that it is only recently that the female has become a kind of domina who despises men and uses them as her sexual or even psychological slaves. Some psychiatrists hold that this is nothing more than "penis envy," but of course we know that just as there are male sadists, so there are their prototypes to be found in the female species. The bloodthirsty Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary was one of these, and in her way as fiendishly cruel and murderous as Gilles de Rais, the Marshall of France at the time of Joan of Arc. For her, sadism was pathological: she sought the blood of the countless young girls she had put to torture and death to keep her own exquisitely white skin perennially soft and ageless.
The Bible tells us of many female martyrs who embraced the torture chamber, the burning stake, the whipping post, the executioner's axe or soldiers' flight of whirring arrows rather than recant their religious faith. But since many of these saints wrote their memoirs, today we can read between the lines and detect what the great psychologist Krafft-Ebing first named "masochism." In the eleventh and again in the fourteenth centuries in Europe, and particularly in France, there were sects of religious flagellants, the majority of whom were women and who scourged their naked or half-naked bodies as they walked from town to town to proclaim their unrelenting fealty to their religious devotions. But these flagellants, much like the Mexican Penitents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were imbued by a fervor of the flesh just as assuredly as they were impelled by their spiritual leanings to welcome pain for the sexual gratification which it provided in a dreary world where all that was taught was the immortality of man, the oppression of the rich and the unchanging squalor of the poor.
In the Oriental and near-Oriental countries where life has always been regarded as a bagatelle, the submission of the female came perhaps to its ultimate point. With the Chinese particularly, thousands of young girls whose parents were too poor to provide for another mouth to feed sold them to brothels where from an early age they were trained to be the slaves of men. Many were instructed in the role of slaves to be put to torture and bondage to whet the sadistic appetites of their wealthy male patrons. If one reads the late Robert van Gulik's famous "Judge Dee" stories about the Chinese magistrate who was renowned long before the savage Middle Ages of Europe, one discovers the merciless and sadistic treatment to which female culprits were subjected in the Chinese courtrooms. To extract the truth from a servant or slave, testimony was taken only under torture, for it was believed that no one could speak the truth without enduring pain that would strip away the expected tissue of lies. Consequently, it was common practice for a magistrate to order a servant girl who might have watched a murder take place in her master's house be flung down on the floor before the august bench at which he sat, with her body bared, and a wet cloth placed over the naked buttocks so that she might receive a lashing from the bamboo cane by the bailiff. Then and then only was her testimony taken as truth.
Today, to be sure, when psychiatry has reached its peak in the warp and woof of our overly sophisticated lives, we know how vital a role masochism, the urge to suffer, plays in our current sexual behavior. One of the most famous American publishers of erotica has just initiated a "degradation" series, each novel of which depicts a supposedly haughty, aloof and independent female who finds herself confronted by physical violence against which she is helpless. Ultimately, even as she revolts against the sexual depravities to which she is being subjected, she comes to yearn for them and finally to beg for their continuation. This theme, which only today is openly admitted, is what we shall discuss in the forthcoming chapters of our book. These chapters, by the way, will be presented in a kind of "case history" method, in order to vivify the authentic documentation of what customarily took place in the various periods and epochs of man's history. Perhaps there may be liberties taken for the sake of graphic realism, but it is well known that truth is very often stranger and more convincing then the gaudiest fiction.
THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER ONE: NICEA, SLA VE OF THE ROMA NS
It was the era of Tiberius, the cruel and malignant Roman Emperor, whose orgies and sex saturnalias had set a standard of depravity and ruthless extravagance which were to pave the way for the decline of that seemingly unconquerable empire and tax the commoners beyond their own resources . . . a situation which, ironically perhaps, exists even today with governmental burdens imposed upon people of fixed and moderate incomes!
But in those days, there were only the powerful and the poor, and the class distinctions were severely recognized. To be a Roman citizen was a passport to the very world for Rome was the world, extending itself constantly by new wars, new conquests, legions of slaves brought to the great city by the banks of the Tiber and there sold to avid buyers of human flesh. Some of these slaves were to be used in the kitchen or in the fields, and those with better education and antecedents than their humbler fellows would be perhaps used as scribes, or tutors to the young, or might even be privileged to handle the household accounts of a benign master.
But for the females, and especially if they were young and comely, their lot was to become slaves of pleasure, virtual concubines, or in some instances harlots for the many brothels of mighty Rome.
The fate of Nicea, an exquisite honey -haired Greek virgin from Persepolis, was perhaps written in the stars at her very birth when it was observed that she was exquisitely wrought, with delicate, sweet features. Her parents were poor and toiled on a little farm which they owned a dozen miles from the thrivingGreek city. But in the second year of the reign of Tiberius, the Helots embarked upon a stupid and senseless war against the Romans and were crushed within a month or two after their campaign. Among the many prisoners taken as a part of the spoils of victory was lovely Nicea. Two half-drunken Roman centurions had seen her trying to hide herself behind a plow on her parents' farm and had dragged her out to their commander, who had at once given orders that she was to be shackled, given food and drink, and made to march in the long processional back to the Imperial City.
Although a virgin and only seventeen, Nicea understood what awaited her. In her native Greece, girls were often wed as early as fifteen and sixteen, and there were many slaves in the wealthier homes who were still younger and who serviced masters and at times mistresses to celebrate the rituals of Priapus as well as those of Lesbos. She understood, also, having seen how some of the rebellious captives along the processional march back to Rome were treated, that it was to her own interest that she be as submissive as possible, and that she do nothing to antagonize her captors or ultimately, the one who would buy her as a slave. True, she regretted the loss of freedom, but she had already learned a fatalistic outlook, since in that early epoch in mankind's history, constant wars and slavery were accepted as the inevitable consequence of life itself.
About ten miles from Rome, the commander halted the processional and angrily ordered that two of the female captives be put to the lash for having tried to escape. All other captives in their chains were forced by the centurions, who drew their short spears or swords, to watch the punishment which would serve as an example.
Nicea observed with inward terror how one ripe-bosomed, chestnut-haired young woman of about twenty-five was dragged forward to a huge cypress tree, bound with thongs at her wrists as she embraced this tree, and then her chiton (short tunic) ripped off so that she was naked. Frantic with shame and terror, the victim looked back over her shoulder as a burly soldier approached, holding his heavy leather belt by the broad metal buckle to be used as a whip. And twenty-five times that thick belt cracked over the naked hindquarters of the rebellious captive, while she ground and twisted her body against the tough bark of the tree, rasping her inner thighs and cunt excruciatingly as well as her full, round titties whose nipples began to bleed from the scratchy bark as in her desperate twists and jerks under the belt, she tried to free herself from the fiery agony of the lashing.
The whipping over, she was released and fell to all fours, weeping bitterly. Two soldiers roughly raised her to her feet, not without fondling her titties and belly, and then shackled her again and dragged her by the hair back to her place in line Then the second victim was dragged to the whipping tree, a tall, slim saucy-featured black-haired girl of twenty-four, who was also bound with her arms embracing the solid tree, her tunic torn from her, and sentenced to thirty-five strokes with the belt, since she had committed the indignity of spitting in the centurion's face.
She tried to remain stoic as the heavy leather belt clung to the high-set oval-shaped cheeks of her ivory-tinted bottom, but by the fifteenth stroke began to writhe and sob and groan and plead for mercy.
The whipping went on inexorably until her buttocks, puffed and livid from the thrashing, were finally bleeding from the savage lashes of the soldier's belt. She sagged in her bonds, moaning hoarsely, and when she was released, the commander himself demanded whether she was now ready to show humility. As proof of it, she was made to lick his sandals with her tongue, while a soldier stood behind her with his belt ready if she should show repugnance at this servile task.
Then she was shackled again and forced back into line with the others. For young Nicea, it was an unforgettable lesson. She vowed then that she would do nothing to incur the punitive wrath of her masters, no matter who they might be.
At last the captives entered the Imperial City, and were quartered in the Mammertine Prison, that grim, dark-stoned building which had housed and was still to house so many thousands of Christian martyrs destined for the arena as victims of the maniacal sadism of the insane Nero and those others who would come after him.
Then, on the second day following their incarceration, Nicea and perhaps twenty other girls from her own village were taken in chains and wearing only short tunics and sandals, to the slave-dealer's market in the Square of the Caesars. Again Nicea watched with widened eyes and trembling limbs as her compatriots were made to ascend the wooden platform where the bearded Egyptian dealer and his two Numidian aids would "display the merchandise" for the throngs of buyers. These included fastidious, elegantly dressed matrons in their litters, held aloft by strong slaves. They had come to purchase some pretty girl for their own lustful pleasure, for many a Roman matron, bored and seeking distraction when her husband was away from the city on business for the Emperor, amused herself by having the household steward bringing a new slave girl before her, strip, torture and flog the innocent and helpless captive. And there was no appeal or justice granted a slave; under the law, a rebellious slave might be put to death or mutilated or whipped as often as he or she could endure the lash. A male slave could be sent to the arena to be pitted against gladiators or wild beasts as punishment for daring to lift his hand against his master; and for the female, it was not much better. The laws were tyrannical and there were no exceptions.
One by one the Grecian girls were exhibited to the buyers, their tunics removed, made to pose this way and that, squatting, turning slowly around, lifting their shackled wrists high above their heads, or in cross, spreading their thighs until the secrets of their loins were plainly gaped to the glittering eyes of these men and women buyers of human flesh.
Nicea herself was nearly last, and she preceded a weeping coppery-haired girl of eighteen, who had been betrothed to a handsome young Greek free man and who indeed had been about to be married on the very day the Roman soldiers had torn her from her lover's arms before the ceremony could be performed and before her maidenhead could be taken as his husbandly prize. Now a less loving male would enjoy her chastely guarded virtue and reward her with the lash if she showed reluctance to yield it at his command.
When at last it was the turn of the young Greek girl from Perseplos, the avid buyers crowded around the auction block as the slave-dealer ripped off her tunic and, putting his left hand on the top of her honey-haired head, forced her to stare out with eyes leveled at her potential purchasers. Her hands at once pressed over her mound of Venus, wanting to hide the most sacrosanct part of all her young, quivering body, but an angry order from the slave dealer made her lift her hands, and there was the clanking of chains from her wrists. To be presented thus in fetters, considerably augmented the purchase price, the wily dealer knew, and already there were hoarse shouts from his audience ordering him to begin the sale.
Nicea was finally sold for three thousand sesterces (the equivalent of $1800).
Straining her eyes against the intense sun which beat down upon the block, the naked honey-haired young Greek girl tried to see who had purchased her, her tender body shrinking at the thought that perhaps this very night her maidenhead would be ruthlessly pillaged from her.
The crowd grumblingly made way for a tall Egyptian named Hastrobal, who had come forward to take possession of Nicea not for himself, for he was only an overseer and himself a slave in behalf of the noble Lady Fulvia Astrobanti, the wife of an elderly Senator of the Imperial City.
Fulvia Astrobanti at twenty-nine was beautiful, haughty, black-haired and insatiably lecherous. It was mockingly said behind Senator Astrobanti's back that his crest should have a pair of horns upon it rather than the wreath that he and his father before him had won in the service of Rome. It was also said that he was impotent and that Fulvia herself had sent a pair of her comeliest slave girls, two young Thracians not more than fifteen summers, to his bedchamber to titillate and homage him, to see whether he could maintain an erection to satisfy her on that particular evening, and he had been quite unable to respond to all the artful ministrations of these charming hand maidens.
And it was true that Fulvia Astrobanti was the most ardent in the lists of fornicatory love, even with her own overseer, a man of forty who, it was reputed, had taught her many of the mystic sexual rituals used in the secret worship of the goddess Isis, and also of the Persian Islitar. She was known to have wagered vast sums of gold sesterces upon a handsome blonde gladiator named Marcus Donasto, who had just slain his twentieth victim before the eyes of the Emperor himself in the great arena.
But what was not known except to the unfortunate slaves in the household of the villa along the Via Pompeiianeum that Fulvia As-trobanti fulfilled her passions equally with those of her own sex, though here she preferred the role of dominatress and to select her bed-partners from among the prettiest slave girls in the villa. This, indeed, was why she had purchased Nicea, out of pure caprice, as her litter had been passing the slave mart. Her eyes had feasted on the girl's firm, closely-spaced round titties, and the smooth, deeply dimpled belly and the saucily upstandingly rounded bottom cheeks and the gracefully full thighs.
When Hastrobal reached the platform, he took Nicea by the elbow and murmured to her in her own native tongue, "You have been purchased by my mistress, the Lady Fulvia Astro-banti. Your virginity is safe so long as you please her. Do not show yourself to be tearful, sulky or insolent. The whip rules in her household. Obey, submit I advise you thus as a slave myself. Come now, she wishes you to clamber into the litter with her that she may inspect you closely."
Mingled fear and gratitude shown in Nicea's quick look at the tall, somber-visaged Egyptian. Though grateful that her maiden head would be spared, the thought of the whip terrified her. She remembered how she had seen the centurion whip those two girls who had tried to run away. Even as a child, she had never known the ignominy and humiliation of the lash; her parents had doted on her and treated her only with kindness.
Shrinking, trembling, she let herself be led to the litter, and there she saw the imperious face of her new owner, the silver bracelets on the ivory arms, the jeweled rings upon the long, slim fingers. Hastily, at Lady Fulvia's command, she climbed into the litter and lay on her back, trembling uncontrollably.
"And only seventeen, and a pure virgin what luck!" she heard her new mistress gloatingly murmur. Then she felt the touch of Lady Fulvia's fingers on her naked titties, then her belly, then the insides of her thighs. Instinctively she clutched those round, satiny columns, but was rewarded at once by a vicious pinch to her belly as her new mistress hissed, "Don't dare try to Conceal yourself, you little Greek bitch! I've bought you, you're my slave. Spread your thighs more, girl!"
And she did, trying to fight the tears that edged under her lids. She felt the noble Roman matron's fingers glide along her belly now, down towards her mound, and then she uttered a choking gasp as she felt Fulvia Astrobanti pry apart the labia of her cunt and delve a forefinger up to verify the maiden seal. Shamed, despondent at this obscene palpitation of her tender young naked body, she could not suppress her tears now.
"You stupid little fool!" her mistress irritatedly declared. "Do you think yourself a princess, then, to shrink from my touch? I will have Hastrobal give you the lash after the midday meal, to introduce you to the ways of my household! Now lie back, and lift your shackled wrists up to your bosom, and do not dare at any time to twist away from my touches!"
Necia whimpered as she obeyed her new owner, and dimly she began to realize that even though her prayers had been answered and no brutal or elderly man had purchased her, she was not to be spared the ignominy and pain which was the lot of every slave taken by the Romans. Closing her eyes, gritting her teeth, she lay beside Fulvia Astrobanti and suffered in silence the patrician woman's lingering and perverse inspection. TherE was no part of her which the Roman dominatress did not touch and palpate in her avid desire to appraise the charms of her newest acquisition. And by the time they reached the villa, there were tears on the cheeks of the lovely young Greek girl and her face was flushed and her bosom heaving in distraught emotion.
Fulvia Astrobanti stepped out of the litter as the bearers hastened to attend her and aid her up the marble steps of the imposing edifice. As for Nicea, her cheeks were scarlet when she was obliged to follow, stillstark naked and with the shackles on her wrists. Once inside the villa, Lady Fulvia turned to her Egyptian overseer and directed, "Hastrobal, take this girl to the bath, give her a little food and wine but not too much, for I do not wish her to be too drowsy when she feels the whip. Then, after I have had my repast, bring her to the punishment room outside my chambers and prepare her for the lashing. It may be that I shall do her the untold honor of whipping her myself."
"At your command, noble lady," the overseer respectfully inclined his head. This done, he turned to the trembling naked Greek girl and ordered, "Follow me, girl, and be quick!" Tears ran down Nicea's cheeks again as she dolefully followed the somber-faced Egyptian, for the prospect of being whipped was terrifying to her. Never had she known that humiliating and painful chastisement, but of course it was imposed upon her at the very beginning of her servitude so that she might understand the lowliness of her status in this household. She would be taught and by a particularly perverse tutress, that her body was no longer her own, that she had no rights whatsoever, and that she existed solely for the amusement of her owner.
She followed the Egyptian down a long hall with many marble columns, towards the back of the villa, and then he turned to the right and brought her to a circular chamber across from which rose the large bath chamber designated for the slaves. There were stone benches on either side of the archway leading to this bath chamber and Nicea perceived that two girls sat on each bench, dressed in short white linen tunics which left their arms bare, began at the valley of their titties and descended to about mid thigh. This garment and sandals comprised their complete attire. Also, on the left wrist of each girl was a hammered silver bracelet with the seal of Fluvia Astrobanti engraved into the soft precious metal, At the sight of the overseer, four young slave-girls sprang to their feet and quickly approached. "This is the new slave Nicea," Hastobal informed them. "Have her bathed, then let her be fed and given a little of the Thracian wine, after which you, Judith" this to an olive skinned, dark-brown-haired Cretan girl who was not much more than seventeen "Will come to tell me that she is ready to be shown to the mistress."
"It shall be done, Hastrobal," the young Cretan girl murmured, sending at the same time a sympathetic look towards the trembling naked Greek girl. For everyone in the household knew the terrible meaning of that term, "presented to the mistress," since it invariably meant the whip or at least some form of torment which had nothing to do with the conduct of a slave. There was not one of these four, for instance, who herself had not suffered many a time at the whim of Fulvia Astrobani, and so all of them pitied Nicea.
The overseer himself removed the shackles from Nicea's wrists. "In this household, girl," he said in his solemn voice, "you will not be fettered unless, of course, you make the dreadful mistake of trying to run away. And I would advise you never to think of such an act, because it would be pitilessly punished. Marta," this time he addressed a tall, coppery-haired girl of about eighteen, a slave taken in the campaign against the Gauls, "tell Nicea what happened to Penelope but a month ago. She was a new slave, but a week in this villa, and she longed for her homeland and she was crushed by her first whipping from my hand."
Nicea turned to stare at the slim young red-haired girl who, her face shadowed with remembrance, informed her: "She had reached the Atrium Gate when a soldier recognized her bracelet and captured her. Seeing the crest of our noble mistress, he himself brought her back to Hastrobal. The mistress condemned her to be whipped with thorns on her breasts and thighs, then to be flogged with a rod of birch switches on her buttocks to the blood. Then hysop was poured upon the wounds, and that night she was offered to the Lady Fulvia's guests to be enjoyed in any fashion they desired. The next day, Hastrobal took her to the itrineum (the lowest brothel in the slums of Rome), where she would have to service the poorest wretches and the scum of the city."
Nicea sHuddered at this calmly narrated story, comprehending what anguish the unfortunate slave girl must have suffered. She vowed not to try to escape and to obey humbly any order given her though she could not guess what degradation soon awaited her.
"A last word of advice, girl," Hastrobal gruffly told her, "I must take you back to the mistress and give you the whip. It may be, of course, that she will decide to inflict the punishment herself. In either case, I counsel you strongly to be as courageous as you can, not to cry out too soon or to beseech mercy too often. She will lay on the lash the harder if she thinks you a weakling. And now, go have your bath and your meal, and meditate on what I have told you."
As soon as Hastrobal had left, the four slave-girls surrounded the trembling, naked Nicea. "Come, Nicea," the Cretan girl Judith gently urged, "Do not cry. Why, the bath is lovely, and we are to annoint your body with precious oils and rare scents. Now we will take the shackles off your wrists, and you may enjoy your meal and your wine."
"Oh, but then I am to be to be whipped!" the lovely naked Greek girl groaned.
"All of us are," Judith said simply with a shrug of her lovely shoulders. "The thing to do is not to offend the mistress and always to be on the good side of Hastrobal. Yes, he is a slave himself, but he has a good heart. And often when the mistress is tired or preparing for a banquet, she lets him apply the lash, and he knows just how to make it sound very harsh and yet not make cruel marks on a girl's tender skin."
The overseer had handed Judith the key .to Nicea's shackles, and they were now removed. Nicea uttered a sigh, extended her beautiful arms and stared at her wrists. The angry red chafe-marks left by the irons appeared, a kind of terrible symbol of the future which she was to begin this very day. She bowed her head and wept, while the other girls tried to console her.
They led her down into the huge sunken bath which occupied nearly all of the spacious chamber, and two girls knelt on the edge to rub myrrh and jasmine oils on the glistening body of the downhearted new slave.
After the bath was over, the four girls dried the newcomer's body with fine linen cloth, and then urged her to stretch out upon one of the stone benches so that Marta could ungent her body with a soft, sweet-smelling cream.
Meanwhile, one of the other girls had hurried to the kitchen to bring back figs, dates, a bit of fowl, and a cup of Thracian wine. Nicea discovered that she was ravenously hungry, and ate with good appetite and drank the wine. It put color back into her cheeks, and the other slave girls glanced at one another and nodded. When the Cretan girl saw that Nicea had quite finished and seemed more composed, she murmured, "I must go tell Hastrobal that you are ready to shown to the mistress."
Tears sprang at once to Nicea's beautiful eyes. Judith's words had recalled the terrible moment ahead of her, this "welcoming" of a new slave into the household of the haughty Lady Fulvia. And remembering how arrogantly and contemptuously her mistress had pinched and tweaked and prodded her naked body in the litter on their way from the slave mart, she closed her eyes and shivered, her heart beating rapidly. Oh, what would the whip be like, she wondered, she who had never known its shame and torment.
A few moments later, the overseer entered the circular chamber and beckoned to Nicea. "Follow me, Nicea. The mistress is ready for you," he said.
"Am I-am I to go like this?" the Greek girl stammered.
"Of course, you silly little fool!" Hastrobal snapped. "I will give you a valuable lesson in advance, and it will not cost you any stripes this time. The mistress bade me report to her what you said and how you acted when I told you to come with me for your whipping. Well, I shall say that you were courageous and obedient. Otherwise, be very certain she would lash you much more cruelly. Now, for the lesson: you are a slave, you have no rights, your body does not belong to you, and therefore the idea of modesty is ridiculous for a slave. That is why when you are summoned to her, even if you be naked, you may not delay so much as a moment to put on a tunic or robe. Do you understand?"
Her eyes blinded by tears, poor Nicea nodded, and then slowly followed the overseer down the corridor. Her legs threatened to give way beneath her at any moment, as they came closer to the luxurious quarters of the Lady Fulvia Astrobanti.
He paused just before entering the mistress's chamber to give Nicea a stern look, then murmured: "Now remember what I told you, girl.
Smile, show yourself to be humble and grateful. Don't have the slightest concern that you are naked. When the whip is laid on, try not to beg for mercy to quickly. O yes, she will expect you to implore mercy, but grit your teeth and take all the strokes you can, till you think you can take no more, before you utter a single word begging her to spare you. Do that, and it will not be so bad."
"I thank you, H Hastrobal," Nicea fal-teringly whispered back.
But when the overseer swept aside the curtain which led to the foyer of Lady Fulvia's private chambers, Nicea's eyes widened with shame and fear. She beheld her mistress in the very next room, lounging upon a couch clad in only a filmy robe through which her body was almost completely revealed, so diaphanous was it. And seated on a padded stool beside the couch, his hands on his knees, looking up at her with an ardent gaze, was a handsome young man with tousled black curls and a strong, athletic body.
Nicea was to learn that this was Pollux Meander, a dissolute young wastrel born to wealthy, old parents and who was the Lady Fulvia's lover.
"Ah, the new Greek slave, Pollux," she heard her mistress exclaim. "Come forward with her, Hastrobal. Now, my dear one, tell me if you don't think I have good taste. I acquired her at the slave mart this very day."
The young roue rose from his stool and contemplated the blushing, naked Nicea. She was not shackled, but her hands longed to clap over her mount and hide her virgin nook from the gleaming eyes of this man. Gentle and chaste though she was, even Nicea could see in his face the marks of dissipation and sensuality which had stamped him so indelibly. But even she could not be prepared for what he was to do to her.
"Does my lady wish me to apply the whip?" Hastrobal inclined his head and crossed his arms on his chest in sign of respect.
"I think not this time. I shall do it myself. Bring me hmm her skin is quite delicate, I can see well, Hastrobal, a light birch rod. Mind you, one with not too many sharp twigs. I do not wish to scratch that soft skin unless the little bitch deserves it. By the by, how did she behave when you came for her?"
"Quite bravely, quite obediently, good mistress," the overseer replied, and Nicea shot him a look of ineffable gratitude.
"A moment, Hastrobal!" Lady Fulvia's insolent voice halted him as he turned to go. "Bring also a thin short strap. I love to hear the sound of leather on the soft tender bottom of a little bitch like this. Be quick now, man!"
Hastrobal bowed and, passing by the trembling naked Greek girl, whispered, "Kneel down at once and bow your head towards your mistress." Then he strode off in search of the whipping instruments which had been ordered. Nicea, doing her best to control her sobs, slowly sank down on her knees and clasped her hands before the imperious Roman matron.
"At least," Pollux Meander remarked, "she's a docile little slut."
"But of course, my darling! I'm sure the other slaves acquainted her with my methods, just as I am that my overseer explained to her what I demand of a new slave," Lady Fulvia retorted.
The overseer returned with a birch rod comprising perhaps five slender, flexible withes, from which the twigs had been cropped. It was bound at the end with a linen cloth to serve as grip for the wielder. Also, he had procured a leather strap about fourteen inches long, two inches wide, and about a quarter of an inch thick, the whipping end being cut into a kind of broad oval so as to impart more sting upon impact with the victim's naked flesh.
Meanwhile, the arrogant matron had risen from her couch and walked towards him to accept the instruments. "These will do, Hastrobal. Leave us!" she curtly ordered.
Once again he inclined his head and left the chamber. "Pollux, my dear one, will you not assist me in preparing this little slave for her thrashing?" Lady Fulvia cooed as she turned towards her lover.
"With the greatest of pleasure, my beautiful Fulvia. How do you wish her posed?" the young wastrel approached now, his eyes glittering with anticipation. He put a hand on Nicea's shoulder and caressed it, and the girl could not help shivering and biting her lips in mortal fear. His eyes feasted on the lovely rounds of her titties, on the smooth belly and the dark-blonde curls of her virgin cunthole.
"Let me see now," the matron pursed her lips. "Pose her against that round marble column in the center of the room. Then take a cord and tie each of her thumbs together. Thus she will be embracing the column as she awaits the lash."
"A pity, to waste such an embrace upon senseless stone," the young profligate chuckled. Then, reaching down and seizing Nicea by the wrists, he ordered her to follow him and led her to the column. Bidding her to embrace it with her arms, he swiftly tethered her with the cord so that each thumb was tightly bound to the other. The cruel pressure of the knots made her thumbs ache, and forced her to flatten her titties and belly against the cold marble. Yet it emphasized the jutting rounds of her magnificent bottom, and the white marble made her soft carnation-tinted skin even more exquisitely alluring.
Lady Fulvia now approached, brandishing the birch. She took her place at the girl's left, laid the rod straight across the roundest, plumpest curves of both flinching bottom-cheeks, and then, sucking in her breath, delivered the first cut. The whistling kiss of the switches made Nicea utter a stifled groan, and she tightened all her muscles in heroic resistance to meet her ordeal. The scolding heat of that first stroke was more torturing than she had imagined, and it was all she could do to keep from crying out.
"What soft fine skin! See, Pollux, how nicely it marks from the rod!" the matron purred, her sadism already mounting.
Moving backward a step, she now directed the birch across the supple, deeply hollowed back just above the chinkbone, a cruel stroke which was so unexpected and vicious that Nicea jerked madly and tilted back her head as her tear-filled eyes sought the ceiling. Her mouth gaped in a panting little cry: "Ohh-aahhh!" but even as the burning pain made her squirm against the cold stone, she desperately remembered what Hastrobal had told her. She must not call out for mercy at any cost, even if she were to die under the whipping.
Satisfied with the girl's docility, the matron now resumed the birching of Nicea's buttocks. She dealt the trembling, squirming, sobbing girl about a dozen stinging cuts, laying them solidly across both quaking asscheeks, and then paused to contemplate her handiwork. The darkening red streaks stood out on the magnificent posterior and thus intensified the purity of the unmarked flesh above and below. Nicea had pressed her right cheek against the round marble column, and tears ran down her face and her flattened titties heaved with anguish. It felt as if her bottom were on fire, and she prayed that this unjust and undeserved whipping was now at an end. In this, of course, she was pitifully mistaken.
"There!" Lady Fulvia exclaimed in a husky, sensual voice, "now her bottom is ready for the strap, dear Pollux. Will you please me by giving it to her? And then, my beloved one, please me still more by accepting her maidenhead as my gift to you for the happy hours you bestowed upon me."
"You are too kind, too beautiful," he exclaimed ecstatically. He took her hand, the same hand which had cast aside the frayed rod, and kissed it, then began to kiss her arm up to the crook of the elbow. "But rest assured, beloved Fulvia, that I do this only to please you, for I would rather it were you in my arms."
"Who says I shall not be?" the lustful matron purred. Then she went back to her couch and reclined upon it, her face flushed and her eyes burning with desire as she watched her young lover take the leather strap and approach the weeping Greek girl.
Pollux Meander lifted the strap and slashed it furiously across the base of Nicea's shapely rounded ass. A wailing cry escaped the naked victim, and again she tried to break free of the rope that held her tumbs together so tightly on the other side of the marble column. She twisted her tearstained face back over her shoulder to implore mercy from this depraved young man. And then she uttered a shriek of consternation: he had removed his tunic and underlinen, and was naked in his sandals, his prick already in violent erection between his wiry thighs.
Again and again the strap visited her bottom. Nicea forgot the advice of Hastrobal; twisting and wriggling, kicking up one leg and then the other, she babblingly implored mercy: "Ohhahrr oh in the name of all the gods on Mount Olympus, have mercy on me I have done nothing I will obey I will be a good slave aiiiii ooohhh aaahhhrrr, oh have pity, it is too much, I can't endure it!"
Fulvia Astrobanti had doffed her diaphanous robe and was naked now on the couch. She sat upon its edge, one finger playing with her furry slit, the other hand narcissistically fondling one of her dark-tipped boobies. With flaming eyes and open, wet, salacious mouth, she followed the torture of the helpless and innocent young slave-girl.
Pollux Meander did not stop until he was out of breath and his arm aching. He had inflicted at least fifty Strokes of the strap on poor Nicea's beautiful bottom, which was now swollen and inflamed. The girl had slumped, her head sagging, held up only by the cruel cord which tied her thumbs together on the other side of the round stone pillar. Now he moved behind it and cut that cord. As she crumpled to the floor of the chamber, he cast aside the strap and fell upon her.
Nicea uttered a shriek and tried desperately to defend herself. With a growl of joy, the vicious young debauchee struck her on the side of the jaw, momentarily stunning her. Then, reaching under her to grip her swollen bottom globes with his digging fingers, he brutally fucked her.
And when he had risen from her sprawled, bleeding, half-conscious body, he saw that Fulvia Astrobanti had already summoned another slave girl with a ewer of perfumed water and a linen cloth to sponge his prong and to prepare him in turn for her own shameless lusts.
Once the girl had been dismissed, the naked lover of the Roman matron sank down upon the couch with his perverse mistress who fondled and kissed him until he was again renewed in strength to fuck her.
Thus a gentle and innocent Greek girl, taken as a slave into the household of a Roman strumpet, became a submissive. For in the months that followed, poor Nicea often had to participate in such orgies, suffering the lash and even torture simply to divert the sadistic whims of her imperious mistress.
Yet her fate was not much different from that of countless slaves in Roman households of that time. And at last, some years later, when the Lady Fulvia had tired of her, Nicea was given to the lowliest brothel in the slums of Rome, where doubtless she soon perished. It was her destiny, yet the rulers of Rome cared little. There were always new slaves for the lash and for lust so long as the legions could conquer enemy lands!
CHAPTER TWO: MARGIT, THE FEUDAL SERF
Margit Roux was nineteen, and, the villagers said, old for marriage. Had not young Guillemette and Johanna already mated at fifteen and sixteen respectively and spent their wedding nights in the grim castle of the mighty Baron Claude de Bross-Lancrey? There were indeed some who considered Margit fey, touched by the woodland spirits and given to sorcery, but since she was a gentle girl and her parents were much be loved in this lavish estate near the heart of Normandy, they kept their peace. For to have gossiped about such things in this dark age of the Black Plague would have brought young Margit to the burning stake, there to die in the blackening flames as a sorceress and witch.
All she had actually done, it was true, was to find a mongrel dog which had broken its leg and which was in great pain. With her gentle hands, she had soothed the savage beast and, miracle, made a crude splint for the leg with a piece of wood and strips of cloth from her coarse petticoat. Now the dog ran as if it had never been injured, and it had even killed one of Goodwife Nercier's hens. But in the Middle Ages in feudal Europe, it could be said that Margit Roux had bewitched the dog and made it her familiar and that it had killed the hen because once Goodwife Nercier had said unflattering things to Margit about her lack of a husband.
No, the little village of Clarandon did not speak of witchcraft or sorcery, for all the soldiers of the cruel Baron Claude were forever about, collecting taxes, hanging poachers who dared to bring down a deer with bow and arrow on the Baron's estate. And those rough men-at-arms would have been the first to hale this gentle, quiet and lovely girl before their brutal master and have her punished as a witch.
Margit's own father, crippled and white-haired though he was but fifty years of age (in those times, such an age was almost miraculous in itself, for pestilence and famine flourished throughout Europe and many men died before they reached their thirtieth summer), had spoken to her of late with great concern. "Girl, you must take a husband ere much longer. Thus far we have been fortunate, your mother and I and you, in not being singled out by the Baron's retainers for oppressive taxes and tithes. But your beauty is known to him, and he covets you. Therefore you must wed quickly so that he may at last have the droit du seigneur, the right of the first night."
"But I do not understand, my good father," Margit gently answered. She was tall, perhaps five feet seven inches in height, with long russet-hued tresses that fell to her waist. In her coarse kirtle and petticoat, barefooted, and wearing only a thin shift beneath her outer garments, she possessed already a mouth-wateringly tempting form. Had she been born of noble birth in the court of France, she might have been a princess, or a duchess or even a countess, with a retinue of poets and courtiers singing her praises. But here in this forsaken little province, far from the fripperies of the royal court, she knew only the tortuous world established by the mighty Baron. She aided her father in tilling the soil, and her mother in preparing the simple meals and in sewing. But she had not yet lain with a man, and she was not drawn to anyone that way.
"My daughter," her father patiently explained, "it is the law of the land and you nor I cannot gainsay it. It means only this, my daughter, that when you are wed to the man of your choice, and after he and you have obtained permission from the Baron, you must go to the castle on the night of your marriage, there to deliver up to your feudal lord the privileges of your body."
"It will be he, then, who will take my maidenhead, my father?" Margit asked with widened dark-brown eyes.
"I fear so, my poor child. This is why I tell you to become betrothed at once. Else the Baron will send his men for you and perchance have his will of you and shame and sully you so that no man will wed you. Let it be done quickly; and then, once he has had you mayhap this great lord will forget your beauty."
Margit Roux promised to ponder on what her father had said. She was their only child, three other babes having been born sickly and dying after a few months. That was why they cherished her, since she was their only descendant. And of course with marriage, their humble name would perish once she changed it to that of her spouse and consort.
And on this radiant May day, Margit Roux was picking wildflowers in the little garden next to the humble cottage in which she and her parents dwelt in at the pleasure of the lordly Baron Claude de Bross-Lancrey. As she bent over the flowers, the sunlight was blotted out, and she turned to see a man on horseback, in armor, tilting up the visor of his helmet and staring coldly at her. He had thick black brows, a hawk-like nose, a thin cruel mouth, and she recognized at once from his crest which was embossed on his shield that he was the dreaded lord of this fief.
Claude de Bross-Lancery had been granted these estates in Normandy by his grateful monarch Louis VII for valor in the Second Crusade. This was the crusade which had been preached by St. Bernard of Clairvaux after the fall of Edessa in 1144, led by Emperor Conrad III and the French King, and ended in dismal failure. It lasted from 1147 to 1149, and the Baron who sat astride his snorting black stallion had acquitted himself with special valor. So his king and liege lord had given him this fief and all the people dwelling upon it, that therefore their lives would be under his protection and rule. It was now the year 1154, and the Baron was forty-two, vicious and debauched. His beautiful baroness, the Lady Wilhelmine of Plecy, whom he had wed upon his return from the Crusade, had died two years later mysteriously. She had had no issue, and he had since not taken another wife. But the villagers had heard stories of the riotous feasts and the savage orgies that took place at his castle, and when so his retainers rode at night, they locked themselves into their little huts and extinguished what light they had and prayed that there would not be a knock of a mailed fist upon their hovel's door to drag forth their daughters to the tyrant.
Yes, it was said that Margit Roux was perhaps a witch because thus far, at her advanced age of nineteen, the Baron's men had not yet brought her to that sinister castle.
Now seeing the man who had the right to her virginity and indeed to her very life, she curtsied and bowed her head. "What is your name, child?" he asked in a hoarse voice.
"It is Margit Roux, my lord," was her reply.
"Diantre! I have heard much of you, fair damsel. One night I shall send for you. Keep yourself in readiness until then, and take care that you lie with no serf without my blessing or you shall be flogged and branded as a strumpet," he said coldly. Then he spurred his horse on down the road, and Margit trembled.
No one dared cross the Baron, for he had the rank of war lord to King Louis VII himself. He alone could dispense the high and the low justice, and at his command, a man could be hanged from the yew tree in his courtyard, or a scolding wife ducked in the pond and then flogged by the belts of his retainers back to her hovel. He was the lord of life and death in this little village in France of the twelfth century, and he was to be Margit Roux's demon and master . . .
But the gentle blonde girl had been stricken with fear at that meeting, and she had bethought herself of her father's advice. That was why, two days after that meeting, she went across the field to the cottage of Jehan le Beausoleil, a tall, rather gruff farmer in his twenty-eighth year who tilled an acre more of land for the Baron than did her father. Jehan was not prepossessing, and neither could he read or write but then, neither could she herself. The monks and the nobility jealously guarded knowledge, for if the common serfs were to become educated, they might be incited to revolt against their overlords of church and land.
Jehan lived with his mother, a toothless, almost senile woman of fifty-four who was not expected to live through the next winter. He had had a wife when he was sixteen, and she had died of the pox four years ago. But of all the men in the village, Margit could think only of him as a possible husband, for he was the least brutal and the least surly towards her whenever they chanced to meet.
Blushingly, as he admitted her into his cottage and wonderingly bade her sit down and tell him what it was she wished to discuss, the blonde virgin found herself unable to speak for sheer embarrassment. Then he prompted her, "Come now, Margit, you did not walk across the field to stare at me with those sheep's eyes of yours."
"It is true, good Jehan. Will you not forgive my wantonness? I have come this day to offer myself to you as your wife if you will have me. If I find favor in your eyes, I shall tell my parents to sue before the Baron so that the banns may be proclaimed."
"Why, this is right good news, girl!" he chuckled as he rose to stare at her. Yes, she would make a good wife. Her hips were full and ripe, her waist easy to span with both his hands, and her breasts were high-set round globes on which he could pillow his head on a cold night. "I do not hold you wanton, Margit. And though I had not thought of taking a new wife, you will do as well as any other."
"I thank you, Jehan. With your permission, then, I will speak to my parents who will arrange it all."
And that was how Margit Roux took the bold step of placing herself, as she believed, beyond the reach of the lecherous Baron, knowing just the same that her first night as a bride must be spent in his castle. But at least after that one night, the security of marriage to one of his own serfs on whom he looked with kindness for Jehan was an industrious worker, and only last Christmas had received a silver piece from the steward of the Baron himself would be guarantee to protect her fair name and chastity when the odious but inevitable sacrifice had been made . . . .
And so a few days later Margit's mother and father timidly sought audience with Baron Claude de Bross-Lancery. The steward, the wily, malicious Michel Tourdieu, pulled at his beard and hedged, "The great lord is occupied now. Perhaps if you have a bit of mead or a comb of honey to give me, I will see what I can do to grant you a moment of his precious day a week hence."
"But the matter is of great urgency, my lord steward," Margit's buxom, graying mother pleaded. "I myself will bake you some honey-cakes, and you shall have a comb of honey all to yourself and I will knit you a new doublet into the bargain. Let it be tomorrow, then, I beg of you?"
"Bring the gifts here by noon, then, and I shall see to it," was the steward's reply. And so on the very next day, Margit's mother came with a covered earthen bowl in which she had laid the newly baked honey cakes, and her husband carried a jug of sweet mead, and they presented themselves before the steward. He accepted the gifts, and reminded Margit's mother that she must show him the cloth of which the doublet was to be made and that it must be of the finest workmanship. And after she had promised, he shrugged and remarked, "You may go into the hall now; he is there with his master of the hunt. But be quick about it."
So they presented themselves before the surly armored lord of the fief, and hesitantly and humbly Margit's father begged the Baron's permission for his daughter to wed one Jehan le Beauso-leil.
"The sly wench thinks to escape me, does she?" Baron Claude grinned, in high good humor. He was arranging for a hunt on the next day, and there would be great sport. His neighbors from the surrounding fiefs would be present, and there would be venison and roast boar and wines, and perchance some of the winsome ladies from those neighboring courts would sit at his table. He knew of one, the plump but willing Matilde de Carvoisier-Pretonne, a widow at twenty, and it was rumored, as passionate between the sheets as any slut who sold her body. He would tumble this russet-haired wench with gusto, then enjoy Matilde in his good time.
"Oh no, my lord Baron," Margit's mother hastily interposed, "it is high time my daughter was wed. She has nineteen summers and those in the village who are loose tongued say that she may be barren. It is to put an end to such gossip that my husband and I beseech you to grant permission for this union."
"Well, I have no wish to say no to you, good woman. You have toiled for me well, and you are deserving of this grant. Let the banns be proclaimed at once, then. And the wedding two weeks hence, on the Friday evening. You will not forget what is to be done after the words have been spoken by the priest?"
"Oh no, my lord, nor has my daughter," Margit's mother quickly replied as she bowed before the cruel feudal despot.
And so the ancient ceremonial was followed to the letter. Both Margit and Jehan came to the great hall of the feudal lord, clad only in white shifts, barefooted, and knelt before the dais on which he sat in a huge chair whose back showed his noble crest. He stared down upon them both, and his eyes blazed as they fixed on Margit's round thrusting young titties, and at the smooth goblet of her belly against which the thin shift clung like a carress. Then Jehan humbly begged permission of his lord to wed the girl beside him, and the Baron declared, "I grant it here and now, and pledge my oath as lord of this fief from the King himself. Let the marriage take place this
Saturday at noon, and let it be told me when it is done."
With this, he rose from the massive chair and left the two kneeling young people there before symbol of his puissance. Margit could not help shivering as she rose, for she knew well what this meant for her only a few days hence. Once the rites had been performed which made her and Jehan one, then Jehan himself must, in the same penitential shift, go back to the great hall and tell the Baron that he humbly submitted his wife for the droit du seigneur.
The rites were simple indeed. The old village priest performed them, and the parents of Margit and Jehan congratulated them both, but there was no hearty joy in their words. For all of them knew that this night young lovely virginal Margit must go alone and unattended to the castel there to submit her maidenhead to the will of the lord of the fief.
It was Margit's mother," who herself had been young and desirable as her daughter was now, who took her aside that afternoon and told her what she must and must not do. "There will be his retainers in the hall of the castle and on the stairs and on the landings, my child," she said gently. "They will say wicked things to you and mock at you and perhaps even touch you. You must not think of these things, and you must go steadfastly onward till you reach the chamber of the lord. Then what he does to you, you must accept without protest or struggle. It is the law of our land, and for hundreds of years it has been so and doubtless will be so for many more. It is true that there are lords who, perhaps because of age or infirmity, do not wish to take this right unto themselves and are thus merciful. But he-" and by this Margit knew her mother meant the somber, cruel-faced man who had spoken to her from the saddle of his war horse "Will, take his right and that lustily, you may depend on it, my poor child."
"But is it not a sin to be taken by a man one does not love, Mother?" Margit asked.
With a weary sigh, the woman replied "For such poor folk as we are, my dear one, the sin is not of our making. We must bow to the law of those who are rich and strong and who govern us in their power. But the good priest, Father Rene, will tell you that you have done no sin. Think on it only as a duty, and once given, over and done with forever. Then you and your husband may begin your lives."
It was good counsel, and indeed, the only such that Margit's mother could give her. She herself as a bride of sixteen, had been on the fief next to Baron Claude's, and Margit's father had also been a serf there. They had done what Margit and Jehan had had to do this very day, and Margit's mother had gone alone to the castle. Her lord had been a man in his late forties, fat and corrupt, and impudent. He had tumbled her about on the bed naked, pawed at her and kissed her slobberingly, but he had not been able to fuck her and take her maidenhead. So in his coarse humor, he had had his seneschal substitute for him and take the cherry so that by proxy he had fulfilled the law. Then, a year later after his death, the Baron Claude de Bross-Lancrey had purchased some of the land from the boy successor, whose coffers were impoverished because of his father's sudden death and many debts. That was how Margit's mother and father had come to live here under the Baron's rule. So she well knew what it would be for Margit yet neither of them could know what awaited the lovely, gentle girl this night of nights.. .
She went in her shift at dusk that night, barefooted with a garland of bluebells about her neck. Her mother had bathed her, and given her a new shift, which she herself had especially sewn for the occasion. On the left breast, it bore the crest of the lord of the fief. She had kissed Margit, as one might kiss farewell, and there had been tears in her eyes which she had tried to hide. With heavy heart, the girl had begun her pilgrimage to that towering, gloomy castle a mile beyond the little hovel where she and her parents lived. And when she reached the castle, there were retainers in armor sitting on the steps before the great door, and their words made her cheeks flame and her eyes close at the obscenity and lustful envy and the lewd praise they made of her body. One of them had, with mock gallantry, gone to the great door and opened it for her, but he had claimed for his reward a kiss upon her swelling titties. Margit suffered this without a word, wisely understanding that to show shame or to rebel would only draw more excoriating abuse upon her person.
Up the stairs she went, there again to be jeered at by servants. One of them called after her,. "Tis a cold night, sweeting, so be sure to warm the Baron's bed and to open your legs well so that he may warm his sword in that little furnace between them!"
As she turned upon the landing, the tall gawk steward stood there, a smirk on his thin face. "He awaits you, girl," the man said roughly. "The last chamber at the end of the hall and to your right. Hasten to him, he has already called for you a dozen times!"
Margit stammered her thanks in a faint voice, and, mustering her courage, went down the corridor. A lighted torch thrust into a metal stand lighted the way to that dark door behind which was her master and her lord, the one who would take her maidenhead this night and not Jehan.
Timidly she knocked at the door and the Baron bawled out, "Make haste, you are late already, wench!"
She opened it then, and entered, and her eyes widened and a sickening fear gnawed at her belly. He was already naked, hairy, the purplish marks of old wounds on his thighs and calves, his arms and chest. And in his right hand he held a braided leather whip, such as one used to thrash the hunting hounds when they had brought back no quarry-
"By the rood, wench, you have kept me waiting longer than you should! Do you not come in humility and joy to your lord this night?" he demanded in a rasping voice.
"Aye, my lord Baron," she quavered.
"Then show your fealty, girl. Off with that ugly shift and let me see what will warm my bed this cold night!" He grumbled. The bed was huge and canopied and postered, and beside it on a low table was a flagon of mulled wine. He moved now to it, lifted the flagon in one hand and tilted it to his mouth. Then he belched, set the flagon back down, and turned to stare at her: "What's this? Are you ashamed of your body, wench? By our lady, I'll tear it off you with this whip if you're not more dutiful!"
She was trembling now, and her eyes fixed on the whip which he swing back and forth in his hand. But she saw, too, the ugly protruding shaft of his prick, with the heavy, almost purplish balls, and the foreskin taut along the throbbing, rigid shaft. She bit her lips, and then stooped and caught up the hems of the shift and began to draw it off her body. As it fell to the floor, his eyes gleamed savagely. "A sweet bitch, that you are, girl! And such fine white skin, why, 'Tis as fine as that of a countess, I'll be downed! Come closer now, that I may feel it for myself."
She saw herself now, the bush of her cunt exposed, her naked round titties swelling agitatedly, and she longed to cover herself with her hands, and yet instinct told her that she must not.
And so, her cheeks flaming, and her eyes downcast, she moved slowly along the stone flaggings of that rude floor, and if she shivered, it was not entirely from the cold of it. And then his left hand shot out and sized the combed-out tresses of her russet hair, which her mother had taken such pains with. With a brutal laugh, the naked Baron dragged her towards the bed by her hair, flung her upon it, and then stepped back. As she lay sobbing, stricken with horror and fear now, he raised the leather whip and brought it down upon her naked bottom, since she was laying on her side and turned with her back towards him. An angry red weal leaped upon her soft white flesh, and she shrieked and twisted onto her back, clasping her hands and sobbing out, "My lord, my lord, why do you beat me? I have come to submit myself, have pity on me as a maiden!"
"You are too tame and gentle, bitch," he mocked her. "In my bed I wish a wench of spirit and fire and lust to match my own. This whip will guarantee me that!" And with this, raising the whip again, he brought it down across her belly, and then even as she screamed and clasped her hands out towards him, over her heaving titties. Wild with pain, crazed by her own fear, Margit rolled away to the other side of the bed, but he pursued her like a demon. Clambering onto the bed, he set his left hand upon her neck, and held her pitilessly there while he flogged her bottom and thighs and back until her shrieks rang out reverberatingly in that great chamber. And below, the retainers and the servants who could hear Margit's cries, winked and joked among themselves, envying their master his savage sport with this gentle serf girl who carried herself like a noblewoman and whose body was doubtless fairer than many such.
When at last blood appeared on her titties and bottom, and she lay moaning, almost fainting, the Baron Claude de Bross-Lancrey uttered an oath, cast aside the whip, and fell upon her. His hands gouged her titties, his mouth slavered at her throat, and his knee pried apart her struggling thighs until she felt the abomination of his prick prying against the soft pink lips of her virgin cunt.
Then she forgot her mother's words of caution; then she sought to avert the disaster. She pushed at him, she pummeled him with her little fists, and she tried to twist herself from side to side to avoid that odious penetration. He roared with bawdy laughter, savoring her plight. "God's wounds, bitch, now you come to life at last, do you? I'll gentle you, never fear!" And then, striking her brutally with his fist on the side of the jaw so that her head rocked back and forth, he forced his prick against the barrier of her hymen, and pierced it as he thrust home to the very hilt.
Now, groaning and panting in his rut, the lord of the fief began to fuck the half-conscious girl.
She moaned, her eyes tightly closed, and her nails dug into her sweating palms as she tried to obliterate this ravaging of her helpless, striped young body. The angry throbbing of the whip was everywhere now, and his savage friction inside her lacerated cunt drew cries and whimpering gasps from her parted lips.
And then she felt him stiffen, felt the bubbling, hot seed burst into her cuntsheath, and she moaned and knew herself undone.
But he had not finished with her yet. Withdrawing from her, his deflated penis bloodied from the conquest of her cherry, he went to the flagon and swigged deeply. Then, slapping with gusto, he returned to the sobbing, shuddering naked girl. And again he had the whip in his hand, as he slashed her across the thighs and ordered her to take her hair in her hands and cleanse his prick of the blood her unworthy loins had shed upon it. And when she had done this demeaning thing, he bade her put her mouth and tongue to it and restore to him his vigor that he might enjoy her now at his leisure.
It was a night of indelible horror for gentle Margit. He seemed tireless, and he was never without the whip in his hand to force her to new degradations. At the very end, before dawn, in a last burst of vicious lust, he made her crouch before him and then, opening the cheeks of her behind, buggered her, roaring with laughter at her screams and tears and plaints from the pain this unnatural torment caused her.
And when he had finished with her, be bade her put back on her shift and go back to her husband. But at the door, still naked, gloating over his conquest, he chucked her under the chin and muttered, "Sweet bitch, soft white-skinned wench, I am not finished with you yet. Go back to your peasant husband, let him comfort you. But I shall send for you again, Margit Roux, and you had best be quicker and nimbler with your body when next I bid you, or by the Rood, I'll have you triced up by your ankles and whipped by my master of hounds."
And thus it was in the dark ages of man, and thus Margit became the strumpet of the lord of the fief. Many a night in the months ahead a man on horseback rode out from the castle to halt before the cottage where she and Jehan dwelt, to order her forth to pay her homage to her lord. And when at last he had tired of her, when he had slaked his lust in every imaginable fashion and grown tired of even whipping her trembling, white-skinned nakedness, he tossed her a piece of silver and bade her go back to her husband and raise a litter of brats that would grow up to be strong sons and till the soil for him, lord of the fief.
She, like so many innumerable girls before and after her in feudal Europe, became one of the submissives, the sexual slaves of the cruel lord, the dominating male and master.
CHAPTER THREE VALERIE
It was the Renaissance, that period of transition from medieval to modern times. It was a time of great cultural and intellectual currents which began to flow in the fourteenth century in Italy, reaching its highest flowering in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. From Italy, the Renaissance spread to France, Spain, Germany, the Low Countries, England, and the rest of Europe. The Italian Renaissance culminated under the patronage of the Medici at Florence, of the Sforza at Milan, of Renaissance Popes at Rome, of Este at Ferraria, and of Gonzaga at Mantua.
It was the age of Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelan-gelo, Guicciardini, and Machiavelli. It was the time of Erasmus, of Rabelais, and Montaigne (whose best-remembered saying was that "there is more to marriage than four bare legs beneath the sheets"). It was a time in which the far-reaching influence in art and architecture and the formation of the modern mind was to look to us, as we now see it in retrospect, as a golden age of mankind. And yet it was an era of tyranny, of paid soldiers, of dissolute royalties and broken trusts, it was the time of the Borgias and it was also the time of the terrible Spanish Inquisition. The lifespan of a man was still not much more than thirty years, and there were the plagues, the ominous "Black Death", and there were also the poxes, those forerunners of what we now call syphilis and gonorrhea. It was a time of despotism and internal strife, of internecine warfare and of treachery, and it was a time when a gently bred girl whose station was not that of the wealthy or the nobility had no chance whatsoever against the usurpation of her body and her very soul by the tyrannical male who could command her.
It was the year 1499, and the place was the Castle of Sinigaglia. Here was the realm of Cesare Borgia, born in 1475, and the youngest son of Alexander VI. He was made a Cardinal of the Church at the tender age of seventeen, but resigned after the murder of his elder brother (in which he doubtless took part) and entered the politics of Europe. He became the ally of Louis XII of France, who created him Duke of Valenti-nois, and with his own father's encouragement, made himself master of Romagna and the Duchy of Urbino.
It was three years from the time when he was to lure his chief enemies to this gloomy castle and have them strangled. It was he who was the model for Machiavelli's famous "The Prince," a book which explains as can few in any other time of man the cynical exploitation of power by those who have no scruples except for more power and its seizure.
Cesare Borgia was, of course, the brother of Lucrezia, that enigmatic beauty whom historians have almost uniformly damned as a black-hearted poisoner and schemer, and to whom has often been imputed the sin of incest not only with her own brother, but also with her father, who became Pope of the Church.
It was a pleasant October evening, a day of festivity in Rome as at Sinigaglia, for the Borgias were at last on good terms with Naples. Cesare would be made papal legate there, and his sister Lucrezia was to become Duchess of Biscelli. All through the day in Rome there had been feasting and dancing in the streets. Now at night the bonfires lit up the great squares, and there were festoons of flowers on the colonnades and statues. The lords and ladies of the court stood outside on their balconies and watched the delightful processions. A dwarf who wore a golden surcoat led the parade, drawn in a chariot pulled by gray-hounds. Musicians who played harps and lyres danced on the edge of the crowd. Magnificently gowned women, with feathered hats and ornate jewels, rode their richly caparisoned horses, escorted by knights who displayed the papal insignia, and all this processional passed under the triumphal arch of porphyry and gold erected near St. Peter's, bearing atop it the heraldic bull of the Borgias.
Cesare Borgia was there, but at his castle the handmaiden of Lucrezia, Valerie Cortesina was kneeling in prayer to a little statue of the Holy Mother in the tiny alcove of her room. She was in mortal terror of her immortal soul, and small wonder.
Two days ago, before the young Duke Cesare had departed for Rome for his entitlement into the Church, he had come upon her in a darkened hallway. She had been sent from the tiny village of Pesaro to serve the Lady Lucrezia the year before. Busy with his war, his falconry, and his ambitions, as well as his many mistresses, the handsome and profligate Cesare had not had time to notice her, but two nights ago he had. He had seized her by the puffed sleeve of her gown and drawn her into a corner.
"Sweet bitch," he had murmured, his right hand at the silver pommel of his dagger belted at the side of his doublet, "will you not grant me an hour tonight? You are new to my sister's service, are you not?"
"Yes, my lord D-Duke," Valerie Cortesina had stammered, and she had begun to tremble violently. The lust and brutality of the young Duke was well known and no one dared to say no to him. She too had heard the rumors that a servant had once seen him and Lucrezia lying naked together on the great bed in Lucrezia's bed, and that poor girl had had her tongue torn out by the executioner and then been whipped to death for the fault of eavesdropping, that she might never spread that abominable slander. And there were other stories: how the Duke would go down to the torture chamber to watch a handsome young wife on her wedding night torn from her husband by several of his armored horsemen, brought there and put upon the rack and threatened with a whipping or worse if she would not first yield to the Lord Duke of the Borgias just as it had been decreed in feudal Europe for centuries past, the law of the first night.
"But it is strange I have not seen you. How long have you been with my sister?" Cesare Borgia had pursued.
"Nearly a year, my L-Lord D-Duke," Valerie had gasped. "Oh, please, I must hasten to pack her things for the journey to Rome."
"She has other servants. She can spare you for an hour, wench," he said. "Moreover, I myself will tell her that I had an errand for you."
"An errand, my lord?"
"Malatesta! Yes, to be sure, an errand. An errand that will rid me of my desire for your body, by granting it to me so I may enjoy it to my fill," he had mocked her. Then his left hand had come out to caress one of her high-perched, firm, round titties through the bodice of her gown, and Valerie had trembled, turning her face to one side, whispering, "Oh do not, I pray of you, my Lord Duke."
"You pray of me! So long as you do not pray at me, little bitch, I shall not be vexed with you. But are you afraid of me?"
"Oh yes, my lord!"
"And you are a virgin?"
"Yes. Oh, have mercy! There are so many in this castle, and I am so afraid. I am a good girl, and I am betrothed already "
"And to whom, little Valerie of the fine breasts and the blushing face and the soft, innocent blue eyes in which a man could drown," he had jested.
His palm continued to caress her tittie, and Valerie felt her legs give way beneath her, so that she had to lean against the wall of the corridor to keep from fainting. Her heart was pounding wildly and she could scarcely gather her voice to reply to him: "To Messer Francesco Reverolta, my Lord Duke. He he is a scrivener in Pesaro, where I was born."
"I warrant it was but a short time ago, sweet Valerie. How many years lie upon those comely shoulders?"
"I I am nineteen, my lord."
"And still a virgin? That is an oddity at my castle, and I will not have it. You will come to me at midnight. You will ask Peter, my man-at-arms, show you the way. Be punctual and do not fail me, or it will cost you a good deal more than your maidenhead, you frightened little wench."
And, giving her tittie a final squeeze, he had leaned forward and kissed her hotly on the mouth, then disappeared. But Valerie Cortesina had failed that summons. She had knelt and prayed, then, tears running down her face, she had gone to Lucrezia Borgia and knelt before her mistress, imploring sanctuary against the Lord Duke of the Borgias. And Lucrezia had laughed at her and said, "I do not know why girls value their maidenheads so greatly, not when they are politely asked for them by one so high in power as my brother. But if it frightens you, little dove, I shall ask him to take some other wench who is more willing. You have served me well enough, I shall grant you that boon."
And in her fervent gratitude, Valerie had clutched the hem of Lucrezia Borgia's brocaded gown and covered it with kisses.. . .
But yesterday, after the Borgias had departed for Rome for the festivities, Valerie Cortesina had known agony of soul and the black fright of apprehension. Giorgio, Cesare Borgia's grim hunchbacked torturer, had come into the courtyard and, perceiving her filling a bucket at the well, had come up to her and said, "My master left a message concerning you, wench. Tomorrow night you shall be punished for disobeying the order of my Lord Duke."
And when she burst into tears and begged Giorgio to know what that punishment would be, he had tugged at his bristly black beard and sniggered at her, "Fret upon it, timid one, for I will not tell you. You shall not be put to death, console yourself with that thought, at least. Until tomorrow night, then, sleep well and dream of our noble Cardinal who celebrates in Rome but thinks of you, ignoble little wench that you are!"
The hours that followed were agonizing, even worse than the dreaded punishment itself, for the gentle Valerie. There was no recourse, no appeal. Her mistress, Lucrezia, and the Lord Cesare, were in Rome and would not return for at least a fortnight. The thought of running away from the castle of course entered her mind, but Valerie Cortesina knew only too well that this would be tantamount to death. The retainers of the duke would pursue her out on the open plain, make sport of her, ravish and torture her to their hearts' content. The only consolation she could take was what Giorgio had said to her, that she would not be put to death. Perhaps, she told herself as she sobbed herself to sleep that night, it would be only a whipping. Well, her parents had given her the strap when she was only a little girl, and she could endure that much at least. Her maidenhead would be spared, and then she could make the gift of it on her bridal night to her beloved Francesco.. . . .
When she rose the next morning, she was pale and trembling, but she tried desperately to keep a smile on her lips as she went about her tasks. Her duties were to see to it that the Lady Lucrezia's chambers were kept neat and prepared with those comforts which the blonde sister of Cesare Borgia desired at all times. When she went to the kitchen for her midday meal, the fat old cook, Helena, clucked sympathetically and shook her head. With a kind of presentiment of terror, poor Valerie demanded, "Why do you do that, good Helena?"
"Alas, my little dove, it will be a hard night for you. I have heard evil things in this castle. And I am sworn not to tell you any of them. They would tear out my tongue if I dared. Say your prayers, my good girl. Oh, they won't kill you, be sure of that. But it would have been far wiser to have yielded to His Grace. And your young man wouldn't have thought you spoiled, nay, he wouldn't. In faith, to lie with the Duke is an honor for a lowly girl who has no noble blood in her veins. Think on that, my poor dove."
It was scant consolation, and Valerie Cortesina burst into tears. The afternoon dragged hideously, and she found herself alone in Lucrezia Borgia's chambers, dabbing at her swollen eyes with a kerchief, her lips moving in prayer.
She could scarcely touch her supper, although the compassionate cook had urged wine and roast fowl, and even a huge peach plucked from the Duke's own orchard beyond the gloomy castle of Sinigaglia. "Eat, little one, 'twill give you courage for the night. You'll need all your strength, I'm thinking. All I can do is pray to Our Lady for you, little Valerie. And all I can say to you is, accept it and be obedient. Perhaps they will be gentle with you, for you have served Lady Lucrezia well, she herself has said it many a time."
Her eyes huge and clouded with tears, Valerie Cortesina stared at the fat cook, trying to draw what little solace she could from those well meaning words, and then at last she went back to her own chamber and waited. And soon it was nine o'clock, and yet another hour, and still they had not come for her. Her heart began to quicken inside her bosom. Perhaps the order had been revoked. Perhaps it had even been forgotten. Perhaps Giorgio had only told her what he had the other day to agonize her and keep her in suspense this horrible way. Well then, she had been punished, and the next time the Lord Duke Cesare would send for her, she would forget her pride and virtue and submit. She need not tell dear Francisco, not ever. It would be her own secret, and thus she would save herself for him.
Then, as the hour neared eleven, and hopefully she was preparing to sleep, having already taken off her puffed gown and her slippers, and choosing her shift, there was the sound of a heavy fist against her door, and she uttered a terrified cry.
"Open, wench!" she heard the voice of black-bearded Giorgio. "It's time to reckon with you. Open the door and come forth. No tricks now, little one. I've orders for you, and it's my head if I don't carry them out."
A sick fear clutched at Valerie Cortesina's vitals. Naked as she was, she hastened to drag the shift over her shapely body, and then falteringly approached the door, unlatched it, and haltingly opened it. Giorgio himself appeared, more hideous than ever to her now, because he wore the garments of the torturer of Castle Sinigaglia. Black boots, black hose, a slitted black facecloth which dropped like a hood down to his bristly beard, and black leather tights which left his massive, hairy chest naked. Two men-at-arms, with halberds, stood beside him.
"Oh no!" Valerie piteously entreated, clasping her hands and falling upon her knees as she stared up at that horrid apparition.
"Oh yes, little dove," he mocked her, making a sign to the men-at-arms.
They seized her then, and her shriek rang out as they dragged her along the stone hallway, down the great stairs, and down again an even narrower passageway which led to the dungeons of Cesare Borgia. Giorgio hobbled ahead of her, and she trembled with revulsion at the sight of his naked hump, which made him stoop and, with his long, spindly and powerful arms, made him look like a great ape. His matted black hair was indeed like an animal's pelt, almost as thick at his back and around his hump as upon his chest.
"To the last dungeon," he commanded the men-at-arms. And when they had dragged the half-fainting shift-clad young brunette before the door, Giorgio snickered malevolently as he opened it.
A cry of horror froze on Valerie Cortesina's trembling lips. The gloomy, dank walls were lighted by flaming torches thrust into metal brackets fixed high upon them. The eerie, flickering glow illumined this dreadful torture chamber, for such it was. Here in this very dungeon the Lord Duke Cesare had once suspended two teen-aged sisters by their thumbs, had them blindfolded and stripped naked, their toes fighting for purchase just a fraction of an inch above the heavy stone floor. They had been accused of slanderous gossip against his impeccable and noble name, and for their loose tongues they had been atrociously punished. First, as a kind of allegorical symbol to teach them how deadly a serpent-like tongue which played its owner false could be, he had them whipped with snakes, not poisonous ones, but long black snakes which glided harmlessly in the ravines outside the castle. Their blindfolds had been removed so they could see' the horrible whips inflicted on their naked flesh; till, by comparison, this first ordeal was merciful. Yet stark terror and loathing had congealed their minds and thoughts, and rendered them babbling, piteously submissive puppets to the Lord Cesare's will.
Then their lovers had been dragged in, stripped naked and racked, and hot irons had traced the noble insignia of the Borgiasr the bull, upon their backs and buttocks and their bellies and chests. All this while the two naked girls shrieked and pleaded for mercy for those handsome young men to whom they would soon have been wed and to whom they had already allowed full conjugal privileges. Under the torture, the young men admitted this premarital knowledge of the lovely, dangling captives, and so the debonair Cesare had speciously lectured all four on their shameless and wanton conduct. And then once again the torturers had resumed their horrid work. Before the eyes of the half-swooning, weeping girls, their lovers had been castrated, the hideous wounds staunched with red-hot irons. One of the men had died under this brutal mutilation, and the other would for the rest of his days be a hopeless idiot. And then at last, Giorgio and his two aides, misshapen and rejected men like himself, whose only glory was their sport with the helpless over whom they could at last proclaim their strength and cunning and cruelty, had carried out the order of the young Duke to its finite letter.
First, a leather strap had been buckled around their sweating waists, to merge their bodies in lascivious emulation of those devotees of Sappho of Lesbos. And this time they were beaten with leather whips, tapering and plaited, which curled round their satiny thighs and sides and hips and buttocks with merciless accuracy. As their deafening shrieks rose in the dungeon, they writhed and twisted and jerked, rubbing against each other, while Giorgio and his two henchmen obscenely mocked their sport. And after they had been flogged to the blood and a bucket of brine doused over their shuddering, dangling bodies, a supreme martyrdom awaited them.
Taken down from the hoist, each made to kneel facing her sister before a black wooden block, they were ordered to thrust out their tongues. When one of them weepingly refused and prayed for mercy, she was told it would be torn out of her mouth with redhot tongs if she did not at once obey, and so she did, quelled by a frenzied terror which knew no bounds. Giorgio's two aides then took hammer and nails and drove a nail through each girl's tongue. Their wrists had been bound behind their backs, and they had been warned not to move about too nimbly lest they tear out their own tongues.
And then, even as they slumped in the sickening pain of that fiendish torment, Giorgio's two henchmen knelt behind the naked girls and buggered them ruthlessly. And when that was done, Giorgio himself violated each with his own virile and insatiable prick. Then, naked as they were, their wrists still bound behind their back, the nails pulled out of their bleeding, swollen tongues, the two girls were driven out of the Castle Sinigaglia, henceforth to be branded as harlots and to be used at will by any male subject in the Lord Cesare's realm.. . This, then, was the vile chamber in which the dark and diabolical lusts of the young Duke were unleashed, while to the world he appeared suave and courteous, statesman and soldier, handsome gallant and lover. This, then, was the site of Valerie Cortesi-na's own submissive martyrdom.
She saw the rack, the iron boot which could be clamped over a female's tender, naked leg with wedges driven down by mallets till the bones were crushed. She saw the strappado, that terrible hoist which the Holy Inquisition so expertly and inhumanely used to force confessions of sin and guilt from its innocent victims. She saw the whipping post, and the chains dangling from its arms and base, and she saw two round stakes set in a small dais raised several feet from the dank stone floor, and then her eyes bulged and her mouth gaped in a cry that was strangled by sheer incredulous agony of soul.
Young Francesco Reverolta, the scrivener of Pesaro, naked as the day he was born, was tethered to one of the round stakes, his arms bound behind it, thongs lashed around his waist and under his arms. Brown-haired, fair-skinned, with soft, almost effeminate features, he writhed, whimpering in his own terror.
"My Lord Cesare has a fitting surprise for you, wench," the hunchbacked torturer cackled. "Behold your betrothed. Oh, he is comely as a girl, with that soft white skin. And see how little hair there is about his prick and balls. Is this truly the first time you see his manhood thus, little dove? Well then, it is only right and fitting that he should see your charms as well this night." Then, to the men-at-arms, he barked. "Strip this bitch and put her to the other stake, that she may see her bridegroom."
Greedily the two halberdiers ripped the shift from Valerie Cortesina's ivoryskinned, ripe young body and Giorgio chucked and pulled at his beard. "A tasty pullet, this. My Lord Duke is generous to a poor hunchback this night, and to you, you unworthy dogs. Now to the stake with her!"
And soon the sobbing black-haired serving-maid was bound to the opposite stake, about five feet distant to that to which her naked young lover was tethered. They had gagged him, and his face was chalky with terror and shame.
By a refinement of cruelty, Giorgio himself grasped the thick mane of glossy black hair and lifted it up, then tied it around the wooden stake so that the naked girl should have no protection.
This time his two aides, Valentino and Emilio, would not assist him. They were, indeed, at this moment guzzling Falarian wine in a tavern and cuddling two blowsy wenches, enjoying a night off from their grim labors. For it had been the order of Cesare Borgia that these two men-at-arms should assist Giorgio in the punishment of a lowly serving maid who would dare deny his august will.
Now the hunchbacked torturer hobbled over to a brazier where coals were heating and into which a branding iron and a pair of metal tongs had been thrust, to glow cherry-red. Satisfied that they were hot enough, he seized a sharp knife from the array of torture tools placed upon a little round table in a corner of the dungeon, and hobbled back to the stake to which Francisco Reverolta was bound. Then, with his left hand, having first donned black leather gloves, he seized the prick of the young scrivener and turned towards the horrified, naked brunette: "You boast of your virginity, little bitch, and so my lord Duke has decreed that your betrothed shall not taste your sweet maidenhood either. Behold!"
And with this, his lips twisted viciously, he gelded the maddened young Francesco and flung away the severed penis into a corner of the dungeon. Then, at his sign, one of the men-at-arms, also wearing leather gloves, lifted the branding iron from the brazier and hurried towards the stake at which Francisco slumped, and pressed the smoking iron against the gory wound. The stench of human flesh rose, and even through the gag, a horrid, screeching cry emerged. Then Francesco's head dropped and he sagged at the stake. Valerie Cortesina, triad with terror, jerked and twisted at her bonds, babbling hysterically, praying for mercy, and in the same voice, begging for swift death. But this was not to be vouchsafed her.
They began by whipping her. Giorgio procured a short-handled three-thonged leather whip, the ends of whose lashes were viciously tapered so as to impart additional sting upon impact. Planting himself at the frantic naked girl's left, he chuckled, "This is to warm you for your bridal night, sweet dove. And since, as you have already seen, your lover will no longer be able to service you, be comforted. My Lord Duke Cesare has seen to it that you shall be well attended this night."
With this, raising his arm, he dealt poor Valerie a smacking cut which sent the thongs bounding across the soft goblet of her naked belly. An agonized, shrill cry was torn from her, and she wrenched at her bonds. Another lash followed, and then another, each curling round her supple waist. "That's for starters, wench," the hunchbacked torturer explained with a salacious snigger. "And now that you know what it's like, let me prepare your tender maiden parts for this night of nuptials." So saying, he directed the whip this time across those two high-perched, creamy titties, with their wide aureoles of dusky coral and their tips like eager buds that sought the warmth of the sun. The atrocious pain was maddening; Valerie Cortesina writhed against her torture stake, twisting madly about in the desperate effort to avert that hellish whip.
But she could not. Tightly bound against the stake and facing her executioner, she had to present those glorious, round love globes to the leather whip. Beyond her, slumped in his bonds, her mutilated lover could not hear her pathetic cries or prayers, nor would he ever again be able to console her. And once again the whip dashed across her panting titties, drawing a new poignant shriek of despair and agony: "Aaiii! Ohh, in the name of the Holy Mother, at least kill me, kill me, but not such pain!"
"Pain, little dove?" Giorgio chuckled as he lowered the tapering whip to the floor of the torture chamber. "You have not yet begun to learn what true pain is. What delicate skin you have, and how marked it is already from only a few light kisses of my whip! Wait a bit, and you will feel yourself burning with fever, ardent with desire, impatient to service him who shall take the prize you would not grant my Lord Cesare."
Now his three-thonged whip smacked wickedly across the lower belly of the unfortunate girl, and again she screamed and twisted. Playing with her as a cat with a mouse, the hunchbacked torturer plied his whip with expert skill, prolonging the time between lashes so that the unfortunate naked young virgin might taste to the fullest the excruciating torment of the previous blow. The thongs wrapped round one creamy round thigh, then its sweet twin, or sometimes across both just above the knees, and then again just below that thickly thatched niche which was her virgin sanctuary. Or again, it would sweep from right to left, or again in back-handed strokes from left to right just below her titties, or over her naked belly. And then again it returned to sting and burn her heaving titties, till these creamy goblets which the unconscious Francisco had dreamed of cupping and covering with impassioned kisses when they were wed became covered with livid, darkening streaks and blotches where the tips of those three flexible leather thongs had nipped.
Finally, the torturer lowered the whip and, studying Valerie Cortesina's contorted face, swept the tips of the lashes right up into the triangle between her shuddering thighs. A maddened, prolonged, almost inhuman cry of intolerable suffering was torn from the innocent young girl, and her head tilted back to ease the terrible traction of that improvised fetter he had made by binding her thick long hair to the stake itself, thus to keep her head upright and to punish the slightest movement. Already, many times thus far, Valerie Cortesina had felt the scalding-hot twinges of pain when, in her desperate and uncontrollable squirmings under the lash, she had jerked her head this way and that.
"Oh, that's where your tenderest, little dove," Giorgio mocked her. "And this is the place that must be warm and eager to receive your mate this memorable night, little dove! But be patient a moment or two longer, I shall prepare you for the nuptials!"
Then again lowering the three-thonged whip to the floor of the dungeon, the hunchbacked executioner fiendishly leaped the thongs up into the mossy gape between Valerie Cortesina's struggling, creamy thighs. And once more, her eyes rolling to the whites, her mouth gaping in a clamorous scream that reverberated throughout that gloomy dungeon, the naked girl twisted her hips in the most lascivious manner as if, indeed, she yearned for the fulfillment which her young scrivener could never give her again.
Eight times more viciously tapering whip leaped up into her cunt-hole, the tips ruffling the silky black curls, smacking against the soft pink virgin lips of the vulva until they became puffed and dark with the afflux of blood. Her throat was hoarse from shrieking by now, and her body was dripping agony-sweat. The two men-at-arms stared greedily at the scene, savagely aroused by the girl's beauty, helplessness, and the unbearable agony of her ordeal. One was a bearded rogue of thirty called Paolo II Tabarro, Paul of the Cloak, so named because on occasion he would hire himself out as an assassin for some wealthy nobleman or merchant who wished to dispose of an enemy. Stalking the victim through the darkened streets, he would fling his black cloak over the man with one hand and, reaching round with his right, stab his dagger upward into the victim's guts. The other halberdier was squat, fat, a lecherous villain of forty named Lordesco. He had very nearly been hanged by Cesare Borgia himself for having raped a young tavern wench in the little city of Tarturola, a city which the handsome and profligate Duke has sacked as part of his rapacious conquest of the province of Ur-bano. Cesare himself had coveted that wench, a girl not unlike Valerie Cortesina, and he had fallen into a fine rage when, breaking into the tavern with drawn sword, he had seen Lordesco mounted atop the sobbing girl on a table near the kitchen.
Fortunately for the rogue's neck, he had gasped out to his noble master that another girl, still comelier, was hiding in the cellar of the tavern and that he himself had locked her in to save her for his master. Cesare Borgia had given him a ferocious look, and then muttered. "You had best pray, Messer Lordesco, that for once your plebian tastes and mine are akin, or on the Papal Bull, I swear I shall have you dangling from a rope's end over the sign of this accursed tavern!" Happily, indeed for Lordesco that the sensual young Duke of the Borgias had found the cowering girl, a coppery-haired virgin of seventeen, even more tasty than the wench his halberdier had been fucking!
As poor Valerie Cortesina moaned, her body shaking as with ague, almost fainting from the infernal, scorching pain in her cunt, which over rode even the burning agony of her whipped belly and titties. Giorgio hoarsely declared, "Now pay heed, little dove, and open your eyes again. There you see my Lord Duke's faithful servants, Paolo and Lordesco. It is the order of Cesare Borgia himself that this night, here and now, you shall choose one or the other to take your vaunted maidenhead. Come now, girl, quick. 'T'is but a formality, do you not understand," he uttered a ribald laugh. "Mayhap you would think to yourself that you, a pure maiden, cannot not truly know which of them would be better able to give that virgin cunt of yours the pleasure you dreamed of having from your walk-ling of a lover. But I tell you this in confidence, little Valerie: make a choice quickly, for the other man and then myself shall enjoy you before the night is done, and thus you will have no need to feel desolate and abandoned in love." And with this, he burst out into a roar of lecherous laughter while the suffering, hysterical naked girl again wept and begged for the boon of death.
"Did I not promise you that you would live, Valerie?" Giorgio angrily declared. "You have not profited from this lesson, it would seem. Very well, you shall taste the whip again and where you have just had it. Yes, girl, there and nowhere else until at last you choose!"
So saying, he again jerked his wrist, and the three taperingly tipped leather lashes darted up greedily into that martyrized young virgin cunt-hole. Wild with agony, shrieking raucously, poor Valerie Cortesina could no longer endure such suffering: "Ohhrrroowww!! ! Oh, my mother and father, forgive me, oh I cannot stand this anymore, oh I cannot! Let it be anyone you choose, but end it quickly, either that or let me die now!"
"Nay, girl, you yourself must name your lover," the hunchbacked torturer insisted, and once again the infernal whip sent its diabolical kisses into the tender, swollen cunt of the naked girl writhing at the torture stake.
"Eeeyouww ! ! ! Ohh, have pity, pity, let it be Paolo, then, but have done with it, oh you are killing me, you are killing me, Giorgio!" Valerie Cortesina shrieked.
The bearded rogue she had chosen as her initiator, as the taker of her sweet chastity, had already removed his coat of mail and his doublet. Now, baring his swollen prick he came forward to the stake, his lean fingers clenching and kneading the whip-marked creamy titties of the young virgin. "A wise choice, wench," he muttered huskily, "there now, don't fret about that puny man-less thing you once set your imagine on. I, Paolo, Tabarro, will make you die of delight. Prepare yourself for it, sweet bitch!"
His prick thrust against the mossy snatch, and Valerie Cortesina screamed again, for the prodding of his cocktip against the chafed, swollen lips of her quim was a new torment. Ruthlessly, her ravisher thrust till he was well imbedded, and up against her virgin barrier. Then, his fingers curved like talons around the heaving, whip-streaked rounds of her magnificent titties, he lunged with all his strength. Valerie Cortesina's eyes rolled upwards, her mouth gaped in a long and frenzied cry at the pain of her virgin loss.
He pitilessly fucked her now, while Giorgio and Lordesco watched with greedy impatience. When he had at last bubbled his essence deep into her womb, he drew his bloodied organ out and panted, "By the horns of Satan, the bitch is tight! But I've stretched her for you, good Lordesco, and for you, too, Giorgio!"
And in turn, the other halberdier and then the hunchbacked torturer fucked the moaning, whimpering, half-conscious naked victim at the stake.
But her ordeal was not yet ended. The two men-at-arms untied her from the stake, only to turn her to face it and fetter her to it once again. This time it would be her bottom and thighs, those creamy and untouched terrains so ideally suited for the lash, which would feel Giorgio's three-thonged whip. And once again her wild screams and babbled prayers for mercy or for death rang out in the horrid chamber where the Duke of the Borgias so often sated himself with human suffering. When her back and shoulders and thighs were livid, when she slumped in her bonds, then Giorgio himself, casting aside the whip, dug his bony fingers into the striped, inflamed cheeks of her voluptuous young ass and buggered her. And after him there followed the two men-at-arms.
The will of the Lord Cesare had been done. And the next morning, at Giorgio's order, Paolo and Lordesco came to the cell into which the unfortunate young serving-maid had been flung after her hideous night of martyrdom, and took her to a brothel in Sinigaglia. There she would serve the rest of her days, accepting the lowliest and the poorest, the beggar and the infirm and the diseased, till at last death would grant her the boon for which she had so piteously and vainly prayed on the night of Cesare Borgia's celebration in Rome.
CHAPTER FOUR: ARLETTE
The year was 1781, in the reign of Louis XVI, the last king of France. He was ill-equipped to deal with the problems he had inherited from his father, Louis XV, and he was faced with famine, corruption and misery among the masses, while his court was noteworthy for its extravagance, corruption, immorality and inefficiency, a contradiction which was to lead to the French Revolution. It was his grandfahter, Louis XIV, who had said "Apres moi, le deluge (After me, the deluge), but even he could not have foreseen the dreadful bloodbath which was to purge all
France of royalty and nobility and let the masses rule.
The amiable grandson of the Sun King, Louis XV was indeed incapable of dealing with such problems. Shy, well intentioned, stupid and phlegmatic, Louis XVI preferred hunting and his workshop in which he tinkered with clocks and locks to his royal duties. What popularity he had was offset by the common people's hatred of his lovely queen, Marie Antoinette.
Her intrigues and those of the chief minister, Marais, induced Louis XIV to dismiss his ablest minister, Necker, in this year upon which we fix our attention now. He was to recall that gifted and able statesman seven years later, but by then it would be far too late. Meanwhile, the lovely Austrian woman who shared his throne thought nothing of the poverty of the masses; we know the apocryphal saying attributed to her when she was told that the common folk had no bread to eat: "Let them eat cake, then." The culmination of her extravagance was, by fate's own irony, not her own act at all. The wily Countess Jeanne de la Motte had duped a high-ranking churchman, then out of facor with Marie Antoinette, to believe that he would regain royal blessing by purchasing for her a necklace worth over a million dollars. Having found an innocent girl who was the double of the Queen of France, the Countess let the naive churchman have audience with her. And when at last the deception was uncovered and the trial absolved the churchman as well as the renowned erotic adventurer Cagliostro, even the public punishment of the Countess did not sway the people from their vitriolic hatred of the Queen. Jeanne de la Motte was stripped naked, despite her protestations of nobility, tied to a bench in the public square and birched on her naked body from neck to heels, then branded on the shoulder and confined in a convent prison, from which she escaped to England, whence she directed polemics against the injustice of the rulers of France. And all this contributed to the bloody holocaust which was to follow.. .
In many ways, France had not really changed since the Middle Ages, insofar as absolute feudal power remained in its nobility. A count, a baron, a marquis or duke who succeeded to the title his father had held before him and assumed power over the estate, took with that power a tyrannical emprise over all those who dwelt upon that land. And most of these ancient families who believed themselves endowed by God Himself to direct and rule, knew little of what was taking place beyond their terrain. It was this disunity, too, which was to bring about the downfall of all their kind, as one day it would that of the Comte Raoul de Coureges, master of the royal fief of Courtembois, about a hundred and twenty-five miles to the southwest of Paris.
His father, the Sieur Alan, as he had often been called, had been medieval in his ways, certainly so far as punishment for his vassals was concerned. But his sadism was brutally direct, contrasting with that of his dandified son whose cruelty certainly took a far more subtle and terrible form. Alan de Coureges had enjoyed watching his peasants fight a duel with hunting knives, blindfolded and with the left wrist of each man tied to his fellow's not unlike the manner in which the immortal Jim Bowie was to invent with his famous knife in the pioneer days of Texas a few decades later. He also enjoyed coming upon a comely wench bathing by a stream, upon which sight he would release his fiercest hunting dogs to surround the terrified young girl. Then, standing on the edge of the bank, grinning cruelly at her plight, he would tell her that she might have her choice, to resist him and have the dogs set upon her, or to surrender humbly, upon which he would call them off.
But his son was not made of such brutally obvious mettle. He was more the voyeur, the schemer, and he wove merciless little schemes and intrigues to entrap his unsuspecting servants. Although he gave lavish parties to which his noble neighbors on all sides were invited, where enough food and drink were consumed or wasted to have fed a dozen villages in starving France, he was parsimonious to a fault. He would leave a cut-glass decanter of Burgundy wine on a table in a narrow, rarely used hallway of his castle, with a secret mark upon it. A week later, discovering that the contents of the bottle had diminished below the mark, he would summon his servants and announce that unless one of them came forward and confessed this unauthorized tippling, he would have his steward tie one of the young girls in the scullery to the whipping post in the courtyard and have her flogged to the blood. And since these serving maids and kitchen wenches were invariably the daughters or cousins or nieces of his enslaved household staff, this cruel threat would loosen their tongues and at last the guilty man would confess. Then the dissipated Comte Raoue de Coureges would order a flogging for the daughter or the niece or the cousin of that man, or for his wife in the event he had no other kin toiling in the castle.
On this mild September afternoon, the priggish dandy was admiring himself in a silver-backed mirror held up to him by his fawning valet, Edouard Lavois, Lavois, forty-five, bearded and graying, stoop-shouldered and soft-spoken, had held this post under Alan's father by dint of keeping his own wits about him and anticipating the sometimes choleric outbursts of which his noble master was so often capable. When he sensed them coming, he saw to it that a tasty young wench was waiting in the Sieur's bedchamber with instructions on how to submit herself and dire warnings of a whipping or worse if she did not please the Comte. Raoul, though his father had been disgusted with his seeming effeminacy, had observed Lavois' devotion and diligence, and so when he came into the estate, had let the valet know that he would be rewarded if he performed as suitably for the son as he had for the father.
"I think, Lavois, this cravat is much too simple. A more flowery one, I should say. After all, we shall have the Due d'Alencois as our guest tomorrow evening. He is one of the foremost arbiters of good taste in all France, and I certainly must not let him outshine me, even if I live here in the province."
"Most assuredly, Your Grace." With his native shrewdness, the valet invariably addressed his dissipated master with the title of courtesy one usually accords a duke. It never failed to please Raoul de Coureges. He smiled, coughed, looked down modestly at his satin waistcoat and admired the wig again in the mirror.
"We shall have as sophisticated an evening as one could find in Paris itself, shall we not, my good Lavois?" he went on. "There will be music on the harpsicord and on the virginal by the beautiful Mademoiselle Yvonne de Mosaim-beau. The Chevalier d'Orleans will declaim his latest sonnet on the glory of the Bourbons, may they live forever and guide our glorious France to chief rank among the nations of the world."
"Amen to that, Your Grace," Edouard Lavois absequiously amended.
"But then, for the men at least, we must find a-more interesting diversion, would you say, Lavois. Perhaps a hunt, with a special quarry. We shall have the Marquis de Dampierre, you know, and he is mad for a pretty girl." '"I believe I have a small idea, Your Grace."
"Then out with it, man! Our guests will be arriving early in the morning. This must go like clockwork. On the other hand, how the devil can we have a hunt at night?"
"But it's quite simple, Your Grace. If you were to take some wench from the village, set her in the forest and bid her light a candle, then our huntsmen might track her in the dark. When they come within range, she of course would blow out the candle to protect herself. But more and more we should gain upon her, and eventually the winner would claim her."
"Capital, Lavois! At times you show almost as much imagination as a nobleman."
"You are much too kind, Your Grace," the valet bowed low.
"And you have an idea who this charming quarry should be? I can see it in your eyes already, Lavois, you sly dog."
"There is a red-haired, strapping wench known as Arlette. Arlette Poitivers. You may .ecall her brother appeared before your tribunal some few months back."
"Poitivers? Poitivers?" the Comte mused, wrinkling his forehead in a frown. "But there are so many of these villains whom I must have brought before my tribunal because they do not bring me either enough tax or quails or barley or vegetables as is my due. I don't seem to recall that fellow, though."
' "He was a tall rogue, Your Grace, and he was insolent. You threatened to have him whipped for his pains."
"Oh, now I remember! Of course! And he has a sister, you say, a redhead, a rousse? Have you seen her?"
"Unquestionably I have, Your Grace. In fact, I took pains to invite her to this castle and she is here at this very moment. She is almost as tall as a man, and her hair has the red of the setting sun in it, and is thick and long, almost to her waist. Her skin is so milky. Your Grace, that if you saw her bathing by the pool without her garments, you would think that Venus herself had returned," the wily valet drew upon his lecherous master's penchants in his calculated description of Arlette Poitivers' charms.
"But that's superb, Lavois. She's much too good for the Marquis, you know. You devil, you why haven't you mentioned her before so I could find some way of enjoying her?"
"She has a cousin, Your Grace. Arlette is, I should say, nineteen and betrothed. Her cousin is sixteen, however, with black hair and impudent face and such large brasts, Your Grace."
"You rogue, you wretch!" the Comte sniggered affectionately as he slapped the valet on the shoulder. "We must certainly arrange to have Arlette and her pretty young cousin take part in our festivities. And you say that the red-haired wench would be more to my taste than this innocent little Jacqueline?"
"Of a certainty, mon mailre" Lavois winked salaciously. "Consider the fact that M'amselle
Arlette is spoken of by the villagers as a most dutiful daughter who, after her father's death about two years ago, became the mainstay of the unfortunate household. Her mother is ailing, doubtless from grief, and so this strapping wench gives no thought to being tumbled in the fields by a lusty young farmer. Mon Dieu, she is a very paragon of virtue, though Venus endowed her with the body of a courtesan. Her sewing and baking are exemplary, and she can even read and write. Indeed, knowing of her skill with needle and thread, I had one of your servants visit her mother's cottage but yesterday, to extend your own invitation for the daughter to be in attendance so that she might mend your best cloak, that you might wear it to the reception of your honored and distinguished guests."
"My father always said you were a shrewd rogue, Lavois. Peace to his memory, and applause to his judgment!" the delighted profligate exclaimed. "Then I take it you propose the young cousin for the hunt and ultimately the Marquis de Dampierre?" Alan de Coureges took a pinch of snuff from the box that the valet deferentially offered, touched it to his nostrils, coughed gently, and again took up the mirror to contemplate himself.
"Ah-er-yes, Your Grace. But I see no reason if you will pardon my presumptuousness for the Marquis to so much as set eyes upon Arlette Poitivers. She is a morsel worthy only of the man of the most fastidious good taste, the most appreciatie sensitivity and there is only one man in all France who is so endowed, .yourself, Your Grace."
"Go to, you scoundrel!" the young proligate chuckled, pleased with this gross flattery. "Well, you may be right. Arlette will be my own private guest then, shall we say. And this cousin of hers is for the hunt."
Edouard Lavois saw no reason to tell his effete, twenty-eight-year old master that black-haired Jacqueline was really destined for himself. He had marked her with vindictive lust ever since she had dared to insult and rebuff him last April when, at his master's order, he fulfilled his other function of majordomo and steward and had gone to the village to collect taxes due his royal master from the peasants.
Jacqueline Villefranche was the daughter of Arlette's mother's sister, her father being a forester employed on the estate and whose duty it was to see that no poacher killed the Count's deer. The tithes from Arlette's father were modest, a kind of benign approval that his duties had been carried out to the Count's satisfaction. But when Edouard Lavois had come to collect them, he had espied the olive-skinned, saucy-faced Jacqueline, and his prick had stiffened with ardor. She had been alone in the cottage, had handed him the little cloth sack of copper sous which represented the annual tax paid by the forester in exchange for his favorite's post. Edouard Lavois had chucked her under the chin, praised her beauty, and slyly intimated that she might keep the sack herself for a new dress or a pretty bauble if she would but be kind to him. Then he had slipped his arm around her waist and tried to kiss her on the mouth. Jacqueline had twisted herself out of his grasp, kicked at his shin and indignantly told him that she was not a doxy. He had not forgotten that insult. It pleased his devious mind to plan how he could give her words the lie, and indeed, make a doxy of her.
"Let us see this charming red-haired minx you so thoughtfully lured to the chateau, Edouard," his master affably decreed. "Have her bring the bit of tapestry she's working on, it will give me an idea."
A few moments later, Edouard Lavois ushered in Arlette Poitivers, selfconsciously flushed at the idea of being in the presence of the Comte de Coureges. She executed a somewhat awkward curtsey before the amused young dandy, who made a sign for Lavois to leave the salon. He contemplated the girl with a jaundiced, highly critical eye, and found that his valet-majordomo had not at all exaggerated her charms. Clad in a simple, almost shapeless coarse cloth dress which hid her trim ankles, she nonetheless quickened his pulses. About five feet seven and a half inches in height, with high-set cheekbones, firm chin, full mouth, intense hazel eyes and a dainty little nose with elegantly thin, flaring wings, she could well have passed for quality had she been dressed for the part. There was not a noblewoman in the province who would not have envied her roses-and-cream complexion, the strong, perfect white teeth, and the magnificent resilience of high-perched round titties, surprisingly slimming waist that veered into sensually opulent hips and bottom cheeeks.
"Approach, Arlette," he invited. "Have a sweetmeat." He gestured toward a silver box on the table before which he had seated himself. "Th-thank you, my lord." Arlette's voice was deferential, yet his sophisticated ear detected an ardent vibrance, couched to an emotional contralto, which under the duress to which he meant to force her, would ravish his aural senses.
"I am told that you are quite gifted with thimble and needle, my girl," he said patronizingly. "Tomorrow evening, many of the nobility of the realm are to be my guests. It may well be that you will earn commissions that will earn you many francs. You have, I take it, finished my cloak?"
"Oh no, not yet, M'sieu" Arlette stammered. "M'sieu Lavois gave me this piece of tapestry to work upon this afternoon."
"He was misinformed. I wish you to forget that and go back at once to the cloak. Be especially careful with the silver threads. I shall have you sent for tonight, and I expect the work will be done, and satisfactorily."
"But but" Arlette stammered.
"What's this?" he arched his eyebrows and gave her a cold stare..
"I was told that reception was not to be until tomorrow night, and I had thought I should finish it by tomorrow noon."
"Who gave you permission to think, my girl? Such insolence! You will do as I have bidden you. If I am not satisfied, your cousin Jacqueline will be punished."
Arlette promptly dropped the piece of tapestry, her mouth open with stupefaction. "My cousin?" she echoed. "But that is not just, my lord! She does not even sew."
"Do you dare to question the justice of the Comte de Coureges, you stupid girl? Now get back to your work at once."
Arlette retrieved the fallen tapestry, scarlet to her hairroots, and hastily left the salon. Raoul Villiers de Coureges permitted himself a malicious smile.. .
The old grandather's clock at the foot of the huge stairway of the chateau had just finished chiming ten when Edouard Lavois peremptorily knocked at the door of the little room in which Arlette Poitivers was quartered. It was near the kitchen, in the far back of the chateau, and it had only a crude wooden trundle bed and a stool, and a small piece of frayed rug as furnishing.
Aware that she was to be sent for, the lovely redhead had not prepared for bed, and so at once opened her door to the valet.
"Come, wench!" he said haughtily. He walked ahead of her down the long dark corridor and up the stairs to the bedchamber of his noble master.
With a discreet knock at the door, he turned the knob and opened it, then silently went back to his own quarters. There two sturdy footmen awaited his orders. They were, he directed, to go to the village and bring back one Jacqueline Ville-franche, lock her in one of the subterranean dungeons, see that she had food and drink, and then await further instructions concerning her.
This done, he lay on his bed for a long hour, shaping out of the darkness salacious images in which both Jacqueline and Arlette principally figured, both naked and being subjected to torture and the whip, finally yielding to him alone. If he prayed at all, it was that his debauched young master would allow him to witness the actual coercion and violation of the two peasant beauties.. .
The Comte de Coureges received Arlette clad only in his dressing gown. Even his imagine perr-inque had been put into its case to await the morrow. His natural hair was closely cropped, and dull brown. His features were sallow for want of exercise, for the exercise he preferred did not go beyond the bedchamber or the torture chamber.
"You have brought the cloak?" he coldly demanded.
"Yes, M'sieu le Comte," Arlette responded. She handed the garment to him, and the profligate dandy moved towards the bed where he had lighted a large red wax taper in a silver candlestick on the little tabouret beside the huge canopied bed in which his father had lain and where he himself had been born. The workmanship was excellent, but there was one loose thread which gave him the pretext he sought.
"How you came by this reputation for skill, my girl, I do not know. Look at his disgraceful flaw!" He turned the cloak so she could see the loose thread.
"But my lord, that will take but a moment to repair."
"You have already had your moment. All these hours, and then this! And I shall keep my promise to you, too."
"I I beg of you let me go back to the sewing room and I will bring it to you in only a few moments, M'sieu de Comte," the red-haired virgin implored.
"Too late! Your pretty cousin will soon be enjoying the hospitality of my chateau, Arlette. Tomorrow night I mean to make her punishment a bit of entertainment for my worthy guests. She shall be the quarry of the hunt."
"Ohh, mon Dieu! I beg of you, I beseech you she has done nothing punish me, since I alone offended!" Arlette groaned, wringing her hands in anguish.
"I perceive that you have heard of my nightly hunt, then" he went on with a cruel little smile.
Arlette shuddered, lowered her eyes. "Out, M'sieu le Comte." Who in Courtembois did not know of that satanic game which the depraved young nobleman offered his equally sadistic guests. Last year, Arlette's dear friend, Madeleine Rouwald, the woodcutter's blonde daughter, had been taken to the chateau and, the next night, sent into the woods only in her shift and with a candle. She had been told that if she did not light it as bidden, when she was finally snared by the fortunate hunter, she would be branded on both cheeks and on the forehead for mutinous disobedience. An elderly marquies had tracked her down at last, hysterically hiding behind a lightning-ravaged oak tree at the south end of the forest. He had had his young bride, a dissolute, perverse beauty of nineteen, take the girl's maidenhead with a godemiche, while the unfortunate Madeleine had been compelled to lick and suck his atrophied cock until he attained some measure of gratification.
And then, peevishly denouncing the girl to his host, for having shown scant docility and less spirit, he had arranged to have the young blonde girl put to the whip in the dungeon and then brutally fucked by the two soldiers of the Comte's personal bodyguard who held the posts of torturer and exucutioner in this estate. Madeleine had host her reason as a result of her terrible experience. Even today when she saw the carriage of the Comyr de Coureges went past her father's hut, she would mewl and scream in insane terror.
Arlette's face, pale and drawn, reflected all this knowledge. The priggish nobleman gloatingly discerned her agitation. "However," he slyly insinuated, "though I am the law and the lord of this fief, I am just, even if I must be severe.
Therefore I will pardon your cousin on the condition that you give yourself to me this very night."
"My lord Comte, what are you saying!" the red-haired beauty gasped, her face crimsoning with shame.
"You have your choice, girl. Either you disrobe and surrender yourself willingly here and now, or Jacqueline will be the prize for my guests at the hunt tomorrow night. And one thing more if you refuse, tomorrow afternoon my guest will be offered the amusement of seeing you tethered to the whipping post in the courtyard, stripped as naked as I wish you to be at this moment, given the whip to the very blood and left there for the pleasure of any of my guests who deign to favor your lowly charms."
With a groan of despair, Arlette Poitivers began to draw off her dress, under which she wore a sleeveless tunic-like camisole of coarse lisle and white muslin drawers. The dandy's eyes blazed as he contemplated the thrust of her high-perched and closely spaced round bubbies, now beginning to rise and fall in her emotional agitation. Her thick mane or red-gold hair fell to the splendid slimness of her supple waist, and as his eyes descended, he could admire the ripe verve of her hips and long but beautifully rounded thighs.
"Be quick, girl!" his voice rasped. He moved to the four-postered, canopied bed and seized a silver-handled leather dog whip, turned back to her as with his other hand he swiftly opened his red satin dressing gown. His prick was already in savage erection. And Arlette uttered a cry of lea-thing and terror at the sight of these two rut-weapons by which he meant to conquer Tier this night.
"Oh please, my lord at least don't beat me I I will do what you ask, if only to save poor Jacqueline. But I pray you, not the whip!"
"Who are you, peasant scum, to dictate terms to me, master of this land and of all those who dwell upon it at my indulgence?" His lips curled in an insolent sneer. "Take off the rest of your wretched garments before I rip them from you with the lash!"
Tears rolled down her cheeks as the beautiful young redhead slowly drew the tunic-camisole off and let it flutter to the floor. He caught his breath at the sight of so much wondrous, milky flesh, at the sight of those two proud round globes with their wide, dark-coral love-circles centering about crinkly, pert pink buds. The deep, narrow niche of her navel seemed to wink lewdly at him just above the waistband of the coarse drawers which now, with her coarse white hose and shoes, alone concealed her. He made an impatient gesture with the whip, and Arlette, groaning aloud, tugged down the drawers and stepped out of them.
She could not take her eyes off the swollen protuberance of his dark-veined prick. And as he observed this, his viciously debauched mind conceived an even more odious ordeal for the young peasant girl.
Instinctively, in her maiden chastity, she put a hand over the thick, dark-red silky bush of her cunt, still contemplating the horried apparition of his palpitating cock. With a mocking laugh, Raoul de Coureges slashed the leather whip against that offending hand, and the tip of the flexible leather whip cracked wickedly against her tender, milky groin.
"Aaahhh! Pity, M'sieu le Comte!" Arlette implored.
"What airs you give yourself, you peasant bitch! That gesture of yours goes well with a noblewoman, but not a peasant slut. You need a lesson in the law of our realm, it would appear, Arlette. Know you that by the indulgence I grant you and your kin to live upon my estate and to earn your daily bread from it, not one whit of yourself do you posses that is not mine. Now kneel down and put your hands at my hips."
He swept the whip through the air to punctuate the order. Sobbing desperately in her plight, the naked young beauty sank down before him, her eyes blinded with tears. His left hand caressed that lovely red-gold head, moved down to lose itself in the thick silken cascade. Then, his fingers entwining in the shimmering tresses, he hissed, "Homage me now, Arlette. You see my beque? Kiss it as a token that you give yourself to me of your own free will."
Arlette Poitiviers uttered an spontaneous cry of revulsion. She recoiled, though his fingers viciously wrenched her tumbled hair. "Oh no, my lord, it it's unworthy. I would not for any man be content with my body, but do not shame me so!"
"Mort Dieu! Do you think to lecture me on propriety, you whorish naked slut? You've earned a proper lesson for yourself and one you shall have quickly." Releasing her hair with a shove that nearly made her fall to the floor, he strode to the bell rope and imperiously pulled upon it thrice. In a moment Edouard Lavois entered, having been about to retire for the night and clad only in his nightshift. He had, indeed, excited himself with dreams of the black-haired young cousin, and his master's summons had interrupted his own self-administered relief.
"Lavois, tether this bitch to the bed at once," the Comte de Coureges commanded.
There was no need for the valet to seek fetters; under the brocaded pillow of that luxurious bed there was already placed several lengths of cords, for the debauched son of the Sieur Alan had often diberted himself in such coercive manner.
Greedily bending down and seizing Arlette by the wrists, Lavois dragged her onto the bed, and at a sign from his master, forced her onto her back and then made fast her wrists and ankles so she was straddled on this altar of her maiden martyrdom.
The valet stood back now, his face flushed, his lips wet and trembling with unrequited rut, hopeful that his master would grant him some assuagement after he had finished with the naked captive. But the imaginatively sadistic young Comte de Coureges had no such intention of sharing this prize with a servant, and it added a fillip of lust to his cruel ardors in letting Edouard Lavois suffer the tortures of Tantalus, by watching without being permitted to enjoy.
Now, raising his silver-handled whip, he began to flog the unfortunate Arlette across her belly and titties and then the tender inner thighs, till at last her courage broke and her deafening cries filled the bedchamber. Her body arched violently as the leather whip slashed down at her milky nudity, leaving blazing, salacious markings on the heaving round turrets of her breasts, and the sweet smoothness of her shuddering belly, on the writhing and flexing contours of her long, delightfully fashioned thighs.
Her face turned restlessly to and for and she gnawed at her lips until she drew blood in her unspeakable suffering. After about thirty such savage lashes, the profligate nobleman paused, his chest heaving, his eyes glazed with rut.
"Are you ready to pay homage yet, you stubborn slut?" he gasped.
Then, laying the whip against the very apex of her thighs, he drew back his hand arid sent the whip whistling into the mossy gape.
A frenzied, inhuman scream rent the air as the naked red-haired victim's body lunged and jerked in uncontrollable spasms.
(Pity, have pity on me, my master, I consent I'll do all you wish, only stop) she capitulated.
With a sardonic laugh the young dandy cast off his dressing gown and knelt astride her whip-marked, panting titties. Then he turned to his valet: "Go back to bed, Lavois. You need your sleep so you can arrange all the details of the hunt tomorrow."
The valet's face fell and he mumbled a most reluctant leave taking as he left the bedchamber.
Comte Raoul de Coureges tilted back his head and burst into bawdy laughter. Then his hissed, "Now keep your promise, or I'll strip every inch of skin from that white body of yours with my whip."
Shuddering, her eyes closed, Arlette Poitiviers opened her mouth and performed the ignoble act of obeisance. . .and where she had done it, her blue-blooded despoiler stretched himself out upon her sculptured, palpitating body and savagely fucked her. He was insatiable through this long, hideous night. And her only consolation in her desperate shame and loathing and suffering was that little Jacqueline would escape the fiendish game of the hunt.
* * *
Jacqueline, tottering with stark terror, had been led out beyond the wails of the chateau, clad only in a short, thin shift and holding a red taper and a tinderbox, The two brutal guardsmen of the Comte de Coureges were accompanied by Edouard Lavois whose own night had been haunted by both frustration and hope. When the noble guests had their fill of this black-haired little bitch who had repulsed him, he would have her taken to an isolated dungeon beneath the chateau and there enjoy her to his fill.
"The night is dark, ma petitie," he said in an oily, ingratiating tone as the trembling and weeping girl was led towards the first stately row of spruce trees which bordered the edge of the forest of Coureges. "We shall give you five minutes. Then you will hear the sound of a hunting horn, and you must light this taper to guide us to your charming person. A second hunting horn will tell you when to extinguish it. If you fail to light it, bitch, the branding iron and the whip await you. And much more, as well, Now, be off!"
The two-soldiers, all this while exchanging obscene appraisals of the young girl's virgin charms, fondled her titties and her plumply rounded, satiny bottom through the thin shift. "The night's chilly, sweeting," one of them chuckled as he pressed his calloused fingers against Jacqueline's furry cunt, sliding it under the shift to attain her most intimate nook. "Take this caress to warm you, and now run swiftly like a deer. Mayhap no one will find you. Parbleu, these noble lords have fair besotted themselves with our master's wine this night!"
Then they sent her off, each smacking her bottom and laughing uproariously as the sobbing, frightened girl ran blindly into the forest. There came then the sound of the hunting horn, and a moment later the Marquis de Dampierre bawled out, "La void! To horse, my friends, and may Venus reward the best hunter with her bounty!"
He spurred his horse towards that tiny flickering light, while Edouard Lavois, hunting horn in his right hand and his master's gold-cased watch in his left, marked the passing of the time. At the exact moment, he blew the signal that would tell Jacqueline to extinguish her candle.
The frightened young brunette heard it, flung away candle and tinderbox and began to run once more. Sobbing, out of breath, her bare legs scratched by brambles, terrified by the hooting of the owls, she lost all sense of direction, her only thought to flee her human pursuers.
To her ears there came the thundering of hooves, and with a shriek she stumbled on, trying to summon her flagging strength, to find some sheltering place that would conceal her.
She stumbled over the dead branch of a stricken tree and fell headlong, bruised and stunned. She heard a loud cry: "Je I'ai trouve!" and then leather-gloved hands gripped her shoulders, and she shrieked aloud in her agonized despair. "Ahhh! Ohh, non, ayez pitie de moil" It was the Marquis de Dampierre, fifty, corase-featured, with elegantly waxed moustache and thin, sensuous lips drawn back to show his rotting teeth in a rictus of lecherous anticipation.
His young retainer, Edmund Vosgeres, rode up and dismounted, and at his master's order, bound the weeping girl hand and foot and flung her over the back of his horse. Then the two rode back to the chateau, meeting the others along the way and the Marquis de Dampierre boastfully bade them sweet dreams, for that was all they should have of this tasty wench this night.
Taken to his bedchamber by the young retainer, the black-haired young girl was flung upon the bed and the retainer then dismissed. Out of the adjoining room there now appeared the au-burn-haired, patrician and sensual mistress of the Marquis, Mademoiselle Claire de Frontenac. Twenty-five, already the widow of an elderly minister of state whose passions for wine and Claire's lascivious caresses had sent him to his grave a scant two years after their union, she had secret hopes of becoming a marchioness. To this end, knowing her lover to be insatiable and perverse, she devised the most ingenious orgies to keep him faithful to her.
She wore a filmy silken peignoir and silver-buckled pumps, and in her right hand she dangled the straps of an ivory godemiche.
The Marquis, still refaced and puffing from his exertion in the forest, swiftly undressed while Jacqueline stared at both of them with maddened eyes, whimpering in her craven terror. It was Claire who ripped the thin shift from the young girl's creamy body, and it was Claire who untied her wrists, only to tether them to the head posts of, the stately bed. Her lover, catching her idea, guffawed and set to work fixing poor Jacqueline's ankles so that she was straddled.
Then, letting her peignoir drop to the floor and revealing her sumptuous, tawny-skinned body, Claire donned the artificial prick and mounted the bed. Soon the wild screams of pain rose from the tortured young girl, but they were muffled as the naked Marquis de Dampierre knelt astride Jacqueline's heaving titties and compelled her to accept his noble prick into her tender mouth.. .
By Sunday night, when all the guests had departed, Arlette and her cousin were reunited. Once more it was in the bedroom of the Comte de Coureges. Both were naked and both by now cowed and submissive. And this time the valet received his reward for his forbearance. After he had plied a five-thonged whip over the writhing bodies of the two unfortunate victims, to compel them to enact the roles of Sappho and Bilitis, his dissipated master fell upon Jacqueline and panted, "Have your reward then, good Lavois. This fresh younger slut excites me moretonight. Do you then amuse yourself with Arlette."
History does not record how long these two lovely, innocent cousins were prisoners in the chateau of the Comte Raoul de Coureges. It is known only that they were never again seen in the village of Courtembois. But one month before the infamous Robespierre perished under the blade of the guillotine to which he had sent so many thousands of aristocrats, Raoul Villiers de Coureges was drawn in a tumbril towards the place of execution amid the jeers and the bloodthirsty howls of the masses of France again whom he had so often sinned.
CHAPTER FIVE: JOHANNA
The year was 1802, and in the United States, the first catalog of the Library of Congress was issued with the announcement that it listed 964 volumes and 9 maps. It was the year in which the American Congress recognized the war with Tripoli and the Barbary pirates which was to last three more years. In March of that year, Congress established the West Point Military Academy and in May, the city of Washington, D.C. was incorporated as a city by an act of Congress, its mayor to be appointed by the President himself. It was also the year in which the district of
Ohio was authorized by governmental act to become a state and its boundaries prescribed, and also when Georgia gave up her western lands to the United States, the last of the original states to do so, these lands being added to the Mississippi territory.
But in Europe, while the new nation across the seas was beginning to feel its muscles and look to the future and the days of the pioneers which would develop it into a world power, life was vastly different. Much of Europe had become a battlefield because of the advent of an upstart, a short, pudgy corporal from Corsica who at the age of twenty-four had become a brigadier general after the capture of Toulon. He had already defeated the Austrians at Marengo two years earlier, and, this very year of 1802 had negotiated a treaty at Amiens which brought a temporary peace. A year later, England was to declare war on France again, this time against the allied French nation over whom Napoleon, in this same year of 1802, had had himself elected consul for life.
Against him stood not only the English but also the Prussians, a former state of Germany, and with its capitol at Berlin, occupying the bulk half of Germany with nearly two-thirds of the total German population, historically emerging from the electorate of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia which had been united as a kingdom in 1701 under the Hohenzollern dynasty-
This Prussia, today our modern Germany, was the Prussia that had produced Frederick the Great and was, in this year of 1802, now ruled by Frederick William III, who was to be defeated at Jean in 1807 by the then self-proclaimed Emperor Napoleon.
But much of Prussia was still feudal, particularly its little towns where the power was in the hands of corrupt and ambitious magistrates. Such a town was Anhalt, which boasted some five thousand citizens and was dominated by the sadistic Herr Magistrat Karl Bodenheim.
Anhalt lay about 175 miles to the northeast of Berlin, and Frederick William III had only glowing praise for his own appointed town official, since the tax revenues paid into his royal coffers were always bounteous. To be sure, he had heard protesting reports from burgers and lesser citizens attacking the unjust and even cruel methods which Karl Bodenheim employed in collecting these levies, but this did not concern him. He needed the money to strengthen his army against that damnable Corsican brigand who now sought to be master of all Europe. And so Herr Magistrat Karl Bodenheim could live as he pleased and rule as he pleased over the lives of the poor, the unprotected and as well those females whom he coveted.
One such was Johanna Meist. Her father had been a wood-cutter on a little farm just outside the town, and her mother was now a seamstress, employed by the corpulent and quite wealthy
Frau Hermann Roeding. Johanna, twenty, was a magnificent beauty and as yet not even betrothed. All the young men lusted for her, but none with more determined zeal than Karl Bodenheim himself. And thus far the insolent peasant bitch had refused his attentions. It could not be tolerated, and it would not be!
Karl Bodenheim was forty-eight, bearded, stern-faced, but if one looked at him closely, one saw the signs of bloating and dissipation from too much good food and wine and beer, too much wenching. His face was florid, his chin already beginning to double, and his paunch far too evident even as he sat stiffly upon the presiding bench at the Town Hall on HertenStrassze. In his black robe, frowning down at a trembling prisoner, he seemed indeed to be the epitome of Prussian justice. And he saw to it most cleverly that most cases in his district were never referred beyond his own tribunal. There was a war against the French, and there was no need to bother the Emperor with such small matters as the plight of a stalwart and beautiful virgin who would not yield her body even to his order . . .
Johanna Meist was about five feet seven and a half inches in height, magnificently built, like some young Nordic goddess, perhaps the incarnation of Freya, beloved of the gods Wotan and Loki. Her hair, drawn back away from her pure, higharching forehead and thickly braided down to the middle of her sculptured back, was the color fo newly mown hay. Her skin was soft and pink, save where her arms and legs were darkened by the caressing sun as she sometimes worked beside her morose older brother Ludwig on the acre of farmland which their father had left them. Their little house and the farm, together with their mother's sewing and her own occasional assistance, brought them as comfortable a living as lowly born people in this Year of our Lord 1802, could reasonably expect.
Ludwig, some of the townspeople said, was verricht. He had been wounded by a French musket ball in the shoulder last year and mustered out of the Prussian army with an honorable discharge and the rank of corporal. But the wound had been badly treated by the surgeon and he had little use of his left arm. His sweetheart Gretchen, who had promised to wait for him until he came back from the war, had changed her mind and married Peter Grossze, a fat but wealthy young farmer who had twenty prospering acres several miles to the north. With that knowledge, Ludwig lost his easy going, jovial manner and began to brood. His sister Johanna was deeply concerned for him. That was one reason she had not wed, but there was another, even stronger. That reason was Use Kroner.
Use was Fifteen, a helpless, homeless waif who had been abandoned by her whorish mother in Dfuckheim, a village seventeen miles southwest of Anhalt, when the buxom, pleasure-loving woman had decided to follow a strapping young soldier and cast her lot with his. Use's father had deserted the mother eight years earlier no doubt because of her marital infidelities. So, fearing incarceration in the town orphanage, the pretty and timid dark-brown-haired girl had made her way to Anhalt and there obtained employment as a slavey to Farmer Ernst Mulhaus and his domineering wife Bertha.
The girl was overworked, underfed, and paid in curses and beatings, mainly bestowed upon her by Frau Bertha herself, since the fat, shrewish woman saw in Use's exquisite, gentle and nubile beauty a tempting lure that might well seduce her henpecked husband from her bed. One afternoon, after she had thrashed Use with a harness strap under the pretext that the girl had failed to do all her chores but in reality because Ernst Mulhaus had spoken kindly to the unfortunate waif Use had run off to cry and nurse the smarting of her buttocks and thighs and back from the strap's harsh kisses. Johanna had seen her crouching near an abandoned pig shed not far from the Meist farm, and gone to talk to the girl. And that was how it had all begun.
Under Johanna's sympathetic questioning, the tearful Use revealed what had made her run away from the farmer's house, and how she had come to Anhalt. Johanna Meist hurried back into her house and brought the girl a bowl of nourishing broth and some freshly baked black bread. Then she had urged Use to hurry back home lest Frau Mulhaus give her another beating, and told Use that she would like to talk with her again.
A few days later, Use was sent out into the fields to pick blueberries, and once again Johanna Meist met her. The young girl had already begun to idolize her beautiful protectress, and in an access of gratitude and affection, she flung her arms around the tall blonde beauty and kissed her, while the tears ran down her lovely face.
Awkwardly comforting the waif, Johanna's hands brushed the firm oval-cheeked bottom, and a singular emotion began to palpitate in her own not yet wakened flesh. It was true that she knew the ways of mating and that some of the young men of the town had already approached her, some even trying to lure her into the hedges to fuck, but thus far she had been aloof to their ardors. Concerned as she was for her brother and for the fact that her mother was beginning to show the infirmities of advancing age, Johanna Meist had not yet tasted the carnal joys which her magnificent body surely seemed to presage. And finally, when she had been fifteen, a drunken lout from the town hall, who had lost his way and who had nearly tumbled off his horse to try to ask directions, had perceived her and tried to fling her behind the hedge and fuck her. She hadn't cried out, but she had clawed at him and kneed him until finally she had escaped his drunken embrace. He had taken his prick out of his britches, and the sight of it had nauseated her. Ever since that day, Johanna Meist had loathed the brutality of the male.
All these factors, therefore, combined into a was drawn toward lovely young Use, and this first time of embrace between them, even though it had been a soothing one and with no lascivious desires intended, had made her conscious for the first time of her own secret needs for affection and passion.
Her kisses had grown more ardent, and Use, murmuring wonderingly, had continued to return them, hugging Johanna and giving her soft sweet mouth to the older girl's, shivering and squirming as Johanna's hands squeezed the plump young bottom-cheeks, then made their way along Use's sides to touch at last the girl's burgeoning round young .titties.
So little Use managed at least three or four times a week to sneak out of the farm and go visit her dear friend Fraulein Johanna. More and more, Johanna Meist looked forward to these visits. Several times she had had to console the unfortunate girl after a good whipping which the cruel Frau Mulhaus had given her for almost no reason at all. She began to think that perhaps she could petition the Herr Magistral to allow her mother and herself to adopt the forsaken girl. Indeed, she mentioned this to Use, who was in a seventh heaven of delight at the thought of escaping the persecution of the hateful, fat, farmer's wife.
It was a sunny September day, about an hour from sunset. There were ominous clouds in the sky, and Ludwig Meist had gone into town for supplies and food. Johanna's mother was napping, escaping for a brief time the miseries of her old bones. Johanna herself was out in the fields, and she saw the brown-haired girl come towards her. This time Use was weeping hysterically, and her coarse dress was torn, and Johanna could see that on one soft milky bare shoulder the purplish marks of a thick strap were emblazoned.
"Susses Kind, has that old sow been at you again?" she commiserated as she took the weeping girl into her arms and then made her sit down beside the little shed. "Tell me why she did it. Oh surely I shall go before the Herr Magistral next week. I have talked it over with my Mutter, and we should be proud to have you as a member of our family, little one."
"Oh, you are so good to me, dear Fraulein Johanna," Use Kroner sobbed. "I didn't do anything, I swear I didn't. Herr Mulhaus was talking to me, asking me how I was getting along. It was very nice he is always nice to me. I think she hates me because that is so."
"Of course that is why!" Johanna Meist vehemently interposed. Her eyes blazed with righteous anger. "Tell me, and be truthful, little Use. Has he ever tried to kiss you or put his arms around you?"
"Ach, nein!" the young girl gasped, shaking her head. "I swear I'm a good girl, oh do believe me, dear Fraulein Johanna!"
"Of course I believe you, Liebchen. You have had a terrible life for all that you are so young, but perhaps next week things will be different. Oh, what is that? Thunder it's going to rain. There it comes down now it's a storm let's go into the shed, dear little Use!"
Indeed, and almost without warning, a late summer thunderstorm had burst upon them. They were already drenched before they could enter the little shed, Use most of all. Her coarse dress clung to her shapely young body, and Johanna's magnificent contours were equally accented by the adhesion of her garments to her thigh and bottom and breasts.
The storm was long and noisy. Clap upon clap of thunder, even flashes of lightning, rent the stillness of the little farm. Use cowered on the floor of the shed, clinging tenaciously to her protectress. Their lips met, and Johanna's eyes saw the delicate white skin of the bare shoulder and just the hint of one sweet tittie which the jealous farmer's wife had laid bare when she had ripped at Use's dress and then begun to thrash her.
On an impulse she put her lips to the angry dark welt left by that thick strap, and Use moaned and hugged her even more tightly.
"Oh, you're drenched to the skin, little one," Johanna murmured. "Let me take your things off so that you don't get a chill. I'll get you some new clothes from the house. Here now, raise yourself up a little there we are now!"
She had drawn off the girl's coarse, tattered dress, a castoff which the farmer's wife had prettily begged from a neighbor who had three daughters. Use wore a single petticoat, coarse muslin drawers and a kind of camisole over her young bubbies. The sight of the young girl in this intimate deshabille fanned the secret flames of Johanna Meist's already amorous desires. Her hands began to stroke Use's lovely young titties, and now her mouth fused to the girl's. Instinctively she moved against her young charge, her loins prickled with the lascivious heat of Lesbian desire.
If Use had repulsed her or indignantly denounced her for such unnatural attentions, perhaps Johanna Meist might never have become enslaved as she was destined to be. But instead, the dark-brown-haired waif nearly swooned with delight under these caresses, which were the first signs of affection and tenderness she had ever known in all her short life. And as the storm raged on, so did the ardors of Johanna Meist and the wakened adolescent response of sweet Use. Soon the camisole was cast aside and then the drawers, and the milky-naked body of the dark-brown-haired girl palpitated and shivered there on the floor of the shed. Johanna, who had fucked up her own dress and lowered her drawers, lay upon her sweetheart, her mouth feasting on Use's, her hands under Use's firm satiny oval-bottom globes. She moved backwards and forwards, like a cat in heat rubbing herself against the couch, and little sobs and gasps began to exude from her panting mouth as she felt herself drawn towards the abyss of total fulfillment. Her fingers squeezed and pinched Use's naked behind, and Use's answering whimpers and groans of pleasure urged her onward to this Lesbian conquest.
Their cries echoed together in the little shed as each attained the sweet oblivion of climax. And when it was over, Johanna Meist was scarlet with shame at the knowledge of her own lascivious immodesty. But Use, on the contrary, dewy-eyed with bliss, could not get enough of kisses and caresses, of reassurances that yes, next week, for certain, her dear Fraulein Johanna would go to the town hall and ask the Herr Magistrat to render the decision of a Solomon and let Use become a member of the Meist family.
But fate, who had brought about the tunder-storm, was intervening again to alter the lives of both Ilse Kroner and Johanna Meist. The two girls at last reluctantly disengaged themselves of the passionate embrace which their naked bodies had profoundly sought, and dressed, Ilse, blushing shyly, hiding her face from her sweet lover, faltered, "Oh, I don't know if I shall see you again until next week, Susses Fraulein Johanna. Frau Mulhaus says that I must do all the chores for the next few days because Herr Mulhaus is going to Potsdam to see his half-brother."
"Never mind, little one. I myself will go before the Herr Magistrat, and with my mother. Perhaps it is best we don't see each other till after he says we may adopt you. Then it will be a lovely surprise, and the next time we meet, you will be my little sister, nicht wahr?" Johanna Meist told the entranced young girl.
They exchanged a last kiss, and then Use Kroner hurried out of the shed. The storm was over, the fields were soaking, the skies still omi-niously dark. As dark, indeed, as the shadow which had now come upon both of them and which they yet could not see.
But when she reached the farmhouse, she found Frau Mulhaus in a towering rage. "Wo im Teufel hast du sein?" the fat woman angrily scolded. "Where did you run off to, you miserable little bitch? A Dim like your mother, I'll be bound. I know where you've been. Lying in a hedge with some boy who lifted your skirts and did what he wanted to you, I've no doubt."
"Oh no, Frau Mulhas, that's not true! I I went to the Meist farm, and then it started to storm, and I stayed in the shed until it was over."
"A likely story!" the vindictive woman sneered. "Take off your clothes they are soaked. Clothes cost money and you don't even earn you keep around here, you lazy slut! Take them off now, I say. Don't be so modest, I'll bet you've already shown your kootzele to half the boys in town!"
Overcome by this unjust and vicious accusation, Use Kroner began to cry. This in turn only infuriated Frau Mulhaus the more. She sent Use's head rocking with a violent slap across the mouth. "Don't you obey me? You're just itching for another d ose of the strap, you little filth!
Now take off everything, I want to see you. I'll soon find out if you've been fucking yes fucking, my girl. Comeing in here with those sheep's eyes and being only fifteen, but the daughter of a whore, what do you think I expect from you? Be quick about it, now!"
Weeping bitterly, Ilse Kroner stood naked, shivering in the kitchen of the farmhouse. The woman's beady eyes narrow. She could see that the soft downy curies of Ilse Kroner's pussy-hair were ruffled and suspiciously moist." And this, you dirty little Dreck" she hissed as she came forward and put her finger to Use's cunt." I suppose you're going to tell me that's from the rain, too. Oh yes, my fine lady, you took off your clothes so you could let the rain wash your white skin, like the wife of a baron, I've no doubt. Little filth, tell me everything, or I'll thrash you raw!"
"Oh no, please, Frau Mulhaus, don't whip me! I swear I wasn't with a boy I wan't!" Ilse Kroner wept, wringing her hands, cowering and trying to clench her thighs to conceal the soft virgin nook of her young cunt. But Bertha Milhaus had already reached out towards the hook from which the harness strap dangled, a cruel, thick polished brown leather strap, and now with sadistic joy she brandished it and then sent it smacking violently over Ilse Kroner's soft round titties.
The brown-haired girl shrieked in indescribably suffering, clutching at her bubbies, backing against the wall, blubbering, "Oh please no, oh don't, have mercy, good Frau Mulhaus! I wasn't with a boy, I swear upon the Holy Book, I wasn't!"
"Don't you lie to me, Use! Wait till my husband gets back home from Potsdam. He's been sweet on you himself, and don't think I don't know that. But I'm going to make him whip you to the blood this time. Before that, just so you won't think yourself neglected, you young bitch, I'm going to warm your Arsch for you right now."
Lifting the strap, she slashed it over Use's belly, and then as the frightened, agonized naked girl twisted round and pressed her front against the wall, the strap began to smack noisly over the young girl's bottom and thighs and back. The white-hot scalding swipes of pain were unbearable. Shrieking, babbling entreaties for mercy, Use at last sank down on her knees and flung her arms round Frau Mulhaus' skirts, moaning, "I wasn't with a boy, I was with Fraulein Meist in the shed! Oh don't beat me anymore, it hurts me so, oh please, dear Frau Milhaus, I swear I wasn't with a boy."
"I'll find out if you're lying. I'll see this Meist bitch. She gives herself airs too, but she's no better than she should be, I'll warrant. But let's find out now. On your feet, or I'll let you have the strap agian. All right. Now go sit down on the edge of the table and lean back. I want to see if a boy has been playing with you. Let me see that dirty little kootzele of yours."
Cowed by pain and terror, Ilse submitted to this supreme indignity. The sadistic fat woman, transfering the strap to her left hand, now poked her forefinger about the tender pussy. She discovered the virgin seal, and so her suspicions of Use's wantoness were nullified. But the suspicious, viscous moisture adhering to the soft fleece of the girl's cunthole led her to an assurance that Ilse Kroner had been up to no good in that shed. And then she uttered a cry of righteous horror. She had just divined how that phenomenon could have come about. Of course, two girls together. Why hadn't she thought of that? In Berlin, just before she'd married that fool of an arnst, she and her boyfriend had gone to a very special house, where you paid a few thalers to watch through a peephole. And there had been two bitches, in their stockings and petticoats and nothing else, lying on a bed and playing with each other's kootzeles. Yes, that was how it had happened with this little bitch here. So the fine Johanna Meist, who made such bones about being too good for any eligible farmer's boy in town, had her dirty pleasures with this little bitch. It would be something to tell the Herr Magistrat. Why, it was sinful, unnautral, against the law of man and God alike.
Ilse, cringing back on the table, her body shaking with uncontrolable agitation, saw the cruel, flushed face of her tormentress warp in the rictus of an unholy smile of joy. "Oh please," she began, "I've been a good girl, I wasn't with a boy "
"Keep your dirty little mouth shut, you Dime you! Go put your clothes back on. There isn't much supper left, not after your fun in the shed there with Fraulein Meist. And then go right to your room. You're going to get up at dawn tomorrow and go work in the fields and I'll be out there with this strap to make certain you do a good day's work, Use. Off with you!"
Whimpering, Use Kroner hastily retrieved her discarded garments and donned them. Then, after the frugal supper which she was allowed, she went to her room and wept plaintively. All that consoled her was the thought that next week dear good Fraulein Johanna would intercede for her and take her away forever from this horrible creature. Oh how she hurt from that terrible strap!
* * *
But it was the crafty, vindictive Frau Bertha Mulhaus who preceded Johanna Meist to the town hall and demanded audience with none less than Herr Magistral Karl Bodenheim on that very next Monday morning. She had wheedingly urged his bailiff, bald Kasper Ebelduring, to let her have but a moment with the Herr Magistral and she would see to it that his worthy bailiff was made a present of one of her finest seed cakes. So she was ceremoniously ushered into the private chamber of the Magistral of Anhalt. Curtseying, she obsequiously thanked him for his kindness in giving her this audience.
"Well, now, what is it, frau Mulhaus?" he irritatedly remarked, pulling out his big gold-encased watch from its chain and fob round his corpulent waist. "I've only ten minutes to give you, for there are cases before me this morning, urgent ones which need my full concentration."
"That I know, gnadige Herr Magistrat" the fat farmer's wife simpered. "But I have been so horrified all week long, and with my husband in Potsdam and thus unable to counsel with me, that I thought it best to bring to Your Lordship's attention something that has left me distraught."
"Well then, out with it, woman, if you will!" he burst out. "What has made you so distraught? The storm the other night?"
"Perchance one might say that, Herr Magistrat. You see, I have a drudge, a little waif that my husband and I gave Christian charity to. We took her into our very home, we made her almost our daughter, and she has repaid us with the most blasphemous of sins."
"So, what sin do you speak of, woman?"
"The sin of unnatural lust, Herr Magistrat. I am a decent woman, and though I have borne no children of my own because it is God's will that I cannot conceive, nonetheless I'm kindly inclined towards them. That was why I took Ilse Kroner into my house. It is true that all she does for me is do some of the chores and we give her food and lodging and we will bring her up to be a good
Christian. Her mother was a slut, begging Your Lordship's pardon, and it is my fear that the girl herself will follow in her mother's footsteps."
"You speak in so roundabout way, Frau Mulhaus," he retorted, frowning angrily, "that I do not follow you. Please to make haste, for the time presses!"
"I will, Your Lordship. Forgive me, but it is because I am so devout and so unused to such iniquity in the young that I can hardly frame my thoughts," the fat woman propitaitingly replied. "I believe in the virtue of obedience and since I have taken this little slut again begging your Lordship's pardon as a daughter, my husband and I have chastised her when she has deserved it. Spare the rod and spoil the child, you know, Excellent."
He made an impatient gesture with his hand, adjusting his black coat, scowling at her. Would the woman never end this tirade? The fat sow, she was beginning to get on his nerves. Now if it were a matter of a handsome wench, that would be another matter.
"It was the evening of the storm, Your Lordship, Friday night."
"I am well acquainted with the storm. But for God's sake, woman, come out with it, for my time is almost up!" he burst out.
"Forgive me, Your Lordship." Unerringly wishing to flatter him, she gave him the highest possible title of respect, one that might have suited for a cardinal or an archbishop. "Well, the girl had run away after I had given her a little thrashing. She's lazy, you see, and she needs to be guided. She ran away, as I say and she was gone a terribly long time. Then there was the storm and I was worried about her, naturlich. And so finally when she came back, she was soaked to the skin. Well I thought to myself, I must find out where she's been. So I asked her. She went over to the farm of the Meist's. Perhaps Your Lordship knows of the family, with the crazy brother Ludwig."
"I have heard the name," he admitted cautiously. But now he was all eagerness, for the name recalled to him the lovely blonde Johanna, who had spurned him. He had, some months ago, sent his bailiff to the Meist cottage, to inquire discreetly whether she would take supper with him. And the answer had come back that she would not and that she was too lowly to deserve such attentions, and she prayed him to desist. Imagine, such a lordly answer from a peasant bitch!
"Well now, Your Lordship," Bertha Mulhaus went on, "I had her take off all her things and I saw that she had been wicked. I do not wish to offend Your Lordship -"
"You will if you don't come out with it at last, woman!" he roared, clenching his fist and bringing it down with a crash upon his desk.
The fat farmer's wife paled, her eyes very large and round, because she like everyone else in Anhalt feared this powerful man. "Very well, then, Your Lordship, and forgive me if I offend your sensibilities with what I'm about to tell you. I thought at first, knowing what her mother had been, that this little bitch had perhaps lain with a man during the storm. I had her strip herself, and I examined her. It was true that her maidenhead was yet intact, but there was sign of how shall I say it pleasure, which must have been taken unnaturally, and when I pressed her to tell me with whom she had been, she said that it was with Fraulein Meist. You see, Your Lordship, that young woman gives herself such airs around the town, saying no to this one and to that one and all the time she has put a horrid hex on my poor little girl Ilse. I appeal to you, Herr Magistrat, to punish this sinful creature before she corrupts the sweet nature of our adopted daughter."
"I see. I'm grateful to you for having told me this, Frau Mulhas. I shall make my own investigations, and you can be sure if there is iniquity here it will be ruthlessly punished. Good day to you. Now I must go into the court.
* * *
Little suspecting the vindictive action of Bertha Mulhaus, Johanna Meist had persuaded her mother to accompany her to the town hall where they meant to petition Herr Magistrat Karl Bodenheim to permit the adoption of Ilse Kroner.
The unscrupulous and lecherous judge, however, at once recognized the desirable young woman whom he had vainly tried to accept his attentions. His mocking glance down from the tribunal bench made Johanna Meist's face redden with shame, and when she and her mother had finished their appeal, he coldly remarked, "Things like this aren't done in a moment, Frau Meist. I shall have to have the matter investigated. Perhaps Herr and Frau Mulhaus will want to keep this little orphan, perhaps they've grown attached to her. And I've only your word, and that's on hearsay, that they've been unkind to her. You will hear from me in good time, Frau Meist. Next case, bailiff."
At the end of the day's session, the unscrupulous magistrat sent for his fat, gray-haired bailiff, Rasper Ebelduring, a widower in his early fifties and a notorious lecher in his own right. The magistrat knew his man quite well, and understood also that on the none-too-lordly salary which he earned, he could afford little more than a tavern slut, lusty though he might still be.
"Rasper, old fellow," he said to his bailiff once they were in his chambers together, "I've a little commission for you to execute. Do it properly, man, and there'll be ten silver thalers for you. Why, that's enough to earn you an hour or two with that red-haired dancer what's her name, now? Rlara, or something like that? The one at the Rottes Rreuz."
The bailiffs eyes glinted with avaricious lust at such a tempting offer. "I'm your man, Herr Magistrat. Just tell me, and it'll be done," he avowed.
"Well then, listen carefully. I want you to go to the Mulhaus farm and bring back their little brat, that waif they've adopted as a slavey, one Ilse Kroner. Put her in a cell overnight, so she can think about matters and be in a truthful mood when you and I examine her tomorrow morning. See to it that all cases before me are scheduled for after the midday meal. And you can assit me, if you like. I've heard that you're a fair hand with the birch, you old devil, you!"
"Your worship gives me too much credit," the bailiff smirked, modestly lowering his eyes. "It's true that I've thrashed a few bitches in my time, Your Worship. I know how to make them sing and waggle their fat behinds, you can be sure of that."
"Well, this one is a tender morsel, Kasper, so you're not to spoil her. I've reasons for that. I want to find out exactly what influence that haughty bitch Johanna Meist has had on her. Why, to listen to Frau Mulhaus, you'd think the Meist bitch put a spell on her. The days of witches are just about over, but it might well be, Kurt, that you and I could have a little fun, since these stupid peasants don't know what we can cook up for them, hein?"
"I understand Your Worship perfectly. I'll go get her myself this moment."
"No, you stupid dog, not now. Not until it's time for bed. That'll impress the little bitch all the more. Instead of having her nice little trundle bed, she'll come to a cold, narrow cell. She'll cry herself to sleep, she won't know what it's all about, and in the morning when you and I take her aside and try to learn something from her, she'll be extremely cooperative, you mark my words."
"Excuse me, Your Worship, no one in Anhalt is a match for your cleverness. Of course that's the way to do it. You may count on me, Your Worship!" the bailiff hastily amended and bowed himself out.
Karl Bodenheim lit his pipe, grinning with satisfaction. Before too much longer, he would pay himself back for that Meist bitch's insolence and surliness, and he'd have a little amusement with that young piece of kootzele, Use Kroner, into the bargain . . .
"But why am I being taken to jail? What have I done? Oh please!" Use Korner sobbed as the two men, without bothering to address a word to her, lifted her down from the cart in which they had driven her after visiting the Mulhaus farm and curtly ordering Bertha Mulhaus and her husband to get the girl ready at once. They pushed her into a little cell, locked the door and walked away down the damp corridor in the jail under the sturdy beam of the town hall. The punishment room, however, was at the back of the first floor, for at times Herr Magistrat Karl Bodenheim granted the townspeople a kind of holiday and allowed them to see the public punishment of wicked culprits, as a good example for all of them.
Poor Ilse sobbed herself to sleep, and the imagined noise of the scurrying of rats did not ease her anxiety and fears.
In the morning, the two men who had locked her into the cell came with a bowl of porridge and a crust of black bread, and one of them ordered her to eat it quickly, as she was soon to appear before the Herr Magistrat himself. Once more the unfortunate young girl pleaded to know why she had been jailed, and once again she went unanswered. After she had finished the meager meal, both men seized her by the wrists, hauled her up the narrow stone steps, down a side passageway which led to the Peitschen Ziemmer, or, translated from the German, the whipping room.
As one of the men holding the sobbing girl knocked upon the door, the bald bailiff, Kasper Ebelduring, swiftly opened it. "In here, boys!" he jovially commanded. Ilse Kroner's lovely hazel eyes widened with horror as she saw the low, wide whipping bench, the buckling straps affixed to the legs and at the middle, with a round wooden bolster placed at the center for the victim's belly, a precaution recommended by the Herr Magistrat himself, so that the bottom of the victim would be lewdly and tightly offered up to the flogging. On a table near by lay various instruments of investigation: a tawse, a bull's pizzle made from the bull's nerve and fiendishly biting, a five-thonged leather whip, and a long peeled birch switch. In a bucket near the wall, from which dangled metal gyves, there was steeping a very slim birch rod, made from about half a dozen long birch switches, the buds from which having been cut off. At the end of the room was a low desk and a velvet upholstered chair, where the Herr Magistrat himself would sit, acting as both judge and questioner. On his sign alone the whipping would start and end, and on him alone, too, would depend the severity and the nature of the flogging.
"Put her on the bench, boys. Tie her up good. Get that skirt and petticoat up and let's have her drawers down so her nice little Arsch can be ready for His Worship!" the bald bailiff wheezed.
"Oh no! I've done nothing I swear to you, I've been a good girl!" Use Kroner wailed, as the two men, laughingly mocking her childish terror, dragged her to the whipping bench and flung her down upon it.
Her wrists and ankles were quickly strapped and buckled tightly. Then one of the men greedily and lingeringly lofted the coarse skirt and then the one tattered petticoat beneath, to reveal the luscious young behind encased in a pair of coarse muslin drawers. The same man fucked up the scanty camisole so as to reveal as much of lovely Use's naked skin as possible. Then the other man put his hands under the waistband of the drawers and began to tug them down.
"On no! Not naked, not like this in front of men! Lieber Himmel, have pity on a poor girl, a decent girl, Your Lordships," the pathetic waif pathetically begged.
But in vain. The drawers were relentlessly yanked down to her calves, covered with cheap black hose which reached scarcely above her knee hollows. The pale, exquisitely smooth, milky white skin of her lovely bottom and thighs and lower back were exposed now in the infamous chamber. It would be a private session, this time. And now the other door opened, and the Herr Magistrat entered, in his judicial robe. Seating himself in his chair, he made a sign for the two assistants to leave the room and to lock the door from the other side, with the admonition that he was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Then he made a sign to his bailiff to proceed.
Kasper Ebelduring bowed low. "With what shall I begin, Excellenz?" he deferentially asked.
"The birch, naturlich. Gently at first, so as not to tear that fine skin. Now then, Ilse Kroner, you are her on the complaint of your kind foster parents, but it is from your lips that we must here the truth."
"The truth about what, Your Worship? Oh, I swear to you, I'm a good girl. I don't go with boys, I work hard. Herr Mulhaus will tell you!" Ilse Kroner sobbed, raising her beautiful, large, tear-glistening hazel eyes to the lecherous judge. She was beautiful thus, and lasciviously desirable as she lay strapped down, the bolster under her belly arching up the temptingly curved globes of her virgin ass, showing also to the baliff the sinuous, ambery-shadowy crease between the cheeks, and then below them, the exquisite pink lips of her maiden cunthole. Her clothes fucked up to the middle of her back, her drawers twisted about her knees, her tumbled cascade of dark-brown tresses falling into a silken mass about her slim shoulders, she had a particular allure for the cruel justiciary of Anhalt.
"My child," he said in a deceptively kindly voice, "you are not charged with any crime. But this is the regular procedure of the law, that when testimony is taken, it must be done under the question. This dates back from Roman times." He was, to be sure, speciously twisting the law to serve his own abominable purpose. The Roman law he referred to was, indeed, atrociously unjust. It was assumed that slaves, being unintelligent and unaware of the privileges of freedmen, must necessarily lie and be ignorant, and thus it was ruled that all such questioning must be under torture that would bring forth the truth. It was true that in times beyond that, such as in the days of the terrible Inquisition, such law was also invoked. But in Anhalt there was no such law.
"Oh, what do you want of me, Your Worship? I am so ashamed! Oh, please, at least have them have them pull my drawers up, Your Worship," Use wept.
The bailiff was licking his lips as he took the birch out of the bucket, flourished it in the air to shake off the excessive moisture, then took his station at the left of the victim, waiting the sign from the black-robed magistrat.
"Listen carefully, my child," Karl Bodenheim continued. "Frau Mulhaus, who in the eyes of the law is your foster mother, has come to me to say that a friend of yours, one whom you well know, has cast a hex upon you. That curse has made you commit a sin, a most grievous sin, my child. You are but fifteen, and I do not impose the stringency of the law upon your tender body. But you must feel the birch, nevertheless, until you speak the truth or the falsehood of that charge. Now be very careful how you answer. Use. Bailiff, one cut at the top of the bottom. Not too hard, mind you."
"Oh no, Your Worship, please don't! I'll oww! Oh, please don't whip me please don't! I'll be a good girl!" the lovely young girl's plaintive protest was interrupted by the descent of the birch, whose flexible withes swept crisply over the tops of her naked hips. She writhed convulsively, twisting back her tearstained face at the smirking bailiff, uttering a cry of doleful anguish.
"Attention, Use!" the magistrat commanded. "Now, is it not true that you and one Johanna Meist were together in a little shed on the Meist farm on this night when there was a storm? Be quick, and remember, you must tell the truth, or you shall be punished severely!" He made a sign, and the bailiff again brought the birch down, though mildly. Nonetheless, as it leaped across the creamy, tightly drawn hemispheres of Use's bare ass, about an inch below the bright pink striata left by the first cut, her body jerked violently and a piercing cry of pain attested to her suffering.
"Aiiiii! Oh, don't oh, have mercy I haven't done anything, I swear not!"
"Will you speak, you little vixen?" Karl Bodenheim harshly demanded, his voice thickening with the lust he felt as he watched this delicious, nubile virgin writhe under the birch. "Yes or no? Were you or were you not with Johanna Meist?"
Sobbingly, Ilse avowed that she had been indeed with that young woman.
"Very well," the magistrat went on. "And now, upon the Holy Book and your hope of salvation in the next world, Ilse Kroner, speak truthfully. Did you and Johanna Meist not come together in lascivious and unnatural manner, caressing and embracing as might a man and a maid? Hasten with your reply, girl, for my bailiff is already raising the birch over that pretty A rsch of yours!"
Before Ilse Kroner could speak, the bailiff had brought down the rod, brought it down straight across the center of both lovely young asschecks. It was the crudest blow yet, and Ilse Kroner's body vibrated and threshed about as she shrieked aloud, "Ahrrr! Eeeeowwouuu!! Oh, have pity! It tears and cuts me so! Oh please, it wasn't wrong, she was being nice to me. Frau Mulhaus is cruel to me, she beats me all the time she didn't do anything wrong, Johanna didn't. Oh please, please, Your Worship, have him stop now!"
"Then you do confess?" the black-robed magistrat leaned forward, his eyes glittering. "Speak, or the bailiff will shred the skin off that pretty Arsh of yours to the very blood, my girl." Once again the bailiff raised the bundle of switches, and the terrified, weeping and tethered young captive, looking back over her shoulder, cried, "Oh, don't let him beat me again, Your Worship. I'll I'll tell. But it wasn't wrong, I swear it wasn't. She was kind and good to me, she brought me food and drink, and then she said that she and her mother wanted to have me in their home and they would be good to me. Oh, please let me go to them, Your Worship!"
"We shall talk of that later, Use. Now that you have admitted this abomination, this filthy sin with Johanna Meist, I wish to hear most particularly from your own lips what precisely took place. Speak quickly!" And again he made a sign to the bailiff, who applied two light cuts across the straddled, shuddering white thighs of the unfortunate teenaged captive. Wails of pain were torn from Use Kroner, and tears coursed down her cheeks as she babbled, "She kissed me, she held me, she was good to me oh please, it's not a sin! Oh, please don't let him whip me any more. That awful rod, it's torturing me, Your Worship."
"It'll torture you even more, you impudent vixen, unless you speak the truth as I command you!" he thundered. "I wish to know everything. Tell me, were your garments removed?"
Sobbing, Ilse nodded, her eyes blinded with tears. But the magistrat was not yet content. "Now tell me, did she also take off her clothes as well as yours? And what did she do. Where did she caress you, where did she kiss you? Speak, Ilse!"
Once again, at his sign, the birch whistled down, this time diagonally from left to right across the pale white asscheeks trembling before them, and then from right to left. The angry vivid red X springing up on the nacreous flesh of that virgin ass made both the bailiff and the magistrat tremble with their ill-concealed lust. The girl screamed, twisted and jerking, her bottom on fire, and hysterically, shamefully, in a quavering voice broken with sobs and groans, she revealed all that Herr Magistrat Karl Bodenheim desired to know. Yes, they had taken off their clothes, they had lain together and they had rubbed their bodies together. They had exchanged kisses and their hands had wandered here and there.
And when it was over, she bowed her head, closed her eyes and burst into hysterical sobs, knowing desolately that she had brought about the very downfall and disgrace of the one person who had been kindest to her in all her tender young life.
"I am satisfied with you, Ilse Kroner," he said at last. "Bailiff, take the girl back to her cell and have the physician look at her. Give her some bread and milk, and we'll see to her later. Now you will send your men for Fraulein Meist."
It was late that afternoon when the bailiffs assistants drove up to the Meist farmhouse in their horse and cart and hammered upon the door to demand entrance. Johanna herself answered that rude summons, and shrank back at the mocking cruelty on their brutal faces.
"You're to come with us directly, girl," one of them commanded. "Yes, and you'd best come quietly or we'll iron you," the other added.
"I have done nothing. Of course I shall come with you." Johanna Meist's quiet demeanor momentarily halted the men's rougliness, but all the same they jostled her as they pushed her into the cart, one of them stepping in with her, the other taking up the reins, clucked them and directed the horse and cart back to Anhalt.
She was at once lodged in a cell not far from Use Kroner's. Throughout the long afternoon, until twilight she waited, at which time the Herr Magistrat had heard the remainder of the civil cases before him. Then, without a word of warning, the two bailiff's assistants, reappearing, seized the beautiful blonde young woman and bore her to the whipping chamber, without vouchsafing her a word of explanation as to what her fate was to be.
The magistrat had discarded his judicial robes for a brocaded dressing gown and a pair of silken under drawers which he had purchased in Berlin. His sensual nature loved the feeling of silk and satin against his naked skin, and already the sight of the superb, tall, poised blonde woman had whetted his appetites.
He took his place at the table, cleared his throat, and pompously began. "Fraulein Meist, you are here to answer a most serious accusation. It is a charge by which if you are found guilty of it, could likely have you beheaded."
"I don't understand you, Herr Magistrat. Of what am I accused?" She was pale and trembling, but nonetheless she bore herself with a superb dignity which even the bailiffs assistants and the bald bailiff himself observed with grudging admiration. Yet it was a kind of admiration which preceded their gloating knowledge that soon she would be humbled, yes, once her fine big Arsch was stripped bare and she was tied down on the bench for the Dirchenrot. There were few women, not even the blue-blooded ones, who could withstand the taste of the lash. The bailiff himself could remember that two years ago the Herr Magistrat had himself given the rod to no less important and noble a personage than a countess, one Edith von Herzog, who had been condemned of poisoning her elderly husband. Oh, she had gone to the headsman's block, and in the public square, too, for the sin. But first Karl Bodenheim had closeted himself with her, and intimated to her that if she were amenable to reason and yielded herself to him, he would let her off with the penance of a flogging, then imprisonment, instead of the axe. Oh, she had been a fine, sturdy bitch, that one, with titties like musk melons! It had been a pity to put an end to such a fine piece of kootzele. Unfortunately he, the bailiff, had only been a party to the whipping, not the fucking. Oh, the bitch had been eager enough to save her neck. She'd agreed, almost babbling, to be taken to the whipping bench, and he'd taken her there himself, tied her down himself, tied up those fine lace-trimmed petticoats of hers and the skirt, undone her gaiters and taken down her silken drawers to reveal that wonderful Arsch. He'd even caressed it slyly, and the Herr Magistrat hadn't noticed. Then he'd given her the birch, thirty good whistling cuts on the big bot-ton. How she'd yelled and howled, and finally begged the Herr Magistrat, "Ach Himmel, I submit! Oh, in mercy's name, take me to bed, do anything you want, but make him stop! He's cutting me to ribbons! I'm going to faint from the terrible pain!"
Her bottom had been bleeding, right enough, when he'd finally finished. He had laid the last cuts on spitefully, since he wasn't going to have a piece of that sweet cunt. Nor had he. The Herr Magistrat had taken her into his bedchamber and there he had lain with her until dawn. And then she'd been gagged and blindfolded, taken back to her cell and had a priest in with her. An hour later, still blindfolded, hands bound behind her, clad in only her shift, they'd forced her up the block and made her kneel with her pretty neck upturned to the sharp axe.
But perhaps tonight would be a different story. Perhaps the gnodige Herr Magistrat would allow him to have a little bit of that tasty kootzele for all he'd done in snaring that little bitch Ilse and now this fine piece for him.
He placed himself behind the young woman, awaiting a signal. He gestured to his assistants to be ready. The mocking, lecherous face of her judge peered at Johanna Meist, his crafty, cruel eyes already stripping her in advance. "A very serious charge," he repeated. "You are too young to walk up those seven steps to the platform of execution, Fraulein Meist. Then there is a heavy wooden block, hollowed out, so one may put one's neck into it. Your hair will be most likely shorn before you mount that platform. Then the headsman will come with the axe, the mask on his face so you will not know his name. He will ask your pardon, and you will be allowed to say a prayer. And then when I give the signal, the axe will fall."
"Im Gottes namenl Of what have I been accused? I have killed no one, I have harmed no one. Why do you speak of execution to me, Herr Magistral" Johanna Meist almost hysterically cried out.
"You are a brazen one," he chuckled. "There are three men here besides myself. The charge is of a nature that I should not like to have my in-corruptable assistants hear. But since you insist, I shall have no choice. In a word, Fraulein , Johanna Meist, you are accused of having unnatural lust with a minor child, one Use Kroner, in a shed during the evening of the rainstorm. The child's foster parents and guardians have complained against you, and Use Kroner herself, right here in this very room, has admitted the truth of the charge. How do you plead, guilty or not guilty?"
"But it's not true! You must have tortured the poor thing to get her to make up such a nest of lies!" Johanna Meist gasped. Nevertheless, she was terribly shaken. She racked her mind at once to know how this terrible thing had become known. Oh yes, she'd known shame and contrition, but Use had been so sweet and their love had been so beautiful. Now, spoken here before these men, it sounded degrading, filthy. And yet what proof was there? "I have done nothing," she repeated, taking a deep breath and staring back at him. He smiled. He relished the challenge such an adversary provided.
"Then I shall have to question you officially. And this is done in this court under the lex Ro-hanicus. Place her on the bench, after you have stripped her down to her camisole and drawers," Karl Bodenheim commanded.
"Neinl I've done nothing. It is unjust!" Johanna Meist cried. But already the bailiffs assistants had seized her, ripped off her dress, then the two white petticoats, until she was down to camisole and drawers and her gray lisle hose and shoes. Seizing her by the elbows, despite her struggles, they forced her down upon the whipping bench and swiftly had her strapped by wrists and ankles, and were about to place the broad strap around the middle of her back, except that Karl Bodenheim shook his head. He wished to see that gorgeous ass of her given liberty enough to twist and bound and weave all she desired, so that she could not deny the sight of her charms, her most intimate treasures, to his gaze. She, who had considered herself too lowly and asked him to desist in his attentions to her she would beg for them before this night was done, the Dire!
The bolster under her belly projected up the high-set, ripely rounded, tightly spaced cheeks of her magnificent bottom. She had long, gracefully rounded thighs, slim, high-set, sinuously sleek calves which even the coarse gray stockings could not hide. The thick braid of her pale golden hair fell almost to her waist. Her face was scarlet with shame now, but she stared courageously at the bearded, stern-faced magistrate in his brocaded dressing gown.
"Whipping me will not change things, Herr Magistrat,'I" she told him coldly. "Poor Ilse is innocent, she has done nothing. Nothing but slave for that vicious woman, and it is she who should be flogged, not me or Ilse."
"Have a care of your spiteful tongue, Frauleinl You must yourself answer the charge against you, before we consider others. Bailiff, I think now we can dispense with your assistants."
"Jawohl, Excellenz," Kaspar Ebelduring turned and waved his hand at the two burly men.
Their faces fell. They had wanted at least to see this sweet bitch's arsch. Now they wouldn't have that pleasure. And Herr Ebelduring and the magistrate would have all the fun to themselves. Damn the luck, but it was always thus for the lowly born.
When they had at last reluctantly departed and locked the door behind them, Karl Bodenheim nodded. His bailiff bent to the bench, inserted his fingers in the waistband of Johanna Meist's drawers, and dragged them down. The young woman uttered a strangled gasp, closed her eyes, and pressed herself down as tightly as she could on the whipping bench, wanting to hide her private parts from the bailiffs eyes. He swore under his breath at the sight of that sumptuous, firm, satiny ass, marveling at the smooth, flawless pink skin. Why, it was worthy of a duchess! He hadn't seen an Arsch like this in years.
"Begin, Kasper, with the thin strap. Then we shall have the birch, once we have warmed the Fraulein's nether parts a bit," the magistrate jovially decreed.
Eagerly nodding, the bailiff strode to the table, chose a short strap about an inch and a half wide, but not more than an eighth of an inch thick. Armed with this, and at the sign of his superior, he began to lay it across Johanna Meist's quivering, naked behind.
Courageously, her eyes tightly closed, her teeth clenched, she bore this relatively mild thrashing with remarkable stoicism. At times she was seen to wince when the bailiff laid the strap more harshly than usual over the broadest part of her bottom, and especially over the base where it was tenderest. Tears edged fron under her lids, but she was able to keep her body from jerking and twisting about too much. Nonetheless, when he had stopped after about thirty strokes, the skin of her bottom was burning, tightly drawn, felt as if it would burst, and a bright red hue suffused it.
"Now are you inclined to confess, Fraulein Meist?" Karl Bodenheim hoarsely demanded.
"I say only that I have done nothing of which I am ashamed, and that this young girl had been brutally treated and found in me a friend who wishes to aid her, that's all," Johanna Meist gasped.
"The birch now, Kasper!" the magistrate angrily commanded.
The bailiff grinned as he strode towards the brine bucket, drew out the slender birch, with about two more switches added, for Johanna Meist's bottom was more spacious than Ilse Kroner's. He awaited the signal, and when it came, lifted the rod slowly, and brought it down with a Thwuckkk! across the middle of Johanna Meist's scarlet-tinted naked asscheeks. She uttered a strangled cry, and for the first time her body bounded on the whipping bench.
"So you felt that one, did you, Fraulein?"" the bailiff mocked her. "We'll have you singing soon enough, I arrrant! How many, Excellenz?"
"Till she confesses, man," the magistrate snapped. Then, sitting back, tapping tobacco into his pipe and setting it alight, he smoked as he watched the thrashing.
The bailiff was determined to show his artistry this time so as to earn a little pleasure with this sweet bitch after she had confessed. To that end, he flogged masterfully. The rod did not fall viciously to break the skin, but rather to burn it, to make it smart, to make it radiate glowing heat and growing anguish through the luscious hemispheres. Attacking the base and the lower summits most of the times, and at times the upper thighs, he drew cries of anguish from the stoic young woman. Then, his eyes meeting those of his superior, he nodded. Slowly and carefully he raised the rod and swept it down right at the crease dividing Johanna Meist's luscious as-scheeks. The peeled withes rasped and dug into the perineum, attacking her sensitive asshole. And this time a wild shriek of intolerable suffering was torn from the tethered young woman.
"Are yOu ready to confess yet, Fraulein?" Karl Bodenheim urged.
"I I have nothing to confess Ach Gott, ich sterbe!" whe cried out as a second cut followed the first right down the groove of her flaming, welted ass. Her cheeks were drowned with tears now, and her magnificent titties heaved agitatedly, bu the true proof of her suffering was seen in the restless way she rubbed her belly over the bolster, twisting this way and that, and how at last her face began to turn over her shoulder and her eyes widen with agony as she saw the bailiff raise the horrid rod once more.
Now at another sign, the bailiff lowered the rod between the young woman's thighs, then darted it up with a flick of his wrist, thus attacking her maiden cunthole. "Not there! Mein Gott, nein, not there!" Johanna Meist's voice rose to a shriek, as she tried to tear herself free of her bonds. And once again the perfidious stroke was repeated, and once again her maddened shriek rang out, despairing and abject: "No more! Oh, for the love of God in Heaven, no more! What do you want of me?"
"The turth, Fraulein Meist! Confess, confess that you have lain shamefully and bestially with that innocent girl!" Karl Bodenheim thundered. "If you do not, you shall be birched to the blood, and in the morning, you shall face the headsman's axe."
To quicken her, the bailiff applied still another upward-darting flick of the switches into her tender gape. Even Johanna Mesit's stoicism was not proof against that.
"Ahrrreeeouuu!! ! I confess, I confess to anything, only in the name of Heaven, enough! Spare me! I am dying!" she screamed.
The magistrate rose now, unbelting his broacaded gown. His prick, swollen and pulsating with lust, was bared as he left the table and came towards the whipping bench. "It is true then, that you have coupled in shame and lechery with that innocent child, Johanna Meist. Under the old statutes, I could have you put to death. But I will be lenient to you, on one condition only. You shall surrender yourself to me this night. If you do not, not only will you perish by the headsman's axe, but I shall see to it that Use Kroner is publicly whipped and then sent to a house of correction where the good sisters may, with rod discipline and black bread and water as her only fare, purge her young soul of the taint you have put upon it. Well, what is your answer?"
"Oh God oh, it isn't just but I am helpless I am suffering so let her be let her be, and I will do whatever you want!" Johanna Meist bitterly sobbed.
"You may start by kissing and sucking my Schwartz, my lovely Johanna," the magistrate chuckled lewdly. "I well recall, how you sent me packing with that insolent message of yours. You would rather lie with a girl and do your dirty nastiness with a child than accept the passion of a person as worthy as myself, the Herr Magistrat of Anhalt. But you see how justice has brought you to your judgment, Johanna Meist. Now obey me. Kasper, let her feel the rod now and again to quicken her responses."
Then, leaning over and seizing the thick braid of hay-colored silky hair, Karl Bodenheim jerked it so the captive's tearstained, contorted face was upturned. A look of revulsion crossed her agonized features, but at once the birch punished such repugnance by whistling diagonally over her welted, flaming ass, and with a scream of pain she forced herself to the odious homage her judge required of her. Choking and gagging, weeping bitterly, she sucked and licked his cock at his direction, while from time to time the bailiff laid the rod over her thighs, her piteously striped and inflamed bottom, even the pink-sheened skin of her back. And then, going behind her, forcing open the cheeks of her burning bottom, Karl Bodenheim buggered the shrieking young woman, while the bailiff, overjoyed at his master's allowing him to participate in this orgiastic torment, forced the unhappy young woman to do to his prick what she had done to his master's, even while she was groaning and crying out under the rasping penetration of her ight young asshole.
They unstrapped her then, turned her onto her back and once more tethered her. This time, with the bolster against her back, her loins were up-rched. And now it was the magistrate himself who once again commanded her to lick and kiss and suck his prick until it was once again restored to life for the taking of her cherry. Then he fell upon her like a beast over its prey, and the bearded, corpulent, dissolute justiciary fucked her pitilessly, and her shrieks of maidenloss rang through the chamber. And when he had finished with her, Kasper Elbeduring fucked her pitilessly and flooded her chaste womb with his bubbling spunk.
On the next day, with her mother in the courtroom, pale and trembling and aghast, Johanna Meist was brought before the tribunal of Herr Magistrat Karl Bodeneheim. She heard herself sentenced to ten years at hard labor in Anhalt prison, and at the end of each six months, a whipping in public to be bestowed upon her by the bailiff as punishment for her heinous sin.
As for Ilse Kroner, the ruthless magistrate persuaded Herr and Frau Mulhaus to part with their "foster daughter" in exchange for a few thalers. And lovely, shy, terrified Ilse became the mistress of the stern-faced bearded magistrate for a year. When he had tired of her, passed her overto his bailiff, and when in turn that worthy had sated himself with her tender young flesh, he had her sent to Magdeburg, where a cousin of his ran a prospering bordello for wealthy burgers.
Thus was justice done in Prussia in the year 1802 to the innocent, to the submissives, to those who could not protect themselves against the lecherous power of their overlords.
CHAPTER SIX: MOLLY, PLANTATION SLAVE
This second week in July in this year 1859 was atrociously hot, even for Annister, on the northeastern boundary of Georgia. The slaves toiling out in the cottonfields wore improvised cloth hats which old Aunt Hepzibah had diligently made for them so that they would not be overcome by the pitiless sun as they bent their backs over the rows of plants, huge wicker baskets alongside them. Even the overseer, brutal, black-earded Luther Hendricks, was more indulgent than usual as he himself lolled on a chair which he had tilted back against the whipping shed, at that corner where there was at least a bit of welcome shade because a gnarled oak tree stood off to the side. From here, every now and then after mopping his sweating face with a red calico handkerchief, he could see the rows of slaves, both men and women and girls, and knew that his very presence would be enough to make them do a full day's work in spite of the heat.
His master, Matthew Donager, had given him absolute power over these black creatures, and there was a kind of kinship between the supercilious plantation owner and his overseer, even though the latter had come of humble birth, his mother being a servant in a Savannah hotel and his father a roustabout and gambler on the river-boats chugging their way along the Mississippi. Luther Hendricks hated niggers because, although his parents had both been white, his own skin was bronzed and he dreaded that perhaps far, far back on either his mother's or father's side, there might have been a nigger in the woodpile. And to compensate for that, he exercised his authority with the whip and other merciless punishments for the lazy, insolent or shiftless black under his jurisdiction.
Matthew Donager hated them too, because he was dependent upon them. He had inherited this plantation of some six hundred acres from his father, who had defended the land against attacks by marauding Choctaws until the Treaty of Dancing Creek in 1832. That savage tribe and the even more hostile Chickasaws had given up to the United States all their remaining lands east of the Mississippi River, and so his father had been able to turn the plantation into a prosperous venture.
But Matthew Donager at 34, longed for contact with more refined and cultured people than even his neighbors, for as a boy he had visited New York and Boston and Philadelphia where some of his mother's dearest friends had lived. He was well read for a Southern landholder and slave wner, and here in his stately white-columned house which was a kind of a little world unto itself, he felt himself surrounded and assuredly outnumbered by the blacks toiling on his land and serving in his very house. His young wife Christine, an insipidly shallow but delightfully pretty blonde of nineteen, his invalid uncle whom he supported not because he liked the man but because he was white and thus another bulwark against the blacks, his three-months-old son and the child's thirty-year-old white nurse (whom he had engaged from an agency in Atlanta because he could not bear to think of having his boy suckled by a Negress) comprised the household. And with Luther Hendricks as his white overseer and two scalawag younger white men to aid Luther, he knew he must rule by fear and force because if the slaves ever rebelled, all these whites, this handful, could be wiped out swiftly.
Matthew Donager had watched with growing alarm the dissension spreading through the
South, the fomentation of attacks upon the institution of slavery, the only way to which Southern agriculture could be profitable. Now the Northern abolitionists were even invading the Southern States, sending their disciples down to preach to these ignorant black animals and to stir up trouble. Why, only last week, he'd had Luther Hendricks whip and then tar and feather some dirty little preacher from Illinois who represented what he called the American Society for the Emancipation of Slaves. He'd really wanted to have the man hanged, but then on second thought had told his overseer to let the dirty little bastard live so that he could go back to his own kind and tell them that the plantation owners weren't going to put up with that sort of nonsense any longer.
But there were evil signs in the land. This very month in the year 1859, the Kansas Constitutional Convention at Wyandotte was drawing up a document that would prohibit the ownership of slaves. And that malcontent John Brown, whom some called "God's Angry Man," was going around taking decent people out of their homes at night and murdering them just because they spoke out for slavery. (In Octobef of this same year, John Brown with a force of thirteen whites and five Negroes, was to seize the U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and then to be captured by Colonel Robert E. Lee and his marines in a kind of preview of the terrible Civil War that would put brother against brother, and from which Lee would emerge as a gallant and untarnished leader of the Confederates.)
Well, Matthew thought, it would take a good-sized war to free these niggers, and then they'd all starve, because they had no intelligence, not enough to earn their own livelihood on their own. He was hoping that his own state would pass an act which would prohibit a plantation owner from willing his slaves free after his death or by manumitting them even during his life-time. (And, indeed, on December 14, 1859, the State of Georgia was to enact just such a law.)
During this broiling afternoon, Matthew Donager had remained in his study, poring over bills of sale on his last shipment of cotton. The market was getting tight, and some of his neighbors had made a fortune by breeding slaves and selling them down the river in the New Orleans and Mobile slave arts. He himself at the present writing owned some 225 blacks, including their brats and the old men and women who weren't doing a lick of work but for eating him out of house and home. It was time he started to think seriously about the business of letting them multiply more and then selling them off for a tidy profit. Old Henry Aronson, the slave-seller of Hancock County, had stopped by last week to enjoy a mint julep and a little conversation. It had been very enlightening for Matthew Donager. Aronson had suggested that, with all due respect, Mr. Donager ought to breed some of his likely-looking wenches himself, because there was a premium for niggers with white blood in them. They'd be sharper, could learn more, and be a lot handsomer too, especially if they were girls. They could be sold as doxies to imagine houses, or as concubines for wealthy gentlemen.
He had done a fair share of wenching, but he never had very many suckers out of it that was the term niggers used to designate the brats they dropped from fucking. He lifted his half-emptied glass of toddy and puffed at his cigar before he took a swig, thinking over what Aronson had told him.
It wouldn't be a bad idea. Virginia, his blonde, slender wife, had really been a tribulation to him. Oh to be sure, she brought a fine dowry two years ago. Her father had deeded over to him that forty acres of woodland right next to his own property, and he'd got some mighty fine luber out of it all ready. But in the poking department, Virginia had been a real disappointment to him. She was flighty, everybody had known that before he'd gone sparking. Of course, he'd had like a nice aristocratic Eastern girl, even though his neighbors would have been shocked at the idea of his bedding down a Northerner. But the fact was that these gently bred Southern daughters of the plantation aristocracy were much too sheltered, often brought up in convents schools or private ladies' academies and taught not much more than how to dress prettily and give themselves airs and act like ladies. When you got to bed, shucked down to fuck, you didn't want a lady, but a red-hot bitch. And of course it wasn't proper for a decent girl to have a hankering after poking and certainly Virginia didn't. Why, by the Eternal, even though Daniel, their little baby, was all of three months and going on four now, he'd got to bed with her just about twice since the doctor had said it would be all right for man and wife to sleep together again. And she'd just sighed and turned her face away and whispered to him please to hurry, and it had been enough to make a man's hard-on dwindle down to nothing.
He finished his toddy and set the glass down with a clatter. Then he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, contemplating the present fancies which had come to mind. There was a wench he'd really like to poke, what was her name now oh yes, Molly. She was a light-colored bitch, about eighteen, the daughter of Mammy Ruby and Jake, who tended the garden and the lawn. Now there were niggers who knew how to keep their place, but he'd fair overlooked having Molly in the house. Not that he hadn't been watching her the last few years growing up. She was prime stuff now, tall and slim, and yet she had big firm round titties and a soft full mouth, and her hair wasn't kinky and the chances were she wasn't as musky-smelling as most of his blacks.
He got up from his chair and took another at his cigar, stared down at his dusty boots, his sensual mouth twisted in a lecherous smile of anticipation. And he went over to the door and pulled the bell ope. In a few moments, a tall Gullah Negro, clad in red livery to show that he was a house servant and therefore privileged, deferentially entered and inclined his head in a sign of deep respect: "Yes, Massa?"
"Alexander, go tell Mammy Ruby that she's to bring Molly to the house tonight about bedtime. Then tell Luther it'll be all right for the two of them to come to the house, you understand?"
"Yes, Massa, I go tells her right away."
"Fine." Matthew Donager watched his middle-aged majordomo leave the room and smiled to himself. It was going to be a treat breaking that sweet bitch in tonight. And if she fussed any, he could always tie her up and give her the paddle or the switch. The last time he'd had one of the black bitches out of the cabins down the row there, it had been a sixteen-year-old girl named Alma, and he'd had the cook, Clarissa, fat and autocratic with her own kind, give the bitch a good bath and rub a little cologne on her black skin so she wouldn't smell too rank. But Alma had been terrified when she'd been told to shuck off her linsey-woolsey, and she had started to cry. He'd had Clarissa come in and pull the naked black bitch over her lap and then, standing in his nightshift, taken a hickory switch to her plump black ass until she'd howled for mercy and promised she'd make the Massa right cozy in bed. And she had, the wriggling, tight little bitch!
But there was just enough suggestion of white blood in Molly's background to make her even more desirable for Matthew Donager tonight. She'd likely be more sensitive, and of course, being older, had a good deal more interesting reactions when it came time to give up her cherry. And the thought of giving her a good flogging to make her do everything he wanted already made his prick throb with anticipation.. .
Mammy Ruby nodded when the tall major-domo told her his master's wish, and glumly promised that it would be fulfilled. After the red-liveried slave had gone back to the stately house, she wrung her hands in despair, and her eyes filled with tears. In a way, poor Molly had been luckier than most. Matter of fact, it was real surprising that the master hadn't sent for her long ago, considering how well she had filled out even when she was fourteen or fifteen. Mammy Ruby suspected that he was feeling the need now, hankering because that puny wife of his wasn't much use to him. Not that it was her business, but at least his getting married and then having little Daniel had kept his mind off visiting the cabins for quite sometime now.
But it was a doggoned shame that he should want Molly right now, because she and Jake had just been fixing to ask his permission for Molly to marry Cato, the good ooking twenty-five-year-old stable room. The two of them were really in love, and Cato was a fine young man, could even read a little though of course you didn't dare let the overseer and the master find that out, or you could be whipped raw and sold down the river for it.
Well, there was no getting around it. Molly was old enough and sensible enough to understand her place, and she was going to have to talk to the girl right now. Molly was over at old Julie's, tending their sick ten-year-old girl. She sighed again, and wondered if she ought to tell Jake, who was putting a little water on the petunias and clipping the hedges. Might as well not, poor fellow might have a stroke from that hot sun and this news on top of it. But she'd have to break it to him at supper one way or another.
Putting on her shawl to protect herself from the sun, she left the cabin and went down to Julie's, knocked on the door and entered.
Molly looked up from the little bed in which the sick girl lay. She had had a touch of worm fever, and she had picked up a lot. Some berries and herbs mixed in with some hot broth had seemed to bring her around, though. "What is it, Mammy Ruby?" She looked up at her mother, eyes widening in a kind of presentiment.
"Child, I got to talk to you some. Is Daisy well enough to be let alone now? Her Mammy's out in the fields, isn't she?"
"Yes, Mammy Ruby. What's the trouble? You look worried," Molly said with an anxious smile.
"You tuck Daisy in now good and tell her you'll be back in a jiffy. And you come right along with me, child."
A few minutes later, Molly stood staring at her mother. "Oh no!" she breathed. "I thought that was all gone now, that sort of thing. I thought after Miss Virginia had given him his sucker, he wouldn't be coming around no more to us poor folks."
"But that's just the reason, Molly honey. That Miss Virginia ain't much good for a man who's hankering at his time of life."
"What am I going to do, Mammy Ruby?" The tall light-colored young woman groaned. "Here Cato and me was just about to go ask the master effen we could be married off. He was going to ask for a cabin all to ourselves, Mammy Ruby."
"I know, child, I know. There ain't no help for it, nohow. You know if you don't go, he could have Mister Luther take you out and whup you in the shed. And I'd plumb die effen that was to happen," her mother despairingly replied.
"I I've never been with a man, you know that, Mammy Ruby. I'm sure old enough, but it's what I feel for Cato that worries me so right now."
"He'll have to understand, child. It's not your fault, it's not as if you wuz hankering for the master yourself. It's just what we poor black folks have to put up with. Ain't no good fretting about it none, we just have to do it."
"I I don't even know what he'll want me I don't oh. Mammy Ruby!" Molly began to cry, putting her hands to her face, her luscious round titties rising and falling agitatedly under the thin linsey-woolsey dress.
"You know, you's real light, baby," Mammy Ruby said slowly, "and you has a nice shape and you can talk real good and you don't smell strong like most niggers. Reckon that's why the master hankers more for you than anybody else. I guess Miss Virginia can't give him no pleasure, maybe having little Daniel plumb sore her out that way. Some women is like that, girl."
"I know. Bbut I'm so ashamed and it's not because I don't know my place or anything like that. It's just well, it's maybe right now because with Cato and me-"
"Don't fret yourself so, Molly girl. Best thing is to get it over with and then forget it if you can when Cato and you have that little cabin all to yourselves. Once he lets you marry Cato, chances are he won't come bothering around. There's plenty other gals on this plantation that can service him."
And so mother and daughter consoled themselves as best they could, and then Molly went back to take care of the little girl until it was time for supper with her father and mother. It was over the suppertable that Mammy Ruby finally broke the news to Molly's father, big gray-haired Jake.
"Downright shame has to happen like this right now," Jake mumbled, shaking his head. "You'd best be telling her what's 'spected of her, Ruby. Our Molly's a fine good girl, ain't never had no truck with nigger studs when she was just having her flowers and reaching her womanliness. Cato was going to break her in, only now the massa got his notion in fust."
"I I'll tell her, Jake. Now you eat hearty, Molly honey, and then you'n me's gonna sit down and talk 'bout what the Massa'llxpect from you," the worried Negress said.
***
In his cottage, Luther Hendricks, knowing that his master would be occupied tonight, had sent Big Dulcy, the best worker in the fields even though she was a female, to bring Melissy to him. Big Dulcy, Amazonian of build, a widow these past ten years, catered to the overseer because she knew that if he were kept comfortable and from getting his pecker up, the other slaves would have it easier. The first few years he'd been there, Luther had used his whip steadily, sometimes even going out into the fields and laying the lash over the shoulders of that Negro buck or girl whom he detected slacking. Big Dulcy had talked it over with the slaves, and they had agreed of their own free will to send Mr. Luther a lovin' gal every now and again, just so he'd simmer down and not be so free with the whip. Big Dulcy was thus able, particularly after a specially exciting night of pleasure for the overseer, to wheedle a little more food or an extra bolt of cloth out of him.
But if Molly approached this memorable night with quiet despair in her gentle soul because she was spoken for by her accepted Negro mate-to-be, the summons to Melissy caused consternation in the slave quarters fifteen, the fos Blind Sam and Edna. There were really no papers to document her birth or transfer to the Don-nager plantation, to which she had come the year of Matthew Donnager's lather's death. The story was that Melissy had been abandoned on the doorstep of Blind Sam's hut on a stormy night by a scalawag slave rader who had mistakenly taken her off instead of a darker Negro girl, and who, fearing the wrath of the slave owner, had decided to get rid of her without returning to that plantation.
She was even lighter than Molly, light enough to pass as a quadroon. Her hair was straight, dark brown and wavy, falling to the middle of her back. Her cheap red calico dress misshapen as it was, could not hide the mouthwatering pears of her proud, well-developed young titties, nor the suave curves of her lithe hips and graceful thighs. She was perhaps the favorite of all the slaves who had come to Blind Sam's hut at eventide and hand him a ribbon or a doll made from cornhusks or a bit of bacon rind and mumble, "Dat's a l'il somepin foah Lissy now." The slaves, indeed feared that the white master would be first to summon her, though it was known that he preferred girls in their early twenties or late teens, and so, too, had Luther Hendricks, until tonight.
Edna, rocking back and forth in her wicker chair, was crooning prayers for her little honey-gal, and Blind Sam was scowling and tapping his empty pipe on the rickety table and shaking his head and saying, "It jist ain't right nohow, it jist ain't."
"Ain't nuttin' we kin do, you knows dat well as I does, Sam" his portly wife spoke up. A deaconess in the little Negro church whose chapel was at the very end of the slave quarters (a concession which marked Matthew Donager as a humane owner), she felt the burden of Melissy's sacrifice even more keenly than her older husband, who, as a boy, had been blinded when he toiled over a soap-making vat and was splashed with bubbling lye.
"Mebbe so, but de Lawd didn't mean foah pore folks to bow down to dem dat wants to sell dere chillun inta bondage, woman. De Good Book say dat's a sin."
"Now you stop yoah preachin', Sam. Only make pore Lissy fret and it ain't gwine do her no good nohow. Mebbe you want her to tell Mistah Luther he ain't got no cause to mess wid her 'cause de Good Book say so, huh? Den he takes her out to de shed and peels her down raw and uses pimentade on her sweet l'il butt. You wants dat?"
"You knows Ah don't, woman. Only some day, no overseer nor Massa either gwine tell our l'il Lissy dat she gotta shuck down and git inta bed wid him. You mark my words."
"Amen to dat, Sam. Only right now, Ah's gotta take Lissy over to his cottage 'foah he gits rambunctious. C'mon now, honey. It's a shame sho nuff, but it kain't be helped none, not while we's slaves."
Edna sniffed, dabbed at her eyes with a calico herchief and then took Melissy by the wrist and led her out of the hut. She could feel that the girl was trembling, and she tried her best to gentle the virginal fears of her adopted daughter.
"Now you lissen to me, honey. Do jist wut he sez you gotta, you heah me? Doan show him you hate him fit to kill, 'cause he'll whup you raw if you let on any. Now I done toF you time and agin how a man 'n a woman gits a sucker, you knows dat, Lissy. Ain't gwine be much different for you with Mistah Luther tonight, I s'pect. You ain't s'posed to know nuttin' 'bout sech goin's-on, else he'll think you bin lettin' de young black bucks poke you when he don't know about it. Young gals is s'posed to let de man have his fun 'n jist give in quiet-like, you heah?"
"Y-yes, M-Mama Edna," the brown-haired quadroon girl stammered, hotly coloring as she lowered her eyes.
They had reached the overseers cottage, and Edna knocked timidly at the door. Luther Hendricks, in unbuttoned shirt and rolled-up sleeves, cotton drawers and boots, a stogie clamped in one corner of his mouth, opened the door to them and grinned appreciatively, as his eyes swept the trembling, slender quadroon.
" 'Bout time, you showed up, Edna," he drawled without shifting the stogie, "I was just about ready to yell for Big Dulcy and that sure would have got my dander up for fair."
"Yassuh, Mistah Luther. Here she is, Ah done scrubbed her down some maself so's she'll be sweet. Now then, chile, you go on in and make Mistah Luther right cozy now, you mind?" The portly negro woman hesitated a moment, then added, "Be all right if Ah comes round 'bout brekfust-time to git her, Mistah Luther?"
"Never mind that. I'll send her back when I'm done. You just get your black ass to the field on time, Edna. "Pears like to me I'd better start setting quotas again for the baskets. Now that I recollect, yours had been kinda skimpy last few days."
"Oh, nossuh. Ah'U fill up past de top, you'll see," Edna hastily and fearfully added. Then she gave the lovely young quadroon a little push, bobbed her head in deference to the overseer, and hurried back to her own hut, her eyes blinded with tears.. .
Luther Hendricks walked slowly around the cowering quadroon, prodding her back, bottom and legs with the butt of his coiled cowhide whip. Melissy stood trembling, trying not to flinch, her eyes closed tight, arms at her sides, in total self-abnegation. But her heart was pounding wildly, her throat was dry and her lips were parched. Under the gaudy calico dress she could feel her warm, quivering nakedness, and the flesh of her thighs was prickling with apprehension.
"How old are you, you cute little yaller bitch?" he suddenly demanded.
"Fifteen, Mistah Luther." Melissy had been brought up by Gullah blacks and had thus adopted their softly slurred speech and their gentle ways. Of all the plantation slaves, the Gullahs were perhaps the most readily malleable, the most docile and dependable. It was mostly the Mandingos who gave trouble. Mammy Edna had told her that once, about three or four years ago. The master had bought a Mandingo girl named Thea, all the way from Mobile, and she near to scratched his eyes out when he first had her shucked down for poking. He hadn't had her whipped too hard that time, because he'd been hot for her lovely shape and soft, dusky skin. But the next night she tried to stab him with an ivory letter-opener. He'd had Mistah Luther and two of the houseboys hold her down on the bed while he poked her, and then they'd turned her over and he'd taken a dogwhip to her till she bled all over. The next day she'd run away and drowned herself in the creek.
"Have you ever been poked before, Melissy?" She knew he was asking that just to goad her and humble her some, 'cause Mistah Luther watched the slave huts like a buzzard, he did, and told everybody who could poke and who couldn't.
"Nossuh, not ever," she mumbled. Two big tears welled up in her dark brown eyes, and her lips were trembling violently. He was behind her, tapping her shoulders with the butt of the whip, and she gasped and squirmed, taken by surprise. He had put his hard hand on her bottom, squeezing first this cheek and then the other, and then gave her a hearty slap that made her wince.
"We'll soon see. Shuck down. See that jug of corn likker over on the table near the bed, Lissy?"
"Yassuh."
"Soon as you're shucked, bring it here quick!" he commanded.
She stooped, caught up the hem of the calico dress and slowly drew it off her body and let it fall.
"Jeesus!" he ejaculated, his voice thick with rut.
She was so very nearly white he thought for a moment it was Miss Virginia right there in the cottage with him, and if the truth be known, he'd had a few hot dreams about that uppity dreams about that wife of Mr. Donager's. There was the same sort of delicacy to them and he could tell from Melissy's face that she was just as finnacky as Miss Virginia must have been the first night she gave it to Mr. Donager. He would have given half a year's pay to watch that prissy blonde bitch spread her legs.. .and the other half to be there when she did with what he had to offer this sweet piece of nigger pussy.
He watched entranced as the naked young quadroon girl moved swiftly over to the table. For her age, she was really made to give a man the hots. The oval cheeks of her ass were firm and tight, not too big, just right for a man's hands to squeeze them while he was poking her and settling her in position. She had nice long legs, not too skimpy in the thighs and not too lean in the calf. Some of these niggers were spindly bags of bones, besides which the musky smell of them fair made a man puke. He sniffed warily and was gratified to detect nothing. It was just as well for Mammy Edna.
She turned to face him now as she brought back the jug. Her uptilting young pear-titties bobbed deliciously adorned with soft yet perky buds in narrow, dusky-pink aurolae. There wasn't too much hair around her snatch, so he could see the soft pink lips. He felt his under-drawers bulge and ache with the lust in him.
He took the jug from her trembling hands, scowled at her as a kind of warning that she had held it so precariously, and tilted it to his mouth. It warmed his belly, but the warmth below was even more of a conflagration by now, roused by her nubile nakedness. Then he shoved it back at her.
"Take a swig yourself. It'll put some fire in you. Now mind, you'd better not lie there like a log while I'm poking you, 'lessen you want a taste of this," and he showed her the cowhide in his left hand.
Melissa pretended to take a swig from the jug, and then waited for his next order.
"That all you want? Well, it'll keep the rest of the night, and there's anotherjug when that's gone. Put it on the table and get yourself in bed."
Again she turned, hurried to the bedside table, deposited the jug once more on the table, and crawled onto the bed, where she lay trembling, her arms at her sides.
Luther Hendricks spat out the stogie and crushed it with the heel of his boot. Then he unbuttoned his underdrawers to liberate his gnarled, heavy prick. The foreskin was already taut, and his big hairy balls contracted with the erotic spasms surging through his loins. Transferring the cowhide to his right hand, he strode towards the bed, got onto it and knelt beside her, and put out his left hand to squeeze one of those perky pear-titties of hers. Melissy could not control a faint whimper as she closed her eyes, her flesh crawling at his touch.
"Didn't your Mammy teach you how to make a man feel right home in bed, you yaller slut?" he growled, taking her nipple between thumb and finger and pinching it until she cried out piteously, and then committing the irreparable blunder of trying to push away his hand. "So you have got some spunk in you, have you? Just you use that hand where it'll do me the most good!" he warned.
But though Melissy had been taught the rudiments of fucking, her foster mother's limited imagination had failed to supply her with the lore of the perverse nuances which white folks demanded when they poked. She stared up at him dumbly, her right hand still pressed against the fingers which so savagely tortured her sensitive nipple, quavering, "Please, s-s-suh!"
"Goddamn it anyhow, I see I gotta learn you. Maybe a lick or two of the cowhide'll start you off proper," he snarled. Getting off the bed, uncoiling the whip, he drew it back and then swept it out. The band crashed down over the belly and one panting tittie, the tip visiting the mossy nook of Melissy's left armpit. A wild scream of poignant suffering was torn from the naked young quadroon. Frantic with pain, she rolled over onto her side, her back toward him. Grinning like a fiend, Luther Hendricks slashed the whip across the pale-skinned back, and even as she shrieked and writhed, her hands rushing behind her to sooth the darkening welt, he brought the cowhide down again over her belly.
"Eeyeowwouuuu! Ohh, pl-pl-please d-d-don't whup me so hard, Mistah Luther, please, suh. Whut does you want me to do? Please, suh. Whut does you want me to do? Please tell me, only don't whup me no more!" she wailed.
"Maybe you're ready to act a bit smart now, Lissy. I'll give you just one chance," he observed. Again he got on the bed and knelt beside her. "Put your hand on my cock, rub it nice and gentle, tickle it some, you hear?"
As tears streamed down her flushed cheeks, the young quadroon obeyed. She touched his swollen organ gingerly, and yet she could not control the flinching grimace on her lovely, poignantly controted face. He grinned sadistically, hugely enjoying her wretchedness.
"Now use both hands. Cuddle it between 'em.
Nice and slow and gentle, don't forget that," he ordered.
Melissy forced herself to obey, though within her gentle being a sickening revulsion had begun to grow. Soon he began to gasp and to squirm about on his knees. Then, when he could no longer bear it, he panted, "Now stick it in your mouth and suck it good." And with this, he straddled himself over her panting titties, arching himself, showing her the cowhide which he still gripped in his right hand. With the other hand, he gripped the cascade of silky, wavy hair, thus to control her.
"Oh please, suh, doan make me do dat. Ah ain't nevah had no man b'foah now. Please don't make me, Mistah Luther," she supplicated.
"You'll do it, you little nigger bitch, or your Mammy and me'U go out to the whipping shed first thing in the morning. And then I'll get Sam in there and use the pimontade on him."
Before his lurid threat, the gentle young quadroon girl capitulated. Weeping bitterly, she opened her mouth and accepted the overseer's swollen, nauseatingly strong-odored prick. At his rough, rasping instruction, she sucked and licked, trying hard not to retch, sick with the pain of the lash and her abhorrence of him.
When he felt himself nearing climax, he pulled out of her mouth and panted, "Now I'm going to poke you, and you just better show more life, if you know what's good for you. Hold on to me tight with your arms and legs, Lissy, and wiggle that cute ass of yours when I put it into you," he threatened.
His hands gripped her titties, as he stretched himself over her, his turgid ramrod finding the pink gape of her virgin cleft, brutally as he felt himself enter the portals, he thrust forward and Melissy's frantic cry of pain attested to the con-sumation of this brutal conquest. Yet, cowed by the whip and by the threats he had made against her foster parents, she bore even this and strove to make herself satisfying to him by putting her trembling arms around his shoulders and pressing her calves over his booted legs.
Ptitiless he fucked the young girl, till she could no longer control her sobs and groans at the fiercely lacerating twinges each eviscerating thrust inflicted on her martyred cunthole. And when at last he had bubbled his essence deep into her womb, he drew himself out and, glancing down at his bloodied weapon, panted, "Now clean me off with your mouth. I'm only just started with you, you whiny little nigger bitch!" The half-fainting girl stared blankly at him, trying to comprehend his meaning. When her young mind encompassed it, she shrank back on the rumpled bed, her face contorted in. "Oh no, don't make me do that, Mistah Luther, please not that!"
Ferociously he got off the bed and once again began to lay on the cowhide. This time, twist and turn as she would, rolling over from side to side, he did not relent until her body was crisscrossed with livid weals and she lay sprawled, nearly unconscious. Then, casting aside the whip, he again mounted the bed, and this time, his prick newly invigorated, he gripped the cheeks of her shuddering young ass and buggered her.. .
Molly had not had quite the apprehension which the younger girl had known as she went towards her destiny with Luther Hendricks. To begin with, she was almost a woman at her age and secretly had looked forward to the excitement of changing from girl to fulfilled woman in Cato's arms. Indeed, she may have even had a certain hectic curiosity concerning a white man's lovemaking and that of her own kind.
She had also tried to reconcile and resign herself to the inevitable. In one sense, being chosen after all this time by the white master was a kind of mark of distinction which would almost redound to her parents, who would receive even more respect from the other slaves. And so she had gone almost proudly, Mammy Ruby holding her hand and murmuring solicitous advice on the way to the big house.
When her mother timidly knocked at the back door, it was Alexander, the majordomo who opened to them. He was smug with self-importance, because the master had told him to see to it that Molly got up safely to the bedchamber. Not only that, he'd even been told to smell the girl and see if he could detect any musk. If there was any, both Molly and her mammy would be for the whipping shed in the morning.
Having made that inspection and finding no fault, he haughtily beckoned to them both and led the way up the winding, narrow stairs. Arrived at Matthew Donager's bedroom, he muttered to Mammy Ruby, "Send her on in. You knock, and you come downstairs wid me. Mebbe ah kin rustle up a l'il piece ob ham 'n some corn pone."
"Thank you kindly, Alexander," Mammy Ruby smiled sadly. She knocked at the master's door, heard him call "come in" and then gave Molly a tearful hug and a whispered "Try to smile some, gal. It'll make it easier."
As she followed the liveried majordomo back to the kitchen, she tried hard not to think of what was going to happen. Her little gal was going to be a woman now, though she was already old enough to have dropped a couple of suckers by now. That was the way of things. And maybe, because Molly was older than most and hadn't been bothered by Mr. Hendricks at all, just maybe the master would treat her special-like.
Matthew Donager was in his nightshirt, enjoying a glass of port and a cigar, sprawled in the armchair across from his massive bed. When Molly timidly entered, eyes downcast and silent, as befitted her lowly status, he felt a delicious tingle warm his loins. It had been far too long since he'd had a girl from the quarters, but he'd picked a real beauty this time. She was nearly able to pass for white, and he could pretend it was Virginia. Even if this nigra piece was cherry, she was bound to have more gumption in bed than his listless wife. Everybody knew that these nigra gals were taught how to poke as soon as they were old enough to talk.
He knew, of course, that Luther Hendricks was amusing himself with that Melissy. Let him have her. She was just a little too young, sure to be flighty and scarey. With a girl like Molly, he'd expect and get more. And there was something very special he wanted Molly to do, which of course he'd never dream of asking Virginia to do.
"Get your dress off," he said curtly, finishing his port and putting the cigar down on the edge of an ornate milk-glass ashtray.
Molly trembled, knowing the moment had come. Like Melissy, she wore nothing under the green calico dress into which her mother had helped her, after rubbing her down with a little sassafras to make sure she wouldn't be musky. She drew a deep breath, lifted the dress and let it fall, offering herself in a kind of grave and certain pride, knowing her body to be well made.
But that almost exquisite gesture was lost on the plantation owner. He took it for granted a nigger slave would obey at once it would be her hide if she didn't. He dragged up his nightshirt, slid himself down along the comfortable, thickly upholstered chair, to expost his rampant prick. His eyes devoured the splendid titties, the smooth flat belly with its wide niche, the thick black triangle at the peak of her delectably rounded thighs.
"Get down on your knees and come to me, Molly," he ordered in a harsh, strained voice.
Slowly she did so, looking at him wonderingly. As she approached, as she saw his swollen cock, color flooded her cheeks. Yet she could not help staring at him, for this was what she had been told would be.
Arrived before him, she waited, expecting him to touch or caress her. Instead, he roughly commanded, "Hold my prick in your hands, Molly, and then kiss it nice and sweet. Put it in your mouth and suck at it. Rub your tongue around it, hear?"
"Oh, Master!" Molly gasped, thunderstruck and revolted. "Don't make me do that, please don't Master!"
"You say no to me, girl? Go over to the wall and pull that bellrope," he growled, taking up his cigar and relighting it with a lucifer.
Molly rose, her legs trembling, her eyes huge with fear. She pulled at the bellrope, and joined her hands as if in prayer, staring at him plaintively.
Alexander, summoned from his stealthy snack in the kitchen with Molly's mother, entered. "Yassuh, Massa?" he attentively inquired.
"Take this girl down to the shed and tie her on the bench. I'll be down directly," Matthew Donager curtly ordered.
Molly burst into tears. "Oh please, Master, I came to pl-pleasure you. I'll be a good girl. Don't whup me, please!"
"But you haven't pleasured me, you stupid black bitch, not the way I told you to. Now get along there with Alexander. I'm going to whale your ass until you learn your place," Matthew Donager snarled. Going to his closet, he put on his robe, then his slippers, and hastened down the stairs and out to the whipping shed towards which he could see the red-liveried majordomo leading the dejected Molly to the whipping shed.
He stood there, frowning impatiently, as the sobbing naked young woman slowly laid herself down on the low flat wooden bench while Alexander strapped her wrists and ankles tightly. Then he ordered the majordomo, "Take that paddle and lay it into her black ass, boy, till I tell you to stop."
He drew up a stool and seated himself in front of the bench, gloating to see the naked victim's bottom tighten with justifiable apprehension, to hear her choking sobs, to see the anguish, tear-filled eyes. The majordomo lifted the wooden paddle and brought it down with a resounding Crackkk! which flattened both jouncily rounded bottom-cheeks. Molly stiffened, uttered a strangled cry, and bowed her head, along shudder rippling through her tethered body. The paddle came down agian, again, and agian, each time attacking first one rounded hemisphere and then the other. The sixth blow, however, bit home against both huddling globes, and Molly uttered a poignant scream of pain.
"Ahrrr oh please, Master, please it hurts, it hurts! I'll be good to you, I promise. But please let him stop."
"Go on, Alexander, but not so fast. And polish off the lower part of her ass more from now on, hear?" Matthew Donager rapped.
The majordomo bowed his head and then, fiercely contemplating the already reddened ass-cheeks of the naked young Negress, resumed the paddling. The reiterative smack of wood on tender female flesh rang out in the whipping shed, punctuated by Molly's sobbing squeals, shrill cried, and, soon, babbled supplications for mercy.
After the twenty-fifth stroke, Matthew Donager held up his hand. Molly's bottom was livid, swollen, and uncontrollable jerking spasms wrenched the lovely naked body stretched along the whipping bench.
"Now maybe you'll do what you're told," he panted. Spreading aside the folds of his robe and raising the nightshirt, he once again presented the prick to the victim's piteously trembling mouth, and this time Molly greedily sucked in the bulging head of his bulging cock, rubbing her tongue frenziedly around and around the plum-shaped meatus. Matthew Donager looked up at the goggle-eyed majordomo.
"Get the hell out of here an back to bed, you black bastard!" he thundered. Alexander hastily dropped the paddle and hurried out of the shed.
"Now you see, Molly," he said in an almost kindly voice, "what a foolish bitch you were to dare to say not to your master. You're going to do everything I tell you to from now on, aren't you?"
"Mmmmmffff yassuh, Master," Molly's muffled voice reached his straining ears.
"That's more like it now," he chuckled. "Does that nice round ass of yours hurt now, girl?"
"Oh yes, yes, M-Master," Molly moaned, feverishly looking back to him over her shoulder.
He knelt down on the whipping bench over her straddled thighs. His fingers caressed the swollen hemispheres a moment, then he directed, "Now, to show me what an obedient little bitch you're going to be from now on, ask me to open up your ass and stick my cock into your little hole there, Molly." And when he heard her utter a shuddering gasp, he cruelly added, "Do it, by God, or I'll have Mr. Luther whip you there with his cowhide and put pimentade on it. Yes, and on your front hole, too, girl!"
Crushed by the diabolical threat, the weeping young Negress surrendered herself, mumbling the obscene words of that ignominious formula of self-sacrifice, and then, lifting her head, her eyes straining to the roof of the whipping shed, she uttered shriek after maddened shriek as the plantation owner forced her cheeks apart and thrust his prick into her asshole.
And after he had thus violated her, he knelt before her and made her clean his prick with her tongue. And when that was done to his satisfaction, he made her go back unbound on the whipping bench and offer up her true maidenhead to him.
And thus it was before the civil War, as it had been in the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Europe of Napeleon . . . as it was in the earliest days of mankind when man learned how to subjugate the female and make of her his submissive, dominated slave.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The year was 1926, there was peace in the world except, perhaps, for the Moroccan-French skirmishes over Riffian independence, which was not to come till more than a generation later. In the United States, the St. Louis Cardinals had just won the World Series over the invincible Yankees, in seven arduous games, culminating when a grizzled veteran, Grover Cleveland Alexander (often accused of tippling even during a game), sauntered in from the bullpen and proceeded to strike out Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded. It was a serene, carefree world in those days, there was prosperity and peace for all.
Well, perhaps, not quite for all. Not for Phyllis Calhoun, slim, tall 24-year-old blonde from a little Nebraska town who hadn't wanted to marry the stocky, dull, predictable farmer's son her parents had picked out for her. Phyllis had aspirations towards a movie career. A week before her wedding to Joe Blandery was to take place, she ransacked her mother's carefully concealed sugar jar and pocketed the $218 it had contained. With a single cheap cardboard suitcase, she crept out of the white-painted little farmhouse, past her parental bedroom from which their slumbering snores reassured her, and made her way out to the road, where she hitched a lift from a genial truck driver bound for Omaha. There, at seven the next morning, she bought a bus ticket to Hollywood.
Hollywood, magic city of a tinsel, never-never world, with Grauman's Chinese Palace and the immortalized footprints of the great stars in the concrete sidewalk in front of it; with the Brown Derby on Wilshire Boulevard a Mecca for the great, the near-great and the hangers-on who poignantly yearned for just a nod from any of their idols.
Phyllis came to this world of broken drams and phantasmagoric illusions on Columbus Day. She thought it a fortuitous omen. Like that courageous explorer, she was destined to discover a new world but it would not be the one she had yearned for.
She found a cheap rooming house, and then, once installed, began to plan her campaign to take the Movie City by storm. First she made the rounds of the studios, registering as an extra an older, wiser girl, who worked as a waitress in a greasy spoon and had the room next door had advised her to lower her sights of stardom and be practical and then she haunted the booking and agency offices.
After two months, her little hoard was gone, and she was obliged to work as a carhop in a drive-in restaurant. The boss, Al Manka, fat, moustached and imagineing himself a Lothario, noticed her slim long legs, the delicate and almost wistful quality of her face, the superbly round, high-perched titties which her uniform accentuated, the way her high set, spaciously oval shaped firm bottom-cheeks undulated when she hurried out to a flivver to serve a double milkshake and a hamburger with two, not one, pickles and a stack of French fries, all for just 37 cents as the Manka Midnight Special (available only from eleven till one a.m.). And he coveted her. Al Manka himself was divorced, had just had his plump, blowsy auburn-haired mistress walk out on him, and felt the carnal urge whenever the new carhop came up to pick up her tray and then turn and scurry out to the waiting customer.
So he propositioned her. His deal-she'd work days, just five a week, so she'd be fresh and ready for him nights (after closing time, which was two-thirty in the morning). He'd set her up in his apartment, so she'd have no rent to pay. Of course, her meals at the drive-in were free. Plus which he'd give her a five-buck salary raise, and of course she got to keep all the customer tips. For him, it was a really generous offer. He knew, of course, her ambition to be a movie star. Even the customers did; she told them, stars in her eyes, always hoping that one wonderful night a producer would drive up in a Rolls-Royce, see her and sign her to a star contract without even a screen test.
So of course she indignantly said no to Al Manka's generous offer. To begin with, she was a "nice" girl, a virgin, and if she hadn't wanted to marry Joe Blandery because he was sort of fat too and unexciting, she was surely not going to give her prize to this greasy, pomade-using Casanova. It was cheapening; what would her fans think when one day she became a star and it was revealed in a scandal sheet that she had been the "sweetie" of a creature like Al Manka?
She also gave him notice, and told him huffily that in a week, as soon as she could find another job, she would say goodbye forever to Manka's Mammoth Mealtime Mecca (that was actually the name of the drive-in, in glaring red and yellow and green neon lights).
And then it happened. On her next to last night, as she was wearily leaning against the order counter waiting for two giant hamburgers, double fries, a Coke and two Green Rivers for the bald man in the old dusty Nash being heckled by his shrewish wife, there was the blare of a car horn. She took the order back to the bald man, made change, thanked him for the nickel tip, then hurried over to the newcomer. My, but he was good looking! In a camel's hair coat, a cigarette holder, spats and a new fedora, his lean face and big soft dark-brown eyes, he sent shivers of excitement through her.
"You're new here, aren't you, Miss?" he asked in a suave, interested voice.
Phyllis blushed, shook her head, confided that she was leaving the very next night. He pursed his lips, frowned. "That's a shame. You see, I'm a talent scout for Imperial Productions it's a big new studio in West Hollywood. We're starting a historical epic, two Westerns and a Biblical Allegory next week. Trouble is, most of the big-name stars are already under long term contracts to our competitors."
Phyllis nodded, wide-eyed. She ignored the call of the bald customer whom she had just served; his wife wanted the French fries sent back to the frier for more cooking. "Will you need any extra of bit players, maybe?" she quavered hopefully.
"Of course, Miss what's your name?"-
"Phyllis Calhoun."
"A lovely name. I can see it in lights already."
"You you can?" she breathed rapturously. "Look, I think that man over there in the
Nash wants you, Phyllis. Suppose I pick you up when you finish tonight. We can talk about your future at Imperial. Here's my card. What time do you get off?"
"A-about two-thirty." Phyllis stared at the card. It read, "Jerry Brooks, Talent Director, Imperial Productions, West Hollywood," In her excitement, she failed to notice there was neither address nor phone number. Already, her mind was in the clouds. She could see herself wiring Mom and Pop to come, in a first-class Pullman, of course, to Hollywood to see their daughter starring in Imperial's latest epic, "Beauty and the Pirates."
"I'll be round to pick you up. We'll have something to eat and drink not this slop, of course. See you then, Phyllis."
He revved up the motor and drove out into the highway. Phyllis sighed after him, till the blare of the Nash's horn recalled her to the world of prosaic reality.. .
Thank goodness she'd thought to wear her best dress, the green cotton, and that she still had one good pair of silk stockings. Al Manka looked glumly at her, muttered, "Look, honey, change your mind, huh?" I'll make it a seven-buck raise."
She staed coldly at him. "Drop dead, please, Mr. Manka," she said. "Tomorrow's my last night. Please have my pay ready. Oh, there's my date." The shining black Bentley had just pulled into the drive-in.
"Right on time," Jerry Brooks beamed at her as he opened the door. "I'm glad you could make it, Phyllis This is going to be an important night for both of us."
"I-I'm so lucky, Mr. Brooks. I-well, all my life I've wanted to be in the movies. I-I've a lot to learn, but I promise you I'll work awfully hard."
"I know you will," he chuckled, eyeing her savoringly.
She leaned back, closing her eyes, already seeing her name on the marquee of Graumann's Chinese, the fans standing behind ropes as the big stars came in their limousines, and the cheers that greeted Phyllis Calhoun, Imperial's exciting, exotic new star.
His bungalow was in the Hollywood Hills, and set off about half a mile from any neighbors. It was beautifully furnished, and she took off her turban hat and relaxed on the padded-leather couch as he brought her a tall glass with a pale pink liquid in it. Mmmmmm, it tasted good! Then he sat down beside her, and began to talk about his movie company. They wanted a beautiful blonde of course, she'd have to have coaching lessons in dramatics, and do something about her hair and makeup. But she had the potential.
Two drinks later, Phyllis was feeling as if she were floating off into space. Solicitously, he offered to lead her to the bathroom when she blushingly mumbled she wanted to be excused a minute. But instead of the bathroom, she found herself in the bedroom, a mirrored room with a huge low bed and a tiger skin on it.
And then he was ripping off her clothes and she was struggling and screaming, and he had turned ugly, his face warped and cruel, and his fist crashed against her jaw. Phyllis slumped to the floor. A moment later, her inert naked body was being mounted by Imperial's Production's talent scout and her hymen was gone forever.. .
When she awoke the next noon, she had a headache and was sore between the legs. She found herself in a cellar storage room, converted into a kind of cell. He brought her some bread and fruit, without a word. That evening, he came to see her again, followed by a black-haired, tall, domineering woman in a chinchilla coat.
"She's perfect, Jordan," the woman purred. "I'll take her. My limousine's in the driveway. Do you want my chauffeur to help you with her?"
"No thanks, Myrna. I'll handle her myself. The stupid little bitch, she's got a great body, but you'll have to teach her how to use it."
Whimpering, pleading, Phyllis Calhoun was dragged out of the storage room and gagged and bound, then trundled to the waiting limousine. Myrna Fortner ran an elegant bordello in Santa Monica, paid off plenty of protection money, and had the most exclusive clientele in Hollywood. She was thinking that Phyllis would be ideal for Mr. Tennant, who loved to tie girls up by the thumbs and use a switch on their bottoms and legs. She'd be wearing a little-girl costume, of course, and a ribbon in her hair. And she'd fetch top dollar too, with that ingenuous, big-blue-eyed virginal look of hers.. .
Phyllis Calhoun had become one of the sub-missives. A week in Myrna Former's place actually, four days in the basement punishment room when she had made a scene and tried to kick poor dear old Mr. Tennant, with two whippings a day inflicted by Myrna herself, and then Lesbian consolation each night had turned the would be farm town movie star into an accomplished, eagerly obedient prostitute.
Once again, the dominant male, the usurper of maidenhood, had conquered.
