Early in the 19th Century, convicted criminals were "mercifully" released from prison and shipped to the colony of Tasmania, there to face a life of indentured slavery. Though many were innocent of any crime, they were nonetheless subjected to beating, whipping, sexual abuse, and sexual slavery according to the cruel whims of their masters. With wills completely broken by sadistic punishment, men and women were forced to submissively kiss the bodies of their owners and to open their own bodies to disgraceful sadoeroticism.
FOREWORD
Man's inhumanity to man has been chronicled through the ages, and there are black pages in nearly every century to attest to the sadism and the unscrupulous tyranny which those in power exert over their inferiors and those whom they have bested, either through war or through the pernicious exactitude of formal laws which penalize the oppressed and the impoverished and bring justice only to the side of the oppressors and the wealthy.
The French had their Devil's Island, the Nazis their hideous concentration camps like Ravensbfuck, Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz. The Spaniards, in the days of the Holy Inquisition and the bigotry aimed at the Jews and the Moors, had their colonies in the conquered lands of South America like Peru, and parts of Mexico, where men and women labored in withering, humid heat on inedible food and with the whiplash of the overseer a constant punctuation to their enforced toil.
But the English, who perhaps were the greatest colonists of all, had Australia, the Carolines and what was once called Van Dieman's Land, some 25,000 square miles south of Southeast Australia between the Indian Ocean and the Tasman Sea and separated from Victoria by Bass Strait.
That foreboding island was discovered in 1642 by Tasman, who named it Van Dieman's Land. It was visited in 1777 by Captain James Cook (who was to die soon after his discovery of the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii) and brought under British control in the year of 1803, when a penal colony was established. In l825, Tasmania was attached to New South Wales, and joined the Commonwealth of Australia as a state in 1901.
This is the story, then, of convicts of both sexes who, for political reasons, for paltry thefts which in a more emancipated and enlightened age would never have reached the courts, and for a score of other misdemeanors, were sentenced to death or to prison and eventually remanded to that terrible island where life was a constant struggle for survival against despotic masters and mistresses as well as the savage aborigines.
As is our custom in an historical novel, we have taken only a few liberties with the truth; the rest is documented fact. Indeed, one of the oddities of our life is that often truth is stranger than fiction.
In the years following the end of the American Revolution, England sent its criminals (including a girl of fifteen who rode the squire's horse in violation of the rules!) to a land so far away and so forbidding that it was believed that such prisoners would never bother the English again. And yet, one of the early American governors was actually a prisoner in Tasmania, Thomas Francis O'Meagher, an Irish insurrectionist, who was condemned to death in 1848 but "transported" to Tasmania. There he met and married a lovely girl, but soon afterward he escaped to the United States where he was hailed in New York as a great hero by Irish exiles.
His wife gave birth to a son whom O'Meagher never saw, and the boy died at the age of four months. The young wife attempted to follow her husband to America, but when she first returned to his home town of Waterford in Ireland where thousands of citizens welcomed her, she fell ill and returned to Tasmania where she died.
O'Meagher joined the Union Army, rose to the rank of general, was appointed secretary of the territory of Montana, and later became its governor. He died by drowning in the Missouri River in 1867. From his own memoirs, one can read between the lines to know what horrors and what fiendish brutality was meted out to the unfortunates transported to that island so far from what was known in those days as civilization.
Our story, then, has truth behind it, truth even more dreadful than the incidents inscribed in the pages that follow. If there is a lesson to be learned, it is that man repeats his follies in timeless cycles and does not learn from past history. Perhaps only the methods change, the techniques of cruelty become more refined and imaginative. And, too, the setting changes from century to century. And so, perhaps those who say that we have come nearer to a universal brotherhood of man would do well to remember that it has not been many years in the span of time when children could be hanged for stealing a handkerchief or a crust of bread, when helpless young women could be branded, whipped and mutilated at their master's whim, and when the hopelessness of the indentured prisoner was such that he or she prayed for death rather than continued existence.
CHAPTER ONE
It was the year of our Lord 1824, a year notable in the young rebellious country which had broken away from the British Empire some forty-eight years previously. In this year the American Sunday School Union was formed. At Auburn, New York, a new system of prison management was adopted, which allowed for silent but not solitary confinement.
In this same year Frances Wright arrived in the United States from Scotland to champion free thought, labor, public education, anti-slavery and women's rights. In April of this notable year, Russia and the United States concluded a treaty which recognized the 54/40 parallel as the southern limit of expansion and in which Russia abandoned her extreme claims in the northern Pacific. The great Marquis de Lafayette arrived in New York with his young son for an American tour that would last a month. And oddly enough, though the hero of the battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson, received more votes than any other candidate, the fact that he obtained no electoral majority led to the eventual choice of John Quincy Adams as President, chosen by the House of Representatives the following February when these votes were counted.
It was a year in which Daniel Webster delivered his fiery speech in favor of free trade, and his mortal enemy, Henry day advocated his system of developing home industries by protective tariff and internal improvements.
But across the seas, one did not speak of women's rights or of better treatment in prisons. Here there was dire poverty, unrest, and sharp disparity between the wealthy and landed gentry and the impoverished masses who lived in the slums of London or who toiled as little better than slaves on the lordly estates in the country sides.
It was true that George III no longer sat upon the English throne: his reign embittered by this same successful rebellion of those thirteen original colonies who proclaimed themselves a free nation and a democracy, the pompous Hanoverian king had succumbed to insanity, and in 1811 his son George Augustus Frederick was proclaimed regent, to ascend the throne in the year of 1820.
This foppish young man, who ruled through Tory ministers, was the leader of a profligate society and was personally detested. Indeed, it would be almost a hundred years before another George would sit upon the throne of England, four years before the outbreak of the first great global war.
And because the monarchy was tottering, young George IV had intensified the power of his courts to suppress rebellion. The always scurrilous Irish rebels, and the quarrelsome Scots, who had plagued the British Empire even back to the days of Good Queen Bess, menaced the security of a nation who had already lost its most recently acquired colony and had lost face among the other nations of the world as a result of that defiance.
And so the magistrates were pitiless in enforcing the edicts of the land when there came before them the downtrodden, the poor, the helpless and the resolute who believed that independence was as priceless as life itself...
It was a sunny April day, but the disposition of Squire Timothy Dengman was black and stormy indeed. The fifty-two-year-old widower owned a luxurious two-thousand-acre estate about ten miles west of Nottingham, and he had long been feared as a tyrant in his own household. His wife, indeed, had died fifteen years ago, browbeaten, despairing of being able to put up with his numerous infidelities which included the seduction of her very own maids in her own house. She had come to him with a sizeable dowry, and he had dissipated most of it in spirits and wenches as well as gambling.
Beetle-browed, squat, his brown hair receding from his forehead, paunchy and choleric, Timothy Dengman sat in his study, playing with his ivory-handled riding crop, made of flexible black leather with an oval-shaped flap at the very end. His footman, the lanky, toadying Miles Verdon, had just brought him a piece of infuriating news scarcely a few moments ago. "It's that Arabella, Squire," he had obsequiously explained, "She's taken Prince and I didn't think it was by your orders."
"Oh damn it, man, of course it wasn't by my orders! Why, that stubborn little bitch! But shell be back. If she runs off with Prince, they'll stretch her pretty neck at Tyburn for her. No, she'll be back. And when she does, Miles, she'll have a hot welcome You'll assist me, of course."
"It will be my honor, Squire Dengman." The footman winked and scraped, a lecherous smile curving his lips. Squire Timothy Dengman had found his footman particularly trustworthy and helpful in informing on the errant members of his large household. Thanks to the footman's spying, he had enjoyed many a thrilling session with some tearful maid or buxom housekeeper, culminating always in a sound thrashing for the culprit and then a brutal fucking.
Arabella Lewis was only sixteen, but already her voluptuous young beauty had inflamed his viciously depraved lust. A year ago, the young girl and her mother, Mrs. Evelina Lewis, had come to Dengman Manor when her handsome forty-eight-year-old father had been killed by his former master's horse. Richard Lewis had been an excellent groom, but unfortunately for him the stallion had had a thorn in its hoof and proved unmanageable. As he had been attempting to extricate the thorn, the stallion had kicked him in the forehead and killed him at once. Lewis's master had uncharitably refused to offer the widow and her young daughter employment, and so Evelina Lewis had swallowed her pride and come to Dengman Manor.
Squire Timothy Dengman had at once offered her the post of assistant to the fat old cook, Gertrude Benton, whose attacks of asthma had of late begun to interfere with her culinary skill. But he had really engaged the woman because of her spirited young hoyden of a daughter. Arabella Lewis was auburn-haired, about five feet seven inches in height, with a sensitive oval face and a bewitching figure. Her mother had taught her letters, and the girl had developed an omnivorous interest in books far beyond the humble rural school to which she was sent. As a consequence, she expressed herself with a maturity far beyond her years, and this had infuriated the lecherous Squire.
Evelina Lewis herself was still quite attractive, with dark brown hair, of medium height, and sumptuous titties and bottom and thighs, with a very finely-grained milky skin. Arabella's complexion was exquisitely tawny, and so the dissolute landowner had envisioned compelling both mother and daughter to share his bed.
After much planning and scheming the answer had finally come.
Three months ago, he had found an occasion to coerce the widow into surrendering herself. Arabella had unwittingly broken one of his dinner plates, and when the malicious old cook had reported that to her master, he had sentenced the girl to a flogging by the house steward, a gnarled, elderly reprobate named Tom Gentry, who shared, as did the footman, his evil master's penchant for sadistic cruelty towards the weaker sex.
Evelina Lewis had herself gone to beseech mercy on behalf of her daughter, and had flung herself down on her knees before the Squire in his study, imploring him not to punish the girl. "Punish me instead, Squire Dengman," she had implored, tears glistening in her hazel eyes, "She's never known even so much as a slap, she's been a fine girl, I beg you to have mercy on her!"
He had chuckled at the woman's distraught supplications. "Well, if I let the little doxy off this time, do you think you could be grateful to me, woman?" he had demanded.
"Oh yes, Squire, I'll pray for you, I'll-"
"I need none of your snivelling Methodist prayers, woman," he had sharply interrupted. "What I have in mind is something you can do for me in your own bed tonight. Now then, here's the long and short of it. I'll spare your girl the thrashing she's earned, and tonight I'll come to your room and you'll be good to me, you understand me, woman?"
Biting her lips and turning scarlet from mortification, Evelina Lewis had obeyed. And that night, in only her shift, she had timidly unbolted the door and allowed the master of Dengman Manor to enter. He had ripped off her shift, slapped her titties and bottom, pinched and gouged her flesh as she lay gasping on the bed, her face averted and trying to hold back her cries and tears. Then he had fucked her brutally, and panted, "Next time, woman, you'll show some life, or by the Eternal, I'll have that little bitch of yours trussed up and thrashed within an inch of her life, you mind me!" And last night, his blood hot within him, Squire Timothy Dengman had attempted to force his way upon Arabella, going to her room at night and knocking on the door demanding entry. The spirited young auburn-haired teenager girl had indignantly barred him, exclaiming, "It is true that you have hired my mother and myself, Squire Dengman, but it does not give you the right to have your way with me!"
Thwarted, he had gone back to his bedroom swearing vengeance on the little bitch. And now, he could hardly believe the testimony of his footman, for now he had a superb pretext to condemn her and force her. She had taken his best stallion without permission, and he knew that when she returned, he would order her a really severe thrashing, which her mother wouldn't be able to beg off with her body this time. No, it would be Arabella herself who, under the whip, would implore him to fuck her and to take her cherry. He could see the girl with her long dark red hair tumbling about her shoulders, kneeling down in just her camisole, rubbing the backs of his hairy, stocky thighs with her soft little fingers and sucking his prick to prove her humility and obeisance.
It was true that Arabella Lewis had gone for a ride on the white stallion which her master so cherished, as a kind of act of defiance against his brutal and humiliating attempt to lie with her last night. First she had thought of running away, then she had remembered that this would leave her mother behind alone to endure their cruel master's vicious spleen. And so, after two hours of riding, she had finally jerked the reins and headed Prince back to Dengman Manor.
As she reached the stable, a smirking, pimple-faced boy of her own age, Willy Murdock, seized the reins and joked, "Now you're in for it, Bella! The Squire is in a towering rage, and I wouldn't want to be in your shoes when you get into the big house. He's been asking for you every minute."
"You mind your own business, Willy Murdock, and I'll mind mine!" Arabella spiritedly flashed. "I mean to go and tell him myself, come what may so there!"
She entered gingerly by the front door, another breach of discipline since no servant in the Dengman household was permitted that liberty, being an inferior and virtually a slave. Miles Verdon gawked at her as he opened the door, and then grinned: "Well, your ladyship has seen fit to return, I see. And the master is waiting for you in his study. You'd best go there quickly, I'm thinking."
"I intend to," Arabella retorted. She strode down the ball still wearing the boots she had borrowed from a young hostler, and the riding breeches which she had cozened out of the infatuated boy, who, himself an orphan, was as badly treated as any of the other members of this ill-fated household, and would have gladly given his life for a smile from Arabella's soft red lips.
Arabella Lewis went directly to the door of the study, and, knocking on it, heard Squire Dengman bawl out, "Come in, dammit!"
Taking a deep breath, the courageous teenaged girl turned the knob of the door and entered.
"Well, my fine lady, so you come in by the front door, do you? You think yourself quality, I've no doubt, just as you've done all along since your first day here. And then taking Prince out for an airing, the horse which only I myself am privileged to ride. You've a good deal to account for yourself today. Miss Arabella!"
"You know why I took it? I wanted to run away from here forever. Squire Dengman. It was vile of you!"
His face black with fury, the paunchy landowner rose, gripping the handle of the riding crop. "You dare to speak to me that way, you filthy little baggage? But you'll sing a different tune when I'm done with you, aye, that you will! I'll have Tim Gentry trice you up in the stable by the thumbs, with just your feet left to kick an inch or two above the ground, and I'll have you thrashed on your naked butt with a harness strap!"
"Because you're too much of a coward to do it to me yourself, Squire Dengman, that's why. And you've no right, if the truth be known."
"No right, girl, no right? Do you dare to tell me, you, a mere brat from that bitch of a mother of yours, what I can do and what I can't here at Dengman Manor?"
"Yes, but when I tell Mr. Gentry before he thrashes me that you tried to force me last night and are punishing me because I wouldn't let you in my room, he may see what sort of vile and wicked man you really are," Arabella Lewis tilted back her head and defiantly exclaimed.
"Why you-you filthy, insolent little slut! I'll have you arraigned at Old Bailey, so I will! Do you know that you can be hanged for the theft of a horse?"
"I'd rather be hanged than give myself to a fat, wicked brute like you. And when I tell the judges there what you did to my mother-"
Squire Timothy Dengman ground his teeth, almost at the point of having a stroke, so overwhelmed was he by this minx's blithe defiance and arrogance. Then he grinned wickedly.
"You're right, though. I'll punish you myself, and we don't need Mr. Gentry. And after I finish, Miss Bella, we'll see whether you want to be nice to me or not. Because if you don't, the constable will take you in charge and off you'll go for a hanging." Then, reaching for the silver bell on his desk, he rang it angrily. And when the footman entered, having eavesdropped just outside the door all this while, he bellowed, "Take this bitch into my bedroom and prepare her for a thrashing. If you need Tim to help you, call him! And then when she's ready, come back here and tell me."
CHAPTER TWO
Miles Verdon was panting with lustful anticipation as he reached his master's bedroom, joked the lovely teenaged captive inside and kicked the door shut. "Now then, you little spitfire," he panted, "Don't give me any trouble or III have old Tom come in and gentle you, sure as you're born! Step over here to the foot of the bed. You're in for it now, Bella!"
Arabella Lewis was very pale, but her courage had not deserted her. She infinitely preferred a whipping to the filthy lust of Squire Timothy Dengman, whom she considered debauched and evil to his very marrow. Indeed, on many a night she had urged her mother to run away with her to some friendly little hamlet, but Evelina Lewis had only sighed disconsolately, shaken her head and replied, "Ah, my poor girl, that's all very well to say for the gentry. But not for the-likes of us, dearest Bella. Why, if we did that, the Squire would have us hunted down with dogs and by the sheriff or the beadle, brought back here and thrashed within an inch of our lives."
"But then we're no better than slaves, Mama!" the courageous young beauty had protested.
"That's true. But, that's the way of the world, and when you're poor and have no man to stand up for you, you'd best bow your head and try not to anger the master too much," the handsome widow had dolefully advised.
And so now with punishment imminent, Arabella Lewis had decided to submit herself and take it as bravely as she could. At least, she told herself, that vicious man would get no satisfaction from her. Oh, if she were only a man, that she could kill him for what he had done to her poor mother! She moved slowly to the foot of the huge canopied, four-postered bed while Miles Verdon, smirking, adjusting his somewhat rumpled wig which had come awry in the scuffle of dragging her down the hallway to his master's bedroom, advanced, licking his lips, his beady little watery blue eyes lecherously undressing the' lovely young girl. "Hold your hands up high over your head there, you saucy chit! I'll warrant that when the Squire's done with you, you'll dance to a different tune!" he gloatingly averred.
On the heavy walnut post at the right, there was a pair of solid brass manacles fixed round the wood and set solidly with turnscrews. Reaching up, the lanky footman touched a spring and opened both the shackles, then seized Arabella's wrists and guided them inside, and locked them shut around the girl's slim wrists. Then, moving to her right side and reaching up to the post, he adjusted a larger turnscrew which slid the brass ring to which the shackles were attached upwards, again locked it, forcing Arabella to stand on tiptoe, with painful stress on her arm and shoulder muscles.
She had closed her eyes, and was very pale. Her magnificent, luxuriant mane of glossy, auburn hair tumbled just below her shoulder blades. Miles Verdon stood sweeping her body with glittering eyes, envying his master for the nonce. There wasn't much chance, he told himself, that Squire would share this tasty little pullet with him, not likely. But just the same, before Squire came in to administer punishment, there wasn't any reason why he couldn't steal a few kisses and pinch the little bitch here and there in the most delightful places.
"Now to get you ready for the thrashing, Bella girl," he jocularly announced. Then, stooping, he ran his lean, bony fingers over the sides of her riding breeches, moving round to the front and then slid his fingertips right down her crotch to feel her cunt.
"Stop that, Mr. Verdon!" she panted indignantly, turning her face to stare at him with blazing eyes, "Do what you have to do, but there is no need to shame me. You're a worse coward than your master."
"Oh do you think so, now, Bella?" his lips were compressed and thin now, and there was a nasty look on his smug face. "You think I'm a coward, do you?
If I were the Squire, I'd flay the skin off your butt until you crawled at my feet and licked them, aye, I would that! But he'll do that for you right enough, Bella. Now close your yap while I get you ready, or I'll have old Tom in, and he won't be quite so imagine with an uppity little slut who thinks herself a lady! Wearing breeches like some trollop in London town! Let's just see what's beneath them, shall we?"
Now his fingers were rough as they unbuckled the thin belt, loosened the buttons and then, inserting into the waistband, yanked them down unceremoniously while Arabella Lewis uttered a stifled gasp, bent her head and closed her eyes. Because the weather had been warm, she had put on only the breeches and a dark cloth blouse with long sleeves over her camisole and drawers. Lisle stockings up to the knees and held there by dainty little pink garters were her only other covering, and the boots hugged her finely turned, sinuously high-set calves and rose to the hollows of her dimpled knees. Miles Verdon now fucked up the camisole, rolled it up under the blouse to her armpits, then reached slyly round to squeeze her pear-shaped, already magnificently firm and thrusting titties, marveling at the soft satiny feel of her naked flesh.
"You bastard!" she panted in a low trembling voice, glancing furiously round at him. "I'm not to be whipped there-take your filthy hands away from me, or I'll tell the Squire that you've tried to do me a harm!"
"Oh would you? We'll see about that," he vindictively muttered. Just to show her how helpless she was, he put thumbs and forefingers to the soft pink buds of her nipples and pinched viciously. Arabella's head tilted back, her eyes wide with agony, and humid tears blurred her vision as she ground her teeth together, though unable to suppress a dull, prolonged groan of pain. She arched and twisted, all her muscles in play, till at last he released her and stepped back. "Not so high and mighty, now are you, you red-haired doxy!" His voice was harsh, his breathing quickened, and already there was a stiff bulge at the crotch of his liveried breeches. Then his fingers inserted into the waistband of the girl's batiste drawers and brutally yanked them down to her knees. Arabella Lewis uttered a poignant cry of shame and despair, and bowed her head and closed her eyes, while a violent shudder rippled through her tractioned body.
Miles Verdon's eyes were narrowed and aglow with lust to see the saucy, spaciously firm tawny sheened ovals of that voluptuous virgin ass, the muscles of which were now in violent mobility as Arabella Lewis desperately tried to diminish the revelation of her most intimate charms to his profaning gaze. The cheeks of her behind were set tightly together, with a very sinuous amber groove between them, and her long, gracefully rounded thighs had almost a kind of boyishness, which of course the riding breeches had accentuated.
Now, putting his hands to the neck of the blouse, he ripped it from her body, and then yanked the uprolled camisole over her head as a kind of improvised blindfold, leaving her naked from shoulders down to her knees. Again she gasped, and a still more violent convulsive shudder surged through her svelte, helpless young nudity. He moved round in front of her to stare greedily at the turbulently rising and Calling pears of her virgin titties, at the wide shallow dimple which was her navel, and then at the already surprisingly thick dark-red curb which fleeced her virgin cunthole. Sensing his intent, Arabella Lewis pressed herself frantically up against the round, heavy and expertly hand-scrolled bedpost.
"That's it, girl, hide your cunt all you Eke, the Squire'll make you show it to him by die time he's taken his crop to that imagine butt of yours," Miles Verdon hissed.
And at that moment Timothy Dengman flung open the door of his bedroom and strode inside, brandishing the ivory-handled riding crop, having taken off his cambric shirt. "Get out, Verdon," he snapped, "And see that I'm not disturbed, because I will hold you personally responsible for every minute that I am!"
"Your servant, Squire," the lanky footman obsequiously inclined his head and reluctantly left the bedroom, closing the door behind him. But once outside, he dropped down to a squatting position and squinted through the keyhole to watch. He could just make out the tawny jut of Arabella Lewis's naked ass and the bulky form of his master standing behind her and partly obscuring that regalia of virginal girl flesh.
"I imagine you don't feel quite so proud and independent now, girl," the brutish landowner hoarsely chuckled, as he playfully traced the oval flap of the riding crop down Arabella Lewis's beautifully chiseled back, along the deep, exquisite hollow of the spine down to her chinkbone. "Do you want to beg me for mercy now or will you wait till you've had a few dozen cuts over that sweet butt of yours, girl?"
"Go ahead and kill me, Squire Dengman," Arabella gasped, still keeping her eyes closed and teetering uncomfortably from her shackled wrists which made her arch up high on the toes of her boots. "I wanted to run away for good, and it's only when I remembered that my poor mother would be left alone here at your mercy that I came back. I know what you did to her. It was the act of a coward and brute!"
"So you'd say that to your master, you, a snip of a girl just turned sixteen? Now be reasonable, Bella," his voice changed now to an almost coaxing tone. "I'm quite fond of you, girl, and even though you've given me mortal affront and shamed me in the eyes of my servants, I don't bear you any real ill will. We could be good friends, very good friends, Bella, I'd see that your mother's wages were doubled, yet-doubled, mind you. And you'd have imagine gowns from London and even a poodle, if you would like-or a monkey-"
"And I suppose the price would be going to bed with you here in this bed, Squire Dengman, and letting you do to me what you wanted to do last night!" she interrupted.
"You stubborn little bitch," he growled, "I own you, yes, and your mother too. Best not to forget that while you're here in this house, eating my bread, quartering in my rooms. I've but to say a word and the sheriff will turn you and your mother into gaol as vagrants, and no one will give either of you a situation if I say the word, just remember that."
"Because of your bounty, I'm to spread my legs for you and let you have me, I suppose," Arabella
Lewis defied him.
He sucked in his breath at her effrontery, and his stubby fingers tightened round the ivory handle of the riding crop. "I could have you branded and your ears dipped or your tongue cropped, bitch," he reminded her. "I've got to lodge a complaint with the magistrate at Notts, and you and your mother could be pilloried and whipped and branded as mutinous. Aye, and I'll do just that if you don't have a care of that sharp tongue of yours, you little shit! Now ask my pardon for having ridden Prince, and tell me that you'll be nice to me. Sure, I know the humors of a girl as young as you. You just want to get the best price for your charms, and I can't say that I blame you. You're young, but you've a body that sets a man's blood to heat, rd much rather gentle you than thrash you, if you'd but be more humble and grateful for your station in fife here, Bella girl."
"Whip me and have done with it. I'd die before Td go to bed with a pig like you, Squire Dengman!" Arabella Lewis hoarsely cried.
His face blackened, and he stepped back and slashed the riding crop diagonally over the tightly contracted, smooth satiny cheeks of her virgin ass. A poignant though stifled cry was at once wrested from her, and she writhed, her head tilting back and her tear-filled eyes fixing on the overhead lofty ceiling, while her slim fingers clawed at the shiny, heavy round post. On the pale tawny sheen of her naked bottom, an angry, darkening red welt had at once sprung up.
"So you'd rather be thrashed than be nice to me in bed, would you? I'll give you plenty of time to make your choice, Arabella Lewis. Tell me how you like this-and this-and this one too!"
His voice raucous with savage lust, the paunchy landowner applied three whistling cuts of the riding crop, each horizontally inflicted, the first over the tops of the young girl's hips, the second over the upper summits of both naked cheeks, and the third squarely over the ripest curves of that huddling, virginal posterior. Arabella Lewis could not suppress a strangled scream of pain as she twisted and jerked, lurching from side to side, frantically glancing back with tear blurred eyes at his darkened, twisted face. It felt as if a searing bar of hot iron had been touched to her tender bottom at each place where the venomous leather had kissed her virginal flesh.
"It's a shame to mark such a sweet, satiny butt, but mark it I will till you've come to your senses, you insolent little bitch!" he growled. "Or mayhap you'll be changing your mind now while there's still time?"
"I told you I'd rather die and I meant every word of it! Oh, if there were only justice in England to stop brutes like you from harming and tyrannizing poor innocent females!" she flashed at him.
Baring his yellowish, decaying teeth, Squire Timothy Dengman slashed the riding crop with all his might over the base of Arabella Lewis's naked ass, making her lunge forward with a piercing cry of intolerable agony, as her fingers clawed at the post. Then, the fingers of his left hand digging into the scruff of her slim neck, he began to flog her. With quick, brutal, short but stinging cuts, he patterned her writhing, jerking naked ass cheeks with livid streaks and welts, crisscrossing them especially at the base and at the ripest curves of the summits, while the unfortunate teenaged victim, her face turning from side to side, drowned in tears, ground her teeth together with all her strength to keep from begging for mercy. Her body shuddered under the uncontrollable, feverish torment of the thrashing, and the muscles of her shoulders and wrists and arms ached savagely from the atrocious traction which the shackles round her slim wrists exerted. She could nor escape at this short range, and it seemed to her that fire was consuming her tender flesh, till she prayed for a merciful swoon.
But she was young and healthy and courageous, and this boon was not vouchsafed her.
By the time he had administered forty strokes, there were tiny rubies of blood pearling here and there at the tops of her hips, on the lower right cheek of her bottom near the narrow groove which led to her virgin ass-hole, and at the base of both globes, while beads of torture-sweat trickled down her heaving sides, and her lower lip was bloody where she had gnawed it to keep from imploring him for mercy.
Panting heavily, he ripped open the fly of his breeches to bare his turgid, dark-veined prick, pulled back the foreskin with right thumb and forefinger, till the plum-shaped head aimed at her welted, bleeding bottom, the lips puckering with the frenzied urge to spurt his vicious lust-lava into her virgin orifices.
"Now, you hussy, what do you think about me now?" he gasped, his eyes feasting on the welted, shuddering, lividly streaked and bleeding ovals of that delicious young bottom. The nuance of her down-tucked drawers clinging round the tops of her dusty black boots, the camisole pulled over her face-though in her struggles it had fallen slightly back to allow her to see him or that ceiling to which she addressed her silent prayers as if it were Providence which alone could save her. "Are you ready to beg my pardon, bitch, and ask me to come to your room tonight?"
Arabella Lewis shuddered, moaned, her head bowed, as a fit of trembling seized her. Then, fighting for breath through her sobs, she panted at last, "I will not! I'd rather die right now!"
"God's bowels, was there ever such a stubborn little whore!" he bellowed, beside himself with frustrated lust and fury. "Perhaps you've a imagine, then, for one of the young stable boys-aye, young Tom! Aye, I've no doubt he's the one gave you those breeches and those boots-well, he'll .answer to me tomorrow morning."
"You-you dirty, contemptible c-coward-it wasn't T-Tom-I-I found them myself," she courageously lied, her teeth chattering now with the savage, burning waves of pain that made her almost sick with nausea as she teetered there, her arms tractioned high above her head and all the stress of her body aggravating the fiery torment of her furiously marked naked behind.
"Perhaps you've no cherry left, then," he mocked her. Moving behind her, so that she could feel against her welted bottom the prodding of his stiff, hot prick, Squire Timothy Dengman moved his pudgy right forefinger round her body, foraged for the furry niche of her cunt, and inserted it between the pouting soft pink lips of her virgin cunthole.
"Oh no! Take it away-oh how I wish I were a man-you coward, you beast-oh stop-aahhh!" she wailed, and began to sob hysterically. What the lashing had not made her do, his obscene and taunting palpitation of her maiden cunt had achieved. But by now his finger had run up against the barrier which proclaimed her chaste of man, and he grinned wolfishly. "Aye, you've still your cherry, and it's as well for you that you have. Now a last time, do I come to your room tonight at your bidding to take it properly and to honor you?"
"Never! Kill me now! But you shouldn't have me if you were the last man in all this world, Squire Dengman!" she cried.
The lust in his face had changed to a furious and vindictive hate. "Say you so, girl?" he muttered softly, his lips twisted, his eyes pinpoints of satanic cruelty. "Then if you'd do yourself a harm rather than lie with me tonight, you can lie in shit for all I care. You can keep your cherry for the hangman, aye, and for the rats at the Old Bailey. I'll have you charged as a rebel, that I will, and as one who threatened my very life. For I've no doubt you'd try to stop me with a bodkin could you but put your hands on it this moment!"
"I would that-I would willingly kill you for the pig and coward and brute that you are," she panted.
"Speak your peace, girl, the magistrate will hear every word. But first, before I deliver you to him in the morning, I'll at least take some little pleasure with you. I've no doubt your butt is paining you right now, eh? Good. Then you'll feel me all the more."
And with this, grinning like a fiend out of hell, Squire Timothy Dengman snuck his pudgy fingers into her lividly striped and bleeding ass-cheeks, and yawned them pitilessly apart to reveal the shrinking dainty-petaled pink crevice of her virgin ass-hole.
The pain was so intense as his blackened fingernails sank into the striped and bleeding flesh that Arabella Lewis tilted up her head and uttered a shout of intolerable agony, wordless and prolonged. And then her body jerked and quaked and another, even longer and more despairing shriek was ripped from her throat.
He had thrust his turgid prick against that dainty orifice, cramming himself past one ring of sphincter muscles, till he had forced half his length inside her narrow, protesting bumhole. Then, reaching round to clutch at her pear-shaped titties, his breath hoarsened and quickened, Squire Timothy Dengman gouged himself to the very balls as poor Arabella Lewis uttered cry upon cry of unspeakable despair, shame and torment.
Pinching her titties, tweaking and gouging at her nipples, he began to bottomfuck her, while the unfortunate young girl struggled desperately. Her fingernails scrabbled at the heavy wooden post to which her wrists were shackled, she tried to lunge and avoid this brutal evisceration of her bowels, and the hot waves of agony which his digging, gouging fingers caused her severely flogged naked young ass drew piteous cries and wails and hysterical sobs from the unfortunate sufferer.
At last, with a bellow of triumph, he emptied his gism deep into her bowels, and sagged forward against her, squeezing her titties until she thought she would faint with the pain. His chin resting on her shoulder, he gasped, "Now at least I've had a little of you, you whore! As for the rest of you, mayhap when they sentence you to the rope at Tyburn, I'll come see you in your prison cell the night before you're driven out there in a cart file with straw to say good morning to Jack Ketch, the hangman. And maybe then you'll grovel at my feet and lick my boots and ask me to take your cherry. But till then, I'll have you charged as a treasonable little rebel and murderous bitch, for such you are. Do you hear me, Bella? And your mother, I'll be in her bed every night while you're lying on your prison straw and thinking of the rope, aye, that I will!"
But Arabella Lewis no longer heard his triumphant, jeering, hoarse voice. She had fainted.
CHAPTER THREE
In Dublin, the same week in which spirited Arabella Lewis began her ill-starred destiny, Michael Corrigan was to enter upon his own, one that would involve his devastatingly lovely black-haired young wife Colleen.
Michael Corrigan was a printer's clerk, having served as an apprentice since his fourteenth birthday to old Paddy Murfree, and his elevation beyond the rank of printer's devil to official clerk had been inspiration enough to pop the question to winsome Colleen, whom he had loved since his school days.
Michael Corrigan was six feet tall, with an unruly shock of dark brown hair, thick brows and rugged features. But his candid blue eyes and frank mouth bespoke the measure of the man, and he was already marked down by the British secret agents in Dublin as a hothead, a radical and a dangerous rebel who must be watched with the utmost vigilance.
Even in these early days of the year 1824, British press gangs scoured the taverns, the brothels and the gutters here in far-off Dublin forlikely seamen who would be shanghaied and wakened out of aching slumber induced by either a rap on the noggin with a kerry club or by the addition of a powerful soporific in their ale or whiskey, to find themselves aboard a British man-of-war. When they protested, if they were new to the ways of Britain's lordly empire, they were summarily shown what purported to be their very own signature on a document which bound them to his Majesty's Navy for a period of not less than three years. If they further protested, the boatswain was ready with his cat-o-nine-tails to persuade them to honor the aforementioned signature. And once aboard, their life would be a living hell, subject to floggings at the post before the entire crew, moldy biscuits and rotten meat or fish, pitifully small wages, and always the chance of death by hanging for the slightest mutiny or rebellion against the master of the vessel to which they were confined.
But of such skullduggery young, lighthearted Michael Corrigan thought little this sunny April day, for even as the sun was setting he had bidden his employer a hearty "Good day to you, Master Murfree!" and was striding down the cobbled street towards his little cottage a mile to the northwest, where his bride of ten days, the beauteous black-haired Colleen, would be waiting with his supper. There would be a fat kipper and a baked potato, and strong tea and her own hot buttered scones, a fine day's provender for a starving man. And after the supper dishes had been cleared away, there beside the fireplace they would cuddle on the couch until it was time to seek the nuptial bed. Michael Corrigan's prick throbbed with the very anticipation of that.
Colleen Bewley (her maiden name) was but nineteen, yet there was no more hot-blooded, deliciously provocative lass in all of Erin. Oh, a good, chaste, God-fearing girl was she, and Michael Corrigan's thick brows formed an angry scowl as if in readiness to challenge any man Jack who would dare say naught against his sweet young wife.
But there was no gainsaying that once they were safely between the sheets and the candle blown out, Colleen would turn to him with a fierce hunger matching his own, her high-set pear-shaped titties stabbing their turgid, dark coral points against his heaving chest, her warm red mouth sucking his in a passionate entreaty, as she squirmingly accommodated the brunt of his sinewy body atop hers. And once his stiff prick had fitted against the moistening, twitching pink lips of her narrow, seething lovesheath, her beautiful long legs would lock round him and she would arch herself up to devour every throbbing, swollen inch of his virility, then thrust in her tongue between his lips to tell him that she had it all and wished it was his. Thus, Michael Corrigan was heard whistling "Rose of Mavourneed" as he trudged happily down the cobbled street towards the domain which was his entire world. Even this morning, fussy old Murfree had as much as promised him a raise in wages. Then they could plan on a bairn, and of course the first would be a boy. He would name it after his father, Patrick Shaugnessy, and then the second would be a girl with black hair and lustrous dark-brown eyes like sweet Colleen herself. Oh, what a lucky fellow he was to have such a bride! There wasn't a man in Dublin who didn't envy him the sweet pillowing of his head upon those firm pale-ivory-tinted bubbies of hers, nor the clinging, muscular grip her long beautifully sculptured thighs impressed over his own when she felt him deep inside her cunt. To be sure, to no man alive would Michael Corrigan have breathed such impious and salacious words, but his sweet Colleen had dazzled him by murmuring a few on her very wedding night. Yes, she had been brought up at Mrs. Dannaher's Finishing School for Young Ladies, where they applied the switch to the pantalettes or drawers of an ill-mannered girl, but she had never once known that humiliation. And yet, as she had shyly confessed when he had blown out the candle and taken her into his arms, "You big great lout of a man, Michael Corrigan, don't you know that I've been fair crazy for love of you ever since you first pulled my pigtail back there in Dunderry School? I've saved myself for you all these years, and I'm thinking you'd best be appreciative, for I warn you, Michael Corrigan, it's only the good sisters who brought me up properly and my own decent folks, who've kept me from being a painted hussy in Mrs. Case's house on Ulster Lane."
He had been speechless at this revelation of her sexuality. "Mother of Heaven help us all, Colleen," he had gasped. "What do you know, you a pure virgin, of that wicked place?"
"I would ask you the same question, my husband. And you had best not tell me you've been there, or you shall have none of me this night, be it or not our wedding night," she had teasingly replied.
And then she had whispered to him how some of her girlfriends had told her of the naughty things men and women did together in that bordello, and how she had often confessed her sins to the old priest who had given her many a rosary to tell as penance. "I've used my own finger, I've been shameless, Michael Corrigan," she had breathed into his ear, as she wriggled beneath him, her night-shift fucked up to her armpits, her satiny warm pale-ivory flesh torturing him with its exquisite promise. "So now you'd best service me so that I need never use such a naughty substitute again, d'you hear me?"
There were few women who would have dared make such a candid admission of sexual knowledge to their own husbands, but Michael Corrigan's keen mind and blithe independent spirit had already divined that sweet Colleen was no simpering, prim clit who would swoon away at the first honest kiss she ever got. And thus far, in the ten brief nights of their union, each had been a paradise upon earth, as she brought to the bridal bed her own eager hunger for him, her curiosity and, as she herself merrily explained, her own pent-up girlish passions...
But Michael Corrigan was not the only man in Dublin who hungered for the lithe, sweet thighs, the hard-nippled titties, the upstandingly rounded, tightly set bottom-cheeks and the thickly furred tight cunt of delectable Colleen. Benjamin Scorcey, very bald, with horn-rimmed spectacles and threadbare coat and worn boots, who lived across the way, had long lusted for this gaily smiling young beauty. Ostensibly, Benjamin Scorcey was employed as a clerk in a greengrocer's shop. But in reality he was a British agent and informer. Once a month, he rode his spavined mare out to Gorgan's Creek, some twenty miles to the West of Dublin, where he would meet with two supercilious, well-groomed men who listened to his toadying reports with bland faces, taking snuff from jeweled little boxes. Then one of them would contemptuously hand him a few guineas, and he would ride back to Dublin by a different route, hoarding his Judas-gold in the cellar of his little cottage.
Michael Corrigan attended several meetings of the Sons of Free Ireland. The theme was as it had always been, independence for Erin. George IV had sent his Tory soldiers to patrol the streets of Dublin, after a violent revolt by a handful of hotheads in February. Three of these men had been hanged as an example to the others, were languishing in prison, under very indeterminate sentences.
But since his marriage, Michael Corrigan's head had been in such a whirl that he knew he would have no time for politics. It would suffice that he worked all the harder at the shop so that he and Colleen might have their bairns and a good life together. And Ireland would have her own freedom under God during his own lifetime, he was certain.
But Benjamin Scorcey had already, just yesterday at Gorgan's Creek, turned in the name of Michael
Corrigan as a man to be watched and to be taken so that he would not lead a similar rebellion against the English soldiers. Confident that his rival for Colleen's bed surrender would soon be arrested and brought to trial to face treasonable charges that could only result in a hanging for the rascal, the informer had decided to make Colleen his very own this very afternoon.
The man who had given him his pay, Cecil Upshire, had assured him that Corrigan would be arrested at his place of employment this very afternoon. And Benjamin Scorcey, who had never had a wife or even a sweetheart, and who spent some of his ill-gotten guineas on sluts at Mrs. Case's house, was knocking on the door of the little cottage even as Michael Corrigan neared it by about half a mile.
Colleen, thinking it was Michael, ran to the door eagerly and opened it, and then her face fell and her eyes widened. "Mr. Scorcey-I'm sorry, I was expecting Michael."
"I'm not sure you'll be seeing your husband, Colleen. You must be brave and prepare yourself," the informer glibly adopted a commiserating tone as he edged his way inside. "Hmm, I smell hot scones. Perhaps you can spare a cup of tea and some of them, my sweet Colleen!"
"Mr. Scorcey, I am not your sweet Colleen and what you told me does not smack of the truth. Why do you say that I won't see Michael again?"
"Who knows? The British are rounding up all known rebels, and I know that your husband has fiery Irish sympathies."
"Why, then, so have I, Mr. Scorcey. And I'm sorry, but I'm in the midst of preparing Michael's supper. You'd do me a great courtesy by taking your leave at once, sir, I've nothing more to say to you."
"But I've a great deal to say to you, Colleen."
"And who gave you leave to call me by my first name, as if we were good friends, I'll be asking you?" she angrily flashed, her eyes sparkling, her hands on her lissome hips.
His shifty, gray-blue eyes narrowed as he studied her, in the white blouse and long dark full skirt which could not hide the stately sculpture of her hips and thighs. Indignant as she was, her magnificent titties rose and fell exuberantly against the clinging blouse, serving to inflame his already whetted lust.
"You'd best be nice to me, Colleen, I'm thinking," he purred. "You'll be needing a friend when poor Michael is standing his trial. And I'll console you, you'll see. I've much gold-"
"And I can guess how you came by it, Benjamin Scorcey!" she exclaimed. "I'm telling you for the last time, be out of here, you scalawag, you good-for-nothing, before Michael comes back and clouts you out of County Cork and into the briny Atlantic where perchance you'll drown as you deserve."
"Why, you high and mighty little slut, taking such airs with me, a peasant brat such as you were!" he growled. Advancing on her, he seized her by the shoulders and began to rip her blouse away, while she tried to kick at him and pummel him with her fists. With a sneering laugh, his prick violently swollen with rutting desire, the informer twisted one arm behind her back and wrenched the slim wrist till she cried out and doubled over with pain. The he began to tear away with his other hand at her skirt, till he had tattered it and exposed one lovely, lithe hip clad only by the thin pink camisole.
"Michael will kill you for this!" she panted, twisting and trying to escape him. "You great coward, you wouldn't be man enough to try this if he were here!"
"But he won't be here, you bitch, and it would be a shame to waste such white skin and such big firm titties in a lonely bed for all the nights you'll be missing Michael Corrigan," he boasted. Now, ripping away the camisole, he attacked her drawers. Colleen uttered a shriek of mortification, twisting like an eel, to avert this catastrophe. But now, moving round in front of her, he ripped the front of the camisole so that it festooned down to her waist and exposed the magnificent pale ivory turrets of her bubbies, with their dark coral points. Wild with rut now, he grabbed her by the bottom cheeks and, bending his head, sucked one of her nipples, while she struck at his nearly bald head with her fists, trying to jerk up her knees and foil his lecherous efforts.
Releasing her, he struck her brutally across the jaw with the side of his right fist, and Colleen Corrigan stumbled and fell, dazed, to all fours, shaking her head like a wounded prizefighter. Then, baring his swollen prick, he stooped down, seized her by the hair with his left hand, and with his right completed the fucking down of the thin drawers, exposing the jouncy white globes of her voluptuous ass between whose sinuous crease he could see the black silky curls framing the pink lips of her cunthole.
"Now we'll just see how much you're going to miss him," he gasped as he sank down on his knees, and, cruelly squeezing her titties with his fingers, crammed his prick against her cunthole. Mad with shame and despair, Colleen cried out and twisted wildly, defeating him momentarily. And then the door was flung open and Michael Corrigan uttered a roar of incredulous rage and horror at what he saw.
"You'd dare, Scorcey!" he was nearly speechless with fury. "You stinking informer, I'll send you straight to hell, for your heart is as black as the horned one's!"
"Now wait a minute, Corrigan," Benjamin Scorcey babbled, stumbling to his feet, turning himself half way round to hide the jutting obscenity of his swollen prick, "You don't understand-"
"And I don't think I've a mind to. There, you blithering swine!" the young husband roared as he strode forward and struck the informer with all his strength on the cheekbone.
Benjamin Scorcey's eyes goggled, then a spurt of blood shot from his nostrils and mouth, and he crashed to the floor and lay on his side, breathing stertorously for a moment. Colleen, weeping, tried her best to cover her almost naked body with her tattered garments. "Oh I was sore afraid, Michael, oh thank the good God you came in time," she whimpered.
But all of a sudden the informer's breathing had stopped. He had, his physician had told him but a few weeks ago, an overtaxed heart. And this access of ravening lust and then the terrible fear of discovery by the enraged young husband had ended his mean, toadying life. And in a sense, also, the happy connubial existence of Michael and Colleen Corrigan.
CHAPTER FOUR
After he had buggered young lovely Arabella Lewis, the sadistic Squire of Dengman Manor had the house steward, white-haired, lecherous old Tom Gentry, lock the auburn-haired teenager into a narrow, dank little closet in a guest room on the other side of the house, there to await being turned over to the bailiff on a charge of insubordination and mutiny. The corrupt Magistrate Edward Holcomb, who presided in the lower courts of the district in which Nottingham was situated, would, the vindictive Squire knew, do whatever he wished. Many was the evening that Justice Edward Holcomb had enjoyed his lavish hospitality at
Dengman Manor, and had always found some pretty kitchen wench or upstairs maid to bed down with the old rascal. No, Arabella Lewis would be sent far away from Dengman Manor where she would no longer be a troublemaker to him.
He sent Willy Murdock over to the Justice's house on horseback, though the hour was late and it was a good fifteen miles away, to ask his good friend to be ready to preside at a special hearing the next afternoon. Before this hearing, Arabella Lewis would be taken, incommunicado, gagged and blindfolded, bound if need be, and her case would be quickly disposed of.
But in the morning, Evelina Lewis, having overheard a sniggering remark by the footman Miles Verdon, learned that her daughter had so gravely offended the master of this estate that he himself had punished her and then locked her up awaiting trial.
The brown-haired widow, agonized by this horrifying news, had gone at once to her master's study, only to be told that he was riding out in the fields and would not be back until late evening. By then, at his previously given orders, Arabella Lewis, gagged, blindfolded, with her wrists tied behind her back and her ankles hobbled by a hempen cord, had been smuggled out of the closet and through the garden where Tim Gentry and Miles Verdon themselves, on horseback, awaited her. Then, trundled off like a sack of potatoes, she was driven into Nottingham in this ignominious and demeaning fashion, with Squire Timothy Dengman himself standing as chief witness for the prosecution in the little courtroom of gray-haired, dyspeptic Justice
Holcomb.
By then, of course, the gag and blindfold had been removed, but not the fetters on her wrists and ankles. Her eyes swollen with weeping, her face haggard, still suffering the pangs of that brutal flogging and then her buggering the night before, she faced the magistrate defiantly. But when she heard him intone the pompous and oratorical words of the charge of mutiny, treason to the master's person and then to the Crown itself, she broke out vehemently: "But 'tis a lie, Your Worship! Never once have I uttered a single syllable of aught that is treasonable against the King, I would not do such a thing!"
"You will have your chance, girl, to plead to the charges after I have finished their reading," the gray-haired judge reprimanded her. Then, gesturing to his stout, red-faced bailiff to stand behind her and be ready to clap his hand over her mouth if again she should speak before it was her time, he finished the reading of the indictment.
"And now what say you, Arabella Lewis?" the judge demanded.
"That I'm not guilty! That this wicked man, the Squire himself, because I would not lie abed with him, did thrash me and then take his satisfaction on my person in the most inhuman and unnatural way that could befall an innocent young girl!" she defiantly cried.
"How now! What pack of lies is this, wench?" the judge removed his spectacles and peered angrily at her. "You do yourself no good in this court by reviling such an upstanding gentlemen as the Squire here!"
"He is less than a gentleman, the worst beggar and outlaw in the forest is better than he!" Arabella cried, digging her fingernails into her palms, her shoulders erect, her body shuddering with revulsion as she saw the scowling, mocking face of her tormentor. "Is there no justice in all this land for a poor girl who, because she does not have blue blood in her veins, must be at the mercy of any scoundrel who is wealthy and has a title? Must such a girl, I demand to know, be forced to give her body like a slut simply because he beckons to her? My mother and I were engaged as servants, nothing more. Naught was said about our letting this man have his way with us."
"Take care, girl, I have already warned you," Magistrate Edward Holcomb thundered, as he brought his fist down on his desk, for this hearing was being conducted in his private chamber. Then, turning to Squire Dengman, he respectfully demanded, "Tell me, Timothy, where did this wench get her learning? Egad, she speaks the King's English better than we do."
"Aye, that's because she's the devil's own time on her hands with naught to occupy her save seditious books which she's forever reading. It is true that she's only sixteen, a mere chit of a lass, but you know the trouble we have had with rebels and traitors the past decade. It would be wise to arraign her as such, lest she raise up the countryside against all of us landowners. Why, she would overthrow the class system of our very empire, Magistrate Holcomb!"
"That is true. It is a very serious thing, Arabella Lewis, that your master tells me. I fear I have no alternative but to remand you to the court at Old Bailey in London. Let it be here inscribed," he turned to his bewigged clerk, who was frantically scribbling with a quill pen, "that I have done this on this day and that in my opinion, which should be transmitted to the justices in London, this girl is a very dangerous potential criminal."
"You lie, all of you! Oh hell, is there no one to help my mother and me? I have done nothing except defend my virtue. If Your Worship has a daughter, I pray God himself she will not one day have to stand at bay before such a vile, despicable beast as Squire Dengman. And if she does, may she not come before her father in a court of supposed law and justice!" Arabella cried.
But the bailiff's hand now clapped over her mouth and he dragged her away, his other hand squeezing one of her titties, as he muttered, "Tonight, you dirty little slut, for offending His Worship so, I will myself trounce your young butt and learn you better manners. By the time you're in Old Bailey, I'll warrant you'll have learned how to hold your shrewish tongue!"
Arabella Lewis had been lodged in the county gaol for the night, and would be the next afternoon chained and placed in a carriage bound for London. The matter settled to his utmost satisfaction, Squire Timothy Dengman shook hands with the smirking gray-haired magistrate, invited him to dine the following Saturday night and promised him a tasty wench as dessert. Then, in high good humor, he mounted the stallion Prince which the condemned girl had dared to ride without his permission, and went back to Dengman Manor. All that afternoon, poor
Evelina Lewis had wept and wrung her hands and implored the servants to tell her what had happened to her poor daughter. And only Miles Verdon, the gloating footman who himself lusted for Arabella's virgin cunt, had replied to her, adding immeasurably to her mounting horror and terror: "You won't see that pretty one again, Mrs. Lewis, I pledge you. The Squire's had her taken to Notts this very day, to appear before the justice there. She will spend the rest of her days in a cell if they don't decide that she ought to be stretched at Tyburn." And then he had made a hideous gesture of his finger circling his throat and uttered a croaking sound to symbolize the last gasps of a hanged convict, so that she had nearly fainted in her mounting grief and frantic despair.
Squire Timothy Dengman knew perfectly well that she had been trying to see him all day long, but he had taken his supper in a private guest room, served him by a fawning, simpering ash-blonde kitchen maid named Dorothy Wiggins. Because it pleased his sadistic nature and his perverse humor after what he had done to the unfortunate and innocent Arabella, he had ordered the giggling eighteen-year-old maid to bolt the doors and then to strip down to her stockings and camisole and share the meal with him. At this unexpected mark of favor, Dorothy Wiggins nearly swooned away for joy, and she drank a full mug of ale, after which what inhibitions she had swiftly fled.
So when he gestured to her to remove the camisole, she did so at once and stood there, blushing, with her eyes boldly fixing on him for a sign of approval, as her hands cupped her big closely spaced round titties, then smoothed her belly and at last the thick dark blonde bush of her cunthole. She was not a virgin, and it was her fervent hope that the Squire would take interest in her and elevate her beyond the kitchen.
But because he knew that Arabella's mother would doubtless plead the girl's cause with her own voluptuous and buxom body, Squire Timothy Dengman decided to amuse himself with Dorothy Wiggins in his own cruel way.
"Fetch me that pair of leather gloves over there on the settee, girl," he had ordered. And when she had brought them, simperingly kneeling down to offer them and looking at him under her long thick lashes, he had taken one and slashed it across her mouth, making her recoil with a gasp of stunned fear: "That's to remind you, you bitch, not to be bolder than your station befits. Now, if you want to be of some service to me, my prick is overloaded. Take it out of my breeches and suck it all down, for I am fair loaded with spunk, girl," he commanded.
"Oh sir, don't make me do that, you can have me, I want you to, but oh please sir, no!" she had whimpered.
Reaching out and seizing her by her tumbled hair, he had dragged her, squealing and pleading, across his lap. Then, gripping the heavy leather glove like a whip, he had begun to bring it down violently and rapidly over her pale pink-sheened naked ass-cheeks, till she began to wriggle and groan and sob and beg for mercy.
"I'll have Tim Gentry give you the cane on that big butt of yours, Dorothy, if you don't do what I tell you to this moment," he growled.
And so the sobbing young maid had got down onto her knees, forgetting the burning and vividly streaked contours of her quaking naked bottom, fumbled in his breeches, drawn out his stiff aching prick and begun to French him.
He amused himself by flickering her bowed back and shoulders with the heavy glove, until at last he spurted all his essence down her throat. It was all poor Dorothy Wiggins could do to swallow, retching and coughing and choking, but she at last managed, which was as well for her.
"Now take these supper things and get out of here, you bitch."
"At once, Squire! But-but, didn't-didn't I please you, sir?"
"Well enough, I dare say. Have Verdon give you a shilling when you leave here. And now get out, I'm finished with you. Tell Verdon to send Mrs. Lewis to my bedroom by about midnight. I'll just take myself a little nap until then," he yawned.
Stretching out on the settee, he was soon asleep, his sensual mouth curved in a smile of reverie as he saw in his dream how the spirited red-haired girl he had sent off to London was, in his fantasy, stripped naked, bound to the whipping post by the public hangman, lashed until blood pearled down her thighs, and how he was standing in the front row by the whipping post and watching her taper under the lash.'
It was nearly ten when he wakened, and pulled the bell rope for a flagon of ale. Miles Verdon himself brought it to him, obsequiously inclining his head. His master winked at him: "Well, you dog, I've no doubt you're regretting Arabella's leaving here. I shouldn't be surprised if you'd wanted her yourself."
"Your Worship knows everything, but then that is why you are the best master in the county," Miles Verdon flattered him.
"Go to, you tricky dog," Squire Timothy Dengman chuckled, not at all displeased with the compliment. "As you've done me a service, Verdon, and you've helped me settle the accounts of Miss Arabella Lewis, would it interest you to fuck her mother?"
"A good deal, Squire Dengman, thank'ee sir!" the footman bowed and scraped, lasciviously grinning. "Do you want me to help you whip her tonight, Squire?"
"If you like. I'll go to my bedroom, and do you bring me my leather dog whip out from the stable. The one I use when I hunt the fox, Verdon. It may be that tonight will be diverting after all."
He napped a little, then awoke just before midnight, belched and coughed, then sat up with a hoarse chuckle as he recalled what awaited him. Without putting back on his waistcoat or cravat, Squire Timothy Dengman left the guestroom and went directly to his own bedchamber. When he opened the door without knocking, Evelina Lewis, clasping her hands in prayer, tears running down her cheeks, moved towards him. Behind her stood the smirking footman, who nodded imperceptibly to tell his master that he had just informed her of her daughter's fate.
"Oh, Squire Dengman, in dear God's name, let poor Bella go just this once! I'll be your slave, I'll do anything in the world you want, but don't send her off to London-oh it's a wicked, terrible thing!" the widow wailed.
"Have a care of your tongue also, woman," he growled, "or you'll find yourself alongside her in the dock at Old Bailey."
Evelina Lewis bit her lips and sobbed helplessly. Then she said in a dull, resigned tone, "What do you want, Squire Dengman? It's mortal cruel to take my only child from me, for she's a good girl and meant no harm. She's too young yet to know the ways of men, and I beg of you, don't be spiteful with her just because she wouldn't go to bed with you. If you must have someone, punish me, do what you want, but not my poor Bella!"
"Am I to understand, you cringing bitch," he smirked, "that you'll be my slave, to come here running at the crook of my little finger whenever I wish it, so long as I change my mind about that flighty chit of a daughter of yours?"
"Oh yes, yes, I swear it on the Holy Book!" the unfortunate widow groaned, fixing him with so piteous a look of entreaty that even a hardened criminal would have flinched at. But the perverse and greedily lecherous soul of Squire Timothy Dengman was proof against such compassion and humanity. His fleshy lips curled triumphantly as he purred, "Mayhap something can be done for the wench. I'll think on it this night and let you know on the morrow, Evelina."
"Oh no, I implore you, sir, oh do have mercy, take me now, do anything with me that you wish, only promise me you'll not send her off to London! I can't think of my poor little girl at Old Bailey!"
"You'll do anything, is that it?"
"I swear it!" Evelina Lewis moaned, wringing her hands.
"I have a mind to test you, Evelina. All right, take off all save your hose and shoon, aye, and your garters too, so your hose will not be wrinkled and vulgar, like those of a whore," he commanded.
Rushing furiously, the brown-haired woman began to undress, letting her garments fall on the floor about her, while the lecherous landowner lit a cheroot and began to unbelt his brocaded satin dressing gown. He had, of course, clad himself in only that after his earlier session with little Dorothy Wiggins
When at last she straightened, her eyes averted, the generous round milky globes of her titties displaying their wide brownish-coral aureoles and the voluptuously ripe nipples which had given suck to lovely young Arabella, with the widely dimpled goblet of her belly quivering with apprehensive loathing, and with the thick dark-brown triangle of her mount hiding the fleshy, pink lips of her cunt, he rose and flung off the robe and was naked. Massively virile, again, despite the tributes to Venus he had paid with the kitchen wench. Squire Timothy Dengman gloatingly appraised the humbled, self-surrendering widow and found her toothsome indeed. "Now this is a demeanor which better becomes you and that brat of yours, Evelina girl," he muttered thickly. "Get down on your knees now and suck my prick a little. I want to sec you kneeling and humble, and perhaps then I can think on Bella's future more benignly."
So saying, he seated himself on a wide low footstool, spreading his hairy, fat thighs, puffing at his cheroot and sending wreaths of thick, noisomely pungent smoke right into her face as the unfortunate woman sank down on her knees and servilely crawled towards his bobbing, swollen spear.
Hesitantly, her soft trembling fingers touched the shaft, where the dark-blue veins were thickest as they bulged against the tautly drawn skin. Then, smoothing back the foreskin to bare the angry-looking glans (chafed and reddened from Dorothy Wiggins' ministrations to it), she forced herself to open her mouth and accept the ignoble weapon of his rut. He breathed deeply, his face darkening with lust and avaricious triumph. "Mind you be gentle now, Evelina, because, so help me, if you make me come too soon, I'll burn my brand on you with this cheroot, like this!"
As he spoke, he leaned over her and put the glowing tip of the half-smoked black cheroot to her spine just above the waist. For an instant, there was the sickening smell of burning human flesh, and then an agonized shriek as she righted herself, eyes mad with pain and terror, her hands supporting herself by gripping his knees and her throat contracting.
"Just a warning," he chuckled, pleased with the effect he had wrought. "Now back to your work, you bitch, before I have your little daughter charged with attempted murder!
"Make up your mind you belong to me, woman," Squire Timothy Dengman snarled, yanking at Evelina Lewis' hair, his pudgy fingers twisting, as he showed her the glowing cheroot. "If need be, I'll mark your face, you sluttish bitch, so every one in Notts will know you are mine. Now go back and suck my prick nice and slow and get me ready for that fat hot twat of yours if you want to save your Bella!"
Agonized and desperate, Evelina Lewis could only capitulate. Choking back her sobs, the livid scar of that burn already throbbing in her milky back she crouched before her satanic master, cupping the backs of his thighs with her trembling hands and again her soft lips accepted the swollen tip of his cock. She began to nuzzle it, to flick her tongue against it, following his instructions. All the while, the fingers of his left hand still twisting her disheveled hair, he puffed at the cheroot to keep it hot and studied her with a smirking and triumphant look. He already knew that no matter what he did, her daughter was bound for Old Bailey. He knew well that if he kept Arabella with him, he might well flog her to death, so maddeningly provocative was she and so defiant at the same time. And even though he had taken the virginity of Arabella's ass-hole, it had been a hollow triumph and one which had given him little joy, for he found himself rutting after that little slut and wanting her to respond to him ... and since he knew she never would, the only alternative was to send her far away, either to be hanged or transported.
So like a kind of little god, he exulted now in this realm of his, watching this handsome, buxom, milky-skinned woman grovel before him and perform the most ignominious obscenities in the illusory hope of saving her daughter when all the time it was manifestly impossible against his already predetermined will. And when he felt the sap rising again in his prick, felt himself near climax, he told her brutally, "Now get over to that chair and bend your head on it, and then open up the cheeks of your butt so I can bugger you, Evelina. Aye, just as I did with Bella. Oh, I left her cherry untouched, safe enough, I trow, for some farmer's boy to wed her one fine day. Now do as I tell you, woman!"
She crawled over on her knees, weeping helplessly. Arrived at the chair, she bowed her forehead to it, reaching back to open up the plump round hemispheres of her milky behind, to expose the crinkly, twitching and shrinking crevice of her ass-hole. With a grunt that was more that of an animal than a man, Squire Timothy Dengman flung himself down behind her, reaching out with his pudgy fingers to squeeze and pinch her titties mercilessly as he gouged his prickhead against the shrinking fissure of her brown hole. Setting her teeth and offering only stifled groans and gasps of pain, the woman endured what she needs must, till he was lodged deep within her to the balls. And then he began to bottomfuck her violently, taunting her with her whorishness, telling her that she could well earn a few shillings a night if he let her into a town to do her harlotry. "You'll be able to teach your Bella," he chuckled as he drew himself back, only to dig to the roots again. "Between the two of you, you'll be able to earn a farm, I'll be bound. Now then, get ready, woman, I'm going to shoot my gism into your butt, so drink up every drop, greedy whore that you are!"
He thrust himself a last time and with a bellow, shot out his torrential jet and sagged over her. Then there was a knock at the door, and he swore a violent oath as he stumbled to his feet, his prick limp and greasied, while, broken and annihilated, Evelina Lewis crouched there with her forehead pressed against the seat of the chair.
"Who's there?" he roared in a fine frenzy of anger.
"It's I, Squire, Miles Verdon," came the answer.
"May the devil take you for a stupid dolt to bother me now-well, what is it, man?" he testily called.
"Just to tell you that the girl's off on her journey to Old Bailey, Squire. All's well. Old John, the post rider from the next farm, just came by to tell me that he'd seen the carriage well on the high road for London town."
"You cursed imbecile, did I not know that, and why disturb me at my pleasures now? I'll attend to you in the morning, you whore's bastard-now begone!" Squire Timothy Dengman roared.
But Evelina Lewis slowly raised her head, her eyes shadowed with an almost insane anguish at having heard these words. And she realized then how he had tricked her and gone against his word, how all this demeaning sacrifice of her body had been for naught.
Her eyes shifted now, and she saw a heavy candlestick on the mantelpiece near his bed. She stumbled to her feet, hurried over and seized it, then ran towards him even as he turned back to her. He had time but for a cry of "Woman, what do you now-" and then the sharp edge of the candlestick crashed against his skull. The owner of Dengman Manor uttered a hoarse groan, and then sprawled his full length inert on the floor, dark blood oozing from the open wound.
Hearing the struggle and his master's cry, Miles Verdon hurled himself against the door and broke the lock. His ghastly pale face peered down on the motionless body of his master. And he squatted down and fumbled for the squire's pulse, but there was none.
"You've killed him, you've killed the Squire!" he uttered in a horrified gasp. "Oh you'll swing for this, you and that little bitch of yours, you planned this together, I'll be bound!" And then, wresting away the candlestick from her numbed hand, he drove his fist brutally into her face and stretched her unconscious on her back, and then bellowed for Tim Gentry and for other servants to come help him with this demented bitch who had just killed the master.
And on the following afternoon, before the same magistrate who had condemned her daughter to be sent on to Old Bailey, Evelina Lewis, her eyes listless, her head bowed, her wrists bound with hempen cord behind her back, heard herself remanded over to the prison in London, with the magistrate's recommendation that she be hanged by the neck until dead.
By an odd quirk of fate, Evelina Lewis was flung into a cell at Old Bailey adjoining that which her lovely young daughter occupied. And by the same quirk of destiny, the two women appeared on the same docket on the same day a month later, each to hear the bewigged judge of the Assizes intone the formula of death, putting on the black cap and piously mouthing, "And may heaven have mercy on your soul."
They were both to swing at Tyburn, and Jack Ketch would have fair sport with both handsome wenches, their neighbors told them, for the miserable wretches in Old Bailey under the same death sentence could find their only solace in the misery of their companions, in calculating who would go first in the cart to Tyburn field. There they would hawk meat and drink and pamphlets telling of the crimes of those slated to swing, and do the devil's dance in the air when black-masked Jack Ketch kicked away the stool.
In those days, there was no trap door for the gibbet. Women, with only their hands bound behind their backs, perched on stools with the noose round their necks. When the stools were kicked away, they kicked and twisted in the air, slowly strangling. Sometimes, if one paid the executioner in advance, he would leap onto the body of the victim and bear down all his weight on her shoulders as to make the strangling the swifter. But when the wenches were comely and there was no one to buy them off, then the spectators below would stare up under their skirts and petticoats and obtain a perverse and morbid pleasure in seeing what they could of that flesh which would please man no more.
Because My Lord Duke Clarence Willoughby of the estate of Monmouth and Lord Privy Councillor to George IV, had pointed out to the profligate king that men were needed to labor on the plantations and women to serve as indentured servants to the landed families in the far off colonies of the Empire, George IV was disposed towards mercy. And that was why he set his royal hand and seal to a commutation of sentence which spared not only Arabella Lewis the rope, but her mother also, as well as Michael Corrigan, and his young bride Colleen, who had both been sentenced to hang for the murder of Benjamin Scorcey in Dublin. There were a host of others, and all were, by this royal edict dated June 24, 1824, consigned to sail upon H.M.S. Orion, bound for Bohart in what was now called Tasmania and had been known as Van Dieman's Land.
CHAPTER FIVE
Captain Matthew Bordager, in command of H.M.S. Orion, sat in his cabin grumbling as the insolent, dandified King's Agent, Francis Moultbury, handed him the manifest which ordered him to transport as sentenced convicts some thirty-six men and twenty-eight women to Tasmania. "You will drop anchor, Captain Bordager, at Hobart, naturally. In this manifest, you will observe that a number of the men and some of the females are there to be indentured by the town sheriff, these being considered not too dangerous and of fair health and disposition for such domestic labor. The others, after you have delivered the first lot, will be taken to Port Arthur."
"But the devil take it, man," the burly, bearded captain growled, "it will take us till mid-December to reach that end of the earth, for such it is. Know you not that Port Arthur is some sixty-five miles round the rocky headlands of the Tasman peninsula from Hobart? "T'will take the best seamanship and heaven's own luck to avoid the reefs near Port Arthur, just at that devil's blowhole.
"Why, man, the boiling ocean surf hurls a stream of water through a rocky hole as high as a hundred feet, and there are few decent landing places near the port itself."
"Nonetheless, these are your orders, Captain Bordager, and you will carry them out. I have seen to it that my men from the warehouses have put aship sufficient provisions to feed your scoundrelly cargo. And knowing your shrewdness and how tight a ship you run, I'm sure you'll make a fair profit."
"Aye, I expect to, man," the captain glowered. "Think you I've any stomach for a journey that takes nearly six months and then back to England through storms and typhoons to take on another load? Damme, with all respect to King George, why in tarnation couldn't he find some closer place for these hangman's castoffs?"
"Take care, Bordager, for what you say is close to treason," the bewigged fop sniffed his disapproval as he took a pinch of snuff from a silver case and daintily inserted it into each of his nostrils.
"You will have your sailing clearance from the harbor master directly. A fair voyage to you, and do try to keep the blackguards alive, dear Captain. There are a few wenches comely enough to perhaps make wives for some of the young settlers in Hobart. like that sweet little bitch with the dark red hair, the one who rode that Notts squire's stallion and rebelled against her punishment."
"Look who's speaking treason now, man," Captain Bordager sniggered with a wink. "You'd pardon her a dozen murders, I'd warrant, so you could tumble her in a imagine bed. Well," he added, his face hardening, "she'll get no privileges aboard the Orion.
"And my boatswain Tom will cat her fine white back if there's the slightest hint of nonsense from the little slut. I keep my prisoners separate, and there's no hankypanky on my ship. Nor do the females get themselves exposed on deck enough to tempt my seamen to their filthy lusts, the rogues. Aye, they spend enough time in London town to all have doses of the clap from tumbling whores in Gin Lane. Well, a good day to you, Master Francis."
And when the King's man had taken his leave with a wave of this tricornered hat, Captain Matthew Bordager hawked and spat on the floor of his own cabin to indicate his disgust for such a namby-pamby prig who would doubtless puke out his guts at the first sign of a squall.
The quarters in the hold of the Orion were uncomfortable, although on this voyage they were not to be quite so crowded as they had been on other journeys. At least for the sake of the women and the young girls-for there were about a dozen girls whose ages ranged from that of Arabella Lewis to nineteen-they would not be nearly so packed together as the men.
And of course they would be separated, the door of the hold locked with heavy chains and padlocks to which only the first mate and the captain himself would have keys. On the other side of the ship, near the stores of meal, dried fish, hardtack and barrels of salt pork, there was the hold for the men, and here there was squalor and even more crowding. The Orion was one of four convict ships impressed into service from England's merchant marine to take unwanted criminals as far from England as possible so that good folks of the British Empire might consider them as good as dead ... and indeed, such they were for the most part.
Those who were fortunate enough to secure indentured bondage to some reasonably humane landowner or farmer in Hobart, or a girl or woman who could be bound out as a maid, cook, seamstress or even tutress (supposing that her education qualified her for such a role), would escape the utter hell and desolation of life in the complex of gray-stone buildings standing on a hillside overlooking the magnificent harbor of Port Arthur.
At the very tip of the Tasman Peninsula, when one had taken the road from Hobart to it, one would find Eaglehawk Neck, a narrow strip of land without which the Tasman Peninsula would be an island.
Here savage dogs were chained six inches apart to prevent the escape of prisoners from those buildings in which every known crime of man's inhumanity to man and to women as well took place.
No knowledge of this ever filtered back to the ministers of the Crown. The prison commandant, Sir Clarence Edmunds, who had been politically disgraced and ignominiously sent far from court with this supposed title of "Governor of the Tasman Prison Settlement," brooded over his banishment, cursed his powerful enemies who had pulled strings to have him transferred out to this isolated spot in the world.
And his only pleasure could be in the torture of male and female prisoners, in punishing their pitifully petty misdemeanors or, at times, by more serious punishment, their futile attempts to escape.
Few people had ever escaped from Port Arthur. It was sometimes possible to bribe the guards, even to bribe some of the natives to find a little boat. But the treacherous reefs, the uncertain weather, the sharks and the always lurking danger of an informer eager for a reward made such successes almost unheard of.
It was no wonder, then, as the Orion pulled anchor and slowly lumbered down the Thames on its way out to the Atlantic Ocean, many a prisoner in the hold prayed silently for a swift and merciful death, perhaps even on this vessel before it should dock in Tasmania.
CHAPTER SIX
Among the twenty-six female prisoners in the women's hold of the Orion were Meg Tanner and her two daughters Phyllis and Sally, whose wretched lot was not unlike that of Evelina Lewis and her daughter Arabella.
Meg Tanner was a handsome if somewhat blowsy chestnut-haired Juno of thirty-eight, and had been married at the tender age of sixteen to a Wainwright. Born in Manchester, she had been a slave in an elegant house from the early age of twelve, by which time her parents had quarreled and drunk themselves to death.
Rather than send her to an orphanage, the town sheriff, who was in the pay of Jesse Moulton, a wealthy factory owner of that thriving industrial city, had consigned the girl to domestic service in Moulton's resplendent mansion.
Because she was comely even at twelve, with long hair, vivacious manners and a winsome face with full ripe mouth and dainty snub nose and expressive blue eyes, it was not long before Moulton's profligate son Henry, already a rakehell at fifteen, conceived a lecherous passion for her nubile and already well developed body.
His first attempt to creep into her room during a Spring night was indignantly rebuffed, and the young scoundrel crept away mumbling threats of revenge, his cheeks bleeding from the scratches which her sharp fingernails had inflicted. He bided his time to get revenge and had it soon after.
By dint of hiding in her room one of his monogrammed handkerchiefs and complaining to his mother, an arrogant and shrewish beauty who missed her London socialite friends in the dull monotony of Manchester, he had Meg Tanner's room searched and the missing handkerchief discovered.
Lady Angela Moulton sharply lectured the unfortunate and innocent girl, warned her that thievery was still punishable by hanging and that, as a good example, she would suffer a severe birching before all the servants.
Accordingly, in the huge stone kitchen the following Saturday afternoon, Meg Tanner was brought in by the righteous, fat, gray-haired housekeeper who horsed the girl on her back, while a giggling young maid pinned up Meg's skirt and petticoats and fucked down her lisle drawers to her ankles, twisting them to prevent the young girl's frantic kicks under the swishing rod.
Lady Moulton herself administered the birch, applying twenty-five whistling cuts which left the lovely, chubby naked bottom bleeding in a dozen places, and drew the most heart-rending cries and protestations of innocence from the unfortunate girl.
Thus having already been marked at the outset of her life by an implacable destiny, Meg Tanner learned to be subservient in the hope of averting similar disasters along the way.
A week after her hurts had mended from the rod, she was importuned again by the lecherous son and heir to the Moulton fortune, and this time she tearfully submitted to the loss of her cherry.
Gloatingly, the youth promised that if she became his willing mistress, he would see to it that she was not again whipped. In return for this, the unfortunate girl was obliged to submit herself to buggering, Frenching his insatiably virile young prick, and even to submitting to spankings and thrashings, since he had a penchant for sadistic games.
Six months later, the boy's father came upon the two of them locked in fucking congress, and Meg ingenuously hoped that her days of sexual servitude had come to an end. Quite the contrary: the father lectured his son and cuffed him in rebuke, forbade him ever to approach the girl again.
Then when the boy had gone sulking off to his rooms, the father contemplated the blushing, frightened and stark-naked young girl, noting with a connoisseur's eye the already shapely curves of her thighs and ass, the budding rounds of her young olive-sheened titties and the dark-brown, soft and not yet thickened curls which framed her soft pink cunthole.
Then he commanded her to unbutton his breeches, take out his prick and suck him to attunement so that he might fuck her in his turn.
For two years thereafter, Meg Tanner remained as her employer's mistress. Lady Angela Moulton knew of this arrangement and tolerated it because she had her own foppish London lover, a distant cousin named Jeremy Bridges, who visited her every several months and whom she in turn visited for amorous assignation in a little inn on the outskirts of London whenever she made a pilgrimage to the city of her birth.
But in a kind of spiteful retaliation, nevertheless, she ordered the sanctimonious housekeeper-the same woman who had held poor Meg aloft on her back for the birching-to keep the girl busy from dawn till dusk and at the lowliest of chores, from scrubbing the flagging around the fireplace to emptying the chamber pots.
By good fortune, Meg did not become pregnant, for it appeared that Sir Henry Moulton's seed was sterile. And so when on one of her rare afternoons off she went into Manchester to a fair and there met the young wainwright Peter Tanner, it was inevitable that she should fall in love. He was then only an apprentice, but handsome and kindly and by contrast with her employer's family, a virtual saint.
That same late afternoon, in a hayloft in a deserted barn, Meg gave Peter Tanner not her maidenhead-since that had long been taken from her-but the first true loving fucking she had ever bestowed on any man. When she returned home two hours after the appointed time, the housekeeper had her birched.
But this fortune seemed to smile on her, for she ran away that same night after the entire household had gone to sleep, made her way back to Manchester and thence to the humble dwelling of Peter Tanner. Their marriage bans were proclaimed three weeks later, and they were wed the following week.
For a few years, life seemed to favor Meg Tanner after all the adversity she had encountered. Peter Tanner became a full-fledged wainwright with his own little shop and business flourished.
Two years later, she became pregnant and nine months after that her first child, Phyllis, black-haired, tall and lovely, was born to them. Four years later, Sally, golden-haired, petite and shy, rounded out their happy little family.
But the evil genius of the Moultons had not been lifted from her life. Two years ago, Peter Tanner had died of a stroke, working in his shop on a scorchingly hot day to execute a profitable commission.
Meanwhile, Angela and Jesse Moulton had died within three months of each other just before Peter Tanner's untimely passing, and Henry Moulton as their only son and heir had succeeded to the estate.
Already a legend around Manchester for his whoring, dicing and gambling at piquet and baccarat, Henry Moulton's only talents were for horseback riding as well as the riding of girls in bed. Nor had he forgotten the pleasures which Meg Tanner had been forced to give him when she was but a girl out of puberty.
His first act was to inveigle the corrupt and aging sheriff, the same man who had consigned her as an orphan to his father's mansion, to impound Peter Tanner's estate on the pretext that the dead wainwright had not renewed his license with the guild, that there were certain taxes on the little house which were in default, and so the upshot was that Meg Tanner and her two daughters found themselves dispossessed and penniless.
Young Moulton and the sheriff divvied up the few hundred pounds which poor Peter Tanner had left his wife and daughters, and the profligate heir spent his share that very night at the dicing table.
Indigent, having little skill, Meg Tanner sought work as a domestic. She could sew, and was a fair cook, but virtually untutored in reading or writing. Then it was that Henry Moulton came to her wheedingly and offered her and her daughters a situation his household. She had no choice but to accept, for the only alternative was prostitution.
But it was not long before she discovered that the son of her employer, now the heir and in his maturity and lecherous power, intended to impose the same sexual bondage which he had demanded of her as a twelve-year-old girl.
She yielded to him, out of desperation, pleading with him to leave Phyllis and Sally alone, to allow them to grow up and to marry. For a time, he pretended to be compassionate to that plan, but in return demanded from her the most degrading of sexual servitude.
For the first time, she endured the agony of being first birched while one of the young maids held her over a sofa, seated on her shoulders and pinching her maliciously, after which Henry Moulton forced apart the cheeks of her plump olive-sheened bottom, bleeding from the stinging cuts of the flexible withes, and buggered her dry, despite her frenzied cries of suffering.
Then she had to suck his cock clean, and then gamahuch the seventeen-year-old maid Elsie, who gloated over this mature woman's shameful suffering. Naked, it was then her duty to stimulate both her master and the maid as they lay abed fucking.
And then six months ago, her oldest daughter Phyllis came tearfully to her room one night, her shift torn, finger marks on her titties and inner thighs, to complain that the master had taken her cherry after first thrashing her with a leather strap until the pain made her spread her thighs for him.
The indignant mother went at once to the dissolute Henry Moulton's bedchamber, only to find him in the act of ripping the clothes off her daughter Sally, who was fiercely trying to defend herself and who was about to lose the unequal struggle.
Meg Tanner seized a paring knife which lay on the plate with the remnants of cheese and cold cuts, and stabbed her master just below the left shoulder blade.
The knife was not large enough to inflict a lethal wound, but Henry Moulton was taken to his bed for two months before he recovered. His first act, when he was thoroughly convalesced, was to have Meg, Phyllis and Sally stripped naked, tied by their wrists to the rafters of the barn and savagely birched from shoulders to heels until the blood dripped onto the straw-covered ground.
Then he had his footman and steward bugger all three while callously in turn, standing before each half-fainting, writhing naked victim, he pinched and slapped her titties and then fucked her.
Then, summoning the sheriff to his mansion, Henry Moulton preferred charges of attempted murder against Meg Tanner and named her daughters as accomplices. All three were sent to Old Bailey to await trail, and were duly condemned to hang.
The edict of George IV commuted their sentences to life imprisonment in the penal colony of Port Arthur, with the stipulation that the two daughters might be sold as indentured bondservants at Hobart, while Meg Tanner herself was sentenced to incarceration in the women's compound at Port Arthur, a virtual death sentence.
And thus again the pitiless injustice which favored the gentry and the wealthy against the helpless and exploited poor came to pass as these three attractive and innocent females boarded the Orton, wrists and ankles chained as if they were wild beasts.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tom Dewson grinned maliciously at the shrinking women and girls who passed timidly by him as they made their way to the poop deck. The clank and clatter of their chains was an evil music on the warm July air.
A week out of London and heading down the Atlantic towards Cape Verde, thence to the Brazilian Basin and on to the Argentine Basin till at last the H. M. S. Orion would turn its prow along the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego, till finally it moved around the dangerous Cape Horn and so onward along the Southwestern Pacific Basin till at last it would find the grim fortress-like prison of Port Arthur. The passengers would face long months, endless and torturing, with sudden squalls and violent storms, and then long periods of calm when the ocean was like glass and the pitiless sun beat down.
For this first week, Captain Matthew Bordager, secure in his pledge that his seamen far outnumbered the entire contingent of male and female prisoners, was content to allow the women an hour or two of air out of their confinement in the hold.
It was the third such run he had made to Tasmania, and were it not for the excellent profit and the chance to ingratiate himself with His Majesty's Naval Commissioners, he would willingly have sought work elsewhere. Convicts were always a scurrilous lot, and even the prettiest wench among them was a danger aboard ship. On the last trip, there had been a little Jezebel by the name of Polly Anston, a mere seventeen-year-old auburn-haired baggage being transported for having stabbed her lover when he told her he would not honor the bairn she bore in her belly.
She'd been lucky enough not to have swung off at Tyburn, but instead she tried her best to bedevil his entire crew. The slut had even managed to turn daft with her promises of bedding down with him, until the fool had actually tried to help her escape in one of the longshore boats.
Well, he thought grimly to himself, they'd both paid for their folly. They'd been triced to the mast, facing each other, and old Tom Mewson had been ordered to lay on nine and thirty stripes with the cat on the naked back of each.
That had taken the fire out of the little bitch, and she'd been humble and quiet when at last they'd reached Hobart. The last he'd heard, she'd been sold to an old dragon of a farmer's widow who was probably thrashing her backside with a broom every other day to keep her gentle.
Tom Mewson, his left cheek disfigured by an ugly, jagged purplish scar (the result of a knife brawl with a Portuguese sailor five years ago in Lisbon), stocky, his sparse gray hair and weather-beaten, ugly face enough to scare the females who passed by him, without the sight of the cat whose handle was thrust through his seaman's belt, squinted appraisingly at the lot.
He could spot the trouble-makers at first glance, old Tom could. Just fifty, but still able to out wench and out drink any landlubber in any port of call, the boatswain's very presence guaranteed Captain Bordager there would be no mutiny on this ship of His Majesty's line.
The captain and his first mate, Ned Knowles, a tall, taciturn Welsliman slightly past forty, had agreed that it would be best to exercise the men and the women separately, at different times, to prevent any sentimental scenes or attempts to pass messages.
Already Captain Bodager had been annoyed by having common seamen assigned to guard the holds report to him the second day out that some condemned Irish rebel had asked if he might have a moment with his wife. It was, of course, none other than Michael Corrigan, who was agonized over the fate of his lovely young bride Colleen. What tortured him most was his knowledge that once arrived in Tasmania, he would be housed in the great graystone buildings at Port Arthur, while Colleen would doubtless be auctioned off to some fat farmer or sheepherder in Hobart, her sweet body to be at the disposal of her new master for as many years as the indenture stipulated.
Already he was forming desperate plans to escape, but he knew that this was irrational and it was best to survey the terrain when at last he was upon it, before anything sensible could be done. Nor did he wish to harm his lovely wife by his actions.
Nonetheless, his mere request for an audience with the captain had already marked him as a troublemaker. And Matthew Bordager believed in a firm hand with seamen and even more so with what he was pleased to call "Newgate and Tyburn trash."
Tom Mewson was himself a viciously depraved man, who had lost one wife through miscarriage when he was still a young man in his early twenties, and a second young wife from sheer brutality and insane jealousy. That had happened eighteen years ago, and because he despised women as trulls and whores, he had become a seaman.
Because he was rough and ready with his fists, he had quickly risen in favor among the ship's officers. Six years ago, he had single-handedly quelled a potential mutiny on board the Orion, and for this he had been promoted to boatswain, one of the few promotions possible upon board a British ship of the line.
This he cherished mosi. One of his duties included the flogging either seamen sentenced on deck by captain or lesser officers, as well as convicts accused of mutiny, troublemaking or interference with the ship's order.
And most of all, he itched to thrash one of these handsome wenches whom he had greedily appraised as they had come aboard in their chains going towards the hold. He had already marked Colleen Corrigan as a tasty bit of fluff, whose cunt he would dearly love to poke, and he had noticed also Meg Tanner and her two young daughters, Phyllis and Sally.
Absently his right hand fondly caressed the handle of the wicked nine-tailed cat thrust through his. heavy leather belt and his piggish little eyes saw in imagine one of these tasty lasses triced to the mast, dress and camisole ripped down to the waist to expose her titties to the sun and wind, her white smooth back exposed to the kisses of the lash.
But where the cat employed on a man's back was harsher and often had tiny metal pellets sewn to the tips of the thongs, he had himself fabricated a whip for the more tender flesh of the female. The thongs were more tapering and plaited, brine-soaked for weeks, and then polished beautifully, so that they would be viciously supple and clinging. Expert that he was, he could draw blood with six cuts, or, if he so desired, apply forty good ones to the naked back and shoulders of a buxom wench without once cutting the skin, yet inflicting unspeakable torment.
"A rum lot, that," the first mate moved up alongside him, interrupting his sadistic reverie. "Poor bitches, I wonder what fortune they'll have when they reach Hobart."
"Not all of them are due for that mercy, Mister Knowles," Tom Dewson chuckled grimly. "There ain't many gentlefolk would take into their homes a murderess like that Meg Tanner or that Mrs. Lewis. But her daughter, now, aye, that's a different matter. Have you noted that red-haired doxy yet, Mr. First Mate?"
"Aye, that I have. A man would have to be blind not to, Mr. Mewson," the usually laconic first mate smiled. "But the Tanner woman has two bitches I'd rather have in my bunk. They'd give less trouble, I'm thinking, than the red-haired piece."
"There is summat in what you say, Mr. First Mate," Tom Mewson grudgingly observed. "But I'll warrant ye that if that red-haired hoyden comes afoul of the captain, I'll gentle her with my friend Betsy here-" he touched the handle of his whip lovingly and grinned down at it "-so ye'll not be thinking of troublemaking in the future, dammee if I won't!"
But Arabella Lewis was not yet to incite the boatswain's vicious cruelty. That unfortunate distinction fell first on the journey of the Orion to Meg Tanner and her younger daughter Sally.
On the ninth day out of London, the afternoon being blustery, Meg and her two daughters were at the ship's rail looking sadly back at an England they thought they would never see again. Phyllis and Sally were trying their best to comfort their crestfallen, chestnut-haired mother.
There had been malicious gossip down in the hold, as there was in the men's quarters, too; one woman who had already served in Bridewell and even been flogged on a Friday after for the pleasure of the gentry, and was now being transported to Tasmania for having tried to poison the innkeeper where she worked as barmaid, had sniggered, "Don't worry about your girls, you old bawd. like as not when they get to Hobart, 'they'll find masters who will gentle them to bed. But you, you're for it, Meg Tanner. You'll have the rope spared your neck, but they won't let such as you into decent houses. Oh no, you're for a cell in Port Arthur. Mayhap if you're sweet to the guards, they'll give you all the fucking you want."
White with shame and fury that such words would be used in front of her young daughters, Meg Tanner had fallen upon the virago, and a hair pulling, scratching catfight at once took place, egged on by the other women who saw this as a device to relieve the terrible monotony of the long days and nights on this endless trip to the other side of the world.
Roused by the noise, the sentry outside the hall pounded with his musket butt, bawling out for the bitches to quiet down before they were keelhauled. When this did not suffice, he hurried to the boatswain's quarters.
Tom Mewson grinned, patted the handle of his cat-of-nine-tails, and strode along with the seaman. He had the door of the hold unbolted, and then he bawled out: "Enough of this, you dirty cats! I want silence here, or the next to raise her voice will find herself at the mast and a good taste of Betsy here!"
With this, he dragged out the whip and brandished it in the air, letting them see the polished, tapering leather thongs. Meg Tanner scrambled to her feet, her bodice ripped, her hair disheveled, scratches on her face and throat.
"It was this bitch who started it," she protested, seeing the boatswain's vicious, narrowed blue eyes fixed on her. "I was but trying to spare my poor daughters-"
"I've heard enough from you, woman, now be still. I've only to speak to the captain and he'll have your rations cut in half. Mayhap that'll bring you to your senses do y'hear?"
The door was slammed to and again bolted, but Tom Mewson felt his prick harden at the remembrance of how defiant and buxomly handsome Meg Tanner had looked standing down there defying him, the naked curves of one bare shoulder and curves of her titties on display.
And those two young sluts hovering beside her, that black-haired one and the little golden-haired pair of sweet pussies-there must be a way to taste them before the ship reached Hobart and those two young vixens were quickly stolen for an indenture.
In his evil and hateful mind, he conceived a plan that would bring one or the other of those younger girls to his bunk one night before the Orion dropped anchor. And since he knew that Ned Knowles was a man usually of moody silence, which had been caused by a nasty secret which by great good luck, one night when Ned had been in his cups, he had let slip, and Tom Mewson took steps to involve the first mate in his cunning, ruthless plan.
Ned Knowles had been a contented young cobbler, wed and with a baby on the way at the age of twenty-three. His wife had died in childbirth and the child with her, and he had turned to drink. Then a handsome widow down the street had dozened him, setting her cap for him and trying to make him forget his bereavement.
But she was a bawd at heart and once she had coaxed him into marriage, she dispensed her insatiable pussy passion to other men. He came upon one of these one night when he had forgotten not to visit her, and he'd nearly killed his rival. Then, after whipping her almost senseless, fucked and buggered her, and went out and got roaring drunk.
He was bailed out of prison by his employer and sent back to his last. But the evils of pussy and drink were too much in him. Six months later, he was again in trouble with the law, and to save himself a long prison term, he flung himself on the mercy of the court and offered to go to sea for a period of ten years.
It had made a new man of him, and he had risen to the illustrious rank of first mate. But back in Falmouth, three years ago, and with Tom Mewson to bear witness to what had happened, Ned Knowles had gone to a brothel, drunk more ale than was good for him, and so savagely set about fucking and buggering a young whore that she was very nearly killed.
He would have been clapped into jail but for the intervention of the boatswain, who bribed the brothel madame with half a year's wages which he had stolen out of the first mate's purse, and the promise that he himself would find some slut as replacement for her damaged girl.
He had smuggled Ned Knowles back on the ship, sobered him and then craftily said to him, "Mr. First Mate, you're in real trouble. No, I won't say a word, but you'd best see things my way when it chances. D'ye ken me? I know enough to have you sent to the rope at Tyburn, what with your murdering rage against some poor slut who never did you a harm."
And so, with this extortionate hold on the first mate, Tom Mewson plotted well. By the time the Orion was two weeks out of London, he had almost maddened Ned Knowles with the alluring promises that both of them might bed Phyllis and Sally Tanner if they could but involve those two sweet pussies and the still ripe and tasty mother in some altercation that would bring them to the wrathful attention of Captain Bordager.
It happened just as the two men planned, two days later. As they were out on the ship's deck for an hour of sun, Phyllis and Sally Turner once more stood at the ship's rail beside their mother, looking sadly back to England.
A furtive little man, the cook's assistant, one Dick French by name, who had once felt Tom Mewson's cat on his back and nearly died of it and would have done aught to escape another dose, sidled towards the trio.
He had been told precisely what to do by the boatswain, who had warned him that if he blabbed, he would find himself dropped overboard for the sharks, gagged and bound and no one to hear his cries.
Touching his cap, he mumbled to Meg, "You gotta friend aboard this ship, ma'am, said for me to give you this. Here, take. It'd best be getting back to quarters. Cookie'll be needing me." And with this he thrust a dirk into Meg Tanner's hand and then made his way swiftly through the other women back towards the stairway and was quickly out of sight.
Meg uttered a cry and dropped the dirk to the deck.
"What is it, Mother?" Phyllis exclaimed.
"It's a dagger. Now what fiend in hell would be sending me such a thing? What we need is a ship to take us back home and away from this cruel doom they sent us to," Meg Tanner bitterly responded.
At that moment, shouldering his way through the cringing women, Tom Mewson approached. "What's this now, woman?" he growled, and put his booted foot on the dirk at her feet.
"A weapon now, and in the hands of a murderess-who gave you this?"
"I know nothing of it. One of your crew came to me just now, said I had a friend on this ship who wished to give it to me. Take the foul thing and be off with you!" Meg Tanner exclaimed.
"Not so fast, you murdering bawd," boatswain sneered as he bent forward and seized the dirk, then grasped her wrist. "You'll come with me to Captain, direct. He'll have summit to say about your little game. Play innocent, would you? We'll have the truth out of you, or Betsy will."
And half an hour later, Meg Tanner found herself standing in her chains before the bearded captain, and, her mouth agape with stupefaction, heard herself denounced as an incorrigible, murderous bawd who should have been hanged at Tyburn and who, since she had not yet used that dirk which she obviously must have smuggled aboard by some illicit .means, would set an example to all her kind by receiving the cat on her naked backside that same afternoon, an hour before sundown.
All hands were piped to punishment, and the women convicts as well as the men kept well apart and each group guarded by a dozen armed seamen, were marched to the foc'sle to hear the sentence read and to watch its execution.
Mad with shame and despair, Meg Tanner cried out as two seamen dragged her towards the mast. "I'm innocent, I tell ye. I know naught of that weapon till a man on this very ship, yes, one of you, gave it to me. It is unjust, I swear before heaven, it is unjust!"
"Gag her and trice her up and ready her backside for Betsy," the boatswain sniggered, drawing out the cat from his belt and swishing it about. Two seamen swiftly corded Meg Tanner's wrists high above her head, then ripped down her coarse prison dress from the neck to waist and with it the dirty camisole to expose the finely grained, quivering naked skin.
Her big firm titties panted as they rubbed against the round, hard wooden mast, and she cast a frantic glance over her shoulder even as one of the seamen, roughly cupping her chin, thrust in a dirty wad of linen, while his mate bound a strip of ship's cloth over her mouth and knotted it at the back of her neck.
The captain from his bridge looked down and gestured. The sentence was to be forty strokes of the cat. But Tom Mewson now approached the shuddering woman and muttered, "I can kill ye with thirty of Betsy, if I've a mind, I can make your flesh hang down in shreds, you bawd.
"And more than that since you two whelps were party to it, I've but to tell the captain and he'll have them at the mast here after ye. Do you want that, Meg Tanner?"
She made mewling sounds behind the gag and shook her head. Her eyes were huge and frantic as she searched that cruel face for a spark of mercy.
"Well, then, a bargain with ye, bitch. I'll lay on enough to thrash ye, but not enough to kill. But ye'll tell them this night that one of them's to come to my quarters at night or on the Book I swear I'll have them here and whip them to the blood, each of them. Now, d'ye ken me, woman?"
Agonized, Meg Tanner could only nod her head, choking back her sobs. Even here on this ship, bound for the terrible penal colony, unjustly sentenced and all her life destroyed, again injustice and cruelty pursued her and her two young girls.
She had visions of their tender bodies triced, bared for all to see, and shrieking out and bleeding under the cat, even more horrible to contemplate.
"You're a smart bitch. I'll try not to kill ye, or hurt ye too much. Mind you tell whoever you sent to me to be lusty and obliging, or I'll still have her triced up here. Now get ready!"
He ran his left hand down the smooth, shuddering olive-sheened back and Meg Tanner closed her eyes and prayed. There was a deathly silence on deck as he measured his distance and then, planted solidly on his booted feet, the boatswain drew back the cat, hovered it in the air a moment, then sent out swooping the nine leather thongs to cling viciously across the smooth satiny back on which the facing rays of the afternoon sun glistened almost obscenely.
Meg Tanner jerked, lifting her agonized face towards the heavens. The expertise of the boatswain had made the thong sting but not cut the skin. The angry marks which flamed at once on the smooth back looked painful indeed, but he knew his trade all too well.
Slowly he flogged her, pausing after the fifteenth, as she hung, half conscious moaning piteously, to rip dew? the frock and camisole a little bit more so as to show the opulent curves of her upper hips and just a hint of the spinal furrow which led to the chinkbone.
Again he resumed. By the time he reached the thirtieth stroke, she danced and twisted and flung herself this way and that, for with cruel skill he made the tips dance around her, sometimes stinging her in her furry armpits or at the sides of her mashed titties which she tried to press with all her might against the obdurate post.
More dead than alive, she was cut down but only after he himself had flung a bucket of brine over her limp form. The captain was disappointed: he had expected to see blood drawn before this.
"Put her in irons at the bottom of the ship," he ordered.
But the boatswain muttered to the seaman who was to take the half-fainting woman away, "Give her some rum and a biscuit, Petey. Then you'll ask her which of her whelps is to come to me tonight, you hear, and then you go tell the bitch what her mother has said. If she changes her mind, just tell her that I'll use Betsy on those two brats of hers until there's not an inch of skin left. She'll know what I mean."
At midnight, trembling, eyes averted, Phyllis Tanner followed the wizened little seaman who leered at her as he led her to the boatswain's quarters. She had volunteered to sacrifice herself to save not only her mother but also her sister Sally.
"Mind you make no noise, bitch," the seaman muttered as he knocked furtively at the door of the boatswain's quarters. "It'd be worth my neck if the captain caught us."
The door opened and the seaman grinned and touched his cap. "Here she is, Mr. Mewson, like you wanted."
"Fine, Petey. Now you get back to your quarters for about an hour, and then you come here and take the bitch back. We'll be done with her by then, I warrant. Now then, sweetie-" Tom Mewson, naked except for his breeches, reached for the tawny-skinned, tall brunette.
Her eyes were wild with terror, for she saw Ned Knowles, the first mate, seated on the edge of his bunk, wearing only his underdrawers, a sickly look on his face, and between his hands a thick leather strap.
"Oh no! You said just-oh please, Mr. Mewson, don't, don't I'm a good girl," Phyllis quavered.
But the ravening boatswain had already ripped off her coarse frock, then her shift, and she was naked in her shoes and coarse lisle hose. Swiftly he liberated his prick and, thrusting her back against the bunk, crammed himself into her while, one hand over her mouth to silence any outcry, his other hand pinched and squeezed her titties.
And when he had burst his essence into her, he dragged her to her feet and flung her over to the first mate. Then, taking a deep swig from the bottle of rum, he said, "Let's gag her first, if you're going to thrash that butt of hers to get yourself a hard-on, Neddie boy!"
Phyllis Tanner uttered a cry, but the first mate, with an oath, rose and seized her. He flung her to her back on the bunk, and the boatswain helped him gag the unfortunate girl with a strip from her own dress thrust between her teeth and another wound around her mouth and tied at the back of her neck. Then, sniggering, Tom Mewson dragged her across his lap and held her wrists with his right hand while his left bore down on the scruff of her neck.
"Lace into the bitch! Lace into that sweet butt," he panted.
Ned Knowles, his face that of a madman, raised the strap and brought it down with a sickening crack over the jouncy summits of Phyllis Tanner's naked ass-cheeks. Her body jerked and her legs began to fail the air as the blows followed, quick and furious, till her warm creamy skin turned an angry, darkening red.
Then, dropping the strap, the first mate bared his swollen prick and mounted over the hysterically weeping, terrified, naked captive, yawned open the cheeks of her ass and buggered her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Orion provisioned at the Falkland Islands towards the middle of September, more than two months after the convict ship had sailed out of England bearing its doomed cargo of prisoners bound for Tasmania. A week later, around the Cape of Good Hope, a ferocious autumnal typhoon battered the vessel off course for more than forty-eight hours, and nearly all the women were sick, and many of the men.
Two of the male prisoners died of fever and were sewn in coarse tarpaulin and their bodies committed to the deep after brief burial services which Captain Matthew Bordager read without emotion. He thought to himself they were better off in the bosom of the ocean than in the stinking hellhole that was Port Arthur.
Arabella Lewis, though seasick, had kept up her spirits. She had reasoned with her mother that, since they were still alive and the vicious beast who had persecuted them was dead, there was a kind of justice after all.
Yes, they had been under the shadow of the gallows and yet they had survived. "You're not to worry about me, Mother," the spirited red-haired girl had said with a firm courage.
"Yes, I'll be in bondage as a servant, but I've my life ahead of me. What I shall do will be for you, Mother. I can't think of you rotting away in that awful prison that I've heard so much about. And you're not a murderess, you're not!
"I'll ask the governor himself at Hobart where we land, I'll beg an interview with him and I'll plead for you. The worst they can say is no, Mother, but if I succeed, at least you won't be in prison with those brutal guards and those horrible dogs and all the other horrible things I've heard so much about. It would break my heart after what you've done for me, trying to save me from that filthy brute."
And Evelina Lewis wept in compassion for this young girl of hers who had grown to maturity so swiftly and tragically. Though she had a small comfort in her daughter's courage and conviction, she still resignedly believed that she could not escape the rigors of that prison to which her sentence had consigned her after the commutation from the rope.....
And now it was October and the Orion was heading west by southwest towards the still far distant shores of what was once Van Dieman's Land. And then the young Dublin couple who had so unjustly been condemned for the death of their Judas-informer had their hour of stark terror and shame and ignominious pain.
Colleen Corrigan desperately yearned to have but a few moments alone with her husband Michael. She had begged the guard who stood in front of the door of the women's hold, but he had told her it wasn't possible.
There would be no talking between prisoners at any time, for the captain himself might order out the cat. And yet Colleen knew herself to be pregnant, nearly six months gone. It had been their last night of love, the night before that filthy little beast had forced himself into the cottage and tried to have his way with her.
That afternoon their lives with the sweet idyll of love and married passion had ended, and come to the grim cells of Old Bailey to stand in court and see the black cap placed upon the judge's powdered wig and to hear those awful words again.
And then the dull despair back in the cell of waiting, even praying that it would be swiftly over, until the turn-key had opened the door and jerked his thumb and growled, "You're for the guv now, stir your stumps!" And then stumbling in chains to the office of the prison governor who read a long and meaningless document only a few words of which either of them could understand, so hopelessly clouded were their minds by the oppressive terror and the horror of their sudden doom upon them.
But the words, "On his Majesty's merciful clemency, it is hereby ordered that the aforementioned prisoner be transported to the penal colony in Tasmania," had saved them from the rope.
She had not wanted to tell Michael, even at their trial, that she was bearing his child. It would add to his agony when he went to the gallows to know that their love was thus doubly blighted and murdered before it could be human life.
And then, of course, once aboard ship, there had been no time, no way to tell him. She had to speak. Her lithe young body bore the baby well, and it was not so evident that she was heavy with child. It would be an easy birth, and it would be a son. Only please, heaven, it must be their son, Colleen Corrigan fiercely prayed.
And so in that desperation born of love, as the guard was opening the door of the hold to allow the female prisoners their hour of airing on deck, she pleaded, "I'm big with child, it's my man's and he doesn't know. I'll do anything, give you anything, if you'll but let me have a moment with him, oh please!"
The seaman, rough and brutal like his fellows, nonetheless had a faint glimmering of compassion for this lovely black-haired girl. True enough, she was down in the log as a murderess, but she'd been decent all this voyage and given no trouble, not like some of the other hellcats. "Aw'right, I'll do what I can. Find me a shilling, though, I must have something for my trouble," he growled.
Colleen Corrigan nodded, her eyes welling with tears. Impulsively, she put out her shackled wrists and she touched the man's arm. "May the fates bless you," she murmured huskily.
But as the sailor, after once again bolting the door of the hold when the women had returned from their airing, was moving stealthily down to the other end of the ship to find the men's quarters, the boatswain emerged from his cabin in a black humor. Last night he'd had that black-haired bitch Phyllis Tanner to his quarters, and Ned Knowles had been there to share the bitch with him.
Only she'd pleaded her belly, said that the two of them had bigged her and that she wasn't to fuck any more. Well, he learned the slut. Her belly scarcely showed, and who could tell whether he or Ned was the father, with a slattern doxy like that one, her mother a murderess and all? So again he gagged her, and the two brutal men had whipped her till she was nearly unconscious and then buggered her in turn.
And he'd mocked her as he'd kicked her out of the cabin and let his toadying accomplice drag her back to the women's hold-"You can't say I fucked you this time, bitch! And where I've put it won't give you a baby, that's for certain!"
But then the stupid slut had broken away from her guard, got herself up on deck and before anyone knew it, had flung herself overboard. Weighted down with her chains, death had been instantaneous. She had called out only once, "Oh Mother, Sally, forgive me!" and then gone down.
Glowering, he knew he would have to tell the captain, who would doubtless wonder how a girl locked in the hold could escape and fling herself overboard.
Well, that couldn't be helped. He'd make up some story, something that she'd wanted to confess and the sailor guarding the hold had brought her to him because he was the nearest in charge and hadn't wanted to wake the captain.
That would do well enough. But he'd counted on fucking her till they'd reached Tasmania. Now he'd have to find himself another piece of pussy. Sally, that younger, golden-haired slut, she'd do nicely. And if Meg Tanner dared squeal, she'd get worse than a catting this time.
His mind thus preoccupied, Tom Mewson lurched into the sailor and swore resoundingly, "Damn my liver, don't you see where you're going? And who gave you leave away from the women's hold, Barton."
"Excuse me, Mr. Mewson, I had something."
"Well, speak up, man! You're up to some sneaky work, I can see that with my own eyes," the boatswain roared.
"But please, Mr. Mewson, it wasn't I, it was the lass-"
"What lass are you jibbering about?"
"The Irish girl, she says she's big with child and it's her man, and she hasn't had the chance to tell him yet. I thought I might-"
"So you did, did you, Barton? You infernal fool! Don't you know that carrying messages between men and women convicts could get you the skin off your back? Now you tell me what it's all about, or by the hair on my chin I'll have the captain in on this right enough!"
Cowed by the boatswain's ferocious manner, Abner Barton stammered out the news he had to tell. Tom Mewson grinned. "All right, man, you've saved yourself the cat. Now go back where you belong. I'll handle this myself."
An hour later, he had the door to the women's hold unbolted and stepped down, staring appraisingly at the huddled, pitiful creatures, some lying on pieces of canvas as beds, others seated on the timbered floor, their arms clutched round their knees, their faces blank with despair and hopelessness.
He recognized Meg Tanner and grinned at her, and then at the golden-haired young girl beside her who had her arms around her mother and who shrank back at the sight of him. He saw Meg Tanner make a face, hawk and spit.
He grimaced with fury, but repressed himself. The bawd knew or at least had guessed how her older whelp had come to do herself in. Well, it was no fault of his.
Besides, trash like that was better off dead. But now his eyes sought out Colleen Corrigan, who stood at the very end of the hold, leaning her forehead against one slim arm, her other hand to her belly.
He strode towards her, "Stir your stumps, girl, you're to come with me!" he called.
Colleen Corrigan turned, eyes widening. Then she moved towards him, her face lighted with the hope that she would see her darling Michael, if only for a few moments, to tell him about the life that stirred within her. Oh it must be a boy, she could almost feel it kicking like one!
A proud, fine tall man like his father. At least he'd be free, he'd have his chance at life, and in this new land there might be more justice, than back in England or Ireland under the English yoke.
Tom Mewson led her out of the hold, and muttered, "You want word with your man, I'm told. You say you're with child? Come to my cabin, for I'll have to make certain. You bitches are all full of tricks that you pick up in Old Bailey."
"How dare you! You can but look at me and see that I'm big, and you're no prison matron to examine me, nor will I let you!" Colleen hotly flashed.
"You Irish scum, to talk to Tom Mewson that way! I'll learn you!"
Twisting her wrist, he dragged her up the stairs to the foc'sle, and at that moment, under guards, the male prisoners were marching back to their hold. But Michael Corrigan had seen the unexpected vision of his beautiful wife scuffling with the boatswain.
With a cry, he turned and ran, heedless of the chains that shackled his wrist and ankles, calling, "You dog, let my wife be or I'll do you in! Colleen, my sweet darling Colleen, it's Michael!"
A sailor near him raised a belaying pin and swung it down in 'a vicious arc. Michael pitched forward on the deck and lay still. Colleen Corrigan uttered a shriek and, twisting out of Tom Mewson's grasp, struck him with all her might, her fists smashing his lips back against his teeth and drawing blood. Then she turned and ran towards her fallen husband.
Justice was swift and summary. Captain Matthew Bordager himself sternly lectured the two mutinous prisoners, Michael and Colleen Corrigan. By his order, each was stripped to the waist and bound to the mast, facing each other. And Tom Mewson, uncoiling "Betsy", grinned savagely at the shuddering, half naked young woman who had closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the post and was murmuring, "Oh Michael, dearest Michael, we've a bairn, it's worth a whipping to tell you this. I didn't dare when we were in prison, for I thought certain we'd be hanging and the bairn would die with me."
"This is one way you may pass your word to your man, you bitch," the boatswain sniggered. He reached out with his calloused hand and squeezed one of her titties till she bit her lips almost to the blood and tilted back her head, shuddering with pain. "Now get ready. Forty lashes for each of you. And don't think I'll spare you for your belly's sake."
"You heartless swine, give me all the lashes, but not my poor wife, have you no heart in you?" Michael Corrigan shouted.
"You'll cringe and snivel, you Irish rebel, before the cat has done playing its tawse on your dirty back," the boatswain sneered.
Stepping around and behind the tall handsome young Irishman, he drew back his arm and slashed the nine thongs viciously down. Michael Corrigan stiffened, clenched his teeth and shuddered, but uttered no cry.
Then, cat-like, the boatswain moved around the mast and, licking his lips, swept the thongs across Colleen's slim shoulders with a sickening crack.
And thus it went, a lash for Michael, and one, perhaps even more vicious, for her.
She tried not cry out, wanting her best to be brave before her man, but the pain was excruciating. She slumped in her bonds at the twentieth stroke, but the flogging went on.
And when at last it was over, when the thongs of the cat dripped blood upon the deck, Colleen Corrigan had lost her child. And her husband, still conscious, shrieked out insane threats against the evil fiend who had murdered their innocent babe.
And the Orion sailed inexorably on towards its rendezvous and its deliverance of those surviving prisoners to the penal colony.
CHAPTER NINE
It was the eleventh day of December, and on the mountainous island of Tasmania, 150 miles south of Australia, half as large as the state of Illinois, the equatorial climate was that of summer but extremely cool.
Here there were rugged, wooded mountains, rushing rivers, trout-filled lakes, vast beaches, and the thriving city of Hobart. As the Orion entered the harbor and prepared to drop anchor, Captain Matthew Bordager could see with his spyglass the towering summit of Mount Wellington which had withstood the ravages of time for aeons.
Its peak towered 4,166 feet above the bustling city and its fine harbor.
In back of Hobart, there wound the scenic Derwent River, spanned by a sturdy bridge built by convict labor and made of stone hewn out in the quarries near Port Arthur.
These great stones had been transported in oxcarts and the work had been done under the lash of the guards, and with the savage, chained dogs on heavy leash vigilantly guarding the contingent. Already the stone was quite weather worn. He thought that it almost seemed like a scene out of religious history.
He could see also as he moved his spyglass the turreted government house, Saint George's dignified old church, and the slips at Battery Point where boats were just beginning to be built as part of the commerce which would one day make Tasmania one of the most affluent states of Australia.
Already the wharf at which the Orion would dock was thronged with townspeople, ladies in their bombazine gowns and parasols and men in frock coats and "side-of-mutton" whiskers, with broad hats to protect them from the glaring sun, even though the equatorial breezes made the summer months of December through February cooler than anywhere else in the South Pacific.
The town sheriff, Daniel Durway, was giving orders to his several assistants to prepare the bidding for the indentured bondservants. Several of the men from the convict hold, whose crimes were considered less reprehensible than those of most of the others, would be offered as farm laborers, and for a few who had schooling, they might even aspire to the post of clerks.
Nonetheless, their indentures would be for a minimum of twenty-five years. One of these men, Francis Tulley, a slim dandified brown-haired young man of twenty-six, had been sentenced for writing scurrilous pamphlets about the Tories and had, in the prisoner's dock at Old Bailey, denounced the King himself.
It was well for him, the stern judge had scolded, that they had not raised the severity of the charge to high treason, or he might still have been hanged, drawn, and quartered.
He had been to Oxford, and thus would draw a high price from the wealthiest citizens who might require a former gentleman of his breeding-for though a bastard, he had blue blood in his veins-as perhaps a tutor to their children.
The governor, Arthur Beaseley, had sent his regrets; an attack of gout was confining him to his bed. And thus the sheriff would represent the Crown and take charge of the proceedings once the convicts had been taken from the hold in their chains and led down to the dock and there taken over by the sheriffs deputies.
Captain Bordager sighed, took a pinch of snuff, and turned to his first mate. "Well now, Mister Knowles," he said, "It's come off pretty well. Less trouble than I'd hoped for, to be frank with you. And we've only lost a few who won't be missed. We'll give the men shore leave tomorrow morning, reload our provisions, take on casks of fresh water, and then two days hence with the tide make our way to Port Arthur to deliver the rest of our troublesome cargo."
"Very good, Captain. You're right, it's been an uneventful voyage. But as for my part, I should be happy to go back to the merchant marine. To be associated with such scum and riff-raff somehow makes me feel like scum myself."
"I follow you, Mister Knowles. But that's our duty. And don't be forgetting we've made a tidy profit on this voyage. I dare say I shall go back for another load. Ah, well, come join me in my cabin for a glass of rum."
Already, under the boatswain's orders, the sailors were entering the two holds and calling out the names of those who would leave the Orion to be auctioned off by the sheriff. Sally Tanner, the golden-haired fifteen-year-old sister of the unfortunate Phyllis (who had drowned herself) was one of those to be called.
She turned, weeping bitterly, to her mother.
"Oh I can't go, Mother," she wailed. "You'll need me more than ever now with Phyllis gone! Oh why can't I talk to the captain, beg him to let you go with me? You've done nothing wrong, it's not fair!"
"Come along, ye little slut," one of the sailors snarled as he seized her arm.
But Meg Tanner looked towards the stairway of the hold and her eyes were brooding. She had not forgotten how she had been used by Tom Mewson nor how her older girl had died willingly rather than live with the memory of his debauchery.
And when she saw that two of the sailors were occupied with trying to lift one of the women, who had developed a fever, she quickly made her way up the stairway, mingling with the others who were dutifully emerging into the light of day, blinking their eyes, grasping as the circulation returned to their shackled limbs.
She saw the ugly face of Tom Mewson and she took a deep breath as she moved towards him. The others were going down the gang plank, as their names were being called off by the boatswain himself, who was glancing at a sheet of paper on which were written the names of those consigned to the indentured auction block at Hobart.
"Clarke, Emily," he bawled out. "Forward and lively, bitch!"
A mild-mannered, spinsterish woman, slim and blonde, about thirty, moved docilely forward, bowing her head before the boatswain's searching look. She had originally been sentenced to hang at Tyburn for smothering her newly born child, a bastard forced on her by the rich and dissolute young son of her master.
Tom Mewson chuckled, put his gnarled finger under her chin and lifted it up to stare at her--"Don't sulk, Emily girl," he drawled. "You don't bring near half as good a price if you don't bob and curtsey to those fine gentlemen and ladies. Who knows? Maybe you'll find a protector who will take you to his bed and comfort you. Well for my part, you've no tits and not much butt for a cold winter's night!"
With a salacious guffaw, he shoved her forward, "On to the plank and good luck to you in Hobart, bitch!"
Then he turned, and his jaw dropped. Meg Tanner had twisted herself in front of the next in line. "What's this? You're for Port Arthur, you murdering doxy you! Gates, get this bitch back to the hold-how the devil did she-arghhh-ugghhh!"
Meg Tanner had seized him by the throat with both hands, forced him over to the edge of the plank and, drawing up her right knee sharply, struck him in the crotch. With a gurgling shriek, locking his arms round her and trying to break her fatal hold, he staggered, and both of them toppled into the water below.
Cries of alarm rose from the sailors who hurried over to the side of the vessel. But Meg Tanner's fingers had dug into Tom Mewson's throat in an unbreakable grip. Weighted down with her chains, and sucking in the water through nostrils and mouth so that she could not possibly rise to the surface, with her last failing strength she clung to the man who had abused her and driven her older daughter to such disgraceful death.
And soon all that could been seen were a few bubbles on the surface of the shimmering blue water.
Sally Tanner, at the rail, had to be restrained by two sailors from flinging herself over to join her mother. Hysterically she screamed for them to let her die, but such was not her destiny. And two men dragged her back to the plank and carefully led her onto the first land she had touched since that July sailing back in London.
For Colleen Corrigan, the wharf at Hobart was another Golgotha. Only the grudging humaneness of the Orion's captain in sending the ship's doctor to attend her after her miscarriage had kept the lovely black-haired Dublin girl alive. But now, shackled at wrists and ankles, moving along with the other women down the auction mart along the wharf and near the main square which overlooked the harbor, she turned her lovely face back, piteously stained with tears, as if to catch a last glimpse of her husband Michael. He, alas, was locked in the hold, and would sail two days hence to be incarcerated in the penal colony of Port Arthur.
Her sturdy young health had enabled her to make a miraculous recovery, against the dread dangers of infection amid the squalor of the women's hold. There was color back in her cheeks, but she was agonized at the thought of being separated from the man she loved and who had fucked her in passion to conception, so that she would not even have this memory of him to hold in her arms.
She felt that she would never seen her husband again, for the women had regaled her with horrid tales of the brutalities of the gaolers, of the whipping shed and the "sun-scorcher," a fiendish punishment devised by the prison governor for the most incorrigible.
As for herself, it mattered nothing now. She did not much care what she did or even if she lived at all, if there was no hope of seeing Michael again. Dully, she moved along with the other women, while the sheriff and his men impatiently hussled them, each in turn, onto the wooden platform which served as slavery block-for such indeed it was.
Daniel Durway, a black-bearded, heavily set man in his mid-forties, ascended the platform beside the summoned female convict and in a loud, resonant voice described her qualities and attributes: "Now, my fine people, here's a jade who can labor in the kitchen or in the fields, as you please. She's Margaret Pendelton, four-and-twenty summers. Charged with filching a purse from a gentleman in a tavern-where doubtless she went to sell her body."
"That's not true!" the young woman lifted her head, her black eyes glittering with indignation. She was raw-boned, with tumbled black hair, and the truth was that she had been the mistress of a minor nobleman who, wishing to get rid of her so that he might substitute a younger and more toothsome bitch for his bed, had arranged with the tavern keeper to accuse her of theft.
When the watch had come to the tavern to arrest her, she had struggled with him, and in the scuffle inadvertently blinded one of the soldiers. For this she had been sentenced to hang at Tyburn, and only the great clemency of George IV himself had saved her from Jack Ketch's clutches.
"Keep your mouth shut, you dirty bitch," Daniel Durway turned with a snarl and backhanded her across the cheek, nearly knocking her to the floor of the platform. "As you can see, this jade needs gentling.
"But she's had no babe, though for sure she's no maiden-" at this, salacious guffaws from the male spectators crowding round the platform greeted the sheriff's lewd intimations.
"And as you can see for yourself, she's strong as a horse, and she'll be grateful to the man who buys her, for he'll being her from the rope. Mind, though, you'd best keep a watch on her and have her shackled at night, for she put out the eye of one of his Majesty's own soldiers. She's a dangerous one rJ you, and I myself wouldn't wish to cross he:. "
Margaret Pendelton gave him a vindictive glance, but wisely held her peace as she stared boldly out at all those faces. The bright sun made her blink again, and she scarcely heard the eager bidding: "A hundred pounds for the doxy-Nay, I'll give a hundred fifty-Might we not see summat of her body, good Sheriff, so we can be sure that she's a good worker?"
"Well, as to that," the sheriff smirked, "it's not customary, because this isn't the market place of the Turks, mind you. But seeing that you're all in good humor and I'm bound to get all the gold I can for our gracious king, I'll be showing you a trifle!"
With this, he slyly lowered his Malacca cane and whisked up Margaret Pendleton's skirt, revealing for an instant long, splendidly sculptured calves and thighs sheathed in black cotton hose.
With a cry of shame, the young woman tugged down her skirts and recoiled, her eyes blazing. But Daniel Durway lifted his cane and after clenching her fists and breathing hard a moment, she again held back from the impulse which doubdess would have cost her a flogging.
"What spirit she has, the fine doxy!" An elderly dowager lifted a lorgnette to study the unfortunate prisoner on the platform. "But all that energy should be best put to work in the fields. Aye, to work her into a lather so she'll hawno time for mischief or revolt, is what I say. George, will you not buy her for me? She can tend to my little garden out by the azaleas."
The wealthy dowager's husband, a florid-faced man in his mid-fifties, eyed the raw-boned brunette. Then he nodded. "Of course, my dear. I shall make a gift of her to you." What he had in mind, to be sure, was that he himself would use Margaret Pendleton's tall, sturdy body to grant him the lustful joys which his fat, dowdy wife had not granted in over twenty years. "I'll give two hundred and fifty pounds, not a shilling more!"
But Margaret Pendleton's defiance on the platform had scared off some of the potential buyers. Besides, she was but the first to be thus auctioned;, there would be at least a score of others even comelier. And so the woman heard herself knocked down by three taps of the cane on the platform and then uttered a cry of pain as the sheriff called out, "And sold, indentured for life, to Mister George Anson!"
And then he pronounced the sale concluded by applying a deft cut of the cane straight across both Margaret Pendleton's bottom-cheeks which made her jump and cry out in pain, reaching her shackled wrists back so that her hands could rub the flaming hurt, amid roars of laughter from the heartless spectators.
And indeed, George Anson put his new indentured bondservant to the rutting usage he had originally contemplated that very night. Once he was certain that his wife was snoring away deep in slumber, he went with his steward, a whining, middle-aged Cockney named Willy Sturton, to the chamber which Margaret Pendleton had been given, near the attic of the fine house on the hillside.
The little steward winked at his master as he unlocked the door, and the two men crept in and closed, then bolted the door behind them. Margaret Pendleton lay on a trundle bed, in a small windowless room. She wore only a coarse lisle shift, and it was fucked up half way along her long, beautifully muscled, tawny sheened thighs.
"Egad, there's a tasty piece of cunt, eh, Willy? You'll share her with me. But we must gag the wench-what's this, she's waking up!"
Hearing the noise, and having already learned in prison back in London that noise at night might mean the coming of some vicious lesbian to ravish her or perhaps to steal some trinket from her person, Margaret Pendleton had indeed awakened, sitting up with a gasp: "What-who-"
George Anson nodded to the Cockney, who promptly clapped his hand over her mouth and hissed, "Not a sound, you bitch, or it's the whipping shed for you. The master wants only to comfort you this night, so you'd best be obliging to him. I myself will take a rod to your butt if you're not, now you mind that!"
But Margaret Pendleton managed to strike away his hand and cried out hoars ', "For shame, this is not right, you do not "wn my body, you've no right to that-"
"You filthy bitch, you speak to me of rights, you, a trull and one who would blind a loyal soldier of His Majesty!" the elderly landowner snarled. "To the whipping shed with her, Billy! But take care not to wake Hermione or we'll both catch it!"
"No fear, Mister Anson," the Cockney chuckled. He had come prepared for just such an emergency, and now suddenly pulled out of his breeches pocket a cloth which had been soaked in laudanum. Springing on her, hurling her back against her pillow, he pressed the wad against her mouth and nostrils, while she beat him with her clenched fists and the paunchy, gray-haired master of the house had at last to grip her wrists and hold them until her struggle subsided.
A few moments later, breathing hoarsely, her head lolling to one side, the two men carted her off between them through the back of the house and out to a gray stone shed standing beside the barn in which George Anson kept his carriage and his fine horses.
A kerosene lamp was lighted, and the door of the shed closed and bolted from the inside. There was a whipping ladder in one corner, a saw horse in another, and in the middle a heavy round post with a cross arm piece at the top, at each end of which was fixed a metal shackle that could lock or open at the touch of a spring.
In a few moments, Margaret Pendleton's wrists were clamped in those shackles, and then the Cockney steward aided his master in pantingly ripping off the shift so that the superb, sturdy, tawny sheened naked body was exposed to their avid gaze.
"Go on, Willy," the master of the house hoarsely commanded, taking off his waistcoat and rolling up his sleeves. The bulge at the crotch of his breeches indicated that he was already in rut.
With a lewd snicker, Willy Sfurton squeezed the spacious bottom-ovals of the still unconscious woman, ran his hands over the lithe hips, the supple slim waist and then reached round and forward to cup her high perched, widely spaced pear-shaped titties.
"This one's a fine scrapping bitch, Mister Anson," he mouthed. "I'LL waken her for you, never fear!"
Near the door of the whipping shed was a charcoal brazier, which the steward now kindled. Into it he thrust a wooden-handled branding iron at whose end was the letter "A" signifying that anything so marked was the property of his wealthy master.
Then, taking a hand bellows, he began to work it till the coals glowed hot, while George Anson impatiently paced the floor, his eyes devouring the still unconscious woman at the whipping post.
The cross beam had been placed high enough to make her stand almost on tiptoe, and his eyes laved the deeply hollowed back, the smooth tawny satin of her naked flesh. Impatiently, he undid the buttons of his breeches to liberate his swollen prick, and uttered a grunt of lustful anticipation. "The devil take it, Willy, haven't you got it warm enough yet?"
"In a moment, Mister Anson, in a moment-there we are! Now where should we put this mark of yours, sir? Nowhere to spoil her, to be sure," the steward sadistically grinned as he lifted the red-hot iron out of the brazier and approached the naked victim.
"On the shoulder blade, man, and hurry!" his master cried.
Willy Sturton slowly lifted the glowing iron, approached it close to the smooth naked flesh, and then, setting his teeth, pressed it home. There was the stench of burning human flesh, and then a maddened scream of intolerable agony as, wakened from her swoon, Margaret Pendleton thrashed about, kicking, dragging at her shackled wrists.
"We'd best gag her again, Mister Anson, or she'll wake your wife," the steward whispered. And when his master impatiently nodded, he took a dirty handkerchief from the other pocket of his breeches, forced it between the woman's lips, and then bending to her torn shift, ripped off a piece and used it to bind over her mouth and knot it at the back of her neck.
"Now then, she's ready for the thrashing, Mister Anson," he judiciously pronounced.
His master had already seized a supple, murderously flexible rattan cane and planted himself at the woman's left. "Now then, Margaret," he thickly announced, "this is a good little lesson for you. What I've done, you'll obey me and you'll not say a word to my wife, do you ken me? If you do, I'll tell the sheriff that you've made an attack on my person, and off you'll go to Port Arthur, where the guards enjoy thrashing a rebellious bitch like you, aye, and fucking her every night. Get yourself ready, you're going to feel a good Tasmanian cane on your big naked butt!"
With this, drawing back his arm, he made the cane bound with a sharp Splattt over the upper summits of both bottomglobes, and Margaret Pendleton stiffened, her head tilting back, her eyes enormous and blurred with tears as a muffled cry came through the gag.
A darkening red narrow line sprang up at once on the tawny flesh. George Anson struck again, an inch below, and then a third time, an inch below that. At each, her tethered, naked body twisted and writhed from side to side, kicking out, while maddened, muffled cries escaped her.
"When you're ready to be gentle and obedient, nod your head three times, bitch," he mouthed as he laid the cane solidly across the very centers of both her oval ass-cheeks. And then another one, before she hardly had time to cry out her agony from the previous furious cut.
Perspiring, scolding hot waves of agony searing her vulnerable naked flesh, Margaret Pendleton could not long endure so cruel a caning. By the twelfth cut, she screamed wildly, then nodded her head three times as she turned her contorted tear-drowned face over her shoulder to contemplate the panting, flushed roue who had bought her indenture.
"She's ready, Mister Anson," the steward cackled with glee.
"Then take her down, Willy, and let's see if she's learned her lesson yet," his master thickly panted, lowering the cane.
Willy Sturton hastened to the whipping post, opened the shackles, and Margaret Pendleton slumped down to her knees, weeping hoarsely, her hands frantically rubbing her angrily striped and swollen naked ass-cheeks.
"Crawl over to me, bitch," George Anson gloatingly commanded.
Slowly, wincing at every movement, the naked woman turned to face him, and crawled towards him on her knees, her hands still frantically soothing the livid weals left by the cane.
"If I take that gag off, do you promise not to yell, you bitch?" he ordered, lifting the cane warningly again. Hastily she nodded, her eyes fixed with a horrid fascination on that swishy implement of torture.
"Take out the gag, Willy," George Anson gasped. It was done at once, and the steward stepped back to admire the long thighs, the shapely calves, and most of all the magnificent, spacious bottom-ovals, with the angry purple welts flaming over the smooth tawny epidermis.
"That's better," George Anson chuckled. "Now, are you going to be a good bitch and do whatever I tell you to? Are you going to promise me not to blab to my wife Hermione?"
"Y-y-yes, oh please-oh no more," the woman moaned.
"Call me master, you dirty slut!" George Anson applied a light flick of the cane right over her titties, and Margaret Pendleton screamed as she dutched them, babbling, "Oh don't, not there, Master, oh please don't whip me any more, please don't!"
"You see, Willy? And this one's supposed to have beaten a soldier-why, I seem to be more of a man than he was," George Anson boasted to his fawning steward. "All right, Margaret. D'you see my prick? Take it in your mouth and suck it, and then ask me to fuck you nice and sweet, you hear? Or back you go to the post for another good dozen, and this time I'll send it up between your long legs right on your bushy twat!"
This diabolical threat overcame Margaret Pendleton's revulsion. With a sobbing little moan, she leaned forward, and her soft lips took hold of the odious, plum-shaped head of her new master's prick. At his order, she put her hands to the backs of his legs, and humbly sucked and then rubbed her tongue over the puckering lips of his ram-rod until at last he stopped her, ready to juice.
"All right, hurry, tell me what you want of me, bitch," he panted.
"Please-please f-f-f-fuck me, m-m-master," Margaret Pendleton shudderingly murmured.
"With the greatest of pleasure, Margaret," he chuckled gloatingly.
Tossing the cane to his steward, George Anson bent and gripped Margaret Pendleton's titties with his pudgy lingers, pinching and twisting till she cried out in pain. Then he forced her down on her back and savagely mounted atop her, cramming his prick into her cunt. And at his order, the Cockney steward knelt down over her face, facing his master, and poor Margaret Pendleton was obliged to French the steward while she endured the savage fucking of the man who had bought her life for virtually nothing.
CHAPTER TEN
Golden-haired Sally Tanner ascended the steps of the auction platform to a chorus of gasps of admiration from the eager male spectators. Sheriff Daniel Durway consulted his list and harangued the crowd: "Now here's a winsome lass. Sentenced to the rope at Tyburn for conspiracy in the murder of a gentleman, the sentence commuted to a life indenture. Now here's a girl not quite sixteen, and already a charmer, as you can see for yourselves! A fine complexion, and a figure that's tempting as that of a young Venus, I'll be bound. She knows her letters and can write a bit, has had but a little schooling and the evil in her can be blotted out if one of you good farmers or landowners will give her a berth and see to it that she's kept busy." With this, he gave his listeners a broad wink which drew roars of salacious laughter and made poor Sally turn scarlet as she stared down at her feet. Thus, with head bowed, wrists and ankles chained, a girl not yet sixteen was being offered to any man who would pay the price for her indenture and who, for the rest of her natural young life, would have the power to whip, brand, fuck or bugger or do aught with the privacy of his own bedchamber that his lusts desired. She might not refuse, she might not mutiny or run away, or she would be for the whipping shed, the branding iron and perhaps even have her tongue and ears cropped-such was the rigorous colonial law governing female convicts in this the year of our Lord, 1824.
Naturally there was spirited bidding for so tasty a young wench, and at last Sally Tanner found herself knocked down for the sum of three hundred and seventy-five pounds sterling, but, singularly enough, not to a man. Instead, a simpering lackey ascended the platform, handed the sheriff a sheaf of new bank notes, and received the prisoner into his custody, whom he promptly led to an elegant landau. Inside, there sat a woman with a silver-tinted wig, haughty and tall, with cruel mouth and eyes, who curtly exclaimed, "Don't stand there all day, Wilkins, set the girl beside me." And then, staring at the still blushing and terrified teenaged English girl, she added as insolently, "My name is Lady Marjorie Tuggett, and you are my servant. Sit beside me but not too close, and mind you don't say a word till we reach home."
She sniffed contemptuously as poor Sally Tanner awkwardly seated herself, tried to conceal the clanking chains about her wrists and ankles, and then tapped on the coachman's box to indicate to him her impatience to be off. The lackey had already ascended to sit beside the coachman, who wore a tall hat and a tan livery, exactly like himself.
And thus in the midst of a long silence, Sally Tanner found herself being driven beside the perfumed, bewigged and jeweled woman who did not give her so much as a sidelong glance.
The journey wound up along the hillside, in one of the most luxurious and fashionable houses near the very top. Once the landau had halted, the lackey scurried down to open the door for his mistress, then handed her down as if she were a queen.
Lady Marjorie Tuggett glanced back over her shoulder and disdainfully commanded, "Wilkins, take her in to Ellen, have her scrubbed and scented, then give her something to eat and let her be brought to me at eight o'clock this evening in my bedchamber."
"Very good, Milady," the lackey fawningly bowed. Then, grasping Sally by the elbow, he led her down a long corridor and back into the kitchen where a stout, gray-haired harridan confronted her. "New trash from the Orion, I'll be bound," she sniffed, staring at poor Sally till the latter blushed again and looked desolately down at the floor. "Well, you know what to do with her, Wilkins. Get Suzy to give her a bath-that's something you're not to do, my lad! Then put her in a room and stand guard over her-and mind you, no tricks. You won't be forgetting the lacing you had from the mistress herself when you peeked in at that wicked little slut Dierdre."
The lackey grimaced, looked uncomfortable, mumbled something, then led Sally out of the kitchen and down another winding corridor to a little room at the very end of a hallway. "Get inside, wench, and Suzy will come take you for a scrubbing. You'd best be on your good behavior tonight, I'm warning you.
So you're gallows fruit, are you? Tsk, tsk, and so young too! Why, with those blue eyes and that yellow hair-"
"Keep a civil tongue to yourself, if you please," Sally flashed, tears of homesickness and grief glistening in her eyes. "You've naught to do with me, and you heard the cook tell you so. Now close the door and leave me here, I can't escape with these chains."
"That you can't," the footman sniggered, "But I'll tell you one thing more, little lady. Lady Marjorie will keep you hopping just as a lusty man would, and that's no lie. She's been a widow these ten years, and she's come to love girls instead of men. Don't say I told you so, though. I'll see you again. And mayhap," here he gave her a lewd wink, "You'll be sick enough of your mistress then to want a red-blooded man between your sheets soon enough, girl."
Then he slammed and locked the door, and Sally burst into helpless tears.
About ten minutes later, the door was unlocked and Suzy, a tall, handsome young mulatress, who was not more than nineteen, entered. She wore a stunning crinoline gown, and also black leather boots, such as a seaman or stablegroom might wear. Without a word, she gestured that Sally was to follow her, and quickly the golden-haired teenager learned that Suzy was a mute. The mulatress led her to a bathroom, where two giggling teenaged maids, neither of whom was more than fifteen, awaited. Sally was made to strip naked, and get into the huge wide porcelain tub. The two young girls scoured and rubbed her till her skin was a vivid pink, then toweled her. Next they adorned her in a long trailing white linen shift, combed out her golden hair and put a blue ribbon bow in it. Then she was led back to her room by the mulatress, who an hour later brought her a tray of food and a glass of strong wine.
Wonderingly, Sally ate and drank with appetite, momentarily forgetting her tragic sorrows over the death of her mother and older sister. Indeed, she had come almost to believe that perhaps a new life was beginning for her, because this kindness and the good food and the elegant house were such incredible contrasts after the horror of Old Bailey and the foul, stifling hold of the Orion.
She lay down on her bed, a real bed, with damask cover and even a tiny little window through which she could see the garden in the gathering dusk. She must have fallen asleep, for suddenly she wakened to feel fingers caressing her titties. When she uttered a cry, the young mulatress put a soft palm over her mouth and shook her head with a gentle smile, then beckoned, indicating that she was to follow.
Barefooted and in her shift, the chains still left upon her ankles and wrists, Sally Tanner uncomprehendingly followed the young mulatress up the stairway and down the corridor to a huge door on which she gently knocked.
"Come in at once!" the arrogant contralto voice of Lady Marjorie Tuggett called out. Suzy opened the door, put her right hand against the small of Sally's back and gave the girl a gentle push forward, then entered behind her and bolted the door.
Sally trembled, her eyes huge with stupefaction. There was a huge four-posted canopied bed, and on it Lady Marjorie Tuggett lay, naked except for black leather boots up to her knees, pillowing her head on her arms. She was perhaps thirty-six, and she still wore her silver-tinted wig. But there was one other accoutrement which dumbfounded the golden-haired teenaged bondservant. It was an artificial prick, tied round Lady Marjorie's waist with silken cords, made of wood and painted flesh-colored with such ingenuity that at first glance it seemed an actual male organ.
"Did she give you any trouble at the bath, Suzy?" Sally's new mistress demanded of the mulatress, who shook her head at once. "That's good for her. And those shackles, the sheriff gave Wilkins the key and showed the lout how to open and put them back on again? You've done well, Suzy, I'm pleased with you. I like to see a girl with chains, then I know she belongs to me. As you're going to belong to me, Sally. Now come here and kneel down beside the bed and kiss my hand and tell me that you're going to be a good obedient little bitch!"
"I-I don't understand, L-Lady M-Marjorie," Sally Tanner stammered, her blushed spreading down to her swelling young round titties under the linen shift, making even the lobes of her dainty ears red and hot. She could not take her eyes off that obscene prick which was strapped around the naked woman's waist.
"Then I'll be brief with you, bitch, and it's best you remember what I tell you. I am Lady Marjorie Tuggett, for ten years I've been a widow. My husband, the poor fool, was not much of a man, a drunken oaf who brought me to this desolate island as a virgin bride. But it seemed that he preferred boys to me, although at times he did his duty as best he might. Do you follow me so far, girl?"
Sally could only nod, bemused, horrified, unable to speak.
"Then understand me well. One night I caught him and his paramour, buggering each other and in a drunken stupor. I had Wilkins hold the servant who had dared debase my husband, for he was of noble blood. My poor Teddy had a stroke at seeing this, and fell dead, more's the pity. He left me rich, and he left me loathing men. For I am better than any of them with this!" So saying, she tapped the head of the obscene wooden prick and smiled cruelly at the shuddering young blonde. "Now that you know my story, you'll serve me properly, I'll be bound. If you don't, there's the whipping shed and my pet Dalmatian, Horatio, to make you more docile. Now come here, girl, kneel down and vow your loyalties to your mistress!"
More dead than alive, shamed and trembling, the young golden-haired teenager approached the bed, sank down on her knees and mumbled, I-I will obey you, L-Lady M-Marjorie."
"Then show me how you will. Come now, hoist up your shift, lie beside me, and we will have sport this night," the perverse Sapphic widow commanded.
"Oh no-don't-you won't put that dreadful thing into me, will you, L-Lady Marjorie?" Sally Tanner quavered.
There was a peal of satanic laughter. "Of course I will. I bed and deflower each of my maiden slaves, girl, and you're not the first nor will you be the last to feel my borrowed manhood. Come now, or do you want the whip first?"
"Oh no, I can't, oh please, dear God, don't do it to me, m-m-mistress!"
"Suzy, take this stupid, stubborn little slut out to the whipping shed and have Wilkins thrash her properly. I'll be there directly," the silver-wigged, booted naked Lesbian hissed.
The young mulatress seized poor Sally by her shackled wrists and led her, pleading and weeping, from the bedroom. Outside, the liveried footman Wilkins waited, having eavesdropped and understood his part in this cruel farce. "Stupid little fool," he muttered into Sally's ear as he helped Suzy drag her out of the house and to the whipping shed which stood beyond the garden, "Didn't I tell you to submit? It wouldn't have hurt too much, and then I'd have comforted you. But this time you're really going to smart for it. In you go!"
He lit a kerosene lamp, and Sally Tanner shrieked as the mulatress and the footman removed the shackles on her wrists only to drag her towards a huge wooden pillory standing in the middle of the stone shed. Her neck and wrists were locked into the yoke holes, the chains left round her slim ankles, and then Wilkins ripped away the nightshift.
He moved over to the wall where on hooks there hung a panoply of fustigator implements. He took down a cowhide whip, stationed himself behind the weeping, pleading, naked young girl, and sent the first stroke furiously over the ripest curves of her round naked bottom cheeks, Sally Tanner shrieked and the pillory creaked with her twistings and thrashings, the chains round her ankles clattering as she tried to kick and free herself.
A dozen lashes made the flesh of her tender young virgin bottom inflamed and livid, and she felt as if the skin were being flayed from her. Whimpering, half-fainting, she sagged in the pillory and then she heard the cruel, insolent contralto voice of her new mistress: "That's enough, don't spoil her, you male beast! Now put her over the saw-horse so I can get at her. Then you may clear out, the two of you!"
More dead than alive, Sally Tanner vaguely felt hands opening the yoke holes, dragging her naked body across the floor and then forcing her down over a sharply ridged wooden saw-horse. Her wrists were bound with hempen cords to the lower front legs, the shackles unlocked from her ankles, but her ankles were swiftly corded and similarly pinioned to the back legs of the fiendish device. At once she cried out, for the diabolically sharp wooden ridge chafed her tender cunt
And then she felt slim hands caress her swollen, burning naked ass-cheeks, felt sharp fingernails dig into the agonized swollen flesh and shrieked again as she felt her bottom globes yawned apart. And then a wild, harrowing cry burst from her as the wooden prick strapped round Lady Marjorie Tuggett's loins burrowed slowly and inexorably to the hilt inside her tender, narrow young ass-hole.
She seemed to have revived, and she found herself strapped over an upholstered bench still in the shed, but this time she was on her back, with her knees drawn up in the air and ropes around the knee hollows lofting to a ceiling beam. A waist strap restrained her on the bench, and her arms were drawn down to the lower legs and there her wrists were tied with heavy thongs. She saw Suzy bending over her, a bucket of brine in her hands, which she had just sloshed over the unconscious young girl's face and bottom and loins. The smarting in her bottom at once awakened Sally and she began to sob and plead for mercy.
Suzy put her finger to her lips, shook her head warningly, and then pointed. The young girl's dilated swollen eyes fixed on the naked figure of the sadistic Lesbian. But this time the dildo had been removed, and Lady Marjorie wore only her boots and wig, the thick bush of her cunt a dark auburn, her natural hue.
"I'm going to give you a chance to escape another thrashing, you bitch," she snarled. "You're going to gam me, and do it till I come, or I'll have the skin taken off of your titties, all the hairs plucked out of your little twat and then turpentine put on the raw lips of that soft little quim of yours!"
So saying, she straddled over Sallie's face, and the unfortunate young golden-haired bondservant understood. Terrified at the thought of more pain, she began ineptly but willingly all the same to kiss and suck and lick that avid, perverse cunthole until with a cry of ecstasy Lady Marjorie Tuggett announced her climax.
And thus Sally Tanner exchanged one life for another that, to her, was far more horrible-despite its comforts-than the squalor and the terror of Old Bailey.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Colleen Corrigan stood on the auction block, trying not to see the lecherous gazes which the young and old men crowding round the platform fixed on her slim, full body. The sheriff made great to-do about her crime, but all she could think of was that Michael would be but sixty-five miles away from her, yet far away as hell itself and without possibility of escape with the dogs and the guards and the strong graystone buildings which housed the convicts who were considered most dangerous.
And yet even as she stood awaiting her sale at indenture, she had a small moment of rejoicing to know that the vicious boatswain who had whipped her and her husband and caused the death of their unborn child was dead. One of the women who had gone ahead of her upon the block had told her how Meg Tanner had seized Tom Mewson by the throat and pitched both of them over the rail into the water and that only bubbles had come up.
She did not even hear the sheriffs praises, nor his crude comment that she was fertile, having spawned a whelp which had died aboard ship and thus was ready to spawn more worthy ones for her future master.
But when she heard an elderly woman bid two hundred pounds for her indenture, which was for life, she looked up with a flicker of amazement and saw white-haired woman seated in a sedan chair, carried like a palanquin between four sturdy aborigines, who wore only loincloths. A young man, with the marks of dissolution on his weak, handsome face, upped the bid another fifty pounds, and the woman promptly doubled hers. In a moment, the sheriff had pounded his cane thrice on the platform floor and the sale was over.
"You lucky bitch," he muttered to Colleen," You won't have to service her, at any rate. Unless, more likely, she has those bush niggers jump for sport. That's old Mrs. Dougherty, that is, wealthiest widow in all Hobart! Now mind your manners, you Irish slut, and serve her well!"
Two of the kinky headed black men moved towards the platform, and although Colleen shrank from them, they smiled at her and gently helped her down and led her over to the palanquin.
"My poor child," the white-haired woman murmured, "You're Irish as Paddy's pig, and from Dublin aren't you?"
"Yes I am, ma'am," Colleen said wonderingly.
"Well, so am I, poor girl. And I could not bear to think, no matter what your crime, of a good black-haired Dublin girl who lost her babe on that cruel voyage becoming the doxy of one of these pampered louts. You'll be my maid and companion if you will. Can you read, girl?"
"Oh yes, ma'am!"
"Good. Then come, there's room enough here in this silly litter. My old husband, bless his memory, got the notion from reading about the Romans. Here now, sit beside me. Kebo, take off these chains. No companion of mine wears them in Dougherty House."
The tallest and youngest of the bushman nodded his head smiled, and examined the shackles which bound Colleen Corrigan's wrists and ankles. A moment later he found the spring which opened them, and they fell with a clank upon the ground. With a sigh of joy, Colleen burst into tears.
"There now, there now, my poor girl, cry it all out. Come, get beside me, it is not far to my house. We'll have a cup of tea and we'll talk."
And thus new hope was reborn. And hours later, Colleen found herself telling the kindly woman who had purchased her indenture how she and Michael had run afoul of the law and how the wicked informer Benjamin Scorcey had died when he had been stopped in his brutal assault upon her. And how for that supposed crime of "murder," she and her husband had been sentenced to the rope at Tyburn.
"Oh, ma'am, I care nothing for myself, but only for poor Michael! He's innocent, as God is my witness. If only you could help him in some way-I cannot bear to think of him so far away and in that terrible penal colony where there are savage dogs and worse men to brutalize even the innocent!"
"Tush now, girl, have done with crying. Old Elsie
Dougherty has a few friends at Government House. I'll have my solicitor send back at once on the return of the Orion to London to have the papers and the indictment brought back and we'll examine them. If you husband's innocent, never fear, God will save him till justice is at last done."
And thus at least one prisoner found new life and new hope in Tasmania.....
Arabella Lewis was last to mount the auction block of all the females. In vain she pleaded with the sheriff and then, courageous always, addressed the amused and mocking spectators on behalf of her mother. She implored them to buy both her mother and herself and not let the woman who had given her birth and who had defended her even with her virtue be sent on to the hell that was Port Arthur. But all she got for her pains was a cuff across the mouth by Sheriff Daniel Durway, and a warning that the cane would be taken to her butt if she did not shut her mouth.
When they saw this tall, svelte, lovely auburn-haired girl standing there in a dirtied frock, with chains dangling from her wrists and about her ankles, the lustful men, both young and old, shouted out their bids until the sheriff could scarcely keep up with them. But at last she was knocked down for the unheard-of sum of seven hundred pounds to Sir Marius Cordweigh, a wealthy shipowner and farmer as well, a man of forty-six, whose handsome wife was slowly dying of anemia.
Sir Marius Cordweigh had no love for the Tories, and a decade ago had come to this distant island far from Lond's hubbub and intrigues to invest his gold in ship building and in produce farming. So well had he flourished that there was talk that he would be the next Governor of Tasmania. He loved his wife dearly, but for the past two years he knew that she was not long for this world. Ten years younger, she had wed him when she was but a chit of seventeen, and now at thirty-seven, was about to die and had given him no heirs. He had bought Arabella not for lust, but because his wife loved books and poetry and be had beard the sheriff extol Arabella's knowledge of letters and her ability to write.
And so, she too passed into a household where there would be hope for her, though her heart was heavy with knowledge that her beautiful mother would two days hence be locked up with the other "dangerous" females in one of those graystone building at Port Arthur....
Bessie Bovielly, one of the handsomest trulls aboard the Orion, who had been boasting to her companions on the voyage that she would fetch the highest price of all and catch the imagine of some handsome lad, was doomed instead to a horrid destiny. At twenty-two, she had run away from home because her stepfather had tried fuck her. She had become a thief, her foster parents a couple in the worst slum in London who taught her all the tricks of lifting the purses, handkerchiefs, watches, and snuff boxes of the gentry. She had narrowly escaped hanging, and had vowed never to steal again, so she had turned to selling her body instead. But an old merchant, disgruntled that he could not get a hard-on and fuck her after having paid her ten shillings for the privilege, began to beat and abuse her. In her indignation, Bessie had tried to defend herself, knocked him sprawling and his head had split open on the edge of a table. For this, Bessie had been sentenced to swing and dance in the air at Tyburn, and the King's mercy had sent her instead to
Tasmania.
She went for a mere seventy-five pounds, to a fat, almost bald, and naturally heavy dandy named Julius Etimerton. He was thirty, enormously rich, and a vicious pervert. As soon as he had taken her home, he had her summoned into his sitting room, where, sprawling in an armchair, he fondled the heads of two Great Danes who stood beside him. Bessie had made the error of trying to cajole him, to flirt with him. Incensed, he had ordered his footmen to take her on his back and another footman to hoist her skirt and petticoat, lower her drawers, and then give her the birch on her naked ass.
After Bessie had endured a severe whipping almost to the blood, she was coldly informed that he had not purchased her for his own interest or service, "but for these two beauties, you bitch. Here are Leander and Hero, and they shall have all your attentions, you scum of the London gutter!"
And then, to her stupefaction, he had ordered his two footmen (both of whom were his bed-lovers and who lent themselves to being buggered by him) to take Bessie and the two massive canines to the kennels.
He followed, daintily nibbling sweet meats which a little Negro page boy, dressed in a turban with a feather in it, handed him on a silver tray.
Bessie was stripped naked, forced down on her knees in front of a low stocks-like apparatus. Her wrists were clamped at the opposite ends of this heavy wooden device, her neck clamped by the smaller middle yoke hole. Then her knees were dragged widely apart, corded and the cords in turn tied to rings set into the floor.
Then one of the footmen, giggling like a girl, rubbed a piece of raw meat into her ass-hole and along her cunt, while the other footman led in the younger
Great Dane, Hero.
Bessie uttered a wild scream as she felt the dog's front paws scrabble at her naked back and then an even more frenzied cry when she felt the long bony red prick of the animal thrust between the lips of her gaping cunt, and perforate her until it seemed it must tear through her very belly.
Then, growling and whining, the Great Dane began to hump her, while her debauched master called one of the footmen over to kneel down and suck his prick as he watched with eyes blazing at this monstrous rut of his prize canine upon the naked, writhing body of the helpless young London whore.
And after Hero had gushed his spunk deep into Bessie's cunt, the other footman led him off the leash and then brought Leander to service the whimpering, half-fainting naked brown-haired prostitute who had now become and indentured slave for life to this monstrous pervert.
But Leander's pension was for buggering a bitch, as Bessie's new master mockingly drawled. And so, as the footman yawned apart the stripped bare bottom cheeks of the pleading naked captive, the older Great Dane upreared itself on its hind legs and thrust its long probing prick against the crinky rosette of Bessie's ass-hole, which was, despite her whoring for profit, still virgin.
Her screams and entreaties filled the kennels, as madly she tried to break free of the stocks. But she suffered the vicious buggering until the hot shoot of the dog's jet burst into her bowels, and then she swooned away.
When she woke, she found herself tethered, still naked, but with a dog collar round her neck in one of the kennel cages; no higher than a man's waist, compelling her either to lie or kneel on all fours. She had become, indeed, a bitch for the two massive canine pets of her vicious master, and thus she would spend the rest of her days until death claimed her ... which it did, for only a week later, the lovely prostitute who had boasted to her wretched companions aboard the Orion that she would win the imagine of a fine gentleman, took the bowl that had been put into her cage for her drinking water, broke it into sharp shards, and cut her throat with one of them so she might escape forever. .
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two days after the Orion had dropped anchor at Hobart, the convict ship set sail for Port Arthur, carrying with it several women whose crimes in England had been considered sufficiently serious to deny them the relative liberty of indenture, as well as some eighteen men, among them Michael Corrigan, who were considered too dangerous to be given the freedom of any house.
Into the narrow harbor, the Orion came at last, and the captain and first mate could train their spyglasses on the complex of graystone buildings which stood on a lovely hillside overlooking a superb natural harbor, easy to navigate successfully.
The buildings were new, freshly scrubbed, but the mere sight of them was enough to make the prisoners quail as they disembarked and marched down the wharf. Guards armed with rifles and another six holding in leash savage dogs which had been trained to this brutal work, awaited the convicts. Several of these dogs were dingoes, the wild dogs of Australia which resembled wolves, twenty-one inches high at the shoulder, about three-and-a-half feet long and with a tail some fourteen inches. Their reddish or yellowish-brown coats wear special markings to distinguish them from the brindle canines which had been imported from England and which were, on the whole, a far more docile breed of animal. These wolf-dogs were introduced into the Australian continent by the aborigines and they were capable of killing a prey far larger than themselves, even man.
The prisoners shuffled down the gangplank and were received as their names were read off by the first mate, Ned Knowles. Michael Corrigan stared up at the buildings on the hillside, and the man next to him, Terrence O'Grady, originally sentenced to be hanged as a revolutionist for the Irish against the English Tories, muttered to him, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, Michael old fellow. D'you see that little flat house off to the left? That's the lunatic asylum. And on the other end, flanking all those other buildings where we'll be housed, like the gentlemen we are, you'll find the residence of the commandant, Sir Clarence Edmunds. I've heard tell he's a devil. I'faith, I'd rather take my chances with the aborigines if I could only escape this hellhole."
"No talking there, ye scum," the new boatswain grumbled. "They'll take the nonsense out of all of ye up here, and ye can lay to that!"
The men were led away, herded into horse-drawn carts, shackled hand and foot, and the women, among them lovely, mature Evelina Lewis, were unloaded on the dock. She saw the buildings on the hillside and shuddered, thinking of her daughter and wondering even now how Arabella was faring.
As she was helped into another cart by two soldiers, one of whom slyly squeezed one of her titties, the other fumbling a hand up under her skirt to pinch her bottom through the coarse batiste drawers, she looked back at the Orion. At least there had been companionship there in the women's hold, there had been someone to talk to. Here there would be hard labor, brutality, loneliness and doubtless sickness. All she could pray for would be a quick death.
Each convict, male or female, was led into the office of Sir Clarence Edmunds, Commandant of the Penal Colony of Port Arthur. He was a man of fifty-seven, obese, with a double chin, a puffy, sensual mouth, and an elegant wig and waistcoat. He would have seemed more at home at a London ball than here in this God-forsaken spot so many thousands of miles and months of sailing to what these prisoners knew as civilization. An ambitious and brooding man, thwarted in his bid to be named Governor of the Bahamas, Sir Clarence Edmunds detested his post and, still more, the scum of the earth whose duty his was to guard them. Often he had expressed in private the contemptuous wish that he might have a royal edict to hang every man Jack of them, aye, and the bitches too, the worst of the lot, for all their complaining and whining and trying to corrupt his good men by bartering their pussies for a few crumbs of bread or another bite of meat.
His head guard, Burleigh Grimson, a scowling, former pugilist in the London ring (which he had fled a dozen years ago to escape a hanging for having stabbed his manager when he discovered the latter had held back too much of the purse from the fight) stood beside the teak wood desk of the bewigged commandant. Proud of his ability to read and write, the sadistic bully read off the list of the consignees to Port Arthur, their names, their birth place, their ages and sex, the crimes to which they had been sentenced and duly sent here, adding comments on each for the benefit of his commandant. When he reached the name of Velina. he stared greedily at the handsome widow and then muttered to his superior, "Here's a proud jade, Sir Clarence, begging your pardon. I'd have this one given a touch of the cat right off just to gentle her. Thinks she's a lady, the dirty murderess. Lucky for her the whelp she had was left off at Hobart, or we'd really have a pair of troublemakers here."
"Quiet, man." The prison commandant leaned forward and studied the chained widow. "I must warn you, Mrs. Lewis, that although you are a female, here you arc simply a convicted criminal who, by the grace of His Majesty George IV was spared the rope. In return for this, you will be put to hard labor. Can you sew?"
"Weil enough."
"Call him Sir Clarence, you London slut," Burleigh Grimson growled and made a sign to the guard beside the brown-haired widow. He hit her hard enough to draw blood-he at once drew back and held his bayoneted rifle at the ready, muttering, "Just try it, you whore. I'll spit you as I would a Michelmas goose!"
"Enough of that," the commandant snapped. "Now then, Mrs. Lewis, you can sew. Very well, I will put you with the others. You will work from dawn to sundown. You will be fed, you will have a cell, you will be given a chance to wash your filth away and if you are without fault after two weeks here, you will be granted half an hour in the recreation yard. I warn you also that here we do not coddle prisoners, no matter what their sex. There are many faults for which a man or woman prisoner may be taken to the prison yard and flogged by Mr. Grimson here. I warn you to avoid this, for he lays on the cat none too gently."
"That's right enough, Sir Clarence," the head guard boomed with a salacious leer at the woman.
"Take her away, Grimson, and put her in the cell with the murderess Wooliston."
And thus beganEvelina Lewis' first day at Port Arthur. Locked in a narrow cell that had hardly room enough for one person with a timid-looking woman named Mary Wooliston who had struck a bailiff back in Coventry who had tried to evict her blind, ailing mother. The blow had killed him, and as a consequence Mary Wooliston had been sentenced to hang, but royal clemency had intervened and she was serving a life sentence at Port Arthur. But at least she had a Bible, and the two women, because of their common adversities, prayed until there was no more light to read by. And on a narrow bunk, hard and lumpy, Evelina Lewis sobbed herself to sleep, thinking of winsome Arabella.....
Most of the aboriginal tribes in Tasmania were peaceful, but not the Pindiragoos, whose virile, wiry thirty-eight-year-old chief Mandingee hated all white intruders to this land of bush and hills and rivers. He regarded the buildings on the hillside which housed the convicts as infernal statues to horrid and inimical gods, and he had his witch doctor Ordulgu make incantations to destroy them. The dead body of a newt, the head of a puff adder, five dried scorpions and a lizard's tail were dropped into a kettle and simmered for three days and two nights, and then Ordulgu left the kettle unguarded that the great god Mani, Lord of the Spirit World, would drink this potion to his tribute and reward the Pindiragoos by driving forth these hated white invaders.
But the chief lusted for the pale-skinned bodies of those females who had come on the great ship and were guarded by the men in the red coats and with the puffbang sticks on their shoulders.
The stars had told him it was time to take a wife, and he summoned his witch doctor to evoke all the terrible gods of the never-never world, of the earth, of fire and of water, to send a pestilence or a great wind against those graystone buildings and destroy them, that the inmates might escape to the hills and the fertile plains of his tribal lands, where his warriors might seize the white females and bring them to his hut.
A decade ago, he had come upon a thirteen-year-old girl, the daughter of an old sheepherder, seeking a lost lamb and having unwittingly passed into his domain. She had been seized by two of his bravest warriors and brought to his camp, there stripped naked and pegged out on the ground. He had knelt between her straining young thighs, played with her titties and the sprigs of tender blonde pussy hair, and then fucked her viciously. And when she had spat at him, the insult had been so great that instead of cutting off her head and smoking it, drying it and hanging it outside his hut, he had ordered her to be mated with Kurdala, the strongest of the dingoes, the mascot of the tribe, a huge beast, even fiercer than all the other dingoes who roamed the never-never land.
Pegged out again, crouching on all fours, whipped upon her small budding titties with thorn branches wielded by the cackling old women of the tribe, the unfortunate captive was first fucked and then buggered by the hideous wolf-dog.
Then, after Kurdala had been dragged off the half-conscious young girl, the witch doctor poured over her bottom and loins the thick gruel of a potion not unlike the one which had been left to honor Mani. He then pronounced a new and fearsome incantation, and the loveliest virgin of the tribe crouched behind the whimpering captive to cleanse her with a handful of plantains dipped into the clear water of a nearby brook, thus symbolizing her purification for man.
Then four of the strongest warriors lifted the throne-chair of Mandingee and set it down in front of the tethered, kneeling girl. Stripping away his loinpouch, he leaned forward, the fingers of his left hand twisting the girl's tumbled, straw-colored hair and forced her face up towards his massive prick, gesturing with his right hand to make her understand that she must homage him. Seized with a fit of revulsion, the young girl vomited, amid the cries of horror of the watching warriors and women. Mandingee's face twisted in savage rage, and he gestured to the witch doctor to do with this captive what he would.
Ordulgu gave an order, and the whimpering girl was unfastened from the wooden stakes driven into the ground, only to be tied by the thumbs and little toes with strong vines from the durian tree. These four vine-cords were attached to sturdy young saplings planted in a sacred square of the compound, each pair about three feet apart. Thus the helpless young victim found herself spread-eagled like a living hammock, at about waist-level from the grounds. The witch doctor, holding in his left hand the horn of a giant ram, and in his right a twisted stick at one end of which was attached a bone hook, then buggered the unfortunate captive. After him, a dozen more warriors, those particularly praised for valor, emulated him. And finally, the witch doctor thrust the ram's horn into the unfortunate girl's cunt while he drove the pitiless bone hook deep into her bowels. She died soon after.
And now, ten long years after that sacrifice to the gods of the never-never land, Mandingee had once again been told by his trusted witch doctor that if the Pindiragoos were to prosper, he must seek not a bride of his own tribe or that of any other in Tasmania, but rather a white-skinned female who would thus symbolize the usurping devils who had come to enslave all the people of the bush and the mountain. And thus it was that Mandingee planned a daring attack upon the penal colony of Port Arthur itself.....
A few weeks before Evelina Lewis had been locked into her cell with Mary Wooliston, Mandingee had sent one of his bravest young warriors, Keeteringee, on a mission to survey the prison and to determine by what means the abduction of one of those white-skinned female devils might be achieved. While the prison itself was perched on the hillside overlooking the cliffs, there was one stretch of perpendicular rock which seemed to offer an ideal chance for such a daring plan. Perhaps by erosion or even some volcanic upheaval in the ocean thousands of years ago, there was a huge V-shaped crack down the middle for about a hundred feet before the solid, unbroken rock continued for another forty feet to meet the swirling blue water. There was even a tortuous pathway down from the top of the cliff which someone with sure footing could descend. Then, by diving into the ocean, an expert swimmer could easily survive the plunge and be picked up by one of the war canoes.
Keeteringee duly reported this back to his chief and the bold plan was put into execution.
The women prisoners were given half an hour between four and four-thirty every afternoon in the recreation yard. Still shackled, they were able to walk about and allowed to converse. This recreation yard was walled in by a seven-foot-high stone enclosure on all four sides, and to the left and near the hillside, was a stone tower in which two armed guards were stationed. Four guards with muskets and billy clubs thrust through their belts moved along with the prisoners during this brief half hour.
On this final afternoon of the month of January, 1825, a light rain had begun to fall as the women were ushered out into the recreation yard. Some five minutes later, as Evelina Lewis was conversing with her cellmate, there was heard the throbbing of drums on the hill far above the graystone buildings of the penal colony.
The two guards in the tower shouted down to their companions in the yard, "Bush niggers are on the attack, keep close watch on those bitches of yours down there!" One of the guards squinted into the distance, then knelt down and aimed his musket. A moment later he uttered a gurgling cry, straightened with an arrow in his throat and then fell heavily to the floor of the stone tower. His companion fired, and then in the act of reloading, dropped his musket and pitched lifeless over the rail, a spear sticking out of his heart.
Now the hideous whooping of the aborigines filled the air, and there was the sound of musket and pistol fire. Mandingee had sent fifteen of his wiliest warriors in a diversionary attack against the main buildings, including that which quartered Sir Clarence Edmunds. But forty more had hidden themselves behind the dense thickets and the tall grass north of the women's compound, and now Keeteringee and three of his fellows scaled the wall by a crude ladder they had made in the village and brought with them on this foray. The four guards in the yard died without firing a shot as poisoned arrows rained down on them.
Keeteringee, from atop the ladder, passed down a heavy rope made of the strongest vines, and his three aids lowered themselves into the yard. He gestured toward Evelina Lewis, and a grinning young savage wearing only a loin pouch, his face and chest hideously painted, seized the beautiful widow and bore her off towards the rope. Winding it skillfully around her armpits and waist, he gestured and Keeteringee hauled her up to the top of the wall and then carried her down the ladder. Swiftly untying the rope, he secured her wrists and ankles with strips of her own drab prison dress and then nimbly ascended the ladder to direct his men in the abduction of a second captive. Mandingee had promised him two of the loveliest virgins of the tribe as a reward for his success. He found himself hoping against hope that he would be successful.
Then swiftly, after the second woman had been secured and laid beside Evelina Lewis, Keeteringee lowered the rope back down into the yard till each of his three aids had emerged safely. Lifting the two women and putting them over their shoulders like sacks of flour, the two sturdiest warriors hurried on towards the cliff, while Keeteringee and the other warrior fell back on the lookout for any soldiers or guards. Two men hurried out of the main gate, saw the savages, and knelt down to aim their muskets. But a deadly swarm of arrows dropped them in their tracks. Then, with a bellow of joy, Keeteringee hurried down to the cliff.
A heavy war canoe, manned by four strong paddlers, hugged the base of the cliff. Keeteringee and his three men painstakingly made their way down the V-shaped break, two men each holding one of the women captives. When all was ready, Keeteringee made a sign to the aborigines in the war canoe. Then he and one of his men lifted Evelina and then touched the chief's loin pouch with his scepter.
She thought to her self that it would be death now, and closed her eyes and prayed. But hardly had she hit the water and begun to go down when one of the paddlers dived after her. A moment later, she found herself being dragged aboard the canoe, almost unconscious from the shock, not only of the daring abduction, but the impact of the water at such a height.
The other captive was similarly transferred down into the war canoe, and then the aborigines dug their paddles vigorously into the swirling blue water as the sturdy vessel hugged the cliff and disappeared to the south.....
It was nightfall and the rain had stopped, but there was the distant rumble of thunder in the west. In the camp of the Pindiragoos festal preparations for the nuptials of Mandingee were in full sway. The youngest and most comely girls and young women of the tribe had bedecked themselves with cowrie necklaces and painted their bodies purple and green and red, the sacred colors of the great god Mani, Lord of the Never-Never Land. Before the hut of the chief, the witch doctor stood, dressed in the pelt of a dingo, and wearing a headdress of condor feathers. Around his neck were tied the bones of the Tasmanian devil, the antelope and the cassowary. In his right hand was a kind of scepter made of polished bone to which had been sewn the tail of a jackal.
Now he lifted the scepter and a hush fell over the painted, grinning aborigines. Mandingee stepped from the door of his hut, seated himself in his throne-chair, and the witch doctor bowed low and then touched the chief's loinpouch with his scepter, signifying the sacred night of nuptials.
A chorus of wild glee burst from the throng. Then Ordulgu turned to the clearing and waved the scepter thrice. At the very end of the clearing, the warriors made way as four old women approached, forcing the two naked white captives in front of them, their wrists bound behind their backs with vine-cords.
Keeteringee grimaced with jealousy and envy as he watched, standing near his chief. It might well be that Mandingee would demand both women as his rightful prizes. But he knew that each must first be subjected to the test of homage. He coveted Evelina Lewis more than the other, though the latter was younger and in some ways more enticing, both of titties and bottom.
But it was Evelina Lewis whom Mandingee summoned first. The two old matriarchs in charge of her forced her forward and made her kneel before their chief. Again there was a deathly silence, as the witch doctor let the jackal's tail of his scepter brush her titties and then her cunt, and finally move over her face as a kind of purification before the ceremony.
Mandingee tore away his prick pouch and revealed his massive organ, the lips convulsively puckering to proclaim the virile juices within his thick, hairy balls. He gestured to his organ as he stared greedily into the pale, agonized face of Arabella's mother.
There was not a sound from the aborigines as the naked widow, dazed by all that had taken place, fought to comprehend his meaning. But intuition told her that to show revulsion or refuse his will would mean death. Nor would it be a swift death such as she had prayed for aboard the Orion.
She drew a deep breath, closed her eyes and said a prayer that she might be pardoned for shameful cowardice. And then, leaning forward, her trembling lips brushed the glans of Mandingee's turgid cock.
The night was hideous now with the frenzied cries of the rejoicing savages, and the deafening thunder of the bullroarers rose above the turmoil. And then as suddenly the clamor died as Mandingee rose from his throne-chair, lifted his hand to silence his people, and then bent down to lift Evelina Lewis by the armpits and carry her bound and naked into his hut.
Swiftly he cut away the vine-cords around her wrists, using the head of a long spear which leaned against the wall of his royal dwelling. Then with a cry of triumph, he flung her down on his bed, made of three tanned, soft hides of the wild ox. Evelina Lewis closed her eyes and submitted herself. All that saved her from madness was the fleeting thought that perhaps by this sacrifice she might prolong her life and with it the hope of reunion with her beautiful young daughter.
She felt his hot, fetid breath on her face, and then her titties, and she gasped as his teeth nuzzled at each of her nipples in turn. Then his wiry fingers dug into her armpits, and she felt the brutal thrust of his heavy prick against the lips of her cunt. Setting her teeth, she arched herself submissively to him, spreading her thighs to give him access. Then she gasped again as the harsh rasp of his prong seemed to distend the walls of her cunt intolerably. With a bellow of joy, Mandingee thrust himself to the balls, and Evelina Lewis groaned, for it seemed to her that he must tear out her very chink-bone with the savage prober that was spreading apart the most sensitive tissues of her body.
Now, fully planted, and conscious of his conquest of her, the chief of the Pindiragoos began to fuck the naked English widow with a ferocity that left her gasping. And yet, to her own consternation, long-denied sensation began to bubble and seethe in her cunt, and as he drew back and thrust home again, the rasping of his taunted prick-head brushed the nodule of her clitoris. Her head twisted to one side, her eyes wide and questioning and humid. And then with a whimpering cry, she flung her arms around the oily, painted, sinewy body of the chief of the Pindiragoos and began to respond feverishly and almost fearfully. Her bare legs clutched over his bottom, as she dug herself up against him to meet his unyielding, eviscerating lunges. And her own cry of pussy juicing was drowned by his frenzied bellow of rapture as he felt his essence burst into her womb.....
A long hour later, the rejoicing, dancing warriors and women of the Pindiragoo halted their merriment to turn toward the hut of their chief. He appeared framed in the doorway, grinning, his arm around the shoulders of the white devil-captive who, by mating with him, had banished the curse of those who had come to seize this land. Thus he was strengthened and his power over his people redoubled.
He turned to her, his eyes laving her buxom naked body. And then he led her to the throne-chair and made her sit upon it and summoned the witch doctor to hand her the scepter with the jackal's tail.
And thus it was that an English widow who had been sentenced to Tyburn for having slain a vicious master who had made her his bed-bitch and would have done the same with her virginal daughter, began a new life as the queen of the Pindiragoos.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Evelina Lewis was not the only female convict whom the aborigines captured from the prison yard at the Penal Colony of Port Arthur. There was also Grace Brorsley, a buxom, yellow-haired Manchester woman of twenty-eight, who had been sentenced to hang for the crime of trying to feed her two small children, ages three and five.
She was ousted from her situation as a seamstress by a cantankerous and jealous shrew who mistakenly believed that Grace was trying to infatuate her husband away from her.
She therefore found pretext to stop the unfortunate woman's wages several times, knowing full well that Grace depended on every farthing to support her two children. There was a harrowing scene, and Grace Brorsley finally in despair filched several half-crowns which were actually due her.
Her employer called the watch and the unfortunate woman was taken before the magistrate at Old Bailey, and ordered to be hanged. Clemency again had made a commutation of her sentence to life imprisonment in Port Arthur's penal colony.
She was even more buxom than Evelina Lewis, though her skin was sallow from long months in an English prison and then sequestered in the cramped, unventilated quarters of the hold aboard the Orion. Her waist, however, was more slender, and her bottom really sumptuous, two high perched, spaciously round ass-cheeks with a deepening, shadowy groove between them which gave access to her ass-hole and cunt. But she, alas, had an almost pathological fear of dark-skinned people.
And when she found herself in the clutches of the aborigines, she shrieked and twisted and struggled with her captors in her attempts to free herself.
Stripped naked, she was forced to kneel before the chief, who had already taken Evelina Lewis as his mate. But when she saw his monstrously huge, purple-veined prick bob out at her and saw the gross lips pucker and twitch with the furious torrential dam of spunk that organ contained, she fought like a tigress to break away from the two men who forced her down on her knees to do him homage.
Her punishment was inhuman and thoroughly savage. First, suspended by the thumbs by a vine rope tied to the top of a giant banyan tree, she received a switching from all the women of the tribe, who circled her body, gibbering and gesticulating, as they lashed her cunt, inner thighs, her bottom, calves and titties while she writhed and kicked and shrieked in agony.
Throughout the night they thus tortured her, pricking her heels with fir cones, digging pine needles under her toe nails-and into her ass-hole and cunt. She fainted several times only to be revived when several of the warriors dipped their broad metal spearheads into the fire circling the chief's hut in which Evelina Lewis was already being violently fucked by the primitive and cunning savage who ruled this band of never-never men, as they were called.
It was as well for her peace of mind that she did not know what was happening to her unfortunate companion from the Orion. And his virility was such as to make her gush down all her pussy juice and thus gain her own salvation as a queen.
Once the spearheads had been heated, the warriors ran up, circled the unfortunate, naked, pleading woman, pricking her with the red-hot tips of their weapons, or laying the flat against the small of her back or her ankle or the sole of her naked foot.
She fainted again when one of them placed the red-hot metal point right into her left armpit and held it there until they could all smell the sizzling stench of human flesh. But again she was revived.
For now she was to be mated with the Tasmanian devil, a small, ferocious, carnivorous marsupial, with its black coat and white patches, its length of three feet and ten-and-a-half inch tail. Two of the warriors had captured one in a bush trap, gained its friendship by feeding it doves and rats and mice and live fish taken from the creek to the south of the tribal camp.
Binding a strip of cloth round its jaws, and spending infinite time and patience with the marsupial, they had trained it to copulate.
First they had experimented with a young twenty-year-old woman of their own tribe, caught in adultery with an elderly warrior who was on the point of being banished. The man's head had been beaten in with a club made of wood from the baobab tree, but the young faithless wife had been knelt down on all fours, her wrists, knees and ankles bound with vines to heavy wooden pegs hammered into the earth.
And then the hideous marsupial had been brought behind her, while she wrenched with all her might at her bonds and shrieked unendingly for the boon of a merciful death.
The animal's jaws remained tied, but its sharp claws drew bloody weals across her bottom-cheeks as it stood on its hind legs, beating its tail against the ground in a kind of frenzy, its bony red prick-shaft stabbing for the pink grotto of her cunt.
Her terror had made her faint during the fucking, but her punishment was not yet done. At a sign from the chief, the cloth was removed from the marsupial's jaws, and it began to bite her perineum, cunt and ass-hole, while she writhed and shrieked in a mad, insensate frenzy in her torment.
She was left there to be bitten to death by the carnivorous animal, which was then again recaptured and put back into his little cage, fed well for its performance and kept safely for just such another occasion, which was now.
For Grace Brorsley was at last taken down, more dead than alive, from the banyan tree, staked out as that faithless wife had been, and then two grinning young aborigines carried the cage and set it down behind her, carefully opened the door and drew out the animal, crooning to it, petting it, and preparing it by caressing its prick until it emerged in all its bony, red, obscene length.
A howl of triumph and salacious glee rose from the eager savages as the marsupial once again stood erect on its hind legs and dug its prick into Grace's gaping cunt. And when it had finished fucking her, the strip of cloth was drawn away and it began to attack her jutting bottom cheeks, and the tender tissues along the groove which led to her ass-hole, until at last she died amid the yowls and merriment of these primitive people of Tasmania.
It was the first week of February in this new year of 1825. Arabella Lewis had the news by now that her mother was missing from the women's compound in Port Arthur's terrible penal colony.
She prayed that this news might mean that her mother had escaped and might somehow have made her way to the other end of this long peninsula, where perhaps she had been able to find the help of some man who could hire a boat and go on perhaps to Australia and freedom.
But meanwhile her master's wife was on the verge of death, and Sir Marius Cordweigh, having already recognized the spirit and intelligence of the lovely auburn-haired girl whose indenture he had purchased on the auction mart of Hobart, had made her a nurse and companion.
For long hours, until Lady Cordweigh tired, Arabella would sit reading verses from Dryden and Pope, two of her mistress's favorite poets. She would describe the beauty of the day outside, for this emaciated, feeble woman who dreamed of seeing for a last time her native shores of Wales.
And Sir Marius observed many an afternoon, when he silently opened the door and looked in on his wife, the lovely head of Arabella Lewis bowed over a book, hearing her expressive voice, noting in it the compassion and the tenderness of which this young girl was capable.
Governor Arthur Beaseley had been stricken with the black flux this same week, and his physician gloomily shook his head and proclaimed that only Providence could save the Governor of Tasmania from death.
News had come from Government House early this morning that Governor Beaseley was not expected to last through the day. It had been his wish, the courier told Sir Marius, that the latter deign to assume this trying post.
Sir Marius Cordweigh paced his study, pondering this dilemma. If he agreed, and his wife died (as was certain) he would be alone in this forsaken land for which he had little stomach.
True, it had been good to him, but now it was saddened with the thought that his wife had found only unhappiness and lingering death here.
And yet the fawning psychopaths who had surrounded Governor Beaseley had created such corruption in the management of government affairs that he knew it was his duty to assume this thankless post, cleanse the Augean stables and begin a new regime which might bring prosperity to the faithful settlers in Tasmania and perhaps even more hope to the convicts.
He knew only too well the brutality which both men and women incarcerated at Port Arthur had to suffer under the contemptuous aegis of Sir Clarence Edmunds, and he had heard many tales of the head guards' inhumanity and lusts.
There was a soft knock at the door, and he whirled, engrossed in his thoughts and irritated at the interruption. But his face softened when he saw that it was Arabella, dressed demurely in a muslin frock, her beautiful auburn hair falling in a thick sheaf past her shoulder blades, her face saddened and her eyes downcast. "What is it, girl?"
"I-I'm dreadfully sorry, Sir Marius. The doctor has just-your wife-oh I'm sorry!" and suddenly she burst into tears.
And strangely, this man who was surely old enough to be her father and who had become cynical through years in Tasmania after watching the corruption and veniality of those in power, found himself comforting the sobbing young girl, his arms around her, murmuring, "It's for the best, she's at peace at last, Arabella. Come now, don't cry. No one could have been kinder to her than you. I shan't forget it, not ever, Arabella."
Two weeks had passed, Sir Marius Cordweigh's wife had been buried on the little hill near a bed of flowers she herself had grown. And Governor Beaseley too had died and now Sir Marius was acting Governor of Tasmania. He had spent these two weeks in intensive work, driving himself night and day, demanding that all the records of his predecessor be brought before him.
He discharged half of the late governor's staff, ignoring their threats of returning to England and demanding justice before George IV. He had sent for Sir Clarence Edmunds, the prison commandant at Port Arthur to make a model prison where there could be decency and justice and a chance for those who had perhaps been cruelly and unjustly dealt with back in England to rehabilitate themselves, perhaps even gain some kind of parole.
He himself would argue before the king, when next he returned to England two months hence on the very ship, the Orion, which had brought Arabella Lewis to his household.
The aborigines who had attacked the prison and escaped with their two victims had not yet been captured. In his private opinion, the women were dead, and there would be no purpose in ruthless reprisal against the savages. He intended to go before the tribal leader himself and offer a kind of peace by which they could live without fear of attack.
All the other tribes in Tasmania had accepted English rule.
And so that night, nearly at midnight, he returned to his luxurious house and went to his study, his work not yet finished.
Once again there was a soft knock on the door, and he looked up and called, "Come in."
The door opened, and it was Arabella, bringing him a tray of hot milk and little cakes which the cook had made earlier that evening. "You must have some refreshment, Sir Marius," she murmured anxiously, as she put down the tray on the desk. "You've had so little sleep, so little time to rest-"
"I know, Arabella. I've tried to forget her death, you see. And there's so much work to be done. England has forgotten Tasmania, and I can see it all in these records which poor Governor Beaseley kept to his own ruination.
"He could not cure the evils here of the power of the wealthy, those who held high favor and usurped it by exploiting the helpless convicts who arrived. Why, even your own indenture, girl, is unjust. It binds you for life to me, and yet I am certain that you never did any harm, no matter what the courts may have said back in London."
"You're most kind, Sir Marius. But I don't feel the shame I thought I would at being sold there on the auction block. You've treated me like an equal, like a human being, Sir Marius. I shan't ever forget that. I'm proud and privileged to work for you, for as long as you'll have me."
Her cheeks were rosy now with blushes, and she quickly turned away. He felt a throbbing in his prick, the kind of emotion he had not known in many years, for his ailing wife had not given him, still virile and lusty, the pleasure of what can take place between a man and a maid.
"Don't go yet, Arabella, please," he said hoarsely.
She turned, her eyes very wide. "What may I do for you, Sir Marius?"
"Just stay. Be near me, Arabella. How lovely you are. And yet you're so young, but you seem much older. I know that you've been well educated-that, alas, was a harm and hindrance back in London. But here in Tasmania, still so primitive, we've need of women of wit and courage and intelligence. And I have need too. Great need."
She did not answer. She lowered her eyes and her blushes deepened. She felt a strange aura of yearning and of great compassion for this man, so kindly and just, who had not once abused his right over her. He might well have taken her that first night, had her whipped for his own amusement, and yet he had treated her with the utmost respect as if she had been a lady.
"It's very kind of you, Sir Marius," she faltered. "But you should sleep. You're driving yourself to death, and that mustn't happen. The people here need you too much. There are so few men like you anymore."
"Now it's you who are being much too kind. My dear Arabella, I mustn't say this. And I shouldn't, since I'm widowed but two weeks. And yet for many years my wife was only a helpmate to me, nothing more. If
I am to stay here and to be governor, I need someone with youth and strength to help me, to revive my flagging spirit when there are times-as there surely will be-that I am disillusioned. Would you think of that as possible for you, Arabella?"
She uttered a stifled gasp and raised her eyes to him. "But I'm only a convict, Sir Marius."
"That's easily done away with." He went back to his desk, scribbled something, threw down the quill pen and handed her the sheet of paper. She read it, uncomprehendingly at first: "Know all by these presents that I, Sir Marius Cordweigh, acting Governor of Tasmania, have this 26th day of February, in the year of our Lord 1825, manumitted one Arabella Lewis, whose indenture for life is in my possession and whom I admit to freedom and equality with the knowledge that I do not believe her guilty of the crimes for which she was committed to the penal colony." And it was signed with his signature as Governor of Tasmania.
"Sir Marius-oh my goodness-do you mean this-it's too kind of you-and yet you know so little about me-"
"Enough, Arabella, to know that I could not have it otherwise and keep you in this household. I would be much less a man if I used your senseless and unjust bondage to profit from your beauty. I desire, Arabella. Not as a slave, not as a bondservant, not one that I could have whipped or ordered to my bed out of my own whim, but as a man who stands before a young woman and knows himself to be too old for her and not worthy. And yet I do desire you, my darling.
She put her hand to her mouth, her eyes huge with wonder, filming with tears. He came to her and put his hands gently on her shoulders. "If you say no to me, I will understand and I will not be offended.
Good heaven, I am nearly forty-seven and you are but seventeen. There is a generation between us, and yet mine is old and corrupt and needs the fresh infusion of your blood and strength, my Arabella."
"Oh yes, oh yes," she breathed. And then his mouth came down on hers and her arms locked round him, and she pressed her virgin crotch against his swollen prick and her blood was aflame.
She had broken away from him, breathless, blushing, and whispered as she fled, "I'll wait for you, my darling." She had gone to her room, and she had stripped naked, dipping a cloth in a basin of water to lave her body that she might be sweet for him.
And then, blowing out the candle beside her bed, she had clambered upon it and awaited him. And then the door had opened and he had appeared, and he was wiry and vigorous and his prick in fulminating tumescence to prove that the difference in their ages had not dimmed his appetites for such sweet young pussy as she could give him.
"Is it true, that you will take this old broken body of mine and be my wife, Arabella? After a decent period of mourning, you will marry me?" he muttered thickly as he lay on his side towards her, his hands stroking her titties, their lips meeting chastely first.
"Oh yes, yes!" she breathed. Intuitively, her hand crept to find him, to caress his prick, to touch it gently and reverently, for it was the emblem by which she would become a woman, a free woman now and one who would know love and passion.
And then the sickening memory of what Squire Timothy Dengman had done to her that terrible night flashed into her mind, and she was on the verge of telling him that she was not all pure for him. But by then his fingers were tickling her pussy and his lips were at one nipple, sucking and plucking it forth from the aurola, until she moaned and squirmed with ecstasy.
And then he was between her thighs, and they were widening of their own accord to receive him, and his prick was pressing between the soft pink lips of her virgin cunt hole, up against the barrier, and then, as his fingers vigorously gripped her shoulders and his mouth sealed hers, she felt herself shattered and made a woman.
He was gentle and considerate with her, and he did not selfishly press his advantage. He murmured to her, telling her of his love for her, his hopes and plans for the land that the two of them would govern together. And then his hands again were on her titties, under her bottom squeezing and caressing, while he began to slowly move in and out lest he do her hurt.
The tides of her being began to rise and flow towards him, and she began to buck and arch and squirm, as her mouth fused to his, as her fingernails dug into his shoulder blades, as she urged him on to the sweet conquest of her eager cunt.
His body pressed down hard upon hers, all the while keeping his mouth on hers, also. Their lips were melting together as Arabella rotated her body faster and faster, feeling the swell of desire and arousal build to a high pitch inside of her.
She threw her head back in a wave of excitement, crying, "Oh, my love, my love! You make me feel so wonderful!"
Sir Marius Cordweigh held the young girl tightly, feeling the energy from her body flow into his as his prick throbbed heavily inside the virgin pussy. His balls had filled with cream and were ready to burst. He held tightly onto Arabella's shoulders, trembling and panting.
"Arabella," he whispered into her ear. "Arabella." It was all he could say, for the next moment the heated come came rushing from his body into hers, wad after wad filling the small spaces of her pussy.
"Oh, Marius!" Arabella cried, bucking under the pressure of the come, and experiencing her own orgasm.
The pair held onto one another strongly, and pressed their groins together as their climaxes burned through their bodies. Only afterwards could they relax together, panting to regain their breaths, and lying together in post-climactic ecstasy.
"Oh, Marius," sighed Arabella, "that was so wonderful. I've never experienced anything as beautiful as that."
"I'm so glad you enjoyed it, my darling Arabella. I, too, was thrilled to find out that it could be such a good thing between us. It allayed my fears that you were too young, or I too old."
"Nothing could be better than what we had, Marius, I know that now. You made all the horrible things from my past seem so insignificant, for, although I was afraid at first, they all melted away as soon as you began to love me."
"I am so happy, Arabella. You don't know what this means to me."
"I know it means happiness for us both, Marius, and I don't ever want it to stop."
"It never will stop, my dear Arabella, my beautiful young woman. It never will stop."
At this point, Marius Cordweigh began kissing the young woman's face again, touching the soft white skin with his warm, loving lips, nibbling at the flesh with his teeth.
"Oh, that feels so good, Marius."
He kept kissing her, pressing his mouth against her face, and then her neck, filled with delicate little hollows of her bone structure. Arabella sighed and lay back, enjoying the pressure of her lover's mouth on her skin.
She moved slightly under him, and then encircled his back with her arms, lightly caressing the muscular structure of his body, and letting him know that she was enjoying his own movements.
He moved his head down her neck to her breasts, and began kissing them also, loving the feel of the hard, red nipples against his cheeks.
He held Arabella in his arms, then, and rolled over on his back, the young woman on top of him. Arabella needed no encouragement to mount herself over Marius Cordweigh so that she faced his body with her own.
Her hands were by his waist, to balance herself, and she rubbed her groin against her lover's. His prick rose up, strong and sure, and she let it go in, once again, between her legs. She began a slow, seductive movement up and down on his hard cock, and he trembled as she did so, circling her moving body with his arms and holding her close to him.
Arabella moved faster and faster, finally going at great speed. Marius tried to hold back a bit, but the feeling of his new, young love on top of him was too much. He felt the happy explosions coming and gave her a hot blast of juice that made her shout with pleasure.
"Oh, fuck me, darling," she cried. "Fuck me, fuck me!"
Marius kept his body going long after she had received his sperm, until Arabella finally began to calm down enough to stop. She rolled off of him and moved her face down his body to his prick, where she sucked off the cream from his hot tool, and licked it dean.
With the come still in her mouth, she moved up to Marius' head, and kissed him, letting his tongue explore her come-filled mouth.
Then she straddled his body, kneeling over his chest area. She held her breasts in her hands, and they dangled low beneath her lovely body. She took his cock in her hands and placed it between her breasts, which almost entirely obscured it from his view.
The sensation for him was unique. It almost felt as though his prick was plunging into her pussy, and yet, it was so different. Arabella rolled his flesh back and forth between her mounds, squeezing it in earnest, as she tried to bring it to life once more.
She maintained a firm pressure on the pulsating cock, which was already issuing a few premature drops of fluid. She increased her speed, and so her pressure, until Marius felt that it was only a question of time until he came. And it wasn't more than a minute later that he did, great quantities of cream spurting up into Arabella's soft, fleshy breasts.
She raised them to her lips and got off most of the sticky white fluid, and then she turned around and kissed him, letting their tongues intermingle in the hot fluid.
They lay together for a while, then, sleeping on and off, until both felt their desires rise within them again.
Marius rolled over onto Arabella, and whispered in her ear, "Darling, I love you so much."
Arabella let her arms go around his body, and pulled him tightly down onto her own desirous body, telling him that she loved him, too.
Marius felt his cock revving itself up once more, and he straddled her with his legs, letting his prick touch the edge of her cunt.
"Now, Marius, now!" cried Arabella softly, wanting him passionately and not hesitating to tell him so.
Marius let his organ slide once more into the young woman's body and a smile of satisfaction came over her as she felt him deep inside.
Marius pulled himself almost out of the young woman, and then plunged himself back in just as far as he could, loving how Arabella groaned in pleased pain. His stomach pressed hard against her crotch, as he made minute motions of his hips to move his cock in and out a tiny bit at a time from its position deep inside her.
He felt that he could do this forever. It was only that he felt the inevitable climax coming soon. He pushed himself down hard on his lover beneath him, and felt her hips thrust up to his, as they moved together in the rhythm of their love and passion.
"Yes, Marius, yes!" cried out Arabella, throwing her head back as he plunged into her.
A moment later, it happened, and Marius gasped with pleasure as he gave an extra firm plunge deep inside her, and shot load after load of cream into the pussy that had taken so much already. She responded by wrapping her legs around him and thrashing wildly, just as excited as he was.
They lay quietly in one another's arms, recovering from the wild climax they had had simultaneously.
"Arabella," whispered Marius Cordweigh, "you see, I was right. Every time it will be just as good. It can never be bad between us."
"I know you are right, my dearest Marius, and I only want to remain with you forever to serve you well and to take care of you for the rest of my life."
"No, Arabella," answered the governor of Tasmania, who had just freed this girl from bondage. "I do not want you to be my slave. I want you to be my wife, my equal, my love."
"Oh, yes," answered Arabella. "I wish to become your wife!"
"We will be married soon, Arabella," spoke out Marius.
"And then we can be together always, my darling," said the worldly-wise girl-woman who had gone through so many years of torture and pain.
"Yes," replied her lover. "We will always be together."
Arabella smiled and rubbed Marius' back with the palms of her hands. They rolled over on the bed together, and Arabella climbed up on top of Marius, leaning down over his trunk.
She put her head over his prick as she got into a sitting position, facing him. She held the tool lightly between her fingers, and then licked it from base to end, flicking her tongue over and around the end, touching him with just the right amount of pressure to arouse him. Then she opened her mouth wide, and licked her lips with her tongue.
She then slowly took his hard penis in her lips, gradually working them down over its tip, clamping and unclamping them as she loosened and tightened her pressure. Then Arabella moved smoothly down the cock until all but an inch of it was buried in her mouth. Marius moved his hips underneath her, thrilled by what she was doing.
Working back and forth to the same position, Arabella alternately bobbed her head up and down over the large cock. Marius felt as though his rod was swelling to a never-before-reached size, and the feeling of having it sucked was so luxurious, he could hardly bear it.
"Keep doing that, Arabella," he cried out to her in the midst of his panting. "It feels so good!"
He pushed his hips up towards her mouth insistently until the orgasm came, a monumental gushing of come into Arabella's waiting throat. She swallowed it all down, several gulps at a time.
Sir Marius Cordweigh could hardly contain the ecstasy he felt at such treatment. He held his young love in his arms and pressed her closely to him.
"We will be married tomorrow," he whispered to her.
"Yes, darling," sighed Arabella, "that will be wonderful, absolutely wonderful."
"It will be the happiest day of my life," said the governor of Tasmania.
"And of mine, darling," whispered Arabella.
"We'll be able to build a new life together. You can forget your past."
"No, Marius," sighed Arabella, "I can never forget my past. It was too filled with horror and pain. It will remain with me always, I am afraid."
"No, my love! Don't talk this way!" cried Marius Cordweigh. "How can you hope to build a new life if you feel you must remember all the horror of the past?"
"Marius," spoke Arabella softly, "You are not quite understanding me. I am not saying that I must constantly think about the horrors of my bondage, but I cannot, will not, ever forget the horrible things that were done to me and to my mother. How is it possible to forget all of these terrible things that have been so much a part of my life?"
"Yes, Arabella," spoke the man, "I understand now that these things will remain with you always. But we will have a life that will help you to erase the things from your mind, so that all the good we will build together will take precedence."
"Marius, you are so good to me," said Arabella. "How can I ever thank you for freeing me, and for asking me to be your wife? It is almost too good to be true."
"I know, Arabella, and that is why we must treasure every moment together. Why, you are young! And we will be able to have so many fine times with one another! I don't ask for thanks from you. I did not free you so that you could serve me. I freed you because I believe in you, and love you dearly."
"And I love you, Marius," said Arabella.
They embraced once more, then fell asleep.
In the morning, they went to the home of the judge, and were married in a simple ceremony. Then they came to their home, and had a wedding breakfast together. Both were smiling brightly, and could barely speak for all their joy.
They decided to take a nap after breakfast, and crawled together into Sir Marius Cordweigh's large bed, after quickly removing all their clothing. Their bodies were eager and warm, and they fell into one another's arms immediately.
"Oh, love me," cried Arabella to her new husband. "Love me now, my darling Marius!"
The new husband held Arabella in his arms and kissed her passionately. His tongue moved into her mouth and sought out the wetness of the dark orifice. He pressed her lips apart with his own and bit at the soft flesh that offered itself up to him. Then he moved down to Arabella's neck and buried his face in all the warm hollows there. It was too much for him. He had never imagined this kind of happiness, and he could barely handle it.
He stuffed his nose in between Arabella's firm breasts and felt the warm flesh surround him. He was in ecstasy, and moved down on Arabella's belly, kissing the heat and the softness, and nibbling at the squirming body.
"Oh, yes, my darling!" whispered Arabella. "Yes, yes, love me, love me!"
"I do love you, my darling," said Marius as he kept kissing the young white flesh. "And I will love you now."
He moved his head down to the mass of hair that covered her newly-deflowered pussy, and buried his nose in it, so that his lips touched her clitoris, so susceptible to arousing reactions.
Arabella squirmed and spread her thighs underneath her lover, and encircled his head with her hands so she could pull his head deeper into her wet womb.
"Oh, yes, my darling, this is what I want!" she cried. "Deeper, deeper, my darling, my love!"
Deeper and deeper Marius went, too, letting his tongue slide into the canals of Arabella's vagina and press against the wetness deep inside her. She squeezed her muscles against his probing tongue, and her excitement grew. Her hips began circling in a slow rhythm, and her legs spread out as far as they could go-
Marius took her hips in his hands and felt them sway beneath his touch. The erotic rhythm drove him wild, and he began to sway his head with it, pulling on Arabella's hips as he did so.
Faster and faster he butted his head up and down, plugging his tongue into the eager, gaping cunt. Faster and faster Arabella's hips circled, pounding against the face of her lover until her orgasm wracked her body, and she oozed white cream onto Marius' tongue.
Marius rolled on top of his loving wife again, and pressed her body close to his own. It was so good, so good, for them to be together this way. Nothing could every separate them. Nothing.
Arabella pulled him down onto her body until their groins met. She rubbed herself against him, hard, until his prick rose to meet her crotch.
"Oh, darling, I want you inside me, now and always," said Arabella, spreading her thighs apart and inviting her new husband inside.
"Yes, my darling," whispered Marius. "I want to be with you always, to be able to share our bodies this way forever and ever, and to be separate never."
"Then come inside me now, my darling Marius," sighed Arabella, pressing her hands against his ass. "Come inside me now, and throb inside me, and press me until I die in ecstasy!"
"I'll come inside you now, my darling," said Marius, "and I may never come out again!"
His prick touched the edge of her vagina, and sank gently into the hole that lay open for him.
"Mmmmm," moaned Arabella. "Hold me closely, my darling. Come inside me all the way."
Marius let his prick sink down into Arabella's belly all the way, fully, up to his balls.
"Yes, darling," the wife whispered. "That's how I love it. All the way in, my darling, all the way in."
Up and down they moved together, with a rhythm that grew faster and faster. Their hips swirled together in a rhythm of love, of passion, of arousal.
Arabella seemed to swing her body underneath her husband's, for she was so graceful, so eager, so loving. Her passion aroused him to an even greater extent, and he pushed his hips down hard on hers, feeling the length and thickness of his prick throbbing inside the womanly body beneath him.
"Can anything else in the world possibly be this wonderful, darling?" Arabella looked up at her new husband and searched his eyes for an answer.
"No, my darling," he told her. "Nothing is as wonderful as the two of us, together, always."
"Oh, promise me, my love, that we will always be this happy!"
"Arabella, Arabella," moaned Marius, in the midst of his passion, "I promise you, yes, that we will always be this happy. Nothing could ever destroy what we have between us."
They held one another tightly in their passion. Their legs were dripping with the sweat that poured from their rapidly moving bodies. The sweat seemed to melt the flesh together, and they became one in movement.
Arabella rubbed her hands frantically against her husband's back. Up and down, up and down, across the wide expanse of flesh. She felt the heat building inside of her, and she knew she would soon feel the thrashing joy of her orgasm surrounding and circulating through her body.
Her husband, too, knew the time was coming.
"Oh, my dear, dear wife," he panted out, kissing her lips passionately. "Hold me tightly, my dear, the time is near!"
He felt his balls harden and slap against the young woman's thighs. Down he pushed, harder and harder. Finally the blast came, filling the cunt beneath with gush after gush of juice. Love juice. Joy juice.
Without a doubt, their love would bind them. Nothing could keep them apart now.
Nothing in this world!
* * *
It was only two weeks after this betrothal that Governor Sir Marius Cordweigh issued an order to Sir Clarence Edmunds to deliver the prisoner Michael Corrigan before him, and another order was sent to the home of Mrs. Dougherty to render back to him her indentured bondservant Colleen Corrigan.
Sir Marius Cordweigh had himself examined the dossier concerning the young couple, and by authority of his own station, pardoned them and declared them free citizens of Tasmania.
If they would remain and help him build this land as a part of the great Commonwealth, he would give them a house and land and be godfather to their children.
Colleen and Michael willingly agreed, and within a week, in their new little house on a lovely hillside overlooking the harbor which had once spelled agony and despair to them both, lay in each other's arms fucking ecstatically and praying that their passionate efforts would be rewarded with a child which this time would not die but become the living proof of their unswerving love for each other.
Lady 'Arabella Cordweigh met her mother two months after her wedding, when the beautiful Evelina Lewis, now the first wife of the aboriginal chief of the Pindiragoos, visited her in the company of her proud husband and his chief aide, Keeteringee.
She too was offered freedom, but the brown-haired widow smiled and shook her head: "No, my darling Bella. I have found my lot here now. I have a husband, and I am with child by him-yes, don't look so surprised, my dear Bella. I'm not yet forty, I'll have you know. And he's a virile man. I only hope that your own sweet belly begins to swell quickly, for you've a wonderful man, the best in all Tasmania. Oh we shall see you again, and I shall bring you my child.
May you be blessed always, my daughter."
And thus it was that out of all the injustice and the brutality which the victims consigned to H.M.S. Orion found here in this penal colony at the other end of the world, there was at last a proof that there can be compassion and humanity between men and women of good will when they are brought together in the bonds of ardent fucking which knows neither race nor creed or prejudice.
