Increasingly informed study is being given 19th century aphrodisiac literature. From the pioneering-mass publication of My Secret Life through Richard Manton's The Victorian Imagination: A Sampler, Grove Press has enabled the general public to reform stereotyped opinions of the supposedly staid, repressed century that knew Victoria as queen.
Attention has focused on material published in Britain and produced on the Continent for an English-reading audience. Yet, there is a domestic American tradition well worthy of exploration.
Even casual scholars know Benjamin Franklin's authorship of the lickerish "Advice to a Young Man on Choosing a Mistress." Less discussed is the Founding Father's "The Speech of Polly Baker". An unmarried mother of five roundly defends illegitimacy as a means of populating New England. She concludes her oration to a court threatening her with the lash: "I have hazarded the loss of the public esteem and have frequently endured public disgrace and punishment; and therefore ought, in my humble opinion, instead of a whipping to have a statue erected in my memory."
Her eloquence so carries the day, she marries one of the magistrates to produce fifteen more offspring for New England's rocky shores.
This merry defense of lubricity found print in 1747 in London's Gentleman's Magazine. Domestically, it circulated only privately among acquaintances, as did the rest of Dr. Franklin's libidinal writings.
In 1821 Commonwealth vs. Holmes first prosecuted an American publisher for giving print to John Cleland's venerable Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The resulting conviction banned Fanny Hill from Boston. A general obscenity statute was formulated in 1836, on the heels of similar legislation in Vermont and Connecticut.
Its eyes on more pressing matters, Congress did not render the mailing of erotic publications criminal until the close of the War Between the States. Then civil war unleased itself in true upon sellers and publishers engaged in the aphrodisiac literature trade.
One Anthony Comstock found himself distressed that a friend had been "led astray and corrupted and diseased." He held a book dealer responsible and mousetrapped Charles Conroy into selling him an erotic work. Comstock had him prosecuted under New York's fresh 1868 anti-pornography statute.
"This cursed business of obscene literature," Comstock wrote, "breeds lust. Lust defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul. It unnerves the arm, and steals away the elastic step. . .
"This traffic has made rakes and libertines in society . . . each generation born into the world is more and more cursed by the inherited weakness, the harvest of the seedsowing of the Evil one."
Comstock united efforts with the Y.M.C.A. in forming a Committee for the Suppression of Vice. He drafted the federal Comstock Act, passed in 1873. He became Special Agent of the Post Office, charged with vigorously suppressing traffic in erotic, obscene, and contraceptive literature and materials.
In January, 1874, the Y.M.C.A. issued a "Private and Confidential" report boasting how Comstock had seized and destroyed 134,000 pounds "of books of improper character," 194,000 separate lewd pictures, 14,200 pounds of stereotype plates, and 5500 provocative playing cards.
In 1879, an assistant district attorney addressed his jury: "Now, gentlemen, this case is not entitled 'Anthony Comstock against D. M. Bennett'; this case is not entitled 'The Society for the Suppression of Vice against D. M. Bennett.' ... It is the United States against D. M. Bennett, and the United States is one great society for the suppression of vice."
Comstock died in 1915, proud of having convicted some 400 individuals and of having sent ahead of him no less than fifteen suicides, one of a publisher merely accused of the erotic trade.
His spirit survived him. As late as the 1930's, Fox Movietone News turned its camera on a conflagration of printed matter. "Book burning!" Intoned Lowell Thomas, "A subject much in the news lately. But these books deserve to be burned. . . ."
As mass rallies of Storm Troopers incinerated the writings of Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud in the Third Reich, American officials quietly and efficiently sent to ashes such threats to the nation as Henry Reed Stiles' 1871 treatise, Bundling, Its Origin, Progress, and Decline in America.
Small wonder little 19th century American erotica survives for study.
Scholars are even unaware of the bounty lost to them. Alfred Rose's 5061-item Register of Erotic Books cites twenty-nine separate editions of Cleland's Fanny Hill in English, French, German and Dutch. The 1936 pioneering listing makes no mention of Stiles' classic exploration of all-American bundling.
Rose does show two separate American editions of The Memoirs of Dolly Morton, the flagellation chef d'oeuvre written by Hugues Rebell for Charles Carrington and first published from 13 Faubourg Montmartre in Paris in 1899. Dr. Franklin's Philadelphia saw the Society of Private Bibliophiles issued its octavo Dolly Morton "For Private Subscribers only" in 1904. A second edition, from newly set type, appeared in 1910, "Strictly limited issue for private subscribers only." Rose coyly notes, "Many reprints."
The Society was no lone outburst of earnality. Thomas Beer celebrated the 19th century's final years in The Mauve Decade. While written and graven aphrodisia might be fuel for Comstock's fires, New York paid its court to "Anna Held, a girl of Polish origin whose carved shoulders and narcotic eyes informed schoolboys and their fathers nightly what a French courtesan would be like if she were facially able." The famed Held milk bath, invention of her entrepreneur Florenz Ziegfeld, mingled grooming and sensual luxury in the minds of millions.
Out in the prairies, Beer cites the youthful surgeon seeking refuge from the night in northern Kansas. "He turned into a farmhouse and found himself charged two dollars for admission to a dance of young farmers and blowzy girls, the maidservants of the region. These dances were events of Sunday night, an aftermath of the day's propriety and a respite from all costume ..."
Into this atmosphere leaped : A West Indies Rhapsody on Traditional Airs for Plucked and Struck Instruments. The Society of Private Bibliphiles' press issued at least one printing in 1897. Subsequent editions may be assumed, but have not been confirmed.
No copy of any edition may be found in the British Museum's famed but disorderly Private Case. The Kinsey Institute and the Kronhausen collection remain both bare of any copy. The University of Kansas Library holds not even this, the 1897 text.
It may be that the privately owned original copy of the book you hold is the sole example of this American aphrodisiac novel to escape the book-burners' torches and the other ravages known to time.
The student of erotic literature may only marvel at how thin is the thread linking us to the private tastes, desires, and psychological life of our immediate ancestors in America's Victorian Age.
-San Francisco, 1985
* * *
PRELUDE
Aboard The Lady Dolores, May 12, 1887
Dearest Tibbs,
As I write you, our ship approaches the impossibly green island of Mardi Blanc. Our Massachusetts greenery may appear abundantly fresh after the bare, quite whites and greys of winter. You cannot know green, though, until you see the perpetual verdance of these West Indies Isles, under their eternally summer sky, set in a sea too blue for description.
The Caribbean waters have such clarity we can see the sands beneath us, and the crusted bones of long-dead ships as we glide into each harbor. Yet, the surface spreads from horizon to horizon with a carpet of color too bright and pure for any sapphire.
How this strange, brilliant sea nestles in a crook of our great, green, familiar Atlantic, I do not know.
In Jamaica we saw the broken relics of old Port Royal. Can you forget our pirate book? Our years corsairing the Spanish Main under the Jolly Roger with Nell and Willow? I have now seen Henry Morgan's lair-or what remains. Our wild imaginings of the last, great cataclysm which tumbled the buccaneer stronghold never held anything so sad, so mysterious.
There we transferred from the great steamer to a lesser one which plies the route down the Antilles chain to the Guianas. We debarked from that at Basse Terre. I am told I must say French Basse Terre or English Basseterre, for there are two, which differ on paper more clearly than in speech.
This was, properly, Basse Terre of Guadeloupe, where we boarded The Lady Dolores. I am told I must say ship since this slender two-masted vessel carries its own long boat on the cabin roof. You and I have seen fishermen and yachtsmen set sail in grander craft and still proudly call them boats.
We have lazed our way down the islands, delivering our goods and receiving cargoes, until now Mardi Blanc's green mountains stand like a promised land on the horizon. I cannot yet see the buildings of the capital town, St. Louis le Prophete.
As in French Canada, this land was settled by one nation and has become the dominion of another. Do you recall our friend from Demopolis, Therese de Lorsange? While her Bonapartist exile grandparents settled in Alabama, others of Napoleon's scattered partisans came to Mardi Blanc, an island still under French rule.
In sympathy with the great upheavals of '48, the people declared their independence. They refused the rule of the man they called "the shopkeeper's Emperor" and wisely fled to the protection of England. The Empire holds Mardi Blanc as a dominion. Thus, a British garrison protects the island, while its governor remains elected by a proper legislative body, not appointed by the distant queen.
It soothes my Yankee spirit to know I shall still live in a small republic, like our own dear Commonwealth, though the imperial flag may still wave.
David quite looks forward to his new post. You will know Charles Rogers from our wedding as David's witness. He and other propertied men have conspired to bring David to the island with the scheme of providing further education for those young scholars not able to take schooling in England.
They have learned the familiar rudiments already in the island's school house. They will receive their classics, literature, higher mathematics, history, and Greek and Latin from David. This seems exceedingly generous of Mr. Rogers, for he has no children of his own.
As I told you, the two of them met at university in England and roamed Europe and the Mediterranean together. David lived a while in Mardi Blanc, before his father's illness. I suspect Mr. Rogers conceived the idea of bringing a tutor to the island to have David by him. The ample terms exceed the number of pupils expected.
We shall have a house of our own, with two servants. I shall be true mistress of my day, for David's instruction will be given at the estate of Sir Polkinghorn Bisque-Hardy. I am told I must add Ban. to distinguish the worthy gentleman from a mere knight.
The good baronet has chosen rural retirement to the island with his new wife. David tells me she is of our age. Would you accuse me of a shameful snobbery if I hope we shall become friends? Doubtless. Well, she is Irish. Her brogue will remind me of those idyllic summers with your Beacon Hill cousins, exploring the vast treasures of Boston.
The favored students chosen for further education will gather six days of the week to learn the mysteries of classical civilization and higher learning.
And they are to be of both sexes!
These West Indies planters feel that if England chooses to deny its academies to young women of able minds, that is England's shame, and it shall not continue on Mardi Blanc.
So! We bring a new era of enlightenment to so beautiful and remote a place. I must now seal this to send along with the captain. I can see some low, dazzlingly white structure, and several darker buildings. I shall soon be setting foot on my new home.
Ever my love, Dolly
* * *
1
Theme
"I regret to say, I really don't care to be corrected by a boy!" Resentment crackled in Magenta Bisque-Hardy's voice. The young woman's fingers gnarled her Flanders lace kerchief.
She blinked against the sun, which flooded her stepmother's parlour windows. Lady Bisque-Hardy sat against the light, a dark goddess awash in gold.
"Nonsense." The Irishwoman informed her definitely. "I haven't heard your complaints when you've been asked to cane or strap my nephews. If that experience will stand you in good stead when you've your own family, so will the other."
"They-they went to those schools."
"Foul pits, where the gentry ragged them pitilessly for being fresh and Irish and not born to the manor house. Your father wisely decided to leave the heathen wastes of England; we'll educate the lads here, till they're ready for university."
She sighed. "Besides, they've had no experience disciplining girls. Syndon has had all the wrong experience with young flibbetygibbets, and none with any discipline. It's good for him to submit to your authority, you being little older than he. It's also important for him to learn the responsibilities of chastisement."
Magenta's face raised murderously against the streaming sun. "Then, why do you not let him cane you?"
"That is your third insolence this week." Her stepmother reached for a fat ledger on a low parson's table. She found a page, drew a pen from one of three inkwells, and scribbed briefly. "Further repetitions of that fault will require eight, not five, for each demerit awarded. The coding?"
The young woman closed her eyes. She felt her pulse leap in her throat. "For eight, a red tick mark. For five, a black."
"Signifying?" "Cuts with ..." She swallowed, willing herself to breathe, "with a birch rod." After a waiting silence she added, "On the bared buttocks."
"Friday's weekly summing up will be quite an ordeal for you. I suggest you bridle your rebel's spirit. No girl's good without fire in her veins, but one must temper ardor with judgement. You might save your exclamations for the day when I decide Auberon should practice the whipping art on your bottom."
Her mouth fell, shocked. Beastly Syndon was a boyish seventeen, two full years younger than she was- Auberon was younger yet, a mere child!
"Come now," Lady Bisque-Hardy coaxed. "Surely you can look about you and see that a young woman well into her twenties benefits from corporal pain every bit as much as a girl. I'm sure you'll learn that much, in the years we have ahead."
Magenta stared bleakly. "Years . . . shall I never return to England?"
"London, all Britain and the Isles, and the Continent besides are quite unsuitable for living, these days. Even that quiet countryside I grew up in has become a devilish sewer for any young person. Your father wisely chose this fresh, clean land . . ."
"The French have held this place since the days of ocean explorations," she retorted sullenly. "They fled their defeat by Wellington and hoarded the trash of their Revolution here, worshiping butcher's ideals."
"The schoolroom is the place for historical debate."
Another pen quivered over the ledger's nearly full page. "While I cannot call that Insolence, I believe it constitutes an Obstinant Impertinence. Meaning?"
"An extra ration is added to Simple Impertinence," Magenta murmured.
"The coding?"
Her light-blinded eyes lowered further. "A double yellow cross." "Signifying?"
"Six applications of the tawse, taken lengthwise across either buttock." She pressed her lip against her teeth and caught her breath. "Clothed or unclothed. At option."
"So." A dip of ink and a double yellow cross appeared on the tally beneath Magenta Bisque-Hardy.
"Excuse me, Mrs. Hunter." The primly capped and aproned maid curtseyed. "I've finished dusting Mr. Hunter's library. I believe it's time for my whipping, ma'am."
Her large brown eyes danced from her mistress to the lady perched on a stool, and back. Here she had faithfully tidied the kitchen, even scrubbing the tiny iron stove, and Mrs. Hunter was messing it again, fussing with flour and things, as if the afternoon wasn't already warm enough. Soon there'd be baking, and smells, and flies . . .
"Very prompt of you, Yolanda." Dolly Hunter finished rolling out the wafer-thin brown dough. Perhaps Madame Sandemarche can oblige you.
"I'm so sorry, Aurore," she glanced apologetically at her friend. "I promised Yolanda a skipping for being late with David's tray this morning. He hates to set a poor example for his students, but I'm afraid he had a tardy start to the Bisque-Hardy's."
"And now you're running late with your pie." The guest's angularly boned face and a deep black coloration. Her voice sang of Martinique origins. "Tschou! Why didn't you attend to it after breakfast?"
"The pie needs some time to soak up the Calvados, but not-"
"The punishment, silly thing."
"Oh. David thought some time with the crab would be educational for her."
"Indeed?" Aurore Sandemarche eyed the sturdily fleshed, whey-skinned domestic. "What allowance had you figured on?"
"A simple six, because of the crab, but low."
"Not on the shoulders, then?"
"Of course not. What a cruel thought." Dolly shuddered. "Where a woman's built to take it, naturally."
"You might be quite surprised to discover where woman has been able to take it-not without discomfort, surely, but certainly without undue harm." The ebony matron studied the maid. "Your apron, girl."
Quick fingers untied the sash and slipped it off. Yolanda neatly folded the checked cloth, holding it expectantly. A light skirt and white shirtwaist remained.
"That, also, modest creature."
The powerful dark finger pointed high. The girl blinked. Careful to make no mistake, she undid her linen shirtwaist. She peeled it from her arms, exposing two standing, gourd-heavy breasts. Nipples rose from shilling-sized dark pink halos.
"Does your husband give his trade to Willoughby and Pratt?"
"I believe so."
"You might consider Goodenough & Son, Ltd. 'Goodenough for Milady. Corporal Regimen Our Specialty. We Work To Custom Measurements. No Demand Too Severe. Saddler's Grove, Threshingham, Wessex.' They put their notice regularly in the Overseas Monthly Gazette. " Aurore Sandemarche's finger stretched forward. The nail set a bright, ripe teat juddering.
"Goodenough manufacturers a domestic-grade Bubbyblub. Willow, split down the length into four whisks. Very finely finished and varnished. They can't sliver and cut, like bamboo, unless applied over-zealousy. The stick doesn't leave scars-quite. Merely tender memories."
Dolly suppressed a smile. "In Massachusetts I had a playfellow we called Willow, and she stayed thin and pliable, too. I'm afraid your titty-whisker would be ineffectual on her."
"No, Willoughby-Pratt offers the Titty-Whisk." The black woman frowned expressively. "A penal-caliber thing with braided copper wire. Suitable for hardened prison sluts, but not for household use, I think."
Her look fastened on Yolanda's soft, expectant eyes. "Perhaps I am wrong . . . Now, a two-fingered tawse, applied so."
"I think a caning will be sufficient, Aurore, I really do. On the orthodox bottom, if you please. Unless you'd rather try your hand with the pie while I-"
"Baking is not my specialty, though I wish I had your talent for it."
"Merely use chicken fat rather than lard and it all comes out." Dolly had her crust nicely patted into place in the tin. She began to position thick slices of apple.
"I shall, perhaps, stick to my own last. Fetch the orthodox stick for your orthodox rump, girl."
"Excuse me." Yolanda held her apron and shirtwaist. "Which one, madame?"
The black woman raised an eyebrow at her hostess.
"The thirty-inch, I think, will do." Dolly deftly arranged her slices. She reached for a heavy green bottle and began to souse the pie filling copiously. "The flavor soaks into the fruit if I let it stand for a few hours before baking."
"Your pie or her bottom? Show us this famous crab, girl."
The pale maid began to unhook her skirt. "Ruck it up, if you please."
Yolanda paused. Very carefully, very stiffly, she bent till her fingers grasped her hem. Her mouth trembled. She rolled her thin skirt with schoolgirlish care until her bare loins became vividly evident. Her hands patted and tucked the furled cloth around her waist. She turned, spreading her legs and bracing her palms on her knees.
"I surely must be growing simple. I thought that mincing gait as she led me from the door was the result of some prior hide-straightening." Madame San-demarche looked closer.
A silvery shape flashed at the base of the girl's commendable, rock-firm buttocks.
"Seven inches up the love-gap," Dolly giggled slyly. "I dare imagine she's been spending all day." She carefully placed the top crust dough over the aromatic pie filling. Trimming, she crimped the edges with the knife back.
"Paying for it, too, I daren't wonder." The visitor studied the device attentively. The crab stared upward, as if crawling from the girl's crutch.
Sawtoothed grippers on the front legs clawed firmly into each meaty gluteus overhang. A generous half-inch of pinched flesh swelled dramatically between the spring-loaded pincers.
The gleaming back legs radiated rigidly underneath, silver points jabbing the thighs' skin framing the vulva's purse. The maid kept her legs wide, accounting for her rolling carriage; yet, the points had plainly worked into her. Great scratched weltings showed where hobbling buttock-motion had agitated the metal crustacean.
The bright crab lodged firmly against the pudendum. "You say, seven inches?" "With appropriate girth. I doubt the living article is so well constructed." The knife point made tiny vents, oozing pungent Calvados.
"She's dripping, and not from those nicks." Madame Sandemarche tapped the silvery body with a brittle thing. The maid remained prudently impassive. "This lateness is a repeated fault of hers, then?"
"Ummm . . . yes." Dolly wrapped a thick cloth over her pie to protect it.
"A thirty-inch cane would scarcely be enough. Does Mr. Hunter keep a Ponsonby Tutorial here? I know he has one at the Bisque-Hardy schoolroom."
"The ashlar is rather severe, Aurore," she reproved.
"Did your husband care to be delayed this morning? Did his pupils merit the enforced idleness of awaiting his arrival? Did his dignity as their tutor benefit by his laggard coming?"
"N-n-nooo." Dolly dabbed a strayed drop of Normandy brandy with her thumb and tasted it.
"Six with a Tutorial, then. Fetch it, and leave your skirt where it is."
Yolanda exited, thighs stretched and rump cheeks fighting to confine their wiggles.
The Bisque-Hardy veranda commanded a deep valley vista. The rutted road wound from their carriage house downward, then along the rim to St. Louis le Prophete in one direction. It stretched to the farther highlands in the other.
Magenta lingered by the tea things, considering a scone and butter, or a last cake.
"I see that Wanky Fulkmorris has published a new, terribly thick study of Scripture in the light of the most rigorous current scholarship, all tending inevitably to a conclusion that Christ was the first 91st-degree Mason, and that he specifically warned against the adamantine dogmatism of Rome by terming Simon a 'rock' rather than a 'dressed stone or brick'."
Sir Polkinghorn Bisque-Hardy, Bart, folded the weeks-old London Times.
"Not Scottish Rite, I trust." Lady Bisque-Hardy blotted a last stain of preserved fruit from her plate with plain bread. "The Savior, I mean, not Simon Peter."
David Hunter never ceased to delight in her clear, county-Irish accent. Her soft, heart-shaped face under quite dramatic Titian hair only emphasized her youth. He thought her a particularly winsome fresshe May to her husband's old Januarie.
He doubted there was more than forty years between the baronet and his second wife. Perhaps even less. He hoped his pupils wouldn't remark on any resemblance when they reviewed Chaucer's Merchant's Tale.
The lines came to him: She May be Goddes meene and Goddes whippe; Thanne shal youre soule up to hevene skippe Whether agent of the Divinity or not, he knew she kept her household skipping, if not the red-faced, mustached, port-crusted Sir Polkinghorn.
"I wonder at Mr. Hunter's opinions upon the matter." The baronet grimaced in his direction.
"I regret that I am not versed in the Higher Criticism, sir." The tutor opined politicly. He knew the old gentleman had converted to his wife's religion upon marriage.
"Mmmumph. When I knew the beastly fellow he could only do one thing well, and that not more than two or three times the night. Then, only if we'd each pop for a florin. Damn poor show for the cost, when you consider the fodder in St. John's Wood, these days."
His wife had a copy of Blackwood's open. The packet boat had brought a fresh supply of London periodicals, none much further than two months beyond issuing date. "I'm pleased you've set your sights upon another sex, at least since Eton. Oh, look. A new serial by Julian Lady wood promised."
"Wanky made do for evenings. In daylight, the town girls could be persuaded to astonish us for much manner rates. Boys can be most indiscriminate at that age." He turned reflective. "I do recall a spot of bother which restricted our idle visitations no end. We had to make do with one vicar's daughter for three or four lads. It must have been months."
"Such privation at so early an age."
"Gave me my first experience of holding onto pocket money."
Near the carriage house, a groom held a boy's pony. He seemed reluctant to mount.
"Bertie looks quite out of sorts." Magenta smiled tightly.
"Master Maycliffe is having a time conquering his vin, vidi, vici.'' Hunter opened his Juvenal as the lad settled on his mount with a squeal.
The boy kept the pony to a walk. It shied from a trap cantering up from the road. He checked its reins sharply, only occasioning more jogging.
The boy stood in his stirrups, bare legs sun-darkened under his short trousers. His brief school jacket waved above his tight-fitted pants.
"A pity to deny the scholars their jam and sweet cakes at tea, and after their home meals. Your dietary prohibitions are strict, sir." Lady Bisque-Hardy observed Magenta spooning a second dollop of jam onto her scone. "Syndon and Auberon mope."
"A loaded colon is the enemy of concentration. I mean that they should void their intestines swiftly and regularly and readily, for the good it does clarity of mind as well as healthy of body."
"And your dress requirements? My nephews so hate their short trousers during the day."
"The school rig reminds my pupils to be attentive in class."
Magenta swallowed a bite of scone. "That girl's marks show."
Hunter couldn't tell which gave her greater satisfaction. The knee-length petticoats and skirt rose as Ravenna Aubusson entered the trap. She contrived to kneel on the seat. The brown driver shook his reins, sending the horse gently off.
"If she doesn't improve, I'll send a note asking her rig to be abbreviated further so that I can work on her legs and advise the world of her laziness at Latin."
Sir Polkinghorn cocked his head. "That was the second course of yelping we heard. I thought it pitched higher."
"And the reason she stood so demurely for her tea and plain bread," his wife smiled over her Blackwood's.
"Latin is a difficult subject for unprepared scholars, though I am pleased that their casual knowledge of French and your island patois helps them somewhat."
"I am curious, Mr. Hunter." The woman closed the pages. "You are an American, from a land famous for its bold strides in overturning all traditions. Your course of instruction is little different from that my husband tells me about, from his days under Dr. Keate and Dr. Hawtrey."
"Not quite medieval times, I think," the baronet murmured, "though Keate must have been the model for Scott's Front-le-Boeuf. I thought of him instantly I read the scene with old Isaac before the torture grate. Tell me, tutor, could you flog ninety-eight struggling young ruffians in a night?"
"Keate plied the birch. I should emulate Arnold and offer their backsides the cane, for swifter, deeper hurt."
"Do attend, Maggie." Her stepmother advised the young woman lightly.
"I am not one of Mr. Hunter's scholars, thank heavens!" Her face flushed.
Lady Bisque-Hardy regarded her calmly. "True. Our guest does miss your recitations in his classes. Do you know that I maintain a household punishment book, Mr. Hunter?"
"I was unaware."
"Pray tell him the meaning of a P on someone's record." Her gaze held on Magenta's deeply coloring features. Eyelashes twitched over shamed, astonished eyes. "Your ears will go quite florid in a moment, dear, like a peony. I see your lower lip quite active. May we hope for your tongue, shortly?"
"P-p-p-p-" Her voice failed in an inhaled gasp.
"Let me start you. A P signifies a primary cut, a cane stroke specifically restricted to the lower bottom, as defined by the crowns of the gluteus muscle group above and the sulcus below, the furrow distinguishing the very upper leg from the very buttock base." Her quiet voice never wavered. "Now, you may define a W for Mr. Hunter, on pain of incurring a number if you fail in promptness of declamation."
"A d-d-d-" She conquered her stammering fit. "A W means a . . ."
"He is a tutor, darling, he knows what a cane is."
Magenta spoke in thin, strained tones. "... a stroke applied anywhere on the whole of the . . . lower person."
"By which one broadly is to understand the thighs as well as buttocks." Lady Bisque-Hardy beamed encouragingly. "You did so well you may define a C-mark for him, also."
"A stroke-at-choice, de-delivered at pleasure upon whatever part ..." The young woman inhaled deeply. She had turned pure beet-hued. "Whatever part of the body, and in-in whatever combination will do-do the most good."
"Admirable. I shall not strain your powers." She inclined her head toward Hunter. "An F stands for a flexible cut, of variable number. A sentenced infliction of, say, five may be five, six, or seven strokes, depending on the judgement of the person administering them. There is a fixed formula. Nine may be extended through twelve, twelve through sixteen, and so on.
"This flexible schedule is for application when punishment is delegated. Maggie has often been given the labor of correcting Syndon and Auberon, or one of the servants. She may stop her whipping at ten, if that is the number assigned, or she may extend the punishment to eleven, twelve, or thirteen. She need not ask for specific authorization.
"If she feels more to be required, for poor behavior under the stick, or for whatever reason, she must apply for permission, or remand the culprit to me for an additional punitive award."
A brilliant bird glided above the valley road. Several insects darted in the still air by the veranda, from sunlight to shadow.
Lady Bisque-Hardy continued, "Such a problem occurred recently when Syndon had the unpleasant duty of caning Maggie."
The young woman rose, her half-eaten scone tumbled to the stone flooring. "May I be excused, father?"
She vanished in a rustle of skirts, before hearing a word.
"Morgan," the baronet addressed his wife, "I believe you've upset her." "I trust I have."
"The girl shouldn't be so timorous before family friends." He gestured at Hunter. "I hope we may impose upon you and call you our friend?"
"My gravest pleasure, Sir Polkinghorn."
"Then, may I ask Mr. Hunter the pleasure of using his Christian name?" She set her magazine aside.
"By all means, Lady Morgan."
"So be telling me, friend David, your lessons-are they still in date?"
"You appreciate the virtues of the British Empire?" He looked from wife to husband.
"I am Irish." She laughed. "We love our queen, but, oh, her ministers!"
"The Romans invented empire. Imperator, general-when Caius Julius Caesar became a demigod for his triumphs on enlarging the Roman position, he elevated the title. Augustus consolidated that military extension into a flowering of commerce, ideas, invention through the Roman Peace. He created a concept of peaceful union throughout the world as Rome knew it."
He warmed to his subject, hands spread upon his Juvenal. "Caesar, Cicero, Plutarch, Tacitus-these are your base sources for the concept of an empire. Yes, and gossiping Suetonius, and the pastoral joys of Ovid, and the fantastic Apuleius, and my wry companion, Juvenal. Without Latin, the Empire of today is blind to its heritage from the ages-gone Empire, and deprived of that fresh, original vision."
"Then, it isn't all a meaningless memorization of vocabulary and rules of composition, as my nephews complain."
"Memorization is the hard spade work that prepares the soil for planting and the flowering of the tree of knowledge."
Sir Polkinghorn huffed. "A hundred years of ink-stained schoolboys would give that the lie."
"Was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil so very desirable a thing, David our friend?" She wondered, merry.
"I have no talent for Higher Criticism, Lady Morgan. Look to your own discourse with your daughter. You wielded your Latin as a cavalier would a sword, scoring and routing."
"I had occasion once to do some study of physiology. I learned the physician's barbarous tongue for that purpose."
The baronet mused, "I believe you may be the man to teach our island youngsters what Keate never appreciated in his bullish raging, and Hawtrey buried under his damned fool games."
"What I learned at Oxford with Charlie divided cleanly into two camps: all that you English-forgive me, Lady Morgan, you British have a right to be proud of; and all that you have forgotten to be proud of."
Sir Polkinghorn tugged at his mustache. "Now, I wish Maggie had heard that."
"Perhaps she shall, yet." Lady Morgan touched the silver pot and found it quite cold.
Yolanda offered the ashlar. A curious cane, the final eighteen inches had been rough-planed to a squared cross section. Grooves, as from an adze, showed in the worn brown wood, patined by hand and use. Somewhere in its history, someone had driven a tiny steel wood staple to prevent a slight grain imperfection from growing into a crack.
"The Ponsonby Tutorial, madame."
"Thank you. Kindly count the licks. You may expect more for undue motion."
"Aurore!" Dolly shook her head. "Military wives!"
"One learns, hearing a husband drill troops. Elbows on knees. Flat against your knees. Stiffen your legs. Grip your shins if you must, but keep your elbows on those knees.'' The maid wobbled unsteadily. "I'm-I may fall over, madame."
"I thought your creamy bottomfat would balance you better than that. Very well." Madame San-demarche ascended from her stool. She propped it under the teetering girl's head. "Two extra for the courtesy."
"You are too impossible, Aurore. I've finished, anyway. I should really do that myself." Dolly dusted flour from her hands.
The black woman busied herself unfastening the silver crustaceaform. She withdrew the phallic plug slowly, as the lower buttocks and thighs showed their relief. "Aha! Much moister than innocence would allow."
Yolanda hunched resolutely, her forehead resting on the warm stool seat. Her broad white cap appeared ready to take flight.
The ashlar swung out and in, branding the claw-marked undercheek.
A third harsh, ringing impact. The solid flesh knew the force of even less yielding wood. The maid's naked breasts swung in undulations more vigorous than her taut cheeks.
Angry lines swelled on the pale skin, glowing with pain. The tip marks formed purplish plums. "Low, you said?"
"Low," Dolly breathed. Pungent Calvados flavored the air.
The last inches of square-cut wood lashed uncompromisingly into Yolanda's left thigh. The scratched, bright flesh recoiled.
"You 're bending your knees, girl. "
". . . ank you'm'd'm . . ."
Another whipped into clawed leg flesh. A fat tear stained the maid's nose with its salten trail. Her lacerated thigh showed brilliant ruby pinpoints.
The ebony woman changed position. Using a driving backhand stroke, she limed the crab's trace once ... a palpable whimper . . . twice.
Yolanda whispered her count, huskily.
"There appears to be something wrong with your voice, silly girl."
"Sssssevven . . . 'nd . . . tha . . . you ..."
The ashlar whacked into marked meat, on the buttock proper. The hinds above the rose-stained thighs contracted expressively.
"I see you finally felt that one."
Aurore Sandemarche stood back, cane tapping the floor. She sighed at the portrait of sliced and diced girlflesh. "Eloquent, but not incriminating. You may rise."
"Have Joyau put some witch hazel on those," Dolly Hunter finally said.
"Just a moment. You messed this, you should clean it."
The black woman took the silver crab. She thrust the slick prong against Yolanda's trembling lips. The girl breathed heavily, eyes swimming, as she licked the fat metal thing.
Remorselessly, Madame Sandemarche inserted it till the maid nearly gagged. Her dared breasts strained at empty space, nipples fully erect and wine-dark.
"One of us has enjoyed this," the woman told her in hushed, taut words. "Mind-no having at yourself for relief, or you'll wear the crab at night, with your thumbs trussed to your toes."
The maid suckled the steel prong in salt-blinded terror.
Finally, Madame Sandemarche removed it. The cowed girl plainly longed to clutch her hewn legs. Instead, she bent a quivering knee and solemnly kissed the fingers that had whipped her.
"Go to Joyau for the witch hazel, mind." Dolly ordered dreamily, releasing the girl at last.
Haltingly, she quit the kitchen.
"Is that Calvados only for cooking?" Aurore Sandemarche inquired.
Dolly carried the bottle in to the dining room and fumbled at the sideboard for a sherry glass . . . two sherry glasses.
* * *
2
VARIATIONS
"This won't be her first marital correction, I trust?" Charles Rogers half stood, brushing the angled candle's flame with a fresh, strongly scented cigar. As he drew expertly, the end glowed to life. The narrow flame flickered unsteadily as the candleholder breathed.
Yolanda, uniformed and eyes on the carpet, finished her pouring. She set the heavy, cut crystal decanter between the two men. Hunter tasted the dark Highland whisky. He rolled it across his tongue affectionately before swallowing. "Ah. You always bring the best, friend."
"The Macallan has gratifying body," his guest acknowledged. His glance roamed knowingly over the patiently standing Yolanda.
"You may leave us. See if Mrs. . . mmm, no." The master of the house grinned slowly. "Mrs. Hunter won't be requiring your attentions."
The girl curtseyed, wincing as her fresh weals flared. She caught a darting glimpse of the room's main table. The olive-hued naked candleholder crouched there, breasts and face pressed to the damask tablecloth. Her violently canted hips glistened with diamond perspiration points.
Plainly, the thick, lighted candle screwed so uncharitably into her bottom's vent gave her no cheer. Yolanda slipped into the kitchen quickly.
"I always claim the ladies can see to their own wants in the drawing room. Clara does not agree." Rogers swirled his whisky moodishly.
"Dolly has her recital to occupy her." The host flecked ash from his own cheroot.
"And the thousand joys of anticipation." Rogers' thumbnail prodded some soggy wisps of his down-turned mustache from his lips. He sipped, then prompted again, "Not her first interlude of domestic discipline, I imagine?"
For a moment Hunter simply observed the glowing ends of their cigars and the closely illuminated buttocks of the nude woman. He drew reflectively, letting smoke eddy from his mouth. "The night after you left us, in New York, some three or four days after the wedding-"
"I have always found it tolerably amusing that the best man should absent himself from the carnal feast, leaving the bride's tender felicities to one blind custom deems second best."
"Let us say you were . . . best among equals? As to my own part," Hunter chuckled, "she appeared inordinately delighted with the performance and enthusiastically sought encores."
He let more ash drift onto his rug. "Yet, I must own that Dolly did flirt outrageously, and totally against all common propriety, with some dry goods man-a fellow inhabitant of Massachusetts, it seems. He had come down on the train with us. Some mill owner or mercantile type. A solid New England burgher, without the superficial gloss Boston gives its moneyed sons. This fellow found us in the dining room on the night I speak of."
"Ah, I'd just boarded the steamer for Havana." The hot end of his cigar unconcernedly menaced the bare sole jutting at the table's edge. The candle jerked fitfully in response.
"We were still toasting your departure. Dolly felt the champagne rather keenly, being used, at the time, to the milder dandelion and other rural wines. She all but trailed her hand in this manufacturing fellow's lap. That night I found it wise to remind her that a hairbrush has two uses."
"And the coarse-mannered cad who led her on?"
Hunter inhaled deeply of the rich fumes from his glass. "Pistols have been out of fashion in New York since Burr and Hamilton. I am, in truth, no better with firearms than with Bowie knives."
Rogers laughed, remembering the ass at Oxford who'd asked, "If you're an American, where's your Bowie knife?" The bond of mutual misunderstanding at the life of their host country had grown to fast friendship.
"Someone did report shooting that night, and raised infernal damnation with the hotel's manager." Hunter smiled. " 'Twas the hairbrush. Dolly's hindquarters spank to ripe, ringing perfection."
"You used both sides?"
"How else? I remember how Clara loathed the bristles' bite after only a few whacks."
"She still does, though I incline more to the leather, now, when the sweet wench proves willful." Rogers pondered over a slow draw on his cheroot. "Rather, let us say, overly willful. Her spunk-fancy the meanings that does have, as with pluck and pecker-gives her charm a flavorful edge. Still, she will try to take all manner of advantage."
"I recall." He contemplated the indelicately rooted candle's swaying flame. "Do you remember the game we used to play with tweezers?"
"Do you have a pair to hand?" The guest studied the unruly feminine foliage lining that vertical moue shadowed by the waxen shaft.
"Two." Hunter produced them from his waistcoat pockets. Arcing Sheffield nippers thrust out from cleft rosewood. 'The one who gets her to douse the flame wins."
"Wins. . . ?" Rogers ran a casual finger along the well-remembered, oft-fondled vulva. The light shimmered.
"The first four licks on Dolly," Hunter pronounced lightly.
"A pleasure, a very palpable pleasure. Yet, surely not enough of a prize if you prevail. Say ..." He lazily massaged the silky lips. "First four on Clara if you should win. No, make it six, since there won't be the novelty."
"I hadn't known she was needing, tonight." The host left his cigar to smolder by the decanter. He moved closer to the forcefully presented pudenda.
"She doesn't, yet. But spirited, spirited."
"Ah." He inclined his head, offering Rogers the first go- The islander extended his tweezers, careful to fasten on a single strand of hair. His wrist snapped back. The crouched woman ceased breathing, her muscles rigid.
Hunter found a choice frond and plucked it briskly free. The naked skin shimmered, the flame leaped.
"Joyau could unfairly bias the context," Rogers observed, slowly selecting his next target.
"She knows her punishment will be augmented by one cut for every hair not plucked, under fifty. It will be reduced for each hair lost, over fifty. We stop when she extinguishes the flame with her wiggles."
The guest makes her tremble with a sharp tug. "Our arm-filling baggage keeps her talented tongue unusually still."
"I believe I've awarded a punishment to bank even her fires." A slow series of slight, starting yanks had more effect on the dancing flame.
"Our Moroccan houri does leave Clara trailing her spirits phlegmatically in the dust when it comes to temperament." Rogers calculatingly watched a bead of hot wax descend the pale shaft. As the droplet touched the distented rim of Joyau's bunghole, he pulled loose a hair. The woman made a furious noise, but her hindquarters locked rigidly.
"I think she's also sulking, playing the discarded favorite."
"You haven't . . . had her as a wanton change from your pretty Puritan?"
Rapidly twirling his tweezers, Hunter attempted to twist out a hair. It escaped. He frowned and yanked it away harshly.
"You mistake my wife, Charlie. Dolly owes her keen amorous tastes to 'Quaker riggishness' she claims from her mother's side. Whitman, Franklin, you know the appreciation for flesh those Friends had. Though I breeched her maidenhead for a certainty, she shed it eagerly, with a soft squeak and as voluptuarian a wriggle as I've felt. I had to wonder at her seeming experience. She fair winded me that nuptual night."
"Under the chaste and jealous stars. A quaint conceit."
"Yes, while you entertained her family at the Solomons' place, I enjoyed her on that pine bough bower her sisters constructed behind the Gordons' home. A family custom, it appears. My Dolly knew tricks . . . those same fillies had nestled with her, fancifully finding ways to keep warm on winter nights, all together in their one big bed.
"I had to make a pilgrimage to that room in homage, next morning. We played at tag-games under the covers. I'd barely finished my tribute to the venerable sporting field when you all reined in your carriages."
"I wondered at that Satanic smugness you displayed to the world that morning. Hephaestus crawling off Aphrodite's belly must have shown that identical unhallowed glee." Working his tweezers close beneath the plugged passage, Rogers elicited a definite posterior spasm. "Then, Joyau is superfluous. A pity to have her heathen tail lie idle."
The pagan crupper seemed anything but still as Hunter pressed for victory with a quick, hard pull. "I seem to recall you discarded her from your own household quickly enough. Conflict with Clara, perhaps? Remember, I handled that pair the time I managed your affairs."
"My sojourn to the Antipodes for New Zealand sheep stock."
"Exactly." Candle's wax spattered satisfactorily as the buttocks reacted. "I tried that rule you claim you keep."
"Never flog a woman yourself unless you fuck her afterwards? Only a sensible modus viviende, I'd call it."
"I usually wound up lacing Clara's spiteful Jersey rump as well as whichever other one I'd limed and lined. After covering the one I'd punished first, I had to repeat the task with Clara. If it wasn't Clara's regular week for bedwarming me, this Moroccan mongrel would be in a frenzy, shrieking about me always favoring L'Anglais, and demanding her right to a tupping."
Rogers set the olive-skinned woman trembling, but not frantically enough. "I do admit I'm careful to cuddle Clara every night, though I poke whom I please elsetimes. She's a lovely, demonic fuck, especially after a livening with the birch. Yet, I do miss these hellish hips."
He rested his hand on Joyau's flank, tasting the play of muscles as Hunter tugged forth a particularly deep-set strand of inky silk.
"Why does the female bottom create such a glandular need in males which can only be satisfied by violence?" Clara pensively considered the parlor's empty fireplace. "Charles goes gun-barrel stiff just seeing a comely pair of cheeks. And," the fire in her eyes more than made up for the barrenness on the hearth, "he sees so many of them. So he must straight-away have some rumpsteak on the grill. Too often mine."
"Give thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." Dolly's speech had a ragged edge. She knelt on a painfully plain wooden chair, holding the Book of Common Prayer before her.
"-as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church; and he is the savior of the body. Therefore, as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing."
She turned the pages back slowly. Her forearms informed her uncompromisingly of the strain.
"My one consolation is that my womanly parts do not wear out easily." Clara's ankles stayed crossed under her long taffeta gown and the obligatory petticoats demanded by polite society, even in the season's warmth. "Within or without."
"Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my faults, and my sin is ever before me."
The Yankee wife shifted her weight to her right knee at the ironical line. She wore only plain muslin drawers below her rigid corset. The single tie at the small of her back allowed the slit garment to billow, affording the air unusual familiarity with her posterior's inner slopes.
By contrast, her arms thrust through the legs of an elegantly embroidered pair of lady's underthings. Her neck projected comically from those drawers' rear opening. The topmost pearl button strained tightly against her nape.
"Behold, I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin hath my mother conceived me. But lo, thou requirest truth in the inward parts, and shalt make me to understand wisdom secretly. Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."
She inhaled, fighting the old-fashioned long corset which gave her natively buxom figure an uncharacteristically lean hourglass slope. Stays crushed her breasts and jabbed where her resiliant mammary flesh overflowed.
"Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." She flipped the pages again, returning to the Collect.
"And all over a silly pair of drawers." Clara's tart Jersey isle accent filled in quickly. "Papa taught us correctly about such masculine vanities. Neither maiden nor married woman had the courage in his parish to wear a blasphemous male covering on her limbs. I'm pleased not to have had trousers on since I left North Africa. Not that those tissuey britches could be confused with a man's garment, of course, yet the Pentateuch-"
"Give thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; submitting yourself one another . . . one to another in the fear of God. Wives ..."
She batted back a momentary blur of vision. The lamplight beat steadily on the words, sparkling from the irridescent buttons running along her left front shoulder.
"...Submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church; and he is the savior of the body."
A shrieked curse penetrated the room briefly, dulled by closed doors. Dolly continued her viva voce reading without pause.
The Moroccan woman clutched herself, her fingers massaging the abused feminine mound. The snuffed candle waved emphatically behind her. Coarse Arabic oaths rolled from her lips.
"Nasty stuff, hot wax. Be careful it doesn't set and plug you up, little one," Rogers advised her. "You have only yourself to blame. If you hadn't let your posteriors rotate with such energy, it wouldn't have splattered."
Joyau hissed. She sought to sooth herself with near-Onanistic intensity. Hair slick with sweat and tears clung to her dark face.
Hunter revived his cigar over an oil lamp's chimney. "You'll enjoy my wife, Charlie. She cuts like the metaphorical butter." He pocketed the two pairs of rosewood tweezers, then frowned over the decanter. "That blasted girl let us run dry."
"Flogging is the only stimulant I need at the moment, I confess." Rogers observed the candle-impaled hindquarters twitching in awkward dishonor. "Do you really mean to hide her so thoroughly?"
"Of course. You know the wench. Never responds to half measures." The host opened the door to the kitchen. "Yolanda!"
The pale maid appeared, attention flickering between the angry Hunter and the panged Joyau.
"I hadn't been aware the Temperance Union had an active chapter on the island. You failed to tell me they'd recruited you to their abstinent army." He pointed accusingly at the empty decanter.
"I'm sorry, sir; I'll fetch more."
"Will you? How generous. And will pour with a right liberal hand, too, I'll wager. Would you care to put a guinea on it, Charlie?"
Rogers only laughed, watching Yolanda bustle to the decanter and back toward the kitchen.
As Hunter let her by, he drew on the cheroot. "The whisky and the perch, girl," he exhaled.
"Sir-!"
"Usquebaugh for my thirst, the perch for Mr. Rogers. He pines to see it in earnest use."
She gripped the beveled crystal vessel and disappeared.
"A capital idea you put into my brain, Charlie. An aperitif. A vigorous version of that madman's absinthe we sopped up in our Paris revels." He spoke sharply at Joyau. "You appear quite foolish there. Leave. Use warm water on your motte to get that wax out. I'll inspect you and add extra, tomorrow, should I find any."
The Arab woman clambered to the rug. She offered a sullen motion, half-curtesy, half-salaam. Her legs stayed well apart as she left, Mediterranean skin dappled by darker lamp shadows.
"She's wondering whether it was worth it to hold out for those sixty-seven plucked hairs."
"It saved her seventeen of 180 lashes. A rather full portion, if you ask me, even for our favorite slut of Sheytan."
Hunter smiled genially. "With a single buckskin thong, industriously but not viciously applied, the full count would equal a birch-flogging of three dozen strokes from a five-limbed rod. In further leniency, I shall have creative leeway to spread the cuts along her supple flesh. She'll have scarlet drawers to match the ones she purloined."
He dashed the remains of his cigar into the fireplace. "It also permits elongation of the aesthetic moment."
"Anterior and posterior correction. I comprehend. Still, a heavy tariff for pinching the mistress's pants."
"The rank insolence of it galls me-abstracting the very pair Dolly's sister had so lovingly embroidered, then actually wearing them while doing Dolly's washing. God knows but she intended to wee in them and hang them out with the rest to dry."
"Speculation on scanty evidence."
"True, but remember the way she spiced Clara's handkerchief with black pepper flakes, outward bound from Marseilles? Our lovely dissolved into a pleasant ruin at the captain's mess, sneezing and gasping."
Yolanda returned with a handsomely filled decanter and a strip of stiff grey substance the length of her arm and a handsbreadth wide. She placed the whisky carefully between the men's empty glasses. As she removed the stopper, Hunter halted her.
"You needn't pour." He took the tough, flexible stuff from her. "Butta-percha, Charlie."
"Oh. Oh." The guest sent his mind back. "That peculiar muck I handled those contracts for when I was South Seas way."
"Palaquim sap. Infinite uses. Quite the thing of the future, once it gets going. I know a Baltimore mathematician with half a skull built from the stuff, courtesy of General Jackson's artillery. Before father died, he shipped some very profitable bottoms of it. And I've whipped some very profligate bottoms with it, besides."
Yolanda's fingers seemed frozen around the glass stopper. Mute supplications added luster to her already charming eyes.
"Do extend both your palms. No, don't put that bauble aside. Rest it on your lifeline."
"My what, sir?"
"Surely a Gypsy woman has told your fortune-oh, I forget. African magic is the thing here, eh? Throwing beans in bowls for divination." Hunter pointed to the seam on her palm.
Apprehensively, the maid held the stopper on the flattened hollow of her left hand. She drew a breath.
"Hamlet may say the readiness is all, but these foolish women . . ." Hunter half turned toward his guest. Yolanda exhaled, relieved.
The grey perch flashed and struck resonantly.
The girl's mouth flew open, sucking a shocked lungful of wind. Her right palm twitched under the weight of the rubbery strip.
"Suffer than a conventional leather strap. I don't refer to those fire-toasted Scots bum-breakers, 1 mean ordinary whipping leather. Yet, it has more give and sting than a sole, allowing for more play than a slipper."
The perch bounded up and down, scoring the extended hand again. "Isn't that so, girl?"
"-essssir-" Her torso stayed firm as carven wood, but her knees buckled slightly.
"Uncomfortable feeling, they tell me." The guttapercha slapped her flesh, loud and hard. Her fingers spasmed, curling and twisting.
"Place the stopper on your other hand."
Dismay mixed with relief. She moved the glass bulb to her angry-skinned palm.
Hunter avoided badinage. He flogged, letting the perch's squared end bite eagerly into her hand's heel. Her arm trembled after three strokes.
He raised the grey strip again. She stifled a pleading sob, her right forearm jerking protectively. The stopper bounded across the rug's shadowed pile.
"Bad luck. I was fearful you might to that. Truly fearful." He savored the signs of fresh, lively pain, and dread. "Catch hold of your skirt."
She bent to grasp and lift her hem.
"No," Hunter corrected her. "Stiffen your knees, head down. Pull those draperies tight over your rump, Turn about, first."
Clumsily, the maid obeyed. Face down toward the rug, she permitted herself small, hidden tears as she hauled her skirt between her legs.
"A succulent, womanly sight, wouldn't you say, Charlie?"
Rogers took in the pronounced division of the hemispheres. The cotton outlined her oval hillocks as if a second skin. "No nonsense about drawers here, or petticoats, either."
"Only women of fashion are slaves to fashion."
The rigid gutta-percha tapped the left mound's swelling summit. Hunter gauged distance, then lofted the strip the full length of his arm.
Splack! The perch glued itself to her ripe buttock; the end snapped well into the outlined cleft. Fatty quivers radiated as sensation rose. He walloped the identical spot again. The curving nethercheeks clenched, almost seizing the stiff strip.
Spasms of distress shook the feminine backside.
Hunter delivered a third swat over the same territory.
"Yolanda had a caning today," he remarked casually. "Aurore Sandemarche cut low. I'm taking her across the middle. There should be plenty of room above to handle any giddiness before bedtime."
He moved around to her other side. In three measured, punishing bursts, he repeated the dosage. The girl rose on her toes at the second infliction. At the third, she rocked, heels worrying the rug.
The men watched, listening to the sniffles.
"Your sister Margaret is still frantically seeking a sponsor?" Hunter inquired, eyes on the bottom's subtle gyrations.
"Desperately. She's overage and without the requisite property to avoid indenture. She's offered me everything but incest to put up bond for her." Rogers poured two plump fingers of smokey whisky. "I've explained to everyone the nice parallels between Pegs the Perverse and Kate the Cursed. They agree some of Petruchio's medicine can calm her tempests."
"I recall those Arctic squalls between Clara and her. Painfully correct and viciously shrewish. I could never be sure who won their contests."
"Forgive me, old man, for leaving you that sack of Kilkenny cats while I courted ewes among my New Zealand uncles." Rogers finished his glass.
"You may rise," Hunter permitted at last. He saw the cramped fingers unhook themselves. Yolanda rose by degrees, her skirt fluttering into place.
"Next time, I'll work squarely on any prior marks, and I'll double the allowance, besides. I won't have a stingily charged decanter, girl."
He dismissed her. She wiped her trickling eyes with the back of her hand, showing a darkly sore palm.
Hunter splashed some into his own glass. "To saucy women. May they stay mischievious and toothsome."
Rogers lifted his hand in salute, but did not touch the decanter. "So, to the evening's work?"
"Celebration of the sacred Callipygean mysteries ..."
Dolly's voice had a distinct rasp and she cleared her throat often.
"-purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken my rejoice. Turn thy face from my sins, and put out all my misdeeds. Make me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me."
She thumbed the pages. Her knees pressed numbly on the chair's seat.
Clara quoted from memory, " 'Thou sparest when we deserve punishment, and in thy wrath thinkest upon mercy.' So strange that David didn't assign that passage as well."
She uncrossed her ankles. A slight jingle of steel links sounded as she tucked her feet beneath the love seat she occupied. "And yet there are . . ."
As Dolly searched for her place in the Book of Common Prayer, her wearied mind summoned th6 very first time she had seen Clara shackled.
Her bridegroom, her new husband, her very own David had introduced her to all Mardi Blanc's society at a splendid reception and country dance give by Sir Polkinghorn and the governor, Lionel Daire.
Thereafter, she paid calls and received them; she rode, she amused herself at the fortnightly Traders Market down in St. Louis le Prophete, or at the Petit Market given on opposite weeks across the island at Grande Pointe Station. She found the paIow-speaking black farm people flamboyant and alive with song-at market, at field labors, at domestic pursuits, even at copulation, she suspected. A Yankee democrat, she cultivated Aurore Sandemarche and the women of African ancestors as freely as she sought the company of those from French and English rootstock.
As Charles Rogers stayed David's chief friend, so Clara had become Dolly's closest companion. The two couples met frequently for rambles into the heavily wooded backcountry, for evenings of cards. They jointly read Shakespeare and the Waverly Novels, taking the various characters with flourish.
Dolly and Clara exchanged afternoon visits several times a month. On one such habitual call, the New Englander met Margaret Rogers, Charles' aloof sister, donning a shawl in the entry hall.
"Dolly. I fear I must fly home, and I'm so grieved to leave you. Clara is waiting in her room. Do take her, Lucinda."
The blank-faced maid had stood unrespondingly.
"Lucinda, do take her, now," Margaret commanded. A flurried exchange of kisses with Dolly and the woman strode out to her carriage.
The servant had done as commanded, rapping on the door, then bustling away.
"Clara? Your sister-in-law said to come up straightaway."
She heard no response, and wondered if Margaret had been mistaken. She started to call after the departed serving woman, but a quiet voice sounded.
"Come in. Dolly. I must thank Margaret for her thoughtfulness."
She had opened the door and been startled to the depths of her Massachusetts soul.
Utterly naked from nape to heels, Clara stood facing the bedroom's four-poster. Chains held her arms over her head, locking her to the canopy frame. A violet-tinged pattern of splayed crimson weals ribboned her back and quite covered her full, rounded bottom.
"Hello, Dolly. Make yourself comfortable. Would you care for refreshments? I'm afraid I mustn't partake." Clara craned her head backwards. Her voice had its accustomed Jersey calm, though the eyes puffed red from recent weeping.
For some minutes Dolly had no voice. When it came, her revulsion exploded into anger. "David spanks me himself, when I deserve it. Rather frequently, though it shames me to admit it. Yet no wife should have to endure such . . . such barbarism!"
"No wife has." In her quiet dignity, Clara directed Dolly to a large, curiously inscribed parchment framed above the room's dressing table, where most women would have placed a mirror.
"You don't read Arabic, I imagine. Why should you? I don't myself, really. I know you don't speak French, but perhaps you know it in written form, as my father knew Greek, to read St. Paul with but not to converse in?"
Dolly did not. She studied the flowing, meaningless marks and the utterly unintelligible Roman-lettered script beneath. "I see . . . 'Clara Harcourt, England' . . . 'Charles Rogers, Mardi Blanc' . . . 'David Hunter, Rhode Island, United States of America'... I don't understand at all. Is this some marriage license? I know you met Charles in Arab Africa, but I had no idea David was your witness."
"Not a marriage certificate," the nude Englishwoman corrected her. "It is my bill of sale. I am not Charles' wife and never have been. I am his property."
An enameled clock ticked briskly while Dolly looked from the parchment to her friend's back and bottom, with their bright, puffed stripes. She groped for words, for ideas.
"This is an impossible joke." She shook her head. "Even on Mardi Blanc, with its indentured servitude, surely you cannot . . . this cannot be valid."
"Of course, of course." Clara shifted, her chains giving bell-like jingles. "Your husband and Charles Rogers purchased me in a Moroccan slave market at the same time as they bought Joyau, the fire-tongued Mohammedan backgammon in your household now. They shared the costs of the sale. When David's father . . . died, Charles bought out your husband's share.
"He means to free both of us in the ritual seven years. Only twenty-six months away, actually. Of course this has no legality. I could protest in court. Sir George Doore would snort fire. He's an irascible tyrant, a second Jeffries at his assizes. He'd strip Charles of half his holdings, in fines.
"However, my dear Dolly, Charles and your husband rescued me from a most absolute servitude from which no English law or courtroom eloquence could ever hope to absolve me. I intend to bide my time in this much looser service to repay Charles for that kindness. I am not without honor. I only lack, at this inclement moment, the trappings that customarily go with it."
Dolly drew over to her. She raised a questioning hand. At a slow nod, she ran her marveling fingers over the hard, fiercely hot weals. Thick, stony, with the palpable pulse of the woman's blood beating in them-the spoor of true punishment. Clara's mouth tightened, but she endured the inspection.
"Charles is . . . strict."
"The cat of nine tails," the Englishwoman explained. "A diverting change from a birchrod, his frequent favorite. Not the military cat, of course. I'd be food for our other, furry puss if he'd used the knoutish beast. Have you seen a martinet? The French families favor them. Think of one made from whipcord, not leather. The lashes are boiled in starch for stiffness, after having been knotted. Strict, but not terribly brutal."
"No?" Dolly lightly touched the especially dark traces clustered over her friend's right haunch.
"Well . . . remorseless when applied to a woman's skin." She closed her eyes. "But not savage. And there are compensations. He flogged me in the orchard, then took me, standing, while I hung from the whipping post. A variation on dok el outed, the mode of coition called 'Thrusting Home the Peg' by the Lord Neyfzawi."
"I know," Dolly said simply. "Captain Burton's books are expressly required for my education. David examines me on their contents continually."
Clara laughed. "You know, then, the joys . .. Charles will likely have me the same way, tonight. I do not know if he plans to loose me before morning. It makes certain acts inconvenient. I do hate having someone holding the pot."
She stated the problem without emphasis. Dolly's own attention had shifted elsewhere, around those sternly marked hips to the loins. She inspected the visible nub of female desire. "You're quite erect thinking about it, aren't you?"
"Not about my inner relief, no." She laughed merrily again. "I had quite a copious session before you arrived. Margaret insisted on doing the honors. I could not refuse at that stage."
"I was not speaking of that manner of release. Charles is doubly cruel to have lighted a fire and left it smoldering, unquenched." Dolly reached.
Clara shook turbulently, her tongue stretching ser-pentishly from her open mouth.
Dolly caressed the blood-ready dart thrusting from other lips. Her aid came briskly and to the point. The Englishwoman cried out twice, languidly twisting her loins against the hand's firm pressure.
"My sisters and I used to soothe one another's hurt after a shellacking. Apple switches may not mark so terribly, but they sting. I would calm Judith thusly, lest she stay whimpering the whole night. There . .. There? . . . There!"
The whipped woman slumped from her shackles, face and breasts suffused with the rosy blush of desire satisfied. "Dolly, I could kiss you in thanksgiving." "You shall, darling Clara, you shall."
Dolly's thoughts returned to her task and the holy book open before her.
"-submitting yourselves one to another in fear of God . . ."
"And of sound chastisement." Hunter stood in the parlor doorway. She saw the hated gutta-percha in his hand. "I think you have meditated enough, sweet spouse."
As he entered, she saw the jaunty, Mephistophilean cane in his other hand. It whisked through the air in venomous cheer.
Rogers followed. Clara's chain sounded as she sat upright, tucking her feet expectantly under the love seat.
'Tell Charlie why you're being punished, dearest wife."
Dolly closed the Book of Common Prayer. "I offended my husband by arguing with him in front of servants about matters concerning their punishment."
"And?" Her husband prompted.
"I recommended excessive clemency."
"She tried to save our drawers-thieving bitch from most of her hiding. I suggested a sharp slippering from Dolly, after the thong, to teach Joyau respect for her mistress."
"A reasonable, prudent exercise," Rogers agreed.
"My wife, softened by sentimental novelists of her gender, refused. Both Joyau and Yolanda heard."
"Man and wife must be united in opinion, as in action." The visitor's glance darted. "Isn't that correct, Clara?"
"I remember poppa and momma had the same beliefs," she paused. "Otherwise, I should not know."
Hunter handed the cane to his friend. "Stand out, Dolly mine."
* * *
3
COMPENSATIONS
As Dolly left her chair her dull, dead knees almost set her stumbling. She felt a gingerly return of sensation as the joints worked.
"Touch your toes, my pretty schoolgirl. Here." Hunter indicated a convenient spot, well illuminated by the largest lamp.
"I don't know if I can." She strained to bend, the long corset fighting every degree of deviation from perfect erection. "This . . . monster won't ... let me."
"Clara," Hunter invited with a gesture of the perch. "Would you be so kind?"
"Of course." The fully clothed woman took the half-steps her ankle chain demanded. She reached Dolly and put hands on the downwardly straining shoulders. She lent her strength and weight to the effort. A soft moan, a reluctant creaking of leather and stiff baleen-and Dolly's fingers brushed her bare pink-nailed toes.
Her rich posteriors spread the muslin drawers. Hunter and Rogers took in a choice revelation of pursed depths and silken curls. Clara held her in position with effort.
"Charlie is to wrap the first four around your peccant tail, my love. Isn't that neighborly of him?" Hunter reached for her undergarment's knotted waist tapes. "Bare bottom, as usual."
"David." Dolly spoke a hushed plea, a faint reproach, and a sufficient confession of wifely resignation to avoid insubordination.
"I prefer to thrash the flesh directly," Rogers responded. "If my hostess objects, I can work over her trews."
The widely gapped slit diminished the gallantry of the offer.
"Very well," her husband agreed. "Clothed for six, bare for four. Choose quickly, dearest pet."
"Please take my drawers down, David."
"Such fuss over nothing. She doesn't mind at all." Hunter undid the ribbons and let the warm fabric slide lingeringly down her full limbs. The ivory nether-globes threw back the lamplight fetchingly. The garment nestled at her ankles. "An extra cut for bootless delaying."
Clara's piqued gaze intercepted him. "She never asked to keep them up."
"Didn't she? Surely a secret supplication within her heart. Confess it, Dolly."
"Yes, David." Light, shallow breaths were all the armoring corset allowed her.
"Five, my friend."
"Of the best?" Rogers inquired innocently. He lightly grazed the targeted rotundities with the lean cane, skimming the twin crests. They shivered.
"Rather, of the worst. Tight as you please. You have a most exact sense of justice. Doesn't he, Clara?"
"Yes." The Englishwoman bore down on Dolly's arching shoulders. "I do suppose he does."
The cane's blunt tip investigated one buttock's protrudent base. The springy flesh indented above the crease where her thigh began. He raised the slender stick.
The whistling cut rocked both women. Fundament bunching and jamming, Dolly leaned heavily into her friend. A bloodless bone-white stained one ivory undercheek.
As the woman swayed, a soft flush blossomed where she sat most. A pair of distinct lines around a paler center colored the whipped skin on the left. A rosy cane mark swelled into a distinct corrugation.
Rogers swung again. The lean wood sliced feelingly opposite the first mark. The satin hide recoiled splendidly.
The men watched the freshened pain throb through her. The cane licked in, thickening the band on the left. Her backside danced in disorder as Clara fought to hold her in position.
Seeing the other man relax a moment, Hunter addressed his wife. "Charlie is correct to whip directly over the skin. Do you remember why, my naughty joy?"
"B-because it . . . huuurts . . . more." He jaw worked.
"Excellent. And why else, Clara?"
Eyes smoldering and cheeks aglow, the Englishwoman answered, "Because it's far more shaming."
"And the final reason, Charlie?"
"Why, it's much more satisfying, of course." He lashed the naked right buttock base.
She stamped, the corset groaning noisily over her swift panting.
The punitive wand flashed up, then down. It lifted both rotundities, burrowing into the twin cheeks. She made a strangled sound through locked teeth. Clara looked up with a hot and solemn face, forcing the bent body to stay down.
A seething, ridged burgundy barred Dolly's bottom.
"You shouldn't have thought about lipping," Hunter advised quietly. "I want only one kind of cheek under chastisement. You may stand."
He accepted the cane from his friend.
"Delicious exercise." Rogers flexed his fingers.
As Clara released her, Dolly's drawers-sheathed arms shot ceilingward. Her spread backside contracted as her spine snapped upright. The woman grabbed at heaven, eyes screwed and features brilliant. Her piled hair began to toss in disarray.
"Only five more to come," Hunter counseled.
Clara glared. She pressed her lips tightly.
"P-please . . . David ..." Dolly released a soul-deep sob. Her arms fell, hands dropping back to brush the air about her inflamed hinds, as she fought het need to touch, to rub, to soothe. "Not-not in ... this corset."
She breathed in hasty, shallow draughts.
"I imagine the struggle for air must take your mind from your pain. Very well. You may shuck down completely naked."
"Don't be beastly!" Clara twisted her head away. "I'm sorry."
"You plainly aren't," the tutor chided her. "You're as petulant a puss as ever. Yet, it is such a pretty fury; you're a lucky man to own her, Charlie."
"Yes, doubly so, for tonight I'm going to flog two lovely women. May I try that gutta-percha business?"
Rogers took the punitive grey strip. The Englishwoman's mouth puckered.
"While your wife regains her composure and sheds her confining garments, perhaps my sweetmeat will consent to lie upon her back."
Clara adopted a steady, angry stare at the carpet. "Of course, as you wish."
She knelt in a liquid motion, not using her hands. Her skirts rustled as she rolled easily onto one hip, swung her chained legs forward, then settled back onto her shoulder blades.
"I shall let Joyau taste the pleasures of the supine position for a portion of her hiding, tomorrow."
Hunter flexed the cane he had taken in exchange for the perch.
"Not quite that. A variation on the 'Blacksmith,'" Rogers explained. "The Arabic, Dolly?"
Distracted by her burning posteriors, she spent a moment. "Nik al hadaddi?" "The same."
Clara comprehended, lifting her legs against her bosom. Taffeta and lace tumbled. Dark stockings highlighted the Jersey lily thighs, bare of any drawers legs.
"Point your feet toward the ceiling."
She did, slippers and steel fetters suppermost. The chain swung between her ankles. Her plump thighs hugged against her belly, while her calves reached directly toward zenith. A dark split feminine fig showed in a surprisingly closely cropped fringe of curls.
"Hold the chain, if you care to."
She closed her fingers tightly about the links, bracing herself securely.
"Shackled so." Rogers touched her wrists and ankles. "And set out for the heat of the day and the attention of the flies, a woman has opportunity to reflect, does she not, Clara?"
"A great deal." Her brow furrowed.
"If, during this improvement, she should from time to time require refreshment, and so lick a well-wisher where he enjoys the attention most, and thereby obtain drink-one could scarcely fault her for sluttishness."
"Never, Charles." The Englishwoman kept her voice harnessed, neutral.
"Should she perform the identical-well, I must own it to be similar, but not the perfect facsimile. Should she deliver a like service to another female, surely that would only be an industrious whiling away of time."
"If the girl keeps the wretched buzzing creatures away, anything is worth it." Clara shifted her gaze from empty air to Dolly's open sympathy.
"Yet, to offer her lips to a hunting hound and swill the foaming excess of its beast's lust-assuredly that must be a wantonness of inordinate caliber."
"Or obedience," she tautly answered.
"So. Yet, a woman so punctilious in points of obedience, and so free in her own lips' use, can be sufficiently vulgar to call her generous host 'beastly,' as if he were the hound she had suckled. That woman can even draw notice to her own unmarried state in the company of the man she sleeps with, before decently wedded persons whose hospitality she has shared. Isn't such a coarseness wholly uncalled for?"
Her fetters jangled as she lifted her head, slackening her hold. "I apologize to you both, David and Dolly. Charles, please do chastise me for my affrontery to common propriety in alluding to my ignominious station as kept whore and for presuming to offer judgement on any husband's behavior toward his wedded wife."
Rogers looked to the others. "I always seek to reach an agreement on the justice of a punishment before administering it. Both minds should be united on the salutory nature of the correction."
Clara inhaled deeply. "Thank you for taking the effort to beat me. I also thank you for mocking me so, beforehand. I had thought I had left that custom behind me in the pagan harem. I am grateful for the humiliation and the lesson it teaches me."
"You are most welcome, though I fear I cannot contemplate your wine-tinted cunny with the same abstraction as your gelded former instructors." He found a hassock and guided it near her. Sitting, he raised the -S3 perch over her naked thigh. The garters cinched her stockings at midpoint from her knees, leaving half the soft surfaces bare.
Splack . . . spl-a-a-ack . . . The rubbery length branded her in swift, sharp swats. Clara swayed on her arched spine. Her toes curled the ends of her evening slippers as he continued in rapid volleys along the one leg.
Six stingers had her skin flushing brightly from stocking-top to the very edge of her crupper. He worked the territory a second time, deepening scarlet to sultry crimson.
She wept quietly as the gutta-percha paraded down the thigh a final round, tinging the smoldering crimson with purest beet.
"Imagine if that were only part of a regular touching-up applied to bottom as well as legs." Rogers carried the hassock over to her other side. "I am told that David's spankings are not a childish treat, to be taken with tea."
"I fear Dolly rarely requires less than forty over my knee, with hairbrush or the perch."
Rogers resumed the whipping. Clara's other thigh burned and twitched as each bare inch was struck and restruck. Salt tails glistened from the corners of her eyes.
He sat back, resting the perch on his leg. "A portrait of a chastened vixen, I trust."
Hunter watched her squirmings. "I never knew what Shakespeare meant when Mercutio conjured Romeo 'by Rosalind's quivering thigh and the demenses that there adjacent lie' e're now."
He turned to his wife. "Are you quite naked, yet, my beauty?"
"I-I had some trouble with the laces." Dolly had shed her gaudy drawers and she stepped from the whaleboned corset's long body.
"An Aphrodite Kallipygos risen from the foam," Rogers paid her tribute.
"Five, touching your-rather, no, my favorite schoolgirl. Do you recall what you told me of that Massachusetts female academy that whipped its education into you?"
"Yes, David, Mrs. Caldecott horsed us for our switchings."
The guest chuckled. "Surely you recall that posture, Clara? The time you were flippant during the public assizes, Sir George ordered you down from the gallery and had the bailiff hoist you for eight on the breech. For the sake of public sensibilities, they left her petticoat in place, though Old Dragon Doore had her skirts pinned high. Of course, the rheumy lecher wet it himself from his own water jug, before the infliction."
"How did you enjoy judicial deterrent?" Hunter asked.
Clara rose tentatively, putting her clothes in order. "The strokes hurt. The beadle placed them exceedingly well."
"Not a gap was left for me to fill in when we got home. I had to lay my allowance over the marks. I dislike public discomfiture." Rogers put the perch on the hassock and stepped closer.
The Englishwoman took Dolly's slim, cool hands. "Here, love, stand around in back of me. I take it you know the drill?"
"Bitterly." She mounted her friend's bent back, reaching over her shoulders. Clara caught the naked legs behind the knees. "No! Do not grab me there! Cross your arms over my front."
"I'm sorry. The mistresses' bosoms felt so comforting, though I own we did claw them in our distress."
"Doubtless they enjoyed the caresses," Hunter observed. "A rump exquisitely served for the carving."
Dolly's bottom presented itself perfectly. The ruddy band seethed low on each shapely cheek. Her fleeced central folds and a brown anal dimple displayed themselves without conquetry, between the parted hillocks.
"Oh, for a whip of curious manufacture, as those scribblers conjure up in their fanciful tales. Working inside would be sweet as plum pudding."
"Your own fault for not taking to the birch." Rogers advised, "With twigs you can peel the inner slopes, or whip in with no fuss."
"Except from the one feeling it, eh? At least I'll know where to hit if she requires tanning in the next week. You grouped them admirably."
Hunter sliced the steely wand into his wife's succulent buttocks, a hand's reach above the prior weals. Her cushiony bottom bounded at the shock. Clara hopped, balancing her burden.
"These blood manacles inhibit my footwork. Do be careful!"
He whipped the womanly chubs again, harder. As Dolly yelped, he held the quivering stock to her flesh. The energetic churnings vibrated up the sleek wood.
He snapped the cane up and across in a short stroke. The tip burrowed diabolically into the center of the right mound, leaving a fiercely violet tumescence.
"You're strange-!" Clara wheezed. The choking hold shifted. "No! Not my bubbles!" The two women seemed to wrestle, with the American having the unfair grips.
"Able to breathe, now?" Hunter inquired solicitously.
"She's soaking my neck."
"Pure untidy slobber. She's not even weeping, merely blinking hard."
The fourth lick hissed scaldingly into velvet skin only a pencil's width above Rogers' indigo-speckled band.
Dolly buried her face against Clara's nape, blowing hard. The Englishwoman struggled to maintain the legs around her waist.
The cane sang in short again. The tip sank into stretched, writing flesh. Dolly hissed like a kettle.
The two men watched the distinct, fresh welts burn in a brick-hued fury, the shorter pair ending in purple ink splotches. A secondary flushing radiated from the raised striations. Dolly's bottom shone like a wild sunset.
"May I-may-?" Clara dipped ever more forward.
"Not quite yet. Charlie, you recall that interesting rule of yours."
"Never thrash a woman . . . unless ..." His eyes never left his animated hostess.
"All rules need breaking. You're violating it tonight, though I imagine we can arrange something for form's sake." Hunter drank in the spectacle a moment longer. "All right, let her down."
Clara did, with clear pleasure. Dolly pranced and grimaced on her bare soles. Her breasts bobbed in undulent liberty.
"For form's sake?" Rogers mused, caught by the display. "Could you mean, amuse me with that sorrowfully downturned mouth?"
"It's that or buggery, and Dolly has peculiar scruples about Sodom's path. I have a mind to line her en leverette to feel those stripes warming my belly."
"And your cods." The visitor cocked his head. "And Clara?"
"You needn't concern yourself, Charles," she answered.
"Ah, but I do, tasty pie of mine, I do. Watching it or taking a dose yourself, flogging always makes you hungry for fucking. I have to protect myself from your mad ravishment after you've been scourging the housemaids."
Hunter drew his wife to him, kissing her damp face. He tickled her strawberry-tipped love apples, caressed her rising and falling ribs. With knowing fingers, he investigated and brought a cooing of desire.
He led Dolly back to the center of the parlor. "Hands and knees, my lovely goddess. Let's conclude with a fine rabbit-poke."
She shyly contemplated their guests. "And . . . Charles?"
"Your lips and tongue, charmer. Show him how a New England nymph can nibble and tingle a gentleman's knob."
Wincing and sighing, she took the ancient position, presenting her tenderly scored hindquarters for coitus. She lifted her ripe lips. "And . . . Clara?"
"You're ridden her like a vengeful Valkyrie. She can reciprocate, I think. Clara, mount my love's daity back, facing me, with your skirts hiked.
Rogers had his trousers already unbuttoned. "If David wishes to potter in your grottos, good hunting to him."
His manly growth emerged to survey the company with Cyclopean arrogance. Dolly blinked in seeming surprise.
He tugged his mustache amusedly. "Feigning astonishment, Madame Hunter? I thought you women all talked lengths and girdths and brazen topics when alone. That's the true purpose for segregating our conversations after dining, to avoid scandalizing menfolk with your biological familiarities."
Hunter laughed. "Clara, do stop smirking and seat yourself. Throw those skirts over me once I'm rooted in my wife. I wouldn't care to hear how I countenanced even pro forma criminal conversation and know it to be true."
He pulled his britches to his knees and crouched behind Dolly. Inserting his own respectable rapier, he gently entered her sheath. Clara tossed her petticoats over him before resting her weight on her friend's shoulders.
Her nostrils flared as she felt the sudden, rasping swipe of his tongue. Then Dolly bucked beneath her, weals exacerbated by a pistoning thrust that slapped her husband's hard belly against her bottom.
Rogers assumed a prayful stance, facing his hostress. "Miss Gordon, I presume. For my own part, I know not what that rascal tutor can brook, but I could never stomach giving offense to dear friends' marriage bed."
"Sir!" Behind her tumbling hair, English buttocks and perch-reddened thighs showed as Clara tucked her skirt high in back. "You say the most outrageous things. Wholly improper for an unmarried girl's ears. Especially a New England maiden."
"Alas, I had hoped to fill more than your ears, demoiselle. Miss Gordon, John Thomas; John Thomas, Miss Gordon." Muscular effort made the stalwart bob in greeting. Dolly's lips parted.
"Young John Thomas is a tried and true compaigner, but chary of a Yankee lass's company. He's heard fearful tales about savages eating a traveler raw. I've tried to tell him that Massachusetts girls love their chowders and would never devour a man without first saucing him in the most piquant cream decoction obtainable."
"Purchased by the stallion-load, I presume. Such a nasty affront to parlor conversation should never be seen associating with a modest woman." So saying, she concealed the offending party-or as much as humanly feasible.
Her hips twisted in pleasure, meeting the conjugal jackrabbiting from behind.
Amid soft aaahhhings and ooohhhings, the Psalter lay unregarded. The delicate flutterings of the oil lamp illuminated the page fallen open.
They have mouths, and speak not; eyes they have, but they see not. They have ears, and yet they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths.
Elsewhere in the hushed household, Yolanda and Joyau clasped each other, naked and warm under moist, dark covers. For the while, pain and apprehension and pleasure and contentment mingled.
* * *
4
CO-OPERATIONS
"The brightest spot in any day, seeing you, Lady Morgan." A florid-faced Englishman with heavy dundreary whiskers, Colonel Andrew S.F.X. Sandemarche bowed her into his office. The major seated before his desk prudently slipped away through a side door, his sheaf of papers in hard.
"Courtly as ever, Sandy. Lady Morgan, indeed!" She laughed in a trilling peal. "Not bad for Molly Morgan Mulcreavy, the convent orphan."
"And finest proprietess ever to preside over a house of assignation." He seated her and went around the desk to his own chair. "Assuredly. Your aunt commanded all our love, of course-"
"She'd peel your hide with her oaths and piss on your skinned remains." Lady Bisque-Hardy perched her parasol by her side. She unlaced her bonnet.
"That too, that too. You should have known her before the sickroom days." He shuddered. "I've seen guardsman verging on tears at her rages. No cavalry sergeant ever had her command of the Devil's language."
"I seem to recall some of that fired in my direction," she admitted. "You'll be up to dine with us Friday, with your lovely wife? The Hunters will join us in our recreations, after."
His thick whiskers quivered in astonishment. "You dont' say!"
"I promised the tutor a good look at how a woman keeps discipline in her household. Magenta and those two spratlings should provide an educational display, indeed." A smile played on her lips. "He has his own plans, too. I'll say no more, but . . . there should always be an element of the uncertain about a public performance, don't you believe?"
"Too true. Though I am by vocation consecrated to the most exacting detail in planning, yet I reserve the right to the spontaneous in a campaign. My aides find that disconcerting. It worked well enough against our friend the Zulu to earn me this sinecure in our drousing second Eden."
"You underrate your importance to the island."
"Whom do we guard against? The French? The Germans? Dutch spice traders from Guiana? Is there cause to fear revolt?" He leaned forward. "I'll be candid. I'd fear more for my regiment in Dublin than here in St. Louis le Prophete."
"As well you should, knowing my countrymen."
"May I offer some tea," his hand gripped a bell, "laced, perhaps, with rum, as in the old days."
"No, I've a favor to ask, and I must be on my way. I wish to make my darling sister a present of a visit to one of Sir George's private assizes."
"Ah ... ah. An opportune time." He glanced about on his desk. "I have a request for an escort-yes, tomorrow. You shall be my guests, assuredly, you and Mrs. Reardon. May I hope for Sir Polkinghorn's company, as well?"
"Polo has gone into the hills to see about extending cultivation. He prefers to make a slow journey and rest over in the labor camp. I believe the hardships give him pleasant evocations of his hunting days."
"A famous sportsman, yes; a pity the chase finally bored him."
"I have no such regrets, though I first met him on one of his tramps through the underbrush, you may know." She picked up her bonnet and her parasol.
"Tomorrow, then."
"Shall we meet at the Barracks at 2:00? Will that interfere with your sister's duties at the schoolhouse?"
"She shall adapt her schedule, I'm sure; she has proctors."
"Perhaps some rum-sweetened tea afterward?"
"You're too tempting. The Serpent himself couldn't refuse such an invitation." She smiled with white, long teeth.
"Done, then."
She left and he fell to pleasant recollections of St. John's Wood rambles, in particular to August Mulcreavy's house of resort. A carnal Heaven for a man wearied of killing and the false gallantries of warfare. Molly Mulcreavy had been her aunt's faithful protege, young at the procuring trade though she'd been. Refined conversation refreshed visitors in the sitting rooms; utter, whorish abandon slaked the stormy flesh in the fucking rooms.
Reluctantly, he put aside thoughts of England and summoned his side.
"It is, I suppose, expected." Sir Polkinghorn Bisque-Hardy surveyed the three opulently naked black virgins awaiting his attentions.
"Without the ceremony, the planting cannot begin," the labor gang foreman assured him. "The Yemoja must be placated. Unless they cool and control Ifa, his terrible neglect can shrivel the crops before they mature."
"I know, I know. Nutmeg is a chancy creature at best; why anger the weather spirits before you begin, eh?"
Before her respiring bosom, each sable-skinned maiden bore the abede, a cowrie shell-ornamented fan emblematic of the riverain goddess she served. In her left hand, each held the naked sword associated with her female society's militant witchcraft. He recognized the blades as British Navy sabers bound in rafia fiber, hung with river flowers.
Accommodatingly, he surrendered his trousers and shirt to the foreman. The turned earth felt warm, embracing under his spine. He raised his knees and opened them.
Her bottom still dully smarting from a flogging three days before, Magenta made a second stroll past the small parlor her father had transformed into a schoolroom. Her ear strained to hear something besides chanted conjugations of amo, amas, amat. She lingered in hope by the closed door.
Who cared to know what an "equilateral triangle" was? The silly question and answer examinations she sometimes heard held no interest. She had studied accomplishments at her school, one of the finest in England-which meant the world. Dancing, the piano, elegant embroidery-those were a young lady's learning. Who was there to dance with on this miserable island, where they only knew country hopping and strutting? Father's piano had fallen out of tune within weeks of their arrival. Embroidery-elegance in this wild, primeval place?
She caught raised voices through the door panel. Boyish anger. Mr. Hunter's sonorous scolding. Perhaps . . . she glanced up and down the corridor. No servants spying. She settled her ear snugly against the door.
". . . will not read ..."
". . . as I determine ..."
". . . mother calls it indecent ..."
Footsteps approached from within the room. She started, hands grasping her skirts. She began to walk away briskly.
"Oh. Miss Bisque-Hardy." Hunter spoke from the doorway. "Is your-is Lady Bisque-Hardy unoccupied at the moment, do you know?"
"She has gone to visit Colonel Sandemarche, sir, but I am sure we shall see her at tea."
"Pity." He turned inside. "A moment. You may be able to assist me. I do regret that unfortunate incident at tea yesterday."
A bit of Chinese lacquer set on a tiny, narrow table occupied her gaze. "Thank you, Mr. Hunter."
"I assure you, I have forgotten all details, save one-you are experienced in applying corporal correction?"
A warmth seeped through her bosom, rising to congest her throat. "Yes. I am."
"The tawse, you've applied it to . . . male fundaments?"
"I have."
"Successfully, I do not doubt. Would you consent to do me a considerable service?"
She found strength to meet his level stare with a look of gracious assent.
"I have a lad here who balks at punishment in front of girls. I mean that he shall feel it, and an appropriate humiliation for such contumacy would be correction by your fair hand. If you do not find the task indelicate, it would be much more appropriate than if performed by Lady Bisque-Hardy."
"I shall endeavor to merit your confidence."
"Please come in, then."
She had never seen the room occupied. Seven scholar's desks, four boys to her left, three girls to her right. They stood as she entered.
Syndon and Auberon glowered, having to rise for her. Ravenna Aubusson, Lydia Temple, Elise St. Remy looked like children in their short dresses. She felt her long, womanly skirts swish about her. Her London bearing wrapped her as in a mantle. Mr. Hunter had requested her assistance in his little kingdom . . . she stood at the fore, facing them as his equal.
"A bright lad, but stubborn. We have a disagreement on France's Revolution. I propose Carlyle as a text for study. He denies the authority of any but French authors."
She recognized Gerard Cloutier, a large-nosed, squint-eyed boy. He had teased all the girls stupidly at a gathering at Colonel Sandemarche's, even molesting her with his nonsense. His father had some notoriety as a smuggler-or at least his ships were skilled at evading import duties in Jamaica, Barbados, and other ports.
"Carlyle." She spoke clearly, against a pounding heart. "Such a noble writer."
She dimly recalled her father reading some tedium about Frederick of Prussia aloud over several interminable evenings. That was Carlyle, she thought, almost assuredly.
"I should think the biographer of Frederick would know something of the upheavels in France." She gazed at the boy disparagingly.
"Ah, you see, young Master Cloutier, you may not know Carlyle's greatness, but this educated lady certainly is familiar with him."
"The is an Englishman," the boy muttered passionately.
Magenta remembered something further. Her father comically affected a most horrible Highland burr when reading certain passages. Her success emboldened her to venture, "He was, I think, a Scotsman."
"Brava, Miss Bisque-Hardy!" Hunter had moved to the other side of the lad's desk. "You have disarmed him utterly. Do you see the importance of acquiring learning, young Master Cloutier, rather than acting the fool in educated society?"
His hands sprung and seized the boy. The tutor bent the squalling lad across the desktop.
"You will find a reliable three-fingered tawse on the rack behind my desk, Miss Bisque-Hardy. If you would be so good ..."
He doubled the youth's right arm behind him, easily fending off the flapping other hand. Hunter pulled the boy's school jacket high and attacked the buttons holding his braces.
Magenta rounded the tutor's large desk and faced the wooden rack. It spoke stern volumes, with its aspish, varnished canes and equally shining brown and black straps, smelling of fresh wax.
She lifted the requested tawse from its hook. A full two feet of sturdy leather ran from the doubled handle to the broad fingers. The steer's hide had been cut deeply to form three tails, each well over half an inch across.
She touched it on the way back to the struggling, foolish Gerard. The fire-hardened fingers felt like iron. Worse, far worse than the light tawse her stepmother had allowed her to use on Auberon.
The boy's short trousers had fallen in defeat. His narrow backside poked into the air, paler than his face and legs, but sail showing the dark Southern French coloration. She had read her Dumas and found it strange to realize that D'Artagnan the Gascon had been as swart.
"Five for resisting scholastic authority," Hunter sentenced crisply. "Five for continued resistance. Five, I think, for refusal to accept proper punishment."
Hunter controlled the boy easily. Gerard trembled in anger, but his threshing had stopped.
"Do you wish to take this side, Miss Bisque-Hardy?" Hunter indicated where he stood.
Magenta's blood rushed to her ears, like a river. "I believe that a descending backhand blow is more telling than a descending forehand one, where no run is permitted."
"True, true. I bow to your experience, demoiselle."
She still found that island address strange, but she knew it meant respect and recognized station.
She raised the heavy tawse in her right hand, carrying it back over to fall behind her left shoulder. Praying for true aim, she swung a full-strengthed diagonal stroke. It exploded onto his curved buttocks.
The boy grunted, like the pig he was.
She pulled the strap away, watching the hot coloration begin. Her own muscles ached from the violent strain.
Still, in under half a minute she caught him equally hard across hs impudent hinds. The whipped muscles bunched.
She tried to aim, but wound up hitting him at random. Still, her strokes covered his rebellious behind.
At ten he gave up a moist, reluctant sob.
At twelve he raised his head, bloodless and drawn. "Please, sir!"
"Beg clemency from Miss Bisque-Hardy; she is correcting you."
He ducked his face, teeth grinding.
She used all her strength on those final three. By some gift they struck the most claret-hued, sorest marks.
She stood back. Hunter released the boy. He cradled his face in both his arms.
"Button up your braces. You wouldn't wish to scandalize the girls now, would you?" Hunter mocked.
Gerard reached back, face averted. His fingers could lift his trousers, covering his scalded behind, but he couldn't work the buttons. He simply sat, head reared, lips stretched over his teeth.
Exultation swam through her.
"Thank you, Miss Bisque-Hardy." Hunter extended his hand, taking the tawse from her. He placed it on the desk before the boy. "That is a reminder for the rest of the day."
The tutor bowed, taking and kissing her tingling fingers.
"May I call upon your generosity should a like occasion arise?"
"Pray do, Mr. Hunter. I shall always be pleased to aid your work with these children."
She paraded out in triumph, past Syndon and Auberon, past the big-eyed island girls.
Yemoja, the mighty wind that gyres in strength upon the land!
Yemoja, whose watery rage brings low the river-vaulting bridge!
"Oh, Mary most-Virgin, whose heel defies the lurking fangs!
"Ever-purest bride whose monthly flow refreshes a parched land's fruit!
"Yemoja, sisters of Blessed Mary, show her loving mercy to your land!
"Accept as your love the lord of this land, who serves you now and always!
"Protect his acres and his crops; accept the service of his body and his brain!"
All three nubile ebony witches danced with flagrant eroticism, now fanning Sir Polkinghorn's risen member, now touching swordpoints and revolving in a scythe-edged pinwheel about him. He lay patiently upon the ground.
The first held her blade intimidatingly across his throat while she settled over his ripe and ready peggo. She supported herself on her elbows with her saber menacing his windpipe and her other hand fanning his brow lustily. The naked maidens spread her narrow, sable lips and nuzzled his blunt member into place.
With a wild, devotional look, she plunged her hips against his. The sword edge nicked his flesh. Blood started from both as she emitted a woman's cry. She lifted the saber blade higher and he began the necessary labors.
The ritual proved stenuous work, no denying. He had his hands overly full, tickling, tantalizing, and titillating her sweetly molded body into the requisite climactic paroxysm. She shrilled and bounded happily, her eager, clutching vulva fairly savaging his rigid fellow.
When she rose, it was only to have the next African pythoness mount his blood-greased staff.
Damn those busybodies who sharpen ceremonial swords, he thought. He felt the fresh cuts on his Adam's apple as he bucked and cuddled, lithely muscled thighs in a rapturous death-grip about his loins. Bountiful buttock-moons weaved their ancient magic beneath his kneading hands.
As stern ritual prescribed, none of the three women performed any volitional act beyond her depucellation. He built the amorous frenzy within each one; her bottom began its wigglings of satisfaction in instinctive response to his manipulations; her breasts crept up his chest to his mouth of their own apparent will. He nibbled at inky, hard nipples.
He wondered if the solemn merchants strolling the Change in London ever appreciated the tribulations of the provincial planter. He doubted it.
The last ecstatic deflowered maiden actually trapped his fingers in her gyrating, clenched bottomcleft. The dusky witch rode him with a ferocious chanting of unassuageable, inarticulate lust. Always the last one, he marveled.
Teeth set, he strove to avert the discourtesy of a masculine eruption. One couldn't afford to play favorites among the three Yemoja whose votaries had claimed their initiation into womanhood on his strained, weeping affair.
She dismounted, doe-eyed and spraddle-legged with pleasure.
All right, John Thomas, he thought, now for the final effort. He felt the three swordpoints lift his swollen glans, smirched with female blood and outpourings. The fans began their fluttering cooling. Their breeze tickled his engorged thing.
Sir Polkinghorn thought of Nanny Trent, whose Sunday treat had been a brisk chaffing for his youthful wand between her Midlothian peasant bosoms until he "poured his cream on my puddings." He remembered the shy investigations his hands made into his sister's drawers as she stood in the forboding study's corner, her nose pressed to a ha'penny, after punishment; the fugitive fondling of her hot welts practically merited the half-crown she bargained him into giving her...
He felt the near rush of his tribute, but it receded. He concentrated on Magenta's mother in her fine, apple-cheeked fury as she burst into the hunting lodge on that Irish holiday, to find him on the rush-stuffed mattress with a convent girl, her uniform rucked about her moist armpits; he remembered dew-lipped young Molly Morgan Mulcreavy, shrieking her piquant cries as Lady Betty chased her about the room and out into the night, hunting whip cracking repeatedly across the girl's chubby, spritely bottom . . . Ah!
The spermatozoic offering to the riverain goddesses' potency foamed high and long. The blades whisked through the pulsing jet, scattering gouted drops over the turned earth. The fans kept their agitation until the mighty monster had been thoroughly tamed back into a wet, pale worm.
Polite applause rewarded him as he stood, swatting the clinging loam from his backside. This was truly warm work, he reflected, fucking on a hot day. He longed for a bracing pint, drawn from the deep stone cistern of a hospitable pub. Yet, he had foregone such pleasantries when permanently locating himself on Mardi Blanc.
He had donned his clothing when Father de la Charrette, carefully absent during the pagan portion of the proceedings, arrived with his censer and sanctified water to bless the field and the work crew.
The round-faced, awl-nosed French priest had talked quite freely with him about the relations between the religions in the Caribbean islands. The discussion had certainly eased the yoke of Catholicism upon Sir Polkinghorn's shoulders. He had, however, no inclination to discuss such philosophies with his wife. It would be unprincipled to disturb her contentment with the faith of her childhood.
* * *
5
DISPUTATIONS
A late afternoon heat invaded the Hunter parlor. No sign remained of the prior night's extravagancies, save that both Dolly and Clara moved about the room slowly, each aware of her clothing's weight upon her netherperson.
"Dr. Simon Mackenna, Mrs. David Hunter." Charles Rogers ushered in a sparsely haired man plainly nearing his forties. "I believe you've been previously introduced at Sir Polkinghorn's gala."
"A pleasure again, Mrs. Hunter, a great delight- and, Miss Harcourt, the spirited portrait of health! Good, good."
"The doctor thought me dangerously undercomplexioned after my captivity."
"A pale brow may be a woman's fashionable boast, but her skin had an unreasonable translucence from the seraglio's curtained gloom, and her blood coursed wanly due to excessive sweetmeats without any vitality in them. Now she's robust and bonny as any woman!"
"Please be free to seat yourself, doctor," Dolly indicated a chair. "Clara and I prefer to remain on our feet. The warmth of the day, you understand."
"Ah. Ah. Just so." A thoughtful professional mask displaced any glimmer of indelicate, contrary suspicion.
"You may first wish to see David's operating theater." Rogers motioned the physician to the door communicating with the garden. "Our tutor is inaugurating his new whipping bench."
They stepped outside to a bare, level space before a low rock wall.
"A deadly engine for chastisement, that, particularly with its sinister Yorkist hump. Brrr." Mackenna observed the worn velvet thinly upholstering the curving surface. The mahoganny has slivered and chipped at the edges as from great use.
"Dr. Mackenna, I'm pleased you could attend." David Hunter appeared around the house's corner. "Did you ship that with you, tutor? I've not seen a flogging bench on our island these ten years." "Lady Bisque-Hardy offered me its extended use.
She brought it from London." "Aye, her . . . hem, establishment there, of course." Hunter raised one of the freshly oiled straps dangling from the bench's edge. "I had to all but invent the damned thing myself. She shipped it in pieces and hadn't had it assembled again. Peg construction, would you believe it? Really quite sound, with not an iron nail or bolt in it."
He let the fetter fall, its buckle rattling lightly. "I understand," The American continued, "she prefers something called 'the bar.' She's quite the mysterious coquette. I'm not to see this wonder until Friday-"
"You're invited? Good man." The physician glanced ard the entry to the parlor. "And, Mrs. Hunter?" "Yes."
"Exactly so, exactly so." He nodded judiciously. "A seasoning experience, eh, Mr. Rogers?" "Clara so informs me."
"Where is this pretty sinner, Mr. Hunter?" Mackenna rubbed a finger along his bony jaw. "Shall I certify her constitution's up to this scourging you plan for her?"
"Certainly. Charlies tells me you know Joyau." "Of course, the Musselman's delight! Let me fetch my conjurer's bag."
Mackenna returned to the parlor from the interior hallway. "As ft as any fiddle upon which bow ever played. No doubt, gentlemen, ladies; even a protracted punishment could not mar that sturdy animal constitution."
"Do you find women so brutish, doctor?" Clara inquired.
"A glass?" Rogers offered, unstoppering the decanter.
"A small one, thank you. Miss Harcourt, the saintly Francis of Assisi wisely called his body 'Brother Ass,' for the reason that it bore his spirit about in this world. We all dwell somewhere between the braying donkeys and the insubstantial, if more melodious cherubim."
"A politicker's answer, doctor. Do you have so ready an opinion upon corporal correction for women?"
Dolly's eyes widened, but her tongue stayed still as the physician let the whisky glass play back and forth under his nose.
"It proves effective, I understand, and thus the law dictates such measures for insubordination to certain civil statute." He sipped, a beatific smile transfiguring his solemn air.
"I fell party to a discussion recently concerning why women's punishments so often are inflicted upon the lower person." The Englishwoman took brief steps in a semicircle about Mackenna, regarding him levelly as she progressed. "I have seen you attend Sir George Doore's side when penalties were exacted upon felons, to advise him upon medical aspects."
"Possible deferral, yes."
"Men's stripes inevitably are offered their naked shoulders, whether with stick or lash. Women, without exception, receive their adjudicated portion upon a somewhat lower anatomical region." "And that by sound policy, dear lady, for-"
"All is ready," Hunter announced in the doorway.
Joyau stood in a coarse muslin bodice, her thick tresses unbound and trailing upon her bosom and shoulders. Her bare toes curled in the dry dust before the whipping bench. Almond eyes, heavily lashed, gave brooding looks toward the assembled company. The sunlight made her olive skin darker, lustrous; her mottle seemed a bushy, ungardened grove, despite its fresh plucking.
At Hunter's command, she stepped forward to kneel upon the bench. She stretched over the rounded hump, her gazelle-muscled thighs spreading to the very edges. Her full female territory stayed exposed to the inquiring gaze. Hunter secured her to the frame at knees and ankles with the straps, buckling the leather tightly.
The humped bench had her thickly based buttocks projected and separated at the most convenient angle for casual observation, and for thorough flogging. Her chin rested upon the velvet as her master pulled each arm tautly down, fettering it to the bench's leg.
The kitchen stool held a leather thong with a long wooden handle and a split, hinged wedge. Hunter picked up the latter, bringing it to Joyau's mouth. Her lips pouted firmly shut.
"Damned obstinate demon." He pinched her nose. She breathed through her mouth, but her teeth remained closed. "This is for your own good. Doctor, may I trouble you-" Mackenna quickly, professionally pried her jaws apart. The neck twisted to no avail as Hunter forced the wedge between her teeth. He held it while the doctor secured it by a cord behind her head. "Ingenious."
"The Briarfield Clock and Spring Works in Providence has only recently offered it for domestic and scholastic use. My father-in-law graciously gave us one of their fine clocks at our wedding. 'If you cannot stay the hand of Providence, be sure to mark its passing with a Briarfield Pendulum Regulator.' I observed this useful plaything in their catalogue as Dolly and I selected the clock we wished."
"Did they print a fanciful slogan for that beartrap, as well?"
"Idle chatter is the Devil's Telegraph; curb unruly tongues with a Briarwood Spring Silencer' Their de luxe Detention Model has tackheads studded in a semicircle to completely discourage the tongue. I thought that unnecessary for my purpose."
"Completely. This saves Mile. Joyau from self-injury if she becomes overwrought." Mackenna gave her distented jaw a brushing caress. "You wouldn't care to trim that lively tongue with your teeth."
"The actual instrument for correction, doctor." Hunter held it before him. "The lash is buckskin, like the cracker on a coach whip. It burns with the devil's own sulphur, but seldom leaves raised marks beyond the fourth day."
"That handle is only two feet, and can't get the leverage a good coachman has with his stingtail. I have watched a carriage whip peel skin till a breast resembled a flayed blood orange-I mean no indelicacy, ladies, merely a medical accuracy."
"We quite understand, doctor." Clara patted Dolly's arm as her hand stole to her bosom.
"You mean a full 180 strokes, still?"
"Only 163, due to extenuating fortitude."
"I see no medical problems." The physician stepped back beside the two women. "I've never held with this excessive solemnity during thrashings. Have you seen Lady Morgan at it? Or Old Dragon Doore presiding over a hide-tanning? He actually silences the gallery during inflictions."
"I am aware," Clara remarked pleasantly. Before them, Hunter took a stance a whip's length from Joyau's left side. Dolly stiffened under the Englishwoman's gently massaging fingers.
"Now, imagine Mile. Joyau's fundament as a soft hummock, awaiting that subcutaneous effusion which blushes forth with all the tints known to dawn. We often remain so rapt in the majesty of justice's ritual that the quieter beauties of punishment elude our attention."
Hunter's buckskin sailed high along the left buttock. The tip nipped into that tender crevice parting the plump hemispheres. He paused a few seconds, then whipped the left thigh, just below the dark wrinklings that separated the ample muscle masses. The bottom leaped as if touched itself.
Another moment, then the lash curled fully across the left cheek, fractionally below the first lick. Again the buckskin stung deeply into the softly curved rectal valley. Allowing scant seconds, he repeated the pattern on her right side, letting the thong finish long on the far slope of both haunch and leg.
Taking a step back, he flogged the left thigh, then caught the broad hindquarter's base across both rounds. The leather crossed above the dark-shrouded love groove, but below the anal flowering. As Joyau's skin leaped, the thong burned the left thigh, yet again.
Hunter took the right leg top, both undermost curves, and the right leg. The snapping dart of the lash had occupied a minute's time as he rested his arm.
Joyau's twin mounds, upthrust from her pale bodice, twitched in vivid discomfort.
"Yet, the beauty has its comic aspect," Mackenna continued to Clara. "I speak in the strictest Shakespearean sense. Consider: a grown woman, being punished on her bare bottom-her great, voluptuari-anly appointed bare bottom. You asked why the law focuses upon the female backside. To punish thusly highlights the ludicrousness of the spectacle."
Hunter set his left foot, trailing the lash back with his extended right leg. He swung limb and whip, giving force as the buckskin sang into the left buttock, the left thigh, the left buttock; the right mound, the right leg top, the right mound . . .
Mackenna continued speaking, his eyes never leaving the snapping impact as leather scored flesh. "Isn't the roistering rump a constant source of japes and humor? 'How, with my tongue in your tail?' Petruchio mockes the Shrew."
He imitated a high-pitched voice. " 'It's big and it's white and it follows me everywhere!' 'Before God, madam, what is it?' 'My arse!' So quite well-bred poppets sported in King George's time, when rude boys counseled their betters to "Kiss my Parliament!', thereby holding the Lords and Commons for ridicule as two great, fatty tuberosities at the butt-end of an empire."
Long, hot rills paraded down Joyau's bottom and upper legs. The marks at her buttocks' base thickened as Hunter kept to his target, below the tout, above the slot.
She gurgled through her wooden gag, the posteriors in constant motion as he coursed through the third dozen.
"No man can discount the warmth a woman's jaunty hindquarters provokes. You ladies have such a remarkably hoydenish skill at rotating your hips as you travel. Scant wonder we demand such a great outpouring of material from mills to cover you, down to the heels, lest we poor men be tempted beyond all measure.
"Yet, however saucy well-twitched nethercheeks may be to concupiscent eyes." Mackenna watched the fourth hissing dozen strokes. Joyau's legs fought the straps, trying to kick as the buckskin punished steadily. "No matter what sensual notions those epicurianly gibbous moons instill, the buttocks remain fundamentally comic. The plain truth remains that a woman looks damnably humorous with her bum in the air."
A flexing motion of both the cockled anus and the thatch-blurred vulva attended the fiery pops as the fifth round livened the Moroccan netherglobes.
"A spanking mocks a woman's presumptions to dignity," the doctor pronounced. "Such a flogging as we see merely extends the concept inherent in spanking. To see a woman's cunt available for rogering whets the appetite. To see her bottom turned up for punishment, her comfortable yoni ignored, is to know her as vulnerable-upended, overthrown, domnei inverted to comedy."
Hunter caught his breath, rubbing his arm. "I hadn't known you studied the traditions of Povencal amoir courtois, doctor. Maistrye tumbled to mirth, is that it?"
"Exactly what Bath's famous Wife would have known had one husband among her multitude bared her for a spanking, instead of saying 'meeke, yonge, and fressh abedde.' Grant a wife-my pardon, Miss Harcourt-grant a woman mastery, as Alisoun of Bath commands, and nature's great order is undone.
"Thus we return to Shakespeare, where comedy ends in restoration. Justice administered through the female bottom's clownish pangs parallels the jests and trickery in, say, Twelfth Night, which heal ruptured moral rule. So does the cold, impersonal law specify penalties upon 'the breech well-bared' or 'the posterior regions, soundly corrected'. Pain and tears and reception back into the flock, all follow fundamental indignity and a bottom of good mirth."
Hunter sent the sixtieth stroke with a waspish sound and sting into Joyau's struggling thigh. Dark, clustered marks swelled at each buttock's lowest curve. Elsewhere, her skin rippled under bright, rilled traces.
"Thank you, Dr. Mackenna." Clara had her arm fully around Dolly's shoulders. The Yankee shivered lightly. "You have explained clearly: the hand that cunjugally caresses may seek to win favor through rapture; the spanking hand is ever uppermost over a bottom upturned in disgrace."
"A bracing task," Hunter grinned tightly at them. "Now for her dainty front."
"David!"
"Do you counsel clemency again, my bride?" He asked, the lash between his fingers.
"No ... I don't contest your judgement."
"Wise, my pet." He loosed Joyau's right ankle and knee. The leg thrashed, extending and twisting. "Charlie, can you lend me a hand?"
"Certainly." Rogers took the opposite side of the bench, freeing her leg. She wiggled, grinding her belly against the faded velvet as her lower limbs tossed. When they freed her arms, she rose, planted on all fours, back arched like a cat.
The two men took her by hips and shoulders. They rolled her onto her back, her navel at the apex of her bowed body. As they strapped her into position, her face hung upside down from the bench end, hair trailing in the dust.
Hunter resumed the thong with a brisk volley. Five strokes whipped her front left thigh in a quarter of a minute. She blew through the spring-loaded wedge, naked loins rippling.
He snapped the buckskin firmly across her lower belly, a finger's width above her shaggy Venus grove. Joyau's head raised; she stared glassy-eyed at the descending lash that scored her contracting pelvic flesh. Without respite, the thong bit into her right thigh five more times.
Hunter crossed to take her from the right, now, leaving ripped satin streaks along the legs and undulating loins. He had flogged her thirty times in less than two minutes.
"Thirsty work, doctor, and remarkably silent." The tutor found a cloth and mopped his brow and upper lip. "Dolly, would you fetch Yolanda with a pitcher of water? I believe she's cowering in the kitchen."
His wife left. The Moroccan woman moaned, squirming at irregular intervals.
Yolanda's eyes showed solemn terror as she brought a pitcher, fresh from the well. Dolly took her place beside a comforting Clara as her husband drank directly from the enameled jug. He poured the remainder on Joyau's ribboned skin.
"Charlie, shall we turn her again?" He handed the pitcher to Yolanda, who all but cantered away.
"Those swollen wet marks will chafe," Mackenna commented, as the men loosed the maid and rolled her with difficulty.
"My very thought, doctor, my very intention."
Hunter used ten hissing flecks to fill in untouched areas on the left hillock. He changed sides and applied the same dose, treating the right inner curve to a ration of thong tip.
Taking a careful aim, he flogged the right buttock only, whipping it diagonally. Again and again the buckskin finished directly in the thick welting at the hillock's base.
Joyau's hips arched and worked, the violent rubbing abrading her wet, welted front. Her hair mantled her face, but a moist keening rose, to fall in ragged sighs.
Hunter punished the right thigh back in licking cuts that clung to her flesh, crossing the earlier weals and meeting ones planted from the front.
"One hundred thirty, by my count." He twisted his arm slowly under his soothing left hand.
"One hundred thirty," Rogers confirmed, "with thirty-three more to come."
Hunter changed sides to diagonally stripe the left mound, leaving ten long tender welts overlapping the others. He laced the straining thigh, the buckskin darting like an adder in the sunlight.
He stepped around to the bound woman's head. Her bottom, cheeks spread open, twitched continually. The thong whipped lazily along the right crevice slope. Joyau's hair swung in a frenzy. The lash licked down again, again, again.
Hunter aimed carefully and flayed the well-martyred left inner curve for four slow counts.
"Only five strokes remaining. Now, where would they do our heathen the most good? On the buttocks proper-doctor, Charlie, Dolly, Clara?" He saw stony faces concentrated totally on the bottom twisting before them. "Shall I whip in, as the birching enthusiasts recommend in English female seminaries?"
The lash rose, hung in the humid air, and sliced neatly down the rectal valley. A blistering pip raised exactly betwixt the thick feminine lips and the dark, sphinctered crater.
The anus widened, then compressed. He flogged a second time-a third. The fourth seared the flaring rectal orifice directly. Joyau howled through her wooden gag-Hunter stepped into the final cut, sending it long, into the hair-lined slot and under. Joyau's bottom rose, brightly marked twin halves trembling. Her belly slapped back against the bench.
"I believe she'll want some privacy, to compose herself." The tutor set the buckskin whip on the stool's seat. "She may wish Yolanda's attentions." Dolly left at once for the servants' area. "Doctor, Mr. Hunter is quite correct, you are amazingly silent." Clara observed, her nostrils flared, white-edged. "I thought you found a woman's naked base comic."
Mackenna nodded soberly. "Yet, dear lady, is restoration always occasion for laughter?"
"I observe-and trust my candor will not offend-that it has proven an occasion for lust." She directed her gaze up from his trousers. "Thus, doctor, I quote Falstaff and deny your major premise. A woman's bottom receives man's punishment for quite another purpose."
The aims are not incompatible, Miss Harcourt." "Doctor!" She laughed brittlely.
* * *
6
RECRIMINATIONS
Syndon Readon contemplated the broad, coffee-colored backside pressed against the stocks' weathered seat. The naked servant's wrists had been corded to her elbows so that nothing dimmed the charm of her posterior, flattened to the boards by several hours' time.
He strolled casually around Leila, taking in yet again her capacious, standing bosom. Her eyes followed him.
"It could have been less pleasant, Leila.".
She regarded him stoically. "Indeed, Mastery Syndon. Thank you."
"My mother has detained pupils in the schoolyard pillory who have traveled home looking quite a mess. There's usually no really good drug to daub them with, either."
"I appreciate your kindness, young sir."
He had ridden his mare after lessons, making slow passes by the stocks, ever nearer. Finally he had tethered her, and as expected, a steaming pile had resulted. Flies buzzed suggestively over it, within easy chucking range.
"I think we should be friends, Leila."
She squared her shoulders as best she could with her corded forearms. "I would appreciate it, Master Syndon."
He knew his breath sounded harsh, as he put his left foot between her legs. His fingers kept surprising calm as they dealt with the buttons of the young trousers he had donned after class.
"If you . . . lean forward ..." His rod uncoiled, a blind, hungry thing.
"Shall I take it in my mouth, young sir?" She canted her torso placidly.
The suggestion perplexed him. Never had he considered such a maneuver; certainly the most compliant and adventuresome among the Irish girls he'd frolicked with had never offered such a service.
"No . . . no . . ." The gristle filled his hand satisfactorily. Something his Uncle Polkinghorn had spoken of, casually, once in England, interested him far more. 'These, I want these."
He cupped the silk-textured, beautifully grained brown titties. Hard-fleshed and hot, they were, luxurious against his palms. His penile engine lodged between them and the touch sent sparks trailing along his loins, up his spine.
"Leila ..." He muttered softly, palping the rich fruits so that they polished his pintle in achingly delicious rubs. His eyes shut, the world concentrated to flesh and fire.
Magenta could not believe the sight, at first. She had lingered in the bush, puzzled by Syndon's odd sweeps on his horse, constantly coming closer to the stocked maidservant. She had waited with patience born of her bird studies, observing everything. She knew of copulation, and men's strange desires, for her mother had deemed it important knowledge for a growing girl. Yet Lady Betty had been vague in certain areas, and the impression left had been of vast, volcanic forces at work underneath males' dissembling appearances. It had been hard to reconcile her mother's words with the polite, starch-collared young men she met in London and on holiday. Cricket and nonsensical games filled their minds, if anything ever did.
Now she understood Lady Betty's veiled warnings. Syndon Reardon! The monster had caned her own flesh, probably dizzied with lust to put that, that blotchy tubular obscenity between her bottom cheeks as he whipped her.
Her face burned at the memory, at the implications of this primitive display. She- Her thoughts arrested; her attention focused on the geysering orgar crushed between Leila's bosoms. The purpled head shuddered and spat before her incredulous gaze. Sticky splashings dripped from Leila's chin, as Syndon uttered some barbaric ululations, like a baboon crouched over his kill.
Magenta recoiled. Her mother had explained the process, but the sight! That she should marry and have some secret Hyde perform that ritual within her, perhaps even on a monthly basis-for the first time she understood Stevenson's story, with its insidious cypher. The babblings of cricket were the innocuous face of Dr. Jekyll; the horrid reality, the true person within that dissimulation-that she saw before her with uttermost clarity.
Syndon's piebald apparatus had wilted, she realized. His hangdog bashfulness as he fumbled it back into his britches failed to reassure her. Now that she knew the truth, she didn't doubt that he could pump it up to lustful fury again within-well, perhaps as short a time as a week.
She must speak to someone she knew. Her father had gone to the mountains; Lady Morgan had common coarseness that would probably find such a humiliating spectacle amusing. No, for all her Irish vulgarity, Syndon's mother would still be the one to talk to. The woman should be home from her schoolhouse shortly.
Softly, as if trailing a gorgeous Caribbean bird, she crept away through the bushes.
The wooden Jonathan branded his hand's soft heel. Syndon smothered an anguished yelp.
"No funny faces, now, you bad boy!" Lesbia Rear-don lifted the oval applicator from her son's palm. The hole in the small wood paddle's disk left a burgundy blister, chased at the periphery by blue. The serrated edge gave that tiny hole an even fiercer bite.
"Hand up! Stop that ridiculous sniveling."
She walloped his palm again. The long handle gave the light paddle considerable force, when applied with strength. She used her arm's might, and he whined doggishly.
"Seventeen and think you're a man!" She jeered angrily. "Because your aunt lets you take such obscene liberties with her stepdaughter, a girl not even your blood relation, you think you've business fiddling with the serving girls. I'll give you seventeen!"
So she did, in punishing strokes. The boy's hands dangled, numb, as he fought tears.
"Stand steady," she warned. She slapped his face. Salt stood in hi:; eyes, burning the lids red. He refused to weep as she boxed his ears twice, each. "A whoremonger's lickspittle, that's what you'll become."
She used the back of her hand across his mouth, once, in contempt.
"Out!"
He scurried from her bedroom, useless hands pressed under his armpits.
She aimed a bitter eye heavenward. "Joseph Brendan Loy Reardon, to have left your wife to such abuse from her own flesh-how like a Skibereen man! To sneak from responsibilities by drowning in a little typhoon, as if you didn't know the seafaring trade from your infancy."
"A pretty word, 'responsibility.'" Lesbia Reardon whirled. "Mary Mother of God!"
"Only an apparition of your sister, Molly." Lady Morgan entered, showing teeth but no warmth in a savage smile. "Thank you for noticing the resemblance, though. The good nuns did their best to shape me in our Blessed Lady's image. They had enough years for the task, since my married sister-my very properly church-married sister-felt her 'responsibility' served by leaving me in an orphan asylum."
"Well, we were orphans."
"But not familyless, not once you had your own household."
"They were always good to us there. I thought it the best, since Joseph and I had so little ..." The words mumbled out without passion, as if often repeated.
"You escapee' Sister Bethesda and Sister Mary Golgotha by maneuvering a sweet Mass-going sailor into marriage with as hastily contrived a pregnancy as you could manage at fifteen. How many stuffings did it take to fill your cradle, which had comforted so many before him, without any issue?"
Lesbia Reardon twisted her face away. "He didn't choose to remove it in time, and I didn't have the heart to refuse him."
Lady Morgan shook her head, pityingly. "You left your eight-year-old sister to the tender rearing-and I am not being metaphorical, merely exact-offered by the nuns while you ... I believe 'entertained' is a preferred, broad euphemism for 'fucked dry'... all the lads not at sea, like your faithful sailor boyo, the trusting Joseph.
"If by 'whoremonger' you perchance meant me, I, at least, had the dignity of presiding over Aunt Augusta's establishment. I did not try to do the work of her draggletails myself. She lay swollen with dropsy while I, dewy shamrocks still in my eighteen-year-old hair, managed the whole enterprise for her.
"You, with your pulling protestations of morality, stayed in your sod-roofed shanty, tumbling the village men, first as an adultress, then as a wanton widow. Scant wonder the village ran you from its school. An education you gave young Syndon and Auberon, I've no doubt."
Lesbia Reardon folded her arms, finger white around the Jonathan handle. 'Then, why install me in this. . . cesspit of hell?"
"You're clever enough at booklearning, when you're not ironing your sheets with your tail. I couldn't evade my sisterly responsibility of seeing that you found a position in life more respectable than soixante-neuf.'' She pursed her lips at her sister's wince. "I can't imagine why a woman with such a love for the acts themselves can wrinkle her face so piss-sourly at the mere words describing them."
"I-if the nuns never taught you decorum, I surely can't."
"Assuredly, they had more persuasive means during the donkey's years I stayed with them." Lady Morgan commandeered the chair from her sister's plain, tiny desk. "I'll have you know there're more natural taste and propriety, and common civility besides, in any one of Aunt Augusta's paid nightworks than you'll ever counterfeit, for all your hypocritical aspirations to gentle breeding."
She nodded at the Jonathan. "What were you beating your son for?"
The schoolmistress told her, stumbling over some of Magenta's more vivid descriptions.
"Och. I shall have to put him in the book for Friday. I'll not have him abusing servants, merely because of their station." Lady Morgan seemed undismissed. "You should be less vigorous in your chastisements. He'll harbor a resentment that'll rebound upon you when it's his turn to correct you."
Narrow eyes pierced her in pleading. "You cant'-!"
"On his eighteenth birthday I mean to vest him with the right to use the fruit of forest and tannery on your velvet underbum, fully and freely, without my prior approval." Lady Morgan laughed. "You should seethe colors in your face, and you told your son not to pull quaint grimaces!"
Lesbia murmured something about scarlet and Babylon, her knotted fists trembling.
"The packet boat to Guadaloupe leaves regularly," her sister informed her casually. "I rather fancy you working your way home on a great ocean steamer. I hired some tough-cunted veterans who'd done it without spoiling their marketable complexions. It offers worlds of experience, playing ship's cat."
The other woman's mouth worked fruitlessly.
"Hand me that pandy," Lady Morgan ordered. She took it. "Oh, a Jonathan, even less pleasant for Syndon, but all the more suitable for my purpose now. Take up your skirt."
She swung the wooden whipping tool lightly as she stood.
"Not . . . now." Her sister's eyes darted to the door, half open.
"Are you afraid Syndon or Auberon will overhear?" Lady Morgan taunted. "I could understand your bellowing about 'whoremonger's lickspittle' down the corridor, and that with your door shut. I believe I made a request."
Lesbia's pale fingers hauled up her black cotton skirt.
"No nasty drawers or petticoats, I see. Good." The woman had prescribed her sister's pedagogic uniform explicitly. Period inspection assured compliance, if not acquiescence. "I'll have that folded higher along the small of your back, please. Turn about, so I can take you properly; now, bend over, knees straight."
The full Celtic hindquarters tautened in profile.
Lady Morgan found a faded yellow cane in a corner, its tip splintered from repeated use in the schoolhouse. She thumped it behind her sister's knees. "Wrists between your legs. Hold onto this, and I want to see you really pulling on it while your legs stay yardstick-straight. Fine."
The Jonathan flashed through the air to score the nearer bottom cheek. A hot, bright patch blossomed forth, centered by a ruddy blister. Lady Morgan took her time, whipping again, harder. The small paddle spanked the clenched flesh.
She paused for a look. The tanned hemisphere glowered at her, while the division between that and the pale mound squeezed, widened, squeezed.
"I suppose you know that a charming bit of burred steel called a Prussian Pineapple, lodged up your arse, would cure that giddy habit."
She gave attention and the Jonathan to the other side. Wine-dark pips with pinched blue circumferences smoldered in a steady line down that hillock, as well.
"Those knees are looking a bit unsteady. Don't you practice? You should, you really should. Syndon will be much less forgiving than I am. He's learned a great deal, hiding Maggie's silly rump. Never let up on someone who never lets up on you. It's somehow quite self-perpetuating, but the children haven't figured that out, as yet."
She whacked the thighs directly below the angry cheeks. No sulcate division separated buttock from leg. Lesbia's sturdy limbs simply continued the plump, curving bottom's sweep. Lady Morgan extended a trail of beet-hued blisters, set in paddle-bright blotches, those comical little bumps yet, have I? Syndon's hands must surely hurt, since you can't help hitting the little devils on so small a space as a palm. Perhaps it'll help you be more understanding toward your son."
She flattened the right undercheek in a hearty smack. Lesbia snorted without dignity, shaking her hanging head. Something nasty stained her carpet.
Lady Morgan dosed the spasming chub again, then applied two scalding swats to the opposite netherslope. "I always hated those. Sister Agatha Algonquine, we called her, the missionary among those Red Indians. She claimed they never even blinked at a double-drubbing with a Jonathan. I believe she shaded the truth, wouldn't you say?"
She watched her sister puff and stamp.
"Syndon's birthday is in four months. I've told you his present. I trust he'll have sharpened his skill on Maggie's pretty posteriors enough to know how to leave a mature bottom looking like a bed of coals under a grate."
She sent the Jonathan clattering onto her sister's desk, stirring the papers. "Stand."
Tense from her pain, Lesbia obeyed. She dropped the old cane, but caught her skirt so that it stayed high over her hindquarters.
Lady Morgan smiled at that very particular attention to detail. "I'ld give you time in the corner, but you have enough to reflect on in your chaste, widow's bed. Tomorrow afternoon, we are to visit Sir George's private assizes as the guests of Colonel Sandemarche. Clear your schedule for two o'clock, at the Barracks."
"My pupils!" The schoolmistress choked down the pain in her voice.
"I thought afternoons were for physical training, which your proctors can handle. No wonder these children need a tutor, losing half a day's learning to hopping about the schoolyard." Lady Morgan strolled out into the hallway. "Two o'clock promptly."
Lesbia lunged and slammed the door shut behind her sister, oaths fouling her lips in a hateful monotone.
"My thanks to you for inviting us to dine, Charlie. The household won't be fit for guests until Joyau's lesson wears off a bit, and Yolanda ceases flinching every time 1 give her an order."
"More than welcome, David, I assure you. I regret that Margaret is sulking. Her wit usually stays the talk of any company for days after. I've had such a handsome offer from Colonel Sandemarche that I've decided to save her the chagrin of the public auction."
"Charles, I am your sister. Can you conceive of such indecency, such lack of pride, Mr. Hunter?"
"Mine or yours, my termagant? I know our relationship quite well."
"Your laws are rather peculiar, Charlie."
"But to the point. A woman over twenty-five cannot support herself without employment, a husband, property, or money. If she has none, she's indentured for seven years, with the price going to a fund maintained in trusteeship by the government. At the end, she has her dowery, some useful skills, perhaps, or money to invest in a business or some land. She won't be on the street, an inducement to lewd behavior. Can you see Margaret cozening strangers for shillings?"
"I have a house!"
"I have two, you merely have the right to live in one of them. The will spelled out the terms most specifically. You may have residence, and an allowance for staff and maintenance for the span of your life, but you have no ownership. Mother and father wished you to be able to live in your precious solitude, but didn't want to contribute to gulling some poor swain into marrying you for a fortune."
"Mr. Hunter is shocked, Charles!"
"Mr. Hunter appears amused. Mr. Hunter is smothering a laugh. I know Mr. Hunter, Peg my pet. He does not know you. These were our parents very words, David, I swear it: 'Poverty is burden enough for a man, without taking on a wife such as Margaret.' "
"Seven years, Charles, you can't be really considering-"
"You had your reprieve once. The new law is most specific. The rumblings of the legislative colon brought forth a change of the enchanted age from twenty to twenty-five. Lionel Daire claimed it put too great a burden on parents to have to settle property or a bond on a girl at twenty, merely to avoid indenture. He sponsored the action that raised it to twenty-five. Mad, completely." "A loan is all I need, to indemnity the fund-"
"And how pay back? From your household allowance, denying your servants food?"
"You could post the amount easily."
"Yes, so could everyone else you've asked. Consider it for your own good, Pegs. Everyone you know says so."
"I spoke of male reactions to a flogged bottom, and here I'm-bursting."
"Such an inconvenient fashion. I long to kiss your bubbies and can't get to them."
"Let me unhook this, and if you help my arms from their sleeves, this pulls down, so. "
"Like tiny, warm cherries ..."
"Oh. That's nice. Very nice."
"And if I let my hand stray here, while my tongue ..." "OH."
"Perhaps your soft hand can fill a kindred office." "So much to tickle, my poor thumb will be quite exhausted." "Might this revive it?"
"My skirts, take them up, please! I must-now, belly to belly-"
"Those marks must be sore, still. Yes, you see? Raise your bottom and play St. George to my dragon."
"The Whore of Babylon to your Beast, rather."
"Is this covered in the Book . . . and is this named. . . ?"
"Yes, now-put your hand here-don't stop, deeper-please-"
"Did the great Whore have thighs like these, hot ivory gates to pleasure? And did her teats rise, tipped with rosebuds, at the pressure of a tongue. . . ?"
"Clara has been gone some while, hasn't she?"
"In the garden, under the moon. Not lonely, though. Dolly sat with her a while. Then Dr. Mackenna visited with her."
Mackenna, now there's a possibility for you, Margaret. An impressionable bachelor. Catch him under the moon, in that far rockery, where Clara won't stumble upon you. There's a man to buy you off, there's a sponsor, Pegs."
"Doctor, did Mr. Hunter punish the poor girl quite as cruelly as I hear?"
"Thorough, Miss Rogers, most effective, but I couldn't call it cruel."
"I feel a chill rush through me at the thought. May I rest upon your shoulder a moment? I trust the horrid spectacle had its professional interests for you. I understand you advise Sir George Doore."
"Be assured, Hunter was milder than milk beside some of the private assizes punishments . . . Why, Miss Rogers, such friendly comfort to offer an old bachelor!"
"A bachelor by your own insistence, doctor, not with the consent of women, and to call a man at the height of his powers old!"
"A bit lower, if you might . . . Regrettably, I must say a physician's life calls him from a companion's side too often. I must take long journeys at strange hours. I must . . . must ..."
"I hear Hunter quite whipped the skin off her, front and back. I should be cut to the bone at any such treatment, myself."
"A flagrant exaggeration on Rumor's part, though I'd not want to have her bottom for a week or two. She'll feel it there . . . yes, and there, also ..."
"Here, doctor?"
"Whether she sits or walks."
"Between . . . could you mean-surely not, here?"
"Emphatically, and along this tender pathway. I see the tale has you quite shivering from dread."
"Not dread, doctor, but its opposite." "Now what could that be? I can plainly feel an opposite to this-such an evenly matched pair, of a weight, and of a shape. No distinguishing marks to tell them apart, not to eye, to finger, to-"
"Nothing to difference them?"
"Mirror twins. While opposite this, I find . . . well, totally dissimilar, don't you understand? This, so like a waving finger, beckoning-and here, resembling a lip-less mouth, yet both sharing a common ticklishness . . . Yes, the night chill has you trembling almost to a fever. Let me cover you." "Yes, doctor, now."
* * *
7
ADJUDICATIONS
Colonel Sandemarche led the way across the Barracks parade ground. The hard-packed soil had once been carpeted with cowries. Years of tramping feet had ground the shells into the resisting earth. Heat radiated upward from the solid greyish surface.
Lesbia Reardon walked slightly apart from her sister and the colonel. She tried not to study the eight women undergoing treadmill drill at the far side of the compound. However, some perverse imp drew her attention again and again to the diamond points of perspiration dancing on the very naked, very female figures. Brown and white skins, leanly muscled backs, Hippolytan posteriors, rhythmically treading legs glistened in the dapple of the light penetrating the slat-work canopy.
Four women toiled, arms outthrust against a restraining board. Their legs pumped steadily, feet rolling the mighty log-like cylinder. Behind each, another woman knelt, shins against the platform, bottom pressed to a narrow, inclined support beam.
In front of the mill, a six-foot black Army matron issued orders to a skinny-limbed, pot-bellied brown boy. He laboriously hauled a sun-heated wooden bucket up onto the scaffold. With a negligent toss, he sluiced the nearest marching woman, then dragged the bucket off to a rusting metal pump to refill it.
"Hard work in any climate," Lady Morgan reflected.
"The Army has a rigorous responsibility, caring for felons at the Palace of Justice. Our female warders must be tougher than the most hardened mountain-bred Amazon, or fail that grave trust." The colonel pointed. "Look, now; they rotate every fifteen minutes."
A second matron with sergeant's stripes joined the first, climbing onto the vibrating platform. Each dark woman held a flexible wand at least forty inches from stock to tip. The senior of the two blew her whistle.
The women walking the mill adroitly stepped to the left. The ones on the flat space behind them gradually dislodged themselves to stand. "My! Such unpleasant perches, with a bum-wracker nearly two inches, on the right."
"They ascend in thickness, that one's a full two at the base."
All four women showed difficulty unplugging themselves from the sodomizing prongs. The abundant buttocks reluctantly, inch by inch, yielded the blunt-tipped rods skewering each Army cadet's guts. The one furthest along the right finally had to reach behind to push herself free. Her hind halves clapped together. The rigid, curved affair behind her surely could be no thicker at the rounded crown than a bull's device in full cry.
She doubled, hands on her knees. A slicing backhand seared the long lather switch into her hardily muscled posteriors. She straightened and hopped onto the rolling treadmill, bracing herself against the board before her.
The bucked-drenched cadet stepped off the other end of the cylinder. She crouched, panting. A forehand stroke whistled the other leather wand into her weal-seamed crupper. She jerked erect like a yanked puppet, hips grinding against empty air.
Each woman on the platform had moved down the line. The farthest slowly eased herself onto the mightiest of the upright engines. The near woman, just off the mill, bent her knees until the stained tip of a man-sized pizzle nuzzled her rumpcleft. She rocked onto the thing with short pelvic jabs, bringing herself down to a full kneel as she did so.
"Excellent discipline," Colonel Sandemarche chuckled, "commencing at seven and ending at six, with one hour's respite at lunch-taken standing in the canteen."
"Punishment drill?" Lady Morgan queried, giving her sister an appraising look. Lesbia appeared quite pale, despite the day's heat.
"Routine training, twice a month for recruits, once a month for full cadets. Of course, it can be used for mass discipline in the female barracks, whenever a straightener is needed to tighten slack habits."
He continued to escourt the two Irishwomen toward a whitewashed stone building, long and with a high-thatched peaked roof. "I fear it would not do to interrupt Sir George's court by arriving late. Where Justice Constant Mallowan partook of the ease so often associated with the islands, his successor has only iron resolve to impress a firm will upon the ungodly."
"Mad Dragon Doore," Lady Morgan pronounced deliberately.
"So both Queen's counsel and the defense have been heard to call him. He keeps his assizes on an irregular schedule, so one never knows more than a few days in advance when a case will come to trial. He claims it keeps the barristers from becoming overconfident."
"There're only two on the docket today, I believe, but his latest round of sentences is up for execution of the adjudicated punishments."
The tricolored flag of Mardi Blanc, with its Union Jack in the upper left quadrant, hung limply in the heat.
The crowded anteroom only felt hotter, in spite of the building's thick stone walls. It had been a tack-room, hastily converted to judicial use.
"At these private assizes," the colonel continued in an undertone, "Sir George judges those cases too delicate-or too indelicate-for the public eye and ear. Ah."
"ALL RISE!" A bullcalf bellow and the pounding of a staff upon the reverberant boards heralded a stooped, red-faced figure rather like a grey monkey fancifully decked in wig, ermine, and silk.
"Dispense with the customary orations." Sir George seated himself at a narrow table. He folded his hands by an inkwell with a rising black plume. "Queen's counsel, commence."
"My lord magistrate, I present before you the most lamentable, hideous and degraded crime of a married woman found to have in her possession a most obscene, decadent, and insidious book traded aboard under the title Gynecocracy, overtly penned by one Julian Robinson, a book attained before Her Sovereign Majesty's officers with subverting the sancities of the home, the family, and the state itself. It was being read freely, and without any compulsion, aloud by the accused when she was apprehended at the tea party given by Madame-"
"Hem!" The judge raised his folded hands to his Voltairean nose. "In the avoidance of scandal, I propose you should omit that name, as the lady cited is not brought before the bar, and is wholly lacking in culpability for the undertaking."
"My lord." The thin, nut-colored Queen's counsel resumed, "Following apprehension, the accused did willfully and with presumed malicious intent toward the state and private virtue fail to disclose the circumstances under which she obtained so infamous and catastrophic a published volume. This work, my lord, too this infamy, already condemned in London-"
"Just so. I have perused the filthy thing already. Balderdash about training boys into subservience to women, French women at that, and slipping them into Parliament with the aim of who knows what nastiness. You needn't disgrace my court with further recitation."
"My lord, I must beg your indulgence-" The barrister representing the accused straightened his wig and rose, barrel-bodied under his robe, his nose a drunkard's blob. "Have you read the obscenity in question, my intrusive counselor?" "Yes, my lord, and while-"
"Then I should confine your advocacy to the lady employing your eloquence, as useless words in defense of this malign book may dip your reputation in a pitch too vile for this court to ever countenance again." "My lord." The counselor sat. "I am most disturbed to learn that the accused persisted in avoiding cooperation by revealing her source for this mischief."
"My lord, the prosecution will present witnesses who will attest to the discovery of this justly reviled book-"
"Counselor, does the defense actually contest the possession of this volume by your client?" "No, my lord."
"Then let us take the commission of the act as read."
Silence embraced the courtroom.
"Hem! My lord, if I may be so bold, is not the commission the issue upon which your learned eminence shall pass his judgement?"
Sir George's fingers separated into twin gavels, striking the table. "Upon its gravity, man! Not upon the commission, which none here deny, by your own word! Had your client a motive in reciting this toxic nonsense to the ladies of this tea party?"
"I-my lord, she has informed me, or, rather, can inform this court by her own testimony-"
"Is such really required, my good counselor? I have not brought my court into these animal quarters to enjoy their smells. Your powers of articulation have proved adequate in the past to elucidate the facts in a case. In succint words, why did this silly female sully the minds of her companions with so noissone a declamation?"
"Why, I believe for novelty, my lord."
"There you have it." His hands broadened, turning palms upward. "A coarse attack upon the fundamentals of society for mere diversion. She has chosen to plead not guilty to possessing and proclaiming an obscene, immoral, degraded, sordid, unwholesome, lascivious, debased, or repugnant work, has she not?"
"Quite true, my lord."
"Then she holds her stipulated possession of this pernicious foulness to be, in your own words, a mere novelty, from which I conclude that criminal intent was wholly lacking."
"Just so, my lord."
The queen's counselor blinked at the exchange and put a crease in the papers he held.
Sir George raised one open palm skyward. "Then I find her guilty of extreme folly, but not, I think of willful anarchy. I shall meditate upon the penalty and deliver my judgement tomorrow. The next case, please. I remand this convicted woman to her barrister's custody." The counsel for the defense seized a handful of papers and struggled around to the prosecution's table. The Queen's counselor reached into his brief bag and slid down the way to the defense's position.
The porcine barrister now opened, "My lord magistrate, I now present before your final judgement the most abhorant, shameful, and retrograde crime of an unmarried woman, found to have obtained by clandestine traffic with a married sister on the continent of Europe such contraceptive devices and birth-dissuading apparatus as would permit her, without detection by the fullness of consequent gravidity, to practice carnal arts upon her fiance, the most worthy son of-"
"The service of our Queen does not, I think, compel a constant parading of innocent names before the multitude's heedless scorn."
"-such son having, by commerce with despoiled women during foreign schooling, been so morally corrupted as to incline to such enticement offered through the lasciviousness of the defendant-"
"May I request the learned representative of our Sovereign to restrain his eloquence in dispraise of human courtship and concentrate upon the specific illegalities involved in French letters?"
"Assuredly, my lord, I merely seek to establish a full picture of the motivations-"
"Damn it, man, the pretty vixen's eyes call out all the inducement a young man could require, and I don't doubt the cocksure rooster instigates a like sentiment in the heart of a woman with blood in her veins. Let us not recite the obvious concerning young lovers. Have you never bedded a woman?"
"My lord?"
"Shall I bore the ears of the courtroom with anatomical specificity? Have you ever enjoyed the enthusiasm of a female companion between the sheets?"
"Why-yes, my lord."
"Then extend to the bench the courtesy of assuming that between gentlemen who know that children are not won from cabbage leaves certain common understandings exist."
"Very well, my lord, but this grave charge-"
"Are they to be married, my able counsel for the defense?"
"Of course, my lord."
"May I ask the counselor to confide to the court whether or not his client has plans for a family after the nuptuals?"
"I-" The dark lawyer whispered with the accused and a man evidently her father. "Upon consultation, I may assure the court that she lives in anticipation of such blessing, my lord."
"Then the proper venue for this proceeding is the chapel. Is there any just reason for delay in so ardently desired a match?"
Further words passed between barrister and clients. "The lad's schooling, I am informed, is uncompleted."
"Evidently it is, to hear the Queen's counsel. I should call it most satisfactorily concluded, with a magna cum laude doubtless awarded. Is that young ass trying to hide his face the youth involved?"
"He is, my lord."
"Then I admonish him to wed and bed the lady within the fortnight, else his betrothed will march beside him before a prison's chaplain. This case stands adjourned for one year. So mark it upon the calendar of this court. God help you both if I don't see an heir before this bench once we reopen. I do not brook contumacy, young man, so see you do your planting deep and with as much a will as you put to your sterile delvings."
The judge rose and departed before the terminal "ALL RISE!" could animate the courtroom.
A perpetual stoop gave Sir George Doore's nose the questing look of a thing seeking the ground entrance to its hole. His crusted, darting, febrile eyes peered constantly about.
"Lady Bisque-Hardy and Mrs. Reardon," Colonel Sandemarche introduced, as the magistrate preoccupied himself with inspection of the treadmill.
Impaled buttocks, pale and brown, resolutely churning legs and bottoms, European and African, passed under the judicial gaze.
"Your colored woman," Sir George turned upon the Irish women and pronounced, as from the Mount, "is a child of Eden. Drawers on her would be mere folly, figleaves upon Eve untested by the serpent. The white woman, born into a Christian sense of sin, offends modesty by carrying herself naked beneath her petticoat."
Lady Morgan, taken aback but not yet routed, hazarded, "In Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair the point of trousers is argued by means of ridicule."
Sir George's brown-spotted hand dismissed the contention. "Dr. Johnson's talents lay at lexicography. I find Rasselas reeking of the study, without the warm sense of the coffee house permeating Addison. I counsel that you seek your natural philosophy elsewhere."
Lesbia stood immobile, conscious of the nudity so vividly displayed on the scaffold, and of her own vulnerability to Sir George's censure.
"I speak thus because I have pronounced a strong judgement upon a lady who, scorning small clothes, permitted the wind to offer an indecent display to the Jamaican governor-general's charge d'affairs during Lionel Daire's boating expedition to display the felicities of our island." He dabbed at a red-rimmed, crusted eyelid with a grey kerchief. "Great good that did Daire's intentions of a knighthood. Sir Lionel. Phaah! The scandal to our homeland is worse, a mockery of our self-governing status."
"Rumor is so serious a thing, then?" Lady Morgan summoned her forces. "I recall Cervantes writing-"
" 'No small thing may be uttered or performed, but gossips shall fault it.' Yet, good lady, ignore rumor and reputation and you discount, to your inestimable disadvantage, mankind's chiefest weapon-the malignant tongue."
He abruptly seized command of the party and motioned them back toward the stone building. "I mustn't delay the consummation of justice. I have adjudicated some heavy measures, which wait uj my inspection."
He appropriated Lady Morgan's arm and carried her with him, a miser hoarding beauty. Colonel San-demarche escourted Lesbia in their wake.
A blue-black beauty barely beyond twenty years stretched her legs to their fullest on the Prussian slats. The angled wedges sat in a horizontal frame, their upper edges eating fiercely into the young woman's calves, thighs, and substantial fundament. The twelve flat stones piled with care upon her lap aided the effect.
Her thumbs had been wired to her gaudy brass earrings, allowing her elbows to reach protectively, like wings, over her gourd-heavy bosoms. A heavy perspiration ran from her face and throat, onto the mammary masses.
An Army female warder with corporal's stripes menaced the teats with a willow cane, its last twelve inches split into four light wands. For all Goodenough & Sons' assurances, the edges still appeared razor-honed.
"She appears uncomfortable." Lady Morgan leaned forward, still in Sir George's grip. "Deucedly. The peeled stalk of the pepper plant inserted, so." The magistrate gestured sparsely. "I understand, colonel, that it has been experimented with during treadmill drill."
"For disciplinary cases, yes; however, it tends to be expelled rather violently."
"A saddle strap, do you think?" Lady Morgan asked Sir George.
"A capital idea, colonel." Sir George tilted his face up at her. "Thong or chain, do you think?"
"Given the extended leg motions, the thong-a broad, soft one. A chain would be too galling."
"Hmmmph." The magistrate appeared to reserve judgement. "Axle grease. That mechanism requires pots of it already, else it'd creak and whine like a dozen costive devils."
"What was her crime?" The coffee-skinned warder had encouraged the elbows to part, exposing the twin gloves, their nipples thick as black bullets. The cane flashed, its four tips carving into a ripe supper, humming their relish. Bubbies shaking, the woman blubbed, her sobs bouncing her upon the agonizing slats.
"Crime?" Sir George considered the question. "Surely the sentence had some cause ... oh, a case of assault. Some acrimonious altercation over a male companion shared by two women. A broken bottle was employed, to some intimidating effect, but with no physical damage."
"She attempted to stab another woman?"
The split cane lashed the pectoral flesh in turn. Puffed tracks sprung up, bold and aching, as the nipples leaped and shivered.
"Hmmm. No, no, the other woman was assailant. This one was guilty of provoking speech. Her attacker is at hard labor, with thirty strokes of the birch instead of her supper Mondays and Thursdays for, hmmm, three months?"
"Fifteen weeks, Sir George," the colonel supplied. "With a stiff 'Welcome' and 'Farewell' of fifty strokes, before the Palace of Justice gate, that came to the thousand cuts you deemed appropriate."
"Quite so, quite so. Dangerous things, broken bottles. It wouldn't do to mar such young loveliness."
They passed on as the four ends caught the underside of a breast, lifting it on tines of flame.
Her shoulders pressed on a fiber mat, an Anglo-Saxon woman held her long white legs and bottom in the air, kicking as if propelling an aerial bicycle. Her blonde hair dropped loosely behind her. A loin covering of spikey red leaves crushed into tender areas as the thighs worked. The punitive garment extended between the legs, onto the raised buttocks. At frequent intervals, a battledore paddle encouragingly drove the thorned leaves into her soft skin.
Setting aside the paddle, a bored matron picked a dipper of thick amber liquid from a glass jar. She poured it over the gaps in the leafy mesh, finishing generously between the thighs.
The woman on the mat squirmed, her lips wide in pain's rictus.
"Continue!" The paddle spanked her scratched and seared bottom.
The sharp reek from the pepper oil stung Lady Morgan's wrinkling nose. "The drawersless victim of the wind, Sir George?"
"Exactly so. I am no prude, but Mardi Blanc's name has already been bandied about in a jest sullying our flag. Waspish business about a tricolor sans culottes has already reached my ears from Martinque."
The round paddle-flat punished the inflamed backside as heels tossed.
Hindquarters appeared to be the order of the day, Lady Morgan observed. Twin slabby buttocks, as if carven from walnut, strained upward futilely. Their owner rode the Spanish Horse. Her legs had been stretched wide by the triangular wooden body. Thoughtful iron weights added perhaps twenty-five pounds to each ankle.
The shingle-thin upper edge offered an excruciating seat for even an immobile rider. This one rocked and bounced, her body in continual convulsive motion.
A civilian armed with a long horse-hair fly whisk and a great highland vulture feather tickled mercilessly. Ribs, breasts, the spinal trough, the throat's hollow-the woman rippled with maddened twitchings.
As she begged incoherently, the torment kept her grinding and writhing upon the cutting wedge.
"I imagine she wishes those thumbcuffs bore weight." Lady Morgan observed the thin chains overhead, keeping the arms at zenith, but bearing no weight.
"Perhaps. I gather she's had some period being stretched from their brothers, during questioning."
Both horsehair and feather applied themselves strokingly to her loins, her leaping buttocks, her arms' fleecy cavities, her constantly wavering teats. Tears rolled from the woman's protrudent eyes.
"A terrible case of extortion, really. This simple merchant was on the verge of nuptuals, toward which he'd saved devotedly, when a brother and sister appeared, producing a paper purportedly a marriage contact executed between the sister and that merchant. They claimed to have supporting witnesses, but offered to destroy the document and suppress the story for a sum equal to a third of his ready funds. I cannot say he wisely introduced the constabulary into the affair, for the credulous minds feeding upon supposed scandal have injured his trade."
"His vengeance seems most complete."
"I deemed it proper to satisfy private and personal justice at one sitting." He narrowly observed her for signs of merriment.
She nodded gravely. "A salient point in rewarding sharp dealing. What of the brother?"
"Swift-limbed chap," interjected Colonel Sandemarche. "Last known to have abstracted a fishing boat and bent his oar for another of the Antilles."
"This was a most shocking abuse of indenture." Sir George's nose quivered with an independent life. "I could not contemplate it dispassionately. This virago had the indentures of these two young women. For five years she worked them hard, but treated them fairly. During the sixth year she so starved, flogged, and abused them that they pled for a sale of the contracts to another patron, even at the cost of seven years added onto the time already given.
"Such was her plan for profit, illicitly intending to take the proceeds of the second sale herself. The planter she thought to abet her scheme by paying her for the sufferers himself advised the Women's Indenture Trust of the vicious scheme."
The plump, sun-burnished white woman hung in a classic Swing, a rod thrust behind her knees and ahead of her elbows. Her wrists had been corded across her shins.
For the moment neither Lady Morgan nor Lesbia saw any reason for the felon's pop-eyed fury, her agonized twitchings exceeding those of the woman on the Spanish Horse.
"The fire ant is a methodical little beast," the colonel explained. "It insists upon its marching column. Deprive it of its chain of command, its military raison d'etre and it goes mad. I sympathize with the poor, mislocated trooper. Even though it sacrifices its own life, it bites any living creature until its jaws lock in the victim's flesh."
"Solenopsis saevissima ardesca," Lady Morgan nodded. "One of the nasty little buggers nipped me on the toe. It took a surgeon with a glass and scalpel to remove the bits of its mandible from me. I had swelling for over two weeks afterward. It taught me where to step in the undergrowth."
Two intense maidens used sticks to spot daubs of honey hither and thither upon their quondam patrones. The insects appeared as scuttling black spots, dodging between sharply peaked, bone-white swellings. The honey blots progressed along the buttocks and loins.
The, watching women could imagine the logical convergence of the ebony servants' efforts.
"Seduction! A most vicious crime, perpetrated upon a young lad by this woman indentured into the household. I found something poetic suggested by this traveling mountebank, an apt repayment for her corruption of the boy for pecuniary gain."
A high-boned, long-nosed woman with Southern French coloration knelt in the primorial posture of flight. Her long black maid's skirt had been split from waist to hem, leaving some variety of protection from the forelimbs of the goat now vigorously lining her.
"A variation on Esmeralda the Gypsy from Notre Dame de Paris. So well trained is the animal, I am assured, that it will be ready in only twenty minutes to take its pleasure again."
"Such a boring interval, or do I detect some diverting potential in that tethered young boar?"
"Oral conversation began her campaign upon the lad, and shall end it," Sir George averred.
"One would imagine she might object, on grounds of conscience."
"You are grounded in Leviticus, I take it. There has been opposition."
All could see the frequent diagonal slashes ribboning the coarse-spun blouse. A trainer's whip held by an Italianate man with beard and glasses seemed responsible.
The lash licked suddenly, adding a ripping tear along the left deltoid muscle.
"More hip action! Would you leave all the work to a servile brute?" The servicing beast's full-jabbing thrusts showed no signs of weariness. His involuntary partner increased her own efforts, shaking her skirted posterior on a determined miming of coital enthusiasm.
"She comes to Mardi Blanc from French Base Terre. I am undecided whether to deport her thither, or to compel her to finish her contract in the service of this vagabond performer."
Lady Morgan concentrated on the rhythmically thrusting animal. "That's a new goat, I believe. Old Villon had gotten rather cranky and sneezed far too much when I knew Balzano in London. And where a goat sneezes ..." She grimaced.
Some inner compulsion caused the French woman to fling her head back with a sharp, ecstatic ululation. Her unbound hair draped the goat's wide muzzle. It sneezed.
"Och. She won't get that off her if she bathes in lye each day for a month."
Sir George's active nose flared. "I comprehend your point."
Two swings of the whip opened fresh rents in the shirtwaist. A flap of fabric peeled down, exposing scarlet welts. "No taunting my goat!"
The man patted the animal, whose digs had slowed. Its copulative bucking increased, as the owner looked up. "Oh! Miss Mulcreavy, I am so charmed to see you after these many years! I am training two new performers."
He pointed to the pig and the goat.
"Three," she gestured toward the French felon. "It's Lady Morgan Bisque-Hardy now, Balzano. I see you've changed your bookings, but not your act."
The Italian grinned. " 'Lilith and Her Forest Lovers, a Rousseauist Tableau,' except that my Lilith ran off with the travel money in Port-au-Prince."
"That two-titted wildcat has an aptitude for the business." She turned to Sir George. "Not to press an indecorous point, Sir George, but I know my sluts, and Balzano can fatten the Indenture Trust if you demand a share of his profits. She has the cockstiffening gift. Don't you agree, Lesbia?"
Her sister stared resolutely at a point in empty space over the two swiving creatures.
* * *
8
MINISTRATIONS
A balding figure approached, cooling his face with his broad-brimmed white hat. He gripped his black satchel loosely.
"Dr. Mackenna, you are much delayed, sir. The execution of the Queen's justice requires sufficient speed that it began without you."
"A practicing physician's joys, Sir George. A breech birch and a broken leg detained me; mercifully, neither of them my own."
"You are then fit to inspect the penitents." The nose quivered under blinking eyes as the magistrate applied his kerchief. "I should not care to have the severity of the law exceed these felons' capacity for wholesome suffering and profitable repentance."
Mackenna briefly inspected the French woman being pumped, still, by the stolid, unflagging goat. "Ah, no difficulty at this stage, here."
He bowed. "Lady Bisque-Hardy, delighted as always; Mrs. Reardon, strange to see you among these dire surroundings, educational though they may be. I must leave your charming company, I regret."
He hurried down toward the patroness undergoing ant affliction.
"The man enjoys a bottle overmuch," Sir George opined in an undertone, "but his medical judgements are most exact." He raised his voice, "I believe you offered the hospitality of your quarters, colonel?"
"Indeed, I have refreshment prepared."
"You may precede us," the wizened man swept his arm ahead. "My wind is not what it once was. This generous Goewin can be my prop in my infirmity.
Sandemarche and Lesbia took the lead, slowly advancing further and further from Sir George and Lady Morgan.
"You are widely learned, sir, and fully as wise as Math, Mathonwy's son, yet I am no man's footstool, however sage he may be in his years, not even my honorable husband's."
"I retract my allusion, madam." His clawed fingers held fast to her arm as they strolled. "My eyes are inflamed, but not blinded. I see your sister's skirts cling with remarkably close familiarity to her hind-ward reaches."
"Alas, Sir George, I must confess it. At my instruction, she dresses without the benefits of those petticoats or drawers, whose importance in protecting the reputation of our island you have so convincingly argued. Too tight a friction or too great a warmth in those delicate lowlands may produce a craving most incompatible with her post."
"She is?" He stared after Lesbia, some fifteen yards distant.
"Mistress at the school here."
"I thought they had imported some Yankee chap."
"He acts as tutor for older pupils, in lieu of English education. The great schools there-" She shrugged. "My nephews suffered callous neglect from the masters and cunning abuse from arrogant hellions merely because they had not dwelt in the infamous place since their infancy."
"And their accent, eh? As our poor lads doubtless suffer the 'colonial' stigma. So. So." His talons gripped her gently, as an eagle bearing a Ganymede. "Your sister has not succumbed to the temptations afforded by her position?"
"I ensure that her proctors watch for irregularities.
No unfortunate interludes have occurred. I gather her taste, even when hotly kindled, aims at men of maturity, experience, and skill."
"You speak to pretty purposes, my lady. I am no fool."
"I observed that in your courtroom, my lord."
"Once we reach the colonel's quarters, I mean to raise the gavel of my assizes again."
"My own eyes may not be so skilled as yours at minute inspection, yet they have remarked that the sturdy rod of justice has not yet fallen, from the first calling of 'All rise' to this moment. I had heard the Law held men fast, as might a jealous mistress, yet I had not known her so passionate a one."
A dry, rattling sound, very much like a long unused laugh, echoed briefly. "Jealous, ensorcelling, but not exclusive. I knew a Mulcreavy in older days, in London. Very charitable she was to impecunious toilers at the Inns of Court. Many friends graced the bench before her reluctant demise."
"Aunt Augusta held tightly to all she valued, life most particularly, but she dealt fairly and with a surprising compassion, where she found the circumstances to warrant."
"I saw that during the Crimea. Gaudy poppinjay officers she plucked to their down feathers. Yet her establishment never turned away a common man who'd taken the Queen's shilling, and if he'd a ribbon from the campaign ..."
"I found papers over forty years old recording money she'd lent, without interest, never with security. I marveled, since she dealt so sharply with titles and mercantile wealth, that each was annotated not to be collected after her death." "You seek to soften my resolve with tender memories."
Lady Morgan offered her own Irish laughter. "Only one species of delicate handling shall melt your rigidity, my lord magistrate. I offer my learned opinion from exercise of a past profession."
"Not, to my thinking, an ignoble one if nobly exercised."
"At the colonel's table, should Dr. Mackenna join us, we shall have the professions of arms, jurisprudence, healing, pedagogy, and commerce represented. Without trade, which bridges the barriers between surplus and defect, our empire cannot stand-is but a fiction. You'll have our tutor, Mr. Hunter, lay his oath upon it, if only you question him about 'empire.'"
"I must do so, once I finish my rounds. My schedule is exacting at this season."
"So must we find a means of refreshing your energies stronger than Colonel Sandemarche's rum-laced Darjeeling. Later, I shall provide an opportunity for you to enjoy Mr. Hunter's company."
"I sampled Sir Polkinghorn's hospitality once, in his widower days."
"And now you shall taste mine ..."
"It's Mrs. Hunter, this time." Syndon Reardon sucked a reeking mouthful of cigar smoke. He held the rank stuff in, compressing his lips tightly as he passed the half-consumed roll of tobacco to his brother. Auberon pulled eagerly on the coarse island cheroot.
Syndon expelled his breath in a stinking cloud. "Stars. I saw the book. Complaint of the tutor."
The younger boy's eyes showed whites all around as his bulging cheeks reddened. He gasped out his cigar fumes, finally. "Better'n the birch!"
"That's saved for Maggie." Syndon smacked his lips. He dragged in another putrid mouthload.
"Serves her for peeling my hide like she does," Auberon giggled.
The other boy noticed the ground undulating in a suspicious manner. "Mayhap . . ."He coughed out the harsh tobacco smoke. "We'd better save it."
Auberon nodded, none too vigorously. His stomach had developed an internal rocking that made violent motion unwise. Syndon stubbed out the cigar on a tree root.
"If only we didn't have a piece of the bill, too." The younger looked appropriately glum.
"His brother spoke with manly lack of care. "Two blacks and six green Ps."
Auberon spent a moment fighting back an expression too eloquent of his stomach's distress. "Four blues, three green Cs, and a yellow cross." He glanced upward eagerly. "How many stars?"
"Three black ones." Syndon looked as pleased as if he'd writ them in the punishment book himself. He tucked the extinguished cigar into the small tin box, with other fraternal secrets. He fitted it carefully into its hole. They both covered it with dirt and a sprinkle of leaves, to hide the fresh earth.
Slapping grime and insects from their clothing, they made an unsteady progress toward the Bisque-Hardy home.
Dr. Simon Mackenna cautiously measured a medicinal dose of Mortlach-Glenlivet into a convenient laboratory beaker. He swirled it, watching the thick arches dissolve into fat, slow trailings.
He inhaled. Smoking turf, dark grain under a sky's fast-racing clouds; he closed his eyes and slipped a few drops onto his tongue, almost by stealth. Ah, Scotland.
"Aaii!"
A terse eruption of agony superimposed the childhood memory of a wry-faced tawsing mistress on his reverie of firth and furze.
"Ye na wan' th' warts carved fr'm y'r modewurck, ye sha' na play fooking games wi' th' jolly g'rrls."
Sister Macgregor's dialect puzzled even him, a lowland expatriate raised to hold Sassenach pronounciation sacred. The pa tow-speaking peasantry took her on pantomine and faith. Given her forty years of missionary nursing, they did well too.
Mackenna wished he could cure her unreasoned belief that venereal warts came from unlicensed intercourse. After he performed his surgeries, she laid on her stypic with a rough, censorous hand.
He sniffed the deep amber fumes and drank.
"When maukin-bucks at early fucks,
In dewy glens are seen, Sir,
When birds, on boughs, tak aff their mows
Amang the leaves sae green, Sir;
Latona's son, looks, lickerish, on
Dame nature's grant impetus,
Till his pego rise, then westward flies,
To Roger Madam Thetis.
"Yon' wand'ring will that marks the hill,
An' glances o'er the brae, Sir,
Slides by a bower, where mony a flower
Sheds fragrence on the day, Sir;
There Daemon lay, with Sylvia gay,
To love they thought nae crime, Sir,
The wind birds sang, the echoes rang,
While Daemon's arse beat time, Sir."
His gently voiced song ceased as a heavy fist pounded the wall from the sister's domain. Her voice knifed through the partition. "Mrs. Rrearrdon for herrregularr appointment."
"Thank you, sister," he called. "You may leave early, if you wish."
"As us'al, doctorrr." The woman did overplay thai burr when she chose to be fey. Far be it from a nurse to criticize a credentialed physician, oh, no; but it was equally far from Sister Macgregor's nature to let her unspoken censure stay swallowed and digested by her alone. He heard cabinet doors rattle and keys clatter, locking them. He spun the remaining whiskey and practically inhaled it over his tongue, letting the light trickle vaporize and fill his head with a bracing fog.
He opened his eyes. Lesbia Reardon stood in the doorway, midnight black hair in a crown, Gypsy-black eyes afire, Gaelic black heart-he shied from a further diagnosis.
"I can't, Simon. Yesterday, she . . . and today, after you left the colonel's, she ..." The lips twisted, then compressed, damming vile knowledge too foul to ever let the world guess.
"Did she, now?" He wondered how Lesbia would welcome a suggestion to join him a rousing chorus or two of Nine Inch Will Please A Lady.
"Look, look, then, damn you." She cursed brittlely as she turned and flipped high her stately skirt. The cloth draped nicely in a frame along her hips, exposing truly regal posterior, an unquestioned seat of Celtic kings. He saw it bruised and violet-tinged, red-speckled and puffed.
"Queer blotched, those."
"The Jonathan." A pale hand strayed to the mul-tihued globes. She shuddered from her own touch on the tenderly prepared mounds. "You can't demand-"
"And after I left you two in Sir George's pleasant company, did you not taste more than that?"
"Who told you?" Her inky eyes flared. "My own good sense, coupled with a knowledge of Mr. Justice Priapus' enthusiasm for his trade. How did he have you?"
"She's-I-the foul creature allowed him to fondle her unnatural bosom while I-he took his pleasure in my-"
"If you gagged on his gism as you choke on the words, I wonder he didn't have you triced to the triangle, or draped across a strump in the woods, sprinkled with pollen for the bees to pester."
She summoned inhuman resolve. "I swallowed his effusions, though he tried his best to fill me to overflowing."
"I trust you rinsed your mouth, after. I don't want Sir George's spunk on my tongue when I kiss you."
"I held myself till he'd gone and then purged myself on that fatuous fool colonel's carpet."
"Not precisely the Cologne water rinse I'd hoped for."
"I refreshed my mouth, after." Her fingers palped her hindquarters, tentatively, and he thought of the poet's "weel-knooz'd hurdies." Burns' Merry Muses of Caledonia sparkled with free-running wisdom for all occasions. "You cannot ask that I-"
"But, Lesbia," he explained patiently, "it's your prescribed treatment. You can't dodge regularly administered medication without suffering severe consequences, perchance even a relapse."
"Villain." Her volcanic gaze sought refuge in the wall. She stood, bottom bared, for all the world like a petulant Professional Beauty flogged and displayed at a duchess's levee for public disgrace.
A very near truth, he reflected, an image close to the mark. "Call me rather a practitioner of the healing arts, administrator of homeopathy for your pungent self-hatred. You wield self-righteous anger with remarkable skill, Lesbia. To your credit, you don't skimp in turning the scournful blade upon yourself. You do need this steady spot of the necessary to prevent your wracked soul from some wild self-injury."
"Finer words from an extortionist swine I've never heard." Her hips canted, projecting her tantalizing buttocks all the further toward him. Her hands went to her hair, undoing the pins. It fell in a rich cascade, ending above her furled skirt and naked posteriors.
"You're a passionate woman, Lesbia. One day that fire may temper you into a fine, controlled instrument. Not yet, though, not yet."
"I suppose you see yourself as doing the smith's job of hammering," she muttered, shaking her dress back into place. As the vista of her mottled bottom winked out, her fingers worked to unhook the whole garment.
"Proof of the efficacy of my remedy is your acceptance of its worth. The wisdom of the body dictates to you, otherwise you'd throw Nelson's words at me to 'publish and be damned.' Instead, you submit to the one treatment'll keep you from expiring in a pool of your own self-critical brackishness."
"Your language is as crazed as your motives and your morals." She stepped free from her dress and turned, black Irish Venus-bush leaping to the eye under her snowy white of her camisole and the porcelain swell of her firm-muscled belly.
"Ah, but I am the doctor, and you are my patient. What devotionary of Apollo's art could ever resist the supplicating cries of so sincere a sufferer."
Her lips shaped half-whispered words about Balsamo and physician.
"A remarkably acute simile." He sat higher in his chair, spine straighter. "You know I've always fancied Cagliostro as a doctor of the soul, respected by cardinals and the armies of the Revolution alike. Who was it drank a toast to him at the fortress of San Leo from Count Alissandro's own disinterred skull?"
She had her camisole untied, and her breasts trembled in accusation at him. She did not remove the final garment, allowing it to hang open, revealing her to dim.
Finally, he stood up from his rigid wooden chair. He reached out, tickling a poignantly plump bubby. His foot hooked a low, wheeled stool. He slid it behind him and sat down.
"Over my lap with you, wild woman, and tame that inwardly twisted rage."
"Madman." She stepped over the puddle of her clothing. With fierce dignity, she turned her paddled backside uppermost over his knee.
His pressing, pinching, prying fingers renewed their fond acquaintance with her fully fleshed curves and secret recesses. "Those must be the blistermarks. Aha! I guarantee my bold-bottomed jade that she'll feel this to her marrow."
His extended hand found the limber tawse set out on his instrument table, beside the speculum. He let it tease her sleek, marked thighs.
"So your sister plied the Jonathan across your hindquarters and made you quench the bright flame of justice alight in Sir George's loins. What else?" "That-that bile-blooded bitch is going to permit Syndon to whip me at his pleasure, after his birthday!" Her muscles relaxed. He felt the steady expansion and fall of her ribs against his lap. "I'm to be disciplined by my own son-worse, flogged at his whimsy." The desperate loathing poured out. "She'll be mating me to that brigand's goat, next!" "And you'd think yourself worthly treated, too, I self-hatred. You wield self-righteous anger with remarkable skill, Lesbia. To your credit, you don't skimp in turning the scournful blade upon yourself You do need this steady spot of the necessary to prevent your wracked soul from some wild self-injury."
"Finer words from an extortionist swine I've never heard." Her hips canted, projecting her tantalizing buttocks all the further toward him. Her hands went to her hair, undoing the pins. It fell in a rich cascade, ending above her furled skirt and naked posteriors.
"You're a passionate woman, Lesbia. One day that fire may temper you into a fine, controlled instrument Not yet, though, not yet."
"I suppose you see yourself as doing the smith's job of hammering," she muttered, shaking her dress back into place. As the vista of her mottled bottom winked out, her fingers worked to unhook the whole garment.
"Proof of the efficacy of my remedy is your acceptance of its worth. The wisdom of the body dictates to you, otherwise you'd throw Nelson's words at me to 'publish and be damned.' Instead, you submit to the one treatment'll keep you from expiring in a pool of your own self-critical brackishness."
"Your language is as crazed as your motives and your morals." She stepped free from her dress and turned, black Irish Venus-bush leaping to the eye under her snowy white of her camisole and the porcelain swell of her firm-muscled belly.
"Ah, but I am the doctor, and you are my patient What devotionary of Apollo's art could ever resist the supplicating cries of so sincere a sufferer."
Her lips shaped half-whispered words about Balsamo and physician.
"A remarkably acute simile." He sat higher in his chair, spine straighter. "You know I've always fancied Cagliostro as a doctor of the soul, respected by cardinals and the armies of the Revolution alike. Who was it drank a toast to him at the fortress of San Leo from Count Alissandro's own disinterred skull?"
She had her camisole untied, and her breasts trembled in accusation at him. She did not remove the final garment, allowing it to hang open, revealing her to him.
Finally, he stood up from his rigid wooden chair. He reached out, tickling a poignantly plump bubby. His foot hooked a low, wheeled stool. He slid it behind him and sat down.
"Over my lap with you, wild woman, and tame that inwardly twisted rage."
"Madman." She stepped over the puddle of her clothing. With fierce dignity, she turned her paddled backside uppermost over his knee.
His pressing, pinching, prying fingers renewed their fond acquaintance with her fully fleshed curves and secret recesses. "Those must be the blistermarks. Aha! I guarantee my bold-bottomed jade that she'll feel this to her marrow."
His extended hand found the limber tawse set out on his instrument table, beside the speculum. He let it tease her sleek, marked thighs.
"So your sister plied the Jonathan across your hindquarters and made you quench the bright flame of justice alight in Sir George's loins. What else?"
"That-that bile-blooded bitch is going to permit Syndon to whip me at his pleasure, after his birthday!" Her muscles relaxed. He felt the steady expansion and fall of her ribs against his lap. "I'm to be disciplined by my own son-worse, flogged at his whimsy." The desperate loathing poured out. "She'll be mating me to that brigand's goat, next!"
"And you'd think yourself worthly treated, too, I wouldn't wonder. You missed seeing the French fellatrix amuse the young boar as you entertained Sir George. Marvelous talent she has at simulating passion, but not a patch on your righteous frenzy at your self-violation, eh?"
His left hand stroked up and down the superbly tight crevice between her silk-taut buttocks. "From village adultery and seduction of goggling youths to animal contacts. Just the fit descent for a swinish draggletail like yourself, wouldn't you say?"
She bit back any answer. He inserted his fingers inside her cleft, as his thumb dug into her sore left round. The flesh gave grudgingly. A magnificently muscled specimen of genus feminum, he thought once again.
"Just a mine of endless self-reproach. A passionate temptress who holds herself equal to the Serpent on her belly in the mire one minute, and flaunts herself as Paphian Queen of Heaven, the aboriginal night monster taunting men in their dreams, the next."
He freed his fingers, stroking her midnight hair. He peeled her camisole higher along her pebbled spine. She had a soft curve at the small of her back, even bent over a man's knee. The tawse leaped, spanking her unexpectedly.
She sucked in breath, unready. Her thighs spread; one foot rose.
"Through this very carnal, very monarchial throne upon which you sit in whorish triumph, I hope to teach that self-damning soul and bless it with a spot of peace." The leather smacked, her hinds rippling eloquently. "The road to a woman's spirit lays through her bottom's peaks, so the ancient worshippers of Aphrodite Kallypygos believed."
The tawse stung the darkly mottled cheeks in steady cadence. He whipped the pillared legs at intervals, as the already sore buttocks took on a hotter color. The leather slapped in strict rhymester's rhythm.
"It's nocht but Beelzebub's art,
And that's the mair sign of a saunt;
He ken's that ye're pure at the heart,
So he levels his darts at your cunt.
"But you that is called and free,
Elekit an' chosen a saunt,
Wilt break the eternal decree,
Whatever ye do wi' your cunt?"
As always, he felt her relax and accept the tempo of punishment. Her tears poured within the first dozen stinging swats, a release of her bound-up feelings rather than a reaction to pain. She rocked across his lap, emptying herself of galling passions.
He didn't spare her already paddle-chastened posteriors. Mackenna knew his patient enough not to stint her dose of stern physick. As he'd measured his day's end tot, so he gauged her needful strap-therapy.
Her soul and her bottom ... the honeyed sounds of tawse striking bared womanhide . . . the writhing of her solid loins against his supporting thighs ... the bounce of her bursting-ripe titties against his left leg as her torso shook in abrupt spasms and she tried to double over his lap . . .
He slowed his cadence and strengthened his strokes. The leather seared her indigoed rounds.
"And now, with a sanctifi'd kiss,
Let's kneel and renew the cov'nant,
It's this!!! And it's this!!! And it's Ms!!!
That settles the pride o' your cunt.
"No, no, no-you'll not make me!" She arched her back once more and shrieked, a wild woods she-cat in copulative anguish.
"An abcessed conscience needs deep lancing."
The usual fit, with the grinding of her hairy motte into his leg; he must one day, he knew, try this exercise without trousers.
He flung the tawse away and hauled her forcibly erect. Her hips weaved against his. She squirmed like a mindless slug, eyes blind in rutting pain.
Still, he never rushed as he shed his britches and took her, standing.
She coiled her legs about him. Her arms crushed his ribs, her nails naked his shoulders through his linen shirt. He stood solidly as they locked together. Her explosive cuntal spasms sucked and drew at his upright caber. He need make no movement; she needed none other than her own.
Her breath accellerated into screech-owl yips as she obtained her violent relief upon him, and hastened his own release.
"Ah, Ophidian Temptress seducing the Universe, my beauty, my wanton night's mare, my regal hussy ..." He went on, hugging her to him as her sustained spending brought him to his own bursting ecstasy. His hands massaged the swollen bottom, scalded by his leathering. ". . . Fire-cunted Cyprian, holy Messaline blessing the earth with your loins' bounty, my stone-devouring cockatrice, my Lesbia, my love . . ."
She twitched violently. Her spread cheeks lay heavily against his hands as he held her in position. She moaned anew, at his painful kneading. Her legs clamped him like iron stays about his hips.
"Mother of mercy ..." Her voice expired in a trailing sigh.
She lay in his embrace, now supported by his strength, mind and body calm. Her face tilted upwards as he began to kiss her, gently exploring her eyes, her brow, her chin. Lovingly, he parted her lips with his tongue, feeling the wickedly sharp teeth.
He dared the ivory portcullis and roused her lethargic tongue to soft, loving play.
* * *
9
ANTICIPATIONS
Slender, unpeeled tamarind switches seemed all the longer in Margaret Rogers' efline hands. Her Dresden-delicate palm spanned only half the width of her brother's, though her sea-colored eyes reached fully to his.
Or did when a backboard corrected her willful, hoydenish posture, Charles Rogers reflected.
She squinted as they stepped into the sunlight, the corners of her proud mouth waivering as she tried a final appealing glance. She did an excellent job of looking sorry for her lot, he admitted.
Yet, the severe black dogcart waited, for all her chastened solicitations. His chief groom had harnessed the insolent, coal-flanked stud Iago to the rig. A brown lad stood with the reins, patient.
"Charles, I know you think me overbold. . . ."
An imperious, stamping hoof clattered across her worried whisper.
"The law, my long-toothed lovely, dictates in this matter, suspirations of profound lamentation notwithstanding. You should have considered it more closely when frivolously discarding your suitors."
They crossed the distance to the cart. Through the trees, the sea held the morning's light.
"Shallow, parochial boys," she murmured, "so unlike ..."
"David? Myself? And what of your jaunts to the United States, England, France? Were all the young men so narrow there, also?"
Rogers swung up into the creaking rig. The boy handed him the leather lines.
"Yes," she answered. The withes rustled in her grip as she clambered up the other side. Her light, bone-white dress and gauzy shawl contrasted strikingly with the well-rubbed burgundy sleerhide seat.
"Then you must await an older, traveled, seasoned man, as Morgan Bisque-Hardy lay fallow for Sir Polkinghorn. For such a one, a dowery would be a guild-ing, refreshing charms no longer bursting with the ripeness of fashionable youth."
Iago started at his clucking. Rogers tightly reined the ready stallion as they rolled down the gravel lane, winding toward the main road. He tapped his boot against the tall earthenware crock set between them. "Lucinda considerately placed this here to keep your bouquet fresh."
Margaret studied the briny depths, her nose crinkling. Her expression deepened to a woeful frown. Slowly, fingers stiff around the ribbon-tied handle, she lowered the free end of the birch into the pungent stuff.
"Lucinda had the other girls peeing since first light, just to furnish a fresh pickle. She observed that such affairs interested you, and thought you would appreciate the attention."
Margaret took a short breath. "Is it Clara, then; am 1 to be abandoned because ..."
"You mocked her, you display a cat-cruel contempt for her?" The sloping lane melted into dusty, raw road. Rogers reached for the snappish carriage whip. "No, you serve as an abrasive to smooth her pride. It is your own pride that needs taming, your own fault you're here."
He loosed the reins, giving the stallion its cue. For form's sake, he executed a rifle's crack of the lash. The wheels sang behind the dancing hooves.
Margaret gripped the cart's side as they creaked and bounced. Dust poured in a cloud behind them. Rogers tickled Iago's stretching haunch with the dangling lash.
A stooped figure with a basket appeared down the way. He slowed the snorting stud-horse, reluctant to check the spray of dust and stones from his hooves. The man recognized the wheat-haired lass from a farm further along the track.
"Roxanne in Coventry again, I see." He nodded formally as the girl cast them a swift, shamed look. "Madame Renard finds it such a useful lesson to have her house servants gather dung from the public road. Only freshly plopped manure will do, too, as green and steaming as the horse can provide. It sometimes takes them the full day to make their basketload. The task becomes tedious, under a hot sun, without luncheon-so I hear."
The lowered head followed Iago with hope, but the mucky fingers relaxed as it became evident the stallion had no intent to oblige.
Margaret sat frozen, the crock jostling her fool rhythmically.
From the garden's height, Dolly Hunter could see the coaly stain of a steamer's smoke broadening distantly in the air. Clara had counseled her to arrive early, so as to secretly watch Margaret's leave-taking from the copse overlooking the drive.
"Ohhh!"
Her attention shifted from the beckoning ship to Clara, who strained to cinch the saddle strap one stubbornly contested notch tighter on a wide-eyed maid. The punished girl's jaw set, her distinctly Olympian bosom throbbing with short, rapid respirations. She rigidly held her skirt up, exposing a deep navel.
The biting leather forced her to carry her ribcage high and her belly tucked in. Any chance heavy exhalation or expansion stretched the snug meshwork girdling her hips. From the tiny chain links, already burrowed into her skin, a broad thong descended in front to ruthlessly bisect her tenderest parts. A high, bosked mons appeared to grip the leather vanishing into it.
"There." Clara patted the buckle pressed against the girl's coccyx. It secured the thong after re-emergence from between the lightly downed bottom cheeks. "You'll be brisker about your business in the future, won't you?"
"Yes'm," she swallowed. The belly rippled, trying to ease the pressure. At Clara's word, she lowered her skirt. Conscious of the two women's eyes on her, she forced out a ragged, punishing curtsey. Her arms trembled as she took the tray from the garden table and departed.
Dolly watched the distinctive, hesitant gait so revelatory of the saddle strap's presence, below.
"She's well-fortuned that I didn't strip her to her slovenly skin and pour her into a corset, as David did you, Monday. I may be property, but damned if I'll accept her indolence while I'm occupying Charles' bed."
"Cruel, cruel." Dolly wet her lips. Her own pulse raced in her throat. "You use this mock slavery as a cloak to shield you when you've a mood to be savage."
"And what of your own Borgia tastes? Did David sleep undisturbed after Joyau's skinning?"
A swimming warmth caught her tongue. Her buttocks, still feeling an old, fond ache from Monday's caning, shifted on the cushioned bench. "We . . . celebrated the marital rites."
"Five times, seven?"
"Only twice before sleeping." Clara's pale Jersey eyes seemed to sink into Dolly's being. "And once, waking during the night." "You woke together?"
"I had need, I could not continue sleeping. I roused him."
"Ah." The Englishwoman's hand imperiously rang a brass bell. Another girl came trotting from the kitchen door, almost racing to attend them. "Have Lucinda unlock the private case."
The maid dipped her leg and scurried to comply.
Dolly realized she hadn't breathed in nearly a minute. She let the warm morning air into her lungs gradually, expectantly.
"Our household may seem like a coalbed of rebellion," Clara smiled, "but the truth is otherwise. I have two wenches need some hiding for their sins. Their normal work is in the fields, and they couldn't be spared till now. They've been braced in the pillory since dawn, contemplating their malefactions. While Charles pleasures himself putting his sister under indenture, shall we partake of our own light diversions?"
Dolly took her hand. It seemed blazing hot in her own icy fingers. "With all my heart, darling Clara."
Her friend kissed her fleetingly, piercingly on the lips before they proceeded into the house.
"Cunt-struck, eh, boy?" Colonel Sandemarche slammed a bronze-handled swagger stick down on the massive oak table. None of the five women draped indecorously over its surface even blinked.
He laughed goodheartedly at his nephew, crouched with eyes like saucers. All five wore only shifts, now rucked high and folded at their napes. Their legs spread a full width, their feminine loveliness poised to choicely, it seemed scant wonder that the lad appeared distracted.
Charles Rogers firmly pressed Margaret's back. She had gone sand-white at the first glimpse of the bare-bushed quintet. "Strict, Sandy is; no nonsense in his home."
"Aye, aye, not a drop, by decree of my wife." He tugged at his thick dundrearies. "Seventeen hours a day scrubbing dog-fouled cobblestones with your tongue; no dinner, save crumbled bark and staled water; and first word of complaint from you-the black hole."
Her fingers convulsed on the tamarind birchrod.
"Tschou!" Madame Sandemarche rushed into the room, her ebony face severe. "Frighten every little chick who comes into our household, you nasty beast. Don't listen to the awful lies, girl."
"Ah, I was just explaining to the lass that after prayers each evening we guillotine all the servants. Mornings, too, for the new ones, till they've mastered the household ways." Her husband tried to look contrite.
"Come here, Margaret." She extended a firm, deeply black hand. "Welcome to our home."
She accepted the traditional birch with a puzzled shrug, plainly demanding of Heaven the reason for such customs. A toss sent it clattering into the fireplace, faint droplets of the stinking pickle glistening before they disappeared into the sooty stones.
She affectionately embraced Margaret, having the advantage of an inch in height. "We will do up to your room, now, while these brutes finish their nonsense. You share quarters with Sally, Helene, and Mathilde."
Madame Sandemarche bustled the newly indentured addition away.
"A straightforward woman, my Aurore." The colonel twisted the bristling fringe by one ear.
"Doesn't care for light sport."
"Margaret met with a good introduction to your methods." Rogers surveyed the five choice backsides so thoroughly illuminated by the sunlight streaming through the windows. "Morning inspection of the troops, before close order drill?"
"Must be sure they've bathed and scrubbed behind their ears. Low behind their ears." Sandemarche caught his nephew's dangling lobe for an emphatic tug. 'This one, this randy-tongued devil's bait, panting like a hound before a deer's quarter, needs breaking-in to the ways of mastering the ladies. He's so choked with the craving for fucking, and so constantly prodded by the horn, that he's lavished twice his allowance on prizes for the girlies so that they'll . . .
"Why some of those English demi-vierges won't even oblige with more than a squeeze of his breeches' front while whispering naughty nothings at a ball. He foams his breeks and rewards them all the same. So he comes home from that damned school laden with debts, his cods clanking from neglect. What do these sisters of Eve do, but bleed him saucily for trinkets themselves. I can't see to the English damsels, good though it'd do them. I mean to have my brace of cockstiffeners render fit service for all he's handed them."
A rack of canes decorated the stone chimney climbing the wall above the hearth. Sandemarche took one, slashing the air in a duelist's salute.
"The lesson is simply achieved. The one whose cunt he spends in first is spared a hiding. The pintle-tickler whose puss laps his cream last tastes only half of a dozen. The other three," the crook-handled willow wand rapped the oaken table ominously, "the other three take as tight a fifteen as ever I've given. Unless you'd care to lend me a hand with the chore?"
"My pleasure."
"The beauty of this scheme from young Donald's viewpoint-and a singularly pretty perspective he does have down there-must surely be that they'll all move their cozening arses like Hell's own fury to be first. Yet that victory by one doesn't end his fun.
"Far from it, he can go through a second course of their charms, and a third-all he can fire his wick for. Each one will still shake her croup and ply all her wily arts to drain him so he can't raise his bob for another plumbing. Yet, they must do so slowly, thoroughly, to avoid being merely second and see another filly take him on for a third go." "Ingenious. Is the lad up to this Herculean labor?" "A thick stew this morning from salt-preserved oysters-damn them being out of season!-has him ready to do these dainty sans-culottes proud, no worrying." The colonel replaced the cane in the rack with a rattling thrust.
"All right, boy," he told his nephew. "Trousers off-shirttail duty, young officer! A long, wet campaign ahead. Keep yourself moving, tight and honey-lined as the first may seem. Let each have her fair chance to twitch her cunning noose around your blind felon's neck, so he may find the proper Delilah to trim his coxcomb."
Donald Sandemarche sprang erect, fingers at his belt buckle.
As her friend proferred the martinet, Dolly touched the stiff, inky Russian leather. She gingerly tapped one gleaming silver burr, a miniature hedgehog, curled tight and sewn to the thong tip.
"Severe." Her hand crushed Clara's.
"Deserved. A gift from Charles. Courteously, he permits me to use it, but has promised me not to subject me to it-unless I beg him three times." "Will you, ever?"
"The alternatives ... it would depend."
In a hollow of the garden, fragrant with flowers, two tolerably frightened women stood in twin pillory frames. Their spines arched, their bottoms jutted, backs strained as well as necks cramped. Neither wore clothes.
A wasp skimmed the brown buttock crowns of one, lingered, and darted off. Other flying things had paused, for nourishment. Tiny swellings showed on rosy English skin, doubtless itching.
Dolly wondered if she had become calloused by her marriage life on Mardi Blanc. She could hardly bring herself to regard the two females except as the Pale Bottom and the Brown Bottom.
"Nicole, Caroline, attend!"
Clara swung a hornet-hissing downward cut that lapped hard along the low-set, pearish English buttocks. The woman made no sound, her knees giving slightly as the hedgehogs overmatched the insect bites.
With two steps, the household's mistress took her stance for the other culprit. The Brown Bottom shook its solid, high cheeks at the lick.
Dolly felt the hand-warmed hilt as Clara passed her the martinet. She gauged her distance behind the first woman carefully. Her arm whipped up-down. The impact, the curving, snapping thongs, the flex and clench at the burrowing tips-excitement shivered along her arm.
The Pale Bottom showed her bright striations as the marks pulsed. The same lightning tingled through her as she whipped the bare, brown rump.
"I do believe they feel it," Clara remarked. Her full lips formed a meaningful smile. She might as well have uttered her words: I do believe you do, too.
The Englishwoman patted each lightly wealed mound. "Here, those inhospitable metal bits have already raised marks like dried peas, hard and round."
Dolly palped the dark, hot pips. The cheek cringed under her explorations. "These shall be raw, shortly."
"The abrasions get basted with a stringent ointment, after. An old Cornwall aunt of mine concocted it for th'gels in Indjah.' It heals and prevents mortification, at the cost of a raging, if cleansing burning."
The Yankee continued familiarizing herself with the contours of the naked hindquarters. "I once wondered, why men must have us so, even the men who love us... I do believe I know, now."
She caressed the lash-rilled skin under Clara's knowing look.
Her friend took the thongs and flogged.
Dolly applied the elegant, harsh flail . . . then Clara . . . then Dolly . . .
A delirium filled her as sharp, mournful cries rose from her punishing strokes. Thin, puffed weal lapped over red, tender weal . . . shaking posteriors knotted, she heard moist sobs and Clara's cooing approval.
The women cried freely in the weathered wooden frames. Dolly marveled at the mottled peony of the Pale Bottom and the sullen burgundy abrading the Brown. Her fingertips sought the interwoven ridges, which cringed from her touch. The yoked victims stamped and wept.
Clara led her quietly away.
Dolly saw a grotto. A spring played freely on mossy stones. A coolness shielded them from mounting sun-but nothing disguised the blazing star within each. She mewled softly, meaninglessly, as they disrobed. Hot clothing fell away. Kisses followed hard on fondlings, mingled, above and below.
Dolly felt drawn into a vast, warm expansion of spirit a fulfillment of being.
"Your sisters . . . did they do . . . and this... and-ah! That!" Clara covered her nipples and throbbing grove with moist, tongue-darting kisses.
* * *
10
FLAGELLATIONS
Colonel Sandemarche studied the sight as his nephew peeled down his confining trousers.
"No!" The man tore his eyes from the hillocked hinds and the mesmerized lad. "Hold, boy, I cannot allow it!"
"B-but-" The gawky lad's ramrod-ready member dripped a crystal dew.
"Oh, no need to worry." His uncle waved his hand. "You'll have your pego's fill of fanny today, no fear."
He strode determinedly to the fireplace. "I just can't allow such base sauce to go wholly undisciplined. You'll agree that the ready young nymphs will have their mottes all the merrier for a bum-dusting."
The naked male member seemed to swell, its acorn head thickening. "May I, uncle? I-"
"Swiping underaged, underpadded arses at that damned school is nothing like whipping a woman! Any hand will do to beat a Harrovian, but not a girl." He tossed Rogers a gracefully tumbling cane. The guest snatched it expertly from the air. "Watch and learn something to reflect on at Cambridge."
"Oxford, uncle, please!"
"Same thing. One stonepile or another. My brother might as well send you to Stonehenge; you'd obtain a truly old school tie to knot about your collar. As you tread the hoary halls of Belial College, you should know how to properly thrash a female backside.
"The matter rises continually in smoking room conversation, I'm told. Monographs by famous consulting tutors; letters in The Times; memoirs by her Ladyship of Wildhunt detailing her straitened upbringing; agony column advertisements for methodes drastiques. You'll want for experience to speak from, when the dapper young men hoist their sherry and philosophize on female flagellation."
Rogers held a rapier-lean ashstock. He had never favored a crooked handle, but this cane whistled through the air with alluring possibilities.
"Three cuts across their whorish hindquarters, man, and as close behind that velvet-furred, man-chewing fig as possible. The other terms stay-the first to draw gism saves her fair hide any further infliction.
"The last still has six added to these. Her less talented sisters feel-well, damn it, I can't see twice-nine, even in such circumstances. Let us mitigate the penalty to twelve atop these three."
Rogers suggested, "And three of that dozen crossing these first marks?"
"Done! The lucky latecomer will have all her cuts high, though, on the peaks of her rounds." Sandemarche's cane brushed the skin just bracketing an apprehensively pursed slit.
"Direct your attention to the distance, boy. Never stand too far." He demonstrated, tapping a very buttock center. "Never waste your tip having it finish flush, here. There's a sweet curve on a plump billy that'll bend the tip around into the far slope just an instant after the main length contacts. There you'll draw your ripest spoor."
He illustrated again. "Don't stand too far forward, or it'll just wiggle feebly in the air, all its spring spent, like that unsheathed manikin you're waving at us all."
Drawing his arm high, he lashed in true and straight. The cane seamed the fatty rumpbase. The agile willow sprang back, hovering overhead while the target flexed and a two-tracked welt swelled.
"Let the woman feel her pain. It grows and reaches an apex, then ebbs. Catch her while the hurt's fresh and lively."
The willow exploded lustily again, then poised ready ... ten seconds . . . fifteen . . . twenty ... it carved in a third time. Not a hair's breadth showed between the flaring, blood-sore traces. "Note carefully that sweet, winsome wiggle you see on properly scorched cubs. Too hard and you'll stun the fair creature. Only a madman tries to pound a woman to insensate jelly. Never confuse strength with effect. The intent is to induce a wholesome, reflective pain-one that lingers with its lesson. A paralytic shock spoils the distressful sensation, dims the adorable motion of a nicely hurting bum."
Young Donald's approval of the example bottom's antics showed in the troutish leaps of his own flesh.
"Charles, can you help elighten our young scholar, so eager to thrust his callow hand into the eel-pit of higher tradition?"
"English boarding school beatings resemble English boarding school food," Rogers advised, as he advanced on a woman at the opposite end of the table. "Both may be memorable in the less savory sense, both satisfy the animal wants, but both importantly miss the spiritual enhancement which art can bring to the craft."
"I say!" The lad took an indignant, Priapic stance.
"Tom Arnold introduced the cane to Rugby as a means of saving time, not as a refinement in finesse. Did he offer exquisite alternatives such as the mental anguish of choosing nine from a willow against fifteen from the birch? Did he mix a lingering correction from the strap with a revitalizing dozen from the rod and a conclusive lancination from a lean stick? Not Old Doctor Tom, who wrote essays on corporal punishment as fatuous as patent medicine testimonials."
Rogers whisked his ash over the pink, outthrust buttocks, fanning them with its breeze. "Arnold always commended the good of the practice, but stayed blind to its greatness."
"That . . . that was Rugby," Donald dismissed with a contemptuous toss of both heads.
"I suppose Ladyfingers Vaughn proved a greater aesthetician? At sermons, ah, there he flourished his mettle. As to boys' rumps-a showing of another character entirely."
"I concede the point, sir!" The youth yelped, an uneasy glance toward his uncomprehending uncle.
"Our matter today is the female fundament," Sandemarche emphasized, "not where schoolboys sit-when they aren't being kicked downstairs or having their ears nailed to the clock tower."
"Quite so." Rogers addressed the nethercheeks with the cane. The woman's gluteal masses flowed in straight plains from the coccyx region till they pouted in abrupt, impish chubs that curved into her sturdy thighs. A profusion of reddish hair fringed a full-gated grotto.
The guest slowly turned about the waiting crupper till he faced it from the other side. "The backhand can be a more powerful blow than the forehand, but devilishly difficult to gauge and control."
He raised his right arm over his left shoulder, the cane a perfect horizontal to the floor. "Best save it only for the fattest meat, till you have the skill of measuring it. Now, recall a curious thing: "The same force which brutalizes a boy's leanly muscled arse sinks in with great pain and wholesome effect, but much less damage on a female's more luxuriously appointed rump. Women can take a stiffer dose in the bill than the supposedly ruggeder sex, so long as you whip their fleshier portions. No, don't frown so knowingly," he admonished over his shoulder.
A sudden viper's strike-the ash wand clipped sonorously into the anxious flesh. She clutched the far end of the table, then lay still, save for a rippling of the whipped pair.
The cane lanced in a second time, and a third. Three violent corrugations blended seamlessly. The woman bit her rumpled shift, eyelids squeezed tight.
"A fair weapon for domestic justice, the common flogging cane," Sandemarche ruminated. "We denigrate it by so familiarly calling it the stick."
He nudged a soft chocolate thigh with the hardened tip. The legs spread.
"It's best in its true form-limber wood, chosen for straight, fine grain, and trimmed to the length appropriate for each piece; then shaped to the correct thickness by lathe, under the sure eye and judgement of a master.
"Resilient, yet holding life and fire in its play." He let the cane course in the air, a humming yellow bolt stolen from Heaven. "These have the whip of steel, with a fire-toughened tip to give the final inch the impact of stone. Some thicken the end; all's one. Never neglect your tip, boy! Always remember that it burrows and burns, leaving a fatter mark that'll be felt when the rest of the line fades."
So it proved as he philosophically hewed the next underbum. Impossible to judge the sweeping arc of a cane in dancing flight-dynamics shifting as energy imparts, transmitting to the nerve and marrow of the waiting womanflesh.
Three shimmering inflictions-a single broad, rubes-cent mark finishing in a smoldering beet color from the tips' plangent whack.
"There is nonsense preached," Rogers soliloquized in turn, "on imagined racial and sexual differences in stoicism. The fairest skin may clothe the most leathery spirit; the mildest marks may excoriate the hardiest rump. I've seen boys blubber where younger, slighter chambermaids only grimaced."
He punished a fine, full crupper with upward flicks that caught the prominent overhang squarely, driving them upward in flinching bounds. The culprit's bottom screwed and twisted as actively as her face.
"Charles?" Sandemarche indicated the last, expectant backside.
"Your house, my friend," Rogers waived the offer.
"Sir. . . ! Uncle. . . ! May. . . ?" The scholar shone with fires of new-gained knowledge. He stepped forward hungerly, the zeal to practice his learning evident.
"Your thing, boy! Your thing!" His uncle aimed a swipe at the blind knob which would have decapitated it had not Donald leaped back. "Hell bugger you backwards, lad, hear me: ' 'Never cane a woman in the heat of your desire'. Her lust offers no impediment, but your own inflamation will prove a corrupter of your judgement, a seducer of your higher aims, and a debaucher of your most practiced skill. After correction is the time for your nobble-de-nook. Until you can control your own knocknoodle flesh you cannot hope to discipline the wayward ways of women."
Crestfallen, coxcomb a-droop, the boy relinguished the field.
"I apologize for the coarse insult, Mathilde." The colonel bowed to her naked hindquarters. "He is, after all, a lad."
"No apology needed, sir," she answered meekly. "I understand his innocence."
"Indeed you do, or I wouldn't be skinning your arse."
The proven willow painted its swelling ribbons, accompanied by half-smothered sighs and restrained wriggles.
"Now, you cock-a-walk, take them! Go slowly, given each cozening cunny a thorough probing before you try its sister, but don't linger overlong."
"Andrew Saint Francis Xavier Sandemarche," Rogers interposed quietly but firmly, "you may instruct the youth on flogging, but let him treat with fucking in his fashion."
"Just so, just so." Abashed, the colonel stepped clear of the field.
For all his dripping eagerness, Donald approached the task with discretion. He rear-mounted the first woman cleanly and vigorously. His hands found warm purchase under her breasts. A dozen smartly, languidly executed heel-to-toe plunges showed him no novice. He abruptly disengaged himself, despite her most lascivious undulations.
Amply slicked for the next encounter, he entered the next obliging grotto. As the mons absorbed his gristle, the beauty's contrary mouth oooed winsomely. She joined his hardest drives with her own able motions.
A careful dozen lunges and he pulled free.
So he proceeded to sample the line of them, belly slapping rhythmically against welted bottoms. Forced love-cries mixed with tears as the final maidservant reared her head, tossing her copper-bright locks before his face.
"Every one a bona roba," the gawky boy pronounced with the confidence of a seasoned rakehell. "Now, ladies, I will stay any needless motion and leave you to the task of entertaining Master Priapus."
Sandemarche grinned in admiration; Rogers nodded approvingly.
The lad slid his shaft halfway up a tenderly squeezing sheath. His hands spread over the woman's naked ribs, balancing not fondling, while her energetic workings importuned his impaling member. Immobile as any jaded pasha, he enjoyed her copulative caresses-then swiftly transferred his fellow to another beguiling vulva. He coupled with them in turn, avoiding the amatory crisis despite the passionately writhing buttocks and clinging cunnies.
Yet, the inevitable approached. He burrowed his teeth into his netherlip, withstanding the frenzied mare's tossings. Endurance sore-tested, he abruptly unplugged himself and hopped to enter the reddish furred furrow on the end. The woman plied her ancient art. Swiftly, her wet cries melded with his trumpeting groans. He jammed himself to the cods she shook her scored rump like a succubus, milking his wild eruptions to the uttermost.
"Enough, enough, Fiona," he kissed her bobbing neck and tumbled hair.
Withdrawing, he bemusedly regarded the quantity which slowly trailed, as if a pearly serpent, down from her mattted slit and along trembling thighs.
"Has he put you on the spanking regime, yet?" Clara idly handled some grasses, braiding and tying the rugged strands into a Puckish quirt.
"He has . . . manually corrected me, if you mean that." Dolly lay in contented disarray, her blood singing still.
"I mean-but I suppose he hasn't, if you don't understand me." The Englishwoman flecked her sylvan whip at insects still hovering abroad in the mounting warmth of day, and flurrying from shadow to shadow across pools of sunlight. "To demonstrate some masculine point of dominion or license or libertinage. David once chose to spank me each morning for a full week-not omitting the Sabbath. One day the brush, the next his palm, the short strap, my own slipper, that ebony ruler in Charles' library-continual variety on a constant theme.
"All this was performed regularly before breakfast, without stint, for no fault that I'd committed-save, perhaps, being female and possessant of a bottom." She cast a backward glance at her finely molded, variegated neitherquarters, plumply rising from the unruly tangle of her skirts.
"A posterior worth the reddening," Dolly observed shyly. Her hand softly explored, then administered a crisp pat. "Spanking is much like caressing, Dr. Mackenna is convinced. You do mark superbly, after all."
"I was flogged once-no, twice, actually, if you consider those three stingers for looking sullen at dinner, as I sat on my bare hams. I was flogged twice during that week, without regard from the tender state his spankings had imparted to my fundament."
The Yankee wife brooded a moment, uneasy. "David hasn't yet . . . perhaps he shall."
"Perhaps?" Clara laughed. "He told Charles the scheme and I had to endure the entire smackbottom diet over again, just last year, from Charles."
"How do we endure it so?" Dolly asked, a touch glum. "Are women born to sustain suffering? Does something in us crave such treatment?"
"Does something . . . crave?" A hand touched a once-secret spot; eyes gleamed in shared memory.
'There are consolations."
"Physical retribution; physical reconciliation." Clara stroked skillfully. "Spiritual atonement; spiritual reunion. A cleansed heart; a well-scrubbed pudendum."
Her hand buffed briskly, now.
"Something in the blood that cries out to be mastered?" The American woman mewled from pleasure.
"Wanton philosophizing. Did you enjoy striping my sluttish mignons' tails?" "Ummmm."
"And didn't it thrill infinitely more here to do so . . . and was that some frail-gendered will to submission?"
"Mmmmmm."
Clara raised herself slowly, speaking distantly, cooly. "I have birched a boy to the raw, and clapped salt into his frayed hide with this hand, and driven him to such extremes of gallantry in my bed that we both grew fever-mad from the divine excess.
"Above me, below me, beside me, he was at all times the creature of my pleasure; my weight upon him or beneath him or beside him, he knew me his rider. Was this your something in the blood that divides male from female?"
"Then, a something common to the sexes . . ."
"In the seraglio I first found that transcending link when Divinity, which allureth and chastiseth, unites with our sundered humanity. I plunged beyond myself to identity with that pure radiance that initiated life and sustains it." Clara dipped her inverted face earthward. "Have you read the lines: "Of a certainty, I am a forest and a dark night-land of trees; but one who fears not my blackness will find my cypresses rich in petaled bowers.
And that one shall truly know the tiny god whom girls court: he lies silent, drowsing beside the well spring.
Yes, he sleeps in the fullness of day, the sluggard!
Has he exhausted himself tripping after gaudy-winged butterflies?
Do not be outraged, you dancing lovelies, if I chasten that godling with his hand! Perhaps his cries will end in weeping, but how we shall laugh at those gouting tears!
And with watery eyes, he shall beg you to dance; and even I shall raise a song in celebration of that dance."
The Englishwoman rolled onto her belly, tossing the braided grass switch into the sunlight. "Musings put in mind by this strange, perfect morning. I saw those words in a German book. I was commanded to read to my lord in the heat of the day, to pass the time until evening's cool. Some delightful nonsense about Zoroaster-a Teuton's very scholastic concept of the East."
She kissed her friend's bare thigh. "It was then that I made a 'proper English birch' and plied it upon an amorous lad's rosy Circassian backside until, with tears, the boy pleaded for the Old Daunce and Nature's release. At my lord's command, we did as our flesh and his word bid us.
"Can you say those quaint words referred to a male's slumbering thing? Or, rather, to the 'tiny god' whose pink nose peeps from your silken veils as soon as the whip is raised?"
Dolly exchanged three long kisses on the lips with Clara. "And . . . after you had flogged and fucked the boy?"
"You know, hussy." She cocked her head. "My lord then summoned a flail of silk, braided as I twined those grasses. He administered it with a free and generous hand over my haunches, loins, and breasts until, tingling with stripes, I appeared fair to leap upon. And so warm afternoon became a warmer evening."
"A very greed hint." Dolly's face disappeared. Teeth nibbled speculatively in darkness.
"Minx! Vixen! Bitch! . . . Angel!" Clara sighed, helpless in her desire.
* * *
11
LIBATIONS
"Some cold cider for the boy, for young Don Juan, and some hock for ourselves, I think." Sandemarche strutted to a bellpull.
"Never before noon, I fear." Rogers began.
"Nonsense, man, midday straddles us. I won't hear of abstinence on such a pretext." He tugged at the cord thoughtfully. "It just occurs to me that all my serving maids have their bungholes eying the heavens. Unless ..."
Margaret entered quietly, face lowered. Rogers grimed to see the plain white shirtwaist and severe black skirt, topped by a starched apron and cap. She made an inexperienced leg.
"You wish, sir?" Her voice barely carried.
"Excellent, excellent, plunge right into the routine. There's a crock of cider down the well in the back, lass. Cider from that and the tall brown bottle beside it, as well."
She curtsied again, color mounting. She passed the caned, rogered women.
"A credit to her upbringing," the colonel chuckled as she exited. He strolled back to the table to chuck the still-oozing winner under her chin. "And you, my girl, gave the lie to that 'cold northern blood' tattle. Off with you, Fiona, while we tend to other business."
She rapidly abandoned the disconsolate quarter, her backside swaying with a pained, proud motion.
"Now the context grows serious. What odds on the young man's passion and endurance? I see a healthy girdth returning to those manly parts. Make a furious effort to exhaust him at his second trial? Milk him slow and gentle, hoping to take him out on the third round? Strategy enters at this point, beyond the tactics of bottom-shaking."
Rogers gazed on the shapely rounds and the Paphian groves below. "Your words to Donald on desire and correction could not have been apter. Yet, if we're to swinge the feckless losers, shall there be no consolation for our labors?"
"Did I fail to mention it? In consideration of their sorely used genitive parts, I propose we bugger the pretties till they squeal."
"A ruffian task, but nothing to be shirked, in the interests of full justice."
Margaret arrived, holding a well-laiden tray. She offered the now resurrected Donald cider from a yellow pitcher, her attention directed away from his insolently erect thing. She deposited two tall glasses and the brown bottle with the two men. A shamed dip and she fled with her tray.
"The training will do her haughty spirit good," Rogers commented as the colonel applied a corkscrew. "I might even envy the man who'll wive her once she leaves you, had I not Clara to sauce my days."
Sandemarche slowly extracted a long, pale cork. "A poet fellow I once knew in Barbados claimed all the world's wonder and the transcending commonplaces of immortality could all be summed in the complementary arcs of woman's posterior cheeks. He raved on in that vein, drinking absinthe thick as milk. He saluted each rising sun faithfully with golden Chartreuse, and toasted the moonrise with green, regardless of the hour it surmounted the horizon. Mad, but uncannily accurate, I'd say."
He poured. Rogers sniffed, swirled the liquid and tasted. "Your poet friend missed the joys of Rheingau.
Hock and hinds, and let the universe rest on those foundations."
Sandemarche met the raised toast. "The only wine to overmatch a fine German is D'Yquem, and that outfaces any trockenberenauslese ever vinted."
"True, but too rich for everyday work. Your nephew seems in full cry."
"Back to the wars, eh, boy? Stout fellow."
The women took a grip on the oaken edge, setting their feet for further ramming.
"You dine with the Bisque-Hardies tomorrow? Friday?" Clara stood naked in the dappling shadows, swatting leaves and twigs from her dress. She shook it thrice, then began to slip it on.
"Tomorrow, yes," Dolly sat dreamily, her heels tucked against her hams. "They are Catholic, so I suppose that means no red meat, yet we eat from the sea three or four days each week."
"Is David angry at you for any reason-especially angry? Or have you some repeated fault, some sin that needs particular expiation?"
"No, I can think of nothing. Oh . . ." She moved her netherlip under her teeth. "I must own that I have refused him sodomy, and he's been quite cold and stormy about it, some evenings. I know his classes stimulate him, and he needs to release his pent-up passions, but. . . I . . ."
The Englishwoman laughed, lightly. "Forgive my indifferent compassion. Until you've been buggered by eunuchs-oh, yes, make no mistake. A youth caught after his change to manhood can produce a very fine cockstand, even if he lacks the eggs to allow him to complete his pleasure. That's the very horror of it, they can't be appeased into any easy detumescence. They simply poke on and on until they weary of having their knobs fisted by your bumhole."
Dolly shuddered. "He has said that you, and Joyau, left him with an Englishman's taste for bottomfuckery."
"Think of it as a medicinal clystering. It certainly excites both Charles and David so, they perform copiously enough for a high colonic." Clara drew her friend up onto her feet. "I tried to shy from a sound rectal mounting once. Once. Whatever the joys and pangs of flagellation, there are more dismal things.
"I hate the spiders, myself. Fat, hairy-legged crawling monstrosities that drop on you suddenly in the cool, absolute inkiness of the oubliette. For sheer t-e-r-r-o-r there is nothing like the black hole. Foul toads and nameless winning things flee the heat into our cellars and work their way into . . ." She felt Dolly's delicate tremor. "Charles has a much more lively interest in restraint and the options afforded by immobility than David."
"Thank Heaven."
"I once spent a quite unmanageable three days with my wrists tied close behind me. Arranging the po took such skill and luck that I was condemned to take my relief out of doors. Lucinda sleuced me down, after, with a bucket."
"Unmanageable, yes; and the crime?"
"Being unmanageable." The Englishwoman linked her arm in Dolly's. They began to amble down the garden path. "I should not refuse David his pleasures, again, were I you. I have a most authentically carved gode, should you wish to practice. There is a hole and a bulb so that if charged with milk it can perform to the life."
"I . . . cannot."
"Will not, tease. You have a rosy pretty between your cheeks; I understand David's interest."
"Temptress. A fingertip is one matter, a whole-" She fell silent.
Clara continued, tone level and serious. "I think we should find that godemiche, and I will demonstrate how easy the use is, once one becomes accustomed to a lodging in that location."
"You think the matter important, then?" The Yankee's eyes widened in gentle wonderment.
"Would I make such an offer when a dainty tongue is available, otherwise?"
"Seductress!"
Rogers studied the vacant, idiot mien young Donald displayed after his fifth straining orgasm in under three hours. The lassitude born of excess etched itself deeply on his countenance. Other portions slumped irrevocably.
"As with the ages-old battle between hock fanciers and partisans of imperial French white wines, there is no converting the twin camps of the breast and the buttock. One may praise the haughty dugs on Hera's bosom, imaging the dome of Heaven in their curve, and I shall still slip quietly back for the true face of the twin-cheeked Goddess."
He looked to see if words had any effect where deeds had depleted capacity.
"I believe the young cavalier can no more a-mounting go, this day." Sandemarche finished another glass. He hoisted the bottle speculative. "Empty as young Donald's cods." "What is that line in Catullus, so charmingly ren-red as 'oh the cunning cunny'?" "I never translated him, finding the marital writings more to my favor, in my foolish youth. My congratulations, Mathilde." The vibrant willow cane raised and shrilled its war-cry. "One! You shook your tail with conviction. Two! No hetaera could have out-Theodora'd Theodora better. Three!"
He gestured for his guest, who took up the ashstock. The fresh weals lay high on her dark coffee-hued curves. Rogers clipped into the firm-muscled mounds.
"Four!" Sandemarche kept the count. "The lesson is simple: tantalize a male, but never withhold delivery. Five! A bountiful generosity crowns your sex's virtues. Six!"
Taking her bunched shift, she dabbed her eyes.
"Off with you." The colonel patted her lovely, marked haunch with affection. She sniffled and let her garment drop as she straightened.
Rogers found the memory of her now-hidden cunt stimulating. He envisioned Clara in a like strait, with him doing the comparative delving. Yes, he had enjoyed her active charms in every position, at every hour, in bed or field or in the salt warmth of the sea, yet never had her attractions cloyed, never had she bored his carnal palate.
How was her day, he wondered. Had Dolly Hunter kept her amused, that pert New England bride still virginal enough to show a becoming confusion at some of the island freedoms?
He had the powerful desire to hop into the rig, give Iago his head, and spring upon Clara like ravishing Tarquin. To have her . . . limbs wrapped around him. her heels drumming their urgent tempo against his thighs as he skewered her to the throat. That would show this callow schoolboy and his uncle what fucking was, when woman and man loved it deep in their blood and bones.
Ah, well ... he came away from his reverie. He could lose himself in sodomy once the other three lasses had their stripes.
At such odd moments he always wondered why he didn't end the sweet charade and marry that infuriating, satisfying woman. Perhaps ... the fear inevitably came that she might not be willing, beyond the term of her stipulated servitude. He'd hold her fast while he had that edge over her . . . while she had it over him?
"Shall we lace them two at a time?" His host proposed.
"Nothing better." He put aside his introspection and brandished the crook-handled ash. They stood at opposite ends, staring at prime, plump melons now dripping, below, with love's fickle juice.
The two canes sank as one into their separate naked targets.
Donald's dormant interest in the world appeared to revive. He leaned forward, his attention once more captured.
Rogers held his arm coiled, watching the first mark flush with pain. At the right instant, he bent the stick smartly across the well-rounded peaks. The ear could not tell Sandemarche's cut from his.
He truly enjoyed the purity of impact. The third scorching stroke exemplified the pleasure-the free play of muscles as his arm swung; the crack at the stinging instant of collision; the meaty resistance traveling back up the wood; the leaping and clenching of the scalded mare's cheeks.
Both women began to whimper and gasp at the fourth, fifth, and sixth lashing swings. Their silken hindquarters showed stormy brick hues and queenly purple speckles. The next lick overlapped the original weals.
At the eighth lanciating cut, the colonel's target flew up, her fingers clawing at her chubs. "Master-mercy! I-can-not-" Sandemarche smiled benignly. "There, there, Helene. The mistress'll daub you with witchhazel and balm when I'm done. Over you go, again, mon petite. " Her face streamed saltily. She fell forward, clutching the tabletop with an indistinct blubber.
The two ninth licks finished solidly in the corrugated patch at the very base of their beings. Rogers luxuriated in the rolling toss of the gibbous pears above the ash limb as he pressed it to the darkling ridges.
The two men laced in again, striking untouched skin. Legs stamped and lips blew, as simple anguish raged.
He unleashed his final stroke. The searing wand branded the rippling hide, the rugged fire-toughened tip gnawing into the far, flinching slope.
"You can put your little wet noses to that wall for the minute," Sandemarche directed. "It'll do you some good to hear Sally's yelps, as she's listened to yours."
Their halting progress to comply took over two minutes. Both mopped eyes and noses with their shifthems, still held high. The pulsing marks showed clearly why they still quavered a lachrymose lament.
"Now that was curious," the host rubbed his cleanshaven chin. "I couldn't tell the faintest difference between our strokes. We seemed to hit them as if a single arm wielded both sticks. Surely, this cannot be so."
"The instrument in question moves faster than the keenest eye. Yet," Rogers mused, "the target surely does not."
"Therefore if we stripe the lass at the same time, surely we may tell from her delightful boundings which portion actually felt the cane first. It's good for this that we have Sally, of solid Yorkshire stock as broad behind as a patriarch's jubilee partridge." The master indelicately indented the pearl-smooth skin with a forefinger. "Une plus-belle coquette sans merci. " Rogers had noted the tempting screwings of her lascivious hands as she'd tried to score a final victory on Donald's concupiscence. "Rough on her victim, she was?"
"She'd take his poker in hand, roll it like a fine cigar, and have him steaming from his white-hot heed. With kisses like butterflies' wings and coy tonguings more burning than mosquitous' bites, she'd keep him raging on the boil."
"A fellatricious meretrix."
"Pleasing as a Pompadour, save that the hardened slut wouldn't let him go over, and wouldn't grant him proper service with those devil lips or cunt or arse. 'But, sir, I can't do any more; I am, you know, a good girl, and I can barely resist your handsomeness, but what would my confessor think?' "Never did she give him relief, as I say, ply her with trinkets as he might, except that she would consent to having him sit, trousered, while she perched her too-diverting naked bottom on his clothed fellow to wiggle and bounce while he inseminated his breeks. Once or twice his overeagerness might leave her fingers wet while she was at her manipulations, but that was plain miscalculation."
"A wise virgin, this Sally?"
Her master thought carefully. "In her navel, perchance."
"Twelve seems scarcely adequate."
"I have determined to abuse my office and slip in a spot of treadmill duty. Sergeant Battremont longs for some fresh recruit to introduce to the sport. She has some ideas involving a ginger fig, such as they insert in a horse to keep its tail up during dressage."
Sandemarched planted his willow wand at the top of Sally's gluteal crevice. The divide ran pink and shallow for a hand's breadth, then turned shadowy, deepening. The separated slopes at the base showed dark thatch reaching well above the feminine lozenge.
From the other side, Rogers set his varnished ash low, where the cheeks blossomed their widest.
They both lifted and paused for a space of ten anxious heartbeats. At will, not by signal, they struck as one.
The canewood whipped in, furrowing the mounds above and below. The muscles undulated slackly for an instant, as opposite tides rippled through the globes. Then she bunched violently, hands knotted futilely against the two sticks.
"Mmmmmm." Sandemarche plainly could not be certain which had struck first.
"Hum." Rogers agreed on the indecisive outcome.
Their weapons swung back to full-cock, staying aloft as a skipping pulse tolled ten.
ssswwaacckk! "Aaaannnngggg!"
Her exploded wind left Sally as airless as a beached flounder, and equally desperate. The men pursed their lips and considered the results. Had some force held the tossing hillocks, a ruler could have measured each fresh mark as not over a half-inch from the last.
The two women facing the featureless wall stiffened at the full-throated screams engendered by the third double-slice. The table rattled as it hadn't with both of them taking their ration. They gripped their lofted garments, riven bottoms contracting in sympathy.
"Damned technique polished to mirror perfection," Sandemarche spat in disgust.
Young Donald came over for closer inspection as the fourth shredding-silk whir ended in lusty, united thumps. A sobbing pleading obscured in first words.
"I say," he repeated louder. He bent so that the fervidly quaking buttocks danced two inches from his chin. "That's tighter caning than Catchpole Thomlinson, the Master with the Iron Arm. He used to do the Matron's List beatings for . . . um, sins of . . . uh, bedcrimes, as they called it, in the book."
"This is not schoolboy play!" His uncle explained with shaking Dundrearies. "This is real punishment, out here in the great world-not your closeted, cloistered scholar's den!"
Donald retreated, chastened.
"Besides, what's smuggery-muggery to you, eh, when you've rattled the bones of a brace of ewes five times between breakfast and-" Sandemarche glanced at a clock. "By the merde of the Medici, luncheon due and no one to serve it."
"I fear our chance has passed," Rogers remarked. "We won't be able to tell which impact is first."
"Ah, I see your meaning." The colonel brushed the original weals with the cane's harsh tip. The swollen bar of those first three strokes lay on a particularly protrudent overhang of fatty flesh.
The ash and willow rose and fell, with the finality of Zeus's justice. Sally hauled herself forward in a convulsion of pain, her hips pounding the oaken boards. Her face darkened to the beet color lacing her bottom.
"Rather like bull's blood there, don't you agree?"
"Settle down, skittish little malkin." Sandemarche held her shoulder tenderly and eased her down to her curled toes. "Just a cat's scratching, that's all."
The cords stiffened on her forearms as she locked her fingers on the table's edge. Her shift had settled halfway down her spinal trough. The colonel rucked it higher, exposing her heaving ribcage.
Sally took a deep breath, which caught in her throat and turned to a whispered sob. Her eyes fluttered as she relaxed for a moment.
Twin instruments of justice whistled into her anguished wealage. The exactly parallel sticks furrowed her, driving the cheeks high. As they snapped away, the pure snowy tracks showed where they'd chased the blood from her ridged marks.
Color and sensation flooded back. Sally writhed like a gaffed fish, punishment raging in her vitals.
"Boy! Attend." Setting the willow on the oak, Sandemarche unbuttoned his own britches. "Now's the time for gaming, once duty's done."
The coiled length slowly reared, foreskin peeling to bare the heavy ram's head.
"Helene, Agnes-Mr. Rogers and I require your presence."
The two women returned to the table, exchanging miserable glances. They bent on either side of the still-wriggling Sally. They took their own welted posteriors in hand, parting the wincing hillocks.
The two men plugged them deeply, plumbing and plowing in steady rhythm. Rogers felt the fiery press of Helene's marks as he reamed her bottom, belly clapping the hot surfaces. Her vent gripped his tool all the tighter at each slap of flesh to waled flesh.
A hearty, battling ride it became, too, as he fought the fiercely clenching resistance. Minute after minute, he fucked, one hand grasping a trembling teat with its cherry-thick nipple, the other hand stroking her side and haunch.
Finally, reluctantly, he felt the excited ramus lubricate her guts. He held himself up her, enjoying the bulldog shaking that her outraged bottom gave his impaling thing.
"That, boy, is how to punish a woman." Sandemarche replaced his trousers as Rogers gradually unskewered his prey. "No more schoolroom nonsense for you. The university and the responsibilities of manhood lie before you.
"Sally! Stop sniveling and apologize to his poor, neglected creature for all your whorish tricks."
The whipped woman mewled as she sank to her knees, abused buttocks bending. She obeyed with a will that amazed the young Harrovian, whose phallus actually rose to meet her oral caresses. Still, it took long minutes before he could spout a sixth time in response to her fevered suckling. He grinned in male pride at her accomplishment.
"The maxim of the desert is proved once again." Rogers quoted, " 'A moist kiss exceeds in virtue a hastened coitus.'"
"But a bare bottom is still the most potent aphrodisiac." Colonel Sandemarche cupped a roasted nether-cheek affectionately.
"Hellish, to treat a girl so; how can you take that so far up so narrow a space?"
"Dolly, it reaches quite far enough for anything but a randy whale."
"No ... I really can't . . . Ail. . . Monster . . . Yii!"
"Mule! Are you as stubborn on the pot?" "Cossack!"
"1 thought I'd feel a secret reaction, here . . . Quaker Friendliness or heathen lickerishness?"
"No . . . that's devilish . . . I-I-I-"
"Such explosions of bliss; I do believe they're more violent than from my kisses. Now, don't you wish David had performed this office with the creature this only counterfeits?"
"No, don't remove it till you fetch a towel . . . that milk was cruel, Clara."
"Don't struggle so. Now, the towel or a po?"
"A chamber pot, p-please!"
* * *
12
REJUVINATIONS
Dressing gown elapsed to her throat, Magenta Bisque Hardy flew into the long, narrow breakfast room. Her mouth froze to see the tutor seated at the table, investigating pork rashers and lamb's kidneys with a fork.
"Such informality," Lady Morgan chided. "Mr. Hunter accepted our invitation for morning refreshment before his class. I assure you, sir, we are not always so casual before our guests."
"My clothes-where are my clothes?" Magenta ducked her head, her loose, unbrushed hair draping the shoulders of her gown.
"In their wardrobes, I presume." Her stepmother answered, taking a mouthful of fish roe and eggs.
"Those are locked-why?"
"Your father and I have discussed a matter with Mr. Hunter." The Irishwoman set down her fork. "You lack advantages important to women in our time. Your education-a vain parade of accomplishments that suit a simple-hearted maiden aunt to while away her life. Your unexercised intelligence remains fettered in pretty bonds, the chains of those 'accomplishments.'"
"Even my nightdress is gone," the young woman persisted.
"You must learn languages, history, literature, even mathematics, and thus be a credit to your family in your discourse, not merely upon the ballroom floor."
"Had I taken this with me to my bath, I should be . . . naked."
"Certainly not. Provision has been made. Some very fine sewing work has been done on your behalf. I suggest you consider the speed and the quality of the result. A proper school costume is being laid on your bed right now. The tutor's lessons start shortly; you shall attend them, as a pupil."
A squeak of inarticulate horror preceded a panicked rush toward Sir Polkinghorn.
"MAGGIE!"
His voice, matched by a commanding frown, stopped her. "I have suggested this arrangement, for your betterment. Your mother and I have your interests at heart. You will be educated, truly this time, not left to waste in the drawing room with a sampler."
"By . . . that man." She seemed to regard him as a fawn would an advancing catamount.
"Mr. Hunter is very much a man," Lady Morgan's mouth twitched up at the corners, "but I should not be so pert as to use that tone while he has a cane in his classroom. Or would you prefer the strap? He tells me you have become quite fond of it."
"You are hateful! Poisoning my father's mind with this-this rubbish!"
Sir Polkinghorn stood abruptly, flinging down his napkin. "Indeed. The important families of this island agreed to educate their children, employing Mr. Hunter. Some fools still send their boys to England, and their girls to those embroidering academies.
"You prefer to believe the decision to truly foster learning is rubbish. You would rather be a dancing doll, a clever puppet on a piano stool, and have nothing more to offer a husband and friends. Can you discuss the proper governance of the Empire? Can you discourse on the significant of Mr. Browning's writings? Do you know the essays of Ruskin and Pater?
"My silly daughter, can you even speak on a comparison of Mr. Conan Doyle and the elder Dumas with Sir Walter Scott? I don't ask concerning the effects of Pusey upon hoped reunion of the Englisj church with Rome. I needn't pry into the effect the musical theories of Herr Wagner and Dr. Brahms have had on your tastes and perceptions. What effect have Herr Schliemann's expeditions had upon your appreciation of Homer? None, the truth being you have neither read of Schliemann nor read Homer.
"So it would be idle for me to inquire which you consider the greater, the classical Homer or our own Shakespeare-as meaningless as to ask if the espousing of Voltaire's doctrines compels such excesses as the Paris Commune horror."
Magenta stared at him in teary confusion, clutching her dressing down to her shaking shoulders.
"I do not accuse you, my own true pretty," he continued tenderly. "I condemn myself. Mr. Hunter made me see. I have read my Harriet Wilson-another name with no meaning for you. She taught me what a woman can accomplish on her own, how her mind can develop with reading and talk. My dear wife, your mother, is such an example. With formal instruction, can she not accomplish so much more?"
"W-what good is all that on this foolish island? In this forgotten place?" "A not unsensible question." He went to her, taking her chin and raising it. "St. Louis le Prophete may never rival the brilliance of London, but it shall never acquire the filth and squalor that makes that greater city a cesspool. We may cultivate learning and understanding here, as one may create beauty and order in garden; or, we may wallow in ignorant idleness, till the weeds and wild clutter make us forget that such places as gardens exist. This is not the stagnant ditch you so flippantly take it for. Your mother has discussed martial history with Colonel Sandemarche, furthered her interests in biology in talk with Dr. Mackenna. I have not found two better read men than Mr. Hunter and Hugh Aubusson. Listen to them."
She seemed to melt against him. "Surely I must not wear a school child's dress."
"Then you will go naked into Mr. Hunter's classroom. I will not have you flouting his authority-I know your arrogant ways," he chucked her under the chin, "and I have encouraged them. You must be reminded of your role as his pupil. That is the purpose for your clothing."
"Surely, you cannot . . . permit him to beat me?"
He petted her soft hair. "His authority must rule in the classroom, his will shall govern your moods, his judgement reward or punish your efforts. Syndon and Auberon benefit from his methods. Elise St. Remy is not so much younger than you that she doesn't wear a fetching frock to church, and play the woman with her young gentlemen."
She collapsed and sobbed against him. "Please ..."
"You shall have yourself a real education, my Mags. Shall she not, Mr. Hunter?"
"I direct all my efforts toward that end, Sir Polkinghorn." The tutor blotted his lips. "She should hurry if she is not to be famished during the first hours of class."
"1 worry about David," Dolly told Aurore Sandemarche. A bolt of fabric lay neglected beside her; the shears hung from her fingers, forgotten. "He has been so strangely cold these past days. He left without a kiss this morning to breakfast with the Bisque-Hardies. Have I so sorely offended him ... is it the strain of his scholastic work?"
"This evening, wear your most cunning nightdress. After you have begun your preliminaries, and have him well in hand, beg him in your most whorish tones to sodomize you." The black woman spoke frankly.
"Why? Is that it?" She leaned toward her friend. "And how do you know that I ... do not completely oblige his tastes?"
"Andrew has his fits of buggery," Madame Sandemarche avoided the question. "Whether he is recalling drummer boys from.his-subaltern days, or other childish sports, I do not know. Most English have this yearning for boyhood games-see their solemn devotion to cricket, to soldiers, to private confidences in masculine surroundings about a lot of nonsense. This longing to fill the vent in a bottom is just such a juvenile whim. It passes, if indulged. It may fester, if not seen to."
"David isn't an Englishman," Dolly protested. "Yet, what you say has been suggested by Clara ... she does know his preferences."
"Heeding good advice may save much pain."
The young wife hesitated. "It hurts so. As if I were being impaled, like some Medieval martyr. I have no reluctance about any other carnal pleasantries."
"Not with your mouth?"
Dolly flushed slightly, thinking of her service to Charles Rogers. "No, though I own I have yet to be expert at it-the crisis always comes so suddenly, before I realize it and can ready myself. But, to have him up my . . . bottom is so fiercely disagreeable."
"Exercise widens the avenue, there as with your other channel." The ebony face smiled. "Let us not just speak of men's childish fancies. When you frolicked with your sisters, satisfying one another, did you ever use a carrot or brush handle or other device to procure your satisfaction?"
"Of course not!"
"Of course not?" She chuckled. "I should say, myself, were I asked, of course so! Do you know that many women have a special wooden or ivory gallant made for their solitary delight? Inexhaustible, it never abridges a woman's enjoyment by spending and going limp. But I digress, my purpose is to ask if you do not confuse your marital joys in your husband's arms with those sororal rompings? Can you be resisting his buggering because it is new and different from the ways girls use to comfort their loneliness?"
"1 have only delight at his thing up my cunny."
"Does he stint any attention you crave?"
"No."
"The service of his lips and tongue, below?" "No."
"You ride atop him at times?" "Naturally."
"He was your first man?" "Of course."
"Again, this so-certain 'of course'!" Aurore Sandemarche laughed. "I had a most restricted childhood, yet Andrew was my fifth lover, and my first who was not born on Martinique. I found him quite exotic; truth to say, I still do."
Dolly puzzled. "I thought myself a loving bride, eager, not merely submissive to his caresses."
"Eager for your own, familiar sister-learned pleasures, or for the mature delights a grown man and woman can exchange? Do you know how few men know the girl-kiss you glibly say he doesn't deny you? Morgan Bisque-Hardy may enlighten you upon men's blind selfishness in bed with women. I should not refuse David a few minutes of delving between your posteriors."
Dolly looked mildly piqued. "I suppose David would not mind it if I purchase a gode for use in him?"
"Ah, you have heard of the artificial lover! Would it give you satisfaction to root such an imposture home in him? No. Yet, you may wish to consider a knotted kerchief, gently inserted, and withdrawn briskly at the time of crisis. That may stimulate amazing masculine reactions. Miss Harcourt shared that secret with me, and Andrew has found it a charming occasional indulgence."
Dolly blinked, helpless. "These pagan sophistications of hers ..."
"Knowledge gained in a harem may be valuable in a Christian bedchamber. The stimulation may suit David; once accustomed to it, the stirrings of his John Thomas may suit your backside. I have a sister at home quite fond of the practice-no, really. She finds it more interesting with a younger lad, with a slender engine unable to accommodate her somewhat jaded grotto."
"Aurore!"
"Amuse your husband's whims. He'll indulge himself in these stray desires as often as it takes to prevent his becoming dulled by the enticement of your conventional charms. Deny his passing fancy, and it will straightaway become an idee fixe, clouding all the more orthodox pleasures."
"I shall think on it, thank you." Dolly toyed with the shears. "Perhaps we can talk more tomorrow, in the Bisque-Hardies' garden."
"Perhaps," the dark woman shook her head, "but I doubt it."
"Lydia, stand out here, if you please." The tutor's voice snapped through the schoolroom and carried clearly through two holes in the ceiling.
Sir Polkinghorn and Lady Morgan lay upon cushions, on the floor above, unsuspected by any below. They watched the girl step before Hunter's desk.
He rose to confront her. "I do not recall licensing any quizzical faces and smirks, nor sly whispered comments. Magenta Bisque-Hardy has come among us in search of the same learning you pursue. Your right hand, please."
A springy, flat ruler flashed across her palm. The girl's fingers buckled, then straightened. The ruler slapped again, as he kept his iron gaze upon her. After five hard swats had reddened her hand, he requested her other palm. Her left arm shook and she whimpered as he exacted the toll there, too. She dabbed ineffectively at her eyes when permitted to sit.
"There is an ancient and honored custom of flogging an entire class for the sins of a few. This appears to be rankest injustice. Its effect is to enlist the refractory students' peers in controlling recreant behavior.
"Any further manifestations of unworthy sentiments concerning Magenta's arrival and study here will merit you all, without exception, ten lines-an imposition to be written with a stiff stick across your labile nether-quarters. Do we all have clear understanding?"
"Yes, Mr. Hunter!" Seven voices chorused in unison.
"Magenta, you are new among us and do not know our particular customs."
Her watching parents could see the white midshipman's shirtwaist, and the pink of her knees projecting from her short girl's skirts.
"I trust to your native intelligence to observe closely and adopt readily." He spoke with quiet emphasis, "Do we have clear understanding?"
"Yes, Mr. Hunter!" Eight voices rose, her stumbling, out of cadence.
'Thank you." He returned to his desk. "Young Master Cloutier was, when we adjourned yesterday, about to elucidate upon our slate board some general principles Euclid found to be true. May I prevail upon him to enlighten us all?"
Hands fumbled for paper and pens as the boy came forward. "Magenta, I counsel you to make use of those writing implements provided for you. Each Saturday I collect the week's notes from each student. I review them and any inadequate entries result in some physical unpleasantness on Mondays.
"Ravenna, do you have any advice for Magenta in her jottings?"
The Aubusson daughter cleared her throat. "I would suggest particular attention to her grammar and spelling."
"Spoken from experience. Careless memoranda denote sloppiness of thought, a characteristic I am commissioned to eradicate."
He turned toward a wall. "Master Cloutier, may we have your recitation and examples, now?"
Sir Polkinghorn replaced the wooden board covering the peepholes. He lifted himself off the cushions, smiling at his wife. "She makes a charming girl, again. I had seen her growing up too quickly in England's hurly-burly, but I never realized such youth could be regained."
"She is not the only one rejuvinated by the process." Lady Morgan's hand had plunged deeply. She kissed her husband lovingly on the cheek, on the lips, on the eyelids.
They slid upon a conveniently placed chaise lounge.
"Damn these skirts of yours. You need short ones, like Maggie." The baronet explored upward, rustling skirts and petticoats aside. "Ah, those naughty drawers with their slits up the inner thighs."
"Far more modest by Sir George's standards, should a wild zephyr expose me to the scorn of diplomacy."
He found her warm, lynx-furred lips and the urgent point rising from their apex. "Doore treats the issue too solemnly." He rhythmically caressed.
Her own hand squeezed him in unison with his fingertips. "He had Lesbia quite terrified of discovery. She never realized he already had spied her secret. She treated his prick as if any moment it might accuse her of going naked beneath her skirt to subvert island dignity."
They traded delicate kisses. "Appeased his ire right readily, did she?"
"Sir George will be an attentive guest at some future Friday's exercises. A pity he cannot join us tomorrow."
"The tutor and Mrs. Hunter should offer sufficient diversions."
She rolled her hips in slow, regular motion to his fingering. She crushed his prepuce to its shaft and began a wristy agitation, drawing the tightly held foreskin up and down.
He smothered her slight gasps, entering her mouth with his tongue. As he withdrew for a moment, her teeth nipped his lip, then roved back and forth, serratingly.
When she released her biting hold, catching her breath, he kissed her warmly flushed throat. The pulse hammered regularly under his tickling mouth.
Her hips jerked in irregular spasms, and his male thing swelled to meet her savage clutching. He kneaded the lively gristle above her love-cave, while the meat of his hand polished her fattened netherlips.
"My one, true darling . . ." She sighed, voice hoarse with her crisis.
He felt the sharp convulsions of her ecstasy. Her hand strained to obliterate his engorged crown in a frenzy of friction. He bit her pulsing throat as his own passion lavishly dewed her working fingers.
As she moaned, contentedly, he tasted the salt of her blood and kissed the tiny welling away.
* * *
13
EXPIATIONS
Lady Morgan ran a line across the punishment ledger entry. "Four blue demerits, paid by twelve strokes of the birch, prefaced by six from the tawse. Auberon, I'll thank you to do better on your deportment during the next month or I'll put you up to a six-withe rod.
"Those three choice cuts were for lipping a servant. I'll have no nastiness to anyone merely because you feel superior to their station. Any repetition and it will be six prime cuts, with the injured party applying the cane in front of the entire staff."
She turned to the second of the red-faced, crimson-reared lads.
"Syndon, I had hoped for some improvement. Three black demerits for willful offenses, paid by fifteen of the birch." She crossed an entry. "I've already had to promote you to the seven-switch birch, as you doubtless noticed. Any of your arrogance in the next two weeks and it's red demerits. Requiring?"
He sniffed, cheeks and chin wet. "Eight strokes per tick."
"Be certain to tell Auberon how your six P's felt, atop your birching. That may impress him about courtesy." She tapped the final entry in his column. "If your brother merely mocked Leila, after your indulging yourself with her, your own abuse was far more serious. I am not entirely convinced that twelve Cs, distributed among your palms and thighs, punished you adequately. The slightest indication of any further attentions forced upon the staff members will be dealt with severely. You may consider that dozen a warning."
She pointed toward the adults seated on chairs along the wall. "Both of you apologize to our visitors for the sorry spectacle you required us to provide."
The two boys shuffled dejectedly before Colonel and Madame Sandemarche, and David and Dolly Hunter. Lesbia Reardon kept her eyes on another world as the sons knelt. Sir Polkinghorn remained composed. The lads babbled a ritual supplication, clad only in their shirts and their flogging marks. Bright droplets showed on Syndon's right, where the tamarind switches had flayed the skin and the cane had burst the flesh.
Aurore Sandemarche leaned forward. "Do these monkeys play with themselves afterward? Many boys do, to alleviate the sting."
A palpable quiet filled the room. The youths' ears glowed with greater shame. The colonel coughed indulgently. "It's a little concern of my wife's, she thinks it . . ."
"It interferes with the residual discomfort, part of the intended punishment, does it not?" Madame Sandemarche looked at the three men in turn.
"In my memory it did," Lady Morgan smile tightly, "and I thanked Heaven. I take a normal measure of Onanism into account in assigning penalties, pity in Syndon's case that his hands don't appear to be in condition for the exercise, between an earlier dose of the Jonathan and four cane cuts, each. That can't easily be helped, though."
Lesbia Reardon shifted the weight on her still-tender buttocks.
"From what I see, he may be requiring some help in that department," the black woman commented. Under the shirt front, a spasmodic stirring had begun.
"That must be the proximity to Mrs. Hunter," Lady Morgan remarked dryly.
Dolly's costume seemed extreme, even given Mardi Blanc. Her black stockings were gartered at mid-thigh. French whore's rouge spotted each cheek and brightly highlighted both nipples.
She gave a wan and desolate look as her husband spoke.
"Perhaps, since she is arousing him, she should take care of his . . . reaction, as he is unable to handle the matter himself." His eyes met hers coldly.
"I recall excellent precedent," the colonel contributed.
Lady Morgan peered at Syndon. "Orally or digitally?"
He gaped, "Nngg-nngg-nngg-"
"Would you prefer to be diddled or tongued?" She inquired impatiently. "I don't propose to have you insulting our guest by demanding to mount her, in full view of her husband."
He appeared to have a struggle breathing correctly.
"Silly boy." She gestured at Dolly. "Kiss it and end that carnival tentpole display for him."
"David. . . ?" She looked feebly for succor.
"I suppose you'd prefer for the boy to hold it in and then spurt all over his sheets while he's asleep and unable to appreciate the experience?" Hunter put a firm hand behind her naked shoulder and pushed downward.
She slid to her cotton-covered knees. "P-please stand up, S-s-syndon."
The boy did, wonder-eyed. Her face disappeared under his billowed shirt front.
"Be sure you kiss his cods, first, dear, to make friends, then lick your way up." Lady Morgan leaned on the punishment ledger lectern. "I cannot tell you the number of raw young strumpets who think they're earning their pay by simply falling on a gentleman's pecker as if they were locust at harvest time, gobbling fair to stuff their cheeks without so much as a kiss of acquaintance."
"She's tonguing him nicely," Madame Sandemarche peered low. "Has his prepuce in her teeth and she's skinning him down now."
"Would you say that's commendable technique, Lesbia?"
Mrs. Reardon stared at her sister, agast.
"Mmmm, 1 forget the inexperience of these simple country widows." She tapped the wooden stand with her pen. "Magenta, have you enjoyed oral pleasantries with any of your swains, yet?"
Her stepdaughter stood to one side of the seated company. Her short schoolgirl's skirt had been pinned to the middy, exposing her front and back.
"I-have-no-suitors-here-"
"In England, then? No? Do not young ladies get to know their gentlemen before dragging them between the sheets? No politely mounting one's escourt? Simply pokety-pokety-poke-the haste of young people nowadays." The Irish woman shook her head. "Are you coming along there, Dolly?"
The submerged head shot back suddenly. Steaming gism splattered her painted cheeks.
"She does that at home, too," Hunter confided.
"I suggest you lick that off my floor, Dolly, before it becomes evidence against you." Lady Morgan placed her hand flat against the open punishment book. "I already have a serious complaint of conjugal inattention in here. I should hate to add to the account. Any girl working in London for any reputable establishment knows to lap all the cream and smile 'thank you' for it. In my aunt's day the coy trollop who ITS wouldn't swallow quickly tasted a mouthful she liked even less."
"Nothing vulgar, I trust." The colonel had a mildly shocked expression.
"No, no, castor oil was all; though, for a third offense she'd be dosed and bucked. A rod under her knees, her wrists corded across her shins, and all night to enjoy the effects. Most plebian, particularly when her drawers were rubbed in her face in the morning. Ho, Dolly, done yet?"
"I think she's gotten up every spilled drop, except the ones on her chin." Madame Sandemarche inspected the waxed floorboards.
"Off with you two, then. That's enough entertainment for you, this evening."
The flogged boys exited with all the cautious speed allowed the buttock-bruised.
"Magenta Bisque-Hardy." Lady Morgan studied the punishment record earnestly.
The young woman stepped out before the company. The watchers drank in the proudly independent hindcheeks, each with its own telling motion in her stride. Some stern cane had fallen across the well-shaped mounds in the past. Brown and green lines still showed faintly, with faded purple tipmarks speckled with bright subcutaneous effusion. By contrast, the sulcal border showed a deep violet shot with a poisonous carmine.
"Magenta Bisque-Hardy," her stepmother repeated. "Three counts of Insolence."
"Guilty to each," Maggie breathed with iron control, "mother."
"Three black demerits. Redeemable on your bare bottom."
"Please give me fifteen strokes of the birch." "Granted."
Eyes flickered beyond cracked tamarind twig shards to the tall, clear glass vase. More bound switches swam in their pickle.
"I regret to note heated disagreement with plans to further your education by means of our tutor's very excellent services. I discussed the fault with your father and we determined that it constituted Simple Obstinence."
"Guilty, mother," she poke woodenly.
"Two yellow cross demerits. Redeemable on your bare bottom."
"Please give me twelve strokes of the tawse."
"Granted." Lady Morgan shook her head at the next item. "I'm troubled to have to call you to account in a matter of domestic discipline. Your careless supervision of the kitchen girl caused her to merit a thrashing. She failed to properly sand and soap the pots. Seven flexible cuts were called for.
"You were determined to need an equal measure, as a lesson in household management. Under punishment by Syndon Reardon, you rebelled." The word hung heavily in the warm air. "You refused correction."
"Yes, mother."
"I believe you have a defense to offer, in appeal."
"I-he kept crossing the strokes, in the f-fold. I couldn't stand-at five I just . . ." Her head rose, chin jutting. "He was wrong, and vicious."
"Rather an uncalled for slander, I think." Lady Morgan fixed her with a fearfully mild expression. Lamplight caught the flaming crown of her hair. "Wrong, to be sure; he received six primary cuts, across his birched buttocks, to rather severe effect, here in your presence. Monday morning, before your class, report to him and request three flexible cuts for your calumny."
The young man stood, shoulders drooped.
"As to you appeal," her stepmother looked to the seated adults.
Colonel Sandemarche's voice sounded slowly. "Discipline means self-governance. Could society exist without self-control? The history of our neighbors, such as poor Haiti, illustrates the horror that failure of self-restraint brings. You should have accepted correction and reported his fault to your mother, afterward. She must decide any injustice involved, not you."
Sir Polkinghorn, Madame Sandemarch, and David Hunter clapped their hands politely in agreement. Lesbia Reardon sat stone-still. Dolly looked nervously from Magenta to Lady Morgan. "I think, sir, you have started the judgement of the assembly." The Irishwoman raised two fingers. "You are two flexible cuts shy of your original punishment, You will receive those, plus primary cuts to punish your most imprudent rebellion. Expiation will be next week. As to your plea-in the matter of a frivolous appeal, the usual penalty is doubling of the original sentence."
The blood drained from the young woman's sullen countenance.
"Tradition sanctifies it," the colonel seconded. "However, given the justice of your original complaint, the appeal is not considered frivolous, but merely injudicious. Punishment for poor judgement is customarily a forfeit." Her eyebrows raised. "Unless you wish to appeal this determination, also?" "Accepted, mother."
"Very well. You will forfeit two hours of liberty tomorrow and Monday, each. You will spend the time, after your class, amusing the younger children in the schoolyard. Hobby horse kit." She made a note in the ledger. "They will ride you at their pleasure, under supervision of Mrs. Reardon, or her proctor. Rebellion is a serious matter, however. Colonel Sandemarche can enlighten you concerning the history of contumacy and its dire consequences.
"I have no hesitation in prescribing twice-nine cuts with the cane across your bare bottom. In view of your rather full slate today, I have deferred repayment to next week. Deferral customarily requires interest, as indemnity for failure to promptly repay." She looked to the others.
"Only just."
"Excellent suggestion."
"Yes, of course."
"You will receive nine Monday, promptly after class and before your forfeit time. Nine on Wednesday, after class. Nine Friday, as part of any further correction you may require in this room at that time."
She annotated the book appropriately. "Primary cuts, on the bare bottom." She looked up challengingly.
Maggie hesitated. "Do I. . . ?"
"The proper response, if you accept the judgement, is: 'Thank you.'"
"Thank you . . . mother."
"One count of Obstinant Impertinence."
"Guilty, mother."
"Two yellow cross demerits. Redeemable on your bare bottom."
"Please give me twelve strokes of the tawse." Perspiration showed on her shadowed spine. A bead glinted as it slid into the valley between her condemned buttocks.
"Granted." The sharp eyes of justice moved onward. "Dorothy Hunter. Upon report of your husband, one count of inattention to connubial duties, bordering on refractory refusal. That was only a single count you wished to charge her with, wasn't it, Mr.
Expiations Hunter?"
He made a tent of his fingers and studied his wife gravely. "Yes."
"Let me advise that this assembled company would be receptive to any claim of mitigating circumstances in adjudication of additional charges, if you should wish to make them, and if Mrs. Hunter should wish to claim such circumstances."
"I think one count will suffice. For now."
"As you wish it. Dorothy Hunter, you have heard the charge, lenient as some may consider it."
"Guilty, Lady Morgan."
"Three black stars, redeemable on your bare bottom." She raised her pen. "Using 'bottom' in its extended sense, of course."
"Please give me . . ." Her mouth twisted beseechingly. Syndon's spurting had caused some rouge to run clownishly. Her skin seemed bloodless around the garish spots. "I'm afraid I can't remember all those symbols and their meanings. Please p-punish me."
"Each black star requires three strokes of the martinent, an application of the nettles, and three further strokes," her hostess specified.
"Oh!"
Aurore Sandemarche inquired playfully, "Isn't there usually some physical admonishment for inattention to procedure in not having the penalties memorized?"
"Indeed." Lady Morgan considered. "The customary correction is a double forfeit. Since Mrs. Hunter is not a member of the household, the fault may be considered mitigated. She is adjudicated a single forfeit."
The pause and waiting stares filled several seconds until Dolly woke to her role. "Um, accepted. Is that it?"
"Most appropriate, thank you. You are sentenced to forfeiture of dignity. Tomorrow and for the next week, Moday through Saturday, you will stand in the schoolyard pillory during the luncheon recess."
"Is pelting still permitted?" Madame Sandemarche asked, solemnly.
"I've never known it prohibited. The school is very close to a well-traveled road."
"May I request that she serve the time in schoolgirl dress?" Hunter massaged his forefinger with the tip of his nose.
"A reasonable addition. She may use an extra outfit of Magenta's. Washing it out daily will be such a constructive use of time, too."
Two lanky shapes eased their bodies across the floorboards overhead. They spread their weight as widely as possible and moved slowly, to avoid tell-tale creaking. Only a vague light penetrated the curtains of the room from the moon.
Syndon and Auberon slid a small carpet along the polished hardwood. The younger boy clawed at the edges of a loose board. It pried up. Light blossomed from two small holes, widely set. Voices rose from below.
They wriggled into place, a greedy eye at each spyhole. Both lads grinned as Maggie stepped forward. Auberon lifted his hips, allowing his substantial erection better placement. Syndon's once-drained fellow gave its valiant twitchings, signs of fresh interest in proceedings.
"Kiss it. You observed Mrs. Hunter's ease at the task. Use your tongue on it as you would upon a lover." Lady Morgan flourished a cake of grey, coarse soap before her stepdaughter.
The hot-faced girl obliged. Her tiny pink tongue worked till a sparsely bubbled scum coated it.
"Now bite into it, like a toffee treat." The small, white teeth closed on the slick surface. "You may kneel."
The young woman abased herself, her head between her stepmother's feet, pressing the skirts back. She reached to grip the ankles straddling her.
"Your legs apart, girl-widely separated, now. Wider than that."
The company observed the amber gap between the narrow, yet solidly-fleshed cheeks. Two unalike orifices clenches as the four-inch, fire-stiffened tawse tails tickled the waiting undercurves.
Lady Morgan's arm raised, her spine curving backward; abruptly her torso rocked down, her hips jerking backward in copulative parody.
The smokey leather lapped hard across the grilled flesh. Magenta's fingers crushed into the bony ankles. The purpled ridge of her sulcus undulated in imperial pain. She made no sound.
The hardened leather peeled away, hovering as the skin flushed in a vertical band. The seconds counted slowly as all eyes watched. Lady Morgan whipped the same buttock's outer slope. Again the fingers ate into Syndon's murderously applied weal. Two apple-fresh bars glowed down the young womanhide; with a flattening slap, the tawse bridged them.
Magenta's forehead ground into the floor as her hindquarters shook. The Scots strap lashed the inner slope. Both buttocks knotted while the leathery sound hung in the air, fat and succulent.
Thirty heartbeats hammered. Lady Morgan changed hands, and the tawse martyred the other clenching mound.
"Relax your arse, girl," she advised, her voice low and fierce, "now."
Magenta heroically complied, hillocks juddering spasmodically. By degrees the outraged muscles complied. The hair-thin cleft widened into a proper valley, bordered by the rose and the lily.
The tawse punished onward ... its eighth meaty impact spoiled the pale inner slope. Lady Morgan increased her intervals, flogging almost leisurely. The tawse lapped short, tails finishing high on the left cheek once, twice. The right summit got its due in turn. The respite between blows lengthened; their harshness never lightened.
She began the second dozen, striking at a sharp angle so that her knuckles almost sank into the hot mid-buttock. The strap reached low, the split end soundly kissing the thigh. Magenta's leg columns reddened to two more swats.
She sniffled audibly, face wrapped in her stepmother's dress. She rested her head on one side, giving the company a long glimpse of her lips, stretched palidly around the ugly grey soap bar. A liquid bubbling panted around its edges.
The opposite lower hillock and high reaches of leg burned under three slow, solid strokes. Lady Morgan again shortened her sights. The tails fetched the left globe up on its summit, hitting into the scarlet outer curve; then the soft inner . . .
As the whipping moved to the right, Magenta's taloned hands seemed ivory, where they projected from Lady Morgan's hem. The tendons rose, sculpted starkly in their rigid backs.
The Irishwoman again took the whole left buttock's length, striking down the center. The unyielding tawse fingers crushed into the abused, corrugated fold. With only the barest count, she struck flush across the same mark.
Magenta gave a groveling, hind-shaking exhibition suggestive of a whipped bitch in heat for surcrease. A blood-burgundy band pulsed on her inflamed cheek.
The strap scored the right equally. She arched her neck and shook her head, face scrubbing itself against Lady Morgan's dress. The soap marked the clothing, then flew, bitten through. The leather sank into the fresh mark.
The girl spat out the rest of the bar, sobbing, throat rasping. Her face flamed as her behind seethed.
Four demerits redeemed," the woman almost whispered above her. Fingers caressed the bottom-warmed leather. "A rather nice preparation for the birch. You took that quite well; however, I'm afraid the remainder may be painful."
Magenta gagged and huddled, legs twitching irregularly.
"Mr. Hunter, if you would be so kind, I'm afraid my daughter needs help with her hands."
The tutor left his seat and pried the girl's stony fingers free from Lady Morgan's legs.
"If you could assist her to the Bar, also?" The woman turned toward the tall glass vase of tamarind switches.
Above, the boys blinked, their eyes hot and dry from sustained staring. Neither could lift his head. They shifted their chins, and the Bar came into view at the top of their vision. Mr. Hunter aided Magenta in a half-crawling stumbling to the place of next execution.
Auberon's head pounded, and he tried to remember when he's last inhaled.
Two massive uprights stretched from floor to ceiling, supporting a sturdy six-foot crossbeam just below waist height. The varnished wood had been leather padded along the top and far side. That further edge sloped at a sudden angle, forming a thinly upholstered inclining shelf.
Magenta's feet were forceably spread, reaching to two iron ringlets, solidly bolted to the floor. David Hunter took one of her bare feet and picked up the flat leather strip tied to the heavy eyelet. He wrapped the soft leather around the ankle twice, then under the sole, and back to the ringbolt. He secured it with three efficient sailor's knots. He bound the other food similarly.
Exhausted, shoulders slumping, Magenta leaned into the Bar. She draped her loins across the top, and her torso fell forward naturally. She hung in open space, the leather strips holding her rigidly.
Hunter went to the other side, tautly binding her wrists to ringbolts there as he unbound hair waved slowly.
Her spread legs showed her fully; the lipped central seem appeared in its frame of varicolored flesh. Her tutor returned to his chair.
Lady Morgan had selected a heartless, three-foot birch of seven unpeeled tamarinds. The tips clawed at the air separately, hard and heavy with brine. She used the rod to indicate the split fig of Magenta's femininity.
"Would not a diligent yoniologist evaluate that, after due consideration, as a full, sensual cunt'?" She trilled in her musical Irish voice. "Yet, strangely, a probing digit reveals-ahh, yes."
Her middle finger stroked the unwilling purse, then fidgeted itself between the thick portals. "A hymenal barrier tough as Mother Superior Cunegonde's own-a seasoned veteran named for the Virgin of Bamburg, a poor martyr knocked down the stairs to her death by her husband. I wonder why."
She wiped her finger on cringing flesh by the musky anal crater.
"Does not Captain Burton in his wisdom inform us that girls come to their menarche later in the tropics- at some fourteen and rising, as opposed to twelve in our temperate home climates? Yet, see the greater waste of those ripe years since her flesh attained womanhood. And does she permit the natural warmth of our new home to enthuse her blood?" Lady Morgan laughed. "Despite a natural lewd carriage the assured envy of any girl I worked with in London, this foolish lass remains as prim as Mr. Gladstone's great-aunt."
" 'The Icicle of the Hebrides,' if I recall her sobriquet," Colonel Sandemarche interposed.
"The very same," she acknowledged. She tapped the full buttocks lightly with the tamarind birch, behind the violated vulvs. The tough switches stayed thick as a little finger almost to their tips. "Some young gallant should be handling these chores, Maggie m'girl, and others, besides-with a different tool, if not in a different spot."
The cheeks pulsed, radiating heat. They cringed as the rod brushed their inflamed surfaces again, checking distance.
"Fifteen." She clucked her tongue. "Och. Do you require a bungy to bite on, girl?"
A sniffling wait, then a 'Puh-plea-se."
"Two more for the courtesy."
A frozen silence, which thawed to a low, moist, "Yes."
"I should have offered three," Lady Morgan spoke cheerfully as she strolled to a long shelf beyond the birch vase. "I had a nice bungy soaking in cod's liver oil in case it was needed. The flavor's not a universal favorite, but I wouldn't wish you to gall your lips."
The benefice had a flat steel length well-wrapped in stinking gauze. Magenta took it in her teeth tamely. An elastic band snugly compressed her hair, holding it like a filly's bit in her mouth.
The birch once again tantalized the well-prepared young womanhide.
"Seventeen."
The limbs cut cleanly into the tawsing. Electric fire galvanized the whole rump.
Nut-hard switch tips excoriated the right slope a second time. With conscienceless hunger, they licked in a third ... a fourth . . .
Agonizing, blood-rigid weals rose, stained like burst purple plums where they crisscrossed. Magenta gyrated, helplessly threshing against the vibrating leather lines.
Five-six-something bright welled from puffy nicks.
The birch carved the leather-tenderized meat, working short on the undercurves. The right bottom round flinched and quivered.
Seven-eight-nine-the cuts seared the upper cheeks. The outraged rump broke wind with a mournful keening, the blubbering sound forcing itself between the stonily clenched mounds.
Lady Morgan changed rods. The second splayed more at the end, showing spiny twigs hardened by their pickling. She paused to study Magenta's screwed face. Tears spotted the floor, with saliva. The stretched lips drooled at the edge of the bungy.
"I wouldn't be so wilfull toward authority in the future, if I were you," the Irishwoman advised. "Another birching as late as the end of the month could really hurt, you know."
This time she stood at the right, using the strength of her left arm to flog the swollen, tawsed thighs.
Ten-eleven-the last six inches of tamarind sank into the nearer leg muscles. The fettered girl kicked maniacally, her nose spouting shaming ichor as her head reared.
Twelve-thirteen-the far thigh sprouted razor-sharp welts. A jumping spasm coursed up the leg, animating the butchered buttock above.
Fourteen-fifteen-the rod took the rump's mid-summits. Tips branded the convulsing left slope with violet pips.
Giving the young woman a full minute between swings to appreciate her pain, Lady Morgan finished on the flayed underbum.
Sixteen-the left cheek abraded under the harsh talons. Splinters flew, leaving seeping ribbons.
Seventeen-the whole bottom rose, churning. The flesh resembled a shellplowed battlefield from America's War Between the States. The girl bucked in a peak of agony; her loins writhed against the Bar.
"Such energy and no lover to benefit from it." Lady Morgan flung aside the tamarind birch untidily. She stepped back, surveying her work critically. "I think she'll be grateful I postponed her caning, but even with the two-day intervals, thrice nine'll fetch her smartly."
The woman turned to the silent assembly. "You know, 1 never set a time for those two flexible cuts she still has coming, from Syndon's punishment. If I were a passionate governess, or a boarding school bum-brushers, I suppose I'd make her take them now."
Colonel Sandemarche nodded his head involuntarily.
Sir Polkinghorn caught a murmured word and inquired politely, "I'm sorry, I didn't quite. . . ?"
"Oh, merely, Glasgow. Nothing. Dr. Mackenna's nurse has tales of youth under the truly strict ancien regime. She used to take lad in hand, it seems, before the Nightingale impulse struck." The colonel seemed entranced by the indigo'd, crimsoned, bloodied buttocks still a-crawl over the Bar.
"Not being a Hibernian Hippolyte, I'll save the cuts till sometime during the week, when they'll serve young Miss Magenta best." Lady Morgan rocked on her heels with a quiet satisfaction. The boys' hearts skipped beats, then flurried to catch up. Hot breath whispered between them, from dark space: "Caught you."
A throaty giggle identified Leila, who set iron fingers on each qualing lad's neck.
* * *
14
EXACERBATIONS
"Solarium africanus nefarius, also called the stre-gamaledetta, though how Italian botanical societies came to wander upon it, I don't know." The Irishwoman contemplated a rude wooden bucket at her feet. A damp, fresh, salady smell arose from the intensely green leaves settled cooly in the water.
"I imagine amateur botanists traveled during the Age of Excoriation, under letters patent from an enlightened Borgia seeking a natural means of inducing the piquant sensations characteristic of boiling oil without the unpleasant effects consequent upon so drastic a use.
"Known to the common tongue as bush boar nettle, yet quite misnamed, this transplanted herb thrives in our reaches along with the larger, more purplish devil's nettle. It is, in pure fact, not of the genus urtica at all." A creamy leather fencer's gauntlet lay folded over the bucket handle.
"A relative of the potato, is it not?" Colonel Sandemarche offered.
"Precisely, as well as cousin to the deadly nightshade-two of my old homeland's most important cash crops, potatoes and venom. We feed the populace with the one, incite ourselves to self-slaughter with the other. A grand time we have doing it, too, even without the inducements offered by the gentle presence of the English."
Throughout the bright-toned lecture, Dolly Hunter sat, shoulders slumped; her nails etched into her pale skin, just above her coal-dark stockings.
"I understand they know to fear the cat-of-nine-tails in the military, colonel." Lady Morgan continued her banter as she moved to an armoir against the near wall. She opened the door to reveal shadowed leather, half-seen in the lamplight.
"The triangle is an atavism," Sandemarche declared stoutly. "The bloody back has no place among free troops, voluntary servants to the gracious Queen and this island nation."
"I am amazed." She found something with liquid lashes tipped in starlight. "Surely you have not abandoned ..."
"The so-called Royal Marine cane, a flogging stick supplied by Willoughby and Pratt, serves men and women alike. Some consideration was once given to a lesser grade for female soldiers." He tugged at a dundreary. "The Boadicea Hindliner' I believe they called it."
The Irishwoman laughed, her eyes sparkling. "The soundrels! That's a shameless commercial trick. They merely renamed their ordinary penal-grade Borstal Perfect V, an over-length reformatory cane suitable for ultimate refractory behavior in mature youths' and strick deterence to habitual felons' in regular institutions. There's something about a cork handle, but all they've done is add six inches onto their reformatory rattan.
"I investigated the Hindliner five years ago and found it otherwise identical with the Perfect V, even to the same serial numbering burned just above the grip. Yet the scoundrels brazenly sold it for seven British shillings more than the Perfect."
"Her Majesty's Government should be pleased that we stayed with the Royal Marine for both sexes." The colonel's hand had crept into his wife's lap as he continued to study Magenta's travails.
"Even in London I heard tales of the prowess of a Royal Marine." Nine leather tails shivered in the air, bright tack-pointed silver burrs gleaming on each. "Mrs. Hunter, are you ready to have your reluctant arse taught its wifely devotions?"
The virtually naked woman inhaled audibly. "I suppose so." She stole a glance at her stonily expres-sioned husband.
"Do you, now? How most courteous of you to fit your correction into your busy schedule. I feel quite as a young man might, penciled into a dance card by a distant beauty he'd long courted." She mocked liltingly, "And I suppose that Mr. Hunter will be grateful for the interest you show in repairing your carnal omissions. Have I your attention in these proceedings, or do I need to find a way to focus that faculty?"
Dolly looked up, eyes widened, mouth drawn. "No, no, Mor-Lady Morgan, you don't."
"Do you still wish to hold to only a single count of conjugal inattention?"
David Hunter considered his wife distantly. "I am beginning to wonder."
"Sincerity learned from knowing pain springs from a far deeper well than glib assurances offered by the tongue."
"David, please ..." The Yankee wife's netherlip froze, quivered, then froze again.
He spoke to Lady Morgan. "You mentioned the difference between a simple application of the nettles and a thorough application."
"Indeed, I did."
"May I request. . . ?"
"Certainly." Her Draconian look fixed Dolly as might a cobra's. "A thorough application, and lucky you are to have it instead of three more stars."
Among the spectators, Lesbia Reardon opened her mouth, but she turned away, instead of speaking. Her sister noted the reaction.
"Darling," Lady Morgan purred at her husband, "perhaps you could help Maggie out. I fear we need the Bar just now."
"Of course." Sir Polkinghorn rose and ambled to his daughter. He first undid her hands. The girl hugged her arms under her inverted torso as he pried the bungy from he reluctant teeth.
Hot eyes blinked up at him, furrows narrowing them. "Papa ... it huuurts . . ."
He petted her wet cheek. "After the storm and thunder, the sunshine."
She hung her head and tried to wipe her oil-fouled tongue on her hand.
"Mr. Hunter, could you do those things while I hold her?" He indicated the ringbolts and straps restraining her legs. His hands gripped his daughter's waist to provide paternal support.
The tutor obliged, freeing the bonds, which left ice-white seams puffed with red at the edges. The marks seemed kitten's scratchings compared with those tiger-maulings that had savaged her naked bottom and thighs.
Sir Polkinghorn helped the girlishly dressed young woman from the room. "Leila! Where is-oh, Regine, take Miss Maggie to her room."
He glanced in from the corridor. "Can she have some water on her . . . parts?"
"I'd recommend witch hazel, with stypic on those nicks. Regine knows. Tomorrow, she can apply the lotion." Lady Morgan nodded to Hunter. "Your pupil may have to stand at her desk. There's a balm which will have her skin clear and whole within two shakes of her saucy tail."
"In time for her canings?" Aurore Sandemarche asked.
"Och," the Irishwoman grinned ruefully. "You have me in my absent-mindedness. Well, whole in time for next week's settlement-except for those licks between time. Which, I suppose, means not at all."
"Hobby horse kit requires' bare crupper, I recall." The colonel absently remarked, his attention upon Dolly's respiring, rouged breasts.
"Yes, the children will have quite a vivid example as they ride her."
Sir Polkinghorn returned to the room and took his seat. "How extraordinary. Regine tells me Leila is reading to the boys. No hard feelings on either side, I take it."
"That's the purpose of correction, to amend behavior and leave bitterness behind," his wife purred. Her long index finger beckoned at Dolly Hunter. "I'm afraid this isn't the hand-patting little domestic martinet those French households employ in chastening their babe's nappied bums."
Twenty-four inch-long lashes glimmered, swinging slowly from the lean carved ebony handle. Some carnally free designs showed through Lady Morgan's separated fingers as she raised it.
Dolly stepped forward, flinching as the spikey lash tips lazily swung out to tickle her painted nipples.
'Then, it is only three cuts before and three after," Madame Sandemarche consoled.
"Before the application and after each application," Lady Morgan specified.
"Each thorough application," the tutor augmented.
"I should think you'd be glad, my girl, that you didn't merit continual application." The Irishwoman prodded the fragrant bucket with her toe. "I ask you to imagine a pair of unpleasant drawers, cut from sailing canvas, lined with our spiny friends whose botanical pedigree we've already discussed. Your own arms would be strapped to a yoke, to prevent a very natural, but quite forbidden reaction to such a bouquet livening your pants.
"Do they ever use the bush boar nettle for treadmill drill at the Barracks, colonel? I've found continual application most effective if the culprit must walk-say, in a circle, her yoke fixed to a pole set on a turning stanchion. It take's regular supervision, and the encouragement of a battledore now and again, but the motion works the leaves wonderfully well into the flesh. Like a pony undergoing training, the subject fairly dances the time away."
"I shall forward the suggestion to the sergeant."
"In the meantime, may I prevail upon you, colonel?" She gestured toward Dolly and the Bar.
The military man moved with trained alacrity. His browned hand dwarfed her stockinged foot as he triced and spliced her securely, both at the ankles and at the wrists.
Above the garters her snowy thighs rose to a generous field for operations. The buttocks jutted impudently, their peaks rising impressively from broad slopes. They dipped inward to a hairline division, plump curve pressed to plump curve, suggesting great hidden depth.
"I have meandered about your charge," Lady Morgan told her. "It would benefit the company assembled here and you yourself if you would state the facts."
The bottom showed a mortified ripple as all waited, eyes fixed and ears perked. At last, Dolly spoke. "I refused sodomy."
"I believe that needs amplification." The martinet rested its burred lashes upon wincing buttocks. "State the case fully and clearly."
"I refused my husband sodomy."
"I will ask again, and if you think of a clearer word, and a more detailed means of expression, it would be a courtesy for us all." The Irish voice betrayed its steel edge.
"I, Dolly Hunter, denied my husband, David Hunter, the marital j-joys of buggery-of entry into my bottom-of ... of ..."
"I believe that will suffice." The lithe leather rose, focus of attention. "The first black star. Three cuts beforehand."
"The lashes spread in the air, singing down shrilly. The bare buttocks recoiled, the thongs clinging to the jiggling muscle-masses. Lady Morgan pulled the supple leather across and off.
Frosty scratches showed across the hot rills; nine bright bumps puffed on the smoothly curving right flank, where the tack-sharp stars had struck.
Lady Morgan didn't pause for ruby dew to form. She whipped the rump, letting the tips bite further up the cheek. The flesh knotted, cringing. As speckling droplets glinted in the light, where the first stroke had landed, the long thong welts gained color and heat.
She stepped back, arm outstretched, body pivoting backward. Her whole frame drove the third lick in, hard, sinking the burrs in a ragged line down the right buttock's peak. The inner curves squeezed and jammed.
"Colonel Sandemarche, in your wide practical learning, can you offer some suggesting for increasing the sensitivity of a posterior before a nettling?" Lady Morgan's nostrils flared as she breathed rapidly.
"I have seen a French book calling for a spanking, with the bare hand or with some flat instrument, to increase the receptiveness of the bottom." He spoke slowly, gravely.
"Such augmented tenderness, would that be appropriate during a thorough application?"
"I cannot construe otherwise."
"Mr. Hunter, you will find a well-polished bedroom slipper in that tiny closet of mine." She pointed to the wardrobe which had held the martinet. "I had your wife bring it under a slight misapprehension. I told her I had work for it; I believe you will know it."
He held the door open and quickly found the fawn-colored slipper. "Yes, mine; I've spanked her with it before."
"Successfully?"
"Dolly has shown every sign of benefiting from the instruction, yes."
"May I ask you to give a practical demonstration of the colone's advice?"
He did not reply as he went to his wife's right side. The leather smacked the star-scored cheek; crimson drops started and ran.
"Her normal dose is twice her age, with additional attention for particular derelictions."
"David!" He stiffled the cry with a solid spank to the oppose, weal-flushed mound.
"Perhaps a lesser dose would suffice," he speculated, "if, of course, repeated for each black star." He slipper-smacked the taut crevice.
Nine more thoughtful swats followed, before he stepped aside.
Lady Morgan had donned her leather gauntlet. She held a clump of fresh, spine-covered leaves. Hunter's eyes watched his wife's brightly glowing hindquarters as the Irishwoman slapped her green handful against the right buttock. The tiny barbed hairs of the nightshade's cousin ground into the swollen skin.
"Aaaaiiii-!!!"
The gloved hand scrubbed gently, spreading the effect by quiet degrees. Opulent flesh writhed uncontrollably.
'The poison begins as an intense itching," the musically accented voice explained, "unless it is applied to broken skin. Then it attacks the nerves at once, causing a white-hot cooking. Intensity increases as the stimulated circulation carries it around the flesh. You may know a woman enjoys to have her bottom handled during excitation, as she craves to have her breasts touched or kissed. These areas are particularly rich in sensation."
She gathered a fresh bunch and laved the left cheek, kneading the furry spines into the struggling hillock. "I regret the stregamaledetta leaves a most morbidly nagging rash for many hours."
Her hand came away. Bits of broken leaf clung to the ruddy purple splotches forming along the weal-chased hide.
She looked at the man closely. "A thorough application?"
"She has the constitution for it, and the need."
Lady Morgan nodded once. She chose a smaller clump and attacked the pristine thighs. The legs kicked in their leather bonds at the scratching rubs and driving pats.
Wordlessly, she picked some longer leaves. Holding them between thumb and fingers, she hovered over the tightly clenched crevice. Spasms wracked the indigo-stained rump. Seeing no relaxation, she raked the leaves in harshly, forcing the mounts apart, then drew the nettles down.
"Nnnnnnnnoooooooo!"
Her fingers fought the squeezing hinds, jabbing in against sorrowfully tender netherreaches. Finally, she stepped back.
Tattered bushy green filaments sprouted from Dolly's bottom's very base. The leaves whipped like wind-torn slender banners.
Replacing Hunter on the right, Lady Morgan resumed the martinet. The star-bright lashes seared the far cheek, heedless of inarticulate shrieks.
"One black star redeemed."
The Irishwoman's face glowed purest peony as she raised the nine-thonged whip.
"The second black star. Three cuts beforehand."
"You don't care for that part about the 'mouth with a mustache'?" Leila shook in happy giggles. "Would you prefer 'an experiment which has been recommended to me by a German friend as a capital means of curing bad boys' indulgence of uncontrolled passion?'"
"I don't think he'll enjoy being pissed upon." Regine's legs wrapped firmly around Auberon's neck, forcing his mouth against her lovely, bushy grotto. He kissed the black-olive petals with frightened intensity.
"You never know with these English puppies." Leila's smooth chocolate-hued buttocks settled firmly over Syndon's face. She thumbed through the pages of Gynecocracy. " 'It was not pleasant to kiss and lick a bottom, although a maid's. It gave one a shocking sort of thrill such as the ancients may have known when sailing through Symplagades. They dreaded that the giant rocks might close and crush them. I did not feel sure what a bottom might not do.' "Whatever it may do, little master, you know what your aunt will do, should we tell her of your spying. Hmmm?" She stirred pleasantly as she felt his tongue in wholehearted motion between her dark classical peaks. "I thought so."
She smiled in contentment as he drove the dart in, without further prompting.
Hunter had just finished spanking his wife the second time, with another dozen slipper swats. Lady Morgan applied herself to the woman's jaw, forcing in the same spring-loaded stick that had kept Joyau's mouth open. She released the mechanism. Bitten lips strained as the device forced the teeth apart.
She rounded one of the pillars holding the Bar. Resuming her fencer's glove, she took a new clump of the richly venomous leaves. Her fingers patted and slapped them onto the seething rump halves. They parted the flesh, worried it, poisoned it.
Against the lashings of the martinet and the slapping of the leather, the toxin worked. Strange ivory-livid blotches rose from the burgundy background. The bloodless, stone-hard swellings punctuated the hewn mounds.
When the diamond-pointed burrs leaped to tear the palid tumescences, only coloreless fluid sparkled.
"The second black star redeemed."
Lesbia Reardon stared from her chair, face drawn with horror. She flinched at each blow from the martinet. Her hands went to her face. The leathery spanks sent her palms over her ears.
"Mr. Hunter, you have been so cooperative. . . ." Lady Morgan smiled up, eyes incandescent as a Eumenide. She stooped, her glove deep in the bucket. "Permit my talented sister to thank you for the assistance. She seems distracted. Pray occupy her mind . . . and throat."
"Never-!" The rasping anger died in Lesbia's mouth. She saw the unholy grin caused by the sudden rebellion. She choked.
"She needn't leave her seat." The tutor undid his trousers. A white, fangless cobra rose, hood peeling back.
A hot handful of needle-laced leaves ground into gnarled buttocks.
Lesbia Reardon thrust her face forward and took the knob in her teeth. She shook it, tears burning on her cheeks. Fear in her very soul, she all but swallowed the rampant cock. Minutes of desperate suckling passed, to the snap of thong cuts and hollow, male grunting. At length the creature crowed, its head ramming past her tongue, seeking her throat with its porridgey gushing.
Helpless to even swallow, she absorbed the savage eruptions.
Sated, he left her mouth. She curled into a ball on her chair. Her guts churned with a molten-iron heat. She fought the rising bilious tide, as she beat down her own mad longing to spend. Tear-blind, she cursed her unhallowed loins.
No . . . not this way . . . not like this ... not again . . .
The vision hung in her memory of Sir George Doore's stale, sardonic breath upon her as she had crested to a like ecstasy in Colonel Sandemarche's quarters.
"You root that fat tongue around so nicely, Master Syndon, that you deserve some nice reward." Leila reached down to his opened britches. She indelicately drew out his member, already perceptibly thickened. Her nails held the acorn head, feeling it throb and grow as he continued his lingual caresses between her buttocks.
"Please your hand there." She tweaked the now-standing stalk; he obeyed instantly. "While you kiss my arse, you may play."
His hand remained immobile. Her nails surrounded a wrinkly cod sac, lightly clawing the firm lump within. "Young master . . ."
He instantly began to manipulate himself without restraint. The thing grew yet fatter; he worked himself and Leila toward bliss, blinded by the proximity of her great, warm bottom.
"Nobody gave you permission to enjoy yourself so shamelessly." Her sister towered over Lesbia like Flogging Victory Triumphant, holding the tattle-tail stained handkerchief. It had just been rubbed vigorously between her legs. "Patent evidence of lust, you shameless trollop."
"Improper thoughts."
"Indecent behavior."
"An immoral mind in an immoral body."
The chorus of denunciations hammered in at her. She stared up with sick eyes as Lady Morgan flexed an ash wand into a perfect half-circle. She released the thickened tip; the cane hummed back to true.
"This may not be a Boadicea Bumbreaker, but it'll do to chasten your sins, sister darling, it'll do."
A compound of maddened carnal appetite and shivery dread rose to close her throat.
"Bite on this." She tasted herself as the handkerchief was wadded into her mouth. "Now-stand out. " Lesbia numbly reached to raise her skirt.
Beyond, Dolly Hunter lay over the Bar, drained of all feeling save blind pain. A great, suring agony roared through her, carrying her soul into a realm of white, jagged light.
Slowly, she realized her husband was kissing her face. He crouched beside her, petting her cheek and murmuring fond comforts.
Distantly, she heard the sound of a cacne slicing bare flesh. She winced, hoping the hide being whipped wasn't hers.
"Beloved," Hunter whispered, as a second cane cut snapped. "Did it hurt terribly?"
She felt a stirring of emotion. His lips roamed over her ears, her wet, cold jawline, her oil-tainted lips.
"D-d-d-"' She forced her first articulate sound in an eternity, "D-do-does."
"Good." His hands stroked her neck. "You needed that, I'm afraid, didn't you?"
His tongue tangled with hers before she could attempt to answer.
Another thump of bitter ash into bitterest bottom-skin.
Again . . . again . . . again ... a sound of wholehearted retching.
Wild laughter rattled in at her. "For that, you dirty girl, I'll make you lap-" Dolly closed her mind to anything but her husband's hot, loving breath and his lingering kisses. Hurt filled her body, clouding her brain, yet through that mist came the salvation of hurt soothed by love.
Long after their guests of the night had retired, Lady Morgan offered her velvet nudity to her lord. The bed settled as she lifted her legs till her heels touched her shoulders. Sir Polkinghorn mounted her, resting on the platform of her doubled limbs as he joined her in the fierce, ancient celebration of male and female unity.
"My blazing Irish Sheba, my wild huntress," he murmured as his loins bucked against her.
"Solomon, my master ..." Her arms enfolded him, fingers raking everywhere, lashing their mutual desire toward the climactic sarcramental joy. She hissed voluptuously in his ear as his thrusts rattled the brass bedposts.
* * *
CODA
Proserpine Cottage, August 11, 188-
Darling Tibbs,
As you told me in your veiled, oracular way, I have come to a new understanding with my dearest David after these many months of marriage. I shall greet the first anniversary of our wedding with surprise that I, who had thought herself so knowing, should have proven so naive a bride.
He prospers in his work, having eight pupils now. He drives them hard, but with such fine results! He jestingly says my own education needs completion, and that I should join them in his schoolroom. I respond that I absorb sufficient knowledge assisting him prepare their lessons and in helping review his scholars' notes. I believe that satisfies him. (I hope that satisfies him!)
I have gained many friends. Clara Harcourt is a particular treasure, an Englishwoman whose sojourn in Barbary would astonish you. Aurore Sandemarche is a black Frenchwoman of Martinique, our largest neighbor to the south. Her husband is white, with command over our garrison, and our prison. These are my closest companions, aside from my David.
I have not yet achieved a true intimacy with Lady Bisque-Hardy. She is not of the open, warm Irish people who I knew in Boston. Yet, I must admire her; she was not born to ladyship, yet she wears it with native grace. Am I becoming less a Yankee democrat, more a monarchist? Perhaps.
The summer rushes by us, yet one would never know from the eternal summer of our climate. The weather is universally warm, even during rain, and crops and fantastic flowers burst forth continually without regard for the calendar.
David promises me a Christmas holiday to visit some snow. He wishes to see England again, in search of Greek books and other scholar's treasure. He hopes to start his pupils on the language next year. Their Latin stumbles, but he says they show aptitude and shall be conversing in it before long.
His friend David Rogers may join us. If we do sail to England, it is likely we shall cross back to Boston and visit all of you. We shall have much to discuss. There are words, and ideas, and events I still cannot commit to dull paper, but which represent some of the greatest discoveries of my marriage.
Am I growing prim, the playfellow you always called "saucy" and "untameable"? I think not. I am not tamed, but newly freed, as a closed bud of however wild a rose is released from captivity by its blossoming. I face the sun and the winds for the first time with a naked, knowing face. Yet, convention still muzzles my pen for now; it shall not bridle my tongue, when we meet.
I had thought the Caribbean a magical, piratical land. Now I have the inkling that the greatest sorcery, the most daring adventures occur within the unchartable landscapes of our own souls. There we may unbury treasures beyond the buccaneer's ransom hoards, and freely strew the beaches with jeweled wealth unearthed from secret caches.
Do these ramblings make sense? I think they do to you, my knowing and wise friend. If they do not explain all-well, I surely shall when we meet.
David and I have become less a man and woman joined by marriage yoke and have grown into that single flesh so often spoken of. Our spirits enjoy a free communion as our bodies achieve a greater union than I had guessed at from girlhood days.
The words lie clumsily on paper, like those simple scribling maps we once made of the Spanish Main, all vague lines with Xs for half-conceived treasures. The deeds in flesh and blood, in heart and soul, are the pure, true facts of my new existence, which my pen cloddishly sketches.
I see that I am so full of my inward discoveries that I have quite ignored any description of our island life. I shall leave that for later-or for your own journey to our beautiful home. Mardi Blanc will always welcome you in love. As I may visit you in snow, so may you come to us in our eternal summer. I hope it may be soon.
From the shared depths of soul, Dolly
* * *
NOTES ON The Tutor's Bride by Martin Pyx, M.A.
Space does not permit any extensive analysis of this unusual work. These notes may clarify more esoteric points for the general reader.
Contrary to first impression, is not an irreligious novel. From its dedication, "To Wagner, who gave the inner gods their song," the book consciously overlays a frankly sexual pagan doctrine upon a background of Catholic and Protestant Christianity.
End of the last century saw the rise of such Northern European mystical transcendence movements as Theosophy, Christian Science, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This Victorian precursor of Pauline Reage entwines erudite mythical imagery with erotic dominance-submission relationships. One may imagine the fury of a Comstock, so confronted.
Some source materials and motifs are indicated below: PRELUDE The Lady Dolores-This vessel is likely a glancing reference to practicing fiagellutionist Algernon Charles Swinburne's poem "Dolores," an apotheosis of masochsim in devotion to "mystic and sombre Dolores, Our Lady of Pain."
Therfese de Lorsange-The Marquis de Sade's virtuous Justine traveled under the pseudonym of Therese. Her polymorphous perverse sister was Juliette de Lorsange
CHAPTER ONE
Wanky Fulkmorris-"Wanking" is specifically Etonian slang for masturbation. Julian Ladywood-The first of many allusions to Gynecocracy, cited below. Publication of his work in Blackwood's Magazine may be doubted.
Front-le-Boeuf, Isaac-Torturer and victim from Sir. Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, one of his overwhelmingly popular Waverly Novels.
Dr. Keate, Dr. Hawtrey-John Keate, Eton's headmaster 1809 to 1834; Edward Hawtrey, headmaster 1834 to 1852; Victorian legends.
Arnold-Headmaster at Rugby 1827 to 1842, Dr. Thomas Arnold became deified later in the century and remains a controversial figure. He introduced caning over the then-prevalent birching.
CHAPTER TWO Baltimore mathematician-Undoubtedly the redoubtable, if excitable, James T. Matson of the Baltimore Gun Club, from Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and A Trip Around It and The Purchase of the North Pole.
Lord Neyfzawi-Apparently a typical 19th century variant on the author of The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefza-oui, A Manual of Arabian Erotology, as translated from French by Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton for the Kama Shastra Society edition of 1886.
CHAPTER FOUR Yemoja-River goddesses of the Yoruba, a people in present-day Nigeria.
Ifa-The Yoruba divination god. His anger caused a famine to grip the entire world. Only the cooling influences of the Yemoja averted universal starvation.
Interestingly, this scene is not the mumbo-jumbo of conventional lightweight literature. Dr. Franz Boas, patron saint of American anthropology, had begun teaching at Columbia University in 1896. His method stressed systematic field research and attention to cultural context, unlike British armchair anthropology which produced such hodgepodges as Sir James Frasier's The Golden Bough. It is fascinating to see scraps of field ethnographic work percolating into popular fiction at so early a date.
Father de la Charrette-Chretien de Troyes created the Arthurian Lancelot in Le Chevalier de la Charrette, The Knight of the Cart for Marie de Champagne between 117I aqd 1181. The Vulgate Cycle's later Mort Artu and Sir Thomas Mallory had Guinevere's lover take holy orders after the fall of Camelot and end his days as a hermit priest. In one version, he hears the queen's confession before her death, granting her absolution.
CHAPTER FIVE Domnei, amour courtois-Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter, Marie of Champgna, fostered a cult of poetic traditions by which warriors submitted to the worship of a fair lady-often aloof or whimsically tyranical. The Provencal dialect wrapped the complex of ideas in the term domnei, derived from domna, a descendent of the Latin domina, lady or mistress.
The term amour courtois, courty love, dates from 1883 and is a restricted modern expression for those Troupadour traditions. Julian in Gynecocracy specifically cites Eleanor's Courts of Love and Arthurian material in rhapsodizing upon petticoat rule.
Maistrye-Answering Freud's "What do women want"?, Chaucer's Wife of Bath replies, "Miastrye." The term connotes independence, self-respect, trust, and a host of "modern, liberated" concepts not contained by simply translating it as "mastery".
CHAPTER SIX Scarlet, Babylon-Chapter 17 of The Book of the Apocalypse (AKA The Book of Revelation of St. John the Divine) enlightens further on The Mother of Harlots and her seven-headed, ten-horned consort, The Beast.
CHAPTER SEVEN Gynecocracy. "A Narrative of the Adventures and Psychological Experiences of Julian Robinson (afterwards Viscount Ladywood) under Petticoat Rule" first appeared in 1893. This is a conscious anachronism in a novel printed in 1897, but ascribed to 188-. The most elegant masochistic erotic novel until Harriet Marwood, this sexual cornucopia has been attributed by some scholars to the great researcher Havelock Ellis. Grove Press issued the latest edition in 1971.
"Welcome", "Farewell"-The most graphic account of these gratuitous floggings upon incarceration and release comes from Lenchen im Zuchthause, W. Reinhard's account of flagellation in South German female prisons though 1848. Several considerable abridgements exist in English as Nell In Bridewell.
Notre Dame de Paris-The Victor Hugo novel usually Englished as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and notable for the sum relationship of Quasimodo and Esmeralda, mixing Domnei cult woman-worship with historical realism.
Lilith-Rabbinical tradition considers her Adam's first wife. She became the devouring night monster of Jewish mythology, and is specifically named in Isaiah, Chapter 34, verse 14. Various translations render this passage "night monster", "lamia" (St. Jerome's Vulgate), "screech owl" (King James), "the Lilith", and "Lilith."
Cabalistic literature names her as the demon associated with Friday, a nude, serpent-tailed woman. Some hold her to be drawn from the ardat lili, Mesopotamian female demons. Other tradition names her as the bride of Sammael, the poison angel equated with Satan, whose sexual union creates the two-backed beast called Chioa.
Further variations on a theme consider Lilith to be Adam's true wife, a Heavenly serpent of instruction and inspiration. Eve's lewd cohabitations with Sammael engendered the earth's evils and poisoned Adam by venereal contagion.
She may be seen as the most powerful Western female symbol outside the Virgin Mary.
CHAPTER EIGHT Goewin, Math-The Mabinogion, Wales' classic collection of myth, contains the tale of Math, lord of Gynedd. He could not survive unless his two feet rested on a maiden's lap. The only exemption was time of war.
Robert Burns-This chapter's songs are verses from "The Summer Morn" and "The Case of Conscience" printed in the 1800 The Merry Muses of Caledonia. Variant holographic manuscripts identify the originals as Burns' compositions. Of the second ditty he wrote: "I shall betake myself to a subject ever fertile of themes, a Subject, the turtle-feast of the Sons of Satan, and the delicious, secret Sugarplumb of the Babes of Grace; a Subject, sparkling with all the jewels that Wit can find in the mines of Genius, and pregnant with all the stores of Learning, from Moses & Confucius to Franklin & Priestly-in short, may it please Your Lordship, I intend to write BAUDY!"
author displays a kindred spirit.
Balsamo, Physician, Cagliostro-Count Alissandro di Cagliostro first appeared in London on July 4, 1776. Before the Holy Office in Rome condemned him to living death in a cistern at San Leo fortress, it identified him as the known Palermo rogue Giuseppi Balsamo. Casanova, who observed both, never made this association. Alexander dumas pere followed the Inquisition's tack in the massive account of his mesmerist Freemason revolutionary contained in Joseph Balsamo, Memoirs of a Physician, and The Queen's Necklace.
Screech owl, Ophidian temptress, et al-see Lilith, above.
CHAPTER TEN Belial College-The fallen angel Belial danced before Solomon. St. Paul snubs him in Second Corinthians. Milton's Paradise Lost describes him as "Vice itself ... A fairer person lost not Heav'n . . . (but) all was false and hollow." Colonel Sandemarche may be offering wry commentary on Balliol College, Oxford University.
Ladyfingers Vaughn-Dr. C.J. Vaughn ruled Harrow as headmaster from 1844 to 1859, when his sexual adventures among its young cost him the post. The Good Old Boy network suppressed the shaming reason for his resignation rigorously until the second half of this century. It is a tantalizing glimpse of the author's identity that he apparently knew this clandestine fact and had no compuctions about alluding to it.
German book, Zoroaster-Friedrich Nietzche's Thus Spake Zarathustra.
CHAPTER ELEVEN Netaera, Theodora-The Sixth century titaness Theodora began her career as a prostitute and died empress of Byzantium. She refused to permit her husband to flee the capital during the Nika Riots, thus preserving Byzantine civilization for the next thousand years. History calls him Justinian the Great and her Theodora the Notorious. Procopius offers lavishly slanderous accounts of her sexual exploits in his Secret History.
CHAPTER TWELVE Doyle-Best known to us for Sherlock Holmes, Sir Author Conan Doyle preferred to rest his literary reputation upon The White Company and other historical fiction building on the Walter Scott tradition.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Haiti-Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse provides the most lyrical account of the peculiar revolutions, upheavals, and power struggles to grip that island.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Sheba, Solomon-Famed as King Solomon's seductress, the Queen of Sheba reintroduced the worship of pagan gods, the Baals and the Astartes, into monotheist Israel. This did not faze Solomon, wisest of all men, master of all the djinn, before whom Belial danced.
CODA Proserpine Cottage-The Preface began aboard The Lady Dolores. It is unclear if the coda is intended to evoke Swinburne's intimidatingly gloomy "The Garden of Proserpine" or celebrate the ebulient consort of Hades, Proserpyne, from Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale".
Where are they, Cotytto, or Venus Astarte or Ashtaroth, where? Do their hands as we touch come between us?
Is the breath of them hot in thy hair? From their lips have thy lips taken fever With the blood of their bodies grown red? Hast thou left upon earth a believer If these men are dead?
They were purple of raiment and golden Filled full of thee, fiery with wine, Thy lovers, in haunts unbeholden, In marvelous chambers of thine. They are fled, and their footprints escape us, Who appraise thee, adore, and abstain, O daughter of Death and Priapus, Our Lady of Pain.
