Seen from the elevation of a rickety wooden dais, the Roman crowds jostled fleshily, sharply etched by the burning sun of noon. Over the low wall across the teeming street the Tiber slunk, a yellow snake. One ominous lump of shadow was thrust out grimly, farther down, that of the Mamartine Prison. The very shadow seemed to groan.
Astax was sweating. He was sixty years old. He was dressed for the slave sale in a clean white linen toga and golden sandals. After all, it was not every day you sold a princess. The two girls under the canvas of his dais were perspiring freely also, he was pleased to see. One was a huge Nubian handmaiden, over six feet tall and incredibly stupid. The other was his pearl, the captured British beauty.
He scanned the throngs to see if the Lady Valeria would be as good as her word. She had sent eighty sesterces in advance payment on hearing of his catch, for she wished to have a slave girl of quality relieve her of certain unpleasant conjugal requirements, so it seemed. Astax had been beating off bids all morning for the girl, though her going price was high. The Lady Valeria would have to send the rest of her payment soon.
A beaked face peered over the edge of the dais. A thin oldster with a purple stripe across his toga, betokening an equite, hissed up quickly, "Astax. I know one who will give you double what you ask, if this jewel be truly virgin and has not bred."
"A minute, friend, a minute." Astax mopped his brow on a sleeve. The Lady Valeria was an honored customer, though she did have rather special tastes. "This is no Thracian wench of every day. She is royal and most full of fire. You do not know what trouble I had acquiring this plump bird."
The lips beneath his leered. "With a fatter mouth than a Gaul's, eh? What is she called?"
"We call her Clotilda, her own tongue being unpronounceable. She speaks fair Latin, though. 'Tis rumored that she was niece of the Queen Boadicea who killed herself after being flogged by our Legionaires."
The bald head nodded. "The same with all those barbarians. A few cuts with ferula or flagellum and they squeal like pigs."
" 'Tis rumored that Queen Boadicea reached eighty strokes before she fainted, and made no cry at all."
"Astax. Here. Let me see her . . . properly." A coin was passed up.
Astax turned. The girl behind him was tall and fair and very lovely. She wore only a brief warrior's tunic of worn brown, caught in at her tiny waist by a leather military belt, brass-bossed, from which the sword-sheath had been taken. Her legs were clad to mid-calf by boots with silver plates along the shins. She did not yet wear the collar of servitude but instead a gold band circled her tanned upper right arm, with a band matching it on her left wrist. A mass of blonde hair streamed loosely down her back. Her shoulders were broad and straight, her breasts stuck out generously sideways, prodding at the material with their obviously uncovered tips. The legs, rising from the short boots, were bronzed and roundly muscled. The hips looked long and full. The high cheekboned face was taut and expressionless. Only the mauve eyes, staring into the dusty distance, showed their total contempt. She was yoked.
Astax touched this yoke with his left hand. It fastened round her neck, being strapped under her armpits, and her two hands were raised and strapped at either end of it. Gently he hefted one of the protruding breasts.
"A lovely heavy pair, my friend. Taut as sausage skins."
The girl acted as if he did not exist. Nor did he for her. He existed even less when he turned her and put her skirt into her belt, behind.
"A real warrior's pair here, eh, my friend? I wager they won't stay as white as that for long in my Lady Valeria's keeping."
The tan line stopped beneath the butt. The thighs were round and firm-looking, curved and athletic without being over-muscled. A perfect smooth white, the rump cheeks scarcely sat on them sideways at all. The sulcus was a grave line drawn on wax, the overhang tenderly vulnerable. With her legs set close together, the cheeks were rich deep rounds so full of youth they could not keep from almost imperceptible ripplings as she stood. Astax bent her forward, pressing on the yoke. The cheeks tried to clench.
"By Mithras! she's well fleshed!"
Some pedestrians stopped to look, and guffaw, but it was a routine enough sight as Astax fingered wide the shadowy groove and exposed the deliciously silky-looking amber medallion of the anus. Thick darkly furred lips, deeply sensual by contrast with the texture of the rest of the body, pouched back at the top of the thighs.
"But her bush is black, Astax."
"As a bird's wing, friend. It adds to her allure, does it not? Her hair is bleached by the sun on the long sea journey. Look."
When he turned her back again this time the girl's face was still that of a stony graven image, but her face and throat were deeply suffused with blood. She moved like a doll, her eyes distant. Astax raised her skirt in front. Beneath a flat belly the mons was a jutting hump of crisp curly black, low slit. Suddenly he hissed. The girl had spat full in his face.
Softly Astax said, "My sweet one, I shall pay back ten sesterces of your price so that I may see your first flogging, and those big hips of yours writhing like a Grecian dancer's under the flagellum. With fortune the Lady Valeria will make you sit on red-hot spikes after, and give you to baboons with your hands tied behind your back and honey in your pit. Felices Nuptae! Whipped in the circus, under a furca . . ." As if out of breath, he paused, saying, "I may not mark you, Clotilda, but I can make you sorry for that."
He nodded briefly to the Nubian girl who pressed Clotilda to her knees by simply pressing down on her yoke. Then she took a knot of the yellow mane in one hand and forced Clotilda's head back. Astax had provided himself with an oiled black leather strap about two feet long and four inches across. It was thick and, at one end, cut into tails, He stood in front of her with it in his right hand. She frowned, her eyes still fiery. Astax swung the strap and slapped her face. He did not swing hard but, such was the weight in the leather, Clotilda's head bounced like a ball. Dark strip-like wales jumped up on the lightly tanned cheek. He backhanded the other. There was the same wet thud and again the head bounced. Tears squirted from behind the squeezed-shut lids. Two more whacks and Clotilda's face wore a dizzy expression. Astax moved to one side.
"One good crack deserves another, little one. This time down the middle."
"Just a minute, Astax. We didn't say half-kill the girl, even though she is a barbarian."
The raised hand fell. A young and darkly handsome man in a military tunic had vaulted lightly to the dais. He put a clinking bag onto the table there.
"Ah, centurion. I was wondering if your lady . . ."
"Get her up and get that yoke off her at once."
"Certainly, Marcus Flavius."
Stood up, albeit a trifle groggily, and relieved of her yoke Clotilda rubbed elbows and shoulders. Astax was weighing the bag. The newcomer was eyeing Clotilda's behind.
"Is this the Angle? She's more like an angel. I declare the rumpiest specimens come from that cold little island of theirs."
"She'll be glad of some protection in that part soon, I wager, Marcus Flavius. And her breasts are good, see."
"Hm, hm."
Clotilda wore the same You-don't-exist expression though her face was now streaked by the strap, as the handsome young centurion checked her over like so much horseflesh. It wasn't happening because she said it wasn't happening. Once his grey eyes met hers; there was a fleck of amused light in them and something in her quailed-for the first time on this foreign soil.
Like some doctor, rather, he opened her mouth, examined her teeth, lifted her breasts, and when he put his finger up her pussy she tried her best not to flinch.
"My Jupiter! she's wet. Did your strap do that to her, Astax?"
He wiped the offended finger on her skirtlet, behind, and appreciatively joggled her nether hemispheres.
"Plenty of place for the whip, sir!"
"Plenty of place for a prick, too. Well, then, it's done. What's she called?"
"Clotilda."
"Come then, Clotilda, follow me."
"Mind out, Marcus Flavius, she's spirited."
The litter quickly carried them over the Tiber and out of the city, to a low, luxuriously marbled villa softly set amid cypress and olive. Servants bowed them through the gateway but the cool hallways where they alighted, beside a green sunlit pool, were deserted.
"This way, princess." He half-mocked her, walking firmly ahead of her but feeling the luminous eyes of the new slave on his neck behind him. He hummed as they turned a corner. Then suddenly he grunted, half-sprawling forward. The British girl had charged him, her right hand grabbing for the dagger at his belt.
She got it out, but his right viced her wrist, twisting. With a snarl of her pretty lips she let it tinkle to the marble. Recovered now, and half amused, he belted his left fist into her belly, just above her belt. Breath went from her like a bag and her cheeks bulged as she whoofed for air soundlessly. She clawed at nothing, half lying against him, now breathing heavily.
"You silly little idiot," was what he said, and he said it half-affectionately.
Then she dived. She landed near the dagger with a thud and with an even squashier one he landed on her back. She didn't reach it and for a second she struggled actively beneath him, incurring a quick rent of her tunic at the back to her belt. Finally he held her, panting like a stranded fish, by lying on top of her, his weight crushing her to the marble, two hands under her arms and locked behind her neck. To her left, one big bosom had come out and was on full display, ringed with a swollen aureola, darkly rising to a long thick nipple. Her skirt had rucked up behind in the struggle and he felt her whole warm, sweaty flesh against his. Gradually he felt himself hardening in the rich cleft of her ass.
"Baal must have made your breasts, girl," he said, retrieving and resheathing his dagger. He stood up and said, "Valeria didn't want you marked but I shall have to teach you a little lesson for that. For your own good, Clotilda."
She stood up and confronted him. Sweaty, dusty, with her welted face thrown back, she made a magnificent spectacle, trying vainly to pull her now ragged tunic round her.
"You have conquered, Roman. Do what you like to me."
He mock-bowed her to a door. She passed ahead of him. There was very little light in the room, but there was enough. Marcus Flavius knew where he was. She stood there storming, but a little less certainly. She was developing a curious respect for this Roman soldier.
"This is one of the rooms where we punish naughty girls," he told her. "Over here, you!" Grinning he sent her spinning to one side with a blow to her left earlobe. Clotilda steadied herself angrily, almost bare now from the waist up. She saw shackles and a slop jar and one curious padded seat. She was beginning to feel a faint fluttery sensation inside, one increased by a row of instruments hanging from wall-hooks.
"I'm going to introduce you to the scutica or parchment whip, my dear. But first, take off your boots."
She glared at him a trifle less surely now. "You have conquered me. You can whip me. But you do not need to tie me."
"For what I have in store for you, I do, my beauty." He put a hand under the tail of her skirt and hefted her butt for a second. "Right across what we uncivilized heathens call the nates. Where a woman was made to be scourged and this pair is made for it to perfection."
She had moved from him and now turned and slowly removed each boot with her back to him. Her tunic hem hiked and as she shifted her weight from first one foot and then the other he saw the long, smoothly skinned cheeks fold softly against each other. When she stood up she seemed vulnerably smaller.
"I'm ready," she said, frowning. "Stand here, then, against this bar." With her feet on the smooth metal surface set into the flagging the bar came to the top of her thighs, and when she was made to bend forward over it braced back her legs, which she kept close together. The centurion gyved her wrists and drew them forward to a wall chain, a broad meter away. She was ignominiously bent over at right angles, stretched tight with most of her bottom on display under the tunic. She hid her head between her arms. She sensed that worse was to come.
Humming to himself, Marcus Flavius picked up a heavy lead ball and clipped it round her belt. Clotilda grunted when he let go of it. The weight hauled her waist down, making an arc of back and arms, and tilting up her pelvic area. Already she was on tiptoe, her bottom cheeks spread. It was an animal position and she flushed to her soul. "Part your legs," he said softly, behind her. She made no move.
"Come on," he coaxed. "I can see all of your plump little British quim as it is, anyway. It's set right under you, which betokens a tough hymen."
"Get done with it," she hissed.
He sighed and reached down to fetter each ankle. Then he pulled them slightly apart by chains which he secured to the vertical frame of the bar. She could move her bare feet no closer together than eighteen inches. He tucked her tunic into her belt and stood back, hands on hips.
"There. That is how a slave should look, my lovely British beauty. And how she looks most of the time around here, with her arse in the air asking for it."
"Ach!" This time she hissed in earnest.
He had turned some crank behind her and suddenly the plate beneath her feet, which she had felt to be lightly perforated, was sown with icy spikes. These tiny needles were thread-thin and perhaps no more than a quarter of an inch in length, but they were razor-sharp and already she felt several sinking into the fleshy cushion of her right foot. Her left she had lifted instinctively, to the limit of its chain. Now she knew why he had made her take off her boots.
He chuckled behind her, watching the discomforture of her waving left leg.
"I like my meat to squirm nicely, but I find a lot of threshing about ungainly. I assure you, Clotilda, the best thing is to grit your teeth and get it over with and skewer your tootsies down once and for all, then don't move them. It can get awfully uncomfy, if you do."
Furiously, she realized he was right. He was reducing her fatally, rung by rung. Already her right foot was sinking onto the needles under her weight. Gingerly, blinking, she set down her left to relieve the other somewhat. The tiny needles hurt much more than she'd have thought. It wasn't so bad on the heel, and she tried to stand on both; but there were at least six or seven of the fiendish spikes now sliding into the fleshy pad of her foot sole. Despite herself, shaming tears squirted at her lids. When the insteps came down it was agony. It took about a minute for her to impale both feet solidly on the plate again and by the time she had finished she felt out of breath. Her stretched legs shuddered and these involuntary liquid quiverings deeply shamed her. The fatty places of her upper thigh and underbuttock seemed beyond her control and juddered eloquently.
"Good," he said at last. "Now then, Clotilda, I shall give you only six, but they will hurt. Try to be brave."
He went to the wall and took down a handled lash. It was three feet long, thin and twisted, the parchment grey and rugous; its last inches were rock-hard. He stood to her left and measured his aim.
There was a pause, then a whirr of air and the tough lash clipped into the cheeks with a dull, punishy sound. Clotilda gasped and bit her lip; at first she thought she could contain the pain, but a second flush of it suddenly seethed through her seat, making her stretch and pant for breath. The scutica hurt like unholy fury.
"Good," said the man's voice gently behind her.
There was the same, almost mushy sound as he struck again and fractionally before she felt the pain she sensed her buttocks bound, springily, under the cut. Then she was biting into the fragment of material of her tunic left on her right shoulder. It was infernal. The streak of fire was lower this time and worried into her cheeks furiously so that she could feel them involuntarily cringing with fatty spasms. She yearned to move, to stamp, and writhe, and the inability to do so caused her strong legs to tremble; she felt deeply the disgrace of her backside wobbling helplessly in front of this Roman stranger.
To be brave. As courageous as her aunt, the Queen Boadicea, under the knotted scourges of those infernal . . .
"Aow!"
The third had whacked in and she raised her right foot with the agony of it, her forehead creasing. She put her foot back slowly in the same, now wet patch, feeling the spikes needle through it again as she panted. The man chuckled shortly.
"Growing warm, princess? You certainly have an imperial buttock but I warn you your mistress will order you as many as twenty-five with this little thong."
"OW!"
It belted in again. Clotilda squirmed against the cold bar. She could think of nothing but the pain now. The weight on her belt dragged her down so strongly that she could not muscle her cheeks, behind; her welted hinds felt hot and heavy. They hung limply for the whip, quivering, and it cut into them richly, twice more.
And at the second and last of those strokes she cried out sharply. Her whole body seemed to stretch, cat-like, within its skin. Pure pain poured up her tautly stretched body; her head sang as if it had been struck. She felt her arse cheeks shuddering pitifully. She was completely punished, and deeply shamed. And then she was hissing quickly, "Stop. What are you doing?"
The centurian had put down his flail and, having moistened his palms in some lamp oil at the side, he quickly released both breasts by a final tear on her tunic. The huge mounds hung down udder-like and he began to treat them as such. His slippery strong hands hefted their weight and then ran roughly over the slick twin surfaces. He chuckled.
"Great Jupiter, but you Angles are solid."
He began to milk each rosy melon until the tips went hard and hot. Clotilda began to gasp and pant. Mouth open, her eyes stinging with new tears of shame, she saw the man's hair-backed hands close in on and distend the great fleshy jugs, sending quivering thrills up her whole stretched body, into her head. She began to moan and twitch helplessly, cursing herself for responding to the oily kneading. He laughed again as he tightened his fingers to bud out the toughly strutting nipples, as big as thumbs and engorged with blood.
"A hard-on already, princess, and I've scarcely warmed you."
"Please! Not this. Whip me if you will, but please not this," she begged.
"You'll get thrashed enough here, don't worry, my dear."
He continued his greasy massaging, squeezing the dugs even tighter, until he seemed to be almost masturbating her melons for her. Clotilda was sheer sensation. Her mouth drooled, her eyes gazed sightlessly ahead, her slick-skinned jugs felt leaden, twice their weight, and throbbing in thick pulses. She yearned and yearned, stretching her pelvis and sweating runnels. She did not have to look to know that beside her the Roman's penile tube had come high, demanding. He must have taken off his under-garment, for its swollen head knocked and nodded under her as he rolled her swollen gourds. She was stifling, scarlet in the face, and a steam seemed to rise from her mauled, chest jugs.
"All that work and no milk," he said and as he moved, his penis clubbed her right thigh heavily. "But you do have the most astonishing pair, princess."
Her stomach fluttered. The great shank, the length and breadth of whose silken underside she could now feel along her left thigh, was going to impale her. Cram into her insides. She was certain of it, and hanging there like a side of meat, the pain now subsiding to a molten flow through her loins, her fleshy teats all heated and dissatisfied, she awaited the conquering male member. After all, he had simply won.
"Since you were so keen for my dagger," she heard him say, "let's see how you like it up you. I haven't felt so hard since I had my last Visigoth."
He kicked the crank and suddenly the spikes in her feet freed from her soles, making her whine with pain as the sharp darts picked out. She stood moistly, legs apart and he placed himself behind her, the throbbing meatus vertical between her arse cheeks, the tough ball-bag beneath her.
"I did warm you, after all, princess. And, by heaven, I believe you're ready for it."
She almost choked as his oiled thumb slid along the length of her vulva and flicked up her clitoris; the morsel was fat and juicy ... all too ready.
"Get it done," she groaned. "Spear me if you must."
"It's gigantic!"
"Ach!"
From the pouting furred purse the treacherous stub of gristle that was so infuriatingly betraying her seemed to give a spasmic bound. Clotilda sobbed, shivering all over with degrading sensuosity. With his free hand the centurion reached round for her left breast. Fat and swollen it hung like a pudding and he played with its glistening nipple. Clotilda groaned more deeply. She was riven with appalling pleasure. The oil-smeared lump of breast, though dangling, seemed to try to thrust out, press into his palm. He joggled and bounced it, then slapped its resounding side until it reddened further, as if about to burst. "Naaaoww!"
For the hand had released her breast. Had rested on her welted left rump. The thumb suddenly dolloped an ooze of oil into her anal pucker. Between the still aching, pulsing buttock cheeks the smooth knob of his member started to ease in ... all too easily.
"Not there . . . please!"
In a fury of mortification and outrage (this couldn't be happening to her, it wasn't happening)
she gave a quick wriggle of her ass. The movement unluckily aided him and, with a dying wail, she felt the slide-in as he plugged her butt. The sphincter ring slipped over the thick lip of the corona. The head was in her, lodged, and then she felt the first stony slide of his erection.
"I hate virgins," he gasped.
"Nnnngh!"
The finger on her clit made her suddenly buck to him. She grunted, then squealed as the humid tube shoved the huge head further into her. The pressure was remorseless. The anal ring clasped the feeding piston painfully tight. She felt full up, stuffed, and more was sliding into her.
"Gaaah-kkk!" she gargled speechlessly, shoving her thighs into the bar. The weight held her arched, open for the big rod. "Ach, no more! No more!"
"About five inches more, princess. Now then, hold your breath."
He rammed it into her until her tits leapt and her eyes bulged. "AWWWKKK!"
Ball-tight, belly-hard and wet-locked to her, he now pulled slowly out. The penis did not ease out at first, but dragged back, ringed by the sphincter, to a brief rippling fart. Then with all his weight he drove the entire sensual length of his prick into her so that all the breath left her body.
A minute more and Clotilda was a sweating mass of churning sensuality. The fury at her degradation, at her immense response to his thumb in her guts, only added to her toil and torrents. She was being buggered in between the bulging cheeks of her beaten rump-like some common sheep-herd-and, squirming in sexual frenzy, her body was greedily impaling itself on the awful driving shaft. Her big tits slapped together. A mythical ecstasy was upon her. She stamped her wounded feet.
Suddenly she squealed. The lump in her rectum was growing larger! She heard the man grunt, jamming into her as the thing boiled, kicking livingly within her; she felt the first jerk of semen, the steadying of the tool for the second, then unbelievable terrifying bliss poured upon her. In lurid jolts her clitoris spewed its liquor on his fingers. The volted lava of Zeus-Jupiter lashed at her loins.
When the mists had cleared and she was able dazedly to assemble the various parts of herself, she was sitting on her right ham, the stone cool under her beaten chub, holding her bare breasts in her hands. Her eyes were brimming pools of tears when the man returned from his basin at the side. He was carrying some straps and smiling deeply. His black curls shone with oil and there was a tawny flicker in the depths of his grey eyes.
"You . . . you," she began huskily. "You made me . . .
He shook his head with a grin. "In gushes, princess. But here, stand up. I don't want you going for my dagger again. At least, not this one."
She had to stand with her arms behind her; he strapped each wrist to its opposite elbow. The position arched her back and made her throw each slab of oily breast-meat powerfully sideways.
"There," he said. "That's how a girl with tits like yours always ought to stand." He fastened a dog leash round her neck and pulled its chain over his right shoulder. "Now follow me. Walk, don't run. And see that you keep the leash tight."
She did. In the sun-dappled passages Marcus Flavius walked fast and Clotilda learnt how much you needed arms to half-run. She was bare from the belt up, her oiled breasts jouncing fattily about, her welted buttocks churning under the thin tunic. Her neck burnt with shame whenever they passed others-servants, mostly-but no one paid her any attention. The centurion led her into some cool, flagged quarters, gently perfumed.
"Stay here," he said, hooking her leash to the wall of a small stone anteroom, "and don't run away."
There was an archway and before he strode through it into the room whose luxury Clotilda had never seen equalled he grinned and muttered, half to himself, "Great Mars, but she gives that Grecian hell!"
At the far end of the room to which the man now went Clotilda saw a Roman woman at her toilet. Clad in a sumptuously gauzy scarlet stola she sat with her back to them, having her black hair piled high in combs by a sweet-faced girl slave, wearing sandals and a short peplum of a beige color lighter than her limbs. She shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot as she worked and Clotilda saw the woman raise an ivory stylus and press it into the underside of the girl's right breast, which was bared from the garment. As the mistress worried the tip of the instrument home the slave rose on tiptoe, head back. "Valeria, stop it!"
The woman turned. She was petite, perhaps thirty-two with soft rounded limbs and beneath her piled-up pyramid of inky hair she had a curiously lacquered face. She was smiling impishly.
"Marcus, it's you. I was just getting a nice gall mark going there. All right, you're dismissed," she said to the slave. The girl bobbed and ran from the room, softly weeping. When she passed Clotilda, the English girl saw her trying to stuff back her breast in her peplum. Its underside looked scored with tiny grazes, some of which had dropped blood onto her skirt.
"I brought the Brit," Clotilda heard.
"Wonderful. Where is she?"
"Out there." The man called, "Clotilda, come on in."
Clotilda paused. She gave a tug on her chain.
"Can't," she said.
"Of course you can."
She gave another tug.
"How?"
"Use your teeth, stupid!"
So she went to the wall and took the end of the chain off its hook in her teeth. Then she went in to them like that, arms behind her, breasts pouting out, and frowning a little as she held the chain in her mouth, coldly dangling in between her dugs. She stood in front of them, her hot swollen teats wobbling until they settled, still.
The Lady Valeria's scarlet smiling mouth was wide open. She advanced unbelievingly.
"But this is fantastic. I haven't seen a pair like this on a Nubian."
"The mammary development in those cold corners of the universe is considerable, m'dear. All that fat keeps 'em warm."
"What the hell happened to her face? I thought only Celts wore woad." "Astax slapped her, I fear."
"This is incredible. Her nipples are as big as cherries, just."
"And much tougher, too."
The suave beauty undulated forward till she faced, full-on, the shelf of Clotilda's chest. The smile seemed varnished to her face.
"They're amazing. Why, they're so tense and, and taut-skinned they might be in milk."
"I tried that," said the centurion. "No luck."
Gently she hefted a heavy dug on the blade of her stylus, then let it bounce back on the rib cage. She shook her head, wonderingly. Slowly the woman took the slender chain from Clotilda's teeth and wound it round the right breast; she wound tight till the gourd stood out thickly, an elongated melon, stubbed at its tip. Reversing her stylus Valeria then pressed in the nipple with the blunt end. The ivory indented into the hard cylinder of flesh and Clotilda panted. Then she let it stub out again, wetly.
"Great Jove! she could fuck me with that thing, almost.
Clotilda ... is that her name? I shall call her Clo. Dear Clo, will you like being my pet, mmmn? Now let's see her ass. I can't wait."
"I'm afraid I had to spank her a bit, Valeria. She tried to seize my dagger."
"She tried to . . . what!" The woman's aghast look was converted into ripples of laughter. "I simply don't believe it. Poor Clo, didn't you know that mutiny is invariably punished in the rump? And I'll bet you took your conqueror's reward there, too, you beast, Marc."
Clotilda was turned, her skirtlet lifted. The woman clapped her hands.
"Oh lovely chubs! All the more beautiful for some Roman weals, all velvety and purple. Ummmn." Thin fingers traced them and then, with the centurion pulling down the leash, the fingers opened the cheeks. "Ugh! She's leaking your come in strings, you brute."
"She flowed like the Tiber in front, too." "So? Well, we shall have to see to that later. But this is going to be wonderful for Glaucus. If he doesn't go for this crinkled darling he's out of his mind. Was it a very lush tunnel, Marcus?"
"Very tallowy. With just enough yield."
"Turn her for me."
The leash was tugged and Clotilda straightened, very erect, blinking, the udders settling fattily on her torso. Her skirt was raised in front. At the top of her tanned thighs, bowed in front, sat the slot of her sex, curiously bedewed.
"Ah, how hairy these barbarians are."
"What did you expect, Valeria? Feathers?"
"But this is perfect. She will do superbly."
And then Clotilda panted again. The cold tip of the ivory stylus tweaked at the thing that had given her such unspeakable, heavenly bliss just now. It was gently bladed up-a tongue, a gaping mouth.
"This will be seen to in earnest. Thank you, Marcus, I have a feeling we shan't need you for a while."
"Have fun, Valeria."
The man's footsteps receded. Somehow, though the woman was looking at her with the same strange hypnotizing smile, as if half in a laughing dream, Clotilda felt less secure without him. The Roman matron was a coiled spring, a lovely wasp that could sting.
"May I have my arms loosed now?" she asked. "I . . . won't do anything. I know you've won."
Valeria stared at her miles away. Mournfully she shook her head, still wearing the same amused expression.
"Lovely, lovely Clotilda, I shall take you to the steward of my atrium. I'm afraid it's going to be a very unpleasant month helping in the kitchens. But it will be excellent for your soul. In a month you will be ready to assist me with my husband. More than ready. First, you'll have to have all that fur shaved off in front, though. Come, I can show you some of my playthings en route."
Again Clotilda felt like a tamed animal at the tug of the leash. This time she did not have to walk so fast, down the alleyways and sunlit porticoes. In fact, her mistress almost dawdled in front of her. Men could be seen tilling gardens.
Down one marbled corridor a tiny girl-slave came carrying a tray of fruit. The oranges were in a pyramid and, as the girl bobbed to her mistress in passing, she hissed with sudden dismay. Some of the fruit had tumbled off. Hastily she set down the tray, and in obvious consternation, dropped to collect and replace the oranges. She was a charming slip of a thing in her beige peplum, caught in at the waist with a slender chain. Her fair hair was drawn straight back in a comb and her wistful face was thoroughly crestfallen. When she collected herself and stood before them her liquid little body was in a fit of eloquent tremoring. Valeria had been steadily watching Clotilda throughout the whole incident. Finally, still smiling, she said: "You might think the end of the world had come, eh. I suppose you imagine us Romans forever throwing our slaves to the lions or boiling them in oil, or whatever. Me, I never go near the arena. Ugh. I leave such spectacles to my husband and his friends. Uncivilized louts. But I must tell you that I adore seeing little girls whipped. Little boys, too. Lucina here is only thirteen but she has lovely jouncy little bottoms and I can't tell you how unspeakably exciting it is to cut into them with a switch and watch them writhe. You writhe so nicely, don't you, Lucina?" Lovingly, the woman stroked the silken head bowed before her. Tears had already started to fall down the heart-shaped face. "Poor Lucina. She knows she's going to be ordered a flogging for her clumsiness, and her heart's beating fast; she knows there's nothing she can do to stop it or make it less. She'd give anything to drop through the floor, vanish into the air, become mere water. But she's got to go through with it. In a minute or so, absolute white-hot agony will spread across her soft girlish seat. Isn't that so, Lucina? What she wants to know now is--how many, and with what?"
With a chuckle the matron clapped her hands a few times. A man working on a garden bed stopped, saluted and called. A swarthy young Roman, kilted, ran up and dropped to his knee. "Milady?"
"Servilius. Do you think you could help me make this girl-slave less clumsy?"
When he rose the man was grinning. "I'm sure of it, milady."
Valeria tilted up the girl's face with one hand. Looking deep into the lost, brimming eyes she said: "How many oranges did you drop, Lucina?"
"Se-seven, mistress."
"The mystic number. Servilius, seven strokes across these tender buns. Very low, very hard. As hard as you can. With plenty of time for reflection between. Twenty-second intervals. No mercy, no mercy at all. It is the only way for these soft butterflies." Suddenly the woman put her lips on the doomed girl's. "Make it the flagellum. After all, there is no use in spoiling these slaves. Be brave, Lucina."
With a little pat on the behind she propelled the aghast girl to the male servant, who led her to an open door by the lever of an earlobe. With a dismayed gulp the slave vanished. There was silence in the corridor. Silence but for Valeria's quickened breathing. Her stola rose and fell in front.
"Leave the door open, Servilius," she called. Then to Clotilda, "Was I cruel? Cruel to be kind? I'm afraid that flail hurts like fury. I tried a couple once. Two minutes of absolute agony, followed by about three of mortal pain. By ten minutes it's all over, the bottoms simply feel stiff and lumpy and achy. We shan't see it, Clotilda, but we shall hear it. Hearing's terribly important, the other senses can feast off it. You can imagine it all. Servilius is now hanging her by the pulleys. Arms behind her, so that when he hauls up she bends over like a doll on tip-toe, swinging a little but trying to keep her legs together to save her shaven slot. It won't be touched, actually. Just the chubs which are nice and fatted and relaxed like this, you know."
The woman's eyes were misted, glazed, full of distances. Her body shuddered. She seemed to be talking to herself, plucking occasionally at Clotilda's tunic hem.
"Oh don't let it begin. Let it never begin. Let the suspense be drawn out till eternity. The round cheeks are trembling together. The thin hard cords with their waxed knots are being dipped in water to give them extra weight. Servilius is feeling his meat. Right under her, Servilius, right under her cringing chubs. Cut, Servilius, hew . . ."
Her voice broke off. A gleam lit in those eyes riveted so mesmerically on Clotilda's. From the room there had come the noise of wet linen being struck. Though oddly distant, the dull thwack was pregnant with pain. A stifled gasp ensued.
"There," hissed Valeria. "I told you the sound was important. Oh Christ, how those cords cut. Poor silly Lucina, you won't want to sit down tomorrow, will you. God, how I love you now. You are being steadied as you swing ..."
The woman stiffened, her eyes brilliant. A second dull rippling thrrrup had come to them. It was followed by a cry, then the girl said loudly, "Ow!"
Valeria laughed. "Another juicy beauty just where it does most good." Her index finger stole under Clotilda's skirt, palped up the gristle there. "My, but you're mushy. Marcus was right."
Clotilda panted. Huskily she whispered, "Please. That's where ... I mean, I'll ..."
"Go off again? It really does excite you? I told you the sound . . . there! Servilius put his heart into that one, you could hear it wrap itself around her bunnies. And just the right sort of cry. I do so hate screaming, don't you? I was told your aunt never made a sound. There! Quartus . . . quintus . . . sextus . . . and SEPTIMUS!"
It was over. After the final strangled cry there was silence. It was prolonged. Valeria was standing with her palms against the wall, rocking herself, eyes shut, like some priestess in ecstasy. All at once, with a dry whining gasp, the girl ran out, clasping her bottoms. Lost to all protocol, she danced in front of them, speechless with agony, grasping bunches of her buttocks as if trying to knead the pain out of them. Her riven face looked twice its age.
A hot hand gripped Clotilda's arm. "The moment of honey," murmured Valeria. "Is she not adorable in her penance?"
Finally, the girl mastered herself and, panting, knelt to place her lips on her mistress' right sandal. "Th-thank you, milady."
"There. Perhaps that will help you not to be clumsy again soon, Lucina. Show your marks now."
The girl rose, turned, and leant, raising the blood-flecked skirt of her peplum. The soft, very round buttocks were empurpled with many thin weals; along these seemed to be sown hard dark dots, the size of a pea or more. Some of these were pearling blood. Clotilda glanced in alarm to the servant Servilius who was now lounging in the doorway. Grinning he was putting the ivory haft of his instrument in his belt; from it lagged lean cords with knots in them, darkened.
"Thank you, Servilius," said the matron, dismissing the girl to pick up her oranges.
The man said something in a dialect.
Valeria smiled. "He said he would much have preferred to have had your buttocks to deal with, Clo. Well? What do you say? Just one stroke, to see what the flagellum feels like. Just below the other weals, Servilius. Now-lean forward. Only a little."
Still insistently smiling, the curious woman caught Clotilda's head between her hands. Holding her by the ears, she placed her lacquered lips on her new slave's. Behind Clotilda the air whirred. She felt the thud of impact rock her buttocks, then her loins were laved with pain. She shot straight, her thighs screwed tight, jamming her buttocks together. Behind her back her fettered arms bunched, fingers fluttered; her mouth opened in a soundless howl. The pain was actually increasing.
When she had slumped heavily against a wall, the leash tightening at her neck, she was aware of the shiny enameled little face of the woman who now owned her wavering in dim mists. She was also aware that her own hips were giving little bucking jolts.
"This is extraordinary, Servilius. She is in full clitoral erection. I declare it's as big as my tongue and twice as tough. I'd heard that these Angles react to pain, but this is better than I could have dreamed for. I do believe that Boadicea of theirs actually liked her flogging. Oh no, I must see it done, absolutely, at once. There can be no waiting."
Waiting for what? Clotilda groaned. She humped as the woman withdrew her finger from the slickened slot that had again so royally betrayed her. The heel of the hand had ground against the fatty mound and made her squirt and spurt all over it. Now the Roman lady was looking at it avidly, and now her tiny tongue darted out and licked her own palm off.
"What you have just experienced, Clo, we call ecstagony. Ecstasy combined with agony. You have a hard hymen, as well befits your race, but Gast will burst it asunder for you. Gast is my steward and I assure you he isn't a eunuch. Thank you, Servilius. Put these on, my dear."
Still shuddering, she slipped the forepart of her feet under the canvas of two wooden clogs. In the heel of each was a spike, forcing her to walk only on the balls of her feet, and her toes.
"You will wear these for your training period, Clo. You will find they give you the correct slave gait, slightly mincing, that my lamentable husband likes most. Good for your calf muscles and makes you throw your rump out, so. Now follow me."
There was a tug on the leash. Clotilda stumbled, wincing as one spike scored an instep. She had to walk stiff-legged, calf-braced and, yes, bottom up. At the end of the quadrangle the woman began descending stone steps. This was harder for Clotilda and she gasped aloud. Valeria turned, "Try not to let your heels down. What you feel now are pinpricks by comparison with what it will be like if you gall yourself. Come."
At the base of a deep set of semi-circular stairs was a double-door, guarded. A helmeted sentry saluted and Valeria passed through, with her slave a-leash. The door clanged behind them. Clotilda found it hard to see at first. On stone walls two flambeaux flamed. It was a grim unpeopled chamber, the place of dark dreams. Niches in the walls showed heads of satyrs or gods, the ceiling was painted. A corridor led off. It was warmer than was normal. But Valeria was loosing her cramped arms.
"What are you going to do to me?"
Valeria smiled. "You have lost one virginity here already, Clotilda. Gast will now give you a little more ecstagony, and deflower you in front. It may shake up your kidneys a bit; you could practically pole a barge up the Tiber with what he has between his legs. Ugh! Now take off what little you have on and sit your seat on this." She indicated a short marble bench, covered in leather. Clotilda, wettening within in apprehension, obeyed stiffly. Holy Heavengods, how that flagellum had hurt!
She sat at one end of the seat and rose at once with a cry, grasping her hinds.
"Boar's hide, shaven close," explained Valeria. "If your botty's a trifle tender lie right back on it and take your weight on your shoulders." She did as bid. The Roman then shackled her wrists beneath the bench. Clotilda felt her shoulders drawn back, her chest outspread. Her head lolled over the end of the bench, throat up. Her legs splayed loose at the bench's other end.
"What dugs, what jugs, what udders," whispered the other from what seemed high above her. "How superb they are," she crooned, lifting one jiggling cylinder by the lever of its nipple and letting it slap back. "Never have I seen such firm hardness of chest-meat, such tough nipples!"
Absurd tears prickled behind Clotilda's eyes. The spiky hide hurt her fleshy back. She lifted her squirming buttocks up, pressing at the flagging with her clogs, a lascivious pose. Her belly rippled. Suddenly she cried out, "No!"
Valeria, who had vanished momentarily, was by her side with a lithe peeled switch in her hand.
"No," gasped Clotilda. "Please. I don't deserve . . ."
"What? A quick skipping on the tits? You'll find it awfully persuasive."
Valeria was smiling metallically. She brought the switch down with a keening wheeping swish and a razor-thin line of purest Tyrian purple wrote itself across the rolling mounds of Clotilda's breasts-just above the nipple.
"Nnnng!" She writhed, scoring herself atrociously on the hide.
The limb sang into the fat again. Clotilda stretched convulsively. It was better not to try to look. Her head hung back, her lips drooling.
"I've never split a nipple yet," said the Lady Valeria. She accorded seven. The mystic number. Then she replaced her shivering switch.
Heaving, helpless Clotilda waited, her thigh muscles jumping with their strain, her sex offered open. She heard the rustle of clothes, she felt the rustle of clothes. Facing Clotilda's head, Valeria had straddled the bench above the streaked teats on display there and she had kittled herself to the waist. Straining her head up Clotilda saw the woman in reverse and what she saw first was the center of her body, spread. Valeria was shaven. Her pubic mound was bare and silken, heavily fleshed but shortly slotted, a dark dimple. Atop the vision the high-piled head bent forward. "I shall baptize them for you, Clo." As the jet struck her chest Clotilda gave a grunt of disgust and let her head hang back. Unspeakable. Her a princess! The flow of urine followed her twistings, warm to the skin, soaking her thoroughly. Finally it ran down her throat and into her ears and hanging hair.
"There," said the Lady Valeria, "now you are ready for Gast." She lifted a leg and went to a wall. The cymbal she struck gave a deep resonance that echoed through Clotilda's being. "After Gast has enjoyed you, my dear, I shall conduct you through a number of rooms, the rooms of your future, little Clotilda, the rooms where you will know ecstagony."
TWO: JUDICIAL
"It is winter, a cold time for madam to strip in," sneered the bewigged and red-robed judge from his seat of eminence, "see that you warm her shoulders thoroughly, Mr. Beadle. The cart's tail to Taunton and let's see if you feel so rebellious by the time you have made that little journey, lady."
The good woman so addressed bent her head. A modest seamstress, she had come to the assizes in her Sunday best: Her fault-she had been heard talking ill of the King at Sedgemoor. Two wardresses touched her elbows and, smiling to themselves, escorted her from the courtroom.
"Next," thundered the judge.
"Eustacia Shaw," called the clerk.
A big beefy milkmaid stepped forward next to the rail. She had been found unwittingly to have sheltered one of the soldiers of the fleeing Duke of Monmouth's Army. The soldier had bewildered and bedded her and though she was innocent of any complicity in the revolution she sensed vaguely she had sinned and stood before them all dazed rather than terrified. Her placid ruddy face seemed to excite the judge to further dilations of penalty, and much grinny nudging of elbows among the wardresses present with their prisoners.
"Have you aught to say why you should not be sentenced, girl?"
"No, Y'r Honor."
"Very well. Since there was mitigation in your case, we shall not send you to the cart, Eustacia. But you look as if you have good solid meat on your bones and could take a few lusty thumps. ..." The red-faced judge smiled at the titters round the court. "You will be conveyed from this place to the county jail which you shall not leave until you have received eighteen strokes from the bull's pizzle across your naked buttocks. Mark her down for eighteen of the best, Mr. Beadle. Next?"
It was 1685 and Judge Jeffreys was living up to his name. No sooner arrived in the little West country village than he had proceeded to sentence six to execution, over fifty to the American plantations, for supporting the luckless Monmouth. Now he was finishing the assize with his favorite work, sentencing women to the whip. Standing at the back between the wardresses Clotilda shivered in her skin; there were two more and then herself. The pizzle was a hideous punishment. She had neither had it nor seen it, but knew a girl who had-for picking pockets in an inn. She could not sit down for days. Moreover, the manner in which it was carried out . . .
"Susan Brown."
The slim supple girl before the bar now was but sixteen, and sobbing already. The justice's bleary eyes twinkled.
"Do not think I shall be moved to leniency by your frail age, Sue Brown," he finally opined. "Vice begins young. You shall pay your penance with the rest, and hop a bit after, I don't doubt. Twelve strokes of the pizzle on the naked arse. Next?"
As the weeping girl was escorted out, a murmur passed through the courtroom. A sort of sigh arose as the next offender was brought forward. For this was none other than Widow Treadle, a woman of social prominence and good works in the village. Admired and respected by all, she advanced on her own, frowning and composed, her glossy fair hair bound round her wide head in a bun at the back, the light catching its broad part in the center.
"Mistress Treadle," announced the clerk.
The silence then was pregnant, for this was a case of more than mere injustice, some vindictiveness was at stake somewhere, it was plain. Her fault was to have had a nephew, whom scarce she knew, in the rebel ranks. Judge Jeffreys nearly leered at her.
"Have ye aught to say?"
In a clear confident tone the woman replied, "I am totally innocent of any complicity in the insurrection, Your Honor." She said it in a manner as to express: An' ye know it, too.
The judge leant back with a little malicious chuckle.
"You have been found guilty by us and shall pay your due penalty, Mistress Treadle. You give your age as forty-five. Perhaps it has been too long since you have felt the rod, with your husband dead, too. Do you not think a touch of the pizzle to your so ample hindquarters might not drive out the seeds of rebellion once and for ever, ma'am?"
Suddenly he leant forward, brows bristly, and thunder on his forehead. In a tone of repressed fury he went on, "For you shall bare 'em, ma'am. You shall strip in the yard with the rest and go down on that bench and squirm your rebellious soul out as the whip cuts into your hams. And then you shall follow the cart with your arms tied to a hurdle and your big breasts swinging and bouncing as the lashes bite into your shoulderblades, for all to see. Oh Mr. Beadle, I urge to the utmost rigor with this woman. Take her to your prison and make her wish she'd never been born with a bottom. Let her feel the marks for a month. Marry but you shall get it, Mistress Treadle, and more than you bargained for. Now here is your sentence: You shall be taken from this place to the jail, not to leave there until you have had across your naked buttocks full thirty strokes of the bull's pizzle. On the morrow you will be whipped at the cart's tail from here to Teviot, market-place to market-place, and on the morrow after that from Teviot to Child's Greene and from there back to here again, on the succeeding day. You will have one week in prison on bread and water to recover and reflect, then you will be released only after a second dose of thirty strokes at once followed by two hours standing in the pillory with bare bum for all to see. I wager that should cure you of your pride."
Throughout the dread peroration the woman had striven to preserve her mien. Finally, however, her mouth fell open, aghast, at the enormity of what she had to suffer, she shook her head from side to side, disbelievingly, and was led from the room in horror. Again the hum of murmurs succeeded her. Not an eye that followed the solid hemispheres moving under the soft material of that gown but imagined them rankly stripped and laid out on the whipping bench for the ministrations of the beadle. "Clotilda Bramble!"
She stepped forward, mouth dry. She had not realized she was so frightened; her big jugs juddered in front and would not seem to settle still. Her fair hair was done in a strong plait that hung like a rope down her back. She strove to straighten her broad, bony shoulders. Her only crime was to have conveyed a contaminated letter.
"What have you to say?"
"Ner-nothing to say, Y'r Honor. Only please, sir, spare me the pizzle."
There were chuckles round the court at this.
"Turn around," said Judge Jeffreys, "and, wardress, do incline her forward slightly. So. Yes. All right, now stand up and face me, Clotilda Bramble. You have good broad, even slothful hips and I see no occasion to let you off. You can expect no clemency from me. A sound thrashing never did a girl of your age any harm."
What was it going to be? How many, dear God, how many? Clotilda implored of the scrolled and aching ceiling.
"... and there be released after receiving twenty-five strokes of the pizzle across the naked buttocks. Next!"
She knew. At last she knew. Her legs felt liquid as the wardresses touched her, smiling slightly. She could feel every eye on her "lower person" as she left.
Eight women in all were taken on that day to the county jail, where they were lodged overnight to be whipped the morrow morn. The grim abode, lit within by rush lights, was reverberating already to the exciting news and Clotilda, who was put in a cell with the snivelling Susan Brown, heard the wardress' whispers with a sense of sickening doom.
"There's to be a flogging tomorrow. Yes, eight of 'em, and one to get thirty."
"Lawks! she'll be raw as a beet after twenty!"
"The Judge knows what they like least, eh!"
"Sure to be plenty of spectators."
Clotilda passed a poor night, repeatedly awoken by the sobbing girl in the cot across from her. Once she upbraided the chit: "Oh for heaven's sake, stop whining, do. You're only getting twelve and I'm to have twenty-five."
"Hou-hou, it'll sting so!"
"How do you know? Have you had it before, then?" "Na. But I seen one."
And Clotilda left it at that. The next morning they were taken to ablutions with the other women prisoners. The woman washing next to Clotilda said quietly, "Are you the ones for flogging, then?"
"Yes."
"Then I'm sorry for yer. They say they've got Overseer Robinson in especial to do it. He's merciless, that one, what's more he enjoys doing it, too."
"Have you had it, then?"
"Several times. Try to relax and not clench the cheeks, it only makes it hurt more. Alas," she sighed, as she dried on a towel, "there is nothing one can do about it. 'Tis a brutal way to punish a woman. But none of us want to repeat it. I've had as many as fifteen and all I know is I'm keeping out of the way on't."
"I'm ordered twenty-five," said Clotilda hollowly.
"Then I'm truly sorry for yer," the woman repeated gravely. "Ye'll need all yer strength for that."
When she returned to her cell, food-gruel and warm milk-was brought to them by a cheerful wardress. Clotilda complained that she did not feel hungry.
"Nonsense. You mun't eat it all. 'Twill give you strength and, besides, there is something in't will help you void well, after. Come now, cheer up, you aren't going to be killed, quite." She walked up and down, rubbing her hands, as the two gloomily ate. "At the same time, you are going to be seriously hurt. We feel no pity for you here, nor should we. You have made your mistakes and have to learn your lesson. In fact, we shall most of us thoroughly enjoy watching your bottoms cut into by the whip, and writhing like the devil as you pant and gasp and, finally, shriek. For the pizzle always wins in the end. Mr. Robinson is expert in its use and will wrap it right round you. He takes his time, too. You, Bramble, are up for twenty-five, I think. He will draw that out for minutes and minutes. The first five will set the weals, and then he will work on that band, thickening it until it bursts; then just you wait to see what it feels like when the tip eats into raw skin. The pizzle is a bull's member, cut when the beast is still warm, and stretched with weights. The tip may not be much thicker nor my finger but it's hard as stone and hurts like fury on the right. After ten you'll be howling. No, there's no doubt but that it's a very severe punishment. All the same, I have yet to meet a woman who wanted to come back for more."
After this crude commons Clotilda found it surprisingly easy to void in the rude bucket provided them; whether it was fear or the aperient nature of the gruel, she emptied herself almost embarrassingly. She was beginning to feel very frightened.
Shortly after, the eight culprits were assembled in a bare refectory room. Several wardresses were present, smiling and laughing amongst themselves, their animation a contrast to the dismal mien of the prisoners. Their hum of conversation ceased as an older woman, clad in black, with keys at her belt, strode in, close followed by another wardress with clothing on one arm.
"That is the Matron, or principal here," Clotilda heard hollowly from one of the criminals behind her. "And those are the flogging frocks."
The newcomer disposed of some instructions and then approached the sorry group. She too was smiling broadly, as if thoroughly enjoying herself.
"So. You are all for whipping and, if my records are correct, it is the first time for each of you. May it be a salutory lesson you will ever remember. You had better all make up your minds to some pretty sharp pain in the posterior. There's nothing you can do about it except grit your teeth and go through with it. By the end, if I know Mr. Robinson, you will be pretty sorry you ever entertained treacherous ideas. I don't promise you a picnic. It's bare buttocks and a bull's pizzle for one and all. Miss Rye, fit the frocks on them now."
"Yes, Matron."
The prisoners then doffed their garments and put on, in exchange, thin shifts of pale fawn merino. These sleeveless "flogging frocks" (as they were termed) were softly flared as to the skirt, which reached no more than just below the pubes.
There was merriment amongst the wardresses in their fitting. Young Sue Brown clearly did not mind the necessary exposure of her legs, while two others openly vied for beauty's crown in their novel costume. Clotilda sighed at such misplaced vanity as she smoothed down her skirtlet as best she might over her opulent crupper. Mistress Treadle, however, whose buxom seat was barely covered by the cloth, clearly deplored the succinct nature of their garment designed to shame.
"Ye needn't worry you'll be cold out there," called one wardress cheerily. "You'll feel a mite chilly watching, maybe, but then y'r turn'll come and the Overseer will warm you up. You'll be glowing like hot coals ere he's done."
"What, Matron?" said Mrs. Treadle then, "are we to be allowed nothing under, at least until the execution?"
The senior woman thus addressed turned angrily at this: "Shut your mouth, widow. Your pride will do you no good here. You are going to be whipped like the humblest farm-girl, my fine lady, and that means on the well-bared buttocks, in front of all. An' if I know him, Mr. Robinson will make your chastisement, as the gravest, the most atrocious. Just you wait and see. What is more," she railed on, "I would have you bear in mind that while I may not order pizzle strokes, which are the prerogative of the judiciary, as is the cart's tail, yet I am mistress of my domain, which is this prison. I can call out the birch on a female offender when I wish and make her rue the day, with a few smart ones on the bottom. An' if you're haughty with me, widow, I shall do it, too, and see how you like the flicks of my twigs on the bloody bum Mr. Robinson is reserving for you. I have half a mind to order you a clyster, put a few pints of hot oil up your anus, my good lady, and make you empty yourself in public, in the courtyard, in front of everyone. Oh, we know how to deal with pride here. Sisters Hutchinson and Ward, do you take this stuck-up widow to the infirmary and shave off every hair on her body. Only return her to me here entirely bald-bald above, bald before, bald under the armpits. Let her feel it, too."
"You may not," said Mrs. Treadle then, in a low shocked tone. "It is not in the order. It is surely not allowed."
"You wish to wager?" asked the mocking Matron. Advancing she laid a hand on the plump furry mound of the horrified widow before her. "This too. Bald-headed and bald-cunted. Every hair."
It was a subdued rank who stood in their short frocks, bare of foot, when the protesting widow had been led out by the designated wardresses. They were made to perform sundry exercises, bending and stretching and squatting, the better, they were told, to limber up their flesh for the whip. Then each was individually "curried." This was an occasion for yet more merriment.
This instrument of the stable, the iron curry comb, was created for the coats of horses, not the posteriors of tender females, thought Clotilda as she saw the first girl treated with it. The comb was held at the base of the bared buttock-cheek and drawn briskly up, three or four times, by a wardress. The fatty mass tremored under this scratching which was designed to draw the blood to the surface and improve circulation in the network of nerves beneath the integument. It ruddied the whitest skin and left the whole bottom, Clotilda found in turn, tender and tingling- "nice and ripe for the whip," as her grinning "comber" told her.
Finally they were ready, seven pairs of female buttocks destined for a ration of excruciating pain, in order that the soul within might be improved. The Matron then lengthily described the nature of the ceremony before them, after which, at a signal, they were all marched out, along dismal corridors, to the courtyard where awaited their fate.
The sight drained the last strength from Clotilda's marrow. Here it was to happen, indeed. Here all was prepared to see justice was done-eight tender women put to humiliating and excruciating pain. The place reeked of pain and all color left the faces of the culprits, whom the wardresses now shepherded in a stone corridor giving onto the open, rectilinear court. Snow lay on the ground, but a hardy sun lanced its rays over the prison walls, striking on the far side, where a similar arcaded way contained the spectators of the day. Animation was in the air as several of these, mostly ladies, examined the grim whipping bench or playfully swung one of the heavy pizzles. Clotilda saw the Beadle, in his tall hat, as also a thin man clad in black who, it was told them, was the surgeon in attendance. There was another prison official, a young man with a slate in his hand--this, the wardress explained in a hush, was for counting off the cuts on, "so that none should get extra." But it was Overseer Robinson on whom every guilty eye was riveted, and around whom the women visitors chiefly gathered.
The whipper was a huge man in breeches and a leather singlet, thonged up the front and leaving his brawny arms bare. The man's coarse ruddy face was heavily mustached and spike-like hairs protruded from his chest. He gave the impression of immense muscular virility, a chained dog dying to be unleashed, Clotilda thought with a gulp, and wreak his vengeance on their shrinking flesh. He was demonstrating a pizzle to two eager-eyed ladies in lace bonnets, bringing it whacking down on the polished circular boss in the center of the bench with a ferocity of stroke that made Clotilda blink. It was over this boss, she knew now, they had to place their pelvis and it could be adjusted by a screw beneath.
"Good heavens, sir!" said one smiling lady with a flushed face. "How that must hurt!"
"It's pretty sharp," said the Overseer, his breath steaming in the cold air, "I admit. But the pizzle is an instrument that makes the pain at its worst come some ten seconds after the shock of impact. When it worries and eats in, that's when it does its best work. You'll see 'em, Ma'am. At first it's a good lively thong-cut, then they jump; after that they begin to squirm and wrestle with the pain in earnest. That's when the fun starts. After four or five they know they're done."
"I saw you flog that guardsman at Maidstone, Mr. Robinson," said one pretty, dark-haired woman of about forty. "You were magnificently merciless."
"Ah, that drummer lad, Ma'am. Yes, I recall. He could hardly walk away after."
The woman rose on tip-toe, to his ear. Placed near, Clotilda caught her whisper-"Be as strict with the widow."
"Oh I will, Ma'am. Thank you, Ma'am"-for, before sidling bright-eyed away, the woman had slid a coin in his palm-"Oh do not fear, they'll all have had enough by the time I've done with them. A woman has more gluteal fat protecting her nerves ..."
"All too much, I fear, Mr. Robinson," said a small, dimpling blonde who, with her coin, and it was gold, hissed in his ear, "Draw it out well, sir."
"Can it be possible," grinned another stylish woman, inexpertly swinging one of the pizzles, "that a bull's member can be stretched as long as this? Why, it must be four feet, at least."
"It is, Ma'am," said the whipper, taking the round, rugous thong of a greyish hue from her and doubling it in two. "This is one of a pair I got fresh from the butcher this morning. He has stretched it a little thin, yet feel how hard it is at the tip. That is what catches them. This stinger is admirable for certain kinds of arses-if you'll pardon the expression, Ma'am-but when there is a lot of meat, for this widow here you mention, I shall take my tried-and-true." He pointed to another pizzle hanging from a wall-hook. "You'll soon see her move her jellies under that."
Jelly, thought Clotilda. It was what she felt. All sick and limp. She knew the rumor-that these village dames paid the judge to get him to order a prison whipping, which they could be present at, for following a cart's tail was not possible or even enjoyable for them. Now she was witnessing their heady excitement close to. Each one of them was smiling, aroused, eagerly anticipating the work of the whip on bare flesh. At that moment there was a stir their side of the yard. Widow Treadle was returned to their ranks, her bowed head entirely bald. She looked as she had been weeping. Sue Brown plucked weakly at Clotilda's hem-"I need to go."
"You'll have to hold it, silly," she hissed back. "You can't do it here."
A wardress went up to the Beadle. She had a smirk on her face. "The women for whipping are all here, sir."
"Are they?" He looked over, across the bench. "Ah yes, and not too eager for it, I do see. Very well, bring them on. Ladies, all spectators, I must ask you to retire to the corridor now, for the full administration of justice to be done."
All except the Beadle, surgeon, assistant, and Overseer now promptly retired, jostling and nudging each other, under the arcade opposite from that in which the culprits stood. Then Clotilda felt cold snow under her feet as they were led out by two wardresses.
The eight for chastisement stood in a row with their backs to the wall between the twin arcades, facing the foot of the whipping bench. To its right, at its head, stood the Beadle and his men. Alone on its left was the strapping whipper, making practise cuts.
Clotilda found herself one away in the rank from the spectators' arcade. Throughout the proceedings, until her rum to suffer came, she was subject to the constant whisperings and mutterings of these excited women. Though she stared sedulously ahead, trying with every pore to ignore them, she could not close her ears to their continual running commentary, which so intensified her humiliation.
"Which is she? . . . But they have shaven her head entirely . . . that will teach her to be so stuck-up, will it not? How lovely . . . her skirt barely covers her at all . . . which is the one for twenty-five, that Clotilda? Heavens, what a lovely rump ... so thick through . . . 'twill be a treat. . . Sssh, he's about to call out the first one."
"Eustacia Shaw," called the Beadle.
At first nothing happened. Then in the silence a wardress whispered sharply, "Shaw."
The milkmaid stepped forward. Her snub, sullen face seemed expressionless and Clotilda felt bitter envy of her; for this common country wench, it was clear, the occasion was merely an unusually severe thrashing. The disgrace that vexed the higher-bom was scarcely felt in her.
The Beadle looked at his list. "Eighteen strokes on the naked buttocks."
At once two wardresses, both smiling, drew the girl forward by the arms and stretched her on the whipping bench. Short bars were bolted over her ankles and knees and wrists, holding them firmly down. Finally, another bar, padded, was bolted across the small of her back and this one screwed down until it could be seen biting into the flesh as it held the belly hard to the bench.
The skirt was then turned over this bar.
A sigh swept the spectators. It was a broad bulging pair that came to view; a sturdy placid seat, the flesh looked almost hard, blotchy from the cold or the currying, a buttock fully ready for the whip.
"You'd say two cushions stuffed with horse-hair ... a real country rump . . . that's what I call a common bottom, I hope he flogs it to blood, it's all they deserve, the traitors . . . but look how they're making it spread. ..."
A ratchet beneath the bench was being cranked by a wardress with a lever. The shallow boss was raised under the girl's hips, forcing up the buttock basin against the constricting bars, at knees and waist. The Overseer pronounced himself satisfied with the elevation of his fleshy target, whose full depth of rich meat could now be appreciated. He palped the cheeks with his fingers, feeling for the chink-bone or coccyx at the top of the crease. The milkmaid stared ahead, her face raised.
"What a sumptuous spread . . . Heavens, what a behind . . . d'ye think he'll bloody it by eighteen? My dear, those coquelot ribbons in your bonnet are too charming, did you purchase them in Milsom Street?"
Everything was ready. A tense silence fell on the court as the Beadle said, "Mr. Robinson, do your duty."
The girl, who had given up all hope, lay with her broad bottom exposed, her hands limp, her frowning face staring ahead. The Overseer measured aim, laying the snake of his whip across the crupper; then he stood back and swinging it almost lazily about his head brought it whistling down with all his strength upon the fatty parts before him. The pulpy whack of impact was close followed by a startled grunt-"Uingh!"-as the milkmaid's body tried to give a lurch. A darkening weal streaked either hind. Suddenly, after a few seconds, the girl hissed with an access of pain, her buttock cheeks cringing in against the boss. When she relaxed them, the Overseer hit again.
"OW!"
The frightful flogging continued. The man struck masterfully.
Watching him with horror Clotilda yet felt a faint grudging admiration at his expert sense of pain. He made the buttocks bound and rebound. Soon he had striped their whole lower surface and with each shot the girl was gasping out, "Yes, sir . . . yesss . . . yessss, sir!"
"That's the way to cure treachery," said a woman's voice nearby. "A few good ones like that where they do most good and see if she feels so rebellious a rozum tomorrow!"
"She hasn't had half yet and and just look at her right bummie. I wager he'll tap the ruby there soon."
"And won't want to use the milking stool tomorrow, neither. Ough! What a beauty. D'ye see how she tries to roll, and squeeze!"
"You couldn't get a penny 'twixt those cheeks, she's clenching so."
"OWWW, SIRR! AOWWW!"
Almighty God! thought Clotilda, watching. They could not fairly ask a woman to endure this.
For it was soon clear that a new intensity of agony had been achieved. The girl had wrenched round her raw face, watching the whipper with contorted coutenance, her mouth uttering coarse cries. The lash was cutting now into a band of empurpled bruise, all livid and lumpy on the right. Eight. . . nine . . . ten . . . eleven-the great maid made the bench shake under her desperate boundings.
Suddenly there was, as it were, a startled, nigh hysterical, yet satisfied cry from the spectators.
The last stripe had cut in so cleverly the hard tip had burst the turgid blister forming on the right. Blood spattered on the snow. The Overseer then calmly took from a steaming bucket a hard brush and proceeded to scrub the place with its bristles, thus opening and making more raw the wound. The girl shrieked her agony.
"Are they allowed to do that?" asked a timid lady's tone near Clotilda.
"Certainly, it is the Overseer's right to scrub. With the last Governor they used to be far more rigorous, and make them raw with the curry-comb first and rub salt in, too. They are growing soft. After all, she is a traitor to her King."
"You are right. Nothing is bad enough for them. But she will feel the stripes now, I wager."
As the whipper went for his pizzle again, Clotilda heard a gulp and a soft hushed rushing sound. She looked to her left. With a horrified look on her face Susan Brown was clasping and unclasping her hands. Between her feet the snow was melting, a small golden puddle forming. She had been unable to hold it in. No one seemed to notice for the nonce, however, as the whipping continued.
It did so with redoubled fury.
"Ah no, sir . . . not there, sir . . . AIIIIOWWW!" shrieked the girl as she twisted in terror and agony. "Dear God, sir, spare me there ... but whip up, sir, whip up! Good Sir Robert, knock!" This an impassioned plea for the Beadle's traditional tap with his stick to end the punishment. But suffer it to the full she had to, and did. The last strokes fell on wet flesh and she left blood on the bench when let up.
Two wardresses took her arms. Falling back, her skirt was instantly stained and stuck to her right cheek. She emitted a constant loud moan-"Ow-w-ow-ww!" as she was led slowly away by the smiling women, her hips writhing. Another wardress approached the Beadle.
"Good. That was fine whipping," Clotilda heard a-buzz in her ears now. "Now she knows what it's like to have a raw bottom beneath her. Did you see how stiffly she walked?"
" 'Twill last her well for a while. It is the only way to cure crime and stamp out dissent. A well-whipped buttock for each and every one of them. They've all got to get it and they know it, just look at them. But what is this? Another pisser?"
For Sue Brown had now been called out, and her crime discovered.
"I c-c-couldn't help it, sir. So c-c-cold!"
The Beadle was frowning and shaking his head; he had exchanged some words with the surgeon. Finally he said, "I cannot award extra for this. These are Matron's stripes, for pissing in prison."
A voice from within behind him, a woman's, cried, "But may not we see the birch strokes for this offense, given here before all, as she did it before us all?"
But the Beadle shook his head. "This is a Matron's matter and must be dealt with internally. But you, Mr. Overseer, I counsel the greatest severity in this case. You have twelve strokes across the naked arse. Make them felt, sir, as you never have before. It is a small bottom to work on. Cut into it where it joins the legs. No mercy, sir, no mercy."
It was clear that none would be shown. Bolted to the bench the girl exposed a liquid, muscleless little bottom, a little larger than might have been expected and perfectly round. She too appeared to have given up all hope and lay waiting for her pain with a tremoring body, as her executioner made his preparatives. The ladies pronounced themselves fully satisfied with the target.
"A nice firm little pair."
"Positively made for the whip. ..."
"So young, so vicious."
The Overseer stood back, whirled his whip above his head and brought it snapping down across the young rump. A violet weal jumped up on either hind. The girl gave a shrill squeal, more one of startled surprise than of pain at first. She screamed at the second but now that the punishment had begun her mind calmed and she took it exceptionally well, albeit wriggling her lively behind a lot toward the end. Indeed after the twelth had fallen the Overseer said gruffly, "Mr. Beadle, sir, I claim another cut. She was wriggling so there was no getting at her." The surgeon was consulted and extra given ("A butcher's," laughed one woman from the side). When she was let up the poor girl surprised and amused all by breaking from the wardresses and, mewling with pain, her face scarlet, running barefoot through the snow to the far end of the court, clasping her welted hinds in her hands; there she danced her pain to the delectation of all. In fact, the wardresses did not attempt her recapture for several seconds. The display was clearly a joy to the entire assembly. No blood had been drawn.
While Sue Brown was led out at last, and preparations made for the star performer of the day, Clotilda became increasingly conscious of the ladies under the arcade. This was now buzzing with their excited comments. Their arms lolled over the stone as they hung on each other to get a better view. A lace handkerchief fell in the snow. Clotilda found their gloatings more and more an irritation, more and more humiliating.
"But look at that one's bubbies. You would say udders, just."
"Such huge jugs and a-wobble all the time. Helen, do look at her nipples."
"Heavens! Her children will know they've something in their mouth when they give suck."
"She looks to be in milk now."
Clotilda was aware of one of them trying to catch her eye. She kept staring stolidly ahead, to where the whipper was taking practice cuts with his pizzle on the wooden boss and making reports like pistol shots; but at last she glanced. Slightly behind the others a richly dressed lady was grinning at her; she had a red face and was mouthing a message to Clotilda. She kept rubbing her hand over her skirt behind and working her lips. . . . they seemed to be saying Cunt full of cock. . . . Cunt full of cock. ... But now there came a hush. The Widow Treadle was before the bench, head high even though shaven.
"Thirty strokes across the naked buttocks," said the Beadle with relish, after consulting his list.
This time the two wardresses, both smirking, took her wrists and before laying her on the bench carefully lifted her frock before-to show the bald pubis to all. The woman made a ducking motion and was clearly heard to say, "You do not have to do that." She was bolted down most strenuously and the boss beneath her screwed high, so that she had to camber back her loins most painfully.
Obviously intending to keep her dignity as well as she could, the woman stared expressionlessly ahead, only the color of her cheeks, contrasting with her shaven pate above them, testimony to the shame of her exposed buttocks.
These were magnificent cheeks of a soft downy white, with deep dimples each side; full of fat they were not yet flabby, being exceedingly broad at the base. The Overseer began his palping of them. The widow closed her eyes. The man grasped great fistfuls of the bountiful bum and rolled them in his palms, showing to all the intimacies of the anal divide. But when his finger roved down this the woman turned her head sternly to the Beadle: "Sir! This is not written. He does not need to do this to me."
It was the master surgeon of the prison who answered: "He is merely feeling where the flesh is fullest, Madam. You are to receive thirty strokes, the weals will be deep; this is in your own interest."
"Nor will she be looking forward to her second ration of thirty after this one, sir, I assure you," said the Overseer, going to a steaming bucket around which the snow had thawed. He drew out of it a toughly bristled brush, another item of stables rather than boudoirs, and roughly scrubbed up the fat of the cheeks with it. This caused the woman some pain. Screwing up her face she made second appeal: "Sir! Aaah! This rigor is not warranted. Ouch! We were put to the curry within. This is-hou!-cruelty, sir. Call your man off."
"He is teaching her to criticize him," said a lady in the arcade by Clotilda.
"What a heaven-sent pair; and to think they will get thirty. I have never seen a thirty."
Silence fell. The Overseer stood grimly back, pizzle-tip bending at the snow. The woman sank her head between her arms, where it lay like a ball. For a moment she looked all arse. Thwllllck!
With a whirr of air and a bloated whack the tough whip fell, streaking a weal full across the halves. These seemed to bound, the woman gasped, but that was all.
"Now she knows what the pizzle is like."
"Twenty-nine to come, Venetia!"
The second "sighting" stroke thumped down, somewhat lower. Again the buttocks bounded, this time cringing in for some seconds after.
"She will sing soon. Do not worry, he will make her sing."
The intense silence in the snowy yard was interrupted by another pulpy thwack. Everyone was watching the victim with bated breath, to see when she would start to crack. The Overseer hit with all his strength, grimacing and showing his teeth as he whacked in, seeming to stun the flesh there. After the fifth the woman's head slowly came up; she stared ahead, frowning, her jaw muscles standing out as she gritted teeth to bear it.
Thwacllk!
The man grunted as he hit, lunging with all his might. Her grunt answered his--"Uingh!"
Her feet twisted in. After the seventh there was a broad band of purple weal across her cheeks, a thick, blood-clotted bruise on the right. She shook her head from side to side, as if wondering.
"This is excruciating," she was heard to say.
With great effort she took two more, then cried out "Ow!" in a high, almost childish tone that caused much laughter.
"And not a third done," said a woman near Clotilda.
"She is squirming nicely now."
"Just wait until he taps the ruby."
At this point the Overseer deemed it necessary to raise the boss. He screwed it up higher, pushing the wide bum further apart and arching the back. The widow panted. With haggard face she turned to the Beadle.
"Sir! It is breaking my back. I cannot move from the strokes, in any case."
No answer was given her. She sank the billiard ball of her head between her arms.
"That will teach her to clench. She may not squeeze in now, Maud, just you see."
"And he can work lower, too."
"I do not think I can wait any longer. I shall have to come, and soon."
"I am saving it for the one with the titties."
The hot excited whispers, the tense giggles, irritated Clotilda. Two more cuts ripped in and, indeed, it appeared that the woman was now deprived of control of her gluteal masses. After each stripe the cheeks spasmed involuntarily, writhed fattily together, then slackened, limp, for the next belting crack. The man was not merely whipping with severity, he was cutting in with single-minded ferocity.
"Haaa!" The raucous pant at the next brought her head up, mouth open, saliva on her chin. Again she shook her head, wonderingly. "Cutting me in two ... he does not have to strike as hard as this. Is there no mercy left in the world, sir?"
As if to show her the meaning of the term her executioner brought down a jelly-juddering slasher of a stripe; the tip broke the blister on the right and a fleck of blood popped onto the snow. A sigh of satisfaction, even some faint claps, came from the arcades. Clotilda watched with widening, horrified eyes.
"Now he'll make her jump a bit, you watch!"
"Aaaaargh-naghkkkk!"
Her feet writhed in, her hands fluttered like fettered pigeons before her, and she cried loudly through the next three stripes. Right beneath her the broad band of bluish flesh was turning livid, lumpy, and enrawed on the right.
"Mercy! Oh God! This is agony!"
After one pitiless stunner the Overseer then took his pizzle at each end and bestrode the bench above her thighs.
The whispers augmented-"Now he is going to saw her, oh what heaven this is, Belinda."
"I'm soaking, too."
Suddenly an animal cry, shocking in its intensity, resounded through the court. "GOWWWW!"
Holding his pizzle across the length of her chief weal the whipper had rapidly drawn its rigous length to and fro across the rump, like a man drying with a towel. This energetic sawing tore off the thin integument of the weal and made all raw and moist.
The woman shrieked.
"SIRRR! It is not allowed ... it is not permitted . . . such rigor is not written . . . HOUUUU!"
The whip thrummed.
"GAOWWWW!"
From this point the punishment reached another level of intensity, it was plain. The pizzle whipped into wet flesh. The buttocks jumped, squirming madly. Insane tremors possessed the body. The feet beat against the benching, the hands scratched it to blood before, the bald head rocked like that of one demented. The pizzle kept up its pounding, pitiless work, the intervals ever longer. Blood oozed over the right side, then trickled in the crease.
"He is coming again ... ah, sir, kind sir ... AAARCH! I am in hell, I cannot stand another . . . oh God, merciful father, not another . . . AAAOO0-WWWWYOW!"
"This is what a whipping should be," said a voice. "They should all have had it like this, and more."
At the twenty-third the man "sawed" again, slightly lower down. A wardress administered smelling salts. With a vulgar motion the Overseer spat on his hand, and began again.
The last strokes recorded on the slate fell on slack flesh. The woman's head was between her arms again. A weakness seemed to have taken her. Her buttocks gave convulsive jumps but her lungs allowed her no air to bellow with. The last cut fell, as powerful as the rest, the Overseer stood back and wiped the sweat off his forehead: "Now see if you can stand up after that, Ma'am."
Indeed, the wardresses, still grinning, threw the bolts and stood aside as if to watch. Moaning dully, the woman did not move. Her swollen, tumefied buttocks twitched and shuddered, as though a sea of ants surged just beneath their skin. The bloody weal across their base oozed gently.
"Stand up, woman," said the Beadle. "You have had your score."
Her dazed face rose. With immense effort she half-rolled off the bench, pitched into the snow where she knelt, panting, her tunic skirt still high. For full a half minute, while she gathered strength like some stunned ox, the spectators saw her thus, the great breadth of her arse punctuated by the hairless vulval slit which bisected the grim wealing.
"Help me up," she said at last. "Ach, what he has done to me. . . ."
"Come, Madam. Rise. You have had but your deserts, and will profit by a sore bottom for a few days."
Weakly she stood up. Two wardresses took her arms. She limped off with them, her rucked skirtlet still high behind her and causing some merriment in the arcades.
The sunlight in the yard was swimming. As if dazed by the white snow Clotilda stood with a knuckle in one eye. For a second she seemed not to see. But she could hear. From a far distance the Beadle was saying, "Well, girl, what are you waiting for. Come and get your medicine."
And a woman's voice from the side cut in, "I have never seen one less anxious."
"Come, Clotilda Bramble, the time of retribution has arrived. Twenty-five strokes across the naked buttocks."
Then the gloating wardresses seized her and again, as if in great haste, stretched her on the bench. Clotilda felt the cold bars at ankles, knees, and wrists-then the heavy padded one fell on her waist. It took her breath away. Her skirt was raised upon it. She was bare. Then the ratchet of the boss was turning beneath her. The wardress working it whispered in her ear, "Pretty traitor, say your prayers; this pizzle is the toughest I e'er seen."
"Spread her well, Sister," said the Overseer. "This one has more strength in her hams and I mean to take her full across their width."
"I'll spread her for you, Mr. Robinson."
"Ow!" said Clotilda. Her back felt arched beyond belief; warm beneath her mons, the boss thrust up her loins painfully. She felt herself pouting upwards for the whip and at the same time realized that the bar at her back deprived her of all control of her pelvic basin. Her buttocks were limp masses.
The Overseer scrubbed them hard, then palped them with calloused fingers. Then he laid the pizzle athwart her crupper. Its tip felt wet. There was a pause, a quick and brutal ripping of the air and Clotilda heard herself call out, "AOW!"
"Now it has begun," said a laughing voice. "What a bound!"
The first stroke had fallen across the full breadth of her girth and, as promised, its excruciating pain and bum only came to her some ten seconds after the meaty impact. She tried to bury her head. Merciful Heaven! Twenty-four more. She counted to five and then lost count, realizing that the enormity of physical suffering had brought her soundly to her senses, was making her live in a new and terrible way, with an intensity in every fiber of her being She felt the helpless masses of her buttock cheeks churn and writhe of their own accord, under no known impulsion of hers. He had welted her right across them, even rather high, and, as she awaited with starting eyes the next drubbing whack, part of her horribly admired the monster thrashing her. Something instinctive in her knew that he was perfectly punishing her. She was sweating and panting by now and suddenly she heard herself shout. A ferocious slash had bitten into her bum at its most tender spot; she felt a trickle from her right cheek. She was aware of the satisfied murmurs from the spectators, the stifled clapping of gloved hands.
"Bravo, Mr. Robinson!" said a woman's voice. "That is the way to treat traitors. Now she will feel the tip properly."
"It is a superb weal," said another. "I declare I have never seen its rival. You would say he has hit each one on the same place. So pulpy. And but two inches wide, I'd wager."
"As many thick by tomorrow, Venetia."
"Dear God!" beseeched Clotilda with chattering teeth. "How many more to go?"
The young man frowned at his slate. "There have been seventeen. There are eight to fall."
"That is a tolerably severe bruise," said the surgeon, advancing a pace.
"Do you mean to intimate, Doctor," said the Beadle, "that leniency should be used? We were charged to treat these traitors severely, thrash them thoroughly."
"Sir, sir, good Sir Robert," Clotilda clamored, her feet tattoing, "remit the rest. I am in HELL!"
"These are but crocodile cries," gruffly interjected the Overseer. "This is a fat rump and 'twill do no lasting harm. But let me work that strip for you with these last and ye'll have one traitor less in England."
"It is a severe weal," persisted the surgeon, peering over the striped bottom.
"A surface graze, sir," sneered the Overseer. "I must be allowed to do my job."
"All the same, I counsel other disposition of these final stripes. The nerves are so aroused that it will hurt her just as much to whip down on the thighs. Four to each side, Mr. Robinson."
"All on the right, sir."
"Four left, four right, if you please."
With a spitting curse the Overseer stationed himself at Clotilda's head. He was clearly furious as well as in full rut, for before her eyes now she could see his stained breeches a'bulge with his manhood. From this position he took a pace back and whipped the pizzle with all his strength down over her right cheek.
"GAOWWWWWWRR!"
It was the hardest stroke she had had. The thong whistled down her thigh, its stony tip eating into the tender flesh of her upper leg. Breathless, Clotilda's open mouth sought air in panic. This way was much much worse. The angry Overseer was out to make it living hell for her, indeed.
"Tighten her more, Mistress. Get her right up forme now."
The ratchet of the boss creaked again. Clotilda couldn't breathe. A second slash down her left thigh ended excruciatingly behind the knee.
"Oh this is perfect," said a bystander. "She is feeling the full length of the whip now. And see how he is hitting now."
Two more on the right, two on the left, then a final belting crack on each. It was over.
Clotilda was helped up by the wardresses. Her legs were quivering like a randy mare's, but yet felt stiff as stilts. Racking moans shook her body. She wrung her head from side to side.
In the corridors through which she was taken one of the wardresses at her side taunted, "D'ye feel like betraying your King now, Miss Bramble? You're lucky you don't have to go out at the cart's tail tomorrow with Mistress Treadle."
One they passed grinned and rubbed her backside significantly.
But two elderly women prisoners shook their heads.
"They do not need such severity. Look at her bum; she has been cut to ribbons, quite." With the exception of the widow, who was taken to a cell, the seven sufferers were laid out on straw mattresses in an upper dormitory; they lay on their bellies, groaning and breathless, while salve was put on their wounds. Once two rich ladies came in and examined the weals. Clotilda felt cold fingers on her richly purple thigh-welts. A wardress told her the women had paid handsomely for the pleasure. After an hour's repose all seven were given back their clothes again, but for young Susan Brown, the pisser, who kept on her flogging frock. Then, still aching and leaden-buttocked, they were escorted back to the refectory room. Shortly the Matron came in, jingling her keys. She was smiling.
"So now you fine ladies have tasted our good prison pizzle and know what it is to have an arse," she began. "Feeling a little less uppity now, I'd wager. Mr. Robinson worked you all well, and now you know what to expect if you come within these walls again. For I know how to deal with women. I have some seventy under my care here now and I can bare the bottom of any one of them. Only yesterday I had a woman of fifty, a grandmother, sobbing in here like a schoolchild. Ask about, question my prisoners. They will tell you I know no pity; I mean to show you so 'ere you leave. Stand out, Sue Brown."
The lissom little thing, still in her abbreviated flogging frock, stepped forward from the rank. Now that the worst of her suffering was done she had caught hold of herself, and appeared tearfully resigned.
"I am mistress of this prison and consider your pissing in it an insult."
"Please. An' I could not help it, Ma'am."
"You must learn to hold your water like a woman."
"Once I had started I couldna stop. ..."
"Sister Rye, what do we do with pissers here?"
"Bare their bottoms and thrash their bottoms," came the grinny reply.
"Sister Hutchinson?"
"Master Birch on the buttocks seems to work wonders, Matron."
"Give this chit a dozen, but first duck her in horse-piss."
Pitifully pleading, the girl was seized by both arms and dragged to a steaming bucket or small barrel. Her dark head was ducked and ducked again in the foamy brew; finally she was held under till she writhed and kicked, to be let up soaked and gasping, half drowned.
Before the facing wall there was an iron bar, thigh-high; in front of it a small slotted pillory for head and hands was latched within a frame, adjustable. Sue Brown bent over the bar, her ankles shackled to either strut, forcing wide her legs. Hem high she showed how brutally welted had been her light liquid hinds. The pillory was lowered, and head and hands guillotined within.
"Gag her," said the Matron, glancing up at a barred window. "We don't want that soft-hearted Surgeon in here."
A thick sponge was forced vertically into the widely opened mouth, a wet rag wedged in on that, and the whole strapped grimly tight behind her head. The girl panted, her eyeballs bulged.
One said softly, "It will be torture to whip her so, Madam. You do not know how tender ..."
"Silence!" roared the Matron. A wardress strode. It was Rye, lean birch in hand and pure fury in her eye. The twigs whistled, flicking cleanly across the shelf of the speaker's fleshy bosom. She ducked with a cry and another cut striped her neck.
"Now," said the Matron. "If you have never seen a salmon leap you may learn now. We know no silly mercy here. If I had my way, each one of you would be reporting here daily for a dose like this, till you saw reason. Proceed, Mistress."
Silence raged in the long room as the woman addressed her rod in measuring quiver to the poor wounded buns. Then the first hoarse whistle of her twigs broke it, the withy limbs clipped in. The buttock cheeks knotted energetically, the girl gave a grunt. The thrashing continued so, in drear silence punctuated by the frightful flaying strokes, the wet mewling from behind the gag. Clotilda saw the Matron stiff as a sentry, hands fisted at her side. She nodded her smiling face after each punishing welt. At last it was done and the sufferer led from the room by the junior wardress, Hutchinson.
The Matron looked at the remaining six as if seeing them for the first time. "You are dismissed," she said curtly. But at the door Clotilda turned. "Miss Bramble, you may stay." Her jaw slacked. "I have done nothing."
"It is what you are going to do about which I wish to apprise you." The Matron gave a chuckle.
Wardress Rye, having set down her verge, closed the door and approached. She appeared to be trembling. She put her hand on Clotilda's right ham and Clotilda winced.
"He gave you something to sit on, yes? You will take your carriage ride back standing?"
She looked from one to the other of them. The Matron, too, had come close. Clotilda saw her corrupt face, the down on her upper lip.
"You have a tolerably sore bottom, Bramble?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"And would like to keep it from further harm, I suspect. Strip off."
"But I haven't . . . you can't ..."
"To your shoes and stockings."
Clotilda only hesitated briefly. Once more she removed her gown and shift. She stood naked before them but for buckled pumps, her thin white stockings gartered on plump thighs. The wardress was behind her. She held a heavy iron bar, perhaps four foot in length and provided with straps at each end. Kneeling, she strapped Clotilda's ankles in these, forcing her to stand widely straddled.
"What are you doing to me? Please."
"They ought to order the curry for them afterwards, Matron, as well. That would make this pair tingle."
"It was the ones on the thighs did the work."
"Please. What ... I have paid my penalty. ..."
For Clotilda found her arms gripped behind her back, two leathern cuffs buckled above her elbows and joined by a short strap that was tightened, arching back her shoulders, throwing out her bulging bosoms. She was helpless, scared.
The Matron plucked her right nipple, squeezing it and then twisting.
"It is a custom among us that when an Overseer comes in especially for a flogging to reward him for it." She paused. "Mr. Robinson asked for you."
"Asked for me?"
There was silence. "To have you," the woman said drily.
Sudden understanding flamed in Clotilda. Her face blazed. "No, you cannot ... it is not permitted. I shall complain...."
"To whom?"
"To my Judge." There was a laugh. "If there is an ounce of justice left in the realm ..."
"Don't be silly, child. He won't touch your maidenhead. If you still have one. He prefers to satisfy himself in another manner."
"What manner?" "You will find out."
But she knew.
"Come, girl." They were grinning by the open door. Clotilda could only advance slowly, one foot at a timt, lugging the heavy bar. She saw the flagged, sun-dappled corridor she had come down. It was deserted of prisoners or wardresses now; she saw an open door at the end, low of lintel, flames from a brazier dancing within. The Matron pointed.
Clotilda turned her brimming orbs. "As you are a woman, I beg you-spare me this indignity."
The briny birch whined into her tender rear-spheres. Excruciating pain lashed through her. She squealed, arching, her free fingers and hands fluttering like stricken birds either side her waist.
"By Heaven, Hutch, I have a taste to birch this one in any case."
Clotilda lurched forward. It was colder in the corridor. Her buckled shoes rang as she slowly, nakedly, legs held open, advanced. And as she went to her destiny the figure of the Overseer became ever more distinct in the rampant shadows beyond that door. He was waiting for her alright. He still wore the thonged singlet which finished! his waist, his springy chest hairs protruding above. Below the waist he was bare, it was increasingly plain, and it was below the waist that Clotilda, melting within, was looking. His muscular thighs were astride and between them rose or roared up, licked by the shadows of the brazier's rosy flames, the iron crowbar of his manhood, belly high already , its cobra head blood-engorged, slick, and slightly throbbing at sight of its victim.
Clotilda shuddered, moistening viscously within. Gast's had been like that, just as great. Barreling into her from above. It came back now, clear across the centuries. Distantly a bell rang in the prison. Like her cry within the atrium. The Roman steward, grinning, curly-haired, surprisingly young, standing between her spread legs on the bench, caressing his balls. Valeria saying gently, "Draw your knees up, Clotilda, it will make it easier for yourself. Besides, you will be able to see better."
See! She had seen, she had felt, the thick shank, turgid tool, moistened with saliva, quivering with anticipation, eye a-leak, slide suddenly into her quaking gluttonous tunnel. The fat glib tongue at her pit had felt the rub, the sensuous slide, the first pistoning shrugs and she had gritted her teeth at its giving. Her knees jacked up to her armpits.
"NNNggggg!"
Again the gut-wrenching spasm clutched her; upon the rugous hide her doubled body writhed, her head rolling, dizzied with ecstasy. Yess-ecstagony! Dimly she was aware that her captors were chuckling, that the pillar of stony, glowing flesh was slid, streaming, from her.
"An extraordinary bedewing, my lady."
"These Brits are passion personified." Clotilda felt her head lifted. Valeria hefted her by the hair face-on to the wide raw pulsing bulb of the thing that had speared her. Its shiny sides were literally dripping. "Taste yourself, princess."
At first she resisted, then he thrust, her lips clothed the bobbing prong. Her face was full of absolute maleness, she had to suck her cheeks to breathe, she felt the seething of its root upon her teeth, as Valeria gently rocked the back of her head to and fro. When the man withdrew it from her, it made a clam-like suctioning sound from her lips.
"A minute more," said the matron with a laugh, "and it would only have come out after a few good swallows, I suspect."
The handsome young steward leant forward, lowering it vertically at the puffy moss-lips and placing his hands either side her on the bench. He recoiled with a curse.
"By Bacchus, this pelt is thorny."
Instead, he put his hands upon her aching breast-masses. The now slickened and almost puce-colored kidney-head aimed itself down and sat itself in her. He began a steady prodding of the elastic membrane.
"Hm, a tough one, milady."
"As painfully as possible, please."
He withdrew, raised himself a tiptoe. Clotilda whimpered abjectly at the dreadful poised piston. Then it was lanced utterly into her with a shocking driving screwing lunge she felt at the back of her head. It was then she yelled.
"Come in, me dear," said Overseer Robinson at the iron-bound door. It clanged shut behind her. Definitively. In the dancing shadows from the brazier Clotilda looked about, dazed. The length and strength of his erection appalled her. Her knees melted. The cowled head seemed to be pulsing at his navel.
"Please," she whispered, fettered.
He slapped her right rump, meatfly, and she squeaked.
"Sorry if I had to tender them a bit, missie, but you must admit ye feel less treacherous now. Heh? Heh?" He tweaked a thumb-thick nip. "The pizzle was a good 'un and there was no sense in not letting you feel it. Those cheeks'll heal but I wager if we meet again, me gel, you'll know who's master. Come now and we'll make all better for you." "Unnnhhh!"
Clotilda found herself flung over a refectory table. Her legs were held wide behind her, her welted rear parts quivered like the flesh of mussels wrung from a shell.
"Please not in the ... . not up the . . ."
Lightning volted through her.
THREE: RELIGIOUS
"Which Art in Heaven. ..."
"Which Art in Heaven," they intoned in response.
It was the first Sunday of the month and the Reverend Matthew Bramble led his collected children and servants in evening prayers. It was a mild summer night but the reverend's mien was as ever stern, as he surveyed his no less than thirteen progeny, four of them male and the rest, disappointingly, girls. For one of these chastisement was in store.
"And forgive us our ..."
The Victorian paterfamilias had not done so badly-so would have said any cursory glance around the ruddy-damasked room, at the nine bonny girls, their ages ranging from seven to twenty-three, their faces heightened and expectant. The reverend spoke from a lectern in front of the fireplace. Beside him, also facing the sober gathering, was his wife Emily, a short woman who, apart from her somewhat thinning fair hair drawn tight back from a wide part, showed no signs of age at all, let alone of mothering so many lusty infants at her abundant breasts. She was forty-six, had just had Tommy, and the virile reverend took her nightly; she still, on occasion, suffered the iron of his will in other ways, too.
"Teach us to bear suffering ..."
"To bear suffering ..."
"And infernal pain ..."
"And infernal pain ..."
"As did Thy Holy Saints ..."
The children knelt on the carpet in two rows, before their seats. The servants were behind them. Clotilda, fifteen, permitted herself a slight nudge of her older sister Elizabeth's elbow. A sly, half-frightened smile came back. The girls both felt a sense of suffocated suspense; their hearts beat, they were breathless with anticipation. For tonight was the night of "strokes." Who would be picked to suffer like those Holy Saints, in front of all, as a lesson in Christian duty and control, an offering-up of human fortitude that the Reverend Matthew Bramble made one of his brood endure on the first Monday of each month? Who would wear the dreaded "drawers" tonight?
"For Thine is the power to punish ... for ever and ever. Amen."
"Amen," was echoed fervently.
There was a general relaxation, then, as the assembled children recovered their seats, some of them comfortable arm chairs, the deeper of which was sometimes shared by two, as by Tommy, six, and Fanny, seven, inseparable companions as ever. The servants started putting their hard seats to the wall of the long room and filing out, the men with bows and the housemaids with little curtseys. Prayers were over, if penance was not. A burly senior footman put logs on the fire behind the reverend with heavy fire-dogs and the latter nodded significantly to him as he left the room last, "Very well, John."
Clotilda hoped it would be Clara, age eight, who was always being pert to her. How she would love to see the birch hissing into her snub, chubby little buttocks in their skin-like coating of muslin breeches. She soon would sing out under a few. On the other hand-Clotilda shifted closer to Elizabeth-it could be herself. She hadn't been picked from the pack for months now. Her eyes skidded as her father adjusted the large, brass-bound book on his lectern. There was only one present not truly of their family and she was curiously disturbed by him on these occasions. This was Edmund Fairlowe who, six months before, had married her sister Ruth, eighteen, and had been, as a budding curate of twenty-seven, taken into the bosom of Matthew Bramble's favors. He was a big fair man, handsome in a military sense, his hair cut close, his bearing ramrod. He had almost the height of that dark pillar of a man, his father-in-law, and hands that were, if anything, slightly larger. Clotilda felt curiously afraid of him. He sat or rather lolled beside his lovely young wife, who looked placidly, contentedly up at his slightly scornful face.
"By the way," said the reverend, and he said it, searching in his book, casually, almost amicably, "nobody smiled during prayers, did they?"
At once a deathly silence fell on the family. Clotilda felt a spider clutch her spine. They froze. The reverend never had to ask any of his brood to "own up." They always did so, of their own accord. The power of his presence was enough.
"Hm?" he added, in the same absent, amicable way.
Ten ghastly seconds ticked by. Ten more times tocked the ormulu clock on the mantel behind the swarthy reverend. Then Clotilda felt a rustle. Pale-faced, Elizabeth stood up. She ran her tongue over dry lips once and said, "It was I, Father. I am sorry."
"You know our rules?"
"Yes, Father."
"Then I shall have to make you sorrier still, shan't I?" said the reverend with a smile. "Six. Fetch it, please, Elizabeth."
The girl went to the back of the room. From a cupboard she took a long, intensely lean strip of tough, whippy whalebone. She presented it to her father with a little curtsey.
"I am sorry to see this in you, Betty," he said, accepting and flexing it. "We shall have to drive this imp of Satan out of you."
Elizabeth, a tall, willowy girl, had on a stone-colored gown of light material whose fall over her nether flesh was close. Her waist was cinched by a broad patent leather belt and as she moved the thin stuff moved over the long bell-shaped posteriors. She placed a high-backed chair in front of her, a yard away, standing in profile to the company, to the left of the reverend, facing it, the seat away from her. Then she took off her belt and secured it tightly round her thighs, just beneath her bottom.
"Now broaden the base of your person," she was told, kindly.
Elizabeth did so, reaching gracefully to the chair-back and gripping it with her hands, her face staring straight ahead with a somewhat startled expression. There was a good Grecian bend to her back, against the braced legs, and the skirt's summer stuff drew drum-taut over the surprisingly globular young cheeks.
There was utter silence for some seconds. Without unseemly haste the reverend measured aim with his dark rapier, indenting the fatty underhang with its slightly swollen tip before all eyes. Then he cut. The drear whirr of air was completed by a sharp snap as the bone bit in, visibly lifting the fleshy rounds. Elizabeth gave a sharp intake of breath but stared determinedly ahead, like a runner for the end of the race.
Frrrup!
"Hah!"
A third time the beastly bone bit in and joggled the young buns; in the long pause allotted her after it Eliza looked back, her frowning face flushed and breathless as she strove to master the growing pain. She was unable to keep now from certain natural stirrings of her legs as one scorched haunch rose and rolled against its twin. Her eyes sought the grimly poised and flickering limb, the source of all her woe, then closed despairingly as she turned her face forwards once more.
And once more the reverend clipped cleanly full across the wealth of rump-meat bent before him.
"Ow!"
Clotilda stole a glance at Edmund Fairlowe. Lolling on the side of his spouse's seat he was openly stroking up a heavy tube forming under the fawn stuff to the left of his flies. This arrogant indulgence, evidently countenanced by Ruth, held Clotilda riveted, blood beating up behind her eyes, throughout the next, and last, two cuts. When she looked back, she blinked.
The whalebone was always an excruciating instrument and before their riveted eyes Elizabeth was now true testimony to its efficacy. Arched erect, speechless in pain, her buttocks bunched up by the belt beneath them, she sought great rolls of their scalding surfaces in her hands. Her riven face was squeezed as any nut, panting.
"Let that be a lesson to you not to smile in prayers," said the reverend, proffering her his wand.
The girl gathered some control and frantically restored her belt to its proper position on her person. She ducked a curtsey, kissing the end of the rod as she did so and saying, "Thank you, Father." She then took it, threaded her way through them with averted eyes, one hand rubbing, and put it back. Clotilda plumped out a cushion for her to sit on and the girl took it still writhing. The reverend drew himself to his full height.
"The suffering of the holy saints was as nothing to those of our Blessed Savior, who endured the crucifixion only after the cruel Roman scourging. We poor sinners must strive to emulate a little of His stoicism and control of the things of the flesh. For this reason, as you know, I favor one of you, the first Sabbath of each month, to suffer here before us all, a token of a tithe of what the saints endured and to try to show true Christian fortitude under suffering. We may not all attain to their blessed beatitudes, but we can, for this short pause of our life after prayers, attempt a small penance among ourselves, which we offer in all humility up to Him who knew all pain." Who was it going to be?
"Ou, how that stung," Elizabeth whispered in Clotilda's hair.
The reverend now read from his book. It was
chapter from Foxe's Book of Martyrs; they learnt about a saintly man who died broken on the wheel without a sound, in apparent bliss. When it was over, their father closed the book, put it and lectern to one side and pulled a velvet bell-pull beside the fire. Almost instantly, as if they were waiting outside, which in fact they were, servants entered, supervised by the footman, John. Two huge stable-hands came in first, carrying on twin poles the dreaded block, copied, with refinements, from Keate's at Eton. This was placed in the open space before the fire, in the center of their gathering. It was an "anvil" block, leaking hungry straps and clearly capable of holding the most rambunctious offender in position for the birch. Two neatly uniformed housemaids next came forward; the first deposited two steaming buckets of brine to the right of the block. From each deep bucket sprouted three lean leathery birches, each wrapped in wet cloth at its holding end. The second maid left a jug with an amber solution in it and a brush on a tray. When these had left the housekeeper stood at the door with a morsel of white linen on her left arm. She was a dry, vinegary spinster of sixty and ruled the underhouse with a rod of iron.
"Are they wettened, Miss Harden?" asked the reverend.
"Well damped to cling," pronounced that person tartly; whereupon she went to a screen at the end of the room,
disappeared behind it, and came out without her linen. After a glance at her employer she curtsied and left in a disagreeable way. The reverend reached to the mantel for his deck of cards. A shiver ran round the room.
"I shall now select the privileged one among you," he said, flipping and riffling the cards.
No one had ever seen these, but it was how they were selected for their torment. Clotilda felt absolutely overwrought with tension; she longed to "go." Justice was in the air. Then the reverend cut the pack. The lot was cast. In a sepulchral tone, staring straight at an auburn-haired girl in the front row, he said, "Maud."
There was an aghast hush. At twenty-three Maud was the oldest among them and it was a very considerable indignity she thus suffered. She was a big sensual girl who for some reason had never got married, and for this-so some of them said-her father bore her a grudge. She was not plain, though her face was pulpy, teutonic, in its round halo of burning hair. But her body was sultry and full of sex-Clotilda knew she masturbated a lot-and it was perhaps for this that the reverend liked to beat her unbegrudging flesh. The hush lasted. This had not happened before. Maud had been drawn only last month.
"Matthew!" murmured his wife. "You cannot ask Maud to, again. She still has the weals from last time. This will make twice in a row."
The Reverend Matthew Bramble turned a brow of thunder on her.
"Your sense of succession is perfect, my dear. Maud is lucky to be chosen again so soon."
"She is a grown woman, Matthew." "All the more able to bear the rod. And profit by it." With a sigh the designated girl stood up. "I am ready, Father."
With a slumberous hip-roll she went and stood before the block. Maud had on a bottle-green frock of fitting rep merino. She creaked as she walked for she corseted rigidly, being a round wooden tube in appearance from rib-cage to hips. These fell softly long and very full, pear-shaped globes with a sturdy weight and warmth in them. She waited, her lips lightly parted. The reverend cut again.
"Forty-two," he announced from his deck.
There was a swift hiss of breath from Tommy and Fanny who rubbed their hands between their knees.
"Matthew!" protested his wife again. "So many. You cannot ..."
He turned on her furiously-"My dear, these interjections must cease. Maud is perfectly able to bear a good count. What is more,' he went on, to the company, "tonight as I had a touch of rheumatism in my shoulder and cannot lay on as tight as I should like, I shall call on one who has joined our family to administer. Edmund, you were at Westminster. Did you birch there?"
"Yes, sir." With alacrity.
"Then will you perform the honors tonight? You have been at enough of our little assemblies to know the rote by now."
"Thank you, sir."
The man got off his chair-arm and lounged forward, measuring Maud's buttock-mass with his eye. The erection in his trousers was quite evident.
"I shall enjoy the privilege, sir." "Remember. Complete rigor. You must not spare her a farthing of the cost." " 'Twill be tight, sir."
There was a pause. Maud lowered her head. She murmured: "Then I am to ... it is to be Edmund who ..."
"Edmund is one of our family now, Maud. He will whip the sin from your flesh. Modesty will not be offended. After all, you will have the drawers. Now go and put them on."
In the silence that ensued Mrs. Bramble was heard to breathe another protesting "Matthew!" Again the girl broke the pause, turning with ducked and crimsoning face to make through her siblings to the screen at the back, behind which she disappeared.
Edmund Fairlowe peeled off his jacket and, rolling up his right shirt-sleeve, revealed a bicep big as a Dutch cheese. The reverend, his own hands collecting his coat-tails as he strode before the fire, looked at him with a smile of satisfaction.
"I want every cut to sting like fury, m'boy."
"It will, sir. With your permission I like to start just above the base, and work down."
The reverend nodded approval. "Third and fourth quarters. Good, very good."
"I have never flogged a lady, sir."
"Do not let them soften your stroke by tears, and silly squirmings, Edmund."
" 'Twas a salty sixteen you gave her last month, Father. Our Head Busby ne'er cut so well."
"Then profit by the marks, son. Ginger her up on the old weals, so that she doubly smarts. Three dozen, lad, and for the last six whip in. Make her suffer hell to enter heaven."
The light of fanaticism shone in Bramble's eyes. Edmund picked a drippy verge from the nearest bucket and looked at the five toughly budded twigs-each one of them whips-with respect. Then he lashed it against the side of the block, on which it made a ripple of wiry raps.
"Jove! Tight," said the youth. There was a stir. Maud came forward, her face downcast and her expression one of someone about to swallow very unpleasant medicine, indeed. She stood before the block, her skirt quivering lightly as it hung from her corset marks, as if in a minute breeze.
"Remember your Savior," said the reverend. "Carry on.
"Go over," said Edmund Fairlowe.
Maud picked up her dress and knelt on the ledge of the block bare-kneed, for she wore no stockings in full summer. There was a shallow groove for her shins there, with straps for ankles and knees. The thin soles of her shoes poked over the ledge, looking like poor twin victims themselves. She then bent her upper body forward over the block which was covered in leather; its sickle-shaped curve was such that Maud had to arch up her crupper completely. This fatty filling of the stuff over the broadest part of her filled the girl's face with crimson. Her bust on the forward ledge, she then reached either side to grip two iron rungs.
"Desdemona," said the reverend.
A freckled-face, gangling girl came forward, frowning.
She buckled down ankles and knees, seeing that the skirt was over both; then attended in similar fashion to wrists and elbows at the side, so that Maud appeared to be grasping the block as if for dear life. Then, as if securing some felon, she drew a broad leathern belt tight about the sufferer's corseted waist, which creaked its protest. Indeed, little Desdemona put her slippered foot on one side of the block to secure purchase and was not satisfied till her older sister was a breathless scarlet. Then she slowly drew up, like a connoisseur uncovering his gem, the folds of green skirt which she draped back over the belt. She then curtsied to her father and resumed her seat. Maud's plump buttocks were exposed in the almost transparent white muslin drawers which, "well damped to cling," clung like a skin to their opulent surfaces. Indeed, the filmy stuff, which finished mid-thigh, positively accused the hefty pair, and made them appear more nude. Miss Harden made sure the garment was pumiced until threadbare, and several sizes too small for one of Maud's bulk.
There was perfect silence in the room at sight of this magnificent backside, sturdy without being hard, broad, thick and deeply cleft-two sides of meat, Clotilda thought with the usual tremor of terror-thrill, into which the lagging birch would cut pitilessly. A few bluish striations, turning almost brown on the right flank, were visible beneath the stuff.
"Forty and two stripes," said the reverend gravely: and added, crossing himself, "In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." Then he said, "Begin."
Maud lowered her face, whose crimson contrasted with the lily of her rear, while Mrs. Bramble gently stationed herself to one side with smelling salts and a kerchief dripped in eau de Portugal, murmuring, "It is too many, Matthew, too many by far." Edmund Fairlowe drew back a pace with his withes. Frrrsp!
With a long sweep, gathering velocity, he cut. The twigs bit and hung, lifting the fatty masses and chewing in their pain there. Maud started rather than gasped. When they fell back the twigs could be seen to have clawed scarlet streaks across both sides, on the lower area of the previous weals. Edmund had taken her, as promised, low. After a long pause he cut again. He then waited and gave three slicing strokes moderatley close together, each lapping excruciatingly into the right cheek with wet sounds. Maud's breathing thickened. Her streaked buns tried to huddle together.
Clotilda heard a hot breath in one ear. Eliza whispered, "He is trying to break her quick."
"Sssh," said Clotilda, quivering.
There was a long pause, then a rain of four stripes together, terrifically smacking in and shaking the sitters.
"Oh ow!" cried Maud suddenly.
"Silence," said Matthew Bramble through his teeth.
Clotilda felt her arm gripped. "See, he has split the drawers on the right already. They are through. He will draw before a dozen."
Clotilda shrugged off her excited sister's grip.
Maud's huge buttocks were now rolling and grinding against each other under this assault. She herself gave gasps and moans, her head down. The spectators saw the rich wealing of the nine ferocious strokes. They had fanged long lines, dark scarlet on the left, purple on the right, with black dots like peas where the tough buds had bitten. The meager stuff was bursting on the left chub, but, as Eliza had observed, had split on the right. It showed signs of failing lower, too. Edmund then delivered five terrible, clever stripes together. Shards of birch-rod spattered the carpet. The tips whipped the stuff off on the right side, which the martyr tried to turn from the blow, only increasing its lively lap. She herself had time to cry out an anguished "No," but then had no more breath but for panting gasps. The buttocks tried to squirm and squeeze but these cuts extended the area of punishment downwards, through the tender fold to the thighs. She was all raw and red for three or four inches of her most sensitive person.
Hoarsely, her flesh subsiding in the pause accorded her, Maud panted-"No ... I cannot ... it is enough. I am whipped enough now, Father."
Mrs. Bramble wiped her daughter's perspiring brow and offered her salts. "Matthew, she cannot stand ... it is surely enough."
Again he thundered at her-"It is enough of these protestations, ma'am. Be careful, wife, or you will rue the day." He turned amicably to his new son-in-law, saying, "This is very strict, sir. Do you intend to take her, er, fast tike this to the end?"
Edmund was whistling out a new birch. He touched its tip to his target whose right side was grazed and moist with the first dew from his weals.
As of itself the jellyfish round cringed in at the touch of this new tormentor. Her toes twisted.
"No, sir," said the youth. "I was laying the ground, and testing sensitivity. She has had fourteen and, with the last six to be whipped in, has twenty-two to go. I shall go three slow, over a minute, and then three in a row, as we used to say at school, fast and together. With the last four very fast and sharp."
"NO!" wailed Maud, turning her head. "Please all low, sir. Not together, not ..."
"Try to suffer in silence like the Holy Saints," gritted her parent.
"With your permission," went on the laconic youth, "I shall work low, mostly on the thighs and fold."
"The best place, boy. We must be cruel, to be kind."
"Ach, it is agony, so," Maud panted. "NAOUWWW!"
Edmund came again. The greedy wheepling of the new birch was echoed by the soggy flick of its bite. The big cheeks spasmed in, Maud's whole body was driven forward in a speechless jerk, her feet tattoing, her hands fisting the bars at the side-then she hung breathless, her buttocks flaccid, their scored surfaces heaving as a sea swell.
"I declare he has drawn," hissed Elizabeth excitedly, gripping Clotilda's elbow. "In a minute she will be all raw and bloody."
Again the birch lashed in; again the cheeks spasmed in agony, as though of themselves. Maud gave a whining gasp. The punishment continued as promised. After the first three "in a row" the thin stuff was quite flecked from her right side.
Now the punishment was entering a new phase. It was the turn of the fold to suffer, and the thighs beneath, the very softest areas of a woman's body. Edmund was particularly pitiless with these, scoring the wealed flesh with the claws of the birch-tips till the ruby purled in earnest.
"Whew! Good shot," was audible once from Ernest, aged eleven.
Twice Mrs. Bramble intervened again, exciting ever further her husband's pious ire. Finally, the four together were thrashed thoroughly home, each eliciting sudden sharp cries; Maud was left panting, her head hanging over the block, her bleeding cheeks quite stripped of the derisory drawers and squeezing turgidly together, then dilating in their agony. One might almost have said they steamed, before the company.
"You wish me to whip in for the last, sir?" the youth asked laconically.
"For the sake of her soul," solemnly enjoined the reverend.
In a low moan Maud said, "Father, I am quite done ... I, I have suffered enough."
"It is enough, Matthew," opined her mother.
The reverend's dark eyes gleamed. "I shall deal with you later, Mrs. Bramble," was all he said.
Edmund picked a new birch, whistled it wetly in the air, chose another, longer and evidently sappier specimen and stationed himself at his victim's hung head.
"Now, son, cut in" said the Reverend Matthew Bramble; and there was more than one spectator who observed the shape of his trousers as now the same as that of his son-in-law's.
Maud's ruddy bum was apparently by now beyond her control. Her fatty halves gave deep shuddery spasms of their own accord: despite her cruppery thrust, only the hint of her slice pouched back in the central diamond of those buttocks' base, and this she strove to squeeze out of view as Edmund drew back in aim.
Raising his rod on high, and himself a-tiptoe, he slashed down with all his stinging strength into the deep division of the jutting bottom, his twigs clipping in more under the right under-bum. Maud's body tried to bound, a hoarseness came from her throat, but only after several seconds did she manage to articulate a shout--"HOUAARRRRHHH!"
He let her pant her pain for half a minute or more, her open mouth drooling, then delivered another slash, this time slightly on the left. The block thudded in response.
"NRGHHH!"
The cheeks were quivering, almost bouncing now, and as they had opened a little she got her next down the great divide. Maud howled her agony. The leathery tips had nipped in around the tender pulp of the cunt.
"This is exquisite." Eliza was breathing like a grampus in Clotilda's burning ear. Her stirring thighs attested to the ecstasy of this agony.
Zzsssch! Another hisser whipped down the right cleft. Maud gave a choking howl.
"Matthew," gasped her mother.
Edmund completed the correction with two scalding stripes of the same stamp which were met with no more than raucous hawks, for Maud had lost all voice.
The youth quickly bent and unfettered her legs, thus regaling the company with the salutary sight of her stricken hams sweatingly churning and kneading at each other as her nether limbs stretched and flexed again, in the extremity of birchen agony. For many moments Maud verily appeared to be riding an invisible bicycle, as viewed from behind, her elbows bent, her open mouth beseeching speech.
"Merciful Heaven!' she was heard to pant at last.
"Offer up your suffering, such as it is, to the same," said the reverend, gently draping her skirt back over her lower person. A damp patch appeared instantly on the right. Finally released, the great girl fell to her knees, holding her sore parts. Only after a long interval could she muster up the strength to kiss the bloodied twigs and breath a heartfelt, "Thank you, Father," to her rigorous parent. The latter, smiling, bent and pressed the kiss of forgiveness on her inclined forehead. At which Maud colored hectically yet further and burst into tears. She found her way back through the ranks of her juniors to the screen, her body heaving.
A long silence ensued. The reverend gave a short address, said some prayers, then casually asked, "No one spoke during correction, I suppose?"
"I did, Father," Elizabeth breathily got out to that.
"No one else?"
"Me, sir," said eleven-year-old Ernest, the gulp audible in his voice, his tubbily breeched bottom quaking. Both were given eight. The assembly was adjourned, but for the grim admonition as they trooped out the door--"Mrs. Bramble, you will kindly stay behind." The reverend flexed his supple switch.
It was the custom, after these occasions, for a light collation to be served to the Bramble family in the withdrawing-room on the ground floor. Accordingly the children trooped down to it, already chattering happily. At one end of this long room, bestrewn with comfortable chairs and sofas, servants served sweet champagne and, for the younger fry, cider. Clotilda, full of a feverish, unsatisfied excitement, took a glass of the former and a piece of seed cake. The great french windows stood open to the elmy lawns and she drew near to them, needing the cool night air. Dark shadows, bluish black like weals, lay across the deep lawns beyond.
Gwendolyn, nine, was grinning. "Phew! That was a sizzler. It was the best since Desdy got three doz. Maud has such a lovely porky bum, I could watch her whipped all night."
"Anyway Lizzie enjoyed it," said Clara, eight, with a malicious wink.
"Except for her fourteen." "May I see them later?"
"No," said Elizabeth firmly. She edged Clotilda onto the terrace, whispering: "It still stings atrociously. Thank God I came first." She gave her sister an interrogative stare.
Clotilda shook her head. "But I'll burst if I don't soon."
"Her dress was absolutely stuck to her after," said a boy's piping voice. "Did you see?"
"And how he hit at her thighs. She won't be able to go out riding for a while."
Elizabeth drew Clotilda further off into the shadows of the lawn. "Listen," she said solemnly.
A window upstairs was still fully lit, open. It was the room they had just vacated. From it came a tick. An absolute sound.
"One," said Eliza fervently. There was a pause. "Two, three, four, five." A man's growl. "Six, seven, eight, nine. Ouch, that hurt. Ten, eleven . . . and one makes a dozen." The sound stopped. "I fear the mater is regretting her interruptions. You know what, Clo? What I'd really like is to see you get that beastly stingy bone across your fat, juddery, globby titties. That'd make you squirm. Just look at your nipples now. Why, my big toe is no bigger. Let me feel."
"Don't. Please." Blindly she asked, "Where's Maud?"
"Went into the garden, I think. How should I know?"
Clotilda lurched across the lawn. She was half sobbing for some baleful hidden joy, longing to be expressed. A slice of moon, a mere paring-like a bent rod, was in the air. Silent as a cat she crept up the alleys of the ornamental garden in her slippers. She came out under a big beech tree, an old friend. Here she kittled up her skirt and, still standing, sent a yellow jet between her legs crackling down onto the dry leaves. It seemed to go on and on forever. Sight of a whipped bum always had this effect on her; she was in a feverish tension of fear that someone might catch her doing this. Her father . . . what was his prick like? Fat and thick and silky as . . .
Suddenly she heard murmured voices, a man and a woman's. Two shadowy figures were standing by a herbacious border on the other side of a thick yew hedge, by an urn. Clotilda tiptoed closer, peered.
The man said, "I say, I am dashed sorry . . . you don't link ... I had to lay on, you know."
"You were strict in that room up there, sir," came the half-teasing answer.
The man was Edmund Fairlowe, the woman Maud. But it was a new Maud, her hair down, that Clotilda saw in the moon's young quicksilver.
"You certainly know how to birch a bum. Nice and low. I felt thrashed through and through, and still do."
"I wouldn't have whipped in like that at the end unless your father ..."
Maud chuckled creamily. "Oh those sore parts can be made sweet again, with a touch of balm." At which Clotilda, her heart hammering, saw the shy mouse Maud, a lecherous smile on her moonlit face, advance her right hand and begin unbuttoning the man's flies. "It was the way you whipped my legs I don't forgive you for. And stiff as a sentry all the time. You loved it, didn't you!" She tscked reprovingly. "Just look at what we have here."
What she now had there, Clotilda saw, was a proud pink prick, ruddy in its powerful kidney-shaped head, the eye of which drooled as she palmed the underbelly softly.
"I . . ." He gulped, panting.
"Tell me. When you said you'd never birched a girl before, did you mean it? Don't you rod Ruthie?"
"Well, I . . . that is, your father recommended it. Asked me to, in fact. Yes, I can say she gets thrashed all right."
"I'll bet she does. When do you do it?"
"Just before . . . last thing at night."
"Of course." Maud chuckled again and began gently to frig the pulsing cock, which at once kicked in her hand. "Tell me all about it. I want to know exactly how you do it; you know how anything to do with whipping excites me. Tell, tell, tell."
"Well," went on the youth increasingly breathily, "I kept those long school canes, y'know . . . hurt like hell ... it's never less than six and usually more . . . and of course, if she gets up, two over. I just wait until she takes it all. Bare bum and very low."
"Bending over the side of the bed?"
"N-no. Right over for the cane. A full spread and gripping her ankles, knees braced. Up goes the nightgown and in whistles the stick. I believe she hates it thoroughly."
"But loves it after, I'll wager. When you stuff this great glistening ramrod up her slithery twat."
"Actually, she has it coming to her tonight. I promised her one for making a fuss about being buggered. See, now that she's preggy I bugger her as much as I fuck her. She ... buggers like butter. It's as if a silky ring was drawing it out of me, just like you're . . . now. . . ."
"Promise me you'll give her fifteen tonight. We'll see who sits down most gently to brekker tomorrow morning."
"That's tight. I say if you go on like this . . . any l-l-longer. ..." Gasping, he grasped her breasts.
"Spoil a border?" Maud grinned. "We don't want to waste your thick hot gism there, do we, Edmund Fairlowe. Not when there's-this!"
She turned, leaving the engorged prick jabbing high into the night air. Lifting her dress about her waist she presented her scoriated hindquarters to the dart. She was bare.
"I can't put on my panjammies 'cos they would have got all bloody, too. And I'm too damn sore to sit on that stone bench like last time. So lam, cram, and jam it into my cunt from behind, you monster, and just see if I don't give you a butterier fucking than Ruthie's rubbery anus.
There!"
Bending, hands on shins, she spread her great mare's crupper. Nothing loath, he steadied his head and sliced in under it. She moaned in the anguish of ecstasy at once and Clotilda, watching the sliding shank piston in and out her, had to double up to prevent giving herself away. Her fat clit could stand no more and was shaking her through and through with its spasms, leaving great gobs on the grassy turf between her feet.
FOUR: COLONIAL
"There's going to be a flogging," said the fourteen-year-old Ian Forest, squirming his legs together excitedly on the sofa. "In fact," he rolled his eyes expressively, "I'd even say two, or three."
His sister, sitting in a wicker chair across from him on the verandah, clapped her hands. "Oh goody. I bet Mumsie'll make them jump a bit." At a year younger than her brother, Pamela looked the picture of English girlhood, with short blunt-chopped blonde hair swinging off her gym tunic and a chubby buttocky body.
There was silence for a second as the pair exchanged glances and then Clotilda, who had been sitting reading to them out of The Wind in the Willows, peered over her horn-rims at them and said, "Don't you two little sadists ever think of anything other than beatings?" She put down the book on her lightly-clad lap; her spectacles were plain glass. She didn't need them, but thought they made her look a little more severe and sexless for the job of governess she had taken on in the colony. It was a vain hope. In the stone-colored shantung Chanel she had bought just after the First World War in Bond Street her sinuously-curved body showed with every movement.
Pamela smiled roguishly. "Want to bet I can come twice? Watching them, I mean."
Ian rubbed his bony knees together and rubbed one palm up the side of his shorts. "Oh come on, Miss Bramble. Don't pretend it didn't make you all hot, and, and goosy, seeing Eileen get it yesterday."
"Lovely juicy bummy, all bent over ..."
"Tight as a drum."
"Or maybe two. And Mummy's cane cutting into it like a ripe plum. Ffft! Ffft! Ffft!" She reached under her skirt and rubbed the seat of her knickers.
With a sharp snap of her book Clotilda stood up, her short hems vibrating. "The sooner you two finish your holiday out here and get back to school in England and some discipline of your own, ouf, the better!" She strode off dark-cheeked and upstairs to her room, where she sat on the edge of the bed, quivering and mopping the back of her neck with a tiny lace handkerchief. It was the rainy season in the colony and frankly the plantation could be a steam bath some days. She had been here just over a week now and the heat was getting to her; three changes of undies a day at times.
She had answered the ad for a governess when the evidence was going against her and the Opposition lawyers were almost certain to be able to frame her as one of the Foreign Secretary's paramours-and a German spy. Mata Hari came to mind. They still hung women in England for treason; it was said to be quite a drop. Her own lawyer, a wily Scot, had counseled her to depart to foreign climes and remain there incognito, or incognita-as much as someone of Clotilda's build could. The island where a Mrs. F. Forest required "Sensible Governess two children on holiday from school in home in tropics" was not even a Crown Colony. Clo calculated, after some research in the London Library, that she couldn't begin to be extradited from it, even if the worst went against her, and departed with the usual minimum of clothing, hopes high.
She overlapped by two days with her predecessor who turned out to be a pretty Australian girl, addicted to brandy. She had given Clo one strange warning: "And, dear, whatever you do, don't cross Mrs. F." She rubbed one handover a sleekly trousered hip. "Mama spank."
Her employer turned out to be a maturely built woman of forty-eight whose somewhat sumptuous proportions, only slightly beginning to sag, were incongruously crammed into tight white riding breeches and a thin cream tennis shirt. This uniform, completed by gleaming boots kept constantly spurred, she wore daily, her long dark hair flying behind as she rode energetically about the plantation; this she ran as a widow, it seemed. She introduced Clotilda to her two winsome children and vanished. Clo tried to win their confidence and affection, only to find them a grinningly conspiratorial couple, surprisingly adult. It was at lunch the second day it happened.
The natives on the estate varied in skin color from a strong tan to a white as white as hers. The staff who ran the great rambling frame house under the tanteen trees were equally varied, being for the most part good-looking girls of a coffee hue; they wore charming checkered uni- forms exposing nearly all their legs, brief lawn aprons and caps, and unlike the field girls they stood high in steeple heels of glace kid.
Mrs. Forest had come in late from her work on the estate, her shirt patched with sweat, and one such maid had duly served them. She was a full tall beauty with a pensive face, thick brows and dark down along her upper lip. Beginning with her employer as she poured the coffee she gave a little gasp--a drop had fallen on the table cloth.
"Clumsy little idiot," said Mrs. Forest, a frown pleating her ivory brow. She seemed to think for a minute, then said, "Get a cane."
"Yes, M'm." The girl put the tray down and left the room.
In the silence that ensued Clotilda felt her heart beat up. The two new charges she had taken on were grinning and kicking each other under the table, in obvious delight.
Mrs. Forest smiled across the table. "I keep my house staff in order with a spot of stick. They can count themselves lucky. Outside it's the whip." As Clo's face continued to show consternation she went on, "You needn't worry, Miss Bramble, most of our Overseer floggings are given on the instance of the offender's family, not mine."
"How many lashes are you going to give her, Mumsie?" Pam twisted ecstatically on her seat.
"It'll be enough."
"Nice and low. Right in the fold," begged the boy. "Oh please let me give her one or two."
Mrs. Forest lit a cigarette and drew deeply. "Come to think of it, I haven't had the pleasure of straightening up Olive for quite a while. A quiet girl."
"Can I at least take up her skirt?" pleaded the boy.
"And feel her great big bubsies," jeered his sister from across the table.
Mrs. Forest smiled indulgently. "Very well, Ian."
At that moment the maid in question came in carrying what was quite the longest, willowyest, and sleekest cane Clotilda had ever seen. Her face expressionless, she stood beside Mrs. Forest's chair and said, "The cane, M'm."
Mrs. Forest took it and pressed its tip into the carpet by her side. "Bend over and take them down," she said quietly, after a moment.
Clotilda's peerless mauve orbs were wide open indeed, as the guilty sinner moved to obey. Mrs. Forest stared with wry amusement as her governess followed the maid's progress. The big girl went to a place by the wall behind Mrs. Forest's chair, stood with her feet together and reached under her skirt. A pair of pale blue panties slid over the strong olive legs, to nestle at the ankles. Then she bent gracefully forward with her hands on her knees, drawing up her hem behind.
"Are we all ready for some correction of clumsiness?" Mrs. Forest asked her daughter with a smile. The long cane shivered at her side.
"Nice and tight, but not too, Mumsie. Do make it last as long as poss."
"May I?" At his mother's indulgent smile Ian bounded forward unerringly. He raised the checkered skirtlet up the back, exposing a satiny-skinned pair of buttocks, very fully fleshed and deeply divided. Then he pushed the dress far further up the bending torso than it needed to go, finally fondling the hung breast globes like so much slabby fruit some purchaser was testing in a market. Returning to his place with a wide grin he reported, "Bare bum for you, Mummy."
"And plenty of it, I'd say."
"That's enough of that, now." Extinguishing her cigarette Mrs. Forest approached her victim. Standing well to her left, she measured aim, her cane tip joggling the buttery amber flesh at the maid's base. Then taking a pace she delivered a long whistling cut. It was far harder than Clo had thought and she blinked her eyes, mesmerized. A strong blue weal beat up across the lower globes. The girl had gasped but that was all. Her hung head was expressionless, as she stared down at the pattern of the carpet.
There was a long pause, then another sweeping stroke given with all the woman's weight. The maid winced. Ian's fingers were fisted in his groin. Pamela's eyes were fastened, however, on Clotilda's. The third whistled in, visibly lifting the two buttock lumps.
"Whew! Good shot!" whispered Ian with admiration.
Mrs. Forest said, "For these, get right over, Olive. I'd forgotten you've put on weight. Right down now and touch your toes."
A fourth stroke thumped in. The girl hissed out "Eeeth!" The force of it made her stumble forward a few inches. There was another long pause and then the fifth whined in, rather higher but with scalding force and stinging whip. The girl's hands intertwined, her knees chafed each other, her face crisped in pain as the woman made her wait to rise.
"Hurting?"
"Y-yes, M'm," came the barely audible reply.
"Clumsy little fool. Get up and pull yourself together and serve the coffee properly." Mrs. Forest resumed her seat, and another cigarette, at the head of the table after contemptuously tossing aside her stick, which bounced and jumped to the floor. Behind her the girl straightened painfully with contorted face, holding hard to her beaten buttocks. Clo felt her own throat dry. The maid was in an extremity of pain as she struggled to obey, pull up her panties and straighten her skirt. Then she had to take the coffee tray round.
"Probably cold by now," said Mrs. Forest discontentedly, as she took her cup. "More than Olive's seat is," Pam said, grinning. When the girl served Clo, she noticed her hands were rigidly trembling and that a large tear lolled at the edge of the one fat cheek. Observing her interest in these symptoms, the boy said, "She's feeling it worst about now. A caning mounts up worst for about two minutes afterwards."
Before she was allowed to leave the tall maid had to stand by Mrs. Forest's place with her back to them and have her weals inspected. Panties down, skirt up, the thick rounds confronted them all fully, barred by purple weals, inky blotches where the tip had fallen. "A beaut, Mumsie."
But Mrs. Forest shook her head. "Too wristy by far. I should have made her squirm with five." She dismissed the girl and raised her arms, soaked at their pits, in a long yawn. "Well, it's me for the saddle again, I suppose. God knows I thrash that young mare's crupper hard enough each day, she still pulls like an engine."
When she had gone there was a conspiratorial silence between the children. Then, "Did you?" from Ian.
A contemptuous "Of course" in reply from Pamela. "You?"
"No. It wasn't long enough. But I'm hard as a rock now. Want to feel?"
"No." Decisively. "And you needn't try to come into my room during siesta." Pam turned a disdainful shoulder. "I happen to have a touch of diarrhoea today, after all those mangoes last night, if you want to know."
The boy grinned at his new governess. "Wasn't that a lovely juicy bummie to whip into? How'd you like a few swipes like that across your you-know-where, Miss Bramble?"
Clotilda stood up decisively. "The question is, I think, how would you? And if you're cheeky to me, you will."
The boy confidently shook his head. "We get it at school. Not here. One of Mummy's rules."
"It may not be one of mine if you speak to me like that again. Now it's upstairs with both of you for your rest period, I believe."
"I could walk upstairs behind you, Miss Bramble," the boy said, "for the rest of my life."
Clotilda was seething by the time they were standing at the foot of the stairs. Her right palm itched to give these two impudent perverts the lesson of their lives. But the boy was mock-bowing away before her, all the while his sister grinned.
"Ladies first."
With a furious toss of her platinum mane Clotilda strode ahead, vainly trying to restrain the movement of her rump under the clingy material. Behind her she heard a gasped "Gosh! Look at those calves."
Then the little girl's chuckle-"Wait till the turning of the landing. There! With the light coming through like that she mightn't be wearing anything at all."
The two children were supposed to have a two-hour rest period, or siesta, in this the hottest time of day. Clotilda settled the girl first, then crossed the passage into the boy's room. The tousled lad had doffed his shoes and undershorts and an evident erection tent-poled his hanging shirt.
"I wish it had gone on longer, don't you, Miss Bramble?"
Clotilda fumed. "If I see a spot of . . ." she began, then turned on her heel and almost ran down the steamy passage, beating at her head. What had she gotten into here? She was soon to learn.
That afternoon she changed into her tank-style swimsuit and plunged into the tepid waters of the pool outside, which served as cooler for all about; a few coloreds were splashing merrily at one end, but they took little other than friendly notice of her.
The following day her impish charges took her on a conducted tour of the house. It turned out to be large and rambling with many dusty disused rooms. The kitchens were extensive and well staffed with cheerful colored girls in their laundered blue-check uniforms. They were almost all attractive in one way or another. The children introduced her to Mrs. Milner, a matronly lady of coffee hue in a fashionable short silk dress who presided here as housekeeper, it seemed. She might have just stepped out of the Royal enclosure at Ascot, Clotilda considered, with one exception: the thin quirt was not carried by her jockey, it dangled menacingly from her own broad leather belt. Oh no! Not here, thought Clotilda hopelessly.
"Isn't there anyone for a licking this morning, Mrs. Milner?" the boy asked.
"Not this morning, Master Ian," was the reply, with a little smile on the side to Clotilda, as much as to say, Boys will be boys.
Pamela broke in: "No one in restraint, the saddle strap?"
"No, I'm afraid they're all as good as gold just now. But I promise to tell you of the next alarming felony." They laughed and walked on. Clotilda saw Olive pass, but she did so expressionlessly, with a mere grave bow. Mrs. Milner excused herself.
The children next led her through a pantry to a long beamed scullery. At the end of this Ian excitedly opened a cupboard. Clotilda saw what she took to be horse-training equipment, bits and bridles, and leathern thongs hanging up. Ian took out one of the latter.
"These are mostly deportment devices in here, and Mumsie sees they're jolly uncomfortable. This one's an ordinary saddle strap."
Pamela was looking steadily into her mentor's eyes. "The belt buckles round the waist, see. Then this thin thong is buckled here in front and comes down through the cunt and up your cheeks behind. It's fastened excruciatingly tight, believe me." She rolled her eyes expressively. "Try to bend."
"Try to sit down," joined in her brother.
"And these notches catch you inside. I fear there's many a squeak. You always know if a girl is wearing one by the way she walks or, rather, doesn't. There's a chain one and one made of rope, but they're all darned uncomfy. Half an hour in them and you're sweating."
"And after a morning you're lathering," laughed the boy. bringing out another posture gadget.
"Ordinary bit, with ball. Generally fastened to wrists wrenched behind, in small of back. This collar here, with the studs under the chin, keeps your eyes on the ceiling. This is a whole bar business which practically breaks your shoulder-blades after any time in it at all. Oh and this," he chortled gleefully, taking out a remarkably lifelike representation of a gigantic prick, in black rubber with a ring at the root threaded by a leathern leash.
"I don't want to know about it," Clotilda said, turning. As another maid with the cardboard carriage of a guardsmen on parade passed by, she wondered how these dusky lovelies could ever merit these monstrosities. She heard the girl give a creamy chuckle.
"You really feel you've got something up your bung-hole with that inside." Then in an excited whisper, "Show her the scarlet slippers."
"Yes, yes."
Ian foraged and brought forth a pair of wooden clogs for a woman. There was a pretty toe-piece and then Clotilda looked again: the instep seemed to be sown with vicious little pins or tacks while a single spike reared on the heel. She felt a faintness in her eyes.
"Have to keep right on tiptoe in those. Soon stops slouching."
"Twenty times round the playroom," added the boy. "Gets messy. They hate it." Feeling for the wall behind her, Clo saw what were obviously old bloodstains, rather than rust, on die wood of the heel.
" 'Specially if Mrs. Milner puts something in the galls after."
"As she generally does."
"Show her the scarlet garters now."
"It isn't necessary. I don't want to see."
Again, Ian ferreted and found. She hardly had to have this contraption explained to her. The boy held it up by the belt, which was studded. The pineal thong, also studded inside, made Clotilda shudder. Not only was it, too, darkened by use but at its crotch were two narrow leather buttock garters that clearly buckled on the outside of each thigh, just underneath each hind. Threaded into these garters were a number of tiny steel burrs, supplied with vicious spur-like points.
Pamela frowned. "Given a good fatty overhang-like yours, Miss Bramble-these brutes worry in terrifically. Much better than any of Mumsie's anti-sitting harnesses actually. I've seen big girls with juicy red lines threading down their thighs begging for a beating rather than another hour of scarlet garters."
"They catch you just here, under the tushie!"
Clotilda felt the boy's curiously prehensile fingers feel and probe, knowingly, into her sulcus before she turned. She seethed with anger, dying to slap him, and indeed might have done so had not Mrs. Milner been hastening up solicitously.
"Oh, Master Forest. I quite forgot. There's Joyce. She's in the Second Scullery." "Oh goodie, Mrs. M."
They hastened through some lower kitchen corridors and then down some tiled steps. The sight that greeted them in the large bare scullery there made Clotilda's sensitive white skin goose.
It was a totally bare room with red tiling, and copper pans and kettles hung above an unlit fire. At the near end of it knelt a weird figure, bizarrely accoutered. A big maid Clotilda hadn't seen before was exacting an odd, and oddly exciting penance. She was of dusky skin and wearing thigh-length boots of glace kid; these had been firmly strapped together at ankle, knee, and thigh so that she knelt awkwardly on her knee points. She was naked otherwise but for an arm-glove which bound both her arms behind her back in a single stretch of the same material, forcing back her shoulders. Her glossy head was down and Clotilda could not at first discern what gagged her mouth-then saw! The maid had a scrubbing brush between her teeth, whose ends were strapped behind her head. Kneeling right over, her magnificently cleft rump upreared, she was no less than scrubbing the floor, out of a nearby bucket, with her teeth!
"Repeated laziness," explained Mrs. Milner, with a comfortable smile. They gathered behind the perspiring girl.
The bound maid tried to work feverishly, it was plain, to satisfy her superior, swabbing the soaked part of the floor with her brush. But balance was precarious and she was forced to give little tentative hops forward on her knees, her buttock cheeks rippling and muscling to obey her. Already there were several thin mauve lines athwart the lumpy lozenge of her sex pouched back. Her black eyes rolled back as the housekeeper amusedly approached her, unclipping the greedy switch from her belt. Her head moved quickly, scrubbing the soapy water on the tiles towards the grating of a drain.
With an almost lazy motion the staid-looking matron of a housekeeper then unleashed a perfect whistler across the satiny skin of the upthrust base.
"Silly child," she said, and thoughtfully applied another. The girl stiffened, her inner cheeks contracting, and then Mrs. Milner bit a far harder one into her. At this the girl straightened, her forehead creased in pain, then losing her balance she thumped over on her right side. The two young people laughed. To get back on her knees again was, it appeared, an effortful operation; the girl had to stretch out on her belly, and, balancing carefully, draw her torso up towards her knees. The housekeeper reclipped her belt-switch on and, with one elegantly-shod toe, tipped over the bucket of soapy water from which the girl was working, and into which she had to dip her face to wet her mouth-mop. The water cascaded over the cleaned part of the floor and it was clear the sufferer would have to go over the whole surface again.
"Useless labor," said Mrs. Milner as she led them out again: "The only punishment they understand. Joyce is getting far too fat."
When the visit of inspection was over Pamela stood on one leg, winking. "Show her the red crab, Ian. You know, the pincers Mumsie keeps upstairs."
"I wouldn't mind using them on her bummy," returned the boy. Then to Clotilda he said with his infuriating grin, "You do have the most lovely one. Far nicer than that Australian bitch's."
Clotilda's palm seethed again. She longed and yearned to lash out at this smiling freckled pervert of an English "schoolboy." She felt the young pair were deliberately ' tormenting her to do just this, however, and managed to control herself.
"How about going out riding for a while?" she suggested amicably.
"Good-oh," exclaimed the youth at once. "You look so spiffing in your breeches, Miss Bramble. Bags I to ride behind you, and watch you when we canter."
Pamela's eyes were bright. "I know someone not a million miles away who'd like to be your saddle, Miss B."
Clotilda swung furiously. But she did not strike. Instead she huffed furiously off upstairs, to change.
Two days later it was less easy. She was supposed to be instructing the young things in Math, only to be repeatedly interrupted by maddening comments on her own person by Ian.
"Two plus two equals the loveliest pair of legs I've ever seen, plus two positively peachy hind halves."
The girl snickered. "Pure silk stockings, too. Where do you think they end, Mr. Stiffcock?"
"If she crosses her legs like that again I swear I'll squirt in her face."
This was said, while Clotilda was searching through her fake horn-rims for the answer to a sum. Suddenly she looked up from the book, her eyes flashing. This was too much. No one of her upbringing could be asked to stand this.
The pair were grinning at her as she rose and advanced to where they sat in their improvised desks. Again, she had the feeling of being taunted, led on.
She stood in front of the girl, the hem of her skirt brushing the top of the desk. Grinning, Pamela lifted it an inch, then eloquently fanned her face-"Whew!"
Clotilda lashed out a clout that sent the fair head spinning like a ball. Then she crossed to the boy and belted him a couple; the backhand, with her rings on, jolted him sharply and he gasped, groping.
"You disgusting little children!" she hissed, disbelievingly. "This lesson is at an end. What you two need is a beating like that maid had." At which she strode out.
To her surprise nothing happened for the rest of the day. Her young charges appeared to vanish, on occupations and errands of their own; she did not see them until tea-time, and only briefly then. They had supper by themselves and her own she had alone, Mrs. Forest reputedly being tired out by the day's business on the estate. Clotilda ate gingerly, served by Olive, and retired almost immediately after.
She was preparing for her shower when a timid tap sounded on her bedroom door. It was a young maid she knew slightly.
"Mistress Forest would like to see you in her room, Miss."
"Very well, thank you, Veronica."
Clotilda inwardly quaked. Like anyone who had lost their temper she felt guilty apprehension. Her long and supple thighs felt quivery as she stalked the corridor to the west wing of the old estate house, and her bottoms jounced like jellies under the scant skirt of clingy purple knit she had on.
"Come in." Mrs. Forest was sitting up in bed, an ornate mahogany affair, wearing only a nightgown and much cigarette ash. She had been dining and reading, it seemed. The rest of the long room was but dimly lit. "Ah, it's you. Stand out there, would you."
Clotilda obeyed with a strangely sinking heart. There was an ominous authority about this woman. "There" was the center of the room about ten yards from the foot of the bed, facing it, and with her back to the open windows where muslin curtains foamed. The accusation came at once and at once made Clotilda swallow.
"I understand you struck my children."
"They were unbearably rude to me, Mrs. Forest. Frankly I find their attitude to . . . to . . . quite insufferable."
"Unfortunately, you don't have much say in the matter, do you?"
There was a long pause, during which Clotilda's heart missed a beat. The ivory-skinned, opulent breasted woman was smiling at her wryly.
"You don't suppose for a moment that I hired you, Miss Bramble, without making a thorough investigation into your past? Good Lord, I know all about you and then some. I had hoped your predecessor might have acquainted you with ... my methods. I was forced to fire her when she started drinking. Actually, she began stealing that very bad brandy from the kitchen in order to up her pain threshold a bit. Most unsatisfactory. Even six made her squeal."
Mrs. Forest drew deep on her amber cigarette holder.
Clotilda, dry-throated, said hoarsely, "If you think for a moment that I . . ."
But it sounded unconvincing and Mrs. Forest laughed, throatily. "As I said, my dear, you don't have much alternative, in my humble opinion. That butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth face of yours might look slightly less sweet at the end of a length of rope, with a big red tongue sticking out and your mauve eyeballs bursting. I rather gather the last girl they hanged at the Scrubs created such a fuss it took three drops to finish her off. You know as well as I do that the least you'd get if I shipped you home tomorrow would be thirty years hard. Now then, are you going to see reason?"
Clotilda's chin tilted. "What do you want of me, Mrs. Forest?"
The older woman nodded, tippling her ash, as if to say, That's more like it. Finally she said, "All I want of you, my dear, is what I get from the rest of my staff. Implicit obedience." She reached to one side of her bed and fetched up a bakelite mouthpiece. Pressing a button on it, a croak resounded in reply. It was evidently some form of internal communication system. "Send up Veronica again," she ordered.
The lovely maid knocked, and stood demurely beside the large ornate bed.
"You sent for me, M'm."
"Yes, Veronica. I understand Mrs. Milner had to give you another hiding yesterday." "Yes'm. I overslept." "Turn around and show your buttocks."
The girl turned, slipped down her panties and up her skirt and made a lissom bend. Thin vicious-looking weals streaked the lower part of the velvety hinds.
"All right. Stand up. Now then, did it hurt?"
"Oh yes, Mistress." With alacrity.
"But you don't bear any resentment?"
"No, please M'm."
"And it'll make you think twice about taking that extra nap in the morning?" "Oh yes'm."
Mrs. Forest turned to Clotilda with a shrug. She spread out her hands. The maid said cheerfully enough, "Was there anything else you wanted, M'm?" "Not tonight, Veronica. I advise you to keep out of mischief until those lines fade a bit though. I have a feeling a good sixer with my cane would sting a lot on those, and don't think I wouldn't aim for them, either." "Yes'm." The girl was actually smiling as she slipped out of the door.
There was a long, strong silence when she had gone. Clotilda was quivering. Despite the night air behind her she could feel the stuff of her skirt adhering to her behind; she was sweating in her crease.
Mrs. Forest frowned. "I'm not going to give you strokes this time, Clotilda. But if you lay a hand on a hair of either one of those childrens' heads again, you'll be wishing you'd be born with a bit more fat on that succulent bum of yours. Now let this be a warning to you. Have you got on panties underneath that dress?"
"Yes," said Clotilda faintly.
"Drop them."
Her thumbs reached, and slid. She looked briefly at the miserable wrinkles of silky material round her ankles. "Can you touch your toes?" "Yes, of course."
"Well, lift your skirt right up your back and do so."
Clotilda faced the woman squarely for a second. Rebellion would have been sweet, indeed. She felt herself slipping down the ladder of humiliation and submission rung by rung. But as had been pointed out to her, there was little alternative. The very risk of the rope, the dreaded gallows, made her inner skin cringe. It would not hurt her to obey. She flipped up her skirt and doubled like a hinge. Cool night air fanned her hindquarters, and she flushed. There was a mirror behind and she wondered if Mrs. Forest could see her young, stretched buttocks-into which she doubtless yearned to whine that fiendish cane of hers.
"Buck-bare to the night. You have a nice arse, Clotilda," (so it was as she'd thought and she flushed deeper still) "a little broader at the base than I'd expected. Must be those muscular thighs of yours. All that horse-riding, I surmise, Anyway, you can remain like that for half an hour and reflect on a slim length of willow slicing into your chubs. After which you can return to your room, and count yourself lucky."
It was curiously humiliating, more so than Clotilda had expected, in the big ticking room with its ancestral portraits of previous Forest colonials. The minutes dragged. Blood beat in her bowed head. She tried to concentrate on a knot of wood in the flooring, aware of the woman turning in the bed, sighing and reading. Surely she had completed thirty minutes by now. There was a tap at the door. Clotilda's heart pounded. "May I stand up now, please?"
"You may," said Mrs. Forest in a drawling laugh, "if you want six of the best on that well-fleshed backside of yours."
Someone came in. Not on stilt heels but in felt slippers. She could see pyjama bottoms. "I came to say good-night, Mumsie." It was Ian.
"I should like to stand up now," Clotilda said firmly, but equally ineffectually.
"What's she doing there?" asked the boy. "A spot of penance, darling. I have told our Miss Bramble what happens in my house to servants who get above their position."
"Ou! May I go and look?"
"Please!" gasped Clotilda. "You can't ask me to . . ." But her hands stopped at her shins and slid down again.
"The toes, Clotilda. And-brace back your knees."
She saw the beastly boy, or his pyjama trousers lagging over list slippers, upside down. He stood square behind her bared and bent behind and gasped with pleasure.
"Ooo! I've always longed to see her bum. Heavens, it's much wider at the bottom than I'd expected."
"Isn't it, though. I think that's where I'll hit her when she's naughty."
The boy chuckled, "Just above the tan line."
Clotilda became aware of certain motions in the pyjama trousers. Regular, categoric, in the never-ending silence. She heard him breathing harshly. Her face went from beet to puce. The ghastly youth was openly masturbating behind her-and in front of his mother.
"Gosh, she's got such terrifically thick furry lips. Oh Mumsie, I'm all hard."
"Not again!"
"M-mn. As a rock. I'll never get to sleep like this."
"Well, you can't go to bed all stiff like that, I suppose. Hurry up and wank it off, then." As Clotilda seethed and stiffened, she heard Mrs. Forest add as an afterthought, "Miss Bramble, spread your legs wide and put your palms on the ground in front of you."
"Mrs. Forest! Please. You can't . . ."
"In three seconds. Or it's six."
Clotilda obeyed. But she was being sorely tried, she knew.
"Gosh, she's hairy, Mummy." "What did you expect, dear, feathers?" "No. But I mean so frightfully black and bushy round the twat."
"Urn. Her hair must have been sun-bleached for centuries." (It has been, thought Clotilda furiously.) "Hurry up and get it off."
The boy worked on his cock with his right hand held fisted. He gasped and groaned. What's he going to do it into? thought Clotilda hectically, trying to see if he had a handkerchief handy and only glimpsing the angry red head, astonishing engorged, with its Cyclops eye.
"Christ! I'm . . . Mumsie, I'm going to sp-u-u-u-rt!"
Suddenly Clotilda, bent double, felt a series of swift hot licks on her right buttock. It was too much. The filthy child was shooting all over her. Hissing with rage, she jacked erect, crying "NO!" and pulling down her skirt. As she did so, she felt it paste the cream disgustingly over her heinie. The fisted prick was giving a last few stertorous jerks; two gobs of sperm were flung in an arc across the flooring, before the boy let go, and rebuttoned.
"Thanks, Mumsie, that was a good one." He ran and kissed his mother, as if he'd just come in from cricket, and seemed in haste to leave the room. Clotilda was left facing Mrs. Forest, trying to muster what shreds of dignity she had left, with her panties in her right hand and streaks of boyish sperm trickling off her buttocks down her thighs. "Wipe up those drops with your panties, Clotilda."
"That was quite the most disgusting," she began, but something of sheer steel in Mrs. Forest's stormy eyes cut her short.
"I don't seem to recall saying you could get up."
"But, please. I didn't know that being sprayed with come by a boy of fourteen was in the bargain."
"Implicit obedience, Miss Bramble, implicit obedience." She snuggled down into the sheets. "When you are ready, and in the right frame of mind, report to me here for six of the best across that splendid tookie of yours. I shall enjoy the infliction. Er-before midnight tomorrow, or I shall be forced to cable a friend of mine in a very high place in London."
So Clotilda got her six. The following evening she waited until the household had gone to bed, especially those two wretches, her charges, then taking a very big breath tapped at Mrs. Forest's oaken door again.
"Ah come in, Clotilda." The woman was as before, sitting up in bed in her nightgown, reading. "Come to take your medicine? Just in time. I thought you would. Lock the door and let's get it over with, then."
She swung her legs out of bed and Clotilda was surprised to see the nightgown was a shortie. Mrs. Forest's once good thighs were inclining to flab. She crossed to an old chair and began putting on a rather grimy pair of gym sneakers. They looked incongruous when she stood facing Clotilda, rather uselessly smoothing her short shantung. Her eyes roved for the implement. She was beginning to feel very apprehensive, indeed. But Mrs. Forest seemed in no hurry, standing in a chatty way before her.
"Caned at school, were you?"
"Yes," said Clotilda decisively.
"Well, this'll hurt . . . let's say . . . about four times as much. My canes are made with both more weight and whip. Six shouldn't take more than a minute, but the next two will be where you learn your lesson. And tomorrow you'll notice it sitting down. You've got a good meaty pair and this time I'll work them right across the middle. Well, Clotilda," she said brightly, "you aren't going to need your panties, you know."
Clotilda reached and removed. She folded the scrap of material on a nearby table. "How do you want me?" she asked, with sullen nervousness.
"Nicely bent," was the reply. And she was led to a chair.
In the room's damp glooms Clotilda had not noticed this old upright black chair which, she now saw, was somehow attached to the floor and supplied with copious straps. As if reading her mind Mrs. Forest said, "If you fail to take the strokes to the full, I shall be compelled to secure you, r I after a short rest, and proceed to give you them all again. Bend over the back, here, and reach right forward and grasp that rung-so. Don't leave go of it, mind."
Bent over the chair back, grasping the wooden bar, her legs braced back almost on tiptoe, Clotilda could not see behind her, but she could feel-her skirt lifted off her hips-and hear-a long cane tested on the air. There was a pause, then without preamble two squelchy rubber paces I and the cane wrapped itself around her buttocks like a I brand of blazing fire.
I "Oh!" she gasped, more from astonishment at first. The stroke was excruciating, and drove her forward with its force, but the pain was containable-until a wave flooded into her, drenching her with white-hot agony. Her cheeks cringed in with its tearing sear. A second thumped home, fractionally below the first. Determined to show her mettle, this time she merely gasped. She was being whipped full across her broadest arse, and after four she was afire. She heard her right knee knock into the wood, and dimly heard Mrs. Forest's "Brace back your legs now. I haven't nearly finished with you yet."
The last two were pure scalders and she hung moaning after them, awaiting the word to rise. When it came she was lost to shame, grabbing back at her scarlet-beaten bare buttocks and hopping as if the floor were afire. Mrs. Forest seemed to lose immediate interest, tossing aside her stick and returning to her bed.
"Don't forget your panties," she heard, in a steamy distance. "You don't think I want them, do you?" Somehow they must have got wind of it. For there the malicious little imps were, grinning in the corridor on the way back to her room, capering and clapping.
"Miss B. got a sixer . . . Miss B. got a sixer."
"Stinging nicely?" "Bent tight over that jolly old chair." Had they been taking turns at the keyhole or something? Clotilda tried to storm haughtily past them, only to realize that she was doing so with great rolls of welted buttock grabbed in her hands, from one of which dangled her panties. She slammed her bedroom door on them and burst into tears. She cried with shame as much as pain, lying on her tummy and beating her fists into her pillow. After a while, she got up, dried her face and looked into a mirror over one shoulder. It was astonishing how strongly the cane had wealed her. The stripes were hot and plummy in hue and in two places, where cuts had overlapped, they were hard and turgid to the touch. Her cheeks felt heavy and full of a dull ache. She felt herself to have been thoroughly punished, and in no desire of renewing the experience. That night she slept like a log.
She determined to go through the following day on a note of icy disdain; it was made hard for her by the children-Pamela hurrying forward with a cushion at breakfast-but Mrs. Forest entirely ignored her and made no allusion to the occasion. Only that evening did she send for her to the estate office, a wooden shack apart.
"Oh Clotilda," Mrs. Forest said absently, searching through papers; "My son Ian has expressed the desire that you wear shorter skirts."
"Shorter skirts, Mrs. Forest!"
"Yes. I must say it seems logical enough to me. Your status here is that of employee or servant, so I don't see why you should wear covering any longer than they. In snort, you have a spot of work to do on your hems before tomorrow. In your case-no flair. I want all your skirts to be of thin material and closely adhering to your body, understand?" She smiled up pleasantly. "Mrs. Milner has brand new Singer sewing machine she'd be more than glad to lend you."
Again Clotilda seethed, staring straight ahead of her over is. Forest's dark head. But her gaze merely met a rack of merciless-looking canes on the wall and she gulped and said nothing.
"Oh and Clotilda," she heard as she turned for the door, "you might as well throw away those absurd spectacles. They're serving no purpose, are they, beyond making you look silly."
Then there was Eileen. This was a pretty, sulky almost Italian-looking maid much younger than the others; Clotilda adjudged her as sixteen, yet with a short plump body that I would grow stocky with the years. She had committed some peccadillo, it appeared, and was haled into the drawing room on a hot afternoon. Directly Clotilda, seated between her charges on a sofa, saw the girl standing with downcast face and her hands nervously twining at the lap of her dress, she was forced to confess to a new kind of interest. Mrs. Forest had already supplied herself with one of her more ferocious canes and was pacing up and down the carpet, haling the girl up hill and down dale for something called Idleness. She seemed inordinately angry, and was obviously longing for the fray. As she kicked a low hassock into an open space with her booted toe Ian clutched Clotilda's arm avidly-"Oo, my favorite position. Look."
"This time you're getting eight, Eileen. Plus two days of Restraint. Get over with your hands on that and brace back your knees and keep it up."
"It" was, when duly bared, an adorably soft, mellow pair, very vulnerable. The sight merely seemed to arouse hostility in Mrs. Forest, however. She stood well back and narrowed her eyes.
"She's going to get it this time and no mistake," was Pamela's breathy whisper in Clotilda's ear. The girl had bent over with her hands flat on the low hassock; her legs, however, were at a slight angle behind her, feet together a good pace from the pouffe. In profile, as she was to the spectators on the sofa, she made a gently curved and defenseless inverted V.
Mrs. Forest took two lively pounces forward and hit. She seemed to do so with all her strength. Clotilda blinked. The whippy stick curled and lapped about the bent broadside, hewing up into it from beneath. It looked an incredibly painful cut. The girl gasped, but that was all. The correction continued.
At the third the maid moaned out a drawn-out "Oouw!" Her head came back, her body swayed.
"Five more," whispered Ian excitedly.
"Bet she won't make them. These are absolute beauts," hissed Pamela. "Lovely and low."
Whuck! Another thumped in, bouncing the juddery fat with its impact and leaving its inevitable weal. It was a full-blooded beating and Clotilda watched it with pounding heart. The chubby girl's stoicism was incredible. At each cut she gasped out loudly "Yes'm . . . yes'm," but held her stance, only raising on tiptoe and arching like a cat for the last two. When they had been given Mrs. Forest tossed her cane aside disgustedly; she was clearly annoyed with the lack of reaction, crossing to a sideboard drawer.
"Stand up, you idle little chit and count yourself lucky. But I haven't quite finished with you yet."
At Ian's nudge Clotilda saw the girl jack erect, her face riven with pain, and-lost to all modesty-grab at her buttocks and knead them just as she herself had done in that upstairs passage all too recently. Mrs. Forest was returning with a short braided thong, very thin, in one hand and her face was slightly smiling.
"So you did feel something after all, Eileen. I'm so glad."
It was Pamela who nudged Clotilda in the ribs next. At the sight of the short thin thong every drop of color had drained from the maid's face, over whose snub features a look of horror dawned. Still with her panties at her ankles, and still rubbing her buttocks, she dropped to her knees before her advancing mistress-"Mercy!"
Clotilda's tongue dried. What was so hypnotically terrifying about this short dark thong? True, it looked evil enough, and its tough braided trainer obviously boded no good, but . . .
"You two can turn away and face the wall."
Ian and Pamela obeyed dutifully, kneeling up on the sofa and turning to the wall. On his way the boy had time to mutter to her, "The tail is threaded with wire."
The girl was practically babbling-"Please'm, not the Benjy. Give me more strokes, only not the Benjy, M'm."
"Right over, Eileen. And knees wide apart. Come on, get your panties off and stretch them as far as they'll go."
Clotilda wondered whether she should look away, too. Part of herself wanted to, part was mesmerized by the sight. The young maid was kneeling as prescribed, quivering all over, her arms stretched out and her hands grasping the booted ankles of her tormentress. The thin thong dangled above her most secret and central person; there seemed little doubt as to where it would be used. Clotilda turned away.
A strong whine of protesting air was completed by what she could only describe as a wet thump. A mewling sound grew, and Mrs. Forest said gently, "One more." It fell.
"May we look round now, Mumsie?"
When they did so the girl was a doubled ball of agony. Clutching her sex she whined breathlessly, alternately stretching and rolling. The children's glee was unrestrained.
Mrs. Forest was replacing her thong. "Always makes them sit up a bit, does Benjy," she said cheerfully. They watched the girl writhe herself into some form of control after a minute or more, stand stiffly up and leave the room, still loudly moaning and holding her cunt. "Next time it's the whip, Eileen. I don't care whether you're house staff or not."
Now it was the whip, in earnest. By their inevitable grape-vine of interest in such matters her two young charges told her one tea-time that three luckless plantation women were due to be flogged. There was an intense, feverish apprehension in their faces, and little bantering, as they informed Clotilda about this. They looked half scared themselves. For them this was clearly the real thing. Pamela was grave as she impersonated for her new-found governess the position the offender took up at the whippingpost--"The hands are held up, of course, so's to get at the armpits."
"He's probably oiling the whip now," added her brother, equally seriously. "It's a perfect beast. Not heavy and thick like a bull, but all lean and snickery and hellishly stingy."
"I let Mr. Griffiths give me one once, as a tester, and it seemed to sting for hours."
The estate floggings took place after work. Impressive affairs, they were evidently also spectacles enjoyed by the coloreds, who sentenced their own to such. Mrs. Forest joined them from her labors, white-breeched and sweaty, around five. Clotilda now stood up when she came in, tugging at her almost inexistent skirt and horribly conscious of Ian's eyes upon her. The older woman was putting back a foaming tankard of ale when a slender maid announced, "Beg pardon, M'm. Mr. Griffiths' compliments and he says he's ready when you are."
"Very well, thank you."
The children stood up, tautly eager. Mrs. Forest, dark, almost blowsy in appearance, turned with amusement to Clotilda: "You needn't come if you don't want to, Miss Bramble. I suspect you'll think us brutal out here. We don't boil people and bury them alive, you know. Three women are going to be flogged: two girls who deliberately absented themselves from the fields yesterday-the third is the wife of one of our best workers who wants her whipped for sleeping around. She'll be punished appropriately, both inside and out. I've approved all three requests and had them examined. They'll be touched up sharply with a snake-whip. If you want to watch you can-and if you want to report me to the League of Nations afterwards, go ahead."
Clotilda followed. There was a compound apart where the field workers lived. In a declivity between some huts there was a small dusty square and in the center of this an upright whipping post; this was a heavy square post accoutered with straps, about six and a half feet high. As Mrs. Forest led them towards it this evening, the place was the scene of some animation. Male coloreds were standing around grinning and drinking from bottles, a few children had stopped to watch, while to the left of the post two or three men were practicising strokes with a thin black whip, which made reports like pistol shots as they cracked it. One of these, a bare-chested, greying mulatto of sinewy strength, came forward in khaki pants. He appeared to be the overseer and touched his forelock respectfully to Mrs. Forest.
"They's ready, Mistress."
They were. To one side stood, or sniveled, three very frightened-looking women, indeed. Two were girls-one a slim, black-haired, almost white-skinned lovely who looked no more than seventeen and was crying openly. Holding her hand was an older girl, well fleshed and more defiant in expression. The third was a woman of about thirty or more, who looked ashen-faced. All were barefoot and wore washed-out frocks from the fields.
Mrs. Forest placed herself squarely confronting the post and said, "All right. Let's begin. Royelle, stand out."
There was silence in the square as the defiant girl slipped off her panties and shrugged out of her dress which she left on the ground; she advanced naked, head high, to the post, where the overseer received her. He quickly strapped her to it in a manner that made her embrace the sides of the post, her knees and ankles secured to its outer planes, as were her elbows and wrists, raised above her head. A wide belt, protecting her kidneys, and a broad leather neck-band were then fastened; finally, the fat rump was put completely on display by means of a leather boss or pad which was run up a groove in the pole and fastened under the pelvis, forcing her to arch out and expose her lower halves. The overseer stood well back to the left. The girl could be seen butting her forehead into the post and squeezing her eyes tight shut.
"Ten strokes," snapped Mrs. Forest. "Back and buttocks. Half and half. Take your time, Mr. Griffiths."
There was a breathless hush. Clotilda was standing to the right, with her charges. Suddenly, with little effort, the man made the whip leap and lash, whistling through the air and finishing with an eloquent smack as it bit deep into the under-shoulders. The body jerked, the girl gasped, her head rocking; her right arm writhed in its bonds. The fiery weal that rose darkened at its tip, showing how it had clawed into the armpit. To her horror Clotilda saw dark drops perling out from the flesh there, as if from a squeezed fruit.
"One," said Mrs. Forest calmly.
The second lashed in below the first line and left the girl shuddering and sweating. At the strangled, involuntary squeal produced by the third there was a murmur of satisfaction from those watching; the fourth and fifth wealed lower still and left the victim shaking the whipping post like a chained mastiff. She was bleeding from three of the cuts.
But now the watchers pressed forward, chattering softly. Now was the turn of the buttocks, those sweaty flesh-halves at the juncture of which the vulva could be seen quivering. This was the part of the punishment they enjoyed, it was plain, and Clo felt their excitement in her loins. Pamela, to her right, was quite rigid with interest.
"AOW!"
The whip bit like an asp, plucking at the outstretched rounds. She writhed frantically, as if trying to throw off the burning kiss. A weal thickened up, blotchy on the right cheek. Sweat poured down the channel of her shoulder-blades. She tried to cringe in something of her splendid crupper, could not, relaxed and the whip smacked in meatfly again.
"OUWWWWW!"
She spasmed forward, all her control now gone. Her head turned back to Mrs. Forest.
"Enough please, Mistress ... oh please Mistress, say enough," she panted huskily. "Me had enough ... I be good forever ... oh Lord Lord, he coming at I again."
"Draw them out, Mr. Griffiths," Mrs. Forest said calmly.
The overseer needed no such bidding. He was an expert working before connoisseurs, it was clear. The last three cuts were spread over a full minute and each was a murderous biting slash; the whip hissed, its tip seemed to cling to and burrow into the fatty underbuttock for a second, as it fell back to a squeal, leaving an angry weal. By the time the tenth had fallen the man had found the same spot on the right cheek with his trainer thrice and it was thickly oozing.
"All right, take her down. Let that be a lesson to you, Royelle."
Two serious women, relatives perhaps, Clotilda supposed, came softly forward and undid the convulsing girl. They led her off, bowed over and sobbing, with one arm in each of theirs-possibly to prevent her scratching at her wounds, to which they would tend themselves. One collected the girl's scant clothing as they went. It was the turn of the slim dark girl. She came forward naked and crying.
When she had been strapped up Clotilda was aghast. She seemed little more than a child, her pebbled backbone immensely vulnerable. The overseer himself tested the flesh under her right armpit between finger and thumb as he secured her. But the order was the same.
"Ten of the best. Back and buttocks. Don't spare her, Mr. Griffiths."
As the man stood back for aim Clotilda felt hot fingers grasp her own. Ian was pressing against her-"Makes them sit up a bit, doesn't it!"
The girl shrieked from the first stroke, which was laid across her upper back and right arm. Yet she did not break down like the other. The stripes about her ribs caused her inconceivable agony, it appeared, but she was showing obvious courage. She had a delicious little pouter-pigeon buttock which was welted again and again until there seemed to be a broad raw band like a belt across it. When she hobbed off between her helpers after, there was a murmur of applause from the onlookers.
'What a beauty!" whispered Pamela. "She won't want to sit down for a week with that lot under her."
"She'll feel it going to the lavvy," agreed her brother. "Mumsie should have ordered the pimentade rubbed in, after. But look, oh good!" A bucket and brush had appeared.
For now it was the turn of the adulteress and the coloreds, conservatives all, shuffled forward; the woman was an experienced one and let herself be secured to the post without emotion. When the waistbelt had been hauled tight and the boss drawn up beneath her she spread out a superbly fatted pair of darkish arse-cheeks, deeply cleft and merging into thick thighs.
"All right, Amantha, it's a full dozen for you. Twelve of your very best, Mr. Griffiths, buttocks and legs, at your discretion."
A sigh-obviously of approval-greeted this order, and a man came forward to the bucket.
"That's her husband," whispered Ian.
The man picked up the paint-brush and proceeded to anoint his wife's outspread hips and thighs with a greasy substance, from waist to knees.
"Prevents scarring," was the next whisper Clotilda heard, "but the pimentade stings like fury when it's driven in by the strokes. Just you watch."
She was conscious of only two things in the clearing- the broad fat arse arched back and the thin keen whip. They were destined to meet, they had to. They did-to a moist smacking sound.
The first stroke was a perfect cut, across the full of the cheeks. The second was lower, almost in the sulcal fold. The third whunked in between them. The woman panted hard, bunching her bitten cheeks in together. Her buttocks were muscular, it appeared, and despite the boss she could squirm them together in her agony. The overseer gave her one more, along the top of the legs, then said, "She clenching, M'm."
"All right," nodded Mrs. Forest. "Give it her, then."
"The Spreader." Ian's fingers were like iron in Clotilda's now.
The overseer went to a small battered leather case and took out a black glove, which he put on his right hand. With the other he drew out what appeared to be a small spiked burr, also black. The crowd murmured, the woman drew back her head, cringing as the man approached her with the thing.
"No, M'm, please ... I not clench ... not that, please'm .. . I spread out good for the whip, you see . . . not the Spreader, M'm, please'm . . . you give me those four again and I spread out wide wide . . . nooo . . . AJEEEE!"
She ended in a screech which made Clotilda jump. Parting her lower hinds gently with the fingers of his left hand the overseer had taken the burr in his right and with one strong movement driven it hard up into the very bottom or underside of the woman's trunk. She screamed with reason, it was plain. When the man returned for his whip the thing seemed to be embedded in the darkest recesses, at fatty junction of legs and cheeks, between anus and cunt; it was already causing bleeding and the woman could be seen making bucking motions to throw it off-in vain, the horrid burr seemed hooked in there and would clearly hurt the lower halves with its spikes when they "clenched."
"That'll stop her tricks," said Pamela firmly. "Now, Mr. Overseer, whip her bummy hard."
"Eight," said Mrs. Forest laconically. "Take your time, Mr. Griffiths."
He did. The lashing continued gravely. By its end the woman was a writhing stretch of flesh, her buttocks bloody. The pimentade was then painted into the wounds; finally, to Mrs. Forest's order and the grins of all concerned including the injured husband who inflicted the correction, a steel syringe was filled with one of the island's peppers. The bound woman babbled and begged, but in vain. The husband slid the syringe up her vagina and slowly pressed home the plunger; the sides of the barrel were perforated and, so the grinning children whisperingly informed her, the pepper would squeeze out its juices and-"Her love tunnel is going to be red-hot for a while."
It seemed so. The woman left the arena doubled over, and grasping her scalded cunt. Mrs. Forest thanked her overseer and as the crowd disbanded smiled at Clotilda, "Well, I don't know about you but I'm for a beer. In fact, two."
"Golly, Mumsie, I'll bet that made her think a bit."
"Did you see how he got those last two absolutely into her overhang?"
"And with the Spreader she was so wide you could watch her brownhole opening and closing. Just like a bud."
Clotilda managed to avoid the fiends until their dinner, which they had before hers with her employer. They were seething with excitement-and so was she. She had to be alone. And was. Until Mrs. Forest, still unchanged from her white breeches and bush shirt, confronted her across the candles and cut glass of their dinner table.
"Well, Clotilda? Getting used to our ways? What did you think of your first flogging?"
"I thought ... the punishment seemed to me extremely, excessively, severe."
"Oh nonsense. Extremely yes, excessively no. They're probably all making love right now. Only, not on their backs. That woman Amantha needed every bit she got. But, please, could you come up to my room in, say, an hour?"
What have I done wrong? Clotilda wondered breathlessly, as she nodded to the request. She helped herself to a long slug of the potent island rum.
But Mrs. Forest seemed in a jovial mood when later she went up to the long darkened bedroom. Still in her boots and breeches she was sitting in a low chair, reading.
"Oh Clotilda, do come in. Sit down here, dear, I need to talk to you. Some port? It's Dow's '89. No. Well, I will thanks." She frowned and sipped. "I wanted to ask you something. According to your record you were a Prefect at school."
"Definitely," said Clotilda.
"Did you used to cane junior girls?"
"Definitely," said Clotilda.
"How many did you used to give them? Describe it to me."
Clotilda found herself unloath. "Well, it was usually six, bending over." "On the bare?"
"On the bare. Gym tunics up and knickers down. In fact," she ended in a little rush. "Very like what you . . . I . . . you gave me yourself the other day." "I see. Did you hit hard?"
"As hard as poss, of course. It took place in a sort of changing room, actually, with one other Pre watching. You had to get permission from the Head first, but that was always given. You took a run and cut low, but not too since you were supposed to hit only on the buttocks, and you felt pleased if the girl jumped about after it was over."
Mrs. Forest thought. There was a long silence. "Clotilda, I'm going to ask you a favor. I'm going to ask you to give me a thrashing." "Me! You!" Clotilda goggled.
"Yes, you see it's like this. You may think me a monster of injustice but I have a rule-I never order a punishment I wouldn't be willing to take myself. Whenever there's a flogging I take one, too." She smiled briefly. "It's as simple as that. I take the maximum count given. Oh, I agree it's with a switch but that one there, although it bruises less than the whip, probably stings even more. Mrs. Milner usually does it, and she' s quite good, quite effective. But now you've come it might be more logical . . . besides ..." her eyes strayed, "to be absolutely merciless . . . you have to like doing it. Mrs. Milner treats it more as a duty."
"I liked doing it at school, Mrs. Forest."
"And you had a reputation as a martinet?"
"Very definitely."
There was another long pause. "I think I still have a pretty nice pair of buttocks."
"You have a superb pair of buttocks, Mrs. Forest."
"A trifle fat, I fear."
"All the more to cut into, isn't there!"
"So you mean to say ... if I asked you to give me a dozen bent tight over the chair, with that switch, you would hit me as hard as you knew how-and do so with pleasure?"
Clotilda swallowed. Her tongue licked her lips once, quickly. "Yes," she breathed.
"Well," said Mrs. Forest, smiling a trifle tensely now. "I suppose there's nothing for it but to get on with it, eh." She stood up. "I don't think it would be right for me to strip, in front of a servant, but these breeks are paper-thin and I haven't got anything on underneath. Here's the switch-whalebone core covered with oiled whipcord, it hurts like bloody hell. I suggest you lock the door."
When she came back from doing so Mrs. Forest was facing the chair.
"As you remarked, Clotilda, you have plenty of meat to work on. Stretch me over tight and give me the whipping of your life. Right where it's tenderest . . . you know."
"I know," said Clotilda. Anything to oblige.
So she whipped Mrs. Forest. The switch cut eel-like into the tautly breeched bum which soon began to cringe in and quiver. The woman took it incredibly well, punctuating the cuts with comments like "Christ, that stung!" or "Good one, ow!" Clotilda hit as hard as she could with the rapier-like switch, hewing low and by the end there were two places where blood had stained through the white of the breeches. After it was over she was panting almost as much as her victim. The buttocks were shuddery masses, but to her amazement she heard the woman groan and say, "Jesus Christ, what a beating. I haven't been thrashed like that in years. But I suppose I ought to take an extra two for wearing clothing. Go on, give me them now."
Clotilda did. She was staggered at the woman's control when she finally unfastened her. Mrs. Forest leant against a wall for a moment, then groped for her drinks tray, swilling port straight from the decanter in great guzzling draughts. At last she straightened, a trifle breathlessly, and said, "Thank you Clo. That did me a world of good. My bottoms feel twice their size."
They look it, she wanted to say. Instead she laughed, "I hope I hurt you enough."
"Oh, you did. It's still absolute blue bloody murderous agony back there. It was a first-class hiding, if a trifle too fast at the start. However, you do realize, don't you, that this alters nothing in our relationship. I shall still enjoy finding opportunities to punish you whenever I can."
She did. A week went by relatively uneventfully; all Clotilda saw of physical correction was the occasional maid emerging from a room with a wrung face and ruefully rubbing her half-covered bottom. She seldom went to sleep without the image of that powerful, mare-like rump of the adulteress being sliced into by the whip. What provoked her second beating was Rob Roy.
Two estate girls had been caught fighting on their way to the fields. Clotilda was present when they were brought to Mrs. Forest and her children in the stables, rumpled and already repentant. On being sentenced instantly to a flogging, the pair had fallen to their knees and piteously pleaded for clemency-even suggesting other punishments, instead.
"I take Benjy, Mistress ... but not the whip, no please." A wry smile slowly covered the woman's creamy features. "I don't usually strike a bargain, but tell you what-it might be instructive for our visitor to see Rob Roy. A little invention of my own."
"Goody, Mumsie!" The blonde capered, clapping her hands. "Oh do give them the Rob Roy and let's watch their faces."
Their faces scarcely seemed cheered by this news but at least whatever it was in store for them wasn't a flogging and they meekly followed their owner into the large estate office. While Mrs. Forest went to a closet and Ian stood closely watching, the two girls stripped. The one to come forward first was a pale-skinned thing of perhaps eighteen.
"What a lovely cunny," murmured Ian.
"No nicer than mine," pouted Pamela in reply.
The nude girl had to stand wide astride; her ankles were then stocked in a heavy plank board in that position. The Rob Roy was produced. It turned out to an ingenious appliance, no larger than a ship's compass, fitted with dials and set on a tripod just behind the girl and on a level of her mid-thighs. Into this was inserted and viced a very thin, stiff, flexible length of wire.
"Thank my son Ian's passion for model airplane construction for this," said Mrs. Forest, adjusting it so that the tip, which appeared to have been soldered a shade thicker, rested exactly between the back of the girl's outstretched thighs. "Set it at eighty, Mumsie, do!"
Mrs. Forest set the dials and stood back with her riding switch in one hand.
"Now then, Maria. Three minutes at eighty. No bending of your knees or you know what happens to you. Grit your teeth now."
The girl ducked her head, hugging herself with her arms. A quick tremor seized her body for, with a whickering, snippy sound the instrument had been set in motion. The appliance merely whisked the whippy wire to and fro between the inner thighs, but it did so with such velocity the wire was a mere shimmer in the air. What's more, it was clear that it cut into exactly the same spot in the skin, which rapidly reddened to violet.
The pain it inflicted could be seen in the girl's contorted face and her pathetic attempt to keep her knees stiff, while she clasped and wrung her hands about, even gripping her hair, head rolling, body sweating. Half an inch of each inner thigh looked molten. Finally, so intolerable did the sting become, she involuntarily bent her knees to present another stretch of skin to the snickering wire. Mrs. Forest straightened her with two hissing lashes of her switch.
"You've had precisely fifty seconds, Maria. Straighten your legs and pull yourself together, or I'll put it up by ten degrees."
"Ouuah . . . aaah . . . how she sting . . . she cuttin' like a razor, Mistress . . . oooh . . . owww!"
Her torso, gleaming with sweat, began to writhe. She butted back her crupper, twitching. Ruby pearls had begun to appear inside her thighs, and still the same humming, whisking note continued.
"I not get to three minutes," she panted. "I not take three like this, Mistress."
"Then it's ten of the best at the post tonight, my girl, and I'll tell Mr. Griffiths to put 'em all across your bum."
"OW! OW! YOW!"
The switch flashed again. The girl endured the final seconds, bent over, hands on knees, shaking like an aspen. When it was over she fell forward on her knees, moaning. "All right, Maria, let that be a lesson to you not to scrap. Get your things on and have someone see to those grazes for you."
The second girl proved to be a model of stoicism. A heavy dark thing, she took two minutes with her hands on her hips. Then her head started rolling and she bit her forearm to keep from crying out. Suddenly her free hand stole in front of her and she started frigging herself, to take off something of the pain. When it was over she walked composedly to her clothing. Mrs. Forest did not seem to mind the onanism. "Did you come, Asa?"
"No'm. Hit hurt too much. But I come good soon." "Asa, you took that so well you can have a week off. Tell Mr. Griffiths." "Thank you'm. You punish I good." Needless to say, Clotilda's young charges could talk of little else that morning. All the same she was taken aback that afternoon, on opening the door of Pamela's bedroom to release her from her rest period, to find-instead of an English teener reading Winnie the Pooh-a grim sight: Pamela was kneeling on the edge of her bed, her gym tunic up, her knickers down, saying "Oh come on, squirt it off then" to her younger brother Ian behind her. Holding her by the waist the latter was standing and sliding into her anus the darkly greased piston of his prick.
The two innocents at play did not see her for a second. Speechless, aghast, she saw the humid tube slucking in and out, then suddenly she seized the revolting youth and hauled him off, out of his purchased lodging with a plop-to his protesting yelp of "NOOO!" She saw why. He was coming. Two jerks spouted over his now equally cursing sister, one jet splashed Clotilda's hem as she whirled him; then she sent him staggering across the corridor, clouting him into his room with a half-sobbed "In there!" She ran to her own room and shut herself in until evening, when a maid knocked and said Mrs. Forest would like to see her in the estate office.
There was a very long silence indeed as Clotilda stood in front of the desk, looking down at the still breeched and chain-smoking woman who had her in her power. She herself had put on a charming dress of ivory silk, hugging all her body and tucking under her bottom, as was required. Her pantyhose was dark taupe in hue. She stood tall and straight and very very blonde.
Mrs. Forest looked up. Slowly she said, exhaling smoke through dark, dilated nostrils, "My son Ian has complained about you, Clotilda."
"He," said Clotilda wonderingly. "He has complained about me?" She said it as though to a stupid child.
"That's right."
"Do you know what he was doing after lunch?" Suddenly she half-screamed, "He was buggering your daughter, that's what, Mrs. Forest."
"I don't want to hear about it. Ian is going through that troublesome time we all know about. He seems to have these erections almost all the time. It's probably much healthier for him to get them down with a second party, rather than by himself."
"And if he gets his sister pregnant?"
"He won't. No, I've warned you once about striking him. I'm afraid I shall have to ask you to take correction again. It's a house-rule, as you know."
"And if I refuse?"
"You know the alternative. It doesn't exist. I pick up this telephone to Whitehall."
There was another, even longer pause. Finally Clotilda looked down-"How many?"
"Six of the best with the cane." Mrs. Forest smiled pleasantly. "This time it would only be fitting for you to take it in front of the children."
"You couldn't ask that of me!"
"I give you ten seconds to decide."
At the end of seven Clotilda drew in her breath. "Is this to be ... I mean, you couldn't possibly ask me to . . . denude myself before him."
"You know my rules. You can keep on your panties, but it'll be two extra if you do."
"I don't have on panties," she answered angrily, "only pantyhose and you know perfectly well they won't offer any protection at all. . . ."
"They're opaque at the top and will keep me from aiming at known weals. Now come on and make up your mind. You've got good solid cheeks. I'm not going to kill you exactly." The intercomm at her side croaked. "Shall I send for them now?"
When the children came in they were oddly serious and respectful. There was none of the bantering gloating they showed at the flogging.
"Yes, Mother?"
"Miss Bramble has consented to take her correction before you, as a lesson in obedience. She is going to have six strokes across the naked buttocks. Ian, fetch me a cane. No, one of the longer ones, dear. That's it. Stand here, Miss Bramble. You Pammie will stand at the far side of the table and hold her hands."
"It won't be necessary, Mrs. Forest."
Clotilda stood against the trestle table. When the command came-"Take them down"-she closed her eyes, beet-red in the face, and pressed her front ever closer against the table top.
"Right down under your buttocks, please. Now bend over."
She lay forward on the deal table and instantly the girl's hot hands gripped her wrists. She sank her own face in her streaming hair. Legs braced, hips arched, her skirt barely covered her hips.
"Strip her buttocks, please, Ian."
You don't have to push it up my back, she wanted to protest then as the boy all too eagerly obeyed.
"Shall I put something under her pelvis, Mumsie, to push it up more?"
"Good idea. One of those books."
An encyclopedia was thrust under Clotilda's back-rearing rump. There was a long strong silence. She was going to take a run. "Heels together, please."
They are together, dammit, she thought.
"Stick your cheeks right out so that I can get under them."
The silence was almost unendurable-THWHLCK! The bendy smack of whippy wood biting into tender buttock flesh came to her almost before she felt the pain. Then--Kerrrist! She hissed with it, determined not to show them those gratifying signs all three were longing for.
The second whunked in after an interval and she bit her lip, her fingers gripping the young girl's. It was impossible not to wince at such searing strokes and she knew her arse-cheeks were giving little fatty quivers, inside. Three was a pure beauty and despite herself she gasped out a stifled "OW!"
The boy's voice murmured-"Lower, Mumsie, lower."
Three more to go. Ye Gods and fervent fishes, this woman knew how to cane. Another full-blooded whack made her grunt.
"She's squirming nicely now." The girl's voice was tense and Clotilda realized that the vicious mite was pressing her front into the table top, agitating it there. Another cut-venomously low.
"Right over, please."
Clotilda realized she was gasping, half erect. The last sent her lunging forward, breathless. She hung to the table top, writhing.
"Stay bent over," she heard in the mists. They had all gathered behind her, it seemed.
"Gosh, those last three were beauties, Mumsie. You could put a ruler over the lot."
The boy added, "She cuts like butter, doesn't she. Much nicer than the last one."
"Oh, she was like a board," agreed Mrs. Forest, laughing. "This is a nice velvety ..."
"May I go now?" Clotilda asked in a determined, albeit muffled, voice.
Permission given, she got herself to the door with her hands in her armpits-they simply shouldn't see her rubbing. At the door she heard, "You might at least pull up your pantyhose first."
Squalls of laughter.
She did not go down to dinner that night. Towards ten, with her windows open to a steamy tropical night through which crickets ticked and screech owls screeched, a tap came on her door. Clotilda put the book she was reading on the virtual cummerbund about her lap and stretched in the well-cushioned chair.
"Come in."
It was the girl. She looked a vision of innocent girlhood in her striped pyjama suit and slippered feet. "I came to say good-night, Miss Bramble." "Good-night, Pamela."
"I . . . I'm awfully sorry you got it so tight like that. I thought you took it terrifically well. 'Specially at the end."
"Good-night, Pamela."
"Would you like ... I mean I could rub some cold cream in and ..." "Good-night!"
"Please. Do let me see them, then. All the maids let me see them when they're all dark and ridgy and I didn't really get a good view from where I was, and honest, I could make it lovely for you afterwards, I have a terrific tongue and ..."
"Out!"
The boy was next. He stood in his pyjamas, openly fingering a curving erection.
"I came to say good-night, Miss."
"You did not come to say good-night, Ian, you came to humiliate and degrade me, and if you think ..."
"Oh please, Miss, I'm all stiff down here again and it'd only take you a jiffy to melt it down for me and Mumsie says it's better to get it off at once like that. She takes it in her mouth just like a lollipop and it goes off in a second and she says the goo is good for the complexion, but you don't have to swallow it if . . ."
She looked at him with studied, calculated loathing. In the next life I shall kill you slowly, she thought to herself; meanwhile if you think six with the cane is going to make me suck your dick, you've got another think coming to you.
"The door is right behind you, Master Forest." "I don't want to have to complain to Mumsie about you again."
The next day was worse. Nothing happened till lunch and Clotilda thought she had got through that successfully until the coffee came. The same girl was serving it whom she had seen whipped first and Pamela grinned and said, "D'you think they're starting to go bluish at the edges by now, Mother?"
"Then green and yellow, all the colors of the rainbow," chortled the boy, rubbing his legs together.
"We can always see, can't we?" said Mrs. Forest with a smile. "Stand up, Clotilda, would you, and turn your back. Now drop your britches and lift up your skirt and lean forward, please."
It wasn't happening, a hideous dream. Slowly she obeyed.
"Further over than that. Hands on your shins."
A maid was coming in. She served more coffee without hesitating. It wasn't happening, hadn't . . .
"Gosh, Mumsie, those low ones must've hurt."
"You really hit her with the tip."
"Clotilda," said Mrs. Forest, "I think it would be a good idea if you went without those apologetic fragments that pass, in your case, for panties-say for a week. It'll mean holding on to your hems, I fear, in the presence of servants, but then that's all you are, isn't it, really."
After lunch she had to settle the children. Pamela caused no trouble, nor did Ian, at first. He lay on the sheets in his shorts with a copy of Boy's Own Paper. Suddenly his strong prehensile fingers were digging into her buttocks cheeks, under her skirt, his face was pressed forward, before she could back she felt the flick of his tongue on her clit-"Please, Miss, please, I beg you let me put it in you . . . such lovely squeezy cunt walls . . . please let me fuck you please. ..."
She escaped without striking him this time, but only just.
That evening at precisely six o'clock she was again standing in front of Mrs Forest's desk in the estate office.
Her chin had a determined tilt though her buttocks, beneath the thin green skirt, were wobbly. After the usual long silence the woman said with a dry smile, "My son Ian has complained about you again, Clotilda."
The exclamation mark of a long cane lay on the desk. "If he seriously thinks I came here to suck him off, Mrs. Forest . . ."
She broke off and turned blindly towards the trestle table. Having no panties it was little more than a single movement to bend over it and raise her skirt behind. Mrs. Forest followed at a leisurely pace. "We'll try six more then," she said with a sigh. "I'm afraid that's all we can do about it." It was an intolerably stingy whipping. The woman used the bruises of the last and Clo could barely stay down, When it was over she regaled her employer with two good minutes of frenzied twisted dancing, hands to her seat. That night when she had gone to bed she was awoken a bony adolescent body worming in beside her. His horrible hands swarmed all over her. "Please . . . I've simply got to get it into you ... oh please, please. ..." The following evening she stood in front of the estate office desk.
"All right, Mrs. Forest, you don't have to say it. Your son Ian complained about me."
The woman seemed amused. "You're so right as to why I sent for you, my dear. So it seems there's nothing for it but to try another six of the best-only this time with a rather longer, thinner cane. I'm afraid I must again ask you to extend your adorable torso across that table and turn up your exquisitely rounded rear for the rod."
Clotilda hesitated. Her lip trembled. "I'll take it all right if only you'll cane me clean. I mean, across the ass. Not right under me like that. It isn't fair."
Mrs. Forest laughed. "Not where it hurts most and does so much good, eh. Besides, I wouldn't be able to work on those lovely swollen weals, would I. I have a feeling this is going to hurt you a lot more than it does me, my girl."
She just managed to suffer it. When it was over she slumped to the floor, holding her aching, white-hot welted buttocks. A place on the right felt oozy, moist.
"You fiend," she whispered sickly.
"For that uncalled-for comment to a superior, Clotilda, you will do an hour in the paddock on a punishment saddle. With what you've got under you I think you'll feel it."
The punishment saddle, girthed to a spirited mare, turned out to be just that-broad and wooden, with serrations carpentered into its surface. As she had to ride in a micro that rucked up at once-"bare-back," as clapping Pamela called it from the paddock railing-and without stirrups her bottoms began to feel like molten lumps of bruise. The horse was a hard one to get into a canter and posting in a trot was a series of bumping jerks. Twice she thumped off hard onto the beaten earth and when it was over she hobbled stiff-legged to the house, holding her scorched cheeks. The insides of her knees were skinned raw. She asked to be excused attendance at luncheon, to no avail. She asked to stand to take her meal, and this request was granted.
When the children had gone upstairs Mrs. Forest said softly: "Silly stubborn girl."
"How long is this going to go on for?" asked Clotilda, standing at her place, her mini-skirt trembling.
"Until you see reason."
"You can't ask me to take another six tonight. Not on my ... in my present state, Mrs. Forest." "Can't I?" The woman laughed. "I like my meat nicely tenderized, Clotilda. I like caning buttocks in general, and yours in particular. You're such a nice rumpy specimen, my dear, and you do squirm so eloquently. You should see yourself from behind for the last two." A maid came in with some cigarettes; she was a tall, leggy beauty of a creamy olive hue. "Oh, Louise, fetch the ivory cane, would you." "Yes'm."
When she had left Mrs. Forest went on: "You haven't seen half of my methods of persuasion yet, Clotilda. The children showed you a few in the kitchens, I suppose, but you really don't know the ingenuity of our repertoire out here in the humid tropics. Take The Grille, for instance. I must show you that one day, it's definitely amusing, as well as educative. It's simply a stool-without the seat, as it were. Instead, there are four strands of wire strung across it. The nasty thing is plugged in and the wires heated. Not red-hot-we're not cruel out here-but close on. The rueful sinner-and you really should see the stalling that goes on-has to strip and squat on it, with the wires running across her tender tushie. Mind you-there are rules: she has to sit on the strands with her hands behind her neck and, all important, feet off the floor. Full weight down. She has to keep sitting on the hot wires while I count three. Four for a real sizzler. And I can count awfully slowly. You should see their expressions. They pour with sweat. But what's so comic is when it's over and they jump up as if trying to break a track record or something and scamper around the room, howling. They really dance, and they know that rubbing only makes it worse, so they usually clasp their arms and hop-with four nice warm lines behind them. Oh thank you, Louise."
The maid had returned with a long supple cane, made of polished ivory; she stood respectfully to one side.
"You may go, Louise."
"Was there nothing else you wanted, M'm?" The girl was obviously puzzled. "You not want to use it on I?"
Mrs. Forest laughed. "I agree it would be highly enjoyable, Louise, but no, this time you can get your ass out of here intact. Go on, scoot."
When they were alone again, the woman went on: "If you're complained about again tonight, my beauty, it will be my son Ian who administers the infliction. I sometimes let him practice on the maids and he's getting quite accurate, despite a slight lack of follow-through. However, as he's only a boy, he'll use this on your backside, Miss. It's rare a tusker can be found to cut a cane of this length from; but the ivory is hard as stone and I think you'll find it hurts. . . ."
But Clotilda was on her way out. The muslin curtains had been drawn in her bedroom; the air was steamy and hot. In the half-light she saw the boy standing in his shirt, coning up a surprisingly thick, slick-skinned erection. She looked at him with long silent loathing.
"How do you want me?" she muttered at last. A slow smile spread over his features, that of a child awarded a promised sweetmeat.
"On your back, doubled up like a ball!" he chortled excitedly. Then he flung himself on her. "Hey, wait a minute ... I ... ugh ... ow ... uingh!"
Bumped and buffeted, she was bowled backwards, her legs catching on the bed; then suddenly her knees were in her armpits and she was staring helplessly at the furred seam of her sex being sliced into by the down-driving piston of his prick. It was so big as to be deformed, slucking into her up to the lungs, as she breathlessly fought for some purchase of relief. "Uingh ... oh ... let me .. ." "Christ, you're hot!"
He was sluicing expertly in and out of her. The door burst open and a girlish whisper sounded-"Goody gum-drops! So she broke at last. Bags I sit on her face and if she doesn't make me come, I'll pee all over her."
"Wait. . . I . . . ough!" Her nose was sunk in childish twat.
The trouble was that . . . was that ... she herself . . . in bucking to the boy's thrusts . . . dammit, he was making her ... it was. . . .
"Christ, she's coming in spurts. ..."
That evening Clotilda was more than surprised to be summoned to the presence in the estate office. She had on a cool mint nothing, Mrs. Forest her usual white breeches. They stared at each other for a long time.
"So you finally came to your senses, Clotilda."
"I was fucked by your son, if you must know, Mrs. Forest, and this time I don't think he has much cause for complaint."
"Really drilled it into you, did he! These growing pains in the groin-though I sometimes wonder how that pecker of his could grow any bigger, don't you. I rather gather it was also agreeable for you."
"It wasn't madly amusing being urinated on by your daughter."
"The monkey!" Then the woman's eyes narrowed- "Listen, Clotilda, you've caused a lot of fuss and bother. Far too much. I'm ordering you to wear a shame dress and, yes, restraint for the next two days. Report to Mrs. Milner first thing on getting up and she'll see to it for you. And if I have any more trouble from you, my girl, it won't be the cane it'll be the whip."
The shame dress lived up to its name. It was in fact a little girl's much washed-out blue gingham-Pamela's, perhaps?-worn with soft white socks and buckle shoes. The shame of it was that the minute flirty skirt but covered a half or a third of Clotilda's opulent bottoms, the under-curves of which, so ripely wealed, were on constant alliciating display as they churned milkily together when she walked. There was a biting saddle thong between her legs, padlocked to a belt, at the back of which her hands were kept constantly cuffed. She was at the mercy of the infants who played with her delightedly, like a doll, fondling and feeling bubbies and buttocks. Ian could not, thanks to the strap, shoot off in her, but did so on her, while Pam got up to her urinary pranks; they took her for walks around the estate on a lead, threw her in the pond, and generally made her life a misery for two days. Meals were eaten on a high child's stool, her food being masticated by a maid who then spat it on a plate for Clo to bend and swallow. For relief of her inner person she was allowed three, and three only, appeals to Mrs. Milner.
Things continued amicably enough for a month. So long is she was willing to service the insatiable son, and occasionally pleasure the dimpling daughter, Clo was left in peace-at least she did not hear the bendy whack of cane-wood whupping into her derriere, nor feel the excruciating sting after. Alas, there came the day when the repulsive Ian tried to bugger her. She refused. He "complained." Clotilda was sentenced to a flogging.
She stood in the little clearing looking hopelessly at the whipping post as Mrs. Forest and her two children arrived for the fray. The overseer was oiling his whip to one side. There were a number of coloreds about, watching, yet curiously restrained.
Mrs. Forest stood with feet astride. "All right, Clotilda, stand out."
She stood out.
"Strip off."
"May I keep my panties?" "No."
Nude, fluttery-breasted, she stood there, chin up.
"Now, Mr. Overseer, do your duty. It's fifteen of the very best for this one, and all across the buttocks. I want a bloody bum before you've done."
Sickly, Clotilda turned to the whipping post.
But no one moved.
Behind her she heard Mrs. Forest say suddenly, in a startled tone, "Well, Mr. Griffiths, what are you waiting for, then?"
"You!" said a guttural man's voice.
Whirling, Clotilda saw Mrs. Forest follow suit. A man in white duck was confronting them from behind the barrel of a well-held Luger. Instinctively, Clotilda covered her breasts and cunt.
"Frits!" said Mrs. Forest weakly.
"Exactly," snarled the newcomer advancing. A cordon of armed men in khaki drill had circled the clearing. Mr. Griffiths was grinning. The coloreds seemed to be expecting the event.
"He's only a damn Portugoos, Mumsie," shouted Pamela frantically, before a blow in her ribs doubled her, gasping.
"Exactly," repeated the man with the gun, "your whole colony is surrounded, my dear Mrs. Forest, and I have come to take revenge at last. I rather think you were expecting my return, were you not?"
"What do you want from me, you swine?"
"What you deserve. You're not getting ten, you're not getting twelve, you're not getting fifteen, my dear. You're getting twenty-five, and all across that sweet fat ass of yours, too. Get moving and take 'em down. After that, I'll deal with your children."
There was silence in the clearing. The coloreds were gloatingly grinning. The Luger made a motion. Mrs. Forest frowned and went to the whipping post. Clotilda turned, slipped on her garments and was about to leave when the man barked out, "You! Where are you going? Don't you want to whip the kids? I was going to ask you to, y'know."
Clotilda stayed. Anyway, the whole scene was too crazily exciting to leave in any event.
Mrs. Forest was triced up to the post, hands high, naked to her boot-tops, over which her breeches lagged in unseemly folds. Her splendid crupper, pearl white, was arched back by the boss for the whip.
The overseer drew its tail through his left hand and with a feathering motion of his right sent it whickering through the air. It flacked with terrific, jolting velocity across the lower curves of the stretched woman cheeks. Her whole body winced. Her head came back in a grunt, teeth clenched. A livid weal rose up.
"That's right, Mumsie," called the girl hysterically from the side. "Don't cry. Don't let the swine get a sound out of you."
Another blow sent her sprawling.
"Twenty-four more, my dear," jeered the man with the pistol. "After which I shall have pleasure in branding you with my special mark. You know where, don't you."
