Dorinda sat in the little seat in the prow of the dinghy, tense, angry and very much afraid.
"We'll pick you up in a week." Mike assured her grudgingly.
She did not answer, but instead watched the phosphorescence as the oars disturbed the quiet water and the small craft cut it's way towards the dark bulk of the Island that had become suddenly and frighteningly close in the silver darkness of the Aegean night.
"Have it all to yourself. Not a man anywhere. Ought to make you happy."
Mike's tone was sardonic. It bit and hurt.
Dorinda refused to be baited. She did not want him to sense the tears in her voice.
But, instinctively, her arms tugged rebelliously at the cold metal of the handcuffs that joined her wrists behind her back.
He saw the motion, and jibed: "You don't need hands, Honey. No nasty men to save your honour from."
She turned and gazed at him with a cold hatred that touched his impregnability.
"You won't starve." He complained defensively. "You can save that martyred look for the goats. There's a few around." He guffawed coarsely, "Don't suppose the old billy will want to make love ... "
Her disdainful stare cut short his half hearted attempt at humor. His voice became acidly business-like: "There's berries and some fruit: you'll manage. Besides there's the house. It's quite a place. No one living there right now. But no telling what you might find if you can get in. Probably a few cans of this and that."
Dorinda's only answer was to deliberately clink the chain that joined her hands.
"You can rattle those handcuffs all you like, Honey. But you are going to wear them." Mike's voice became grim. "Just a nice little bit of jewelry to remember me by. They'll make things difficult for you. But, Hell, you got all the time there is. You'll surprise yourself with all the things you can do with your hands behind your back."
Driven by one last powerful stroke of the oars the keel of the dinghy bit into the sand of the beach. The man sat, watching. His lips curled in a grin of bitter satisfaction.
He made no move to help.
As though following a predetermined drill, Dorinda paused for the little craft to steady, then carefully rose to her feet and stepped out on to the sand still warm from the day's sun. It felt good between her bare toes. She took a couple of paces before she turned to face the man who was making good his threat to maroon her, naked, on a Grecian Isle. She knew that in so doing she conceded weakness. There would be no last minute reprieve. She should have trudged manfully up the beach without this last meeting of their eyes.
"You're a silly bitch." Mike assured her cheerfully.
"Have fun with yourself." Already he was yards from shore.
Dorinda choked back the vitriol. He would only laugh. She stood impotently watching the dinghy speed back to the yacht. A tense white statue in the night.
What does a girl do when she finds herself alone, sans clothes, sans hands, on an uninhabited island in the Aegean Sea! Dorinda considered her plight. She had never felt more vulnerable. Mike had shrewdly computed her hazards of survival and reduced her resources to the minimum by which she could sustain herself. Even if she lived on berries she would have to pluck them with her mouth. Her hands were lost.
Petulantly she tugged at the steel bands upon her wrists. They were snug. If she kept pulling at them they would chafe. If only he had been content to tie her she might eventually have managed to free herself by some expedient or other. But Mike had laughingly explained that, without the key, neither she or anyone else could free her hands from their prisonment behind her back. They would stay like that until he chose to return.
He had similarly, despite her pleas, imposed nudity upon her. It, too, was an impediment. Bare feet must tread with care, bare skin must shun the wounds of bramble and brush. A naked girl must eye with dubiety any other human an un-likely chance might thrust her way. Clothes are a form of amour. Without them a girl might find herself eyed with both doubt and desire. Dorinda knew that should a man come into view her first instinct would be to hide.
The rattle of an anchor chain and the muffled purr of a motor came clearly across the water. The yacht was under way. Dorinda watched it merge into the night. She cherished no belief that this was a joke, so that it would soon return to retrieve a frightened girl now amenable to it's owner's whims. Mike had said a week. So a week it would be. She wondered miserably if that which she now faced would indeed break her resolve. But thrust the thought aside. Yet it returned. The seven days could scarce be other than a frightening ordeal. But what then! Mike could so easily leave her as she was and go away and forget her. He was capable of such an act. Dejectedly she turned her back upon the calm water and trod carefully toward the higher slope where she would find warm dry sand on which to spend the night. She would not explore Kyrexos in the dark.
Morning brought hunger and a disquieting confrontation with helplessness. She needed food. But what could she do to obtain it! Sand clung to her skin but she could not brush it off. Her captive hands could not reach her hair, so that she was forced to toss her head wildly to dislodge the particles and, hopefully, soothe the tangles.
Angrily she made her way towards the trees.
The thought of berries was nauseating. Dorinda wanted food, real food! She decided to search for the house. Even with her hands fastened as they were she could probably contrive to open a can should she be lucky enough to find one. Kyrexos was little more than forty acres in extent. A mixture of uneven surface, bare rock and sparse woods of cypress and pine.
There were paths! Perhaps the goats had made them.
Most were barely discernable. But the one she chose bore evidence of the work of human hands and the tread of human feet. She stepped out hopefully and soon found herself on a cleared road, a double track that vehicles had used. Dorinda followed it up an incline in the expectation of a wider reconnaissance.
The vista was delightful. She paused to admire. A shallow wooded valley swept down to a wide sandy beach and the ocean. To one side the house had been set upon the upper slope. Even from a distance it was evident that the mellow stone structure had been built by someone with both an esthetic appreciation and a great deal of money.
It's terraces and balconies had been contoured to make it a part of the landscape into which it blended. The chained girl gave a small sigh of relief. If she could find an open door or a loose window, at least she would have shelter. Scanning the panorama she found no sigh of life.
"Lovely view, don't you think?"
Dorinda froze. The cheerful male voice had come from one side and slightly to the rear. She was shocked into inaction. It was too late to run, too late to hide. Whoever it was, he had already seen all of her there was to see. Why be coy! Besides, she had liked the sound of the voice, it was educated and English. She found herself with the feminine wish that when she turned to face him neither of them would be disappointed.
He sat among the rocks, his sun coloured skin merging with them so that she had been unaware of his presence. He wore only the briefs of a swimmer. He was looking at her with amusement but no surprise. Dorinda saw that he was just the right age and just the right build and just the right height. In spite of feeling all breasts and pubic hair she hoped he found her as beautiful as she found him.
"Good morning." She managed inadequately, and blushed.
He quite frankly appraised her body. His eyes roving in search of defects, assessing her attributes. Piqued by the impersonal quality of his examination which had given but scant attention to her features, she demanded bravely: "Do you want to feel as well as look?"
His laugh was pure good humor. His words made no sense: "Good old Dave!
Comes up trumps every time."
Dorinda was hungry and very unsure. If he decided to rape her there was nothing effectual she could do to stop him. At least he might feed her afterwards. If he was a gentleman then the sooner the preliminaries were dealt with the better.
"Who is good old Dave?" She inquired politely. "I don't know him."
He was still amused. "Bet the blighter's used another name. What did he call himself'?"
"I was put here by a man named Michael Sandos. He's never been called Dave that I know of. I'm afraid you have mistaken me for someone else."
"Why the handcuffs then?" Obviously he thought he had scored a point.
"Do all your female guests arrive suitably restrained?" Dorinda felt she could afford to make her voice appropriately tart.
"If you buy one from good old Dave they certainly do." Evidently he expected her to understand the cryptic reference.
"Well, I haven't been bought from good old Dave!" Dorinda said with finality.
"And, in case you might be interested, I'm hungry. And I'd be grateful if you could get these damn things off my wrists. After that, d'you think you could manage something for me to wear?" Her words surged against an intangible barrier she could sense but not define.
"No key on me, I'm afraid" He said it with an emphasis that consigned her other requests into limbo.
"But I can't eat it with my hands like this." Dorinda wanted to come to grips with whatever was floating in the air.
"Don't worry, dear girl, we'll feed you."
"We?" She looked at him quizzically.
"Terry and me. She's my sister. Proper little baggage. Bought the place a week ago. Just moved in. Of course there's Hislop and Amity." Catching the query in her glance, he added: "Hislop's the butler cum handyman, and Amity's the housekeeper."
He chuckled, "They probably sleep together. But then, Terry and I do too, so who are we to complain. Delightful menage. You'll love it."
He was probably joking. But either way it sounded better than Mike had planned for her. She fluttered her shoulders and rattled the single link between her wrists. She knew she made a pretty picture of impotence. "They'll all accept me like this?"
"Of course, dear girl! Matter of fact, young Terry's in a bit of a bind herself at just this moment." He grinned apologetically as though they shared some amusing knowledge. "Had to keep my hand in, y'know, until you showed up. And Terry's dying to get her hands on you ... When she can, of course!" He gave her a broad boyish wink of shared understanding.
Dorinda understood nothing except a mistaken identity which her companion refused to recognize. It all sounded a bit risque but probably harmless. "My name is Dorinda Matson." She offered tentatively.
He advanced beaming, hand outstretched. "Mark Esmond." He announced brightly.
Then, looking at his inappropriate member, "Sorry, and all that." A moment later, with complete naturalness, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It was quite a long kiss. Dorinda enjoyed it. She knew that if she had not been handcuffed she would have returned the embrace. When it was done she stood breathless and aware of another blush, his skin had felt warm and alive against her nipples. Mark took her arm in a brotherly clasp, "Breakfast ahead." He announced heartily. "Young Terry's going to get the surprise of her life ... "
It was Dorinda who was surprised. Terry seemed unaffectedly happy and unaware of anything untoward. She was very young and very beautiful and very naked. She stood against the fluted pillar on the terrace, a picture of grace and insouciance in no way marred by the silver chains that lifted her arms and held her wrists on each side of the column. Her nipples and the lips of her sex had been painted a bright scarlet.
Her pubic hair had been shaved into a perfect Cupid's heart: the effect both startling and delightful. Her smile of greeting was as radiant as her voice: "Darling, I'm so glad. Now poor little me can shed her shackles again. Look at what Mark's done to me! Isn't he simply awful...!"
There was a delightful simplicity about brother and sister. A sort of puppy-dog exuberance that gathered others to the fold as though a shared enthusiasm in eccentricity was to be expected. Dorinda was far from naive, and not without some knowledge of things outer. If the Esmonds played fun and games she was prepared to be tolerant. But she was demandingly aware of her handcuffs, her nudity and her appetite.
"I think Mark is very nice." She said evenly. "I'm just hoping he can get these handcuffs off me and give me something to eat. I'm hungry."
Terry surveyed her with curiosity. Dorinda had the feeling she had said something odd or out of place.
"Oh, I'll feed you, darling." The happy captive assured her cheerfully. "But, of course, you're joking about the handcuffs ... "
Dorinda had had a bad day and an uncomfortable night. Now she was confronted with what appeared to be light hearted lunacy in which there was an undercurrent of the inexplicable. She was unsure whether to be pleased or frightened. She allowed herself to drift with the tide. Handcuffed as she was it became an easy decision.
She allowed herself to be daintily fed by a solicitous Terry. A Terry freed from captivity, but still innocently naked. An eager moppet deliciously enjoying a situation she seemed to understand. Dorinda strove to find comfort in the knowledge that, without a key, handcuffs posed a problem. It was not until the meal was done that she interrupted her companion's constant flow of chatter to try, once more, for a return to reality. But it was to Mark she turned. He had sat watching the two girls with a detached amusement, allowing his pert sister to take the floor.
"Perhaps you have some tools: hacksaws or something?" She inquired diffidently. "And I've heard that oil or grease might make them slip...." She looked at them both appealingly. "I sure would like to get them off and get some clothes on."
Even as she uttered them, her words sounded lost.
"But darling, I'm sure we have a key!" Terry sounded surprised.
It was on the tip of Dorinda's tongue to irritably demand: "For Pete's sake use it then!" But instinct curbed her waspishness. So far they had been kind. She tried again: "My hands must have been behind my back for fifteen hours...." She gave them both her best expectant smile.
"Oh, pouf! That's nothing!" Terry declaimed. "This awful monster kept me handcuffed for a week once."
"You had been a bad girl?" Dorinda hoped she had struck the right note.
"She's always a bad girl." Mark contributed comfortably: It sounded like a commendation.
"Well. I'm not a bad girl!" Her hint was broad. They ignored it.
"He doesn't really mean I'm bad. He's just sort of generalizing. I'm not bad at all. I just like bad things." Terry giggled as though she had told all.
They were elusive as shadows. Dorinda was tired of their game. Best come to grips with whatever she must face. She caught Mark's gaze. "Please unlock these handcuffs." She requested pleasantly but very firmly.
The silence made her feel like the child who had asked for a prohibited slice of cake.
She could have sworn the glance exchanged between brother and sister was one of puzzlement. It was Terry who responded in a mildly reproachful voice.
"But, darling, you don't really expect to run around free, do you?"
"And why not!" This time the wasps were buzzing.
"Well ... Wouldn't be right, would it." Terry fluttered her hands as though dealing with an obstinately obtuse child.
"What on Earth's wrong with wanting the use of my hands and to wear some clothes!" Dorinda demanded angrily.
The response shattered whatever equanimity she still possessed.
"I think the poor dear wants to be whipped." Terry offered the observation to her brother as though in explanation of an anomaly. "She's probably shy." She added kindly.
"Now see here...!" Dorinda sat up straight pulling futilely at her prisoned wrists in instinctive anger. The motion thrust her breasts into a flattering prominence. She bore Mark's appreciative scrutiny with flushed cheeks and an inward tremor. "I do not wish to be whipped." She assured them with flat finality.
"Or anything else either." She added without being quite sure what she referred to.
Having enjoyed her breasts, Mark's eyes raised to meet her own angry stare. He was obviously puzzled. "D'you mean to tell us that absolute clod never briefed you on the drill?"
"I'm not who you think I am." They were full of surprises.
"Over to the column." Mark tersely ordered his sister. "Oh no, darling!
Please...!" Terry wailed.
Mark rose to his feet. He had suddenly ceased to be a boy. Terry gave him a penitent grimace, shrugged her shoulders disconsolately, and resumed the pose in which Dorinda had first beheld her. She offered her wrists for the fetters. When the metal bands circled them she pulled as though to assure herself that she was indeed securely chained. "I hate you." She said to her brother without conviction. She turned mischievous eyes toward Dorinda. "You watch your P's and Q's." She warned. "He's quite merciless."
Dorinda yearned to run. But what was the use! There was still hope that she was involved in no more than a mild behavioral oddity. But she viewed brother and sister with new and startled eyes.
"I wanted to be in on it." Terry complained petulantly to her brother. "You're an absolute beast, darling." Suddenly, perkily, she thrust her tongue out at him in a provocative gesture of defiance.
Quietly, without haste and without anger, Mark lifted his sister's left foot off the floor and fastened it to the side of the marble by a shackle already provided. Terry must now perforce stand on one foot. In a little while it would become a real punishment.
"Little girls should be seen and not heard." He admonished without rancor.
"Oh, Mark! I'm sorry. I didn't mean ... Oh, not on one foot ... Please!" Her captive ankle struggled against the metal that held it a foot from the floor.
Mark laughingly bent and kissed the pouting lips. "You asked for it, darling. You know you did."
"Oh alright! So I asked for it!" Terry admitted.
The siblings smiled at each other in pure love and perfect understanding.
Mark grasped Dorinda's arm. "Come along." He said cheerfully. "I think we need to have a little talk."
Dorinda could not have agreed more. But she felt little optimism. The sight of the naked girl chained to the pillar made chaos of her thoughts. It was too unreal! Terry, instead of struggling or complaining, contrived to make herself quite beautiful.
Perhaps she posed! Or possessed some natural grace. Standing on her one free foot she leaned negligently against the stone to which she was chained. The one raised leg by which she was being penalized enhanced the appeal of the picture that she made, as did the seemingly effortless raising of her arms to the shackles that held them so invincibly. She radiated the perfection of line and posture of an artist's model. She was very beautiful. She gave the departing girl a smile of encouragement, her own condition forgotten. "Don't be awkward, darling." She advised. "Or you'll hurt when you sit down." The silvery peal of her laughter followed them from the terrace.
It was a pleasant room. A lounge in which perhaps a nude girl with chained hands might not seem too incongruous. Dorinda sat stiffly in the big arm chair to which she had been guided by a firm but friendly hand.
"Bit early for a drink I suppose?" Mark smiled at her appraisingly.
"Handcuffed girls can't hold drinks." Dorinda pointed out reasonably, but with a hint of sarcasm.
"No they can't, can they." Mark agreed as though grateful for the reminder. He had remained standing. She flushed under his scrutiny.
"Couldn't I be draped in at least a little something?" She pleaded with deliberate coyness.
"No." He disposed of the request as though surprised she had made it.
"I think I could talk better if I wasn't so ... so, exposed."
He dismissed the subject with an impatient wave of the hand. But his smile was again that of the boy she had met upon the road. "Young Terry's a chatterbox." He confided. "She has to sparkle. We'll get to wherever we are going better without her."
"So you just chain her up and leave her standing on one foot!"
"What else! Besides, she loves it. Surely you saw that?" Dorinda had seen it all too clearly. It made her next question inevitable. "Am I supposed to like it too?" She clinked her handcuffs.
Mark gave the question considered thought. "Actually I suppose not." He conceded.
"We explained this to Dave at the time. The thing that really matters is that you are here. Crossed the Rubicon so to speak."
"I was dumped here by a miserable S.O.B. out of spite. I was never offered a Rubicon to cross. I don't know your Dave." She told him flatly.
"Remember little sister's warning about hurting when you sit down?" Mark asked nonchalantly.
Dorinda tensed.
He laughed amusedly at her motion's admission of vulnerability. "For the moment you are saved by a discrepancy of a couple of days. You weren't supposed to show this soon. So I'll listen to your story. Let's have it."
She told it in detail. "Mike's a bastard!"
"Sounds like a resourceful type. A bit crude perhaps. Makes hard work of things ... This marooning lark...! I'd have had you behaving in thirty minutes."
"Behaving?" His use of the word was suspect.
He laughed at her groping for what was, for him, obvious. "For a girl, behaving is doing whatever a man wants her to."
"You don't really mean that." Dorinda chided. She prayed inwardly that indeed he did not mean it.
"I was never more sincere."
They stared at each other in confrontation. Between them an invisible gage had been hurled upon the rug.
Dorinda temporized. "This girl your Dave is to deliver: what is she? What do you expect of her? If you'll tell me we won't be so at cross purposes."
"Of course, love! Sensible girl." Mark draped himself in a chair facing her and eyed his guest as though striving to gauge the effect his words would have.
"Frightfully simple, really," He said airily.
Dorinda listened. The way Mark told it made everything sound exquisitely simple: frighteningly so!
"The fantasy has always been there." He explained musingly. "It was the same for Terry as for me. We were born with it as though we had carried it along from some other life or some other place. It was coloured by that same wonder with which a child sees it's first bird in flight or the branches of a tree against a blue sky. For us it had the beauty and rightness of all natural things. Scoff if you want. It was so. I suppose Terry was about six years old when I first tied her to the apple tree at the bottom of the garden. I wondered why she did not cry. But, for both of us it was the birth of an esthetic glory most people never know."
"Esthetic ... tied to a tree!" Dorinda protested.
His boyish grin was accusatory. "I watched your face when we left Terry chained to her column. You glimpsed it then."
"She's an exhibitionist with a gift for posing. She is also very beautiful."
Dorinda felt her defenses slipping.
"You don't really believe that's all you saw." Mark told her discerningly. His voice had become earnest as though she must be made to understand. "As children we played. She was always the damsel in distress. But I was never the knight in shining amour. The fantasy cast me in a quite different role. I was The Male: The male to whom all females must submit by right of conquest. The wicked Baron who chained the poor girl in his dungeon. He never did get as much publicity as good old Galahad. But without him there would never have been a romantic legend.
"Terry was entrancingly attuned. She always resisted in about the right degree to maintain validity. The degree of resistance always briefed me as to what I should do to her. When adolescence came she accepted the whip with the same joy with which I used it. We found in her striated skin that same quality of golden wonder that had pervaded the enactment of our fantasy from the start. It was about that time we also became lovers�^'"
"Whips and incest! What are you trying to prove?"
Dorinda's defenses were still sliding away from beneath her feet. But she made her protest vehement.
Mark sighed tolerantly at her intransigence. "You don't try to prove the Taj Mahal or Lake Louise in the moonlight. They are there. That's the beginning and the end.
Each is an entity with it's own appeal and compulsion. So it is with our fantasy."
"And I suppose your parents approved these small pleasantries!"
"We had to keep it under cover as we grew older. Awful bind actually. But they died in an accident not too long ago and left us quite a lot of money. That's when we decided to buy The Island."
"Seems to me you have your heart's desire. Why bother with some other poor girl?"
He shrugged. "Human perversity, I suppose. Always one more river to cross. Young Terry is absolute perfection. She and I have wondered how amusing it might be to have one that wasn't."
"You mean kidnap?" Dorinda glimpsed a dark chasm.
"Well, that's where good old Dave comes in. He's one of those resourceful blokes you go to when you want the impossible. Put enough money in his hand and he'll produce it for you. We made only one stipulation, she had to be beautiful." He paused to give his next words weight. "You are beautiful."
The dark chasm had widened.
"Know what I think?" Mark asked good humouredly. "I think Dave persuaded you, and that everything probably went along O.K. until he hit on this quaint notion of setting you ashore to deliver yourself nicely stripped and handcuffed and ready for action. In the night you got scared and decided you had made an awful mistake and wanted out. Right?"
"Wrong!" Dorinda declared with all the emphasis at her command. "In a couple of days you are going to have an extra girl on your hands."
"Stretching coincidence a bit thin, don't you think?"
"I have to agree to that." Dorinda conceded dejectedly.
She looked across at him brightly. "But, don't you see: a couple of days will prove me right."
"Suppose I have to concede that un-likely possibility too." He admitted unwillingly. "Seems a silly sort of game ... "
"So couldn't you be real nice and treat me as a sort of guest in the meantime. I like you both. You might like me. Please unlock these handcuffs and give me something to wear." She put all the feminine appeal at her command into her plea.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Get the old cerebrum working, love. You're not that dim."
"Spell it out." Dorinda said resignedly. "Maybe then I'll believe."
"Oh you will, ducky, you will!" He was exasperatingly cheerful. "You see, darling, the crux of your situation is that it does not really matter whether you are Dave's girl or someone else's. If your story is true it puts you in about the same boat that Dave's girl will be in when and if she arrives. As far as Terry and I are concerned you are a simply a first class bit of good fortune."
"You mean I'm kidnapped? First Mike, then you?"
"Let's call it displaced, shall we. Sounds less mercenary."
"Either way I'm a prisoner?"
"Yes."
"What about the other girl when she comes? Will you free me then?"
"No. If one is good, two might be better."
"What will you do about Mike when he roars up here looking for me?"
"If the apocryphal Michael shows up demanding female flesh we may hand him the extra girl. Or give him some fairy-tale. We think you'll do very nicely for us."
How neat it was! Dorinda knew herself trapped by circumstances no one had contrived. Taking this engaging young man at his own face value she could understand the plausibility of his thinking. Now that the truth was out she relaxed into the depth of the chair and struggled absent mindedly with her handcuffs.
"What are you going to do to me? Chain me up to see how pretty I look?"
"Oh, that's just part of it." Mark exclaimed with boyish enthusiasm. "You're not a natural, are you? I mean, not like Terry and me?"
"Good Heavens, no!"
"That's all right then." He sounded relieved. "Think what a marvelous time we'll have training you."
Dorinda groped for the right approach. "What about ... about conscience? Don't you have any? What right have you to make me a prisoner! You can't possibly expect me to play your silly games?"
"You will, y'know." Mark sauntered over to a cupboard.
When he retraced his steps he was flexing the slender length of a wicked looking riding switch. Calmly he offered it for her inspection. "You'll do whatever this tells you to, darling." He chuckled, "Terry always does."
Dorinda cringed. She was naked and afraid. She knew nothing of pain. But looking at the thing he held she knew it foolish to suppose herself impervious to what it might do to her. She was bewildered. "But that's cruelty! You are spoiling something good.
Out on the road there when we met I liked you. I was glad you'd found me �^' even though I was ... like this. With most men I'd have wanted to run. But I didn't with you. Please ... "
Mark resumed his seat, one leg draped over it's arm, the riding crop resting across his knee where she could never be unaware of it.
"It's a bit of a poser, dear girl." He admitted. "You see, we really do want you to understand. We don't want you to think we are a couple of absolute bastards: we like you too. I'm in a similar position to some johnny who can play the piano by ear, or a chap who can do long division in his head. They were born with it. They can never explain it. They can never get rid of it even if they wanted to, and they don't want to. See what I mean?"
"You feel that just because you are possessed of this ... this, gift, shall we call it, that any inconvenience or pain I may suffer is purely incidental and should be borne gladly...." She looked at him beseechingly, "That I'm ... That I'm, well, sort of privileged to be chosen?"
"You put that rather well, old girl." Mark admitted wryly. "Not fair to expect you to digest our fantasy all at one sitting �^' hence the handcuffs. There's one thing I want to avoid in speaking of the fantasy, and that's to be flippant. We Britishyou're American, aren't you! We British tend to use flippancy to get us over the hurdles. But it's not appropriate in this. Honestly, it isn't."
It was hard to be angry with him. Dorinda listened quietly. Tension dissolved.
"The word transcendental comes to mind." Mark continued thoughtfully. "Terry and I are governed and nourished by this thing I am trying to make explicable. It is the most powerful force in our lives, except perhaps our love for each other. But even there I'm not sure ... The nub and essence of understanding it is to face the fact that we are driven by a force, a compulsion that gives us an extra dimension in life beyond the norm. We still move within the framework that contains others. But we have been given an additional faculty of sexual expression. Even that does not say enough, because above and behind it always is the glimpse and awareness of an ineffable beauty, something subliminal."
His voice trailed into silence as though the effort of expression had wearied him. He sat, pensive and distant.
Dorinda knew she could not break the silence. Her heart went out to this man who would always be a boy. She might fight him. But, nonetheless he had managed to evoke a picture in her mind. She knew herself within the grip of something she was ill equipped to cope with. She wished the whip was not so blatantly evident. Was it only by the medium of it's bite that she would fully understand?
They sat mute for a long time. Each busy with their own thoughts. It was a beginning and an end. Dorinda no longer believed in anything other than what Mark had told her. She would not escape. They would not let her go. No one would rescue her. The handcuffs became vividly real upon her wrists. No wonder they had refused to unlock them! What was she now! What was her status! A captive ... a slave.... some sort of plaything, a sex object! What about sex ...!
"What are you thinking?" Mark asked irrelevantly.
"Am I a slave?"
"Yes." He had a gift for monosyllables.
"What must I do?"
"You mean, to avoid this?" He held up the black withe.
"I suppose so." She admitted grudgingly. "I can understand that it is implicit in the question of obedience. That's what slavery is, isn't it, total obedience. I've been looking at the damn thing ever since you produced it: knowing I won't be the least bit heroic if you use it on me."
"I will use it on you." He said it not as a threat.
"Why? I'm sure I'll be a coward. One good swipe and I'll crawl." She looked at him hastily and anxiously. "Please don't think I'm a natural crawler. Honestly, I'm not. If I could fight you and get away I would. But I'm so damn helpless. The way I'm fixed you can do anything you like with me. I'd be crazy to invite a whipping over pride or ... or, because of distaste for something you demand of me."
His boyish grin was back. "Thinking of good old sex?"
"I suppose so." She felt a faint blush rising. "I may as well be honest about it.
I'm no novice. I've used my mouth and tongue. Were you hoping for a virgin?"
"We'd be too great a shock for the poor child. As I said: for Terry and I you are perfect. But you'll still be whipped."
"But why!" It was both an expression of curiosity and rejection.
"I honestly don't think it's possible to be a slave without being whipped. The whip creates a state of mind, and by continued use sustains it. I don't expect you to be pleased about getting marks on that lovely skin. But I think you'll come to recognize the truth of the precept."
"I expect you can bludgeon anyone into anything." Her eye was on the crop.
Mark chuckled and held it up for a better look. "Terry and I are as curious as you.
It's something new for us too. You are our first slave-girl. We think we know your mental processes and how to deal with them. After all, Terry's reactions have been a lifelong study for us both. But, admittedly, it's an experiment. We are looking forward to it." He eyed her quizzically. "I'd like you to look forward to it too ... But I expect that's a lot to ask?"
"You might talk me into it." Dorinda confessed demurely. "But I'm scared to death of that whip. I wish you hadn't showed it to me."
"Well, look at it like this." Mark tried again. "You know how a snake sheds it's skin once a year. We think you are going to have to shed yours. You know, the protective veneer of custom and usage. We think you'll find that becoming a slave is more a case of forgetting rather than learning. There's bound to be an instinctive resistance: that's where the whip comes in."
"Could we talk about something else." Dorinda's voice was apologetic. "That awful thing frightens me so I can't think straight. I have to accept that you are going to use it on me. But don't let's harp on it."
"Slaves do not direct the topic of conversation."
She felt her heart miss a beat. It had started! She gazed at Mark imploringly. "You mean I'm a slave as of right now? That I have to do what Terry said: 'Mind my P'sand Q's. Honest! I will try and be what you want. But please help me. I don't want to stop liking you."
Mark came and gently kissed her lips. It wasn't a brotherly kiss. "You are very sweet." He said, "I don't want to stop liking you either." Without pause, he went to the wall and pressed a button.
The woman was trim and neat, thirtyish. Attractive in her way. A Cockney, Dorinda guessed. They had their own peculiar stamp. She evinced no surprise, simply a respectful attention.
"Dorinda, this is Amity. She will be the first one to give you help." Mark's eyes twinkled at her bewilderment. "Do as she says. She's quite nice."
As Dorinda left the room she turned for one last communion with the man whose possession she now presumably was. "I'm absolutely lost, y'know." She confided in faint desperation.
Mark was smiling pensively. He was again the rather exciting young man she had met upon the road. Amity's hand guided her gently through the door.
"Bit lost meself, Miss." Amity advised cheerfully. "This bit's me first go, like. I know's what to do. I'm 'oping you knows the drill."
They had advanced part way through the house when the captive planted her feet firmly and stopped. Amity seemed human. It was worth a try. "Hold on a moment."
Dorinda pleaded. "You may as well know that I haven't the faintest idea about any drill or much of anything else. I feel as though I've been let loose in a lunatic asylum.
I want these handcuffs off my wrists. Can you do that for me?"
"I'm going to in a minute, Miss." Amity looked at her charge doubtfully. "You ain't going ter give me no trouble are you?"
Dorinda plunged. "Do you realize I am being confined against my will?"
"Oh yes, miss. Proper lark, ain't it."
"It's kidnapping. You could go to prison. Please let me go."
"Spose you 'ave ter try, miss. Seein' we just met, like. But I got me orders. Me and 'Islop thinks the world of the master and missis. Get up to some rare tricks they do. But we wouldn't 'urt 'em for the world. You'll 'ave to do whatever they want you to. This way please."
Dorinda knew the full demoralization of nakedness and chains. This woman, no bigger and probably no stronger than herself, could handle her with ease. Could hurt her terribly should she now essay to struggle or to run. She was close to tears as she allowed the firm fingers to guide her to where they wished to go.
It could have been a pleasant room. But it was bare stone. It's only furnishings were not reassuring to a girl without clothes. They consisted of a large wooden chest in one corner and a rope hanging from a pulley in the centre of the ceiling. Dorinda's apprehensive eye followed the latter to where it ended at a small electric winch on one wall.
"Aven't really got started 'ere yet." Amity sounded apologetic.
"You mean the rack and the thumbscrews haven't arrived!" The prisoner was feeling less co-operative by the minute. She knew that had Mark's smiling features been present the view would have seemed less sinister.
Amity tittered. "Don't suppose they'll go that far, miss. No need really."
"Is that rope hanging there for the reason I suspect?"
Dorinda asked grimly.
Amity looked embarrassed. " 'Fraid it is, miss." She produced a key ring on which there were a number of very small keys. " 'Specs one of these will do the trick ... "
She stepped back and looked doubtfully at the girl who wore the handcuffs. "I want to bring them 'andcuffs round in front, miss. Question is, what you going to do when I unlock them?"
It was all quite absurd! Gentility in slavery. She remembered hearing once that the English made a fetish of having things 'nice.' Their police were always frightfully polite. Here now this woman who was to all intents and purposes her wardress or jailer kept calling her miss. Everybody expected too much of a girl whose clothes had been taken from her and whose hands had been chained behind her back!
"I'm damned if I know!" She grinned ruefully at her cockney companion. "Since we are all being so polite I'll tell you straight that if I ever get the beastly things off my wrists I won't want 'em back on again!"
Amity sighed. "Must be a funny feeling, ain't it, miss? I mean, being undressed and all. And them 'andcuffs! Wouldn't like them at all, I wouldn't. But my! You do 'ave lovely breasts and nipples. Really smashing."
Dorinda dealt with this verbal montage as best she could. "It's a rotten feeling to be stripped naked by force and kept that way for everybody to have a good look. And these blasted things on my wrists that hold my hands behind my back make me twice as naked as naked. I can't cover anything. They make me as helpless as a babe in arms. I suppose I could kick you right now. But it would hurt my bare toes more than it would hurt you. But thanks, anyway, for admiring my breasts and for not calling my nipples tits. I hate that word."
"Get us back to square one." Said Amity pensively.
"Are you waiting for me to give you my word of honour that I'll be a good girl and not fight?"
"Oh, thank you, miss. Would you?"
"Why the Hell should I!" Dorinda was trying to come to grips with an elusive inconsistency hard to define. "It's like asking me to help out at my own execution, or to walk out on thin ice to prove it won't hold up."
Amity considered. "Well, look at it this way miss." She offered thoughtfully, "Don't know how it was with you in America, but when I was a kid and had inked my blotter in school I had to go out in front of the class and 'old my hand out to get it 'it with a cane what 'urt something crool. The last thing I wanted to do was 'old out that 'and.
But I always did."
"But you knew what you were getting." Dorinda protested. "I've been told I'm in something that goes on and on, and I don't know where it goes. I'm scared. I know it sounds silly and ... and, sort of ungrateful. But it would be a lot easier for me if you all used force to do, or to make me do whatever it is you think you have to. Where did the idea get around that I have to help and like it!"
"It's like I was saying, miss. They're a rare pair, they are: Miss Terry and Mr. Mark. Got something up their sleeve, they 'ave. One of them there psychological efforts I expect. Does a lot of practicing on Miss Terry, Mr. Mark does. Rare old games they get up to."
"Oh his sister!"
"She love it, Miss. Don't you believe different! Don't mean to say you'll love it too. But you are a different subject, see. Different background and attitude. " 'E'll get them there reactions out of you wot 'e can't get out of 'er. Tell the truth, Miss, me and 'Islop sort of looks forward to seeing 'ow you'll be in a month's time."
"So I'm an interesting experiment!" Dorinda words dripped frost.
Amity ignored the ice. She had become animatedly involved. "That's 'ow it 'ud be best for you to look at it, miss. Bloomin' awful for you to feel put upon. See, I 'specks that's why no force ain't been used. Mr. Mark, 'e's up to some little dodge 'e's thought up for himself: Not that Miss Terry ain't capable of thinking up some pretty pickles too."
"I suppose I'm a sucker." Dorinda sighed. "And, mind you, I'm not promising a thing, but if I promise to be good this time, what happens then?"
"Oh miss, you got it all wrong!" Amity looked distressed. "You don't ask questions, see. You don't tell me what to do. Or make no bargains. You're a ... I ain't a'going to say it, not yet I ain't."
"You mean I am a slave?" Dorinda cocked an eyebrow. Suddenly they both laughed.
"Sounds silly, don't it!" Amity tittered. "I mean, you ain't behaving right, for one thing. 'Cepting you ain't got no clothes and you do 'ave them 'andcuffs I ain't never seen a gal 'wot acted less like no slave nor you."
"Thanks."
"But that's the point, miss. You are just what the doctor ordered. They want to make you over, like." Amity turned a most serious gaze upon her captive. "I wouldn't laugh, Miss. Honest, I wouldn't! Me and 'Islop thinks they knows what they're doing."
"How about taking the handcuffs off me on trust?" They measured each other.
There was no enmity in their assessment.
"I'll unlock one cuff, miss. You can 'ave a good stretch."
"Oh no you don't! I want both wrists completely free from my stretch. You've no idea how I've come to hate those bits of steel."
Once more the eyes questioned. Amity grinned.
"Alright, love. You win. I got a good feeling about you...." She busied herself with the keys. A few moments later Dorinda was free. Her companion stood back, the shining cuffs with their single link dangling from one hand.
Until that moment the captive girl had not realized how badly her shoulders had ached. It was pure bliss to raise and flex her arms. She did so again and again in an ecstasy of sensuality. Even closing her eyes to better savor freedom.
"You do 'ave a loverly shape, miss: if you'll excuse me saying so." Amity's tribute sounded entirely genuine.
It ended as all things must end. Dorinda did not push her luck. Nor would she evade an issue.
"Well?" She asked innocently.
Amity held up the wicked bits of metal. "In front, please miss."
"Do me a favor." Dorinda pleaded like a little girl asking for candy. "Let me hold and feel those rotten things for a minute before you lock them on me. It's an urge I've got. I won't try anything. I promise."
Dorinda took the handcuffs from a quite willing hand. She sensed that her companion understood her strange need to hold and to handle the potent bits of steel that could so totally render her a helpless captive. She played with them. Examining them in a way she had never been able to. She had never actually seen them before.
Locked behind her back they had been invisible. She slid the cuff round and round through it's ratchet, savouring the series of clicks until it had completed it's circle.
Savouring her momentary power over the things that had prisoned her so long and which were about to prison her again. It came almost as a surprise when she realized that somehow in the past minutes while they talked she had come to accept the inevitability of offering her wrists that they might be once more locked within the metal bands.
Yet when the moment came it proved to be one of the most soul searching acts she had ever performed. Only by a compulsion of will could she return the shining circlets and hold out her hands. Every instinct cringed as she watched Amity cuff the proffered wrists. She winced at the small clicks as notch after notch was pressed home to make the inflexible metal snug with a dreadful intimacy.
When it was done she knew relief. Decision had been taken from her. It was Dorinda's first glimpse of that small beneficence of bonds. Her first lesson in a new school. In fascination she held up her linked hands and found an unexpected beauty in their joining. The handcuffs were no longer a dangling shapelessness. They had become potently a living part of her from which she could never escape.
"I suppose now I have to walk over to that rope?" She inquired helpfully. She felt sure she had divined it's purpose. She had read in books....
"Yes please, miss."
One more she must offer her hands and watch as they were secured. She rejected a silly instinct to run when she was left standing for the few moments it took Amity to reach the wall and press the switch. Unreality flooded her as the rope tautened and the prisoned hands began to rise. She followed their brief journey almost with disbelief as, starting from waist level, they came up before her eyes, above her head, and stopped only when her nudity was as taut as the rope itself. Her heels were still on the floor. She was not suspended. But she must stand very straight and more helpless than she had ever been. She felt all breasts and pubes. Her first reaction was thankfulness that no male was there to see. But this was replaced by a tingling knowledge that Mark might walk in at any moment. No doubt she was stretched and exposed like this for some purpose! A sinister phrase from fiction drifted into her mind: 'Held for questioning ... It was a position in which few girls would be stubborn.
"Coo! You do look lovely, miss." There was actually a trace of envy in Amity's voice.
"Let's change places then!" For a moment Dorinda managed to feel playful.
"I'm sure you'd look just as good. I expect it's a very flattering pose for any girl."
The cockney girl meditatively ran caressing fingers up and down the planes and curves of the pinioned girl. Her touch was soothing. Dorinda found she could not resent the intimacy. The touch was reverent as in the handling of any thing of beauty, an exploration of tactility.
"'Ow does it feel, miss? A bit draughty like?" She stood back and admired the living statue she had helped create.
"Oh Amity, I'm scared. I've never felt so vulnerable." Amity tittered.
"You mean if there was a gentleman around like! Bet there's a lot of blokes would give all they got to get a good look at you like this."
"Amity...?" Is Mark going to see me?"
"That would be telling, miss. Remember? No questions."
The captive twisted in frustration. There had remained in her mind throughout a nagging memory. "Amity, don't be angry. But before he called you Mark was playing with a whip ... He was just trying to scare me, wasn't he? I mean ... he was just joking...?"
Amity laughed delightedly. "You know very well, he was not joking, Miss. That there whip is for pretty girls who ask too many questions."
Suddenly she kissed her prisoner lightly on the lips. A moment later she was gone.
The door closed. Dorinda stood naked and alone.
A quailing Dorinda felt quite certain Amity had gone to procure a whip with which to prove her assertion. Would she return in a moment and send the lash curling round her shockingly available person! How awful to stand and watch yourself being whipped, denied all defense! But as the minutes passed the captive found her mind possessed by other imperatives.
Escape! That was the first thing in any prisoner's thoughts, was it not! But she wasted little time on it. From the moment Mike had set her on the sand and rowed away she had been robbed not only of liberty but of hope. There is no escape from an island! She was faintly ashamed of her tractability with Amity. She could have fought. She was unsure if her compliance had been dictated by the compulsions of helplessness or from her instinctive liking for these cheerful people who held her captive.
Her wrists were beginning to hurt. She stood on tiptoe to ease the strain. She guessed that if she was left long in this position she would come to feel very sorry for herself.
Why were they unkind! Why must she be their slave!
She felt guilt in being infected by their rational approach to a treatment of her that was nothing short of outrageous. She could not use the word criminal in thinking of any of them. But they had kidnapped her! Or had they! Actually she had been delivered into their hands neatly stripped and chained. They had accepted her as a gift. She posed herself the question that should she now be confronted by a couple of rescuing policemen, would she press charges! She knew she would not. So where did that leave her!
It left her thinking of Mark Esmond. He had reached out and touched her with that power men have over women and which women have over men. In love? Nonsense!
She scarcely knew him! But a girl did not have to know a man to feel what she felt.
He would stay in her thoughts as she had first seen him. A golden Apollo enjoying her nakedness.
The whip! Dorinda considered this with urgency. Hung as she was she would be a ripe offering for its lash. It could find her everywhere. She could deny no part of herself. But it was too unreal. It was out of character. Or was it! She had a memory of how Terry had suddenly dropped banter and obeyed, of how serious Mark had become when he had showed her the black horror and assured her earnestly that she would feel it. She suspected unhappily that she might have to be cut by its thong before she could sentiently accept its reality.
The whip would make her slave! That was the thesis!
Unhappily Dorinda glimpsed plausibility in the postulate. She did not feel slave now.
She felt herself only a frightened girl, stripped, her hands chained high above her head. If Mark was to have his way there must come a division, a sundering, a confrontation! She considered humoring him. In his boyish moods it would be easy to make a play of his desire. To enact a charade. To kneel in submission and call him 'Master'. Even to do the same for Terry, and for Amity and Hislop if she must.
But she had little hope that a voluntary surrender would satisfy. He would mould her as his fantasy had molded him. He would make her a dream come true. She felt an erotic excitement.
Terry came in like a breath of Spring. She wore clothes.
Not much, but enough to be considered dressed. "Darling, you look gorgeous! If only we had an artist! That pose should be immortalized." She did a small dance round and round the tethered girl. Her eyes feasting. "I say, love, you do have a super shape y'know. Mark's damn lucky. How about lunch?"
Always to be caught off guard. Expecting to be whipped, she was given lunch.
"Lunch! Like this?" She was annoyed at sounding shocked.
"Of course not, silly. I'd have to stand and slip bits and pieces in your mouth.
Up on the terrace where we had breakfast."
The captive's heart leaped. Hope revived. A moment later her hands were once more free. Gratefully she rubbed chafed wrists, then held them out questioningly to her exuberant companion.
"Not now, darling. Having you handcuffed makes a lot of work for poor little Terry. Come on, let's make you devastatingly beautiful."
The bedroom of a wealthy girl. Closets full of clothes. A bathroom to put the Romans to shame. Pyramids of cosmetics! Suddenly Dorinda knew how naked she had been. How terribly bereft is a naked girl! Robbed of her amour, her secrets and her pride.
But she was not naked now! Terry was a fairy godmother with miracles galore.
Dorinda was quite sure she had never before been so expensively bathed or clad.
Never had she been given such perfumes or felt such nimble fingers so cunningly enhance her loveliness. When she finally stood before the mirror both girls gasped in approval of a svelt someone, enchantingly feminine, they had not previously met.
"Mark's a lucky blighter!" Terry was reverent. Dorinda floated on a cloud of female ecstasy.
Mark's radiance when he beheld the vision was her victory. Dorinda knew that she had captured him in bonds quite different from those she had so recently shed. She glowed and forgot whips and handcuffs. Her moment was now. Terry flitted around them like a ray of pure sunlight. She was irrepressible.
Mark still wore only the briefs. On Kyrexos he would need no more. It was his Island. His Kingdom. Dorinda supposed she could add that she and Terry were his girls. If all he wanted was a slave he already had a radiantly willing one in his sister.
'Young Terry'. The way he said it spoke of love. She adored him. They allowed her chatter to envelop them in gaiety. Dorinda wishing the moment could last forever, Mark amused and amusing, but faintly preoccupied.
No one of the three of them was anxious to bring it to a dose. Each had their own reason to prolong a mood. When, finally, brother's and sister's gaze locked and held, Terry said, flippantly: "I suppose it's school time."
"Yes." Agreed Mark heavily. "I'm afraid it is." He turned courteously to Dorinda. "Do you mind ... "
She knew it was not a question but an order. Meekly, with all the grace she could muster, she followed him from the room.
As they left, Terry held out the silver handcuffs. As Mark thoughtfully tucked them in his belt, Dorinda reflected that the shining things had become the symbol of her new life.
The bare stone room had seemed appropriate when she, too, had been bare. Clothed she felt awkward and out of place in it. She felt foolish, not knowing where to stand or what to say. Mark solved her dilemma.
"Strip." It was an uncompromising word.
Dorinda revolted. Having gained the harbor of clothes, and such glorious clothes!
She cringed from the thought of surrendering them. "No." She told him flatly.
"Please don't make me."
Mark nodded thoughtfully and went to the big chest.
When he turned he was carrying the black whip, or its twin.
"Please...!" Dorinda appealed desperately. "Don't spoil it. We all felt something good at lunch. Don't make me hate you."
"Terry does not hate me. I whip her often." Dorinda had no answer.
"I have explained it to you once." He continued patiently. "I won't do it again."
Dorinda looked longingly at the closed door and the wide windows. But realized, farcially, that she could have run better in bare feet than in the high heels with which she was now shod.
"Alright then! I'll do whatever it is you want me to do. I'll even try and do it well.
I'll try and please you. But if I do that may I wear some little thing ... anything at all?" She implored.
Mark considered. "Very well. Your briefs."
It was a small victory. But it sustained her. She posed in front of him. "Do you want me to do a strip tease or just undress?" She wondered if she had anything to lose by provoking him.
"Please yourself." He was watching her with amusement. She supposed his great experiment was under way.
She had never been a bride. But supposed this was how it was on your wedding night. Not wanton. But very female. The fact that he had seen her naked over a period of hours, strangely enough, in no way diluted the shock of baring herself before him now.
She divested herself of each bit of fabric lovingly and sorrowfully. She had worn them such a little time. They made such a sad small pile against the wall where she dropped them on the stone. There was nowhere else to put them. The tempo of male breathing told her she had accomplished her task not without skill and artistry.
Without shame she turned, in all her glory, and faced him.
"What must I do, Master?" She hoped it was the right note.
"Kiss my feet" It was an obvious start. Dorinda performed the slave obeisance with all the grace and willingness she could muster. She felt pleased with herself. If only Mark would play it as a game. It might be fun. She knelt before him waiting.
"Now wash them with your lips and tongue. Swallow. Don't spit."
The game vanished unborn. He had breached her defenses right at the start. Mark wore only the skimpiest sandals. His feet were well soiled. Obedience would degrade, perhaps nauseate. Tears came to her eyes. She had wanted so much to excel.
He sauntered to the wooden chest. Sat comfortably leaning back against the wall and kicked off one sandal. She knew his searching eyes could read her thoughts. She followed, kneeling at his feet, yet certain she could not do what he required of her.
She looked up at him piteously blinking beak her tears.
"Would it help if I whipped you now?" He asked kindly. The incongruity was a goad. With a bitter sob of determination Dorinda blindly and feverishly began the impossible.
But nothing is impossible. Telling Terry of it afterwards she coined the quip that one toe led to another and when a girl had sucked one she had sucked 'em all. She was amazed at the detergent quality of saliva and the innocent pinkness of each toe as she released it from her lips. She hoped, miserably, that whatever it was she was forced to swallow would not poison her. It was probably just Kyrexos dust. The job was long. By the time her lips and tongue had cleansed both feet she had had time to reflect that a girl can make infinite adjustments if she is sufficiently frightened.
There was no rest. He stood up. "Remove my briefs. Cleanse what you find there.
Do no more than that. Then replace."
Dorinda had expected this. She was aware of the importance men attached to the act. The order came as less of a shock than had the previous one. She dealt with her humiliation competently. In handling his swimming briefs she was obliged also to handle her hated handcuffs again. He made no move to help. He had placed them under the belt. She must leave them as she found them. Her fingers on the steel, she wondered how long it would be before she felt their bite again. She knelt back on her heels, hoping for approval.
Mark spat on the floor.
He must want to whip her very much. He would tax her tolerance until it broke. He had not spoken. But she knew what she must do. She bent swiftly and cleansed the spot on the floor with a willing tongue.
"Run and fetch me a drink, slave girl." Dorinda looked up aghast.
Mark laughed at her surprise. "Why shouldn't a slave fetch her master a drink. Run along now. You know the way. Terry will mix it for you. Don't dawdle."
She was half way to the door when he added an afterthought: "Escape if you want.
I'll hunt you down in an hour. The penalty will be my initials branded on your thigh.
I don't mind a bit. A slave girl should be branded with her master's symbol."
Dorinda fled.
"Is he being beastly to you, darling?" Terry was unashamedly quivering with curiosity. She listened intently as a shamed Dorinda gave details.
"I expect it could be worse, dear." She consoled musingly as she mixed the drink. "He's made me do all those things too, y'know. He thinks of the darndest things ... I say, darling! Why don't you escape?"
"Thanks. I don't want to be branded ... Terry? Would he really do it?"
For answer, the younger girl lifted her very short skirt and bared a thigh and hip.
The three letters were burned deep and clean. "M.A.E. Mark Atherton Esmond."
Terry declaimed proudly as though displaying an Olympic trophy. "He did it to me a couple of years ago when I got angry over something and stayed overnight with a girl friend."
"You let him!"
"Didn't have anything to say about it." The owner of the brand said complacently. The dear boy tied me so I couldn't even twitch. He'll do the same for you. Saves a lot of fuss."
The incredulous initiate lifted the brimming glass and returned to her training and her master.
It was a long litany of order and compliance. It covered many acts and many attitudes. It even embraced a demand that she recite a long speech extemporaneously extolling the virtues of her master and her own abasements as a slave. Dorinda felt sure she rated at least a ninety mark on that one. But Mark, throughout all her ordeal, kept a poker faced refusal to show either approval or displeasure. When it was done he said curly: "Stand up. Back a few paces. Then stand stiff at attention, facing me. Hands at your sides. Head up. Breasts well out."
Dorinda obeyed. She had caught his emphasis on the word breasts instead of chest.
She displayed her twin treasures as provocatively as possible.
It was a male pose. Thus strangely shaming to a girl. She exposed too much!
Dorinda hoped he would not make her hold it long. It was also tiring. But she was doubly thankful for the brief covering her master had allowed her to wear. She knew herself hungering for a word of praise. She felt she had earned it.
"You are thinking you have done rather well and deserve a pat on the back, aren't you?" Mark asked discerningly.
Dorinda flushed. Was she that obvious! "I did hope I'd pleased you." She admitted.
"Sort of puts you one up on me, eh?" His voice was thoughtful.
She saw the trap. "No! Please! I tried hard."
"Feel any different?"
"Just soiled."
He nodded understandingly. Still expressionless. "Kneel before me. Hold out your arms. Ask to be handcuffed."
Dorinda suspected she had not won, or even emerged with honors. But slaves don't win. They are not supposed to. Tears stung her eyes. Her future loomed less than rosy. The laughing boy had gone. The man before whom she stood so shamingly was implacably male. But there was no use resisting now. Hastily she knelt. "Please, Master, lock the handcuffs on my wrists." Obediently she proffered her hands and watched dejectedly as they were ironed.
"Over to the pulley."
There was an inevitability about it. Dorinda stood, stretched taut, and wondered why they had not done whatever they had to do when she had been similarly strung up that morning. In spite of determination she shivered. She knew a leg was trembling, and wondered if he could see. It was a terrible way to be fastened before a man.
"You know you are going to be whipped, don't you?" He was very serious.
"Yes." Now that the awful moment had come she was too weary of it all to plead. But she wanted to understand. So asked: "Why?"
"We have done what we have just done because it's a sort of preamble we have to wade through. For your benefit, really. Didn't actually change a thing, did it?"
"You mean it didn't change me?" She saw his point and wished otherwise. She knew herself the same girl she had been yesterday or the day before. Her own words had summed up the total effect of what he had made her do. 'Just soiled' That was all. But she was desperately afraid. "You think that if you whip me enough I'll become a slave in spirit as well as fact?" She knew her question held all the dubiety she felt.
"Any other suggestions?" He sounded quite willing to listen.
"That's not fair." Dorinda exclaimed. "I've never been whipped. I don't know what it does to a girl except cut her skin. I'm scared stiff right now. I have to wonder why you can't be satisfied by the way I worked at what you wanted. I honestly tried to please. And I'll keep on trying as long as you want to keep me prisoner. I know I can't escape. I think that knowledge is the most potent thing with me. It's pretty final when you think of it. But it makes me a prisoner, not a slave." She peered at him earnestly from between her strained arms. "I suppose you wouldn't consider me becoming your slave because I like you ... Sort of like Terry?"
"I'm not looking for another sister."
"I'd shrug my shoulders if I could." Dorinda affirmed passionately. "I'm marooned on an Island and held captive by a fantasy. I have no place to go except where you take me. I have to accept and understand that you will work your fantasy out on me. Whether I like it or not I have to play Galatea to your Pygmalion. If that calls for me to be whipped, then whipped I'll be. You'd better get on with it...." She looked him in the eye and added the single word: "Darling ... "
Mark nodded soberly. His gaze was riveted on the taut loveliness he was about to whip. Dorinda's last word and her lucid rationale disconcerted him. He would have preferred her to plead or to weep, or even to be some other girl who would spit at him and curse. Dorinda had matched her own logic with his. Mark found himself warming to the idea of discussion, a battle of wits and will, with his guest somewhat more comfortably circumstanced than she was now. Whatever that errant thought may have led to will never be known, for in the midst of it young Terry's voice decided the issue.
"What an absolutely glum pair you are!" She eyed her brother discerningly, then turned to the quaking captive. "I bet poor old Mark's funked out. You look gorgeous enough to eat...!"
"We've been talking." Dorinda vouchsafed lamely. Terry's laughter pealed through the bare room transforming it into a place of gaiety. Without wasting words she snatched the whip from her brother's hand. She turned a radiant and consoling smile on the quailing captive. "Frightfully sorry old girl. But this job has to be done.
Absolutely must get it out of the dear boy's system." She winked broadly. "And out of little Terry's too ... "
Dorinda froze in shock. The limber withe had crossed her back and curled over her ribs. There could not be all this pain in the whole world: She knew there could not be! No one had ever borne it or could ever bear it. She was sliced and bleeding. She was sure she was!
Then a scream. Her cry of outrage split the room. It held all the desolation of a girl who knows herself lost, delivered to a force no girl deserved. Terry's second slash had been neatly beneath the first, but delivered from the other side. Dorinda's white nudity was circled by a band of fire. Al resolution dissolved. In frantic panic she leaped at her bonds. She kicked and twisted, sobbing in the frustration of her helplessness. For moments at a time she bent her knees and lifted both feet from the floor as though seeking surcease in fetal shape. Her slender wrists were cut by the rigid bite of the metal cuffs that circled them so snugly. But that pain went unnoticed under the all consuming agony of the two welts Terry had bestowed so lovingly and with consummate skill.
"Now let's talk for a minute, darlings." Terry suggested with enchanting insouciance.
Brother and sister watched raptly as Dorinda panted and sobbed her way back into a world from which she had been left. The chained girl had no coherent thought. She was dazed and smarting from something more awful than her wildest fears had envisioned. She squirmed in suspenseful vulnerability, every nerve screaming in expectation of the next stroke. It was perhaps two minutes before her wild eyes focused on Terry's gamin grin. Her breasts were still heaving under both the pain and the strain of her suspension. A small trickle of blood found it's way down one wrist.
Tenderly the girl who held the whip dried her captive's eyes and wiped her cheeks.
Gentle fingers smoothed the hair damp with the emanation of fear and pain.
"Tell us what it's like, darling." Terry asked soothingly. A broken Dorinda looked Mark squarely in the eye. "It's a worse cruelty than I thought anyone could inflict." She said desolately. "I can't stand any more. If you are going to whip me more, then kill me and be done with it."
There fell a small silence broken only by the sounds of the whipped girl's distress.
"I've been whipped like this many times." Terry said brightly.
Dorinda did not know whether to accept the statement as a rebuke or as consolation.
She only knew a panicky compulsion to end her martyrdom. "I'll do anything at all."
She offered flatly. "There's nothing I won't do ... I'll be a slave gladly. Don't whip me any more. Oh, please don't!" She looked from one to the other of her owners with abject eyes.
"It's not over, y'know." Mark told her somberly. "We've stopped for a little while because this is a genuine experiment." Terry explained soothingly. "We hope you'll examine it along with us."
"What is there to examine in such awful pain?" Dorinda asked bitterly.
"You have had two strokes with a whip. Have they taken you anywhere?"
Dorinda knew very well what Mark sought. But she was too distressed to deal in subtleties. Within herself she was crying resentfully, 'Why me! Why me!'. But knew it useless to propound the same question to her captors. Pure chance had delivered her to where she now stood. Her agonized wrists told her very clearly that she had been cast in a role and would have to play it. She wished she had been shown a reward for playing it well.
"Pain will make me obey you." She looked from one to the other. "Please help a bit. I can't give a lecture."
Terry handed the whip to her brother. "Step two, darling." She suggested queryingly.
Their victim watched the transfer with pure horror. If Terry could hurt her with such intensity, what would Mark's stronger arm inflict! Only the brake of reason inhibited her from another panic driven struggle with her tether. Her vulnerability devastated courage.
"At this stage we have to compel your participation."
Mark said reflectively. "So you will now ask me, pleasantly and intelligently, to give you two more strokes. You may even choose where they will fall."
"I'd have to be nuts!"
The exclamation got out before she had time to think.
Mark grinned understandingly. "Sounds damn silly, doesn't it! So to make it valid we do the Pavlov bit: Ask for two nicely, or get four."
So simple! A sort of conditioning process. Dorinda was furiously angry at being it's subject. But she was also desperately afraid, she glimpsed the path devised for her unwilling feet. She was defeated by their faces: Two nice young people with a mission, earnest and dedicated. She knew they liked her. It was paradoxical. A discordance that defeated reason. How could any girl be expected to adjust!
The four strokes cut her in rapid succession. Her cry of protest faded before her cry of agony. She groped her way, sobbing and gasping, through the dark forest of pain to the distant point where she could look at Mark reproachfully with incredulous eyes.
"You took too long to make up your mind." He explained evenly. "Never believe I will not be cruel. We will start again. Ask for two or get four ... "
At that moment Dorinda would have asked for anything. But not the whip! She manufactured his demand. It was on her tongue. But it was insincere. Surely Mark would recognize the words as false. She did not utter them. She was groping for others when the whip found her again....
This time, returning from the pit of agony, she found her head thrown back, her gaze resting on her tractioned arms on each of which a thin trickle of blood fell from wrists cut by shining metal. In the throes of her wild threshing she had not known of the wound. It came as a surprise, but did not matter. Nothing mattered save that she be no more whipped ... Hopelessly she turned to plead.
But the room was empty. Mark and Terry had gone while she was still in that fearful other place. Dorinda was alone.
It was with a great thankfulness that the naked girl stood simply in her enforced pose.
An onlooker would have found her exquisitely lovely in her weariness and pain. The whipping may have paused. But the handcuffs continued their unyielding compulsion. Dorinda stood very straight even with tired head and bent knee. From time to time she stood on her toes to ease her wrists. Her pain was constant. When coherent thought returned curiosity came with it. Straining, she tried to examine her body. There was no blood, but the ridged weals were as frightening. She had no previous experience with such inflictions. She could see little of herself, and wondered what her back might show.
Released from immediate threat she wept quietly, wiping wet cheeks against her raised arms. Fear spurred her thoughts, confronting her with the knowledge of a lesson learned: She would have to be obedient. Only by a responsive act could she save her skin. Hesitation spelt out a mental reservation. The master would perceive and punish. Reservations and secrets were denied a slave.
Slave, slave, slave! How absurd a word in today's world! She sought another. There was none so explicit to her condition. That was Mark's thesis, wasn't it! There were no longer any slave markets. So he would create his own slave girl. Could she take comfort in the knowledge that her agonies and fears were no different from the same emotions suffered by countless other maidens in centuries past. Hard to accept the knowledge. But it was true.
What was her cue! A dog-like groveling on the floor!
Sycophantic servility! She was sure Mark would reject both. His fantasy would dictate an emotion more valid....
Terry came cheerfully into the room. She was holding a small key.
�_]�_]�_] It was pleasant on the terrace in mid afternoon.
Dorinda had never admired English Tea. But now it was nectar! She sipped it gratefully and wondered if she should laugh or cry: was she on her head or her heels.
She could not keep pace with what they did to her. No doubt they planned it so.
"The handcuffs won't discommode you." Mark had become the smiling boy again.
They were a part of her now. Dorinda did not mind. She could drink tea and eat a sandwich with joined hands. She could understand a necessity that she wear them.
They would keep her from forgetting. The blood was still on her forearms. No doubt that would keep her from forgetting too. It was in her own interest that she not forget.
"Do you think we are absolute swine?" Terry inquired interestedly.
"No."
"What are we then?"
"You are just you, both of you." Dorinda scrambled for some elusive rationalization that was not there. "You have told me of the fantasy. I think the fantasy is the key. I'm a prisoner because of it. Al three of us will have to be aware of it always in every situation. If I, for instance, forget it for a single minute resentment builds up, anger, perhaps hatred." She looked at them piteously. "You see, it's so out of context. It's like trying to transplant a bit of Camelot or ancient Babylon into our lives ... "
"You don't hate us?"
"No. That would make it simple."
"We are going to whip you again, y'know."
"Oh, I'd guessed that." Dorinda admitted miserably. "I suppose you can understand how much I want to dissuade you?"
"You have not pleaded as much as we expected. Why?" The naked girl shook her head in bewilderment. "I suppose because Mark made a good job of telling me of the fantasy and your determination to use me. Pleading would not help, would it! I have a feeling that the more I beg and grovel the less you would think of me. Silly perhaps: why should a slave care. I know you are going to whip me. And, oh, I don't want to be whipped! I don't! It's more awful than I ever dreamed. It scares me because a girl seems to survive. Look at me now! After those first two strokes I knew I would die. I didn't. I'm sure you know more about it than I do. But please don't whip me so much that we stop liking each other ... "
"It does not work that way." Mark was positive. Dorinda considered.
"You are thinking of Terry. But I'm not a Terry. That other girl, when she comes, won't be a Terry either. I'm not a bit sure any of us know what a whip will do to a girl like me. I admit I don't...!" Her voice became animated and earnest.
"Look, darlings, I think neither of you is the stuff that beats a girl into submission.
But you sincerely believe you have to whip her into slavery. Can I help? I'm purely selfish. Let's say I don't want to be whipped ... well, unprofitably. If I must be whipped then I want every bit of the pain to take me towards where you are determined I have to go."
"Go on." She had caught Mark's interest.
"Let me take over now. Oh sure, I know it's backwards. But let me try to be a slave. I'll work at it. I might surprise you. When I make a blooper, whip me. O.K.?"
Terry clapped her hands. "Isn't she super, Mark! I knew she would be. We'll never, never let her go. Darling, let her be your slave today. But, oh please, can she be mine tomorrow. I know she'll train just beautifully."
Mark looked at his sister with love. "O.K. Kitten. But you pay a forfeit. I won't need you for awhile, so off with those rags and up against your column."
Dorinda watched in amazement. The moment should have been grim. Instead it was pure joy. The moppet shed her clothes in a flash of motion as though glad to be rid of them. A moment later she was securely chained as Dorinda had first beheld her.
Mark stood back admiring the effect. Both were smiling broadly with a shared happiness. Once again Terry deliberately provoked and stuck her tongue out at her brother.
Mark grinned cheerfully at his guest. "You see, girls are incorrigible. They have to be constantly punished. Out little minx has just asked me to make her stand on one leg. But I have something more appropriate." He went into the lounge. Terry winked broadly as though in complicity. When he returned he held a square of pasteboard.
Seeing it, Terry uttered a plaintive wail of protest. "Oh darling, not that!"
The watching girl could not be certain of Terry's plaint.
The younger girl showed every evidence of distaste for whatever Mark was about to do. But her obvious joy in her chains was an inconsistency. Would she, too, come to this! A mixture of joy and apprehension ... the whole scene highly erotic.
The new captive had no more time for protest. Small spring clips bit at each of her nipples. From them, suspended as a bib, the pasteboard sign read in clear print: 'I was impertinent'.
Terry was still complaining, but now with an obvious insincerity, when her brother led Dorinda back to the bare neat room.
Dorinda dived into her slavery, as a swimmer who fears the cold, dives in one swift plunge to end the agony. Coloring her own imagery with scraps of remembered fiction she played her part.
Taking the whip from her master's surprised hand, she knelt before him, kissed the cruel object of her pain, then offered it to him with her chained hands. Gazing up in pure worship�^'was it all feigned!�^'she asked ardently: "Please master, whip your slave girl."
Quickly she took a pose. Hands clasped behind her head. Breasts out-thrust, face raised in serene contemplation of the stone wall. He could whip her where he chose.
Mark's eyes glowed. She had struck the missing chord.
"Why should I whip you, slave girl?" He demanded.
"Because I am a slave, master."
"On what part of your insolent person should I lay the whip?"
The question caught her unaware. But she remembered something she had been told.
"On my bottom, master." She knew she blushed.
"Stand still, girl."
She endured, doubly blushing, as he purposefully dragged down the briefs he had allowed her to wear. Why, oh why, had she chosen her bottom! She should have known. But it was too late.
She held taut for the two strokes. But then did all the things she had longed instinctively to do when she had been chained upright. She moaned no less. But did manage a gasping 'Thank you, master'.
Mark watched, amused. A slave girl writhing on the floor after she had been whipped. It was all falling into place. Before she had expended all her body's rejection of the pain, he barked: "On your feet, girl! Stand as before."
Dorinda managed. The squirming had helped. She refused to think ahead.
"Two more. You will stand quite still afterwards. You can groan but not scream. Any more gymnastics and I'll rope you and give an extra five. Understand?"
"Yes master." She was afraid of him. But knew this was how it must be.
The two blows were deliberately cruel. Dorinda achieved her miracle.
When she had stood motionless save for heaving breasts for ten seconds, her master said: "You may now do your little dance. Scream if you wish."
Dorinda was furious. She could never win. She knew not what had happened in those ten seconds. But now she turned and faced the ardent eyed man with the whip and admitted simply, "I do not need to, master."
Mark laughed joyously. His slave girl essayed a' sheepish smile. "I won't always manage it, master." She warned cautiously.
"Let's try it again then, shall we."
They tried it again. The round bottom absorbed the striating cuts bravely. It's owner clenched her teeth in firm resolve.
Once more she won.
Mark kissed her gently. She sank to her knees before him and avowed with sweet simplicity: "Master, I am your slave." Then added: "I want to be your slave ... "
After a long quiet time Dorinda looked up at the man whose chattel she had become and asked with genuine curiosity: "Master, are there other punishments than the whip?"
"Of course, little slave. You want them now?"
"No master ... I am content."
Mark laughed delightedly. "You shall have them all. With some you may wish you had chosen the whip. But they are for other days than now. As for being content, you do not suppose I am finished with you, surely?"
Dorinda had indeed hoped just that. But managed to expunge the disappointment from her voice. "Oh no, master. Please tell me what I must do."
"Go to the rope."
Dorinda shivered. They had found a rapport. But it would not ease her pain or divert Mark's purpose. She sensed that he could give her love more easily than mercy.
Her wrists protested when she was stretched. If this was to be his favorite pose she would plead for kinder bonds than the steel bands that cut so cruelly. She wished he had not tethered her again. It could only mean something hard to bear.
"Can't ask you for too much self control." Mark observed. "Keeping still wasn't easy, was it?"
"No master. I'm not sure I could do it again. Thank you for tying me."
"Oh, you'll do it, love. I suspect you have a talent for it. In fact you have a talent for the whole scene. You are really a bit wonderful, y'know." He held her with a hand on each side of her ribs where her arms should have been. He looked down into her raised eyes. His own became dark pools in which Dorinda saw mirrored both agony and love. "Thank you for coming to Kyrexos." He said gently.
Al of her responded to his touch. His hands had not previously explored such intimacy. She longed to plead: "Love me, don't whip me". But instinct told her it was not the time. She did not know when the time might be. But they were embarked upon a journey....
"I have not yet punished you." Mark said.
He laughed as she tensed. "So far only tests, little slave girl. But, perfect though you are, there will be times when you transgress. You will be whipped for your fault, and the whip, then, will affect you differently than when you are simply being brave. I will show you now. I sentence you to five strokes. Once thus sentenced, nothing can bring you remission. I think that always when the first stroke falls you will be willing to plead, to promise, to affirm that never again ... But when you have earned a penalty, you must pay all of it. That is what will make these five strokes separate from the others."
"But I haven't done anything to deserve punishment."
Dorinda protested.
"You have now, love." Mark chuckled. "Slaves never protest."
It was not a game they played.
Dorinda abandoned all defenses. She was possessed by a whip. Endless whippings loomed ahead. Months ... years ... Why try and be brave! At the second stroke which curled across her bottom and over one hip she allowed all natural responses to have their way. She wept, she moaned, she even pleaded forgiveness for a guilt she did not feel. The strokes laced her body unrelentingly. At the count of five she was released.
She slumped to the floor as though her bones were broken. Her moans and twistings were her body's outrage at what had been done to it. Mark watched, amused. He had watched his sister more times than he could remember. Even when Terry pleaded for the whip it mostly ended thus, a beautifully erotic finale. She had admitted, readily enough, that even as she writhed and groaned she savoured her greatest happiness in the knowledge that her ordeal was past and that she acquitted herself well.
Dorinda's travail must continue.
"Devise a stroke that will shame you. Ask for it." She dared not ponder, but did the first demeaning act that came to mind. Taking a wanton stance, she placed one foot upon the wooden chest, spreading the other wide. Cuffed wrists behind her neck she faced her master. "The whip ... up underneath, please." She managed tremulously.
Mark was enraptured. The lash he gave her was cunning and cruel. It evoked from his slave girl an artistry of agony. He knew himself a very lucky man.
For Dorinda it was a long afternoon.
... Kyrexos was a delightful island. Dorinda could see most of her captor's small kingdom from the rock on which she sat with Terry. The sun was warm. For the moment her condition was charmingly relaxed. "Nicer than that room with the rope, love?" Terry asked shrewdly.
"Calm before the storm?" Dorinda asked with frank suspicion.
The younger girl giggled. "The dear boy really laced into you. You're a beautiful zebra. Like the swim suit?"
"Pure Heaven! I'm tired of looking down and seeing breasts and hair."
"Sweet of you to let me wear it."
"Doesn't hide all that much, darling. But the little belt effect makes it handy to hang your handcuffs and that bit of cord. I hate carrying things. I like being naked."
"Why the bikini then?"
"Can't very well have the Mistress naked and the slave clothed, can we!"
"You'd better brief me a bit." Dorinda suggested diffidently. "I'm still a novice, y'know. Mark really made me come to heel yesterday. Are you going to do that too?
Should I call you 'Mistress'?"
Terry giggled. "You'll have to play me by ear. I'm a butterfly. Sometimes I'll be terribly brutal to you, darling. Quite often I'll love you to bits." She directed a puckish grin at her captive, "Try and remember, love: Little Terry's never been a Mistress or had a slave girl to play with. It's been me that's been the slave girl. If you think Mark made you come to heel: I could tell you a few stories! You are no more a zebra than I often am."
"Why do you put up with it?"
"I love it, silly! You know I do. Mark's told you. I'm a natural born slave girl.
But only for Mark."
"Aren't you going to be jealous?" Dorinda asked mischievously. "Now I'll get all the whippings and you'll be home free."
"I am a bit curious to see what he does with the two of us." Terry's eyes sparkled with a sudden thought. "If I feel neglected I can always make you whip me."
She giggled. "Would you like that?"
Dorinda was about to affirm that after yesterday she would not wish a whipping on a dog, when there drifted into her inward vision a delectable vision of a naked Terry bent well over and herself lustily caning a pert round bottom. "I'm afraid I'd love to."
She admitted honestly. "Good Heavens, it's contagious!"
Whilst not wanting to be burdened with things to carry, the newly elevated Mistress had ostentatiously brought along on their stroll a long slender crop with which she neatly decapitated any convenient growth along their path. Her slave girl had been constantly aware of it. Dorinda was suddenly horrified to find the wicked length now placed in her hand.
"Whip my bottom, darling, until I tell you to stop." Joyously the younger girl stepped out of the skimpy fabric that had hugged her hips, selected her spot, then bent and grasped her ankles. Dorinda had never seen a girl's bottom more enticingly offered. She felt herself blush. A bright and expectant eye was watching her with avid amusement. "Scared, aren't you?" The young voice taunted.
Dorinda felt herself adrift. But knew this a moment in life to be lived vividly while it lasted. With a tremendous sense of release she swung the crop in a slashing arc and both felt and heard it thunk into the puppy cheeks with a sensual thrill such as she had never before know. She watched, fascinated, as the red weal formed and became a ridge of scarlet. The punished girl held her pose heroically, but gasped with heaving breasts. The right eye discreetly looked elsewhere. Enthralled with sudden power, Dorinda was readying herself for the next blow....
"Stop!"
Had the idol feet of clay! Dorinda was disappointed. "Damn!" Terry straightened up chagrined."
"Damn and double damn!" She repeated. Turning, she donned her briefs. "I'm not chicken, y'know!" She affirmed savagely. "I just thought of something."
Dorinda waited and wondered.
Terry pushed the fabric off her hips and offered her bottom again for view. "I say darling, I'll bet it's a real corker of a mark?"
Dorinda affirmed it was.
"I'll have to keep these damn things on." Terry pulled the scanty protection about her loins. She looked at her companion in sudden appeal. "I should have thought. Mark will probably give me Hell. He'll say I've broken his pattern with you.
I'm supposed to whip you, not you me."
Dorinda was intrigued by the maiden dolor. "Why so concerned?" She laughed.
"The worst he'll do to you is whip you some more. You adore it, so why worry?"
"I don't adore it the way he does it when he wants to teach me a lesson." Terry grinned ruefully. "I'm not made of leather. Besides, it might not be the whip. Mark thinks of the damndest things."
The puzzled slave girl was prevented from asking what 'The damndest things' were by her mistress's evanescent mood reverting to her normal sunshine exuberance: "Darling! I've just thought ... the absolutely most gorgeous thing to do to you.
Come on. I'll race you."
How good it was to run! As she sped in pursuit, Dorinda could not forbear the speculation that it should be possible for her to overpower the younger girl and make her captive with the handcuffs in her belt. The thought was plausible. But to what end! The Island would defeat her. Retribution would probably be too awful to contemplate. Besides, she liked the youngster. Terry would be easy to love....
It was a small secluded spot among sparse trees, one of which had remained standing in the little clearing as though forgotten when it's fellows had gone. Within minutes Dorinda found herself divested of her swim suit and tightly tied to the trunk. Terry kissed her excitedly and dashed off in the direction of the house.
The puzzled girl tested her bonds. Good use had been made of the scraps she had been made to carry. Her waist was cinched tight by a single strand of cord. It hurt.
Her legs were well separated, one on each side of the bole. They, too, were immobilized by single circlets which were very tight indeed and hurt as much as the waistband. Her wrists were handcuffed at the rear. She could wriggle her shoulders and toss her head. That was all. A familiar sense of vulnerability enveloped her.
Ruefully she glanced down at what she could see of herself. Sure enough, breasts and pubic hair! She supposed she had better get used to it. She was only mildly curious about her immediate situation.
When a flushed and obviously highly amused girl returned with a parcel, her captive watched perplexed as busy fingers hastily strewed a white powder on the bare rock.
Sugar ... salt! It could be anything. But she became instantly and intimately concerned when the giggling girl opened the lips of the captive sex and pushed within the secret orifice several gobs of honey and then anointed the hairy triangle with the sticky stuff so that the whole area bore a half inch of the sweet. "Don't worry, darling. Lots of room in there ... at least if it's anything like mine." Chuckling, as at some funny joke, she retired with her paper bag and seated herself on a smooth rock about forty feet away.
"What's this for?" The prisoner at her tree felt entitled to ask.
"No questions, darling." Terry admonished. "If you insist on asking, I'll whip you."
Dorinda did not insist. But her mind was active. She could not fail to note that the white stuff on the ground led, like a trail of gunpowder, to where she was bound. It was probably sugar. Sugar and honey spelt ants! How long would it take for them to find her. And when they did, what then!
It was not ants! The first goat wandered into the clearing with the air of a first arrival at a meeting place. He was a hoary male, well endowed with beard, horns and other accoutrements. Examining him with wide eyed dismay the helpless girl found it easy to give credence to the satyr legend. She guessed her fate.
"Please Terry! Please ... don't let him!"
"I'll whip you for that too." Terry said equably. "And if you shout at him to try and scare him away I'll really let you have it." She chuckled happily. "Best thing you can do is just keep quiet altogether. It's quite an experience for a girl. Mark did it to me once. I'm going to love watching."
Several she goats joined their Lord. But it was he who claimed the prize. Having sampled the salt that led to the mother lode he raised his nozzle to sample the nectar provided by a thoughtful Providence. The bound Dorinda curled up inwardly in a spasm of shrinking withdrawal that availed her nothing. The venerable goat lapped happily.
A goat's snout is a peculiarly mobile facility designed for the inaccessible. Terry's ingenious provision of a hidden store presented no problem. The old billy parted Dorinda's nether lips as easily as he did his own. A nibbling proboscis and an eager sandpaper tongue harvested the treasure from it's warm sheath so that the helpless maiden tied to her tree was driven into paroxysm after paroxysm of vivid and unbearable sensation. No matter how she fought the cords or tugged at her handcuffed wrists she could move no portion of herself that would discommode her unwanted guest. She turned frantic eyes to an imperturbable Terry.
"Oh please! Don't let him. Shoo him away. I can't stand it!"
"You've only had two orgasm. I can tell."
"But I don't want any!" The captive wailed in between gasps and spasms.
"This is 'Be kind to animals week'." Terry announced complacently. Her eyes bright with enjoyment.
The tortured victim groaned and writhed again. "That makes three." Her Mistress stated approvingly. "You're a lucky girl."
"Get rid of him!" It was a cry of anguish.
"You know you're loving it."
"I'm not! I'm not! Oh how can you sit there! Please...." The naked girl fought her bonds uselessly.
"You are up to four now."
Dorinda had never known such an intensity of sensation. It engulfed her loins in wave after wave that gave her no time to regenerate. No sooner had the rasping tongue provoked her palpitating flesh than the cycle of agonized ecstasy began all over again. In panic she could see little chance of the ordeal ending before she was reduced to some sort of disaster.
"Five ... And now six!" Terry sounded jubilant as though vicariously sharing joy. "Can't possibly stop the old dear now, darling. I'm sure you don't want any honey left up there. Let him get it all."
The sweating panting captive's moans were punctuated by sharper cries and fresh struggles. Terry watched her slave with glowing eyes, and counted happily as the tally rose. The hairy recipient of unexpected largesse nibbled and licked assiduously until, having garnered every trace of his favorite dessert from the hostess's quivering sex and pubic hair, he reluctantly turned and led his harem from the scene of his triumph.
"You've never been so clean, darling." Terry assured her prisoner helpful y.
"Frightfully hygenic and all that."
Dorinda relaxed against her tree and panted her way back into the world.
After the swim they lay upon the beach and dried.
"What happened to my swim suit?" Dorinda accused.
Her companion giggled guiltily. "One of the she goats ate both pieces while I wasn't watching. Sorry, love. I've got the rest of the stuff in the paper bag." Like a tail wagging puppy she leant over and frankly sniffed the sun drenched sex of the naked girl beside her.
"Good. We've washed him away. He did smell a bit. So did you." She trilled laughter. "Sort of an appropriate smell for that particular place, darling. But I'm sure we're both fastidious. Go and arrange youself on that rock over there and spread your legs."
Dorinda sat upright, startled. "No!" Her negative was from the heart.
Terry enjoyed her slave's dismay. "Don't panic. Always one more left. That's the nice thing about being a girl."
"I don't do that!"
Terry surveyed her companion with interest. "Well, I've never done it." She admitted.
"Mark never gave me a chance with a girl. But I've got one now. You don't think I'm going to pass it up, do you?"
"But I'm not a Lesbian."
"Who said anything about Lesbians! That's just a name. If we want to explore each other's cunnys with our mouthes we don't have to wear a label."
"Mark would flog us both half to death."
"Well, he might if he found out." His sister admitted reflectively.
"I'll tell him!"
"You won't, y'know darling."
Dorinda had to admit to herself that Terry was right.
She began to glimpse that, whilst the brother would subdue her with a whip, his sister would devise more devious and colorful ways to enslave. Terry had risen to her feet and was flexing the riding crop thoughtfully, her eyes hungry for whatever excitement the situation might engender. Dutifully the slave girl did as she was told.
The female psyche is a complex thing. It's responses are triggered by subtleties not always understood. Faced with a fresh assault on resources already frayed threadbare, Dorinda was bereft. She knew she could only earn the whip by attempts to dissuade, so composed her nudity to best advantage to absorb attentions which, no matter how gentle, were basically similar to her so recent ordeal against the tree. She felt sure of disgrace.
But Terry's magic was not only in her sunny laughter and elfin spirit. She was vibrantly female, exquisitely feminine. Her hands were enchanted hands, her lips enchanted lips. To be touched by them anywhere was to feel the shock of an electric sensuousness. Dorinda who had thought herself depleted was washed now in a fountain of youth that endowed her with infinite renewal. Gasping to keep herself afloat in a sea of pleasure she allowed herself to be led into the scented pathways of a girl who loves.
"Wasn't it super!" Terry cooed. "Girls would be silly not to enjoy themselves."
It was after. Long after! Dorinda lay gratefully in the sun, replete and at peace as she watched her mistress fumble with the bikini. "I say, darling: How's my bottom?" The curved facility was offered for inspection.
"It's a very lovely bottom, and it's got the most beautiful purple stripe right across it's middle." The slave girl assured her with satisfaction.
"Oh golly! I'm sure it has. I'll have to wear these damn things for a week. Mark will be suspicious. Come on, darling: think up an excuse."
"You could claim a defense against my rapacious tongue."
"He'd whip you to pieces ... if he believed it."
"Alright then. Not me, the goat."
"Be serious. I should whip you until you think up something plausible."
"Time of the month?"
Terry tittered. "He knows that."
"Tell you what! We'll both confess our sin like good little girls and ask to be punished. Then he won't do it."
The teen-ager brightened. "You might have something there, love. But, knowing Mark, I'd suspect we'd get about five apiece."
"You'd enjoy only five. And since I suppose I go back into training with him tomorrow I don't suppose five one way or another will make much difference. He's a real 'spare the rod and spoil the child' enthusiast."
Terry looked at her slave searchingly. "Are you sure we aren't tarred with the same brush?"
Dorinda's indignant negative died stillborn. "I hate the damn whip." She averred vehemently. "But I like the man who uses it on me. Does that make any sense?"
"You mean you're in love with Mark?"
"I don't suppose I am. I was frightened of him half the time yesterday. But when he is whipping me I have to respect his motives. I wish he'd tie me to a tree or something instead. But I can understand his fantasy thing. He explained it very well.
I can understand, too, that I sort of just happened along at the right time and got elected. It's funny, but I've come to recognize that this Island affects my reactions.
Anywhere else I'd be resentful and trying to escape all the time, always alert. But because I know it's quite impossible for me to swim away from Kyrexos I don't resist.
I'm as much the Island's prisoner as yours�^'"
"I've just thought of a wonderful game!" Terry was typically irrelevantly enraptured. "You'll adore it, darling."
From something in the youngster's voice Dorinda felt certain she would not adore it at all. But followed, tinglingly curious. She was made to carry the paper bag.
It had been an old wharf, fallen into disuse. An unpretentious bit of ruin. Terry led the way beneath it to the water's edge. Divesting herself of the bikini's halter she giggled portentously, "I want to blindfold you, love. But I promise. No shocks. When I take it off you'll have the loveliest surprise." She went into further evidences of merriment.
Dorinda allowed herself to be blindfolded with the bra'. It was effective. She stood quivering, expectant.
"Hold still and don't be scared." Terry's voice had become authorative and absorbed. Her nimble fingers unexpectedly were working at her captive's bushy triangle.
Dorinda relaxed. She could imagine regaining her sight to behold some absurd coiffure effect with the abundant bush with which she was endowed. At least it was not painful.
It took a long time and many impatient exclamations.
At last a breathless voice apologized: "The handcuffs now, darling. Just so you don't spoil the effect."
The victim offered her wrists without question. They were locked tight behind her back. It felt surprisingly natural. The bra' was whisked from her eyes.
"It's frightfully clever, darling. Don't you think?"
It took Dorinda a little time to comprehend her new predicament. It was not quite the childish game she had hoped.
A sizable tuft of her pubic hair had been woven or spliced into the end of a cord. The join had been reinforced by several knots of lighter thread, probably unraveled from one of the other bindings. It appeared a very secure union. The cord itself fell away from her sex across the sand and into the water.
"It's knotted round an old bolt down in the sand. Watch darling." The younger girl tugged at the cord with all her strength. It did not move. It was an impressive demonstration. Dorinda was tethered tight by a tenuous link as compelling as steel.
"It's like a parlor game, love." Terry explained gaily.
"You can't free yourself. The tide is coming in. It won't submerge you. But it will rise enough so you won't like it and can't sit down. Now, the thing you have to live with is that you can get free anytime. Just take a big leap. You'll lose a bit of hair, but you've got plenty more. I suppose it will hurt. But slave girls have to put up with that sort of thing, don't they."
"I can never bring myself to tear loose." Dorinda vowed flatly. "It would be like tearing off a finger or a toe nail. Even the thought curls me up at the edges."
"You dramatize a bit, darling. You'll get loose when you want to. Just as a further inducement you'll be expected back at the house for dinner tonight. We are even going to let you wear clothes, lovely gorgeous clothes. But if you're a 'fraidy-cat and stay here you'll get fifty strokes."
"Fifty!"
"Of course. Why not?"
"But fifty would kill a girl!"
"I expect you'd survive. Girls do. No problem really. Think of that noble soul who declaimed: "Give me liberty or give me death!" Al you are going to lose is a few cunt hairs ... Forgive me, love, but that awful word is so absolutely right."
With the last bit of cord Terry circled her captive's waist and cinched the handcuffs tight in the small of her back. "Just in case, darling. I'm sure you'll try." Gaily she picked up the bag and her crop and left Dorinda alone with an awful decision.
She tried. She tried desperately. First backing away from her tether until it sprang taut and the prisoned hairs made their painful protest. Fascinated by the ingenuity of her new captivity, Dorinda continued the pressure until the tuft and the skin beneath were stretched out alarmingly. Not a single hair came loose. She realized miserably that the yielding skin made a quick simple jerk impractical. She would have to hinge, risking whatever injury might ensue. Next she sought the knots that kept her hands at waist level. Simply handcuffed she might have reached something. She was defeated there too. Entering the water she explored the anchor of her tether with her toes. But found that the most hopeless prospect of all. She was foxed! Despondently she stepped back on to dry sand. But already the tide was claiming most of the small margin Terry had left her with.
Reason dictated that she risk all in one quick dash immediately. In the end she would have to. Why spend miserable hours waiting and hoping that the exuberant moppet would return and set her free as the finale of a big tease. But did they tease! They had not done so yet. Frantically Dorinda plunged.
The pain was sickening. The shock devastating. Instead of freedom the tether swung her sideways and held. A foot raised in flight was all that saved her from an agonizing fall. Looking down at the intimate bond she saw that not a single hair had yielded. The tuft of the shining wiry stuff so cleverly woven was too large to be plucked in one piece. The beautiful black bush of which she had always been so proud had been her downfall. Most girls could not have provided so hirsute a fetter for their own containment. Leaning against a rotting pole she gave herself to tears.
She was knee deep in water by the time Mark came and cut her loose. Thankfully she padded behind him back to the house, answering his curt questions, sensing a storm.
Terry was clasping her pillar naked facing the stone, arms chained high so that she seemed to embrace the column against which she normally leaned. Looking past a raised arm she viewed them with an apprehensive eye.
"Did you do that?" Mark pointed to the purple line on his sister's seat.
"Yes."
"She tell you to?"
"Yes, I told her to!" Terry broke in hotly.
He looked from one to the other of them. The intensity of his scrutiny was such that each girl sensed his probing. Dorinda blushed. Terry blushed. Without a word spoken their blood had confessed their guilt.
"Whose idea was it?" He demanded grimly.
"Mine." Terry acknowledged bravely.
"Don't punish her, master. It was my fault too. I didn't fight ... or run. She didn't even whip me."
"Kind of her, I must say."
"It was sort of an experiment, master. It was my fault too."
"Nobility, nobility! Well, let's get it over with. Or at least let's get started." He amended.
Dorinda felt sure Mark was enjoying his mastery over two girls delinquent by his own code. There was that in his eyes when he looked at her that left her uncertain.
Without pause he removed the bit of cord round her waist and unlocked one cuff.
Raising her hand he locked it again to one of the rings by which his sister was chained, so that now she, too, was fastened to the stone, but with one hand free. She felt foolish and uncertain of what pose was required of her. She had little doubt she would be whipped. He walked into the house, leaving them alone. "Scratch my nose, darling." Terry sounded contrite.
Dorinda obliged. "I ought to scratch more than your nose." She chided irritably.
"That was a rotten thing to do to me." She described her debacle in detail.
Her erstwhile mistress wept. "I'm a bratty little beast, and I deserve what I'm going to get." She cocked a damp eye at her companion in distress. "I'm really in for it.
Mark's angry 'bout what I did to you. Said it could have scared you silly. Did it?"
"Yes. And it hurt horribly."
"I'm sorry, darling. Honestly I am. I made a mess of my day. I was supposed to train you in obedience and bring you home a well whipped but good little girl." She smiled wanly. "Y'know, love I don't think I can ever be the sort of Mistress Mark would approve of." She considered soberly. " 'Spose actually I don't want to be."
Mark returned. He carried a whip. Tapered leather. "Oh Mark! Not that one."
Terry wailed in genuine anguish. Catching Dorinda's eye, she added, "It's simply awful. You can't bear it."
"You've borne it before, kitten."
"Oh, but only when I've been very, very bad. I'll howl terribly."
"I don't mind." Said Mark simply. "You can howl too if you want." He added for the benefit of his new slave girl.
"Thank you, master." Dorinda felt inadequate to the whole situation.
His sister wept reproachfully. "You could cane my bottom." She suggested.
"You like it."
Fresh tears. "It still hurts like billy-o."
"So does this one."
"Couldn't I be locked up?"
"With your little slave girl, I suppose! Nice!"
"All right then, you horrid thing. Alone." It was the ultimate concession.
"For how long?" Mark sounded interested.
His sister tensed hopefully. "All night?" She tried tentatively.
"I was thinking more in the terms of weeks. Say four?"
"Oh Mark, you're teasing."
"With really heavy chains. I'll go and get the cell ready."
Once more they were alone. The new whip had been left where both could see.
Dorinda shivered. Not after yesterday! She prayed. Not the whip again....
"I think he's up to something." Terry observed sagely.
Her tears had disappeared. She was able to wipe her wet cheeks on her raised arms.
"Sounds awful." Dorinda mourned. "Do you think it's better than being whipped?"
"Not four weeks in chains! He's never kept me in a cell that long. A week's the most. If he hadn't come in and whipped me often I'd have gone crazy even with that.
It's awful just to sit or stand with nothing to do. I was sort of hoping he'd toss us in together for maybe a couple of days. Even if he did put some chains on us it would still be fun."
Mark released them. They were quivering and anxious to please. "Stand back to back."
They obeyed, wondering.
He passed a chain round their middles and heaved it very, very tight so that they both gasped at the constriction that welded them as one. A padlock snapped. They would not release themselves.
"There you are, ladies." He said cheerfully. "I couldn't bear to part you." He picked up his whip, the handcuffs and the bits of rope and disappeared into the house.
There was a stunned silence.
"The absolute rotter!" Terry's vehemence held both relief and anger.
Two pairs of hands sought the chain that joined them.
They found it unsympathetic. "I suppose it's better than being whipped?" Dorinda ventured doubtfully.
"It's because of what I made you do." The youthful captive wailed. "I know him!
Thinks of all your weak points. Then that's where you get it. He's done a bit of thinking here. I suppose you realize we can't do a thing ... for fun, I mean."
"The thought had occurred." Dorinda admitted dryly.
"But I'm also wondering what happens now."
Nothing happened. That was their punishment. With a bit of practice they managed slow and cautious motion. They were not denied their hands. If they came upon Mark in their handicapped perambulations, he affected to notice nothing wrong, passed a polite word or two and left them to their own devices. Neither girl dared utter a word of complaint. Their motto was 'leave well enough alone'. Both remembered the whip. It was still around somewhere. Dinner was formal at the appointed time. They ate it standing up beside the table, taking turns to twist this way or that as their need arose. Amity did not raise an eyebrow. Mark maintained a polite conversation to which they responded with equal gentility. Dorinda had never felt so humiliated. She was sure the servants guessed their sin.
Their night was pure frustration.
"Cute bit O' stuff, ain't she!" Dave enthused. "Nice clean lines, but a bit foul in the mouth."
He was a raffish young man, cheerful of mien with a sly eye. The female to whom he made reference was an angry damsel partly attired in a torn and disheveled pant suit. Her hands were tied at her back. She glared furiously at the small welcoming committee. "I'm going to make trouble over this!" She informed them darkly.
"Name's Mabel." Dave vouchsafed. "Got more threats than a dog has fleas."
"Fuck you!" Mabel dismissed him, and turned her attention to Mark. "Untie my hands you silly bastard. Don't just stand there!" She turned her back and proffered her bound wrists confidently.
"He's the bloke that's bought you." Dave jeered. "Ought to be polite to him, you ought."
Mabel looked uncertainly over her shoulder. "Aren't you going to untie me?"
"I'm a good mind to gag you as well." Mark was amused.
"Do you realize I've been kidnapped?"
"Of course. I placed an order for you."
Baffled, Mabel turned to the two girls. "You in on this?"
She examined the naked Terry's heart shaved pubic hair. "Your twat always been like that?" She asked incredulously.
Dorinda had been ordered to resume her expensive habilment which Terry approved as making her 'a slinky sex-pot'. She made a vivid contrast to her happily bare companion. It earned her Mabel's puzzled attention.
"You his wife?"
Feeling a bitch for compounding the newcomer's bafflement, Dorinda held up handcuffed wrists and smiled sweetly. "We're just slave girls the same as you." She responded innocently.
"I want to go home!" Mabel affirmed without dubiety.
"You're home now, you silly bitch." Dave told her helpfully. "Proper little harem, old Mark's got. You're a damn lucky girl, if you ask me."
"Nobody asked you, you grinning arsehole." The guest told him conversationally. She obviously had no confidence in her abductor, so gave her attention to her new owners. "Drugged me, he did. Two days ago I woke up on his damn boat. Now look at me. Where the Hell am I?"
"You're on an Island."
"Oh gawd, and I can't swim!" Deflation was evident.
She called on her reserves. "O.K. I ain't no bleedin' nun! How about you all screw me and let me go?"
The generous offer met only silence.
"Show her your bottom, Terry." Dave suggested. Pleased to prove her virtuosity, Terry placed her favorite curves on prominent display. Mabel's eyes fixed in fascination on the purple stripe.
"Whodunit?" She demanded virtuously.
"It wasn't Agatha Christie, duckie." Dave assured her.
"Well, are you going to do it?" Mabel demanded. "I ain't like her. You don't have to whip my arse."
"Mark's a gentleman, he is." Dave admonished. "He ain't going to fuck the likes O' you here on this wharf. And I ain't going to either. I done it last night to you twice." He turned helpful y to his audience, "Bit O' all right she is too." He offered informatively.
"Let's all go to the house and have a drink." Mark suggested.
"Gawd, what I couldn't do to one of those!" Mabel's voice was fervent.
Dorinda found herself subject to strange sensations.
She loved her clothes. But being clothed felt odd. Did three days of nudity change a woman! Make her wanton! She felt guilty about her present enjoyment as a watcher of Mabel's introduction to a new status. No doubt she should be adding her protests to the newcomer's verbal indignation. She should appeal to Dave. Two raving females might dent his composure and invoke second thoughts about what he was doing. She knew she would not do these things. She asked herself why. Was she already so broken to slavery! She faced the fact that she could not bring herself to injure or to cross Mark and Terry. The whip was in there, too, of course! She was unsure which influence most potently dictated her decisions. She wondered if two days of slavery would have as vivid an effect on Mabel as they had on her! She doubted it. Lastly she tried not to admit to herself that she was jealous of the attentions Mark must inevitably give his latest possession....
She held her drink easily in her chained hands. Sipping it comfortably she watched the little play unfold.
"I ain't wearing no bleedin' handcuffs!" Mabel seemed to have a gift for firm negatives.
"No handcuffs, no drink." Mark ruled.
"Crikey, I'm no ruddy criminal. Couldn't you hold the glass up for me the way I am?"
Mark spoke with authority. "We are going to untie you. You'll hold your hands out for the cuffs or we'll use force."
Mabel surveyed the company. She was outnumbered.
She was thirsty. Sullenly she extended her hands, blushing furiously in shame as the metal bands clicked tight upon her wrists. Dorinda deduced that, for Mabel, handcuffs invoked a stigma that rope did not. "Think I was a bloomin' shoplifter."
She complained bitterly. She held up the offending objects and examined the mechanism by which she was confined. Distaste and revulsion exuded from every pore. Her blush deepened. She accepted her drink awkwardly, her first act with chained hands. She gulped it greedily and turned her attention to Dorinda.
"You just let 'em put these rotten things on you?"
"Of course. What else can we do! I'm a prisoner the same as you. We can't escape. We can do what we're told or be whipped."
"Come off it, dearie. I wasn't born yesterday."
An amused Mark handed Dorinda a small key. Their eyes met, mirthful. With no word uttered she knew his thought. She wished that Dave was not present. But she would obey. Awkwardly, she unlocked her own handcuffs.
Mabel watched, incredulous, as her fellow captive stripped. She obviously still considered herself the victim of some unkind hoax. "I seen one bare arse already."
She said huffily.
Dorinda staged her strip with artistry. It was not until her last scrap of covering had been set aside that she turned her zebra back.
Had it not been for Dave's heavy breathing and a shocked gasp from the girl with the empty glass, there would have been silence in the room. It was broken at last by a heartfelt exclamation.
"Oh crikey!" Mabel was bemused. Blindly she held out her joined hands. "Could I have another drink...?"
Everyone had another drink except Dorinda. It would have spoiled her pose. Happily she held it so that the full enormity of her master's whip upon her person might be plain for all to consider. Mabel's verdict was incisive and obtuse.
"You're a damn fool to put up with it."
"I am a slave." Dorinda said simply. Then added mischievously, "So are you."
"Must have hurt something cruel?"
"You asked why I was so obedient."
"He do that to you?" A cautious finger indicated Mark.
"He is our master. He does what he likes with us." The proposition hung heavy in the air. The new prisoner responded to it slowly, with great emphasis but small conviction, "Not with me, he doesn't!" Then, in a much weaker voice, "Could I have another drink, please?"
Dorinda felt the word please was a concession to her stripes. Once more she caught her master's eye. Once more she divined the message his sardonic lips need not utter.
She brought the whip, knelt before him, kissed the cruel length and proffered it humbly.
She stood erect, hands clasped behind her neck. Her eyes on infinity. The slender crop sliced and curled round her wealed bottom. Exploding inwardly, she said her thank you in a pleased and eager voice.
Now it was Terry. An exact replica. A second bar across her bottom. In addition to her thank you she kissed the man who had put it there.
Dorinda dressed. Awkwardly she managed to lock the handcuffs back on her wrists.
Dutifully she ensured their grip, then offered the key to her master and her bonds for his approval.
"You lucky bastard!" Dave exclaimed enviously. "How the Hell d'you do it!" He winked at Mabel, "Think of it, love. Next time I come you'll be like they are."
"Kinky lot of kooks, if you ask me." Mabel affirmed without conviction. "Make a fortune, they could, back in Soho."
"Strip." Mark's voice was a pistol shot.
Terry handed the bewildered girl a pair of scissors.
"There will be a piece or two you'll have to cut, darling." She advised sweetly.
"Everything off. Just like me."
The actions of the captive girl were purely instinctive.
She dropped her empty glass and the scissors to the floor. Uttered an angry, "Up your arse!" that held all the indignation in the world. Then dashed through the french windows on to the terrace and out of sight.
Mark restrained pursuit. "Let her go." He chuckled.
"After lunch we'll have a hunt and pick her up again. Or maybe just let her run and see what happens."
Dorinda was glad when, after lunch, Dave accepted his cheque and said his good-byes. His presence was disturbing. She knew that had she been able to use him to effect escape from the Island she would have done so, more from a sense of duty: the feeling that any prisoner owes it to the general rightness of things to end captivity if the chance offers, rather than an urgent wish for freedom. She was wryly aware that, even though she might often feel the whip, she had an emotional need to play out her role in the small drama being enacted on Kyrexos.
She was inordinately pleased when, instead of hunting the errant Mabel, her master took her arm and announced, "Let's carry on where we left off, slave girl." His boyish enthusiasm crinkled his eyes in laughter.
"Can I come too?" Terry was an eager child.
They left her in what Dorinda felt sure would be an infuriating captivity. It was a large simulated dog kennel. A leather collar was padlocked round the angry young neck. It was tethered by about five feet of quite heavy chain. Terry could crawl on hands and knees in and out as she chose. That was all she could do. She stuck her tongue out at her brother. "You're simply horrid to me." She complained.
Dorinda was quite sure that, beneath the pout, the youngster was happy with her lot.
She was not so sure about herself. The walk had been short. It was pleasant among the trees. But the thing planted there possessed a sinister quality as though it had been waiting for her alone.
"It's very simple." Said her owner noncommittally.
A post. Six feet high. A narrower crosspiece resting on it's top to form a 'T'. She cringed. A perfect whipping post! Yet there were no rings or attachments by which she might be fastened. She looked at Mark inquiringly.
"I'm an absolute bastard, aren't I?" He inquired pleasantly.
"No," "I'm going to be cruel to you."
"Of course."
"You know why?"
"It's because I've slipped part way back to normal. Yesterday I was with Terry.
This morning I became a sort of guest. I enjoyed it all immensely. But I've slipped. I know I have. I've been forgetting to call you master."
"You are something special." He said with frank tenderness. "Yes. That's as good a summation as I could have given myself. Not to worry though. It's natural to have regressions. There will be a lot of them. I'll be cruel to you every time it happens, so as to bring you back to heel. The cruelest thing of all is our demand for a sort of duality from you. You'll constantly have to switch back and forth between companion and slave and be sincere and natural in each. You see, little slave, Terry and I are sort of in love with you in our own particular ways, so we won't be willing to relinquish the companion bit."
Dorinda sighed. Was ever a girl posed such a complexity! "I'd like to try without the ... persuasion." She ventured.
"That's the eternal woman talking." Mark's eyes glowed. "A woman always feels: 'Oh why must he! or 'Does he really have to! or 'If he loves me he'll do it my way.' So the only way a man is going to have a perfect woman is to make her a slave girl right at the start."
"Don't we have anything to say about it?"
He laughed at her lugubrious voice. "Women always have too damn much to say.
No matter how abject a slave I might make you I'll bet you'll still get a word in here or there. You'll search my weaknesses and exploit them." He grinned at her confidingly. "You see, the trouble really starts with us men. We're lazy. Actually we are subconsciously glad to allow you to nag us into your decisions. It saves us the trouble, and we have someone to blame if the decision's bad."
"So I have to be whipped regularly?"
"That's right, love."
Their eyes met. They laughed.
"I still think I can be a marvelous slave girl without looking like a zebra or a tiger all the time." She twinkled at him, "This morning, for instance. It seemed quite natural to me to pose and ask you to whip me for poor Mabel's benefit. I don't think I was acting. I wanted to. I did it well, didn't I?"
"Granted. But for just one stroke. And remember, you got a bang out of it personally. Supposing it had been for ten or twenty, would you have been quite so spontaneous?"
Dorinda considered. "I really don't know the answer to that." She admitted.
"Ah!" Said her master triumphantly. "That's what this afternoon is all about."
She made a gesture of bafflement with her chained hands. Then accepted the small key.
"Take 'em off, darling. The clothes too, of course." Dorinda blushed. She was very conscious of the scarlet.
She knew Mark was too. "You only let me wear clothes so I'll feel this ridiculous shame every time I have to take them off in front of you." She accused.
"Of course! Besides you do it so damn well. And never underrate the view when you've done. By the way, would you like your hair shaved the way Terry has hers?"
"Good Heavens! Have I blushed all the way down to there!" She looked down at herself then back at him. "Shave me any way you like, kind sir." She said.
Mark had brought cord. He tied her hands behind her back, then threw the rest of it over the crosspiece. "I'll lift you." He explained. "You slip your hands over the crosspiece and let your arms hand down the other side." He backed her against the post and kissed her soundly. She melted instantly in a way almost frightening. So great was her response that, when their lips parted, Mark placed his finger over hers.
"Silence, little slave." He grinned down at her. "Because we both enjoyed that, you are about to ask me not to do what I'm going to do. Right?" Dorinda was furious.
He could read her like a book. She would never win with him. But, prudently, she contented herself with grinning back and saying, "Yes master," with what she hoped was appropriate humility.
Mark lifted her high with ease. She resolved never to provoke a test of strength with him. She managed to get her arms as he had directed, then felt him drag them down and back with the cord in one hand while he held her in position with his other arm.
Shifting her to suit his design, he pulled until her shoulders were well back over the cross. Gently, then, he let her down and bound the cord round and round her tummy and the post while she gasped in pain as her underarms and shoulders took her weight. Her searching toes would never get closer than six inches from the ground.
No matter how she struggled she would hang. Even at the beginning the pain was excruciating. She tad no hope that it would lessen.
The master stepped back and examined his prize. "You are very beautiful." He said it almost with awe.
"I hurt! Oh master ... "
"I can't be whipping you all the time, darling." Mark said reasonably. "Up to a point stripes on a girl's skin are beautiful. But too many ruin the effect. Fortunately there are all sorts of delightful things I can do to keep you in a proper frame of mind."
"This isn't delightful."
"Depends on the point of view, love. Right now you're as lovely a sight as I've ever seen."
"I don't feel lovely."
"You wouldn't be quibbling, would you?"
Dorinda wanted to cry. She was sure he could have no idea how she hurt. She probably did look exceedingly attractive in her strained suffering. But she was beginning to remember the whip almost with nostalgia. Her breath was coming in irregular panting gasps. It took all her concentration to keep back the moans and cries. No doubt they would come.
"No master. But ... but ... I can't stand it!"
Mark paid no attention, but sat comfortably leaning against a tree. "I could have made it much worse for you by using the handcuffs." He consoled.
"How long must I hang like this?" She made her voice pitiful.
"Oh, I don't know." He drawled offhandedly. "The afternoon, I suppose."
The bound girl moaned.
"I'll sit here and gloat." Dorinda wept.
"This whole business of training you is intriguing."
Mark admitted ruminatively. "Once we have accepted the premise that I'm a right bastard the rest follows naturally. Sets the old conscience aside too. I'm a bit worried that you may hate me. These sessions when you come starkly face to face with your new condition have to be a bit traumatic. But I've studied Terry. If she's a sample, girls must be damn resilient!"
"Mabel will hate you." His victim gasped.
"Well! What gave rise to that thought, darling? I'd forgotten Mabel."
Dorinda wished she'd kept quiet. She knew perfectly well what had prompted her outburst. But she was not going to say so. "You can't expect her to enjoy it.... master." She offered lamely. Then gasped with definite sincerity, "I'm not!"
"Bit of feminine thinking in there somewhere, I suspect. But we'll let it pass. By the way, dear girl, I owe you an apology. With Mabel showing up on schedule, you must have been telling the truth. I mean, about good old Mike or whatever his name is."
"Of course I was telling the truth! Anyone but an idOh gee! I'm sorry master."
"Idiot was the word, no doubt!" Mark's tone was caustic. "Weren't you the girl who suggested that training is superfluous!"
"I am sorry. Honest I am, master. But I hurt so damn bad I can't think straight.
And anyway, you ... anyone looking at me would have to know I'm not Mabel's sort.
Where does your amateur kidnapper shanghai his victims."
Mark chuckled. "I really don't know. Some cheap pub probably. I didn't give him specs' to followapart from her being easy on the eye, of course. Couldn't expect a product of Vassar or Girton. Would have been nice perhaps. You know: the haughty maiden brought low. But with them there'd be repercussions�^'"
"How d'you know there aren't with me?"
"If there are any they'll be on Mr. Mike's plate, not mine. And that reminds me.
Since my favorite slave was telling the truth I suppose the dear boy will show up looking for you one of these days. What do you suggest?"
"Don't you give me to him!"
Mark was genuinely hurt. "You don't suppose...?"
"Oh again...." Dorinda wailed. "Oh master ... It's hanging on this damn thing. I don't seem able to behave. I say everything wrong."
"Much the same as 'In vino veritas', I suspect. You weren't thinking of asking me to let you down?"
"No master."
"You were, y'know. But what shall we do with your boy friend?"
"He's not by boy friend! He's what you English call a rotter. He more or less kidnapped me. I expect he's bound to come up to the house looking. You can make up a story for him. Ohhh master, this hurts ... "
"You are bearing it with great fortitude, dear girl. I can almost see the character build."
"Don't joke. It's awful. Please whip me instead." Mark appeared to consider.
"You sound terribly wistful, darling. Perhaps I should do as you suggest. It did occur to me that your present position is ideally suited to what you have in mind.
What say I give you some nice round number, then let you down?"
"No!"
"But you asked?"
"Not on my front! Oh, please, don't ever whip my front. I'll try and shut up and behave." Dorinda was frightened.
"Tell you what, poppet. Damned unsporting of me to sit and watch you suffer.
No help in your time of trial, eh. So I'll trot along and leave you to do some quiet thinking. You know, seek the elusive attitude we're trying to engender."
"Oh, don't leave me." She was stricken.
"Wouldn't it be easier for you?" He asked kindly.
"I don't care! I don't want you to go."
Mark was touched. "I was thinking of unlocking young Terry's collar." He said teasingly.
"Doesn't she have to stay there all afternoon too?"
"Thinking of unfair treatment?"
"Well, she does actually enjoy most of the things you do to her, doesn't she? She loves you terribly."
"Glad you inserted the word 'most' in that sentence, love. There are some things the dear child can't bear. They drive her up the wall. Remember that whip? She wasn't acting. She hates it. She's a little heroine with the cane or the crop. But not that. She loathes this thing you are enduring now. Sitting on a rail is another. When she gets particularly bratty there are all sorts of things I keep for special occasions to make her mind."
"But you love her?"
"Yes. I may love you. But that won't get your feet on the ground."
Dorinda wished he did love her and that he would indeed put her feet on the ground.
She knew that, threatened with this punishment in the future, she would readily come to heel. There was a nagging awfulness about it that made a girl curl up inside.
"She is a darling child." Dorinda avowed, setting aside her own misery.
"I gathered some mutual attraction yesterday." He said dryly.
Dorinda flushed scarlet and squirmed. Her legs were all she was free to squirm with.
But she used them.
"Properly repentant, I trust? Should have used that whip on you both."
"What you did was bad enough. Try sleeping like that sometime." She suddenly remembered and added a belated, "Master".
"Not bearing up very well, are you, love. Anyway, I'm quite sure you'll both be nibbling away at each other the first time my back is turned."
Dorinda's lips were mute. But her legs betrayed her.
"I know this sounds naive." He continued hesitantly. "But I'm curious. Is it very good?"
"Yes." The admission had been long in coning. Then she burst out recklessly, "I won't lie about it. It was more wonderful than I ever believed. Terry's a darling."
Mark nodded. His face was not the thundercloud she had expected. "You know I'll thrash you every time I catch you at it?"
"Yes master."
"I think you are telling me a thrashing is a small price to pay?"
Dorinda's mind was in turmoil. They were on such treacherous ground. But, hurting as she was, the truth seemed easiest. Her words came slowly, "I suppose that if we could buy such happiness for the price of being whipped, we would make the purchase." She said simply.
"It's Terry, y'know. She's pure magic."
"You love her very much ... and you love whipping her?"
"Can you believe the two things go together?"
"I can believe it very easily." Said Dorinda, "I couldn't have done a week ago.
But I can now."
"How come?"
Dorinda blushed. She could not answer.
TERRY We are terribly lucky, of course. Mark and me, I mean.
Brother and sister, you say! Well, perhaps. But ever since I can remember Mark's been an adventure. Everything you do with him is right, so absolutely right that there's a sort of magic to it. He tried other girls and I tried other boys, but they were a waste of time. Whether he whips me or even does something really awful to me, or when he takes me up in the clouds with that lovely silly thing he has between his legsI'm glad I'm not a man and have to carry one of those aroundit's always fresh and new and sparkling.
Kyrexos came to us as a sort of Garden of Eden in reverse. You know, we got put in there instead of being taken out. The girl was Mark's idea. I didn't mind. His fantasy demanded her, so that was that. I'll admit to a touch of jealousy, but that was offset by an exciting hope I'd get to whip her sometimes. I was curious, too, about that other thing: the two girl trick. I didn't tell Mark that. He's male and possessive, and I was sure I'd get a sore seat if he knew.
Dorinda was a happening. She's super! When Mark brought her home all naked with her hands behind her back I nearly exploded: you know where! I was naked too, and chained to the pillar on the terrace. When she looked at me in astonishment I got that same gorgeous crinkly feeling I get when Mark looks at me or teases me when I can't do anything about it.
The masochist thing! I'm sure you have to wonder. Bit silly, I think. Same as lesbian.
Just names. Some people like boiled turnips and others like chocolate eclairs. If you're wise you like both!
I'll admit I've wondered about me and the cane. For me it's a nice yellow whippy cane or a lovely slender riding crop. We get them at a place in London and always have them lying around all over. That way I can get the crinkly feeling in every room in the house. I won't pretend I'm exactly joyful at the moment one of them laces into my bottom. I won't bother with all those flowery descriptions of pain they go in for in those books you get in the back room in Soho. But it's really something! I can't stand still for too many. I have to be tied. But the before and the after! Nobody, not even me, can tell you how wonderful they are. It's like going up in the clouds the way I told you. Mostly after Mark has whipped my bottom I absolutely attack him. I just have to. Except those times when he has me tied or chained. He knows I'm in agony. But he just laughs. It does something for his male ego.
I can twist him a bit, of course. I don't think he's caught on to all my little girl tricks.
I can almost always get my bottom caned by using one of them. But if he thinks I'm twisting, then Heaven help poor little Terry! I still love him all the more afterwards. I can't help it. Mark's terribly good to me, and we both agree that when he thinks I deserve one of those specially awful punishments he's also terribly good for me. I know I'm a bit of a brat. So I'm really grateful for the bad ones. I mean, afterwards of course!
I really thought I was going to get it that day with Dorinda when Mark found out about us doing, you know what! I was really scared and I felt guilty because it looked as though she was going to get it too. He did give us a bad time with that chain round our middles. I was angry enough to pop. Just think of it! Two naked girls fastened back to back. We tried with our hands. But nothing worked. So we had to talk and giggle. The day had been a discovery for us both: a couple of explorers stumbling on Eldorado. We both knew we'd do it again in spite of his silly old punishments. I didn't tell Dorinda, but I was a bit worried in case Mark foxed us by keeping us chained or tied so we never could. You can never be quite sure about Mark. I know I'll just go pop if I can't get at her again. She's darling!
Mark keeps a lot of things to do to me up his sleeve.
They are things that leave me uncertain whether I'm enjoying myself and getting the crinkly feeling or not. Sort of teasing things. Or some awful frustration. Or something that makes me look and feel like a child who's been a naughty little girl.
I'm not a child, though I sometimes have the feeling he still thinks I am. That's only when he's in the big brother mood.
That kennel thing is a good example of the one's that leave me not knowing. It's cringe making! I suppose a girl kneeling there with a collar chained round her neck just has to feel like a puppy dog. The only thing that's missing is her tail, and if it was there I wouldn't wag it. I can just barely stand upright: the chain's that short. So I have to sit or kneel or move in and out the little hole in the box on all fours, If somebody was watching, someone like Dave for instance, I'd feel so terribly ashamed. I'd go inside and curl up. But even when there's no one there I still find myself blushing. I always try and get loose. I never can. But it's something to do.
Mark often leaves me in these binds for simply the longest times. When he comes to let me loose I'm so terribly glad to see him I'm ashamed of myself. Talk about slave girls! I've always been his.
When Mark collared me to the kennel and took poor Dorinda off into the trees I knew what she was in for. I'd spent a bit of time hanging on that damn post myself on occasions when he'd decided I'd been 'a bad girl'. It's not a punishment I have to wonder about. It's just plain awful. He fastens me up with my toes a few inches off the ground and goes away and leaves me alone. I get scared and there's no crinkly feeling and I'm shockingly humble when he chooses to come back. Sometimes he comes back and I think it's all over, but he just checks the cords and goes away again. I always cry when I see him disappearing for the second time. I can't help it.
I'm so lonely and hurt. So, you see, I could feel really sorry for Dorinda.
Sitting there with the collar round my neck I got to thinking about Mabel and Dorinda. How different they were! I was amused about Dorinda and Mark. He doesn't know it yet but she's in love with him. She isn't completely like me, but because she wants him she has been able to take some really frightful whippings from him and come up smiling. I think he could do anything to her and it wouldn't dent her feelings for longer than the pain lasted, probably not even that. She has it for him bad: what the Americans call the hots. So what has happened is that the darling is a bit ahead of Mark all the time. He doesn't need to whip her into slavery at all. She'd do anything he wanted, same as me. But poor old Mark had laid out a course and he has to follow it through whether there's any need to or not. It's hard luck on the poor girl. She understands, and is putting up with it very nobly. He's like a chap who has prepared a speech and discovers someone else has said it first. He's put all he's got into the damn thing, so he reads it anyway. His audience can't very well pack up and leave any more than Dorinda can., But I bet when her training's over she'll really twist him same as I do.
I think Mabel's different. Mark's 'prescribed course' is probably just what the doctor ordered. Whether she was on Kyrexos or somewhere else it would do her a world of good. I was sitting happily thinking about whipping her bottom and hearing all the rude things she would yell at me, when I'll be darned if she didn't saunter up cool as you please and rub me the wrong way at the start by saying in baby talk, "Is poor little puppy dog all chained up then. Puppy dog like nice bone?"
Well! I ask you! That was a time I wanted to go inside and curl. I was about to let her have a good broadside when I suddenly realized that little Terry had better mind her P's and Q's. I was alone. I was chained, and I didn't know much about Mabel.
Previously when I was helpless there had been just Mark. This was a new experience.
"Just fun and games." I hoped I sounded casual. Mabel looked around cautiously. "Not some sort of trap, is it?" She must have read about the lady and the tiger.
I was about to give her some good advice. But that old chestnut about 'Giving yourself up' sounded just too corny. While I was thinking of something more appropriate she came out with, "That guy screw you both?"
Mabel brought out the worst in me. I couldn't resist.
"Only once a day." I explained casually. "But now you're here it will make it a lot easier."
It confirmed her worst suspicions. "What's this whipping business? He one O' them Johns can't get it up no other way?"
"Oh, it's up all the time." I said enthusiastically. "We get whipped if we don't put up a good show. Very demanding, Mr. Esmond is. Gets very angry if a girl just lies there."
"Wants a bit of action in your ass!" Mabel seemed to be on familiar ground.
I'm not that keen on four letter words. So I tried to steer in another direction. "What are you going to do about escaping?" I asked.
I had her attention there. "What the fuck can I do?" She demanded morosely.
"Bloody Island. I already walked round it. You got any ideas?"
"They'd be no good to me. When I'm alone I'm always chained."
Mabel looked at me with actual pity. Vulgar but with a heart of gold perhaps! "Look, kid, can't I get you free somehow? Maybe if the two of us get off in the woods we can think of something."
I was about to declare that I was soundly chained and not to waste her time....
When it occurred to me that here was a chance for a bit of fun. You know, one up on good old Mark. I knew where the key was! Mark always tantalizes me by leaving it out of reach but where I can see it. Adds to his enjoyment and makes me furious.
Oh sure, this is where I should have stopped to think. Slapped dear little Terry and told her to be good. But, instead of thinking of my poor bottom and whatever other bits of me were likely to be sorry, all I could see was Mark's face when he came back and found my collar neatly locked but me gone. I was weak. I fell. I told Mabel where to find the key.
We both of us got a bit of a giggle out of using it and then putting it back just as it had been. We also left the locked collar right in front of the dog house door. It was too cute for words. But it was the last giggle we had.
You see, as usual when I act bratty, I hadn't thought about afterwards. It wasn't until after we had run off into the trees that I realized I'd sort of inherited dear Mabel. I'd got my liberty and I'd got Mabel. But what was I going to do with her!
We wandered. I showed her bits of the Island. Finally we sat behind some bushes and talked. She was tired and hungry. I felt sorry for her and a bit guilty over pulling her leg. After all, when you considered all that had happened to her it was understandable she'd be a bit put out. In the end I simply told her the truth and wanted to know if she was going to try and evade capture or whether she'd be sensible and come home with me to Dinner. I was sure Mark would feed her. But by that time I wasn't a bit certain about dear little Terry getting anything to eat.
"And get myself chained up?" She demanded.
She was still handcuffed, and I was glad she was. It put me in the catbird seat. I'd had an inspiration: Supposing I walked in and delivered Mabel safe and sound and without a fight my own little lapse from grace might be forgiven. Honest, some of the things Mark does to me when he's angry ...!
"You won't be any more chained up than I will."
"Wanted me to take my clothes off."
"You won't be any more naked than me and Dorinda."
"That other girl had clothes on." Mabel thought she had a point.
"She hasn't got any on right now." I said with certainty.
"She's being punished."
"What the Hell for?"
"Part of her training." I explained.
"Training?" Poor Mabel! I had to understand her incredulity.
"I'm already trained. But Dorinda isn't. At least Mark thinks she isn't." I began to realize how impossible it might be to make her understand. "Look." I said firmly, "You'll have to surrender sometime. Make a virtue of it. Come back with me now. I'll get punished. But you won't. Mark will be pleased with you. Butter him up a bit.
Might save you a sore bottom." I was sure she would have called it a sore ass.
Mabel balked. I got panicky. "Alright, if you won't let me help you, then I'm going back and lock myself in the collar again. No sense getting punished for nothing."
She wouldn't come. So I left her there and ran like blazes. I am sure you can guess what I found.
The key was gone!
Well, I'd been whipped before and I'd be whipped again.
Little Terry had had her fun. Now she would pay for it. I had turned disconsolately toward the house when I got another inspiration. It was worth a try. Once more I ran. At least I was getting exercise.
Mabel was still there. She looked sad and forlorn. I threw myself down beside her, put my head in her lap and burst into tears ... I'm very good with this tears bit.
Mark nearly always falls for it. I told her my plight and wailed that I was scared. But that if only she would come home with me I was sure I wouldn't be punished too badly if she explained I had persuaded her.
It took awhile. But it worked. Probably more from her hunger and fear of the night than my histrionic effort, besides I really do think she has a kind heart. But now I'd got this far I wanted to make a real impression, and I wanted to help Mabel. So I asked her to go back with me as naked as I was and to be really careful what she said. I knew she'd just hurt herself with all of us if she went on scattering four letter words around as though there had been a shortage. Mark doesn't like 'em any better than I do.
That was another tussle. I think Mabel had been naked often enough in all the wrong places. But she had a sort of lower middle class thing about it. I won by saying how much nicer it is to take 'em off yourself rather than to have them taken by force by a man. I intimated, too, that it would mean about twenty fewer strokes. By that time Mabel was beginning to take strokes seriously. She never stopped looking at the pair I was carrying around. Poor Mabel!
I stopped feeling sorry for Mabel when we'd got her clothes off. We'd had to tear some of them because of her handcuffs. But once in the nude Mabel was a beauty.
Her figure was good enough to eat. In fact I did get some bad ideas. But squelched them, she'd had a trying day. The quaint thing about Mabel was that, with a figure that would have won any beauty contest, she was quite unaware of anything out of the way. She described the whole assembly as 'Tits and twat'. I really think she'd be stymied if you mentioned nipples and pubes.
It was a triumphant return. I'd prayed they'd be on the terrace, and sure enough they were. Dorinda pretty as a picture in those glad rags I'd given her, but handcuffed and daintily sipping a martini. She grinned happily so I knew she'd survived the afternoon O.K. Mark was viewing the two naked additions with an uncertain eye.
I'm sure that he did not recognize a naked Mabel, and for a minute wondered who on Earth I'd picked up. But when he grasped the picture Mabel stole the whole show by coming out with a real diller I wouldn't have thought she could have managed.
Holding out her chained hands and with a beaming smile she advanced to the table and said: "Dear Mr. Esmond. I am sorry I've been such a silly girl. Please forgive me."
Amazing!
I got ten with the cane.
MARK Dorinda is beautiful to whip! She is a dream come true.
When the cane thunks into those lovely curves she has there is an electric something that comes from her to me as though the cane had joined two electrodes. In a sense, I suppose, that's what it does.
She is so right! I feel guilty about training her. If I wasn't seeking perfection I'd let her cozen me into stopping it. But she sees what I see. In her heart she knows there's no other way to where we are going. She's quite marvelous! In her time on the post with the cross under her arms, and it was quite a long time too! She often managed to talk to me as though nothing was happening. I know that's not easy. Terry told me how she felt when she hung there. She didn't want to talk, just moan and plead with me to let her down. Poor little Terry! I couldn't stand it and had to go away and leave her alone. Terry is beautiful too.
I am very lucky.
The way Dorinda came to us out of the blue was a small miracle. If I live to be a hundred I'll still remember my first sight of the lovely naked girl with her wrists handcuffed behind her back walking up the road to the top of the hill looking around her as though in wonder at everything she saw.
She has a tremendous natural gift for accepting punishment. If it is not too long she will smile at me throughout. If it is more severe she will sort of share it with me by small glances of apology. If she moans or screams, and she does both, she will catch my eye afterwards and signal in some magic way she has that everything is O.K. and please go on whipping her.
Terry is beautiful to whip, too. But the two girls are different. Terry is a breath of early Spring. Dorinda is a gorgeous day in June! Terry has always loved half her punishments, maybe all of them. She and I should have been twins: not that it matters. She is a magic child. And she is not jealous of Dorinda. Thank Heaven for that! The little monkey has ideas about Dorinda herself. I won't be too hard on them when they try and fox me. But about half the time I'll thrash them both just to keep their nibbling within bounds. I don't want Dorinda changed.
Do you think it terrible to whip a girl! Do you! I can only tell you to take your condemnation and go to blazes! If you have never whipped a girl you have never known her. Underneath every feminine facade there is someone quite wonderful and very beautiful that only the whip can release. The whip is a key to a magic door that most people never open.
Terry would be quite impossible if she was not caned frequently. Use a bit of judgment, of course. But she is a bundle of mischief, a wicked little sprite who thinks up a hundred ways to twist me. I'm wise to most of them, even though she thinks I'm not. But I'm sure there are still a few she slips over on me. There's always her tears, of course. They are mostly sure fire. But once in awhile I'll catch her out.
She puts on a deliciously convincing act when she knows I'm really going to hurt her.
Dorinda weeps sweetly. Her tears are jewels. She tries hard not to cry. I think she is ashamed of tears that are shed because of pain. You can watch her fighting them.
They usually well up just at that time, which I suppose is pretty awful for a girl, when she realizes the pain is more than she can bear and that she is going to stop smiling and begin the little moans and gasps by which I know she is living intensely in the direction she has to go. Tears seem better suited to punishments other than the whip.
I watched Dorinda cry while she was hanging on the bar. She was so exquisite it hurt. A poignancy of the heart.
I shall have to watch the two of them. They'll plot against me and plan small ways to 'manage' the man in their lives. I think there is an element of wife in all females.
Since the beginning wives had wheedled whatever they want out of their husbands. It had become an inborn instinct. They couldn't stop if they tried. It's their greatest challenge. Men held the line for centuries by keeping a whip or a cane around, and there were the scold's bridles, the stocks and the ducking stool. But now we've become so enlightened we wouldn't dare lay whip to a wife any more than we dare to shed blood for things we believe in, so they ride over us rough shod: the women and the barbarian! Our race is lost. But not on Kyrexos! I will have the most fulfilled women in the World!
The miracle of Dorinda has thrown a wrench into our plan. My plan! But Terry was all for it. She still is. But it was for one girl. Now we have two. What in blazes am I going to do with Mabel!
I'll admit young Terry got one up on me when she came proudly marching home with Mabel more or less on a leash. I'm damn sure the little so and so thought she'd get off scott-free as reward for her coupe. But allowing herself to be released after I had chained her was unforgivable, you just can't let her get away with something like that. Obedience must be maintained. So I gave her ten of the best. Her tears were not so much from the pain as from disappointment that she had not managed to slip me a twist. Ten swift ones are a bit much for her, even with a cane. She wasn't happy with the last five at all.
You should have seen Mabel's face! She watched the cane thunking into Terry's bottom as though she did not believe a word of it. I think that anything Mabel learns here will have to be whipped into her lovely skin. If something does not conform to her idea of lower suburbia she just fails to comprehend. She has the most marvelous body. But she'll never come near touching Dorinda.
Next day I started her training. I was stuck with her, so I had to do something. I took her down to the room. It then went something like this: "I want obedience from you, Mabel. If I don't get it I'll whip you until I do."
"Fuck you!"
She was naked, her wrists tightly handcuffed behind her back. I splatted a good one across her seat. She yelped and leaped away. I followed, catching her with the whippy crop wherever a bit of Mabel showed to advantage. She had nice skin. The marks were very satisfactory. We went round and round the room. She kept repeating over and over: "You bastard ... You bastard...! in between yelps. I'd have felt sorry for her if she hadn't been so stupid. Finally she slowed a bit and muttered, "Tell me what you want."
"Kneel at my feet and kiss my shoes." Pretty stereotyped, I know. But simple.
She looked at me as though I was raving. "Up your arse!" She suggested cordially.
She started to leap about again. But I'd had enough of that. I got her to the rope and had her arms up in a jiffy. She seemed surprised that I could handle her so easily.
Then I stood by the winch and took her up an inch at a time. She bent further and further, watching me all the time with a sideways look of pure disbelief. I did not stop until her heels were in danger of leaving the floor.
"Here's the drill. I'm going to cane your bottom. You'll notice it's nicely stuck out. When it's had enough we'll progress to other parts, you have several. I'll cane slowly. When you feel co-operative you will ask for the next stroke and when it is delivered you will say thank you. Both in a pleasant and respectful tone."
She did not answer. But the position was giving her food for thought. It also did wonderful things to her incredible torso.
I wrapped the cane round both cheeks. She went as wild as she could.
"How old are you, Mabel?"
"Twenty-one. Why? What's it got to do with what you're up to?"
I gave her one lower down.
"Oh please don't! Stop it!" She was ordering me.
I gave number three well up on top. It was her best yelp yet.
"Don't be so cruel. You seemed nice ... "
I did not aim number four. Just let it go. She started to cry. If you stay impervious to tears they are a good sign. Number five brought a few gasping words, "I'll do what you want."
"Do it then." I gave her number six.
"Please whip me once more." She shot it out like a bullet. Not a bit elegant.
Besides, she had used the word 'once'.
"Not good enough! Don't quote a number. Call me sir. Say it slowly and distinctly."
I managed number seven before she had time to collect her thoughts.
She was quite beautiful now. Wet with perspiration her whole body glistened. Her breasts were not pendulous. They stuck out, two lovely cones accentuated by her wracked shoulders. She had a nice bush. Nothing like Dorinda's, but good. Her spherical bottom was now delightfully wealed. From now on the cuts would bisect.
Her features had become more appealing. The absence of four letter words helped.
Vulgarity diminishes beauty. I wondered if I'd ever achieve a Pygmalion with her.
"Please sir, give me another stroke."
She did it fairly well this time. No soul. But correct. I gave her a real scorcher that lapped her hip. She held back the gasp and then managed.
"Thank you very much, sir."
The damn thing fell flat. What more did I want! Mabel had done as told. It was a victory. But I didn't feel I'd won. I knew, as a terrible revelation, that if it had been Dorinda I would have been quivering. Poor Mabel. It wasn't there. No electric current. No nothing. Not her fault: mine. I tried another tack.
"Would you like your breasts whipped?" It was shock therapy.
She was equal to that one. "But, sir, no one whips a girl's breasts." Al the weight of lower Suburbia was in her pronouncement.
"I do."
I could see her grappling. It was like telling someone a thousand years ago that the Earth was round. I didn't wait.
It was a lovely upward stroke. The cone jounced and bounced. It was quite lovely. I wanted to bite it. Mabel howled, a long mournful cry of desolation. "No. No....
No."
"You have two of the lovely things."
"Oh please! Alright. I'll do anything." There were gaps in her utterance where the four letter words would normally have been. She was learning. But I felt no victory. I was having thoughts of handing Mabel over to Terry as something to play with. Keep her properly chained and they couldn't get into trouble. But even there good old class consciousness popped up. Mabel's grammar was not that good. I didn't want Terry picking up the wrong words....
I moved round. She really had wonderful breasts. She whimpered constantly as I tapped her unwelted nipple with the cane. One more could do her no harm. I swung.
There is something magic about a girl's breast. You can call 'em mammaries and hint about their utility. But just the same most men would die for a pair. I'd been adoring Terry's for years. She knows it, the little minx.
The cane connected with a quite different sound from the way it splats on a bottom.
This touches the soul. Whipping a girl's breast is like reaching out and touching a Rembrant or the first chords of something from Chopin. Few women realize the power of their breasts. Just as well, actually. A woman's breasts are man's Achilles heel. A woman with fine breasts can make a man do anything. Remember the joke: "It takes nine months for a man to get out of the vagina. He spends the rest of his life trying to get back in." It's true, of course. But I've always resented the compulsion. I always think of some poor little clerk getting twenty quid a week. Poor little bastard! How lucky I am to have Terry, and now Dorinda. Wouldn't it be awful not to be able to ... To know you never could...! You didn't have the price or the courage.
Mabel had cost me ten thousand pounds. I'd got Dorinda for nothing. The whole thing's nuts!
Mabel went berserk. It was interesting to watch her gyrations. Considering the way she was tied they were remarkable. She was still sobbing: "Anything, anything at all...." It seemed only sporting to give her a chance.
"Tell me you will stretch your legs wide. Then ask me to whip your cunt."
She gave this one a bit of thought. I'm sure she thought it out of character for me. I was a gentleman. "Couldn't you just cane my bottom, sir?" Mabel was clinging to lower suburbia for all she was worth.
"Why should I?" Let her do a little thinking for a change.
"It isn't nice to whip the rest of me."
Nice! The quintessence of the class from which she came. The damn puerile word was their lodestone. But I'd offered her a four letter word. Surely that should make her feel at home! I could sense the crumbling of her defenses.
"I'm going to spread my legs, sir. Please whip my cunt." It was beautiful! Mabel had crossed the Rubicon: She had become female, not just a record in a groove uttering vulgarities. I watched her part her thighs and plant her feet reluctantly apart.
I felt reverence for the cane I held. It could mould. I examined the femaleness she was now offering. There was a good deal of hair and mysterious folds of flesh. It was the heart of the Universe. I sliced it with a searching upstroke.
She howled. Oh, how she howled! It was wonderful!
Here was man's revenge for all the frustrations of today's male futility. Mabel was expunging a legion of male defeats. I cut into her sex with a second stroke of savage joy.
I'm a sadist! Oh, sure, sure! I know the book. I think young Terry has it about figured out over these labels. Al I can say is Horseshit! Right now Mabel was closer to being a woman than she had ever been. I let her have another. I felt as though I was assuaging the wounds of male mankind. It was a deep fulfillment. I did not stop.
Mabel put up quite a performance. Couldn't blame her for not relishing her role. Not quite cricket to make one girl pay the bill for all the cheated males in the past hundred years. But Mabel was there. I cut into her triangle again and again. It felt so good I never wanted to stop. But she stopped me! Trust a woman! I sometimes despair. She'd been going wild with pleas. Now she came out with a good old tried and true. "Oh, please sir, what would your mother think...?"
It was so damned trite! I wanted to laugh. But you don't laugh at times like that. I felt a welling concupiscence. I wanted to transform Mabel into a woman. And then I wanted to send her into orgasm after orgasm. I lashed away, then stood and watched as her loins took on a life of their own and carried her to where I wished her to go.
We both fell silent. You know, after God save the King what else is there to sing. I felt very humble when a small feminine voice said: "Thank you very much, sir."
They always get the last word.
After awhile I let her down and untied the rope. Her handcuffs stayed on. I've found that handcuffs have the most potently remarkable effect on the female psyche. They find something implacably compulsive about the bite of steel. I think they see themselves as some pathetic pickpocket being hauled off to jail. Whatever it is the reaction is rewarding. The little darlings respect the metal bands.
Mabel had become exciting. The whip marks, her heaving breasts, each wearing the bar I had placed upon it. The tears and the uncertain disoriented glances in my direction. But it was the handcuffs that transformed her from a querulous bore into a piece of erotic femininity. Handcuffs do a lot for any girl. For Mabel they worked a miracle. The essential parts had always been there. Really high quality parts! But the poor girl had never managed to assemble them properly. Now the cones of her breasts demanded attention, her concave tummy was a joy and the thing between her legs had come out of hiding and proclaimed itself. I found myself affected by the wounds I had placed on it.
She just stood, letting the pain seep away, hoping I wouldn't hit her again. She did not speak. 'Let well enough alone' was, I am sure, her motto at that moment.
"I have a whip much better suited for your breasts than this cane." I told her conversationally.
Her breasts rose as she caught her breath. That's the best part of keeping girls naked.
You get all their reactions. The rest of her is every bit as eloquent as her face. Her eyes widened, her nostrils flared. She pulled ineffectually at her hands. Then she did something quite beautiful. She sank to her knees at my feet and bent her head so that it rested against my knee. She said no word, just bowed in supplication.
We held that pose for a long time. We neither of us had anything to say. I looked down at the white back, the pinioned arms, the disheveled hair. It was classic. If a Pre-Raphaelite had been on tap Mabel could have become immortal.
I'll admit I was at a bit of a loss. Even when they aren't even trying girls can leave you stymied. Here was Mabel beautifully submissive. The next move was up to me, and I was not sure which move to make. Analyzing the situation I realized that I had simply whipped the girl into her present state of mute compliance. No particular skill or psychology involved. I'd enjoyed using the whip on her and I wanted to continue.
But I also wanted the act to be constructive. I wanted Mabel to know why this was happening to her. With Dorinda it had been easy to explain. It wouldn't be with Mabel.
I lifted her to her feet, smoothed her hair for her and patted her bottom to signify she should just stand. Then I went to the chest and exchanged the cane for the small nine tailed silk corded whip we keep specially to use on a girl's most secret parts. Yes, I had used it sometimes on Terry. Why not! I sat down with the lovely wicked thing dangling provokingly from a negligent hand. Mabel looked at it. I looked at Mabel.
"What have I done, sir?" She was quite lost.
"Just been born female. Don't feel guilty."
"You whip them others, too, like this?"
"Worse."
"But you must want something?"
"Total obedience. You must go beyond obeying. You must want to obey. Have no other thought but obedience."
"Don't you want to fuck me?"
"Not now. And watch your speech. Each vulgarity gets you the whip. You have earned it now. One stroke. Will you stand still for it?"
"On my...? On my ... "
"On your what?"
She didn't want to say it. The sacred word would not be 'nice'.
"On my breast, sir?" Prospect of the whip had revived the sir.
"Yes. On your breast. You may choose which one."
"I won't do it! I won't! You've got no right ... "
A little rest works wonders. When the worst of the hurt recedes they discover they haven't been broken after all.
Mabel fought with delightful fury. This time I needed her hands in front. When I unlocked one cuff she gave the battle everything she had. Teeth and claws and a good deal of very vulgar remonstrance. Even when I had her nicely stretched up on to her toes she was still going strong. But the flood receded to a trickle and then dried.
She looked at me with about three expressions at once: Anger, reproach, apprehension, and a few other thoughts as well. Strung up like that a girl rapidly comes face to face with what she must. Then she looked down at herself as though taking a last farewell from those two treasures sticking out of her chest.
The suspension had flattened them out a bit. But they were entrancingly exposed for what I must do to them. You notice I have used the word must. I could no more have ignored them than fly. The two strokes that had already stolen their virginity beckoned like beacons. But I went and sat on the box again. Let the handcuffs hurt her for a little while before I started.
"I suppose it's too late to say I'm sorry?" This time her face was really pathetic.
"It's too late, and you're not really sorry. You just don't want to be hurt."
"Not there, sir. No girl wants to be hurt on those."
"You have one other intimate place that this whip is well adapted to."
Interesting. A girl's breasts her ultimate agony. I didn't recall checking the point with Terry. I'd have to: Dorinda too. There was no doubt where Mabel's weakness lay.
"Don't thank me. I intend to whip all three. Two up. One down."
"You like whipping girls." It was a flat accusation.
"All men like whipping girls. Most lack the courage or the cash."
"Isn't there anything I can do ... or say? Anything, sir. Please, I don't want to be whipped any more ... not anywhere."
Poor girl! She looked altogether too female not to whip.
I couldn't explain the subtleties to her, so I got on with the job. She looked at me as I approached in about the same way that wench looked at the tiger when the Rajah staked her out for bait. I could understand her feelings. They were valid.
It was glorious. Her breasts took the thin lashes exquisitely. They were firm and stretched, no jouncing. The cords bit into their softness with free access to the whole area. Her nipples were rampant. Her plight was provocative. She wanted to lunge, struggle and lift herself off the floor. But she was stretched taut and the handcuffs hurt too much for her to do any of these things. Even though all of her was free except her wrists she had to stand and let me whip her as I pleased. It was cruel y beautiful.
Don't suppose you want the gasp and groan detail. It can be a bore. There were lots of both. Strangely enough she did not plead any more. She seemed resigned to simply enduring. The best thing she did was with her head. She'd fling it back and look up at the ceiling as though fearful of watching what I was doing. Then, in absolute fascination, she'd lean forward and try and look at her breasts to see what the damage was. Only once did she watch my arm and follow the lashes as they flickered down upon her breast.
I whipped one breast at a time. It's much the best way.
Terry tells me it's twice as effective and much more personal. She says it's as though each of her breasts is a person, each getting it's own punishment. In any case it's just naturally a better job than to try and cover both with one stroke. I go from side to side, backhand on one. Sometimes, before the handcuffs got to hurting too bad, I could just stand still and wait for Mabel's gyrations to present a breast to advantage and then let it have it.
They were a glorious scarlet! Mabel wept with abandon.
I let her down three or four inches. She knew why. She looked at me piteously. But seemed resigned. Al hope gone sort of thing. She even nodded dumbly when I told her how to spread her legs. Her penalty for closing them would be a return to her breasts. She cried steadily. I did not mind. I think it's good for a girl to cry while she is being whipped. Saves 'em getting tied up in a knot inside. I've learnt what I can about tears from Terry. But I'll never get the whole truth from the little minx because she uses them to get her way with me. One of her secret weapons.
Girls are beautiful when they cry.
... "It isn't just a picnic, darling." Terry said regretfully. Dorinda had not expected. 'Just a picnic'. There had been a moment when the handcuffs had been unlocked that she had hoped the day might be purely fun. But when she had also been denuded of her clothes, nakedness reminded her she was still a working girl. When she was alone with Terry she did not think of herself as a slave girl.
"I have an assignment." Terry confided darkly. "I didn't do too well the last day we had together. So our Lord and Master tells me that when I bring you back for Dinner you have to show a goodly number of fresh stripes. He says he does not mind where, just so long as he can count them."
"I expect we'll find a place on me somewhere. Not to worry!" Dorinda was happy. A whole day with Darling Terry!
"He thought up another quaint little notion that won't be too easy. He's going to look at your wrists. If they don't show rope marks we're in trouble."
Dorinda considered. "If you want to carry the basket I suppose you could tie my hands now and keep them tied all day. That would do it." She twinkled, "You can untie them for special duties, of course."
"You don't want to be tied up all day."
"Not really. So how would it be if you hang me up by my wrists for half an hour just before we go back? That will make me good."
"Well, if we have to. But let's try and think of something else before the time comes. Dammit! He doesn't want us to forget him. He's promised the most awful punishment for both of us if I fall down on the job."
"Won't he be tired out after Mabel?" There was a faint acerbity in Dorinda's voice.
Terry giggled. "You're jealous." She frowned. "I'm jealous too. I wish dear Mabel had got lost. She's one too many. Poor little Terry is going to get submerged in all these breasts and nipples and hair. I used to have him all to myself. I don't think Mabel's much competition. But she's got all the essential equipment."
"When are you going to whip me?"
"Anytime you like, Darling. But I've just had a super idea. Think we might persuade Mark to give Mabel to me? I wouldn't mind being cruel to her a bit. I'd have her trained in no time."
"Did Mark do things to you every day?" Dorinda enquired shyly.
"Just about." Terry considered as they walked down the path. Dorinda carried the picnic basket. "He couldn't whip me every day. A girl doesn't have enough skin for that. We tried all sorts of mixtures. We got whips that didn't mark much. But somehow they weren't genuine. It's not really a thing you can play at. If it's not real it falls flat. We tried a couple with the cane every day. But that turned out a flop because I can take a couple without too much fuss, and if all you can give a girl is two: what do you do with her then!" She sighed, "So that's where the chains and the cords and all the rest come in. He can make me stand in the stocks all day and I won't have a mark."
"Will we get imprisoned? That cell you told me about?"
"Of course. Mark loves locking a girl in there. She's so damn glad to see him again. Marvelous for the male ego." She giggled. "I say, darling! Let's go back and have Amity lock us both in there. Chains and all. With the two of us it would be super."
"More fun than a picnic?"
"I'll eat you alive. Come on."
Dorinda was intrigued. A day in a cell with this carnal moppet would be an experience. The child's enthusiasm was infectious. To ask for imprisonment had to be absurd: but not on Kyrexos. Not with this joyous creature as a cellmate. In any case she knew she would never deny Terry anything. Terry never made her feel a slave.
Oddly enough, neither did Mark.
"With full chains, Miss?" Amity was unruffled. "Well not our legs together."
Terry giggled unashamedly.
"Quite so, Miss. This way please."
Dorinda found herself taking an interest beyond her expectations. Amity and Hislop were not of any world she had ever known.
Hislop had a gift for making her feel well groomed even when she had no stitch on. Amity could not be ruffled. If they considered any of their employers pleasures odd, they showed no signs of it. Perhaps they laughed together down in the kitchen. But Dorinda found herself doubting such violation of a facade.
"But this is the dungeon, Amity."
"More suitable, Miss. The cell is not private." Dorinda blushed. Terry was mollified.
It was a sizable place. Small barred windows high up gave a fairish amount of light.
It was marvelously decorated with rings and chains. There was a wooden bench and a wooden chest. Sight of these facilities gave Dorinda the shivers, but only heightened Terry's exuberance.
Amity might have been laying a table for two. A place for everything, and everything in its place. She was intent, respectful, firm. It was evident that chains, cord and whips were within her province as was the cutlery and linen.
"A considerable linkage between the ankles, Miss." Dorinda watched, breathless as metal bands clicked shut upon her youthful companion's slender ankles. The joining chain was so long that it impeded no movement, inhibited no stride. But when its wearer essayed to walk the links were a swirling motion around her toes so that, for an escape minded captive, they were almost as great a handicap as a much shorter span.
"You think of everything, darling." Terry was ecstatic. A similarly wide union was placed upon her wrists with similar effect. She could do almost anything. But the chain was heavy. It told the girl it held that she was captive.
"I think, Miss, you would find the metal collar and the very long chain with all it's weight most irksome. May I suggest a confinement at the waist?" She might have been seeking a decision on a menu.
"Amity, you're a darling."
The wide leather belt must have been fashioned for the girl. It was a snug and perfect fit. The padlock that joined it to the heavy chain closed with a quite ominous sound.
"There are other confinements, Miss. But I suggest this ensemble."
"It's gorgeous! I can't wait to see Dorinda ... "
The wait was short. Feeling foolish, yet with a tingling fascination, Dorinda was soon testing her restraint. It was very heavy and very real. Her belt fitted with the same intimacy as did the younger girl's. The chain that joined it to the wall was heavy enough that she would always be aware of it. She felt a little frightened at this unexpected confinement. While she was still kicking at her ankle chains to watch the linkage swirl, the door closed. Amity had discreetly withdrawn to leave the young mistress alone with her joy. There was a very solid thudding of a bolt. No doubt for a final effect.
"Oh darling!" The two naked girls clinked their way to each other's arms.
It could not be! It was impossible! It was too cruel!
"Damn and blast!" Terry was furious. "The silly bitch has chained us to opposite walls."
They could come close. Close enough to reach out and clasp hands. But their belts and the heavy chains to the ringbolts in the stone allowed them no greater contact.
Tug and strain as they did, they were held implacably. Two girls in a dungeon.
Chained. Separate.
For a moment Dorinda wanted to laugh. Their plight had the element of cartoon humor. They were foxed. But she had no love for dungeons or such massive fetters.
She had acquired a tolerant affection for her handcuffs. But these irons were grim.
Disappointed, she felt like tears.
In pure frustration and rage Terry was fighting her chains. Not with any hope of escaping them. But as a vent for her spleen.
"What I'd like to do to her! Oh, how could she! It was going to be so beautiful, so absolutely gorgeous! I was going to eat you to pieces. Oh, darling...." she sobbed in desolation.
"Perhaps she'll come back." Dorinda ventured.
"She won't, y'know. Why should she. The little mistresses are safe and sound�^'" she paused at a sudden vision, her face a study. "Why, the rotten...!"
"She fixed us liked this on purpose, didn't she?" Dorinda divined.
"She must have. Amity's not dumb."
"That picnic would have been nice." Dorinda wailed.
"Oh darling, I've never felt helpless like this before. It's awful. It's ... It's, scary."
"But why! She's got something up her sleeve."
"She's got us." Dorinda mourned. "Is there any use screaming'!"
"No!" Terry screamed at the top of her voice. The stone absorbed the sound, "But it does make me feel better." She screamed again. "Try it."
"No thanks. But hold my hand. I need you."
The two girls strained at their tethers, their belts cutting into their concave tummies.
They could manage one hand. It was strangely comforting. The touch of someone you love has a power all it's own. When they reluctantly broke the link Dorinda sat upon the chest and Terry upon the bench. They belonged to the dungeon. They were it's prey. Their chains were it's hand upon their flesh.
"Don't let's just sit and weep." Demanded Terry angrily. "Let's talk. I was all primed to nuzzle you. I'm crinkly as blazes! Know what! I'm going to be carnal. If we can't do it, at least I won't be cheated out of talking about it."
Dorinda cocked a doubtful eye. It seemed a very small satisfaction. She looked with distaste at the links that joined her hands and rattled them petulantly.
"Two frustrated maidens in heat." Terry said bitterly.
"Darling, how's your clit?"
"Lonely. How's yours?" Might as well play the game.
They could certainly do nothing else.
"Throbbing, of course. I'd play with it if it didn't seem such a waste. I mean, with you over there. Those lovely nipples and breasts and belly and pubic hair and warm thighs and lovely moist slit. Golly, I sound like the Song of Solomon. That old boy really must have liked girls. There's a little fire burning in my cunny. Only you can put it out."
"My fire's bigger than yours." Dorinda could not resist. "Darling! People are silly. Even me. We don't talk about things the way we should. Right now all I want is your sex. I'm going to use the horrid word, just for emphasis. I want to crawl right into your cunt where it's nice and warm and I'm surrounded by love. When I'm safely inside I'll lick and play with your clit until I have you jumping around like a Mexican jumping bean." She paused for a moment in thought. "Darling, looking at us right now it seems incredible that our mothers would never have admitted to possessing nipples or a cunt." Then irrelevantly, "Do you get horny when Mark canes you? I do."
Dorinda laughed delightedly. Terry's sunshine might save their day. Uninhibited girl talk might partially defeat their shackles. "Yes." She admitted. "One stroke and the fire really gets going. But if he keeps on caning me I just get hurt and scared. Until afterwards, of course. Then I'm all warm and wet and longing."
"Mark knows just where my turn off is." Terry admitted wryly. "My fire burns a lot longer than yours. But if he wants to he can put it right out and make me howl."
She looked up suddenly. "Y'know, if he discovers us in here he may do just that!" She grinned confidingly. "I hate to admit it, but Mark controls me utterly. I'm like some musical instrument he plays. He can extract whatever he wants from me. I respond.
His power to make me mind swamps the poor little tricks I play on him."
"Darling." Dorinda was diffident over what she must ask. "Which do we girls love best. A man's phallus or each other's tongues?"
"Our tongues, silly! What a question! It's lovely when Mark fucks me, but it's only a zephyr compared to the storm that blows when your tongue is inside. Anyway, darling, men don't have breasts. Or nipples like ours. Men aren't made to play with.
Girls are."
Dorinda explored again. She saw this ageless child as a storehouse of infinite wisdom. "When men whip us, do you think it is a sort of love play? A prelude to sticking their things into us?"
"That's the least of it. But, sure, it's there. I think they find some sort of ineffable beauty in our striped skin. Like a brand. Their brand, marking us as their own. I'm damn sure that when we moan and cry and writhe it creates, for them, an endless orgasm. They can boil up and flow over for as long as it pleases them to whip us.
The only reason they don't whip us all day long is that we don't have enough skin and they don't want to waste a good girl by killing her. Simple really."
Dorinda was almost reverent before such knowledge.
"I've read and heard about men who go to prostitutes to be whipped. It's the only way they can become potent. Where does that fit?"
"They're the chap who goes to an epicurean restaurant and orders a hamburger.
Just dull clods."
"But girls love whipping girls. At least they do once they've tried it. What about that?"
"Would you love to whip me, darling?"
"With all my heart and soul! Right now there is nothing I can think of that would give me such joy, and I think a kind of peace ... "
"Mark and I have talked about that. Before you came there were times when I simply watered at the mouth at the thought of whipping Amity or of her whipping me. We figured out that actually we are all of us half and half. Woman and man, I mean. I mean. Male and female. Unless stimulated the latent half never shows. But give it a chance ... "
"Oh darling, I want to whip you so much!" Dorinda dumped reticence.
"I expect you'll get the chance." Terry consoled. "Damn! If I hadn't got us into this fix you could be busily caning my little bottom right now." She rattled her chains in a motion of bafflement. "But you see how Mark owns and controls us. If I go home a zebra he'll punish us horribly. He'll light the fire in my cunny and then put it out and go on and on ... Probably do the same to you. He'd consider us equally guilty."
"That gets us back to the women's lib thing. He can have his fun. But we can't."
Terry grinned wryly. "It's the way we are made. Their physical strength enables them to conquer us physically. That and the fire in our cunts delivers us into their hands.
We haven't a chance. We can use all our little tricks, but he can subdue us with one hand. At least Mark can. In suburbia men don't use their strength. Or maybe there they don't have any. But Mark rules this island. He rules us. He can do what he likes with us. Surely you know ... "
"Do you like him to play with your nipples and your sex and bite your ears and all the other tricks they play?"
"I adore it. You do too. Don't let's kid ourselves. I'm as much his slave as you.
More probably. He doesn't know it. But he's in love. It makes a man weak. I suppose it's just nature making sure he looks after the children. But I'm his sister. His love for me doesn't inhibit anything. I'll be whipped and whipped and whipped all our lives.
Darling, what a delectable situation: He marries you and has six kids, but just whips me." Terry laughed joyously at her vision. "Wouldn't it be priceless: me getting whipped, then you getting all the sperm pumped into you to make another child. I'd be a sort of surrogate something or other."
Dorinda's response to this unattractive prospect was cut short by the opening of the door. Terry wasted no time.
"You idiot, Amity! You messed things up for us."
"No Miss."
"What d'you mean, no? You've got us fixed to opposite walls!"
"Quite so, Miss."
Terry glimpsed what Dorinda had long suspected. She cried out against so base a betrayal.
"You did it on purpose! Oh Amity!"
"Yes miss. I took the liberty in accordance with a thought entertained by Hislop and myself. A small pleasantry, if I may say so."
Dorinda guessed that Amity was enjoying herself. "It's not pleasant at all. Hurry up, silly, and chain us both the way you knew we wanted." Terry demanded hotly.
"I am sorry, miss. But that is not according to our plan." The two captives looked at their jailer with concern.
She eyed their predicament with polite amusement.
"You see, miss, Hislop and I feel that, perhaps, in recognition of a correction of your present circumstances you might be prepared to extend us some small favor."
Amity was primly correct.
"You rotten cheat! You mean you tricked us like this on purpose and now we have to pay a forfeit?" Terry sounded more curious than angry.
"I would not have chosen the word myself, miss."
"Well, what would you have chosen? Make it simple, Amity, never mind the pedantics."
"Being aware, miss, of certain enjoyments arising from a mutuality of interests between this young lady and yourself, we had wondered if you might be prepared to extend similar satisfactions to us."
A small silence fell upon the trio. Dorinda wanted to giggle. Amity was too good to be true.
"You mean you want us to nuzzle your cunt?" Terry excised circumlocution.
"There are more suitable synonyms, miss. But yes, that is our wish."
"Why didn't you say so then? I'd have obliged you long ago."
"It is not an easy subject for one in service to initiate, miss."
"And now if we say no you'll leave us chained like this?"
"That is my intention, miss."
"Amity, you're priceless! Silly girl! Off with your clothes."
Dorinda had never seen a female become naked in less time. Amity's body was as nicely correct as the rest of her.
"Which one of us relieves your lust, you conniving creature?"
"I had thought both of you, miss. I would be honored if you would be the first, considering our longer acquaintance and all."
"Here's the carnal couch." Terry invited impishly, "Come and get it you panting pervert." With much clinking of chains she rose and waved their wardress invitingly to the bench.
Dorinda found herself disinclined to be a spectator to Amity's victory. What she shared with the gorgeous child was all their own. She turned her back and stared at the wall. She would pay her penalty when the time came. She longed ardently for the padlock at her waist to be unlocked. She had no other interest in Amity. But she shivered at the knowledge of how completely they were in the woman's power. Mark would not concern himself with their whereabouts until Dinner. The day was long.
The sounds were evocative. No fine rounded periods now. No correct prolixity. From the gasps and groans, and even small cries, it was evident that Terry's tongue had touched an unsuspected chord. Dorinda wryly reflected how wrong we can be. Amity would have seemed to her as un-likely as subject for such ministrations as Eleanor Roosevelt or Queen Victoria.
"Thank you, miss. You are most competent." An unruffled Amity rose and tidied her hair. "I cannot recall when I have enjoyed myself more."
"You've got a super clit." Her Mistress's tribute was sincere. "Do you want me to nibble your nipples until you come round again?"
"Most kind of you, miss, but I won't be greedy. I am most anxious to make myself available to Miss Dorinda's skill."
"You don't deserve her, Amity. Not after that trick."
"Quite so, miss. I am most cognizant of good fortune."
"Don't be so stuffy. You want your quim eaten and your nips nipped. Don't sound like the Chairman of the board."
Amity eyed Dorinda with pure hunger. "May I arrange myself, miss?"
There was only the wooden chest within the range of Dorinda's chains. The captive girl motioned to it and gave her best barber shop smile.
"Make her squeal, love." From Terry it was almost an order.
Amity squealed.
It was long after the squeals had lapsed into moans and the moans into gasps and the gasps into a replete silence that there came the knocks upon the door. When it swung inward it disclosed the astounding vision of the perfect butler carrying a large tray.
"Refreshments ladies?" Hislop was at his best.
The butler was not an old man. He was simply a young man born with the dignity of middle age. Dorinda had a momentary vision of Hislop and Amity in bed. She felt sure their passion would be contained within the confines of protocol.
"Hislop, you're a darling!" Terry easily forgave.
"A pleasure, miss. Amity and I are most appreciative of what you are doing for us."
"What d'you mean, us?"
"I am sure, miss, you understand I am included in the, er, in the activities. I am sure Amity ... "
"You mean you expect to shove your thingummy into us?" Terry had no illusions.
"Yes, miss. But not, if I may say so, in the orthodox manner. I would appreciate a deviation from the norm."
"Not up our...?"
"No, miss. I have never approved of what you were about to mention. It is vulgar and best confined to the working classes. I had in mind the employment of your lips and tongue."
"You want us to suck your cock?"
If Terry was seeking to shame him, she failed. "Thank you, miss. You are most concise."
"What have you got to eat and drink?"
"There are sandwiches, miss. Some excellent sherry and a pot of coffee."
"You are a jewel, Hislop. Do I gnaw at you before or after?"
"I would suggest after your own contribution, miss. I am sure I would find an intermission beneficial before yielding to Miss Dorinda's charms."
"Re-charge your batteries?"
"A graphic expression, miss."
For the girl it had become a game, an intriguing game.
For Dorinda it was pure farce. Absurd, ridiculous. But happening!
"How would you like me, Hislop? On my knees with you standing. Or would you like my kisses sitting down'!"
"I would prefer to stand with you, miss. I will sit on the next occasion."
"You mean, you'll be too weak to stand." Terry giggled.
"Don't touch a thing, Hislop. Leave everything to the young Mistress."
Dorinda watched this one. Knowing that she herself had to provide the encore she felt the weight of her chains more heavily than ever. The thing asked of her was trivial enough. There was no emotional involvement. Yet there had been a steely compulsion ... Amity had been implacable. A sense of true slavery encompassed the chained girl. She was being coerced into a sexual submission that would probably be disagreeable. The full humility would be demanded. She would give it. But without love it became frightening. A girl chained as she was chained had no will. She must obey.
Terry did everything with a flourish, superbly. Within the tolerance of her tether she knelt before the man she must serve and slowly unzipped his fly. Each motion was studied as though a camera was recording her performance. Hislop visibly quivered as she reached in and extracted a most rigid member. Whilst the butler looked into some far horizon of his own she enveloped the engorged maleness with her lips and gave it her full attention. Hislop was taken to another world.
Dorinda and Amity watched enthralled.
"The Portuguese sardines are much the best. They make a most excellent sandwich." Hislop stated afterwards. He munched with relish.
"After that dollop I got from you, I'm not sure I have any room." Terry complained mischievously, but took a sandwich. "Fellatio and fish. Quite appropriate."
Dorinda wished she possessed such resilience.
"I must say that association with you young ladies is a real experience."
"How d'you know Dorinda won't bite your knob off?" Terry inquired.
"Miss Matson is a lady." Hislop's voice was frigid with disapproval.
"But, honestly, Hislop old boy, you fellows do take an awful chance when you stick that thing in a girl's mouth. You didn't know it, but I was tempted to bite yours."
"You are joking, miss."
"No. Really. If I had something like that attached to me I'd be damned if I'd stick it in anyone's mouth. What would you have done if you'd suddenly found yourself minus knob?"
"I fear, miss, this is an unprofitable exploration. May I offer a glass of sherry."
"You know what you can do with your old sherry, don't you. Sherry is just an excuse for not providing a decent drink. Give me coffee." Terry cocked an eye at Amity, "You are going to chain us decently?"
"Of course. One good turn deserves another, miss."
"Will you want me to service Hislop regularly, darling?" She turned to the butler, "I could be under the table while you were polishing the silver. Darling Dorinda could milk you whenever Mark wasn't looking."
"Hislop is not seeking excess." Amity's voice was acid.
"Would you like to whip me, Hislop?"
The silence was electric. Dorinda sensed that Terry's insouciance had touched a nerve. With a stricken look of do or die, Hislop said very simply.
"I think I would give my life for such a privilege." His words hung there in the dungeon. Etched in time. Immortal. A Declaration.
Terry's young eyes widened in understanding. "Poor Hislop." She said softly. "I'll let you. You can whip me. There! Feel better?"
"Hislop is fully occupied." Said Amity with decision. "I suppose I am." Hislop sighed. His glimpse of Heaven had been snatched away.
Terry's surprised gaze switched to Amity. "Don't you let him whip you? You should, y'know."
"I cannot regard it as one of the acceptable sports, miss." Amity sounded like the rock of Gibraltar if it could talk.
"Would you mind if he whipped me?"
"I would regard it as an ambition above his station, miss."
"How about Dorinda then? I'm sure she wouldn't mind once. You know, a charitable act. She's not your employer."
"It would establish a precedent, miss. Quite wrong." Terry's brow cleared. Her eyes shone.
"There's only one answer then. He can whip you."
Amity flinched. "I do not care to be whipped."
"You're a silly ass." Terry dismissed her and turned to Hislop. "Give me another sandwich, darling, and then go to darling Dorinda. She can hardly wait.
Haven't you noticed. That thing of yours is ready."
Dorinda performed her task. Not with love but with mischief. She bit and felt him stiffen in alarm. How easy it would be! She abandoned the delightful thought and sent her tongue to work. Amity directed the operation, ensuring the final clean up after the orgasm. Perhaps she was concerned with the washing. With willing tongue Dorinda relieved her of anxiety. Hislop's sex was clean and dry and very limp by the time she was finished with it.
The butler gathered up the remnants of the lunch and left the dungeon.
"Well?" Terry demanded ominously.
For a moment Dorinda knew that Amity considered leaving them as they were. They had captured Hislop. She could not forgive. But then, swiftly and efficiently she did the thing she had promised. Keys turned. Locks clicked.
"You really ought to let him whip you, darling." Terry advised her earnestly.
"Much the best way to hold a man."
Amity blushed and hurriedly left. The door slammed.
The thudding bolt told the two girls they were alone.
This time their chains were long enough!
Each has their own Nirvana, their Ultima Thule, their Paradise. The slave girl and the sister found their own.
"I say, darling. The light's fading."
Dorinda had long been aware of an increasing gloom. It was several centuries later.
Centuries that had passed as fleeting moments of ecstasy in which the two of them had floated on cloud and ridden the wind. "It must be past dinner." She agreed doubtfully. She had been aware of an uneasy feeling of helplessness since they had first been so heavily' chained.
"I don't care if they keep us chained here forever."
Terry was replete and happy.
Dorinda was not so sure. She thought longingly of Mark, her Master. She remembered Mabel. She had no wish to part from Terry. But she longed to be free.
The chains had not hindered them from making love. But she had never previously known such a weight of metal upon her limbs. It was frightening in it's prohibition of easy movement. When they embraced they must first carefully dispose their fetters and the heavy links. They were truly slave.
A dungeon in twilight is not a happy place.
"Once more, darling. Once more." Terry pleaded dreamily.
With a deep knowledge of possession Dorinda lowered her lips to the scented well.
Terry moaned in delight....
"Another bad day by the look of it."
Mark's voice reached them through a haze of sensation.
The two girls sat up, blinking.
Dorinda was desperately afraid.
Silence! Each delinquent looked pleadingly at her master. They did not speak. What was there for them to say! Mark surveyed the guilty pair enigmatically. Dorinda wished the floor would open up and swallow her. She buried her face in her chained hands and wept, the span of links swinging from her wrists in a clinking loop.
Terry eyed her brother resignedly. "Alright, darling. What do. I get?"
"Both of you should remember what I promised you."
"What was it?"
"A thrashing." Both pairs of female lips uttered the word in unison involuntarily.
The penalty was vivid in each feminine mind.
Impelled by the same instinct the frightened couple shuffled toward the man they had disobeyed. Reaching the limit of their tether they sank to their knees in front of him and bowed their heads. It was a beautiful piece of artistry born of a flickering hope for clemency. Mark killed the hope.
"I'll make it a good one. You can be sure of that." His sister looked up at him imploringly. It was easy for him to interpret the question in her eyes.
"Yes, kitten, the whip you loathe."
Terry wailed and joined her tears to those already flowing. "Don't use that awful thing on Dorinda. She doesn't deserve it. I'm the one to blame."
"You're a pair of idiots." Mark affirmed, baffled.
"Dorinda's as bad as you. She doesn't have to let you talk her into things."
"Oh, but she does, darling! She does have to. She's my slave too, y'know. We can't ask her to obey you in everything and me in nothing."
"You've got a point there, love. Just a little one maybe."
Mark acknowledged. He turned and looked down at Dorinda. "Have you been obeying her in the belief that if you didn't I'd punish you?"
Dorinda squirmed. How to define a communion so amorphous! "We did start out like that, master." Her eyes appealed. "But in what we are guilty of now I am as much to blame as anyone. Please don't punish Terry more than you punish me. I did what I did knowing the penalty. I'm guilty. I won't make excuses ... "
"Such nobility! I suppose this is my cue to let you both off with a caution."
Mark laughed at their woebegone faces. "But I'm not going to. You've behaved absurdly: making Amity put you in this place and loading you up with all those ornaments." He paused and eyed the kneeling figures and the chains that clung to them. His eyes glinted. "You must have wanted them. Far be it from me to be a spoil sport ... "
He left them where they knelt. The door closed behind him with a thud.
Dorinda was bereft. The chains, the deepening gloom.
The certainty of the whip: all confirmed her premonitions of the day. But beyond these loomed the fact that her master had returned to daylight and Dinner on the Terrace, a dinner probably shared with Mabel. Without doubt Mabel would be in the picture with him in some way. The thought made the dungeon doubly dark.
Terry disconsolately and noisily rose to her feet. "Oh darling, I've botched everything." She looked at her fellow captive piteously. "He's made up his mind. We are really in for it! I can tell."
With equal dolor Dorinda joined her on the bench.
Arranging her chains, she said, "When will he whip us?"
"That's what scares me, darling. I expected it to be the first thing that happened to us. I was sort of resigned to that awful whip and the pain and the tears for a couple of hours, or maybe longer if he left us tied up. But now he's got me guessingall deliberate, of course. He says suspense is good for me. I can't bear it. But I suppose you've caught sight of the same thing I have?"
Dorinda had indeed caught sight of the obvious. "You mean that since we were fools enough to ask for this fix we're in, and against his orders too, we can damn well stay in it ... "
Terry clashed her fetters angrily. "Oh damn!" There was not much else to say.
The prisoners held each other as closely as their chains allowed. It was their only comfort left.
Hope rose momentarily when Amity appeared. But was quickly dashed.
"I'm sorry, miss. I really am. But it's Mr. Mark's orders." She busied herself with the big chest.
"Oh, Amity, not more chains!" Terry wailed.
"Well miss. I suppose you have sort of asked for it. The master said something about making the punishment fit the crime."
"I'd run if I could." Terry vowed. "Mark's just being mean."
"Whatever you say, miss." Amity eyed her prisoners questioningly. "I don't suppose you're going to be silly?"
"You mean are we going to hold still while you clamp a lot of horrid things on us?" Terry demanded disgustedly. "Oh sure. What the devil else can we do! Look a couple of right Charlies, wouldn't we, trying to struggle."
"Movement is not completely inhibited, Miss."
"Balls!"
"Thank you, miss. And now I think, the neck please." Dorinda watched, cringing, as a metal collar was locked upon the slender neck. A long length of lighter chain led to the wall where it was padlocked to the ring.
"Oh Amity! It's beastly. All that chain. It drags at my neck."
"Quite so, miss."
"I could kick you when you say that! You sound smug."
"I'm really sorry about this one, miss. I fear it will seem an unkind imposition."
The leather belt was removed. The shining steel that replaced it was not unduly massive. But it was metal clinging above the slender hips. From it ran the same tether to the wall, but also heavy links ran down to the ankle shackles.
"Darling, it weighs a ton." The girl on whom it was fastened shook herself and tried to kick to test this new confinement. The result was to evoke a cry of protest.
"But, Amity, it doesn't do anything! It doesn't stop me doing motions I could do before: just makes it more miserable."
"I believe the intent to be punitive, miss."
It was Terry's turn to watch. Dorinda meekly accepted the collar and grimaced at it's cold clutch and weight of metal that her neck must bear. She knew she would be forever rearranging the tether to seek easement of the strain.
"Amity?" Terry's voice had come alive.
"Yes miss?" Their jailer's voice was politely attentive.
"If we were very nice to you and made you come about six times would you take these last things off? They're just too much."
"Thank you, miss. But I would consider the risk inadvisable for us all."
"You mean Mark might walk in and catch us?" Terry chuckled.
"He caught you, miss. Red handed so to speak, if I may say so. I would find a similar situation most mortifying."
"What would he do to you?"
"I would rather not say, miss."
The youthful captive's laughter gurgled accusingly. "I bet he'd chain you to the other wall?"
"There is a clause in my contract to that effect, miss." Amity admitted reluctantly. "At the master's discretion so to speak."
Dorinda was startled. The Housekeeper had dropped her small bombshell without a qualm. A mental picture of this precise female chained as they were chained was entrancing. Bizarre, but quite in keeping with the rest of Kyrexos.
Terry could not allow so delicious a tid-bit to be ignored.
"Come on! Oh please, Amity. Do it. I'd love to have you chained with us. It would be such fun. Do you no end of good. Honest it would. By morning you'd be talking normally."
"Thank you, miss. But it would not be fair to 'Islop."
"See, you're excited. You dropped an aitch." Terry tried to clap her hands. The effort produced a fine metallic orchestration.
Amity stepped back, her task completed. Dorinda surveyed herself ruefully. The weight of what she must carry was frightening. It would be too easy to think of things she had read. To be chained for life in a dungeon ... She wanted to test her bonds and explore whatever tolerance they might concede. But not before this woman who had placed them upon her nakedness. She would wait.
"What are you going to give us for supper, darling?"
Terry asked expectantly.
Amity was distressed. "I am indeed sorry, miss. But the master felt it appropriate that none should be served."
"But we're hungry!" The girl's voice was anguished.
"You mean the absolute rotter's treating us like two bad little girls sent to bed without supper...?"
"I fear so, miss."
"But you'll smuggle us something, won't you darling." Amity was obviously genuinely distressed. "Water only, miss. I cannot counter the master's wishes."
"We're famished!"
"I'm sure you are, miss. It has been an exacting day."
"Oh damn and blast! Wait 'till I get at him. I say, Amity, it's almost dark. What about some light?"
"The same prohibition, miss. You are not to have any." They watched her go in silence. Then clung together as best they could and wept.
It was very dark and much later when they remembered to make love.
Breakfast was not encouraging. A little water, a little bread, a little fruit. Amity refused to answer questions.
"He's going to teach us some sort of lesson." Dorinda decided. "We really must have hurt him."
"He's not hurt. I know he isn't. He's just working out some notion of his own about behavior and discipline. This could go on for days."
"And we still have to be whipped." Dorinda found it hard to forget.
Amity's mien, on her return, boded ill.
"May I have your word, ladies, that you will not resist? That I may expect obedience?"
"What on Earth are you going to do? Behead us?"
"No miss. But the master feels your day might be better employed than just sitting."
"Nice of him! O.K. Do what you must."
"If you will allow me, miss ... "
It took very little time. When it was done and Amity gone, two naked girls surveyed each other from opposite walls, their hands spread wide at head level, wrists clamped snugly to the stone. They could stand without strain. But stand they must! There was no pain. That might come later. Two maiden quims invited a guest that would not come. It was a very frustrating pose.
Dorinda looked at the two piles of chain beside their bench. It seemed impossible their slenderness could have endured it. She felt miserably certain it had been left there to be used again. It felt so good to be rid of it, that for a little while she would feel a sense of relief in her new plight. It would not last. But, for this moment, only her wrists felt bonds.
No one came. They spent the day alone. Drooping wearily as the hours slowly passed, their pinioned wrists protesting as they accepted a little of the weight that had tired the legs so long. As the light faded the girls became two pale ghosts in the uncertain light.
Inconsistently, at night, their chains came almost as a boon. But now the separation that had sundered them through the day continued. Their tethers were on opposite walls. No tears or pleas or threats prevailed. Once more their ultimate bribe was rejected.
On opposite sides of their dungeon they wept themselves to sleep.
The following day was both better and worse. Less tiring. But a shaming posture.
They lay upon their backs, bottoms tight against the wall, legs up in a 'V', ankles chained to the stone. Their view was restricted to small portions of the wall and ceiling. They could only see each other by painful strain and twistings. Their hands were free. But to what purpose!
On the third day they were whipped.
They suffered together, receiving single lashes alternately. The other's agony always before their eyes as they felt their own. Amity used the fearful whip. Mark had vanished from their ken.
That morning, released from their chains, they had been suspended by their wrists, heels barely on the floor. Amity left them to wait. They hung, well separated, in the big dungeon, the most hated whip between them on a stool specially provided so that it be well displayed before their stricken eyes.
"Is it possible to bear, or will we faint?" Dorinda had built a devastating vision of suffering within her mind.
"I didn't faint, darling. But don't let that fool you."
Terry searched her memory for consolations. "It depends on who whips us. I hope it's Amity. She doesn't hit as hard as Mark. She probably thinks an employerthat's mehas to be whipped with respect. Then it's a case of how fast they let you have it. I'm damn sure I couldn't take it fast from that awful thing there on the floor. I would faint. I think you'll find now we'll get it laid on slowly and spread over a long time. If it's any comfort to know, I can tell you they won't whip our nipples with that thing."
Was there comfort anywhere! Dorinda cringed in her nudity. She longed for the whip to get it over, to pass through the agony over to the other side. But she longed, with equal ardor, that the whip not touch her at all. She felt no bitterness against Mark.
He had told her she would be thrashed if she touched the forbidden fruit. She had knowingly gorged on it. Thus it was proper that she now stand naked with her hands high, the familiar bite of the cords urgent on her wrists, the whip before her eyes.
Soon she would know it's searing cuts and scream the pleas of a slave who has transgressed.
How awful to stand thus! More naked than naked. Curvature of breast and Venus mound accentuated by the traction on her arms. Only the soles of her feet were denied the whip. She had read of the bastinado. No doubt Mark had too. That day would come. To be whipped on the soles of her feet. How awful! How a girl would scream!
It was as though all of her cried for the whip. The cords held her curved. She heard their voices. Her breasts did not know themselves inviolate. They cried: "Whip me, whip me! Whip us both. We are too beautiful not to feel the lash. It is our destiny.
Her bottom, her poor caned bottom jutted, curving it's pinkness and it's fading stripes in it's own special demand: Whip me master. I am designed for the whip.
Millenniums of men have whipped the bottoms of millions of naked girls. Whip me, whip me master. I am a slave."
Two bands of cord held her, sacrifice. They cut into her wrists. Only two bands of cord ... Yet she was their slave. She would stand, naked and palpitating, to be whipped because they told her to. So that she might know herself truly divorced from freedom and from choice they cut her skin and bestowed upon her flesh their own brand of pain. Soon they would bleed. She was a slave.
The secret place between her legs! It had known little of secrecy since Mike had handcuffed her that fatal night. The night of decision. The night she had been delivered to Kyrexos. She could not touch her dark triangle. She could not shield it from the whip. Would she be compelled to part her legs so that the lash, the cutting tip could find her loins and bed itself upon the seat of joy! How terrible it was to be whipped upon her cunt! She considered the word as Terry had considered it. A hateful word! Yet what other word so apt! The slit by which she was pleasured. The portal by which men entered the world and sought surcease forever therein. Should he or she who whipped her pause for a moment to cup their hand thereon she would glow with gratitude ... It, too, cried out: "Whip me, whip me, whip me!"
She wished she had the courage to request a gag. She would not dare. Amity and the authority vested in her would not approve. The girl under the whip should rightly howl. She should writhe and scream. This was her tribute, her acknowledgement of just punishment. It was like signing a piece of paper to say: "Yes I have received so and so many strokes upon my female flesh." The liquidation of an I.O.U.
It was Amity who picked up the whip and looked from one to the other of them with an amused speculation in her eyes.
No words. No pleas for mercy. No attempts to bribe.
Two naked girls hanging helpless without thought or hope of escape. The whip was the centre of their being. It owned them as did the woman who held it. Al of the girl who was Dorinda, save her voice which was mute, cried in some strange paean of exultation: Whip me, whip me, Oh, please whip me....
Amity swung the snaky length. It curled about Terry's waist leaving a narrow neat belt of punished skin, the buckle of which was the drop of blood where the tip had cut. The lovely slenderness swung under the whiplash pull of the blow, the female lips acknowledged it. Dorinda quailed. The next stroke would be her own. Al the agony hers to cherish.
Amity contrived a twin. They would wend their way through their whipping together.
Their maiden flesh equal under the lash. Their fault expiated with a just precision.
Dorinda heard her voice cry out to join that of the child whose tongue had given her delight.
Men hated and feared this union of girls. Always they would whip the flesh that had found joy in what they had not shared.
How exquisite a ritual! Terry ... Dorinda ... Dorinda ... Terry! The naked breasts jerked and juddered. The slender hips writhed this way and that! The cords held. The wrists bled. The girlish bottoms swayed. But the whip mastered them.
Amity struck where they believed themselves immune. They yielded all their agony.
Dorinda drifted on a cloud of pain from which she witnessed the striation of her loved one's flesh and knew it for her own. How beautiful it was! She knew gratitude.
She could not see all her nakedness. But Terry was the mirror of herself. Lash and lash. They were made one by the whip.
They felt each other's strokes rather than their own.
Long afterwards they hung. A whipping was a thing of ritual. It had it's prelude and it's epilogue. The striped and blood flecked bodies of the girls hung from their cords long after the lash was done. Amity left them to their pain and to their thoughts. No doubt custom believed they would vow never to transgress again. They hung, longing for release, willing to make any promise to set themselves free of bonds and free of pain, yet lusting for each other with a great hunger. The victory of the whip is in that moment when it beds itself within the cringing flesh.
On the fourth day they were freed of chains and cords.
They spent it in Paradise and in tracing each other's wounds with fingers filled with love. Their chains had been piled back in the huge chest. No part of them was confined. The dungeon door alone stood between them and the world of sunlight. But it held them captive.
To Dorinda it was a new experience. Confinement within four walls. Imprisonment.
Loss of liberty. It had it's own piquancy, it's own portent and foreboding. Previously in her captivity on Kyrexos she had always been bound or chained. Now she made the strange discovery that bonds were less frustrating than to be obliged to live within a room because you had no key for it's door.
"I told you it was a beastly whip." Terry said plaintively. "Look at us both. We are all over little cuts where the end of the lash wrapped round. We won't get rid of all the marks for at least three weeks. I bet Mark will want us both to wear clothes so his conscience won't bother him. Don't do it! I'm simply going to flaunt my weals and wounds at him."
"If he wants clothes on me I'll have to wear them. I'm a slave." Dorinda pointed out.
Her companion examined the premise. "'Spose you're right." She admitted. "Damn odd spot for a girl. Gosh, darling, Mark and I really are messing up your life, aren't we. I'll never be able to carry off this slave thing the way Mark can." Her eyes sparkled. "Darling, I've got a corking idea. If he demands clothes, refuse to wear 'em.
See what happens."
"That's no corking idea. I'll just get whipped some more." Dorinda had no doubts about her status and the penalties that went with it.
Terry giggled. "I don't see what's to stop me Whipping you if you disobey the order I've just given. See, I order you to stay naked."
"That hazard occurred to me right at the start." Dorinda admitted. "I could easily get jockeyed into a contretemps that would entitle both of you to slash away at me."
Terry giggled with delight. "I'll provoke such a situation just for fun. See what happens. When it comes to the crunch I'll have to concede, of course, or we'd both be getting our tails caned."
"Being a slave girl isn't easy."
Dorinda's rueful statement evoked merriment. "Tell me, darling." Terry said earnestly. "If I order you to do something you hate, would you disobey?"
The slave girl gave the question much thought. "Before I can really answer that one I'd have to ask if you would whip me if I refused?"
"Yes. I'd whip you or ask Mark to."
"Then I'd obey. In that spot a slave girl has to obey. She has no choice. But if I knew you wouldn't punish me I'd only obey if it was something that gave you much happiness.
"I will whip you, darling. You do know that, don't you?"
"Of course. I want you to. Don't give me privilege because of this happiness we find together. If you did I think it would make us both disloyal to our master. He is my master, y'know. I have to see him as that. Good Heavens, if he wasn't, what would I be doing in this dungeon!"
"Darling, let me lick your wounds again."
Dorinda disposed herself upon the bench. Terry's mouth and tongue sought a whip-cut, laved it busily and went on to the next.
They did this for each other throughout the day. They made factual the old expression of 'Licking one's wounds'. A whipped girl cannot bathe in a dungeon or find salve for cut skin. They could not lick their own. But they could employ nature's oldest remedy upon each other. This they did with joy and sensuous delight.
But in the mind of each was a single dominant thought. When would their dungeon door open.
It was on the fifth day they were forgiven and made free.
... Terry's guess had been correct. The slave girl was clothed. The master's edict had been firm. Dorinda dared not disobey, nor did she wish to. Quaintly enough, Terry too had clothed herself expensively in gorgeous scraps. But then: the occasion was a gala one! The first Dinner for what Mark now referred to as the 'Ex convicts'. A sort of coming home. A return to grace. Dorinda's joy was marred by only the one small cloud. The question inevitably arose. When the three of them were seated round the table Terry impishly asked it.
"Mark darling: In what awful predicament have you got poor Mabel tucked away?"
Mark looked smug. His eyes twinkled back and forth between them. Making them wait for what was obviously a pronouncement. Dorinda's pulse quickened.
"Fact is, dear girls, good old Mabel isn't with us any more."
He had their complete attention. Dorinda's small cloud vanished. Mark enjoyed his sensation.
"While you two enemies of society were doing time I saw quite a lot of Mabel.
More I saw of the girl the more I realized she was very much surplus. Didn't need her on strength, no place in the ranks as it were. One extra bod' and all that. So I put the old intellect to work and came up with a cracking good idea."
He paused and beamed at his rapt audience. "Couldn't very well drown the dear girl, and I didn't relish the boat trip to dump her where she could pick up some transportation. But then I remembered Mike�^'"
"Mike! Surely Mike�^'"
"Quiet girl! Don't interrupt. It's more subtle than you think." He grinned at Dorinda cheerfully. "I remembered we were about at the time this Mike chappie said he'd return to pick you up. It was a natural. I took Mabel down to the spot where he set you ashore and chained her to a tree. Off to one side where she couldn't reach it and couldn't read it I placed a sign. It read! "Dorinda's gone. Take me." The key to Mabel's chain was attached."
"Oh, Mark, how could you!" Terry managed to giggle and be shocked at the same time.
"I'll admit to a twinge of conscience. But the more I saw of Mabel the more certain I was that she and Mike might find a lot in common. Besides, it was the chance of a lifetime. Killed two birds with one stone. When I went to check on her comfort the next morning she was gone."
Leaning back in his chair Mark gave his audience a benevolently Machiavellian smile.
"I'm so glad." Said Dorinda. Then blushed at Terry's knowing wink.
"Champagne, Sir." Said Hislop with deep approval. It was Mabel's epitaph.
* * *
"I'm not going to be a bit nice to you today." Terry warned happily. "Mark's monopolized you nearly a week. Today's mine. You'll suffer."
"No dungeons, please." Dorinda's plea was real.
"Oh all right." The younger girl conceded. "I boobed. I don't want to get back in there either. We'll have our day in the sun. Isn't it lovely to be naked again."
Dorinda was happy. To be with Terry again was a delight. She was secretly weary of rooms in which she suffered strangely devised discomforts while her skin was given time to heal. Mark was almost Calvinistic in his preoccupation with her training.
She was a much punished girl. If Terry chose to whip her she would bear it cheerfully. It would not be as bad as her other inflictions. They would be together in the glorious sunlight.
"Hands behind your back, darling. Wrists crossed."
"What! No handcuffs?"
"I'm going to be cruel. Cord chafes."
The slave girl stood passive and allowed herself to be bound. The cords that were looped and drawn tight around her wrists were intimate, a part of her. A beloved reminder of she who had tied the knots. They were tight. But she made no demur.
She had grown used to handcuffs, they gave a greater latitude than she would now possess. She started and looked back over her shoulder when her neck was encircled.
"Told you I'd treat you like a slave." Terry chuckled. "A nice cord tether I'll lead you around by. But that's all. Except the long thin crop. I'll carry that."
Dorinda was amused. It would be fun. The youngster was going to make amends for her previous failure. She would set herself right in her brother's eyes.
"You're remembering those orders, aren't you?" She teased. "Put some marks on Dorinda where I can count them and make sure her wrists are chafed. Right?"
"Clever, clever." Terry laughed. "Sorry about the marks though. Sort of a closed season on marks lately for us two. But don't forget: dear Amity attended to our backs and bits round the sides. She left our nice fronts quite virgin. Which bit of your front would you like me to whip, darling?"
Dorinda pretended to consider. "Could I have my tummy whipped, dear? Above and below is sort of holy ground for us girls."
I'm the perfect slave. Greater love hath no girl than that she offer her slit to the switch."
"You asked for it, sweetheart. But I'll make you wait an hour. Keep you quivering while we take our walk."
Terry tugged the leash. The two girls walked side by side down the path through the trees.
They came upon the boat suddenly and without warning. It was in a tiny cove.
Everything about it spoke of speed. It was sleek and beautiful and wicked. Sight of it stopped them in their tracks.
"Who the Hell would that be!" Terry demanded of no one in particular.
"Just me, love."
The male voice was sardonically amused. It came from their rear. Dorinda was shocked. She swung round against her tether.
"Mike!"
He stood, leering at their nakedness. Enjoyment vivid on his heavy features. Beside him a hefty member of his crew who Dorinda remembered all too well. He advanced with hearty bonhomie, hand outstretched to a bewildered Terry. "Mike Sandos, Miss Esmond. Glad to meet you." His eyes roved her breasts and sex. He added a hearty, "And how!"
"You're trespassing." Terry accused.
"Go away, Mike." Dorinda said without hope. She guessed.
Mike turned his attention to Dorinda. What a neat package." He admired. "Even more convenient than the one I left." He took the leash from Terry's nerveless hand.
"Allow me, Miss Esmond." He passed the cord to his henchman. "Hold on to the lady, Sam."
Dorinda watched, stricken, bereft, utterly helpless. Mike produced a pair of handcuffs. "I'm sure you'll wear these willingly?" The smile of invitation he offered Terry was the ultimate in benevolence.
Terry fought. How she fought! The helpless slave girl who watched her battle curled up in agony. The darling child had no chance. Mike handled her as he might have done a kitten. A minute later Terry stood panting and disheveled, her wrists tightly locked behind her back. Dorinda wondered, irrelevantly, if the child had ever known the bite of bonds other than those she had sought in love.
Dorinda had wondered about Mike's boat. It spelt money. The light craft that had delivered them into a new captivity was picked up by a crane and stowed away.
Engines, already warm, throbbed. Kyrexos diminished over the horizon.
"Welcome to the 'Quest'," Mike said with tremendous flair.
"Quest." It was as good a name as any, Dorinda reflected bitterly. Mike was always looking. Now he had found her again. And he had found Terry. It was a good day for Mike.
Their host removed no bonds. They sat round the table on which drinks were served.
The girls helpless, their host in full command. He lifted glasses to their lips. They sipped grudgingly. Dorinda almost felt like getting drunk to blot out the nightmare.
"You'll be wondering about Mabel," Mike suggested pleasantly. "Bit of a bore is Mabel. After she had given me the gen' on things on Kyrexos I decided the poor girl needed a change, so I put her ashore on an Island that I'm certain is inhabited only by gulls and goats. Mabel will make out. She's that kind." He looked at a squirming Dorinda, "Didn't think I'd forget you, honey?"
"Put Terry ashore. I'll do what you want." Dorinda said flatly.
Mike laughed delightedly and slapped his leg. "True to form, honey. Virtue triumphant. You're quite a girl. This charming child who leads you around on a leash is going to be tied to the rigging and whipped before the ship's crew." He turned to Terry, "You won't mind, will you Miss Esmond? Poor chaps don't get much diversion outside port."
Dorinda was frantic. The cords that Terry had lovingly cinched upon her wrists hurt.
They told her she was captive. Thrall to Mike's wishes. She still bore the leash upon her neck. She knew he was glorying in her importance.
"I know you lick each other's cunts." He said affably as though it was a matter best disposed of.
"Let her go." Dorinda said hopelessly. "I'll obey you now."
"Too late, honey." Mike guffawed. "You had your chance. But thanks for bringing me this little turtle dove." He looked at her bleakly, "You know what I'm going to do to her, don't you?"
Dorinda was silent. But she knew.
"I'm going to whip her and I'm going to fuck her to a fare thee well. When she starts to bore me I'll hand her over to the boys." He laughed in genuine pleasure at the dismay on the faces of his captives. "Do you both good you prissy bitches.
Thought you had your cute little cunts locked up in a safety deposit, didn't you. You'll find different." He winked at Dorinda. "You go to the boys right away. But first I'm going to toss you both in the brig to think about what lies ahead. At the end of the fun time I've got something really special planned."
Dorinda had seen the brig before. It made the dungeon on Kyrexos seem a commodious stadium. Terry cringed and clung to the older girl in horror. It was a small iron box with a narrow bench. It's only decorations were the heads of rivets.
One wall was curved to the contour of the hull. Each girl was chained to that wall from a steel collar round her neck. There was no porthole. The garish light bulb starkly accentuated the claustrophobic intent. They clutched and wept, their chains a metallic accompaniment to their tears.
"Will ... will he...?" The irrepressible Terry was gone. The frightened girl who had taken her place could not bring herself to name her fear.
"Yes they will." Dorinda knew it useless to lie or hold false hope.
Terry had caught the plural. "You mean ... all of them?"
"There's four men aboard. They'll use us."
"This thing about me and the rigging? Will he...?"
"I expect he will, darling." Dorinda was desolate that she could offer neither hope or succor to the darling child. "If it wasn't that it would be something else.
Mike's inventive. Al we can do is be nice and not rile him. If he gets angry he's brutal."
"Can't we offer ... Or do something...?"
"Darling, you see what slavery is like. We have nothing to offer. The man who holds you owns every bit of your flesh. A girl can't bargain with his possessions. We can't even make an offer to be nice, or good, or to behave. He can make you behave." Dorinda's fingers explored the metal on her neck. "He can even influence the way you think." She laughed ruefully, "Mark was teaching me that, and he's absolutely right. His theory is valid. I didn't believe it at first, but there is a slave mentality. It's not that you've had everything knocked out of you. It's simply that you think as a slave. You stop having double standards. You do your thinking and your responses from within a slave's limited viewpoint. Oh darling, I don't want that for you!"
"We did it to you though, didn't we." Terry was seeing very clearly.
"Don't compare your brother with Mike."
"A sort of poetic justice. I'm going to get royally screwed. Little Terry gets her just desserts." She lovingly kissed Dorinda's eyes, her fingers finding the nipples so close against her own. "Not to worry, darling. I'm no virgin. I 'specs I'll survive.
Promise you won't keep yourself in agony over me. We're in this together."
They made love awkwardly, but with a desperate intensity, upon the narrow metal shelf.
"Darling, why are men like ... the way they are!" Terry had found a small peace in their union.
Dorinda made a bitter sound of disgust. "Men like Mike don't see us as people. To him, you and I are four breasts and four of what he'd call tits, and a couple of palpitating vaginas lapping open to greet his holy male cock. Sorry darling. But sometimes they get to a girl. There's no coping with the Mikes. You could only kill them."
"Will he keep us prisoners for long?"
"I don't suppose so. He roves around the Mediterranean in this yacht. He picks up girls along the way. Kidnaps them as he has us. Or hires and pays them. I did hear that he even buys a few. That still goes on in some of his ports of call."
Terry was intrigued. "What would he do with those when he tires of them? Set 'em free?"
"I wouldn't suppose so. Probably trades 'em back in. Men like Mike love to turn over a dollar."
"He's got it good, hasn't he." Terry's interest was piqued. "Buy a girl, use her as long as he likes, then sell her at a profit."
Dorinda kissed the child and wrapped herself around the slender nudity. The space they shared was small and demanded of them a great intimacy which they willingly gave. Her heart welled over for Terry. She guessed that perhaps the girl might possess qualities of endurance beyond her own. A resilience that would cope with Mike's ugliness. But still, the bright and shining radiance that was Terry Esmond should never be on this ship. She longed to shield her. But on The Quest she could play no big sister role. Each wore the iron collar round her neck. They were equal.
It was not easy. But they managed to sleep.
Dorinda watched unhappily as Terry was tied. Her own wrists had been crossed and corded behind her back. "Hurts more that way." Mike had assured her jovially. She could roam as she pleased. She was helpless. She could not even cause damage. She was just a female nakedness for the men to ogle and enjoy.
The younger girl's arms were high and wide. Her wrists corded to guy ropes, heavy and taut as steel. It was the classic pose for a girl about to be flogged. They left her feet free. They would enjoy watching her kick and writhe. The deck about her was clear. They could circle and flog the tense beauty as they pleased. Above the ship gulls circled and gave their plaintive cries. The sky was clear. The Mediterranean sparkled with its own special kind of blue. It was a beautiful day on a beautiful ship.
Dorinda wondered idly how often in the past might this ancient sea have witnessed the flogging of a slave girl on a passing argosy.
As a small refinement of cruelty a narrow belt had been buckled around Terry's waist.
On it was a hook. From the hook hung the whip with which she would be flogged.
Dorinda grudgingly recognized the erotic perfection of the picture Mike had created.
The girl's youthful nakedness standing slim and straight, her arms raised and thrown wide in adoration of a god no one could see: the god of pain. Her features calm in the serenity that comes with the final loss of hope. Her pubic hair offered itself for all to see. She had used the razor but the day before so that the dark patch was a clearly defined heart that so beautifully symbolized the joyous maiden she had been. She wore her heart not upon her sleeve! The belt above her hips emphasized her youth, the short handle and the several slender thongs proclaimed her as a proffered sacrifice.
The girl who watched took comfort from the whip. It was not the dreaded 'Cat' she had half expected. It would hurt enough, but would not wound. Both of them were still well marked from Amity's flogging. They needed no more cuts to heal. Mike had cheerfully explained Terry's ordeal.
"Sort of nice for the boys and me to have her just stand. Anyone passing by can give her a stroke or two with the tickler if he feels like it or if she gets too sassy. In between times she can wear it on her belt. It'll brush against her legs and keep her knowing what she's good for. The whip ain't too cruel. The little trick will last out the day in great shape. Should be real randy for me by night."
Dorinda felt herself de trop. A naked girl with bound hands. A facility for male rut.
Each man had already used her. She had little doubt she would be used again. She did not fight, but quietly accepted the inevitable, hiding her loathing that she might not offend. She wished, too, that she be often in the younger girl's sight for what small comfort her presence might give. Yet to rove the decks naked and blatantly open seemed a deliberate and wanton offering of her charms. But the quality of the day was such as to demand the open air and the sparkle of the spray. It was very beautiful. It was zestful, a day to glory in, a day to dissipate some of the gloom of the condition in which Mike's ugliness imprisoned them. If walking the ship, in such freedom as she had, proclaimed lubricity, so be it!
Terry had her first customer. Funny to think of it like that! Dorinda watched, helpless to intervene. Knowing, in fact, that she had best not interfere. It was Alfred the cook.
With a name like Alfred the rest of him didn't matter much. He leered cordially at the captive's heart shaped hair.
"Don't affect it's working none." He guffawed. "Don't worry, girlie, I'll get in there one of these days."
Terry's pale smile concealed a dozen vitriolic retorts.
"Want I should whip you a bit?" He sounded magnanimous.
"Thank you." His victim managed in a small noncommittal voice.
Dorinda's heart bled as she watched the cheerful clod pluck the thongs from the girl's belt and make a couple of trial swings.
"I sure do like to whip a girl." Alfred admitted. "Makes me horny as Hell when them weals start up on a girl's hide."
Dorinda wryly guessed how this session would end. She had not realized before. But the impact of the whip on Terry's flesh would almost certainly ensure her a busy day.
She groaned inwardly.
"Usually have to pay for it." Alfred informed them aggrieved, "Last little bitch in Liverpool come up with a joke when she makes her price. 'At the stroke often, it will be exactly ten pounds.' she says. I let her have it good. But after every crack she comes up with a beef about doing it lighter the next one. Never get your money's worth when you pay for it, you don't."
He whistled the leather down across the maiden flesh so cheaply and provocatively provided. Terry gasped, and for a moment closed her eyes. When she opened them she sought his and wanly offered thanks that spoke of agony. Alfred was touched.
Returning the whip to her belt he stepped round and admired his work, running his fingers again and again over the pink evidence of his skill.
"One at a time, dearie." He conceded cheerfully. "I'll be back on and off all day.
"You'll be a well whipped little girl by nightfall."
He turned and examined Dorinda with intent. "Well, honey, shall we do it here or go below?"
"I think it would be nicer below." She said demurely. As he led her away, she did not seek her loved one's eyes.
Myron was the big rough one. He gazed avidly at the female sacrifice. "Want me to whip them tits?" He asked as though offering a favor.
"I'd rather you didn't." Terry squirmed.
"Looks to me like your back and your bum already had a good going over not that long ago. Someone do it for fun, or did you rile 'em?"
"I riled them." The question had been honest. So was the answer.
"Man or woman?"
"I offended a man. A woman whipped me."
"Who'd you rather get it from? Girl or a man?"
"A girl." She squirmed again. "You men are too strong."
She looked up at him appealingly. "Have you any idea how terrible the pain is?"
He nodded. "Yeah, Happened I got it once or twice. Didn't care for it none." He looked at her shrewdly. "Want me to feel sorry for you, eh! Well, babe, I do. But it don't make no difference, see?"
Terry saw only too well. Strangely, also, she understood. Myron's wish to whip her was a part of the same hunger he would appease later within Dorinda.
"Please don't whip my breasts." She kept her voice level. She would talk to these men who would whip her as rationally as she could. She deemed it likely to aid her cause better than to be piteous or arrogant.
He looked down at her hungrily. "They're damn nice," he mused. "Ain't been striped like the rest of you. They're ... well, all ready as you might say."
She looked up at him and tried to smile. "Don't think I don't know how men enjoy a girl's breasts." She said wistfully. "It's funny, we girls who have them, we enjoy them too. We can't bear to think of them whipped. We can bear at least the thought of the rest of us. But not our breasts. I can't stop you whipping them. I can only ask you not to. You see ... They'll look lovely for the first few cuts, but then they get red and purple and I won't be nice to look at any more."
"Well, I'll be damned!" Myron slapped his leg in delight.
"You're damn cute, girl. Know that." He chuckled and leered accusingly. "You must'a have had 'em whipped sometime to know all about it."
"Yes. I've had them whipped. It's awful!"
"O.K. You sold me. Hate to mess up that bit of heart shaped hair. Might get to use it some day." He guffawed. "How's about your cute little belly! Not a mark on it.
Here goes!"
She absorbed the two wrap arounds and gave their donor gasps and moans and some sweet twistings. He enjoyed it all.
"Where's that, what's her name, Dorinda?" Myron looked around as though expecting relief to be instantly available.
"Alfred took her below just before you came."
"Huh! The lousy bastard! Well, damned if I'm going in there right after a bloody cook!" He strode away disgustedly.
Terry's day had started. She was not sure whether it was better or worse than she had expected. She wryly reflected that perhaps this was her cue to call out: "Next!"
"Come to get screwed, Honey?" Mike looked up from his desk where Dorinda had tracked him.
She ignored the question. "Must I be tied the way I am, Mike. Makes it damn difficult for a girl in my profession."
"Don't knock it, honey. Makes you push back with your ass. Fine action."
She abandoned a profitless exercise, and tried another tack.
"Any use appealing to your better nature?"
"Don't have one O' them things, sugar. I'm pure bastard."
Dorinda nodded. "The girl you have tied down there on the deck, she's not common stuff, y'know. The family has money. They could make it awkward for you." She looked at him searchingly, "If you let her go with an apology or some sort of excuse there's still time."
"That a threat, girl?"
She wriggled her shoulders helplessly. "Oh Mike! How can I threaten? Look at me."
"Damn nice." He said with approval. "Lovely tits. But the young'uns for it, see.
I like a bit of class and a bit of the young stuff. I'll take my chances."
"I'm not exactly grey haired."
"Singing a different tune, ain't you, compared to last time?"
She fluttered her shoulders once more. "Mike, I'm so damn helpless. You've got me.
A girl can't fight forever."
His look became shrewd and interested. "Good old talkative Mabel told me all about that Island, leastways what she'd seen and added up. Seems like you was some sort of slave girl? Mabel had it figured you was happy as Hell with the job?"
Dorinda thought of Mark, and could have wept. "Know what I think, sugar? I think that guy who whipped the ass off you had the right idea. Some sort of psychological gaff, the way Mabel tells it. You've changed, y'know. Done you a lot of good."
The irony of it! Mark to train her and make her love him. Then this crass creature to profit! She realized that, until this moment, she had not realized. Mike's perception had been more penetrating than her own. In repossessing her he had acquired what he had lacked the subtlety or wit to create. She knew, dismally, that she could not revert. Mark's hand would be upon her always. She was at least part slave.
"Keep me then." She knelt before him in the full glory of what she had become.
"Let Terry go. I am a slave. You are right. I have changed. I will be a slave girl for you such as you have never dreamed."
He looked down at her in wonder. "Dammit, girl. You almost got me foxed. That's about the prettiest thing I've ever seen. But I won't bargain. I've got you both. Pester me again and I'll make you wish you hadn't."
Resignedly Dorinda rose and returned to a chair. The act seemed the withdrawal of a pledge. She had tried and failed. Mike held all the cards. "What about Mabel?"
She asked tiredly.
"What about her?"
"I've got no brief for Mabel." She assured him wearily. "But will the poor girl ever get off that Island?"
"Pretty sure to sometime, honey. Why?"
"Was she handcuffed? I mean, like I was?"
He laughed understandingly. "That scare you! No, Mabel's free as the air. Stop worrying."
"But she's naked?"
"Being naked would be the least of Mabel's troubles anywhere." He grinned.
"Even in London or New York."
"I think it was the worst moment of my life when you put me on that beach naked and with my hands handcuffed the way they were. It's an awful feeling for a girl. I spent a lousy night."
"Good!" He leaned forward. "Want to tell me what happened on that place?"
"Oh Mike! You've got me ... the way you have. And you want to talk rationally?"
"Why not, honey?" He smiled expansively. "Whores talk to their customers, prisoners talk to their guards. I guess slave girls talk to their masters if they are given a chance."
"You could be nice if you'd give yourself a chance." She pouted.
"One more crack like that and I whip you."
She took a chance. "See what I mean, see what I'm up against. You own me. I'm not me. I'm this thing between my legs and a pair of tits. But, tell me, when you had me before why didn't you whip me into submission then? You could have! You put me in that rotten little brig with handcuffs on my wrists and wondered why I didn't love you.
Then, just to put me in the right frame of mind, you toss me on Kyrexos."
"You were an infuriating puritan. A little prig."
"I wasn't!" She flashed. Then looked at him, scared. "Was I? Was that what I was?"
"You better believe it, honey." He became earnest again. "Tell me what happened. You can leave out the bits where you got fucked or licked the youngster's clit. We'll take 'em for granted: Come on, tell me. If you don't I'll whip you good.
That's a fair offer."
Dorinda told him. Not all, but the substance of her enslavement. She found herself wanting to study it in perspective. What she told was no betrayal of anything that lay between herself and Mark. To Mark she was just an interesting slave girl in training.
She supposed, now, she would always wonder what might have happened....
The owner of The Quest gave her his full attention. She had his interest. When she fell silent for lack of more to say, he remained deep in thought. Rousing himself he looked at his captive with a glinting eye.
"You know this guy's methods and theory. If I gave you a girl, could you train her?"
"Yes, I think so." She was surprised how easily the affirmative had come to her lips.
"O.K. It's a deal. I get the girls. You train 'em. I'll cut you in for twenty percent."
Dorinda knew a strange excitement in her loins, and a fresh horror in her mind.
"Twenty percent of what?"
"Their selling price, sugar. It'll be plenty."
"Sell girls!" Evidently the rumors had held truth.
"Come off it! Don't play naive."
"But where do you get them?" She was frankly curious. "Got you, didn't I? Got young Terry. Got Mabel, but let her go." He sat up, amused and laughed. "Good Gosh! We'll have to go back and pick Mabel up. She'd fetch a tidy sum."
"But the police? The families...?"
"So what? Al of you I have just named have disappeared. Might be an inquiry or two. Nothing serious. Girls are always disappearing. The police are sick to death of hunting little bitches with hot pants. As far as I can see it's the favorite teen-age female ambition: hunting cock! They call it falling in love. I've come to hate the little sluts!"
"They chase you?"
"Honey, this ship's had more teen-age poon tang on it than it's had diesel fuel. I think some of 'em would pay to get aboard if you sold tickets."
"Why bother with girls like me and Terry?"
"Because you are at least girls. Those horny little mink are just one big sopping wet cunt. Their holes are so damn big they are not even a good piece of tail!" Mike grinned at a private thought, "Sure be a treat to watch you whip their hot little arses. Wouldn't bother my conscience none."
Dorinda felt guilty at an exciting prospect. How did these things creep up on a girl! A delectable vision of rows on rows of naked moppets, and herself with a lovely limber cane, rose before her eyes. "Alright!" She agreed. "Let Terry go, and I'll do it."
Mike sighed. "Bend over that chair, honey. Good a place as any. I warned you ... "
Dorinda sighed too. He had warned her. She had asked for it. Dutifully, but not happily, she draped herself over the furniture.
"Six if you behave. Twelve if you don't." From somewhere he had produced a quite frightening cane.
It taxed all her fortitude to take the six cuts. She deliberately gave him the expected vocals and the sensual motions. The end result was to be expected. She serviced him to the best of her ability in that capacity too. She felt inordinately proud of his response.
"You are quite something, honey." He sat back in his chair, studying her as she shook her hair back in place and resumed her seat and attentive mien. It was obvious that her bottom hurt. "You get me riled on purpose?"
"No! Oh, honestly I didn't! I don't know why we girls have to be the way we are.
We always prod. To see what we can get away with, I suppose. I can almost agree, we have to be whipped to keep us in line. Under the circumstances I think I should say thank you."
"Maybe you like it?"
"No, I don't. I could have curled up and howled."
"The little trick you're in love with: she loves it." How did he know! Mabel, of course. "Yes, she gets a sensual thrill out of having her bottom caned: perhaps even what you just gave me. Beyond that she suffers like the rest of us."
"So the day on the deck with the boys having a slash at her won't deliver her horny to my bed?"
"Probably the reverse. The poor kid will be exhausted. You sure have some quaint ideas."
"Want to bend over that chair again?"
"I'm sorry. Please forgive me. Honest, I don't like being whipped. But if we are to get anywhere together I have to be able to talk." She gave him a wry grin. "Maybe I won't pick up more than a dozen strokes a day."
"There was a question before the house, honey?"
"I'd love to, Mike. But please! Take Terry off the hook. Let her be my helper.
Don't make either of us receptacles for your crew's sperm."
"Bend over the chair, honey."
Dorinda obeyed mutely. Implacable Mike. He gave her three brutal cuts. She gave him all the expressions of her distress. She wept. It was all hopeless!
"Never asked you up here in the first place." He said testily. "Go and tell your little honeypot about her wonderful future."
His name was Cuthbert. They called him Cuth. He was too young, too pimply, and minus a chin. Terry was quite sure he must practice self abuse and eat the wrong food. He looked at her with lust.
"You're very pretty."
"Thank you." She almost added, kind sir.
"I'd like to fuck you. But you belong to the captain."
"So I understand."
He examined her with interest. "I've never seen a girl's, cunt before. Just fancy, all heart shaped."
"That's the hair."
"Lot of funny stories about them things."
"I'm sure there are."
"That true they reach out and grab a chap's cock."
"Mine doesn't. Haven't you ever been inside?"
"You mean had a piece of tail? Can't say I have." Terry now felt certain about the self abuse. "Aren't you going to sample the girl on call today?"
"Oh, I think she would alright. But I don't like to ask."
"You don't have to ask. Just do it." Terry felt guilty, but safe.
He wrinkled his nose. "Something inside there that ... you know."
"No I don't know."
"Well, takes hold of a feller'? Heard tell of a chap couldn't pull it out."
"Are you this cautious in everything?"
"No sense looking for trouble." Cuth sounded hurt. "Maybe I should whip you."
"Dare you take the risk?"
"I think you are pulling my leg. Anyway, I've never whipped a girl."
"Aren't you afraid of catching something?"
He whipped her twice. Very hard, as though to assert the manhood she doubted. He watched her tug against the cords, and heard her gasp. "I got a great big hard on."
He said, surprised.
"I'm sure there will be a knot hole around somewhere." Suggested Terry helpful y.
Cuth went away, walking awkwardly.
Dorinda was not sure whether she found the sight of land reassuring or ominous. She felt better than the day before. She had slept holding a sobbing girl within the haven of her arms. Mike had not retained his perquisite beyond evening. The collars round their necks had a familiar feel. Thus all things become comparative. The Quest had traveled far to bring them to a new day.
There was a stir and tension. Something had happened in the night. Taken to Mike's office the two girls were not left in doubt. Mike was displeased.
"You were right, honey." He conceded grimly. Then, looking at Terry: "That brother of yours has been raising Cain."
Dorinda's heart leaped. Mike noted the sudden radiance that lit the faces of his audience.
"Don't get them little twat's twitching too soon." He advised sourly. "I'm not taking any chances. I'm dumping you. But I ain't taking you back to Kyrexos and I'm damned if I'll put you ashore at a port. That leaves two choices: A weight tied to your ankles and toss you overboard, or put you ashore where no one will notice."
He laughed at their dismay. "You think I just might use that bit of lead! I ought to, but I won't." He chuckled as at some secret knowledge. "Could be you'll come to wish I had�^'" He was interrupted by the arrival of Cuth with a slip of paper. The youth eyed the girls hungrily and departed. Mike scanned the missive before turning his attention back to the captives. "Radio." He explained tersely. "We ain't out of touch. That's how I know about the hunt that's on for you."
"But you can't hide this boat forever." Dorinda said, puzzled.
"Honey, I don't have to. Nobody saw you get on, and nobody saw you get off.
Suspicions, sure. But no proof."
"And you think we'll just keep quiet about all you've done�^'" Terry bit her lip.
Dorinda watched Mike's slow smile agonizedly.
"Sugarpot, you can talk all you want ... If you can get someone to listen."
Again the knowing chuckle as at things unseen.
Dorinda's hope dissolved into awful premonition.
It was neat and functional. Absurd, but cruelly explicit. "Promised you a surprise at the end." Mike said. Dorinda stared at him in disbelief.
"You wouldn't...!"
"Sure would, sugar. Plenty of precedents."
"But like this!" His captive twisted her shoulders and tugged at the prisoned wrists behind her back.
She could not take her eyes from it. Terry, too, stared in shocked fascination. A simple plank! It jutted far out over and beyond the deck to which it was secured.
"All the best Captains used it." Mike jibed. "A girl said 'No', she got to walk the plank."
"But we haven't said no! We did our best yesterday!"
"Right you are, honey. So you get to wear this nice little decoration."
Mike tightly knotted a leather lace round each slender neck. On it was a handcuff key. "Take you a little time to undo them knots." He opined cheerfully. "In fact you might not be able to undo 'em at all. But that's the luck of the draw. Can't say good old Mike didn't give you a sporting chance."
"But you can't dump us in the sea with our hands handcuffed behind!"
"Sure can, honey. You got a medal for swimming, and Mabel told me the kid here swims like a fish. We're right in close. You'll get your feet on the sand after fifty yards or so."
"Oh Mike, why make us do this! It's dangerous."
Dorinda was aghast at what lay ahead.
"Adds a bit of spice." Mike suggested equably. "If you make it to shore you'll find yourself in one of those wog spots, ain't quite sure where."
"Handcuffed and naked?"
"Well, I ain't got it in for you girls all that bad. And I don't like the idea of them wogs looking at them pretty little quims first off. So, as a special concession mind you, I'm going to give you these." He displayed two swimming trunks.
"You know we can't put them on, the way we're fixed." Dorinda felt a ridiculous gratitude, even though she blushed furiously as Her captor tugged the stretchy material into place.
"No halter?" Terry asked wanly.
"Don't push, sugarpot. You're fifty percent ahead of where you were. Now, just to give you both a good send off, young Cuth has got one of Alfred's big pots and he's going to give you a drum roll as you walk out on that plank. Sort of make a real occasion out of it." He surveyed his captives benignly.
Dorinda's mind was working furiously. They could face death. Mike obviously did not think soor did he! She was thankful for the swimming instructor who had made a span up and down the pool with hands tied as hers now were an essential part of the tests. But a pool was one thing, this wide enough stretch of ocean was something else. Even after they survived they would be on an inhospitable shore, sand and rocks and scrub. No sign of life.
"Well, little ladies, the time has come." Mike announced grandly.
Cuth appeared with his pot and a pair of wooden spoons. At a sign from his employer he produced a quite surprising response from the metal and the wood.
Despite the absurdity and the fear, Dorinda's pulse quickened. The rat-tat-tat of the spoons gave an incredible validity to what she must do. Resolutely, she strode toward the plank. Her first step upon the narrow width was easy. The second brought a sense of isolation. At the third she knew panic. She was a girl alone, naked, her steps set upon a brief and insecure path from which she might easily slip and which came to an abrupt end. Beneath her was the enigmatic sea, a deep pit in which eyes might watch and jaws or tentacles lay in wait. Another step: now she felt her arms tense and strain, her wrists rebelling against the steel that held them close. The handcuffs were the most frightening facet of her plight, they made her a prey to evil chance or hostile intent.
Before the last fatal stride, Dorinda did the thing she had promised herself not to do at all. She caught Mike's absorbed gaze. "Please don't do this." She asked simply.
He did not speak. He did nothing but drink in the loveliness and the fear of the girl who must now plunge to an unknown fate. Myron made a menacing gesture with the pole and advanced one foot on to the plank. Cuth beat his improvised drum into a fierce tattoo. Dorinda turned and dived.
As time is measured it was short. A black awfulness of pumping legs and twisting torso, great gulps of air thankfully but briefly achieved. Dorinda knew with certainty that without the training the handcuffs would have knelled her death. When her feet found the sand her first thought was of Terry.
But the younger girl was superb. Evading startled hands she had leaped after the falling figure of her love and, ignoring the plank, plunged directly from the rail. . She might have been a dolphin or a seal so adeptly did she slice the water and defeat it with her slender nudity. The two girls waded toward the shore together.
"Piece of cake." Terry said jubilantly.
"Thank God you are safe." It was all Dorinda could think to say. They could not embrace. She herself felt a great thankfulness.
"When we get out of sight of those rotten kooks I'm going to chew one of these keys loose." Terry promised.
Without a backward glance they trudged up the slope of a dune, their bodies quickly drying in the sun.
It lay before them in a hollow. A shining new Land Rover. An incongruous intrusion of civilization in the wilderness. It stood alone, welcoming the strangers as a spray of flowers might have done. There was no one in sight.
"Think we might snitch it?" Terry was ecstatic. Dorinda had the sensation of too much happening too fast. She turned and looked back. The Quest's anchor was being hauled aboard. A careless arm was waved in desultory salute or farewell. Even had she been able she would not have raised her arm. She transferred her attention to the inland scene.
Save for the vehicle there was little to encourage. A miserable piece of the Earth.
The one redeeming feature was an ill defined road or track where spinning tires had made themselves a path to follow. The girls moved forward and down, out of sight of the ship and towards the waiting car.
It offered them no clues they could interpret. Tools, instruments, boxes and gear. A soiled burnoose and a folded rug. The engine was warm.
"Miss Esmond and Miss Matson, I believe." Said a piping voice.
The two men advanced from behind the rock where they had waited. An ill assorted pair. The speaker small and lean with shrewd small eyes behind thick lenses was quaint in Jubbah and Tarboosh. His companion wore only the simple haik. He was obviously of lesser rank or substance, a servant, but of quite impressive stature.
Dorinda was not enamored of either of them or their method of approach.
"We were introduced by wireless. The so kind Michael Sandos, he tells me your names. Such pretty girls he says, and he is so much right. Permit me: my name is Rabin. This is my servant and associate Bahreem."
Both men bowed. The English speech was perfect enough, yet in some strange way imperfect, a matter of intonation or the placement of a word.
"Am most happy." Bahreem was not far behind his master.
Both girls acknowledged the greetings as best they could. They felt ridiculous and very naked. Rabin made a motion that sent his henchman to a box. A moment later the girls listened in chagrin as their receipt was acknowledged over the air. The words had scarce ceased before the Quest's motors growled and throbbed.
"Such a nice man to send you to me." Rabin approved. "You mean this is a put up job?" Terry demanded indignantly.
"Is by special arrangement." Mr. Rabin confirmed graciously.
"You're going to send us home?" Dorinda asked without hope.
"Indeed yes. I am taking you home. To the home of Rabin. You will much enjoy."
Dorinda had her doubts. But cross the bridges as they came. "Could we have our hands released?" She asked brightly.
"Ah yes. You are handcuffed, I believe."
"The keys are on these laces round our necks." Terry vouchsafed.
"How very thoughtful of Mr. Sandos. A most charming man."
"Perhaps a bit of covering, too." Dorinda prompted. Mr. Rabin's thoughts suddenly seemed far away.
Bahreen frankly ogled their breasts.
"You are most beautifully attired." Said Mr. Rabin absently.
Dorinda doubted that it was just a compliment. "The handcuffs...?" She prompted.
"A most excellent idea." Mr. Rabin acknowledged.
"To get them off, I mean."
"I was referring to leaving them on." Said Mr. Rabin blandly.
Dorinda remembered the first shot from Fort Sumpter.
The implications were similar.
"What are you going to do with us?" She asked bluntly.
"Please to get in front seat." Mr. Rabin requested courteously. I myself will sit in back."
Dorinda was aghast. 'Out of the frying pan ... '. She wanted answers.
"Please." She pleaded, "We can't go around like this!"
Mr. Rabin considered. There seemed to be a twinkle in his eye. "You wish that unseemly bit of cloth removed from your hips?" He asked innocently.
It could be Arab humor. Dorinda tried again.
"I'm sure girls don't drive around like this here?"
"Ah no. But you are not of this land. You are much privileged."
Dorinda got in the Rover and sat down. It was not easy without hands. But she managed. Terry, following her lead, was ceremoniously aided in making the climb.
Bahreem took the wheel. Mr. Rabin climbed in the back. The motor started.
"Arabia, here we come." Said Terry without much enthusiasm.
It was a long drive. When the engine was not grinding in a low gear there was conversation.
"You have been much whipped." Said Mr. Rabin pleasantly.
"Mr. Sandos likes it." Dorinda said shortly.
"Of course." Rabin's voice bespoke approval. "It is most pleasant and universal enjoyment."
Dorinda's heart sank. "Are we prisoners?" She asked unhappily.
"Yes." The single word was uncompromising.
"What are you going to do with us?"
"You will be whipped, and many other nice things." Mr. Rabin sounded like Santa Claus.
"Did you buy us from Mike: from Mr. Sandos?" Dorinda had to know.
"Ah yes. There are indeed financial considerations."
"Look, please. Take these handcuffs off. We hate them. We'll be good girls and do what we are told."
"You are good girls now." Mr. Rabin would have an answer to everything.
Dorinda resigned herself to chains and slavery, but tried again. "I am sure Mr. Esmond would pay much money for our safe return."
"A beautiful girl is beyond price." Mr. Rabin sighed.
"But you do want to make money, don't you?"
"Bahreem can stop and give you both a good whipping if that would help you accept the will of Allah." Rabin offered kindly.
Dorinda accepted defeat. Perhaps better not to know.
She retired into silence. After many miles they stopped. "For blindfold." Mr. Rabin explained succinctly.
They sped toward the home of Rabin in darkness. Dorinda thought of it as Rabin's world. They could not know what lay beyond it's walls or the belt of trees at it's garden's end. But within the perimeter were patios, gardens and a courtyard. The house was large and rambling. A pleasant place. Mr. Rabin was not poor! They shared a room, a quite delightful room. It could have been a bedroom in Schenectady, Des Moines, London or Zurich. True, the windows were barred and the view limited. There was also a facility not generally found in the sleeping quarters of young ladies: two chains heavily bolted into the stone, the terminus of each being a pretty feminine ankle which it followed round the room, it's metallic voice muted by a lush and expensive rug.
They had been surprised and thankful for the bath. It had been a long, long journey in the dust. The hoods that had been placed over their heads had inhibited conversation until within the precincts. On their removal, Rabin had waved his hand in a gesture of munificence. "My home is yours." He said as though he really mean it.
The chaining of their ankles was an odd welcome.
Neither girl demurred. Perhaps the nature of the room reassured. Having secured them, Bahreem departed. It was a benign Rabin who clipped the laces from their necks and used the keys to remove the handcuffs. Joyfully, they raised and flexed their tired arms. It felt so very good!
"I could kiss you." Terry assured their benefactor.
"Such familiarity is not permitted." Mr. Rabin explained primly.
He watched approvingly as they worked the stiffness from their limbs. Finally he lifted the metal in his hands and requested pleasantly: "The little hands again, please."
They stopped as though frozen. To lose their hands again! It was too cruel.
He laughed at their consternation. "You are thinking me most unkind. But is not so.
This time it is in the front that you wear these pretty things. Thus you will be doing very much."
What use to protest. Perhaps by his own standards Mr. Rabin was being kind.
Certainly he was overestimating their prowess as escapees. The ankle chain was more than adequate to ensure their continuing enjoyment of his hospitality. But, to a naked girl, the front is better than the back. With the best grace she could muster Dorinda held out her hands.
"You are most sensible girls." Rabin conceded graciously. "For one minute I see you think: 'No. I will not wear these things!' But you are not wishing to displease me.
That is good! Is much best you wear little bracelets. They keep you from forgetting."
Dorinda wondered what handcuffs would help her to remember. But what matter!
She watched with faint amusement as Mr. Rabins not so nimble fingers fitted the cuffs upon her wrists and pressed them gently tight. His interested attention to his task caused her to suspect that this was his first exploration in the chaining of a maiden's hands. He seemed delighted with his achievement.
"I am keeping the keys." He said diffidently as though there might be an open question as to custody.
After he had gone they shared a bath. Each resting a chained ankle on the rim. But it was too awkward so they used a towel to absorb the rattle of the links.
Long association with police usage has endowed the handcuff, in the eyes of the uninitiated public, with an almost magic quality of rendering it's wearer impotent.
The two girls could have ably refuted such a premise. When worn behind the back, yes. But borne daintily in front they enable a girl to do most things, albeit sometimes awkwardly, but with a bit of perseverance she will prevail.
"If we ever have children they'll be born wearing a pair of these." Terry complained. She raised her joined wrists and examined the bond. "Actually they do something for a girl. Having them in front is almost like being free after the way we were." She paused and considered. "You know, I think the old boy put these on us just for the reason he said. So we won't forget what and where we are. You know, get ideas above our station." Suddenly she became wistful. "What's going to happen to us, darling?"
The rhetorical question was not answered. A girl walked into the room. She was both brisk and beautiful. "My name is Thalia Rabin." She introduced herself. "I'm the daughter of the house. You'd better be nice to me." She laughed at their astonishment. "What did you expect? Pidgin English? Girton and Cambridge. Came home this year to look after Daddy."
"We didn't expect you." Said Terry candidly.
"Don't let my quasi-Western manner fool you." The newcomer suggested airily.
"I'm daddy's daughter. I'll whip your nice little derrieres with gusto if I have to. Or even just for fun. I'm pure sadist." Her eyes twinkled. "Someone's had a good go at you already, I see."
"Nobody talks about anything except whipping us."
Dorinda told her dolorously. "Surely we must have some other function?"
"Well, there's the one we all know about! You do know about it, don't you...?" Their visitor grinned sardonically. "But, yes, I think daddy has something in mind for you."
"Would it include taking these off?" Terry optimistically held out her cuffed wrists.
Thalia laughed gleefully. "Daddy really is in a class by himself. He told me that was the first thing you'd ask. You know, on the basis of 'us girls together' sort of thing.
What d'you want 'em off for?"
"Well, would you want to wear the damn things all the time?" Terry demanded impetuously.
"I can think of worse things."
"But we can't escape!" Terry kicked the chain that held her ankle.
"No you can't, can you, darling." Thalia looked at them both with serious eyes.
"You never will escape. You'll try, of course. That's understood. And you'll be punished for trying. When you hurt enough you won't try any more."
"Be nice to us." Dorinda pleaded. "We're scared. What's your father going to do with us?"
"I'll let him tell you at Dinner. You're invited down. I'm supposed to dress you in a few ornamental scraps. That means taking off those cuffs. Will you promise to let me put them back on?"
"Scout's honour." Proclaimed Terry gleefully, and held out her hands.
"It has always been my practice with girl who is much new." Said Mr. Rabin ponderously, "To give her a very nice whipping very first thing." he paused and eyed his audience as though waiting for applause. There was none. Only his daughter seemed amused.
"It is much kindness to you ladies. They know what happens when they are bad.
Then they are not bad. Very sound principle." He beamed at his new possessions.
"But I am kind man. You have been much whipped. So you know what it feels like.
We do not whip you now. Thalia agrees. She is very wise, this daughter of mine."
Terry's Thank you impinged on Dorinda's. Mr. Rabin was pleased by their sincerity.
"You are most polite girls. That is good." He paused, remembering. "The last young woman who entered my service was so very rude. She called me 'An old fart'."
His eyes twinkled. "But only once! What was her reprimand, my dear?"
"The bastinado. Don't you remember how she howled, daddy? Ten on each foot."
"Ah, yes. We provided crutches." He smiled winningly at his guests. "She did very well after that."
Dorinda was quite sure she had. She was prepared to do very well herself rather than have the soles of her feet beaten. She expressed this sentiment frankly. It might save pain and humiliation if Rabin understood their exposure to some degree of sophistication in such matters. He accepted her statement. He seemed pleased.
"I suppose you are curious?" He cocked an eyebrow.
"Terribly. We have wanted to ask."
"But you did not. That, too, is good." He paused for effect. "You have most difficult roles to play. You are available for rent."
Dorinda's heart sank. Thalia giggled.
"You mean we're to be ... whores?" Terry asked starkly.
"No. No!" Rabin raised his hand in protest. "I am sorry. I did not mean ... "
He peered at them admonishingly. "I cannot say, of course, that the, er, facility between your legs will never be used. It may. But that use will be secondary to the main intent of the party who leases your person and, may I say, your talents." He paused once more for the handclaps that were not there.
"The name of Rabin is much known." He continued importantly. "It is understood that when someone is wanting something they go to Rabin. Even much far from here it is said: 'Go to Rabin' he will have it. Or if he does not have it now he will get it very soon. Is good, such reputation. I sell or I lend for cash whatever is desired."
"Rabin's Rentals?" Terry inquired innocently.
He surveyed his interrupter through thick lenses. He turned to his daughter. "What do you think?"
"Just precocious." Thalia assured him. "She meant no disrespect." She turned to a quivering Terry. "You were very close to hanging by your thumbs for a couple of hours. Watch it, kid."
"Yes indeed." Said Mr. Rabin, mollified. "Hanging by thumbs is much sad." He masticated a few thoughtful mouthful's, and continued. "It would be nice to tell such sweet girls that nothing unpleasant would happen. But this is not always so. If all was pleasant and, what you say: on up and up, this remarkable daughter of mine could perform tasks. But the work is not always what a father wishes for his daughter. So it is better for me that it be done by such lovely young ladies as you." He sighed. "It is the will of Allah that there are those who serve and others who are served. Who are we to question it!"
It was on the tip of Dorinda's tongue to do a bit of questioning. But she had never hung by her thumbs and had no wish to.
Thalia correctly interpreted her thoughts. "Western mores sort of peter out East of Beirut, darling." She placed a consoling hand on the captive's arm. "Daddy is trying to break the news gently."
The indulgent parent nodded approvingly. "My daughter understands. She will help you. She will help you so long as you are good girls. If you are bad she will punish you most terribly. It was she who bastinadoed the feet of the girl of whom we spoke."
He gathered and reassembled his thoughts. "Your services may be hired to please someone as a favor, or to promote a business deal. You may be leased by an angry wife who will whip you because her husband is unfaithful and she can not whip his mistress." Mr. Rabin waved his hands despairingly. "There are so many strange and wonderful things ... Mine is a service much required all over the world. You may be hired to go to prison ... to be sentenced at a trial in Court and be sent to prison in the place of someone who can afford not to go. I have had such a case. Is most convenient for short time. But not for long. I would not part with property for too long a time ... "
Mr. Rabin caught up on his dinner, chewing in bovine rumination. His daughter sparkled. The handcuffed girls kept a respectful silence. Dorinda thought, heart renderingly, of Kyrexos.
"There was also the case;" Mr. Rabin continued, "Of the guerrillas who required a hostage as an exchange of prisoners. They used a girl I was able to provide. I did not enquire their methods. But they were much pleased with the result.
There is, too, always a need for a girl to be arrested. Always the police must arrest somebody for something. They mean well. When all is over and newspapers are happy the girl walks out of back door. Bahreem is there, of course, to care for her.
That is understood."
Dorinda was quite willing to believe there would never be escape. Here a female was truly owned.
"There are also," Mr. Rabin said regretfully, "Those who obtain one of my girls for pleasure. Not simply for the bang, bang business. This they can get from lesser men for less money. But it is known that a girl of Rabin's will be not as other girls.
She will be superlative. A girl to dream of. A veritable Houri of educated delight. A girl to whip!" He smiled kindly at the two faces so intent upon his words. "I am sure you can understand, but if you cannot Thalia will help you, you will understand that to whip a girl is one thing. It is man's oldest delight to hear her moan under the lash.
But to whip an educated girl is a quite different experience. Dross is always cheap.
Quality is worth whatever it costs. A man may stop whipping an educated girl and talk. He cannot do this with some waif from the marketplace. She has nothing to say.
You understand?"
Dorinda understood. Without knowing, Rabin spoke for Mark, for Mike, for the men of the Quest: for all mankind. The incredible male dream: that a girl should love them as she was whipped. That as they striped her skin she should tell them her heart's dream and listen raptly as they told her theirs. Always a girl must suffer that the male ego might flourish. But why complain. Girls loved it. Most never understood. But for those who did ...!
Confronted with herself Dorinda was appalled. How easily she slipped into these male fantasies and became one with them. For Mark she would immure herself utterly, his whip upon her flesh as a gift of rubies. Because the lash he held sustained him she would cry: more, more...! The pain he gave did no more than feed an insatiable longing in her loins. Had the longing always been there! Was she no more than wanton! A bitch in heat.
Mike? She hated him. He was part atavism, crass, crude, governed by the hunger of his phallus. Himself a slave. Yet he had been able to touch her femaleness, to provoke it and make her call him master.
Now the specious reasoning of Rabin! How plausibly she found herself able to understand his outrageous premise: that a woman was a chattel, a useful plaything for the male. Always a receptacle for his endlessly generating sperm, or for the lash which opened for them both a door to the ineffable, now she had become a medium of exchange. Soon she would be quoted on the Paris Bourse and the N.Y. Stock Exchange. She longed to voice her fear of frailty. But kept silent lest Rabin have her whipped. Of such stuff is woman made.
"I am sure," Said Mr. Rabin compassionately, "that you may feel injustice. You may look at my dearest child and cry: 'Why not her! Why me!'. Do not feel too outraged by the Fate that has placed you here." He turned to his daughter. "Tell them, child."
Thalia made a gesture of bafflement. "How can I tell you, darlings. My father wishes you to know that I, too, have known the scourge and the chains and the cords. I could not tell them at the school or the University. They would not have believed.
Girton is another world there on it's hillside above the South Coast where the English go to sit in their little bit of sun and let their children dig in the sand." She grinned at them amusedly. "I am the product of two worlds."
Mr. Rabin nodded benevolently.
"In the long vacation I came home here. It was when I was fifteen that the bad thing happened. The car that picked me up did not take me to Gatwick airport. I went instead to a country house inside a great many trees. It was very scary. Even now after much has happened to me I would be afraid ... I was delivered very much like a parcel. I kicked and screamed and bit, but I was carried and dumped in a fine large room where waited two men of our own race here. Money was paid, my abductors departed, one of them bleeding. The two men looked at me with much pleasure. One of them said, oh very pleasantly he said it: "Remove your clothes, child."
Thalia made a move of deprecation. "Imagine! Here our women keep well covered.
Except, of course, certain ones at certain times." Her eyes twinkled. "At the big school very little skin was on view outside the bathing facilities. Now, here I was, aged fifteen asked to shed a thousand years of cloisters along with my nice English school uniform. I could not do it."
The daughter of Rabin grinned ruefully. "They were most helpful and did it for me, discouraging my hostility by hurting me very much with their hands. I will always remember that moment when I stood, for my first time naked before men, striving to cover more of myself than I had hands to do. I was a pretty little girl with a nice girl's body, just as I am now a pretty somewhat older girl with an even nicer body than I had then." She mocked them with her eyes, "Let us never be silly with modesty." She paused, looking back into time, "I remember most their very hot eyes as they looked at what I could not hide and the silly things I was doing with my hands. But I felt cold, that strange English cold you feel only in an English house. I was not happy."
Mr. Rabin beamed on all.
"They told me I must write a letter to my father. They gave me a pen and sat me at a table. I felt very foolish and very bare. My bottom was very cold on the seat.
I have always wondered how the English manage to reproduce in such cold rooms. I thought at first to be a brave girl and refuse. But they explained what they would do to me if I did not. They explained, too, that negotiations for my ransom could only begin after the letter had been written. So I wrote the letter with the words they gave to me. Between the cold and the fear my hand shook when they made me tell of the things which were going to happen to me each day until the money was paid.
"I was then taken to another room that was very bare but in which the air was warm. There was a gas radiant popping away and, on the other side, an electric convector heater. I was grateful for the warmth, but unhappy with my guess as to why it was provided.
"They hung me by my thumbs. Think! There I was, a slim little fifteen year old girl naked and in great pain, my small thumbs feeling as though they would leave the rest of me at any moment. They had used a narrow soft leather loop round the base of each thumb. I remember watching them in horror as one man held me and the other tightened the little nooses. Then I saw my hands rising up before my eyes and, a moment later, my toes were kicking in the air and trying to reach the floor that was not there. At fifteen a girl is very foolish. I wanted to die: not because of the awful pain, but because my maiden nakedness was being ogled by two men." Thalia giggled, "I think the British influence was a factor there: They were two men to whom I had never been introduced.
"They were most resourceful. They had cameras and bright lights. They took pictures of poor naked little Thalia hanging from her thumbs. They took pictures of me weeping, howling, and just simply hanging limp. They were clever. They wanted the expressions on my face to be just so. My father was to understand his daughter's plight. In one picture they made me smile right into the camera as though to tell him that I was still alright, but please to hurry.
"When the pictures were done they went away and left me. It was very awful.
For a little while I struggled. Then I cried. Then I just hung ... Twice during the day they held water to my lips. In the evening they took a couple more pictures to show the effect on me of the day I had spent waiting for my father to pay my ransom. They took me down, fed me, gave me a bucket, and then locked a chain round my neck with a very big padlock and fastened the other end to a ring they had bolted in the floor. They tossed me a rug. Thus I spent the night.
"I knew what was to happen to me the next day. Had I not written it in the letter! I stood with my arms tied high and wide. They took great care that the bands of cord round my wrists should be very tight. They even took close-up's to show how securely my hands were held." Thalia chuckled. "I have learnt since that such pictures are sold at good prices all over the world. No doubt my kidnappers saw this as a small extra perquisite of their operation.
"They did not raise my feet from the floor. Just made me stand well stretched.
Then they got down to business: "On the second day I was to be whipped. It was the second day! My whipping called for much care with the camera and the lights. They desired a sequence. First my nice bare back and bottom. Click, click! Then I screamed and leaped into wild and foolish motion as my little round bottom received a truly awful cut with a cane given me with all the force of a man's arm. Such pain could not be! I knew I would die. But a girl does not die. I stood and quivered while my tormentors watched and waited for the stripe across my bottom to "Ripen". They wanted the wheal to stand up well and become as scarlet as my blood could make it ... Then, once more, click, click.
"Actually I was lucky that they were so concerned with excellence. It gave me time to gather up my courage and avoid hysteria. They wanted good close pictures in glorious Technicolor of each wound they placed upon my skin. They contrived a cumulative series with little Thalia's naked rear view showing her with first one then two and three and so on ... Lovely scarlet stripes on golden flesh! Some had started to go purple before they were finished with the last of them. The camera faithfully recorded my martyrdom. Those awful lights made me cringe. I felt five times naked the way they sought out every curve and crevice.
"By now, of course, I was very much on the qui vive. Looking back over one shoulder I saw the whip. The cane for my bottom, a whip for the rest of me! They explained that they would get better camera effects if I bore two kinds of wounds. I also saw that whip raised and swung in a truly terrible slashing swipe. I turned away at the last moment to bite my lip and tense against the blow. When I came back from the pain they were admiring my wound very technically, even tracing it with a rough finger so that I cried out again. Click, click."
"These bad men were former competitors who were jealous of my superior business acumen." Mr. Rabin explained helpfully.
"We click, clicked away until they had me beautifully latticed with a total of ten wounds. That is what they were, wounds. Had my flesh not been so young I would have borne them for many years, perhaps for life. They had spaced the bars across my skin with neat effect so that each stood out to be counted. The rest of my day and night was a repetition of the first.
"The agenda for day number three had set me wondering. Whilst never having previously experienced one and two, they were of a nature so frequently dealt with in fiction and history that I had an awareness of such things. Number three was different. First, my hands were tied behind my back: this way, that way. I thought they never would get through with all the different trials and errors and experiments.
The click, clicking became frantic. The method they finally settled on was the worst of the lot. My hands palm to palm, wrists tightly corded together, and a leather strap round my elbows drawing them together so they touched. It hurt horribly. It also stuck my chest out in front. Next they made me spread my legs and then tied my ankles down to rings in the floor. Tight, tight! Click, click ... It was the most shaming posture yet. What they did then shamed me even more. Each man sucked at one of my nipples."
Thalia shrugged in recognition of something done that could not be undone. With a wry grin she continued her story. "I was just at that age when a girl becomes very much aware of a fresh asset that nature has bestowed. Giggling explorations with the girls and with myself had indicated the quite remarkable possibilities of friction and suction on the female breast. We were intrigued to discover how hard and erect the little dears could pop up with a bit of help. Mine got that bit of help now. When the men were through with them they were larger and harder than I had ever known or believed possible. A moment later I was screaming my head off with a metal clip firmly biting into each nipple. Rapidly my abductors got busy.
"The clips were the kind you use to hold wads of paper. You squeeze on one side and the jaws open upon the other. They come in different sizes and tensions.
Those attached to me were not the biggest. But they hurt so much and stood out so rigidly from my breasts that I was quite sure they were slowly cutting off the two things I had so recently learned to treasure. My, how I screamed and begged! It did not seem possible that anyone would want to hurt so intimate a part of me. I expect that, in it's way, the wearing of those metal horrors on my nipples was one of my first realizations of what it is to be a woman.
"I realized afterwards that the ensuing speed with which my tortured breasts were clicked at from all the usual angles resulted from a shared anxiety that my nipples should not mortify or sustain damage. They got them off me as quickly as they could. They even massaged the scalding spots. I'm still not sure of their motives, but it made me howl some more. I spent the rest of the day looking down at myself to verify that my little rosebuds were still there."
"The villains led me to believe my little girl was wearing those wicked things all through the day. I much longed to kill them." Said Mr. Rabin.
"The fourth day was the most shame I have ever known. Perhaps the worst I will ever know, or any girl can know. By that time we were all looking for the ransom. It was explained to me that my letter and the daily pictures were being delivered by an airline employee so that there was not great space of hours between taking them and my father receiving them. Twelve to fifteen hours if all went well. So I was always filled with hope." The teller of the story shook her head and grimaced. "It was my first knowledge that hope can be worse than no hope at all. Hope is very cruel. It will not let you rest.
"I was tied in exactly the same way as the day before. I wept even when they were tugging at the cords and strap. I had discovered that to have the elbows held like that all day is a very terrible torture too, even though it seems so harmless.
Besides, I was fearful of the clips again ... My letter had not gone into detail beyond the third day ... They produced a leek. You know what a leek is. Like a very large spring onion but with more stem and flat green leaves. Even when I saw it I did not guess it's purpose. I was very young.
"I could see they were amused. They took much care shaving off the root bits to make it smooth and round so that it came to look much like the pestle used by apothecaries in pounding out their prescriptions. They then anointed it with vaseline ... Well, you know what they did with it!" Thalia made a gesture of infinite disgust. "I was deflowered by a leek. I lost my maidenhead to a vegetable! They were gentle enough with their merchandise. But it hurt me terribly and I was deathly afraid. I made a lot of noise and tried to struggle, but I could hardly move. I was held beautifully for their purpose. They pushed it in as far as they dared. I was quite sure it had gone right up into my tummy. So there I was. You can make your own mental picture of what I looked like with my feet spread wide and those green leaves sprouting out of my sex. I took one long fascinated look myself and then refused to lower my eyes again. I turned my head this way and that while they clicked away with camera and lights. They were still busy when a very English voice said gruffly: "Yer can't do that there 'ere, y'know!"
"He was one of the largest policemen I have ever seen. Had I been able to I would have flung myself into his ample arms.
"My kidnappers had other ideas. They dived at him and the doorway he barred.
One of them drew a knife. I was shocked when the constable stepped to one side and let them through. There ensued a considerable commotion and shortly they were marched in again by two even larger members of the law. They were now both handcuffed. I had never seen felons handcuffed before. They looked so absolutely right.
"The police were very kind. They removed the intrusion from within me and set me free. One of them found a rug in which I could drape my girlish charms. But I will always recall how I blushed when one of them was carrying out the offensive leek.
I heard a fine British voice out in the hallway say: "Goes lovely in a stew, George.
My missus does 'em up a treat.""
"I saved much money. The English police do not accept bribes or rewards." Mr.
Rabin complacently supplied the happy ending.
Dorinda found herself looking at Thalia Rabin with fresh interest. She was a beautiful girl. She had tremendous poise. It seemed probable she possessed a sense of humor. Why had she related this shocking ordeal from her past!
Mr. Rabin bestowed upon each of the girls his very warmest smile. "You are quite free to make comment. I would like you to. There will be no punishment for imprudent words...." His tone was benign.
Comment! Dorinda groped, They could tritely express sympathy or shock. But she was sure that was not required. She looked up and found Thalia's eyes watching her inward struggles with amusement. Quite suddenly a shocking parallel became obvious.
"You were kidnapped. Now we are kidnapped. Not much difference in principle, is there...?"
"Ah!" Said Mr. Rabin, his eyes alert, pleased.
"That's right, darling. You put your finger neatly on the spot. The moral is that I have been where you are. I know your feelings and reactions. The marks on your bodies tell us that you have been hurt, perhaps more than I ever was. So we are very much even."
"But with no happy ending for us." Dorinda's voice held pathos.
"I don't believe you should think in that view. Live each day only." Thalia sounded as though she could easily have evoked Allah.
Dorinda lifted her handcuffed wrists for all to see. "A slave has no tomorrows...?"
She let the words hang in the air.
Thalia looked at her parent queryingly. He smiled indulgently. "Yes, tell them of how you were once very bad." He turned to Dorinda and the younger girl. "It is good that you know."
"I have told you of pain. Now I tell of punishment. They are the same and not the same. A matter of motive and acceptance." She looked at her alert audience and smiled reassuringly. "Would it surprise you to know that my father has had me whipped?"
Thalia laughed again at their startled attention. "I have told you I am a product of two worlds. There is much friction between those worlds. As I went back and forth between Girton and my father's house I was constantly subjected to pressures. The overshadowing one being filial piety. The English are as flip about parents as they are about most things. When I came home for my first holiday I called my father 'Pater'. He promptly had me caned before both family and servants. I didn't mention the incident when I got back in school.
"Then I got mixed up in 'Causes'. At sixteen a girl is fertile ground. With my background it's understandable that 'Women's Rights' should catch my imagination.
When I came home and started missionary work on the locals and our staff I was promptly locked up in a nice little stone room we have here for a couple of days of bread and water. However, my zeal had ignited one of the younger female staff. She unlocked the door. I ran away. When I was brought back I was tied to a post in the Courtyard and left there for all to see my shame. The next day I was tied there again and very soundly whipped. And the next day and the next ... Each evening I was asked if I saw the error of my ways. You will understand the depth of my involvement when I tell you it took five days before I was able to say that: yes, I did see ... "
"It was the whip talking, wasn't it?" Terry asked innocently.
"No!" Thalia's negative was vehement. "It was not. The whip told me what I was and where I was. At the post each day I did much thinking. What girl wouldn't.
There is also something very potent about being tied. When a girl cannot move her body or her limbs it is her mind that becomes free. I suddenly saw women's rights as a dream of spinsters. I shocked them back at school by telling them how lucky they were to be female." Thalia laughed roguishly, "A girl becomes very female when she is whipped."
Dorinda wondered, with a clutching of the heart, in how many places and from how many people that lesson might be learned.
Thalia's eyes were almost maternal. "We tell you these things, darlings, that you may learn with least pain. In England and In America, oh yes, I have been there! a girl and a whip are not related. In our land here they are never very far apart."
That night Dorinda felt the chain upon her ankle and knew herself very far from home.
* * *
Dorinda would always think of it by the name Terry had coined: 'Rabin's Rentals'.
She would speak it with caution. But it's utter absurdity was all too apt. She watched, half ashamed, but with a mounting curiosity as papers were signed and money changed hands. The money paid for her. She was being 'rented'. "Is a nice easy job for first time." Mr. Rabin patted her back benevolently as he handed the key to her cuffs to the grinning man in uniform.
Corporal Kuhdin was a dedicated young man. Proud of his uniform and his stripe.
Proud, also, of a motley brand of English picked up whilst working on sundry freighters with their motley crews. He accepted delivery of his naked charge with a flourish.
But not quite naked. Some unexplained motive of kindness or propriety had allowed her to wear Mike's thoughtfully donated briefs. The same sentiment had probably cuffed her wrists at her front instead of at her back. She felt almost free and well dressed. In deference to her single garment which he fingered appreciatively whilst helping her into the truck the corporal vouchsafed.
"The General's a son of a bitch about cunts, Miss." The ambiguity defeated her. But of more immediate concern was the truck. It was not large, the ordinary open type on which hoops and a tarp' made a conversion. It was covered now. But beneath the tarp was wire. The back, too had been wired. The effect was as of a cage. Uncomfortably seated she made her usual ploy, more as an opening gambit to conversation than with hope of success.
"Could I have my handcuffs off, please?"
Corporal Kahdin established an all time first. He took them off and put them in his pocket. "We can have tail later." He approved.
Dorinda sighed. It was hard to do the best thing. Certainly the recreation he had suggested would be impractical in a truck on a road as rough as that they now traversed. "Would you like to tell me what I have to do?" She asked politely.
He seemed surprised she did not know. "You are captured saboteur, miss. General Hakim is making fine example."
There were too many ambiguities. "Fine example of what?" Dorinda demanded.
"Of you, miss. Captured enemy of people, miss. Very bad girl. Put on display.
People spit."
The fine mesh wire began to make sense. Mr. Rabin's 'nice easy job' seemed to depend on the angle from which it was viewed. "You mean your General wants a martyr on display?"
"Oh, already has martyr, miss. Is nice Jewish girl. Very white like you. Could easily hang tomorrow. But the General is wishing to sleep with her. So she is nicely tucked away in little room he keep for very bad girls, and tomorrow you hang instead. Everyone is happy."
Dorinda was aghast. Had Rabin been that"Please not to fret." The corporal put his hand reassuringly on her arm. "You do not really hang. Just drop through trap."
"What's the difference?"
"The rope will break when you out of sight in hole. Most clever."
She looked at his smiling face in disbelief. This was Ian Fleming at his worst. With a service such as this no wonder Rabin's Rentals prospered. "How do I know it will break?"
"I myself have cut it. Is now stuck with glue. Very poor quality." He eyed her anxiously. "You do not think we would harm you?"
"Wouldn't you?"
"Oh no, miss. General Hakim is paying most large damage deposit." Mr. Rabin thought of everything.
"What about this spitting business?" Dorinda asked doubtfully.
"Is very hard to spit straight through wire. Most miss."
"Won't they throw things?"
"Yes. But wire protect." He glowed. "Also we have military escort. I will be there." He sounded like General McArthur.
It was all too Arabian night's! With people like this no wonder Scheherazade could tell her thousand and one tales. "Did this poor girl actually toss a bomb?" She asked.
"Oh yes. At bridge. Much noise. She was caught on way to border. Her jeep get flat tire. Man with her shot. She very well known girl. Much bad. General Hakim most lucky to sleep with her."
"Why?"
"She fight and spit and bite. He must whip her every time they have tail. Is very good like that."
"And he's going to keep her ... keep her for that purpose?"
"For long time. When he tire of her bad temper, he sell to Rabin."
Al was grist that came to Rabin's mill. Dorinda felt like goods upon a shelf. The military truck bumped it's way across an infinity of nothing. Corporal Kahdin exuded bonhomie, his gaze rarely leaving the curves and contours of the costly package to which he was escort.
"Have nice tits and belly." He informed their owner approvingly. "Face much nice too." He added as a chivalrous afterthought.
Surprisingly, the corporal provided lunch from a package and a thermos produced from beneath the seat. The truck paused long enough for them to eat in comfort. For dessert the corporal availed himself of the privilege of his office. He was both gentle and anxious to please and prove prowess. Dorinda wished the floor of the truck had been softer.
When in mid afternoon, they stopped again Dorinda knew she had reached the scene of her ordeal. There were sounds. Corporal Kahdin became embarrassed. He produced the handcuffs awkwardly.
"Behind back, I am fearing." He requested.
The hired girl turned and placed her wrists conveniently. How familiar the steel bands had become. He made them as tight upon her as he could without pain.
"Must be at back." He explained apologetically. "All peoples are wishing to see Jew girl's breasts. Jew girls have fine breasts."
"But I'm not a jewess."
"Ah true. But no one knowing! Your breasts are most fine. With little hands chain at back, cannot cover. Is not allowed for girl to cover in ceremony."
Thoughtfully he inserted a finger beneath the briefs, pulled and let it snap back against her hip. "Most will think should remove. But not now. General Hakim much believe in little something kept in reserve."
"If you'll take the handcuffs off I'll promise to show myself and cover nothing."
The captive offered.
"This I would do. But people enjoy to see girl in chains. Wicked Jew girl who try to blow up bridge. She must be punish. But I put on handcuff. No more."
"Am I supposed to do anything?" The impending martyr asked bemusedly. "I mean, make faces, stick my tongue out? Do I sit down or stand up or lay on the floor? Should I look scared or brazen?"
"Not know brazen. Best to look very haughty. Eyes flash fire and hate." The Corporal did his best to demonstrate. "But I must be asking you to stand very straight and turn about so everyone see. Is bad with truck in motion, but you manage." He looked at her with sudden compassion, "Must take tarp off now."
It was not a good moment for the nearly naked girl. The line that divided her from a girl sentenced to die on the morrow was too fine for comfort. Today there was no difference between them. She would receive the same insults and the same missiles and the same spittle as if she was the guilty one. She would be terribly alone. She wanted to cry, but would deny herself the comfort for as long as she could.
The wire enclosed her, it's gate locked importantly by a very official and distant Corporal Kahdin. There was much tugging and small sounds of snaps and buckles.
Without warning the tarp was swept away. She stood naked for the multitude.
There was the same surging cry that greets the players entering the field: Elation, awe, good spirits. Faces were everywhere. It was a Roman holiday. General Hakim's munificence made it free for all. The first sticks and stones beat upon the wire in frightening volume.
The Corporal seated himself with the driver. A small escort of uniformed troops, well armed, surrounded the vehicle and it's unpopular cargo. The captured girl was thankful to see that the General was protecting his investment. Such a crowd, left to it's own devices, could easily kill her.
It was all frightening, beastly, and quite difficult. In spite of being within the limits of a town the road was far from smooth. Al Dorinda's energies were devoted to keeping her feet. With hands linked at her back it was not easy. The jolting of the truck forced upon her a constant change of stance so that the citizenry did indeed have a constantly changing view of their enemy. She thought, fleetingly, of the real saboteur crouched somewhere in a cell awaiting her captor's pleasure. Assuredly this was not a land in which to espouse the rights of women! Nostalgically a vision of Kyrexos and of her home in the U.S.A. flitted across her mind. In desolation she realized that she would probably see neither of them ever again. From what was happening to her now, the life expectancy of one of Rabin's Rental's could surely not be long. She wept.
The crowd roared it's approval of her tears.
It was not a big place. But the circle and the various side streets on which the prisoner was to be exhibited accounted for perhaps four miles of shameful stumbling and balancing for the female object of everyone's vilification. Most of the crowd followed to enjoy her exposure to the full, but heads stuck out of windows and around doors. It was a gala day! The litter on the floor became an additional hazard for the caged girl striving to stand. Very little of what was thrown reached her with any velocity. But there was a lot of broken pieces that fell within the wire. Dorinda hoped that tears and haughtiness together were appropriate to the occasion.
The Grand Tour concluded, the truck was positioned in the centre of the main square and came to a standstill. Corporal Kahdin unlocked the door to her cage and joined her within. He was smiling cheerfully. Undoubtedly the General would be pleased with his conduct of the day's affairs. He carried something that caused his captive to wince.
"Are now on long display." He announced. "Poor girl are not allowed sitting down. She must stand."
"I'll stand." His prisoner promised miserably. "You don't have to chain me."
"Not needful." The corporal agreed. "But giving much pleasure for all to see.
Could not do in motion for fear maybe fall. But now quite safe."
Grinning widely, so that Dorinda guessed he, too, was enjoying what must be done, he buckled the dog collar round her neck and snapped the light chain tether above her head to one of the hoops and the wire. No locks were needed. Handcuffed she was powerless to touch the new infliction. It gave her about a foot of latitude in which to turn. That was all. "Soldiers stay on guard. No harm come." He assured her earnestly as he left and locked her cage again.
Had Rabin and his daughter realized what they had consigned her to! Probably. She was a woman. It did not matter. That had been the theme and moral of the dinner conversation. It had been a conditioning exercise. Shame and indignity would be her lot from this time forward.
She let her eyes rove. The seething crowd had become amorphous, without identity.
She felt their hate and their lust as she had not felt their sticks and stones. Those who got closest to the cage were the men who had the strength, they were the one's who she knew would conceal the rigid sex beneath their haik, longing to spend it within her loins. They were the one's for whom she wore the chains. Each would see her as his own. Each would violate her in his mind. She supposed it was not really much different from the plight of a girl in the stocks on Tyburn Hill, or held in the pillory in the old Massachusetts colony. No different from all the girls everywhere who had been so displayed for crimes real or imagined. Always the crowd had roared it's approval of her body and her shame. There would be but few who saw virtue triumphant. For most she would be a visual instrument of latent lust.
She suffered. The crowd shared that suffering with delight. As the dismal time slowly spent itself she discovered that, in a small measure, she could control them. Her tears were met with vociferous approval. To tug against the tether on her neck sent a wordless susurration of sound through the ranks. If she struggled against the handcuffs a low rumble of approval signaled her ignominy. She found that she could mute the vocal discords by standing very straight and thrusting out her breasts in arrogant disdain. For a few moments they would be content to look at what they seldom saw. There would be among them adolescent males who had never seen a woman's breasts. The knowledge of their tumescence gave her a momentary glow of satisfaction. She was deeply thankful for the cage and for the guards.
The Military concluded the exercise with aplomb and dispatch. The driver and the corporal resumed their seats as the afternoon waned. The soldiers took up their escort. The small cortege made it's way to a barracks, through a huge door that closed behind them, and stopped at a building beside a smaller, but still impressive, door. To the chained girl it was peace after storm. Her enemies were behind a very high wall. "Welcome to Fort Rahbeal." The corporal glowed.
Dorinda gave him a wan smile. "What now, a cell?" He seemed genuinely shocked.
"Oh no! No cell 'till much later in night. This evening you are guest of General Hakim. Much arrack and champagne." He viewed her with reverence. Such honour was not for all.
She strove to share his enthusiasm as he removed the shaming leash from her neck.
At the moment the General was an enigma. She supposed, wearily, that the least she could expect from him was to be used. Her status would be about that of a dancing girl. But she took heart when he lifted her from the truck and handed her over to a girl who now stood waiting. A girl both respectful and awed. As his last gesture for the day Corporal Kahdin unlocked the handcuffs from her back and locked them again at her front. Ceremoniously he handed the key to his prisoner's new escort who accepted it with glowing panache. For her this was an occasion. She looked at her prisoner and smiled shyly. The Corporal saluted and was gone.
Nothing made sense. But why should it! Scheherazade had taken it for granted. So must she. Her feminine escort led her out of the centuries into the exquisitely modern. General Hakim evidently believed in comfort. When the moment came for the bath, the girl shyly touched the handcuffs and held up the key. "No fight?" She asked simply.
For the first time that afternoon Dorinda laughed. She shook her head, smiling into the earnest eyes. "No fight." It was an easy promise to make.
The serving girl grappled with the key. It was plain to see she was intrigued by the handcuffs. When she had them off she fitted one cuff upon her own wrist and forced it tight to test its feel. Giggling, she held the dangling steel up for inspection as though it was a new idea in bracelets. Thoughtlessly she placed the fetter and its key upon the dresser seeming to find no inconsistency in its easy use or removal. No doubt she had her own knowledge of the impossibility of escape.
Dorinda had not hoped for such a boon as the huge tub.
She sorely needed it after the dusty drive and the attentions the citizens had seen fit to bestow. Now she was bathed and attended as a princess. As the gentle hands lathed the soap they also traced the marks beneath it. "Much whip?" She queried in wonder.
"Much whip." Her charge agreed. Then in mischief: "Much bad girl!"
Her servant viewed her with a new respect.
The raiment provided for her festive evening made her blush. Dorinda had known clothes and she had known nudity. Latterly nakedness had been her constant lot. But this was neither. Admiring it in the mirror she knew she would preferred good honest bare skin. These gossamer wisps of transparencies made her many times naked, many times wanton. They hid nothing. She could see herself through them everywhere. But they enhanced, emphasized, revealed. They were clever, they were beautiful, they were lewd. They also made her very much a woman.
There was much working on her hair. There were perfumes and cosmetics. There were bangles galore. The final bangle was her old friend the handcuffs.
The girl became shy again when she picked them up.
She obviously saw them as a magic token from another world. She who must wear them was touched with that same magic in her eyes. She looked up hesitantly. "You wear, please?"
A relaxed Dorinda would have worn three pairs quite cheerfully if required to do so.
The girl and the place had restored her faith. Perhaps, after all, Mr. Rabin knew what he was doing. Nodding and smiling brightly she offered her wrists and watched, amused, as reverent fingers locked them together.
"You do us great honour, my dear."
General Hakim was of the East. His English perfect.
But in all else he was a part of this land. Lean, good features, a keen eye. He surveyed his guest with evident approval. She, in turn, found reassurance in him.
Whatever else the General might be, he was evidently a man of manners and good taste. But it was not on him alone that her gaze settled in wonder.
The saboteur stood in an alcove. Behind her a window illuminating and silhouetting her nakedness. Her right arm was raised. It's wrist chained to the wall at the level of her head so that she must stand, helpless. She was very lovely. She wore only the fresh scarlet stripes of a whip.
Her eyes widened to match Dorinda's own.
"Allow me: Miss Dorinda Matson ... Miss Hulda Cohen." He laughed at their astonishment in each other. "Both exiles from that great land across the Atlantic.
Miss Cohen, as you may know, is a renegade from the Bronx." The General was suave and very pleased with himself.
"How'd he grab hold of you, honey?" Miss Cohen eyed the handcuffs as though they told all.
"Quiet, bitch!" Hakim picked up a slender cane and negligently added one more stripe to Miss Cohen's extensive collection. "You speak when you are spoken to." He said without heat.
The girl from the Bronx rubbed the place that hurt. She had one free hand for such a purpose. She made no pretence of indifference to pain. It was easy to see her anger and the bitter words trembling on her lips. But she kept a sulky silence. She might not be tamed. But she was subdued.
"Reba, dear child, you can inform them that dinner may be served. You will attend us."
Hakim swung his attention to his handcuffed guest. "It would be most pleasant if the three of us could eat a civilized meal together and enjoy rational conversation. But Miss Cohen, when placed at table, seems under some compulsion to fight. Last night it was the soup in my face." He sighed. "I find it disturbing to the digestion to be constantly whipping her throughout dinner. Please excuse her if she stays as she is."
"Alright, I'll behave!" His captive announced petulantly.
Thoughtfully and without haste the General added one more stroke. Hulda subsided into contortions.
"I think she really means it, General." Dorinda ventured, greatly daring. She saw herself in the other girl's position and understood.
Hakim eyed her narrowly. She trembled. "You do, yourself, behave at meals?" He inquired sardonically.
"Yes General. I have been trained."
Again the narrow look, this time with approval. "Ah. You interest me. Rabin excels himself. I will accept your judgment. Miss Cohen may have her chance to behave.
But another accident and you, too, shall feel the whip."
"Thank you, General." Dorinda knelt before him, bowed in submission. She might as well give him his money's worth.
Reverently, after several hushed moments, he raised her to her feet. His eyes were bright. Bruskly he turned to the saboteur. "Look "Look well, girl. Here we have a woman! He bent and kissed the linked hands by which he had helped their owner to rise. He touched the handcuffs gently. "You will wear these, child. They become you."
General Hakim liked to talk. He held an attentive audience. Both conscious of a whip and much bare skin. "The tendency of today's female to embrace nobility is the bane of our age."
He allowed the statement to hover. Then turned gravely to the bitter silent girl, "Don't you agree, Miss Cohen?"
"Yes General." The flat monotone was a contradiction.
"I am surprised at your affirmative." His voice was chill.
"It's what you wanted, wasn't it!"
He eyed her somberly. "Your attitude rather than your words merit the stroke. It can wait 'till after ... "
"Chain me back on the wall, please. I'll only accumulate a flogging and spoil things for both of you." The guerrilla girl suddenly seemed very vulnerable and very young.
A disappointed silence fell upon the table. The General eyed Hulda's soup anxiously.
"Come, come! We do not enjoy ourselves. We call a truce! For the duration of our dinner, no penalties. We may now be honest. Come, my dear, tell me I am a monster."
Dorinda watched with interest and with empathy. It was easy to place herself in Hulda's shoes. A female thing sundered from all she knew, a body to be used, a mind to be probed. The torture of one would equal the torture of the other. Courageous, yes. But to what end! How vivid that question mark must be. Having slaked The General's lust until he was weary of her, what then! Did the girl know of Rabin? It would be a kindness to tell her. Dorinda felt certain the guerrilla girl expected death.
The handcuffs clinked. She had learned to eat and drink daintily with her hands locked. The metal bond scarcely discommoded her. But the shiny steel was constantly in the attention of her companions. The General's eyes glinted with pleasure as he watched the nimble hands of his guest disport themselves within their prisonment.
She who wore the steel knew of the stirrings within his loins that her condition evoked. It pleased her. She supposed it a slave girl's only victory.
Hulda Cohen's interest was from pure puzzlement. She sensed the incongruity that she, the felon, should be free of bonds, but that the honored guest be chained. She availed herself of her limited vocal freedom: "You wear those things for fun?" She motioned with distaste at the objects of her curiosity.
Dorinda was shocked to realize she could not properly answer the question. She herself knew not why she was confined. Certainly not to prevent an impossible escape.
She felt sure Hakim wanted them only to satisfy an erotic enjoyment of his own. But this she could not say. She twinkled at him and did her best for the Establishment.
"It pleases our master that I be chained."
Hulda considered the proposition. "You mean it gives him a hard on?" She demanded unequivocally.
Dorinda blushed. General Hakim sighed and made a gesture of helplessness. "You see our problem." He said to Dorinda. "Communication is by volleys and thunders.
We do not talk. We kill."
"It is some sort of a slave?" Hulda probed at him. Dorinda sparkled.
"Have you explained my status, General?"
"It is none of her business." The General stated flatly. "In any case she would be incapable of gratitude. Such as she can be only at your knees or at your throat."
Dorinda tried again with the glowering girl. "Tonight I am handcuffed for our master's pleasure. Tomorrow I will be chained so that I make no foolish attempts to escape." She looked sympathetically into the hostile eyes. "When a girl becomes a slave it is best she forget freedom. If she can do this she will be much happier." She shrugged, "But we are weak and sentimental. We think of home and what we once were. At such times it is best that we be chained. It saves us much whipping."
"Doesn't seem to have saved you any!"
"The marks you see upon me are not recent. They are of another time."
"You mean you let yourself be chained and whipped without argument?"
"Yes. If I argue or fight I am whipped more."
"And you get screwed coming and going?"
"It is a slave girl's lot."
Hulda Cohen turned to the general. "Is that my life from now on?"
"You prefer execution?"
The watching girl knew that the word 'yes' trembled on Hulda's lips. It was the conventional answer to the villain's jibe. But, for most, it was not a true answer and never had been.
"Alright, it's' better to be fucked than killed." Hulda contrived to make the choice sound about equal.
"You see, you are a fortunate young woman." His tone was sardonic. He enjoyed watching Hulda squirm.
"Won't I ever have clothes again?" The question was not rhetorical.
"You have no need of them." He dismissed the question as flippant.
Hulda looked at her captor shrewdly. "Suppose I turned into a pretty little slave like Dorinda and said 'yes' in all the right places, and called you master. Suppose I held out my hands for the chains and bent my back for the whip, would it help.... whatever is going to happen to me?"
The General laughed appreciatively. "Honesty compels me to tell you that it would change nothing for you. It would simply rob me of some stimulation."
"More erections if you whip me into submission?" She sneered.
"Your hatred is an exciting stimulant." Hakim agreed equably.
"I can defeat you, then, by total subservience?"
"Too late, dear child. Simulation would be obvious and doubly punished."
"Do you whip Dorinda before you screw her?"
"You are becoming personal and insolent."
"You wish to whip me now, Master?" Her glinting eyes made the question a parody.
Hakim shook her head in despair.
It was Reba who served them brandy in the lounge. A pleasant room, a pleasant place. Even the atmosphere had become relaxed. But Dorinda wondered ... When the serving girl had completed her task she stood at obvious attention to one side.
She held a whip.
"An enjoyable evening of entertainment." General Hakim declared heartily.
"Dancing girls?" Dorinda twinkled at him. He was not a bore.
"One!" He pointed to Hulda Cohen.
Dorinda had half expected something of the sort. Hulda was flushing angrily.
Hakim laughed at the expression on their faces.
"Perhaps not a dance. Perhaps instead a little training in deportment. But not by me!" He laughed again at their surprise. "For tonight Reba shall be our Mistress of Ceremonies." He turned benignly to Dorinda. "You may find this interesting, my dear."
It was indeed! From a gentle serving wench the Arab girl was transformed. She was a half nude tigress, lithe and vital. Yet her features remained demure. There was a small smile upon her lips. Dorinda suspected she had played this role before.
Hulda Cohen had, for a moment, looked shocked. Then, resolutely, she downed her drink, rose to her feet and walked to where she could face the company. "O.K." She said resentfully. "No Roman Games. Put away the whip. Tell me what to do and I'll do it."
The whip wrapped around her viciously.
Reba's motions held infinite grace as she circled the startled and writhing captive, slashing her thong to cut the protesting flesh. Hulda Cohen yelped and ran.
Dorinda grasped the whipped girl's dilemma. She had said the wrong thing. Now, what would be right! The stalking girl with the whip followed wherever her prey ran.
No matter how the prey twisted or fled the lash found her skin. Some contortions inadvertently displayed the more secret recesses of their owner's femininity and were immediately sliced by an intent Reba who was obviously awake to such opportunities.
In desperation the moaning and gasping victim lunged at her tormentor. But in physical combat, too, the Arab girl could not be bested. She evaded or repulsed with ease, the whip bit and cracked.
The girl from the Bronx made agonized appeals. None of them the one desired. At length, in an all or nothing bid, she knelt before the girl who was punishing her and sobbed, "I'm sorry. Please forgive me."
She had found the key. Reba let the whip fall, and once more took up her pose.
There was no need for words. This was the entertainment. A dozen hours might have danced unnoticed in the room. Hulda Cohen held the stage. The watching faces were rapt....
Reba had left the vanquished girl kneeling on centre stage. She remained there sobbing. Dorinda reluctantly recognized the carnality of the picture. It was cruel y beautiful. Hulda sobbed, her face buried in her hands. Why the hands! To hide her shame ... To mask her tears ... To seek the darkness of the womb! Whatever their comfort, the whipped girl remained within it's embrace a long time, her bowed body jerking with her sobs. When the gasping admissions of agony came to an end, the fingers widened and an anxious eye peered forth. Seeing no immediate threat, their owner let her hands fall and rest upon her thighs. She shifted so that she faced those who watched. She did not speak.
Dorinda was sure the wounded girl had nothing to say that she dared voice. She was obviously deeply ashamed of her condition and her capitulation. She would wait without hope.
Reba came forward. She held handcuffs, at sight of which the bowed girl winced.
"Give me your wrists and ask me to lock them in handcuffs." Reba wasted no words.
It was a tense moment. Those watching saw the battle wage within the whipped girl's mind. Slowly she got to her feet and stood before the girl who had held the whip. As though forcing some intractable object into conformity she raised that part of herself to be prisoned.
"Please lock the handcuffs on my wrists." Her face was a mask of misery.
She visibly quivered under the bite of the steel. She had relinquished her small freedom. She could still resist, but uselessly. She looked piteously and questioningly at her youthful mistress. She knew her ordeal was not done.
"Stick your bottom on display in any pose you wish. Then ask me politely to cane it." Reba was enjoying her power.
Dorinda cringed in sympathy. To ask for that you want least is a terrible thing for a girl to do. She invites not only pain, but shame.
Hulda Cohen was still examining the bands upon her wrists. Her hands were high before her. Her eyes almost mesmerized by that which linked them. The fresh demand struck her like a blow. For only a few moments did she consider what she must do. Slowly, hating every motion, she bent and grasped her ankles with her captive hands.
"Please cane my bottom." Each word was laved with tears and hatred .
"After each stroke you will say: thank you."
"I will say thank you." A dull monotone.
It was beautiful. It was pure artistry. It was cruel. Reba was a mistress of her art.
Dorinda wondered where the girl had picked up her skill and her grace. To watch her deliver each stroke was a study in flowing motion, a delight. Hulda suffered and delivered her thanks. But her writhings and sounds of distress intensified with each blow so that the end was inevitable. She fell writhing and crying to the floor. "I can't ... I can't! It's no good...." She crawled to Hakim's feet. "Please kill me."
She asked flatly. "I cannot do these things you demand."
He pushed her sideways with his foot as one does a dog.
Reba grasped the hair of the bent head and dragged it's owner back to the centre of the floor. She was offered brandy which she drank avidly.
"Stay there."
When Reba returned she led by the hand a teen-age youth. He was clearly the village idiot. A huge beaming vacant smile. Dorinda guessed he had played this part before.
His roving gaze settled upon the naked girl who would find her deepest shame in servicing him. He stood gawping.
"You know what to do, bitch."
Hulda knew. In a wild despair she buried her face in her shackled hands. Her head shook negatively, "No ... No ... Oh, no!"
The whip played upon her already striated nakedness.
Reba cared not where she struck, but applied her aim to whatever part of the naked body and legs it's agonized squirmings presented. The half-wit watched the proceedings with satisfaction. To him it may have been a familiar prelude. His chin became moistened with saliva. He knew himself an object to which victory was assured.
When Hulda had salved her honour with the whip, she thrust out her fettered hands in surrender. Reba immediately stepped away and joined the audience.
The shamed girl looked at no one. But immured herself and her vision in the task before her eyes. Disdainfully she pulled at the nondescript garment and dragged into sight the rigid thing that was to be the instrument of her abasement. The idiot grunted and grinned at all present as though inviting them to share his good fortune. Hulda Cohen took the ugly thing within her mouth.
She did what she had to do with great competence, even coping adequately with the Grand Finale. Expelling the now clean penis from her lips, she looked at Reba.
But the creature she had pleasured was engrossed with her. His idiot hands fondled her breasts, played with her hair and traced the contours of her face as though to familiarize himself with the source of such ecstasy as she had given him.
Reba smiled knowingly at a scene well played. "Again."
She instructed.
Perhaps it was no more than Hulda had expected. She took a quick glance at the whip, then resignedly resumed her humiliation. Her subject gasped his joy and clapped his hands.
When he was, at last, led away. Hulda Cohen remained kneeling, her eyes focused on the rug before her. She was a girl to whom too much had happened. She was numb with despair. If hope had germinated in her mind it was soon shattered.
"You will stand with your legs spread very wide. You will clasp you hands at the back of your neck. You will stand thus while I whip your cunt." Reba directed pleasantly.
The kneeling girl got stiffly to her feet. Her eyes mirrored her disbelief at what she had heard. In mute appeal she sought the faces of Hakim and the girl whose function was still, to her, an enigma. In Dorinda's she saw infinite sympathy. In Hakim's only implacability and satisfaction with Reba's competence. She shook herself as though dazed. Then obeyed her instructions.
Again the eroticism was overwhelming. The pose itself provocative enough. But the handcuffs and the marks of the whip and the cane endowed the exposed nudity with a quality deserving of immortality on canvas. After a lingering look at those who held her in their power, the victim lifted her gaze above their heads and waited.
Dorinda need not have wondered aghast at how female flesh could be expected to stand for further slashing. Reba had the matter well in hand. The curving strokes with the full force of an arm were set aside. The arc of a downward cut was discarded for more subtle employment of the thong. Standing at the requisite distance from her target Hakim's servant brought the leather flickering up from the floor to bite with it's tip and snap in small licks at the open sex and loins.
Hulda had courage. She winced, she cringed, she twisted her body. But she held her pose. Shaming and hurtful as the new infliction was, it was probably less awful than her expectation. It was also a test of Reba's skill and accuracy. They stood the test.
Before long she gave another command. "Turn with your back to us. Same pose."
The victim obeyed. Dorinda shrank in her own knowledge of what would come. Now the last sought out the topmost crevice of the 'V' and spent itself within. Hulda yelped and cried. But, once again, endured.
"Do what you like. Stand or hold yourself in whatever way you please. I shall whip you as I choose."
In it's way, the cruelest of all. Now there was decision.
Now each move would invoke the fear of revealing an unsuspected vulnerability.
Each movement would enhance shame. A cat and mouse which ended before the General's chair: a weeping crouched girl across whose bent back the lashes still fell in rhythmic cadence.
"Please ... Kill me. I do not want to live." Without theater. A cry in truth from the heart.
"You will live a very long time, my dear." Said General Hakim.
That night it was Hulda Cohen who slept in Dorinda's cell.
Corporal Kahdin was apologetic. No handcuffs. They were too much of the West.
Today was of the East. The saboteur maiden was to he executed without comfort.
She must be bound with rope, as painfully as possible. Dorinda shrugged. "I'm all yours." She said playfully. "Do what you please with me. I'm paid for."
Once more the cage. The corporal explained that custom decreed her being dragged through the streets at the end of a rope. But this he would not countenance. It was doubtful that she would arrive alive. The bridge had been a valued asset. She had destroyed it. Angry merchants whose produce had not arrived on schedule might vent their National spleen ... Dorinda herself was thankful for the cage.
But before she had been placed therein the corporal had completed a task not to his liking. It was not to Dorinda's liking either. She suspected she would like it less and less. Her hands had been tightly tied with cord, palm to palm. Her elbows had been joined by two severe strands that cut into her flesh like living coals. A strap was beyond bearing. These two bitter circlets were pure Hell. Her eyes had pleaded. She had twisted her shoulders helplessly. She had asked him, quietly and without hysteria, to lighten the bonds that she must bear. He had kissed her nipple gently and told her that she must suffer. The people must see her suffer. It was expected. Sometimes a girl was whipped, or had a hand cut off before she was killed. The bands about her elbows were merciful. She must be content.
She was not content. But she did what she must do. It was frightening to realize that this was real. She might be an unrecognized proxy. But to all intents and purposes she was going to her death. It was impossible not to feel, here and there for brief moments, that she was indeed Hulda Cohen going to pay with her life for a single bomb....
Once more the shaming dog collar and chain. How the crowd howled! She hated them, all of them, and their turgid passions. There was not a man among them who would not have given half of all he owned for the right to bed her. To take her now at this moment when she was near death and plant his seed in a womb in which it could never flower. She knew instinctively that the short span of her life before her final and choking death made her doubly desirable. To fuck a girl, vivid with life, a moment before she died! To what greater height could a man aspire!
The dreary route ran it's course. She could not quell the thrill of fear as she saw the scaffold against the wall of Castle Rahbeal. There a girl was to die! But there was comfort in the enclosure below the trap. Comfort, too, in her memory that there was a lesser door in the wall within the limits of that enclosure. General Hakim had planned well.
The things men did to possess a woman's body! This whole charade was for no other purpose than to enable a man to enjoy the body of a girl that was forfeit to The State. She was desirable to him because she fought. Because she was subject to the ultimate punishment. There was a fire in Hulda that he sought to quench. Thus this whole play of which she was a part. Thus the money that would enrich the house of Rabin. A dancing girl with equally functional vagina and breasts could have been purchased for a fraction of the sum. Thus do men enslave themselves. Dorinda fought her bonds in misery and wished a man might stand where she was now.
The crowd adored her. She was completely nude. That, too, had been apologetically insisted upon. Her nakedness bothered the Corporal more than it did her. They howled and cheered her breasts. Lewd jokes she could not interpret were tossed back and forth about her physical attributes. Fingers made understandable reference to sexual friction in their pantomime. She had only to flutter her wracked shoulders to evoke instant response. If she truly struggled against her pain the multitude went wild. General Hakim's Circus made him a most popular despot. Of such things are Empires built. A girl's pain might found a dynasty.
Poor Corporal Kahdin. He lusted for her. She smiled to soothe the agony in his eyes.
He was a nice boy. But he was not immune. Her jutting breasts, the thin cords bedding themselves in her female flesh had worked their mystery upon him. Like the crowd he was in the grip of a primordial lust against which he had no defense. He could not take her now. Dorinda wondered if there would be an afterwards.
The time came when her life must end. When her neck must pay for a bomb. She left nothing but pride as she was propelled up the scaffold steps. The populace was hysterical. Had Marie Antoinette this same thrill of mingled desolation and majesty as she went to the guillotine!
Farcially she could think of nothing but Westerns as the noose was fitted round her neck. How many times had she seen just this that was being done to her now. The massive roll of cord that was supposed to break her neck. The innocent noose of rope that would choke her until she died with staring eyes and gaping mouth. An unknown man fitted these things upon her. But it was the hand of Corporal Kahdin that lifted the rope before her eyes so that she might take heart in the obviously severed strands held together by the frailest bond. Dorinda saw it with a great thankfulness, and smiled at him with a gratitude she sincerely wanted to make real....
She was about to die! The rope felt rough upon her neck. The anonymous fingers had drawn it tight enough that she could not be unaware of the thing that would take her life. She was positioned on the trap. Her ankles were tightly tied. What matter the circulation now! In a few moments it would have ended forever. She tried to move her hands, to separate her elbows. She was trussed.
Someone was reading from a paper. A great silence had fallen. Men looked stonily ahead. Women looked avid or ashamed. A brusk command was given. The naked girl dropped out of sight.
For Dorinda the fall was a moment of pure terror. She had been bound so tightly that she could influence the thing being done to her not at all. As she felt the surface vanish from beneath her feet every nerve and sinew surged against the cords so cruelly embedded in her limbs. He mouth opened in an involuntary cry of desolation that was choked back as the noose tightened upon her neck. In that flashing fraction of a second she met death.
Within the pit below the scaffold there was quiet efficiency. While the crowd without howled it's jubilation at the unseemly demise of a naked girl, two men worked with feverish haste. Corporal Khadin caught Dorinda as she fell. The jerk of the severed rope was but a momentary hesitation. Her full weight must be cushioned. That he contrived to catch and hold the helpless package in his arms was a tribute to his strength. The package herself was so well bound and so petrified with fear that she could not help. She was all his. He accepted the glorious manna from Heaven with reverence.
The corporal's assistant must have rehearsed his task. The moment the rope parted he seized the dangling end and hung thereon to simulate the tension of a body in the throes of death. By way of giving the audience a bit extra for their money he bounced and twisted so that rope visible to all conveyed it's message of a jerking corpse. Having placed his burden gently on the ground, the corporal attached a bog of sand to the loose end, thus relieving his helper who immediately picked up one end of the trussed girl, the corporal taking the other they deposited her in a coffin-like box and carried her through the small door to the interior of the Fort. The execution was done.
"Congratulations, my dear. You have come through your ordeal nobly."
General Hakim raised his glass. Reba held a similar potion to Dorinda's lips. Both drank gratefully.
The cord had gone from her ankles, but Dorinda's shoulders were still painfully wracked by her joined elbows, the cords of which imposed a nagging agony.
"Could I be untied, please, General?"
"Alas no, my dear, you are far too beautiful as you are."
The general said cordially. "You must forgive a wretched man this last glimpse of paradise."
"Couldn't you tie Miss Cohen up instead?" Dorinda twinkled at him. She was riding high on a wave of elation at being alive.
Hakim shook his head sorrowfully. "The poor child does not possess your joie de vivre, your panache. I fear her only asset at the moment is a small death she dies each time I possess her." He sighed gently. "I fear her only love is a carton of dynamite."
They drank again. Dorinda gave up caring about the pain of her cords. Whatever the General might be he was a charming host.
"You return now to our excellent Rabin. I would send you back with gifts. But he would take them from you. You are a slave and may own nothing. A pity."
Placing a hand on her shoulder be bent and kissed her forehead. "I am sorry that we part." He said somberly. "But you will now be in the hands of my loyal corporal.
Kahdin is a good man. On your journey home be kind to him."
* * *
Watch for Part Two of Dorinda so you can follow her into her Arabian slavery and her whip wealed search for the Isle of her captivity and the man who owns her heart.
Be with her as she is sold, punished, bound and loved.
