Erdislune slept. The soft warm Irish air from off the Western Sea bathed the ancient place in benevolence. It had slept thus for a thousand years, opening a sleepy eye from time to watch the brutal frailties of men. The pickets Costigan had posted lay with their rifles pointed at an enemy that was not there. They, too, were drowsy and inclined to shut an eye from time to time. Each, in his own way, believed they kept watch for ghosts. An enemy hovered, but they had never seen it. They never would.
Costigan stood at the window of the room he had made his own. He was angry with his vigil. But he would see her for a brief space as she made her shameful way to George with his shameful message. He was irritated with the girl and with himself. He wished now that he might recall her. But it was too late. An order is an order. Generals do not rescind them. The trouble, of course, lay with Erdislune itself. How perfect it was! Yet it harbored a malignancy that he must excise. The possibility that the threat might not be human was an Irish whimsy he refused to countenance. Pensively he watched the slight figure of the girl as she passed upon his errand. When she passed from sight he shook himself as though to dissolve the ghosts his men believed in. But in actuality to thrust aside a dream. What would a guerrilla do with a wife! Even as a camp follower or captive she would not be safe. He was the leader, but men are men. When death is close a woman belongs to who can take her. Gloomily he returned to his desk.
Clare wondered why she was not angry. Was it sorrow for the man on whose errand she obediently set her steps. In spite of his ruthlessness and the brutalities of some of his men, there hung about him an aura of sadness that was as Irish as the day itself. He was a man who knew his destiny, and this is a terrible knowledge! If his men knew theirs, they gave small evidence of it. They lived each moment and each day without introspection.
At times like this Clare always considered escape. Being chained always left open that small door. Because her ankles were chained, and because handcuffs were on her wrists, no one would consider her a risk. On her present task she could not hurry. The links between her feet made a pleasant clinking accompaniment to her measured steps. But perhaps this was the time! No one would miss her for thirty minutes. How far could a chained girl walk in half an hour! And what would they do to her when they caught her! It would be something horrible. They were on edge. An escapee would not be popular. Escape was a tantalizing temptation. That was all.
Clare considered that which was about to happen to her. She should be in screaming hysterics. But she had grown a protective armor of Irish humor. Since Erdislune had been taken, one either laughed or wept. She had an intuitive conviction that with these strange moody men it was safer to laugh and to make them laugh too. Not easy for a girl in pain. But she would try.
She clinked her way toward her punishment.
George was pleased to see her. He was working on the jeep. She spared him nothing. "Mr. Costigan requests you give me six strokes with the came." She put as much comradely warmth into the words as her cringing skin would allow.
George was electrified. So were his two colleagues who had been watching his efforts. For a moment Clare enjoyed a sense of drama.
"Ohhh, Miss. It's making fun of me, you are."
"No, George. I think it's an order. You have to cane my bottom. You know, " mischief got the best of her, "I bend over and touch my toes and you hit it."
George sought moral support by scratching his hair. "That'll hurt somethin' awful, Miss." He offered a profound revelation.
"Yes, won't it," Clare agreed brightly.
George was torn. Belatedly he blushed. "Mean you'd really let me, Miss... your bottom an' all...?"
"My bottom and all, George. Aren't you lucky! I think the term is 'six of the best'."
Inspiration dawned. "I don't have a cane, Miss."
"I know where's a cane!" One of George's companions disappeared with alacrity.
"Clever bastard, ain't 'e." George was miffed. "Ain't never done it before, Miss."
"You don't do it before. You do it behind." His colleague guffawed, then added, "I'll cane her arse if you don't want to."
"It's George's responsibility," Clare said primly.
George accepted the cane dubiously. But visible evidence of concupiscence had appeared. He eyed Clare's nether equipment with heightened, almost professional, interest. "Real hard, Miss?"
"Of course, darling," Clare gushed. "Look, I'll bend over nicely for you. See! There's a wonderful target. You can't miss." She suited action to the words, and presented those present with what was probably the most beautiful and barest derriere they had ever beheld. Events of the past days had worn shame and humiliation threadbare. Oddly enough, Clare was aware of thankfulness that they were gone. They were excess baggage.
George's nature was simple and direct. "I'll have to fuck you afterwards... You won't mind, Miss?"
"Get on with the job, George," Clare requested sweetly.
It was harder and hurt more than expected. She yelped and straightened up, massaging her rump.
"See, I told yer. Knew yer wouldn't like it."
"You did very well, George." She managed to keep the hurt out of her voice. Smiling archly, she temporized. "By all means, make it a little lighter."
"Oh, I couldn't do that, Miss! You said yourself... " He added with naive honesty: " 'Sides I like it."
Sighing but resigned, the naked girl exposed herself once more before the three men. The cane sliced her harder than before.
Clare had made up her mind to avail herself of whatever latitude George would tolerate. But, even if she had made a determined effort to remain quiet and still it is doubtful that she could have done so. Her cry of pain and the rueful rubbing of the wound gained a respite and actually seemed to help. The twins would never have allowed her to behave so. But George was easy... She turned apologetic eyes to the three rapt male faces.
"Let's have a go, George. Me and Len both got a hard-on too." It was a voice from the audience.
"No jolly fear!" George stood up for his rights. "Mr. Costigan sent her to me, 'e did."
"Oh, what a shame I'm only to have six," Clare said sweetly. She bent forward again before the argument could get heated.
She took her six as conversationally as she could. It was easy. The three men were as anxious to prolong her caning as she was to get the breathers. George hit hard every time. The pain was intense. But Clare felt that, with the intermissions, she managed to carry off her whipping with some aplomb. Once again she felt the detachment of being the plaything of a force carrying her she knew not where. But she did know that she wanted to go where she must with a smile or a jest wherever it was possible. "Thank you, George," she said brightly when she had finished rubbing for the last time.
George wasted neither words nor time. Taking a rug from the jeep he spread it on the floor. Then looked at the naked girl he had just caned. Clare smiled back at him. Their eyes locked. Clare shrugged and, accepting the inevitable, did what she was forced to do, sometimes several times a day, and arranged her body for his pleasure. When he had grunted his way to a sweaty conclusion she was possessed by the other two in turn. She managed to smile at each as though they were the only one. But her bottom hurt.
"At attention. Chest out. Sir!" She had managed a quick toilette on the way back.
"Turn round and let me look."
Clare obeyed, not knowing whether Costigan was methodical or Qarnal. Her striped bottom had had a profound effect on the three males she had left behind.
"Did a damn fine job!" He looked at her quizzically. "Do anything else?"
"Three of them did something else, sir." She turned and faced him.
He nodded somberly. "I told you. Fair shares."
"They wished to share my caning, sir."
He eyed her shrewdly. "Anything to tell me?"
She shook her head. "There's nothing to tell, sir."
"In "that case," he said quietly, "go back down and tell the other two chaps to give you six apiece. Wouldn't want 'em to feel cheated, would we!"
Tears sprung to her eyes. He saw them but did not relent. "Please, sir. If I must be caned again I wish you'd do it."
"Why?"
She was not sure she knew. She could not answer. But dabbed at her tears with her chained hands. He sat quiet, expressionless. Chagrined, she wheeled quickly and went to seek her punishment.
They were overjoyed. Clare did not know whether to feel flattered or fearful. In spite of the severity of what she must now endure, and in spite of the tears that still dewed her cheeks, her mood was still high. She knew it would betray her: or she it. But she would play it to the end. She smiled at the two startled oafs lovingly and asked demurely: "Please, darlings, will each of you cane my bottom six times the way George did. With Mr. Costigan's compliments... "
"The way you said that you give me another hard-on," George accused.
"I'm flattered. What about you two?"
They shuffled. Clare loved the sense of power, brief though it might be. "Will you require servicing afterwards?" she inquired outrageously.
"What's servicing?" Bill was groping.
"She means fuck, you silly arse," Len reproved. "That's right, ain't it, Miss?"
"You're sweet," Clare cooed wickedly. "Would you like to unchain me?"
"Ain't got the key, Miss."
"If you could get it I could be so much nicer to you."
"This un's kissed the blarney, for sure," Bill declared. "But nix on the key. Costigan 'ud flay us. You do better in handcuffs than most girls do completely free."
It was a gratuitous compliment. In spite of incongruity, Clare felt flattered. "Thank you, kind sir. Now, how would you two like to cane me? One at a time? Or, if one of you is left-handed you could stand on each side and lay into me alternately?"
They looked at her aghast. She knew herself a phenomenon and was glad. She would suffer now and in days to come. But she would sing as she writhed. Make them wonder. Keep Costigan as off balance as he tried to keep her. Men had taken her. She could never deceive Costigan. But his cohorts were another matter. She would extract what joy she could from them as they used her body.
"Think we got to stay just on yer bottom, Miss?" Len inquired.
Clare knew it her least vulnerable spot. "I'm afraid so, darling. Where would you like to cane me?"
"How 'bout them tits?"
She curled up inside. Men! Always at a girl's nipples or her vagina! Animals!
"How sweet of you to think of them, love." Her look of ardent admiration almost withered him where he stood. "But they do mark so. Mr. Costigan wouldn't like it. Would you like me to bend over?" Without waiting for an answer she took up position.
"Bloody remarkable, ain't she?" Bill ejaculated.
"Fair caution, if yer ask me," Len agreed, and struck her naked cheeks with savage delight.
Clare managed to hold still. Perhaps George's infliction had blunted shock. "You next, Bill," she invited amiably.
Bill's thwack across her taut seat brought her upright, rubbing furiously. She dared not think of the remaining ten. She could not take them rapidly unless tied. She did not want to be tied. Repartee was her only salvation.
"You both whip a girl so well. I'm sure you've had practice?"
"How about a few on your cunt?" Len wheedled.
She pretended to consider. The ten strokes might be difficult at this rate. "A girl's cunt isn't usually caned when it's going to be used," she pointed out reasonably. "Now do be good boys and give me two nice strokes on my bottom."
Clare absorbed the brutal pain stoically. Eight to go.
"Heard tell some girls shave their cunts?" Len said. He was evidently determined to exploit a rare occasion.
"Quite a lot do," Clare told him rationally. "Just a matter of taste. I did it once. But it's a nuisance. You have to keep shaving it or it looks sort of silly." She giggled. "The bristles prick the pricks. So I let mine grow again."
Len shuffled his feet. Amazing how shy a murderer could be! "I say, Miss, would you mind if I just pulled a few? Plucking, they call it. Spelt with a 'P', of course," he added with a flourish of wit.
The naked girl sighed inwardly. The stronger sex! Good heavens! Well, if they were doing that, at least they weren't hurting her in other ways. "What a gorgeous idea!" she enthused. "I've never been plucked. I'll watch." She spread her legs as wide as her chain would allow, and arched her pudendum with its thatch of shining hair into maximum prominence. She bent her head and watched. Fascinated in spite of her irritation.
Len fell to his knees before her in unconscious tribute to the female, the eternal woman, before whom all men are prostrate. His eyes glued, in pure joy, upon the dark hair from which he had once emerged. Clare watched, amused and only faintly apprehensive, as his fingers approached her most secret place...
It hurt more than she supposed. He deliberately chose a single hair and pulled it out slowly to give her the maximum suspense and pain. It was quite absurd that so small an act should so discomfort a girl. But her cunt hairs were well anchored and relinquished their roots with much protest to the nerves. She gasped, but smiled reassuringly when he looked up at her anxiously. "You should keep them," she told him tenderly. "When you are old you can take them out and remember me."
She knew he worshiped her. She owned him. If only he held the key to her chains! She watched as his fingers selected another of the longest members of her bush. She held her breath as he pulled. Savoring with him all the ecstasy of the simple act. For her, only a small absurd pain. Yet she could share with him the glory he found in her female hair. Watching, she became the eternal feminine. Mother to all the pathetic race of men! "I think you should cane me again," she said gently.
They caned her naked bottom. Savagely as men must always ravage female flesh. Four strokes she took before standing again so that her hands might give solace. She was cut in two. She longed for tears. But only four more to go. She turned her attention to her slaves. "I think you should all do a little plucking," she invited provocatively. "I want you all to keep them always." She thrust out her furry mound for their adoration.
Detached, she watched as they satiated a strange need. George had joined the collectors. It was a good thing her hair was abundant, she reflected wryly. Stab after stab of pain told her of their assiduous pursuit of some quintessence of femininity beyond her ken. Men lived by dreams. If cunt hairs-her cunt hairs-gave them solace in their eternal quest she would not deny. Again she felt the strange pride in being stronger than they. "I think you should cane me again," she told them. It was as though she had told a child to wash some dishes.
It was as though, in their sexual excitation, they must always strike her harder and harder. Their canes cut into her and fell away from her punished flesh as though reluctant to sever a bond. She moaned and moaned again. Knowing her audience, she cast aside inhibitions. They loved her moans and her pain compelled motions. They loved to watch her fingers seek her wounds. So why deny herself these comforts. They were nature's salve. Eroticism was her only weapon. The entrancement of these three men spelled its potency. Perhaps if she used it enough she might one day persuade one of these bemused louts to loose her chains. Once free of shackles she could run...
"You sure do know how to hit a girl," she breathed admiringly. "That cane really bit into me. Golly, it hurt!" She rubbed her seat as she smiled at them.
"Corker what you can do with a girl, ain't it!" George sounded intrigued by the versatility of female flesh.
"Oh, you poor darling! Did you think we were only good to fuck!" Clare purred lovingly. "There's all sorts of deliciously painful things you can make us scream with."
"You're having me on, Miss."
"She ain't, y'know, George," Bill was patronizing. "You just ain't been around."
"Not even around the other side, I'll bet," Len contributed with deep meaning and a snicker.
Bill laughed knowingly. Clare cringed inwardly. George looked sideways, suddenly glimpsing fresh horizons. "You mean, you really can...?"
"Poor bastard's just discovered the Northwest Passage," Bill guffawed.
George was intrigued. But he had been well brought up. "They can't help being rude, Miss. Don't pay no attention." He paused and scratched his hair, groping: "I say, though! Would you mind?"
"Would I mind what?"
George was perspiring. "You know... ! I mean-ter-say, not in the usual place, like."
"Oh, you want to use my mouth, darling?" Make him sweat!
George's explorations into the realms of sex were broadening too rapidly. He was in much the position of a thief who, having placed his hand upon the Cullinan diamond, finds beside it, also, the Koh-I-noor. An unknown infinity of riches...
"Well, hadn't really thought o' that, Miss." It was obvious that he was now thinking about it furiously.
"My hand perhaps. A girl can do an awful lot with her hand." She made a small moue of disparagement. "Even if it is chained." Clare was reveling in George's agony.
"He wants to fuck you up the arse, Miss," Len explained helpfully.
"He's really sweet, isn't he!" Her audience could not but understand her awed discovery of hidden virtue. She beamed impartially. "But it's time I was caned again. You hadn't forgotten...?"
They had not forgotten! Clare had guessed these last two would be bad. But they were delivered with such impact that she was driven forward to her knees. The pain went deep, all-encompassing, sheathing her buttocks and loins in a sickening creeping agony.
Clare stayed kneeling where the final stroke had driven her. She buried her face in her hands and wept. No one had previously struck her with such brutality. The pain went beyond the point where she wished to explore it with her fingers. She wanted only to be left alone to cope with it and to dry her tears when they were done.
"She's cryin'," George marveled at an extraordinary phenomenon.
"Watchin' that 'ull give yer a hard-on too," Bill observed clinically.
"Lovely bit o' stuff, ain't she!" Len's contribution was pure worship.
Reverently the three men stood and watched a naked girl kneeling, bowed, sobbing into the sanctuary of her hands. Her glowing bottom with its scarlet and purple stripes a testimonial to their prowess with the cane. Perhaps they guessed, within their limited comprehensions, that what they beheld was probably the most beautifully touching thing they would ever see.
They made no blundering gestures of chivalry. After all, she was a prisoner of war! Clare was grateful. When she was done with tears and sobbing breath she eyed them dubiously over her chained hands. She had had enough. It was obvious they had not.
"I got this lovely hard... " George's statement might have come from Sir Francis Drake who, having refitted the Golden Hind, was in need of an uncharted ocean to explore.
"Couple more over here," Bill said encouragingly.
She quailed. Had Costigan known he was sending her to this! "It's time I reported back to the office," she ventured.
"Won't take us long, Miss," Len offered generously. "It's only old George wants it up the back."
A General faced with defeat cuts losses. Manfully, Clare returned on stage.
"Oh George, you don't really, do you?" Her voice was dulcet.
"Sure do, Miss. Bad!" He was eagerly resigned to degeneracy.
Clare sighed. Had it not been for the rampant bulges beneath three pairs of trousers she might have temporized further. But she did not wish to be manhandled. Getting to her feet she gave her would-be sodomizer a winning smile, spread her feet as wide as her chain would allow, and bent forward to touch the floor.
George watched these maneuvers with surprise. "I already caned your arse," he pointed out plaintively. "I want something else now."
"Isn't this the approved position?" For some reason she did not wish them to know it was her first time too. She flushed at the possibility of being positioned all wrong.
"Want us to guide it in for you," Bill suggested helpfully.
Len had found what looked like vaseline on the work bench. By way of helping a comrade through a difficult task he smeared a dab of the stuff over the naked girl's anus and rubbed it around. When he inserted a well-greased finger where she had no wish to have it, Clare longed to slap his face and run. But what was the use! She endured. If other girls had survived, she would.
She knew a familiar guilt that she longed to stand to one side and watch. It was absurd, ludicrous, impossible. But it was happening. A three-man operation with one caned girl obscenely spread. Len had anointed George's weapon with more grease. Bill was kneeling supporting her shoulders in anticipation of forward momentum. The star performer moved forward into battle. Clare gritted her teeth and clutched determinedly at her ankles...
* * *
Standing with her back to his desk, Clare hoped Costigan was shamed by her bottom. She knew it was livid and ridged. She had been cruelly caned.
"Basted you well, didn't they," was his only comment. "What took so long? Damn near sent a search party."
Clare strove to be unemotional. "I have been caned eighteen times on my bare skin," she reported evenly. "Endured compulsory copulation five times, and been sodomized once." She looked him in the eye. "Will there be anything more... Sir?"
Costigan leaned back in his chair surveying the naked girl who stood stiffly to attention before him, her breasts pointedly and arrogantly out-thrust, her handcuffed wrists held tight against her tummy. He suspected she was not far from tears.
"Any information yet?" His voice was gruff. "There never was any... Sir."
He nodded. There was admiration in his glance. "Do you want me to send you down to them again?"
"No sir." She was trembling. "I don't think I could stand another round."
"Well then?"
Clare's voice was unsteady. It held pleading. "If you want me tortured more, sir, couldn't you take me to the... the room? You must have found it by now. It's got all the horrible things to use. But it's private... "
Costigan laughed in genuine amusement. "Oh, sit down, Clare. You can stop sticking your tits out at me, and you can stop calling me sir. For the time being, anyway." He poured two generous drinks and handed her one. "Alright. So you don't know anything."
Her chained hands lifted the glass. She gulped gratefully. "Why do you send me to others to be hurt?"
"I told you." His face was enigmatic.
"You are not in love with me."
He made a gesture of frustration. "What do you call this thing between a man and a woman? You give it a name."
"George or Bill or Len could give it a name."
"You know it's not that!" His voice was impatient.
Clare knew a sudden wave of sympathy for this man. He was lonely. He was travelling a desolate road. On impulse she told him of the rapist and the arrow that killed him. It would save speculation, and show she wanted to be reasonable.
He listened quietly without surprise. "It makes sense," he nodded. "Why didn't you tell me before?"
She tried to spread her chained hands, but was foiled. "I'm not sure I know. We were enemies. When you gave me the drink you were kind."
He poured another. "Was I kind to send you down there twice to get... what you got?"
"It wasn't really you who did those things to me... " She stumbled with an uncertain premise. "I expect some of them were my own fault." She smiled ruefully. "I'm afraid I provoked them. I thought I was being amusing, but to them it was erotic."
"Everything's erotic to men away from females," Costigan said amusedly. "We're a silly lot of bastards." He gave her one of his shrewd appraisals. "If I set you free about this place and relieved you of all chains and such like you'd have the whole ruddy lot demoralized in a week."
"Is that a compliment?"
"Actually, yes. You affect me powerfully. So I can imagine what you do to the rest of the bunch." He considered something in his memory. "Y'know, there's an interesting psychological query popped to mind: If I hadn't had you... well, punished, you'd never have told me about that man of mine getting killed."
"Does it matter?"
"Sort of." He made a gesture of helplessness and chuckled. "It's absurd. I don't mind in the least seeing you whipped for amusement. But I feel an absolute bastard for sending you downstairs this afternoon. But what you have just done in telling me justifies the means."
"You want to rationalize the virtue of torture. Well, I suppose you've done it. Congratulations! My bottom hurts in a good cause."
"You're quite something." He said it as though whatever she might be it made him proud.
"I suppose you are whipping the other girls regularly? Have any luck with information?" Clare asked demurely.
"You can forget the other girls," Costigan told her decisively. "I'll break you of being a lesbian even if I have to order you whipped fore and aft daily."
"There you go again!" Clare complained. "Order me whipped! Why the hell can't you whip me yourself?"
Instantly she knew she'd done it once too often. Clare quailed.
"You actually want me to, don't you, love?" he asked seriously.
Oh, why must she be chained! She longed to beat her fists on the desk, or better still on him! Or to stamp her feet in an expenditure of angry energy releasing the turgid emotions she was suddenly afraid to face. She had trapped herself unwittingly by a strange passion she had glimpsed too late. Tavie and Alethea had built better than they knew.
"Yes."
The small lonely word spoke volumes. Costigan nodded understandingly. "Go down and get the cane from the boys and bring it back here."
Clare made the now familiar journey in a daze of shame, guilt, happiness, and a terrible excitement. Her third appearance created a sensation. Her errand provoked ribaldry. Awkwardly holding the cane with which she was to be whipped, she escaped with flaming cheeks.
He had poured two more big drinks. They sat and sipped in a strange rapport, the cane potent between them on the desk.
"This is really your idea, love."
"Are you sure?" Clare was not sure herself. "If it is my idea, my bottom is going to be very angry with me."
"Look, sweetheart, enough's enough. That nice little behind of yours doesn't need anymore today. I'm not going to cane all those welts you have already."
She pouted. "You would if I held a secret. You'd send me right back down without a qualm."
"I suppose I would," he admitted meditatively. "Rummy business. Anyway, your nice little derriere is quite safe."
"I have other nice places, sir," she said.
"I won't use a cane on 'em," he stated firmly.
"My bottom is still in one piece, y'know," she tantalized.
"You are a wanton hussy." He capitulated, sharing a smile they both understood. "How many do you want?"
"Six of the best. Sort of de rigueur, aren't they!"
He poured more drinks. "Here's to a little girl who's either very brave or very wicked."
"I'm both," said Clare with certainty. And raised her glass.
Each, in their own way, approached the punishment Clare had provoked. He with a determination not to relent. But to make her sorry for her mischievous baiting. He judged correctly her wantonness to be bequeathed by the two girls who were still a mystery to him.
Clare, for her part, was only concerned with acquitting herself well in his eyes. She knew she was pandering to a hot erotic memory of Tavie and Alethea. An eroticism unsatisfied by such as George or Len or Bill. But Costigan was something different. She knew he held for her, and she for him, something of that magic quality impossible to define. There was a current between them. Perhaps she had made him whip her to see if the current could be dissolved by pain.
"How would you like me?" she asked sweetly. He told her. She obeyed.
It was pure hell! But a beautiful golden erotic hell. He planted his six upon her in ways and places the men below had not known. He whipped her with subtlety. They had been brutal. He was clever and very wise. She marveled. Only in the last swishing careless stroke did he cross the wounds inflicted by his men. She was consumed in a flaming holocaust of sensual joy. She had not moved or screamed.
"It's all over, love."
Clare was still bent, drifting in the multicolored world of pure sensation. Gently he guided her to the chair, for which he had found a cushion.
"Satisfied?"
She nodded thankfully. She had needed him as some sort of cathartic. She would never be cured, for she did not wish to be. But, for the moment, she was back in his world.
"Thank you," she said simply.
"Hurt?"
"Terribly. I don't mind."
"Habit-forming?"
Clare nodded. "Yes. I didn't know till now."
They sat with their thoughts for a few moments. Then Costigan said briskly: "Now that little matter has been dealt with. I want to talk about those two girls."
"What about them?" Clare did not wish to talk to him about the twins. "They have killed two of my men."
She could not share his concern for men who would have used her ill. "Neither of us can be sure it was the girls." She pointed out reasonably. "No one saw who shot those arrows."
"Who else shoots arrows!"
"Go away from here," she pleaded. A sudden prescience gripped her. "Give them back their home. I'm afraid... afraid for all of us. This is not like other places. Montrilas is different-"
"Montrilas?"
"It's the old part. I was chained in the big hall there when George found me. It's the original name. Before Erdislune... "
"Witches and warlocks and noises at night," he jibed.
"Go away. Take me with you if you want. Not in chains. I'll go willingly if you'll give them back what belongs to them."
"They murdered two of the men who trust me. They have already been sentenced."
Clare looked at him incredulously.
"To hang." He was deadly intent. "We held court after Rory."
"Leave this place!" she demanded again. "Please! Please. Take me with you."
"Have you considered something, love? Both men were killed because they threatened you. Maybe those two girls with their bows and arrows aren't all that concerned with this old ruin. What they want is you." , "That's easy then. Set me free. If I wander off through the park they'll find me."
"Exactly. That's how we are going to catch them. They want you. You are a perpetual bait. Sooner or later they will fall into a trap trying to get at you."
"I'll never help you hurt them." She was angry with him for spoiling a mood, and flashed angrily. "I'd escape if I could, and go to them."
He laughed without rancor. "Why do you think we keep you chained!"
She wished he was different. How absurd men were with their silly notions of politics and honor! What incomprehensible compulsions they carried around with them! Forever driven! For he who sat across the desk she could feel at that moment only pity and a great sorrow.
Clare was not returned to the dungeon that night.
But he did not loose her chains.
* * *
How good it felt! How absurd! How very Irish! Clare wanted to sing. The whole adventure was exciting and delightful. It was like release from prison. Actually that was what it was! An illusory freedom, of course. Her left wrist was firmly handcuffed to a ring in the seat of the truck. But her right hand was her own. She could raise or lower the window of the cab, and even stick her head out into the rush of air as the moor sped by beneath their wheels.
"Aren't you afraid I'll call a policeman?" Clare asked happily.
George was an intent driver, but more than willing to spare a glance for the naked girl chained beside him. "Ain't goin' ter be seein' no coppers," he assured her with certainty.
"Well, somebody who sees us is sure to report a naked girl."
"Not likely. Irish mind their own business these days."
"Aren't you embarrassed?"
"What 'ud I be embarrassed about, Miss?"
"Me not having any clothes."
"Yer never do have any, Miss. Boss said you'd be easier to handle naked."
"I'm surprised you didn't put me in the back with the other two chaps?"
"Sorta closed in back there. Mr. Costigan wants you to get a bit o' fresh air. Sort o' nice fer me too. I can see your tits."
Clare could feel her floodtide of mischief rising. George was a delightful foil for nonsense. Especially erotic nonsense.
"Do you like my tits, George?"
"Course I do! Shouldn't talk about 'em like that, Miss."
"Why not?"
She watched George flounder. "Well, Miss... you know. I mean to say... " He had a flash of inspiration: "Your Ma wouldn't like it."
"But, George! They're my tits, not hers."
"Come off it, Miss. You're pullin' me leg." He gave an appreciative sideways glance at the items in question.
"If you ogle them like that I'll hold my hands over them."
"You couldn't cover no more than one of 'em," he guffawed. "You start covering things and I'll fix your other hand too."
"What shocking crimes are we about to commit? Do I watch, or take part?"
"It's that little bitch Nancy O'Malley, Miss. High time too. She's a'goin' ter get it."
"What's the poor girl done?"
"Fucked a British Tommy, that's what she done."
"Couldn't we go to a movie instead."
"We got another job beside Nancy," he said darkly. "That's where you come in."
"Do I stand up for Erin or lay down for the I.R.A.?"
"Shouldn't joke, Miss. It's dead serious."
"Dead seems the operative word most of the time," Clare reminded him. "Why don't you get out of the dreary business?"
George grunted. "You're a thinkin' 'bout them two pore bastards them girls shot with arrers." There was a bitter intensity in his voice. "We'll get them bitches, see! And we'll make 'em wish they'd never been born."
It was always there: the dark undercurrent. One wrong word and you left the sunshine. Clare had little doubt she would see things she did not want to witness. But she strove valiantly to cling to the lighter mood of which her companion was capable so long as it was laced by the erotic. She sought compromise. "What do you do to these girls, George?"
He smiled again. "Bit of a lark really, Miss. Costigan's boys do things right." He grinned reminiscently. "Take 'em to a quiet spot, then let 'em give us the high-and-mighty bit. You know, threats and so on. What their old man's going ter do ter us... Sometimes we strip 'em. Sometimes we make 'em take their clothes off themselves. They don't like that! But you ought ter see 'em when they catch sight of the rope or the handcuffs or whatever we use. That's when they get the wind up. You're the only girl I ever see what don't mind a bit o' chain or cord: real corker you are, Miss! Then sometimes we fuck 'em before we tie 'em. Or maybe we tie 'em first. When we've screwed 'em real good we fix 'em so they can't move and shave 'em bald. We got clippers we can hook to the battery: leaves 'em bare as a billiard ball. You ought ter hear the fuss they make about that...!"
"I suppose I will, won't I?" Clare asked without enthusiasm.
"Damn right! Then it's the tar and feathers. We got the whole kit in the back. These panel jobs are the real thing for our kind of work."
"Work?" Clare found it hard not to be caustic.
"Yes, work!" he retorted belligerently. "We'll get the British out of Ireland inside two years."
"I'm British. Why don't you tar and feather me?"
George had a literal mind. "Well, yer see, Miss, if you fuck a Tommy it's O.K. Sort of like two cats knocking off a chunk. But if a good Irish girl lets a Tommy shove his dink into her it's all wrong. Like a cat and a dog having a go... See what I mean."
She saw what he meant. Drop it!
"I can hardly wait," she breathed ecstatically.
'I'll fix yer with the handcuffs so you'll get a good look," George promised chivalrously.
"Couldn't you just let me loose?" It was worth a try.
He looked at her reproachfully.
"Darling George!" Clare laid in on thick. "Please! Pretty please... ? No handcuffs. Let me move around so I can really see... right up close." She looked at him adoringly.
"You're lardin' me up, Miss. Think I don't know." He shifted uncomfortably. "You give me a hard-on too. Serve yer right if I tied yer up real tight so it hurts and dumped yer in the back."
"Or we could copulate on the roadside."
"Shouldn't use dirty words like that, Miss."
"Or you could pull over to the roadside and whip me for thirty minutes. I'm sure you brought a cane?"
"You bet! Goin' ter slice young Nancy's arse." He gave her a quick new look. "That right, Miss, you like gettin' yer backside caned?"
"Don't be absurd!"
"I'll do it for yer any time." He oozed magnanimity. "And copulate too, I expect."
"There you go again," said George, miffed. "Always so fucking rude."
* * *
Clare reluctantly recognized the neatness of the operation. Costigan's boys scooped Nancy O'Malley out of her daily pattern with precision expertise. Once within the panel truck the girl was lost. Clare's heart went out to the teenager at that first stricken comprehension. When the first male hands fell upon her Nancy knew!
The 'quiet place' was well chosen. Clare could believe that endless atrocities might be perpetrated in the bit of woodland with impunity. George kept his promise. Her cuff was unlocked from its ring, she was led to a tree, her hand lifted above her head, the metal band clicked tight around a bough she could never bend. She would stand, one wrist locked securely. No hope of escape! How wonderful were handcuffs! she mused bitterly. With them a girl could be tethered here or there, this way or that, with the utmost facility: every home should have a pair.
"See, I told yer. Ringside seat yer got," George said proudly.
It was a strange and terrible tableau. In her fear and foreknowledge the captive stood at bay. They had loosed her. But the three men stood close enough that she could not dive between. The girl was panting. Assessing her plight her features took on the same feral cunning that was on the men. The chained spectator caught a momentary glimpse of why nature ejects more females than males from the womb. The surplus were intended as casualties for men's sport.
"You let me go... see! I won't say nothin'."
No man spoke.
"You mess about wi' me and the army'll get yer, so they will!" Silence.
The trapped eyes went from one to the other. Then saw Clare. "What yer bin doin' ter her?"
Clare longed to tell the child to take no comfort from her abundance of hair and absence of tar. But deemed silence best. The men remained mutely intent.
"Alright then!" The Tommy's sweetheart moved up her heavy artillery. "Fuck me! That's what you bastards want, bad cess ter you."
Silence withered her salvo.
Clare saw their cunning. In desperation the girl would punish herself. She was glad it was not her own delinquent nakedness that stood where Nancy stood. The male faces were ferocious, no pity, not even concupiscence.
"Please just fuck me. Don't do... that... that other." The teenager looked around piteously. "If you'll let me off I'll be real good to you, so I will." Sensing that she had failed to touch them she added a pathetic bonus: "I promise I won't see Cyril no more."
Clare guessed that even had there been hope for clemency the name would have erased it. Anything but Cyril... !
"Strip." The man George called Cully bit the word off curtly.
The child was uncertain. Had they accepted her terms! 'I'll do it if her promise not ter do nothin' else... You know, them awful things... " Her whole being was a question mark.
"You get the lot, girl," Cully assured her brusquely. "Strip."
She leaped. They caught her easily. She fought, viciously and frenziedly. They subdued her with slaps and small blows, taking their time so that it was exhaustion that finally left her crouched on the ground as they resumed position. She was sobbing in an acceptance of defeat.
"Strip."
Meekly, brushing at her tears, she stood and began a task that few girls relish. She was cowed. But it was easy to see that she hated every motion that bared her body for them.
Nancy's outraged pudicity could have been revealed to better advantage. But Clare saw she was quite lovely. She saw, too, the girl was endowed with a magnificent black pubic brush. It brought instant comment.
"Look at that there quiff," George said in awe. "Have ter burn it off with a taper, like. Ain't got no scissors."
His captive started in pure horror. Unsure whether to believe so awful a threat. "What you want me ter do now?" she-inquired without hope.
Clare knew the familiar guilt. Should she close her eyes! She left them open. Watching the men use their captive she wondered sardonically if what she saw was technically rape. Or was the girl's body 'spoils of war' as she had been told her own had been. Or was it pure punishment! The latter seemed most probable. None of the participants showed joy. The supine splayed open nakedness of the child was plowed savagely again and again. Snarling orgasms repeated each other until the victim herself gasped in unsought climax. Everyone seemed glad when Nancy's first tribulation was done.
Did hope flash for an instant in the sufferer's eyes when she saw the cane! A hope that if she was now whipped it would be the end! Perhaps. But still she must plead.
"You ain't goin' ter use that rotten thing on me, are you?"
The question was rhetorical, it merited no answer. "Not on me bare skin... oh please, let me put me panties on."
They flattened her against a slender tree trunk, her pert breasts hugging the bark on either side. A rope was looped round the narrow waist and tugged torturingly tight so that her stomach disappeared and her shoulders and hips bent back as in a bow. Savage knots were used, so that even though she could reach them with her fingers she could not loose the stricture. Even without other bonds it held her helpless. She could kick and wave her arms. But her bottom was positioned perfectly for what it was about to receive. No effort of hers could move it.
"It's breakin' me back," Nancy said with conviction.
"Stops Tommy Atkins a'goin' ter the front," Cully said with relish.
Clare looked at the round little behind sticking out for its punishment and cringed in sympathy. How well she knew the shock of that first lash. Nancy was doing her best to look back over her shoulder, her eyes wide with apprehension. "You ain't goin' ter do nothin' besides this, not that other...?" Thus do the hopeless explore the faintest hope.
The scarlet stripes sprung up on the soft flesh with an almost clinical perfection and metronomic regularity. Clare saw the youthful nudity spring tense, shuddering as the cane cut her in its initial impact. Saw the wide eyes turn imploringly in disbelief that anything could hurt with such cruelty. Heard the moaning cries by which Nancy acknowledged her surrender to pain, her realization that these men could feel no pity for such as she. Watched as the small hands instinctively sought the wounded flesh and, for their trouble, received a full slash across their knuckles that wrung a peal of pure anguish from their owner and sent them to the tortured lips for what solace they might find, thereafter to hug the tree for what strength they might absorb from its unyielding trunk.
The three men took turns. Not from exhaustion, but to share pleasure. Clare could not but sense the carnality of the caned bottom. Stripe on top of stripe, a scarlet and purple grid on a girl's skin, the feminine moans from the female lips. It was all wickedly erotic. Why, oh why, be born a girl when your agony could bestow such delight! In all her life to come, Nancy might never again give such sensory joy to man. Utterly hostile, hating every stroke, her bottom nonetheless bestowed a joy ineffable on those who whipped it. Even Clare felt the traitorous stirring within her loins. The caning of Nancy O'Malley was beautiful!
The girlish legs kicked and bent and shuddered, responding to the cane with frenetic motion. The white shoulders were hugged to the tree as though momentarily expecting themselves to be lashed. The tear-wet face sought succor against the bark, first this side, then that, as though in refuge on a maternal bosom. The hair, so soon to be shorn, hung limp and damp or was tossed wildly from side to side. When the men loosed the cinching rope the punished girl remained clutching her tree as though, sharing her agony, it had become a friend.
Now her arms behind. Tied bitterly tight at wrist and elbow. Once more Clare could share the pain. Then her ankles and her knees. She was made to kneel, wrists and ankles joined. Nancy could not move save to fall sideways. Cully tapped her conical breasts with the cane. "Keep still if you don't want your tits mashed," he promised. She looked up at him in desolation. She would not move. Clare was sure she would not move.
The shaving was as efficient as the rest. Clare was shocked.
George grasped the bound girl's hair and drew her head back as far as it would go. Cully denuded the eyebrows above the staring eyes... But not before the victim had screamed her protest.
"Not them! Oh, not my eyebrows! I'll look a sight... ! Oh please, please, please... I'll do anything, anything at all! Ohhhh...!" By the time her moaning plea was done she had lost one of the silky brows she sought to save.
Cully took much care. He even had two clippers, one coarse, one fine. When he was done not even a bristle remained, scarce even a shadow of lost loveliness.
When the grip in her hair was loosed so that it, too, might join her brows upon the grass she cringed away from the shears that would make her bald, shaking her head in denial. It earned her a stinging cut across her left breast, at which she groaned but moved no more as the clippers sang their busy song and the long hanks of her tresses fell to the ground before her eyes. Soon she was as bald as those mannikins on which a wig is placed. Clare shrunk in horror. Without hair or brows the pretty child had become grotesque.
Next they loosed her ankles and knees, dragged the small of her back across a big stone and pulled her feet, one to each side until she moaned in consternation.
She lay still. Even if she had fought it would have mattered not. She was mastered. Clare guessed the child's elbows would be a scalding fire as she lay on them. Her black bush offered itself for attention. There were a good many yelps as it was dealt with. Cully's fingers lovingly paved the way for his shears, but even so soft folds of female flesh sometimes caught the flashing blades. After all, a prisoner of war cannot expect a cosmetic depilation. Soon her sex was as naked as her head. The watching girl suspected it would impose an even greater shame.
The precision drill continued. Costigan's boys had thought of everything. They freed their captive of all bonds and helped her to her feet. Not from chivalry, but so that she might peer at herself in a mirror, thoughtfully, and with subtle cruelty, provided. She took one appalled look at the caricature of a girl that stared back at her and sobbed into her hands in despair. "You rotten bastards," she ejaculated bitterly. "You rotten bastards...!"
George and Bill each grasped one of the shrinking girl's wrists. Cully administered the huge can of warm tar. They must have heated it before starting out so that it still retained fluidity. With obvious satisfaction he began his task.
They forced her, once more, to her knees. She could not move enough to evade the warm black stream that encircled her neck, spread in small tides across her white back and down to her hips. Then they pulled her shoulders back so that her breasts and belly offered themselves to the viscid muck. No inch of her loveliness escaped. Cully took special care to fill her navel and to well saturate the sex he had so recently shorn.
A canvas was spread. On it the feathers were strewn in profusion. Nancy was laid upon the mess and her wrists relinquished in exchange for two grips upon her ankles which were spread and raised so that her tar-soaked body was held immobile on its bed of feathers. Now Cully tarred the out-flung arms, the wounded bottom cheeks, the thighs, the legs. As a last indignity he poured a blob of the black horror on the bald head.
"You swine... you filthy swine...!" Nancy sobbed. She had ceased to fight.
As a final degradation they laid her on her shoulders, legs spread, cunt rampant. Cully hugged the nearly empty can with one arm, and with the fingers of his other hand opened up the labia of the punished vagina.
"Don't do it. Oh don't... ohhhh, please... not in there...!"
She could have saved her breath. The can tilted. A thin stream of black goo found its way to the quivering quim and into the gaping slit the strong fingers had separated wide. The gaping orifice overflowed before the stream was staunched.
"Nice surprise for Cyril," Cully snickered.
They positioned the tarred nudity to their satisfaction on the canvas, making sure of a proper distribution of feathers. Then they rolled her into a straitjacket which they secured with a couple of loops of cord. With this final degradation Nancy had lost the will to fight. She let them have their way with her without protest. They deposited their neat bundle within the rear of the panel truck.
Once more handcuffed to the ring in the seat, Clare said bitterly: "I suppose you're proud of yourself!"
"'Twas a fine piece o' work, so it was!" George affirmed with conviction. "You've messed up her whole life."
"And why not, Miss!" He was exultant.
Clare sighed. It was so useless! "Would you like to do those things to me?" she asked offhandedly.
George looked at her doubtfully. "Ain't never sure when you're havin' me on, Miss." He considered her query with a flattering concentration. "S'pose I would, Miss. I got a hard-on just thinkin' 'bout it."
"I'm honored."
"Ain't no use bein' sarcastic, Miss. You give me a hard like nothin' I ever knew before." He gave a moment to deep thought. "I'd like to marry you."
It was pathetic and sad. A boy lost in death and sex. Her heart went out to his simplicity. "Thank you, George." Her free right hand reached over and touched his. "That was nice of you." Clare fought down an impulse to ask him to release her cuffed wrist. He might do it. But it was an unfair advantage from which she shrunk. How potently our emotions shape our acts! For a single moment she loved him.
The panel truck stopped in a quiet street on the outskirts of a town. It was now dark. Nancy, or that which had been Nancy, was taken from the rear and carried to a metal lamppost. The sobbing girl was steadied on her feet and the canvas unwrapped. She was an extraordinary sight: grotesque, frightening, absurd: above all pathetic. They had saved her face from defilement. It made a contrast more vivid, more frightening. In moments she had been chained to the massive vertical post. Clare saw that, even in this last infliction, Costigan's boys had forgotten nothing. They used rusty great lengths of ship's chain to fasten her three times tightly round her waist. Each separate. Each with a huge padlock. Whoever tried to loose her would have no easy task. Nancy looked at them in dumb misery as they secured her. She had no plea. It had all happened to her! The time for mercy was past. She would stand, chained tight to the unyielding metal, until chance sent someone to whom she might appeal for rescue. A rescue that must inevitably carry with it an infinity of shame. They drove away and left her there. Clare wondered, nonsensically, if Cyril would take her back.
"Now we got summat real ter do," said George.
It was a nice house in a street of nice houses. The incongruity of a naked girl with wrists handcuffed behind her back, standing on the front step and ringing the bell with chained hands was no more than apposite to the Costigan charisma. How could she be suspect! She was not suspect. She was sure she had been scrutinized before the door was opened. When it swung wide it revealed a handsome woman of perhaps thirty-five. Clare recognized her instantly, her innermost being shrinking from the role she had been forced to play. Forced! Ashamedly she knew she had allowed George and her own instinct for mischief to place her where she stood.
There was neither time nor need for words. She had served her purpose in opening the door. She watched miserably as Corinna Winthrop was bound, gagged and thrust into the ever convenient vehicle. She herself was led back to the cab by one fettered wrist and her handcuff, once more, clicked tight into the ring in the seat. The business of being handcuffed here and there now seemed the most natural thing in the world. She would be doubly naked without the grip of metal round at least one wrist.
"What are you going to do to her, George?"
The driver chuckled. "Don't rightly know, Miss. Mister Costigan, he's got somethin' up his sleeve." He guffawed gleefully. "There'll be a fine old to-do in the mornin' when she ain't there."
"I suppose the usual whips and things...?"
George gave the matter careful thought. "I'd sure like to whip her arse," he admitted reflectively. "Proper bitch, she is. All that guff she writes and spouts on platforms. Needs a good stiff prick to teach her she's a woman."
"You'll be a big help to her then."
He gave his prisoner a sideways glance. "I never know when you're kiddin'," he admitted. "But, sure, I'd like to ram it into her, hard! All her pretty words proving we are a lot o' bastards. She thinks her shit don't stink. She'll know different when a whip curls round her backside."
"Why didn't you treat her the same as Nancy?"
"Don't know, Miss. But seein' who she is, Costigan he'll have somethin' special."
Clare felt quite sure there would indeed be something 'special' for the unfortunate journalist bound in the back. But why pursue misery. It was frightening the way these men could swing from warm humor to cold cruelty. They treated their own worse than they treated the hated English. They lived on hate. It nourished them. But those who lived by the sword...
She knew herself privileged. She knew why, and felt the familiar guilt. She and Costigan shared a strange communion. In her punishments and usage with his men she had deliberately given herself and infused into what she gave and what she received a mischievous eroticism they understood. She had chosen to be wanton rather than be savaged. She her choice wise. But few would condone. Hope of escape was implicit to all she did. How much wiser to sit as she was now instead of being chained in a dungeon! If they came to trust her enough the moment might come... But would Tavie and Alethea understand! That was what mattered.
Spurred by such thoughts, Clare allowed her right hand to reach across her lap and finger the metal band about her left wrist.
"I'm tired of always being chained, George. Be a sweetie and unlock me for a while."
She knew her request seemed natural to him.
"I'd just get into a peck o' trouble, Miss," he said defensively.
"No you won't. No one will know. Unlock me now. When we get to Erdislune I'll put my hand down so you can snap the cuff on." She gave her troubled companion a shamelessly hungry look. "In fact, love, I'll snap it on tight myself for you."
"You'd jump out the door." Poor George was torn.
"Don't be silly."
She knew it a tribute to whatever role she played that, flushed and awkward, he handed her the key.
"Here, you can do it. But first I want that promise thing. What do you call it?"
Clare laughed. He was delightful at times. "My parole! You have it, love. I promise. I'll let you handcuff me whenever or however you want. Honest... I'll be the best little girl."
How absurdly easy it was when you had the key. So tiny a piece of metal to hold a girl captive. She handed it back and watched an uneasy George tuck it safely in a pocket. She raised both hands to the roof of the cab, flexed them back and forth and sighed ecstatically. "I suppose it's mostly in the mind," she admitted. "But, oh, it feels so good. Thank you. You're sweet. Thanks again."
"What you goin' ter do now?" George asked as though anticipating some Yoga gymnastics.
She bent over and kissed his cheek. "Nothing, darling. Absolutely nothing except move my hands up and down and back and forth without hearing clinking sounds or being snubbed up short. It's lovely."
George glowed with magnanimity. To bestow such happiness upon a girl without the expenditure of cash loomed as an attractive prerequisite of his profession. "I'll do it when I can, Miss. Don't suppose it'll be too often."
Conscience smote her. She had given her word. Would she betray it and him! Could she! Would the twins expect that of her. What would they do. She suspected they would never have given their word in the first place. What did she owe to the overgrown boy beside her! A killer! But all soldiers were killers. A rapist! But not by his own code. He had been kind to her because she had been kind to him. Did that reduce her to his level! No, no, no... He was what he was. But she would not destroy him. In amused resignation Clare recognized that even without the bite of metal or cut of cord she was bound as securely as she had ever been.
When they reached Erdislune she placed her own wrist within the small gaping jaws of steel and clasped them shut. The familiar click, click, click seemed to mock her pretensions of escape. George reached down with one hand and nodded approvingly. She had deliberately closed the cuff an extra notch. "Yer a damn good girl, an' all," he said gruffly. "Wish yer weren't no prisoner."
"If I wasn't a prisoner you'd never have known me," she pointed out.
It was very feminine logic.
The trial of Corinna Winthrop made no headlines. It was attended by but a very small group. The public was represented by four chained and naked girls. Three of them wore about their hips the close chain mail that denied their sex. The fourth was fastened well apart from them and wore nothing. Costigan's boys were the jury. Costigan himself the prosecutor. There was no judge.
Corinna Winthrop had been allowed to keep her clothes, to tidy them and to use make-up. She presented her usual svelte image so familiar on TV. She was handsome and vital, with an air of authority in no way lessened by having her crossed wrists bound behind her back with cord. Clare suspected cord had been used as being more painful and demeaning than handcuffs. It is always a bad moment for a girl when she must stand passive while a man loops and tugs the bands tight. When the knot is tied she knows herself frighteningly vulnerable.
Clare supposed the charade satisfied some conscience that must be appeased by rationalization. Had the Winthrop woman's social status been no more than Nancy O'Malley's she could have been as casually tarred and feathered without a qualm. But, being a pillar of the Establishment, she offered a fine mental diversion before her flesh was consigned to agony. Perhaps they cherished a wish to make her see their side: some sort of conversion before they sentenced her. Shades of the Inquisition!
Corinna Winthrop fought with words. They were stock in trade. Because of words she stood where she was now. Elsewhere she would have been a formidable adversary. But not here. Clare watched and saw the slow realization grow upon the taut features that she could say nothing to appease these men. Each statement she made was countered by the cold enunciation of a 'crime'. Costigan was hard and relentless. The prisoner had been their bitter enemy. He built around her a cage of accusation from which she could never escape. When Cully, acting as foreman of the jury, spoke the word "Guilty," it should have ended the heartbreaking farce. But it did not. Corinna Winthrop must now be sentenced.
For a moment the scene held drama. Clare saw the captive straining in an instinctive rejection of her bound hands and that which she must now endure. Costigan unveiled a surprise.
"I have told you why you are here," he said soberly to the unwilling defendant. "I have told you of why you are guilty in our eyes. I will not also be your judge. For that it is more fitting you should face a more simple man. A man without pretensions. A man the opposite of what you are or what I was: Barney Riodan."
He was indeed a very ordinary man. Save for the bright hatred of his eyes he was nondescript. To the bound women he would be anathema: not so much of the people as of the gutter.
"A traitress, so ye are, and treason ye've done."
Corinna Winthrop looked at him wearily and with distaste. "Never mind the speech. Get on with it, you Belfast rat."
"The whip for my fine lady, it is." Clare saw her flinch.
"And too good fer the likes o' us, so ye are. Despise men, so ye do. No wedding ring fer one so grand. Well, 'tis a wedding ring we'll be giving ye. Out of the kindness of our hearts, an all."
A wedding ring! Clare was puzzled. So, too, was the prisoner. Corinna Winthrop said nothing. But looked at her judge as though he was some offensive matter that should be disposed of. Barney Riodan chuckled with evil knowledge.
"Tis a brand ye should be wearin', too, my lovely. A little something to remember us by." Corinna Winthrop turned desperately to Costigan. "Will you allow this excreta to drool on like this! He's psychopathic."
Riodan chuckled and resumed his list. No one said him nay. "And ye'll be takin' yer clothes off fer us, so ye will, so common stuff like us can see yer quality. Tis curious we are that ye might have the same bits and pieces as the little girls over there."
"You are an animal."
"Aye, I am that. And animals breed, don't they! The boys and I 'ull be servicing yer. A rare treat it'll be."
"The whole lot of you will hang."
"The saints protect us, Madam. But it's a bit o' hangin' you'll be doin' yourself. It's on the list, for sure. Thumbs or toes maybe."
"You've got a sick mind."
"Then you'll be wantin' ter know us better. A bit o' psychology stuff. So we'll have ye sittin' fer a day where we can all talk ter you. Not the sort of seat you're used to, a lady an all, but summat to rest on."
It went on and on. They played with her. But Clare was sure it was no game. Corinna Winthrop would suffer. She was right. It began instantly.
Clare stood with Costigan and watched. She had no choice. It was an order. The other girls had gone, whisked away before they could contaminate her. Clare herself had handcuffs on her wrists in front, her feet were chained so that she could walk, but never run. It was what she and Costigan jokingly referred to as 'Her Uniform'. She wore her shackles with unconscious grace.
Corinna Winthrop looked scornfully at the circle of rapt male attention. "I am not going to strip," she said with finality.
They stripped her, making a game of it. Tearing her clothes from her bit by bit. Naked, she refused to cower or to try and cover what could not be hid. She glowered back at them defiantly. "Rape me if you have to. I won't help." Her voice was bitter gall.
They made a game of that too. Boys being boys. Some were wounded by her nails and teeth. But they had their will with her. Ireland's leading feminist was forced into position after position and held by eager hands as her sex was ravaged again and again. No part of her escaped.
"Do I have to watch?" Clare asked Costigan in disgust.
"I want you to see us as we are." He turned from the scene and grinned at her. "You'd have handled that situation a hell of a lot better than she's doing."
Clare wondered if she should feel pride that she would have emerged from the compounded rape with fewer wounds than this woman whose heaving nudity was held taut for each successive impalement.
It takes surprisingly little time for eight males to plant their sperm. Even with deviations and repeats. When it was done the woman who had been their vessel stood panting, once again the center of their gloating eyes. They were in a courtyard, so that Corinna Winthrop's sweating nakedness was stained with grass and dirt and the secretions of the male. She stood at bay, breasts heaving. Clearly expecting the next assault. She still had courage. But it was easy to see she no longer cherished hope.
They tied her wrists behind her back, then her elbows cruelly tight so that they met. They laid her on her back beneath a tree and raised her feet high. It was part of her sentence: 'To hang'. Her big toes were looped. By them alone she was raised until she rested only with her shoulders on the ground. She could look up and see her feet and hips widely spread and tied to a bough above. Not only could she see her legs and belly. But she could see, most intimately, her naked sex, gaping, open, demanding of attention. Clare heard her give a sobbing moan of desolation. The men went away and left her.
Clare turned to Costigan. He laughed. "O.K. Be tender hearted. I've work to do. I'll leave you here. But the way you're handcuffed you could free her. Are you going to?"
She knew he was amused by her dilemma. She faced reality, and could not be angry with him. She grinned back. "I promise, I'll be good. She'll hate me."
She watched him go. A jaunty, solid, determined man with a conviction that could lead him to his grave. She wished it otherwise. Ankle chains clinking, she walked to the woman being punished and looked down into the imploring eyes.
"Thank God! Let me loose, please." A mixture of humility and authority.
Clare held up her handcuffed wrists. "I'm a prisoner too."
"Your hands have enough freedom to get me out of this." There was a schoolteacher quality about the woman.
"My feet are chained too. I can't escape. If I interfere with... with, the way you are they'll punish us both terribly." She knew she sounded ineffectual. She knew, too, that Corinna Winthrop was in pain.
"Nonsense, girl! Set me free. I'll look after you."
Clare wished she had stayed with Costigan.
"Don't stand there like a dummy. I can't stand much more of this. Can't you see what they've done to me! Look at my toes! The absolute swine! And get those things off my elbows. They're being cut in two." Corinna Winthrop was much absorbed by her own pain.
"You don't understand. None of us can escape. You can't. These men do what they want with us. They'll do all those things to you. Sure, they trust me after a fashion. But they always keep me chained. If I shuffled off into the park now they'd catch me and hurt me terribly. So I do what I'm told. You should too. It's best."
The tortured woman gave her a look of bitter loathing. "You rotten little coward. You deserve chains. It's all you're good for." She turned her head away and moaned in despair.
Clare was absolved from further embarrassment by the appearance of Cully and Riodan. Each with a box. They looked like plumbers intent upon repairs. Grinning, Cully produced a key and unlocked one cuff of Clare's handcuff. It both amused and irritated Clare that her tether had such infinite adaptability under the control of everyone except herself. He took her hand round one of the victim's raised legs and snapped the cuff round her wrist again. She found herself quaintly embracing one of the tortured limbs. Both men were vastly entertained by her bafflement. Even Corinna Winthrop contrived an interest. Her eyes darting back and forth in fearful conjecture.
"Ringside seat again, Miss," said Cully.
"Watch out this don't happen ter you!" Riodan winked lecherously.
As usual, these nondescript men were surprisingly competent. Riodan produced a hypodermic and cast a stern eye on the female he had sentenced. "The more you struggle the more it hurts," he warned. "Being kind to yer, so we are, with this here. Don't want yer fainting on us."
Clare watched fascinated as, without pause, he inserted a thumb in the exposed vagina and, pulling out one labia, thrust home the hypo needle. He repeated the action on the other.
Clare began to guess. Her heart fluttered at the enormity of it. Corinna Winthrop looked up speechless. She had not struggled, nor had she divined. "If you're thinking of depilation," she said crossly, "go ahead. It's all the fashion."
"Talking about cunt hairs?" Cully inquired solicitously.
"Ohhhh!" She turned her head away and ignored them.
Cully produced batteries, wires and a long thin electrode that soon glowed red. Standing so that he obscured the Winthrop woman's view, he touched the tip of the rod to the insensitized sex. There was no reaction. He nodded, satisfied.
Clare watched this violation of a woman's most private place with interest. She could not help herself. She was chained there so she might as well learn all she could. She admitted to herself a wanton thrill at Riodan's laughing threat. Suppose one day she too...
Again the finger and thumb lifting the lip of the helpless woman's sex. The scarlet needle found its entry under the firm fingers of the man intent upon his work. With speed and facility the white hot metal burned its passage through the flesh to emerge at the other side. Riodan worked it back and forth twice. Then drilled another hole exactly opposite. The orifices were not small.
An open silver ring was produced. Clare gasped. To wear something as big as that! It seemed huge. But, of course, it was for punishment. She watched intently as it was positioned. Looped through the two fresh wounds in the flesh it united the lips from which it would hang. Huge pliers forced its divergent ends together, the white hot needle welded them. Corinna Winthrop's sex would wear its heavy ring for life unless stout tools were used to cut if off.
"Never uses the damn thing anyway," Cully observed philosophically. They moved back.
It took several moments for the bound woman to digest what she saw. Clare could imagine her first unbelief. When she did at last realize that she must wear a metal ring through the lips of her sex her eyes sought Riodan. "I'll kill you," she said quietly. It was all she deigned to say. Laughing, the two men gathered their tools and left.
"Hey, take me with you," Clare pleaded. She felt sure the woman around whose leg she was chained would not be cheerful company. But her plea was waved away. "You can move it round and round," Cully chortled. "Make sure it settles in right."
Clare looked down sympathetically. "I'm sorry."
"Like hell you are! Get away from me."
"I can't." Clare again demonstrated her handcuffs.
The prisoner snorted. "Is that bloody thing in me the way I think it is?"
"Yes." Clare could feel mischief rising. "It's really quite attractive."
"Why haven't you got one then!"
"I guess they don't think I'm important enough." She could not resist. "I'd like one though."
"You would! You're the kind. All bloody sex!" She paused, deep in a sudden thought. "I say. Can a man... ? I mean... "
"You mean, can a man fuck you?" Clare asked wickedly.
"You would put it like that, but yes."
Clare reached forward and tenderly lifted the bright shining circle. It was heavy, but had its own loveliness. So well had the holes been burned that she found she could move the ring within its anchorage of flesh. Indubitably its positioning denied entry.
"No, they can't! But here the boys use the other side of a girl too," she offered comfortingly.
"You tell me that now! What d'you think they were doing to me while you and that swine Costigan stood and watched."
"Were you really a virgin?" Clare knew herself incorrigible.
"None of your business!" There was hesitation, and then, "Well, yes I was. I wanted it that way."
"Must have been a damned interesting experience for you! I wasn't a virgin when they got me... But the things they do to a girl! I was amazed... " .
"I'm sure you enjoyed every minute." How bitter could sarcasm be!
"Are you a lesbian?" Clare felt she might as well die for a sheep as a lamb. She already pictured the headlines: "Rebel girl torments journalist." She did not care. Corinna Winthrop was difficult to love.
"No, I am not a lesbian!" The suffering public figure was loaded with negatives. But, once more, there came the thoughtful pause. "I have wondered... how d'you go about it...?"
Clare longed to laugh. "You lick each other's clits. Want me to tongue yours?"
She might hate herself afterwards. But she could not stop now. It was not easy with the handcuffs. There was also the ring. It did not help. But the tip of her tongue did manage to reach the neglected coral bud. Ireland's leading journalist gasped.
"Like it?"
"You might try it again. I'm not sure." The coral bud's owner quivered mendaciously.
Obligingly, and loving every moment, Clare skillfully brought Corinna Winthrop to orgasm. She watched the changing shadows of emotion on the strained features. How little this authoritative virgin had known of life. But then... for that matter, how little had Clare Norman known before she had become a thrall.
When the ecstasy had died the prisoner groaned. "The pain's awful. I really am grateful. But are you sure you can't...?"
"I can't untie you," Clare said flatly. "Do you want to see me get a hundred lashes with the whip!"
"Would they do that?"
"They have already done it. You can see some of the marks."
"Will they do those other things to me?"
"Yes."
George came into view. He was whistling cheerily. The key was ready in his hand. "I got a feelin' fer you, love," he declaimed happily as he unlocked one cuff.
Clare looked amusedly at the startled woman who had suddenly become a spectator to another's shame. "Watch this," she invited sardonically. Then, turning to George, "How d'you want me, love?"
"Suit yourself, sweetheart." He was in an expansive mood.
The receptacle of lust arranged herself suitably with widespread legs. George plunged to his Waterloo with gusto.. The resultant action was prolonged and explosive. George retired whistling "Tipperary."
"It's disgusting! You should be ashamed."
Clare got to her feet and brushed off the usual adhering particles. "O.K. So I fight and get whipped and knocked around! Which is best?" She looked down sadly. "I know it's not easy to take. But the thing is that a girl can get pleasure... " She waved away the indignant protest. "It's true! Pleasure! If that makes me bad I'm bad." Suddenly Clare felt a great pity for the tortured woman who had been made to suffer so much so soon. George had linked her wrists again without tethering. She knelt and smoothed the damp hair. "I know you think this a madhouse," she said softly. "Perhaps it is. But a girl does survive. It can't go on forever. Hold on to that. It's what I've had to do."
Sadly she left the woman she could not help.
Costigan's boys had sport with the ring. It intrigued them, as did the behavior of she who wore it. They contrived a long but light chain lead with a snap at each end. The wrists of the lady of the ring were kept tied behind her back, so it was a simple matter to snap on to the intimate circlet, lead the lady wherever you wished, then snap the other end to any convenient object and leave her to consider her plight. Corinna Winthrop displayed an abject anxiety to follow where she was led.
It was cruel by intent. The incision and the insert were fresh. They hurt. When the ring was moved or pulled the hurt was doubled and trebled. She dare not resist. Obviously hating her submissive role, she nonetheless played it with a fearful determination. It was not the most brutal thing done to her. But Clare suspected the arrogant female found it the most shaming. To be led, to be tethered like a dog, from a ring through the lips of her sex!
She found her so tethered the following day. Corinna Winthrop was actually in tears, standing naked against a rail where her bound hands could not reach the snap.
"The rotten swine," she sobbed vehemently. "Why! Why! Why!"
Clare dealt with the tears as best she could with her fingers. They were a feminine problem of being naked.
"Actually they are going easy with you," she counseled.
The older woman had been thinking. "I am actually going to be branded," she acknowledged wonderingly. "Costigan talked to me. And all those other things they said... they'll do them to me too. They are going to hurt me everywhere, even my breasts and nipples."
"They are the bits of a girl men like best," Clare pointed out. "Tits and twat, George calls them. The first time I was whipped here was on my sex. I thought I was cut in two."
"You take it all very calmly."
"You have to," Clare said with sincerity. "If a girl is forever in revolt she'd break." She eyed Corinna speculatively. "You are getting shock after shock, aren't you? I bet you have never gone naked before?"
"Good heavens! Of course not!"
"Well, you have to understand that in the world these men inhabit-perhaps in all men everywhere, there is a gorgeous vividly colored and accented fantasy of woman. Us! It's a world filled with sweetly curved breasts, nubile nipples, concave tummies, and neat slits either covered with a lovely black brush like you had or cleanly shaved as though no hair had ever been there. They cup their hands on these treasures. It is their greatest wish. They adore our breasts, our nipples and our little triangle at the top of our legs. Do you realize how strong this makes us?"
"Strong! When they can do this to us!" Corinna fluctuated her loins so that her ring shone proudly.
"Yes, strong! It's one of the reasons they particularly have it in for you. You have possessed these things they worship for a long time. But you have never shared them. Never made a man joyous by letting him suck your nipples or put his hand on the cleft you pee through. There's lots of names for it. Which do you like to use?"
"You talk like a whore."
"I didn't when I came here. But I have lived, and been chained, in a world of nakedness. I have come to know the sadness of denying what we are. With your breasts and your cunny you could enslave a man far more securely than I am enslaved." Clare held up her handcuffed wrists. "These will come off with a key. But a man can never escape our breasts."
"He can put a ring through my... " Corinna was not converted.
"Go a step further, then," Clare reasoned. "They do what they please with us. But where does it end! They fuck us! Beastly word, isn't it. But it's best to use it sometimes. When they have done that it's the finish, the end. They go to sleep, or walk away hot and sweating. But we endure.
Fucking us weakens them and strengthens us."
"You're a lesbian!" Corinna had made a discovery.
"Of course! You're a nothing! Who wants to be a nothing! They fuck me when they please. I don't mind. The friction is pleasant. It diminishes them, not me."
"You've been whipped. I can see the marks."
"A girl did it. I loved her." Clare looked pityingly at her bewildered companion. "You don't know the quintessence of love until you have been whipped." She felt the tide of mischief rising. "It would give me great happiness to have a girl place in me a ring such as yours."
The tethered beauty looked at her askance. "You are being ridiculous."
"I'm not. Carnality is about half of life. I'd almost be willing to bet that when you become a free woman again you'll leave that ring where it is and cherish it. Whenever you uncover your cunt you'll look at it and be glad it's there."
The bearer of the ring looked at Clare with a new respect, a reluctant sympathy. "You've come a long way, haven't you! I suppose I seem a big spinsterish." She smiled wryly.
"I've come a long way too." Clare remembered her first haunted journey across the moor. "Not long ago I used to hold on to my quim, that's George's word, and my breasts and my nipples as though they were the crown jewels." She laughed derisively. "If a man had said to me, 'Hey, Clare, show me one of your breasts,' I'd have clobbered him. I would not have been willing to face the fact that by letting him tickle my nipple I could do what I liked with the silly ass."
"But it's a sort of prostitution."
"Horseradish!" Clare was making discoveries as she went along. "There's something females like you and me have to face. We are like the queen bee. We're special. Most girls sag or bulge. We don't. We stick out in all the right ways. We are a breed apart. We don't know it, but we have a choice. Get impregnated and swell and burst, or fuse with a male or female and create a current that fuels a fire. We have our own place in the scheme of things."
"An odalisque!"
"So what! An odalisque can change a kingdom."
Corinna Winthrop looked at the vehement girl in wonder. "But men will brand me. And whip me. And what else... "
Under the intoxication of her own thesis Clare took an absurd plunge. "I'll go to Costigan and ask that some of the things you fear most be done to me instead."
She walked steadfastly away, under the compulsion of an emotion she did not bother to fathom. The woman who wore the ring stared after her in wonder.
* * *
"I'm not going to put a ring in your cunt, darlin'," Costigan laughed at her. "The boys would murder me."
"Alright then! Brand me instead of her!"
"Hell, no! It would prove nothing."
"Brand me too then."
He looked at her with his tired, wise eyes. "Still the female thing with you, isn't it! The urge to immolate yourself. To crawl up their unsoiled cunts. To feel their whips." He gave her a comradely grin. "How'd you like a good whipping? Something ritualistic. Tie you up to your figure's best advantage and whip the shit out of you?"
She considered his proposal. Her negative was well considered. Her flesh hungered for no male thong upon her flesh.
Costigan chuckled. He would deal with her stubbornness without resentment. He might resent, but he understood the magic touch the siblings had placed upon her. "Very well then. You can share an amusing diversion with the dear girl." She eyed him with suspicion. "I don't want to share. I want to absolve her from some of those awful things... "
"A victim of nobility," he jibed. "Common at your age.
Hell no! You want to suffer, do it right! Who d'you think you are anyway, giving orders... Damn women! Give 'em an inch... "
It hurt worse than anything Clare could remember. A quite different hurt than anything she had known. Unrelenting, searching her innermost being. Punishing her femaleness. Woefully she looked at Corinna Winthrop and saw a mirror of herself. Why, oh why, hadn't she had the sense to leave well enough alone!
They sat upon a trestle, a naked girl and a naked woman who was, in many ways, younger than the slight figure facing her in agony. It was a very ancient punishment, hallowed by the centuries. But neither cared its antiquity. They were concerned only with pain. The vertical board of the trestle had a sharp edge. They sat upon it.
Simple, as are all lasting concepts, it was called "The Horse." The naked girl in disfavor straddled it, her feet widely spread and tied down so that she was held immobile on the cutting edge. Her wrists crossed and bound behind her back so that she could not use her hands to support her weight. She simply sat and endured. All her weight rested on that small area of herself between her sex and the orifice between her bottom cheeks. As the minutes, and then the hours, sped by she wished she had not been born a girl. She wished, too, with a demoralizing urgency that she had not offended the man who had placed her thus. If only... If only... If only... !
Clare gasped in agony, and heard the panting breaths of her companion match her own. Hours had passed. She was sure it must be hours! The cutting edge on which she sat was slicing her sex, her rectum, her whole female being. All she could do was sit so that it cut her more and more. She tortured her body simply by existing. She had glimpsed, once before, that a girl's function was to suffer, that her agony was the bread men ate to live.
She looked at Corinna Winthrop, the tense muscles, the sweat-soaked nudity, the damp lank hair, the white shoulders wracked back by the bound wrists. Thus she would look. A terrible beauty quite unique. A tortured girl. There is nothing more beautiful than a tortured girl! Her bitter reflection was confirmed by George's cheerful comment: "Ain't never seen nothin' as beautiful as you two. Not never."
Clare looked at him through a haze of pain. "Go away, George, unless you are going to let us loose."
"For God's sake, get us off this blasted thing!" Corinna's voice was pure, unreasoning agony.
"Never seen two cunts squashed quite like that," George submitted clinically.
"Go away or let us loose!" Clare reiterated. She did not wish to be examined by lewd male eyes.
"You're goin' ter sit there all day," George said comfortingly.
"Go away and leave us alone."
"How T)out if I tickle your tits?"
"No!" Corinna's voice was desperate.
Clare grasped at any straw. "You can tickle mine," she offered, certain that her fellow sufferer would consign her to the lesser breeds beyond the law.
George availed himself of the opportunity. Clare could feel her nipples hardening under his fingertips. She loved it. But said caustically: "You'll have to untie me if you are going to do anything else."
He chuckled, enjoying his mastery. Wordlessly his finger slid down and entered her sex. Soon she was gasping. She dared not look at Corinna. When orgasm took her she strained, gasping with a quite new agony and ecstasy that made her one with the flaming edge that bit unceasingly into her loins.
"Take your filthy hands off me," Corinna spat at him.
Clare watched as her companion on the trestle endured George's carnal attentions. If it had not been for her pain she might have smiled. Corinna Winthrop went through all the stages of feminine revulsion, examination and acceptance. After she had moaned in orgasm George left them alone again with one final injunction to Clare: "Damn silly, yer are an all ter be sittin' there." It is not easy to talk normally when your being is sundered oh a sharp edge. Between clutching breaths Corinna Winthrop asked wonderingly: "Why the hell are you sitting there?"
In spite of wishing to be anywhere than where she was Clare could not resist. "I asked for it," she admitted demurely.
Corinna Winthrop's withering retort was stifled by two male hands circling her from the rear and cupping her breasts. "Horsy, horsy," Len said enthusiastically. "Ain't it a lovely game."
Clare was not in a mood for fun. She hurt. On the other hand any diversion to take her mind from the process of being slowly cut in two was welcome. Her inquiring eye acknowledged a broad wink from the grinning man who had, himself, straddled the trestle behind the pain-wracked nakedness of the woman whose breasts he was kneading busily. "She hates that," she told him. "Do mine instead. Leave her alone."
"You're a greedy girl, so ye are," Len acknowledged. "This pore soul's been neglected, so she has. 'Tis a bit o' attention she'll be deservin'."
"You can stop anytime," Corinna gasped ungratefully. "Tis lovin' it she is, and that's the truth," Len said complacently. His fingers displayed a knowing cunning in their play. Clare guessed the unwilling recipient would not easily rid herself of them.
Corinna evidently decided not to demean herself by futile protest. She kept a strained silence and endured. But the motion on her twin mounds was enough to impart itself to the central focus of her punishment so that the small pained sounds that did escape her lips came more from enhanced pain than sensual response. Instinctively she had shrunk back from the searching digits, but the screaming protest from tortured nerves forced her to relapse and to surrender her most cherished secrets without a struggle.
Clare watched her face, entranced. It was a montage of emotions. Thirty-five years of virginity. Now this! Breasts cradled only in bras. Now mauled by men. A utilitarian sex now closed and held by a metal ring by which she was led... A figure exquisitely clothed, soignee, immaculate. Now naked and bound grotesquely... It was all there. All there and more! A woman's breasts cannot be delivered into their own separate captivity without their suffering or their joy imparting itself to their owner. Len's hands invoked disgust, resentment, resignation, and finally arousal. The two separate entities that were the breasts of Corinna Winthrop would betray her. That yearning breasts and palpitating nipples had delivered woman into slavery throughout the centuries would comfort her not at all.
"I could be nippin' 'em with me teeth, so I could," Len offered.
His victim did not interrupt her labored breathing to reply. But suddenly she screamed. Len was pinching both her nipples with hard cruel thumbs and fingers.
"Twas a kind offer I was makin'. Tis rude, it is, ter be silent."
Clare looked in wonder at the contortions Corinna could not control. They must be causing her a shocking penalty of pain. She saw the struggle on the woman's face in her search for the right words to end this new agony.
"Oh please stop! Ohhhh... no thank you! Ohhh please...!" The absurd jumble of rejection ended in a new shrill scream as the relentless pinch held firm.
"Tis little sense ye're makin, darlin'," Len was enjoying himself.
"No thank you, sir. I don't want my nipples bitten." The evenly spaced words must have exacted an infinity of control.
"And why not, now, mavourneen?" Len's warm solicitude was deeply personal. His pinch upon the buds of flesh did not relax.
"I... I'm-I'm afraid I don't care for that sort of thing." The polite temporizing must have evolved through waves of pain.
"Tis a sad colleen ye are, ter be sure. Not likin' a chap ter be kind to yer. Would ye be tellin' me now what would pleasure ye?" Len's voice oozed sorrow at his failure to please.
"Let me go. Please... ! Not anymore. Please stop pinching my nipples. I can't stand the pain... You don't understand how it hurts a woman. Ohhh, stop it! I'll do anything, anything at all... ! What d'you want me to say?" Corinna screamed again, a long, pealing ululation of desperation.
Len loosed his grip. The twin buds were scarlet and out of shape. Their owner groaned thankfully.
"That's interesting, to be sure." His hands found employment with her hair, her neck, her ears. Clare suspected he would be a competent lover. "Would ye be tellin' me in yer own words, now, about this anything. Just ask me nicely for all them things 'anything' might be." His fingers drifted down to barely touch the waiting nipples. "I'll be holdin' the little darlin's again if you've no a ready tongue."
So great was Corinna Winthrop's revulsion at the task by which she might earn relief, that she tugged impotently at her bound hands and fluttered her strained shoulders in mute protest. She groaned at the self-inflicted pain. Then, slowly, with an agony inspired determination commenced her rogation: "Sir, please bite my nipples." She paused, then supplicated: "Please don't injure them." Clare could have wept at her fear and her humility.
"Please sir, whip me."
"Whip yer breasts, mavourneen?" His voice was tender.
There was a longish silence while Corinna Winthrop examined the unthinkable.
"Please whip me wherever you like, sir." She plunged desperately: "On my breasts if it would please you."
"Aye, I will an all." It was like the plighting of a troth.
"Please fuck me, sir."
His voice was sad. "You are ringed, lass. Remember?"
"Please sir, fuck me... befund." Corinna Winthrop was trying hard.
He allowed her euphemism to pass. "If there's any behind left after today, I'll certainly use it," he promised with ringing sincerity.
What else has a woman to offer a man! The naked woman sitting with obscenely spread legs and bound hands was obviously seeking inspiration from a limited experience. The thing she said next touched Clare's heart.
"Please kiss me, sir."
Perhaps it touched Len's heart too. He bent and kissed the lips that must strain against agony to meet his own. The kiss was long. Clare saw the woman was kissing him back. How lonely a girl can be while tortured! She wondered wryly if the captive's enumeration had been in order of preference.
When he had gone they sat alone with their pain and their thoughts. They hurt too much to talk. There is a degree of pain that demands full homage. The edged board on which they were bound exacted it. They exchanged small sounds of anguish more eloquent than words.
Clare saw them first: Cully and Riodan. She guessed their mission and looked pityingly at the panting nudity whose pain she shared. Whatever injury Corinna Winthrop may have done 'The Cause' she was paying dearly. She, too, instantly divined the purpose of the gear their visitors employed. She looked in wide-eyed questioning at Clare. Then, once more, struggled ineffectually. "Not now," she gasped. "Ohhh, not now!"
"No better time, dearie," Riodan cheerfully explained. "You won't be runnin' away on us."
Clare recognized some truth in what he said. If a girl was to be branded, the position in which she was now bound had obvious advantages: she could not move. Was it possible that one agony could counter another!
"Where we mark her, Barney?" Cully asked briskly as if he did not know.
"Figured I'd bum her tits off first," Riodan suggested thoughtfully.
Clare prayed they were teasing. Surely not... !
"Is there nothing I can do or say?" the woman whose flesh was to be burned asked without hope.
"Bit late, lady. You done and said too much already," Cully snickered. "What we goin' ter do suits yer to a T. 'T fer traitress. You'll have it always."
A girl to be branded! The stigma never to leave her skin. All her life she would see it when unclothed. Others would see it. They would be the ones she would least of all wish to know its message. 'T' for traitress! Whether you believed it or not it would be there.
Cully's finger traced the damning letter on the top curve of Corinna Winthrop's right breast. "Good as spot as any," he suggested thoughtfully.
Corinna groaned, raising tortured eyes that pleaded more appealingly than lips. "Ohhh, not on my breast! Please, anywhere but there."
"You ain't never used 'em, lady. Told us so yourself."
"Oh but, on a woman's breast! It's too awful."
"Don't matter where a woman's libber gets 'er brand," Cully chuckled. "No man ain't never goin' ter get a look at it anyway."
"She says 'anywhere but there'," Riodan reminded. "There's a good flat spot above their cunt. Get a bit of the hair along with it. If she ever changed her mind about us men the fellers 'ud get a good look."
"Stop it!" Clare demanded angrily. "A brand's bad enough. You don't have to torture her like this."
Cully chucked the angry girl under the chin. "Playin' at bein' little mother," he chided. "Bit o' a weakness o' your'n. Mayhap you'd still like to wear the T instead o' her?"
"Alright!" Clare demanded defiantly. "Brand me instead." She glared at the men with the full conviction of her female fury. "And I don't give a damn where you do it!"
Corinna Winthrop gazed at her uncomprehending.
"Serve you right if we did," Riodan admonished. "You're a damn silly girl ter get yourself into these fixes, so ye are."
"If you won't brand me instead, then let me loose. I don't want to see."
Cully chuckled knowingly. "Mr. Costigan told us you'd want them things, so he did. Told us not to brand you and not to let you loose either. Looks after his little girl proper, does Mr. Costigan."
"I'm not his little girl."
"Come off it, love. Don't sleep in the dungeon much now, do yer."
"I might have known," said Corinna darkly.
"Well, I'm sitting on this damn board with you, aren't I!" Clair found the Winthrop female very hard to love. She was also finding her own fortitude increasingly hard to sustain. She had never been more helpless or felt more foolish and exposed. Her widely spread legs... Her hours on the trestle could go on and on...
Her attention was caught by Cully's firm grip of Corinna Winthrop's hair. The journalist's big moment had arrived. "Just outa the kindness of our hearts, you understand?" He tugged the head back brutally.
In spite of her attestation to the contrary, Clare watched. She watched with a fascination of which, as usual, she was ashamed. Riodan had contrived a metal 'T' with an electrode. It was about an inch and a half long. It was beginning to glow red. He was waiting...
"Thing is ter get it deep," he said chattily. "Nice and clean and permanent. Takes a bit o' time," he added as though time was of small concern to a girl against whose flesh a white-hot metal was being pressed. "Like Cully says: we're bein' kind." His finger traced a mark upon his helpless victim's thigh.
Clare recognized the plausibility of the place chosen. She knew that, no matter how it hurt, she could not move her own thigh at all. Stretched as she was, that part of her person was rigid. It would accept a brand with only the quivering of the nerves. The upper part of her torso could writhe to whatever degree agony might dictate, but the thigh would remain quiescent during whatever time the fiery kiss was prolonged.
She watched, and was frankly glad she was there to watch, as Riodan's improvised T became white. Casually and with a firm hand he pressed it against the waiting skin. Cully pulled down on his handful of hair. Corinna Winthrop screamed and screamed and screamed.
It smoked. You smelt burnt flesh! Clare watched, wide-eyed, as the metal sunk slowly into the white flesh. Unconsciously she counted slowly to five before the iron was lifted. It left behind a neat incised initial burned black and deep. Its new owner's screams moved into a swift declension to inarticulate sounds that told of things too awful to contemplate. Clare felt honestly grateful to Costigan that it had not been her flesh so visited.
Once more they were alone. Between her sex and her rectum a small hell burned with an increasing personal venom.
* * *
"You asked for it," Costigan pointed out reasonably.
"You didn't have to keep me split in two all day!" Clare was determined to be femininely inconsistent.
"Keeps you in a proper frame of mind. After all, you are a prisoner of war."
"Balls!" Clare felt the epithet vulgarly apt.
"The boys told me you enjoyed every moment."
"If I was a wife I'd cut you off for two weeks telling you it hurt."
"You have altogether too much impudence for a prisoner," he laughed.
"You don't have to be so cruel to that absurd woman."
"At least you see her for what she is."
"Why didn't you use her the same as Nancy O'Malley?"
"Sinks in better with a bit of ritual."
"I suppose you'll whip her next. Will you let her go then?"
"Aren't you going to offer to be whipped instead?" he jibed.
She stuck her tongue out at him. "Ha. Ha!"
"For that you go back on the horse tomorrow." Clare looked at him for a long time, uncertain. A tear gathered and fell. She did not want to go back on the horse. "I'm sorry. I apologize."
"Prisoners can't apologize," Costigan pointed out. "When they earn a penalty they get it."
Clare wept unashamedly. She did not want to go back on the horse.
"Tears become you," Costigan said with honesty. "If I have to put you on the horse to make you cry, I will put you there often."
She looked at him appealingly. One feminine eye above the shielding hands.
"I know all your tricks," he assured her. "All day on the horse!"
Clare believed him. She was captive. She did not want to sit on the horse again. "Punish me another way," she pleaded.
"Would you like to be whipped?"
"Yes. Whip me."
"Branded?"
"If I must! Brand me."
"You've never been hung by the toes. Would you like that?"
"Yes. Hang me by the toes."
He gathered her in his arms. "You are incredibly wonderful," he said.
All the next day she sat upon the horse. She was a prisoner who had been impudent. But she did not spend her nights in the dungeon!
* * *
Farce and tragedy. Drama and death. Ireland! The execution of Corinna Winthrop was a work of precision. In action Costigan's boys knew what to do.
The radio had told the story. Confronted with it their captive had been triumphant. "A dozen rats snuffed out because of what I published... Good!" Unwittingly Corinna Winthrop signed her own death warrant.
Clare shared Corinna's doubt that it was true. That it could happen. But the action flowed with an inevitability that shaped the actions of them all.
Another court. Identical! Clare chained well away from feminine infection. The defendant with wrists and elbows tied so that she must have been in agony stood, naked and bewildered, as the charge was read. She listened uncomprehending their intent, a sneer of derision on her lips. Twelve of their rodent kind had died because of her. She was glad.
The sentence of death impinged the consciousness of all save she who was about to die. Riodan made it solemn. Definite. They were ushered from the court to beneath a tree where a life would end.
Clare said to George: "Take the chain off my legs. I want to see what happens. With my wrists chained I can't escape." Thus, women have always used their men. Grumbling, he did her bidding. He loved her. But did not trust her. Without complaint she suffered him to handcuff her wrists behind her back. For her feet to be free was a rare event. She followed meekly where he led.
It couldn't be true! But it was true! It was happening. The ridiculous theatrical noose dangled from the bough. Clare remembered a hundred 'westerns'. John Wayne would walk on at any moment. But he did not walk on...
It was Corinna Winthrop who held the stage. Naked and bewildered she was ushered to her 'spot'. Her hands were cruelly bound. She was a body with a price to pay. For her volition was gone.
Clare watched. It was a nightmare that would not end as nightmares end. It was real. But she could not believe that it was real. She was not Irish.
They read it all out in a very official way. Corinna listened without seeming to hear. The cord round her elbows would ensure great pain. Perhaps that was all she was conscious of. They backed the jeep beneath the bough. Corinna was lifted up. She stood, a lonely figure, while they affixed the bulky noose around her slender neck. Suddenly she was a little girl with mischievous little boys at play. Cully drove the jeep away so that suddenly the little girl was hanging by her neck, her toes striving for the ground a foot beneath her feet, her hands and arms writhing in a futile effort to be free. Every eye was riveted upon the naked woman who was dying.
All the adjectives zeroed in. Clare recognized their awfulness. A woman was being killed before her eyes because of bigotry. Without thinking, without reasoning, she turned and fled.
It was an instinctive act without plan or thought of consequence. She ran in blind panic from something her whole nature rejected. Into the park and beyond. Somewhere out there were the twins. Surely they would find her. She yearned for their femaleness with a terrible hunger. Men! Men were hatred and death. There was no joy in men. Clare loathed men with all her being.
No one saw her go. They were too intent watching the death struggles of a female journalist whose body would be found on a Belfast pavement on the morrow. She ran, panting with exertion and fear, seeking the road to the moor.
A girl can run when her feet are free. But when her wrists are handcuffed behind her back her strides will not be as long nor as sure. She will tire more easily. She will know herself cruelly vulnerable. She can run. But she cannot fight. Battle is implicit to the flight of any prisoner.
She thought of surrender. To tug at her chained wrists was to invite defeat. She could never free them. If she wandered on the moor for days her wrists would inexorably remain chained at her back. If she turned back now she might rejoin her captors without query. She did not turn.
Her feet sped forward. How good it felt that they were not chained! Soon the twins might find her. Yet she knew instinctively they would leave her hands fettered as they were. It would please them to have her impotent. She would not mind. How strange the nature of a girl's adoration. She longed for Alethea and Tavie as a child may long for its mother.
But they were not there. She had found the road. She followed it well to one side. It would be a long journey to those who might be of a mind to help. Tired of running she slowed to a striding walk.
They waited for her. Striding over a hill she found them parked. She quailed and damned impetuosity. Then walked, erect and proud, to the jeep. "Waiting for me, boys?" she asked George and Bill.
They tied her ankles so it hurt. They meant it to hurt. Then tossed her into the back of the jeep like a bag of potatoes. "You tricked me," George accused. The hurt in his voice made her wish she had not run.
"You are the damndest girl to try and be kind to," Costigan said.
"I know. Whip me," Clare said abjectly. She understood his dilemma.
"But dammit... to run like that, handcuffed... "
"You didn't have to murder her."
He waved his hand in dismissal of the irrelevant. "You turned yourself into an escaped prisoner."
"What you are trying to say is that you'd sooner give me a good talking to and chain me more heavily. But that the 'boys' think I should be punished."
"You put it concisely."
"Do I get whipped?"
"Why pick that?"
"Men seem to get their biggest kick out of seeing a girl whipped," Clare said miserably.
"It's true," Costigan admitted. "But there's something you don't know. When the jeep arrived back Bill was dead... The usual arrow."
Clare readjusted her thoughts. The twins had seen her too late. They had exacted their revenge. She looked at Costigan piteously, sensing his predicament.
"Always you," he said solemnly. "When you are threatened my men get killed. It centers round you. You are the focus."
"So I have to be punished?"
"Yes."
"Something particularly awful?" She longed to help him.
He remained silent. Looking at her woefully.
"You don't mean... ? They want to hang me?"
He waved the thought aside. "No. They don't blame you personally. But they want you punished for running. Can you understand?"
"Of course!" Clare longed to help this sorrowful man who loved her. "Not to worry. I do understand." She knelt before him, clasping his knees and looking up into his eyes as millions of women have done through eons of time. "I should not have run. It was a silly panic thing. What you did to... to the Winthrop woman... I could not face it. You frightened me. But I know I have to be punished." She looked up innocently into his eyes. "Don't feel badly at what you must order done to me. I'll understand. I know I have to suffer. What punishment have they chosen for me?"
His hand sought her bowed head. His fingers ardent in her hair. Clare was happy. "You guessed it," he said heavily. "They want you whipped... Nothing casual: full dress. Ritualistic. Out in the garden where those girls can see. There will be enough guns to wipe out an army if they get that close-which they won't! They are too damn wise. But they have to watch you get it for what they did. It will bother them. You'll be whipped and then hung up by wrists every day for them to see."
Clare considered what lay in store. "It's pretty bloody awful," she conceded. "Do I have to? I mean, I can understand being whipped. But the rest... every day... " She looked up at him with hurt eyes.
For a little while their communion was through the gentle fingers caressing her while he considered. "We are an army. You have to understand that to understand us. We live by rules. Without that discipline we wouldn't survive a month." He shook his head as though sharing her own perplexity. "In effect our army is no different from the British."
"The British would never whip a girl."
"No, they'd bung her in some miserable jail to rot." He looked down at her searchingly. "Be honest. What would you choose? To be whipped and be done with it, or be locked up in some sterile cubicle for two years of your life?"
Even in this she was defeated. The Irish had their own unanswerable logic. "You know I'd choose the whip," she admitted, seeing him through a veil of tears. "But don't let them hang me up every day like a side of beef."
"It's those damn girls that bother you, isn't it." Costigan was bitter. "You think if they see you hanging there day after day they'll break down and make a slip and we'll get 'em."
"Try and understand that, too!" Clare flashed. "We had a beautiful clean world here before you came with your silly army and your war and your hate and death, death, death... !
"War and death! By the saints, girl! Three of my men killed already. Arrows in their backs from a bow we never see."
Clare sat back on her heels and made a blind gesture with her arms consigning the whole sorry business to limbo. The motion was her first realization that she was unchained. She wondered, but did not ask. She had a greater urgency. "Oh, let's both drop it. Drop it! Please! Tie me tight. Throw me in the jeep and drive away. Far away to a port, and then on a ship away from this poor sad island we cannot help." She held her arms out to him in enticement and surrender. "We can do it so easily. I'll make it easy for you... I promise."
"You don't understand, child," he said wearily. "Women can't understand." He grasped her hands and drew her close.
But Clare knew she understood all too well.
* * *
The court was familiar enough to have become silly. The silliness of a deadly game in which death had become implicit. Clare herself felt silly standing there naked with her wrists and elbows tied to impose the bitter pain she bore as a habit. The cynosure of every eye as she listened to her formal sentence: Fifty strokes with a whip on her naked body! She wondered bitterly why they added those last words. She was-always naked. Always!
She was desperately afraid. But fear, too, was familiar. A girl in Erdislune now carried fear around with her as she carried her shackles. She could discard neither. She bore them because she must. To be fastened naked and whipped by a man! Clare shivered. It would be a merciless determination to break her spirit. They would probably refer to it as "Teaching her a lesson." But she would scream and beg and demean herself, and afterwards like them all a little less. She remembered Nancy, how the cane had thunked into the round bottom with a savagery without finesse. Under the full force of a male arm the cane or the whip did not just leave a stripe. It left a wound. Fifty strokes!
The tree with its stout bough was well chosen. No cover in its immediate vicinity to hide a girl with a bow. Clare stood meekly as they did their will with her. Her eyes sought Costigan's in mute pleading. He did not evade them. His own shared her desolation. When the tugging and the hammering was done she stood a taut 'X' hands high and wide to the bough above, feet far apart tied to stakes driven into the ground. Only her head could move. Riodan held the whip. He showed it to her, dangling its tapered length before her face, making it tease her nipples. She closed her eyes.
It cut her in two. She was sure there would be blood. She surged her whole strength against her bonds as the only expression possible against so terrible a thing to happen to a naked girl. Keeping her eyes closed she let her head fall against a raised arm. Panting, she waited for the second stroke.
It did not come.
Expecting only a deliberate accentuation of suspense she opened her eyes timidly and looked around. She was alone. The men had disappeared. Only the whip remained. It lay before her on the grass.
Clare was sure the respite could bode her no good. Having given her a taste they had left her to savor it. At that moment she did not believe it possible to bear forty-nine more such as the single one. They would kill her. Perhaps they intended to. Did Costigan know! Would he allow her to be whipped to death! She could not believe it of him. This stroke and this loneliness, this stretched inability to move, it was a ploy, a cleverly cruel prolongation of her punishment.
The sound was a whisper in the air until the broad arrow blades sliced the cords with a solid bite. Her arms fell to her sides as though weighted. Gladness flooded her with fresh vitality. Her free hands sought the knots that secured her ankles. They had been craftily tied as though to defeat her at this very moment. Angrily and purposefully she tore at them in a frenzy of longing.
The gunfire was deafening in the quiet garden. Clare spared a brief glance. Costigan's men were advancing from the house, firing as they came. Shrubs and bushes were mowed by their bullets. They cleared a wide perimeter with flying lead, moving past her tree and towards the woods. Knowing only that she must do her part, Clare fought the knots feverishly and had loosed one ankle before a hand was placed gently on her bent shoulder. "It ain't no use, love," George said sorrowfully.
Two things saved her. The first was the wound of the whip itself. It was horrendous. She paled when she saw the cut skin and small trickles of her blood. The men, seeing it, turned away ashamed. Her second and principal salvation was George. He was left to tell her of it himself as he led her back to the house.
"That there whip was Riodan's pickin'. Don't think he realized what it 'ud do to a girl. We don't none of us want yer cut ter bits. Fact is, Miss," he fumbled in embarrassment, "the boys and me sort of like havin' yer around. We got used ter yer, see. Was suggested we chain yer tight in the dungeon. But we weren't all that keen on losing sight of yer... " He flushed. "Yer a damn pretty girl, an all."
"You mean I'm not going to be whipped?" Clare was incredulous.
"Fraid not, Miss." She could have laughed with joy at the apology in his voice. "But-they did think a bit o' punishment 'ud do no harm. So now you'll wear a heavier chain on your ankles, and most of the time your wrists will be handcuffed behind your back."
It was heaven! Impulsively she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him hard. Death and laughter. Torture and teasing. Why analyze! George was blushing proudly. He had loosed his firm grip on her arm. "Better come along, Miss, and get yer properly chained. Can't have yer runnin' round like this, y'know." He sounded like a mother solicitous for her child whose toilette was incomplete.
Her new anklets and connecting links were indeed heavy. She made a little moue of resignation as she watched them fastened on her. They would be awkward at first. But she would get used to them. Compared to the weight of the whip they were swansdown. She made another wry grimace of acceptance as she put her hands at the small of her back and felt the familiar bite of the steel on her wrists. She reflected ruefully that, at least, these new inflictions would keep her out of trouble.
"Keep yer out o' trouble, Miss," said George running true to form.
How good to feel mischief rising again. "You'll dry my tears when I cry, won't you, George?" She tugged at her handcuffs to illustrate her helplessness.
"Not sure we shouldn't have whipped you after all, Miss," George said happily.
* * *
Routine reasserted itself. Clare spent one night in the dungeon. She never knew whether by accident or design. Then her nights and days reverted to the previous pattern. She learned to walk in her heavier chains, from which no amount of cajoling could win her release. She adjusted to the loss of her hands very easily, for any of the boys were always willing to do for her anything she could not do for herself. They liked 'seeing her around'. In this knowledge she made herself 'seen' as gracefully and appealingly as she could devise. She did not try to escape.
The big table that made its appearance in the courtyard came as a shock. It was not the table itself, but that which was on it that caused Clare to catch her breath in consternation. It was a naked Sula chained spreadeagle, a Sula whose loveliness was arched as though in the throes of epilepsy.
Clare approached quietly and stood looking down at the wantonly exposed beauty. Ursula was panting as though in some deep distress. Her eyes were closed as though she wished to suffer in loneliness. Wondering at the strained posture, Clare sank to her knees and caught her breath in sympathy at what she saw. Set squarely beneath the small of the slender back was a broadly based wooden pyramid. Its peak was already pressing into the white flesh so that the sharpness of its top could not be seen. Clare guessed it to be blunt, but of small enough dimension to exact agony if the body's weight was rested on it. It was evident that Sula was still resisting, but weakening fast. The girl on the table had a choice. To rest herself on the projection and suffer agony. Or arch herself above it for as long as tortured muscles and sinews would endure.
Sula opened her eyes. She managed a wan smile when she saw her visitor. "Oh, darling... " It was all she could say.
Clare was distraught. Who had done this! Why! She thought of seeking Costigan. But felt a compulsion to end the agony. Chained as she was it would not be easy. But, kneeling, she backed up to the table and managed to raise her linked hands and thrust them back to grasp the torturing block of wood. Sula summoned her last strength to raise her hips while Clare plucked the thing from beneath her. The punished captive relapsed on the now flat surface with a sigh of pure ecstasy. Her rescuer sat beside her. "Who did that to you?" she demanded.
Sula's breath was still labored. She looked up guiltily at the chained girl to whom she owed surcease. "Oh darling... it's wonderful! I can't tell you how wonderful! But you shouldn't have... "
"But no one can leave you like that."
"You were supposed to." Sula's face took on a flush of shame. "They told me you'd find me, and that when you did I was to give you a message. The message was to leave me alone. You could do anything as long as it did not affect what... what-they've done to me."
"O.K. You have delivered the message."
"But that's not all." A tear made its way down Sula's cheek. "I had to say that if you did interfere they'd stretch you out like this too." Tears now trickled in earnest. Sula's voice was a wail. "But it was so awful... I couldn't have stood it much longer."
Clare felt less than happy. She most urgently did not wish to lay as Sula lay. She looked at the offending object. Its point was not needle-sharp. It was rounded. But to rest on it... ! "Not to worry," she admonished cheerfully. "We'll manage something."
Sula's lips were tremulous. "I'm a rotten little coward," she avowed. "Look, darling, I've had a nice rest. I'll raise up. Shove it back under before someone comes." She arched her slenderness painfully in invitation. Clare, who had seen something that the supine girl could not, hastily prodded the small pyramid back into place. It was easier to push back than to remove. "I saw what yer done," said George reproachfully and cheerfully when he reached them.
Sula moaned in despair. "It was my fault," she told him. "I didn't give her the message. Don't punish her. Please."
"Big girl like her shouldn't need no message," George declaimed. "Thorough bad lot, she is." He sounded quite pleased with his judgment.
Clare was never quite sure about George. She knew he was never deceived when she buttered him up. Nonetheless he enjoyed the female tribute to his masculinity. He unashamedly wallowed in his power over what was little removed from a slave harem.
"Please don't punish me, George." She arranged herself to look as erotically attractive as possible. Her mien was sweetly demure.
"Proper little hussy, you are," he declared reprovingly. "When Miss Sterling's done her stint I'll chain yer in her place myself."
Clare doubted he would carry out his threat. "George darling, we can't leave Sula like this."
"Why not?"
"That awful spike thing. It will do her an injury."
"Not if she don't lay on it." He was deliberately obtuse.
She stamped a bare foot ineffectually. It just hurt and jangled her chain. George laughed. She lashed out at him angrily.
"Take that beastly thing away!" She looked at him pleadingly. "Please, George. Take it away and I'll be nice to you. I'll do anything you want. Anything... just think...!"
"You'll do anything I want anyway," George said imperturbably.
Clare tore at her handcuffs as she always did when frustrated. "Well, do it just to be nice then!"
"O.K., darlin'." He withdrew the pyramid and laughed at her surprise. "Too clever you are, by half." He chuckled.
"What did she do?"
"She was a bad girl. So she doesn't get off scot free, see." He picked up a squarish chunk of wood and shoved it beneath the slim hips which Sula obediently raised at his command. "Ain't exactly torture. But not all that comfortable either." He winked at Clare. "You aim ter push it away directly I'm gone, don't you?"
Clare could not answer. He shook her arm good-naturedly. "Give me yer promise or I'll fix you proper, so I will."
"Oh, all right," Clare said petulantly. "I promise." She watched him go away, whistling. He had forgotten to use her. She felt sure that was what he had come out for in the first place.
She turned her attention to the bowed loveliness that was Sula. The most evident result of the new position was the punished girl's sex. It was raised to the sun as in worship. It would be the first thing to greet a passerby. It demanded more attention than the flushed features of its owner. "Does it hurt, darling?" she asked tentatively.
"Oh, nothing like that other. Ohhh, sweetheart, how can I thank you! My hairy thing's stuck out like a beacon. I suppose they'll all come and look at it... I say, darling... it isn't open, is it?"
"A little," Clare admitted. "But not to worry." She giggled. "I'd close it with my fingers if I could. Maybe I can back up between your legs. Want me to?"
"No." The word was vehement. "I don't want you punished."
"Oh alright. But tell me how you got in this pickle."
"I'm supposed to have helped Chloe escape. We were chained together. They didn't close her shackle tight. It fell open. I told her to run like hell. She did. I was chained tight so there was no use her trying to help me. They didn't find me all alone for about an hour. They raised an awful fuss. Said I should have shouted for help when she got away. Probably just an excuse to make me nicely available the way you are. You get screwed all the time, don't you?"
"I'm afraid so. I've become a very obedient little girl," Clare admitted.
"Is that right, Costigan's taken you for his own special girl?"
"Yes." Clare did not even blush. "You like him, don't you?"
"I can't help it. Mostly I feel sorry for him."
"A bloody murderer."
Clare shrugged. "Everything's crazy. I've given up trying to make sense."
Sula was frankly curious. "At night... oh, I know it's none of my business! But... does he unchain you?"
"Yes." Clare laughed mischievously at Sula's interest. "He unchains me. Sometimes he chains me again in different ways. Calls me his slave girl: really that's what I am." She chuckled reminiscently. "But he has a long chain fastened to the floor permanently. With it he shackles me by one ankle while we sleep. I don't mind. He couldn't possibly trust me. I can understand that. I never, never have any chance to escape."
Sula gasped and tried to move. She could not. "Don't mind me. I'm just making the best of a bad job. I expect it will hurt more and more. But I'll try and not be a nuisance." Her voice sank to a confidential murmur. "They keep those belts on us so we can't enjoy each other. I don't know if it's some moral thing with them. Or if they want us exclusively for male use. How's it been with you... ? I mean with me I've found it ugly to be used by men. They jibe at me about being a les. I'm all mixed up. These damn chaps keep screwing a girl so she can't help getting a bang out of it sometimes. I always feel guilty when it happens. But it happens... Even if they cane me... sometimes I don't mind. Is it that way with you?"
"I had the mixed-up bit too," Clare admitted. "But now I just invite the whole thing. I try and have fun with them. It's like everything else: if you make it easy for them they don't want it... well, not all that often," she amended, blushing.
"You're a proper little tart?"
"I sometimes think so. But one day I'll escape. Or they will go away. The girls are still out there somewhere... " All else fell into limbo: "Wasn't it lovely when we belonged to them... "
Sula tried to wriggle her hips, but failed. "Yes, it was a beautiful, gorgeous, wonderful dream." She considered for a while. "Darling... about these men. I suppose we were all comparative virgins when we came to Erdislune. We were still virgin when they came and captured us. They have made me feel... well, as though I'm another sexual entity altogether." She looked up at her smiling companion. "I mean-I used to be a woman. The twins made me wholly female. But now I'm something else. I'm two tits, two boobs, a cunt and an arse. That's what the boys call the parts of us that they see. A sort of strict utility: If you can't use it, don't bother. There was some sort of a funny story once... "
Clare nodded understandingly. "It's because they are so close to death. The bits of us you've named: they're the urgent bits. They don't have time for the rest of us." Clare looked off into some far horizon. "Darling... don't you see. We are all they've got. We are their mothers and their sisters and the eternal woman. The female thing. Because they are going to die the urge to mate compels them to use the parts of us that serve that need. Can't you feel sorry for them? They are so terribly vulnerable, so weak. Little boys playing dangerous games. It's us who are strong."
"With me in this fix and you chained so you daren't say boo to a goose!"
"Oh, I know. But that's a woman's role. They absorb strength from us. Think of being fucked! Oh, I know it's a rotten word. But let's use it. In that, our most natural fulfillment, we moan and gasp just as we do under their whip, or as you are doing now on this lousy table. When they cane my bottom I know they are subconsciously trying to create an endless orgasm that goes on and on. They resent that little couple of minutes of ecstasy they get when they shove their absurd penis into us. They spend themselves in our vaginas-O.K., in our cunts! And they're a nothing. When they whip us they can make an orgasm last all day."
* * *
This time it was Riodan. He had his usual little box. Clare quailed. "Please don't hurt her," she asked humbly, all her analyses brought to nothing by fear.
"Ah, tis a lovely thing she is," Riodan said admiringly. His gaze centered on the gaping sex. "Are ye comfortable now, me darlin'?"
"No." It was an easy question for Sula to answer. Her eyes implored him apprehensively.
"Ye have no the pretty belt round your private places," he said with an infinity of suggestion.
"They took it off me when they chained me here," Sula said doubtfully.
"And nae doubt you are feelin' the lack of it, love?"
She looked up at him. Knowing he intended to hurt her. "I don't mind." She could find no right words. She looked at him appealingly.
"Don't hurt her anymore," Clare pleaded. "Isn't she suffering enough?"
"Aye, to be sure." Riodan placed his hand reflectively on the upthrust vagina. "Tis this pretty thing I'm concerned with."
"Oh, go ahead and use it," Sula suggested wearily.
"Or mine," Clare invited. She was afraid of what was about to happen.
"Ah, but ye have the wrong idea entirely." His voice was sly. Clare miserably knew he was playing with them. "Tis a burden this thing is to a pretty girl. Always she must be worrying about it," he smirked at the spreadeagled girl on the table.
"Look, I know you intend to do something rotten," Clare said heatedly. "But have a little pity. She's in pain. What more do you want! Be sensible and a bit human. Fuck me. You'll feel better." She wondered if she was utterly beyond the pale.
Riodan leered. "Tis a fine girl ye are, mavourneen, by the saints I could fuck ye a year and a day, so I could. But tis the little lady here I've business with."
Without inhibition, Riodan fingered Sula's exposed sex. Not with personally erotic intent, but clinically. He pinched the labia together to see if they would stay shut without the aid of his fingers. He explored depth and dimension. His every motion was pregnant with purpose.
"Please fuck me and be happy," Clare pleaded.
He did not answer.
"What are you going to do to me?" Sula asked without hope.
"Tis a bit o' protection I'm after giving ye," Riodan said cheerfully and without sincerity. "This lovely thing stickin' up fer all the world ter see. Tis a temptation to all of us, so it is."
"I'm not sticking it up," Sula protested. "It's that damn bit of wood under my hips."
"Oh, aye," he agreed ambiguously. "Tis a sore trial it is to ye an all. Tis a bit of help I'll be giving."
Clare knew the time had come. Riodan had enjoyed the play of words. Now he would do what he had come to do. She ceased to offer her body as ransom. He could take her when he wished. It was a waste of breath. She watched, fascinated and repelled.
In his usual business-like way, Riodan opened his box and placed on the table a bottle of antiseptic. Clare shivered at the sight of it. Next he produced a large safety pin. He chuckled at their surprise at the sight of the utilitarian item. "Tis a very simple thing," he acknowledged. He stuck the incisive stem of it into the sterilant.
Clare knew what was to happen, but rejected it. Surely even Riodan would not do a thing like this! All her rationalizations must seem childish nonsense to Sula at this moment. Men owned them utterly and worked their will upon their femaleness. That was all. It was so simple. Clare knew, with a frightening impotence, that nothing she could do or say would halt the inexorable. All the loveliness of her body could not divert Riodan from his cruelty. His mind had found a fantasy no concupiscence could tempt.
"Please don't do that to me." It was a girl pleading to a man. Its sincerity would have halted most male hands. But not Riodan's.
"Do it to me if you must," Clare pleaded.
He ignored them both.
Clare watched as in a nightmare. Satisfied with his preparation, Riodan used the fingers of his left hand to close tight the lips that had pouted to Sula's shame. Slowly and with infinite concentration he selected the exact place whereby her sex should become impotent, and thrust the pointed barb into the most tender flesh...
Sula screamed and screamed. Her body could not respond to her demands. But her head weaved from side to side as she cried her protest of this violation of her flesh.
Clare saw the pin make its way slowly through the flesh of the helpless girl. She saw the careful guidance of the male fingers as they moved the pin from side to side, back and forth, to facilitate its passage through the maiden lips. She heard Sula's screams as something quite apart from this careful sealing of a girl's cunt.
Riodan's pressure was steady and persistent. The pin made its way unopposed exactly as he wished it. Sula's screams had become an appropriate accompaniment to his artistry. After an eternity of agony the point emerged from the innocent labia and was thrust into its natural union with the rest of the pin. Sula's sex had been sealed.
He stepped back and admired his work. Clare recognized its macabre appeal. A neat and tidy notice to all concerned that this girl was not for use. The belt had achieved the same purpose without pain. But Sula was under punishment and must be made to suffer. The frightful pin used in so frightful a way epitomized the resentment of the male against female love. Poor Sula!
"Now get this straight, little darlin'," Riodan told Clare. "She's ter wear it. Understand! You take it out and you'll wear one yerself so damn quick you'll wonder what happened."
The moans of the pierced girl upon the table made a desolating background to their speech. Clare looked at him with hatred. "Why no anesthetic?" she demanded.
"Hoity-toity! Bit uppity, aren't we!" He fumbled in his box and came up with an identical pin. He held it up for her inspection. "Come here, Miss High and Mighty," he ordered.
Clare was stricken. She knew she had come to rely too much on George's good nature and Costigan's authority. She was still a prisoner. Still subject to the whim of any of these men who wished to use her. "You don't think I'm going to stand still while you stick that thing through me, do you!" Her words held more courage than she felt.
He had seen the fear in her eyes, and laughed, his purpose accomplished. He returned the pin to his box. Then, unexpectedly, unlocked the shackles that held Sula stretched. "Bit of a poser, I'll be leavin' yer," he cheerfully explained. "Ain't sure how you'll handle it. But that there pin stays right where it is or it'll be the worse for the two of yer, and don't be forgetting that!" He went away chuckling.
Clare turned her attention to her sobbing companion. She cursed the frustrating handcuffs. With her hands chained behind her back she could do so little. Tenderly she bent and kissed the trembling lips. "He's gone," she said comfortingly. "We're alone."
Although she was now free of restraints, Sula had not moved. "I'm afraid," she moaned. "If I move it hurts worse. Ohhh, darling... it's beastly... beastly." She sobbed quietly, her hips still held high by the wood block. Her grotesquely ornamented sex still her most prominent feature. Unable to use her hands, Clare used her lips instead to give what solace she could to the tortured girl. After many minutes she persuaded the sufferer to use both hands and feet, now free, to take her weight while she contrived with her chained hands to withdraw the block of wood. Sula relaxed gratefully with a long sigh of pure relief, but kept her legs well spread. "It hurts so damn much," she apologized.
Costigan's boys came to view the innovation. The owner of the object of their interest kept her eyes closed and did not move while they made their lewd comments and went their way. When the last of them had gone she looked up at Clare pleadingly. "Darling, what am I going to do? Oh darling... ! What can I do!"
Clare had been asking herself the same question. In the minds of both girls there was an urgent compulsion. Sula voiced it. "I... I don't know if I'm brave enough to stand the pain. But what's to stop me pulling it out and running like blazes."
Slowly and fearfully the new owner of the pin used her hands and arms to raise her torso so that she could look down and examine her new possession. She studied the bit of steel that was so much a part of her. "It's so tidy and neat," she said in surprise. "But it's as though there's a fire burning down there, the pain's so awful. I suppose it would be utter agony to pull it out... ? I'd have to do it myself. You're chained altogether too tight... the bastards!"
Clare glimpsed the cruelty. Riodan would know how their minds would work. They faced a shocking decision. A dilemma that was largely that of the wounded girl. Chained as she was, Clare could contribute only words. She was helpless to withdraw the pin and helpless to accompany Sula in flight. She found herself savoring the full depth of her captivity.
"Darling, I don't know." She shook her shoulders angrily. "I can't help. I can't do anything. I feel so useless. I don't even know what to advise. I want you to escape. Think how wonderful that would be for all of us. But we always get caught and punished. That's why these heavy chains are on my ankles: because I tried to run. If I tell you to... to do what you said, and you got caught, I'd feel a bitch."
"Don't feel badly about that. I expect we'd both get punished," Sula offered morosely. She was sitting, propped up by hands and arms, still examining with morbid fascination the small object of their quandary. Suddenly, as from an instant thought, she turned to Clare. "I'm thinking about Chloe. Damn funny there's no commotion going on about her escape. Know what I think! Those dirty rotten bastards engineered the whole thing for a bit of sport, an excuse to do what they've done to me. I bet they left her shackle loose on purpose. I bet they've got her locked up or " chained up somewhere right now waiting for some bloody awful punishment. Poor kid! She's so sweet."
"I expect you're right," Clare agreed unhappily. "I'll try and pump George when he shows up. But our problem is you. Darling, can you stand up?"
"What for?"
Clare made her familiar struggle of defeat. "I know. It's silly. It just seems so awful that you're free but can't move. They are bastards. I bet they're laughing at us."
"You notice, we don't either of us consider taking it out," Sula conceded glumly. "That threat scared us. Me anyway." Slowly, with infinite concentration she began the most painful journey of her life.
Clare watched, sharing the agony, the gasps, the pauses and fresh starts. Sharing, too, the final victory as Sula stood erect.
"How is it?"
"I suppose it wasn't any worse than I expected," Sula admitted uncertainly. "The real test is going to be to walk. Want to lend me a shoulder?"
They made two small shuffling steps that covered only inches. "I don't know if I can stand it," Sula groaned. "Oh, darling, they've really fixed me. Let's try it with my feet further apart." She gave a small bitter laugh. "Us girls always end up like that."
They managed a small circuit. Gingerly and cautiously the pinned girl sat back on the table and arranged her legs for whatever easement she could find. "For sure I won't try and escape," she conceded woefully. "Darling... do you think they will make me wear the damn thing... ? I mean--for always?"
Clare was absolved from an opinion.
* * *
Chloe was led to her punishment by a firm grip on each arm. Cully and George were grinning at her futile struggles. Barney Riodan brought up the rear with his inevitable box.
The new arrival had been effectively gagged. Clare could see from the distended cheeks that some object had been placed in the girl's mouth. A wide strip of adhesive sealed her lips. Her eyes were desperate. Clare wondered what she had been promised to evoke such fear.
"Make way for the next one," George ordered briskly.
Using Clare's shoulder once more, Sula managed to remove herself from the table. The two girls watched as Chloe was spread wide and chained. George lifted the slight figure as far as the fastenings would allow. Cully unrolled a piece of leather through which a great variety of nails had been driven. He slipped it into place and nailed it down.
"Just in case it happens ter get moved," he assured them sardonically.
When George released his burden the pinioned girl sank slowly to the sharp points and then, with a start of realization, arched her body to avoid them. Her eyes were frantic. She could not speak.
Riodan produced two more safety pins. These were smaller. But still large enough. Without a word he held one against Clare's nipple and one against Sula. "Just the right size, me little darlins," he enthused. "Ye'll both wear 'em if our little lady's gag should just happen ter be missin." He gave them a lewd wink and then, ostentatiously, placed a pin on the table, one on each side of the taut body and beneath a breast. "I'll leave 'em handy. Almost certain to have ter use 'em on one of yer, so I am."
When the men had gone three pairs of feminine eyes sought each other in misery. Those of the girls who could not speak became riveted in horror on the metal fastened within the triangle of Sula's sex. For a few moments what she saw would divert her mind from her own predicament. Sula painfully positioned herself to provide the best possible view of her infliction. "Don't worry, sweetheart. This is just for me. They won't do it to you. You've got your own troubles," she told the frightened girl, but knew she was not believed.
Clare had never felt more useless or more cruelly aware of her condition. Her fetters were the inhibiting hands of Costigan's boys. They would be much amused now knowing the agonies of impotence that she and Sula must endure. Two girls in agony and she could help neit'ier. One girl with unfettered hands and feet who was prohibited from helping her companions: prohibited by fear.
Sula practiced walking. It was slow and painful and deeply shaming. But better than standing longing to help someone who could not be helped. But when Chloe's panting breath told of the end of her endurance, she had an inspiration. Cautiously and with grimaces of pain she positioned herself on the table so that, by leaning over the arched slenderness, she could thrust a balled fist under each hip. "Relax on my hands, sweetheart," she panted, fighting her own suffering.
Clare watched them through tears. Two naked girls, brutalized by men! Why, oh why! The panting form of the girl being tortured had subsided gratefully on the clenched fists of another whose pain was greater than her own. But how safe was it that this relief be given the sufferer. She wondered if she and Sula could abstain from the forbidden acts. For a little while perhaps. But what then! Would they all wear the hated pins in labia and nipple before the day was done! Would they! Surely Costigan would not sanction such treatment for her! She was his chosen girl. Or did she place too great a reliance in her carnal eminence.
How long could Sula hold position! Even without the wound she bore it would be tiring. Clare had an inspiration. Ludicrous but worth a try. Sitting on the table between Chloe's spread legs she swung her chained feet round so that she could push her toes beneath the triangle and with continued pressure insert her feet beneath the girl's round bottom. "Try this," she invited hopefully.
It was not perfect, but it helped. Sula thankfully eased back to normal. Most of Chloe's weight rested on the proffered feet. Clare's own position now was strained and awkward. But she would hold it as long as she could. It was then that Sula went berserk.
She had watched. Her eyes betraying the misery of their plight. She had edged to her feet again, controlling her pain. Suddenly she bent and reached for the forgotten hammer. Using the claw she tore loose the spiked leather from beneath the young nakedness that Clare's feet held off impalement. She hurled it from her in disgust, and in the same motion tore the tape from the prisoned lips and removed the wad of cloth from the grateful mouth. "I can't take it," she vowed furiously. "It's no good. I just can't!" With firm and determined fingers she loosed the hated pin and pulled it from her flesh. She screamed. But she did what she must do. "Pray for me," she pleaded and ran.
Clare was distraught. Everything was going wrong. Disaster was in the air. She was desperately afraid for each of them. Suddenly she had a great need... Costigan! In an agony of impatience at her chains she began her hobbled pilgrimage.
Clare flung herself at Costigan's feet and wept. She longed to clasp him, but could not. "Please take my handcuffs off. Please... Please... " She rubbed her head against him as does a dog.
Without a word he unlocked the metal from her wrists. Instantly she clung to his knees in an agony of terror and need of human warmth. He let her weep, his hands playing gently with her hair and caressing her face and neck. She moaned in a strange mixture of gratitude and anguish. It was a long while before she could look up at him and speak.
"Don't let them. Oh please don't let them...!"
"Riodan?" he guessed instantly.
She told him. "Oh please... please! Not in my nipples! Not anywhere... " He listened gravely. She absorbed his strength with a great thankfulness. "That will not be done to you," he said with certainty. She wept anew.
"And the others?" she had to ask.
He shrugged. "Be satisfied that I can save you."
"It's too awful. They are only girls."
"You are only a girl. It seems fearsome. But they won't die. If they did it to you, you would not die."
She sobbed herself into quiescence. Then looked up at him with large hurt eyes. "They don't deserve it, y'know. It makes me feel so lousily guilty. I'm not hurt. They're tortured... just because... because they're... "
"Lesbians?"
"Is that really the reason?"
"The men don't like it."
"They liked me, didn't they, because I was wanton. Because I played their game."
"They like you because they sense your sorrow for them. You must have an Irish heart."
"Why can't they just whip us?"
He gave her his wisest grin. "They don't all love having their bottoms caned the way you do." She flushed. "Do I really?"
"Of course you do, you little humbug. George gets an erection every time he thinks of the way you bend over and the things you say."
How good it was to be back on familiar ground and know that mischief had not died. "Why can't they just cane us then! It hurts like billy-o." She looked at him witchingly. "I know it gives them erections. But we even look after .that for them-at least I do! Why this awful ghastliness?"
He shook his head sorrowfully. "Just part of the whole dark picture. Try not to look at it. Be a good little girl in chains and leave it at that."
She persisted manfully. "If I offered to bend over and be a good little girl for... oh, some truly awful number of strokes with the cane, wouldn't they let the girls alone? Put them back wherever it is they keep them? Those belts they lock on the poor dears are a bad enough punishment... " she added ingenuously.
"I'm not going to have you cut to bits. You've escaped very well so far without me having to make an issue of you. Old George has helped. He's in love with you. Besides, you overrate your fortitude. Six of the best on your bottom probably does you good. A hundred might kill you."
He was so strong. He knew everything. Most of all, he knew the innermost you: the bit you hid even from yourself. She knew that while they were together he gave her the strength and love she had previously found only in Tavie and Alethea. "How long are you going to hold Erdis lune?" she asked irrelevantly.
He gestured impatiently. "Never mind. I don't know myself."
She rested against him, content to hold and to be held. At that moment she wished that she would not, one day, have to lose him. Unheroic as he might seem, he had the strength of ten. She needed strength. "What must I do now?" she asked finally.
"Go back and act naturally with the boys."
"Can't I stay here with you until bedtime?" she pleaded wistfully.
"No."
Dutifully she got to her feet. Her obedience to him always surprised her. Meekly she turned and offered her wrists. She even managed a faintly sarcastic thank you when he had clasped the handcuffs back upon them.
They had caught Sula, of course. She stood panting, arms held by an amused George and Cully.
"Been in fer a quickie?" George inquired ribaldly.
She stuck her tongue out at him impudently. If only she could keep things leavened with a bit of humor!
"Done everything we told her not to," Cully accused indignantly.
Clare turned on him. "I know what you want to do... Horrible things! Barney and his rotten pins and boxes. Look, we are only girls. We've never hurt you. We'll be obedient if you'll give us a chance." She searched her mind frantically for rationalizations. "We understand this prisoner of war bit. You are men, and luck has made you a present of some girls that you are going to enjoy using as a sort of... prerequisite... or spoils of war, or whatever term you want to use. We won't complain too much. But why spoil a good thing by being so cruel we can't take it, can't play our proper role! It's like killing the goose that lays the golden egg."
"Wish they were all like her," George contributed fervently.
"Make a good member of the Cause," Cully conceded.
Clare returned to battle. "Look, boys, we've all got sort of messed up today. Us girls sort of know we are for it. But we are lost in this cruelty thing. How about caning us instead? You all enjoy caning me. I know you do. You all get the damndest hard-on. You can cane us all sorts of ways. Tie us or make us stand. Make us ask for it-you know... all the things you enjoy. It will hurt like hell. But we'd love you." Her plea hung pregnant in the silence.
"Damned if I ain't got a hard-on already," George sounded surprised.
"See! What did I tell you! It's much more fun," Clare insisted, feeling like a five-dollar whore offering something special for an extra ten.
"Little bitch got a point," Cully agreed.
"I got some points meself," Riodan said heavily.
Clare looked at Barney with deep affection. "You'd like to cane me, Barney, wouldn't you?"
"I'd hurt yer somethin' awful," he warned.
"But, of course, darling! Us girls expect a bit of pain."
Riodan considered. He was a man and fallible. "I thought up a nice little plan, so I did," he complained.
"Tell us. We'll love it!" Clare knew herself pure bitch.
"It ain't bad," Barney admitted modestly. He surveyed his audience with a showman's instinct. "Bet you all think this here wench wot run off is going ter get safety pins in her twat and her tits and what have you." He chuckled portentously. "That's what she thinks too. Look at her. She's scared shitless. Had a taste of it already, so she has." He paused with a showman's true instinct. "But I've thought o' a better way o' making her squeal, so I have. She's earned herself a fine punishment. She's all primed up to bear it. So what do we do!" He looked around triumphantly. "We do the thing that'll hurt her most. We give her punishment to the little girl down there on the table."
It was masterly. Clare recognized a worthy opponent. The other men were already eyeing the shackled figure of Chloe with mounting interest. Sula moaned in desolation.
"Real clever, that is," Cully paid tribute.
"What yer aimin' ter do?" George inquired. He was neutral.
"She's earned the lot," Riodan stated factually. "I got three pins."
Chloe began to cry.
Sula fought frantically. But was subdued.
Clare wondered what erotic delight she could offer to offset such an entrancing fantasy in the minds of men. Always the male libido would be over the hill with some fresh notion.
"Don't you like my bottom?" she asked wickedly. "Sure do," said George. Good old George!!! "We can cane that any time," said Cully. She looked at Riodan. "All three will half kill her."
"She'll live."
Clare turned to the distraught Sula. "For heaven's sake give me some help."
The captive girl shook her head as though in waking. "Let go my arms, please," she asked innocently. "I won't try anything."
They loosed her and watched entranced.
It was as though Sula was under a spell. She knelt beautifully before the costive Irishman and asked meekly: "Please cane my bottom. I'll be a very good girl and do just what you say." She looked up at him with a sudden insight. "When you have caned me all you want, please fuck me. I want you to."
"I got a job ter do." Riodan sounded less certain of the nobility of his cause. No one helped him.
"I have a beautiful bottom," Sula said simply.
"We're being screwed proper," Riodan was retreating.
"I'll say thank you after each stroke."
"I'll ask for the next stroke." Clare upped the ante.
"We can't give you more'n half a dozen," Barney said wistfully. "You got the nicest arse. Orders!"
"Cane me anywhere," Sula implored. Obviously she was fighting for courage. "How about my breasts?" She thrust them out arrogantly. They were very beautiful.
Riodan was conscious of a dwindling moral support. "I got ter do somethin'," he affirmed defensively. Sula's breasts were not to be treated lightly.
"Tell yer what," said Cully as though he had just discovered the law of gravity. "Let's have one of them there compromises the British are always talkin' about. Let's have half and half. Let the little girl choose which she wants: the top or the bottom-hers, that is. Then we'll cane the others' arses and we'll all be happy."
Clare supposed this was how the world's affairs were run. Broken deadlocks. She played safe and kept silent.
Sula said: "It hurts terribly." No one knew whether she was speaking of the cane or the pins.
There was suddenly upon them all a sense of drama. Before their eyes a chained, naked girl would make a choice between having the lips of her sex pinned together or of having similar pins thrust through each of her nipples. Clare realized that, for her, it would be a choice impossible to make. Both were unthinkable.
Chloe defeated them. She had been quietly crying. Her eyes wide in horror and disbelief at what she saw and heard. She made no choice. But when every eye was upon her she raised her head as much as her bonds would allow and said defiantly: "Leave Sula and Clare alone! Why should they be cut up by your rotten cane if you are going to stick those beastly pins in me anyway! I'm not going to choose. To hell with you! Stick all three pins in me and forget the rest!"
The female capacity to contemplate agony is inexplicable. It left Costigan's boys speechless. Clare groaned inwardly. They were back to square one. It was George who took them out of it. He spoke directly to Barney Riodan.
"Summat in what she says. Start out fer a bit o' fun wi' one of 'em and end up givin' all three a bad time... It ain't cricket."
"Fuck cricket!" Riodan felt his fortunes had improved.
George was the bigger man. He tapped his colleague seriously on the chest. "Look at it this way, Barney. I know what's in yer mind. You'd like ter see them pins sort of nestlin' in little dolly's tits and twat. Tell the truth, so would I. Tis a fancy notion an' all. But I ain't all that keen on them screams. Don't think any of us are 'cept you. So be a good chap and use that hypo thing yer got. Little girl gets her ornaments and no one gets hurt. Sure an' you're a good feller, Barney... We'll all love yer."
"Tis the Blarney Stone ye've kissed, George." But Riodan was smiling. Perhaps he was glad of compromise, too. He turned to his ubiquitous box. Chloe said nothing. What was there for her to say!
Cully thoughtfully handcuffed Sula's wrists behind her back and pushed her to where she could view another suffer what she had borne. George raised the small hips and pushed the block of wood beneath them so that she who was to be hurt and shamed was now arched taut, unable to struggle. Chloe resolutely closed her eyes.
That the punished girl could feel none of the pain of her suturing made the whole scene bizarre. Something unspeakable was done with neatness and dispatch. Clare's nerves and stomach writhed as she watched the sterilized points pierce the maiden flesh and, after an eon of time, emerge on the other side to be clipped home. The whole safety pin carefully centered to achieve whatever esthetic potential might exist and at the same time scream its utter incongruity. When the three utilitarian bits of shaped steel had been placed to Riodan's satisfaction, the block was pulled away, the shackles unlocked... The heartbroken Chloe was made to stand and to walk while the anesthetic still protected her from pain. The flowing freedom of motion she was encouraged to exercise revealed her shining appendages to the fullest advantage of a strangely erotic contrast. Safety pins in a naked girl!
Clare felt her own breath catch, and sensed a quivering awareness in Sula as the two of them watched the bemused Chloe walk as she was told to do, then stand and peer down at the three most secret portions of herself impaled by foreign steel. The punished girl stood long and gazed in wonder at her new toys. Tentatively she touched each with a hesitant finger, the barest touch to assure herself that they were real, that her nipples and her nether lips had indeed been pierced for ornaments she had no wish to wear. Her curiosity satisfied, Riodan cuffed her wrists behind her back. Taking her by one arm and grabbing Sula in the same way he propelled them forward.
"Come along, me little darlin's. I'll take ye back where ye belong while ye can still talk. Tis a pretty picture ye are, an that's the truth." He led the broken spirited girls away.
"She is a damn pretty picture, an all," Cully said, surprised.
Pain! Clare shuddered. Yet she knew that, without intending to, Barney Riodan had achieved a twisted beauty.
"Every girl should wear 'em," said George with reverence.
They stood in silence remembering what they had seen. Two men and a naked girl in chains. Clare did not want to remember. She wanted to forget. She looked brightly from one to the other of her companions. "You were good to us girls," she said softly. "Take me somewhere and let me be good to you."
"Bloody good idea!" George enthused. "I got the damndest hard-"
"I noticed it," Clare admitted demurely.
"What about the cane?" Cully suggested hopefully.
"Oh, you have to cane me first," Cane agreed warmly. "It's a sort of a hors d'oeuvre."
"There you go bein' rude again," George said approvingly as he picked her up and carried her towards her favorite punishment.
"I'm sorry I'm rationed to six strokes." Clare had no trouble in sounding sincerely regretful that Costigan had limited any daily infliction on her person to 'six of the best'. "Not much between two of you, is it," she added winsomely.
"You'll know you've had 'em!" George assured her darkly.
"If you'll take my handcuffs off I won't look so silly when I bend over."
Cully had the offending metal off her wrists in seconds. She used her newly freed hands to pull his head down to be kissed. Playfully, and because she wanted to, she kissed George twice.
"Give me number one now, please, darling. Just to get me in the proper frame of mind."
"You're always in the proper frame of mind," George flexed the slender cane happily. "A rare bad lot you are, an all."
"I'm going to give you a really special bend," Clare told them impudently. "Watch how it sticks my bottom out. I can manage it the first time. I'll be too scared after that."
They watched entranced as the girl they were to whip immolated herself for their delectation. Knees firm, legs slightly apart, back arched in and down, clenched fists instead of fingers on her toes. From her almost upside-down position she looked up at them pertly. "Whenever you're ready, gentlemen." Strangely she felt happier than she had done all day.
There was a snickering in the air before the fire lanced her bottom. A scalding wave beat against the dyke of her determination. She fought it as an enemy that might spoil her impudence. She won. But her lovely pose was shattered. The cane had driven her forward. The agony had knifed her erect. She was sure she could feel her flesh swelling and bursting into the ridge that would mark the passage of the slice. Her seeking hands confirmed its rise. Slowly she turned so that her smile should be complete...
"Ohhh... George!" The exclamation said it all.
"He's frightfully clever with the cane," she said admiringly to Cully. "I expect it's your turn next. Is there any particular position you'd enjoy me in?"
"That comes later," Cully confirmed with heavy humor. He looked her up and down with serious consideration of her question. "Y'know, Miss, I like yer best a'standin' up straight with yer hands clasped behind yer neck. D'you mind."
Clare did not mind at all. But an imprudent honesty prompted a mischievous admission. "I love that way. But I should tell you it doesn't hurt as much." She stood as he had asked, taking care to thrust her breasts into maximum prominence. She had adopted an axiom: men loved a girl's breasts, so use 'em! From his indrawn breath she knew she was beautiful. "Like this?" Her sideways glance was pure provocation.
Perhaps Cully hit harder. The pain seemed just as bad. If there was a competitive urge between the two men her bottom would rue it. She fought her battle and came up smiling. "My poor little bottom," she said with mock sorrow. They loved it. What little boys they were!
She rested her hands on George's shoulders and smiled up at him adoringly. "And now Miss Bottom wants to know your wishes for her, darling."
George glowed. For a moment Clare was sure that by a judicious use of her posterior she could own the world. "There's a way, Miss. It's sort of down on your knees, but then you get right down with your elbows and forearms and your face. Can't rightly explain... "
"Like this?" Clare knew what he wanted. It would hurt. Her thighs and torso hinged together vertically. The posture was pure bottom. She was surprised herself at the tight exposure. "Am I doing it right, darling?"
"You do everything right, mavourneen!" He cut her low down where the hairs showed through the wicked crease. She yelped and fell over squirming.
The two men watched a girl's agony. It was a beautiful agony as she stretched and twisted and gasped. She lay there hurting even when she smiled lovingly, looking up at he who had whipped her. "Thank you, George. You are sweet to me." She rose with a deliberate grace and rubbed her wealed bottom tenderly while her eyes acknowledged their gratitude.
She turned to the other man she served. "Between my legs, Cully? You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
Cully was stunned. "Miss... you ain't really offering that, are you?"
She enveloped him in sunshine. "I'll howl and wriggle all over the place. But if you don't mind...?"
"Mind!" He was incredulous, and avid.
"I'll say thank you now," Clare said prettily. "I won't be able to right afterwards." She wondered what little devil of whimsey got hold of her at such times. She wondered even more fervently as she propped herself up under the hips to spread as obscenely as her ankle chains would allow. "I could be much nicer for you if my ankles weren't chained," she wheedled.
In a moment her ankles were free. With a small moue of complicity she parted her feet as wide as they would go.
The cane sliced her in two. She had shut her eyes. She had not dared watch. She gave a high keening moan and collapsed on her side, both hands feverishly clutching her bruised sex, curled up in a feminine ball of agony.
Again the two men watched with reverence.
"Proper little hero, she is," said Cully, awed.
When she had gathered her forces once more she knelt before them as a slave girl kneels. "Two more lovely cuts still," she whispered. "May I serve you now, please? It will rest me," she grinned impishly. "I'm sure the last two strokes will put you both back in form again."
"Bloomin' little witch you are, for sure!" George breathed huskily.
"How, please?"
They told her how.
She acquitted herself with great skill. Perhaps with love.
For the rest she touched her toes and said her pleases and thank you's nicely.
They loved her and rewarded themselves again.
Then, for what reason, or under what impulse she never knew, they took her to the great Hall of Montrilas. They took her there without her chains and without her handcuffs. But they locked the heavy shackle round her ankle.
"Just like when I first found yer," George said romantically.
They went, without a backward glance, Like men suddenly remembering a mission, and left her standing there alone and forlorn.
Clare was bereft. She wanted no more of the nightmares. No more of the morbid wakings and rememberings. She kicked angrily at the chain that would keep her there forever if need be. The Great Hall absorbed her into its gloom and into its antiquity.
She, tenderly, lowered herself to the stone and wept.
* * *
It felt deliciously wicked there in the long grass of the glade. Clare stretched her nakedness in wanton sensuality and looked up through half-closed eyes at the intent faces of Tavie and Alethea as each of them teased one of her nipples. How beautiful they were!
"I'll whip you both hard," she promised dreamily.
"You mean, if we stop?" Alethea giggled.
Tavie pinched. Clare opened one eye wide. "That hurt."
"Well, don't promise to punish us then."
"You know what we are going to do to you?" Alethea asked softly.
"I don't mind." Clare was floating on a cloud, a lovely sun-kissed cloud.
"We are going to tie you all spread out and whip you with nettles."
"But I'm in charge of you. I'll do the whipping." Clare was half asleep.
"Between your legs as well."
"I'll tell our Lord Godfrey if you do." She knew she would not.
"He doesn't whip us as hard as you do. Poor Daddy. He hates to have to hurt us."
"He can put you in the dungeon though."
Clare realized too late that her nipples were being neglected. Her ankles were tied wide apart before she came awake and sat up. "No fair," she protested. "I was half asleep."
"You were talking about putting us in the dungeon."
"You know it's good for you."
"This will be good for you, darling Clare. Give us your hands."
"Take them," Clare said with false petulance. "I can't stop you. Not with my feet spread a league apart like this." She tugged ineffectually at one prisoned ankle.
The twins laughed happily as they tied her with arms and legs wide to invite their attentions. Clare did not resist. It was a game they played often. Tomorrow one of them would be the victim.
"If we are ever caught we will all be in the dungeon, with chains and other grievous things to bear," she warned. It was an idle threat. Part of their game.
They whipped her gently with the nettles, making her plead. She could not squirm much, for they had tied her well. But she tugged and strove in ways that gave them joy.
"Methinks Lord Godfrey would be much angered with me if he knew his three wards disported themselves shamelessly naked within his woods. I am supposed to guide thee aright. Tis me he would punish."
They laughed at her concern. "Lord Godfrey is busy elsewhere. He comes not to this glade. You carp like old Bette in the kitchen. Here, we give thee something of more concern." They opened the lips within her hair and dropped a nettle leaf therein.
She could never best them. She did not really want to. But at times their mischief was extreme. She moaned with the intimate sting. They watched, rapt, as she tore at their bindings. She refused to plead. They would only listen in wide-eyed enjoyment. But it helped to struggle.
"Let us whip her breasts with the nettles, very gently... "
"No!" Clare was angry that they had found her weakness. She could not bear to have her breasts whipped, even if it was only a few nettles. The twins knew she could not bear it. So they would do it happily while she writhed and moaned. Each would whip one breast, their faces intent watching the scarlet rash start up on her white skin. Flicking her nipples teasingly. Clare wished she could control her nipples. But she could not. Always they stood up and hardened demandingly as though in invitation to the girl's attention. But was she any better! She let them have their will with her...
"They're both nice and red now," Tavie said, and threw her shredded stalks away.
"We can put a fresh one in her cunny," Alethea said as she extracted the expended leaf and dropped in another.
"You wait," Clare threatened. "You'll be sorry."
They loved her threats as they loved her nakedness. Tavie opened up the soft lips and inserted a second leaf. "You threatened us," she accused. "Say you're sorry."
"I'm sorry," Clare said without argument. Then, after a long pause: "Aren't you going to take it out?"
"Who said anything about taking it out?"
"Well, I said I was sorry."
Tavie opened up the now angry lips and pushed one more leaf within. "There's a lot of room inside," she said thoughtfully.
"Oh please. I'll be a good girl." Clare always capitulated. The twins always won. Outside the castle she never managed to maintain her role of elder sister. Maybe she wasn't elder at all. No one seemed to know how old the twins were. She did not care. "What do I have to do to get those leaves taken out?" she asked humbly.
"You could ask us, really nicely, to whip your bottom."
Clare considered. "I think I'll keep the leaves."
"Of course, darling. Here's another." Nimble fingers did their task. Clare wondered unhappily how many leaves she had room for down there.
The crack of a dry bough underfoot froze them into immobility. There was only one male who intruded into their sacred preserve. "Bet that's Kaspar," whispered Tavie irritably.
"Untie me!" Clare's demand was urgent. She had no wish for the pimply-faced youth to see her thus.
"Go away, Fat Face!" Alethea raised her voice peremptorily. "We told you not to bother us."
"I can see your tits," Clare heard the silly male titter that was doubly lewd coming from the ineffectual sixteen-year-old. Nobody liked Kaspar. Thankfully she felt hands tugging at her bonds.
"They are a lot nicer to look at than that silly thing you carry around between your legs," Tavie retorted hotly.
Clare sat up. Kaspar devoured her hungrily with his eyes. His lips were slack. He was pleased at having caught them at their game. She resisted an impulse to snatch at something and cover herself. A plague on him! He'd seen them naked often enough, damn him!
"Run along, Kaspar. Go and play with the boys." She added her admonition to Alethea's.
"It's you that should play with the boys," Kaspar said with dark emphasis.
"You really want us girls to play with the boys?" Tavie baited her hook.
"You and me can play games right now." He was suddenly eager. He did not see the trap. Kaspar never did see the traps they set for him. Matched against the twins he was stupid. He did not even see the flash of understanding that passed between them now.
Before he'd grasped their intent they had him safely pinned. He was no match for the three lithe bodies. It took but a minute to truss him to a sapling. They laughed delightedly at his red, indignant, bovine face and the ineffectual protests they had heard before.
"I'll tell on you. I will! Let me go!"
"We told you never to come here again, tattletale!"
He struggled furiously. No one ever got free from Tavie's knots. He stuck his tongue out at them in frustration. "Rotten cunt lickers!" he declaimed sulkily.
"We don't like the way you do it," Alethea stated reasonably. "You probably practice on your father's sheep." She giggled at his fury. "Or do your poor cousins have to let you have a go?"
He tugged uselessly. The twins watched him with purposeful intent. Clare wondered if one day this absurd creature could cause them trouble.
"If I tell my Lord Godfrey he'd flay you for what you do here!"
"Tell on us and we tell on you," Alethea promised equably.
He moaned youthful obscenities as they bared his sex. Clare watched amused. She should stop them. But had no intention of spoiling their sport. It was not the first time. Kaspar should have known better. He was of a type for whom it is hard to feel sympathy.
"Don't! Oh don't... You dirty bitches...!"
The girls were happily whipping his maleness with their nettles. In spite of its owner's anguish his penis flourished under their ministrations. The harder it got the harder they beat it. "I told you so," said Tavie. "It likes what we are doing. It would be unkind to stop."
Their scarlet-faced victim kept up an incessant chant of distress. "Alright!... I'll never come here again. I won't."
"You said that last time." The nettles lashed without pause.
"I'll stay with Lise and Sula and Chloe. They like me."
"They have to like you, poor girls."
"You could like me too if you wanted to," he whined. "But you're beastly selfish. You just like each other. Oh, stop it, stop it! Please...!" He looked at Clare. "Make them stop. You're as bad as they are," he moaned in shame.
"Oh look!" Alethea clapped her hands and peered with interest. "All that funny stuff that's coming out." She looked up at their gasping captive. "Ugh! What girl wants that horrid mess inside her?"
His paroxysm over, he glowered hatefully. "I'll put it into you at both ends one day," he promised bitterly.
"Isn't he naughty," Tavid said with revulsion. "Let's do it again."
They amused themselves with Kaspar for an hour. It was an old game. Clare wondered why he returned to it. Some male compulsion that resented their exclusive happiness with each other! Or perhaps he secretly enjoyed it! But he never evinced other than deep loathing for what they did to him. Always he left vowing vengeance: in sharp contrast to his supplications while still bound. She watched him go now, muttering his imprecations with a voice full of tears.
Clare was happy at Montrilas. She loved the siblings. She loved Lord Godfrey who they called father. He had adopted them before the death of his wife. He adored them as his own. She sensed his moods, almost as a wife will know the temper of her husband. For a week she had felt his disquiet: On the eighth day she rode with him on a strange errand.
"Tis foolish talk of witches," he growled, irritated. "There are no witches. Just tales to frighten children. A sad day for my brother that his nieces stand accused." He pursed his lips in thought. "I'll be bound it's no more than the King's man with his infernal warrant-that bitter misanthrope Rearden! He's scoured the whole land for his prey. A week since, the Devil take him! He seeks a shortcut through a few trees and sees your cousins at some game they play. A game he says links them with Lucifer. Now the marshal has them in his keep. I pray we may reach them in time to be of help."
Clare's heart was ice. Three girls and a game in a woodland glade! She knew well what their game might be! There, but for the grace of God... ! It was too cruel.
Because Lord Godfrey was who he was Clare was allowed to visit. The jailer pocketed his coin and locked her in. He would return in an hour.
So winsome they had been. So full of joy. How bitter to see them thus! It was as though they had been consigned to some nether world where no sun shone. They cried out in gladness as the door slammed behind her. But there were no welcoming arms, no hungry lips. All three of them were chained, chained deviously and cruelly. Clare kissed and held each of them a long time. She wept.
"The devil in me must be made to tire. So I stand thus." Lise raised her chained hands to the collar at her neck. A metal collar joined by but a foot of chain to the ring in the wall so that she must stand, and stand... without rest.
"My devil gets the same attention," Sula sighed miserably. She could not move her hands, for they were parted wide and chained to the wall above her head. She drooped wearily.
Chloe shrugged without comment. But smiled wanly. She stood in the center of the chamber, one wrist shackled above her head by a chain from the ceiling. She, too, would find no comfort.
Clare was shocked. "Your clothes...?"
"We were stripped and given these bits of sacking."
"But they are shameful. They scarce cover... what should be covered." Clare looked from one to the other and was afraid.
"We are near naked that we may be easily examined."
"Examined?"
"Yes! For witch marks."
Clare's heart fluttered. "And they found...?"
"Yes. They found them. Kaspar joins our games and his hand is heavy. We were all well striped. We are still."
"But they are whip marks! Surely...?"
"It matters not. For M'Lord Rearden any mark suffices."
"But Kaspar can explain."
"And be himself accused." Sula moved in her chains and grimaced wryly. "He is well striped also. One day we caught him off guard."
"But he should come forward." Clare clutched at straws.
"You know our Kaspar better than that. He is trembling in his shoes. But we do not think too ill of him! He could not help us."
Purposefully, Clare went to each in turn, shifting their scanty coverings so that she might see. She was not heartened. "His hand must indeed have been heavy if these are of a week past."
"We do not want him in our games," Chloe pouted. "He is cruel, and he always wants to stick that horrid thing into us and jerk away with it. But if we reject him entirely he threatens us, so then we let him have his way. It can't be helped. We hope soon he will find others."
Her voice drifted away. Then Sula bitterly spoke their single thought: "He may soon have to!"
Lise moaned. "These beastly chains!" She shook her manacles in frustration, and looked tearfully at their visitor. "Oh, darling. Remember what fun it was to tie each other to a tree! Now look at us! I hate these chains more than I have ever hated anything."
"Can you help us, darling?" Chloe's voice was desperate.
"My father is with the marshal now, and I will be a witness if need be. Aye, and many from Montrilas if t'would help." Clare sensed how little help it really was. "Can we not bribe the jailer to remove your chains? Or to place easier irons on thy limbs?"
"That has been tried. Our father and all his friends. None can prevail against the Inquisitor: Rearden is the devil. Not some demon in us."
"But need this... this Rearden know that a jailer gives thee easement?"
Sula laughed bitterly. "He visits us twice daily. He says to question. But he comes to gloat. It tightens his reins to see maidens held as we are held. He strips us naked when he asks the questions. He speaks often of torture. His eyes glow when he sees us shrink before him. I would spit in his face. But I am afraid."
"Torture!" Clare was aghast. "He loves the word." Chloe's voice held loathing. She tugged at a fetter resentfully. "He took us to the chamber where... where such things are done. It is a dark and fearsome place. Far worse than this dismal prison. We did not understand... The things are so ugly and without meaning. But he told us. He told in much detail how we would be fastened naked and how the pain would come. There are terrible things... "
"But must he not charge thee? He cannot keep you here in chains."
"It is because we are high born. He hopes by tiring us like this we will confess. Then all will turn against us and he can use us for his pleasure before we are burned."
"Burned! Oh no." Clare had once witnessed a burning at the stake. "Not the fire! Not for girls like... like us."
"The stake, and other things. Perhaps worse. But we are told that by the time he leads a girl thither she is glad to die."
Clare shuddered. A sunlit woodland glade: and now this! How could the two conditions exist in one world! "And Rearden? Can he not be bribed?"
"That has been tried too."
"If I went to him and offered my body? Would he relent?"
"He will pay no price to buy you. Why should he! In this dungeon he already possesses three naked girls, chained and open to him. We are not ill favored. He has bodies enough. Each of us have offered ourself to buy his mercy for us all. But he has pretended rage and slapped our cheeks as though we were some tavern wench presuming on his nobility. Perhaps if you could suffer some torment that was new to him it might spark his interest. He deals only in pain. Every night we expect him to come and use one or all of us. But he has not done so." Sula's voice was without hope. "Our jailer tells us that maidens who reach the dungeons of this place are usually violated by any man with the price of a bribe. But not us... "
"Still will I seek audience," Clare promised. "I must try."
* * *
Save for his bright eyes and shrewd features he was ordinary enough. He was of no stature. But authority mantled him like armor. He was courteous but cold.
"You have fresh evidence, Mistress?"
"None save what you know. I ask for mercy. They are but girls who have injured none."
"They are witches." His voice was without emotion.
"My Lord Rearden, I am but a girl myself. I know little of worldly things. I know it possible for such as I to please a man. Perhaps-"
"Silence!" She could not tell if his anger was real or feigned. But she recoiled as from a blow.
"The daughter of Godfrey a strumpet! Dos't seek the whipping post, girl! A day in the pillory would serve thee well."
She faced him defiantly. She would deal in his own coin. "Would pain upon my person soften thee?"
He examined her with fresh respect. "You would bargain with he who holds the King's warrant?"
"An it save those I love from harm."
"Even though your pain be grievous?"
It took all her courage. "Yes, My Lord. For safety to those you hold in your dungeon."
"Have you been whipped, child?"
"Never as you would have me whipped, M'Lord."
He considered her answer. She wished he had not asked the question.
"Or racked?" He had become animated.
"I fear I know nothing of these things." She spoke truth.
"Let us test thy resolution," he suggested amiably, but his smile was cold and thin, his eyes lambent. "Sit thee in comfort, Mistress, while I draw a picture."
Clare obeyed. She felt a dread cold as she watched him pace thoughtfully and slowly before her.
"You would be taken, Mistress, to a dark and gloomy place and there stripped as naked as you have ever been. You would have a choice." Again the thin smile. "You could remove your clothes yourself, or they could be stripped from you by the men whose attentions you are to receive. They would then place you on the rack and amuse themselves with your cries as you were stretched. When they loose you it will be but the beginning. They will fasten you again and again. They will not hear your screams. They are too used to the sounds a maiden makes while under their care." He stood still and eyed her curiously. "Do I interest you, my child?"
"You destroy my courage, Lord."
"Good! Forget these valorous nobilities." His smile was almost kind.
"If I want female flesh to torture, I have enough. I have no need for yours." He patted her gently on the shoulder. "But had I that need I can think of none I would sooner see naked or hear scream. You have a quality... Tomorrow you may come and witness my justice. It may comfort you."
Clare felt she had received the devil's accolade.
* * *
The three girls were thoughtfully and exquisitely placed for his attention. Now they were naked. Totally available, spaced with hands chained high, feet spread and tied to the floor. They gazed at Clare in desolate wonder that she should see them in this deep moment of shame and fear. She smiled with a reassurance she did not feel. Lord Godfrey had been repulsed at every turn. She knew him troubled. He had sanctioned her acceptance of Rearden's invitation dubiously. It was to her now that Rearden spoke: "There is doubt that I am just. There is doubt of these lovesome creatures being witches. Watch carefully, Mistress, that you may give a good report."
With something of a flourish he produced a needle. Two inches long, set in an exquisitely ornamented handle. His tools were no less polished than his speech. He was a happy man. He smiled benignly at the three naked girls whose eyes were riveted in horror at what they divined, and at Clare who stared at the macabre tableau with a fascination she could not hide.
"A demon has entered them. When I probe the spot with this needle they will feel no pain and shed no blood. Tis very simple, Mistress."
"But should ye not find such a place?" Clare asked sickly.
"Their responses will be normal. The innocent need fear nothing."
"The needle will torture them."
He shrugged indifferently. "But in a worthy cause, Mistress. Would you have it otherwise!"
Clare fell silent. If pain would prove them innocent then perhaps it might be borne. She watched the Inquisitor cup Sula's breast in one hand and slowly thrust the needle home to the hilt. Saw the naked girl tense and writhe in agony and heard her scream. When the needle was withdrawn there was a spot of blood.
"It is a quest that can be long," Rearden explained affably. "But it is time I never begrudge."
He was the. devil himself, going from girl to girl with his needle and his quiet voice, evoking their screams and their struggles. Soon their wrists were bloodied as they tore savagely at the snug iron fetters that held them. Other tiny specks of red marked the passage of his probings. Clare was beginning to wonder when and how the agony might end, when suddenly he gave an exclamation of triumph and beckoned her to approach.
"It is always to be found," he declaimed sententiously.
It was Lise's left buttock. Carefully he held the point at the spot he had discovered. "Press it in yourself, Mistress. I want no doubts."
Unbelieving, Clare obeyed. She cared not for the girl's pain. She would press the slender wickedness well home and draw both the scream and the blood that would save a life. With care and precision, yet with stomach turning at the thought of what her hands performed, she firmly thrust the steel in to the hilt. When she withdrew it there was no scream, no blood, no mark. The silence that followed was pregnant with awful knowledge. Lise moaned.
Rearden had said the path was long. It was. He traveled it with meticulous attention until there were few places, even the most sacred, on the two remaining girls that bore no testimony to his dedication. To the watching girl it came almost as a relief when their sufferings under the searching steel were ended by the discovery of the inevitable 'spot'. In the end all three moaned and writhed under the pain that had failed their innocence.
"They are proven witches," Lord Rearden said softly.
Clare wept. He led her gently from the room. The witches stayed there in their chains.
* * *
Lord Godfrey and his child held council. With hope gone only mercy remained. "I like it not," her father admitted. "But he has shown thee respect and decent kindness. I know him evil. But if he give thee head it is the best that can be done. Go to him then and sway him if you can."
"Surely, child, you speak in jest?" He gave Clare his full interested attention. "You would share the witch's dungeon to give them comfort?"
"Yes, My Lord."
He studied her curiously. "Would you share their chains and their discomforts? Neither they or their demons will rest easy."
"If it will help them, Lord. Or gain thy mercy," she quailed. But said the words bravely.
He waved away her gesture. "It will not be asked of thee. But consider: were you as they are now, would you find comfort in watching a girl who was free, who bore no pain, whose body was clothed, who could leave the dungeon and go home when she chose? Would it...?"
"I do not know, My Lord." In truth she did not.
He shrugged. "It is thy wish. So be it. Go with my blessing." Once more he gently patted her shoulder. He was a strangely diverse man.
"They are about to be whipped, lady. You wish to be present?" The jailer was obsequious to one who carried the Inquisitor's sanction.
Clare's heart fluttered. It would be no whipping such as had been a lovesome thing in their play. She would find no joy in it. Nor would the girls wish her to witness their shame. But she had been granted a privilege. She had best not relinquish it because of queasiness. The man was eyeing her in doubt. She would be firm. "I must be with them whatever their inflictions," she said determinedly. He was an amiable man. He led the way.
They were hanging by the wrists. Toes barely above the stone. "So that they may kick, Mistress. It disturbs their demon." Clare could not be certain of sarcasm or sincerity in his voice.
They looked at her with love. But made no pleas. The jailer whipped them, unemotionally as though he swept the floor. Clare's heart yearned. How beautiful they were! As they danced from their tethered wrists they made a picture of esthetic loveliness that left the watcher guiltily entranced. In such strange ways beauty may be found.
There was no urgency. He whipped slowly and carefully. Clare suspected he would ply his ugly trade with pride. He stopped and turned to her. "Name's Dickon, Ma'm." He held out the whip with a friendly smile. "Perhaps ye'd best use this, Mistress. Your arm is strong enough to mark them well, I vow. But they will feel less shame from a woman's hand."
Was it kindness! Or a trap! Clare sensed no harm in him. His profession would render him impervious to incongruity. Yet she was appalled. Her eyes sought Sula's. What she found there made it easy. The girls preferred to suffer by her hand. She accepted the whip.
"You are kind."
He shrugged. "Tis a small thing. They must bear their pain. It matters little who bestows it." He chuckled. "You may be a lady executioner by the time all is done."
Clare whipped the girls she loved.
They danced their arabesque of agony.
She stayed with them through the night. She gave Dickon gold. Gave it simply. No words. No demand. Perhaps because of it the three condemned maidens bore only heavy chains on wrists and ankles. There would be no torture through the dark hours. They found each other's arms in ecstasies of fulfillment and wild hunger. They slept and knew not that the floor was hard and cold.
They never spoke of death. But because of Clare found a vivid life. All closed their minds to the morrow and absorbed from each other the elixir of being. They bore their tortures and their pain as best they could.
Dickon gravely explained the principles of that which confronted them when morning came. Clare suspected him of possessing humor. "Tis a simple stocks, Mistress. Yet I'd have no wish to sit in 'em. Tis a chamber for their use alone. Enough for all there is, and to spare." He bestowed a puckish grin of complicity. "I'll be leaving you for a half an hour. See if you can have them safely locked, Milady."
So resilient is the human spirit that they shared a moment's laughter. Clare's heart blossomed that she had been permitted to share these days. With pixie mischief Lise made the first experiment.
"These aren't ordinary stocks such as in the Village Square," she complained, puzzled.
"Sit thee squarely on the bench, for I fear I know what must be done," Clare adjured the child lovingly.
Still as though in play Lise did as bid and, happily enough, placed her ankles in the slots and watched shiveringly as the bar was lowered upon them. The two half circles met and clutched the slender ankles with surprising snugness. Lise grinned with less assurance. She had divined her plight.
A second set of bars with their sinister small orifices was set well above the first. This one closer to the prisoner on her bench. Clare raised the top-hinged section and looked invitingly at she who it would prison. With a shrug of resignation Lise bent forward, raised her arms and placed her wrists where they belonged. Once more the circlets met with a close bite upon the slender flesh. Fastenings were pegged. Lise had found her seat for the day.
Those who were still free examined, uncertainly, the crude object in which they, too, would soon be prisoned. At first glance it seemed deceptively ordinary.
Lise was seated on a bench. Her legs were not spread obscenely wide. But enough to expose that which is normally hid. In order to position her wrists she had been obliged to bend well forward and to raise her arms. By so doing she had been robbed of comfort. Seeing their curiosity she gave an impish grin and fought to free herself. Almost nothing happened. Her shoulders fluttered and swayed. That was all. She looked up at them, suddenly piteous.
Glumly, Sula and Chloe followed Lise's lead. Clare did what she must do. Soon three naked girls were held immovably. As always they were beautiful. But it would not be long before pain would extract its toll of their strained loveliness.
"I don't think I can stand this all day," Lise said soberly.
The rest said nothing. Why tell her what she must already know: that she would have no choice?
On his return Dickon inspected the fastenings and nodded approval. "A pretty picture they do make to be sure," he said to Clare. "Tis a pity they'll be groaning in an hour."
Clare knew her sudden impulse absurd. But the words were out before prudence could halt them. "Fasten me too," she demanded.
Dickon looked at her askance, startled beyond speech.
The die cast, Clare resolutely sat herself upon the bench of another of the punishing contraptions and set her wrists and ankles where they should go. Instantly she became aware that the device was unsympathetic to the impediment of clothes. Disdainfully she rose again and stripped, keeping only her shift. But even that clung uncomfortably. So she shed that, too, sitting as naked as her cousins. She turned an inquiring, and secretly amused, eye upon the astounded jailer.
"But, Mistress! Tis not proper."
"If they must suffer, then so must I."
"But naked! Madam!"
"If three are naked, what matter a fourth?"
"But, Mistress, you know not what ye seek. Tis beyond a girl's courage to bear."
"Fasten me."
"I cannot, Mistress. Nor do I wish to. An' did ye would ne'er thank me. Rest assured of that."
"I will rest assured when I am safely locked."
Dickon sighed. Perhaps he was a married man and a woman's caprice familiar. He beamed with sudden inspiration. Without a word he obeyed Clare's demand. He made the fastenings firm. Her nudity was held as was the others. She could not escape.
"The first time ye cry in pain I shall set ye free, like it or no," he told her cheerfully.
He went out and closed the door.
Clare immediately longed to scratch an itching elbow.
The four naked girls sitting in their enforced immobility had no track of time. But Clare felt certain that the first pangs of unbearable stress manifested themselves within the hour. She found a wry humor in that her bottom was the first casualty.
A girl's round bottom would have seemed the last rather than the first place to feel distress. But the stocks held her in such a way that nature was distorted. Bent forward with her legs straight out changed the padded curves of her posterior so that her weight was on bone. Moreover, she could not shift. Try as she would, no easement was possible. Her bottom had been planted on a hard place and there it would remain. Its disorganized nerves becoming more plaintive by the minute.
Then the small of her back! Beginning as a tiny nag, the pain evolved and blossomed. Soon it was joined by aching arms and shoulders. They stifled small shamed gasps. But their breathing became heavy. Sometimes one of them moaned, uncaring. Since there was aught to speak of but pain they seldom spoke.
When Dickon returned he set upon the floor a black mongrel dog. "He's part of this punishment," he apologized gruffly. "I've got no choice but to leave him here with you. It is believed that a dog will lick a witch's cunt. Tis a further testimony that he scents her demon."
"You don't believe that nonsense?" Clare demanded.
"Whether I do or not, Mistress, I have to leave him here."
"He'll lick us all. You know what dogs are!"
"I'll leave it to you, Mistress, to give me an honest report on him." Dickon seemed glad to be gone.
Four pairs of suffering female eyes centered on the sniffing dog. The inevitable followed. He found their sex as a magnet finds metal. He lapped busily. They were powerless to stop him. None cared enough to try. They endured in silence. To a tortured girl there are worse things than a dog's tongue. It was while she was receiving the animal's attention that Clare realized Dickon had come and gone without giving her a chance to seek release. When the others wept she made no effort to restrain her tears.
Dickon was adamant. He would not punish her again.
She had proved her love, he said. For the little time left she should be free. Clare was guiltily glad. She used her freedom with her hands and her lips to give what pleasure there was left...
'She knew it was The Day when, in early morning, Dickon took her to Lord Rearden. He greeted her gravely, asking no questions of her days with the condemned. "There is a serving woman to attend thee," he told her courteously. "When you are refreshed I will escort you."
"It is the end?" Clare knew the answer.
"It is the end," he said without emotion.
"Grant me a small boon," Rearden asked when she returned. He held up a length of cord. "Allow me to tie your hands."
"What have I done wrong, M'Lord?"
He smiled charmingly at her consternation. "You have done naught that displeases me," he assured her. "Quite the contrary. As I told you once, you have a quality. Because I would have you keep that quality I will tie your hands. By your own wish you are about to witness that which no maiden such as you should ever see. Distress may prompt unseemliness." Again his thin smile. "Dignity, once lost, is not easily regained. To me dignity is precious. I hope it is to you."
Clare nodded. She understood. Strangely she trusted him. She found herself glad to be tied. For her, then, there would be no decisions. As he had said: no unseemliness! She turned her back to him and crossed her wrists. The cord bit purposefully. She would not escape from it.
She wondered afterwards if what came then was, for her, the end of girlhood. The end of innocence. The end of simple faith. Certainly in the time itself it was an end to all things.
Rearden positioned her against a pillar and, with a courtly apology, passed a cord beneath her arms and bound her shoulders back so that she must needs stand still, no matter what her wish. For this, too, she was glad. Her courage was ebbing fast. Lord Rearden himself took position to one side. It was the hooded men who occupied the stage. There were three of them. After her first shudder at the ominous hoods, Clare spared them scarce a glance. Her eyes were riveted on what she had feared to see.
Three posts, a few feet apart in a row. Vertical, sharpened to tapering sword-like points. Thrusting up. Waiting. Clare knew what they were waiting for and was glad that she was bound.
They brought in Sula first. Beautiful, desirable Sula! Her wrists and elbows were tied, cruelly. There had been no thought to circulation or injury. It would not matter! The cords bit deep. The white shoulders were dragged back, the breasts demanding. A bandage was tight about her eyes.
How strange a man was Lord Rearden! To choose so great a cruelty, yet deny himself the supreme moment when the girl would see how she was to die. Blind she would know nothing until she was pierced. No doubt he would be richly rewarded then... ! Sula was quite naked. She had walked meekly where she was led.
Two of them lifted her, great hands beneath thigh and arm. The third guided and positioned. His care and concern told that, even in this, there was a skill and an art. Clare watched their practical movements in mute horror. Stealing a glance at the Inquisitor she saw his face rapt, his eyes glowing. He was as much spectator as herself.
THE END was sudden. A grunt from the third man. Then three pairs of male hands tugged down on Sula's loveliness. A scream so piercing that Clare would hear it forever filled the chamber. Fingers tore away the blindfold. The hooded men moved respectfully away so as not to obscure the view.
Impalement is not death. It is only the beginning of death. It is not the end of consciousness. Shockingly it is the beginning of an awareness all the more acute in the knowledge that it will end in death. In that time the mind goes on unhindered in its thoughts. Speech is unimpaired. Thus was Sula!
Clare did not know these things. Her first reaction was relief. Sula was still beautiful. The lovely nudity impaled upon the stake was frozen in its own pose of erotic enhancement. The legs separated, hanging free on each side and slightly to the fore of the post. The body erect, the breasts as arrogant as they had ever been. There was no blood. It was all neat and tidy. Clare understood Rearden's sense of the esthetic in his choice of the manner in which her loved ones were to die.
Sula herself was shocked into immobility. Her first instinctive motions told her she must not move. She would never move again until she slumped in death. Agony would not matter then. Until that time agony was a constant to be reckoned with. She was in a haze of incomprehension: A girl executed, yet still alive. She moaned without cessation. A rise and fall of sound that ate into the heart. When she saw Lise lifted as she had been, she pleaded: "Oh no... ! Not them too... ! Just me... Please, just me." She watched trance-like as Lise, too, was impaled upon her stake. Then turned her eyes to Clare in a suffering too great to bear. When the three girls began their lonely wait for death, Rearden released Clare from her bonds and supported her with a strong and gentle hand. Before they turned to go they faced, for one last look, the loveliness that still was Sula, Chloe and Lise. "Do you not see?" he whispered, "the quintessence of beauty that it is?"
For a single moment Clare saw it through his eyes. She nodded, unable to speak. The beauty she had seen had placed a lump inside her throat.
They went away.
For two days Tavie and Alethea fought her nightmares. She never spoke to them of what she had seen. They did not ask. Perhaps, from some wisdom of their own, they knew. She absorbed their love with a great need. Lord Godfrey was an angry man, troubled and saddened. He, too, would speak not of what he knew.
Time heals.
The magic of The Glade was, for Clare, the greatest healer of all. There the girls who were her very life had their way with her. They led their loved one into their own enchanted world. Happily forgetting the authority of her supposed seniority she surrendered to them utterly and indulged their erotic fancies without inhibition.
"What shall we do with her?" Tavie asked on the ninth day.
"The nettles?" Alethea suggested brightly.
"We've used them, silly. But let's tie her first."
"I won't let you," Clare said lazily. She lay naked in the hot sun. As always they had shed their clothes with their inhibitions. A great lassitude possessed her. It was delightful. She knew she would let them do anything they wanted.
"Tie her how?"
Their favorite tree had a trunk that just exactly accommodated Clare's arms. They crossed her wrists behind it and bound them tight. It was a game. But they played it intently, joyfully extracting every possible sensation. They gloried in their sensuality. Clare pushed her back against her tree, savoring still the sun imposed sleepiness from which they had stolen her. She smiled quietly to herself when they did what she knew they would, separated her feet and bound one on each side. They never allowed her modesty. She would have felt slighted if they had.
They went away and whispered, keeping her in gorgeous suspense. When they returned and their fingertips and their tongues sought her nipples she sighed in happiness and closed her eyes. But, having achieved an objective, the erotic play was short-lived.
"Mine's hard and sticking out beautifully," Alethea giggled.
"So's mine. Hurry."
Clare opened her eyes, interested at the innovation. Each twin held a trinket. Small charms their father had given them. A goat's head and a cockerel. They had removed them and threaded them anew with fine twine so that they hung from a brief loop leaving two long loose ends. Clare guessed their use. She looked down amusedly and watched her own nipples being decorated by busy nimble fingers. Each hard bud at the peak of her breasts was circled twice with twine drawn as tight as might be wise and tied with a neat bow over which much care was taken. Her breasts each now proudly bore a shining ornamentation of which she was instantly inordinately proud. She wriggled them in pure enjoyment. The twins stood back to admire.
"Think her tits will shrink so they'll fall off?"
"Not while we are around," Tavie giggled with conviction.
Again the fingers and the tongues. "They'll stay hard for a week," Clare gasped, laughing at their determination.
"You are going to wear these for a week," Alethea promised. "Before we let you loose we are going to undo the bows and then knot the twine really tight and cut the ends off. You'll need our help to get them off. You can't do it yourself. You can wear them under your clothes. No one but us will know." She chuckled delightedly. "I bet your nipples stay hard like that just because of what we've done. Oh... darling, you do look sweet."
Tavie clapped her hands. "Do it now. Come on. It's a wonderful idea. Every time we look at her we'll know she's wearing our little charms on her nipples. She can't get them off. I want to see how long they'll stay there."
Suiting action to words, she undid her own bow and tied a shrewd little knot and drew it tight. Not too tight, but a small embrace of love on a secret place. Clare herself was intrigued. She watched the knife slice away the loose ends. There was nothing left for her fingers to work upon. She wondered amusedly if, in her sleep, the nipples might not invert themselves so that in the morn the trinkets would be on the sheet. They would see.
"The darling hasn't been properly whipped for a long time," Alethea suggested.
"I'm tied the wrong way round," Clare said comfortably.
"You know perfectly well there's no such thing for a girl as the wrong way round," Tavie admonished.
Clare knew this very well. Her pulse quickened.
"What whips have we got? Or shall I cut a switch?"
"We'll cut a switch later. It makes its own special mark. But I brought the light little one thong. It's just right for her pussy. You first."
Clare watched Alethea measure distance. The lovely little tapered strip of leather dangling from its short handle. She could almost feel her sex burn from the calculating eyes that assessed the possibilities of striping it. It was awful to have to watch. It was understood that she must never close her eyes. They punished her quite cruelly when she did. Clare felt better about being whipped when she was tied facing the tree with her curved bottom stuck out for their attentions. But the choice was never hers.
"Do you think we can get at her little quim properly the way she's tied?"
Clare knew they loved her quivering suspense in these verbal preliminaries. She could never hide it from them.
"If we get to one side and back so as to curl it down over her hip," Tavie offered judicially.
"Couldn't you just tickle me with a feather or something?" They loved her to temporize.
"Another time, darling. We want to whip your cunny now. You won't mind if it sort of laps round here and there, will you!"
"Couldn't I whip you for a change?" Clare pleaded in her best little girl voice. Alethea's play with the wicked little thong was sending the butterflies fluttering in her tummy.
"Don't be a silly girl. You are much nicer to whip than we are. I think for making all this fuss you should ask us to give your furry spot a really bad time."
"Oh no, please!" Clare tried to keep laughter out of her voice. She could never get over being shy when she must ask them to punish her. And, also, she did not want her hairy triangle to be given a 'bad time'. The twins' 'bad time' often made her squeal. "Please, don't make me ask. I'll be a very good girl and not say another thing."
With an air of grave consideration, Tavie drew her finger across the lower curve of the bound girl's left breast. "A really hard one right across there to teach her to be good," she indicated brightly.
Clare shivered as they intended she should. They were quite capable of giving her the stroke. They imposed an amazing authority upon her by such unpredictable flashes of cruelty. She plunged into abject obedience.
"Darlings." She looked from one to the other of them with her most kittenish smile, a heart-melting appeal with the eyes. "Please whip my cunny." She paused, quivering. Then exploded the thing she had no wish to ask. "Please give my dear little cunny a bad time."
"She's trying to get us to relent. She's a real little minx." Tavie could never be deceived. "Dear little cunny indeed!" Laughing, she kissed their captive. "Alright, Miss Clever Puss, we'll forgive you the one on the breast. But this little thing down here is going to get so hot it'll burst into flames." She patted the 'dear little cunny' lovingly with a knowing hand and backed away.
They whipped her with great skill, with care and with love. Taking turns, they discussed with each other and with their panting victim the best positions and effect of their strokes. Clare could never refrain from tearing at her bonds at such a time. She moaned for her own easement and because she knew the sound of maiden anguish gave the girls who whipped her great happiness. The heat in her loins grew and grew...
There came a sound: another.
"Oh, not Kaspar again!" Alethea wailed.
But the single sound had become many until they were surrounded by the noise of heavy feet.
It was Kaspar. But a very different Kaspar. His hands were bound. His cheeks were smudged and tearful. He was dragged on a tether by a mounted man at arms. Suddenly there was a ring of steel around the glade. Men were everywhere. Magic fled.
There came a silence. No one moved. The men smirked and exchanged glances, no more. Kaspar stood panting and disheveled.
Lord Rearden dismounted. Slowly and without speaking he examined the glade and the three naked girls. Two of them struck still as statues in dismay. The third, tied to her tree, watching his advance with anguished eyes.
He stood in front of her and surveyed the taut nudity Clare was impotent to hide. Nodding, as with some secret knowledge confirmed, he scrutinized the fresh pink and scarlet stripes across her loins. His eyes lifted and saw the trinkets tied to her nipples. He fingered them with interest. Finally his eyes sought hers.
"I knew I would have you." His voice was vibrant and warm as never before.
Clare said nothing. She, too, had known.
* * *
It became, then, a kaleidoscope of vivid cameos of action, hate, fear and death that etched themselves on Clare's consciousness.
It took many men a long time to subdue the siblings. The watching girl, tied to the tree, had never had occasion to know their strength. Now she shared awe. There was a stir, almost of fear, among the soldiers as man after man was sent sprawling or clubbed senseless by a stolen sword. The two girls fought grimly and with a terrible purpose. Standing back to back they thrust and parried and struck. Before they were brutally bound at wrist and elbow and their necks snubbed with cord, two men had died and several bore wounds. The siblings stood panting, their eyes glowing hate. The Inquisitor, unperturbed by the carnage, viewed them with an intent curiosity.
The feral pleadings of the perfidious Kaspar. That having delivered 'The Witches' into M'Lord Rearden's authority he be now freed with his thirty pieces of silver. Watching him loosed and soundly booted from sight.
Herself untied by the Lord Inquisitor himself. His arm waving aside those who would have performed the task. Then being bound again by him as Tavie and Alethea were bound. His fingers strangely strong and strangely kind. His whispered words for her alone: "I love thee, child," as he tied the last knot. He kissed her gently on her forehead as he passed the tether from her neck to a gaping man-at-arms.
Lord Godfrey's shock at sight of his beloved daughters bound and naked and ashamed. His mighty oath of fury as he drew his sword and plunged at the man he had come to hate. The thuds as the arrows struck from a dozen bows. Sight of his crumpled figure, strangely shrunken on the ground, as they were led away.
The dungeon and the chains.
Then The Room.
It was a rich room. Those who lined its walls and filled its benches were rich. Peers come to judge! Men driven by lust, or curiosity, or fear, or hate... The three girls, their arms bound in constant pain, standing as an incongruous contrast with their bits of sackcloth in the solemn place.
The Inquisitor! He owned them all.
The questions and the answers... Or the silences!
Kaspar of the beady eyes. Lusting for their flesh. Damning them with his testimony. Witch... Witch... Witch!
"On a previous occasion you stated formally that you had never been whipped?" Lord Rearden's voice was low, yet filled the room.
"True, My Lord." Clare knew herself already sentenced.
"Yes, My Lord."
"You lied?"
"Yes."
"You disport yourselves naked in the woods. Why?"
"Tis but a summer game we play." She would never tell him.
"You can be made to tell, girl." His voice was sad. "Because we love-that's why!" Tavie's words bit at him like a dagger.
He turned and bowed to the interloper. He was grateful. "You give your body to be bound and whipped by your familiars?"
"By my sisters, yes."
"Why?"
"Because I love them."
"They are not your sisters?"
"No."
"You are adopted children. Is it not true your familiars were found by their deceased father wandering in the forest at an uncertain age?"
"My sisters were found as you describe."
"What is their age?" It was not a casual question.
She temporized. "No one knows, M'Lord."
"Is it not true they are ageless?"
She looked at him piteously. "I do not understand... "
"I think you do."
"We are without age," Alethea dealt with the question. Her eyes burned into the Inquisitor with a light such as Clare had never seen.
Again his courteous acknowledgment of help.
"You bear Satanic symbols upon your person?"
"I, My Lord!" Suddenly she realized. The innocent plaything the twins had fastened on her nipples!
"Upon your breasts."
Her eyes implored. She had been unable to release the charms. She still bore them. Her errant nipples had given her no aid. Perhaps she would wear them until she died.
"Come here, girl."
Clare stood in the brightest spot in the big room. Sunlight found and betrayed her. Submissive she held herself erect while he thrust the sackcloth down to her waist and stepped back.
She did not know how beautiful she was. So lovely that she gathered all the light of the somber place upon her white skin. All present gasped in their individual reactions. The goat's head and the cockerel sparkled on her nipples. On another day, the needle. He would not be cheated of this most intimate joy! The three of them, bound so that they could scarce quiver. Alone with him and the sliver of steel by which he would make them his own. He sent for two witnesses. Grave men who watched in reverence. They quietly left when the flesh of each naked girl had betrayed her. The twins accepting the probings in an eerie silence. Save for blood the needle might never have touched them. Their eyes were closed as though they were in some distant place. Even the denouement of his discovery of the fatal 'spot' on each brought no response save his own exclamation of triumph. Clare screamed and shared with him a strange communion of pain. The small charms on her nipples dancing with her gasping breaths. When the door had closed on the departing witnesses, Rearden came close, his eyes soft with fulfillment. He held the needle for her to see, twisted the base of the handle, then plunged the point into her shoulder. Nothing happened. There was no pain. For a moment the bound girl thought that indeed she was a witch. But, smiling his thin smile, he plunged the steel again and again against his hand. She saw the needle retract into its handle. It was an exquisitely fabricated trick! He smiled at her understanding. Clare smiled too. It did not matter...
My Lord Rearden was a little boy playing his favorite game!
The small lonely cell and the light fetters. Clare knew that he would come. The time now would be very close. She waited.
He loved her. Yet he was a rock. Unassailable.
"Let them go free, M'Lord. Do what you wish with me."
He fed hungrily on her nakedness.
"Can I offer my person for more tortures, Lord?"
She held her chained hands high that he might see the wounds of the implements that had been used upon her.
"To buy their lives there is nothing I would not give or do or be."
She had nothing he did not already own.
"They are witches, child."
"I am not a witch."
"You are no witch," he acknowledged.
"Yet we must all die?"
For the first time she saw him at a loss. He gestured hopelessly. "I do not understand anymore than you."
"For you it will be an exquisite beauty when you see us impaled upon the stakes?"
"Yes."
"Do you wish to see my body impaled there upon its sword?."
"Yours more than any other."
"You will find a quintessence of beauty and feeling when you watch us die? It transcends all else?" He nodded.
"It justifies losing me?"
"That grieves me sorely, but yes."
"Let us live. Chain Alethea and Tavie in your dungeons. Torture me daily. We can live forever."
He shook his head sadly. "The flesh is too weak."
"Love me then! Instead of torture, love me! I will love you as no man has ever been loved. I will love you in a thousand ways!"
He took a deep breath. His soul sighed.
Deliberately she posed. She knew her strength. She knew the lure of her breasts, of her belly, of her cunt. She knew herself woman! She was all the woman who had ever lived. "I love you!" She knew not why or how she could say it. But she could! "Come." She held out her chained hands. "Take me. I will arrange the chains. They shall not hinder us."
He took her fiercely.
When it was over, he whispered into her neck: "It is the first time. The first time... " But she knew she had failed. "When is it to be?"
"On the morrow."
"Upon the stakes?"
"You prefer to be placed to die like that?"
"How can I know, Lord?"
"You will die by fire." His eyes were lambent. He still hungered.
"It is an awful way to die."
"The stake is beautiful. I want it for you. But death comes too slowly. Sometimes several days. That I could not bear. The fire is terrible. But it is quick." He sighed. "I fear, too, that the rabble must be regaled. It is the custom... "
"Love me."
He loved her cruelly and beautifully through the night.
* * *
In the bright light of morning the posts stood stark in the public place where three naked girls would die. A strange detachment was upon Clare as they bound her very tightly, yet in such ways that her loveliness would be enhanced. Rearden would save her beautiful until that last moment when the flames would rise. She stood straight, clamped against the wood, and watched with bitter amusement when they brought the heavy chain.
"Am I not safe enough? I cannot move!"
"Witches have strange powers, Mistress. Should thy demon slip into ropes he will not easily loose this."
They circled her waist, a man on each side tugging her back against the post so that she was near cut in two by the heavy iron. The ends were joined and hammered shut by a brawny smith. Looking down at her slenderness she knew that even without the ropes the chain alone would hold her to stand immovably until she died.
Tavie and Alethea fought. They had tricked their guards by feigning debility from their torture. But close to the waiting stakes they flung themselves into a frenzied battle for life. Clare watched incredulously as man after man went down. For a few moments her heart beat high that their fury might earn freedom. But in the end she saw them bound as she was bound. An extra chain pulling back their shoulders as testimony to their guard's respect.
There was a long wait while the fagots were piled high. The crowd enjoyed it. This was their day. Three naked girls to ogle and then watch burn. Whether they be witches or not mattered little to the spectacle.
Once again the Lord Inquisitor stood to one side, a quiet black figure intent upon the sculpture he had wrought. Those in charge watched him. Clare watched too. She knew that it would be his signal that would light the fires. She knew him insane with a strange lunacy. How bitter a thing was it for a girl to die as tribute to a madman's estheticism! From the comer of an eye she saw the torches lit and held ready.
From a distant place there came sounds. A commotion. Heads turned. Clare was bound too tightly to turn and look. Rearden himself paid no heed. Slowly he raised his arm and let it fall. The blazing torches were thrust into the tinder dry wood. A blow struck her and a voice cried in her ear. She sank into a dark, dark well.
* * *
Clare came up out of the darkness to see Lord Godfrey's face. She shook herself dazedly and saw not Godfrey at all, but George: Good old George! He was shaking her arm, his face lit with a great excitement.
"A fine sleep ye've had, an all. Thought I'd never wake yer."
She sat up and touched his face, seeking a tangible reality to cling to. The great Hall of Montrilas was bright with day. Impulsively she threw her arms around the startled George. "Hold me," she pleaded. "Just for a little while. I've been frightened."
"Nightmares, Miss?" He seemed to understand.
"Horrible things!" She gripped him very tight. "Oh, George... "
"Twas a terrible look on yer face ye had when I come, Miss. Scared me proper it did when I couldn't wake yer." Clare felt better. George was solid and real. She was still bound to the stake and the fire was rising, but the dream was fading. She would fight as for her life before she would be chained in that haunted spot again.
"Take me away, George." She had a sudden great need to be gone. She started for the door and tripped on her ankle chain. They both laughed as he unlocked her shackle. How good it felt to laugh and know normalcy. It was with true happiness that she turned her back and crossed her wrists and heard him chuckle as he snapped the handcuffs tight.
"I was forgetting," he admitted. "Don't know where I'd be without yer." He suddenly remembered. "Proper surprise I got fer you, Miss. That I have."
"Nice one, George?"
He looked at her oddly. "There's some as thinks so." Jauntily he led her from the hall.
* * *
Clare crouched on the rug at his feet. It was her favorite pose when they were alone. She twinkled at him and pleaded as a child pleads for candy: "Handcuffs...?"
"I spoil you," he said indulgently as he removed them. "I'm going to start saying no."
She clasped his knees happily and comfortably. "George says you have a nice surprise for me?"
Costigan shook his head. "You won't like it, love."
Clare knew instantly!
"We caught them last night."
"How?"
"A truck had come with... with-" he gestured irritably. "With supplies. We unloaded it. When we went out later in the dark... the whole lot of us, they were in the van. Curiosity I suppose. Or perhaps they wanted to steal a case for themselves. They jumped into our arms." He shook his head ruefully. "I want to know more about those two.
We could hardly handle them. Their strength isn't natural. We damn near lost them a couple of times-" He saw her consternation. "Don't worry, love. They are not hurt. Not yet anyway. We have 'em safe in a dungeon with enough chains to wear to hold about three horses. With those two, chains aren't for either ornament or punishment. They need to be chained! We tied 'em first with a bit of cord to bring 'em in the house and have a good look. But damn me if they didn't snake out of that inside ten seconds."
"Can I go to them?"
His negative was vehement.
"Please darling!"
"You are not going to dive into that pickle again," he said sourly.
"But you'll let me see them?"
"Oh, I suppose so." He smiled down at her tenderly, his fingers in her hair. "When?"
He shook his head in disapproval of her eagerness. "Anytime." He added a stern admonition that she knew he meant: "None of us trust you where they are concerned. You'll be watched, and fastened so you can't do much, and searched if need be."
"Searched!" She laughed at him. "A naked girl searched?"
He nodded soberly. "Yes. Searched. Think a bit...!"
She blushed. Then asked the question nearest her heart. "What will you do with them?"
"That's not for you to know, sweetheart. Not yet anyway. The first thing those hellcats are going to do is answer some questions."
"They won't. You know they won't!"
"I don't know that at all. You know 'em better than I do. But there is one thing we want to put our finger on. A reliable source tells us there has been a small but steady trickle of gold come into the market. Amounts that would be about right to keep this place going. We want that gold. Our claim to it is probably as good as theirs. They probably dug it up in the old ruin. Or, more likely still, they are a pair of witches."
He detected her shudder.
"You believe it too, don't you?"
"No! No, no!" She beat her fists on his knees. The dream flooded back. But she dared not tell him. She would tell no one. Tears entered her voice. "Please... They are girls. Two wonderful and incredible girls whose home you have stolen."
"We stole you." He chuckled. "But you haven't killed any of my men."
"Please don't hurt them."
"How else do you suppose we can get them to talk?"
Her face lit up. "Let me talk to them first. Let me tell them what you want."
"Dammit, that's a thought!" He considered briefly. "O.K., love. Proper little treasure you are. No sooner said than done. Hands behind your back now."
It was not an intentional cruelty. But, for the three of them, nonetheless heartbreaking. The handcuffed Clare had been chained to the wall by one ankle so that she had no hope of touching those she loved. Tavie and Alethea themselves were chained to the opposite wall of the dismal chamber. Wrist and ankle, waist and neck. They were frighteningly shackled so that their visitor was close to tears at the sight of their helplessness. But they themselves still contrived to move with grace as though their irons were weightless.
When they had said to each other all that was meaningful to them, she told of Costigan's demand. "We must kill him," Tavie said simply. "We must kill them all," said Alethea. "Men are vermin.
"They will torture you," Clare explained miserably. "Hot irons and the rack and such-like," Tavie said indifferently.
"I expect we'll live." Alethea spoke as of some minor discomfort.
"But darlings... I can't see you tortured... not you."
"Can you stop them?" Tavie's voice was bitter. "Can you help us escape?"
Clare felt shamed by her impotence. "I'm always chained," she wailed unhappily. "I'm not allowed near anything that matters. Now I've been warned that I'll be watched and doubly chained." She looked at them yearningly. "Oh darlings, I want you so much!"
They spoke of their love and forgot all else.
When they heard the bolts in the door withdrawn, Clare blurted out her most fearsome thing.
"They think you are witches."
Tavie laughed with pure joy. "But, of course, darling! What else!"
Allie said, irrelevantly: "When the time comes, go toward the road and scream." The door opened.
Clare wished she had not been chained in the great hall of Montrilas. It was like possessing foreknowledge.
The heavy chains were back on her ankles. She stood with the men and surveyed their work.
The siblings had fought their chains uselessly. Now they stood quiet against the wall of the courtyard, fastened to the metal rings set in the stone, hands high and wide. The Inquisitor, who was now Riodan, held out the stub of the thong that would slice their flesh. "You whip them, little darlin'."
It was absurd. The whole thing began to take on the imprint of the dream. "I cannot," Clare said flatly. "I am handcuffed." Her evasion was inadequate. He unlocked the metal on her wrists and again proffered the whip.
"No. If you must use it, then use it on me."
Riodan laughed. "Always nobility. Always the little mother!" he sneered. "Actually it's an easy way out."
"Darling!" It was Tavie's voice. "Whip us. We want you to."
Clare's mind computed possibilities. Her world was insane. She computed it as such. She took the ugly weapon in her hand and, fearful of second thoughts, sent its thong slicing across Tavie's back.
Tavie did not scream.
With breaking heart, she slashed the white loveliness with deliberate cruelty. She herself would have screamed under it.
Tavie sighed rapturously, shifting her weight from one foot to another, a small sensuous ripple of exquisite joy.
It struck Clare like a blow, an' envelopment of erotic heat. It was passed from Tavie to her as by a hand invisible, a passionate communion of deep, deep female love. The siblings owned her. They would always own her. She was their "little Thrall."
For a moment, as Clare stood with her whip facing the scarlet traceries she had painted on Tavie's back, she was confronted by guilt. Guilt in the sudden raging desire to whip the girls she loved so that the whole of their loveliness would be striped by the frenzy of her passion. To mark them as they had loved to mark her. Not in revenge, but in love. A love such as only they could know. Her knowledge of an unalterable conviction to whip them with a transcending joy until she could whip no more sent guilt tumbling into oblivion.
She moved from one to the other alternately. Her hobbled steps contrasting strangely to the authority of her arm. The wonder and glory of those first lashing coils encompassing the chained slenderness made her oblivious of her audience. She and the siblings had, for a brief time, retreated into their own world as though they were once more alone at Erdislune.
The watching men were hushed in something deeper than astonishment. They could never know what they watched. But they sensed a current beneath the surface. A deep mystic current they did not try to understand. Two naked girls were to be whipped until they spoke. That the third girl should whip them with such verve and dedication was remarkable. Perhaps she feared to be whipped herself if she failed to please. Or perhaps she desired to please Costigan by loosening tongues. It is un-likely that they analyzed.
As, gradually, the beautiful stripes upon sibling skin mounted, Clare could not but share her audience's enthrallment with the sinuous, scarcely perceptible writhings by which Alethea and her sister acknowledged the kisses of the thong. It was as though some inward fluidity responded turgidly. Not in pain, but in deep content.
Clare whipped her loves with an intent involvement. The fire in her loins glowing more demandingly with each stroke. But soon she spared a glance at the men she served. George's face was rapt, the bulge in his trousers tumescent. Riodan was a man worshipping at a shrine. She found an ironical amusement in their belief she was torturing the twins so that they would soon cry out their willingness to tell... and tell.
The chained girls were far enough apart that, as she whipped one, the other would turn enough to impart a glance of smoldering complicity from an adoring eye.
No man knew he beheld an act of love.
It was Riodan who put an end.
"The bitches like it!" he exclaimed angrily.
He walked to his captives. Seizing a handful of their hair he shook them. "Well?" he demanded, his face close.
Both spat into his glaring eyes.
"Bloody witches!" He turned and faced his fellows. "That's what they are, boys! Have ye any doubts?"
Cully had a shrewd thought. "Let's string our little wench up and whip her until they sing."
Clare's heart went cold. She could never bear it as they had done. "I got a better idea," said Riodan.
They watched him walk away.
He returned carrying Lise. She was tightly bound at ankles, wrist and elbow. He stood her against the wall so that the chained pair had a good view of his intention. Leaving his burden standing erect against the stone he backed away and drew a revolver.
"You have a minute to speak," he told Tavie and Alethea. "Then I kill her."
There was a shocked silence.
"There's nothing to tell, you fool!" Clare cried in fury. "Can't you understand!"
"Shut up!" He would waste no time with her.
"Look here, Barney," George interposed heavily. "Goin' a bit far, ain't yer!"
The chained girls could not see, but Clare saw, the sardonic wink by which Riodan told George to keep quiet and see if the threat worked. George returned the wink and subsided.
"You winked at each other," Alethea told them dispassionately. "Do you take us for idiots?"
"Witch!" In the peak of his fury Riodan fired. Lise fell.
For a bare second the awful tableau held. Then Clare leaped towards the still figure in the grass, only to be felled by the ankle shackles she had forgotten. George let out a mighty oath of anger and dismay. The siblings were galvanized into a frenzy of tugging and dragging at the chains that held them captive.
"You bloody fool!" George straightened up from his examination. "The girl's dead!" He looked for Riodan. But Riodan was gone.
For Clare it was another kaleidoscopic nightmare. Picking herself up, she now hobbled towards Tavie, but was intercepted by Cully's rough grasp on her arm. "Stay away from 'em," he warned. He pulled her back with him to join the rest, shifting and muttering in a disorganization Clare had never seen in them. They could not meet her eyes.
The twins had abandoned their hopeless battle against their chains. They leant against the stone gazing at each other in desolation. They were silently weeping. Clare had never seen them cry before.
George carried a limp burden towards the house.
Riodan returned.
This time he carried Chloe. Bound as Lise had been. Once more he placed the naked girl to his satisfaction and stepped away.
"Oh, come off it, Barney!" Remonstrances came thick and fast.
Riodan allowed them to expend their protest. Then spoke: "You silly bastards. Look at 'em! Cryin', so they are. Got 'em on the run, we have. Never seen 'em cry before, have yer!'" Cully stepped forward. "We don't think much o' what yer just done. That girl never done us no harm."
"Just a rotten les."
"Be that as it may, we all used her, so we did."
"Yer ain't goin' short, be yer, Cully!" Riodan sneered.
"We damn well could, an' all, the way you're goin'!" Cully flared. "We got a good thing here. You ain't a'goin' ter kill 'em all off."
Riodan motioned towards Clare. "As long as we got little Trixie here we ain't goin' ter suffer."
Clare wondered, numbly, if it was a compliment. She was sure her mother would not have thought so.
"Little Trixie's got her hands full. Ain't entirely public property, y'know," Cully pointed out.
At that moment it occurred to Clare that 'little Trixie' could be doing something more helpful than standing in despair. Determinedly she began her hobbled journey to Costigan.
"Where d'you think yer off to?" Riodan demanded. "I'm not public property, y'know," she mimicked. Cully laughed. They let her go.
It was not until she was halfway to Costigan's office that the obvious struck her like a blinding light. She was not expected. Costigan had no need of her. She had been dismissed by the rest. For some indefinite space of time she was in limbo. As though sleepwalking and almost without volition she sped her chained feet towards the garden. No matter what the penalty it was worth a try. For her to find a rational human being was the twins' only hope of life. Her chain clinked merrily and snubbed each urgent step.
It has happened to all of us that embarking on impulse on an unplanned and unexpected venture we make our first motions with dubiety. Yet as realization of sound decision clears our mind of irrelevance our course becomes clear, conviction hardens. An excited acceleration spurs our pace. Thus it was with Clare.
With the twins captive there were no lookouts. The men were absorbed with Riodan and his arguments. Even chained it should be possible to get out of sight of the house. After that it would be chance that she might find the Muldoon farm or someone connected with it. She did not even know in which direction it lay. But it was a link with the world. It was out there somewhere. People might come and go to it. A slender chance! But it was all she had.
In the first openness of the garden the naked girl knew a heart-clutching panic. She was in clear view. Totally exposed. She cursed her chains. If only she could run! She had alluring mental pictures of leaping across the sward on feet unfettered. How glorious it would be! Without the handicap of hobbled feet she might even reach the world beyond the moor. As it was she could do no more than contrive a sort of twinkletoe marathon in which her ankles were snubbed short at every step so that she knew eventually she must have wounds beneath the metal bands of her anklets. The linked steps of chained captivity were the crudest frustration she had ever known.
Her only salvation was that her ankle chains had been designed to prevent her from kicking or running. They permitted a mincing walk. Erdislune was huge. A ten-inch tether would have made her missions about the premises only ludicrous. Even with the length of chain now joining her feet she would never have essayed escape. The chances of success were too slight. The penalty she would pay when captured too severe. She did not know what it would be, she dared not think about it. But it would be fearsome! Her feet shuttled back and forth eagerly and painfully within the limit of her chain. Today was not as other days. The end would justify the means.
The foliage welcomed her like a cloak. It was like pulling the blankets over your head in bed. You were suddenly in a warm and friendly world. Relieved of the anxieties of exposure Clare strove to perfect a gait that would cover the most ground without stumbling. She had already fallen twice. It was a constant hazard. Beyond the garden she must needs watch where she trod and keep a roving eye for any sign of life.
It took a long time. But perhaps no more than a mile and a half in space before she found it. Her heart gave no sudden leap of joy, for it was in a form she distrusted. Liam and Jenny Muldoon sat on a fallen tree and watched her measured progress with rapt attention. They sat silent and still, making no move to come and meet her. Their watchful immobility sat strangely upon children. Clare remembered that previous time when she and they had been fellow sufferers. But it had not endeared her. To them she was a stranger and perhaps an enemy. Had her feet not been chained she would have ignored them and sped on by. But, hobbled, they might be her only chance. She clinked her way to them, smiling.
"What you wearin' them things on yer feet for?" Liam demanded.
"It's wicked to go bare naked," Jenny reproved. "You ought ter be put in prison."
It was not an auspicious beginning. But Clare put all the warmth and urgency she could muster into her voice: "I need help. Something terrible has happened. Please take me to the police." She had a sudden memory: "Or to Father Rattigan."
"Don't have nothin' ter do with narks. Ain't one closer nor Limfoyle, and that's fifteen mile afar. Father Rattigan visits once a month, that's where he's from too." Liam casually shattered two of Clare's hopes.
"Could you take me home please?" She made the words authoritative. "I'd like to talk to your parents."
"What about, Miss?" Jenny was curious, "Something terrible has happened. We need help."
"Bout up at the big house, you mean?" The boy's voice was a sneer. "We know bout that. My dad ain't doin' no informin' on Costigan."
"But lives are in danger. Please!"
"Costigan put them" things on yer feet?" He ignored her plea.
"Yes, he did. But-" she broke off. If these were Costigan's allies!
"He don't want yer runnin' orf, then," Jenny deduced.
Hope dwindled. Clare could almost feel the whip curling round her body when she was dragged back to Erdislune. The limited and biased comprehension of these children made them hard to deal with. "Stop this chatter and take me to your mother and father immediately," she demanded. "This is no time to quibble."
They watched her with intent bright eyes behind which inimical visions were racing. "We're goin' ter take yer back t'farm alright," Jenny said reservedly.
"But not afore we gets even wi' yer!" Liam's words were vicious.
"But I've never harmed you," Clare wailed.
"You and them other two did," the boy affirmed vehemently. "Them strange ones. Mother says they're witches."
"They're wicked too," Jenny contributed. "All naked... "
Clare was uncertain just what the "getting even" might entail. But fearful suspicions easily painted pictures on the canvas of her fear. "Couldn't we leave that until after I've talked to your mother?"
"Clever, ain't yer!" This time the sneer was unmistakable. "Take us fer a pair o' ninnies 'cause we're kids, don't yer! Can yer walk with yer feet chained like that?"
Clare shifted unhappily. These disagreeable children held all the initiative. "You saw how I could walk. It's quite slow."
"Can yer run or kick?"
"Of course I can't!"
Brother looked at sister. "Let's tie her hands behind her back ter start with... "
So that was it! Clare instinctively turned to flee, but stopped. She could not outrun two children. It would also be an admission of weakness. "You needn't think I'm going to let you tie my hands," she said firmly. "You'll be in trouble if you don't do as I ask. Stop this nonsense."
They were upon her like a pair of swarming monkeys, hands and feet and teeth. Had Clare's feet been free she might have coped. But the chain between her ankles delivered her into their hands. Jenny managed a firm grip on her hair and pulled her head back without mercy. When the victim of assault reached back at the wrenching hands, Liam grasped both her nipples in vicious fingers. Clare screamed and tried to knee him, but was snubbed by her chain. Grasping his wrists her effort only increased the strain upon her already tortured nipples, on to which he held with a grim tenacity that bespoke knowledge of their tender vulnerability. Jenny tugged back dangerously on the bent neck. They had her!
With team-like competence they turned her face down upon the grass. Hard knees dug into the small of her back. Her chained legs threshed fruitlessly as did her arms. She could reach nothing that mattered. The backward tension on her neck was alarming. She ceased to struggle.
"Good thing I got that string in me pocket," Liam panted.
"Cross them hands behind yer back," Jenny ordered. "If yer don't, I'll pull yer head back somethin' crool." Another tug held authority.
It came close to being the most hateful thing she had ever done. To surrender her person to these children who possessed none of the endearments of childhood. But, miserably, Clare crossed her wrists behind her back and lay still while the thin strands were wound round and round and pulled snug and tight with a cunning that told her plainly she would never free them. The thin stuff, too, would cut her skin far worse than what she was accustomed to being tied with. She was in a daze of frustrated anger. To be diverted like this at such a time! But there was still a glimmer of hope. Perhaps in the end they would guide her to the farm.
"Goin' ter fuck her, Liam?"
They allowed her to struggle to her knees. With her hands bound as they were she was totally at their mercy. They could do what they wished with her, and they knew it. Clare could neither fight nor run. "You can't do that to me with my feet chained." She hoped they would not know how false the statement was.
"I don't mind," the boy said triumphantly. "I liked that other thing like last time." He paused and grinned. "Leastways I liked it first go." He grinned at their kneeling captive. "You willin' ter do it proper, or we got ter whip you?"
"Let's whip her anyway," Jenny enthused. "Give me your knife, Liam."
The kneeling girl and the male child watched the sister cut the limber willow withes. He in delight. She desolate. She tried to reach him: "People are dying...?"
He ignored the inference. "That hurt when I grabbed your tits, eh?"
"Terribly! You don't have to whip me. I'll do what you want."
"I'm goin' ter suck yer tits afterwards."
"If you want." She was thankful he did not know how small his threat.
His sister trimmed the wands and selected one. She gave him back his knife. "While you're doin' it to him," she directed Clare seriously. "I'm goin' ter be right behind you. If you do somethin' wrong I'll whip your arse. You gotta keep yer hands well up, see, so I can hit it proper. Understand?"
"I understand." She understood it all better than they knew!
Liam stood, feet apart, in front of the kneeling Clare. He unbuttoned his flies. "You do it right, now," he warned. Jenny emphasized his admonition by a cut of the willow that made their captive cry out in appeal. She did it right.
Two savage cuts punctuated involuntary pauses in her task. She tried hard to please.
"Now you do it to her," Liam announced grandly after his time had come and gone.
Jenny giggled. "Oh, Liam, you're awful! I couldn't."
"Corse yer could. Works same with a girl, only different," he assured her expansively.
"Sure you know what you're talking about?" Clare inquired acidly.
Without a word he carefully selected a willow. Clare's gaze followed his movements with loathing. "I'm sorry," she said humbly. "Please forgive me."
He struck her twice. Once across her bottom. Once over her shoulders above her bound arms. She fell sideways with a cry of hurt and despair. She knew now that, for her, these children were without mercy. She lay on the grass, sobbing. "Get up. You go to do Jenny."
"Ain't sure I want to, Liam." Jenny was nervous. "You got to," he warned. "I want ter see. Bet she knows all about it. Hold yer skirt up high so I get a good look."
Clare struggled to her knees. Neither of them helped. She looked without joy at the downy small slit revealed by the lifting of the dirty skirt. She wondered how many fingers or tongues may have preceded her on this exploration. From the look on the girl child's face she suspected few. Perhaps none. She proceeded with the ritual of ecstasy.
"Either one of yer what stops gets it proper. You too, Jenn," Liam warned. He cut the air with his wand for emphasis.
The dismal union worked its way to an inconclusive end. The prurient watcher got bored with the mechanically sucking mouth, and with his sister's pink cheeks and glazed eyes. The girls were glad to stop, if only from exhaustion.
"She's a bit young," Big Brother conceded. "Now we're going to have a look at your cunt."
Clare longed to kill them. But the bite of his string cutting into her crossed wrists invoked obedience. "How do you want me for that?" she asked without hope.
They debated her posture for this quaint new sport. Then demanded she lay on her back. "I can't with my hands tied like this," she said untruthfully.
"Do it anyway. We don't mind if it hurts."
When she obeyed, Liam pushed a small piece of rotting log beneath her hips to obtain maximum exposure for her sex. "We always wanted to see where babies come from," he said lewdly. "Your cunt's a lot better for looking than Jenny's." He laughed knowingly. "Bet Costigan's boys all been havin' a good go at you. Should be well stretched."
Clare lay mute, helpless and shamed while they probed and hurt her. There was nothing good in what was happening. It was not long before an inevitable realization dawned. "You said I couldn't fuck you with yer feet chained," the boy accused.
"Well, it's not good," Clare offered lamely.
Liam whipped her breasts, carefully, accurately and cruelly. A bitter slash across each. "Say yer sorry fer lyin'."
Bound as she was, Clare had not managed to move. She had squealed and moaned and arched her back in agony. She looked up into the avid grin and saw no kindness. Jenny, too, was looking down at her with vivid curiosity. Her own breasts were not yet developed. "I'm sorry I lied to you," Clare obeyed abjectly. Then, spurred by a wish to end this sorry play by acceptance of the inevitable, she added, in as winsome a tone as she could muster, "Please fuck me now."
Liam coupled with her. Because he had already climaxed the act was not a thing of moments. His penis explored her sheath slowly and with intent to discover. From time to time he bit a nipple fiercely so that the girl beneath him arched and thrust in agony. Clare's hopeless eyes beheld Jenny's rapt expression as she watched her brother possess an enemy of Ireland.
It should have been over then. But it was not. Clare's breasts remained an unexplored delight. "Fancy havin' these bobbing about under yer chin," liam admired as he kneaded and pinched. "Don't they feel funny? Like they was sort of stuck on yer?"
"Yes. That's why girls wear bras." Clare tried to aid his clinical interest.
"Let me have a go," Jenny pleaded. "I expect I'll get two like that in a few years. I want to feel."
Her brother laughed in brotherly scorn. "You'll never grow two like she's got. You ain't hardly started."
"Oh, Miss?" Jenny pleaded. "Could I grow two like yours? Please tell me."
"You could grow two like mine, Jenny. Don't worry," Clare sought an ally.
"Does it hurt very terrible to have them whipped, Miss?" Jenny asked, as though uncertain of future benefits.
"It's a girl's most tender spot," Clare assured her as she writhed under liam's teeth and fingers. "You can see now how liam's hurting me."
"I want to have a go at her," Jenny demanded excitedly.
Liam reluctantly relinquished his place upon their captive to his sister. "Make her squirm," he advised in adult pretense. "It's easy. I wish yours were like that."
Clare bore with the nipping teeth and the cruel fingers. In this juvenile encounter her nipples were not instruments of joy. They were only erect receptacles of pain. Why, oh why, must they stick out as they did under torture! Now was their time for inversion. But they betrayed a girl. It was as though they welcomed pain.
"Let's take her back to Mum," Liam said suddenly with typical male selfishness. His lusts were satisfied.
Jenny was enjoying Clare's nipples with her lips. Her hands caressed the bound girl's breasts. Both would willingly have prolonged the moment. But the single male presence ruled them both. Clare got eagerly to her feet. Perhaps at least... !
It was a long and dreary walk with the fettered girl. Liam tired of the slow pace, and went on ahead, leaving his sister with a supple willow with which to encourage any hesitancy in their captive. Clare wanted only to reach their destination. She stumbled forward as fast as her chained ankles would permit.
Netty Muldoon was typical of a place and of a time. Uneducated, married too soon, superstitiously religious, politically prejudiced, she worked out a lonely life with a man as bereft of joy as she herself. That he was absent for the week was pure chance. Muldoon was visiting relatives who did not like his wife. The advent of Clare into the ken of this bitter woman was a mischance of Fate. Liam briefed her. The two of them waited in the barnyard for Jenny and the captive girl who Netty already saw as the whore of Babylon.
"Harlot!" said Netty in friendly greeting.
Clare recoiled at the incongruity. Were harlots chained and tied! Weren't they supposed to offer themselves without let or hindrance! "Please untie me," she pleaded. "I don't think the children understand."
"They understand the likes of ye all too well: the saints be praised," Nettie assured her passionately.
The captive Clare poured out her story, pleading for the lives of those she loved. The dark-haired, dark-eyed pillar of virtue heard her out with contempt.
"You'll get no help from me."
"Then please untie me, and help me get these things off my ankles. Please! Oh please...!"
She was laughed to scorn. "The Lord has delivered you into proper hands," Netty Muldoon declared. "You'll no betray Costigan and his darlin' boys. Tis a lesson you'll be learnin' with me." She looked at her wide-eyed offspring. "Seducing the innocent, so ye did. Shameless ye are. Look at ye! Naked! I'll learn ye a lesson."
The captive of stupidity wept. Wept shamelessly and heartbrokenly. Her escape had come to nothing. To worse than nothing! There was no pity for her anywhere, nor for those whose lives she sought to save. She was in a land and in a time with people who believed in witches and warlocks and bitter hate. The awful frustration of her tied hands and chained ankles were desolating in their finality. Helpless like this she belonged to anyone who laid a hand on her. She could not resist. Whatever awfulness Nettie Muldoon intended to inflict upon her she would have to bear.
"Have you not considered mercy?" she pleaded.
"Did you have mercy on my children?"
The captive knew herself defeated. "Please punish me as you deem fitting. I will be cleansed. Then set me free." She strove for a biblical tone.
"There's no freedom for the likes of you."
She tried again. "Surely there must be some way I can make amends. Something I can do...?"
"You are whoring. Offering your body."
"To a woman!"
"Oh aye! You think I don't know!" There was a sudden change in the atmosphere. "You have the skill, haven't you?"
"I have the skill."
Nettie Muldoon turned on her watching family. "Get you gone. You've work to do. I'll see no more of ye till supper. Make certain of it." The children vanished as though by magic. A minute later Nettie Muldoon was stark naked.
Clare sighed. Always it came to this. That her tongue or her nether lips must appease hunger. Yet the hunger, once appeased, showed no gratitude. It was the bindings on her wrists and the chains upon her ankles that made it so. No matter how willingly she gave herself to the lust of others, she could gain no credit and no thanks so long as she was bound. A naked girl bound can gainsay no one: thus she earns no favors and no love. "Set me free that I may pleasure you," Clare pleaded.
A stinging slap upon her cheek was the first answer. "What need have you of hands!" The reeking sex was thrust against her face. Hard fingers fastened in her hair. "Do it to me. Do it well. Show me this devil's work you do so well in Erdislune."
Clare showed her. It was one more step to a destination she could only fear.
For a little while Nettie Muldoon seemed at a loss. She stood vibrant and surprisingly lovely without her soiled clothes. The bound girl kneeling submissively waited with a faint hope of sympathy. She deemed silence her best ally.
"Tis a devil's trick." Nettie Muldoon pronounced. "Too good to be right, it is. I'll not be seduced. Tis a good flogging you'll be needin'."
"Oh no!" The cry of anguish broke from the captive throat with all the desolation of the world. "Don't whip me. It won't prove anything. Rid yourself of responsibility by setting me free. What happens then will be beyond your will or mine. Please! There are lives at stake. Lives in your hands... Surely you don't want that burden on your conscience? Set me free."
"You've escaped from Costigan, haven't ye?"
"How can I escape! Look at my chained feet. Your children found me and brought me here."
"Aye, after you'd worked your scarlet will with them."
"But how could I! It was your son who tied my hands.
Look, it was his string."
"And well indeed it was. The blessed lad knew evil when he saw it."
"He treated me brutally. Look at the marks of the switch he used on my breasts."
"Keepin' the devil at bay, he was. The brave lad."
Clare moaned in despair and tore at the strands that held her wrists. They bled but did not yield. "If you think it right to hurt me, then do it and be done. Your conscience will be clear. I will have been punished. You can set me free."
The naked Nettie laughed in derision. "There's no freedom for ye, girl. Understand that. Righteousness has thee. You'll suffer for yer soul's sake."
"Do you want money? I can get you money... "
"Money!" Nettie Muldoon laughed in scorn. "What money has a naked whore like thee got! D'you want me to search inside yer slit to find what's not there! You've no other place to put good cash."
"Then take me back to Costigan!" Clare flared.
"An why would I be doin' that?"
"You make a great pretense of admiring him. Return his whore."
"So that's the way of it! Oh, I'll return thee, never fear. But not without stripes."
"He'll whip me for this long absence, never fear. You are making it longer all the time. It's not fair for you to whip me and then him to whip me too because your children made me captive. Please take me back to Costigan or free me."
"I can't free you of those chains. They need a key."
"Yes you can. A farmer has tools."
"You have a devil's answer to everything. You'll sing a different tune under the whip."
"I've never hurt you. I've never hurt your children. I've never hurt Costigan. Why do you want to whip me?"
They glared at each other. Two naked females, each driven by their own compulsions. But one was bound.
"Please, let me pleasure you again. I know you are lonely and sore at heart. But, honestly, I'll make you happy. Then let me go," Clare pleaded. "Then there can be no guilt."
For a minute they stared. Each pledged to a conviction. "Come, mavourneen." Nettie wound her fingers in the bound girl's hair. Her voice was suddenly kind. "It is whipped you must be for ye soul's sake. I'll do the job for ye gladly. You're a winsome lass."
"You'll get pleasure from whipping me, won't you?" Clare accused. "Indeed I will, my love," said Nettie Muldoon as she dragged upon the captive hair.
It was a shed. A storage place for tools. There was a work bench and odds and ends. It was perfect for Nettie's need. "Will ye fight while I tie ye? Or will ye yield?"
"How can I fight?"
"That's answer enough. You'd fight if ye got the chance. I'll no be givin' it to ye."
A minute later Clare stood on tiptoe, her arms cruelly wracked high behind her back, her head bent down to ease the strain, her back and buttocks beautifully exposed for that which was to be done to them.
"Please don't whip me."
"And why not, pray? You're a whore."
"Not by wish. Only by force."
"You expect me to believe that?"
"I'm chained, aren't I! Whores aren't chained."
"Ye have a glib tongue."
"I've been kept a prisoner. I'm always tied or chained. I'm made to do things, just as you are making me do things now. Tied the way I am you can do whatever you want with me. Can't you see! I'm innocent. Everybody does whatever they want with me."
Clare's eyes followed the handsome Muldoon nakedness. Nettie had selected the whip from several. She struggled and found herself beautifully positioned and helpless for the thong. "Please don't whip me," she pleaded. "Please...!"
Nettie whipped her with surprising skill and knowledge. She knew where the lash hurt most. Perhaps she herself had known the bite of the leather. Clare screamed and pleaded. She swung this way and that upon her tether. But the whip found her lovingly. There was no escape. Nettie Muldoon had tied her well and followed the gyrating nudity, taking swift advantage of each unwary motion of leg or hip to plant another bleeding cut upon the tender skin. Clare screamed steadily. She was not captive to religion, but only of a woman's lust.
Nettie stopped the thrashing at the fifteenth stroke. "You feel chastened?" she inquired pleasantly.
Clare was gasping and moaning in pain. But she managed a coherent "Yes... oh, thank you! Oh yes... "
"It is only the beginning," Nettie Muldoon said happily. She had found what she had always sought. The pinioned Clare suffused her being with an ineffable contentment.
Clare herself was badly frightened. The pain, her utter helplessness, the ugly death menacing Tavie and Alethea, and now this primitive superstitious creature who cared for nothing but her own bitter convictions and desires. She could not even struggle to vent her frustration. It hurt too much. She was possessed totally. "What are you going to do with me?" she moaned.
"Scourge you as a whore."
"But I'm not a whore. I was taken by force."
"You were part of Erdislune and them strange creatures what owns it."
"I was kidnapped."
"A likely tale, so it is! I'll teach ye a lesson you'll not be forgetting. Tis too bad indeed I don't have them others strung up beside ye."
"Please, Mrs. Muldoon. You have taught me a lesson. I hurt. I won't forget. Please don't whip me anymore."
The lash, from a new angle, flew beneath her anguished eyes to cut across her bent loins. Again the shock, the agony, the scream. "Tell me what to do and I'll do it," Clare sobbed.
"Buy me with your body, you slut! That's your game." This time the stroke curled round Clare's thighs so that her foot dragged piteously at its chain.
"You'll kill me," Clare sobbed. "Oh please, don't kill me. You mustn't! I can't stand being whipped like this."
"Ye've no choice, mavoureen."
"Then let me rest. Let me gain a little strength to bear more," Clare used her lips as her only weapon.
The thought appealed. Nettie Muldoon was in no hurry. She was in a Nirvana of her own. The sight of Clare's bent strained nakedness was nectar. She was in no hurry to flog it into unconsciousness. "I'll give ye a rest, harlot. But only while I get ye fixed better to me likin'."
Clare woefully watched her ankles tightly bound with rope. Then her knees. This woman was not underrating her need to escape. Then a loop round her neck and thrown over a rafter.
"I'll not hang ye, girl. Tis just so you'll play no tricks."
Tricks! What tricks could she play! Clare mused bitterly as her hands were lowered and freed and the rope round her neck tightened so that she clutched it in fear.
The two women stood thus gauging each other's intent. "Yer hands be free, slut. Fight," Nettie mocked.
It was a cruel plight. Probably intentionally designed to tantalize. Clare's hands were indeed free. But to what avail!
Her lower limbs were tied so that she could not even hop. The noose round her neck was too tight to pull loose. She stood there, a naked girl whose free hands and arms were no more than a frustration emphasizing her impotence. "I don't want to fight you," she said sadly, making a virtue of necessity. "Why don't you tie my hands, then let me give you pleasure?" She held out her hands and crossed her wrists invitingly.
Few men could have withstood so tempting and appealing a sight. The whip-marked body of a naked girl offering herself, willing to be bound as slave to someone's flesh. Nettie Muldoon's eyes glowed as she sought rope.
But it was not the crossed wrists she wanted. Contemptuously she knocked them apart and looped each singly. Soon Clare stood on her toes, her arms strained up toward a truss bar. The noose was taken from her neck. It was the crudest exposure. The whip could find her every secret.
"Tis a beautiful sight you be, and that's a fact," Nettie Muldoon conceded grudgingly. "I'll be takin' the ropes from your legs, so I will. I'll be whippin' ye there, too, I've no doubt." She bent to her task.
"It's you that's beautiful." Clare's affirmation was not entirely flattery. The Muldoon woman had a barbaric splendor all her own. "Please, set me free. I want to love you." What other weapon had she!
"You and yer love!" The voice held scorn. But there was desire there too. Clare sensed it. If only she could fan it to a flame. True it might not spell freedom. But it would take her closer to it than she now was. Suspended like this she had no hope at all.
"You can keep me tied in some way while we do it," she wheedled sweetly. "I won't be able to get away."
"You'd like to though. Think I don't know!"
"It doesn't matter what I like. It's what you like that counts. I'm your prisoner. You can't blame me for wanting to be a good prisoner.
Nettie Muldoon considered. The situation of dominance in which she held herself appealed. To have this lovely pleading creature tied for her personal enjoyment was alluring. But, at the moment, the taut nudity's invitation to the whip was too compelling. The other could wait. "I'm going to whip you," she said with relish. "All the way from your pretty toes to your pretty neck."
For Clare it was suspended animation. She could think of no fresh plea, no new inducement. She knew herself in the grip of a force she could not control. She was in the throes of an icy fear that this woman might not know or understand the awfulness of the whip she wielded. If the fifteen strokes already delivered upon her innocent flesh was but a beginning, she could easily hang there dead before Nettie Muldoon realized her lack of judgment. Dazedly she watched the arm and the thong slide back, then flash like lightning towards her nudity.
Nettie Muldoon was transfixed by the effect of her blow. The tied girl, around whose waist it had cut a vivid belt of scarlet, went wild. The lovely body jerked, arched and tossed against the pinioned wrists. Scream after scream filled the shed with the sound of agony. She stood breathless, watching.
The whipped girl was frantic. Through the depth of the Valley of Pain she still saw her loved ones held for death. Saw the possibility of what was happening to her going on and on. Somehow she must break this sequence of senseless punishment. She could think of nothing but the preposterous. But perhaps that was what it took...
"I... I have an idea... May I tell it to you?" Her sobbing voice was weak and broken.
"Go ahead." The whip snaked idly back and forth.
"If you could punish me with something so awful, it would last all my life... Something that everyone would recognize, telling my shame. Something that hurt me beyond anything else... Would you then let me go free?"
"I might," Nettie sneered. "What devil's brew have ye hashed up?"
"But, if you saw it as punishment enough, and if you did it to me, would you let me go?"
"I suppose so. Yes." The admission was grudging, but curious.
"Brand me."
The two words filled the shed like a thunderclap. The silence that followed was alive. Clare prayed.
"The blessed Saints have inspired ye," Nettie Muldoon pronounced the words as though she believed them. It was as though she believed them. It was obvious the barbaric horror of the act held, for her primitive superstition, a lightness. A symbolic propriety... "I'll mark ye with the cross," she breathed reverently.
"Then set me free?"
"Ye'll never be free. Not bearing The Mark," Nettie sighed ecstatically. "But yes, I'll untie you afterwards and try and get those things from your feet. You can go your way." There was something almost biblical in her pronouncement.
Clare had won a battle. But at what a cost! She hung against her ropes not caring. The thing that mattered now was time. To pay her penalty and go. How long would Nettie take!
The cross was the easiest thing of all. They abound in Ireland. This one was metal about four inches long. Nettie found long-handled pincers with which to hold it. Next the fire. The tool shed held a primitive forge in one corner. There was an anvil and many tools. It was sight of these things that had sparked Clare's hope of ridding her ankles of their chains. She watched in cringing anticipation as the woman who was to brand her raked among dead coals and experimentally turned the handle of the whirring fan.
"Don't take long ter get it red hot once I get this here fire started," Nettie said encouragingly.
She kindled a tiny blaze, raked fresh coal around it and gently turned the fan. Even from a distance Clare could see the magic of the blast of air expediting the hunger of the flame. The coal soon glowed.
The captive was now beset with a new anxiety. She had asked for the brand. It was evident her flesh would receive it. But where! Then too she knew herself incapable of standing as she now was while a glowing iron made an imprint in her skin. The whip had caused her to writhe madly, what would the iron do! It was a strange dilemma. She had no wish to be bound more tightly or helplessly than she was. But, hanging by her wrists, she could envision herself getting half a dozen botched-up burns while Nettie strove to place the iron against her plunging nakedness. Better to be held immovable. It would hurt less, and the brand itself would be a better and cleaner mark for her to carry through her life.
" She need not have worried. With mutterings of annoyance at the trouble and precautions, Nettie bound her captive to one of the uprights supporting the roof. Bound her with a savage tightness in which she could only quiver inwardly. Bound with her feet separated by the post, revealing her thighs. "That's where ye'll wear it, lass. Where the devil can see the holy cross when he comes to enter yer sinfulness." Going back to the forge she dropped the metal cross upon the coals and turned the handle of the fan.
It is a terrible thing to have to watch the heating of the iron that will brand your flesh. Clare tried to look elsewhere, but could not. The busily glowing radiance held her fascinated. From it would come the greatest pain she had ever known. But from it, too, would come a key to freedom. To be able to run with leaping strides across the moor! It was a dream that made anything worthwhile.
Nettie Muldoon took the pincers and picked up the glowing cross. It was as red as need be. Greater heat might damage it. In righteous purpose she advanced towards the naked girl, bound and waiting.
"And what the devil might you be playin' at, woman?"
The deep male voice preceded the vision of the dark visaged, heavy-footed farmer. Shock caused Nettie's grip upon the pincers to slacken. The hot iron dropped to the dirt floor where it smoked and spluttered. Nettie herself stood as though turned to stone. "Rory! Tis early fer yer to be comin' home."
"And well I came, by the look of things!"
"Please help me!" Clare pleaded.
"She's a witch!" Nettie affirmed triumphantly.
Muldoon laughed coarsely. "Cast a spell on you then! You're as naked as she. And don't think I'm not knowing why. Get your clothes back on and cover that achin' cunt you've had her lick."
Nettie feared this man who was her husband. She dived for her clothes. But he stopped her with a laughing command. "Hold on, woman. Perhaps ye're best as ye are for a spell. Just struck me: there's a little job I need to do."
"Mr. Muldoon! Please help me. I'm desperate," Clare shot the words at him in a frantic need that this family antic should not keep her any longer captive.
Muldoon spared her but an irritated glance. "You from Erdislune?" He looked knowingly at her chains.
"Yes. I'm from Erdislune. I need-"
"Then shut up!" He ended her plea with the brutal command, and turned his attention to his quaking wife.
"Take the holy cross off the ground."
She obeyed in silence. Her movements urgent.
"Now the fire. Douse it."
She sped upon the errand. Keeping one eye on him.
"Now come here, you naked trollop!"
He had found rope. Clare watched him tie his wife's hands together in front of her, throw the rope over the same support from which she too had hung, then pull. Nettie stood on her toes, stretched. Not satisfied, he lifted her with a huge arm beneath her hips, his other hand taking up the slack. When he tied the knot the naked woman hung swaying. Her toes six inches above the floor.
He stood back and eyed his work appreciatively. There was remarkably little lust in his gaze. Clare wondered. He seemed more irritated, faced with a job that had best be disposed of, rather than angry. Occasionally he spared a glance her way, but it was with an unflattering lack of interest. He picked up the whip his wife had used with such skill. "Know what I'm goin' ter do wi' this?" he asked jovially.
"You're going ter whip me." A simple acceptance of fact. "Why?"
"I ain't sure, Rory. She's only a whore... " Nettie was reaching for the ground with straining toes.
"Whatever she be ain't fer the likes o' you ter judge. You silly bitch, don't you understand she either belongs to them as owns Erdislune or to Costigan. Either way, we ain't meddlin'." He laughed raucously. "Costigan 'ud be right pleased, so he would, ter get her back with a cross burned into her arse."
"I'm sorry, Rory. Don't whip me." Her voice lacked optimism.
He slashed the leather round the taut center of the suspended nudity and watched it turn, twist and plunge, the unfettered legs beating a mad tattoo in space. "Think you're ever goin' ter learn sense?" he inquired conversationally.
"I will learn, Rory! I will. I promise. Don't whip me no more. Not on account of her. She ain't worth it... "
The whip sang again and again. After each stroke there came a casual question, answered by the fevered acquiescence of the punished wife. It went on and on. Muldoon was in no hurry.
But Clare was in a hurry. She groaned inwardly at what she was forced to watch. It was all so sad, and so useless. True, this man had saved her from the brand. But she could see no hope of freedom in him. In that sense she was worse off than ever. She dared not plead or remonstrate. She sensed his mood. He would only turn the whip on her too. But time was speeding. For her to be bound to a post watching a farmer discipline his wife helped the twins no whit. "I'll get you money. A lot of-" Her sentence was abruptly cut off by a pantherish move and swing of Muldoon's arm. The whip, diverted from his wife, cut Clare squarely across both breasts. She howled in shock and pain.
"Think that 'ull help yer ter keep yer gob shut?" he asked pleasantly.
She nodded mutely. She did not trust her voice. She was dazed with agony. She would not dare cross him. The blazing wounds across her breasts would silence her as effectively as a gag.
Clare thought it would never end. It was not until Nettie Muldoon's writhing under the whip and the responses of her voice weakened that her husband set aside the thong and lowered her to the ground. She stood sobbing, her tied hands dabbing at her cheeks. Muldoon's interest in her was over. "Get yer hands loose yerself. Use yer teeth if yer have to," he jeered. He turned his attention to Clare.
She dared not speak while he untied her. When the last rope fell away, she stood naked before him, linked ankles precluding thought of flight. He studied her slenderness. "More nor we Muldoons whipped yer, I can see," he observed thoughtfully. "Get it often up at the big house?"
"Quite often." Her voice was husky. "Like it?"
"Oh no! No... "
He laughed. "I'll take that with a grain o' salt. Not that it matters ter me." He eyed her shrewdly. "Yer know what I'm goin' ter do with yer, eh?"
"Yes, I know." Her voice was listless. Without hope.
"S'pose you'll get 'bout what Nettie got, fer a welcome, eh?"
"That or worse." Her eyes pleaded the question she dared not ask.
He shrugged resignedly. "No use talkin'. Can't do but one thing." As though regretting the necessity he picked up the rope.
It was the little donkey cart that is one of the commonest sights in the west of Ireland. Muldoon must have returned in it. The long-eared little animal with its bony hips and prominent ribs stood tired and waiting in the shafts. Clare remembered the story of Chloe, and knew it would be repeated now with her. Like a piano teacher placing a novice's hands upon the keyboard, Muldoon set Clare's wrists upon the tailgate of the cart. Spacing them well separated, he tied them there. Wherever the cart went, she must follow. She recalled how, in history, women had been whipped like this at the cart's tail through the streets of London.
"But my feet are chained!" She feared he had forgotten.
He laughed at her concern. "Ye haven't a care," he assured her. "Old Nellie here don't move an inch faster nor what you can." He climbed into the driver's seat. The donkey's ears fell dejectedly. The Prisoners' March began.
He could have let her ride. But he obviously saw something fitting in her abasement. No doubt those who would welcome her would see it too. Clare stumbled fearfully Behind the rickety vehicle, feet flashing in her chains, hard put to keep pace with even Old Nellie's lack of ambition, gasping in pain as her feet found stones she could not see. It was a demeaning and relentless journey. Muldoon spared scarcely a glance at her frightened face, but kept his eyes upon the road ahead.
Thus Clare returned to Erdislune. She knew a cringing shame from the laughing eyes, the cheerful quips, the lewd remarks that was her greeting. As they clattered over the cobbles of the courtyard men gathered from nowhere to witness the return of the delinquent. She knew the good-natured banter in no way precluded her eventual punishment.
"Been doin' a bit o' farming, eh!"
"Bin' practicin' fer Sports Day. That's what she's bin doin'."
"What yer have ter pay for the moke and cart, love?"
"Bring us a few more like this, Rory lad! You'll be takin' a little nip wi' us, to be sure!"
It was George who untied her wrists. "Twas a foolish thing to do, lass."
She met the sympathy in his eyes and wanted to cry. "I had to try... " It was as though she owed him the explanation. "You know I had to try and save them. You'd have done it... "
He nodded somberly. "Costigan wants you. I'll come along." He took her arm.
"You mean I'm not to be trusted now?" she asked bitterly.
"Are you, love?" His voice was sad.
"No, I suppose I'm not to be trusted," she admitted. "But with these damn chains on my ankles you could trust me anywhere. You owe it to them that I'm here. If my feet hadn't been chained I'd have escaped."
It was all so hopeless! Defeated by a few bits of metal on her feet'. It was too cruel! And the metal was still there! They would never trust her now. How could they! She would be punished, probably quite terribly, then become a helpless spectator to horror. And after that, what! To be Costigan's girl, shared by his band. A sort of camp follower along with the other captives. She remembered the day she had driven her little car across the moor. How could she have known...
Having delivered her, George discreetly withdrew.
Once more she stood before the desk of judgment. The naked captive in her chains. Once more the sad wise Irish eyes drank in her loveliness. They gazed at each other in silence, a silence that lengthened because, between the two of them, there was no need of words. Neither wished to voice what must be said. At last, angry with a situation he had not controlled, Costigan struck the desk with the flat of his hand. "What do we do now?" he demanded without heat.
Clare shrugged. She longed to free this strong and vital man from his bonds of loyalty and death. But always his dream would defeat her and hold him a captive without chains. A dream that perhaps neither he or his men properly understood. A dream that led them inevitably to an oblivion that they seemed to accept with a strange and fearful prescience.
"Is there a decision?" She smiled at him with tenderness. "Won't the army make those for us! I attempted to escape. I have been recaptured. Now I will be punished. Isn't that about the drill?"
He made a gesture of frustration. "That's the drill, and there's precious little I can do about it."
"You could get in the jeep with me and drive away from here. You need to escape just as much as I do. I don't know anymore what's at stake for me. But for you it's your life."
He dismissed her words as though unheard. "I try and shield you... "
"I had to take the chance. I can't let them die. Had my feet not been chained I would have got away."
"But they were chained: that's the point. You never had a chance. You'd have gone further, but half the men are still out there looking for you. They'd have picked you up."
"Alright, so I was foolish. Compared with all else it's no big thing."
"The boys don't see it that way."
It was borne upon her by his voice and by his hurt eyes that her transgression was greater than she supposed. She looked at him, puzzled.
"Don't you understand. You weren't just a girl running away from a strange captivity. Your escape would have meant that by now this place would be ringed by guns. Every one of us would have died."
"Oh, you and your death!" She was close to tears. "You could surrender, disperse, give it up."
"For us, surrender is death. You know that."
"No one seemed angry with me when Muldoon brought me back."
"That's the Irish, love. Deep down they think you betrayed them."
"Surely they don't think I'm happy and joined the ranks?"
"No one will analyze. They've simply become fond of you. You've been a damn good sport about a lot of things that would have sent other females up the wall. I suppose they see you as a mascot. Or they did... "
"Little Trixie who's handy to fuck!" she said bitterly.
"More than that." He ignored the ugliness. "George worships you. He's going to be heartbroken."
It registered slowly. But suddenly she understood Costigan's disquiet. "You mean... you mean, they are going to kill me?"
"Execute." Even his voice was cynical over the word. Clare's world shattered. She was about to die! "I won't let it happen," Costigan said quietly. "Can you stop them?" Her mind was in turmoil. "Yes, by killing Riodan."
"You'd do that! For me...?"
"If I must, I will."
He came around the desk and took her gently in his arms. She clung to him in a surging need of his strength, of his maleness, of his love. How good not to be handcuffed! She made the fullest use of her free hands and arms. No man had ever been clasped as she clasped him now. For brief moments they forgot all else save themselves. When he gently took her arms from about his neck, he dragged up a chair. "Sit down, my dear. There's no standing at attention today. That's for tomorrow."
"Is there anything to talk about?" Clare sniffed and used Costigan's handkerchief. It was nice to sit down. It was comforting to know that she belonged to this quiet man. But she was still faced with terror.
"Tomorrow there will be a trial... " He waved away her ready outburst. "Sure, sure, love. I know! Tis a farce and a mockery and all else you want to call it. But with you as the prisoner let's give 'em all a chance to blow off steam. Riodan's the enemy. But they may quash him with words better than I can with a gun."
Clare looked bleakly into the morrow. "What's the best I can hope for?" she asked forlornly.
"To be whipped." His voice dripped distaste.
"I've just been whipped!" Clare passionately declaimed. "Look at me! I'm covered with fresh whip marks. Those damn Muldoons!" Her tears flowed afresh. "I'm always being whipped." She sobbed into his square of good Irish linen. "Whip, whip, whip! That's my life. Whip little Trixie, then fuck little Trixie, then whip little Trixie again... " Once more Costigan made the journey round the desk. Once more Clare found comfort in his arms. "Oh alright." She sniffed against his shoulder. "I suppose I should be thankful. Better be whipped than killed. When it's all over maybe I'll feel better... I hope! It'll be bad though, won't it?"
"It will be bad."
"In the meantime what's for me, the dungeon?"
"I want you."
"I want you!"
"That's settled then. You spend the night with me." He grinned. "Just the usual precautions."
"But now? Mustn't I be locked up?"
Costigan chuckled. "I think the boys would sooner see you around the premises. Go out and around as though nothing had happened. Play your little game of repartee with them."
"Like this?" Clare flung wide her unchained hands. "They'll expect me to run away again."
"O.K. I suppose we have to make a concession, love. You've been a bad lass." Ruefully Costigan produced handcuffs and handed them to the astonished girl. "Here, take these. Go and clean yourself up and do whatever you want. When you're ready to face the world lock these on your wrists at your back. You'll find it's quite easy. But be sure they're tight. No slack at all. Understand?"
She kissed him and dangled the handcuffs in his face. "For you, darling, I'll make them very tight indeed."
At the door she turned. "I suppose I'm not allowed to visit them?"
"It's better if you don't," he said gruffly.
Clare did not argue.
It was Cully she met first. "Well, well! Little wings been clipped a bit, eh." He turned her round and examined the handcuffs. "Didn't mean you to get out o' them, did he!" He grinned. "Don't they hurt?"
"I think they are supposed to," Clare acknowledged impishly. She looked demure. "I've been a bad girl."
"That you have, an' all," he agreed heartily.
"But I'm a very hungry bad girl. Would you like to feed me?" She wriggled her lost arms. "I can't feed myself."
He took her to the garage where the boys were engaged on their eternal task of working on jeeps. There from sundry dishes and cans and from sundry spoons they took turns at spooning tidbits into her mouth. They seemed glad to have their little Trixie home again.
"Half the boys are still out lookin' fer you." Someone laughed. "Riodan was bound he'd be the one. Lucky for you he wasn't. He took a whip along."
Clare took note of their faces. She had made herself beautiful in the time Costigan had granted. They were desiring her. She laughed lightly between mouthfuls. "S'pose I was a naughty girl," she admitted coyly. "Maybe after you've fed me you ought to punish me."
It never failed! Speak of a girl being punished and men instantly got erections. She had noticed it before: a sort of conditioned reflex. One or two of them were shifting awkwardly. The air was electric.
"Would you like to cane my bottom?"
They sighed in unison. One pointed heavenward. "He tell you we orter?"
"Mr. Costigan felt we could use our own judgment," she giggled to ease the tension.
"How many strokes?" The voice clearly felt this too good to be true.
She kept the tone insouciant. "I'm sure I can trust you."
"Don't know him like we do then!" There was general laughter.
Clare prayed their lust might blind them to her intent to suborn. The closer she could touch these men today the more kindly they might treat her on the morrow. A sore bottom would be a small price to pay for tolerance. She knew from previous experience how much the male loved to cane the feminine posterior.
"Are you going to draw lots for me?" She eyed them brightly.
"You keep on like this and you're goin' ter have the horniest lot of boys south of the Shannon," George warned.
Clare had been well aware of what, in her own mind, she thought of as an occupational hazard. She had bowed to the inevitable before, she could do it again. "Poor darlings," she cooed. "I can't expect you to be in agony just on my account, can I! So why don't you make up your minds whether you'd like relief after each of you have had a go with the cane, or all wait till after?" She managed to look joyously expectant.
"You got any preference, Miss? After all, it's you wot gets it."
She pretended to consider. "I think it would be nice if each of you fucked me after you've caned my bottom. I mean, one at a time. That way you'd sort of go away satisfied and I'd have a lovely time in between canings." Her vibrancy implied that each would be endowed with vigor, potency and charm, of all of which she would be the blessed recipient.
"She's a bloody wonder," said George reverently.
"You've already had a pretty good goin' over, Miss," said a sympathetic voice.
"I have, haven't I," Clare agreed. "That was the Muldoon family. Everyone enjoys whipping me."
"I heard somethin' once," Cully contributed doubtfully, "that if yer was to give her arse a good greasin' with vaseline or oil or somethin' it wouldn't mark up so bad. You know, get the sting but not the friction." He guffawed in embarrassment.
There was an awkward pause. The suggested intimacy provoked a couple of pink faces.
"Want yer arse oiled, Miss?"
Clare refused to be shamed. In for a penny, in for a pound. For all she knew lubricant might be beneficial. "I'm willing to try," she agreed cheerfully. "It's nice of you to offer. Which one of you's going to rub it on?"
Another awkward silence. Obviously it was not an honor to be shared by all.
"Tell you what, boys!" Clare took advantage of the occasion. "Why don't you take these handcuffs off me. Then I'll oil my own bottom while you watch and make rude remarks. But, better still, I'll be able to touch my toes properly. I feel silly bending over to be caned with my hands behind my back."
The new silence was pure embarrassment.
"Oh boys!" Clare said scornfully. "You don't think I'm going to escape, do you? Just because no handcuffs? You can put 'em back on me first thing afterwards. Besides," she added thoughtfully, "I can lay on my back a lot better without them."
"I got a key!" said a helpful voice.
Clare oiled with gusto. She hoped it would do no harm: it might do good. But she found herself blushing under the combined male interest. What a situation! A naked girl oiling her bottom in front of a group of men! Oiling it to be caned. She wondered, absurdly, what her mother would have thought.
She did a trial bend, suddenly realizing that her selfinvited pain was about to start. She gave them good measure. Rising to her toes she stretched, then bent forward and down. It was a graceful motion deserving of a happier purpose.
The cane splatted with what seemed to be a louder sound than usual. The pain was no less. Fighting to absorb it without disgrace she heard the ribald comment.
"Might say ter lass's got a buttered bun."
She almost managed to laugh.
* * *
Much later when she went to join her master, she found herself almost limping. Her bottom was very sore indeed. She had given of herself many times. She felt soiled. Her first words to the man who awaited her were: "The handcuffs, darling. Please... ? I need a bath."
Good-naturedly he freed her hands, laughing at the oil. "You're a ninny," he told her. "Didn't hurt any less, did it?"
"I'm not sure it didn't hurt more," she confessed. She backed up to the mirror. "Scarlet and purple as usual... well, anyway it amused them. They seemed happy... "
Costigan unlocked her ankle chains on her return from the bath. She moaned in ecstasy and kicked her feet as high as she could get them. Then extended one foot for the anklet and chain that would insure her fidelity through the hours of the night. She offered her wrists for the handcuffs, but he thrust them away. "Tomorrow is soon enough," he said tersely and took her in his arms.
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow... " The quotation monopolized her consciousness when she finally drifted into sleep.
No one, not even George, managed to bring the casual bonhomie of every day into the courtroom for Clare's trial. Clare herself could manage only a wan smile for any eye she met. She was frightened and terribly alone. Her wrists handcuffed behind her back set her apart. She was the defendant. She was the prisoner. She was some sort of felon... Her ankles were heavily chained. She should have no doubt of her status.
The army took over in the grand impersonal way that armies have. Positions were taken, names were called. Clare longed to scream that they were silly boys playing games.
Riodan demanded death. She quailed under his venom.
"Don't be an arsehole," George advised him amiably.
Riodan poured out his poison with clarity and emphasis.
"Would yer settle fer a good fuck, Barney?" Cully inquired helpfully.
"She's bought the lot of you with a piece o' tail," Riodan accused.
"Try it, Barney. You'd like it."
"A traitress with a wet slit!"
"Warm the cockles of yer heart, lad!"
"Informing whore!"
"She don't charge nothin', Barney."
Little by little it became evident to Clare that she was not to die. Costigan gave her a brief nod of approval and took his hand out of his pocket.
"What yer goin' ter do with the bitch then, kiss her arse?" Riodan mocked them savagely.
He was not without support. "She's got to be punished." Several voices were emphatic.
Riodan switched to diplomacy. "Alright, so I grant you have a point. It's nice ter have the bitch shufflin' around where anyone can lay her handily. But she needs a lesson. Make an example. Do her good and the others too."
"How about a good spanking?" The voice came from the opposition.
"Would yer still say that jerkin' from a rope's end?" Riodan was savage in his purpose. Clare recalled that he had never used her body.
"Alright then! How 'bout a good whippin'?"
"She's covered in whip marks already."
"Always room for one more!"
"If her back's well basted, how about her front?"
Riodan silenced them with a raised hand. "I like the last suggestion. That's where a whore should be whipped. Whipped on those devil's curves she uses on you. But there's something better." He paused for effect. Then delivered his salvo. "Brand the bitch."
Riodan and Nettie Muldoon! Clare could understand that they would share something in common. The same black bitterness was in them both. She wondered miserably just how terrible the hurt of a hot iron on a girl's flesh really was.
The silence that fell upon the room was not one of assent. This naked girl had laughed with them. To see her flesh smoke and smell it burn had no appeal.
"We're damn well not going to give her a lollipop," Riodan warned. "If any of you think she's going to walk out of here wiggling her little arse at us you'd best think again." He paused and waited for the jeers that did not come. There were none present save Costigan and George who did not either want or expect that the runaway girl should be disciplined. The prisoner herself had no such hope.
"So I'll suggest something where the punishment fits the crime." Riodan shook an admonitory finger at all present. "The girl runs away to betray us. And what does the little bitch run on!" He looked around in triumph.
"She run on the grass, Barney. Didn't have no carpet!" The opposition scored again.
Riodan scowled and regained the floor. "She ran on her feet, that what she run on," he stated emphatically. "And that's the place to punish her. You've heard of the bastinado. Simple! Whip the soles of her feet."
Clare cringed. Her feet, her innocent chained feet! Why did he hate her so! She was close to tears. To stand naked and chained to listen to the punishments out of a book of torture that someone wished to inflict upon her. It was frightening. Frightening because one of the punishments would be chosen and she would have to bear it. She tugged at the handcuffs in her familiar gesture of revolt.
Barney Riodan looked from one to the other of them with a sardonic grin. "There's a better way, but you'll no have the guts fer it. Cut the tendons in her legs. Then she'll neither walk nor run." He laughed sourly. "Wouldn't hinder her laying on her back."
They shouted. They jeered. They laughed and made their jokes. Some spoke of cruelties beyond imagining. To Clare it all merged into a bedlam in which only the face of Costigan remained rational and sane. Finally he rose and rapped for order. His voice was quiet. But very firm. "I am going to make a proposal," he said. "But I want the prisoner out of the room while it is debated."
It was really an order.
No man gainsayed it.
George led the chained captive from the court. His hand was heavy on her arm.
The unused gateway to a field was ideal for their purpose. Its posts were joined and braced by a heavy bridge of timber ten feet above the ground. It could be a goal post or a gallows. Led toward it, Clare assumed the latter. But her faltering step was reassured by a cheerful: "Nah, nah, lass. Tis not the hangin' we'll be doin' ter yer, at all, at all."
It was not an occasion. Clare was grateful to the men for not wishing to witness what must happen to her. She was escorted by a trio whose main concern was to get a job over and done with. When they were finished with her they turned and walked swiftly back to the house. They left the culprit hanging from her wrists. Her toes a yard above the soil, her ankle chains dangling uselessly. The time was eleven A.M.
Clare was a beautiful picture. It was as though the naked slenderness had been placed with an eye to form and composition. She was suspended evenly between the posts, her wrists tied separately, arms well apart. She was framed by that to which she was secured. Her nudity was marred by no other bindings than those upon her wrists and the chain that joined her ankles. She could look about her at the peace and loveliness of Erdislune.
Someone had been kind. If kindness is applicable to a condition such as hers. The slender wrists had been bound tight in strips of cloth. To these the ropes that held her were fastened. There would be no stricture of the blood. But the thoughtful act told another message: She was meant to hang thus for a long, long time. To a girl fastened in such fashion an hour is unthinkable, a day eternity and death.
Clare looked up the columns of her arms. How beautifully she was tied! There would be no struggling and no escape. As so often in her captivity it was her wrists, her poor small wrists, that bore the brunt of her suffering. How often had she been tied by them! How often had they been cut and bled from her struggles! Today there would be no struggle. It would be useless. It only hurt.
Should she feel gratitude! Perhaps. Was it better to hang like this than to be whipped with the fifty or a hundred strokes her prosecution had demanded. She supposed it was. But she was not sure. She had hung from her wrists before and knew it for a deceptively simple horror. There was no motion of her body or limbs, no breath or sigh, no moment of time that did not exact its toll of pain. The whip struck with pauses in between. But there were no intermissions for a girl hanging by her wrists. Nothing would get better, only worse.
It was better than the whip upon the soles of her feet.
She was sure it must be better. It had to be! Costigan must have been sure too. Or the cutting of her tendons or the brand. Clare wondered about the brand. If she was left as she was for hours she might see the quick cruel burn of the brand as preferable. But Costigan had chosen her punishment. Chosen it, no doubt, because it would leave no mark upon her loveliness. It would not damage her. Yet would be severe enough that his followers would be satisfied that she had been adequately punished for her transgression. She must not enlarge upon her plight, must not see in her condition more than need be seen. She was no more than a naked girl who had been bad and now was expiating her sin.
Riodan came in midafternoon. The captive's half-closed eyes open wide at his solitary approach. She had no interest in him and no hope. He had come to gloat or to threaten.
"You are very beautiful."
The simple words brought her to life as no ugliness would have done. She stared at him in wonder.
"It is that I want you too much, lass."
She did not speak. It was more of his cruelty.
"Your punishment is to hang through the night. I'll bring a jeep, cut you down, and we'll go away together." His eyes burned with a fierce intensity.
His words scarcely registered. They were too incongruous. That morning he had sought her death. Now he sought her body. Spurred by a curiosity she could not contain, she asked, "You would keep me chained?"
For answer he rummaged a key from his pocket and unlocked the metal anklets from her legs. He backed away and stood staring up at the naked girl he hungered for. A nondescript man, the dangling chains held in his hand an incongruity.
"No," she said the word with utter finality. He stood and looked for a long time. Looked at beauty such as few men ever saw. Looked with longing and with hate. For Riodan the two emotions were synonymous. Then he locked the irons back upon her feet and went away.
The night was very long. They gave her water. Nothing more. She pleaded, but they gave no heed. They left her hanging from the bar. From time to time she wept. She had no faith in the morning. It might never come. All she knew was an agony that did not end. A helplessness so utter it took her from the realm of the living. She hung there, a decoration like a picture on a wall.
When they cut her down she crumpled on the dirt. With gentleness they picked her up and carried her to the familiar office and the familiar desk, and the honor of a chair. This time it was Costigan who knelt. He took her numbed hands and caressed them continuously with his lips. Then he gave her food and watched her eat.
"Is my punishment over?" She was not even sure of that.
"It is over. Was it... was it-"
"It was bearable," she lied. "Thank you, darling."
She sensed his disquiet. His fingers played upon her with love. "Let us both give up everything and go far away," she pleaded.
His brief "Humph!" dismissed her plea as an innocent childish notion.
Clare poured out her heart. He listened quietly. When she was done he gazed down at her with love. "I should put your handcuffs on," he said irrelevantly.
She smiled into his eyes, rose and held out her hands. He got the shining steel things and locked them on her wrists. Now she sat upon the floor, her head on his knees.
"Why is your life tied to them?" he asked sadly.
"What will be done with them?"
"There will be a trial."
"That nonsense! They'll be killed, won't they?" Costigan waved his hand wearily. "It's war. We can't split hairs."
"You should execute Riodan."
"I would if I could," he admitted with a surprising candor. "But the bastard's the best soldier I've got."
"The best murderer."
Again his gesture of a great fatigue. "It will be tomorrow," he told her simply.
No chances were taken with Tavie and Alethea. A great weight of chains had been fastened on them. For the first time they accepted impotence. They did not try to break their shackles. They took no more interest in their trial than they had in that other centuries ago in Clare's dream. They showed no fear. Only a bitter loathing.
"We don't mind being called witches," Alethea told them quietly. "By your standards and beliefs I expect we are." She turned to her sister. "Are we witches, Tavie?"
"Of course we are, darling," Tavie proclaimed equably. "They wouldn't treat us any kinder if we said we weren't."
They were told that on the following day they would be taken out into the park and burned.
They paid no attention, either to their sentence or the promise of its remission if they talked. They had retreated into a world of their own, a world into which these crass men who held them could never follow.
Clare pleaded and stormed. But Costigan was adamant. She understood his loose authority and that the burning was not his wish. But she won a small victory.
"I don't understand these girls," Costigan admitted. "They are not ordinary. This witch talk has to be nonsense. But if I believed in it I'd say that's what they are. There are some damned queer legends about a place called Montrilas... "
She watched him hopefully, the night shackle heavy on her ankle.
"They know things. I'm sure they do," Costigan continued soberly. "There has to be a way to get at 'em, to touch them. I think they are harboring some faint hope of escape, or that we are running a bluff." He paused and considered. "So here's what I am going to have done: Tomorrow they are going to be fastened to the stakes where they will be burned. We'll have every chain on 'em that there's room for. Take no chances of escape, and it may sober 'em up a bit. They're so damn insouciant. Then we leave them like that all night knowing what is going to happen in the morning. Maybe they will get a bit of sense standing there in the dark." He looked at her with a small smile. "Sorry, love. It's the best I can do."
Costigan's boys made a magnificent job of the stakes. Massive and solidly planted they stood alone. There was an atmosphere of drama as the two girls were fastened where they must die. Clare watched helplessly as the chains were hammered and riveted and locked. Less chance than ever now of escape.
There was a small kindness. They faced each other. They could talk. Perhaps Costigan hoped that, in communion, they might decide to tell him what he believed they knew. The stakes were ten feet apart. How bitter to be so close through the night and to know they could never feel each other's hands or lips again.
They were mourners at a funeral. When it was done they left the two naked girls to their vigil and their loneliness, and trailed back to Erdislune, a ragged group of nondescript men bowed in thought, subdued by their individual involvement in what must happen, and a naked girl. Costigan had cuffed her right wrist to his left. She knew she was not to be trusted.
It began to rain. The soft warm Irish rain from out the west. It seemed somehow fitting. The siblings would not mind. They had always run naked in the rain. To them it would be a caress.
"Bring 'em to their senses," said Costigan without conviction.
"Got a truckload o' dry wood in the barn," said George to no one in particular.
Clare could have sworn she saw the flutter of a woman's skirt beside a distant bush. How absurd!
The rain fell gently.
Had it been any other night they would have found happiness in Costigan's teasing. Or was he teasing! Clare was not quite sure.
"The boys want you in a dungeon tonight, well chained, and with the door well barred and locked," he told her.
"Shouldn't present any problem," Clare retorted acidly.
"I don't want to sleep alone. I've got used to you."
"Come and sleep in the dungeon with me then."
"Alright. No dungeon. Just special precautions."
"Like what?" Clare asked frigidly. She was beginning to enjoy herself.
Costigan produced a metal collar, a long chain and a padlock. She could tell he felt sheepish.
She kicked her foot so that the heavy ankle chain rattled. "Look, I'm already chained. I could never get this off."
He held out the collar. "This is nicer than being handcuffed, love."
"Have I got to be handcuffed, too?" she asked with real distaste. "Yes."
"Front or back?" She could always hope.
"Behind your back."
"Bastard!"
"I won't do it until last thing," he wheedled.
"You don't have to do it at all," Clare said with mock petulance. "Anyone would think I was Houdini." She did not really mind. She had become so used to chains that she could sleep in almost any combination of them. But she liked to tease too. She scored points if she made him feel guilty. "Is it you that's chaining me up like a sideshow or that creature Riodan?"
He visibly squirmed. "Say it's for your own good, love. No temptations."
"Last thing?" she bargained.
"The collar now."
She knelt submissively before him and bent her head. She knew submission affected him potently. Good! It would take their minds away from the other for a little while. The metal was cool on her skin, the band snug on her throat. Locks clicked. Keys were hung on a nail far from where she could ever reach them.
She would not roam Erdislune in the night.
Clare got into bed and stuck her tongue out at him in provocation. By morning the rain had drifted into a misty luminescence. It would clear by noon. Rakes of mist clung and wafted in the still air that smelt so fresh, adding a new dimension to sight and sound. It should have been chill. But, with Irish inconsistency, was warm.
"Must I?" Clare asked.
Costigan nodded. "You know you must. The boys expect it."
"Teach me a lesson," she reasoned bitterly. "Something like that. Sula and Chloe will be there too. Same reason."
He locked her handcuffs in front. She watched the steel bands click snugly round her wrists. He was being kind. But it did not matter. She would still be helpless. Amusedly he picked up the chain from her collar. "You can wear that on your neck. It's not uncomfortable."
"No hobbles?" she inquired, genuinely surprised.
He chuckled and tugged her tether. "It's a long way to walk, and this neat little arrangement will keep you out of trouble."
Clare followed her master like a puppy dog.
They were going to burn two witches.
The same nondescript group straggled upon their mission with no more enthusiasm than they had retreated with the evening before. Clare noted the other girls were bound at wrist and elbow with cord. If they hurt they would remember to behave! Their feet, too, were free. They were guided by male hands in their hair, more helpless than she herself. But then: she was Costigan's girl! After today she would be more than ever his!
The mist played tricks. They had reached the ugly stakes before anyone realized that Tavie and Alethea were no longer chained to them. The chains were draped, as though in mockery, around the posts. But the girls they had held were gone!
The thud of the arrows came instantly. Clare's tether fell at her feet. The arrow through Costigan's neck had killed him instantly. He gave her no last look of love or recognition from his dead eyes as he slumped inert. Clare remembered Cedric in the dream...
She turned fearfully. Uncertain. Three more men were down. Arrows proclaiming their end. The rest scattered. They had only revolvers. They fired at random as they ran, seeing no enemy.
But Riodan stood his ground. His face was a study in hate. Gun at the ready, his eyes roved. Nothing! In a sudden insane fury he swung and fired. Chloe fell. Sula screamed and leaped sideways. Riodan sighted at her carefully. But the arrow was quicker than his finger on the trigger. He died. Sula was running frantically into the mist. Clare found herself alone. She picked up her chain and coiled it in her hand while she looked somberly at the lifeless hulk of the man who had fastened it on her.
There was no silence. The crack of pistol shots was constant, but more and more spaced out.
Suddenly she remembered Alethea's injunction: run for the road. Scream. She could do no good where she was. Her feet sped. How good it was to run again! Even with chained hands and a collar round her neck... !
She found the road. What now! The firing had died. She screamed. Then listened. Nothing! If the twins remained hidden that meant men were still alive. Uncertain of what she should do, she began the walk back to Erdislune, stopping from time to time to scream and listen. There were no more shots.
How had the twins escaped! But she remembered what she had seen the previous night. It had not been illusion. There had been someone in the park. She suddenly realized: everyone had forgotten Hedda. Hedda had the strength of a man, and much competence. Hedda loved her mistresses with something close to worship..
Clare was frightened. She began to run. Shouting as she went.
It was George. He had been forgotten. Left behind to come later with the truck and the dry timbers and kindling that would spell the witches' end. He ran towards her now. His red face concerned...
Her frantic cry to stop him, to turn him back came too late. The arrow took him in the chest. He died with the same surprised look with which he had observed her most outrageous behavior.
She felt sure he was the last.
Silence! Her eyes roved. She knew what she would see.
The drifting mist was a silvery curtain. But it had rolled back enough for her to look up the gentle rise and see the two slender figures of the girls. They raised their hands in love.
