### B-514 ###

The Gardens Of The Night
by Anonymous

Grove Press (1985)


From The Rear Cover:

The Gardens Of The Night... A Victorian Novel

Anonymous
with an Afterword by Lynn Paula Russell

From the febrile imagination of the author of the famed Victorian classic, The Days At Florville, comes this voluptuous sequel continuing the tale of a young woman's journey into erotic servility. Casting aside reserve, pride, and "good sense," like the brave heroine of Story Of O, Lesley submits to the perverse demands of her Machiavellian lover Anton. In doing so, she achieves not only her own self-mastery, but the very apogee of pleasure. Presented in the Afterword is a conversation with present-day English artist Lynn Paula Russell who, in the words of her interviewer, has "perhaps a better right than anyone to be the subject of The Story Of The Real O."


EDITOR'S NOTE

The Gardens of the Night forms a natural sequel to The Days at Florville. The earlier novel describes the awakening of masochistic desires in a disdainful and emancipated young woman through the self-revelation of a long erotic dream. In the shock and excitement of this, Lesley realises her deepest yearning. To yield herself to an absolute master, to submit to his most perverse demands and to writhe under the cuts of his whip, is a sudden challenge which makes her flesh tingle and her blood quicken.

The Gardens of the Night translates Lesley's dream into reality. Repressing her natural arrogance and pride, she seeks a greater excitement and pleasure as Antons slave. Before she is accepted, however, she must prove herself by submitting to a series of ordeals. She must make a public display of her sexual submission and undergo a sadistic judicial thrashing at the hands of a prison-farm warden. Only then can she make the final gesture of masochistic self-abandon to her master.

Unlike the heroine of The Story of O, Lesley is not a willing slave from the first. Her training is long and skillful. She shows moments of resentment and self-pity, reluctance and rebellion. The conquest of her pride and self-possession is accomplished by teaching her the greater gift of self-knowledge. Lesley acquires that gift in her masters bed and in the punishment room, in the arms of other young women and by submitting to pleasures still more perverse. The long journey ends with her surrender to the ultimate excitements of slavery in the Gardens of the Night.


PART ONE - LESLEY AND HER MASTERS


CHAPTER ONE

The girl in n her long grey skirt and white blouse stood on the little balcony outside the hotel suite. Pressing her hands on the moulding of the rail, she watched the holiday scene below. At eighteen years old she was a pretty trim-waisted creature, still poised uncertainly between adolescence and womanhood. Debby possessed a neat prettiness of nose and chin, an appealing young face lightly sun-tanned with dark eyes and wide cheek-bones. The fullness of her mouth and the even line of her teeth appeared in a ready smile.

There was much about her that still hinted at childishness and subservience to others. Her golden-brown hair had not yet been put up in an elegant coiffure but was worn loose, combed back from her appealing young face so that its lightly waved tresses just overlapped her collar. As she looked at the scene below her, the silky hair fell forward a little in charming disorder.

Perhaps it was most of all her legs, bare from the knees downward, which showed a childish awkwardness of poise and bearing. Yet Debby s bottom and hips, even her thighs, also had the slight adolescent heaviness of the goose not yet become a swan.

It was late enough in the afternoon for the waves of the tranquil tide to burn silver in the suns decline. Below the canopied balcony, the Sunday crowds were walking homeward through public gardens of tall camelias in blooming crimson and dark hedges of Monterey cypress. A pattern of small tables had been set out on the terrace, among the urns and balustrades where the casual cafe-music hung like warm perfume in the summer air.

The rain-drop pools of April,
The apple-blossom bough...

A girl in a tailored suit sang to the ripple of a piano accompaniment in the interval of the tea-dance.

All that we did without last spring
Would make a summer now...

Debby pressed upon the moulded rail as if there was a secret comfort in feeling its shape against her loins. She had the ready pleasant manner of one who serves others, the girl in the travel bureau with her quick and smiling answers for those planning their journeys. It was easy to see how she might give adoration to another. Round her right ankle she wore a white leather ring. Childish and yet womanly, it symbolised her fierce and willing bondage to the person she loved beyond all limit.

Yellow as a peach, the teatime sunlight patterned the white bulk of the tall hotel. Childrens voices, high and frail as gull-calls, rose among salvoes of breakers on firm sand. Far out, where the sea darkened to a green horizon-band, a bird settled in a tiny feathering of spray.

At no time did Debby turn and try to open the French windows, to enter the hotel suite. Like; a little girl dismissed by her elders, she was to remain on the balcony until they called her back. Yet the two men who were busy with the other young woman in the room made no attempt to draw the curtain across the glass nor to conceal from the girl what they were doing to the woman. Debby, ten years the junior, could only turn and look with an agony of love at Lesley during her humiliation.

The French windows had been locked but even had they not been, Debby knew better than to interrupt Anton and Mano in their dealings with Lesley. She stood at the glass, watching the men in the hotel suite, her pretty face and dark eyes following Lesley with desire and understanding.

The interior of the sitting-room had been furnished in a style of modernistic opulence. Deep-sided chairs and white drum-shaded lamps were arranged on a plain neutral carpeting. The muted tones of the luxuriously furnished suite reduced the marine light of the sky to a cool aqueous shimmer in the mirror-glass of the tables and the angular wall-mirrors bound in platinum.

The men, watching Lesley as she stood at their will by the fire-screen, were indifferent to the holiday world outside. In the closed room they were engaged in that most private and absorbing of rituals, the inspection of a slave-girl. It heightened their enjoyment to see that their victim was, by nature, a moody young woman with a dismissive manner towards the male sex. To subjugate such an emancipated female—and to see her own secret excitement in being subdued—was the most exquisite of pleasures.

It was Anton, a tall and golden-haired Apollo of thirty, who acted as the host. Mano, a distinguished patrician, already brushed with grey at the temples and Spanish or Italian in appearance, was the guest. To judge from the conversation, this was his first sight of Lesley. He talked of her without much addressing the girl herself, questioning Anton and advising him on his future treatment of her.

Lesley stood waiting at the centre of the room in a white short-sleeved singlet and a black coolie-suit, its jacket and trousers made of thin cotton. Her appearance revealed her for what she was, a spoilt and pampered young Englishwoman of the middle-class who indulged her own rights and privileges at the expense of others. As if to emphasise her equality with the male sex, her straight fair hair had been cropped perversely short in a plain pudding-basin cut. It hung to her jawline and her nape, lying in a long parted fringe on her forehead. Ironically, this plain boyish style excited perverse desires in her admirers.

Everything about her hinted at her upbringing as a wilful and indulged little girl, a demanding and promiscuous student at college; a young bride greedy for pleasure, but a young wife moody and resentful towards her husband and children. Below the level of her fringe, the blue eyes were disdainful and brooding. Her fairskinned features were clear-cut and firm but there was a sullen weight in her jaw and a sulky line in her mouth. It was on this unlikely idol that Debby now gazed with such mute adoration from beyond the balcony door.

Mano laid down his cigarette in the brass ashtray.

"I should like to see her undressed a little," he said, "At least her trouser-suit and singlet must be removed."

As if it was beneath her contempt to question or resist such a demand, Lesley took off her black jacket and pulled off the white singlet over her head. The milk-whiteness of her back and shoulders contrasted with the black halter in which her taut young breasts were moulded. She shook her short-cut hair into place and began to unfasten the black trousers.

"Her breasts will be important," Mano said, "But the sort of men who will possess her will transfer their attentions below the waist. Her legs and her arse will interest them most of all."

Lesley pulled down the trousers and stepped out of them. From the waist down she wore only a white suspender-belt, a pair of golden-tan stockings drawn well up her pale thighs by the suspender straps, and tight-fitting black panties of a filmy translucent material to match her breast halter. Mano walked closer and looked at her.

"How old is she now?"

"Twenty-eight," Anton said.

"And how long was her marriage?"

"About seven years."

"She conceived her two children very early?"

Anton nodded and Mano seemed satisfied.

"I shall know how to deal with her when the time comes," he said, "She is tall enough and trim enough for her erotic maturity to be an advantage. There are things one would hesitate to do to a schoolgirl of fourteen, even to a nymph at nineteen or twenty. In the case of a young married woman like Lesley—seven years experience of her husband s penis in bed—one has no such qualms."

He walked round her then turned to Anton again.

"You say she exercises? Bicycling perhaps? Her thighs are so long and trim. That is good. Her hips have a marginal broadening after her two children but that counts as an advantage too in such a case. How did the marriage end?"

Anton shrugged.

"Abruptly. She wanted to live with another man. Lesley's claim of being an emancipated young woman entitled her to choose who should penetrate her. One day, while her husband was at work and the children at school, she packed a suitcase and left to share her lovers bed."

Mano smiled.

"She was promiscuous during her marriage?"

"Quite often."

"Did she refuse her husband s penis?"

"When in her sullen moods. She sucked him only once, during the height of their honeymoon passion. In her infatuation she let her next lover use her mouth—but never, never her backside!"

Mano smiled again at this, trying to see the expression on Lesley's face as they talked about her. But she had lowered her head until her chin was almost buried in her breast.

"She was never whipped by her teachers or parents—or her lovers?"

"Never," Anton laughed at a sudden recollection, "Her young daughter was caned at school—ten strokes across her bottom—and you can scarcely imagine Lesley's outrage on behalf of injured womanhood!"

Mano now walked across to Lesley and stood in front of her. He ran his hand over the smooth whiteness of her skin, the slight proud curve of her belly. Then Mano slipped the hand into the front of her tight silky briefs, feeling her flinch back instinctively as he touched the soft fair hair on her pubic mound. He put his other hand at her bare waist to steady her. The fingers in her black diaphanous panties intruded between her legs, feeling the moist warmth of her softly-haired vaginal flesh.

"You like to play with yourself, don't you, Lesley?" he said quietly, "You do it quite often, I think."

She looked up suddenly, the blue eyes now startled out of their self-possession. Lesley seemed about to answer and then failed to find the words of denial.

"Yes you do," said Mano understandingly, "It asserts your belief in your right to use your own body as you choose—even to be independent of the male sex. When did you last make love to yourself?"

She stared at him, as if unable to believe that he required a response. He moved his fingers further between her legs.

"Answer the question, Lesley," Anton said sharply.

"I d-d-don't know... I c-c-can't remember..." In her confusion she arched her hips back, as if to escape his fondling.

Mano smiled.

"She has had sex with other women?" he asked Anton.

"With several. The first while she was a student, just before her marriage. And now, of course, with Debby. At the Villa Rif she masturbated with Judith Terry, a girl of sixteen."

Mano drew his hand away.

"Turn around and show me your backside, Lesley," he said, teasing a little and yet demanding obedience.

She obeyed him awkwardly, standing with her back towards him but her legs and buttocks clumsily tightened in apprehension.

"Take your knickers off, Lesley," he said, "Then go and bend over the back of the sofa."

They watched as she hesitantly wriggled the briefs down her trim fair-skinned legs. In her suspender-belt and stockings she seemed aptly dressed for the inspection of those areas which most interested the men. At the front the triangle of fair hair on the base of her belly, and the tops of her thighs above her stockings, were bare. She turned her back to them and walked with careful steps of her stockinged feet towards the tan-coloured leather of the broad sofa. Her head was bowed like a child in disgrace and the short crop of her fair hair parted on the nape of her neck under its own weight. The two men watched the undulating movements of her hips and thighs as she walked. Her state of undress seemed, once again, designed to draw their attention to her backside as the area of their examination. The white elastic arch of the suspender-belt across the back of her waist, its straps drawn taut to the stocking tops at midthigh, the tops of the filmy gold stockings themselves, all seemed to act as a frame for the proud bare cheeks of Lesley's bottom as she walked.

Mano stopped her with a hand on her bare hip as she stood at the back of the sofa. He turned to Anton.

"She should stand against the sofa-back and then bend forward over it with her hands supporting her on the seat-cushions. She will be better that way. The leather back will support her under her belly and make it easier for her to endure the indignity of being examined by a mere man. There will be less temptation to try squirming free when she knows she can so easily be held down."

Lesley glanced back over her shoulder at Anton, the first hint of her uneasiness betrayed in the clear blue eyes. When he nodded at her, she lowered herself a little awkwardly, having to stand on tiptoe in order to bend over the leather back and reach the sofa cushions with the palms of her hands.

Mano spoke quietly to Anton.

"You should use your camera now. A supercilious young woman like this needs frequent lessons in subservience to her admirers. It will do her good to know that she must show herself not only to us but also to the men she most despises, who collect sets of such photographs."

Anton saw Lesley's thighs and buttocks tense together a little as he walked to the table and picked up the camera. Mano had previously arranged the sofa so that the full sunlight fell upon it.

"Turn your head and look into the camera, Lesley," said Anton impatiently. "The men who collect such photographs will want to see your face as well."

Mano shook his head.

"You have treated her too gently. She must be taught to show herself properly without being coaxed."

Lesley had turned her face to Anton and was looking at the camera with the moodiness still visible in her clear features. Mano stood behind her at the same time and began his examination of the young woman's body. He laid his hands on the smooth backs of her thighs where the pearly skin was bare above her stocking-tops. He pressed the firm surfaces apart a little and saw the lightly haired lips of her vagina from the rear.

"Keep your legs still, Lesley!" he said sharply as she tried to press them together. The camera recorded the sudden, widening dismay on her face as his hands enforced obedience while she bent. He cupped the fleecy softness in his palm as the young woman lay bottom-upwards over the sofa. "When did you last play with yourself?"

The camera shutter clicked again, and then again, recording the appealing confusion of her eyes and firm features under the long parted fringe of her gamine crop. Mano caressed the warm humid flesh between her thighs.

"When?" As he repeated the question more brusquely, he felt an involuntary shiver in her legs.

"Yesterday," Lesley bowed her head as if to muffle the reply in the sofa cushions, "Last night."

"Alone or with Debby?"

"Alone." Now the voice was begging for a respite from this interrogation.

Mano took his hand away and spoke to Anton.

"She should be photographed from this angle next. Make her part her legs a little wider."

This was done and the camera shutter clicked several times on this view of Lesley bending and straddling, looking back over her shoulder at the lens. Mano's hands now touched the cool pale mounds of the young wife's buttocks. Though an instinct of pride or modesty made her compress them, he held her firmly.

"A refusal, Lesley?" he asked gently, "A good whipping with a pony-lash would cure you of such reluctance. Is it that you still regard your body as your property to show or not to show as the mood takes you?"

She looked at him uncertainly but made no answer. Anton, as her master, made the decision for her.

"Do as Mano tells you," he said.

She turned her head away, bowing it until only the high crown of soft fair hair was visible to those behind her. Yet the moon-pale cheeks of her backside now relaxed. Mano pressed them apart and looked down into the stretched valley of Lesley s bottom-crack.

"So self-conscious about your arsehole, Lesley?" he asked, "Do you imagine you are made differently in that area to a thousand other girls who have bent over before their masters? You see? You flinch at the touch of a finger there! Ah, I think it is because you envisage what will be done to you in that part by the men who possess you!"

He held her in this spread posture while Anton clicked the camera shutter again. Then Mano was satisfied.

"Let her lie there like that," he said, drawing Anton aside, "The pictures should be added to the ones already taken of her and shown to men who may wish to enjoy her. Lesley is far from being your slave yet, however much she may whimper for your penis between her legs. I will give you my advice."

He sat on the arm of a chair and looked up at the younger man.

"First you should take her somewhere, a place where other people may walk or ride by. She must obey you in small things. In showing herself as you please to strangers. In submitting to be birched like an awkward pupil."

Mano lit a cigarette and then resumed.

"Then you must let her see how a girl who has accepted slavery is dealt with. You might choose Julie, or Maggie, or one of the others. Let her see them beaten."

"Her curiosity would get the better of her," Anton said with a laugh.

Mano nodded.

"Then she must submit to an ordeal. You should arrange for her to be taken somewhere where she must show her obedience through suffering without ever receiving pleasure. It could be done in a day or a night. Only after that can you tell whether she is the right woman to accompany you on the first stage of the journey into total submission."

"That is the hardest part for her," Anton said, smiling, "Look how she squirms at the mention of it. Lesley knows that there can be no return from such a journey as that. Her slavery would be as final and as complete as that of a girl in the most secure and perverse regime of a harem-master."

"And as exciting to her," said Mano sardonically, "See how fast the blood pulses in her veins at the mention of such horrors!"

"In ten days," Anton said, "In ten days I will take her riding and test her obedience in public."

They stood there, looking at the young woman who lay bottom-upward over the sofa-back, her long breaths audible in the warm room, her thighs touching and pressing, for all her aloof self-possession, like a schoolgirl of twelve or thirteen unable to control a thrilling of her nerves.

The two men watched her a moment longer Beyond the glass, on the balcony of the tall hotel, Debby contemplated the scene, her dark softly-lashed eyes wide with innocent longing for the young woman lying over the sofa. With the fine prettiness of her features, the openness of her wide-boned face, the charming cut of her golden-brown hair in its pretty fringe and the coy brushing back to uncover her ears and neck, she had all those qualities which Lesley seemed to lack. Yet it was Lesley who possessed the urges of a mature young woman, some of which Debby could not yet comprehend.

Mano looked at Lesley for a moment longer.

"I will make a suggestion," he said presently, "I will find you a sadist when you put Lesley to her final test before beginning the long journey. Look at her. In order to show her liberation from marriage and children, to assert her equality with men, she cuts her hair almost like a boy. She wears a black trouser-suit or jeans. Very well, let her be taken to a place where her femininity will be disregarded."

"The prison-farm," Anton said.

Mano nodded.

"An institution whose warden is an unabashed sadist. Let her taste such equality by being treated as a delinquent youth. She will be punished as those lads are. Without pleasure and without pity. Since she cuts her hair like a boy, let her buttocks be bamboo'd while she sprawls bottom-upwards like a prison-farm boy over the wardens sofa. He makes such punishments last an hour or more. He will not care if she has the bottom-cheeks of a young married woman with two children of her own. Lesley may scream and squirm, but he will bamboo her until the cheeks of her arse are bruised and wealed."

"I know his reputation," Anton said softly, as much for the young woman's benefit as for Mano s, "He will not be checked by weals and bruises on Lesley's buttocks, nor a few trickles of blood. His practice is to cane all the harder when the culprit is in that state. She will cry out and scream, of course, but they are used to hearing such things in that place and no one will think it unusual."

"Then let it be her final proof before she submits to you absolutely," Mano said, "If she cannot do so after such an experience, it will still have checked her arrogance. She will be a curiosity to men—but to women most of all—an emancipated young woman who smuggled herself into such a place in order to be thrashed like an adolescent boy!"

They watched Lesley and saw that horror and excitement contended in her at the description of the ordeal they proposed.

CHAPTER TWO

The hour between the warm scented afternoons of the beaches and the more formal engagements of the evening was devoted to such secret pleasures and bondage as Anton or Mano inflicted upon Lesley and their other young woman. It was a time of yellow sunlight through wan curtaining, of naked thighs parting and yearning on silk or leather, of the girls eyes imploring her master over the gag which widened her lips.

Later on, when dinner was over, the actors in these scenes appeared in a dress and a manner which would have made their private excitements the wonder of the world. Evening was a time of paved gardens among dark evergreens, of balustrades and the glass moons of lamps on their wrought-iron standards. Starlight shivered and splintered on a gently filling tide.

Such men as Mano and Anton led, with their women, lives of the greatest formality in this respect. Not for them the easy cadences of the cafe-song and the chatter of the little tables.

Lesley's thighs and hips were covered by a long skirt, her back and breasts by an ornate bodice. With her companions, she passed each evening in the gilt and plush of the recital rooms. More surely than Mano or Anton, the genius in the fingers of the pianist held the young woman in mute obedience to his mood. From the bland crescendos of Chopin the minutes passed to the dark chords of Beethoven, waking drama from the tomb of silence. At each pause in the sonata s flow, girls sat meek as nuns in the warm velvet stirring of the pianos harmonies. Lamplight shone on bare shoulders in the still air. Presently the dark majesty of the instrument sounded the elegiac charm of Schumann, quietly reflective in the Kinderszenen or soaring in the exhilaration which concluded the Etudes Symphoniques.

After the summer evening recitals, the counterpart to the operas and concerts of the winter city, the men led the young women back to their rooms. Though Lesley and Debby were permitted to share a room, while Mano and Anton gave their attention to Kim or Trudi, the events of the afternoon had made Lesley seem indifferent to the girls adoration of her.

They undressed in one another's sight, Debby taking off her red jacket and white blouse, her light grey skirt, without averting her gaze from Lesley for more than a moment. Lesley had chosen as her night attire a short top of translucent black silk and a pair of panties to match. Debby had imitated this style, though in pale blue.

Lesley had put on her diaphanous black top and was about to pull the panties up when Debby sighed and slid her arms about her. She was trying, as if in a child's game, to snatch the black silk briefs from the young woman's hand.

Hugging Lesley, the pretty girl of eighteen kissed the bare arms and murmured to her.

"Please," she whispered, "Please don't put them on. I want to love you. I want to love you so much. Please let me."

The older woman made no affectionate response to this beyond putting the briefs down on a chair and stretching herself on the bed. Debby, taking off her own panties, lay down beside her. Safe in one another's arms they kissed and petted each other with gentle sighs and lascivious little squirmings. Yet the difference between them was evident at once.

Lesley masturbated Debby first. She slipped her hand between the eagerly opened adolescent thighs and then did it quickly and. expertly. Debby gave a shuddering little cry as her excitement began. She closed her wide innocent eyes. The pretty teeth worried her lower lip in her ecstasy. Alone among the clerks with whom she worked, the other girls of the travel bureau, Debby s lover was a woman. Lesley stroked the golden brown hair where it was cut back to show the neat whorls of her ears. She kissed the short level fringe on the girls forehead.

Debby responded by little squeezing motions of her awkward thighs, as if in clumsy gratitude to the hand which rubbed her between them.

Lesley turned slowly and lay down so that her own face was level with Debby's thighs and the girls mouth almost touching Lesley's tuft of pubic hair. Lesley kissed the moist feminine tract between the girls legs and felt Debby respond in the same manner, though less certainly.

Far off a clock chimed midnight. They settled down to tongue and nuzzle one another in a passionate lovemaking which would be renewed with little interruption until two or three in the morning. With a half indifferent air to the girls pleasure, Lesley brought Debby to orgasm by quick kissing and peremptory fondling of her roused vaginal flesh. A brief manipulation of the girls clitoris was then enough to precipitate the crisis.

Debby, though less expert, grudged nothing to the older woman. Her lips had lavished their adoration on Lesley's face and the buds of her breasts. Now she ran her energetic tongue to and fro in the pubic slit, saluting the clitoris with gentle sucking kisses. She nuzzled Lesley's thighs and bottom-cheeks. Like Mano in the afternoon, she was insistent upon parting them and did not even hold back from imparting her kisses between them.

At last, by an unspoken agreement, their desire had been satisfied on both sides and they lay damp from their exertions in a light embrace. Only then could Debby bring herself to ask the question which had troubled her during the past hours.

"Will you truly let Anton beat you when you next go riding?"

Lesley paused before replying. Then she said, "Yes. If I must."

"But why?"

"Because he will be the master then and I his slave." Debby drew one arm away.

"I don't understand," she said miserably, "I should hate to be beaten. I could not bear the pain of it." Lesley touched her lightly.

"A beating is not something one understands at eighteen. Most women never understand at all. It only comes after a great many other experiences."

"If you go away with Anton," Debby asked suddenly, "will you be his slave for ever?"

"Yes, if I go. I may not go after all. If I do, I must be his slave for as long as he wants. If he gives me to another man I should be that other mans slave. That kind of slavery is final. The girls who submit to it go to places from which there is no return. No escape from the love of the man who owns them."

Debby seemed to understand and her pretty face relaxed something of its tension and anxiety. She kissed the side of Lesley's neck.

"If you were Anton's slave, would you let me be your slave?"

Lesley hugged her, as if reassuring a child.

"If I am Anton ss slave, whatever is mine is his. You would not be my slave, love. We should both be his."

"But perhaps I could be with you," Debby whispered.

"Perhaps."

As if to end so awkward a conversation and such gentle interrogation, Lesley slipped her hand once more between the girls legs, feeling the slipperiness and warmth of her earlier lubrication. The lovers' words grew hushed and formal in caution.

"Make love," she murmured, "Make love, Debby, and forget about such things. We shall talk about them later."

The girl began to fondle Lesley between the thighs.

. Then she stopped.

"When you next go riding with Anton, when your training begins, will you let me be there?"

Lesley kissed her.

"Anton must decide."

"Whatever happens," Debby said, "I want to be with you. If they beat you, I want to be there. Whatever happens. To be with you."

"Perhaps," Lesley said gently, "perhaps Anton will allow it. We shall see."

Then the young married woman and the girl of eighteen began to fondle and play with one another again. The first thin light had broken over the sea before they finally drew from each other and sank into the separate worlds of their dreams.

CHAPTER THREE

Anton had arranged the day of Lesley s initiation for the following week. Despite Debby s appeal, she was not permitted to accompany them when Anton and Mano took the young woman to the place they had chosen.

They drove first to the livery stables in a picturesque village close to the foot of the downland, where three horses were saddled and waiting. From there it was a short ride to the end of the lane and the beginning of the downland track, between tall hedges and under interlacing branches which reduced the strong summer sun to dappling of pale light. The road ended at a tiny settlement of manor house and cottages, an old flint-walled church standing alone in its deserted graveyard, silent except for the buzz of flies.

The two men were dressed in their riding clothes of breeches and jacket. Lesley sat astride the saddle in the tight denim of pale blue riding-jeans and a white singlet. The few field workers who saw her pass stopped and stared at her in overt admiration. Though she held her fair-skinned features high and the blue eyes under the parted fringe of her short-trimmed hair never deigned to acknowledge their homage, her distant contempt for such men was evident enough. These sunburnt workers cared little for that, exercising their right to contemplate her firmly-muscled thighs pressed against the stallion s flanks, the spread of her hips and the sight of Lesley's bottom-cheeks moving, firm and broadened, in the saddle.

One of the men came forward to open the gate which divided the end of the lane from the flint and chalk of the downland track. As he did so, his eyes remained covetously on Lesley in all her moody ungraciousness. It was Anton who handed the man a coin for his trouble and spoke loudly enough for Lesley and the men who watched to hear his words.

"Pay no attention to her sulkiness. She is an adulterous young wife being taken somewhere for a sound thrashing. Her backside will not sit quite so comfortably on the saddle when we bring her back again."

Lesley looked up, startled and with lips slightly parted in her dismay, at this casual humiliation. The men whose admiration she had treated with such disdain only a few minutes before now caught her gaze with broad smiles and whispers. As the riders began to climb the downland path, the farm workers watched from behind, ensuring that their laughter should reach the young woman's ears as she held the reins with head bowed.

The dusty path of chalk and flint was dazzling in the suns ascendant. To either side the corn was tall in broad fields, scattered with the scarlet hoods of poppy. Above the verges rose tall russet fronds of sorrell, lower the purple vetch and, here and there, the white and mauve veining of wild orchid. Beyond the fields the ridged turf lay in vast flanks and amphitheatres, rising to a skyline of browned grass, the level cliff and the steel-sparkle of calm sea far off.

In the noon heat, Anton led them to the hill-top and the beginning of a forest which divided the two halves of this landscape. The stillness of the place was overlaid by the murmur of wild bees, the buzz of summer flies, and the chatter of rooks in an immensity of fierce blue. Behind and below them, the flat weald stretched to a hazy distance of fields and woods.

At Anton s suggestion, they dismounted and led the horses down the broad track of grass which ran through the centre of the forest to the sea cliffs several miles further on. To either side of them the ground rose in wooded banks, or fell away in shady hollows. Planted thick with beech and spruce, the forest was divided by grassy avenues running off the main track like the streets of a city. The two men were alone with Lesley in a place which seemed deserted by the rest of the world. So it was at that moment. Yet Anton knew the importance of ensuring that Lesley's subjugation should be witnessed by others and that she should experience the casual humiliation of knowing it was so. By such means her self-possession would be curbed and her resistance to his commands more easily subdued.

They turned into one of the less-frequented side paths where the grass was cool and lush, growing tall along the way. First tethering the horses to the post of an old forest gate, Anton found a convenient place where the trees arched at the side of the path, as if to make a nave or a cavern. The lower branches of two rows of evergreen had died to autumn brown, the live growth at either side forming an arch overhead. Within this shelter, scattered reflections of sun fell upon the hard earth.

Here the wickerwork baskets slung on the baggage-horse were opened, the cloth spread, the silver and glasses laid out for lunch, as if this were no more than a summer excursion of the most usual kind. But it was Lesley who was to act as the servant and the two men who were to be her masters. Mano and Anton lay by the white cloth, the moisture on the glasses and the wine bottle chilled by the ice-pack. It was Anton who filled three glasses, watching Lesley as she bowed her head meekly, standing before them, until her lips touched the rising bubbles which broke at the smooth rim.

Presently Anton said, "Take off your jeans and singlet, Lesley. You should be undressed a little more before you act as our servant."

She hesitated a moment but not long enough to make a repetition of the command necessary. Then she pulled up the waist of the white singlet and drew the garment off over her head, shaking the short cut of her fair hair into place again.

"Now get your jeans off, Lesley," Anton insisted quietly.

She undid them, worked them down her firm pale thighs to her knees and then pulled her legs clear. She stood before them in her two pieces of underwear. Lesley's knickers were a pair of stretched black briefs in webbed cotton, her breast-halter made of flimsier black silk which was translucent where it cupped the firm young globes. Anton smiled, seeing through the material that the nipples were erect with an excitement which belied Lesley's indifference to her plight.

Anton stood up and walked over to her. He touched her lightly where the thin silk clung damp to her breasts in the warmth of the day and the hardness of the nipples showed.

"Such excitement, Lesley!" he said teasing her gently. He kissed the parting of her fringe, then the sleek pallor of her shoulders, close to her neck, enjoying the cool dampness of her skin and feeling her tremble a little at the touch.

"Kneel down at the cloth," he murmured, stroking the smooth incurve of her lower back, just above the firm swell of her hips. She obeyed him, sitting on her heels, her head lowered a little, awaiting his instructions.

The men knelt either side of her examining the slight proud curve of her belly and the triangle of her loins where the front of the briefs ran so narrow and tight. They made Lesley keep her head lowered and watch their hands, as they pulled the soft flesh of her upper thighs back a little to examine this part.

"Her panties hardly cover it," Anton said, smiling, "A firm young mound and a nice covering of soft fair hair!"

"The briefs are certainly too small for a girl of her age," Mano said, "I should like to see the seat of them."

Anton smiled and kissed the young woman's shoulder again.

"Lift your hips from your heels, Lesley and go forward on your hands."

Lesley obeyed the command, but first she put a hand behind her and plucked at the cotton briefs as if to cover her buttocks more fully than the fold of black elasticated cotton caught between her rear cheeks seemed to do. She leant forward and the two men smiled as they watched the pale cheeks of Lesley s arse grow fuller and wider. In an attempt to excite the two men, she had chosen a pair of briefs far too small to cover the firm young maturity of her hips and seat. The elastic waistband of the black briefs, denting her fair skin deeply, came only half way up Lesley's buttocks. For the rest, the black cotton web was no more than a cover for the rear of her vaginal lips and the lower anal cleavage, leaving the pale cheeks of Lesley's bottom otherwise smooth and bare.

Mano laughed, seeing that these were the briefs normally worn by a girl of twelve or thirteen, now used as a cache-sex by a young married woman who was almost thirty.

"I had thought that when clothes were borrowed, it was the other way round," he said, "I have never before seen a young woman dress in the pants of her little girl."

"It will be the costume in which she acts as our waitress," Anton said. As Lesley went forward on her palms, he stroked the smooth pearly skin of her bottom-cheeks where they were left uncovered by the briefs. His hand went between the back of her legs, fingers testing the slight bulge of womanhood shaped in the black cotton gusset. She was moist with excitement either from the friction of the saddle or else in anticipation of what the two men were going to do to her. As he drew his hand away, allowing Lesley to sit back on her heels, she took it, pressed it to her mouth and kissed it. Anton smiled, but the kiss was ambiguous. Was it gratitude for putting her through such training or an intercession with him to be gentle in his first dealings with her?

As they stretched out and drank their wine, the white linen and the cut glass sparkling in the sun, he lodged the needle of the phonograph on its record, filling the air with fluid Mozartean melody.

U mio tesoro intanto... andate a consolar...

Subdued but pervasive, the cadences of Don Giovanni's drama accompanied the meal. To serve the two men, Lesley was obliged to kneel rather than stand and this added to the appearance of meekness and submission, the erotic maturity of her fair-skinned body more suggestively exposed in her panties and breast-halter than if she had been entirely naked.

During much of the meal, from the pate with which it began to the strawberries and peaches at the conclusion, the two men talked to one another, as if Lesley had not been there. From time to time as they ate the fruit with their fingers, Anton made casual demands on her.

"Sit on your heels with your back to us, Lesley. Now lift your hips again and go forward. Lower your head till it touches the grass. Show the full spread of your thighs and backside. Stay like that while we drink our coffee. With your head down and your behind lifted high, you will offer us a view to stimulate our imaginations. Turn your face and look back at us."

Sardonic irony coloured his phrases. The two men watched her as she obeyed. Sometimes they admired the view in silence, at others they commented on the forms of punishment which such a backside and thighs merited.

At last they were ready for her.

"Lie down at the edge of the path, Lesley," Anton commanded, "You will feel more naked when the cool grass touches your flanks and belly. Hold your wrists together in front of you, press them tightly while I pinion them with a strap."

She caught her breath as she lifted her head and shook the short cut of her fair hair into place.

"Don't tie me," she said quickly, Til do what you want without that."

But Anton had the broad leather strap in his hand.

"Put your wrists together," he said sharply, "You must learn that your masters orders are to be obeyed."

"Besides," said Mano, smiling at her as Lesley forlornly held out her wrists and watched like a self-pitying child while they were strapped together, "you do not yet know what it is that we have in store for you, Lesley. Suppose it is the naked agony of the pony-lash across your bare bottom-cheeks and thighs. Or possibly we may choose to stretch your opening with the tapering neck of the wine bottle between your legs. Even to widen your anus upon it. Could you prevent yourself from trying to interfere if your hands were not tethered? I do not think so."

Kneeling down beside her, Anton arranged a saddle on the ground and made her lie over it on her belly so that her hips, thighs and backside were raised by its curve. From his pocket he took a small box, containing three little globes of silver-coloured metal and an oval shape, the size of an egg, made of the same material.

"Lie with your hands folded under your loins, Lesley," he said quietly and watched her as she shifted into this position.

He took the waistband of the little black briefs and drew them down from behind until they lay in a tangle round the young woman's bare thighs. Lesley settled her shoulders down and seemed to lift her hips a little and open her legs slightly, as if guessing and wanting what they were about to do to her.

Anton took a pat of butter, using it to lubricate the little silver playthings. He fondled Lesley's vaginal tract for a moment, then pressed the three little balls into her cunt, one by one. She gave a gentle gasp of anticipation at the feeling of them inside her. Anton s thumbs parted the two pale moons of her buttocks, revealing the tight inward dimple of Lesley's anus. He touched the glacial smoothness of the eggs rounded end to it and pressed hard. This time, Lesley gave a short cry of alarm or discomfort as the silver-coloured oval widened her hole round its rim and then passed into her body.

It was only necessary for Anton to use one hand. The thumb exerted a gentle rhythmic pressure on Lesley's anus. It was the fingers which entered between her thighs from the rear and manipulated the ingenious "geisha balls" through the warm pubic flesh.

Lesley responded quickly, the cunning movements of the smooth metal balls in her cunt coaxing the most intimate and tantalising sensations. In a moment more the slipperiness of her lubrication was a liquid whisper as his fingers rubbed her. Mano also knelt over her, closely watching the rear opening of her thighs.

"You see how greatly the thought of her slavery excites her?" he said to Anton, "The hair on the lips of her cunt is matted with her wetness already."

"She likes having her wrists strapped together after all," Anton remarked, "I shall have a full set of leather pinions and belts made for her. And a leather gag for her mouth."

Mano knelt in front of Lesley now, raising her head so that the blue eyes and firm young chin were turned up to look at him. He unbuttoned himself.

"Mano's erection, Lesley," said Anton gently, still masturbating her while Lesley rode his fingers with pushing and squirming movement of her hips, "take it in your mouth and play your tongue upon it. Remember that a slave-girl swallows her masters passion when it comes."

"If she never sucked a man except her bridegroom once on their honeymoon," Mano said, "I doubt if she has ever swallowed it before. Have you Lesley?"

"No!" she gasped, breathless from the tension of being masturbated. Yet the shame was driven from her now and she held Mano's gaze steadily with her blue eyes while she answered. "Make me do what you want...

He drew her face to his thighs and the young woman opened her mouth to take his erection on the warm velveteen wetness on her tongue. Anton drew his hand away from her legs, while she lay with her wrists pinioned under her loins.

"Play with yourself, Lesley. Show us how well you can do it."

She hesitated only a moment. Then she widened her bare thighs a little and the fingers of her strapped hands entered between them. As Anton watched, Lesley rubbed her pubic slit with a brisk and impatient energy. At the same time she played on the little erection of her clitoris. Anton smiled, seeing that he had brought her beyond the point where she could be left untended.

"You love yourself a good deal, Lesley," he said, "When you are taken to the place of your ultimate slavery, even the freedom to do this will depend on your masters wish. There are men who would have such temptations removed from you, if it pleased them."

She squirmed in ecstasy on the saddle and her head began to move as she sucked up and down the length of Mano's erection. Anton, still kneeling over her hips, stroked the pale mounds of Lesley's bottom-cheeks.

"Release the silver egg from your behind, Lesley," he said.

In the abandon of her present state, Lesley greeted even the grossest humiliations without a qualm. She raised her backside a little, adjusting her anus to his cupped hand. The tight hole seemed to distend. Then the rounded tip of the oval egg appeared, swelling fuller, until it slid from Lesley's bottom and rolled into her masters palm.

Putting the egg aside, he now drew her fingers clear and began to bring her to the climax of her pleasure with his own hand. Meanwhile, Mano had set his teeth and arched his back a little. He gave a short gasp as the sperm began to escape him in the young woman's mouth. With the first jet of sperm he flooded Lesley's tongue, provoking two or three retching sounds from her after that—the fault of her inexperience—as he pumped his remaining passion into her throat.

Yet this enforced subjugation precipitated her own crisis. Writhing on Antons fingers, Lesley came at last with a trembling of her breath and a quivering of her entire body. The short animal cries grew shriller at each spasm as if to mark the rising intensity of her climax.

Anton allowed her breathing to grow quieter and watched as she lay inert on her belly with the saddle removed.

"Are you ready to be birched now, Lesley?" he asked mockingly.

"Yes," she murmured, her eyes closed as if to relive the moment of her bliss, "Yes, if you want to."

But it was not to happen for a little while. Anton leant over her and pulled up the little black panties to their proper place. At the same time he attached a strap to her waist, running it through two pegged rings hammered into the earth, to hold her on her belly with the hands still folded under her loins. She lay like this, her pale nudity broken only by the black shoulder-straps and back-strap of her breast-halter, the absurdly small black panties which left much of her hips and buttocks bare.

It was evident that she had been made use of. The rear parting of her thighs, the backs of the thighs themselves, shone wet with her own lubrication. Though the little panties borrowed from her daughter covered her lower anal cleavage, the silky steel egg emerging from her behind had left an oily smear across the bare flesh of one bottom-cheek.

Anton kept her like this for a purpose of his own. Presently there was a sound of voices approaching. It was a family party—or rather a party of two families. Two men walked ahead deep in conversation, followed by two young women of thirty or so. Behind them came two little girls who stopped from time to time to pick flowers.

Lesley saw them and tried to pull herself free of the bonds holding her down. Her eyes looked at Anton in apprehension.

"Lie as you are, Lesley," he said gently, "It is good that you should be seen for what you are. As they pass, the men first, then the women, then the little girls, keep your face turned towards them. See that your gaze meets their eyes. I want you to remember how they Took at you."

The two men walked past slowly, meeting Lesley's gaze without compassion. Their eyes travelled down, examining her body before they walked on. Their conversation was carried back on the warm air. One of them began a sentence which ended with the words "the young bitch." The two blond women also slowed down as they passed, the first meeting Lesley's gaze with earnest curiosity, the second with a knowing and wicked smile. They paused close by, to look back at her, one asking the other if she had noticed the smear of grease on Lesley's bare bottom-cheek, at which they both laughed.

The two little girls stared wonderingly. For the first time they were able to see between the legs of a grown woman, the wet cotton twist of the black knickers with the stray tendrils of hair escaping from them. Younger than Lesley's own daughter, they showed a lewd childish curiosity. Under the pretext of picking flowers, they knelt close by, whispering and sniggering at the state of the panties between the young woman's legs. Because the child's pants came scarcely half way up her backside, the little girls were able to peer at her anal cleavage and giggle at "seeing into her bottom."

One of the women turned and called them. So the two girls walked onward, though looking back several times at Lesley's face with smiles at one another.

Anton released her and allowed Lesley to get to her feet. They led her into a clearing of the forest where the sunlight dappled the fallen leaves. Mano had chosen the place well. The forest workers had left one of their heavy wooden trestles there, roughly made and about eighteen inches in height.

Anton ordered Lesley to kneel at one end of it, then to lift her hips from her heels and lie forward on it. Using straps at her wrists and waist, they fastened her down. Then Anton took the diminutive black briefs and drew them off, before pinioning her thighs together with a strap just above her knees.

"She needs a gag in her mouth," Mano said, "With so many people close enough to hear her, I should judge it prudent."

Anton picked up the fallen scrap of black cotton web.

"She herself has provided the very thing," he said.

Lesley tried to protest but in 'a few moments she was silenced, kneeling on all fours over the trestle in the forest clearing. Anton fetched a birch-rod, a full-scale instrument of judicial punishment. Its four yard-long switches were straight and supple, bound into a handle at one end. It had been soaked in a strong solution of brine and, now that it was dry, the salt crystals glistened on the buds of the switches.

"Fifty strokes of the birch, Lesley," Anton smiled at the uncertainty and self-doubt in her blue eyes above the mouth widened by its gag, "We shall see if your bottom can bear the slavery for which your heart longs!"

"See that you draw a little blood from her arse and legs," Mano said, "The salt will smart like fire in her cuts."

The young woman tried to watch over her shoulder as Anton touched the birch lightly across the firm pale cheeks of Lesley's twenty-eight-year-old bottom. The first stroke, with the birch whistling through the air, hit the fullest curve of her bare buttocks with the force of a whip-lash. They heard the sharp intake of her breath before Anton thrashed her a second time across the same place. Lesley mewed into her gag, tortured by an agony of which she had no expectation. It seemed infinitely keener than she had imagined.

Anton thrashed her across the same reddening stripe again. He lashed the birch low down, just above the division of Lesley's buttocks and thighs. He birched her across the backs of her thighs, her lower buttocks and the crowns of her bottom-cheeks. The birch raised a mass of thin weals running in every direction. The two halves of the young wife's backside contorted and tensed, compressed together and surged out in her anguish. Anton set his teeth and gave the next three strokes of the birch with the force and skill of a hangman. Lesley screamed into her gag and tried vainly to twist her behind aside, as if to take the cuts on the flank of her hips. But the straps held her firmly over the trestle and there was to be no escape.

A vicious lash of the birch-switches drew several dots of crimson on a weal which lay diagonally across her buttocks. As Lesley screamed again, Mano chided her.

"I'm sure your husband would like to see you now," he said, "This is what he should have done to you long, long ago!"

Anton thrashed again and then again, until Lesley's buttocks presented two masses of thin raised weals. Between the strokes she writhed with a frantic energy as if to work away the lingering smart, as the salt crystals entered the little cuts and rekindled the soreness. Several tiny trickles of blood from the birch marks trickled down her bum-cheeks and thighs to gather behind her knees as she lay over the trestle.

Mano waited while Anton lashed the birch twice more across Lesley's buttocks and then again across her thighs. He took the small jar of salt fat. He dipped his finger into it and then rubbed the burning salt into the cuts on Lesley's bottom. She tried to buck and rear on the trestle like a filly between the shafts maddened by an agony of hornet-stings. Mano smiled at the frenzy in the blue eyes as she watched him dip his finger again and once more work the smarting grease into the cuts.

It was now evident that Lesley's buttocks, apart from their raised weals of birch were blazing red from the torments of the salt crystals and the raw fat. When there were ten or twelve strokes still to go, it seemed that the screaming and writhing against her straps had brought her to the point of exhaustion. Anton livened her up with a vicious stroke across the backs of knees and another low on the rear of her thighs. Lesley mewed wildly into her gag, her buttocks straining outward and broadening, as if begging to have the birch across them instead. While she presented herself like this, her bottom-cheeks rounded out like a young Amazon—well-parted to show her arsehole and a rear glimpse of vagina—her face turned with such a self-pitying look under the parted fringe—her mouth packed with the gag of her girls panties—Mano lifted his camera and photographed this intriguing portrait.

"She needs the two kids to see her like that," he said smiling, "It would teach her a lesson in humility."

He continued to photograph her as the last strokes of the birch were given and Lesley's face assumed a wide-eyed urgency not greatly different from her expression when the tremors of orgasm shook her. At last the thrashing was over. The men unfastened her, took the gag from her mouth and carried her across to the grass where she had been lying before. In her black breast-halter and little-girl briefs, they made her lie once again on her belly. Her wrists were pinioned under her loins and she was held down securely by the belt round her bare waist.

In the lengthening shadows of the sun s decline, she lay with the mass of raised birch-marks on her legs and bottom revealed by the diminutive briefs. Presently the walkers returned along the forest path—the two men, the blond women and the little girls.

"Turn your face and let them see you, Lesley," said Anton quietly, "Watch them as they pass."

The two men who walked ahead of the others, stopped and looked down at her, examining the raised and reddened stripes of the thrashing she had received.

"She needed a beating," said one to the other, "Now she has the look of a whipped woman in her eyes."

The two young women who passed were taken aback, yet amused at Lesley's condition. They stood for a moment, catching her gaze with laughter in their faces at what her lovers had done to her. Then they, too, walked on. The pair of girl children stared wonderingly. It was Mano who walked across the grass and spoke to them, as they pondered Lesley s woebegone face and the redness of recent weeping in her eyes.

"She had to have a smacked bottom," Mano said to the first child, "Thats all. Now she will be loving and obedient."

As the sun sank lower in the sky and the insects began to gather in the forest dusk, the two men drew the panties down Lesley's thighs. They inserted the three "geisha balls" in her vagina and pressed the metal oval of the egg into her behind. Anton masturbated her until she came with such intensity that Lesley's screams of pleasure filled the woodland paths. Later still she received Mano's erection in her mouth again, while Anton filled her between her legs.

That night, Anton woke in his room, aware that the young woman had made her way to him. Either the soreness of her birch cuts had banished sleep or else she was still lubricating with the excitement of the days arousal. She knelt at his bed, drew his stiffening penis from the pyjama trousers and closed her mouth over it. After a while she drew her lips away. In her hand was the little pair of briefs which she had worn and with which they had silenced her cries.

Lesley brushed the fringe of fair hair with the edge of her hand.

"Let me be your slave again," she whispered, kissing the hardened knob of his erection lightly, "Tie me if you like. Do what you want. Let me be your slave for the rest of the night."

CHAPTER FOUR

In the days following these events—Lesley's "initiation,'" as she thought of them—Anton made no further demands upon her. More than a week passed before he informed her that arrangements were made for the next stage of her instruction.

Before committing herself to such slavery as Anton proposed—even before submitting to the pain and humiliation of a prison-farm thrashing—her training required that she should see another girl whipped in the manner reserved by such masters for their submissives. Lesley had been birched on the occasion of her initiation but that, as Anton pointed out, was no more than a boy or girl in a schoolroom might have received.

"You must see for yourself, Lesley," he stroked her hair as she stood naked in his arms, her face pressed to his bosom like a timid child, "You must see what it is that you will have to bear. We must also observe whether it excites you to whip another girl."

At this last suggestion he felt a quickening of her heart and smiled in anticipation.

Mano had returned to France by this time but Solon, another of the group, was still living in the city. He, too, would be leaving for the summer in a week or so, accompanied by at least one young woman who had surrendered to the bondage of erotic servitude.

Unlike Anton and Mano, Solon was a man of stronger tastes whose preference led him to girls of the working-class rather than to educated young women of Lesley's kind. A number of them were what the bourgeoisie referred to disparagingly as "shop girls." As such they were on public display during their work. Anton had confided the names of several of these girls to Lesley, so that the young woman was able to observe them, and, in some cases, to realise that she had often seen them as she walked on the wide shopping boulevards or made her purchases in the lavishly-decorated stores or the little boutiques.

One of these young women, Maggie, was employed to arrange the luxuries of the rich in the window of a store on the grand boulevard. She was perhaps twenty-three years old, not tall, and the lack of length in her legs gave a slightly coltish or even stocky appearance to her figure. Of such a robust young shape was Solons ideal woman made. The plain length of her lank tawny-blond hair was worn loose to the shoulders and fringed, in the style of a young girl. However, there was a hardness in the features of the fair-skinned oval of her face which would never have done for Mano or Anton.

Yet Solon was evidently not unique in his taste. Lesley noticed that a number of men paused to observe the young window-dresser at her work. She ignored them with the indifference which a girl of her type cultivates to ward off the unwelcome attentions of men in the crowded streets and tenements of her upbringing. But still they watched her. Did they treasure the image of Maggie in sleeveless blouse of red and her jeans-trousers of yacht-white as she worked behind the plate glass? Did they admire or deplore the broadening of her hips at twenty-three? Whatever the truth, they paused to watch as she bent to her task, Maggie's bottom-cheeks and hips full and robust, the outline of her panty-briefs clearly contoured through the material. Did they glimpse—or only imagine—the soft shape of a woman's sex between her thighs as they contemplated this rear view?

Lesley was to know more of Maggie in due course. The other object of Solons passion during that summer was Julie and, as Anton explained, it was Julie whom Lesley would see submitting to the ordeal of slavery.

She, too, was easily observed. A girl of eighteen or nineteen, Julie matched Solons type perfectly.

She seemed a casual worker in the bookshops and boutiques which flourished one month and were gone the next. In appearance she was petite and almost childlike in certain aspects of her figure. Once more, her golden-blond hair was worn loose, spread on her shoulders at the back and falling across her lapels each time that she bowed her head forward. The hair was brushed back from the long slope of forehead and rather pointed nose. The challenge for Solon was in Julies aura of lasciviousness and the petulant appearance of her young mouth, her dark hazel eyes with their mascara'd lashes. In her black dress and red shoes with their spiked heels to add to her diminutive stature, she sat on her stool behind the bookshop counter, treating the customers with that disdain which might ordinarily provoke complaints of insolence and incivility.

It was easy to see, in one respect, what had provoked Solons desire for her. Julie was a girl who treated male admiration with indifference and yet sought to arouse it. Often she presented herself behind the bookshop counter or in the boutique in a short blouse or singlet worn with pale blue working jeans which fitted almost tight as her skin. The smooth denim was drawn, by this tightness, into little sheaves of creases behind her knees and across the backs of her slim thighs.

Though she still wore the little shoes with spiked heels to add to her height, the tight fit of the denim revealed a figure that might almost have belonged to a nymph at thirteen or fourteen. Her belly was flat and she had the same backward jut of the hips evident in many younger girls before maturity. Julie's thighs were so slim as if to be almost fragile. Only at the rear did she have a true softness of womanhood. Though Julie's bottom was quite trimly rounded in its cheeks, it was here that she showed her fullest and fattest curves. As she stooped to pick up a pile of books to fill the shelves, the demure young cheeks of her behind rounded very tightly under the smooth denim, opening widely and suggestively the forbidden valley between them to the eyes of the men who coveted her.

Such was the nymph whose ordeal Lesley was to witness on a warm afternoon in May. Solon, the plump and dispassionate master, had chosen the house of a friend, where half a dozen selected witnesses were to assemble, three men and three women.

The house with the green verandah stood at the centre of a fine Regency terrace of golden stone, divided from its quiet avenue by a screen of plane trees. In their sunlit seclusion, the substantial villas of the long road were little disturbed by the traffic of the city. While the mornings were still cool, young women on horseback rode by, equestriennes in groups of two or three on their return to the livery stables. From time to time a car drew up, bringing several little girls to the dance academy, or to the teachers of piano or deportment who occupied several of the handsome houses. Then stillness would settle again, like a flock of birds momentarily disturbed.

To this house, on a warm afternoon, those who were to be witnesses of Julie s submission made their way. In spring and early summer the gardens of the avenue were filled with a china delicacy of oriental blossoms, their pink sunlit cups darkening to mauve in the lovers' hours of dusk and lamplight. Each of the six guests was admitted by the white-painted door, under the wrought-iron spiderwork of the canopied belvedere.

Apart from Lesley and Anton, the guests were unknown to each other, though all were acquainted with the portly figure of Solon who presided over the events. He led them into a room which appeared to be the studio of the dancing school, an expanse of light polished boards, the dark liquid gloss of a Steinway grand, a scattering of little chairs with plush seats and gilded backs.

At the centre of the polished floor, the music stool which served as a piano seat had been set before a semicircle of six little chairs. It consisted of a cupboard to hold piano scores, the wood varnished a dark honey-colour, topped by the curve of the seat in moss-green velvet.

When the guests had taken their places, Solon went into the next room and returned with Julie. The gaze of the three men surveyed the dark hazel eyes and the wan young face with its sharp nose and petulant mouth. They admired the petite figure which she presented. The pert young breasts in the white singlet. The smooth denim of the jeans skin-tight on her hips and legs.

The first of the men, Joachim, turned to Solon.

"I congratulate you on your discovery, my friend. Her belly is flat as a child's. She will keep her shape well for years to come."

The second man, Robert, moved his chair slightly.

"Let her turn," he said, "I should like to see a view of her from behind."

Julie looked at Solon, quickly and apprehensively. When he nodded at her, she turned her back to the others. In the tight denim, her slim young thighs and the softer swell of her provocative little bottom were perfectly shaped. She was dressed now as she had often been behind the shop counter for the benefit of its customers and the passers-by who stopped to admire her through the glass, as they had admired Maggie.

Had she been naked under the tight denim, the girls rear view on such occasions would have been less suggestive. But Julies knickers were outlined clearly by the skin-tight denim of her seat, luring the thoughts of the admirers to the flimsy lingerie and the intimate areas covered by it. Julies knickers appeared in outline as a scandalously brief pair of panties. Their contours showed the world that they arched high and tight from Julies bottom-crack. At their lower extreme, they seemed no more than a scrap of filmy material in her anal cleft and under her legs, while even as they curved up to the waist they left most of her bottom and hips bare under the denim.

"Julie," said Solon quietly, "Turn your head as you stand there and look back over your shoulder at our guests."

The fine veil of light gold hair brushed across her shoulders as she obeyed. Her expression still had the casualness which betrayed her social class and character as she looked from one to another of the men and women, waiting for their commands.

A handsome woman in her early forties, dressed in furs and with jewelled rings on her fingers, looked up at Solon.

"You say she is nineteen? One could believe that from her face. But such elfin features... and thighs still so childishly slim. I grant you that her bottom is softer, but still no more than a cheeky or saucy little thing. There are girls of thirteen in the high school with bottoms as fat as Julie s."

They discussed her for a little while longer. The second woman, more severely dressed, had the harder unindulgent look of a professional moralist.

"What is her acquaintance with men? Julies experience of the penis?"

Solon smiled and explained that two or three strapping young fellows had each, for several months, lodged their erections snugly at night in Julies cunt.

At last Joachim brought the discussion to a conclusion.

"I understand she is to be whipped," he said, "I should like to see that done to her."

Julie looked at Solon, her eyes wider and the mascara'd lashes blinking quickly in her nervousness.

"Pin your hair up, Julie," he said, "It will be better like that. I intend that you shall cry and scream under the whip. Our guests will want to see your face when that happens. Pin your hair up so that it does not fall forward and conceal from them the reality of a girl being flogged."

The uncertainty and self-pity in the sulky little face made her all the more appealing to them. Yet Julie gathered up her blond mane and drew it out in a single strand from the crown of her head, forward above her face. She plaited it, wound the braid into a coquettish little bun on the top of her head, and pinned it in place. It was not a new style for her. Lesley had sometimes seen her sitting on the stool behind the counter displaying this teasing and childish coiffure to the world.

"Someone else will undress you, Julie," Solon said, "Kneel down at the music-stool, over it on all fours."

They watched her obey, lifting her hips so that the tautly rounded young buttocks became a pair of widely separated and deeply divided cheeks under the denim. The nap of the moss-green velvet stirred audibly as Julies flat young belly smoothed against it. Solon fastened her to the heavy stool by straps round her wrists and waist.

"With your consent, Anton," Solon said, "We shall make Lesley undress her."

The other men and women smiled, guessing from this that Lesley herself was also a slave. They watched the young wife stoop over the kneeling girl, undoing the jeans and working the tight denim down to Julie s knees. Though Lesley's fingers worked dispassionately to extricate the flimsy little fold of the panties from between Julies thighs and bottom-cheeks, there was no mistaking the shudder of pleasure or horror with which the girl felt this happening.

Lesley stepped back so that the others could see the tightly rounded nymph-cheeks of Julies bottom and the rear view of her pubic flesh between slim thighs. Lesley waited in her long skirt and blouse, the short crop of her fair hair bowed as if in submission or contemplation.

Solon picked up a prison cane, a bamboo which was cruelly long and supple.

"Thirty strokes across Julies bottom—and then as many more as you choose to give."

He was holding the cane for Lesley to take. At first she stared at him, uncomprehending, as if thinking that he meant her to take the bamboo to some other person.

"No, Lesley," said Anton, laughing at her uncertainty, "You are the one who must cane Julies bottom. Does it not excite you, the idea of doing it to her? Whether it does or not, you must learn to whip another girl for your masters pleasures—as other women will whip you. Have you never smacked Rachels sweet little bottom for naughtiness? And did you not feel a guilty but sensuous thrill?"

The young woman dismissed with scorn such ideas of male sadism in the punishment of a girl-child. The appeal of Julie was quite another matter. Lesley turned and looked at the young nymph lying over the velvet padding. She held out the cane and touched it across the tight well-separated buttocks. The guests who watched her smiled at one another. The first surprise and revulsion in Lesley's face had given way to a furtive quickening of excitement in the movements of her eyes. The command, given her without warning, woke a desire in her of which she seemed scarcely to have been aware before.

After a pause, Lesley raised the bamboo and brought it down with a light smack across Julies backside, a stroke no more vicious than she might have used in the bedroom on her daughters bottom. Julie shivered a little but made no sound.

Lesley nerved herself and whipped with more force. The bamboo made the air sing and Julie caught her breath at the smart. At first Lesley seemed to recoil from such sadism but she brought the cane down harder still. Either the excitement or the exertion caused a breathlessness, a deeper movement of her breasts as she drew air, and a flaring of her nostrils.

With a sudden resolve she caned Julie harder—and harder yet. The girl cried out, her buttocks tensing and flexing in pain, though the straps at her waist and wrists held her in position. Two spots of colour appeared in Lesley's face, betraying her growing excitement.

Now all the young woman's hesitation had gone. A wicked diagonal stroke marked Julies bottom-cheeks, the supple tip of the cane hitting the back of her thigh and drawing blood. Julie screamed in pain and with the fear of what lay in store for her. But Lesley had cast aside all restraint. She whipped the backs of the slim and fragile-looking thighs again and again. Julies head threshed wildly as she shrieked, the little bun shaken loose and the pale gold hair spilling in its fine veil again.

Lesley's blue eyes were wider with exhilaration and in her breathlessness she drew air through her lightly parted lips. She bamboo'd Julies pert young buttocks with all her strength, the strokes falling faster and faster as if Lesley herself were approaching an orgasm. When she paused a moment for lack of breath, Solon gently took the cane from her.

"You see, Lesley?" he said softly, "You understand now the enjoyment which your master has in beating you?"

Anton smiled at this. After the excitement of thrashing Julie, Lesley would identify more easily with the pleasure of the men who whipped her. Even when she screamed and writhed under the lashes she would think of herself as they saw her and imagine the pleasure of whipping as they felt it. Care would always be taken that the punishment-room was mirrored so that her own reflection was fully in her sight. Even while she struggled and pleaded, that glass would show her the exciting drama of a young woman—who might have been another—squirming erotically and sobbing seductively as the sharp cracks of the whip cut her bottom and thighs.

As she sat down next to him, Anton turned her head with his hand and kissed her on the lips. Her response was quick and passionate.

"You think you have hurt, Julie?" he murmured. "It was nothing. Now you shall see her whipped as she will be when her submission to Solon is complete. Will it horrify you so greatly that you cannot endure the thought on your own behalf?"

He watched her, intrigued to see her response to the drama which was now enacted. Julie shook back the length of her light gold hair and looked back at her chastisers with eyes brimmed by tears. Yet it was the shock of being thrashed by Lesley, rather than the severity of the discipline, which had caused this.

Solon put down the cane and picked up a black leather pony-switch. It was about three feet long, tapering from a handle as thick as his thumb to a point which was fine as the tip of a pencil.

"Press your belly down harder on the velvet, Julie," he said, "and spread that lewd little bottom even wider." They saw her obey, though she still watched him over her shoulder, the fine gold hair cascading on the far side of the music-stool.

"Across the cheeks of your arse, Julie," he said quietly, "then your legs. And then the cheeks of your backside again. Then you shall have a visit from Meena, your sadistic little oriental mistress. She still asks me to let her trim you between the legs as is the custom with girls in her country. If the mood takes me, I shall allow it tonight, while you are still strapped down like this. But first your bottom, Julie, and a session with the whip which will last all evening."

He stood back and brought the leather switch down across her pert little buttocks with a report like a ringmasters whip. Julie shrieked and the imprint of the switch was branded in a welt across her behind. There was no doubt of the excitement which grew among the men and the two well-dressed women as Julie responded to the strokes by short and spasmodic yelps of pain. After every five or six strokes there would be at least one weal which ended in a crimson droplet drawn by the fine point of the whip.

Solon altered his aim a little and the tapering end of the switch began to follow the curves of Julies bottom and thighs, seeking to inflict its naked agony on the inner surfaces of her slim legs or between her taut little buttocks. The room rang with her screams. She did not sob or weep but shrieked, dry eyed, as if this expulsion of breath was more necessary to help her endure the anguish than the self-indulgent weeping of a spoilt little girl.

At last Solon put down the whip and allowed Julie the luxury of bursting into tears, her face still turned towards the guests, as if they might plead on her behalf. It was a vain hope.

"She is such a sulky little thing," said the handsome well dressed woman, "One sees her behind the shop counter, almost surly in her manner. Perhaps you should let Meena have her way. Between Julies legs. A keen caress or two with the little implement. You would, I believe, find her more docile, more eager to please..."

Such topics were openly discussed to fill Julie with a thrill of horror. Sometimes, as if to stimulate her still further, the playful threats were accompanied by sinister caresses. Joachim stooped over her, his fingers stroking the fair-haired vaginal slit.

"A few minutes would trim her," he said, his hand then moving to touch Julies anus. "And here you might use the Arab bottle treatment, reserved for sullen girls. A little soap. The entry of the first inch of a long tapering neck. The widening as it is pressed deeper..."

Julies wild cry at these words was louder than any during her whipping. Though the "remedies" proposed were not to be used, the excitement of the girl herself and the onlookers was stimulated by discussing them.

Before Julie was dealt with further, Anton led Lesley to an adjoining room, whose interior window showed the scene in the one they had left. He made Lesley turn her back to him and bend over so that they could both watch the rest of the petite blondes ordeal as Julie knelt strapped over the music-stool. Anton drew up Leslie's skirt until it was bunched round her waist. He touched the filmy, tight-fitting briefs underneath. His hand between her legs, he lovingly fondled the folds of warm vaginal flesh through the silky gusset. Lesley was wet with the lubrication of her excitement, wet from the enjoyment of caning Julie. The pleasure of it, so unprecedented in her case, had taken her totally by surprise.

As if unwilling to have this secret explored, she tried to pull away from his fingers. But Anton held her. He drew the panties down and inserted his erection between the moist lips of her sex. At once Lesley began to work her hips on the stiffened penis with such eagerness that Anton had several times to slow her down or check her, in order to prolong the pleasure.

As he made love to her he directed her attention to what was now happening in the other room. A girl of nineteen had entered, a slim and fine-boned beauty with the features and colouring of India or Arabia. Her black hair was bobbed, her warm skinned face had demure young features, beautiful almond eyes, a sensuous contrast of high cheek-bones and round innocence.

"Look at her, Lesley," Anton murmured. "She is Meena. When I take you to France, she will be there. I have made Meena the mistress of my girls. She has the most admirable vices of her kind, a perverse sensuality and a vein of cunning cruelty when it is needed."

Meena in her white print dress, brushed back the bob of her hair with one hand and took, in the other, a whip with a stout handle and a short woven thong of snakeskin.

Lesley groaned with longing as Antons penis entered her slowly and deeply.

"Watch," he said, kissing the crown of her urchin-crop gently, "See how slave-girls are whipped."

Meena stood back while Julie looked in horror over her shoulder, the golden-blond hair spilling to one side. The Asian girl flicked the whip high and then cracked it down with speed and skill across the tight cheeks of Julies bottom. There was an instants pause and then Julie screamed with all the power of her lungs. Anton felt a tremor of excitement in Lesley's body, the first thrill released by her subconscious mind at hearing a girl cry out under the whip.

The indifference with which Julie habitually regarded the world was replaced now by the contortion of her features into a wild frenzy of consternation. The mouth which made its sulky little answers to the customers in the bookshops or boutiques was wide and screaming, the mascara from the lashes of her hazel eyes running with her tears down her face.

Despite her slim build and comparative youth, Meena was expert in using the woven leather whiplash. She brought it flashing down with a supple energy which the cruellest gaoler would have envied. It cracked across the slim taut cheeks of Julies bottom with an ear-stunning impact. Julie shrieked for Solon, the guests, even her boy-friends to take pity on her in such a predicament. Her tight and well-separated bum-cheeks were marked by thin purple weals, sinuous and vivid. The lash caught the backs of her thighs and even stung her agonisingly between them. Lesley watched all this, lubricating on Anton s erection in her gratification and moaning a little with her own pleasure.

"You like to see Julie whipped, don't you, Lesley?" Anton murmured, his lips touching her ear. He penetrated her cunt more deeply, his hands steadying her bare hips.

"Yes!" Her final surrender of all pretence came in a gasp, "Yes... Yes!"

"But look at her tears and hear Julies screams!" he said, teasing her softly, "Will you have no pity on her?"

"I can't," she gasped, her voice quivering, "I c-c-can't."

"Solon will stop the whipping if I ask it, Lesley," he held her now with his erection motionless inside her, "Will you not ask for that?"

"No!" Lesley might be his slave but, defying his immobility, she worked her hips to and fro as if masturbating herself on his stiffness, "Let them whip her till she swoons..."

Anton touched his lips to her ear again.

"Now do you understand why men wish you to be their slave, Lesley? Do you begin to share their enjoyment in whipping your bottom as Julie is being whipped?"

"Yes," she gasped, riding the penis with a maddened energy, "Oh, yes!"

"Even to whip you until you swoon? To revive you then and to whip you once more?"

"Yes..." It seemed that the answers came from her without thought or reservation. It was as if Anton had at last penetrated to the darkest recesses of her mind, the dungeon of thoughts which Lesley had never even allowed herself to think. "If it was necessary..."

The Asian girl who was whipping Julie had paused briefly to alter her aim. Now the black lash cracked like a drivers whip, aimed so that it sought out the parting of the girls thighs and its snaking tip curled in between the tight little cheeks of Julies bottom. Meena had been bred in a tradition which reflected an eastern delight in cruelty. With pitiless skill she took Julie beyond the limits of punishment and into the sinister realms of torture. Lesley's thighs twitched and her breath came in a series of short cries as she began to climax. Anton released his sperm inside her and felt the young woman's orgasm fade at last with a spasm like the final pulse of a dying animal.

He made her remain bending as she was until Meena had finished with Julie and handed the whip to Solon himself. Then it was Meena who came in. Before Lesley could stand upright, or pull her panties up, Meena laid a hand on the back of her waist.

"Stay as you are, Lesley," she said, in a voice which had something of a Celtic lilt, "Anton has told me of you and the plans he has made. Relax yourself, my dear, and let me feel the state you are in."

Meena s fingers slipped between Lesley's thighs and felt the wetness of the vaginal lips.

"I need not ask if Julies whipping excited you," Meena said. "You see now what awaits you if you accompany Anton and I?"

With one arm round Lesley's waist as if to hold her down, Meena fondled the firmly broadened buttocks with her other hand.

'Anton was right," she said, "Having your two children has not spoilt you in this area. Not too fat, yet a most alluring maturity to your hips and the cheeks of your arse. I should love to take you somewhere with Anton for a few months. There are ordeals I could inflict with the whip on your bottom, Lesley, which would require you under submission for more than an occasional day or night."

Meena s finger stroked the young woman between her buttocks and pressed into Lesley's anus a little. The tight entrance contracted in alarm.

"We must overcome such foolish resistance, Lesley. It would be easy enough in a few months. There are devices to stretch such tight holes and make it impossible for them to defy the penis so easily. I have one that has been used on several young women of your kind. You would pay the price of some discomfort while wearing it for a few hours each day. It would do only the slightest permanent damage and the advantage for your master must outweigh that."

Lesley twisted her head round, the first sign of panic in the blue eyes under the long fringe. Meena smiled. While fondling the soft genital flesh with one hand, she caressed the promiscuous young wife's arsehole with the other.

"You would soon be taught to accept the idea, Lesley. At your age, after so much penis between your legs, the uses of marriage and children, a man who possesses you as a slave will make equal use of the tightness of your anus. So long as you are not a slave, you may refuse such things. Once you have surrendered yourself, it will be otherwise."

The dismay lingered in Lesley's blue eyes. Under the smooth skin of her throat, the pulse beat faster with mingled apprehension and yearning as Meena continued her caressing.

"You will not understand, Lesley, until you learn to identify your own enjoyments with those of the men who possess you. You must try to share their excitements in doing such things to you, as if you watched them done to another girl like Julie."

Lesley found no answer to this and Meena continued to reassure her.

"Your body will no longer belong to you. Once you are a slave, it is the instrument of your masters pleasure to use as he wishes. Do you set so high a price on the privacy of your behind? You will pay that price anyway. They have only to strap you down and you will be sodomised as they wish. Believe me, Lesley, your body and every function of it will be at the disposal of those who enjoy you."

As she touched Lesley between the thighs, Meena knew that such advice, far from repelling her, had excited the young woman profoundly. The Asian girl smiled, for she had dealt with such novices before. In their mouths were the words of disgust and repudiation, but they were denied by the heat and moisture between their legs.

"You think there will be a limit to what is demanded of you, Lesley?" she murmured, beginning to rub the young woman between the thighs in the unambiguous caress of systematic masturbation, "There is no limit. At first you will be subject to forms of punishment and ravishing—the whip and the phallus—which you cannot bear. One day, you will learn to bear them perhaps. When that happens, new ordeals will be devised for you which are beyond your power to bear even then. You will never be allowed to forget your masters pleasure in making you endure the erotic torments of orgasm and punishment."

Lesley bowed her head and surrendered herself to the skill of Meena s fingers. But the encounter between the two women had yet to reach the question upon which all depended.

"Now you must decide," Meena whispered, "Not when your blood is still and your thighs are cool, but while your heart races and you feel pleasure swell towards bursting in your loins. That is when you will be truest to your desires. Decide, Lesley, to surrender yourself to Anton or to be lost to him for ever. To allow him to take you on the first stage of that journey, or else remain a grudging wife and a resentful mistress."

Lesley let out a cry of pleasure which was closer to a sob than to the joy of exhilaration.

"Take me with you," she murmured, "I will go with Anton and be his in whatever way he chooses!"

It was the closest Lesley had ever been to declaring her love truly for another person. Meena masturbated her a moment more.

"Remember, Lesley, the first rule that determines your slavery. Promises made in the heat of passion cannot be retracted in the cold aftermath of realisation."

"I love Anton!" It was a peevish little girls cry.

"That is irrelevant," Meena said, "You will submit to his pleasure, whether you love him or not. You will promise now that all your protests and demands to be set free from such slavery shall be disregarded."

"Yes," Lesley rode her loins on Meena's fingers, "Oh, yes!"

"And tomorrow night you will go to be thrashed, coldly and sadistically in a prison room. Without pleasure or consolation."

There was no reply.

"Answer me, Lesley!"

"Yes," Lesley's voice trembled a little, "I will do whatever I must."

Meena brought her to orgasm. She watched Lesley dress, a young woman now frightened at the rashness of her own vow.

CHAPTER FIVE

On the following evening, Anton led Lesley to the waiting car just before sunset. The black vehicle with its sleek lines and silver trim was empty, except for the driver to whom Anton had given his instructions.

There was a glass screen between the driver and the rear of the car, the speaking tube removed so that no communication was possible. The doors on either side of the leather seat where the passenger sat had been fitted with locks, to ensure that she remained a prisoner unless a key were provided.

At Antons insistence, Lesley was wearing a short sweater of white wool and the pale blue jeans of her denim trousers. He opened the door of the car for her with a sardonic courtesy.

"Mano's ambition for you will be fulfilled in the next few hours, Lesley. He has taken great care to find a sadist of the kind who can give you precisely what you need to curb your pride. You are going to an institution built to be a place of punishment, though intended for boys of a criminal type."

He raised her chin and made her look at him properly.

"You will be stripped of more than your clothes, Lesley. Marriage and child-rearing, even your femininity will be taken from you. As for your right to sexual freedom, to choose whichever man you fancy, it will be without meaning there."

Anton saw her shiver despite the warmth of the sunlit evening and he smiled at this.

"Mano has stated his intention, Lesley. There is a place, ten miles from here whose warden is a sadist indeed. You will receive no pleasure tonight. You go there to be hurt. No word need be spoken to you. You will be stripped and held down sprawling bottom-upwards over the sofa-cushions like a prison-farm boy. Your backside will be viciously bamboo'd by the goaler. Do you imagine you will preserve your dignity and feminine self-control during such a thrashing? You will scream, Lesley. You will writhe and kick until they have caned you into submission."

She turned her face away, as if to avoid his amusement. Anton smiled.

"That will not be all, Lesley. The man who beats you will be greatly excited by your perverse charms. The short crop of your hair might also have been worn to excite him, by making you look more boyish. But your thighs and bottom have the mature feminine beauty of a young married woman. Imagine the thrill of it for a man of this type. A young woman with children of her own who cuts her hair almost like a boys in order to have her bare bottom thrashed in such a manner."

She was still looking away from him, as if to conceal the emotions which her eyes might betray.

"You do not understand yet, Lesley," he said, "but soon you will. When they have subdued you with the cane and you are lying in tears over the sofa cushions—that is when the bambooing really begins in such places. I promise you, Lesley, that you will make such a spectacle of yourself on the sofa as you could not imagine now."

He stroked the short fair hair at her nape as she got into the car.

"There will be no arousal," he said, "no soft whispers, no randy endearments. The beating will be cold and sadistic. That is what you must endure. Pain without caress or reward."

He closed the car door and locked it. Half an hour away, through the deepening twilight, was the place which Mano had chosen. It was approached by a long driveway under overarching oak trees with broad fields to either side. The building itself was surrounded by a high stone wall and guarded by an entrance arch whose massive doors were bound and studded by iron. A keeper in uniform came out and spoke to the driver of the car. Then the gates were opened and the vehicle was admitted.

On each side the yard was surrounded by buildings of dark stone, rising to several storeys of narrow-barred windows. When the car stopped, two other men in their dark uniforms were waiting for it. One of them unlocked the rear door with a key identical to Anton s.

Without speaking, they took Lesley's wrists and strapped them together in front of her. Then they led her into the building, down a vaulted corridor which was brightly lit throughout its massive structure. At the end of the passageway, the first man opened a door at one side and they took her into a white-tiled room which served as washroom and toilet. They watched her for a moment as she stood at the centre of it, flicking the parted fringe of her fair hair into place.

The first man confronted the dismissive glance of Lesley's blue eyes, the firm set of her mouth and jaw, the spoilt sulkiness of a pampered little girl.

"She needs something to teach her a lesson," the man said, "She needs to suck."

He went outside to give some orders. Presently, he drew back a curtain which hung across one end of the washroom. On a stone table a dark-skinned boy was lying on his back, his pants stripped down and his vest pulled up. One of the men held Lesley, the other unfastened and stripped down her jeans. In her short white top and honey-toned stocking-tights, they led her to the boy who was watching her with wistful, imploring eyes.

Without any further preliminary, the first man took the short fair hair at Lesley s nape and forced her to bow her face to the boys penis. She tried to resist but the grip on her hair drove her down and the pain of struggling free would have been too great. Her lips touched the penis of the sixteen-year-old, which quivered at the pleasure of it.

The man who had forced her to bend by his hold on the hair at her nape felt an instinctive tremor in Lesley's body as her lips brushed the adolescent cock. Once she knew that they would not hesitate to force her, Lesley would suck it obediently. Even her disdainful manner could not conceal that from him. He used the forefinger and thumb of his free hand to press her nostrils gently and oblige her to breathe though her mouth. As she opened her lips to draw air, the boy shifted on the table a little so that his penis entered her mouth and stiffened on her tongue.

While the uniformed guard held the young wife's head down by the hair of her urchin crop, the boy turned Lesley's face a little with his own hands and began to make love into her mouth with cautious movements of his hips. Whether by feminine instinct or as a gesture of surrender, Lesley closed her lips on the boys erection and began to suck his stiffness with gentle nodding movements of her head. They released their grip and watched her, the man who had held her turning to his colleague.

"You see? She likes to do it after all! But snooty young women of her kind always need the excuse of being made to suck a boys piddler against their will!"

The boy gave a groan of pleasure as the suction of Lesley's pressed lips and the caresses of her tongue played upon the sensitive flesh of his prick. The soft fair hair of her fringe fell forward as she bowed her head, tickling the lad on his belly and balls. Several times he arched his hips upward in his desire and the deep intrusion of his penis forced a brief retching sound from Lesley's throat.

He gazed down the length of his body as he lay on the table and watched her bending over him. His hand stroked the backs of her thighs in the honeyed gloss of her tights, then caressed the broadened and tightened curve of her seat.

Presently his hands began to coax her, guiding Lesley to turn her hips so that she bent alongside the table as she sucked him, her head bowed to his loins and the rounded seat of the tights level with his face. As if submitting to a lovers entreaty, she shifted round without drawing her mouth from the young penis. The boy gave a sigh of contentment. Moving his head a little, he was now able to enjoy a close view of her erotic beauty as she tongued him. It was his first experience of a woman and the prospect he now enjoyed would haunt all his future desires.

Lesley presented herself to her young lovers eyes at no more than twelve inches' distance. The filmy veil of the tights was broadened and fully rounded at the rear by the maturity of the young woman bending to her task. The boy had shifted to enjoy the most intimate view of the firm globes of Lesley's pale bottom and the misty cleavage between them. Between the soft meeting of her upper thighs he saw the vaginal shape, like a finely cleft fruit.

His hands roved over the sheen of her tightly-clad backside and touched the warm feminine slit. Then he took the waistband of her panty-hose and drew the film of it down until she was stripped to mid-thigh. His lips touched the cool moon-pallor of Lesley's buttocks, browsing over them, moving down to kiss the sensitive vaginal flesh. The two men saw Lesley flinch away and then yield herself to the kisses after all.

The boys hands were no less busy. He stroked the light-haired cleft between her legs and explored with fascination the smooth yellower surface of Lesley's bottom-crack where the cheeks curved in towards her anus. She gave herself to these attentions without reserve, her eyes now closed in some reverie of her own as she mouthed his penis with more vigour. Like a child excited by a new toy, the boy played with her. Now, intrigued by the little details or her rear anatomy, his finger began to work its way against Lesley's arsehole. At this she pulled away with a little sound of protest, though not letting the tool slip from her mouth. The two men who were watching laughed.

"Is it modesty or fright?" one of them asked. "We shall see presently."

The boy gave another cry and, pressing his lips to Lesley's thighs, allowed his penis to begin spurting in her mouth. She tried to draw away but the man who had first forced her head down now held it so that the boy was able to flood her tongue with his sperm. The two men held Lesley expertly, closing her mouth with a hand and pinching her nostrils, as if she were a child again, being made to take her medicine.

"She must swallow her gruel," the first man said. They held her until they saw by the movements of her throat that Lesley had swallowed the boy s sperm, despite the insult to her code of feminine dignity.

After that it was the first man alone who took the young woman to the room where she was to be thrashed. With her wrists strapped together in front of her, there was little she could do to resist, even had she chosen to.

The room itself appeared to match Mano's description of the wardens study. Though the windows were not barred it had the look of such institutional places, its walls distempered green below and white above, the dark wooden furniture chipped and stained. At the centre of the room stood a black horsehair sofa with no arms or back but a padded leather roll which had been fastened across its centre.

As if she had been one of the prison-farm delinquents, the guard took Lesley by the hair at her nape again and pushed her face-down on the firm horsehair with the leather roll under her belly. It seemed that the bleak and functional surroundings, the suggestion of sadistic punishments given without pity—cold and impersonal—broke her nerve at last. She tried to twist away and stand up. But the guard seized her strapped wrists and buckled them to the forward edge of the sofa-frame. Lesley might writhe and struggle as much as she liked but she would never break free of the padded horsehair on which she was to be thrashed.

Regaining her composure a little, she lay over the leather roll in her short white sweater and her panty-tights. She twisted on to her side a moment but only in order to see what the man who had brought her there was doing. He closed the door, then turned her over so that Lesley lay bottom-upwards over the leather bolster, the swell of her seat made fuller and broader.

Lying there in her short white sweater and translucent tights, Lesley tensed herself against his exploration of her. But he took the elastic waistband of the tights themselves and peeled the sleek film from her. The sheen of pale flesh on Lesley's bottom-cheeks and hips seemed prouder and fuller as it was freed from this confinement.

Opening a drawer the man took out a wad of cloth and a short strap of black leather. As she lay on her belly with her wrists fastened to the forward frame, Lesley twisted the high crown of her urchin-crop and watched him. She shook her fringe clear and her blue eyes and firm chin had all the resentment of a sulky little girl. He strapped her bare legs together just above her knees and pulled the hem of the singlet up at the back, well clear of the fully-curved cheeks of the young wife's bottom. The wad of cloth was a gag, and though she twisted her head wildly to avoid it, he pressed it into her mouth and secured it by another thin strap, between her teeth, which buckled behind her head.

He left Lesley twisting from side to side but unable to free her legs of the strap, while he went into the adjoining room. When he came back he was carrying a small bottle of green liquid soap which stood customarily by the hand-basin.

Sitting on the edge of the sofa, he pressed Lesley's buttocks apart, despite her efforts to tense them together. He stroked her anus with his finger, as if to assure her of what he was going to do. At the same time, he avoided any contact with the cleft vaginal shape between the rear of her thighs, as if he wished to prevent her pleasure.

For five or ten minutes his fingers played between Lesley's buttocks, slyly taunting her by the lingering sensations in that area. She still watched him over her shoulder but when he looked up at her he saw only dismay in the blue eyes which had once been so dismissive.

"Did you never allow your husband or your boyfriends to see your arsehole, Lesley?" he said, speaking directly to her for the first time, "I promise you that you will be made to show it here. When we have a young married woman of your sort we make it the centre of our interest in her."

He tipped the bottle and poured a little of the green liquid soap on to her anus, the scent of it heavy in the warm room. Lesley gave a wild mewing cry into her gag as his forefinger pressed and entered her backside to the knuckle. He withdrew, poured a little pool of the slippery liquid and then inserted finger once more, lubricating her as deeply as he could. As he stood up and put the bottle away, Lesley compressed her buttocks quickly and her strapped thigh tensed together.

The man found a sardonic amusement in the sight of the young woman trying to contain the disturbance which the slippery liquid had provoked inside her. Then he opened another drawer and took out a sheaf full-plate photographic prints. As if he were dealing a deck of cards, he laid these out on a low table at the head of the sofa, so that Lesley should have them before her eyes. As he stood aside, it seemed that the sight of the pictures curbed even her squirmings of unease.

All but three of the photographs were of Lesley herself, evidently taken during the last months of her married life but without her knowing. They showed her in her sweater and pair of jeans, or the black cotton coolie suit, working in the garden. There was no indication of who had taken the pictures. Some showed her standing in an appealingly thoughtful mood with her head bowed or her eyes looking at some object in the distance. Others were taken with a sense of grotesque mockery. The latter, selected by a voyeur of a sadistic genius, had been carefully taken from behind as she bent tightly to weed the flower-bed or clip the verge. In one of them, the man with the camera had made it appear that Lesley was offering the fullest spread of her behind in her tightened jeans as she bent unawares to clip the grass. In another, she bent over in the thin cotton trousers of the black coolie-suit, legs braced apart and knees bent a little. The camera had caught every detail. It showed the fully rounded cheeks of Lesley's bottom in this posture, the maturing effects of childbearing imparting to her the look of an Amazon soldier-girl caught bending. The parting of her buttocks, her bottom-crack, even her soft vaginal flesh were clearly shaped by the thin black cloth.

There were three more photographs of a girl who might have been at the dawn of her teens. Her brown hair was tied at the nape. The slight sulkiness of her pale face, most of all the cast of her firm features showed her relationship to Lesley beyond all doubt. Indeed, as the young woman's eyes fell on these pictures, it seemed that the full shock of them took several seconds to register.

The first picture showed the girl looking forlornly at the camera as she took down a pair of white briefs. To judge from the white blouse and tie which she still wore, these were part of her school uniform. In the second shot, the young nymph was bending over a schoolroom desk, reluctantly presenting her innocent young buttocks, while she turned her imploring eyes upon the man behind her. With tight-lipped resolve, he was measuring the cane across her bare bottom. The last picture was one of adolescent frenzy, the mouth distended and eyes frantic, legs and hips twisting, the nymph s young backside plentifully marked by the cane and about to be marked again.

While Lesley stared in dismay at these photographs the man unbuttoned his erection. It was clear from her state of shock that the photographs themselves were not the worst. She had been watched by men who planned her slavery long before she realised her own inclinations. The caning of her daughter under the pretext of moral discipline had been arranged for the enjoyment of the same men who coveted Lesley as a slave.

The guard s erection was hard as carved ivory when he knelt astride Lesley's strapped thighs and parted the young wife's buttocks. The pale curve of her bottom was well emphasised by the leather bolster over which she lay. He guided his knob to Lesley's anus and entered her arse at a single thrust, its tightness well-lubricated by the liquid soap. The ruthless stretching and penetration made her cry out as he pressed himself at full length. But now that he had impaled her, the man knew that she would not dare risk damage to herself by struggling to resist him.

He kissed the side of Lesley s neck and her ear, whispering to her as he buggered her, playing on the ambiguity of her erotic feelings...

"Your lovers should have made you feel the length and weight of a tool in your arse, Lesley. Were they too meek to make you suffer the indignity? What fools they were! No man can master a disdainful young woman of your sort unless he demands this ultimate submission. This is how slave-girls are fucked, Lesley. In the arse."

He moved in and out with a vigorous rhythm, feeling the smooth pallor of Lesley's bottom-cheeks curving into his loins. From time to time she tightened on him with the instinctive fear of such deep penetration.

"Does it frighten you a little, Lesley? You feel how easily a man can turn your pleasure into punishment when he sodomises you?" Once his knob is deep in your backside and your arsehole is stretched round the root of his stiffness, you have no choice!"

With greater energy he made her feel the length of his bulky cock, deep and heavy in her bottom, until Lesley cried out with still greater alarm. He smiled as he sodomised her.

"Look at the photographs again, Lesley. It fascinates you to see how they caned her, I think, despite your anger at it. She will be brought here as soon as the arrangements can be made, to be thrashed on this very sofa. Would you not secretly like to be present? A prison bamboo across the pert little cheeks of her pale bottom! Who could resist giving her a first real lesson with the training-lash? Leather on her elfin bum-cheeks!"

After this promise, he gave all his powers to completing the act of sodomy. Lying with his lips at her neck and ears, he worked his erection harder in Lesley s backside. The pulse in her throat was beating faster and he had no doubt that this perverse ravishing had stimulated the first unhealthy excitement in the sensitive areas of her behind.

"Lie still, Lesley," he whispered, "this is how your masters will use you in future. After your marriage another child would spoil you for them. Nature has unwillingly provided an answer to those bold enough to seize it. There can be no danger of you having a baby in your bottom, Lesley. Best of all, as you get easier between your legs, you remain tight here."

With that he released the first jet of his sperm into Lesley's backside, followed by a salvo of others, directed as deeply as possible in order that she should feel how completely he had flooded her. Presently he withdrew from her, seeing Lesley's anus go urgently small and tight as the limp penis slid from it.

Without another word, he picked up the photographs, removed the gag from her mouth and unstrapped her legs. Then he buttoned himself and abandoned her, with her wrists still strapped to the frame. Sprawling bottom-upwards over the leather bolster, humid with the exertion of her ordeal, Lesley was left to her chastiser. Her hips, her bottom and her legs were bare, the hem of the white seater drawn up to her waist. As she shifted on the black horsehair, as if to ease the lingering sensations of ravishing round her anus, the cleft little apricot-shape of her vagina appeared forlorn and unattended between the rear of her legs. The warden chose to leave the young woman waiting for half an hour, tensing and shifting on the sofa in the cold apprehension of the pain to be inflicted on her. Lesley was to be brought to such desperation that she almost longed to have her thrashing so that it would be done with. Yet her masters intended also that the cheeks of Lesley's bottom should crawl with fearful anticipation at the approach of her chastiser.

When the warden entered at last he neither spoke to her nor even looked in her direction. He was a burly man in his fifties who behaved with an impersonal and yet callous air. Indifferent alike to Lesley's screams and writhing, he had no desire but to administer a sadistic thrashing to the arrogant and promiscuous young woman. If he was excited by the knowledge that the young wife's boyishly cropped hair was matched by the erotically mature bottom-cheeks of a sexually experienced beauty, he concealed such lechery from her.

On the table by the sofa he laid a vicious bamboo cane whose use would have been prohibited except within prison walls. To this he added the cruellest kind of birch-rod whose four long switches had been well-soaked in brine. Finally there was a leather whip with a stout handle and a short tail of woven snakeskin.

The cane was quite three feet long and supple as a rapier. He picked it up, while Lesley watched him, the blue eyes under her parted fringe now expectant yet scared. He walked round behind her to look down at the swell of her pale bottom-cheeks over the black leather bolster. She tensed as he touched the bamboo lightly across her bare backside, choosing a stroke this way and then another, across the backs of her thighs, and even behind her knees.

He stood back and made her wait, though the sofa springs shifted a little as she tightened her legs and tried to contain herself in her burgeoning fear. He raised the cane and brought it down with savage energy across the full pale curves of Lesley's bottom.

The agony of it seemed to catch her with such intensity as to paralyse all movement and all sound. Without respite he thrashed her again and yet again, the lashing strokes of bamboo each imparting its pain before the agony of the earlier ones had swollen to a climax.

Lesley screamed as the cane whipped across her backside yet again. To be thrashed like a prison-farm boy by the warden was to endure a sadism greater than anything she had imagined. He shifted his stance a little, his lips tight and eyes showing the intensity of his zeal. Watching her keenly to see where the stripes hurt her most, he thrashed with all his strength across the fullest curve of Lesley's bottom-cheeks and then lower down, just above the soft meeting of her arse and thighs.

Hers were not the abrupt, sudden cries forced from a girl at each cut of the whip. Lesley screamed without respite, shrieking at the warden to spare her or, at least, to allow her a minute, even a few seconds, before the thrashing continued.

He ignored this. Expert in his use of the cane, he aimed it across the faint crease which marked the division of Lesley's bottom-cheeks and thighs. She cried out at the stroke and, without compunction, he measured the cane across the same stripe again.

Already her self-control was broken. The prospect of a second stroke of the bamboo across the smarting stripe was more than she could bear. With her wrists strapped and no other means of avoiding such pain, Lesley began to kick and struggle with her legs.

He caned the back of her thighs with a yet more savage stroke, and then another. Lesley possessed thighs so long and trim that the temptation to such cruelty was strong. He thrashed her legs with sharp and accurate strokes. Twice, high up and just under the swell of her bottom-cheeks, he raised vivid weals. He drew a speck of blood just above her knees and then caned her twice across the backs of her knees themselves. Though she screamed and howled like a schoolgirl having her first smacking, Lesley was no longer kicking like a wicked child but only twisting her hips as she cried out in her ordeal. Yet the warden habitually prolonged the punishment on such unruly legs. He settled down to give Lesley a sound thrashing across her calves, the backs of her knees and the rear of her thighs. Twenty or thirty vivid weals were the result of this, some already swollen and others showing pinpricks of blood.

He paused at last, as if before returning to the main area of punishment, while Lesley lay squirming and weeping over the leather bolster. There was no doubt that the warden had subdued her struggles. The weals across her legs would make walking painful for the next day or two. To kick and struggle any longer was almost an impossibility. The gaoler flexed his cane.

"Get properly forward over the leather roll," he said dispassionately, "Swell your bottom-cheeks out to be cut by the whip!"

She pulled forward a little, looking back at him, her eyes brimming entreatingly with tears, her mouth a tragic mime. His lips tightened. He lashed the cane across that same crease of bottom and thighs which he had marked before. Lesley gave a short yelping cry and contracted her arse-cheeks hard as if to contain the smart. Perspiration dewed her pale back in the humid night and the man who was beating her could hear her smooth bare belly slithering on the leather bolster as she writhed.

A vivid crimson stripe now burnt low down across the young wife's buttocks. The warden measured the bamboo upon it, taking aim.

"Don't cane me there again," Lesley cried, "Please!"

With his teeth set, he raised the switch and brought it down with cruel precision, turning the stripe into a darker swollen weal. Lesley screamed and jammed one knee into the back of the other as she squirmed in her torment. Twisting her backside from side to side under the bamboo, she caused its cheeks to part, showing the glistening sheen of unwiped soap round her anus, the lubrication used to sodomise her. The few stray hairs near Lesley's arsehole were pressed wetly on the yellower skin by the slippery moisture.

"Keep your arse still, Lesley," said the warden gruffly, "you're not a little girl any longer. After seven years of marriage and two children, you can take a real thrashing—and so you shall."

He touched the cane across the raised weal low down across her buttocks, whipping her there and then again. Ignoring Lesley's hysterical cries, he looked and saw that several red droplets had risen from the weal and were trickling down the backs of her thighs. Even in her present plight, resentment was mingled with self-pity in Lesley's cry as she turned her face to him pleadingly.

"You've made my bottom bleed!" she sobbed, "I've been punished enough..."

He slid his finger between her buttocks and stroked the warm moist soapiness in Lesley's bottom-crack.

"Prison-farm thrashings always draw blood," he said, "not once but a dozen times. In the case of a young woman's bottom, much more than that."

He bamboo'd her without pity until more than a dozen weals had been raised, each by several strokes of the cane. In her madness, Lesley tried to get down from the sofa, for she was still held only by her wrist-straps. But her leg slipped so that one foot went either side of the sofa and she now presented her rear view to her chastiser, bending forward astride the horsehair padding, her thighs spread and buttocks parted.

He at once put down the cane and picked up the whip with its short tail of woven leather. He cracked the lash across Lesley's twenty-eight-year-old bottom in such a way that it clung to her rear cheeks, its tip curling agonisingly between them Once again the intensity of the impact seemed to paralyse her for an instant. Pleased at her predicament, the warden whipped her hard and quickly, skinning Lesley's bottom-crack a little more with each of seven strokes.

At last he allowed her to lower herself crying over the leather bolster once more. Those prudish neighbours and acquaintances who thought Lesley a young whore for her conduct to her husband and children had often recommended a good spanking or even a whipping for her. Even the most severe of them would have been well pleased by the spectacle she offered now, her backside tapestried by the weals of the cane and the red curling cuts of the whip. She could scarcely bear a breath upon her punished bottom and, even had it been permitted, the thought of wearing tights or jeans would have made her shudder.

However, the warden now picked up the prison birch-rod. As though the punishment had not begun, he said, "Lie forward a little more, Lesley. I want your bottom-cheeks more fully rounded for the next thirty-six strokes."

In her panic she failed to obey him, but it mattered little. He birched her with vindictive energy until Lesley's bottom-cheeks were red as peeled tomatoes. The buds of the birch switches had patterned her buttocks with the smudged beads of blood.

When he put down the birch, it was only to pick up the cane again. He continued the thrashing until Lesley had disgraced herself thoroughly over the sofa cushions and the stimulus of smelling salts had been required twice.

Only then did he leave her, without a word, to be unfastened and led away by the two guards. It was now past midnight and the vaulted passageways of the reformatory building were deserted, though still brightly lit. They led the young woman back to the car, carrying her tights and jeans, allowing her to wear only the short white sweater which left her bare below the waist. At the car one of them spoke to the driver.

"This snooty young bitch enjoyed having a smacked bottom. She kicked and squealed loudly enough for the entire prison to hear!"

The driver smiled and took his place. As the two guards helped the young woman into the back of the car, for her legs still trembled from the beating, they added a final tribute. Fastening her wrist-straps to the metal handle on the far side of the seat, they tightened a belt round her waist. To this they attached a woman's false pony-tail of hair. It was mounted on a cigar-sized base, which they inserted in Lesley's anus. The tail ran up and under her belt in a graceful curve, the wedge held securely in her bottom by a cord under her legs and up her belly. As she lay on the leather car-seat her legs drawn up and her back to them, gazing round at them over her shoulder, one of them pinned a handprinted card to the back of her sweater. Her full name was written upon it and underneath the description: 'A Well-Trained Filly."

With this sardonic farewell, the car turned and drove through the guarded archway into the moonlit lanes. After a mile or two, the driver pulled in to the verge. He opened the rear door and looked at Lesley as she lay there on her side, displaying the welts and bruises on her buttocks and thighs, the toy pony-tail curving up out of her arsehole, its hair falling over her bare flank.

He beckoned her to look back over her shoulder, which she did. Then he aimed the camera and took a dozen photographs of this intriguing composition. There was no doubt that he would find a ready market among men who supplied such photographs to a discerning public. The fact that Lesley's name was given on the card pinned to her back, and that she was turning her face to the camera, added to the piquancy of the subject. The driver grinned at her, sensing her excitement in being photographed like this. Why else did she not turn her face away? Indeed, as he took the last few photographs, Lesley drew one knee a little higher as if unaware of offering a partial view of her vagina and a glimpse of her darker bottom-crack.

Anton made no demands on her after her return, judging it best to allow her tranquility and thought. The next day she kept to her bedroom, which was often the case with a young woman who had been so soundly thrashed.

On the promenade, in yellow sunlight filtered by the thundercloud, the men in light suits and panama hats, the women in their tailored dress or beach trousers, strolled between the camelia gardens and the slack tide. Meena, the Asian girl, rode past in her open car, the driver recognisable as the man who had taken Lesley to her rendezvous. But Meena with her white print dress and parasol had the air of one who was—as yet—the mistress rather than the slave.

Anton turned and walked softly across the pale carpet to the wall dividing him from Lesley's room. Though he allowed her enough privacy, a slave-girl is never to be unobserved. Opening a door which might have concealed a wall-cupboard, he revealed a mirror giving him a full view of the next room.

He watched with some unease. Young women of Lesley's kind were so deeply divided in their personalities that it was impossible to be sure until the last moment which of their urges would prove the stronger. Lesley was a snooty and self-willed bitch with a profound excitement at the thought of being mastered and abused. She was also a sexually selfish and arrogant girl in whom disdain for the male sex might after all vanquish every other desire. It was this contradiction in her which obsessed Antons thoughts and made him wish for her a slavery more absolute and even humiliating than any she could yet imagine.

With these thoughts in his mind, he spied upon her and saw his doubts resolved.

Lesley had woken earlier and then slept again. Now she had woken again and was arranging the triple mirrors on either side of the room, as if for her use in dressing. She wore only the short white sweater in which they had laid her down, trembling and exhausted after her ordeal.

At that moment she stood with her head bowed in thought and her back to Anton. He saw the mass of bruises, blue to oyster brown, which covered her buttocks and the backs of her legs. Here and there the red tracery showed where the birch or the whip had cut her.

Using the mirror, she picked up the card which described her as a well-trained filly and pinned it again to the back of her white sweater. She tightened the belt round her waist and then went back to the bed. Lying on her side with her rear to the mirror, she dipped the butt of the pony-tail into the jar of vaseline on the bedside table. Then she cautiously inserted it in her anus, watching herself all the time in the mirror. Presently, holding her hands as if they were strapped together in front of her, she lay just as she had done in the car on the return journey.

On this occasion, however, she was a blatant admirer of her own humiliation as she lay, watching her reflection over her shoulder. One of her hands moved caressingly down her own belly, the fingers entering between her thighs. Then, lost in contemplation of the rear view she offered herself in the the glass, Lesley began to masturbate, breathing through parted lips.

Anton smiled, knowing beyond doubt which half of her paradoxical personality would triumph now. Whatever powers might be possessed by Lesley the liberated young woman with the dismissive manner, the lures of Eros would betray them all.

Presently she got up and drew the long low table before the mirrors. Across its centre she put the pillows from the bed to represent the leather bolster on the wardens sofa. Then she knelt on the table and lowered herself, face-down, into the position in which she had been sadistically thrashed the night before.

Anton watched her closely. Once again Lesley gasped in panic and twisted, as if straining against her straps. Yet her hands were folded under her loins. As she viewed herself in the mirrors Lesley's fingers began to stroke gently over her clitoris.

Anton turned away and knew that Lesley had crossed the last frontier. Now she was both Lesley the whipped girl but also Lesley who shared the sadists' pleasure of seeing herself whipped. When she was next flogged the pleasures of the torturer and the tortured would ensnare her equally. In a few months more, her submission to her masters would be absolute.


PART TWO - COTE SAUVAGE

CHAPTER SIX

A group of travellers in which the number of women exceeds the men, necessarily excites curiosity.

Their precise sleeping arrangements and the nature of the intimacy between them plagues the bourgeois imagination.

One man alone with three young women, sitting at a hotel dining-table in the evening, formed a natural subject of scrutiny by the other guests. Anton was unconcerned by such speculations. The silent spectators of their meal would perhaps conclude that Lesley was his mistress, Debby her younger sister, and Meena their servant.

He had chosen western France as the place of Lesley's subjugation. Anjou and the Loire, the flat pastures of the Vendee, the river gorges beyond Bordeaux, were rich in the ancient romance of whipped brides and virgins put to rape. To him, the drama of Lesley's suffering would be the more vivid when her screams were overlaid by the boom of ocean surf at night beyond the garden wall of the shuttered cottage.

His ambitions for the arrogant and promiscuous young woman went far beyond such things. After a few months of being trained by Meena and himself there would occur a moment when Lesley's slavery must become absolute. After that her protests and refusals would be unavailing. Mano had made the necessary arrangements. High among the gorges of a secret river was a house whose doors were locked against the world outside, a place from which no girl emerged except in the company of the men who possessed her. Anton anticipated the pleasure of seeing Lesley thrashed and penetrated while flame-light played on the ancient stone of baronial vaulting. There would be nights on the high verandah when they made her lie naked on the low table, the men drawing their chairs round to watch her perform with herself or with one of the other girls, Kim or Trudi, Maggie or Debby. There would be nights when Lesley was lost in gasping abandonment to such pleasures, and nights when her screams withdrew her consent to the ordeals of slavery. But her consent would be irrelevant by then and the world outside would see her no more.

Even now, Lesley was doubly a prisoner in a land whose language she spoke and understood so little. The people of that western coast, with its remote villages and vast ocean sky above flat alluvial soil, were a reserved and indifferent race. If tears flooded the young woman's eyes, if the wilful mouth quivered in entreaty, they might remark the fact with amusement or excitement—but nothing more. The tale of an errant wife being escorted back to her outraged husband would move these primitive villagers only to assist her captors.

As Anton stroked Lesley's fair hair, kissing her lips, her neck, her breasts, during their last night in England, he knew that she would plead and weep in the weeks to come. Her curiosity to taste the pleasures of slavery would not make pain the less when it was inflicted. She would try to withdraw her agreement, to negate the promises given now. Yet Lesley had also promised at the outset that such contradiction or withdrawal was not to be permitted.

Lesley had made her promise when both Meena and Anton were with her, and while Meena masturbated her. Only in such a state of excitement, riding her loins gently on the Asian girls fingers, was Lesley's true desire expressed. Now she was to live in reality a life whose fantasies had excited her increasingly for several years past.

The car which took Anton and the three young women to their destination was the same black limousine which had brought Lesley to the scene of her judicial thrashing. This time it was Anton who drove it as they began their summer journey on the long switchback roads of the Normandy bocage. Scattered farms and grey villages, lay between wooded hills, the long fields sloping to hidden valleys and quiet streams. From the centre of a little market-town on a hill-top rose the cathedral-like spire of a gothic church, built to celebrate the revival of piety after years of revolution. Its storeyed windows stood, row upon row, like the flank of a walled fortress.

Turning off the long undulating road, they began the westward drive, the landscape flatter and the sky more vast. Hedges of tall poplars hushed the breeze with their soft movements. It was a country of manorial farms with high courtyard walls in the meal-coloured stone of ancient building. Round turret towers with their conical roofs stood at the corner of each manor house, windowless below the slits high in their walls. The blind walls of the towers woke suggestions of their interiors, places of arcane mediaeval ceremonies and torments. Light from the slits high above fell on iron rings set in the stone of inner walls, where footsteps echoed softly as water drops.

Meena's almond eyes moved with a quick excitement. She leant forward, now that the dividing screen had been removed, and spoke close to Antons ear.

"Lesley must see where Maggie was taken. We must tell her what they did to their slaver."

It was several weeks since any of them had seen the rather stocky young window-dresser with her hard pale features and lank blond hair. The mention of her name evoked that last image of her at work in white cotton trousers and red sleeveless blouse, a girl of the people in a window display of luxuries.

Ignoring her young Asian mistress, Lesley turned to Anton.

"What happened to her?" she asked softly, "Tell me."

Silencing her for a moment, Anton slowed the car presently by a high-walled manor-house behind whose locked gates the guard-dogs barked.

"She was brought here," he said, "several weeks ago."

Meena laughed at this.

"Tonight," she said, smiling wickedly, "Tonight we shall tell Lesley the rest. When she is in the mood for it!"

They drove in silence for a while. Debby, who sat with Lesley on the back seat, slid her arm round the young woman's waist and hugged her closer. The girls dark eyes and pretty face were turned to Lesley with the same adoration that had marked their first love. As if indifferent to this show of affection, Lesley turned her head slightly and stared at the passing landscape. But Debby kissed the young wife's neck and cheek softly, murmuring" and pleading until Lesley smiled, turning her mouth and meeting Debby s lips with hers.

Glancing in the mirror, Anton saw that Debby had opened her mouth in invitation to Lesley's tongue and was now receiving it with loving caresses of her own. She glanced down only to undo the front of Lesley's jeans and slip her hand into the opening. Through the thin film of the panty-tights, she fondled the soft vaginal flesh.

"You like to masturbate Lesley, don't you Debby?" Meena said quietly, "Are you still so shy of using your mouth between her legs while we watch you? Never fear, I shall cure you both of such bashfulness."

As the sun struck lower across the rich pastureland, Lesley whispered something to Meena. It was evident that Debby s fingering, apart from its excitement of her sexual nerves, had also made the young woman want to release a torrent long held in.

"We should stop soon," Meena said to Anton, "Lesley needs to ease herself a little."

Anton nodded. He drew up a mile or two outside a village, just as the sun faded on the horizon and the summer twilight of moth and bat began to deepen. He had chosen a place which would be avoided by the villagers at such an hour. Beyond the roadside verge, far from any other building, a plain grey wall rose high above their heads, enclosing the village cemetery. The tomb-houses and monuments stood obscurely in the dusk, among tall grass and the tiny glass fire of red or white funeral lamps placed at the tomb gratings. The drab stonework of the wall was patched by the layered scraps of posters, peeled and discoloured by months of sun. A circus bill with a roaring tiger, a black-lettered political proclamation, the announcements of a sale and a horse-race. At the far end of the burial ground, black spears of cypress rose against the first pale flush of starlight.

Anton took Debby and led her away down the twilit road a little, so that she should not see what Meena did to Lesley. Debby hesitated and looked back many times, like an awkward child who obeys reluctantly.

Meena took Lesley to the wrought-iron gates which were securely locked. At her command the slave unfastened her jeans and then stepped out of them, finally pulling off her tights as well. The Asian girl made her stand against the iron bars of the gate, facing them.

"Spreadeagle yourself, Lesley," she said, "Arms and legs wide apart."

When the command had been obeyed, Meena strapped the young woman's wrists and ankles in this position.

"Arch your hips back a little, Lesley," she said. When this command had been obeyed also, she fastened a sprung car-cushion between her victims loins and the gate so that Lesley was compelled to remain with her hips jutting backward. Meena smiled at the sight, pulling the sweater-hem above Lesley's bare waist. The bob of her sleek black hair, the neat cruel face with its soft roundness, its high-boned cheeks and almond eyes came close and kissed Lesley's neck. Meena's fingers began to stroke teasingly between the pale thighs of the older girl. Repeatedly she tickled the little fountain-hole. Presently, Lesley gave a gasp and a soft cry which was partly a warning and partly a submission. Meena drew her hand away. She saw the firm pallor of Lesley's thighs grow tense. There was a pause, then a fluid whisper in the darkness and a scattering of drops on the dry grass between the wide-stretched legs. The cropped fair hair was bowed as the young wife hid her face, not to see Meena watching her. But Meena watched all the same, her almond eyes unblinking. Once or twice it seemed as if Lesley tried to check the flow, to cut short her public performance of so private an act. Yet once the flood escaped her, it proved impossible to halt until the last drop had fallen.

When Lesley had finished, Meena took a handkerchief, folded it, and made the woman take it in her mouth as a wad to silence her. Putting on a glove, Meena pulled up a handful of grass and dried her between the legs. Lesley, still spreadeagled against the iron bars with her bottom and hips thrust out, watched over her shoulder. She gave a stifled cry of protest when the Asian girl threw away the grass and plucked a spray of stinging nettles.

Meena s smile had gone. Her dark slanting eyes met Lesley's forlorn gaze enigmatically. She caressed the white thighs with her hand first. Then she touched the spiked leaves of the nettles to the limbs which strained at their leather bonds. She began at the backs of Lesley's knees, raising little clusters of white sting-blisters. She knew that the tingling smart was well within the capacity of a young married woman to bear. It was a light, burning pain, enhanced by a virulent irritation.

Lesley mewed urgently into her gag as Meena drew the nettles up the trimly-muscled thighs, continuing until both upper legs were suffused by a deep blush.

The firm maturity of Lesley's bottom-cheeks was irresistible. Meena stroked her there and on her hip-flanks until the pale slaves tautly broadened buttocks were scarlet, a hundred little sting-blisters showing on the pain-flushed cheeks of Lesley's arse.

Meena's slim fingers pulled the white sweater up and undid the breast-halter. She brushed the soft globes of Lesley s breasts with the nettles, smiling as she felt the nipples grow stiff despite the stifled cries.

There was a moments respite while the wicked young mistress picked fresh nettles. The spreadeagled fair-skinned victim struggled harder still against her straps, knowing what must come next. Meena smiled and kissed Lesley's neck again, taunting her.

"What a mistake it would be to overlook the most interesting part of your bottom, Lesley. Between the cheeks!"

Despite the tensings and twistings, Meena stroked the nettles easily on the smooth skin of Lesley s bottom-crack, for her buttocks were pulled wide apart by the jut of her hips. This part of the ordeal was greatly prolonged with an almost childish enjoyment of such playful cruelty on Meena's part. When it seemed that it must be over, the golden-skinned mistress took a fresh spray and heard a new pitch in the muffled shrillness as she touched the spiked nettle-leaves to Lesley's anus.

"Your bottom quite still!" Meena's reprimand was in earnest but the amusement remained in her tone. "Did you think we should overlook your arsehole, Lesley? What cries there will be when the turn of your soft pink pussy-flesh comes!"

That turn soon came. Meena first pressed the nettle stems into Lesley's anus so that the spray remained between her buttocks, brushing her with a new sting-rash at each sudden jerk of her hips. Taking a fresh bunch, Meena stroked the inner surfaces of Lesley's thighs and the secret cleft of her vaginal lips. It was significant that the young woman's shrill cries had now sunk to soft moans and sighs, perhaps because the smart of the netties already tormenting her allowed of little increase. Yet Meena knew that as the scorching rash plagued her, so would a growing itch in the parts tormented.

At last the young mistress had finished. She unfastened the slave from the iron bars of the gate.

"Dress yourself, Lesley. Unless you wish to have the stings repeated, you will say nothing of this to Debby. If you choose to disobey that order, then little Deborah herself shall squeal under the nettles!"

Meena smiled again as she watched Lesley pull on her tights and jeans, with many a catch in her breath as the silky mesh pressed on the scalding soreness of the nettle stings. They drove through the dusk to the centre of the town, the timbered lodging of the Hotel du Vieux Chateau standing on the broad road which ran westward through the clustered buildings. It was a place of dark faces and suspicious glances, the uniformed girls in their black dresses and white aprons attending the dinner tables of the long salle a manger with peasant reserve and brusqueness.

Opposite the windows of the beamed dining-room, with its red-shaded lamps shining on white linen and the bottles of dark vintages, stood a broken tower and a gatehouse. It was the last home of a dead Second Empire poet, whose verse reflected the light of brandy and satanism in his eyes. His brain was a caserne of virgins put to martyrdom in sealed rooms; adulteries glimpsed at night through parted curtains in a strange town; dried candle-wax on a nude woman's thighs as she sprawled at dawn on the wrecked banquet-table where they had ravished and sodomised her.

An hour later, the four travellers retired up the broad stone stairway to their two double rooms. From these windows they looked upon the after-dinner twilight which turned the trees to black and gleamed upon the mirror shards of tranquil river backwaters. Fields of young wheat and grass lay pale in the gloaming as pastures of the moon.

Lesley protested with sulky little phrases and sounds as they brought her to the old-fashioned bed with its polished brass rails and wide feather-mattress. But Anton and Meena drew her down, causing hardly a struggle for all the virulent smarting and itching of her nettle stings. Meena was wise in such matters and knew well some of the purposes for which nettles had been traditionally used.

Anton strapped the young woman's wrists to the post at the top corner of the bed as Lesley lay on her side facing him. Meena ran a handkerchief under the tap, wadded it into Lesley s mouth and secured it with a gag-strap. They undid her skirts and took them down but had privately agreed to leave her tights on. Blushing so brightly from the sting-rash, the sight of her thighs and buttocks, her vaginal lips and anal cleft, might have deterred Debby from playing with the young woman if she had been able to see them clearly. Buy the honeyed film of the tights concealed the deepness of the blush and the gag in Lesley's mouth made every cry or moan an ambiguous syllable of pleasure or suffering.

Meena strapped Lesley's ankles together, then made her draw her knees up until she lay on her side in a squatting posture. When the ankle strap itself was pinioned to the bed-frame, the young wife had no alternative to offering herself like this. With her knees drawn up close to her breasts, Lesley presented the fullest spread of her buttocks, thighs and hips to Debby who sat behind her on the mattress.

While her body from the waist to the knees still smarted and itched from the nettle stings, Lesley was to be masturbated. In the days of her marriage, when she must play with herself on the bed in the long, deserted afternoons, it seemed she had drawn out the pleasure to exceptional lengths. Anton and Meena were more exacting. Not for them the furtive self-excitement of a little girl who brings herself to a pitch quickly and guiltily before pulling up her knickers and rearranging her dress. They made Lesley masturbate hour after hour, through one climax after another.

Meena paused, admiring the backward squat with which the young married woman presented herself to Debby. The gusset of the tights bulged a little with the fullness of the pubic flesh. The stretched posture broadened the tops of the thighs suggestively. The firm mounds of Lesley's bottom-cheeks had the full roundness of erotic maturity which was at its peak at her age and condition, Meena laughed.

"Even Mano cannot be jealous of the fun your husband had with you, Lesley. It was a husband s penis and spouting sperm that made you carry such a charming daughter in your belly. You may be sure we dream of the day when you shall make a pair for some discerning master. It was your children who gave your thighs and hips their taut maturity. And your husband s sperm also caused that state which gave you such proud young bottom-cheeks!"

Anton turned up the lamp close to the pillow where Lesley had cushioned her head. He spoke to Debby.

"Play with Lesley," he said calmly, "You shall do it through her tights. Unless you would rather see her thrashed with the dog-whip."

The last threat was spoken as if it were a joke. Debby, with her wide innocent eyes and soft lashes needed little persuasion before obeying. She snuggled down behind Lesley on the bed, her face level with the squat of the young woman's hips and upper thighs. Debby s fingers touched the tormentingly sensitive flesh of the female cleft through the translucent tights. Lesley jerked uncontrollably in her straps, a sharp cry penetrating her gag.

"You see how ready she is for it tonight, Debby?" Meena said, "Make love to her, my dear."

Debby did so. Though her fingers played gently, the torture of being rubbed where she was smarting so fiercely forced more trapped sound from Lesley's throat. Yet the stings were also itching from the virulence of the little blisters, an irritation which was both appeased and then increased by Debby s fondling.

"Use your other hand at the same time, Debby," said Anton quietly, "Play with Lesley's arsehole."

Debby s wide innocent face blushed a little at this, but her fingers began to play up and down the seat of the tights, pressing more deeply into Lesley's bottom-crack which closed on them in an instinctive convulsion of soreness. Whatever her doubts, Debby's wide eyes under her charming fringe of golden-brown hair showed that she sensed Lesley's predicament.

At the same time there was no doubt that Lesley's natural lubrication was beginning to gather on the filmy mesh of the tights. She moaned and whimpered into her gag, her soft pubic flesh scalded by the nettles so that it shrank from. Debby s eager caresses, yet possessed by such a virulent itch that it yearned for the tickling of the young fingers, the pressure of the hands and the light friction of the fingernails themselves.

Meena aided a little by cupping and squeezing the weight of Lesley's breasts. Here, too, though the soreness of the stings had made them tender, the irritation had maintained the erection of the nipples.

After only a few minutes, Lesley's eyes closed in a dream of bliss and she rode her cunt lasciviously upon Debby's fingers, while still making little whimpering sounds at her own tenderness. Yet the very soreness seemed to precipitate the orgasm of this furtively masochistic young woman. Lesley's hips moved faster and she made short gutteral cries into her gag. A final spasm and release shook her as she scaled the summit of her pleasure in a few moments.

Debby paused, but Meena intervened, allowing no respite as she began to masturbate Lesley again at once, with every skill of her perverse oriental fingers. Employing an intuitive sense of feminine erotic responses, Meena made the young woman climax a second time within a few minutes. Then she settled down to play with Lesley in a more prolonged manner, not allowing her to achieve her orgasm easily, though Lesley moaned into her gag to be brought to that luxury of release.

Now it was Anton who added to Lesley's morbid excitement. As Meena stroked her between the legs and buttocks, and Lesley rode the slim brown fingers like a saddle, Anton took a volume of photographs and showed her the story of Maggie. It was not done merely to thrill Lesley with the horror of Maggie's fate but as an anticipation of what lay in store for the promiscuous young wife herself.

As Lesley sighed and squirmed on Meena's masturbating fingers, the Asian girl lay close behind her, kissing Lesley's face and neck, urging her to look at the pages of photographs which Anton turned.

"See the first pictures that Solon took of Maggie," Meena whispered, "Before she knew him or guessed his interest in her. She was photographed secretly, as you were with your children in the garden, without knowing it. Maggie at seventeen arranging the trinkets in the shop window. Pale oval face with firm young features—blue eyes with mascara'd lashes... Golden Blond hair hanging loose like a child's to her shoulder-blades." Meena's fingers slid in the slippery wetness with which Lesley was bedewing her tights.

"Look at Maggie, sitting so charmingly on her heels in the store window, with no idea that the shutter was clicking. Always Maggie in the photographs, never Pat or Jennifer or the other girls. Now, see how he photographs her while she waxes the floor of the display case. Maggie on all fours in her pale blue jeans and singlet. The thighs a little stocky for a girl who is not very tall. The fall of her breasts in the singlet as she goes on hands and knees. Now from the rear. Maggie's bottom-cheeks nicely rounded and broadened in the tight jeans, the slight bulge of her pussy-flesh between her legs..." Anton turned the pages, showing how Solon had recorded every view and every stage of development in Maggie's life. She was shown when her hair was cut short and as she grew it to its former length. Maggie, so timid at seventeen, seemed so brazen now.

"You see?" Meena said softly, "It was not Mag who begged to be made a slave. Solon sensed something about her. He watched her carefully and wove his web. But Solon knew that she must be taken somewhere from which return was impossible, a place where her renunciations of slavery and submission would fall on deaf ears. There are auction-blocks where girls like Maggie are bought and sold."

Lesley shuddered in the excitement of being caressed. Her thighs began to make a rapid tensing rhythm on Meena's hand. Then she gave a soft cry and began to come again. The warm-skinned mistress paused only a few seconds as Lesley lay sweltering and exhausted in the warm room with its windows closed and its lamps burning. The humid feminine scents of Lesley's body mingled with the camphor and lavender of the linen.

As the minute ended, Meena's fingers began to manipulate the moist and hot vaginal lips in the gusset of the tights. Lesley gave a cry of resistance at being rubbed again in so tender and irritated a place. But her cry was ignored. At the same time, Meena moistened her other forefinger with saliva, rolled it in the soap dish by the bed, slid it under the waistband at the rear of the tights and gently inserted its length in Lesley's arse.

"Exercise your bottom on Meena's finger while she plays with you, Lesley," Anton said.

In her present state, Lesley had no power to resist. They saw her pale buttocks swell out and then contract in a slow, repeated motion, acknowledging her submission to the finger in her backside. She was so wet between the thighs that the slippery rubbing was now audible in the heat and stillness.

They continued to show her the photographs which recorded Maggie's progress. First there were some taken a few weeks earlier, showing the young woman as Lesley had last seen her at her work. At twenty-three, Maggie had a cruder and fuller sensuality, liable to provoke desire or cruelty in men of strong tastes. The features of her fair-skinned face seemed harder, though she still wore her golden blond hair loose like a child. She was dressed in the white summer trousers and the red sleeveless blouse which showed a suntan on her arms. She appeared a little short in the leg and slightly full at the hips, which would have been less evident in a taller girl.

Solon had photographed her several times, showing the distinct crease in the white trouser-seat under the curve of Maggie s buttocks. As she bent to her task with her back to the glass, she showed to the passers-by the fuller and rounder cheeks of her bottom. The tightened white cloth displayed the outline of Maggie's knickers, a pair of close-fitting briefs, for the world to see.

Then they came to the last pages of photographs in the album. Meena had played carefully between Lesley's thighs, not allowing the balloon of pleasure to burst in her loins however full it might swell. Now Meena was to keep Lesley at a pitch of excitement while she saw the pictures, without ever letting her spend herself until the young shopgirls torture was complete.

The photographs showed Maggie, still in the white trousers and red blouse, being led into the round stone tower which they had passed only a few hours before. It was the night when Solon had sold her into the slavery of a dark-skinned man who would take the twenty-three-year-old blonde to a remote Arabian palace where her body would be probed for the last spasm of pleasure which she might afford those who possessed her.

Either she had not realised the fate which awaited her or else Maggie revolted from the subjugation now demanded. The photographs showed her struggling with two of the men while a third undid and stripped off the white trousers. Maggie's knickers, the tight cotton briefs, came next.

"Be sensible, Lesley," Meena whispered, "Think how often those stones must have echoed to the same cries and struggles over the centuries. Village girls brought there to be whipped for their faults. One grows used to such pleading—and one ignores it!"

There was a wooden trestle fastened to the flagstones of the old tower, lit by the flame of torchlight from iron wall-brackets. The three men pushed Maggie to her knees and then strapped her down upon the length of the trestle, her wrists and arms pinned to the forward legs, her thighs to the rear ones.

The purchaser exercised his right to inspect the girl. He used a glass speculum to probe between her legs, sliding in and out a little until Maggie's blond hair flew this way and that, her head threshing in refusal to endure what she had to endure anyway. The man smiled and parted the pale broadened cheeks of Maggie's bottom. This time he inserted the speculum into her anus and drew it to and fro for a moment until he was satisfied.

Meena kissed Lesley's bare back.

"Does it shock you that his interest is also in her behind? We have no secrets among us, Lesley. Half the men of my acquaintance who saw a rear view of Maggie bending to her work assure me of the truth. They would use her in that way too. Solon wished her to belong to such a master. Where she is now, Mags arsehole is exercised on the tool of a strapping fellow when she wakes. Another turns her over on her belly for it in the afternoon. They bugger her at bed-time and wake her before dawn to receive it once more."

Lesley was whimpering with the pleasure of what was done to her, straining to jut her hips out further and open her thighs more fully to Meena's fondling. Every image of Maggie's ordeal was imbued with this erotic ecstasy. Pictures which she might have trembled at, knowing the girl whose torments they recorded, now fused with the swelling pleasure in her loins.

Solon exercised his privilege to take a farewell of Maggie. By the wall of the tower the coals of a brazier sparkled and two little discs the size of coins were being heated to white intensity. But Solon picked up a dog-whip with a short leather thong. Maggie's blond hair flew as she turned her fair, hard-featured young face to him, the blue eyes stunned by his threat.

Perhaps Solon was goaded by his first memory of the girl at seventeen, on all fours as she was now while she waxed the white display floor. Maggie's bottom-cheeks were heavier and a little broader at twenty-three. He cracked the lash across them without compunction, often allowing the tip to curl round and cut the flank of her hip, sometimes even her belly or the front of her thigh.

They showed Lesley the photographs in which the young blonde strained at the straps holding her over the trestle, the lank pale gold of her hair flying wildly as she twisted her head to and fro. Each stroke of the whip had been given with vicious energy, raising its thin red weal across the pale broadened cheeks of Maggie's bottom. Only in her mind could Lesley hear the wild cries rising from the soft woeful lilt of Mags voice. The men had no pity on the working-girl with her rudely stocky young figure and the hardness of the streets in her face.

Anton turned another page of the album and showed Lesley how the farewell whipping by Anton had continued. There could be no respite as the lash cut the firm broadened cheeks of Maggie's bottom a score of times, drawing beads of blood. The state of the young window-dressers buttocks and thighs, though not fully described by the photographs, was a lesson in erotic punishment. There were many more pictures to come, some already showing how the tip of the dog-lash had curled between the cheeks of Maggie s backside.

Meena excited Lesley a little more, sensing the young woman's orgasm growing close.

"Look at the pictures, Lesley! See how soundly they whipped young Mag? Ah, I think you must be close to climax now. Can you see how she must have excited them as they did it to her? Now, see Mags face. Such a wide open mouth and such frantic eyes. Think how many men she must have sent off with her hard and impudent stare when they admired her at her work. How these photographs would please them. Imagine the broad young cheeks of Maggie s arse facing them as she knelt forward in her tight denim. How they would wish for such a whipping as this to go on, and on. That makes your juice run faster does it, Lesley? Their cruelty to Maggie excites you at last. Solon whipped her for more than an hour..."

Lesley rode on Meena's fingers faster still. They turned a page and showed her the last act of Maggie's drama.

"You see, Lesley?" Meena whispered. "You cannot control the thrill that makes your breath tremble now, however hard you try! Look at the last pictures. After such a whipping, how could her new master resist marking her with his own little sign of possession? The ferocity of the torment lasts but a minute, the smart of the brand for a few hours, but the sense of being his slave will be with her perpetually. Maggie has a certain rebelliousness in her nature. The brand which she carries will help her to accept her subjugation more easily... See how the two servants hold her very still, round the waist and round the thighs, as she kneels over the trestle with her buttocks drawn apart... They choose the inward slope of Maggie's bottom-cheeks, where the two halves curve in to meet. The white skin smooth and very firm... Does it make you gasp, Lesley, to see how the little disc sparkles and glows?... Now on the pale firm slope of Maggie's bottom-crack... Ten long seconds counted away... They meant to impress it on her mind as well as her fair skin... Those ten seconds are the ones she will remember most clearly for the rest of her life... Now they calm her for a moment before it is the turn of the other pale cheek. Her own monogram on one side of her bottom-crack, her masters on the other... They could not relent with only one half completed... Now I must work you to the precipice of joy before you see the last photographs... Now the tremors begin again... Look at them as you come, Lesley. The wicked disc pressed firm and Maggie's face wild as your own in orgasm... You would not spare her now, Lesley, in your present state... You enjoy it as much as the man who marked her...

Presently they left her, alone on the wide bed. Only an ankle chain held her securely to its rail. It was past midnight and Anton knew that the labour of prolonged arousal had exhausted her. For that night he permitted her to sleep alone so that she might be prepared for the ordeals which lay ahead of her.

He could not, however, resist leaving uncovered a tiny keyhole aperture between the two rooms and spying on Lesley as he had done after her thrashing by the prison-farm warden. It was not Anton s intention to do this at first, until he realised that the light in Lesley's room was still on after the rest of the hotel was in darkness.

He walked across to the dividing door and watched her through the aperture. She was kneeling upright on the bed, at a point were her reflection was caught by both the mirrors in the room. As Anton watched her, she was examining the fading blush of the nettle sting-blisters on her thighs and buttocks, hips and breasts. Sometimes she stared thoughtfully into the mirror in front of her, sometimes turning her short cropped hair to look back at the rear view of her thighs and bottom in the mirror on the opposite wall.

The proudest and most beautiful princess never admired her own elegance with greater fascination than Lesley now showed for what had been done to her and the marks which remained. She moved her knees a little apart to see where Meena had stung her cunt. She placed her hands on her buttocks which still tingled with the last pricking of the spiked leaves and parted the flushed mounds to inspect the raised white masses of the sting patches on the sides of her cleavage.

At last she lay down, leaving the light on, and curled up with her clasped hands comfortingly pressed between her thighs. Of what was she thinking, Anton wondered? Of Debby s wide-eyed and innocent love? Of Maggie's present fate? Of the elfin cheeks of Rachels bottom caned by her teacher? Of her earlier loves and pleasures?

Presently Lesley roused herself a little. She took the book of photographs depicting Maggie's ordeal in the round tower. Slowly she turned the pages until she came to the last twenty or thirty photographs which showed the whipping and the branding of the young blonde with the marks of her slavery. From time to time she compared them with the first shots of Maggie on all fours polishing the floor of the display case or standing in thought among the treasure house of luxuries behind the plate glass. But always Lesley turned back again to the final whipping and marking. She settled down, with these pictures before her eyes. She pressed one hand to her mouth in a lightly clenched fist, as if to muffle the tiniest sounds. With the other hand she parted her own thighs a little and began to caress herself in a slow and languorous manner, the photographs of Maggie always before her eyes.

Anton smiled and walked back across the room. All that he had sensed of Lesley s self-obsessed masochism was confirmed once again.

On the following morning the travellers resumed their journey. They came at nightfall to the Hotel des Voyageurs, with its iron verandahs and red flowers, in the last market town of that remote tract of western France. Its bar was a cavern of red plush and bentwood, patterned marble and opaque yellow lamps. It stood on a vast republican square the tall white-stone houses with their grey shutters and mansard roofs bleached by the sun and the rains of the nearby ocean.

In the Hotel des Voyageurs there occurred an incident, trivial in itself, which suggested that Lesley's innate disposition to servitude was sensed by some of her own sex.

Before dinner, Anton and Meena took her up to the bedroom overlooking the courtyard and stables. Meena made Lesley take off her skirt and panty-briefs before bending her over the rail at the foot of the bed. Lesley's rounded and broadened bottom-cheeks were once more suggestively framed by white suspender-belt and honeyed stocking-tops.

Anton then took the school punishment-strap, a flat broad strip of thin leather, divided into tails at its end. With hard and carefully measured strokes he brought the strap down across Lesley's buttocks, forcing a short yelping cry from the young woman at each impact. Swathes of crimson marked Lesley's backside, a blue-black hint of bruising appearing in them and then vanishing.

After she had been spanked with the strap, as hard as the most unruly fifth-form schoolgirl ever was, Lesley was allowed to straighten up and blink away the involuntary tears which the smacking had brought to her eyes. Anton went out to bathe and shave. As he did so, he put the strap down on an occasional table in the corridor.

At dinner, the four travellers sat together. A girl of fourteen or fifteen, dressed in a maids uniform, came in and caused a hushed giggling among her companions who waited to carry the tureens of soup and platters of game to the diners. An older woman of Lesley's age came up, the wife of the hotel proprietor whose child could be heard playing in the next room. She inquired the cause of the embarrassed laughter. The young maidservant handed her the leather spanking-strap discovered on the table in the bedroom corridor.

Carrying it folded in her hand, as if it were a matter of discretion, the woman walked slowly down the panelled room to the table where Anton sat with his three companions. As if sure of her instinct, the woman stood and confronted Lesley, a cunning smile playing about her lips as she met the raised blue eyes. The woman extended her hand with the strap coiled in it and placed the tawse at Lesley's corner of the table.

"Je crois que ceci est a vous, madame," she said, her smile growing a little as she saw her suspicion confirmed by Lesley's startled reaction. With a nod to Anton and the young women, the proprietors wife withdrew, relishing Lesley's discomfiture among the smiles and whispers of the other guests.

It was late on the following day when they came at last to their destination. The way to the house which Anton had rented for the summer months lay down a narrow road, running for several miles from the highway which skirted that wilder part of the western seaboard. To either side were none but a few isolated farm buildings of ochre-coloured stone with old tile roofs and towers. Tall maize and wide pastureland made up the flat landscape, drained by quiet canals and little streams. At last, beyond a belt of pine trees protecting the fields from erosion by the Atlantic wind, the road ended in a broad sweep of hardened earth, a few feet above the seaweed contour of the tide-line.

The cottage which Anton had chosen was here, two miles beyond the last of the farm buildings and three miles along the beach from the nearest cluster of holiday villas and shops which sold the bric-a-brac of summer leisure. The cottage and its garden stood on the edge of the beach, raised ten feet above the first rocks and sand, an enclave divided from the surrounding pine forest by a tall hedge of closely-stacked brushwood. From the end of the coastal lane, a short driveway led to the cottage, a track shaded by the interlacing branches of the firs, the strong sun laying only a thin dappling of yellow light on the hard earth of that path.

By the time that Anton stopped the car and sent Debby to open the white gates, the sun was no more than a streak of gold between two clouds of gunpowder grey on the Atlantic horizon. The headlights cut yellow paths through the dusk of the white moths.

Meena kissed Lesley on the side of her face in gentle mockery.

"Did you imagine that your first taste of true slavery would be in such a place as this, my love? It will suit us very well. Here you can be thrashed with no need to curtail the enjoyment because your screams may be overheard. No one will see you but those who wish you to taste such enjoyment to the full. We need not hesitate to whip you just because you are already marked from a few hours earlier."

Anton interrupted quietly.

"Before you let her sleep, fasten the leather collar round her neck, a leather cuff round each wrist and ankle. She must get used to feeling them on her—and to accepting how easily and how often she will be strapped down for pleasure and pain."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Like most of the older buildings on that coast, the cottage was a single-story structure of white-painted walls and green shutters, the shallow-pitched roof covered by weather-darkened tiles of terra cotta. Its three bedrooms and kitchen opened on to a communal living-room. The coolness of the shuttered interior had a stillness of plain tiles and whitewashed walls.

The most appealing feature of the enclave was the garden beyond the front door. Standing immediately above the beach, it was reached by a small latch-gate in the hedge. A wall of parti-coloured sea-stones—brown and mauve, grey and black—concealed it from the foreshore. Protected by its wall, the garden was a place of warmth and colour. Sunflowers and geraniums grew among pampas grass and the crimson-feathered tamarisk. In one corner was the languid beauty of madonna lilies and in another the first melon flower.

The cottage stood at the inward point of a long bay. One arm of land extended in low cliffs and broad, deserted sands to the remote finger of a lighthouse several miles away. To the north a similar view ended at a rough breakwater, where a few white houses and an old round windmill with broken vanes marked the nearest settlement.

In the southern direction, the cliffs were low and wooded, their sandy mounds and paths crumbling here and there to dunes. Below them, the long beach with its firm sand was the hunting ground of the swifts—black arrow-heads darting and weaving after the summer midges. By day the shouts of children rose above the bombardment of the surf. At night, in sunset and twilight, the beach became the concourse of equestriennes and their escorts on fine bay horses.

With the long receding roar of the tide, as Anton and the three young women ate their dinner at the wooden table in the garden, the aspect of the shore changed. The ebb uncovered a dark cratered plateau of rock and weed. Pools, vast and still, shimmered with tiny transparent fish or stirred briefly at the scrambling of a crab. Far out on the uncovered rocks appeared the dark figures of the mussel-gatherers, filling their buckets and baskets for the morning market. By moonlight the four occupants of the cottage explored these black water worlds of the shore—and were momentarily so entranced by their magic that the purpose of their journey was forgotten for an hour or two.

It was not forgotten for longer. In the sunlit summer mornings, when the wind-blown drifts of cloud were scattered across the pale blue of the sky, Meena unstrapped Lesley s wrists from the bed-frame and stripped the young woman of whatever clothes she might be wearing. It was a time when the surges of the pale green tide, far out, were no more than a distant rhythm. Naked but for the black leather strapping of her collar, anklets, and wrist-cuffs, Lesley was taken by Meena and Anton to the tiled bathroom.

At first she had stood reluctantly before the table which occupied the centre of the tiled floor. Her head was bowed, her fringe falling forward a little, and there was still a hint of resentment in her partially concealed features. It was Meena who cured her of this.

"Do you not know the price a slave must pay for disobedience, Lesley?" the Asian girl said gently, "There is no longer any limit to the discipline which will be enforced upon you to ensure submission. If Anton decides, we will trim you this morning between your legs, like a fractious little Arabian girl-slave whose toys must be taken from her. Even an arrogant young woman of your kind would be docile after that. Anton prefers to have you as you are. The mistress of a harem would deprive you of those playthings which make you so moody and wilful."

Meena's round high-boned face and feline eyes watched Lesley with malicious amusement. Though Anton and Mano might never permit such barbaric measures, it pleased the other girl to remind Lesley that she had no appeal against the sentence if ever it should be pronounced. Such was her state of slavery, in which the ownership of her body passed entirely to her masters. It would have been a common remedy among Meena's people to trim away those troublesome ornaments which rendered Lesley so vain and self-obsessed. Such pruning would turn her from a woman's woman, a creature of fretful masturbation and lesbian amours, to a man's woman who could find excitement only in the penis-penetration of her cunt and her backside. Anton would not consent, Meena knew Yet this did not prevent the cruel almond-eyed young pet from taunting Lesley. If ever Anton was persuaded to give the order, Meena whispered to the young wife, she herself would beg the favour of being allowed to trim the fractious parts.

Lesley's blue eyes confronted Anton with incredulity.

"I prefer you to keep your little ornaments, Lesley," he said, smiling at the two girls, "I like to see you play with yourself and your girl-friends. But Meena is right. You have no right to keep those little toys if your master wishes you otherwise."

In the next few days, Lesley curbed her arrogance and obeyed Meena without hesitation. Each morning, before being left to herself in the bathroom, she lay for an hour over the table. Meena fondled the little clitoris and rubbed the vaginal slit. For an hour she made Lesley play with herself while the young mistress teased her with a slim glass probe in her loins and another up Lesley's bottom. Lesley masturbated slowly to arousal, climax, and further arousal. For an hour she awoke her own desires, conditioning herself for the day ahead.

Bathed and perfumed she wore her suspender-belt and stockings but no panties. Standing before her masters chair, she turned to let him fondle her pubis and backside. Then, while Meena and Debby watched, she knelt before him. Anton wished that Debby s passion for Lesley should be encouraged. The younger girl was still bashful in her devotion, still seeming awkward and self-conscious. The wide eyes with their dark pupils and soft lashes were demurely lowered. She still wore her grey skirt and white blouse when Meena led her to sit on the floor behind Lesley, her legs drawn up under her.

After a few days, Lesley knew what was required of her now and obeyed at once. She lifted her hips and knelt with her head in her masters lap, the rear spread of her bare hips and thighs presented to Debby s gaze. At a word from Anton, she unbuttoned him, drew out his stiffening manhood and lowered her open mouth over it. It was a part of her training that she should perform this service for him and his guests several times a day until her lips and tongue moulded themselves to a mans erection as soon as it was adjusted to them. Debby, aware that something was required of her but timid in loving the young woman before the eyes of others, stroked the smooth pearly flesh of Lesley s thighs above her stocking-tops. The ends of the girls golden brown hair brushed her collar as she lowered her head to conceal the neat prettiness of her features from the man and woman.

"Higher up, Debby," Meena said softly, "Caress Lesley higher up on her legs... Between them now... Tease the little folds of her cunt with your fingers... Thats better, my love... Why be so timid about giving her pleasure? See how she widens her knees apart for you!... Kiss her bare legs above her stockings at the same time, my dear... Ah, she shivers at the touch of your mouth! How she likes that!... Stroke the cheeks of Lesley's bottom with your other hand, Debby. I think you like to see between them, don't you, for all your shyness? Watch how she spreads her rear cheeks for you. Stroke the smooth skin of her bottom-crack, Debby. Caress her where the skin turns yellowed ivory as her buttocks curve in to meet... Now tickle her clitoris with one hand—and with the other fingers tickle Lesley's arsehole. Do you like it when she shifts and cries with the excitement?"

Anton held the young woman's head lightly as Lesley sucked him.

"Use your tongue more quickly now, Lesley," he said suddenly, "You must drink Cupid s elixir in a moment"

He kissed the high crown of her fair hair and watched her parted fringe fall forward, brushing against him. Then his body stiffened and he felt the sperm pulse from him on to the soft warmth of her tongue, holding her to him until she had obeyed after only a short-lived sound of rejection in her throat.

As she lay with lips touching the limp penis, now drawn from her mouth, Lesley's hips began to move in time to Debby's caresses. But it was not her masters intention that she should complete her enjoyment yet.

"Take your hands away from her, Debby," he said sharply, "At once."

The girl and the young woman looked up at him with startled eyes, but Debby obeyed. To keep Lesley in a state of arousal, longing for whatever was to be done to her in the evening, was part of the training which Anton employed.

They led her out into the cottage garden, the crystal glitter of the waves at noon darkening during the hours which followed through blue to violet under the salmon-coloured flush of the sunset sky. Her wrist-straps were locked together in front of her and attached by a waist-length chain of light steel links to the leather collar round her neck. On these excursions, the stockings and suspender-belt were replaced by a pair of stretched briefs in white elasticated cotton.

Their usual destination during these afternoons was not the beach but the sandy paths of low cliffs and crumbling dunes above it, among gorse thickets and pines. It was a child's paradise of grasshoppers and lizards, dragonflies among the blue and gold flowers of the tufted grass. The honeyed scent of wild thyme came in drifts of the warm salt air, the haunt of mauve and yellow butterflies.

In this place the sea was no more than the long layered roar and cascade of Biscay rollers on the firm sand below them. To Anton it was a matter of curiosity how Lesley, the slave, responded to men who did not possess her. Sometimes he would allow her to wear a beach-bolero which covered her to the waist. It protected her fair skin from the sun and concealed the straps on her wrists. From time to time, Anton would take her down to the tide itself, where she could be admired by the young men in their tight swimwear which so easily betrayed the state of their erections.

As the men passed, their eyes met Lesley's own with glances of inquiry or suggestion. She received these with a look of contempt and a turning away of her head. A few of them followed her, some with cameras to record the vision of her young pride. To taunt them a little on his behalf—and to remind Lesley of her submission—Anton would tell the young woman to bend and observe the tiny creatures of a rock pool. The voyeurs, bulging at the loins of their swimwear, stared entranced at the sight of the firmly broadened buttocks and hips in the white stretched briefs. Some admired and some photographed her from every angle. But when Lesley straightened up again with a flick of her fringe, it was to look briefly at them with chill disdain.

After dinner in the evenings, the convenient table was moved from the bathroom to the main room of the cottage. There, while Anton and his guests sat round it in their chairs, Lesley was to lie. It was a low ceramic-tiled surface and well-designed for them to watch her.

It was Meena s task to prepare the young woman for these appearances. Lesley was stripped and bathed. Her pale body was naked except for the stout black straps of leather which adorned it. The variety of positions in which they might choose to fasten her made it necessary for her to wear extra straps during the evenings. In addition to those on her wrists, ankles and neck, there was one round her waist and one round each bare thigh, a few inches above the knee. To prevent any thought of resistance, the wrist-cuffs were once again locked together in front of her. With intimate fingering and caresses, Meena bedewed Lesley's breasts and back with the perfume spray, using it also on her neck, her arm-pits, between her legs and between the cheeks of her behind. Then the young Asian mistress led her slave-girl into the other room for the admiration of the master and guests.

To begin the amusements of the evening, Lesley was required to position herself on the table as they chose. Sometimes she was to lie on her back, thighs open and knees spread. Often she sprawled on her belly over a pillow, her bottom and the rear opening of her thighs offered to them. Other men liked her lying on her side with knees drawn up, Lesley s hips and thighs spread for them in a backward squat.

Anton admired her in this pose, stroking the soft fair hair of her urchin-crop, her neck and ears. The black strapping on her white nudity had a potent effect. The straps just above her knees and round her waist seemed to give a firm young majesty to Lesley's thighs and buttocks. Anton freed the two wrist-cuffs from each other. The men and women who sat round the low table and admired her had been smoking and talking. Now they were silent.

"Make love to yourself, Lesley," Anton said.

Her pride revolted at this for a moment.

"Heat one of the little markers for her," a well-dressed woman said, "Stroke her bottom with it. She will obey you after that."

Anton had arranged that Lesley should have her back to them, making it easier for her to obey, since her face was hidden. Perhaps it was this which brought about her surrender. She slid a hand over the soft hair of her pubic mound, the fingers entering between her legs. Slowly she played with herself. It was one of Antons guests, a man in his middle years, who commanded her.

"Lift your upper thigh a little, Lesley," he said, "and turn slightly on to your tummy. That's better. Now we can see what your fingers are doing. Ah, the little clitoris! Thats where you like to begin, is it?... Anyone can see how much you love yourself. Use your other hand to play with your breasts... I don't believe you would have resisted your masters commands at all, Lesley. You long to give yourself pleasure, don't you?... Now the little slit needs a finger to caress it... Anton, I should like a mirror placed on the other side so that we may watch her face. It will be good for her to meet our eyes in the glass. Excellent! See how the lips part and she closes her eyes in a dream of bliss? She could not stop now if the penalty for refusing to do so was to have her throat slit at the end!... Lesley! I will give you a choice. Either stop playing at once or else Anton shall use the pony-lash across your bare bottom on our next visit. You see? There is panic in her face, for she knows it will happen. Yet she cannot stop now! Very well, Lesley. Use your other hand behind you while you rub between your legs. Play with your arsehole like a lewd little girl! You find she likes that, I think! What hypocrisy on her part to pretend that the thought of sodomy frightened and repelled her. We must devote several evenings to exploring the possibilities in that area."

Often they watched until Lesley reached her climax with a crescendo of short violent cries. Then it would be the right of any man who wished to turn her on her back and sheathe his erection between her legs, riding her while Lesley gripped the edges of the table, knuckles whitening and thighs tense in joy.

The guests who attended these evenings at the cottage were often friends of Anton who had rented villas nearby for the summer or were staying as members of house-parties at the chateaux of Cognac and the Gironde. For much of the time, while Debby looked on, Anton and Meena possessed the young wife as their slave to the exclusion of the world.

During these quieter evenings, Lesley was still strapped and made to lie on the table. Anton and Meena talked of their arrangements, ignoring her. Or else Anton read and smoked, his hand occasionally stroking the white firmness of the young woman's bare flank or back. She had been taught that as soon as his fingers touched her face she was to kiss them as a sign of submission. He caressed the moody young lips, the firm and fair-skinned features of English middle-class girlhood, the soft fringe of her boyish crop.

Stirring himself at last, on such occasions, he would address Meena.

"I should like her on the bed now, face-down and with her wrists fastened to the corners. Her bottom will need to be well-raised on a few pillows."

Smiling at her victim with the wicked light of her almond eyes, Meena led the young woman into the bedroom. Anton saw that Lesley looked back at him quickly, her lips parted in apprehension, and that she walked with her buttocks tensed together. Her short white singlet was allowed in the cooler night.

The straps which Lesley wore on her naked body made it an easy task to place her on her belly over the pillows and to fasten her wrists to the two upper corners of the bed. Then Meena unscrewed the jar of vaseline, loaded her finger with the yellow-grey grease and spread it thickly between Lesley's bottom-cheeks.

Anton heard the sound of bed-springs shifting, Lesley gasping as she pulled at her wrist-straps.

"No! Not there!" Her voice had the same peremptory indignation which she might have shown to her bridegroom in the days of married life, "Not in my behind! I don't want it there! Please!"

"I think I must strap your legs together," Meena laughed, "It will remove the temptation to kick and struggle. Lie still, Lesley. I must vaseline you a little more. Now lie there and wait until your master is ready."

They left her waiting for an hour on these occasions, hearing the creak of the bed and Lesley's frustrated gasps of exertion as she pulled in vain on the straps which held her down. At last Anton got up and went into the bedroom. It intrigued him to see the mingled reproach, excitement, and fear in her blue eyes as Lesley watched him over her shoulder. Meena had wedged the pillows under her loins. Below the hem of the white singlet the smooth pale moons of Lesley's bottom rose proud and lightly parted, despite her refusal. Anton would sit on the edge of the bed, circling Lesley's waist with one arm to steady her, while he looked closely at the bare curve of her seat. He stroked her cool bum-cheeks, then parted them to see the sheen of the smeared vaseline between them. Lesley tightened her behind urgently and Anton smiled.

"Did you expect that your backside would be spared by such a master, Lesley? It is the place of a woman's ultimate sexual surrender to a man. The entrance to a woman's body of which she is most self-conscious. Often she conceals it from her husband and her lovers. That is why, in her slavery, it is the entrance that her master uses. Later on, I shall whip you for your defensiveness now. In future you may learn to enjoy a mans stiffness in your behind. If not, you can still excite yourself by imagining the pleasure he feels in sodomising you."

Kneeling astride her, Anton presented the hammerhead of his erection like a ram at the tight dark dimple of Lesley's anus. Meena heard the young wife's shrill alarm and then a howl of mingled pain and anger which seemed to come through Lesley's clenched teeth as Anton forced her anus with his tool. He prolonged the act for ten or fifteen minutes and, later, for half an hour, by pausing and allowing the threat of his spending to recede.

During these pauses he was fascinated by the sight of Lesley's face in the mirror. The woebegone and self-pitying look of the spoilt young woman was to be expected. Yet there was fearfulness in the eyes at the consequences of what was being done to her. And, more significant still, he saw the speed of her pulse and a slight colouring of hectic and morbid excitement at the unhealthy thrill which his penis had inspired in her arse.

Often he held the little hand mirror, so that she could see in the other glass how he had impaled her.

"Look into the mirror, Lesley. Now you see the reflection of your own bottom. Ah, you pretend to turn your head away but you look again! I think it excites you, Lesley, to see your arsehole stretched round the stiffness of a mans prick! You sly young bitch, Lesley! Does it make your thighs squeeze your clitoris? You're wet there! However uncomfortable you feel in your behind... it excites you to see it being done to you, doesn't it?"

Her face in the mirror afforded him no clue. The little-boy fringe which the young woman affected, the aloof eyes and slight sullenness of mouth and chin yielded him nothing. As if to punish her for this defiance, Anton buggered her with greater force, murmuring into her ear at last and warning her of the flood of sperm which he was about to release in her behind.

It was Meena who listened most intently to the climax in the other room. She heard Lesley give a sharp "Ahh!" of rejection mingled with surrender as the first semen spurted deep, warm and slippery in her bottom. It was an intriguingly ambiguous cry, the series of "Ahh!

... Ah!... Ahh!" which marked the successive jets of sperm in Lesley's backside. There was revulsion and defiance in the sound which escaped her throat. But as the young Indian mistress heard, there was also acceptance and submission.

A pause followed this, the bed creaking under Lesley's movements as she continued to tense her strapped thighs together. Then there was the dry rattle of bamboo as Anton picked up the cane.

"Each time that I use you in such a manner, Lesley, you'll get a thrashing afterwards to remind you that your status is still that of a slave. I shall bamboo you more cruelly tonight for your attempt to close your arsehole against me."

Lesley cried out in protest at this. But the cane cut the air with a short whistling sound and lashed her mature pale buttocks with an ear-stunning impact. With a surge of excitement, Meena heard the young wife cry out indignantly. Anton ignored her shrillness, striping her again and again across her firmly broadened bottom-cheeks. Lesley screamed as the cane cut her across a weal already raised by the bamboo on the broadened swell of her backside.

"Don't twist your arse away, Lesley," said Anton calmly, "Lie flat over the pillows and take your caning properly."

Lesley gave a wild sob of protest but he enforced her obedience. Then the white walls rang with the savage smack of the bamboo switch across firmly rounded rear cheeks. At last he stopped, hearing Lesley's sobs. He unstrapped her legs and left her wrists tethered to the bed, obliging her to sleep on her belly over the pillows. Without speaking to her again, he turned out the light, closed the door, and left her alone.

The master and mistress fastened her and made her sleep in this manner every night. Meena's last attention to her before leaving was to pull the hem of the singlet up above the young woman's hips, laying bare the full pale moons of Lesley's bottom-cheeks. Her vagina was equally available through the rear of her thighs. After her wilful and self-absorbed conduct during the years of marriage, it pleased them that she could be so easily woken and used for any purpose during the night.

Several hours after Lesley had been sodomised and caned by Anton, Meena went to the darkened bedroom and gently turned on the light. Lesley stirred, barelegged and face-down over the pillows, her backside suggestively raised by this padding. The hem of the singlet had worked down a little in the movements of sleep and now trailed low enough to cover the upper curve of Lesley's buttocks. Meena woke her gently, drawing the cotton hem well up again. Lesley's short crop of hair brushed the bolster as she turned her face to the Asian girl. Meena bent and kissed her on the lips, feeling the pressure of Lesley's instinctive response.

"The gag in your mouth, Lesley," she said quietly. Holding the young woman's head firmly, Meena pressed into her mouth the rubber wedge with its attaching straps, tightening these between her teeth and buckling them behind her head. One hand went between the trim fair-skinned thighs and she felt the shiver of pleasure with which Lesley's body responded to the first caresses of masturbation. Meena's other hand laid on the bed a snakeskin pony-lash—a training-whip with a carved brown handle and a slim thong no more than two feet in length.

Feeling the tension of alarm in Lesley's body, Meena kissed her ear, murmuring as she played between the young woman's legs.

"Did you think you would not be woken for a whipping because Anton had thrashed you already, Lesley? You will learn that such things matter nothing when the culprit is a slave. The pony-whip will be an added torment when your legs and buttocks are already smarting from the bamboo? That matters only to you—not to your master or mistress. You think we. will have pity because the weals of the bamboo mark you? To have you in such a pretty state already—so responsive to the lash!—only adds to the excitement of the person who flogs you."

Meena tightened the gag a little more. She kissed Lesley's face, her ears and neck, with an undissimulated passion. Then she stood up. Before beginning the whipping, she pressed apart the proud cheeks of Lesley s behind and saw between them the thickly spread vaseline. With an ironic gentleness, Meena wiped away the grease on several tissues, crumpling them and dropping them by the bed. Then she picked up the whip and wiped the lash down with a mustard-soaked rag.

"Remember, Lesley," she said softly, "you have come here to feel pain."

Meena worked the pungent mustard into the texture of the snakeskin lash. Knowingly, she reminded the young woman how she had been furtively admired by the male sex in the days before her submission to Anton. Beauty at twenty-six or twenty-seven, bending to her tasks in the suburban garden. The braced thighs and the fully rounded cheeks of Lesley s arse under the tight black cloth of the trouser-suit. The childbearing which had given her the backside of a trim young Amazon. How natural, Meena insisted, that this rear view of Lesley or the studies of her standing with head lowered in thought should provide subjects for the contemplation and the cameras of passers-by. When she rewarded this admiration with a glance of proud distaste, how apt that the men thought of her mature young buttocks so conveniently presented. In each mind there rose the longing to sentence her to an appropriate fate. Several years of confinement in a disciplinary institution. Punishment to be given in weekly installments with no possibility of reprieve. Lesley bending as they had seen her but with her bottom bare. While she was so conveniently positioned every week, an hour for the chastiser to enjoy himself alone with her. Then sixty strokes of the whiplash across Lesley s backside with all the vigour of the hangman's skill.

"We shall find such a place for you, Lesley," Meena said, "You may be sure of that."

Then the golden-skinned mistress fastened the pale legs a little apart, to prevent the possibility of Lesley squeezing her thighs to distract herself secretly from the whipping. She kissed the lids of the frightened blue eyes and brushed the fringe into place.

"Sixty strokes, Lesley," she said gently, "When the whip is well soaked in mustard, the most rebellious young mare in the stables never disobeys again after a lashing of her hind-quarters with it!"

Lesley was breathing harder in her panic. Her wrists tugged vainly against their straps. The pinioned legs tensed and shifted with fear. Meena teased her a little longer, fondling the firm pallor of Lesley's buttocks and stroking her between them.

"We shall observe the rules of a proper whipping, Lesley," she murmured. "If a stroke lands out of aim, it will be repeated and an extra one added to punish you for not keeping still. If the snakeskin lash cuts you a little, the wet mustard will truly test your ability to lie motionless!"

Lesley mewed wildly into her gag as Meena stepped back and raised the whip, the frenzy breaking from her even before the lash cracked down. Presently the whip sang and smacked, the warm shuttered room ringing with the sharpness of the strokes. Under the desperate pressure of Lesley's knees, the bed creaked and shifted. As she had flogged Julie while Lesley watched, so Meena s punishment of the young wife fell in hard pitiless strokes of the whip. The gag reduced Lesley's screams to a stifled shrillness. It was Meena's voice which carried more clearly beyond the room.

"A stroke across the fullest curve of your buttocks, Lesley... Another... and one more... Now once more to draw a little crimson... I think the mustard smarts like fire in that cut... You cannot release your pain by screaming while the gag and straps check your outbursts... Ah, the whip caught the backs of your thighs... And again... Those two strokes must be repeated on your arse-cheeks, Lesley, and two more added to them... You shriek into your gag that you cannot bear any more... But you will bear it all the same, if I wish it... I think it would excite your lovers to see your bottom in such a state, Lesley, and still more than thirty strokes to be inflicted..."

Meena spent an hour in the room before removing Lesley's gag and unstrapping her legs. Then the Asian girl came out, slim and demure in her white cotton dress.

On many nights Lesley was woken again, between midnight and dawn. Anton would study the pale cheeks of her bare bottom before parting them and making use of her there. Often he or Meena would wake her to be caned or whipped. No excuse was permitted. The fact that Lesley's bare bottom had been bamboo'd for the amusement of the guests a few hours earlier was no reason to postpone a whipping. If she protested that her anus was still sensitive from its use by Antons friends, he reminded her that it would be illogical for a master to deny himself its pleasure, especially when she would be so exquisitely responsive.

These ordeals in the darkness of the night were necessary to Lesley's training. It was not her body but her mind which was conditioned by them more potently. The master and mistress ensured that she was never free for a moment from reminders of what had been done to her. Perhaps it would be that the bruises on her thighs and buttocks would smart a little at every careless movement in sitting or walking. Or else her cunt was so cunningly stimulated that its demands plagued her for a day afterwards. Sometimes, they sodomised Lesley in prolonged and ingenious manners so that the morbid excitement which she felt remained long after in tantalising sensations of her anal region.

As yet Anton had left no lasting evidence of his possession of her. When one day this was remedied, the cause was trivial. It occurred on an evening when he and his guests dined in the cottage garden as the twilight gathered and the receding surges of the tide became a hushed roar below them. Joachim was present and was waited upon by Lesley in her white singlet, suspender-belt and stockings. She wore no panties, allowing the men a free view of her thighs and backside.

Joachim found fault with this proud young waitress in some small matter. Exercising a guests privilege, he ordered her to bend over the table. Taking off the rubber-soled gym-shoe which he wore, he spat on the heel, gripped the shoe by the canvas upper and gave a dozen powerful smacks with the rubber heel on the pale swell of Lesley's bottom-cheeks.

It was little more than a playful punishment. Anton held his hand across her mouth but her cries were no more than squeals of protest and gasps at the sting of the rubber heel. When it was over, they led her to a tall post and fastened her wrist-cuffs to it. Meena fixed the gag in the young woman's mouth. Lesley was obliged to stand there, before them, her back to the guests and her gamine crop bowed in contrition.

The lamplight showed that the cheeks of her bottom were in a curious state. They were red from the spanking but also muddy from the prints of the wet gym-shoe heel. This caused a murmur of amusement among the guests.

An hour later, as they talked and smoked, Joachim suggested that Lesley was showing signs of disobedience. She was looking over her shoulder at them with a little girls self-pitying glance of unease.

"Stand still, Lesley," said Anton quietly.

Yet as they watched her, Lesley's hips and thighs continued to squirm or tense a little. Her legs were pressed tightly together as if they had been pinioned. The cheeks of her bottom were compressed until the crack dividing them was a thin tight line. Anton smiled at her but he treated Lesley with the harshness reserved for a little girl who is made to stand in the corner—in disgrace—and yet refuses to obey.

"Stand quite still, Lesley," he said, he smile growing wider, "Hold yourself properly. You're not a child too young to control herself any longer."

As Anton well knew, it would help to condition Lesley to her slavery if this young married woman with children of her own was treated herself on these occasions like a naughty little girl of eleven or twelve.

Lesley relaxed the pressing of her thighs and buttocks a moment, then tensed herself again instinctively.

"Widen your legs a little," said Anton gently, "and bend right over."

She looked back in dismay at the men watching her but made no movement. Meena went up to her, also smiling and held a whispered conversation with her. The tone was plaintive and persuasive on Lesley's part, probing and mocking on Meena's. Meena came back and said something to Anton which caused laughter among the guests. It was then that Joachim spoke.

"She is too self-absorbed. Too preoccupied with every little need or urge. On these occasions she needs a penis to distract her. With your consent, Anton, it shall be mine."

A garden sofa, well covered with cushions, had been placed in a conveniently secluded corner of the garden wall. Lesley's blue eyes widened with dismay and disbelief as she was taken to it. Joachim asked that she should be placed bottom-upwards over the cushions and strapped down by wrists and ankles.

"I too must test the excitement of Lesley's behind," he said to Anton, "She will learn that when she is strapped down and a mans erection is filling her bottom, she has no alternative but to subordinate her own wishes to his."

Joachim was as good as his word. Alone with Lesley he soaped his erection in preparation and then inserted its hard length in her behind as he knelt astride her. She cried out in alarm at the bulk of him and the added weight she was now forced to bear.

The gag had been removed from her mouth and he was able to lie over her, kissing her mouth as he made her turn her face aside. Lesley's buttocks were making alternate thrusting and tensing movements, her anus performing a rhythmic contraction as if trying to expel him from her body. The only effect was to excite him to greater stiffness by this spasmodic pressure.

He lay still, content to impale her for the moment while his mouth brushed her lips, eyelids and soft fringe of hair. Lesley implored him with all the pleading sulkiness of a little girl trying to escape the teacher's cane. He kissed and refused her, whereupon Lesley sobbed that he was a brute and a sadist. Then she forced a few tears and swore that she would do anything for him, give him any form of pleasure that he chose, if only he would postpone his demands.

"That is why I prefer you as you are, Lesley," he said, his lips touching the crown of her urchin-crop, "I find more pleasure when you are uneasy, sensitive, responsive. I cause you a little discomfort? It is better for me when I see that happen. Now I take the enjoyment of your firm young arse, Lesley. I am luckier than all the men who admired you before your slavery..."

He sodomised the young woman with slow vigour, watching as she lay with the short crop of her hair turned aside on the pillow, hearing the catch in her breath and the little sounds of alarm as he pressed deep. Joachim knew that the rhythmic pumping and suction of his tool in her behind was causing a sense of turmoil in Lesley's innards which would remind her finally of her body's vulnerability. By the time that he released the flood of his passion into her backside his conquest of her seemed absolute.

Joachim left her, fastened as she was, and advised Anton that Meena and one of the other women should attend Lesley while she was strapped on the sofa. After that the men would return to her themselves. When they did so, she was limp and moist from her ordeal.

As they stood over her, Joachim placed his hand on the pale cheeks of Lesley's bottom and parted them to expose her anus.

"You were right in your praise of her," he said to Anton, "To men of certain tastes she is more attractive now than when she was a bride of twenty. She has the rather aloof pale beauty of the English middle-class and the firm fullness of bottom-cheeks which its girls acquire in their later twenties. She had her two babies when she was young enough not to be fattened by them, only to acquire that erotic firming out of bottom and hips."

"And yet she displeases you?" Anton asked.

Joachim shook his head.

"No. But now that she is your slave, you may use what force you please to adapt her body to your wishes. You see how small and tight Lesley's arsehole is? That is common enough. A young married woman of her sort, even if she has a couple of kids and the penis regularly between her legs, remains very tight there unless her husband makes use of it."

"Is it so inconvenient?"

"She can close herself against a mans stiffness and make his insertion more difficult," Joachim continued, "true, he would whip soundly until she yielded to him. But that is not always convenient. I would like to see you enlarge Lesley s rear entrance permanently. It is better for her also to be like that."

They paused and Joachim smiled at the alarm in her eyes as Lesley shook back the fringe of her urchin-crop and stared at them in consternation.

"Once she is strapped down," he said, "you may easily impose your decision on her. A slave like Lesley is not permitted to deny her master. For the next month or two, she must be stretched in that area a little, for several hours a day—longer if possible."

Lesley emitted a wail of protest and panic. Joachim smiled.

"She fears the old wives' tales that you will ruin her at the rear by such means. Even our discussion of the method makes her tighten her buttocks together. True the consequences will be permanent and may be a little disagreeable to her from time to time. But that is Lesley's problem—the price she pays for your chosen pleasures. When she has paid that price, how foolish she would be not to try and derive some enjoyment from your use of her. Such a self-loving creature will learn to like it."

Lesley's blue eyes watched them, wide with fright.

"It will benefit both of you," Joachim continued. "By showing your determination, you diminish the temptation for Lesley to disobey and resist your use of her backside. That tight little hole will be less able to close the entrance to your erection. By accustoming her to an intruder in her behind, you will begin to stimulate in her what medical prudes call an unhealthy excitement. Moreover, she will be more completely your slave when you have made this permanent alteration. It will remind her of her subjugation for the rest of her life."

"Look at her," said Anton quietly. "That last idea excites her for all her fearfulness."

"Fear and excitement," Joachim stroked Lesley's fringe, "The two hounds that pursue her, drag her down, and devour her with desire."

In the nights that followed, it was Meena who positioned Lesley face-down over the pillows, her wrists strapped to the bed-frame. Then the singlet hem was drawn high above her bare bottom.

The device was about eight inches long, stout as a cylindrical ruler, and with a bullet shaped head. A strap was threaded through its base. At the front, the strap joined the buckle of a tight belt round her bare waist. Running down her belly and under her legs, the strap was then drawn up taut between Lesley's buttocks and locked to the rear of the waist-belt. However much she might twist or struggle, the stout bullet-headed implement would be held firmly in place. Six inches of its length was sheathed in her behind and two inches protruding so that the obstinate rear hole was stretched to the maximum during the hours of wearing it.

On the first occasion, as the young woman lay over the pillows with her wrists fastened to the bed's corners, Anton and Joachim watched Meena tighten the straps in place. When Lesley saw the size of the rounded-headed phallus which was laid on the table all her fortitude deserted her and she tried to twist away on her hip with a cry of panic. The two men turned her back so that she lay properly with her bottom raised and more fully rounded by the pillows under her.

Joachim held her with an arm round her upper hips, smacking her flank lightly.

"She needs a moment to accept what will be done to her," he said.

Only Meena seemed to find satisfaction or amusement in Lesley's fearfulness. While Anton vaselined Lesley in preparation, Meena smiled.

"Was your husband s sex as big as this, Lesley?" she asked, "or smaller?"

Lesley stared in silence at the insult of such a question.

"Answer Meena when she speaks to you," Anton said sharply.

Lesley looked round at him with the resentment of a little girl who would like to defy her teacher but dare not.

"He was... he was not so big."

"And your lovers," Joachim kissed the cool damp flesh at the swell of her hip, "was any of them as large?"

"No!" she said peevishly.

Meena stroked the tightened crack of Lesley's compressed buttocks with the bullet-head of the phallus. The two pale cheeks remained tensed together in a thin line. Meena clenched her pretty little teeth and smacked the nearer cheek of the young woman's bottom hard.

"Lie properly over the pillows, Lesley," said Anton quietly, "You may as well act sensibly. Sooner or later you will obey, because we shall make you. You would be wise to let Meena do it to you now."

Both men were excited by the prospect of seeing Lesley Tebel and of watching Meena punish her until she submitted at last. A sharp though indefinable air of anticipation filled the room. Meena took the spanking-strap and thrashed it hard across Lesley's bare backside. The strokes would have brought to heel the most rebellious schoolgirl who ever taxed the patience of her mistress.

Lesley's resistance was doomed, as she must have known from the beginning that it would be. It intrigued Anton that the young wife should have put on such a display of defiance at all. Was it sheer panic at the thought of the slight but permanent damage which would be inflicted by the stretching? Did Lesley find a perverse thrill in the thought of being thrashed into submission? Was it a matter of feminine self-respect that forbade her from submitting meekly to such monstrous impalement of her woman's body—and for so lewd a purpose?

At last the drama was over, ending in the only way which was possible. Lesley lay moist-eyed over the pillows like a smacked and contrite child. Meena was supporting her with one hand under her belly while the impaling phallus was being fastened firmly into place. At each injudicious movement a short hard syllable of alarm escaped Lesley's throat.

"She feels it to her belly-button," Joachim said, "It teaches her the vulnerability of a young woman in her situation."

Anton stroked one of the blushing, burning cheeks of Lesley's smacked bottom, as if to check the little self-pitying sounds of unease.

"You must be stretched like this every night, Lesley. From the time we leave you until the hour when you are woken in the morning."

She made a petulant protest, but he quietened her again.

"You will learn to discipline yourself, Lesley, and to bear what is done to you. Perhaps in the end you will learn to feel excitement in the knowledge that your master will spare you nothing if it adds to his pleasure."

He kissed her and went out, followed by Meena.

Joachim stood by the bed staring down at the fairskinned slave-wife. Now she regarded him with the look of a little girl demanding to be indulged after all that had been done to her. Lesley settled her bare thighs wider apart on the bed. Calmly, with all her alarm and show of defiance over, she coaxed Joachim to play with her between her legs.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In the long days of summer on that western coast the routine of the master and his slaves varied little. Regularly did Meena come to Lesley during the nights when she lay fretful yet roused with the straps and dildo in place.

Anton felt no jealousy over this. It pleased him that Lesley should be at the disposal of the young woman. Meena knew intimately the areas of a woman's body most responsive to pleasure or torment. Moreover, Anton believed the saying that a girl who is to be put to torment has more to fear from another woman than from a man. Ordeals which a man might hesitate to impose on the girl would be inflicted without compunction by the woman, whose knowledge of her own body made her less scrupulous.

On these nights, Meena would wake Lesley and spend two or three hours with her. While the bulk of the dildo filled and stretched the young wife, Meena s skillful fingers slid under the pale loins and caressed her clitoris or her slit with great cunning. Night after night, Meena conditioned Lesley to accept the swelling pleasure in her loins and the perverse arousal in her behind as equal stimulants to erotic excitement. As the slim brown fingers caressed the ticklish little clitoris, Lesley squirmed or whimpered, her teeth fretting at her lower lip in the languors of ecstasy.

Meena allowed her no respite, often manipulating the dildo in Lesley's backside at the same time.

"Move your hips a little, Lesley," she would say quietly, "Make love to my fingers and the tool in your bottom."

With eyes closed and lips parted a little in the breathlessness of exertion, Lesley obeyed her mistress, gasping at the. delicious strokes of Meena s caresses between her thighs. As the days and nights passed, there was no doubt that the tighter hole between the rounded and broadened curves of Lesley's seat was accustoming itself to the presence of the dildo. being so erotically sensitive in its own right, it was increasingly conditioned to respond to Meena's attentions, that conditioning, which had at first been enforced, was accepted passively and after a while welcomed actively by the young woman who lay over the pillows.

Every night the slim Asian mistress woke the fairskinned English beauty and employed her in this manner for two or three hours, by the time that Meena left and turned out the light again, Lesley was fulfilled and exhausted. On Antons instructions she was permitted to sleep until noon.

Because Lesley had been such a self-indulgent young woman, she accepted greedily the excitement of the dildo as the tightness of her anus began to ease a little. With wrists fastened she lay obediently and even expectantly each evening when it was inserted and fastened into place. No longer did she turn her self-pitying face to Meena and plead her fears of the damage which such use might cause in that area, the afflictions which would lie in wait for her during the years to come.

"You see?" said Joachim to Anton, "It excites her a little to know that you will not even spare her that if it interferes with your pleasure to do so."

It was apparent in other ways too that Lesley had set her foot upon the path of submission, in a manner which made her return from it unlikely. There was an evening when Anton and Joachim decided to end Debby's privilege of being a spectator and to oblige her to submit to their demands.

Robert, who was also present, had taken Lesley into the bedroom, where she lay spread-legged on the pillows in order to be stroked to lubrication and then entered between the thighs. Anton, Meena and Joachim were in the other room with Debby. Anton admired the girl, the open, wide-eyed appeal of her face, the golden-brown hair whose gentle waves touched her collar and whose short fringe softened the pretty regularity of her features.

'Take your blouse and skirt off, Debby," he said quietly, "then lie on the table in front of us."

The girls dark eyes looked at him as if she doubted his command. Meena got up and went over to her.

"Come now, Debby!" Meena slipped an arm round the girls waist, "did you think we should make no more claims on you than we have done?"

Debby said nothing but looked helplessly at the bedroom door beyond which Robert was enjoying himself with Lesley. Meena unbuttoned the white blouse and drew it off, revealing the trim young shapes which filled Debby s white breast-halter. It seemed as if the girl was going to stand there, stupefied while they did as they pleased with her.

At that moment Anton got up and went over to the cupboard. From it he took several body-straps.

"No!" Debby tried to back away from Meena and the others, "I won't wear them! I won't!"

Anton smiled and Joachim went to aid Meena in holding. Debby. Though she twisted her head and wrestled against them, Anton soon clipped the leather collar round her neck. Holding each arm in turn he fastened a leather wrist-cuff on each, then locked them together with Joachim's assistance. After that it was easy to attach them to the collar-chain so that the girl's wrists were held at the level of her breasts.

Debby stood quietly now, the ambivalent light of desire and denial in her innocent eyes. Anton knelt, unfastened the grey skirt and drew it down. Gently he kissed the still childish awkwardness of Debby's calves, the slight heaviness of her light-skinned thighs. He heard the sharp intake of her breath as he drew down the tight cotton of her white briefs. Despite her nervousness she looked down at him as he knelt, watching while he peeped at her silken haired pubis and parted her fleshy softness with his fingers.

"Such a pretty little thing between her thighs!" he said smiling, "no wonder that Lesley likes her there."

Turning his head he now looked round the other side of her, admiring the rear of her thighs and, again, the rather childish softness of Debby's bottom. She flinched as he stroked the pallid cheeks.

"Mano will enjoy this part of her. How absurd that it should be covered by a skirt for the rest of her working life or pressed on a stool behind a counter."

He coaxed the cheeks apart and the eighteen-year-old girl looked sharply away from them as he revealed Debby's anus. She tried to pull forward as his finger touched her there.

"Such a tight little postern-gate," he said, "I'm sure there will be some lucky master who pays court to Debby's arsehole."

Despite her earlier struggles, Debby allowed them to lead her to the table and she lay meekly on her back, like a well-brought up schoolgirl who knows better than to defy her elders.

Meena guided Debby's legs, making her draw them up until her knees almost touched her breasts. In this posture, the young thighs were tensed and the vaginal folds well exposed. Anton fingered the sensitive flesh with expert and gentle firmness. Tense and resistant at first, Debby soon began to turn her head from side to side, uttering quiet and tremulous sounds. Never once allowing her any respite from the pleasure, Anton drew the first lubrication from her cunt.

Without any coaxing, Debby now opened her legs wide and gave a wild cry as Anton began to kiss her clitoris. Judging that the right moment had come, he unbuttoned himself and lay down beside her on his back, his erection rising stiff and gorged. Meena helped Debby to kneel astride him. Despite her wide-eyed innocence, the girl seemed now to be in a state of erotic possession. She made little whimpering sounds as she sought to imprison Anton in the passage of her loins. At last, stretched out over him, she held his erection sheathed inside her. Now it was the girl who seemed the aggressor. Sometimes she rode upright, like a young conqueror in the saddle, sometimes she lay on him as if trying to pin down her opponent in a wrestling match.

The posture suited Meena's perverse tastes. With one hand she caressed Antons balls to stimulate a more copious spending. Her other fingers tickled and stroked the warm pubic flesh which was revealed between the rear spread of Debby's thighs. This exquisite erotic torment brought fierce cries from the girl as she began to approach the crisis of her desire.

Joachim guessed that in her present state there was no lewdness that Debby would shun. Standing over and smiling at the contortions of her lithe young bottom-cheeks as she rode, he held a whip whose phallic handle was greased and smooth. Pressing the butt between Debby's arse-cheeks he penetrated her anus a little. She gave a cry of alarm and held herself tense. But Joachim urged her on. Debby was to ride Antons erection and bugger herself on the whip-handle simultaneously. She turned the open prettiness of her face to him, uncertainty in her wide dark eyes with their fine lashes. Timid at first, she soon joined in the game. Debby's bottom made love to the whip-handle with total lascivious abandon.

Those who knew Debby only as the helpful and smiling girl of eighteen with her neat pretty features and dark-pupiled eyes innocently wide, would scarcely have credited her conduct now. Debby's arsehole, so lewdly exposed, tightened and opened rhythmically on the whip-handle. With abrupt startled cries she began to climb to the bliss of her own orgasm while Anton jetted his sperm into her womb.

When it was over, she hid her eyes blushingly. By cautious squeezings the whip-handle was expelled from Debby's arse and she blushed a little deeper at the thought of the state of the leather butt after its acquaintance with her bottom.

By the time that Robert came out and Lesley too was once more summoned to the main room, both slaves were in a condition of lingering excitement. It was now that Anton chose to put another matter to the test.

Debby was helped to her feet and led to the sofa. They made her stand facing the back and then bend over it. Her wrists were now attached to its arms on either side and her short brown tresses brushed the sofa seat. There was a curtain which was used to divide the room, along the line of the sofa back. Anton drew it across so that Debby's view of what was happening behind her was completely hidden. He went to the shelf, picked up the long and flexible bamboo—and handed it to Lesley.

Though the upper part of Debby's body was concealed by the curtain, the velvet folds had been gathered up to expose her from the waist down. She would have no idea of who was thrashing her.

Lesley hesitated, seeing the slight heaviness of Debby s bottom-cheeks and the childishly awkward pose of her bare legs. The young woman herself was naked below the waist but for her suspender-belt and stockings. Meena smiled, walked up behind her and whispered in Lesley's ear. At the same time she slid her slim brown fingers between the back of the pale thighs and teased the warm slippery flesh. Sensitive as she was after Roberts arousal of her, Lesley flinched away. But Meena went on caressing her gently.

"Thrash Debby's backside for her," she murmured, "the girl will never know that it was you—unless you choose to tell her. Ah, the idea excites you, Lesley, doesn't it? Such a charming bottom she has. More than a child and less than a woman. As many strokes as you like—or as few. As hard as you please."

Still Lesley resisted. Meena smiled again.

"She must be thrashed anyway, Lesley. If not by you, then by Joachim or Robert. Since she must be whipped, why not by you? You would like to do it, wouldn't you, Lesley? The wetness between your thighs tells me that..."

Lesley gave a gasp, a breath long held in during Meena's own caressing of her. She pressed the Asian girls other hand to her lips and kissed it. Then she took a step forward and stood over the bending figure of Debby. Meena, smiling at this, still played with her fingers between Lesley's thighs, intending to continue exciting the young woman as she used the cane.

Lesley touched the bamboo across the innocent cheeks of Debby s bottom, raised it and thrashed it down with a force that made the girl cry out. A slave of her own pleasure, Lesley cared nothing now for the pain of the eighteen-year-old. She caned her hard and harder still across her bare squirming buttocks. Debby shrieked and, since her legs were not fastened, kicked out wildly behind her. The cruelty she had been taught in her own suffering at the hands of the prison-farm sadist inspired Lesley now. she bamboo'd the backs of Debby s awkward thighs as the girl kicked and danced in her anguish.

Lesley aimed for the calves of the adolescent legs and the backs of the knees. The cane drew blood in several places on the young legs. Then Debby's bottom got its share, the stripes bamboo'd until they became weals and welts. Meena fiddled cunningly between Lesley's thighs, urging her on. The cane thrashed the victims legs again. So once again, Debby kicked and danced in a display which would haunt her own imagination even when the other men and women present had forgotten it.

No limit could be set to such punishment, except the crisis of Lesley's desire and its resolution in her accomplishment of orgasm. The men who were present had taught her to know the pleasures of inflicting such a thrashing, even when she was the recipient of the strokes. The tip of the cane caused a plum-coloured streak—darker than the rest of the stripe. From these more dangerous marks there swelled two or three spots of blood.

With teeth clenched, Lesley began to thrash the girl, using rapid but erratic strokes of the cane. They were given with erotic passion rather than with cruelty, yet they left a score of beaded plum-coloured weals across Debby's bottom-cheeks. Then the cane dropped from the young woman's hand. Lesley sank forward, sprawling beside her victim over the sofa-back. She opened her legs wide, too far gone in the languors of the masturbation to do anything but plead with Meena to bring her to a climax now.

When Meena had finished her, Lesley and Debby were left alone in the room, the girl unfastened from her bonds. They lay naked in one another's arms, Debby still in floods of tears and Lesley comforting her as if she had been a child. Then, as the outburst of tears ebbed and died away, their hands sought each others thighs and they caressed lovingly for the next hour or two.

Later on, the two beauties were taken to their separate beds. On this occasion Lesley waited an unusually long time to be positioned and fastened for the night. At last Meena came in alone The black, lightly-waved bob of her hair had been freshly combed and perfumed. The round neat-featured face with its almond eyes and high-boned cheeks had an air of triumph.

Meena was wearing the white print dress which she had on during the evening. Looking at the young wife who lay on the bed, Meena undid her dress and took it off. Her slim golden body was naked except for her white breast-halter and elasticated briefs. She sat down on the bed and stroked the short cut of Lesley's straight fair hair.

"You will not see Debby again," she said quietly, "unless you are both the slaves of the same master at some time in the future. Tomorrow Mano is coming here and will take you away with him. To prevent any scenes, Debby has already left with Joachim. I shall sleep with you tonight. You will do the things I want you to do because, Lesley, you want to do them as well. You protest only to save your modesty, to make it seem that you were forced to indulge such pleasures against your will"

Meena made Lesley open her legs a little and stroked her between them.

"I shall not fasten you tonight, Lesley," Meena brushed the sleek black bob of her hair with her hand as she looked at the fair-skinned slave, "I shall not whip you to make you obey me."

The almond eyes moved quickly, almost anxiously, in the anticipation of pleasure. Desire and longing banished from the round high-boned face of the Asian girl all trace of malice and vindictiveness. But Meena was not to be denied in the demands she would make upon Lesley.

'Tomorrow," Meena said, "it will not be Anton who decides your fate. Mano is less gentle. He will grant what I ask, if I ask it. It would amuse him to see you tamed by the methods I should employ."

Lesley stared back at her but there was no doubt of the meaning and the intensity in the beautiful dark eyes.

"Tonight you will give me pleasure," Meena said, touching Lesley's face gently, "You will give it as you have never done to any other person—except perhaps yourself. You will do it better than you ever did with your lovers, your husband, even Anton or Debby."

Meena stood up, unhooked her breast-halter and slipped off her briefs. The slim golden body lay next to Lesley's pale beauty. In a turmoil of excitement and alarm, Lesley gave her young mistress the pleasure demanded. There was to be no sleep on this last night in the cottage. They squirmed naked on the bed together until long after the sun lit the cracks in the shutters of the windows. They lay awake together until it was time for Lesley to be taken to the bathroom and prepared for Mano's arrival.

In the hours of that night, Lesley's hands caressed every part of Meena's odalisque beauty. Her lips kissed and nuzzled Meena from forehead to feet. Lesley's tongue washed the tawny beauty from her waist to her knees.

The fear of what might otherwise be done to her drove Lesley to abandon all the reserves of her natural arrogance. By a fine irony, the menial attentions to the other girls body also gave an added excitement to Lesley herself. She lay head-to-tail with the slim darker beauty, holding the slender golden legs apart while her tongue ran in the feminine slit between them. Not daring to draw away when the slippery lubricant began to moisten the roused flesh, Lesley licked and consumed it as if it had been the elixir of life. At her mistress's command, the young woman's tongue washed over the soft inner surfaces of the upper thighs, tasting all the mineral tang with which that smoothness had been splashed.

For more than an hour after the love-making began, Meena required that Lesley should use her lips and tongue in this manner. Then the mistress turned and presented the slim coppery cheeks of her backside. Once again, Lesley was obliged to part them and kiss the smooth inward curve, to mould her kisses to the Asian beauty's anus, to force it with her tongue in a prolonged and gentle act of feminine sodomy.

All this was done to overcome her repugnance and to ensure that throughout the night the tastes of Meena's bottom and loins, of her breasts and humid flesh ran in Lesley's saliva.

Yet this last night together was not without curiosities of another kind. Meena had been privileged to retain those adornments between her legs which she threatened in Lesley's case. This seemed the mark of the mistress rather than the slave. But when she turned, Lesley saw that on the inward slopes of Meena's bottom-crack there were the marks of the branding-iron. They were similar to the marks branded on Maggie, the young blond window-dresser in the photographs. Meena, after all, was subject to the authority of a man. Lesley kissed her there, on the marks, and Meena smiled.

"Such things surprise you? There is no cause for that. I may be the mistress of a girl and yet I have a master. You may cane Debby or Julie, yet you are subject to your masters whip. It is Antons pleasure that I should possess you. But I do so with his consent. The place to which you go tomorrow is one from which there can be no return, unless your master permits it. They will command you to love other girls there, and the choice of partner will be theirs. You will be ordered to make lesbian love with Kim or Trudi, Maggie or Jill. You will perform naked with other girls while they watch. No refusal is allowed. It will not do to protest that you are no lesbian, or that you love a girl other than the one chosen for you."

Meena revealed one episode already arranged for Lesley at her request. It involved Kim, one of Solons nineteen-year-old shopgirls who had passed into Mano's possession. Lesley must have seen Kim many times behind the counter of the stores boutique. With her short tresses worn in a page-style on her back, or else the brown hair fringed and in a docked pony-tail, Kim was not Lesley's type. She had the look of a common girl, the wide bones of her cheeks marked with rouge, her eyelashes blackened or false, the blue eyes themselves too narrow, her mouth painted but her chin shallow and weak.

To see Kim in her red blouse and white skirt was to find this girl at her most elegant. Yet often she eyed her male admirers or loitered for them in the shadows of the bridewell alleys and parsonage lanes. As if proud of her soft and even plump young body, Kim would flaunt it in blue denim pants in the most vulgarly provoking fashion. In her sluttish manner, she would loll forward over the counter in this outfit so that the world was regaled with the plump cheeks of Kim's bottom presented fully in the denim seat of her pants.

Lesley would find it far beneath her dignity to have sex with a young tart like Kim. For this reason Meena had ensured that she should be required to perform the most lewd and prolonged lesbian acts with the girl. Mano would tolerate no refusal, least of all from so vulgar and sluttish a girl as Kim. Kim would be reminded that she had enjoyed her boy-friends penis and could not, therefore, expect to be excused from obeying. While Mano went to fetch the pony-whip, his servants would bend Kim over the tall stool and fasten her wrists to the forward feet of it. Lesley would be made to witness the sequel in order that her own reluctance might be cured.

The girls denim pants, with the slight bagginess of a clowns, would be taken down and also Kim's panties if she wore any. Indeed, Kim s panties would be wadded in her mouth to quieten her protests. Having got their softly-shaped shopgirl in this plight, the servants would busy themselves between her legs. Then the fattened shape of Kim s pale bottom-cheeks would seduce them as she bent. It would be the work of a moment to choose the penis-like butt of a whip handle and smear it with wet soap. Without compunction they would widen Kim s arsehole upon it and exercise her young backside with a vigorous phallic ravishing.

Only after this would Kim endure the penalty of her masters whip. Fifty strokes or more of the slim lash across the soft weight of Kim s bottom-cheeks would be a matter of routine. He would make it severe as any prison whipping. Meena smiled. At the sight of this ordeal, Kim farting and kicking, dancing and screaming under the cuts of the lash across her arse and thighs, Lesley herself would change her mind. Knowing that they would oblige her to make a similar exhibition of herself, she would choose obedience.

The oriental beauty of Meena's round high-boned face was bright with a wicked smile.

"Make love to me with your tongue, Lesley, while I tell you of what you will do with Kim."

She turned on her back, drew her knees up and obliged Lesley to use her tongue actively along the cleft of her cunt and bottom. She described how they would imprison Lesley and Kim on a divan. The two young women must lie naked, head to tail, so that each pillowed her head on the others hip, thigh, or rear cheek. To ensure this, each girl wore a leather collar and waist-belt. A short chain ran from the front of each waist-belt to the front of the other girls collar, passing back under the legs of the first prisoner. Each reluctant lover was thus made to keep her eyes and lips within twelve inches of the others rear thigh-opening and backside. During the sunlit days of the warm boudoir and the lamplit nights, Lesley would see little beyond the white softness of Kim's thighs and the pink feminine flesh between them, the sleek pallor of Kim's hips and arse-cheeks with many a glimpse of her anus as she shifted restlessly. Kim s vision of the world would be bounded by a similar view of Lesley.

The suggestiveness of such a view and the natural unappeased longing of bodily desires would do the rest. However reluctant at first, the girls would exchange soon an accidental or hardly intended kiss and caress. During long hours, Lesley's sole occupation would be to watch the slight shiftings of Kim's hips, the little squeezing together of her legs, the uneasy tensing of the plump bottom-cheeks and their parting again. The languor of warm idleness would make restraint a torture. Mano's servants would visit them morning and night, rubbing each vaginal slit with a cunningly irritant powder.

Meena smiled again. Lesley would wake in the night aware of Kim's tiny furtive movements and the scent of the girls arousal. A few inches from her face, between Kim s legs, Lesley would see the secret rubbing of the fingers. Believing Lesley to be asleep Kim had been driven to this clandestine masturbation. Or else, Meena said, it would be Lesley who could not hold out. Caressing herself in the stillness of the night she would freeze motionless as she felt Kim's hand upon her own.

After that they would both cease to resist. Lesley would make love to Kim a dozen times each day and night as they lay on the divan. She would not do it out of affection for Kim but because she needed so badly to be relieved of her own frustration. Several times during the night, the servants would wake them and order them to make love together while they were watched. They would ensure that Lesley tasted Kim's bottom as well as her slit, the salt humidity of her flanks as well as her flesh-tang. Soon they would wake unprompted and make love two or three times a night. At dawn they would wake again, each scenting the others arousal as they began the days loving anew. Kim would be replaced by Trudi or Maggie, Kim or Tania, and Lesley would accept her new lover.

As Lesley made a faint protest, Meena reminded her of Judith, the sixteen-year-old nymph of the Villa Rif, her graceful figure and the veil of brown hair framing the pale oval beauty of her face. Lesley had made passionate love to her, performing the most self-abasing act. Her saliva had run with the tastes of Judith Terrys bottom as well as her vagina, and every odour of her flesh. She could do for others what she had done then. Still Lesley protested. Meena smiled and answered her. If there was true love in the sixteen-year-olds vaginal slit or in the tight dimple of Judith Terry's arsehole, the same must exist in the corresponding parts of Kim's body.

Next day, Lesley asked Anton meekly if she was still to be his slave and whether she would see Debby again. He smiled at her.

"You belong to Mano now. If I give Debby to him later on, you will see her again. I should prefer her to. go far to the east where Meena's first master will know how to make good use of her. Her destination or your own need not concern you. Your masters will make the choice. You are too sensible to believe that Mano or I feel gratitude or obligation to you for obeying us. Mano has asked for you and I have given you to him. I should prefer you to go to another such place in the east to be sold with young Rachel, as a pair. The harem is a natural institution in such countries. Stories of an adulterous young wife and her schoolgirl daughter under the whip together would be too common for scandal."

Mano, the dark saturnine figure with hair greying at the temples, arrived in a few hours. Lesley was taken to the car, where she sat in the back between Mano and his valet. She was dressed conventionally in a blouse and long skirt. Yet before taking her out they fastened her wrist-cuffs together and linked them to her leather collar by a short chain. In the car, they drew up her skirt, making her lie over, for the valet to manualise her arse and thighs during the long hours of the drive.

The journey lay south, across the flat pasture of the Charente and the hills inland from Bordeaux. It was a landscape bright with yellow fields of mustard and maize-cobs, of the rows of ripening vines. Many hours later they entered a long inland valley whose cliffs grew steeper and more rugged on either side. The wooded precipices dropped sharply to the narrow banks of a slow and limpid river. Here and there was an old mill with its wheel turning slowly in the hot sun. It was a land of few isolated cottages far beyond the last of the little towns.

Just before sunset the car turned from the valley road and began to climb a serpentine track which wound upwards through the trees towards a remote and ancient manor house. Standing in woodland and pasture the house looked out towards the sharp ridge of the Spanish mountains to the south. Around it the estate had been cultivated as parkland and vista. When the car stopped there was a vast and absolute stillness on every side.

In this place, behind its ancient walls and securely fastened doors, Lesley was to undergo the last stages of her training in submission. During the days which followed she became accustomed to the stone-flagged rooms and tall baronial chimney-pieces. There were glimpses of other girls being taken to or from the presence of their master by the men who served him. They walked meekly with heads bowed, as if this symbol of obedience was required of them.

No demands were made upon her during the first few days, though soon she was to at the disposal of Joachim, Robert, and other men who were among Mano's guests. Until that time she was treated like a rather neglected visitor in a country house. The room in which she slept, with its silk curtains and fine panelling, was divided from Mano's own by a marble luxury of sunken bath and fragrant potpourri. She was provided with everything she might need. Yet the doors to the marble bath and the corridor remained securely locked.

It was Mano who put an end to her isolation. He came into her room at midday, kissed her on the forehead and raised her chin with his finger as if to make her look at him while he spoke.

"You believe that you have learnt submission, Lesley? You think you have humiliated yourself sufficiently? There is much more—and much worse—to come yet. For your next lesson I wish you to learn the truth about the feelings of your lovers towards you. You shall see how even the most gentle and the most chivalrous of them would use you if they dared. It is best that you know the truth before we take you further."

She looked at him, doubting and only half understanding.

"I shall convince you," he said with a laugh at her uncertainty. "When you lie here this afternoon, I want you to dream of those days last year. Of your longing for a man which overcame your attachment to marriage and children. Of your lovers obedience and continued devotion to you when you refused him certain unorthodox pleasures. Dream of the man who made you wet between the thighs at the thought of him, even while you were lying beside your husband in bed... Dream of the man for whom you exercised your rights as an educated and sexually emancipated young woman... The man whose penis you coveted so much, who made you whimper and swoon with the joy of it... The man whom you left for another when it suited you."

She tried to question him but he silenced her by a further command.

'The maid will unlock the door and attend you while you bath in an hour or two. After that, you will be taken down to one of the other rooms."

In the hours which followed, Lesley began the last stage of her voyage in self-discovery. She was soon to hear her destination spoken of as the Gardens of the Night.


PART THREE - THE GARDENS OF THE NIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

Each evening after dinner, Mano and his guests took their coffee and armagnac on the long verandah.

From this colonnaded walk, high above the wooded slopes of the valley, the view lay south towards Aragon and the mountains. Black and silent, the Spanish peaks ran like characters of an ancient cipher across the last flush of sun on the clouds and the luminous glimmer of twilight.

When the sky grew darker, a spasmodic lightning broke the warm night, far off above the rocky summits. From time to time in the humid stillness the scattered drops of an electrical storm fell, heavy and brief, on the broad leaves beyond the shelter of the verandah. For an hour or more the men smoked and talked of the gossip of the Faubourg St. Germain or the summer scandals of Biarritz, ignoring the girls who awaited their orders.

Mano's slaves were always present on these occasions. Sometimes they were accompanied by Robert and Joachim, sometimes by other guests who were strangers to the girls and whose names were not mentioned. One or two of the trusted male servants stood within call to assist their master when necessary.

Several of the girls knelt or sat by the chairs of the men, silent and demure. They were not told in advance of the demands which would be made upon them—or even whether they would be chosen at all. In some cases a man would put the girl to his pleasure on the low divan which stood on the verandah tiling. If he preferred to take her somewhere more private, there were several convenient rooms which adjoined the wooden colonnade. Discretion was not necessary in itself. At such a height, the shrillest cry would be lost long before it reached the mill wheels and the scattered cottages on the shaded bank of the river far below.

It was on such an evening as this that Mano had decided to take Lesley one stage further in her training, by dispelling her illusions in the meekness of the men who had been her lovers before her acquisition by Anton. Mano had gone to great lengths to accomplish this and had chosen as the unwitting accomplice the man for whom Lesley had left her husband. Jason was the gentlest of her lovers, who had tolerated all Lesley s demands and refusals. He proved an amorous and, in his heart, a lecherous young man. Yet he had never treated Lesley or any other woman with anything but that characteristic gentleness and adoration.

So Mano had taken the trouble to befriend the young man. Hearing that Jason was travelling south during the summer, he invited him to spend a night as his guest. Playing on Jasons natural lechery, Mano promised him slyly that he should have a woman at his absolute command and never be reproached for anything he did.

There was no mistaking the excitement in Jasons eyes at this promise. Mano was careful to conceal from him that the young woman would be Lesley, for he wished Jason to treat her without scruple.

While Mano and his guests were drinking their coffee and armagnac on the verandah, two of his servants led Lesley to the scene of her ordeal. She was dressed in sheer black stockings which came up to mid-thigh and were drawn smooth by the black suspender-straps of a corset, cut high and seatless at the rear.

The room in which Jason was to sleep was divided from the next by a soundproof wall with no door in it. Yet there was an opening low down in the wall. Built into it stood a raised platform with a punishment block.

Lesley s two escorts forced her to her knees and made her lie on all fours over the block while they strapped her down by waist and wrists. Her bare seat, hips, and upper thighs, her stockinged legs, were presented in the room where Jason would sleep. Her head, shoulders, and all her body above the waist were on the far side of the dividing line between the two rooms. When they had strapped her down, the two men lowered a thick and padded partition—like the blade in a guillotine—which locked into place over her waist. In one room it was possible to admire the high crown, the boyish cut of her short fair hair, the long parted fringe, the aloof blue eyes, the clear fair-skinned features, the sulky mouth and chin. But in that room she did not exist from the waist down.

The other room, to which she presented her rear view, offered a striking contrast. This time she was invisible from the waist up. As she knelt over the block the long trim legs in their black sleek stockings were seductively available. Between the rear of her thighs at the top she showed the lightly haired and gently cleft lips of her vagina. Lesley's bottom appeared as a pair of erotically mature cheeks, enticingly firmed out by marriage and child-rearing.

Once the padded partition had been lowered and locked into place, no sound on one side of the wall would be heard on the other. The sighs of pleasure and the screams of punishment were alike inaudible to the person who inflicted them.

At either end of the partition were two large mirrors in the room allotted to Jason. Yet these served as windows to anyone on the far side. Without knowing it was so, Jason would display himself and his actions to Lesley in the wall-mirrors of the far room, the reflections passing through the concealed windows and forming in the glass on the wall beyond.

Mano had handed one of the men a cane and given him certain instructions. It was not his intention that Lesley should be thrashed before Jasons arrival. Yet Mano sensed that the young man would be excited rather than repelled by seeing a few marks of punishment fading on the young wife's backside.

The servant took the cane. Without any preliminary he gave six stokes across the pale broadened cheeks of Lesley's bottom, and then, more cruelly, six more across the backs of her bare thighs, just above her stocking-tops. It was little more than a child's punishment, though the stripes on the back of her legs crossed one another and, at one point, there was a deeper red where blood was almost drawn by the tip of the cane.

There were many other things which the two men would have like to do to Lesley's lower half—and which they promised themselves they would do before long—but now they obeyed Mano's orders by strapping her ankles together as she lay over the block and leaving her to her fate.

It was Mano's intention that Lesley should see and recognise Jason in the mirrors in order that she might profit by the lesson. Jason, however, would not know the identity of the slave-woman who was at his disposal. Lesley was reduced to being a pair of legs, a backside, an area of pubic and anal sensitivity, hips, belly and womb.

An hour or so after the two servants had left, Mano led his young guest into the room with its curious display of Lesley's lower body. He laughed at Jason's surprise.

"It is our wish that you do as you please with her tonight. Whatever lust you wish to satisfy, whatever severity you care to inflict, she is at your disposal. You need have no compunction. She will never be able to tell tales—and she may remain unknown to you."

The young man uttered an exclamation of amusement and astonishment. Beyond the partition—inaudible to the men—Lesley at last saw his face in the mirror and screamed, "Jason! Jason! Jason!"

"You need have no compunction," Mano said, "Your pleasure is to be your guide. She is open between her legs. Have you tried the tightness of a woman's arsehole? If not, you may do so now As for punishments, she needs a whipping and I should be grateful to you for giving her one. If you choose to put something between her legs or even up her bottom, that is your privilege. If you find her sluggish in her responses to you, there are little incense sticks which glow at the end and can be used to stimulate her."

The excitement in Jasons face was controlled with difficulty. As Mano spoke he saw that the young woman's black-stockinged legs were tensing and smoothing together in their straps with apprehension, even though the words were inaudible to her. The red imprints of the cane on the backs of her thighs and the fading stripes on her bottom seemed only to stimulate his thoughts to cruelty.

Mano opened the cupboard at one side of the room.

"A cream to lubricate her between the legs, if you choose not to manipulate her first," he said pointing out the jar, "A pot of vaseline for her anus. A douche and an enema syringe. A bowl for every purpose. Then you may punish her as you choose. There is the long prison birch-rod, the four switches bound at the handle. And there the reformatory bamboo. You may use the whip of knotted cord, the riding-switch, the snakeskin training-lash, or even the spanking strap kept for little girls."

Jason was smiling now and Lesley, seeing this in the mirror, began to scream his name as if he could hear her.

"The dildo," Mano said, "This to give her pleasure between her legs and this, a formidable erection, to punish her by being inserted in her behind. These are the little incense-sticks you may choose to light and tickle her with."

"How long will she be at my disposal?" Jason asked, his face paler with expectation.

Mano shrugged.

"You will not be interrupted. There is nothing you can do to her which will cause me to intervene. You may be as extreme as you choose. A girl sits on the far side of the wall with smelling salts to administer in case of swooning. You must forget your timidity. No demand is too severe for her. Perhaps you would hesitate to use so impressive a phallus in her rear for fear of causing havoc there? You need not hesitate. She feels such ravages and learns that we allow nothing to impede our enjoyment of her. Enjoy her, until you have satisfied yourself with her and leave this room of your own accord."

With this advice, Mano left the young man alone. Jason walked across to where Lesley knelt. He felt a tremor as he stroked her sleek pearly hips and thighs. Slipping a hand between her legs he coaxed the warm folds of vaginal flesh, working them back a little. Lesley gasped his name again, as if the touch of his hands had weakened her resolve to be a slave.

Jason lowered his head and touched the light-haired flesh with his lips, performing a service which Lesley had disdained in the days of their love. He brushed the sensitive feminine slit with a series of light pouting kisses and ran his tongue along it with agile movements. Lesley shuddered and wept with the thrill.

The girl who sat with the smelling salts on the far side of the partition-wall stroked the high crown of Lesley's straight fair hair. Jason s lips began to browse on the firm pale cheeks of Lesley's bottom. He kissed one and then the other before parting them and daring to leave the impress of his lips on the smooth yellowed-ivory of the inward slope, he felt her shudder again, though the ambiguous little groan of excitement and revulsion was inaudible to him as he touched his lips to Lesley's anus.

Unbuttoning himself, he laid his erection between the sleek surfaces of her thighs. At once she began to squeeze and squirm upon it. He unstrapped her ankles and she opened herself for him, thighs wide apart and entreating impalement. Never had she been so eager, not even in the first days when she abandoned the last of her marriage for him. Jason inserted himself into the warm comfort of her cunt and allowed her to ride her hips upon his erection for a few minutes more.

Yet Lesley, by denying him extreme pleasures in the past, had conditioned him to be more eager for them in secret. It was an exquisite irony which made her the subject of his passion now.

He drew from her presently, feeling the shudder of her loss but not hearing the little sob which Lesley emitted at being deprived of him during the rising tension of her pleasure. Now he was like a child, excited at the gift of strange new toys. Taking the china bowl and the douche, he played a teasing jet between her legs, tickling the sensitive flesh until the tops of her black stockings were soaked and her thighs squirmed in their straps. Nor could he resist employing the nozzle of the enema syringe in Lesley's bottom. The mundane ritual of the squirt, as he pumped the liquid soap into her behind was an erotic excitement to him in the present circumstances.

He then saw the tightening and tensing of her behind, hearing nothing of Lesley's cries of refusal. For all that, he sensed her resistance. With a hand under her belly, feeling the added weight and swelling of such a load, he smacked the nearer cheek of her bottom hard, as if commanding a disobedient little girl. Her stockinged legs were tightly strapped to the block now but she shifted and tensed the back of her thighs against the china rim. Jason gave a harder smack on the same bottom-cheek and then several more which were harder still. He caressed the blushing and stinging cheek, then smacked it hard again. The crisp echoes of the spanking rang in the silent room.

There could be but one outcome to such a struggle and it followed soon afterwards. In that moment whatever arrogance and self-possession Lesley had boasted towards Jason in the days of their earlier enjoyment was lost forever.

Jason was far from satisfied. To be presented with the trim thighs, the mature young hips, the warm and yearning vagina, the firmly broadened bottom-cheeks of a young married woman like Lesley, completely bowled him over. For the next hour he played with her, as a prurient little boy plays with a lewd little girl in a game of doctors and nurses. Between her legs he parted, tickled, and inserted. Peering between the cheeks of her bottom he tested Lesley's arsehole repeatedly, widening it on the little glass probes, the dildo-shaped nozzles, even putting her to the test with a phallic whip-handle. From time to time, for no apparent reason, he gave her another stinging smack on the same bottom-cheek.

Lesley's backside and thighs, her hips and flanks, shone damp with the labour of bearing so many insertions and performing so many prodigies. One cheek of her behind was suffused by a deep blush. Jason smacked it hard, caressed it for a moment, smacked harder, caressed again, and then smacked harder still.

The girl who held the smelling-salts watched the victim s face with fascination, stroking the short fair hair and the parted fringe. At first Lesley's blue eyes and demanding young face had assumed the defensive look of a schoolgirl who tries to avoid punishment by appearing already on the verge of tears. Now there was a subtle change. The self-indulgent woebegone look was still there. But now it was that of the child who threatens tears because a promised treat is to be withheld. The sounds in her breath were indistinct but they had the suggestion of a half-formed refrain.

"Please!... Please!... Oh, please!..."

Jason seemed to sense this mood, though he was governed by his own desires alone. He knelt behind her, unstrapped Lesley's thighs and guided his erection between her legs. Lesley shuddered as if with relief and opened herself gratefully to receive him at full length. She began to sigh and twist her head, smoothing her face against the hand of the girl who attended her. Though her wrists were strapped to the block, she kissed her companions fingers and touched them with her tongue.

Despite the little discomforts and the enforced routines of the douche and the syringe, Lesley seemed to be in a state of great arousal. Indeed, it was perhaps these very penalties which had roused her. Tensing her legs, she thrust her hips up and down on Jason with a rapid but erratic movement until, long before him, she began to climax. He would never have believed that this could be the response of the snooty young suburban wife he had known as Lesley. All the same, Jason was flattered at having brought the unknown slave-woman to such a pitch of yearning and wanting. Thrilled by the feeling of her firmly broadened buttocks writhing into his loins, he steadied her by a hand on each bare flank and moved vigorously in and out, driving hard to his own orgasm. As he thrust and spurted in her belly, he sensed the tremor of crisis and release in her limbs, though her failing cry was inaudible to him. He drew from her, pleased at the wetness of her excitement on the inner surfaces of her parted thighs.

Having eased himself of his need, Jason was once again the villainous little boy who will spare his partner nothing. Now his eyes admired the full and firm cheeked spread of Lesley's twenty-eight-year-old bottom as she knelt strapped over the block. The thought that she would never be free to tell tales of what was done to her added a cruel thrill to his enjoyment. He chose a long and supple bamboo which had a spring like a rapier. It was the wicked delight in his face, rather than the sight of the cane itself which made Lesley scream out as she saw him approaching her in the mirrors.

He touched the long switch lightly across her pale buttocks, this way and that, taunting her with the promise of what was to come. For half an hour he kept her waiting, judging by her tensing and shifting that Lesley's rear cheeks and the bare thighs above her stockings must be crawling with a fearful anticipation of the pain. The twistings of her legs were vain because she was held to the block by the tight strap round her thighs just above her knees and her ankles were pinioned.

Jason smiled and stroked the fading marks left by the valets cane, as if to assure Lesley of what he was going to do. In her fright she was obliged to compress her bottom-crack to a thin tight line to contain her panic. The smile faded. Tight-lipped he touched the cane across the fullest width of Lesley s arse and thrashed her savagely.

The first fifteen strokes were a smarting torment but no worse than a strict teacher might have given. But a sadistic gaoler would have envied Jason the excitement of giving the twelve which followed. His enjoyment increased and he was bambooing the young married woman across her backside so that every stroke raised a thin weal.

Mano, that inveterate observer of human aberrations, had arranged a further diversion. He was sure of what Jason would do so long as he had an anonymous woman at his disposal. What if he discovered it was Lesley? At Mano's command, the reflecting layer of the mirror-windows was drawn back briefly. Glancing up, before the scene was hidden from him again, Jason saw the face of the woman in the glass of the far room.

He recognised at once the high-crowned crop of straight fair hair, cut short at the jawline and worn in its long parted fringe. Despite the dismay which had overcome the blue eyes and sullen features, he knew the weeping slave for who she was. Their eyes met. Lesley shrieked as she saw Jason s astonishment resolve into an open-mouthed grin of delight. His penis began to harden again at once. To have at his mercy a young woman who had refused him so much—and who could refuse no longer—doubled his exhilaration. His eyes met Lesley's with a smile of cruel promise and he directed her glance to his stiffening erection.

Lesley's mouth formed a wild scream of "No-o-o-o!" before the reflecting layer turned the window to a mirror once more on Mano's side.

Still smiling at the mirror, aware now that she could see him, Jason put down the cane. He chose from the cupboard a short lash of woven snakeskin with a stout handle. Now he remembered Lesley as the selfish and self-willed young woman, or perhaps Lesley snootily aloof on her bicycle, contemptuous of the admiring eyes which followed every movement of thighs, hips and arse on the saddle.

To show her his amusement at the irony of fate heightened his spirits. He trailed the lash through his fingers, raised it, and cracked it across the pale cheeks of Lesley's bottom with vindictive energy. Knowing that this was the last time he would ever see her and that he had no need to restrain himself, Jason whipped her without pity. Lesley's buttock-flesh jumped and quivered under the impacts of the strokes. He inflicted every plum-coloured weal, each loop and curlicue of the streaking lash, with a profound satisfaction.

The suggestive squirming and contorting of Lesley's buttocks, the glimpse of vaginal flesh between twisting thighs or of the young wife's anus as her buttocks arched and contracted, was like the seductive ballet of a dancing-girls backside. It was the girl with the smelling-salts in the other room who heard the shrill frenzy, who saw the wildness in her blue eyes and the lips distended as the boyish crop twisted and jerked desperately. Yet Jason guessed, by the sudden slackening, when the little restorative bottle had to be applied to the young woman's nostrils. Only then would he pause until she was ready to receive the rest of the whipping. Her cries were inaudible, though several times the sharp abrupt sounds which broke from her under the whip caused him to smile.

He whipped hard and rapidly, allowing no respite between the strokes. After twenty or thirty lashes he was whipping her on stripes which had been whipped once already. Smudged red dots from her cuts appeared in a score of places. The fifty strokes grew towards a hundred and several fell on the backs of her bare thighs above the tops of her wet silk stockings. Lesley's bottom was in a state which would have been considered imprudent in any place from which her complaints might be heard.

Satisfied with her at last, the smooth skin of the young wife's bottom cut in thirty or forty places, Jason put down the whip. He was about to rest. First of all he took the large pot of heavily salted fat, feeling the larger crystals within the grease. Because the whip had cut Lesley's backside and drawn blood in so many places, however slightly, the salt fat would smart like fire in the rawness.

Kneeling behind her, Jason spread a large blob of the salt fat on one cheek of Lesley's bottom. He saw her toes curl with the intensity of the anguish. He stopped abruptly and listened keenly in the stillness. Despite the partition-wall, he could just hear Lesley screaming. His heart beat faster. Eagerly he continued to massage the salty grease into the raw and whipped bottom-flesh. He did it gently as the considerate lover he had once been, though he knew it would smart atrociously for the rest of the night.

At last the fat was spread over the backs of her thighs and between the cheeks of Lesley s backside, where the wicked tip of the lash had curled in to inflict cuts on the most sensitive areas.

Lesley was tensing and twisting in her straps, the firm maturity of her young bottom-cheeks a deeper crimson and sleek with grease. Like a vindictive teacher who seeks to reprimand his pupil by making her predicament still worse, Jason smiled and gave a sharp smack on one of Lesley's bottom-cheeks. Harder and harder fell the smacks until the red sleek bum-cheeks pressed and squirmed, untouchably sore.

All this time, Jason had been stiffening. Kneeling behind her, his prick had gathered a good deal of the grease from lying against Lesley's burning arse-cheeks. Because her buttocks were stretched apart by her posture, the penis knob lay between them, against Lesley's arsehole. Jason had shared the dreams of the men who admired Lesley bending to her garden labours in the tight black cloth of the trouser suit or working-jeans. Her experience of married sex and childbearing removed their last scruples. Like them, Jason had always wanted to bugger Lesley.

Such a thing was impossible during their affair. Lesley would reject the suggestion with disgust and rarely allow her buttocks to part sufficiently for him to see between them. Now that had changed. Not only would he sodomise her, he would make Lesley sodomise herself upon him. With his knob to her anus, he took the whip from the floor and trailed it against her bare thighs.

He felt her hips and buttocks go tense and still. Jason gave a sharp little whip-flick on her bare legs, enough to sting her quite hard. His rounded knob presented itself peremptorily to the tight dark anus. Another whipsting and then another warned her of what she must do. With a last little sound of self-pity and reluctance, Lesley arched her hips out, pressing her bottom against him until she forced her arsehole over the knob of the penis and engulfed it in her behind.

Jason gasped at the exquisite tightness on his erection. Yet he still made Lesley supply the movements of her own ravishing. A flick or two of the whip on the young wife's taut bare thighs spurred her into motion. Glancing down as he knelt behind her, Jason stared in fascination. The pallor of Lesley's firmly broadened bottom-cheeks was surging and tightening in a steady rhythm. Between her buttocks he could see Lesley's anus stretched to its limit round his veined and hardened sex. He could only guess at the expression on her face which the mirrors reflected back to her in the other room. Were the blue eyes under the parted fringe narrowed and tear-brimmed, Lesley's mouth drawn down at the corners like a self-pitying schoolgirl? Or were her lips parted with the exertion and her eyes betraying a certain unhealthy excitement at the sensations which his tool was stimulating in her entrails?

He gave her a flick or two of the whip on her flank to make her go faster and faster. At last his passion seemed to boil and overflow within him. Jason directed its spouting torrent as deeply as possible into Lesley's bottom.

Withdrawing from her, he stretched out on the bed and slept at last. For Lesley there was to be no sleep. She remained in position, her lower body available to him whenever he chose to enjoy her. In an hour or two, Jason woke again. He was stiffened by the memory of what he had done to Lesley and the prospect of finding her still at his disposal. When he stood over her again, he knew that she could see him in the mirrors, for Lesley's buttocks had compressed her bottom-crack to a thin tight line and her thighs were clenched together.

Her rear hole yielded easily to his erection and he felt her little tightenings and squeezings upon him, as if to excite his spurting quickly. But Jason withdrew and chose the school spanking-strap with its broad thin leather and tailed end. For the next half-hour he gave Lesley's bottom a hard time with the strap so that she was too sore to endure a breath of air upon her buttocks. Then he completed his sodomy of her, delighted at her sensitivity, the flinching of her backside from the pressing of the coarse hair round his penis. This roused him to copious spending again, sufficient to astonish Lesley herself when she yielded it.

Before stretching out on the bed again, he made Lesley's predicament far worse by massaging a second helping of the salted fat into her raw and deeply blushing buttocks. He stung her hard with a complimentary smack on each scalded bottom-cheek and turned away.

Mano assured her next day that her ordeal had been necessary to increase her understanding of men and her own self-knowledge.

"You believe me now, Lesley? Your conquest of such meek lovers as Jason was mere illusion. The real Jason was not the man who gave way before your sullen arrogance but your companion of last night. Turn your face to me. Ah, you still weep a little for the sore and sorry state he has left you in! Be sensible, Lesley! In the past you denied him so much. How could he resist the temptation to enjoy all those forbidden pleasures?"

Several times, Lesley was positioned in the same place, though not allowed to see the mans reflection. She felt only the hand and penis of each visitor, the stretching of vagina and anus, the smooth branding torment of the whip. Each time it was one of her previous lovers who enjoyed her, secure in his anonymity from her. On the last of these occasions Lesley was ravished, sodomised, and whipped with exceptional vindictiveness. Mano smiled the next day.

"Can you not guess, Lesley? That was your husband taking his last farewell of you! Such a tapestry of whip-marks on the bottom-cheeks of his faithless young wife proves him a true artist!"

In his sardonic manner he left her to assimilate the shock of this revelation. Though he made no more demands on her for a week or two, she was in no doubt that some further ordeal lay in store before her slavery was complete.

To guess what still lay waiting for her was impossible. Yet there was some indefinable dimension lacking in Lesley's submission to Mano. She had obeyed in all that was required of her, making love with Trudi, as Meena had anticipated, and also with Kim. On the terrace after dinner, Lesley attended on the pleasures of her master and his guests, naked but for the black stockings and corset.

Mano knew which act of the drama was lacking. Lesley the slave had yet to rebel against her master—and had yet to have that rebellion crushed. In his experience that crisis always came, as if by means of an unspoken agreement between the girl and the man who possessed her. The disobedience seemed necessary, whatever the pretext. The girl needed the release of challenging him, of breathing the high keen air of defiance. It was as if she sought the reassurance of her slavery, of being thrashed, subdued and made to obey after all. Mano thought that it was her way of testing her master, as she might have tested a lover under other circumstances. The slave needed her master to thrash her into submission as a proof that he still valued her obedience. If she meant nothing to him, her defiance would be ignored, or at least quickly forgotten, as a matter of little significance.

The moment of Lesley s rebellion was more than an intuitive understanding between the young woman and her master. It was also the time when she was taken deeper into the labyrinth of servitude, to that heart of self-abasement in which she was to exist for the future.

On the night in question, she was not called to the verandah until the men had finished their coffee. When the summons came she was led there and made to kneel at once on all fours over a long low bench padded with leather. Her wrists were strapped at full stretch in front of her and a broad belt held her down at the waist. At the rear, the black corset arched high and seatless, displaying the pearl-pale nudity of her upper thighs and her buttocks, her hips and the curve of her lower belly.

The men talked without looking at her or referring to her. Mano produced an album of full-plate photographs and began to circulate the prints to the others. They examined them with smiles, often looking from the photographs to Lesley herself.

Tut the pictures on the tiles where she can see them," Mano said to one of the servants.

The full-plate prints were laid out, a dozen of them, and Lesley knew the reason for her own display over the bench. They were pictures of that elfin beauty, a pupil on the verge of her teens, who so closely resembled Lesley herself. The same rather sulky fair-skinned pride was evident and the straight brown hair cut at the shoulders. It was clear that the guests had been told that the young nymph belonged to the boyishly cropped and erotically mature Venus who now knelt strapped over the bench.

The subject of the photographs caused further smiles. No longer was the setting a schoolroom but a disciplinary institution of some kind. Yet it was the same pedant—he who had raised Lesley's fury by chastising her daughter—who was presiding. Kadek, the middleaged schoolmaster, had the solemn young nymph bending tightly forward over a high stool, her wrists strapped to the base of the forward legs. A gym-slip lay on the floor and the culprit was naked from the school briefs of white elasticated cotton to the tops of the black uniform knee-socks.

Lesley's cry was one of disgust, anger, and helplessness. Kadek was shown to her, smiling as he drew down the white stretched briefs to the girls knees. Then he confided his amusement to the camera lens as his hand touched the pale and immature innocence of Rachel's bottom-cheeks.

The rest of the photographs recorded a punishment of the kind to which the wall of reformatories echo every day of the week. They showed Rachels delightful little backside, the caning and squirming, the stripes and bruisings upon it, the tears and imploring of the solemn young face, the bamboo thrashing and thrashing across her buttocks. The face of the stern chastiser smiled as he glanced at the camera again, his finger pointing out the weals on the slim elfin bum-cheeks. The front of his tight trousers bulged with the weight of his erection. Then the demure schoolgirl cheeks of Rachels bottom were thrashed, and thrashed, and thrashed...

The amusement in the men's faces as they caught Lesley's distracted gaze was caused by something more than the subject of the photographs. Presently the bead curtain of the verandah entrance was brushed aside. Lesley looked back over her shoulder and gave a cry of incredulity. The man who had joined them was Kadek, the chastiser of her daughter, who smiled so knowingly in the photographs.

He knelt behind Lesley and she shrank from his touch as his hands caressed her bottom.

"The man who has chastised the charming filly so severely must also admire the bottom of the young mare," Kadek said, "And besides I have a certain account to settle with this young woman... Believe me, Mano, though they are at such different stages of development, their two bottoms have a true family resemblance! To have their two arses side by side for the whip!"

He unbuttoned a redoubtable erection, spread a little vaseline between Lesley's buttocks, and inserted himself up her bottom. She grunted a vain defiance between clenched teeth.

"You have no idea, Mano," Kadek murmured, "the anger of Lesley when her girls bottom was smacked... the trouble that was made. There is, as I say, an account outstanding."

He drew back and pressed into her again, leaning over and kissing Lesley's neck.

"I think she likes it after all," he said softly.

But Lesley uttered a sob of exertion and revulsion as she tried to expel his stiffness from her behind. Kadek laughed and, presently, withdrew from her of his own accord. But it was only to walk round and sit astride the other end of the bench, close to her and facing her. The hard and veined erection touched her lips before, in her bewilderment, Lesley could twist her face aside. Kadek held the short cut of her hair and turned her head back.

"Such bashfulness from so emancipated a young woman, Lesley!" he said teasingly. "Come, now. Show your gratitude for having your daughter well disciplined. In your passion you sucked the lover to whom your husband lost you. You can do it as easily now."

Lesley mewed her refusal between pressed lips. Mano smiled. The moment which he had hoped to contrive, the rebellion of the slave against her master, had arrived.

"Obey our guest, Lesley," he said quietly. "Have you so soon forgotten your promises of submission?"

"I won't!" she cried, her anger overcoming the dismay, "I won't touch a man so brutal and vile!"

"You will obey me," said Mano in the same quiet voice, "it is my command that you such the penis of the man who demands this service—that you do it to show your acceptance of him—and that you show your own humility to him by swallowing his libation."

Lesley screamed out her refusal. Mano nodded, as if he understood. Standing over her, he stroked the straight fair hair where it was cropped short along her jawline.

"I shall make you obey, Lesley," he said in the gentle voice of a lover. "You know that I must. Indeed, I believe that you need me to. A slave-girl cannot demand exceptions to the orders she must submit to. If I allowed you to succeed in this one defiance, everything would be at an end."

Despite her revulsion at Kadek, Lesley pressed her face softly against his hand.

"You understand," said Mano, "I see that. Yet you have a need to be punished and compelled before you obey. I see that too. If I prized you less, I should have you unfastened and I would tell you to go. Your freedom would be restored again. That is not my way. You have been brought too far for that. You invite me, by your defiance, to show the value I put on your obedience. You urge me to put you to the extremes of torture, Lesley, if I choose. Very well, it shall be so."

Kadek still sat astride the bench, his erection presented to the sullen young mouth. But Mano now picked up the snakeskin training whip from the table. He flogged Lesley with exceptional cruelty, allowing the lash to curl between her buttocks and her struggling thighs. A score of times the tip of the lash cut her flank or curled round to mark her belly and the front of her legs. Lesley screamed and sobbed, howled and shrieked, yet still she would not suck the penis of the portly middle-aged man who had so sadistically thrashed her schoolgirl daughter.

By the time that Mano paused, the blood drawn from a score of the weals on Lesley's bottom-cheeks and the backs of her thighs bore the smudged crimson of cuts from her waist to her knees. Yet still there was some strange alliance of feminine dignity and masochistic excitement which made her endure rather than obey.

Mano took one of the little incense sticks from which the grey ash curled and fell as the fragrance rose from the red-hot glow of the tip. He nodded to two of the servants who at once held Lesley very tightly round the waist and round the thighs. Then Mano knocked the ash away. He touched the tiny glowing tip to the bare cheek of Lesley's bottom, drawing it slowly over the smooth skin in an intricate pattern. That this was torture could scarcely be disputed. That Lesley had invited it was equally beyond doubt.

Was the slave-girls rebellion purely an act of revulsion at Kadek and defiance of his command? Or had Lesley courted this ordeal in order to show her absolute submission to Mano—to beg subjugation of the most sadistic kind? That she screamed without respite suggested the intensity of the pain caused as the glowing tip traced its pattern on her bottom-cheeks and between them. With a final wild cry she begged at last for a chance to obey. When this was given, Lesley closed her mouth over Kadek's erection and sucked him as if with a passionate gratitude.

Mano stood over her and ensured her obedience. When the gross figure of Kadek came at last, his sperm ran over Lesley's tongue and she swallowed like a timid little girl at her first experience of the medicine spoon. Mano ordered her to thank Kadek—and Lesley thanked him.

She had been hurt that evening beyond anything which she had known before. Mano judged it the kindest thing to allow her to remain kneeling over the bench, though her straps were unfastened. The other guests, including Kadek, took their leave. Mano dismissed the servants.

All that night, until the first white sun was reflected from the mountain peaks, Mano sat in his chair and contemplated the curve of her proud beauty kneeling over the bench. He forbad her to speak to him and, himself, said nothing to her. Yet their eyes met almost constantly during those hours. There was between them the strange complicity uniting such a girl with her torturer. Reviled by the world, it was yet more intimate and more intense than any other in her experience.

It was not love which drew them to one another in the first place, rather fascination, self-abasement, and sadism. Yet the ingredients of the magic potion which entranced them both that night were powerful as those of love and not dissimilar. No bridegroom s kisses were ever applied to the beloved with more care and desire than Mano's stroking of the red-hot incense tip over the bare cheeks of Lesley's bottom.

In the cool dawn he got up and went over to her. Raising her to her feet he clipped the collar chain to her wrist-cuffs and the dog-leash to the collar itself.

His fingers stroked the side of her face gently.

"In a few days," he said softly, "I will have you soundly whipped in front of the others for your disobedience last night. It will be done by a man who is experienced in such things. Your bottom and your legs will be cruelly flogged. I shall like to see that."

Lesley said nothing, but she bowed her urchin-crop and kissed the hand that was stroking the side of her face.

CHAPTER TEN

The hot days of August in that place were passed under a fierce and bleaching sun. At noon the wooded gorges were still and the house silent. At night the cicadas sang in the undergrowth among gorse and thyme, while the lamps on the long verandah burned into the cooler hours after midnight. As the season began to wane, the days of Lesley's possession by Mano passed without further rebellion or resistance.

On the last night of summer, before the dry wind of fall harried the sun-withered leaves, Mano led the young woman into the quiet valley which formed the main estate. With its broad lake, its pillared mausoleum and the great trees rising like columns on the slopes above, it had acquired the peace and the fragrance of a templed Arcadia. Two centuries before, its designer had intended it as a place of resort in summer after the bleak heat of the southern day was over. For that reason the landscape was sometimes known as "The Gardens of the Night."

It was a place of idyllic seclusion and total privacy. Lesley accompanied Mano there in the adornments of his slave, worn on the nudity of her pearl-pale flesh. The leather collar at her neck and the belt round her waist were accompanied by the usual wrist-cuffs, anklets and the two straps for her legs—each worn just above the knee. Naked but for these, she walked ahead of Mano, her head bowed and the straight fair hair of her crop parting under its own weight on her nape. Though she seemed, as so often in this posture, meek as a little girl after a scolding, the self-possession and pride which were a part of her nature had merely been tamed by submission, not eradicated. Mano was not one of those who believed in the sudden alterations of personality. The fact that Lesley retained all her self-indulgent vices made her subjugation more enjoyable to him.

A passive slave was not to Mano's taste. He did not expect that Lesley in the future would be instantly and totally obedient to every command. Nor did he truly desire that she should be so. The young wife's arrogance and self-possession would flare up from time to time in the guise of self-respect or her feminine right to choose which man should penetrate her and in what way.

Mano and Lesley both knew that he would deal cruelly with her for such acts of defiance. Lesley would have cause to scream and scream into her gag, to view with dismay in the mirror the state of her bare bottom and legs. And yet she would test him by such little rebellions, Mano was sure of it. As other women demanded a display of their lovers' continued adoration, so this young woman needed proof from time to time that her slavery and subjection were valued by her master.

There would be no rebellion in the Gardens of the Night. Mano had brought her there to spend the hours of darkness with him until dawn. In his turn he required to test her—not by pain or by ordeal, but by her acceptance of the life which now lay ahead of her. He had not yet revealed to her the full extent of what would be enforced upon her, though he supposed she must have drawn her own conclusions.

Lesley seemed to have accepted already that there could be no return from her erotic captivity, hesitatingly entered into. She was Mano's possession, by Anton's decree. Mano might keep her or give her to another, Joachim or Kadek, Robert or Solon. He might return her to Mano or even find her a mistress who would love and punish her equally. None of these people would go to extremes with her, the impaling of her backside or her loins with such monstrous devices that her life would be ended. Yet such extreme tastes were well-known. If Mano chose to give her to such a master or mistress, he would do so without compunction.

As Lesley walked ahead of him, her head still bowed a little in contemplation of these truths, they came to the edge of the rippling lake. On the far shore, beyond the stone bridge and grotto, stood the pillared temple of the mausoleum. Lesley paused and watched the trees shimmer in the gentle water. The grass was still warm from the days sun, though the flooding lake already held the first images of cloud-fire in the western sky.

Mano made her follow the lakeside path, while he walked behind admiring the childish simplicity of her bowed urchin-crop, the careful grace with which the fair-skinned feet and legs moved, the elegant touching and parting of Lesley's bottom-cheeks in the sway of her hips and the rhythm of her walk.

They came to the arena of turf in an opening of the trees. From here one looked into the round marble vestibule of the pillared mausoleum and saw all that passed there. Where they now stood, a marble couch had been sunk into the ground so that its smooth undulating surface was almost level with the grass. One of the servants had prepared it by laying a cover of midnight-blue velvet on the polished surface.

"I shall spend the night here with you, Lesley," said Mano gently, kissing her forehead. "Kneel down and have your wrists pinioned in front of you. Then lie facedown on the couch."

She obeyed him at once, as eager as Mano himself to accomplish what he had planned. As considerately as any lover, he helped her to position herself. The marble was shaped so that there was a rest for her head and an upward curve to raise her backside and hips.

"Lie with your hands under your loins, Lesley," he said quietly, "Let your fingers touch upon your lower belly and the front of your thighs."

She settled the pale nudity of her body in this posture and shifted her thighs apart, as if anticipating that command. Mano fastened her down by her waist-belt to the rings in the marble. To be strapped down was not necessary to enforce Lesley's obedience on this occasion. Yet it was important for her to feel the restraint and to know that she remained her masters slave.

Mano made her lift her shoulders a little. He kissed the lids of the aloof blue eyes, the parting of Lesley's fringe, the mouth whose sulkiness was lost as the lips opened to receive him. He held her breasts in his hands, fondling the white and finely-veined flesh of their firmness. When his tongue had wetted her nipples he applied to them a powerful spice whose excitement and heat would keep them in a state of erection. His lips touched her bare back and the sides of her waist, relishing the cool dampness of her girls skin as its delicacy responded to the humid warmth of the day.

"Use your fingers now, Lesley," he murmured, "between your legs. Caress yourself."

She settled the mature young thighs a little wider and turned her face on the headrest so that she looked, unabashed, to his side. The little movements in her forearms showed that the fingers were already making love to her clitoris and vaginal slit.

Mano moved down, lying so that his head was level with the back of her open thighs and he could watch the fingers at their task. He kissed the backs of her knees, where on other nights he would cut her pitilessly with his whip. His lips touched the rear of her thighs a hundred times as he heard the catch of excitement in her breath while she played with herself. The wetness of Lesley's arousal was audible to them both and it seemed that she moved her fingers a little more cautiously as if self-conscious at the tiny sounds.

Mano began to kiss the sleek cool skin on the inner surfaces of Lesley's thighs. At first she shivered and seemed about to pull away, as if a last reserve of modesty required it. But her master spoke quietly and at once she settled her legs wide apart.

Higher up on these smooth inner surfaces, his lips and tongue evoked a sob of release from her as he tasted the mineral salts with which such feminine flesh was impregnated. He felt her shiver with pleasure at this and Mano smiled.

"Are you happy in your slavery, Lesley?" he murmured.

"Yes!" she gasped, "Happier than ever before!"

"Whatever is to be done to you in the future?"

"Yes!" she whispered, "Oh, yes!"

"Even if I give you to Kadek or to a master who uses you far more cruelly than I?"

"I am your slave," she said simply.

"If I keep you," he said, "I might mark you between the cheeks of your backside with my brand, as Solon did to Maggie. You would be soundly whipped beforehand and the servants would ensure that you felt the torment of the red-hot discs as you have never felt anything in your life."

There was a pause. Then Lesley kissed the hand with which he was stroking her face.

"After that I should be yours for the rest of my life," she said, as if settling a domestic difficulty. "Your mark would make sure of that."

For all her bravado he had seen the cheeks of Lesley's bottom tighten together with instinctive fright when he described the process of marking. Indeed, now her fingers were motionless with the shock of his words.

"Play with yourself, Lesley," he said reproving her quietly. "Make love to yourself between your legs."

As her hands and hips stirred a little, he began to kiss the firm pale moons of Lesley's bottom-cheeks. His lips tested the smooth cool slopes of her buttocks. Pressing them apart he touched his kisses to the yellower skin where the cheeks curved in to form her rear crack. She tensed a little at first, then relaxed and permitted his attentions. By now her fingers had brought her to the moment of her first orgasm and the musky scent of her arousal emanated from the moist and well-fingered slit. Mano continued to kiss her between her bottom-cheeks as she came, adding a poignancy to her faint shuddering and gentle moans of fulfilment.

Mano allowed her a little respite. Then he ordered her to begin playing with herself once more. Lesley obeyed, more slowly, caressing herself this time as if to draw out the pleasure to its greatest length.

Yet Mano had brought her there for other purposes, not to rouse or whip her but to reveal the future. As the last gleam of sunset faded from the surface of the lake and the twilight deepened into full dusk, the first lamps were lit in the marble vestibule of the pillared mausoleum and the torches began to flare in the iron wall-brackets. The domed Grecian structure had never been used as a mausoleum but was a garden temple bearing this title.

"Play with yourself while you watch, Lesley," said Mano gently. "They are bringing Kim here to be marked as you shall be marked one day if I keep you."

She turned her head and looked back at him, startled at hearing that she must witness such a thing.

"Go on playing with yourself while you watch, Lesley," he coaxed her, "Kim will be a sight worth seeing. So different from you. A common shopgirl, like Maggie or Julie. Plump and loud-mouthed. I confess that when Solon gave her to me it was because she was a slave against her will. It was necessary for Kim to be taken somewhere from which she could not abscond."

Lesley's fingers had stopped their playing. Mano smiled and caressed her himself. With sensitivity and cunning he kept the balloon of pleasure swelling in Lesley's loins throughout Kim's ordeal, without ever letting it burst. Lubricating the forefinger of his other hand he explored her backside intimately, his kisses brushing her neck and ears.

"Watch while I caress you, Lesley. Don't turn your face away."

Kim was in many respects a contrast to Lesley, a girl of less intelligence and sophistication who was far from being a willing slave. They watched her brought to the marble vestibule, the brown hair combed into a round page-style cut on her shoulders and its fringe softening her face. Yet the narrower eyes, the streaks of rouge on her broad cheek-bones, the weaker mouth and chin were not to Mano's taste. In her plain white skirt and red blouse, she showed a soft plumpness of figure which was also not of a kind to appeal to him.

Though the four men who had brought her there were holding her firmly, Kim was struggling with all her energy.

"You see?" murmured Mano. "They have just told her of her fate. She is to be marked, not as mine but as Hassans. My Arabian friend has a harem in a country where such things are common. A plump and sluttish girl will be prized there. But Kim is in a panic now. She knows of the practices in such places and the more bizarre tastes of the east. Kim's arsehole has never been stretched, however much Solon may have wanted to do that when he saw the rear view of her lolling over the shop counter. She knows also that she will be whipped by the older women of the harem, her bottom at their mercy as well as at their master's. And, of course, Kim is desperate to avoid her marking now."

In a moment they had removed Kim's skirt and attached her kneeling over the marble centrepiece. It was their last chance to amuse themselves with her and the four servants set about doing so. Kim's panties were pulled down, revealing her soft bottom and thighs. They obliged her to use her mouth on their erections and then gave the whip across Kim's backside. As all this happened, Mano made Lesley an uncharacteristic promise. Kim should be spared any ordeals, even the marking itself, if Lesley asked for such a respite.

Yet Mano also made sure that his enjoyment of Lesley s cunt and her excitement in their pleasure was kept at its height. Now he would hear the truth from her. Despite her nights of sex with Kim, their long hours of masturbation and climax, Lesley would spare her nothing.

"Will you save her from Hassan?" Mano asked gently, fondling Lesley's nipples as his stiffness filled her cunt, "She shall be spared if you ask it"

Lesley gasped to release the tension of pleasure in her body a little.

"Let her go to Hassan! It excites me to think of what will happen to her there!"

Mano smiled, recognising the same self-gratification in Lesley's character. Her slavery would not alter that.

One man was fondling Kim between her soft thighs, another parting the plump pallor of her bottom-cheeks. Despite her shrieks of protest, a third man picked up the training-lash.

"Kim shall not be whipped, Lesley, if you ask me to stop them," Mano whispered. But Lesley seemed to ride his erection harder.

"Let her be whipped," she whispered breathlessly. "Let her be whipped as I shall be when I am marked."

Kim's face with its mascara'd lashes, rouged cheeks and painted lips was a study in frenzy. The servants took their last chance to enjoy her and all the whipping was consequently severe. The soft fattened cheeks of Kim s bottom jumped and quivered under the cracks of the sinuous lash. Lesley looked on, panting and squirming as she rode Mano's erection. The ambiguous pleasure of seeing herself whipped now embraced the sight of Kim's ordeal. Several times the whip caught between the buttocks and Mano felt Lesley shudder as if with excitement and dread.

Even when the little discs were brought glowing from the brazier coals, Lesley would not intervene.

"No!" she gasped. "Let it be done to Kim, as you will do it to me!"

Two men held Kim's waist and thighs, the third pressing the disc to the slope of her bottom-crack for ten long seconds. Despite the girls shrillness and shrieking, Lesley spared her nothing. At last the men finished and led Kim away.

As they made love in the moonlit gardens, shadowed by the temples stillness and soothed by the movements of the lake, Mano described the fate which lay in store for Lesley—as the cause of Kadek's trouble—and for the delightful nymph who had been the centre of the scandal. Mano smiled and assured Lesley of what she had long guessed. That elfin girl of hers was already in the care of Anton and Meena. She had yet to share Lesley's experiences of slavery but they could not long be delayed. Kadek had been promised the retribution for which he asked.

There was a certain man whose excessive zeal as a chastiser in prisons and reformatories had been his downfall. His profession was to visit such places and inflict the sentence of the whip, like a public hangman, on those whom the court had condemned. His enjoyment of this task was printed in bamboo and leather on the bottoms of young wives and schoolgirls, wayward brides and insolent shopgirls. Yet the sadism of his whippings had raised doubts in the minds of his superiors and led to his dismissal.

In two weeks more this man would be employed by Mano and Kadek to exercise his talents. Mano had already given orders for a room to be prepared, a stone-flagged cellar. At the centre of the floor was to be a heavy vaulting-buck with a padded leather top. The hangman's eyes would surely start from his sockets at the sight confronting him when he entered that room to earn his nights fee.

Lesley would be standing at one end of the vaulting-buck, bending over tightly along it and firmly strapped down. Stripped to her short white singlet, her white-suspender belt and the gold-tan sheen of her stockings, she would be made to show herself admirably for the punishment. Her thighs above her stockings would be bare, as would the firmly rounded and broadened cheeks of Lesley's bottom.

To have such an arrogant yet promiscuous woman at his disposal would stiffen the man at once. However, astride her waist would be perched that young nymph who so resembled her. Mano smiled as Lesley gasped at this revelation. He assured her that a man who possessed them both would regularly require the young woman to "horse" her daughter for a double chastisement. At this promise, he felt her tighten on his erection and her pulse quickened. He kissed her ear and continued in a murmur.

The gym-slip and white cotton briefs would have been removed from the schoolgirl nymph. Barehipped astride her "mounts" waist the solemn little rider would lie forward along Lesley's back, wrists strapped to the forward corners of the apparatus. Her legs, bare above the black knee-socks of her uniform, would be strapped wide apart by her ankles to either side of the vaulting-buck. Thus her thighs and pert young buttocks would be stretched enticingly apart.

This double rear view would entrance the hangman... by its contrast of innocence and experience. The firm pallor of Lesley's bottom matured by marriage and child-rearing, the feminine slit so often lubricated by her own excitement, the young wife's anus redolent of vaseline and the penis. The earliest form of womanhood in the taut cheeks of Rachels bottom, puppyish and innocent.

Mano assured her of the excitement the man would feel, his amusement at the two faces twisted round to him in such dismay. Two such expressions of reproach and apprehension would confront him. Venus with her boy-cut fair hair shaped to her head and fringed, her nymph with the brown hair tied back at her nape. The same fair-skinned look of brooding and self-indulgence, the same sulky and self-pitying air.

The chastisement would last all night, allowing ample time for the man to carry out a preliminary inspection of the two culprits. Lesley would share the youngsters gasps and shudderings as his hand smoothed over the bare schoolgirl thighs and tickled the little slit between them. While Lesley waited her turn she would hear the ambiguous little cries of apprehension and pleasure from the younger pupil. The ingenious geisha balls in the moistened vagina, the vaselined oval of the smooth egg pressed between the pallor of the buttocks until Rachels anus closed over it. The riding-lesson would begin with the solemn little pupil unwilling and imploring. Yet soon the skillful manipulation would have her tensing and squirming in desire, loving the bare waist which she straddled and the smooth pale hips which her thighs gripped ecstatically. At every slackening of her efforts, a smack or two on the schoolgirls buttocks would spur her on.

Meanwhile the man would be amorous and severe by turns with the young wife. His erection would part the lips of her sex and enter, so that she added to the youngsters pleasure by squirming with her own enjoyment. Then he would vaseline her between her hind cheeks. In playful menace he would hold a firm full-grown banana, so that Lesley could feel it lying across her bare bottom. His words would leave no doubt that her backside was to be put to the test. For the present he was content to make her frantic by the threat and promise of so monstrous a proposal, knowing that she would not be permitted to escape the ordeal. He teased her by letting her feel its length across her bare backside and its bulk lying between her bottom cheeks. When the moment came, he would prove implacable.

Mano left Lesley's imagination to work upon the details of the next hour. Then he reminded her of the chastisement which would follow. Thirty-six strokes of the cane across the taut and innocent cheeks of Rachels bottom, given with wicked skill. Fifty strokes of the pony-lash across the full pale cheeks of Lesley s backside and the backs of her bare thighs above her stockings. Yet faced with such an alluring double target, it would be unreasonable to expect the hangman to confine himself to the sentence now laid down. A hot-blooded fellow would prolong the thrashing of Venus and her nymph far beyond that. Mano reminded Lesley of the truth which she had learnt at Jasons hands. Not even her lovers or her husband would intervene to prevent the whipping from lasting until dawn. All night the shrillness of the two slaves would mingle, Rachels thighs sensing the squirming hips of her mount under the lash, Lesley feeling her daughters legs writhing as her young bottom was birched.

Mano assured Lesley of the amazement and amusement on the faces of the servants who would come to unfasten the culprits after such chastisement. Their amusement would surely arise from seeing the presumptuous or arrogant faces of Venus and her nymph now so self-pitying and chastened. The innocent and more immature cheeks of the youngsters bottom would be a study in the art of birch and bamboo. Lesley's rear cheeks must display an inferno of cane weals and whip-prints, the loops and curlicues of the lash. Amazement would be caused by the extent of the chastisement and the hangman's resolve in sparing his two miscreants nothing.

Curiosity would waken, too, in the servants' minds. The excitement of the riding lesson was evident between both pairs of thighs. The giant finger of banana was still a little warm, which caused smiles at the sheen of lubrication between Lesley's hind cheeks.

All this Mano evoked for his slave as he lay with her in the moonlit gardens. That it was a promise of the immediate future rather than an imaginary excitement seemed never in doubt. As he made love to her, Lesley responded by obedient movements of her hips and backside. He came at last, bringing her to her own climax at the same time.

Now that the turmoil of desire and fulfilment had died away, he watched her carefully. Such things had been promised as might cause the pride of any young woman to revolt at them. Lesley was lying with her face turned to one side, her eyes closed and her lips lightly parted. Mano stroked her face and she kissed his hand instinctively. He saw that there was a faint stirring of the hands strapped under her loins. She was not caressing herself to full arousal but very gently, as if for comfort or reassurance.

The first green flush before dawn appeared in the eastern sky above the lake. Mano stroked her gently on the smooth skin where she had seen Kim marked. He felt her pulse quicken.

"If you mark me," Lesley betrayed a breathlessness of tension as she spoke, "I must be yours for ever. Is that true?"

"Of course," he said. "With my mark upon you, you could not belong to another. You would be mine as Meena is Anton s or as Kim is to be Hassan s."

Lesley paused, as if summoning up her last reserves of bravado and desire.

"I should like your mark now," she said suddenly, "Here. Like this."

Mano smiled and kissed her bare shoulders, his finger stroked the smooth inward slope of Lesley s buttocks where the mark would be made.

To those who knew no better, it might have sounded as if the slave had given her first command to her master. It was not so. Mano knew that Lesley was at last his slave, more completely and unalterably than any branding would make her. She was certainly Lesley the slave, who would weep and plead under the whip. Yet simultaneously she was Lesley the instigator and the eager spectator of her own ordeals.

The process had begun long before, in the early summer. Now, as she was Lesley the slave in her sufferings, so her alter ego shared the pleasure of her master in imposing that suffering. Like two beams of light which converge into a single circle of brilliance, Lesley's desires had grown closer to those of her master until, at last, they had converged. Now there was no pain, no humiliation, no act of intimacy between Venus and her nymph, to which she would hesitate to condemn herself.

Mano sent for Bernard and ordered the little discs to be laid in the glowing coals of the brazier, which stood at the centre of the marble vestibule in the mausoleum. Then he picked up the snakeskin whip and went back to where Lesley was lying.

"Your thighs and your bottom, Lesley," he murmured. "A flogging such as is given in certain countries to condemned women before their sentence is carried out."

Lesley watched him. She seemed to raise her hips a little so that the firm pallor of her mature bottom-cheeks swelled fuller and broader. Her fingers moved lasciviously between her legs with her wrists still strapped together under her. She was breathing more heavily, lips parted slightly, in the natural fear or apprehension of her plight. Yet the blue eyes under her parted fringe watched Mano with a piquant mingling of challenge and desire.


AFTERWORD - A CONVERSATION with LYNN PAULA RUSSELL

The conversation which follows took place in London during the spring of 1984. Lynn Paula Russell is a young British artist whose paintings and drawings are among the most remarkable of her generation, for their strength of technique and imaginative gifts. By turns her work is erotic or sinister, evocative or idyllic. She has in equal measure the power to intrigue and disturb. Readers of the Grove Press Victorian Library may already be familiar with her frontispiece to The Days at Florville. The darkly fascinating figure of Anton towers above Lesley, the young woman to be thrashed and ravished.

For an artist of such abilities to match her work by a life of similar originality, is not to be expected. Yet the unexpected proves to be true. It is, of course, foolish to match a real woman against the heroines of The Story of O, The Days at Florville or novels of their kind. It belittles a real woman to confine her within these fictional structures and stereotypes. Yet if there were ever to be a book entitled The Story of the Real O, Lynn Paula Russell has perhaps a better right than anyone to be the subject of it.

She has, in reality, paralleled the essential experiences of O in Pauline Reages fiction. The development of this, the role of the personal master and the excitement experienced in submission to the whip, are topics of the conversation which follows. Many other things were talked of, which it is impossible to include verbatim for reasons of space. She described, for example, her visit to a world-famous dominatrix and her ordeal which consisted of more than 250 strokes with a variety of implements. The weals and bruises of this took a month to fade. No one who saw those marks would question the severity of the whipping.

Yet while confirming the artistic truth of such fiction as Pauline Reages, this young woman also destroys the easy myths of pulp pornography by being a real person. Her comments in the conversation on the "pleasure" of pain or the experience of "submission" are totally convincing in their reality. If the master truly believes that he has the whip-hand over such a slave—in more than the literal sense—he is a fool.

Repeatedly in the conversation, Lynn Paula Russell's comments on the master-slave or pain-pleasure experience have the unexpectedness of total truth and reality. They are, in other words, those of a real woman and not a novelists creation. The slave or submissive, in her world, is also the actress whose roles included everything from Miranda in The Tempest to Five Finger Exercise, from Hair to television drama. She then returned to the world of art, for which she had been trained, through portraits and film posters of such stars as Clint Eastwood and James Dean.

Art and life form the two subjects of the conversation which follows. Many of those who read it may already have seen the artists work in posters or illustrations. The private world of her erotic art is not yet public property in the same way. But to see one of her paintings in an exhibition would be to remember that when those of most of her contemporaries have been forgotten. Her moonscapes with their naked figures have the strange allure, the mysterious felicities of such Surrealists as Paul Delvaux or Clovis Trouille, though the beauty of her women is more natural than theirs. Energy and colour characterise such erotic dramas of hers as Hecate, The Minotaur, or The Story of the Story of O.

In March 1984, we talked of her art and her life. The conversation began with a discussion of the nature of submission in the relationship of the "master" to his beautiful "slave." The next three hours produced an account of the reality which the authors of such novels as The Story of O could scarcely hope to rival in fiction...

...... First of all, Paula, let me ask you a question to which anyone who knows you will guess the answer. In the usual sense of the word, you wouldn't regard yourself as a submissive person?

No, I wouldn't. I think I'd regard myself, so far as men are concerned, as a very baulky, very obstinate woman, who's never submitted to a man's will at all. Ever since I can remember, I'd always thrown men off, as people who didn't really count.

...... You don't appear to do that now.

No, I don't do that now. I've accepted them a lot. But I'm still not an easily-led person, although I appear to be going along with what they want.

...... You know what you want?

Not always. I know what I don't want. I'm often inclined to say "No" to something before I know what it is. So I need to be pushed and I'm often grateful to people who force me. I think that's what a submissive often is. If you come across any girls who play that part, you often find they've got a will of their own—and their will is very strong. Otherwise there's no pleasure in testing it. A weak person who loves to do it is no pleasure.

...... No. Because what you're creating is drama, isn't it?

Drama emerges from it. It's more a feeling of what you need, as a counterbalance to what you are. We're all seeking somebody who will respond to us and give us what we need—rather than just what we want. I'm talking of a tremendous battle that goes on, where you're thinking: "No, I don't want to! I won't! I won't!" It isn't actually the man who ultimately subdues you. It's a battle within yourself to make your will submit to the other person. They haven't made you do it: you've made yourself do it.

...... Is it accurate to say that the object of the whipping, in one way, is to be hurt but never to be harmed?

Yes, absolutely right. Yes. I don't think there's any point in pussy-footing around and half-playing these games. I don't even like them being called games. A game suggests something which is just for fun and the moment it goes beyond that barrier, you stop. But you've always got to go beyond the barrier of fear and to face fear. There's got to be enough pain. I think pain is really a cathartic thing. Its very useful if it's administered right. It's a bit like—from my point of view—administering the riding-crop to the rump of a horse to make it run. The pain is searing but it gives you a spurt of energy. You bolt ahead. It makes you overcome a lot of problems you might have considered insurmountable. Actually, it sounds a bit like the alcoholic with his drink. You know: "If I had a drink inside me, I could do all sorts of things because I'm not looking on the negative side."

...... So it's, in the best sense, a stimulus?

Yes, but it's more than that. But, yes, you're right. There's got to be a real pain and a real fear that you may be hurt.

...... Can I ask you about this experience generally? It does involve a considerable degree of severity, I would have thought, by most peoples standards. It obviously involves a lot of bruising and so on.

Yes, occasionally. It doesn't have to involve bruising. The bruising can have an importance. Either you may wish to have some sort of mark, like a kind of branding, although it goes away whereas brands don't. And the person who's doing it might like to feel they've affected you, and they can see the marks of what they've done. But that is only just a personal gratification. You can give someone a sound whipping without leaving marks.

...... So the marks are immaterial to the actual experience, but they may be regarded as a trophy of the event.

Yes, they are. I've often seen girls looking round at their bottoms and surveying the little bumps and the weals, and thinking: "Oh, look! I've had a lot today! Aren't I good?" A bit like warriors who've got their battle scars.

...... Theres a general point I was going to ask you about Paula. Sceptics are going to say: "Either it doesn't hurt, or else she's insensitive to pain."

Oh, yes. I've heard people say this. "Do you experience pain as pleasure?" And the answer is: I experience pain as pain. Everybody does.

...... Yes. Presumably if you stub your toe or bang your elbow, it hurts just as much for you as for anyone else.

Oh, yes. I'm an awful coward about pain.

...... You don't sound like it!

May be that's why I want to push it to its furthest reaches. It's almost as if by welcoming it, by actually planting yourself in the way of it and saying: "Now do this to me," you're warding off the evil spirits that cause accidents and make such things happen.

...... Is there also a feeling that you have done something which most other people couldn't—or wouldn't—do? A sense of achievement?

I never think of that actually. I am a bit down-to-earth about it sometimes. Sometimes, when I'm feeling particularly down-to-earth, I think of my whipping as being just a practical need. My coming to this was through a very vague fantasy connected with The Story of Oy and the idea that it might be nice to have a man who was a master. He was a very shadowy figure with no character at all. Just this object. It was all in shadow. When you start acting out the fantasy, you realise it isn't at all the way you thought it was. None the less, you find that there was a reason for you having these fantasies. A very strong reason. You needed this treatment. But if you'd only thought of it on a practical level, it wouldn't have appealed to you. It had to be dressed up as something to get you to do it. It's true on all levels. I suppose that sex is dressed up too...

...... Oh, yes! The wedding dress...

... Romance, erotic paraphernalia, dressing up, the whole business. When it comes down to it so many women, I suppose, think: "Oh, God, its so crude! Its awfully disappointing." Its the same with whipping—that you can dress it up as much as you please. But the basic fact is the same as with ordinary straightforward fucking. Its useful to people to turn them on and keep them healthy. Its a way of communication between the sexes. Its a marvellous stimulant. The same with whipping. It can be dressed up with the most marvellous clothes, the most marvellous peculiar bizarre backgrounds. You can project fantasies on to this mysterious man, though he never quite emerges out of the shadows. He's just there as an all-knowing kind of magician. Someone who knows and loves you—who knows everything. But at the very lowest common denominator, its just a simple application of the medicine a girl needs. I think, like the horse, I need a good old slash across the rump to drive me—to cause the adrenalin to be released.

...... Is the subsequent state of mind more important than the actual ordeal? In other words, is it exciting as it happens or is it exciting in recollection?

I think that it is the subsequent state of mind which is what we're chiefly aiming at.

...... That fits absolutely with a lot of these experiences.

Yes. Yes, it does. I've often been in the middle of a session—being whipped—and I've detested it so thoroughly that I wondered why on earth I was doing it. But I have to keep thinking I'm going to love it in a minute. It's going to open out and it's going to become a good thing. It doesn't always. There are times when it doesn't. Sometimes, may be, because you weren't in the best of health.

...... When Heine was in Paris in 1836, he wrote an essay on the Romantic movement. In this, he obviously thinks things have changed completely since the days when pain was to be avoided. Previously, you didn't incur pain willingly. Now the world has altered and people have changed their view.

That was very true. I think you'd find with a lot of girls like me that we've all come from rather comfortable backgrounds. We never even have to endure having a tooth pulled out.

...... Heine refers to "a shuddering pleasure, like the convulsively agreeable sensations which come from pain itself." Later on he calls it "the luxury of pain"

I wouldn't call all pain a luxury by any means. A stimulatory thing is maximum effect with minimum amount of damage. Lots of pains tend to be nagging, don't they? They go on whining at you, like somebody whining and moaning. Whereas, what we're talking about is short, sharp, and clean.

...... Within the whole spectrum of this, there is also what you might call the gentle whipping, which begins very lightly. Can this be merely irritating, while something given with the force of a punishment can be enjoyable?

I can't imagine anybody who'd just want to be gentle and not push it to its limit. I'd still want it to go far enough so that I was properly challenged. But you don't have to keep on challenging yourself all the time. There must be a time when you're just enjoying something. You just push it as far as you need it.

...... Is it conceivable that something which was administered with the force of a punishment would be enjoyable? Or would that completely turn the person off?

No, I don't think so. There are no set rules about it. Some people deliberately want to give the masochist a bad time. They might learn the way you like it and they go out of their way to change it.

...... That seems rather mean!

But then sadists are mean, aren't they? They can either torment you by not giving you enough or they can torment you by hitting you in all the places you don't like, or when you're not expecting it. I think this is the constant battle between the dominant and the submissive. The dominant is trying to dominate and the submissive is also trying to dominate really, you know. That's the whole point.

...... I was going to ask you about that too.

The dominant knows what the masochist wants to experience. But he's got to give it to her—or she's got to give it to him—in such a way that they're not anticipating it. So you always give them a bit of a shock. Thats only me talking. There are some people who know exactly what they want to do and just get on with it. I think that if your dear master always delivered the blows exactly as you were expecting them, you'd think he was trying to please you. He must never try to please you. And yet the object of the exercise is to please you. He knows that he is pleasing you ultimately by being cantankerous.

...... He's a benevolent sadist—if there is such a thing?

Yes. Well, he's pleasing himself too. But I think that some submissive people can be very demanding. They can make the master or mistress work like mad to keep them interested.

...... I'll tell you why I asked you that, Paula. In Aus Memoiren einer Sangerin—once attributed to Wilhelmina Schroeder—Devrient, Wagners first Venus—there are two girls in Hungary who voluntarily incurred whippings in prison because they found these exciting. Not at the time, but either in anticipation or in retrospect.

I can believe it.

...... But these were out-and-out punishments. A lot of people must read that book and conclude it couldn't possibly have been true. As you describe it, it might have been.

You have to take into consideration the fact that they were the centre of interest. I personally never fantasise along the lines of punishment. I know many people do. I always feel that people who construct punishment stories around their activities tend to be using it as an excuse. A justification for doing it, which leads them into a kind of absurd behaviour. I might have been thoroughly put off by all that. But, yes, it may well have had an effect afterwards.

...... That's what she suggests. They got excited by this—and in one case by the comments of the onlookers.

Yes. The fact that they were being watched. That's very exciting. I love the idea of people watching. You'll find a girl who goes through a period of wanting to submit to men, and then she turns. Now she wants to beat men. This is often caused by resentment at men always having the whip-hand. But as the mistress, she finds she's not getting the same attention as when she was the slave. Then she regrets it. She thinks: "When I was a slave, I was getting so much more. The dividends were higher. I was the centre of attention. I had everyone rushing around. Even though they were doing horrid things to me, I felt that I was being thought of every moment. They were aware of me there." Whereas, as the mistress she's the one who's suddenly responsible for making the thing work.

...... Is the whipping exciting in anticipation?

In anticipation, I don't think it's at all exciting. I'm always afraid. If I know I'm going to get it, on an evening when I'm actually going for that purpose to see someone—to have this done—I always delay and delay. I often make silly excuses for not going and try to get out of it.

...... You don't think you do this subconsciously to heighten the tension?

I don't know. I just know that there's a tremendous reaction in the other direction. Not to go. Then we go through with it and I'm released. I come back all sparkling-eyed and feeling wonderful. There's a great reaction in people, I think, to fend off the thing which is going to bring them alive. At the same time, I don't want that fear to be taken away. If the person who's doing it actually reassured me and said, "Oh, don't worry. I won't hit you very hard," I'd be disappointed at once. The fear is important.

...... The fact that you can do all this—that you are a centre of attention—is there a sense of power in it?

Yes, there is. I think it literally does build power in a person. Whenever you face such a thing, it builds power in yourself.

...... Most of all power over yourself?

Yes. It means that people can't manipulate you. they can't hold out the same sort of threats. Nothing will disarm someone more quickly than just saying, "Oh, yes please!" to some sort of threat they've made.

...... But perhaps we should make clear that were not talking about whips that rain down over the whole of your body; because that would be dangerous and silly.

I think that some women do like their breasts being whipped, but I don't think that it is necessarily a good thing. The legs, the thighs, and the bottom are the best. The thighs are more sensitive. The bottom is a good place because it heals quickly and it's not actually as sensitive as the thighs. Whipping of bottoms is the safest—and the most stimulating thing too.

...... How far is the event a performance, a kind of drama?

I think it varies all the time. You may go along and enter a room. You meet people and you sit and chat to them quite informally. But then there comes a moment when it's started. Something's going to happen in a minute. We're all aware. We're all on tenterhooks. You need the discipline to be able to carry something out.

...... So even someone who appears to be the submissive is participating quite vigorously.

Yes, they are. There's no limit to the kind of rituals you can make out of it, if you want to. It can be so elaborate, if you've got the right woman who will trust you enough to go along with it.

...... Does the personal master have a defined and limited role? Suppose Sir Stephen said to O: "You're a fashion photographer. I really don't like that. Go home and burn all your photographs." That would be stepping outside the role?

Yes, I think it would. Very much. This is why the fantasy can never be totally carried out. It's only operative within certain confines. You have to assume that O has her own life to lead, outside the time that she spends with her master.

...... It seems as if the role of the personal master must be incompatible with that of the permanent companion—husband or lover. It's more restricted. The girl and her master are very much master and beautiful slave. The permanent companion has to be with the beautiful slave at all times. When, say; she is in bed, nose running with the 'flu, demanding hot lemon and aspirin.

The important thing about the mysterious master-figure is that he should be able to erupt into your life at various intervals, and be unexpected. Your own companion can't possibly be that. He's always there, as you say. There's got to be somebody in your life you can rely on.

...... There's a sense in which, as beautiful slave to personal master, both parties have to be perfect. In that limited situation.

In that particular situation. Yes.

...... Because once the beautiful slave has the 'flu, and needs the tissues and the aspirin—or once the personal master has a bad attack of piles and can't really get around very easily—the whole thing just collapses.

It does, it does. We're deprived of being able to live out our fantasies properly. I think it's a shame. But may be we're deprived of disillusionment as well, because we might be very disillusioned.

...... I'm sure.

I've heard people say that things have gone off the rails because they've seen too much of somebody.

...... 0 would have got disillusioned in the end.

Because we don't really know what Sir Stephen was.

...... I think he was an RAF officer, wasn't he? A drill-instructor who dealt with new recruits... Does the personal master have certain obligations? Presiding over his slave's development?

I think that he should preside over the training of the slave. I don't think you should start somebody off on this path without seeing it through. I think that's very dangerous and you can mess somebody about. If you leave them at the wrong moment, the trust they may have had in the man until then will be totally shattered.

...... Ironically, if you have a beautiful slave, you cant just treat her as a beautiful slave?

There's an awful lot of training to be done. Women think they're very good at obeying, but they aren't.

...... What exactly is training?

Training her just to be able to submit her will to somebody else. Just for a couple of hours, may be. Just as an exercise. Will she just allow this man to dictate what she should do? Most people say: "Oh, that's easy." But it's not, actually. Any woman, particularly, will say: "If you tell me in advance what you're going to do, I'll agree. But I won't say yes to it, unless I know." That takes a long time. It's not as if there are any set things that have to be accomplished. You may just be training her to accept certain kinds of pain, certain kinds of things. You may want to train her in order to take her out somewhere, to a party, and to have her obey you in front of other people. That's an important thing. So many husbands and wives go out to social occasions and the wife is always making the husband feel humiliated because she disagrees with him in public and makes him look a fool. If you go anywhere with your master, you certainly have got to make him look good. And immediately he tells you to do something, you must do it.

...... But he mustn't humiliate you in public?

He can do, if he wants to. Yes. I wouldn't want him to but that's his prerogative. I don't think he should. Anyone who wanted to humiliate me in public, I think I would lose my respect for.

...... If you care about someone, you wouldn't humiliate them in public.

No. But there are no set rules. The delight of this whole business is the idea of a man taking a woman off on an adventure. I think that's why he needs to be an older man. He needs to be a man who has had lots of experience and knows clearly what the girl needs—and what she will respond to. He needs to be the one who has planned the adventure in advance. I don't think he should take her into situations that he doesn't know the outcome of.

...... But, as you say, most women would just say: "No. Not unless I know exactly what is involved."

...... Yes. If Sir Stephen wants to take O off to the chateau, there are going to be other men there. Most women say: "Oh, I don't know whether I want to have contact with other men, unless I fancy them. And unless I like them." It wouldn't do there. If the master wants her to be sodomised by a lot of his friends, he wants that to happen. It's not up to her to say whether she fancies them or not. She has to see herself not as a person but as an object of pleasure. Love does grow out of these things, but it doesn't start like that.

...... There must also be a level at which consent is necessary.

Yes. That's a very important aspect. A good master will never use force. He brings you to a point where he shows you what is required—but you must consent to it. He would never raise the whip against you, unless you had said: "All right. Do it." He may then hit you harder than you expected, but you have said: "Go ahead."

...... If during the whipping you say: "Stop! Stop!" the fact that you have consented presumably means that he doesn't stop.

I think, if you've consented, your "Stop! Stop!" becomes impotent. It's up to him.

...... Is there a difference between fact and fiction on these occasions? For instance, in Days at Florville, two things happen while Lesley is being whipped. At one point the whip draws blood and, at the end when she gets up, she swoons. The boy looking at the scene thinks this is a perfect ending. One suspects that in reality people would be rushing round with the band-aid or the smelling salts, or phoning the ambulance. Do you think fact is different to fiction in that respect?

No. I think these things might well happen. When you've beaten people enough and you know what has really damaged them and what hasn't damaged them, then you don't get yourself into a lather about it.

...... But if somebody actually swooned, wouldn't there be...

I would have thought so. There certainly would be so far as I'm concerned.

...... Yet there isn't in Florville—and there isn't in The Story of O.

No. What you're saying is that you have to reverse your response to the opposite of what it would normally be.

...... Yes.

There was a time when I was being whipped by two men at once. That was quite a good experience actually. I was wearing a very tight corset, I remember, and I was spreadeagled over the back of a settee. About half-way through this I felt I was passing out because I couldn't breathe. So I stopped it and everybody was very, very attentive. They got me a glass of water and sat me down. So definitely the object is not to make somebody pass out.

[Later the discussion turned to The Gardens of the Night and the ordeals of its heroine which lead her to absolute slavery at the hands of her master.]

...... Is the fantasy of complete and continuing slavery in The Gardens of the Night important precisely because a woman can't undergo it in reality? In real life she would have to have time off from her slavery in order to earn a living, go shopping, or look after the family.

Yes, that may be. Everything we do has to be less concentrated than we would like it to be. We don't know what would happen if we had it all the way we thought we wanted it. In real life it's better to concentrate some experience in a short period of time, because these needs come in phases. In reality I can't imagine being enslaved to somebody for the rest of my life. It would demand far too much of the master. He would have to be constantly changing with his slave. After reading the book, thinking about it more and more, I realise that the whole basis of these stories is one of a religious motivation rather than a human kind. That's why I couldn't analyse my shady master. I couldn't really put a name to him or an appearance because he isn't human. He's got to have the intuition of a brilliant psychologist and the power of a god—and love you so much that nobody could contain so much love. He's got to love you so perfectly.

...... But in The Gardens of the Night it's perfectly all right to fantasise Lesley going off to a place from which she will never return to freedom?

Well, when Lesley goes off to France, it's a bit like the children's stories of C.S. Lewis, where they go into the wardrobe, through the coats, they come out into Narnia and they're there for about a whole lifetime. Then they come back into their world again and no time has passed at all.

...... Do you agree with the importance of the slave learning to identify her desires with her masters pleasure in what he does to her? In the case of Lesley; in The Gardens of the Night, she is taught to understand increasingly her masters excitement and somehow to share this enjoyment of her own ordeals.

Oh, yes. Lesley sees herself as the instrument of his pleasure. Totally. May be that's what she needed, because she'd never really thought of what men wanted at all. Like that scene where her first lover is invited back and she's told: 'This is what he really wanted to do with you." I think we all want to know what men really want us to do—or what they really want to do to us—regardless of whether they love us or not. Sometimes love can stand in the way.

...... Is that an important part of her training in the novel?

She was positioned through the partition so that her face wasn't seen. She was just a body. This would be a very important part of her training, to see herself as just a body with apertures to be penetrated, or to be beaten and have things done to her. You might think of that as being a rather humiliating and dehumanising experience. But when you see yourself at that level, you can build upon it.

...... It's the teaching of self-knowledge?

Yes. She knows after that how she reacts to these things. If people are always gentle with her, she'd never find these things out. She'd never know if she liked them or not. All Lesley's men-friends have been pussyfooting around, trying to find out what she wanted. She'd never find out what they wanted when they could let themselves go. It's not good for her to have men saying: "What do you want me to do to you?"

...... What about the dark hints in the book? Things which don't happen in the story but make her shudder at the thought of them in the future? Mano promises that she and her daughter will be slaves together, undressed and whipped as a pair.

Those things have to be there. She's been through all the physical acts by the end of the book, but her mind and her imagination still had to be worked on. If somebody orders her to have contact with her own daughter, Lesley can shrug off the responsibility for it. With a daughter she might get a lot out of a sexual situation.

...... Yes. Because her master orders her, she can enjoy it without any burden of guilt.

The master always has to think of something new to challenge her with. Something he knows she'll dislike. That unpleasant man who had whipped her daughter. He was important. He was someone she had a tremendous loathing for.

...... But that man desired her and Lesley was strapped over the bench so that, as a slave, her loathing was immaterial. Even so, this is her great act of rebellion during her training. It almost seems as if she was made to submit to this man in order to make her rebel.

I think that a lot of games that people play in the S & M field—playing up just in order to have a beating—get a bit pointless after a while. I didn't think Lesley was doing it for that reason. What was demanded of her was something she really couldn't stomach. In the Story of O the first thing that Sir Stephen asked O to do was to masturbate before him, to make herself come. She just couldn't do it. It wasn't that she wouldn't—she just couldn't do it to start with. I daresay it was the same with Lesley.

...... Her pride wouldn't let her, perhaps. In Lesley's case Mano recognises that her essential character will remain the same. She will learn to repress her pride and arrogance but won't alter fundamentally by submitting to him.

Yes. I'm very glad he thought that. I was pleased at the end that he appreciated her self-will and her slight snootiness. I think she looked sulky to start with because she wasn't getting what she needed. But it would have been no fun for him to have had some meek and mild little creature.

...... From the point of view of a slave like Lesley; would there be an excitement in rebelling deliberately in order to incur retribution?

Oh, yes. That's often done. Then it's a battle of wills. "How long can I hold out before I have to give in?"

...... A masochistic excitement, knowing what the penalty will be?

Yes, the supreme moment for her.

...... In the novel, Lesley the slave seems to rebel to test her master's need of her. Presumably; if she rebelled and he said, "If you don't want to do what I command, you needn't" it would be like a woman feeling a man no longer cared for her.

Yes. She's testing how much he cares about the outcome of it. A man who will just give in half way through—that's terribly disappointing. You feel that you've both lost at that moment. The slave has lost, although she's got her own way. She's lost really.

...... And Lesley is also subject to a mistress, of course, although the mistress is a mans slave in her turn.

I agree with the comment in the book that women are much more harsh with one another. I would much rather have a man whipping me than a woman.

...... The novel certainly suggests that women are worse.

It's said in connection with Meena. Women are very, very merciless. There's always that slight resentment between them. They don't love each other in the same way as a man loves them, and treasures them, and cherishes their bodies and the beauty of them. Women take their own physical beauty for granted and hold it more lightly. At first there's a great inhibition about whipping another woman. I know there was for me. But once that inhibition is dissolved, they're worse than men. Absolutely unmerciful. They know it hurts. There's a kind of devilish quality. They know how strong and hardy women are.

...... Perhaps, though, Lesley's worst ordeal is the final test before she is allowed to set off on her journey as a slave. She has to submit to an extremely sadistic judicial thrashing of an institutional kind at the hands of a prison-farm warden. Would anyone accept that?

You mean it was done by someone who hadn't any affection for her? It was worth her trying out as an exercise to see how different it felt. A cold calculating approach would make me cold about it. It would hurt ten times more. I know that. But that was the object, I suppose. She should feel it without other things making it easier, lubricating her.

...... She's told beforehand that they will ensure she receives no sexual stimulation of the usual kind.

That's right. She wouldn't. I can believe it.

...... So that was perhaps her supreme sacrifice?

Yes. It's the worst thing, probably. The very worst thing. She's not having any soft words whispered in her ear, or any caresses, or any love-talk.

...... But even the pain of a judicial thrashing might have its value in teaching her self-knowledge?

Pain reminds us of who we are...

THE END