‘There’s the rack,’ said Belinda quite casually, ‘and the stocks and the whipping-frames and the caning-horses — see the rubber cufflets for the wrists and ankles and the waistband. A girl caned on the horse is absolutely helpless.’
She licked her teeth.
Isobel swallowed nervously.
‘So many! It’s hard to imagine decent girls needing such…draconian treatment,’ she said. ‘I thought corporal punishment was an occasional usage.’
Belinda shrugged.
‘Corporal punishment makes decent girls less brutish because they understand it.’
‘It all looks nicely polished and dusted.’
‘From use,’ said Belinda, opening a cupboard, at which Isobel gasped: the space was neatly packed with canes and whips, as well as restraining harnesses, rubber corsets and cuffs, and metal branks and gagging devices.
‘Will I have to use all those?’ Isobel gasped.
‘Not all on your first day,’ smirked Belinda. ‘There’s an inventory book and list of punishments, here’ — she indicated a thick leather folio. ‘Ghislaine Bassin, the trusty, will show you how to decode it. Sound slag, Ghislaine — been here the longest and never accepts promotion.’
Beside the door was a row of four structures with pointed tops, each mounted on wheels and covered by a dust sheet. Belinda pulled off one sheet.
‘That is the cage,’ she said. ‘It is for really naughty slags and is designed to be too narrow to sit down, so that a miscreant caged must stand up. It is an antique, actually: look how carefully the rods and eyelets are pierced in the bars, so that a victim may be trussed, or skewered, by any combination of restraint. The bars are hinged and can be lowered separately to show her bare for whipping.’
The cage bars were painted ochre and red, and atop the spire was coiled a chain with a hook. The four-sided ceiling of the cage was painted in swirling, abstract symbols; Belinda said they were supposed to be from North Africa, representing the four forces of earth, air, fire and water.
‘Sometimes, the cage is hung from the refectory ceiling,’ said Belinda, ‘or outside, from one of the turrets. Especially when it’s snowing. Miss Horsfall says that corporal punishment is a movable feast, so that almost any chamber can be used for an informal caning, while formal floggings tend to be in the gym or the refectory. You’ll see the whipping posts outside and the ducking gibbet by the river. That’s an antique too, from when the place was Pollecutt Manor.’
Isobel and Belinda visited the main bathroom where a group of stinkers, all nude, were at latrine duty. Under the canes of Sarah Bunn and Edra Forge, the bottom strokes, the girls crouched, contorted, to clean the floor with their pubic bushes as mops. One girl was held by wrists and ankles bent back over her head by two muscular inmates, who swung her pubis along the latrine channel, wiping it dry after two nude stinkers had licked it clean.
‘Want to pee?’ said Belinda. ‘I do.’
Without ceremony, she nodded at Sarah and Edra and squatted on the toilet runnel, just before the girl’s swabbing tongue. The aluminium was already bright but Belinda stained it with her copious jet of steaming piss. The girl did not pause in her cleaning duty and any droplets of pee left unlicked were wiped off by the suspended girl’s pubic mop. From time to time, her piss-soaked curls were sucked dry like a sponge by one of the other latrine girls.
‘Yes,’ said Isobel, as she watched Belinda’s bush of ash-blond curls disappear back into her black panties, ‘I feel like a pee, too.’
Trembling, she squatted and let flood a torrent of yellow fluid, some of it splashing the duty stinker’s face and lips. The girl looked up sullenly at Isobel’s buttocks as she licked her pond of golden piss. Isobel pulled up her panties and followed Belinda in rinsing her hands, then wiping them dry on the cunt bush of the nearest nude girl.
‘Slags are muck,’ she said loudly, ‘so don’t treat them as anything less.’
In the courtyard again, Belinda asked Isobel if she would mind exploring on her own. ‘I’ve some things to do,’ she said. ‘Actually, I’m out of snout and that bitch Ignoge won’t lend me any more.’
‘Of course,’ Isobel replied, ‘but let me ask — Ignoge mentioned a thing called the labyrinth which had to be rebricked…’
Belinda pointed beneath.
‘Down there,’ she said. ‘That’s where slags have to go when a spell in solitary, and twice-daily canings, aren’t enough to correct them. They must find their way out, which is why we keep changing the configuration. Anything may happen down there — you don’t want to be in the labyrinth, Isobel. It is accessed by a tunnel beside the Pollecutt Room, which, by the way, is always kept locked — it’s the only room that neither slags nor wardens are allowed to enter.’
‘And you mentioned slags being promoted — if Ghislaine Bassin is already a trusty, surely that is a promotion?’
Belinda’s response was to look cautiously round, then raise her skirts and lower her panties, to give Isobel a glimpse of her bare arse, ridged with crusted cane welts.
‘I was a slag for six months, then trusty for nine, before I was promoted to warden,’ Belinda said.
8
Scared of Strokes
The scrubland darkened quickly and a fine dust of snow began to fall, so that Isobel curtailed her walk down to the River Wrigley and headed back towards her room. The prison buildings, cosy even in the bleak midwinter daylight, were now shadowy and menacing. There were solitary cries, rhythmic tapping noises, muffled groans. Isobel shivered as she entered a corridor unfamiliar to her but with a bathroom visible at one end. She hurried towards its sign, announcing ‘Senior Wardens Only’; she peeked inside to find the place empty. Bladder bursting, she locked herself in a cubicle, unfastened her garter straps, fumbling in haste, then, lowering her panties, peed copiously and sighed. The bathroom for top strokes was painted in lemon yellow, with padded satin toilet seats, bidets, scent, tissue, nail files and cotton buds, and other tools of the boudoir. There was a commotion in the chamber; Isobel bit her lip, left her panties at her ankles, but pulled her feet up, to squat, invisible to the outside.
‘Well, Ghislaine,’ said a girl’s voice — that of top stroke Althea Tite — ‘I’m not at all pleased with you. You were supposed to deliver me my aubergine bra and panties today…I don’t know what you do in the sewing room!’
‘Please, mum,’ whined a girl, ‘it’s not my fault. Miss Horsfall had me down for a waspie corset, in mauve silk, which takes a long time, and then Miss Brand wanted one the same, only in peach…’
Slap!
‘Ouch, mum! That hurt!’
‘Are you saying that Miss Brand takes precedence over me, bitch? After all I’ve done for you?’
‘No, mum…’
Slap!
‘Oh!’
Slap!’
‘Please, mum! I promise…please, don’t be cruel!’
‘Cruel? Wait till you meet the new stroke, Miss Coker. She’s gym mistress, and she told me at lunch she would test every single appliance on her trusty…’
Slap!
‘Ohh!’
‘Strip down, slut, for full inspection.’
‘Y — yes, mum. Of course.’
There was a rustling and snapping, and the sound of dress and underthings slithering on skin. Boots clattered to the floor.
‘I don’t believe it! You’re wearing my panties!’
‘No! honestly, mum, I made these long ago.’
‘Still a crime, bitch!’
‘But Miss Horsfall has never said anything —’
Slap! Slap!
‘Take them off, then lift your arms for pit inspection.’
The panties slithered off the girl.
‘You haven’t shaved your armpits!’ hissed Althea Tite.
‘I ran out of razors, mum. You see, I owed Emma Shadwell a quarter ounce of snout and I didn’t have any, and she said she’d take a razor instead because Oswald wouldn’t give her any more credit at the shop, and
she owed June Dunton half a quarter ounce, and…’
Slap!
‘Ohh…’
‘You slags are all the same with your pathetic excuses. Get into that toilet. Now!’
Slap!
‘Y — yes, mum,’ Ghislaine stammered.
The two girls entered the cubicle at the end of the row, next to Isobel’s, and Isobel was able to survey the scene through a knothole in the wooden partition. The victim of Althea Tite’s displeasure was a lithe girl, an inch shorter than Isobel, with big, pendulous bubbies and a firm, jutting arse over powerfully muscled thighs. Her skin was a delicate uniform olive. Though long, the breasts were nevertheless firm, jutting up pertly and outwards. Muscle bunched her spinal cleft, giving her back the aspect of two stretched peach-halves. The tight buttocks dimpled at the top, forming a cup, or pouch, and curved abruptly over the thigh-tops to make separate clefts where thigh joined fesse. The waist was narrow, which exaggerated the swellings of teat and arse; her breasts bobbed, quivering, as Althea Tite pushed her into the cubicle. Her raven hair was flat around her skull but gathered in a slide, with braided ringlets cascading over her shoulders and caressing dark nipples like fat, glossy dates. Althea held her by an earlobe. Kneeing her between her buttocks on the anus bud, Althea forced her head down to the toilet seat, and ripped the slide from her tresses so that the girl’s hair fanned across the toilet bowl.
‘Clean it, slag,’ Althea hissed.
‘No, please…’ wailed Ghislaine.
‘What gang are you with, slut?’
‘Gang, mum? Gangs are illicit…’
Slap!
The palm of Althea’s hand cracked acros the girl’s bare buttocks.
‘Oh!’
‘Illicit, like smoking and coloured panties. Which gang is it, bitch? Franks, Goths, Vandals, Saracens?’
‘Saracens, mum — remember?’
‘You are a dirty bitch.’
‘You should know, mum.’
Slap! Slap! Ghislaine’s bare bum jerked.
‘Fucking whore!’
Isobel held her breath, craning to watch, as the top stroke pushed the squirming slag further into the toilet bowl.
‘No…please, mum,’ came her muffled moans, but her head began to revolve, scrubbing the bowl with her hair.
‘Tongue and lips, too, bitch,’ Althea snapped.
Ghislaine made licking sounds.
‘That’s better. Keep at it, bitch,’ Althea said, unfastening her cane and rope from her waistband.
She grasped Ghislaine’s hands, removing them as props from the toilet seat so that her head sank deeper. She roped the girl’s wrists at the small of her back, perched at the top of her buttocks, but leaving the fesses clear. Lifting her cane, Althea patted each buttock, then brushed her fingers down the crack of Ghislaine’s arse. Her fingers poked the cleft wider and Ghislaine obeyed the mute command; she spread her legs, clinging to the toilet bowl with her calves, and parted her fesses.
‘Oh…how many, please, mum?’
‘Just fifteen.’
Vip!
The cane whistled and sliced Ghislaine’s bare bum. The girl shuddered and her buttocks clenched before the next stroke took her on top croup, making her cry out.
‘Mmm!’
‘The second doesn’t count, for blubbing. I should stick a fistful of goosefeathers in your cunt, you brat.’
Vip!
Ghislaine’s head banged the inside of the toilet bowl; her bare bottom, striped by three livid pink weals, began to squirm, opening and closing rapidly. Althea waited for a relaxation of the bum muscles to allow the cleft, and the raven forest surrounding the red gash, to appear beneath the anus bud, before lashing Ghislaine an upender, hard in the perineum, and slicing both cunt and anus.
‘AHH! Mum! Oh, please!’
‘That doesn’t count, either, Ghislaine. This may be a long set…’
Isobel’s gaze was fixed on the trembling bare bottom of the beaten girl, the top pouch of her bum-cleft opening and closing like a mouth, and her spine writhing, with bone and muscle rippling beneath the skin. Her fingers crept between her thighs, to her own gash, swollen and seeping come. Isobel grimaced and shut her eyes, but only for an instant: returning to the scene, she fastened two fingers on her stiffening clitty and began to masturbate as she watched Ghislaine’s bare-bum caning.
The vip! vip! of the cane echoed over the flushing sounds of water in the bathroom, with Ghislaine’s head churning the toilet bowl, sometimes rising for air, only to have the soaked tresses pushed down again by her caner. The soft olive skin of her bottom, though scarred with old weals, had seemed creamy and whole. Now, it was bruised by stripes of pink, darkening to crimson, then to purple, laid in delicate pattern over haunches — which bruised the darkest — to top buttock, to the shuddering compact flesh of the mid-croup and the clefts between thigh and underfesse. Ghislaine had taken nineteen strokes of Althea’s cane on the bare, including repeaters, when Althea stopped the beating. Isobel wanked herself as slowly as she could, yet unable to stop her fingers quickening as she peered back at the caner and saw her with skirt lifted and fingers under her knickers, glistening with seeped come. Althea Tite was wanking off as she caned her slag.
Althea poked between Ghislaine’s thighs and her fingers came up dripping with oily come from Ghislaine’s pouch. Ghislaine remained in position, not shifting her roped wrists, while Althea departed, to return, moments later, with a cluster of rubber thongs at her pubis enclosing a strap-on dildo. Unwrapped, this was a double prong, with one giant rubber phallus, in pink, already impaling Althea’s cunt; the other shaft quickly nuzzled the lips of Ghislaine’s anus bud. Both prongs were over a foot in length and the girth of a girl’s wrist. Beneath them hung two rubber balls.
Althea prodded Ghislaine’s bumhole, the caned girl jerking with sobs, until she penetrated her to about an inch. Ghislaine squealed. An inch more and her squeal became an unbroken wail; as Althea thrust her buttocks to plunge the dildo as far as the balls in Ghislaine’s anal elastic, the girl screamed, once. Thereafter, she took Althea’s buggery in squirming silence. Althea fucked her in the bum vigorously, while masturbating her own distended clitty, below which the cunt-slimed pink rubber slid in and out of her own soaking gash. Ghislaine began to rub her cunt and clitty on the toilet seat, and rivulets of come trickled down the cane-wealed olive skin of her inner thighs. Both girls groaned, mewling in unison.
‘Going to come, slut?’ panted Althea.
Isobel wanked faster, come gushing on her wrist and soiling her panties at her ankles.
‘You know, mum…’ gasped Ghislaine. ‘God, yes, fuck my hole harder, mum…yes, bugger me. You know me so! God! Ah! I’m coming! Oh! Ohh…’
Althea’s belly heaved; her fingers were a blur as they wanked her clitty and, as her own moans grew to gasping squeals, she squeezed hard on the rubber ball-sac hanging between the two dildos.
‘Yes!’
‘Ahh…’
Isobel’s own gasps as she wanked off to spasm, with come wetting her thighs, stockings, boots and panties, were drowned by the tribadists’ squeals, as white cream from the rubber ball-sac frothed at Althea’s cunt and Ghislaine’s anus, splattering their pube-jungles, thighs and lower buttocks. Isobel’s crouching thighs trembled so that she almost toppled, grasping the cistern top for support, and making a dull clank, as her weight shifted its lid. She sat, shivering and trying to mop her flood of cunt-juice from her skin and clothing with a toilet tissue. Suddenly, an eye appeared at the knothole she had just peered through. The eye winked. There was a rapping on the cubicle door.
‘Come out, come out, whoever you are…Miss Coker!’ Althea sang.
Numbly, Isobel corrected her stockings and panties without taking time to fasten her garter straps, smoothed down her skirt and opened the cubicle door, to be greeted by the sight of three of the bottom strokes: Imogen Tandy, Amy Patel and Belinda Garce. All had rolled cigarettes in the corners of their mouths. They jeered; Belin
da was the first to seize her. Althea lit up a half-smoked rollie while untying the ropes from Ghislaine’s wrists. Ghislaine emerged, head and face dripping from the toilet bowl, and rubbed her bare bum before going in search of her discarded knickers.
‘That really hurt, mum,’ she said.
‘Thought Saracen bitches could take it,’ snapped Althea.
‘Well, I did, mum, didn’t I?’
‘Let me go!’ Isobel cried.
‘She was wanking!’ said Amy Patel brightly, with a flick of her shiny black mane and a trembling of her conic breasts under her clinging white uniform shirt.
Her stockings slithered as she rubbed her thighs together and grinned, at Isobel, then the others.
‘Wanking off, and in the top stroke bog!’ said Althea.
‘That’s very serious, miss. Lucky these ladies happened to be passing. You’re a stroppy one and I’ll need help holding you down.’
‘What for?’ wailed Isobel. ‘Surely, you don’t mean —’
‘A caning,’ drawled Althea, with a puff of smoke in Isobel’s face. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I mean.’
‘Belinda!’ cried Isobel, as the girls pinioned her wrists and head, holding her bent over a washbasin with her face pressed against the mirror.
Belinda shrugged as Althea lifted Isobel’s skirt and pulled down her sopping knickers. She knelt and clung to Isobel’s left foot, immobilising her. Another girl held her by the right foot; it was Ghislaine, her trusty, grinning impishly.
‘You were witnessed wanking off, in flagrante,’ said Althea. ‘I wouldn’t advise an appeal to higher authority.’
‘You forget what I witnessed!’ Isobel blurted.
‘An unruly detainee, whom I corrected with reasonable force. Isn’t that what happened, Ghislaine?’
‘Yes, mum,’ said Ghislaine, ‘no more and no less.’
Caged! Page 14