by Mark Andrews
“The Royal Bank, Angela?”
“Certainly, Mr Mayor,” she said and stepped off, entering the traffic in the busy street while the mayor sat back, gloating over his good fortune in acquiring this crème de- la crème of prisoners. He had had the court record sent to his office and had frowned over the findings. He thought the decision more than a little strange since her defence that she had only made the remark as a joke and in passing had been backed up by her colleague. He also found Judge Rowbottom’s sentence excessive but he wasn’t going to do anything about it. Not considering the plans he had for this girl.
Alas, it is given to none of us to see into the future. Things were unfolding that the mayor had no inkling of and which, once they had emerged and played out their parts in human history, were going to change things even more.
Now she stood at the kerb outside the bank. Again people, fully clothed and perfectly normal people stared at her nakedness as they passed. It was all part of her punishment and she had to bear it with equanimity, even aplomb. To see their eyes move down her body from her face to her naked breasts; down her flat muscular belly to her groin - her so naked groin where her nude vulva only barely hid the secrets delights of her vagina; then down her well-formed thighs and then back up again. More than a few stopped to stare at her, ogling her naked beauty in this so public of places right in the heart of the central business district of the city.
She had decided to brazen it out and smiled back at them. Not lewdly and not even provocatively. Her smile was demure, as if she was fully clothed and walking in the street beside them. Many were taken aback by her attitude. How could a girl look so normal. So pure and chaste while she stood stark naked in the public street, they wondered.
By now she had developed a lovely tan all over her body from her days working nude out in the sun. Not too dark. The authorities were well aware of the dangers of skin cancer and sprayed the girls with a block to prevent almost all the ultra-violet rays from penetrating. But enough got through to turn them from milk-white to a light tan and it made them even more beautiful.
And so she spent her day. Most of it was in standing and waiting while the mayor transacted his business around the city; just a small part of it was spent in actually running ahead of the gig, taking her boss to his various appointments.
Once home, Jane came down after a while and released her from the gauntlets that held her so securely to the gig’s poles. “Come on, you can help me bathe the master and dress him for dinner...”
“What about Mrs Swift?”
Jane grinned. “She has to fend for herself. We women are nothing now, don’t you realise it?”
They went up to James’ suite and ran the water into the huge spa bath and then took out the dinner suit he would be wearing this evening, brushed it and made sure it was properly pressed. His dress shirt and bow tie followed and then Jane asked Angela to polish his black shoes.
The mayor arrived soon after and they undressed him. He was used to this personal service being performed for him by Jane and Angela’s predecessor but now he watched her carefully as his body was slowly stripped of its clothes. On her reactions during the next few minutes would he decide how to proceed with this girl.
She was punctilious. Her face gave away nothing as his still athletic body was revealed to her. He could see no hint of whether she approved or disapproved of what they were doing to him nor of his body as a sexual object. Jane handed him up into the spa and then got in beside him, gesturing to Angela to do the same. Then the two of them soaped him and massaged his body under the water but neither touched his penis. He had warned Jane in advance that until further notice, his bathing was to be a perfectly correct affair. She had raised her eyebrows at him but when he shook his head she had merely nodded and gone on with her duties.
Her mind was racing however. It all had something to do with the new girl, but what? Never before had he behaved like this with a new servant and since she had been with him for three years (of a four year sentence for aggravated impertinence) she had seen a number of pony girls come and go.
In truth, Angela found the mayor’s body very appealing. His regular exercise, performed hard and under the best trainer, had kept him lean and hard and he was as fit and tanned naked as he looked fully clothed. She didn’t at all mind soaping his body and later, as he lay naked on the rubbing table and Jane instructed her in the art of massage, she found his skin under her hands, to be quite delightful. She wondered again at the revelation that he might be calling on her as one of his concubines. So far he had been most proper. Oh he had touched her but almost perfunctorily and his penis hadn’t even twitched as they had undressed him, bathed him and then massaged him.
She wasn’t to know that it had been only by dint of enormous effort on his part to control it that it had not erected of its own volition. All his girls: Jane and the various pony-girls he had had over the years, had all been beautiful, slender and athletic, just the way he liked them, but Angela had something else. She was beautiful, perhaps more so than any of the others and her body was quite perfect but it was something more. Something indefinable: perhaps an aura that seemed to surround her. An inner beauty that radiated from her; an ingenuousness that no degree of humiliation and physical chastisement could destroy. It was this that James had recognised without being able to define it and it was this he wanted to protect and nurture.
She met Amanda Swift that evening at dinner. There were just the two of them but they always dressed formally, part of an old tradition and they always had a sherry beforehand although that was all. The mayor drank wine sparingly on formal occasions but not otherwise.
He had asked Angela to present herself during this pleasant half hour with his wife. “So, James, this is the new girl.” Amanda too had heard the city gossip about this paragon but she was not the sort to embarrass the girl in front of her, restricting herself to the simple ‘girl’,
“This is her, my dear. Exquisite, isn’t she?”
“She is. Come here, my dear, let me see you.” She smiled at Angela as she stood before the wife of the man who, if all rumours were correct, was soon going to take her to his bed. Angela returned the smile deferentially and bowed her head but Amanda took her by the chin and raised it again. “You have no need to bow to me, child. I am but a woman like you ...”
“Amanda!”
“Well, James, it’s true. If I said those words outside this room, I could be arrested as this girl was, and sentenced to exactly the same penalty as she. Impertinence! Well!”
“Amanda, please. I don’t want to see you arrested. One day you will go too far. Anyway, you approve of my latest pony-girl?”
“If we must have such things, yes. She is perfect...”
Angela was dismissed but she said nothing of the conversation to Jane. Gossip was a no-no but in any case she knew just how dangerous were Amanda Swift’s words - at least for her. But she wondered. That the wife of the most powerful man in the city harboured such dangerous thoughts and dared to voice them - in front of a prisoner. It was weird stuff.
During the meal, while Jane and Angela, naked still, served their master and mistress (well she was that, at least nominally), the conversation across the table was lively, about current affairs and the latest town hall politics. Angela realised Amanda was a very intelligent woman and she mourned once again that able women were now barred from public involvement in such things. Perhaps the leaders of the Women’s Lib. Movement had gone too far too fast but women surely did have something to offer, she thought.
That night, she was pleased to find she was to share the attic room with Jane and that the beds they were to sleep in were indeed as real as Jane had intimated. No more straw to itch your body, even if it did keep you warm. The sheets were coarse but adequate and they even had a pillow. She fell asleep almost immediately and dreamt about the mayor making long and passionate lo
ve to her.
Her days were spent in like manner but when the mayor had no public duties on a weekend, she spent the time gardening with him and his wife. This was a passion for James Swift. It was both a relaxation and a joy and every single annual in his garden had been planted by him or Amanda and as far as possible, they tended the garden themselves. Now Angela knelt, naked of course, on hands and knees between them, weeding the rose garden silently while he and his wife talked. Mostly it was about the garden but other things interspersed themselves at times. She was one of them.
“You haven’t taken her yet, James?” she said suddenly after a silence.
He sat back on his haunches and looked at her strangely. Then he spoke. Softly and without heat. “You’ve never ever raised this subject before... ? I thought I had always been discreet... ?”
“You have. You have. You have always been most considerate of me and I have always appreciated it, James. We have a good marriage and I am aware of the current mores on the subject. I am just surprised you haven’t taken her yet - she is so exquisitely beautiful and I am sure she will perform most adequately.”
He didn’t ask how she knew. In a big house, everyone seems to know everybody else’s business. But he was clearly embarrassed. “Amanda!” Now his voice had an almost strangled tone to it. “Do you really want to discuss this in front of her?”
“Why not? She is only a prisoner. Almost a slave. I’m sure she will be interested, won’t you, my dear?”
Angela kept her head down and James appreciated her consideration.
“Alright, Amanda, I’ll tell you why. It is because of her beauty - her inner beauty not what is on the outside, that I have not taken her. I think this girl is something different from any female I have yet met with the possible exception of yourself. I want to protect her, as far as I am able, anyway, from the worst aspects of our new laws and keeping her here in our house and otherwise under my eye, so to speak, is the best way I know.”
She didn’t say anything for a while but just sat there, eyes brimming, staring at her husband. “You are something else yourself, you great oaf,” she said at last, rushing over to him and taking him in her arms.
“I think, Angela, it is time Mrs Swift and I went inside. You may continue to weed here until Jane calls you in...”
She didn’t even smile. “Certainly, Mr Mayor.” But inside she smiled. She was glad it was good between them, just as it was with her own parents. She knew so many men these days had girls on the side. They could of course. A boss might ask one of his female workers to come to his office and she would know very well it wasn’t to take dictation. But she wouldn’t dare complain or refuse. He might well have phrased the invitation in that guise but if she refused, she might well find herself on a charge of rebellion or impertinence and few male juries acquitted a girl these days. A few months as a naked prisoner soon squashed any fractious ideas such girls might harbour.
Similarly, a male customer might ask for a favour from a female clerk or assistant in a store. That assistance might well involve a kiss, a feel or even more but if she complained of sexual harassment, she well knew what her immediate fate would be.
Angela felt both relieved and in a strange way ennobled by James’ words and his actions - or lack of them. She had begun to think there was something wrong with her for Jane was often summoned to his presence when his wife was out on some fundraising bash and Angela well knew what for. Now, it seemed, he wanted only to protect her from the worst excesses of her predicament as a female prisoner in the second decade of the Twenty-first Century. She blushed though as she recalled his words about her to his wife. Surely she was nothing special. No, she knew she was nothing special. She just tried to live her life by rules which she thought were fairly common amongst decent people.
She lived her days according to her own ideas, subject only to James’ requirements. They were not demanding apart from the constant shame of her total and utter nudity. She drove him to work in the gig except on those occasions when he had to go out of town when a city car came to pick him up. On these occasions she stayed at home and gardened under Amanda’s direction.
She came to like her boss’s wife very much but she also feared for her. For Amanda now revealed that she belonged to a secret society. In fact she headed it. The society, named Females and Males Equal, FAME, met very secretly to plot a course to restore equality for women. “You, Angela, may be in a position to help us. My husband is a good man and he doesn’t abuse women but he is a politician and a product of the system. He would never get behind us. You, on the other hand, if he does take you into his office and give you some responsibility may well be able to assist us. Will you help?” “No, Ma’am. Not because I am not sympathetic but because your husband has been very good to me. Very good indeed. I could never betray the trust he seems to want to place in me. I hope you understand... ?”
“I do and I admire you for it. All right, but I trust you will erase this conversation from your memory?”
Angela smiled. “What conversation, Ma’am?”
No more was said of the conspiracy and Angela gradually forgot about it. Her days were full enough although the waiting periods were both boring and harrowing. Boring for long inactivity and harrowing because she often had to stand in conspicuous places and suffer the examination and ribald comments of those who chose to stop and stare at her nakedness. They hadn’t lessened in their suggestiveness or obsceneness and she still blushed all the time although she tried to ignore the worst of them.
Most invited sexual congress in one form or another with the speaker but usually in some unusual way as up her backside, down her mouth or between her legs rather than in the more usually accepted way. But nearly as many told how they thought a good beating would do her the world of good. These were usually quite detailed in how the beating should be administered.
A spanking whilst draped over the speaker’s knees was the most common but then, as he warmed to his theme, he often went on to more painful and some quite weird punishments. The cane was the next most popular and there were many ways it could be applied to her buttocks and thighs. Some men wanted to cane her breasts as well at which suggestion she paled. How could they even dream of doing such a terrible thing to so delicate organs as a woman’s breasts?
Others wanted her spread out along an upright sloping bench with her legs pulled out wide to expose her vagina which they then proposed should receive an impossible number of strokes of the cane, right up along the crack. Similarly, the soft and so sensitive insides of her thighs ought to be similarly treated.
Then there was the paddle. This instrument of leather and wood was the perfect instrument of chastisement to some of her ‘admirers’. “Yes, girlie. I’d have you strung up by your heels - spread as wide as my servants could get them mind, and then get stuck into that pert little bottom of yours. The paddle being leather it doesn’t do as much damage as the cane but it sure hurts and we can go on for a long time. A stroke a minute over two hours would be a fitting punishment.”
Others spoke of ‘electrical stimulation’ of her most sensitive parts: “A probe into your anus while another goes deep into your vagina and then the current raised up to around fifty volts would soon have you thrashing around beautifully,” said one technical wizard. Another young man agreed with the anal probe but suggested as the other electrode, a roving instrument with ultra-fine wires at the end, grazing over various parts of her anatomy would be even more effective.
All this she heard but tried to ignore. She couldn’t really ignore them though and as the suggestions became more and more horrible she blushed furiously and the sweat on her flesh showed how badly they were getting to her. It only egged them on to better things.
“I think these sluts ought to be permanently enslaved. Then they could take off their arms entirely. Let them pull the gig with a belt around their waists... That’s teach t
hem a lesson and also be a warning to other would-be sluts.”
These were the worst moments. The best were when James climbed into the gig and bade her trot to another part of the city. The gig was light and he was no heavy-weight. It was easy enough work and anyway she delighted in punishing her body physically - with hard work anyway. She felt the wind in her face, there were no spectators to goad her and she was doing what she loved, running.
She never complained to him about the men, young men mostly, who abused her as she waited for him to come out from the building to which she had brought him. He didn’t find out until he came up silently to where she was waiting one day and heard a particularly nasty suggestion involving golden syrup being introduced into her vagina and then being staked out near a nest of soldier ants. He took hold of the young man and shook him by his shirt front, scattered his audience with threats of prosecution for loitering (not indecent language as that would have been laughed out of court when applied to a mere woman) and then turned to Angela. “This happen often, girl?” he said gruffly as he climbed into the gig.
“Most days,” she said. She wasn’t going to complain but she wasn’t going to lie to him either.
“I see,” was all he said, but from then on, when she dropped him off he always told her to take the gig around the block until he was due to come out and he gave her a cheap watch so she could be on hand as required. She was inordinately grateful and that night as she soaped him down in the spa, she kissed him on the forehead. He just smiled.