Nothing had prepared Greta for this. The pain was electric, excruciating, consuming. It was how she imagined childbirth but worse. It was like giving birth to a cloven-hoofed devil and the satanic gaze of the billy goat crossed her mind like a shadow. Tears fell from her eyes, snot from her nose. She rocked back and forth, trying to keep balance.
‘Keep still.’
And she tried to keep still. She tried to absorb the pain. She tried to imagine she was someone else, or somewhere else. The leather bit between her teeth grew slimy and she dug in harder as she felt the line being measured once more, the cane lifting into the air and coming down on her damp body like a flash of lightning. Greta wanted to cry out and she just chewed down harder on the foul piece of leather. She could do this. She could take six lashes from Mrs Maddox. She could take 12 if she had to.
Greta held her breath for number three, the blow cutting across the first two as if Mrs Maddox were creating a design, the points where the lines intersected sharp stabs of agony on a field of pain. Greta was dazed. She tried to keep count and lost count. There was a fourth, a fifth, randomly placed, scribbling stripes of red graffiti across her tender flesh. She was learning the difference between the cane and the crop, the touch of leather and the flat of the hand. And she learned, too, that where pain can produce pleasure it can also produce just more pain. The pain was a forest fire, almost removed from her, like something seen from a mountain top, a distant event.
She opened her eyes and caught a glimpse of Richard. He had folded his arms together, one hand raised to hide his mouth. Old Mr Maddox was staring at the ground and the sound of the cane beating the air once more made Greta close her eyes and steady her legs, the hot wand of fire blazing a new trail across her bottom.
Mrs Maddox changed the line of attack and slashed the cane down across just one of Greta’s cheeks. She did it again, aiming at the same spot and Greta was sure she had gone beyond six and was grateful that the worst was over. She had passed the half way mark. Richard would be pleased. Greta took one more across the right cheek and Mrs Maddox took her fiery instrument of torture around the other side in order to concentrate on the left, the angle taking the cane across Greta’s side in a place where there is less cushioning and the agony is multiplied.
Was that nine? Or ten? She didn’t know and it didn’t matter. The cane cut an arc through the motionless air and uncoiled again like a dragon’s tongue across her young body. It was a different sort of pain now, outside her experience, a burning like acid that moved below the surface and into her thoughts. She was a new person, an object to be used, flogged at will, humiliated and abused. She was Richard’s toy. She was his slave and he was her master. She understood that. Mrs Maddox wielded the pale yellow cane, but she was Richard’s tool. Greta was being punished for something and she didn’t know what but she knew she must deserve it.
There was a pause, brief but discernible. Greta was sure this was the end. Just one more. I’ve taken 12 strokes with the cane. I’ve done this on my own. She hasn’t got the better of me. I’ve done this for Richard.
Greta gritted the leather wedge and screwed up her eyes. The cane came down like the blade of a guillotine and Greta stood there bent over, her bottom and sides screaming, her hands wet where they gripped her ankles, her long locks of gleaming chestnut hair sweeping over the grass between her legs.
‘A glass of water, if you please, William,’ she heard Mrs Maddox say, and Greta straightened her back with a feeling of gratitude.
The woman stood back half a step. ‘I thought I told you not to get up,’ she said, her mouth twisting in anger. ‘Just behave yourself, girl.’
Greta stared into the woman’s eyes and read her thoughts. It wasn’t over. It had only just begun.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
Mr Maddox was hurrying back, the glass trembling in his hand. Greta looked pleadingly at Richard. He looked away and she bent to take a fresh grip on her ankles. She felt the cane in repose on her bottom and big tears leaked from her eyes as she chewed down on the leather bit. She listened as the woman gulped down water and the drop that fell on her bottom added an extra touch of cruelty.
Mrs Maddox gave the glass to her husband. She took a breath, sighed with satisfaction and sawed the cane across the tops of Greta’s legs. She drew back and brought it down, the cane stinging the air before cutting a crimson line into the thin white flesh. That’s one, Greta thought. The second moved further up, lacerating the tender place where the thighs and bottom meet.
Sweat seeped from Greta’s every pore, down her back and into her hair, over the curve of her breasts and settled in tears on the peaks of her tingling nipples. Her vagina was moist from fear and her throat was parched from sucking the wedge of leather. Her mind was beginning to wander and she remembered being a little girl chasing a puppy through the garden. She wasn’t wearing any clothes and she couldn’t remember why.
The cane carved its path across the undercurve of her cheeks. Greta felt its weight lift away and when it came back down it sliced like a knife across the soft petal lips of her pussy, raising a faint spray that evaporated in the warm air. Greta had a momentary vision of her name in lights, totally out of place. She saw the piece of leather fall from her mouth and the pain was so intense, so terrible, so unbelievable her little body took control. She heard a single word...
‘Enough.’
And the world went dark.
Chapter Sixteen – The Golden Bridle
WHEN SHE OPENED her eyes, Greta wasn’t exactly sure where she was. The light seeping through the grey slates of the roof was speckled in dust and for just a moment she thought she was in the dirty attic in Soho where she had followed Dirty Bill.
Her body throbbed with a dull ache. She could smell witch-hazel and as the odours of the stable drifted over her senses the cock crowed and she was fully awake.
Her back was sticky with sweat. She pushed the blanket to one side and the strap pulled at the ring connected to her choker as she rolled on to her knees. She stood, flexing her shoulders, stretching her spine, every movement sending a burning sensation across the damaged skin of her raw buttocks. She must have fainted, she realised, and was deeply ashamed. She had been determined to take everything the cruel woman could give, to learn from it, to learn about herself. She had failed on the first day.
If it was the first day? It seemed like forever. Even Tom’s whistle as he made his way towards her stall had the familiarity of time and she turned automatically so that he could brush the straw from her back. He did so with great tenderness. It was Tom she thought who had probably cared for her damaged bottom.
He went down on his haunches for a closer look. ‘There, not too bad,’ he said.
She turned with tears misting her eyes. He unhooked her lead and attached it around his waist. Grace was waiting for them outside and licked her ankles before they crossed the yard to the shed. The hens were clucking boisterously, the peacock feathers gleaming like opals in the sunrise.
Tom smoked and a feeling of calm came to her as she squatted on the low stool among the goats, the smell oddly soothing, the milk hypnotic as it splashed into the bucket. She moved deeper into the stall, among the skittering hooves, pulling and squeezing each set of fleshy udders, and the goats responded with a generosity even Tom noticed as he took the full buckets to the vat.
‘You see, girlie, they’ve found a soul mate,’ he said and she turned with a small smile. She wanted to please.
The chocolate goat showed more patience, although again the first nervous spray coated Greta’s face before they found their rhythm. The tall friendly goat Greta called The Lady pushed eagerly into her hands and milking her had all the intimacy as if she were touching a part of herself.
The billy goat was kicking its heels and reared up as she made her way to the cheese table.
‘Get back in your hole,’ Tom roared and the he-goat bared its teeth as it hissed at her. The dog barked and the nanny goats trembled on their skin
ny legs.
Greta did her best to ignore the commotion and didn’t notice the camera above turning on its axis as she placed the three-legged stool back on the shelf where it belonged. There was work to be done. She wanted to get it right. She watched closely, stirring the mixture with the paddle as Tom measured out the live culture before adding it to the vat. The he-goat was leering at her and as she glanced over her shoulder she had a terrible vision of Mrs Maddox reshaping the air with her pale yellow cane.
The curd had to mature but there was always something to do. The hens had to be fed, greedy things that stamped over her bare feet, the peacocks with their silly displays, their feathers tickling her thighs as she moved among them. She watched Richard ride over the fields and had a dim recollection of a girl with auburn hair riding a pony in a video. She had thought that’s what she would be doing when they set out from London.
She drank orange juice and ate plates of muesli with fruit. The stew in the evening was always packed with fresh vegetables grown on the farm and she ate with her own wooden spoon. Every day she took her V400 pill; that first day when she’d climaxed so greedily under the crop she had wondered if the V stood for something other than vitamin, but after that day many days passed and she was neither beaten nor aroused.
Most of the time she was sticky with goat’s milk and streaked with mud. The animals on the farm accepted her moving about them with a tolerance that at first seemed surprising and then became natural. The afternoons were hotter than she had ever known in England, but the faint breeze drifting in from the sea brought with it promises of new worlds and faraway places.
Alex arrived each day with a fresh load of turfs. While the men sauntered off to The Black Sheep, she would unload the cart and was steadily transferring the rolls of earth two at a time up the low rise beyond the paddock. Her shoulders were strong. Like iron hammered for a sword blade, the beating had made her stronger. She unrolled the turfs and laid them out, knitting them together, the soil coating her body and making her feel at one with the earth.
Tom and Alex would return carrying a board and while they pressed the turfs in place, she dragged the big hose from the barn back up the hill, the reel unwinding like the line on a kite. The new turfs had to be thoroughly soaked twice a day and already they were binding and growing greener.
The task seemed as if it would take forever but, suddenly, the hillside was bristling in a carpet of new grass as green and shiny as her eyes. Alex brought a stack of boards on the cart and she watched bewildered as the men assembled a grandstand with a canvas roof and triangular pennants in red, yellow and blue.
A week must have gone by. Perhaps two? Time was different now. She was different. The shadow of her old self had been beaten from her. She had stopped being Greta May playing a character and become the character Richard had pictured and Vanlooch had painted. She was Pegasus. The name was on a brass disc above her stall. She lived in a stable with Delilah, Thunder and a little foal named Greta.
She could hear the chime of church bells when she awoke that morning and thought it was probably Sunday. The sun had lifted over the horizon and she found hanging from the side of her stall an intricate set of leather straps joined by brass rings and shiny buckles. The straps were golden in colour and smelled of polish. She was still studying the strange artefact in the morning light when Tom bowled in to administer the usual brushing. He inspected her bottom.
‘Fantastic. Good as new,’ he said.
He brushed down her thighs, around her knees, down her calves. The fine hair on her body had softened, grown translucent and slowly vanished. The dark patch of her pubic hair was perfectly shaped, a well defined triangle, and silky soft. Her skin was the same even colour, pale bronze, kissed by the sun as she went about her daily chores. Her hair gleamed and fell in abundant coils to the pit of her back. The little curve of her tummy that she had once thought so sexy had gone. Her stomach was flat and muscular from carrying all those turfs, her breasts standing out firm and shapely from the fine lattice of her ribcage. She had always wanted to be considered a great beauty and thought it was beauty that made you a success in acting as in life. She didn’t think about those things now. She was flawlessly herself and that was enough.
Tom hooked her lead about his waist and they crossed the yard with Grace trotting along behind them. The goats had grown greedy for her touch and the milk they gave more copious. The he-goat that morning was more animated than ever and violated her with its penetrating gaze, its tongue hanging lustily from drooling lips, its devil hooves beating a death knell against the woodwork as she prepared the cheese for market.
When she left the goat shed, Richard was in the paddock with Thunder connected to a long rein and trotting in circles. Tom went off to get a fresh bale of hay and, as she watched Richard at his task, it occurred to her that no one would ever beat a pony. They are sacred. They know how to behave. They don’t require the rigours of discipline just the patience of training. A pony is everything a girl could be if she really tried. It was something to aspire to. Life was a constant process of change and transformation. Only when you surrender your will to the flights of destiny do you break from the shell of a chrysalis and enter the fragile perfection of a butterfly. Well, a pony, she thought. She admired Thunder’s arched back and long proud neck, her fine, tapering limbs, the way she moved so elegantly, lifting each little hoof and flexing her legs at it fell again to the earth. Richard was flicking at the ground with his whip, but its tongue never touched the pony.
He caught her eye and when he smiled she felt warm all over. It was the first time Richard had glanced in her direction for so long she wasn’t sure what to do. She took a step forward, then stopped as it dawned on her that the convoluted set of straps hanging in her stall had been made by Mr Maddox especially for her.
During this moment of confusion, Richard nodded his head and she rushed back to the stable.
Tom was cleaning out the soiled hay. It was her job to do the sweeping but the little wave he gave her made it clear that he would do it today. She clutched the golden straps in eager fingers but no matter which way she turned them they didn’t make any sense at all. She glanced up as a long shadow shot thin as a needle across the barn floor. In his loose white shirt and polished knee-boots and tight britches, with the sun behind him, lighting his features, Richard had never been more striking.
‘Come, come,’ he called.
She hurried to him with the golden bridle and he eased it over her head. He removed her collar, slid it through the straps and did the collar back up again. The bridle buckled at the back of her neck. A bit connected to two brass rings slipped into her mouth and the blinders that partially covered her eyes accented her forward vision, her view of the future.
‘Perfect,’ he said, and she knew he was pleased.
They left the stable and crossed the yard to the fence. When she climbed the low gate, she noticed the four hooks screwed into the fence posts, waiting for her if the need arose, and she had a feeling that they would never be used again. At least, not by her.
Richard connected the reins to her collar and she trotted around the paddock in orderly circles, slowly upping the pace, her thighs stretching and getting a proper work out. She had built up her upper body carrying turfs, but her legs could still do with some work. Richard flicked at the earth with his whip, the beat helping her keep rhythm. While she was learning how to move gracefully, Tom saddled Delilah. Richard climbed into the saddle and she ran at his side, up the hill to the grandstand and down over rolling meadows carpeted in bluebells and daisies that descended to the sea. Richard galloped across the shingle beach and stopped for her to catch up.
He didn’t need to say anything. Words had become unimportant. They were joined by something primitive and esoteric and loads of fun. She ran out into the sea, chopped through the waves and swam in the cold water. Her body felt clean for the first time since she’d arrived in Marsham and her hair was glossy as it dried in the afternoon sunsh
ine. Richard trotted back to the paddock and she kept pace with Delilah all the way to the stable. After she had brushed down the mare she tucked into a bowl of stew with noodles and beans and couldn’t recall ever eating anything quite so delicious.
That night, Greta had the dream where she saw her name in lights and was wide awake in the pre-morning chill, listening for the cock crow and watching the light filter through the roof. She couldn’t wait for the new day to dawn. She did her work, and Tom was saddling Richard’s horse by the time she had scrubbed down the cheese tools.
She watched Richard ride up the rise as she was leaving the goat house and felt a stab of disappointment. It was only a game. He was teasing. He glanced back with a grin and she had to sprint as fast as she could to catch up with him.
He slowed at the crest of the hill and, when she reached him, he flicked his whip at her bottom which of course made her run faster. When they reached the beach, he rode across the shingle and she followed him around the curve of the bay to the stone lighthouse on the headland. The shingle cut her feet to ribbons but she was determined not to stop and the salt water when she swam in the sea healed her wounds in no time.
The soles of her feet toughened and it wasn’t long before they didn’t hurt at all. She flew across the fields like Pegasus and swam in the sea like a fish. It had been freezing that first day but the cold and the heat don’t bother you if you have the discipline to bare them. Her skin darkened and turned golden brown. Her limbs shone like they’d been polished, her muscles grew strong, and she could see great distances with her eyes focused through the blinders. Most days she wore the golden bridle. She was getting used to it, but liked the freedom when she didn’t wear it at all. She remembered that time, it seemed ages ago, when she enjoyed being naked in the market. Now, she couldn’t imagine there was any other way to be. Clothes would just be so silly.
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