Madeleine

by Stephen Rawlings

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘The Working Girl’

  All she had was an address and a time. This was not unusual. Some clients gave a name, especially if they lived in an apartment block, and others had left instructions how to find the entrance to discreet penthouses, with private lifts tucked away in basement car-parks, or office foyers. Once or twice she had received detailed instructions of what to wear, or how to behave on being admitted, but usually it was just an address and a time.

  A solid town house not far from the river, no name on the brightly polished doorbell, but obviously well maintained, and well funded. A male voice responded to her ring.

  “Take your clothes off at the top of the stairs, and wait.” The buzzer released the door, and she pushed it open and entered, to find herself in a hallway with an elaborately carved mahogany staircase directly in front of her. She ascended without haste, with the customary sensual traffic beginning to build on the erotic highway that linked her belly and breasts, her groin and her cortex. Already she was vibrating with terror and excitement, while her vagina contributed its own lubricious signals of arousal. She feared and hated what was to be done to her, but ached for the overwhelming waves of fulfilment that would sweep her when she was in extremis, and the deep satisfaction that would follow.

  As instructed, she stopped at the top of the stairs and began removing her clothes, methodically, and without any attempt to add any further erotic element to her natural movements, themselves full of feminine grace and allure, laying her bag and garments on the one straight chair than furnished the landing. Naked, she stood facing as she had when she reached the top of the stair, her fingers laced together behind her neck, and her feet placed about eighteen inches apart, a pose provocative, without being too blatant, for the watcher whom she was sure was observing her from concealment, possibly via closed-circuit TV.

  She was not kept waiting long. Within less than a minute, a door before her opened to reveal a tall, middle-aged man, with thinning silver hair, austere features, and a thin lipped bloodless mouth that suggested its owner understood clearly the concept of pain, and did not associate it with the word mercy. She shivered at the thought of how much suffering a man like this might inflict on her.

  “So you’re Madame’s little Madeleine, who can take anything a man can give,” he observed in a tone that lost nothing of menace by its quietness, “we shall have to see if we can’t make her eat her words.”

  “I can’t promise to take it indefinitely, there’s a limit to what the body will do, whatever the mind says,” she replied, as softly, “but I do promise to obey you in everything, including submitting to restraint, when I can’t maintain position voluntarily.”

  “Brave words, girl, but we shall see if you can make them good. In the end, there can be only one winner in a contest between the rod and woman’s flesh.” He turned on his heel, and started to walk up the next flight of stairs. “Follow me,” he commanded.

  He led her to the top floor, into a circular turret room with slit windows and open beams in the roof space, a quixotic relic of the Victorian Gothic Revival. The room was decorated throughout in blood red, and contained little but what she was experienced enough now to recognise as a whipping frame and bench, and other apparatus for the infliction of pain, something this man was clearly very familiar with. Well, she would give him a good run for his money, the great deal of money he was paying for the privilege of breaking her.

  “We’ll start with very basic stuff, just to see what you are made of,” he announced, “touch your toes for one dozen with the cane.”

  She looked at the yellow length, arching as he flexed it between his hands, and did not like what she saw. It was as long as any she’d had so far, and looked to be a little thicker and heavier than most. Obediently she turned away from the doleful sight, and bent to touch her fingers to her toes, feeling the now pristine skin of her vulnerable buttocks stretch ready to receive the scalding impact of the pitiless length of rattan.

  The air parted behind her with the familiar ripping sound, and a feeling like hot iron tore her hinds. This was going to be bad, she knew at once, as the agony built and her initial gasp was followed by a low groan. She crested the peak of the pain, and immediately heard the next stroke on its way. It exploded in her underhanging fold, slightly lower than the first, but no less devastatingly, and she rocked onto her toes with the impact of the heavy stick. Again she did not cry out, but she groaned at the sheer weight of the anguish that flowed from it. She could feel the skin stretching, as the bruise began to swell and throb, and she could imagine what the thick purple ropes would be like already. Later they would darken and raise themselves even higher.

  The man had found his mark now, and continued to lay on the searching strokes at regular drawn out intervals, keeping them concentrated in a close band around the underside of her swelling haunches, and just above the faint crease which divided them from the creamy whiteness of her upper thighs.

  By seven she was puffing and gasping with the effort of maintaining her position, and her gasps and groans had become strangled cries of torment at each searing impact. She struggled through to the end, her bottom clenching and flinching, but she was conscious as she rose, stiffly, to his command, that she would be hard put to it to endure more than a few repetitions of that fearful dozen. If he simply ordered her over for a second dose, he would probably achieve his aim of breaking her before the evening had even got into its stride.

  It would appear that he too could see the danger of achieving his ends before an hour was up, and the anti-climax that might follow, if he was then to hew fettered flesh, with no element of contest of wills. He did not press home his advantage, but afforded her a respite instead.

  A respite that most women would have howled for mercy to avoid, for he had her mount a wedge topped trestle and sit on her mound, the sharp upper edge of the wood bruising her soft vulva and her pubic bone, as she sat with her hands obediently clasped on top of her head.

  After fifteen minutes, he offered her the choice of a further session on the wedge or to resume the beating, and she elected to sit for another quarter of an hour on her hideously painful perch in order to spin out the time to the point where, inevitably, she would cry for mercy under the rod.

  When he lifted her down, she had to crouch wide-kneed for a minute, clutching her ravaged vulva, before she could collect herself sufficiently to say she was ready to continue. She had expected him to simply continue the assault on her buttocks, but cringed when he ordered her to stand, legs astride, and hands clasped on her neck, thrusting her firm white breasts, with their fear hardened coral points, prominently to the fore. Her inward shrinking, for she held her delicate mounds out for him without reserve, was occasioned by the thin silver wire he held, its quivering tip bearing witness to its spring steel composition. She had already discovered what this could do, and was not anxious to repeat the experience, but, welcome or not, she had to accept it, and she braced herself for what was to come.

  What came was a wristy slash that cut a thin red line just above her right nipple. It was followed by a second and a third, and each drew not only a scream of agony but a line of bright red droplets where the delicate skin of her breasts had parted. And then three screams for the cuts on her left breast. She stood for a moment, her upper body writhing as she tried to throw off the pain, and then her eyes and mouth both opened in horror as she realised that he had moved back to her right again, and stood poised to strike again.

  Moaning with fear, she closed her eyes, and braced back her shoulders to offer her bubs again.

  “Keep your eyes open,” he commanded, “I want you to see it coming.”

  Obediently, she opened them, only to see the steely sliver descend in a silver streak, to strike into her puckered teat itself. She let out a frenzied shriek, and bent from the waist, her elbows coming together in front of her to shield the tender bud from further assault, but in vain.

  “Straighten up, and
put them out,” he barked, “or are you crying ‘enough’ already?”

  Mustering her resolution, she straightened, and exposed her points again, the right one now oozing redly. It became even wetter as the second cut hit it, and then she was bullied and shamed into exposing the left nipple to the same dreadful treatment. A rest on the wedge came as a welcome relief, and she sat wrapped in agony from breasts mound and buttocks, with tears streaming down her face, the racking sobs shaking her body adding to the distress in her vulva. At the quarter hour, he gave her the choice of a further flogging, or staying on her perch, and she shook her head to indicate she was not yet ready to continue. Fifteen minutes later he took her down and, when she could walk, led her to a frame bolted to the wall where he made her grasp an upper bar, standing on her toes.

  With cruel deliberation, he flogged her across her alabaster shoulders with a black snake of a whip, until a dozen livid weals scored the pale flesh. She cried out at every stroke, and her upper body writhed from side to side, but she would not let go, and she would not plead for mercy.

  In the end he broke her by sheer unwavering attrition. He made her bend again, over the trestle this time, and accept his brutal cane across her lower buttocks. He told her, before he started, that this was to be to the finish, and that he would give her a dozen cuts, and then a pause of three minutes to collect her strength and recover her breath, since such a tight bent position restricted the filling of her lungs. He warned her that, after the break, she would have to put her buttocks out for the rod again, and that it would only stop when she begged for mercy, or failed to stick to her post. Then he ordered her to her place.

  She stuck it out through six frightful dozens. She’d never faced an open-ended sentence before, one which must lead inevitably to defeat, eventually. With no target, or safe haven to aim for, she simply gave herself up to the pain, letting each wave wash over her, as if she were a shipwrecked seafarer, lying in the surf where she had been washed ashore. With her defences lowered, she no longer fought to keep from crying out, and shrieked out her torment at each stroke, and with it, seemed to expel a little of the cane’s vicious bite.

  She knew she was being wounded behind. The swollen plum coloured bruises throbbed and stung in the so brief respite allowed her, and she could feel the blood trickling down her thighs, as she knelt, exhausted, waiting the command to bent and accept more agony. When the cane descended again, she could feel that it was impacting on wet flesh, and raw meat through her split skin. Though she had managed to ride the pain up till now, these terrible cuts on an open wound lifted the hurt onto an even higher plane that not only was more difficult to endure, but sapped her strength.

  And it was exhaustion, rather than lack of will to face further punishment, that finally undid her. On command, she struggled to get her belly onto the trestle for the seventh dozen to her bleeding buttocks, and hung there, her screams audibly weakening, as he thrashed her with no diminution of the force he had deployed from the first. When it was over, her backside now like uncooked beef, she sank sobbing to her knees.

  At the order to present that raw meat for the eighth dozen, she made a desperate effort to raise herself, but got no more than her tender, striated breasts over the bar, only to scrape them painfully as her body gave up the struggle and slid back, first onto its knees and then, as her strength failed totally, collapsed onto its side, her mind only half conscious that the body had given up.

  She was vaguely aware of being wrapped in a blanket, of a uniformed chauffeur and a large car, and of finding herself lying on her face on her own bed, her clothes in a plastic sack on the floor and her handbag and keys on her dressing table.

  It had been a brutal, calculated and inhuman beating, devoid of any personal involvement or contact, designed simply to test the limits of her endurance and, in the process, break her. Well, he had certainly found her physical limit, with the inexorable unending heavy thrashing to which he had subjected her, but she didn’t really accept that she had been broken yet. When she had finally collapsed, she was still struggling to get her belly back on the bar in obedience to his command. To have her spirit broken, as opposed to her body, was an experience yet to come, though she did not doubt that she would be made to endure it one day, on which happy note she slid into deep unconsciousness.

  She woke, nine hours later, her mind relaxed, even content, but her body stiff, sore, aching all over. As she turned to try and get up for an urgently needed pee, she found the sheet had stuck to the sticky congealed mass on her right haunch, and groaned as it pulled free. She shuffled on stiff legs into the kitchen for coffee and juice, then rang Madame Ruskova, as was standard practice after a session, to report on her condition, and any matters bearing on the client’s practices and preferences for future reference. She gave a brief resume of the night’s events and described the livid state of her behind. Madame said she’d already heard that she had acquitted herself well, and told her to stay in bed while she sent medical assistance.

  This latter arrived within the hour, in the form of a very large red-headed Irish nurse of about forty, with a brisk and business-like manner, who proceeded to examine her minutely all over, including a speculum survey of her vagina, although she had assured the woman that there had been no penetrative sex, and the insertion of three rubber-gloved fingers deep in her rectum.

  “Madame would not like it if I failed to give you a complete check-up,” she explained and, big and tough as she was, it was clear from her tone that Madame’s displeasure was something she did not care to provoke.

  The state of the battered body did not appear to cause her any surprise, as she palped the sore breasts with their scabbed nipples, scored by the fierce kiss of the hardened steel wire. She turned her wincing patient to view the pulpy purple mass on the buttocks which flinched as she drew a forefinger over the ridged weals and the raw, sticky patch where the skin had been broken time and again by whistling thrash of that aching yellow length of cane.

  “We’ll need Jellonet and a dressing here while you grow some new skin,” she pronounced, “and under your arm, where the whip’s bitten in a few times. A bit of antiseptic cream on the rest of you won’t do any harm, and I’ll give you an antibiotic shot just in case whoever did this wasn’t too careful with hygiene. I’ll come back and see how you’re doing for the next few days, but I’ll be telling Madame that you’ve suffered nothing a healthy woman can’t take without harm, and should be available for light duties in a week or so. Meanwhile,” she advised, “take plenty of exercise, it will help with the healing and stop you getting stiff and out of condition, and you’ll be ready to work again all the sooner.”

  She was as good as her word, visiting daily and, for all her intimidating size and no-nonsense manner, exercising surprising gentleness as she renewed the dressings on armpit, nipples and flank.

  Obediently, Madeleine resumed her customary exercise routine. She seldom went to the gym these days, her body too often bore telltale marks, as now, but she set aside regular time on the rowing machine, though she would lower her wounded bottom onto the hard moulded seat very gingerly, to the accompaniment of heartfelt groans and sighs, and jogged conscientiously, though the suit rubbed her welted back and tender nipples, and the bouncing motion imparted to her sore breasts made her hiss through her teeth.

  The big nurse was right though, the exercise speeded her recovery, though she marvelled at herself for the way she cooperated so readily in preparing herself to face further punishing sessions as soon as possible. Within a week she could dispense with the dressings. The nurse pronounced herself satisfied with the patient’s progress, and discontinued her visits. A few days later there was a note from Madame, advising her that she was to expect a client in another three days.

  “I’m told you have made a good recovery,” she wrote, “and are fit for duty again. This client is happy to agree not to delay your return to an unmarked condition, as he has many amusing little ways of his own that do not involve whipping
or similar,”- Madeleine felt an involuntary shudder run down her spine at what that might imply. The shudder somehow ended up in her belly, “-but will, I think, extend you sufficiently. I am enclosing a memorandum of his requirements for your preparation, to be opened on Friday afternoon when you are getting yourself ready.”

  Friday afternoon saw the arrival of a special delivery package to complement the instructions, and she set herself to carry them out carefully, exactly as given.

  First she stripped and crouched to insert the over-sized suppository, supplied with the kit, into her tight anus. For ten minutes she exercised vigorously, while the melting gelatine capsule had released its potent contents into her colon, and the demands of her straining belly became almost too urgent to ignore, but she held out against the cramping spasms for the full time stipulated before she allowed herself the relief she craved, squatting on the toilet seat while her over-taxed sphincter relaxed, and her bowels erupted their contents into the bowl. She heaved and grunted for several minutes, them wiped herself, and proceeded to clean and groom her body with infinite care, shaving her underarms, noting with satisfaction that the angry red patch where the whip had caught her had faded into near invisibility, and trimming the luxuriant growth between her thighs.

  Next a long hot scented bath, followed by a mild borax douche for her vagina and, after careful drying in a large fluffy towel, a soothing application of a gently scented body lotion to every part she could reach, from the backs of her ears to the soles of her feet.

  A manicure and pedicure were called for next, with pale nail varnish, above and below. While her fingers dried she checked over the instructions once again and, when the varnish was set, went to work, first on her hair, burnishing it into a glossy mane hanging down her back, then on her make-up, restrained almost to the point of primness, but immaculate. The foundations laid, she took out the remaining contents of the Special Delivery package. Silver sandals with four inch heels, narrow thongs separating her big toes from their sisters and her ankles gripped by thin silver bands that fastened at the front not with a buckle and tongue, but with a clasp carrying a tiny keyhole, which seemed to offer the only means of release once they were snapped shut. From each clasp dangled a small silver ring and linking the rings, a fine silver chain, twelve inches long. Carefully she stepped into the sandals and closed the clasps with a little click. Now she was secured until her Master for the night chose to release her.