Title Page
THE SUFFERERS
By
Caroline Swift
Publisher Information
The Sufferers converted and
Distributed in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © Caroline Swift
The right of Caroline Swift to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Chapter One
That February night in 1702, the winter of the great snow, was cold enough to split a stone as the little gathering assembled clandestinely in the woods above the village of Pressignac to listen to the visiting pastor and recite psalms. They met secretly since after close on a century of religious freedom, the French Protestants had seen the Edict of Nantes revoked by the arrogant, short-sighted Sun King. Louis XIV. After smouldering a while, the revolt had broken out, bringing fire and the sword to much of the Cevennes.
The dragoons' sudden descent on the prayer meeting that night had afforded the pious congregation of parpaillots - the common appellation for the religious traitors - no chance of escape. It was clear that the royal troops had been aided by local Catholic informers who thereby received the usual monetary compensation and a share of what was in the humble cottages before they were burnt to the ground.
By the light of the moon and the flickering pitchblend torches, the posse had fallen on the group like wolves, separating the men from their women folk and promptly hanging the pastor along with the sentinels caught with arms in hand. The male contingent of prisoners was lined up under the holm oaks for immediate fettering and chaining of the necks and legs in preparation for the long journey south on foot to Ales Ninmes - where they would be formally sentenced in the square - and on to the coast and the galleys moored awaiting them at Sete, Grau du Roi and other ports. There in appalling, inhuman conditions, they would spend years of their life as His Majesty's convicts, rowing uselessly under the thud of the argusin's tawse. Those who failed in the week's journey on foot to reach the coast, were left to expire in local prisons or by the roadside. A fate almost preferable to being chained for years to the galley benches and oars.
The female captives that fateful evening would as usual be transported in tumbrils to the dreaded Tour de Constance at Aigues-Mortes, the royal prison overlooking the sea. Despite the overcrowding in the ghastly tower there was always room for new captives in its dark chambers of suffering: there the conditions and treatment of religious offenders were worse than for others, sufficient to cause them to waste away in despair. Only their prayers and psalms seemed to keep them alive. The whip also helped.
But prior to their conveyance south and in line with the Versailles dictate, the women had to be scourged. Thirty strokes apiece over the bare back, down to the hips.
Joanne and Martine were among the prisoners taken by the marauding dragoons that night. Being among the youngest, they were dealt with first. Stripped to the hips. Martine was dragged to the munition case the troops had unloaded from the baggage mules, bent over, a rough cord encircling the thighs and wrists, her breasts crushed brutally, to receive the lash. The dragoon corporal seemed to derive special pleasure from flogging females: the bulge in his breeches betrayed it. He looked forward to blooding the half-naked women and especially Martine with her well-fleshed body and swarthy skin. Sweeping her long, dark tresses forward to clear the shoulders, he whipped the eighteen-year-old ferociously; the youngster's shrieks echoed through the surrounding woods terrifying those waiting in line, guarded by the muskets and flashing sabres. When her turn came after Martine had been flayed and thrown aside, Joanne was hauled to the flogging block, her woollen smock being ripped from her shoulders. She positioned herself without waiting to be manhandled, descending her skirt well below her hips to the birth of her rear cleft to provide the man with a maximum of skin to mark. The flogger smiled at the gesture. Much would he have enjoyed opening up a naked arse but orders unfortunately confined him to the back and there, as orders prescribed, only down to the birth of the buttock crease.
Practically unattached, Joanne hoped to take the lashes stoically without struggling, stifling her cries; she even turned her drooping head to watch the fellow grease the ox hide - to enhance the pain. Then she gritted her teeth. Although now twenty-two and just married to the austere Jean-Jacques, the weaver, she had throughout her adolescence received the whip regularly from her parents at home for the least breach of discipline and, on those occasions, she was invariably stripped. Those whippings during her maidenhood had given her welts but also a strange pleasure that had her masturbating furiously when sent to bed. The orgasms steered her through waves of lascivious lust into a delirious aftermath as, with one hand, she fingered the imagined ridges of scarlet bruises over her rump and thighs and, with the other, punished her clitoris to bring herself off.
Preparing herself for the whip before countless eyes in the torchlit clearing, she felt her vagina starting to throb, her heartbeat quickening. Her sidelong glance caught sight of the lump in the dragoon's crotch. It was obvious the lout was taking his duties to heart and she was aware she was presenting him with one of the prettiest bodies in the Cevennes - the attendant priest, Father Delpuech admitted as much as he watched - and she found herself almost challenging the young dragoon to commence.
The scourge's fanged extremities bit in deep across the back, striking the swollen teats the flogger had been careful to draw out from under the crush of the thorax. The flagellation seemed endless as Joanne writhed not only in pain but with resentment that her buttocks were not bared for welting. Finally the last lash did curl round the waist close to the sloping rise of the rump but it merely sliced into the thin skirt drawn tight and wet over the trembling cheeks. When she rose unsteadily from her knees, she sensed blood had been drawn from somewhere round the ribs but far more manifest, at least to her, was the warm sex sap oozing from the bloated labia. The clitoris had during the first lashes shuffled off its protective sheath and Joanne knew it was rearing fully erect, begging for attention. Her breath had shortened under the force of the strokes that had crossed each other on the shoulder blades but she was gasping more from trying to control the weird sense of erotic pleasure she was experiencing. If only they had stripped her nude and hung her by the wrists from that nearby oak bough and flogged her back and front... had the young, sweating dragoon with the rigid cock thrown her backwards over the flogging case and ruthlessly slit her skirt, she would willingly have parted her thighs to be fucked and filled. But she was flung headlong to the side to sprawl in the gorse while the next victim was hustled forward. And the horse drawn tumbrils were already arriving to load the heretical - and hysterical - females once the lot had been scourged and chained. Only too soon would the hideous journey south to the Tour de Constance commence; and there endless incarceration awaited the impious Protestant females, even if they recanted.
Joanne tried vainly to catch sight of Jean-Jacques amid the men being manacled and lined up for their long trudge to the sea in the care of the royal guards. At home her man had been a solemn and unimaginative lover, hardly satisfying her sexually but finally agreeing to have hi
s cock sucked in the makeshift bed when the parents had retired. The religiously stalwart weaver had learnt much from Joanne, not only in bed but from her dauntless tenacity in keeping the Genevan faith bright. And now, lost in the torch smoke and commotion, in a moment he would be on his way to the galleys and the whips wielded by the ship's argusin in charge of slaves - just as she and the pathetic, plump Martine along with the other females from Pressignac were doomed to the inferno of Aigues-Mortes and its gloomy cellars. There they would be far beyond the reach of the courageous Cevenol leaders, such as Cavalier, Séguier, Jacques Couderc, Roland operating in the Lower Cevennes, and Mazels, already dominating much of the High Cevennes - men who knew the terrain like the lines on their palms. Papist churches would continue to be burnt. The revolt against Babylon would become a civil war - and that despite the killings, the forced abjurations, 'conversions', and the clandestine emigrations to the safe places of the Refuge - Geneva, Zurich, Brandenburg, the Low Countries... The power of Queen Anne's England seemed ineffectual. And meanwhile the Tour de Constance, with its chains and visiting Jesuits out to proselytise, lay in wait for Joanne, Martine and the dozen other unfortunates huddled in a group, trying to cover their breasts and tensed bellies.
***
Amid the screams and piteous wailing, the prayers, the riveting of iron trammels and shackles and the thud of the ox hide on parpaillote hide, Francis-Etienne, Marquis de Lassignac sat patiently on his roan mare, watching the proceedings. His faithful valet, Coursel, had dismounted to hold the bridle of his master's mount and his own, awaiting the outcome of their mission. He recalled its origin and purpose only too clearly.
A week back, serving at table along with his scurrilous wife, Simone, and two half-naked wenches, he had been privy to the exchange between the Marquise Elodie and the great Marshal over the most sumptuous dinner the Château de Lassignac could provide. Appointed by His Sublime Majesty earlier that year, Claude Louis Hector de Villars, Grand Marshal of France, Prince de Martigues and victor over the Coalition at the recent battle of Friedlingen - only Marlborough was to defeat him - Villars detested his new duties. Being called to crush a rebellion of ragged, illiterate peasants was below his dignity but, as usual, he put all his energy into the task, murdering men by the hundred or despatching them to the galleys, flogging and imprisoning females and putting countless villages to the torch. Replacing his predecessors, de Broglie, the former Intendant of the Cevennes, and the uncompromising Captain Poul who had suspects broken on the wheel at Nimes, he laboured unceasingly towards ridding the realm of infidels. True, a multitude of abjurations, feigned for the most part, had been obtained through terror and torture but Versailles would require a further two full years to suppress the revolt, while France lost thousands of its most enterprising citizens to Protestant havens abroad.
The incident that night in the clearing near Pressignac had constituted one of the Marshal's more local victories compared with his great battles in Germany. His dreaded Cadets in their green tunics, marked with the Cross, fawn breeches and sloping leather boots, had sabred generously and surrounded the whole miserable bunch of parpaillots. The Marquise Elodie was proud to be his hostess at Lassignac, lodging him in luxury while he planned his further skirmishes and wrote reports to Versailles.
"I am sure, Marshal," Elodie had simpered with one of her more winning smiles, "you could see your way, should you fall upon a gathering of these rascals, to releasing one or two female heretics to our keeping." She would prefer pretty, well-built ones but did not say so. "We would welcome the chance to play our part in cleansing our region if you would agree to leaving a young parpaillote or two to us for conversion. Our dear Dom Anselme," she gestured towards the gaunt, tonsured Dominican seated at the end of the table, "would see to it in his own manner that the infidels are persuaded to abjure and of their own accord attend Mass in our chapel. After all, that is the object of your mission and it would contribute to His Majesty's crusade, would it not, Excellency?"
At the outset, Villars had demurred. By virtue of royal decree, all female parpaillote prisoners had to be deported as miscreants to the Tour de Constance, males to the gibbet, the wheel or the oar. On the other hand, he owed much to his hosts; their hospitality had been not only gracious but grandiose. They had gone to great lengths to make him comfortable and the château had been conveniently situated for directing operations. Being finally obliged to move north to organise greater battles, he felt he had to express his and the King's gratitude. After some soul-searching and deliberation and aided by the roast duckling, sweetmeats and Rhone wines, the noble warrior had agreed. A prisoner or two less in one of his conveyances south would barely be noticed. The decision lay in his own hands; after all, he was a Marshal of France. Moreover, a fuck with his hostess Elodie would not have come amiss. But alas, despite her smile, she lay beyond his reach.
***
Hence the Marquis's reminder of the agreement, as they stood amid the torchlit pandemonium of manacling, floggings and shrieks. With the Marshal next to him - they had ridden out together for the attack - Francis-Etienne de Lassignac made his choice without waiting for the conclusion of the beatings. He pointed with his riding crop to the blonde beauty - the same Joanne - and then quickly, reluctant to risk a change of heart in the Marshal, to the well-rounded Martine. Both girls had collapsed into the wet heather, sufficiently flagellated to prove their stamina, at least in the case of the blonde who, he considered, promised well, if not for conversion, at least for Elodie's enjoyment...
"In view of your august consent the other night, Marshal, I would petition the release to us of that fair-haired slut over there and that coarsely fleshed one groaning in the grass. They will do admirably. I assure you we shall have them converted briskly."
The military head nodded gravely, summoning the colonel of dragoons to set the two women aside. Their condition hardly encouraged him to endorse the choice, for neither female seemed worthy of the assiduous attentions of the delicious Marquise; true, one was slender as a lily but the other was loaded with heavy breasts and a distinct over abundance of rump meat. Each in her own way would suit the Marquise admirably.
"If they will suffice, so be it. Thank you again for your gracious hospitality." With that, the Marshal rode off to supervise the departure of the male prisoners. He had avoided debate which he detested, and had contented his hostess; he recalled her impenetrable smile and how she had knelt beside him at Mass, exuding sweet odours of rosemary and tempting flesh. Moreover, the Dominican, Dom Anselme, with his heavy-lidded grey eyes had impressed him. The girls would be in the saintly hands of a staunch converter, certainly equal to those hard-working Jesuits sent to indoctrinate the misguided lodged in the Tour de Constance. Further, the girls had been officially well whipped and thus had received an important part of what Versailles required. "The bitches are yours," he said.
Delighted at his success, the Marquis issued his orders immediately Villars had cantered off. "Get those two sluts bound by the wrists, Coursel, and ready to run. And be quick about it, man. We have to be back before moon set." He watched his lackey plough his way into the mass of sobbing humanity to emerge, dragging the pair of half-clothed females after him by the hair. The Marquis took stock of what he had singled out; the blonde girl had neat, well-sculpted breasts and a slender waist and would certainly meet the Marquise's desiderata. As she approached the horses, he saw her more clearly; tall with long legs and a muscular torso she was surprisingly attractive despite the welts and trickles of blood. If what was visible of the body was anything to go by, Francis-Etienne foresaw the hips leading down to firm, rounded buttocks and powerful thighs, probably capable of withstanding much of the same punishment she had just received. Further, something told him she was no virgin, not that such criteria mattered where she was destined. On the contrary Lassignac was not a place where one met many virgins.
Then he studied the younger heretic. Certainly less erotic
, the girl nevertheless presented truly prodigious udders with swollen teats that seemed to have become rigid in permanent erection upon the perfectly smooth areoles; they at least would please Elodie, for most of the slaves she had inveigled into the castle cellars always seemed to boast remarkably buoyant mammaries. And the bigger the better. Further down, the navel in the slope of the belly was profound as an inkwell. Although still clothed under the drenched skirt the arse seemed to match the volume of the breasts; again an asset for Elodie. Francis-Etienne considered he had chosen astutely enough under difficult conditions and given the need to decide with precipitation. Selecting slaves could be a delicate matter.
He encouraged the valet again. "Get them tied up to your saddle, man, and ready to move." The servant led the females to the rear of his gelding and roped their wrists to the long cords attached to his pommel. Both girls were barefoot, having lost their sandals in the chaos of the troops' descent and the whippings. As Francis-Etienne mounted, he saw their backs; the flagellation had indeed been thorough. The weals stood out like purple rods across the taut skin, glistening with sweat. He trusted that Elodie would not disapprove of his choice nor be disenchanted at their having been flagellated, for she much preferred her newcomers to be unblemished on arrival. But then what could a mere Marquis do faced with a Marshal of the Crown? Elodie would just have to accept the damage.
"Yer'd better keep up, whores," Coursel advised the two trembling figures, neither aware why she had been extricated from the group nor what was happening. Joanne even risked a wistful look behind at the colleagues being loaded into the carts and then readied herself for what lay ahead. Quite evidently they were to be towed into the night. barefoot and half-naked. "If yer fall, whores," the valet went on with menace, "yer'll be dragged through th' gorse an' brambles like bleedin' sows till the master says we reins in. An' yer'll get stripped nude an' belted till yer back on yer feet. Got it?" He tapped a black length of horsehide clipped to his belt. Joanne saw it terminated in a metal stub.
The Sufferers Page 1