"So, I think we can start," Jeanne announced serenely. "And you, Marquis, will watch while it is done. Yes, I consider the penance my righteous sister proposes fully appropriate. It is, alas, regrettable that the two satanic priests have for the moment eluded us and their due punishment. But anon our brothers here will storm that convent of vice, if Heaven gives us time, and the wrath of God shall descend upon it."
The speech brought another howl of protest out of Elodie and a profanity from Anthea. At the same time, Brissac was booted in, his implements in hand while several Camisards took charge of the two propitiatory victims dragging them down to the now sunlit yard, Elodie being stripped of her nightgown. Her slim body gleamed like sliver. Still she could not believe the barbarian enemy was not only at the gates but within.
As his wife left, the Marquis avoided her glowering eyes. The prospect of the double thrashing to come quickened his pulse but also quelled some of his anxieties. A ration of lashes would not, he felt, go amiss on his insatiable spouse, leave alone on her lesbian whore. How Elodie would take the whip remained to be seen but, recalling the recent beating he had given Anthea in the armoury, he was far from averse to watching that slender body writhe again in all its profligate elegance. By paying for their lust, they would, he hoped, spare the castle from damage and bloodshed - the same could not be said of the countless protestant temples and humble cottages the troops had laid waste nor of the men wasting away in the galleys, the women in the Tour de Constance. Alas, alas.
He wondered further how his major-domo and the pretty slave handler with the strabismus would react to the order. Would they refuse? His doubts were quickly resolved.
Wrists freed, Bouchard and the nude girl seemed to accept their assignment without demur and they too were led out of the room. Anything to avoid those blades of steel.
"Now, down with the domestics," Joanne decreed "Have them facing the gibbet."
As the line filed out, the two girls leaned against the long table and parted their cloaks and thighs for Brissac to smear the slave rings. Florence supervised the task. Ring by ring, the quaking blacksmith sawed through and edged each circle out of the genital flesh and nipples. The shears then slit the five broad, studded straps. As the tackle fell away, the Marquis winced at the purple abrasions left by the leathers that had served, time after time, to stretch the sinews for flagellation, erotic torture and penetrations. Yet, catching Joanne's eye, he showed no regret over the prolonged sessions they had shared in the west wing. Nor, to judge by the girl's sidelong look, did she...
The pastor, who had audaciously accompanied the posse, averted his eyes from the spectacle of female sex organs being distended and freed. He had seen ample already.
The girls could hardly contain their joy as their extremities were relieved of the last tokens of servitude; as the metal fell to the floor, the bodies felt they had been lifted into the clouds scudding above the castle turrets and the mauve hills of the Cevennes.
Once Florence had smeared balsam over the inflamed flesh and closed the capes, the group gathered at the open casement, giving on the radiant courtyard below where Lacombe had taken charge of the proceedings. The sun gave the space an unreal aspect.
Forced to mount the steps of the slave scaffold, Elodie turned to look up at the figures at the window. Her eyes sent daggers at her former slaves. And at her husband.
"I trust you up there know what you're doing. You'll pay for this. I taught you to find faith through suffering and didn't try to convert you." Her fury was laced with venom. "Whores! I should have had you culled like diseased ewes! Or rather, whipped to death..."
With a contrite bow to exculpate himself, Bouchard a second later had her lying on the scaffold. Grasping the loop of rope dangling from the gibbet arm, he passed it over the right ankle and heaved on the slack. Slowly his owner's resplendent body rose aloft.
Joanne could hear Martine's breathing shorten as the nude beauty swung clear of the boards, Bouchard tying the already bound wrists to the nape of the neck above the flowing hair. The free leg was then bent back until the heel dug into the left buttock, a leather thong strapping the shin firmly to the thigh; it was bondage the Marquise herself had taught him. Up at the casement, Martine, with a sharp gasp seized her colleague's hand. "That's what they did to me down at the convent, Joanne," she murmured, "and then used my rings to wrench me open. Then..." Joanne shushed her. Elodie's sodden vulva had unglued, the labia parting above the tufts of golden fleece. Watching the nakedness being steadied for the whip, Joanne felt a jab of envy pierce her own sex. To be displayed thus before so many eyes was an experience and thrill she herself would not have disliked.
The woman's moans reached the casement. Aghast, the household kneeling along the wall saw the sweat trickling down from the crater of the belly, over the rib cage to drip from the teats to the planks. Even there she was elegant. Elodie Marguerite Helene de Vonnange-Lassignac was about to be flagellated by her own indentured servant - a humiliation beyond name.
"Did we look as tempting as that, Joanne?" the younger spectator breathed. "I'll wager you've begun to leak..." But her blonde cousin, indeed clammy between the thighs, was concentrating, unlike her companion, on her arch-enemy, Anthea; Joanne had more cause to loathe the spoilt lesbian slut and felt the bitterness welling up in her.
As ordered, Coursel had braced the harrow against the far wall of the yard and on it Anthea formed a star of taut sinew. The conceited bitch hissed as the bed of prongs drove into her flesh, Marie-Félice - fearing she might be next - dutifully wrenching the limbs to the four corners of the grid. Finally, Martine in turn had to gaze at the harrow blanching as she recalled the atrocious journeys to and from the nunnery; she could almost feel those spikes lacerating Anthea's body.
"Just look at that drab," she rasped. "Nothing but a load of lascivious depravity and thews," - her vocabulary had enriched since her incarceration, "only fit for the whip. Isn't she something, squirming there on the teeth? I just hope a prong's gone up her anus. You don't know the harrow, Joanne," she added, "so you can't know how she's enjoying it."
His eyes desperately trying to avoid the two nude bodies and the thatches raddled with recent discharges in Elodie's bed, Lacombe glanced up at the casement for a gesture from Joanne. When the nod came he ordered Coursel to hand out the whips - the thick horsehide flogger to his colleague, Bouchard and the supple cane to the ruthless girl standing completely naked in the sunlight, impatient to begin. The fact that Marie-Félice was to flagellate nude gave the scene a certain irony, for Joanne had only too often been whipped by a stark-naked Anthea, wearing her double dildo. The irony of justice.
Strangely, no one in the yard, least of all the floggers, seemed particularly disturbed by the rank, high birth and prestige of the victims to be punished; the Lassignac staff unerringly carried out what authority required of them, or, as under the prevailing circumstances, what they were now obliged to do under armed coercion.
Stripped down to the haunches, the major-domo released his crotch flap and brought out his battering ram of a cock. As it always did when he was about to flog a naked woman, the blue-veined shank of fucking meat, already secreting, throbbed prodigiously erect from the shag of sex-hair; the sac of balls swung stolidly below, preparing their load of sperm that Joanne's taste buds could never forget. Speechless for once, Martine stared at the thing, having neither glimpsed nor serviced it in her short-lived sojourn at the château. But Joanne could almost feel the blunt dome splaying her sphincter again as when, a few nights back, Bouchard had nonchalantly sodomised her against the passage wall while she was being led back to the cellar after a vicious session in Elodie's bedroom. Contrary to Dom Anselme's rod - an item Joanne knew almost as well as Martine - the major-domo's organ had filled her with exhilaration, in addition to succulent wads of healthy sperm. How often, indeed, had her three well-trained orifices gaped to encompass that cudgel durin
g those interminable ordeals under the whip? Times without count, and she recalled the bizarre pleasures - and frantic orgasms - that stupendous helm and stock had given her and all her companions. Bette had recounted that once, in the course of a punishment entailing her being hung sideways by an arm and a leg, she had serviced three cocks at the same time - Coursel up her cunt, some masked guest using her throat, Bouchard in her anus - and she always preferred the major-domo; she could accommodate him behind with effortless ease. Or so she said. One rarely believed Bette.
As the whips were being soaked in the pail of brine that always stood at the foot of the gallows, Joanne continued to think back, wondering how she would survive without her colleagues, her sex rings, the whip and, above all, her Marquis. That the abject Elodie might, in the performance about to commence, enjoy the same thrills, nettled Joanne. But the prospect of Marquise's welts perduring for the best part of a week calmed her. Yet the thought of being whipped before the entire Lassignac retinue did excite her. Moreover, Francis-Etienne's hand on her shoulder did not help. Nor did the idea of leaving him.
Marie-Félice, stationed to the side of the grid, was running the tip of her cane over Anthea's triangle of crotch hair, after stimulating the nipples. Martine grasped her friend's hand even tighter enjoying the preparation, for the convent nuns had used the same technique prior to their beatings and torture sessions. Watching Marie-Félice, Joanne realized the juvenile slave handler needed no prompting; the brat knew a fully swollen areole when she saw one and long since had learnt how to rouse a clitoris or a male cock into erection, the mandatory state at Lassignac for slaves about to be flagellated.
"Commence!" The great walls, bereaved of swallows and human kindness, echoed back Joanne's order. Raising their whips, both floggers struck together.
Frigging leisurely, Bouchard laced into the pallid undersides of his exalted owner's jugs. Aware he was as much a prisoner as his mistress, he whipped flawlessly; the breasts flattened, rebounded and then squelched anew, marking magnificently, being callow and unused to leather. Yet, on one occasion, Francis-Etienne had tried them out, mainly to provide his lecherous spouse with an idea of the shock and possibly the pleasure her uncomplaining slaves received when she laid into them. Elodie had understood soon enough and, refusing further ignominy, told her husband to desist. By way of recompense, she had substituted for her own tender flesh a young milkmaid, who had inadvertently upset a beaker of cream, a crime, she felt, meriting thirty lashes over the fat udders and teats.
Bouchard's thongs worked steadily up the thorax and then slashed the soft belly. Screaming oaths already - something she allowed none of her slaves to do - Elodie arched backwards, her body gyrating on the single rope. The front well striated up to the broad haunches, the major-domo attended to the lean arse cheeks which the man had always maintained could do with welting; and that he administered with his customary force. Although it belonged to his gracious owner, he saw to it that the bottom reddened well. He knew every arse in the castle, at least those that lay within his purview of authority. But this one was new to him and his mistress's wild shrieks and writhings truly surprised him, for when beating cellar slaves, the girls did little more than shudder and groan. But then they were used to the lash; that was why they existed.
Having welted most of the body amid the woman's shrill shrieks, Bouchard paused to glance up at the window. It was Martine who gave him the signal without waiting for Joanne to concur. Bouchard nodded and brought the thongs down across the crotch.
Taken aback at the suddenness of the stroke and Elodie's howl, Joanne winced.
"I didn't really mean to go that far, love," she murmured hesitatingly.
"Then why hang the bitch up like that?" Martine answered. "Let her have a taste of what's served up at the convent. And you know what Bouchard always says, nothing drives a woman to orgasm faster than rawhide over a clit."
"But I don't want her to come," Joanne protested. Yet she let the whip continue, recalling what the burly monster, Evelyn de Burre-Sage, had done to her in the drawing room. But then, poor Martine had suffered a great deal more than she.
The thongs slammed and splashed into the flaxen-haired bush, a feature the slaves were deprived of. And it was a change to see a neophyte - if that was what the Marquise could be termed - learn the hard way. Oh, yes, the dissipated bitch had much to learn.
The screeching reached a new level of intensity, mingling with cries of repentance, dissembled or not, that no one heeded, apart from the uneasy husband.
"Listen, Joanne," he voiced his anxiety strangely. "My wife may be guilty of some transgressions, that I do not dispute but she's relatively inexperienced, you know..."
His remark also went unnoticed. Bouchard steadied the jerking carcass and whipped from the mons to the anal cleft, his preferred target for the major lashes - a target every slave at Lassignac 'should learn to relish with gratitude and sexual pleasure', he frequently claimed. Joanne had had it twice and, although she had orgasmed smoothly, she felt she could well do without a third visitation down there where sensitivity was at its highest. But, for his part, little satisfied the major-domo more than a yawning vulva, ringed, haired or shaved, so long as the clit had shed its protective sheath. Otherwise it was wasted leather and energy. A female had to learn to spend under the scourge.
Elodie reacted as all crotch-whipped women always did, her elegant torso rearing upwards in a fruitless attempt to protect the most salacious, lustful zone of her entire being - maybe, Joanne mused, apart from her mouth when Anthea kissed her or that pale clitoris the older woman gave her to flick and suck.
But the cries were to no avail. The bitch was too traumatized to orgasm and the major-domo well knew the thin line that divided pain from sexual pleasure; he had been told to punish not please, just as his mistress demanded of him when disciplining a pert, insubordinate slut who did not deserve a climax. So he continued to beat the vulva.
Ablaze with magenta welts, Elodie gave up the fight. The body slumped, streaming with sweat, as its owner petered out into that void where whipped females hover when beyond the reach of orgasm.
One, at least, of the Lassignac sorceresses, Joanne judged, had paid her due.
The major-domo lowered the body until the head and breasts lay flat on the planks and let his cock browse on the scorched vulva like a stoat sensing prey. Veering his stiff shaft downwards, he plunged into the bloated slot. Indifferent as to his owner's condition, he clutched the buttocks he had welted and used the inanimate creature ruthlessly, as he always did, whatever the state of the victim. With satisfied grunts, he fucked as he thought his captors wished him to do. Whatever their intention, he felt he deserved his usual recompense. When finally the discharge shot into the sufferer, Francis-Etienne looked at Joanne but said nothing. In the event, there was precious little he could say...
Martine, on the other hand, did comment. Her timbre was husky with exultation. "If that doesn't satisfy you Joanne darling, I don't know, by my faith, what will!"
Both perturbed by what had been set in motion and yet pleased with Bouchard's cooperation, the elder girl remained silent like the Marquis. She looked across the yard. The rays of sunlight had reached Anthea's writhing, caned body; the spectacle of the nude - that Joanne loathed with all her being - receiving the cane from another equally naked minx led the blonde onlooker to within a hairbreadth of orgasm; her clit needed only a touch of the finger to trigger the spasm. The loathsome lesbian had been beaten from armpits to thighs. Saliva trickled from the bitch's maw as Marie-Félice continued to ensure the pliant length of bamboo bit deep into the sex pad and slot. The hoarse yells seemed to delight the girl but, as Bouchard with Elodie, she took great care to deprive her victim of any chance of climaxing. Joanne knew through Mariette that the former slavegirl owed her adroitness to the cold-blooded Anthea herself who had taught her to hand over a slave, once well welted between the thig
hs and shuddering on the brink of orgasm, for a guest to flog or torment into fruition. Joanne recalled the ladder episode.
Having delivered her final stroke, the squint-eyed drab jammed the haft of her rattan cane into the vagina and left it there to throb. Preening with self-approval she stepped back, mopping her brow and soused cleft. She had done her utmost to satisfy the demands of the riffraff marauding the castle. And she had thoroughly enjoyed it.
"Yes, I think that will do," Joanne announced to the courtyard. "Leave the two daughters of Satan where they are, to consider their sins and ungodliness. It is time, dear brother Lacombe and friends, for us to leave this lair of iniquity and desolation."
With Martine pleading to have both victims' breasts throttled and skewered, as her own had been at the convent, Joanne shook her head and guided her down the stairs to join the Camisards who were becoming restless over a stay that was lasting too long for safety. Leaving the bodies where they were, Lacombe led his band of faithful out into the paddock. Adequately clothed and shod, the two girls joined the posse taking Florence with them, Joanne having just time to wave to the Marquis who had meantime mounted the battlements to do likewise to the only one - he claimed - he had ever admired. As he did so, he scrutinized the horizon of oaks and broom for signs of the possible descent of the dragoons. He shuddered to think what Elodie would have the sex-starved troops do to the two parpaillotes were they caught. He could almost see their chained bodies bleeding.
Pausing at the armoury for the men to grab additional weapons before heading for the nunnery, Joanne glanced back again. Coursel was withdrawing the cane from Anthea's vagina to replace it with his rigid cock. It was something he, as a lowly, indentured valet, had contemplated over many months. It was his own private revenge on the vain, insolent lesbian who despised him and treated him as a pile of horse droppings. Her being there, bound and barely conscious on the harrow, was a rare chance to avenge himself. He used her brutally and filled her where she lay, scorning whatever retribution might ensue when she regained her former status. He would say he had been forced to fuck her. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof... If he had fertilized her, so much the better. Later it would keep her at bay for a while.
The Sufferers Page 21