The Sufferers

by Caroline Swift

  The Camisards slithered down the hill towards the convent, the baleful Château de Lassignac dwindling behind the crest of the wooded hills. No one bewailed leaving it, even if Joanne regretted not having kissed her Marquis Francis-Etienne in the haste of departure, for, quite apart from the chains and the scathing lash, she had received from him a certain sort of affection. But few, leave alone Martine, would understand that.

  The descent took time, the two girls dawdling, overawed by the sweet air of spring and freedom, the chaffinches greeting them from wayside branches and under the clear sky the Cevennes spread far away. It was unbelievably wonderful. Yet Joanne's thoughts went back to the desolate team of slaves still in the depths of the castle. They had no faithful friends to redeem them, even if indeed they wanted freedom and, with a twinge of grief, she imagined the reprisals Elodie and Anthea would now visit on them.

  The lofty walls of the Convent of the Annunciation loomed up and Martine let out the cry Joanne half-expected. "Now comes my revenge!" The yell was sharp and shrill.

  Mother Priscilla's fortified purgatory proved impregnable. Without ladders, grapnels, ropes, battering ram or an ally like Florence within, the walls defied the posse. The portal resisted firmly and Lacombe refused further risks. He sensed the dragoons or the dreaded Cadets of the Cross, now alerted by riders from Lassignac, would soon be upon them.

  "Into the woods, brethren," he ordered. "Make for Marcillac." After reciting psalm 63, the posse vanished into the bracken to rejoin Castanet and the rest of the faithful.

  Later, in the shelter of a secluded cavern, the girls lay down, exhausted, to rest, Joanne wondering how the venomous Anthea felt. She doubted that the bitch would be in a fit state that night to grace the bed of her equally distraught Marquise, and for once she cursed them with biblical vehemence. Too tired even to frot herself and lulled by Florence snoring nearby, Joanne took Martine in her arms and kissed her drowsily. Then the sleep of the just and righteous overwhelmed them.

  ***

  Following the abrupt departure of the Camisards and their three liberated females, the atmosphere in the castle became even tenser. Released and tended to by the loyal Simone, The Marquise and Anthea vented their fury on Francis-Etienne; they considered him a cynical, vain and perfidious fornicator who had betrayed them after slaking his lust on a cheap whore of a parpaillote. To wreak revenge, the women fell upon the senior servants and Marie-Félice, accusing them of treason. The Marquis lay beyond their reach.

  A stalemate installed itself between Elodie and her husband, who merely smiled as the Marquise fumed. Finally she ignored him, waiting for him to come to his senses and apologize. But he merely had his horse saddled and rode off for an afternoon of hunting.

  She then turned to deal with the renegade Bouchard, Coursel and the two-faced Marie-Félice, Brissac's part in the drama being condoned. The major-domo found himself temporarily demoted and assigned to shovelling dung in the stables, replacing the lad who had perished in the horrendous attack. The varlet Coursel fell foul of Anthea's rage and was assigned to tilling the field beyond the portal, a penalty he found mild, given the pleasure he had enjoyed in availing himself of the conceited bitch offered on the harrow.

  A very different fate awaited Marie-Félice. Audaciously she refused to repent, claiming she had been forced to obey and use the cane under threat of the Camisards' weapons. After slapping the girl's face, Anthea suppressed their initial instinct to have the slag thrown into the well; instead she persuaded Elodie to reduce the nude reprobate to her former state of slavery. Promptly, Brissac refitted her with flesh rings and the five bondage straps and then helped Simone to chain and impale the frantic body, more erotic than ever, on the gibbet. Using the crude argot of mistress to slave, Anthea told her what was to happen. She had no intention of letting the drudge off lightly.

  "I'm going to flay you here in the yard and when Dom Anselme is back in our midst, he and I will deal with you in the oubliette over the next week. From now on you'll take the place of those two bitches who got away. And, pardieu, will you suffer!"

  Smarting badly and still feeling the prongs stabbing her back, Anthea felt a visceral urge to torture the slut. Elodie consented readily but felt too exhausted to do much else than sip the remedial Schaffhausen water Simone had prepared for her. After distributing the various sentences the Marquise was helped back to her bedroom and its cool sheets.

  Demoralized, the former slave handler found herself hanging from the gibbet bar, her thews taut, as Simone fed the anal rod into the star between the muscled buttocks. When the legs had been chained to the upright, the sullen maid was ordered to haul the head back so that the cane - the same she had used to scourge Anthea - had unimpeded access to the dangling breasts. Overjoyed to be back in service and, along with Coursel, not to have been penalized during the Camisards' assault, the hag pulled on the victim's sweat-drenched hair to jam the haft of Bouchard's scourge behind the biceps and across in front the mouth. Still unclothed, Anthea refused the mantle she was offered to cover her welts, instructing the domestic to suspend weights from the victim's sexual extremities. After fumbling among the gyves and irons beneath the platform, Simone extracted a series of metal lugs and hooked them, one by one, to chains hanging from each newly implanted flesh ring. Marie-Félice had forgotten how the ghastly traction could punish the teats and cunt labia. And she valued her sexual pinnacles like her eyes. Her moans, though stifled by the leather whip handle, told Anthea the body was ready for its long trek into pain. Barely audible, the sacrificial scapegoat attempted a final, almost inaudible, plea; she had only obeyed an order given under armed threat. And Bouchard, she spluttered, had done the same.

  "Maybe," came Anthea's hiss, "but he's our flogger. You could have refused."

  The girl saw no point in arguing with a closed mind bent on revenge. Bouchard was too valuable to Lassignac to be more than mildly rebuked and would be back in office soon enough, she was a mere menial and now a sex slave again. She knew she could now be whipped and even branded for causing Anthea to lose face before the entire household. As a slave again, she could easily be replaced by another whore - from the convent or by some parpaillote from some nearby ruined village. Her cunt flooding, she bit hard into the plaited leather gouging her jaws and waited.

  Anthea lashed out with fiendish spite. The thrumming cane struck the base of the lavish bottom where the flesh was devoid of muscle. A streak of fire seared her brain, the flesh, until then white as candle wax, rising into a purple welt, thick as the crop itself. The slut bore it and the following twenty strokes with groans but also with her former courage, learnt in the cellar. But when the rattan sliced into the sagging udders, the bleats became shrieks. Anthea flogged the breasts as the bitch had flogged her far more elegant ones.

  Up in her bedchamber, the Marquise heard the swish and thuds with deep delight but felt too weak to hobble to the lancet and watch the punishment. Once the bitch was in the oubliette, chained by the ankles and later, knowing Anthea's predilections, by the roots of the breasts, then it would be worth watching the odious squinting wench suffer.

  Yes, Bouchard had to be pardoned and reinstated, for Elodie needed that muscular arm and authority. Nothing, not even the daunting invasion of the château, should affect plans for the subsequent weekends of pleasure. Her guests counted on her and she counted on her guests. It was outright sedition that those blasphemous Protestant villains had had the gall to attack a noble residence. They would pay for it. As to the Marquis - well, he would come to heel sooner or later. And she would ensure there would be no more sexual romances under her roof.

  Whipped turquoise, the girl was released from the gibbet for Simone to drag down to the oubliette for the young she-wolf of a lesbian to use until the bitch repented - if she had a voice left.

  In the cellar, the slaves were bewildered by the commotion above, the sudden abduction of Martine by armed men, a
nd then Marie-Félice, fresh from the whip, passing by on her way to the lower regions. Such things had never happened before.

  Chapter Nine

  The week under the protection of the Camisards in the woods brought the girls and Florence news of the Cevenol revolt and the repression. The royal forces were devastating the highlands, burning villages, destroying temples, breaking leaders on the wheel, hanging pastors and sending males to the galleys, women to the prisons of Nimes and AiguesMortes. Joanne learnt that a timid approach of English men o' war before Sete had created a sudden panic diverting the troops to the coast only to see the enemy sail off. Whereupon the dragoons returned to the Cevennes to continue the war and pillage. Every Protestant parish in the diocese of Mende had been laid waste without quarter. For once the area round Pressignac was spared, most of the population having been condemned, dispersed or, like Joanne and Martine, otherwise disposed of. The sheep and stores - and such young women as remained - had been requisitioned by the dragoons.

  Thus, civil war spread throughout the Cevennes, diverting regular troops Versailles and the Sun King could barely spare, the French forces being heavily engaged elsewhere.

  By chance Joanne heard that her weaver husband, Jean-Jacques, had been freed from the galleys and enrolled by force into some regiment embroiled in the absurd war of the so-called Spanish Succession. But he had deserted along with others, been picked up near Perpignan on his way north and condemned again as a galley slave. The horrendous news made her listen more attentively to Martine who was obsessed with the idea of reaching the sanctuary of Protestant Geneva, the distant City of Refuge. Encouraged by several Camisards, Joanne finally agreed to risk the perilous journey with her, along with Florence and three others. In peasant clothes and clogs, the group set out with a guide up the wild paths of the Ardeche towards the Rhone valley where the escape route bore east into the kingdom of Savoy; being ruled from Turin, the mountainous area was considered relatively safe. At least, Geneva was nearer than the Netherlands, leave alone far-off England or Brandenburg, where other refugees had fled and prospered, despite the weird languages.

  The going was hard, fraught with danger but goading on the other members of the group Martine's determination burned like a beacon. Only once, before the Savoyard border, did terror freeze the émigrés - near Tain l'Hermitage a roving company of armed Cadets of the Cross halted them. If discovered, being devoid of exit papers, Joanne knew the journey was at its end with the whip, rape and the Tour de Constance in its stead. After a search and finding no Calvinist bibles or Psalters, the troops reluctantly let the travellers move on. The scare had served to teach the group - and the guide - to keep to pathways and sheep tracks. Joanne had not liked how the booted militia had thrust into Martine's bodice to grasp her breasts, still bulging temptingly despite the convent's whips and scanty diet. As her welts had waned, the men found no valid cause to detain her.

  The group trudged on, avoiding villages and even hamlets, sleeping in dells among the ferns, the guide encouraging them to move faster. Soon they would be over the frontier. But when they reached it, joy turned into alarm, for the guide left after indicating the route towards Aiguebelette and the Granier Pass. Extenuated and starved, they skirted the lake at Aix three days later, awed by the heights of the Grand Colombier towering above; there Joanne nearly gave up, only to hear her colleagues spur her on in the name of Gideon, Joshua and, for the first time, Calvin. Finally they crossed the Mont-Sion and at long last the hump of the Saleve lay ahead, Martine assuring them the spires of Geneva's cathedral would be soon visible. How she knew astonished Joanne. And on they plodded.

  Just in time before the Forte de Neuve, on the Treille, closed its gates at sundown, the group entered the promised haven, the Protestant Rome. Once on the cobbles of Geneva, Martine fell to her knees and led the group in prayer before a crowd of virtuous Genovese taking the evening air and staring at this further group of bedraggled refugees.

  The temporary lodgings were meagre but for the two girls paradise after Elodie's cellar. Joanne was amazed at the pluck Martine had shown on the way; she seemed to have exorcised the ghosts of Lassignac and the convent. The past resolutely behind her, those dark eyes seemed to be fixed on a Calvinist future. The long journey had been miraculous, even if Huguenots did not believe in miracles, and they were safe at last. What would have pleased them even more, had they known it, was that Cavalier and his Camisards had that very day defeated the royal forces - or Moabites and Philistines, as he called them - at Devois de Martignargues. But that was far away, in another land.

  The following morning the newcomers, dressed in borrowed garments of solemn grey, gave thanks in the cathedral of St Pierre, Joanne offering up a prayer for her Jean-Jacques in galley chains. The thought of chains suddenly called to mind Francis-Etienne; he kept wandering in and out of her mind. It was ludicrous but she began to miss him...

  ***

  The days searching for work went by in dreary succession; the stifling nights on her pallet next to a serenely contented and suddenly celibate Martine began to weigh on Joanne. Lying half-awake in the taper's flicker, strange reminiscences troubled her.

  Francis-Etienne's pointed beard seemed to be grazing her breasts... while she hung naked, chained from that well-used beam in the west wing. The straps were wrenching her ankles outwards... locking her to those massive floor rings. Yes, she was moaning in pain and ecstasy after the initial whipping, the man's tributes trickling over her freckled skin. He was calling her his 'angel of an Aphrodite' - whoever that was - and his 'exquisite sex slave' with, so he said, 'the most tempting body I've ever lashed, naked as a candle'. Heavens, how she loved those honeyed words, now distant echoes of a vanished past...

  In the sombre Geneva lodgings Joanne began to look haggard and distressed. Every night her fantasies became more vivid - the Marquis's handsome ghost, smelling of stables and leather, seemed to be sucking and tugging on her whip-swollen teats... the beard was edging down her belly to the scrolls of cunt frond fluttering like limed birds... Then, yes then, he would draw her erect stalk into his mouth along with the metal circle. 'Ahh, yes, master,' she remembered moaning, 'leave your teeth marks there, as you did in my tits... Bite sire, bite it hard! Or whip it... please, master..." And she would shift her neglected buttocks higher on the lodging's mattress parting her thighs for the phantom whiplash...

  Cautious not to wake the sleeping Martine, Joanne held her breath, her trembling fingers spreading her wet vulva under the sheets, feeling the holes left by the slave rings. And in her imagination she would feel the chains splaying her open for the Lassignac guests to torture the liquid trench of vermilion membrane before wrenching her clit... in the penumbra of the shabby boarding house, it was not the same. Yet she frigged hard, there next to the torpid Martine, and careered rudderless into the eye of the cyclone as the orgasm towered, crested and devastated her - wave after wave crashing over a foundering wreck. And every night, as she spent, the tangled images merged into one; it was Francis who was filling her with spume, still holding his leather scourge, soaked in her sweat.

  Somehow she managed not to wake Martine or Florence as she churned her ringless gristle and teats. Then she would turn over to sleep, blowing out the candle - for which she had other uses apart from illumination - and try to lay her dreams of Lassignac to rest. She realized her plight; it was well over a month since she had been thrashed and fucked in chains - an unconscionable time for a forlorn former sex slave to be deprived of what she needed most. Some solution had to be found, somewhere, somehow. It was unfortunate also that Martine in the bed next to hers had turned frigid... Even if the huge phallus of that tonsured swine, Dom Anselme, had appeared there in the lodgings, she would have encircled it with her lips, on condition that he beat her. Even Anthea... But no, not her.

  Yet Joanne slept soundly until her neighbour's morning prayers wakened her, Martine giving her the customary three kisses of th
e Huguenots.

  ***

  The days and then the weeks dragged bleakly by, stretching into exasperating emptiness. Existence beside the now austere, chaste Martine, already learning to read and training as a deaconess at St Gervais, had worn Joanne down into moody spells of despondency. What employment she had found as housemaid to a staid Genovese family on the Rue des Oranges, had begun to pall. Hounded by the lady of the house and deprived of any respite from work, life in the imperious shadow of the nearby cathedral was stifling; and she was without hope of sex. Moreover, the solemn bells of St Pierre adjacent chilled and inhibited her. She missed her bleating ewes and the breeze in the chestnuts and larches at home. Still deeper within her she yearned desperately for something else, something that she found was conjured up by the mere sight of a leather belt or even a length of cart rope.

  It was on one Thursday in late June that Joanne made up her mind and decided to return to her treasured - and devastated - Cevennes. The Geneva summer with its plane trees and neat rows of privet numbed her. Down in the Cevennes the acacias, golden broom and honeysuckle would be in full flower and the grass loud with the tireless grating of the cicadas in the midday sun. And she would be nearer to the galley ports and poor Jean-Jacques - whether he was there for desertion or for his faith, or both, she could not guess, and anyway there was little she could do for him now.