by Kim Knight
The Marquise then repeated and confirmed what the slave had already heard.
“I have no objection, trollop, from now on, to you spilling your bawdy juices when you spend. It will only sap the strength you’ll need to cope with what I’m going to have done to you over the next nights. So, please yourself. Make use of my benevolence as you wish. Spurt out that foul slush while you’re whipped, as you used to do. Or you can remain inert. It’s of no importance to me. But knowing your licentious nature, to climax may help you to endure what Anthea, my major-domo and Melanie are going to inflict on your depraved, reprobate body. Now, apostate infidel, prepare that crotch of yours to expiate the crime you brazenly perpetrated at my expense.” The words she used bewildered the slave.
At that, the victim felt Bouchard wrest her clit ring almost out of its piercing. She let out a stifled cry and, on the verge of orgasm, controlled herself and her fright - for something far worse than penance was leaning over her masked face. The niece’s vulva gleamed directly before the hood’s mouth slit. That was what she saw; what she felt was the tail end of the scourge drifting menacingly over her pubic mound. Joanne almost puked when her ringed nose caught the cloying smell of the bitch’s crotch; it nauseated her, but not for long. The perineum bore down on to the leather and stopped up the nostrils.
Then Anthea rasped out the inevitable order. “Slurp me out, whore, and woe if you don’t satisfy me time and time again while I bloat that cunt of yours. Dally or retch and I’ll have you stretched on that crucifix yonder and I’ll rake, whip and...and... que Dieu te garde...I’ll...I’ll devastate you. So, slut, to work with that studded tongue of yours, the same forked appendage as that between the Devil’s jaws!”
The woman seemed to have taken leave of her senses but Joanne’s compliant tongue emerged from the narrow leather slot and, after licking the labia, managed to reach the bared clitoris and suck it in. As the cunnilingus began, Anthea’s riding whip slashed down into the outstretched, drooling oval of what the niece condemned as ‘Great Satan’s squalid lair of lust’. “Ventre de Dieu,” she swore, “I’ll flay this damn strumpet raw!” Not to the aunt’s displeasure, the niece embarked on her vengeance with resolve.
Stoically, the slave endured the crotch whipping, delivered with a crop bound in horsehide, as long as she was able before descending into a mist of oblivion, her mouth behind the hood unable to swallow more of the niece’s discharges. If the sweating Anthea paused occasionally as she was tongued off, the cane continued to fall, sending Joanne climaxing through one spasm after another, her muffled gasps lost among the slushings. The treat - or rather, ordeal - dispensed by the château favourite was compounded, at long last, by Melanie’s merciless lashes over the clamped breasts. The victim was despatched into a vortex of sex, vicious pain and orgiastic bliss that only a submissive slave can know.
It was only when a well-satisfied, sweltering Anthea had returned to her aunt’s side that Bouchard was given his turn. Depositing his scourge on the concave belly, he veered his gleaming cutlass of a phallus downwards and slid it smoothly into the scabbard of mucilage - these being some of Elodie’s favourite similes. Plundering such leeway as the anal dildo left available, the cock dome butted the rod lodged beyond the thin membrane separating the two inner tracts. Joanne suddenly revived, moaning with gathering pleasure, and jerking her haunches aloft, as far as her chains allowed, to ride the erection. A dozen thrusts brought her off again, even more vehemently than under the whips; and finally, in the grip of ecstasy, she felt the penis tense, pause and pump her vagina full of that boiling, turbid sperm - or what Marie-Félice called ‘clotted curd’ - that every Lassignac inmate supped on regularly at least twice a night.
Even Elodie was bewitched, watching her naked penitent writhe, and content to hear the groans stifling within the slave hood. Though the cries of pleasure were irrelevant, they had humoured the Marquise as she put an end to that evening’s punishments, noticing the slave’s stamina waning when the body was released and chained to the wall, the arms stretched up backwards behind the shoulder blades.
As the contented company departed, the valet duly extracted the ribbed dildo from the rectum and cranked it back in place against its bracket, before ripping the sopping slave hood off the head and face. Muttering to himself, he unshackled the vandalized breasts, returning the root clamps to their hooks on the instrument board. As the globes of mammary meat swung free to hang pendulously and resume their former shape, Joanne again wailed at the pain caused by the blood flowing back into them; she continued to moan until Deljoux soused the bags of flogged breast flesh with water from a nearby keg.
“Now, whore, weep away through what’s left of a steamy night,” the thug told her, slapping the livid, welted bulges of what he ominously termed ‘brothel blubber ripe for branding’. “A few nights more and these flabby balconies will have lost some of their bulk, if you want to trust what Melanie says. I’ll stake a wager you’ve never been chained by the dugs to the flogging post, eh, bitch? Or - see that rafter hook yonder? - hung by a chain round the roots...” The girl was too far gone to muster a reply; all she wanted, damn him, was to be left to sleep and rest her sinews for the nights still to come.
After being given a drink of the same polluted liquid from the keg, hardly enough to quench her thirst, the candles doused, the brazier coals hissing when the lout pissed on them, Joanne was left in total darkness. Thinking of her Marquis, Francis-Etienne, she lamented his absence, for he most likely would have curbed much of his wife’s vindictiveness. Why he, many leagues away, should now suddenly come to mind mystified Joanne but, under the circumstances, her strict bondage forestalling any hope of masturbating, about whom else could she fantasize? For want of anything better, she made do with the memory of the evening’s orgasms the whips had brought about, which compensated to some degree...
She guessed it was quite late the following day when preparations for the further punishments began. Meanwhile, she had been molested only twice since waking - first by Melanie, who taunted her and, extending the wrist chains, made her stoop and lick her off, Joanne finding the woman tasted far less tart than Anthea. The other, quite gratuitous, harassment was from Deljoux; completely against the rules, he simply thrashed her and, just as Melanie had done, lowered her to have himself sucked off. (Joanne swore to herself that she would somehow make him regret his insolence.)
Suddenly, however, when Sandrine appeared, straight from bed and for once unveiled, Joanne sensed that something strange was afoot. Lanthorn in hand, the portly wench stepped cautiously across the straw-strewn tiles, putting a finger to her lips. Instinct told Joanne that the visit was in some way clandestine, for the tense face did not have the usual impassive expression the subordinate wore when on precinct duty, greasing the whips, oiling the rusty flesh rakes and tending the brazier with the bellows.
“You have a visitor,” she murmured, “all the way from Paris. Someone we all know and she wants me to bring her down here. Why, God knows. But not a word to Deljoux, Coursel or even a maid, let alone Melanie and the mighty ones. She has a message for you.” With that, she returned to the iron-bracketed door she had left ajar and beckoned.
Who should enter, clad in velvet riding breeches and mired boots, but Marie-Félice, Elodie’s most dependable and vicious flogger of earlier times, prior to the Marquis taking her with him to Paris. The masked apparition astonished Joanne, besides raising terror in her guts, though the woman carried no riding crop nor that metal-lugged switch which could split open a buttock with a mere dozen lashes.
The former slave mistress spoke in a hushed voice. “The Marquis has learned of your return here,
you reckless idiot. The news reached us through gossip on the part of the rider who apparently brought you back when you were being carted north. Someone - Dieu sait qui - must have passed a message to our most distinguished Marquis at court” - Joanne noticed the gracious epithet ident
ifying her owner. “Rumours, fair or foul, travel rapidly here, you know. Anyway, he’s already on his way, travelling south by royal coach, a day behind me. He ordered me to seek you out and inform you that he’ll be here anon. Meanwhile you’ll have to endure whatever his wife is doing to you - the sort of things that, knowing you, you’re probably enjoying - until he arrives, probably late this evening. Like me, he’s travelling day and night. Now, I have to go. My pretext for being here is to collect his hunting horn and second musket.”
As stealthily as she had appeared, the Master’s concubine, currently flaunting her charms - and wielding her whip - among the nobility at Court, left with Sandrine, also sworn to secrecy and who received disdainful looks from the Paris visitor. Praying that what she had just heard might possibly be true rather than trumped up (Marie-Félice being among France’s most accomplished liars, who were innumerable), Joanne could not believe what had just been said or the manner in which it had been conveyed. Although excited by the girl’s news, she wondered how this provincial whore, even if the mistress to a titled aristocrat, could possibly have been entrusted with such a mission.
The extraordinary incident over, and Marie-Félice no doubt being assigned a bedroom and a stable for her mount, the slave had to prepare for her second evening of penance that promised to be far worse than the first. She supposed the former slave mistress would be invited to share in the whippings but truly hoped not, for in her time the woman had ranked among the château’s fiercest floggers. And should no Marquis be on his way, she doubted whether, with Marie-Félice in residence and solicited to partake with that muscular arm of hers, not even a hardened slave would last out a week.
Having supped on leftovers and been given a mug of wine, Joanne was again hooded up and chained in a position she had never really liked: stretched, rump up, by the arms and legs fully parted to four lengths of chain descending from the precinct’s central beams, and the neck flange forcing her head backwards. The posture might appear erotic to an overseer but Joanne, as far as her buttocks and drooping breasts were concerned, had known less painful positions, many of which she had enjoyed immensely. But her months at Lassignac had accustomed her to accept without question what the dominant rather than the submissive wanted, aware that a slave, deprived of choice, relinquished herself far more readily to the whip. However, it perturbed her that her welted breasts were left to sway invitingly and loose.
Though a long, if fitful, sleep had refreshed her, one of the bizarre artefacts she saw through her mask slits also made her fret: Bouchard had inserted a metal ring at the point where the foreskin gathered to join the bulb on the underside of his penis. The circlet glinted threateningly and since obviously it would chafe the clitoris, if the slave was fucked from behind, as it was trawled in and out with each thrust of the man’s cock, the bared sex stud would be abraded and ground to a gristle in no time. Moreover, from earlier episodes in the year in the slave cellar she knew that a grommet, cock ring or strapping always brought her off far too rapidly, cheating her of the gradual measured climaxes she usually enjoyed. But again, how could she, a mere whip-wench, choose how she wished her subservient body to be used? A slave took what she was given.
As though sensing her anxieties, Bouchard slapped each of her drooping, welted bubs, first forehand across the left bag of offal, and then, with a studded backhand, hard into the other. Joanne groaned under the usual melange of pain and compliance, her breasts still aching from what they had already suffered. As now they hung directly downwards, she realized how enticing they must seem to a connoisseur, carrying out what at Lassignac was known as ‘bust basting’; she only hoped her teats would not bleed; at least, luckily, they would not spurt milk like, Joanne recalled, that pregnant slave from the Rouergue back in May when she had her mammaries put into the throttling vice to receive the rattan cane.
The major-domo grasped the sagging burdens that he considered, given his erotic partialities, among the best he’d had the pleasure of working on. As he stretched them down as far as they would reach from the gashed roots, Joanne caught the malicious smile behind his veil and trusted they would not be irremediably damaged, and thus jeopardize her future when carted off to one of Elodie’s port brothels.
Bowing to his revered owner, the man confirmed that the slung nude was ready for sentencing.
“Tonight, our wanton betrayer, we shall really teach you fidelity,” Elodie thereupon informed her victim. “Once I’ve had the lower crevices and those heretical udders well beaten, we shall see how they take to my new set of honed bodkins, a thoughtful gift presented to me recently by my dear friend, Evelyn de Burre-Sage, whom you certainly remember. They enter the bubs, labia and pubic mound most pleasingly and the sapphire-jewelled hilts, when firmly in place, glint like angels’ eyes. Of course, you’ve had similar ones thrust in before, but not these. As you have the faculty of serendipity, you’re sure to enjoy them.” The strange, foreign term scared Joanne. “So, Anthea and Melanie, my two sweet wenches, and you, Bouchard, kindly proceed.”
Joanne had endured, with or without pleasure, numberless beatings in her time but what the Marquise had her Anthea and the slave mistress inflict on the curved back, purple rump and up into the vulva surpassed anything the slave had known. But it was rather the opulence of the ‘drudge’s dugs’ - as Elodie was given to calling Joanne’s drooping sacks - that especially delighted Melanie who said they swung like ‘her favourite goat’s udders at milking time.’ Already Bouchard was in his element, raising further welts, first on the front of the suspended cones and ringed teats, and then, changing place with Melanie, excelling himself by flaying the rear cambers of swinging meat with the bamboo rod. Elodie, who in her time had exerted much diligence in training all three floggers, or at least the two women, gave herself what she declared later to have been a ‘well-deserved orgasm she would not forget’.
Once the Marquise considered the sites adequately welted, Bouchand was ordered to pierce the whinging victim, a pastime he revelled in also, particularly if Her Ladyship was present. He took the bodkins from a cut glass vase of mauve liquid, proffered by Sandrine, and one by one some dozen or so spikes traversed the vulval lappets, one passing through the summit of the clitoris, above the ring. He then drove a further handful into the flaccid, pendant breasts, the silver lengths catching the candlelight as they puckered the skin and slid slowly in. Each jab brought a hiss from behind the slave hood and then a long sigh; the reaction to the longer needles piercing the nipple ducts, as expected, was more of a groan than the sharp yelp the man expected; yet it rose to the rafters all the same, the retainers thoroughly enjoying the session that constituted part payment for their exertions.
The interminable evening concluded with Bouchard using the bullwhip on the buttocks rather than the supple cane, with the cherished Vonnange niece taking the slave mistress’s place opposite him to thrash the thighs to the blood with her riding crop. Weak from tension, the insertions and lashes, Joanne surrendered and slumped, but not before careering through a final blinding orgasm. How long she remained slung from the chains, neither the departed Elodie nor her niece would know, for well after midnight it was none other than Marie-Félice still in riding habit, and summoned by Sandrine, who reappeared. Together the two extracted the needles, released the slave and, with the Parisienne giving the orders, spread-eagled the spent body to recover on the marking bench - an item listed on Elodie’s agenda for use two days later, when the pubis would receive the red-hot branding iron.
The third day had already dawned outside the precinct, but of that the exhausted nude was unaware, just as she could not know the Marquis’s coachman, still leagues away, had with a louis prevailed upon a young local peasant to take to horse and alert Marie-Félice of her master’s imminent arrival, soon after first light - hence the reason for the woman being up at cockcrow and on the qui vive. To Sandrine’s surprise and alarm, the concubine ordered her to remove the slave’s septum
ring and rub salve into the welts and the sites where the needles had entered the slave’s flesh. Returning to life, Joanne was grateful for the relief but could not believe anyone would dare take such steps without Elodie’s sanction or at least agreed to by Bouchard. Strange things indeed were taking place.
Quite abruptly, on being given a shabby cape, the exhausted victim of the precinct’s second night was told by Marie-Félice to spruce herself up. “The Marquis will soon be here and you’d better try to look your best, as he would expect. The coach will then probably leave once he has refreshed himself, had the horses watered and the driver fed. It’s a long trek back to Paris, and you must think of the trouble we’ve gone to in coming down here.” Again Joanne could not be sure she was hearing aright: Francis-Etienne himself, like Marie-Félice, again present before her in person under the eaves of the Château Lassignac! And this talk of Paris...! As the girl had said, news spreads speedily in the kingdom, with so many eager tongues and ears about.
What to Joanne seemed like a century later, a second lampion illuminated the confines of Elodie’s secret retreat. With a petrified Sandrine bowing low, Marie-Félice ushered in none other than the Marquis de Vonnange-Lassignac. First, he stared at the stakes, chains and implements thronging what once had been his sanctum, and only then at what confronted him, the denuded beauty now perched on the margin of the stone block. He summoned his concubine forward, as though about to avenge himself on someone, at the same time grasping the pommel of his rapier - rather than the bulge of his noble cock perceptible within the deerskin breeches. He seemed strangely taken aback, frowning and stroking his pointed beard.
“She is not adequately clothed for the journey, wench. Fetch the necessary from the old raiment closet above.” At that, the one who had travelled ahead of him calmly gestured to the half-clothed Sandrine, who scurried out to unearth what she could from the Marquise’s rosewood wardrobe, one of the many cluttering the château. “Then have Fremont ready the horses,” the man called after her, at the same time as telling his bed whore, “We return to Versailles at once. Seat the girl next to you in the coach.”