Nobody approached her, but her good mood held as she walked. Hugh Bowle had been delighted with her artwork, and also the story. His only criticism had been the title, which he felt was too obscure for the readership. Giles had attempted to stand his ground, but after a few minutes’ debate they had agreed to call it ‘The Graverobbers’ instead.
The change had meant Sarah had to rework the entire first page but, as she spent so much of her time drawing by choice that was no real hardship. Her second effort had been accepted without need for further change, which had left her with more than a fortnight free for her planned trip. Now she was here, and so pleased to have arrived that she continued to walk despite the weight of her bag, putting it down only when she stopped to draw.
She knew exactly where she was going; first to the Latin Quarter, where she would choose a hotel, then to the Île St. Louis, where she would fulfil one of her ambitions by drinking a glass of wine in a café beside the Seine. She had always pictured Céleste living there, in a beautifully appointed flat overlooking the river, directly across from Notre Dame.
Entranced, she walked across the Pont du Carrousel, stopping again and again to sketch. Not feeling financially secure enough to afford one of the grand hotels along the river, she selected a family establishment among the smaller streets behind the great Quais, secured a room, showered, and changed into a light dress more suitable for the weather than the jeans and top she had worn on the train. Despite being tired, she went out again immediately, walking along the Seine in a dream.
After crossing to the island she selected her café immediately. It was perfect, exactly as she had pictured it, and more. The round wooden tables were set out on a broad pavement, each with two chairs of a quality unthinkable in any British outdoor café. There was even a waiter in a white apron, whose nod carried exactly the amount of arrogance she would have expected as he took her order, while a young man was selling paintings by the road just a few yards away.
The waiter brought a half-carafe of white wine and a glass, again exactly as Sarah had pictured. She poured the wine and took her first sip in reverent ecstasy, absolutely content with her circumstances, which might well have been from one of her own drawings. Even her fellow customers were just as they should have been: a middle-aged couple as alike as twins, small and fussy and prim; a haughty grande dame, eighty if she was a day yet perfectly straight and composed as she sipped from a tiny glass; and three students in berets deep in discussion over the worth of Émile Bernard and drinking what appeared to be absinthe. There was even an immaculate young woman walking with purposeful grace along the pavement, a woman who looked exactly like Céleste du Musigny.
Sarah smiled for her own overactive imagination, and yet the woman was like Céleste, extraordinarily like Céleste, tall, beautiful, immaculately dressed, and with a manner of absolute confidence and unquestioning self-belief that would have shamed a Roman emperor. She was also heading directly for Sarah’s table, and her expression was anything but friendly. Alarmed and confused, Sarah began to rise, only to sit down again as the woman reached her, speaking immediately, in English, perfectly clear yet with an unmistakable French intonation, exactly as she imagined Céleste’s voice.
‘There you are, you little brat. You have a lesson coming to you.’
‘I – I’m sorry, I think …’ Sarah stammered, and stopped as the woman reached down to take a firm grip on her wrist. ‘Hey!’
‘Get up!’ the woman snapped, and pulled hard, jogging Sarah’s table and upsetting the carafe.
Sarah rose, still babbling questions and apologies, but unable to resist the woman’s tone of command. Some of her wine had splashed her dress, the rest pouring onto the pavement, but she didn’t protest, too shocked and astonished to react. The woman sat down on Sarah’s vacated chair, her grip so hard it hurt.
‘Across my knee with you, you dirty little monkey,’ the woman ordered.
Sarah found herself drawn forward, unable to find the will to resist as she was put into the threatened position, laid across the woman’s lap with her bottom lifted towards the other customers.
‘What – what are you doing?’ she wailed
‘What am I doing?’ the woman retorted. ‘I am preparing you for a spanking, that is what I am doing. Is that not how one deals with a mischievous child, with a spanking?’
‘A spanking?’ Sarah gasped as her arm was twisted high and tight into the small of her back. ‘You can’t do that! You can’t spank me!’
The woman didn’t answer, but lifted one knee, bringing Sarah’s bottom up into full prominence.
‘You cannot do this!’ Sarah squealed, wriggling in the woman’s grip as panic took hold. ‘You just can’t!’
‘I can, and I will,’ the woman said, and Sarah’s dress was being lifted.
‘No!’ Sarah screamed as the seat of her big white panties was revealed. ‘You can’t do this to me, you just can’t! You can’t!’
‘I rather think I can,’ the woman answered, perfectly calm, and with just a trace of amusement mixed in with the authority of her voice as she tucked Sarah’s dress up. ‘How typically English, no taste at all in lingerie. Still, I think we had better have these down, don’t you?’
This time Sarah’s scream was wordless. She tried to snatch at her panties, determined to keep them up, but she couldn’t get her hand past the woman’s body. A thumb had already been pushed into her waistband, and it was being done. She went wild, kicking her legs in every direction and thrashing her body, full of rage and frustration, threats and pleas and denials spilling from her lips. It was impossible, outrageous, unthinkable, that she should have her panties pulled down for punishment at all, never mind in a public place. Yet that was exactly what was happening, the taut elastic of her waistband moving inexorably down across her bulging cheeks, showing more and more chubby pink flesh, until it was all out, the full spread of her bare bottom on show to the other customers, the artist selling paintings, a dozen passers-by, the waiter.
‘So I cannot take down your knickers?’ the woman remarked, her voice as calm as ever and now openly amused. ‘Yet they are down, no? And your naughty bottom is showing to the world. I suppose you think I cannot spank you either?’
‘No, please,’ Sarah sobbed. ‘You can, but don’t … please don’t … please?’
‘You are to be spanked,’ the woman responded, ‘and that is that. For what you have done, how could it be otherwise?’
‘What have I done!?’ Sarah begged.
‘Ho, ho, she asks what has she done?’ the woman answered. ‘She knows what she has done, but perhaps she does not think it is wrong, yes? Perhaps she thinks it is amusant, oui?’
The tone of the woman’s voice had changed, showing anger for the first time, and as she spoke she began to lever Sarah’s panties further down.
‘Look, no … you don’t need to take them off! No!’ Sarah babbled, but they were already around her knees, then her ankles, then free, hanging from one leg.
‘Ah but I do,’ the woman was saying, ‘they must be off, I think, for you to feel proper shame, for you to understand, maybe, how I felt in front of the disgusting Monsieur d’Orsay! There, how does it feel, with your cunt on show to the crowd?’
As she spoke, the woman had hooked her leg around Sarah’s and pushed her knee up, spreading the helpless girl’s thighs and exposing everything between. Sarah gave a scream of raw agonising shame as the most bitter sense of frustration she had ever known hit her. She began to fight, writhing on the woman’s lap, striking out with her single free fist, screaming incontinently, and yet nobody took any notice, least of all the woman, though there was a rising note of anger in her voice as she continued to speak.
‘Not that you could know how it is for a lady, you, who are so common, such a – a whore!’
The first smack landed on Sarah’s bottom, adding a squeak of pain to her clamours of protest and misery. Now it was done, her bottom not merely bare but being smacked, spanked in public
, and as her cheeks began to bounce her raging frustration and self-pity redoubled. The woman talked as she spanked, her voice now loud and thick with anger as she belaboured Sarah’s wobbling bottom and pumping thighs.
‘You, you dare, to sell your art, to sell me! To make me bare for Monsieur d’Orsay! Never will you do this, never, do you understand me, you little whore, you filthy thing, you salope … cocotte … branleuse … maquerelle! Putain de merde!’
The spanking had become furiously hard, reducing Sarah to a wriggling squirming mess, her trapped arm and leg jerking helplessly, the free ones flailing wildly, with her lowered panties waving from her ankle like a flag. Her tears had come, spattering the pavement beneath her with every smack to her bottom, along with mucus from her nose and spittle from her mouth, while her attempts to speak had broken to a desperate pig-like squealing punctuated with yelps of pain.
‘Be quiet!’ the woman snapped, calmer now that she had expended some of her fury on Sarah’s still dancing bottom. ‘And will you hold still? This is just, as you must know, so at least try to take it like a lady. Now listen, petite salope, you will not draw me bare for your dirty English boys to make branlette, not again, not ever, and if you show me so in front of that foul roué d’Orsay, I swear I will have you make a pipe for him, you know, you understand? To suck his dirty penis! So, do you understand, Sarah?’
The spanking had become a little less hard as the woman spoke, allowing Sarah enough control over herself to gasp out a reply despite her pain and bewilderment.
‘Yes … anything, anything you say … please just stop!? Please?’
She was whimpering, her entire body now prickled with sweat and aching, her bottom a glowing ball behind her, hot and nude and fat, spanked, a word she couldn’t get out of her head, that came back again and again as she lay sobbing across the lap of the woman who was punishing her, spanking her, spanking her in public. A choking cry escaped her lips at the sheer shame of it, then a gasp and a fresh squeal as the smacks grew firmer, this time delivered as glancing blows across the meat of her buttocks, to make them wobble and part, adding the exposure of her anus to her woes.
‘Do you mean it?’ the woman asked. ‘I wonder. Perhaps you think you do, but perhaps you will change your mind later, yes? Understand this then, Sarah, that if you ever disobey me, if you ever insult me so again, this will happen again, and more. Am I understood?’
‘Yes!’ Sarah wailed. ‘Yes, yes, yes, now stop spanking me, please!’
‘A few more, I think,’ the woman answered, ‘just so, to be sure you do not forget.’
As she spoke she began to spank as hard as she could once more, full across Sarah’s already blazing bottom. Yet it no longer hurt; the pain was gone, her cheeks were now warm and receptive, and with a stab of humiliation stronger even that what had gone before Sarah realised that the spanking was making her aroused. A fresh scream erupted from her mouth at the horror of what was happening to her, and another as a smack caught her low and she felt the air cool on the wetness of her sex.
They could see, a dozen or more people, not only her bare red bottom, but that the spanking had made her wet. It was worse even than the hideous shame of being given a spanking in front of them, to have them know that she was more than simply the victim of the awful woman’s retribution, but that she found having it done to her exciting. She screamed again, unable to bear her own emotions, and again as a voice sounded from behind her, in French, cool and imperious.
‘Ça suffit, Céleste. Elle est si turbulente.’
Sarah gave a heartfelt gasp as the spanking stopped. The elderly lady had spoken, a trace of irritation in her voice, indifferent to the bare-bottom punishment but annoyed by the victim’s squeals, which added yet more outrage to Sarah’s boiling feelings. A last gentle pat was applied to her bottom and her wrist was released, so suddenly that she tumbled off her persecutor’s lap, to sit her hot bottom down in the puddle of spilt wine on the pavement, where she stayed, too dazed even to pull up her panties.
Three
Sarah fled Paris that same afternoon, pausing only to collect her things from the hotel before she took a taxi to the Gare du Nord. Only on the train did she begin to calm down, with the emotional reaction of what had been done to her slowly giving way to the reality, which made no sense. She had been spanked, with her bottom bare and in a public place, yet not one of the numerous bystanders had reacted, save to watch, and in the case of the elderly woman to complain about the fuss she was making.
It was not normal behaviour, not for the French, nor anybody else, of that she was sure. Somebody, surely, would have stepped in to rescue her, or at least made some sort of protest. Nobody had and, as she had run off, clutching her smacked bottom with her panties still hanging from her foot, the only reaction had been a quip from one of the students, who seemed merely to be amused by her fate.
Only one explanation seemed to fit: that the entire episode had been set up, and that she had been spanked as some sort of horrible joke, although that raised as many questions as it seemed to answer. One thing at least was obvious. She had not in fact been spanked by Céleste du Musigny. However real Céleste seemed at times, she had no existence outside Sarah’s head. Yet the woman had been so like Céleste that Sarah might have drawn her, not only in appearance but in personality too. Therefore whoever was responsible had to know about Céleste, which narrowed the possibilities down to only a handful of people.
Her parents, her college friends and her brothers could be discounted immediately. None of them would have dreamt of playing such a degrading joke on her, and nor could they possibly have known enough about the plot, nor to coach ‘Céleste’ on what to say during the spanking. It had to be somebody who had seen the cartoon, which meant Mak, Giles Compton-Bassett and any number of people at Hot Gun, or maybe even the whole Ehrmann and Black organisation.
Mak had a wicked sense of humour, and had occasionally shocked Sarah with the things he did with his gay partners, such as making them gag on his erection, but she couldn’t imagine him setting her up to be spanked and humiliated in public, let also in Paris and by a Céleste du Musigny look-alike. Hugh Bowle was far more likely, and just possibly could have done it, yet the joke seemed far too abstract for his sense of humour. If photographs had been taken of the punishment, then maybe, but she was fairly sure they hadn’t.
That left Giles Compton-Bassett as by far the most likely candidate, and she could just imagine him enjoying the joke, even if he didn’t get to see. Or maybe he had seen? Maybe he’d watched the whole thing? He could easily have been observing her from a distance, or maybe even from a seat inside the café. She would never have noticed, especially once her panties had been pulled down, after which she’d been in far too much of a state to realise even if he’d been right behind her.
Yes, it really had to be Giles, although it was hard to see how he’d have set it up. Not that it mattered how. What mattered was that he had. Yet what could she do? If she accused him to his face or complained to Hugh Bowle, he only had to deny it, and no doubt he would find it extremely funny to hear her explain what had happened.
One point jarred, which was that throughout the punishment ‘Céleste’ had repeatedly told Sarah not to do exactly the drawings Giles wanted. Possibly he might find some perverse amusement in having the woman give the orders when he knew that Sarah had no choice but to follow his script or lose the job, yet he didn’t even know she had any qualms about showing Céleste nude. Possibly he wanted her out of the job and might have guessed her weakness, but if so he had chosen a highly bizarre way to go about it, while his attitude suggested the exact opposite.
No better solution presented itself, and Sarah arrived back in London still puzzled, but also determined, not only to find out what was going on, but not to be a victim. There would be no visits to therapists, no allowing some psychologist to delve into the intimacies of her mind until she felt worse than she had done in the first place. Definitely there would be no admission
of the darkest and most shameful secret of all, that towards the end of the spanking she had been highly aroused.
It wasn’t something she wanted to think about, but it was very hard not to – the way her entire bottom had seemed to glow; the way her whole being had seemed to focus on her smacked cheeks and embarrassingly wet sex; the way it had felt to be held helpless across the woman’s knee with her bottom exposed to others. All of it was so shameful it hurt to think about, but also so arousing it made her want to get on her knees in something close to the same rude position she’d been punished in and bring herself off under busy fingers.
To do so, she knew, would be the final admission that she was exactly what the woman had called her, a slut and worse, and yet every time she let the words slip into her mind it sent a little shiver through her body. Common sense told her that no woman could possible enjoy the utter degradation of being spanked, let alone in public, and yet common sense had never really had very much to do with her sexual needs.
A week passed during which Sarah was left to herself. Most of the people she knew thought she was in Paris, Mak excepted, and she had found herself unable to tell him the truth, making up an excuse about feeling ill instead. Knowing, and dreading, that left alone she was all too likely to end up with her bottom in the air and her fingers down her panties, Sarah spent her time out sketching, shopping, or just walking, anything to keep her mind off how she had felt across the woman’s knee.
Not to think about it at all was impossible, but the best distraction was to try and work out what had really happened. Her mind invariably ended up running in circles, with Giles Compton-Bassett at the centre. The more she thought about it, the more she was certain he had to be involved, save only for the apparent contradiction of the woman’s orders. Giles had been rude with her, and yet the words the woman had chosen during the spanking suggested exactly the sort of contempt Céleste would have shown Sarah had the circumstances been real, and which Giles knew nothing about.
Strip Girl Page 4