It was strangely formal. The occupants of the room were witness to a happening. Diana had acquired a presence. Belinda radiated purpose. Quigley hovered, watchful for the niceties of the occasion, The rest, including Minnie, were enraptured spectators of a woman’s shame.
When it came to the strapping of her wrists, Diana fought. Drusilla knew the ‘now or never’ compulsion to evade the total helplessness that would deliver her nudity in which the frightened woman sank to the floor against the grappling hands. But the column from above followed her down. Helen’s grip upon her hair dragged back her head. Male fingers were strong in the buckling of the straps round rebellious wrists. Then, before a breathless audience, Diana was obliged to follow the dictates of the column at it once more rose, forcing her to scramble to her feet, and then to stand with arms held high, taut and strained and proudly naked.
“Diana, you’re lovely. Don’t feel badly... ”
“Take her up another inch or two.”
“It will hurt her more if her skin’s well tightened.”
“What about her ankles?”
“Let her have her feet. It’s lovely when they kick.” Drusilla shared the shame. Her own wrists still bore the imprints of the straps. She wrenched at them restlessly in frustration. Agonizedly she beheld her darling stand as she herself had stood. Captive of the column, a vulnerable loveliness available to pain.
Diana knew herself lost. The straps were brutally tight. They would contain her writhings. In the firmness of their clasp she would be able to lift herself from the floor in a futile seeking to escape the lash. Her hurt. eyes sought and found those of her slave. She smiled and shook her head as though in denial that what was about to happen mattered. She closed her eyes and surrendered her lips to a silence that might be short. A mental vision of Ginny crossed her mind. Where would the radiant child be now! Doubtless locked lonely in her own cell. Bound. Frantic with concern for those from whom she had been sundered. Ardently she prayed they would not transport her to witness her mother’s punishment. It would be too cruel.
“The salutary effect of a flogging can be greatly enhanced by the old formalistic rituals employed in the past century ,” Proctor’s precise delivery droned its way to dominance.
“Want her to make a speech, Proc’?”
“Rub her back with salt?”
Proctor was not easily extinguished. “Both suggestions have some merit,” he admonished. “But I had in mind the confessional. It was considered edifying to all that, before the punishment or execution, the convicted person confess his sins, thus obtaining absolution or a degree of mercy.”
“Got anything to confess, Di’?”
“I bet it’s juicy!”
“Hell, she ain’t done nothin’!”
“It was also customary to provide two floggers. A right hand and a left to ensure evenness of application.” Proctor was standing firmly on his Member’s Rights.
“You left-handed, Proc’?”
“What about you, Belinda?”
“What say we get the caterers to do the job on her?” Helen’s consort was unruffled. “There was always present a clerk or factotum to record the strokes. Maintaining an accurate count in a clear voice. I would be most happy—”
“You want Proctor to count your stripes, Diana?”
“Say, Di’, I’m left-handed.”
“Maybe she’d sooner count her own.”
“I bet he got to feel her up!”
“How’d you like to be whipped by a waiter?”
“It was generally supposed the subject was too preoccupied with, ahem, discomfort to pronounce a proper tally.”
Proctor Frobisher’s diction flowed on and on, assailed by quips that halted him no whit, but which made Drusilla long to lash out verbally in defense of the woman she adored. Diana herself refused to respond. She recognized this as part of her punishment for a sin she had not committed. The group was enjoying her and themselves. Nothing she could say or do would influence anything. Her role was to provide them with the manifestations of her suffering so that they would be sexually aroused. She drew scant comfort from the knowledge that some, if not all, the females present had stood as she stood now. She paled and her heart thudded painfully as Belinda and Helen moved to where she stood. Each held a whip. Each one had stripped naked to the waist.
It was immensely dramatic, almost unbearably erotic as the female whippers found their places and measured their thongs against the white and helpless back. To one side stood Proctor, armed with clipboard and pencil, his lean features solemnly stern and righteous. Drusilla had the sense of being transported to another age. The preparations for the flogging of Diana Winslow had become breathlessly impressive.
“One.”
Proctor’s pronouncement and his tick upon the paper were swallowed up in the avid concentration upon ridged flesh and the silent motions by which Mrs. Diana Winslow acknowledged her agony. To Drusilla, they were beautiful and terrible. Hating herself, she knew she was sharing the heated excitation of the rest of those who watched. Her loins were afire even though her eyes held tears. Her bound hands would absolve her from nothing.
“Two.”
The first blow had been Belinda’s, the second Helen’s.
The face of each was alight with glory as she surveyed her handiwork. The whippers stood back to admire what they had wrought. The nakedness of the woman they had lashed paid tribute to their skill with fluid writhings, limited by her strapped wrists, but shocking in their mute testimony to pain.
“Three.”
Drusilla flinched as though the cut was upon herself.
She, too, thought of Ginny held somewhere helpless while her mother was striped for the delectation of the group and the more personal animus of Belinda Pendleton. The suffused bars upon white skin stood out like a beacon across the strained back.
“Four.”
Diana screamed. It was the bursting of a dam of silence sustained by a pride now defeated in the dust. She leaped wildly in her bonds, her legs thrashing, her hair tossed back and forth between raised arms. Her vocal protest spilled over into words. “No! Oh, no! No more! No more! Oh, please!”
“She isn’t enjoying it,” Helen drawled reproachfully. “She’ll love this one,” said Belinda.
Diana did not love the fifth biting cut. She howled in a bitterness of anger, shame and pain. She lunged and surged against her strapped wrists, uncaring of the delight her struggles generated within the loins of her audience.
“I’m almost ashamed. of her,” Helen declaimed with affected nonchalance.
“I can’t bear it! I can’t! Nobody could.” Diana’s voice rose and fell between her moans. “Quigley, make them stop—make them stop—”
“You belong to us, dear,” Helen Frobisher said with unholy zest, and struck again.
Drusilla beheld the incredible. While her beloved Mistress plunged and screamed, Helen Frobisher slowly circled the wounded nude, examining and listening intently, a quiet and secret smile upon her red lips, her eyes aflame with excitement. Standing before the punished beauty for quiet moments, she then leaned forward and kissed and kissed again the face drawn and lined with pain and apprehension.
“Isn’t she exquisite?”
The exclamation called for no answer. The room remained hushed.
“But she’s so noisy! Not a bit grateful.” The room waited. It sensed a purpose.
“I’d like to teach the darling a lesson. Would’ you mind?”
Only Quigley overcame suspense. Quigley was a man always conscious of the proprieties. “We cannot whip Diana more severely,” he reprimanded primly. “Her present sentence is fully adequate. You must remember she is not inured to pain.”