Griselda

1. Discovery

There can be few places as deceptive as Nether Slype.  The churches are well attended and the all children say their prayers.  Such presumably innocent pleasures as the fete, the sack race, and the village pantomime are milestones in its calendar.  There are also summer and winter sports gatherings, though all these events, I later learned, are curiously unique.   There are two pubs, a school, two shops — one with a post office — a tea rooms where the old ladies gossip, and a Saturday market where you can buy anything from a home-made cake to a grandfather clock.  The village garage takes forever to fix your car, the mobile bank comes once a week, and the small library boasts the 1974 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  The few Saturday-night drunks are harmless, there is no vandalism and no rowdiness, which is as well because Jack, the village bobby, couldn't handle more than the mildest disagreement. 

Nether Slype is nestled among wooded hills, and the woods encroach into it.  It is a place of nooks and crannies, green shades, cool shadows, high hedges, privacy, and footways.  There are bridleways where big-bottomed, bouncing-bosomed girls ride their ponies and other things besides.  The long, curling, hedge-rowed lanes are overarched with heavy branches of wimpling leaves.  The river murmurs under the mediaeval bridge, flowing fresh and clean, down from the higher hills on the Welsh borderland.  You'll see an occasional fly-angler there, standing midstream in his waders, his fly whipping back and forth across the sparkling water; but their numbers are few and they're all local, for no one comes to Nether Slype to fish, in fact no one comes to Nether Slype at all. 

Nearly all the villagers marry within the community — and they firmly believe in marriage.  I am aware of the commonly-held urban belief that rural folk are interbred, but there is little risk of that in Nether Slype, with its population of twelve hundred, and Long Wallop, two miles up the valley, with a further six hundred, not to mention Threshers Bottom, over the hill, with another five hundred.  So, as I've learned, few in this hidden, tucked-away place look beyond the three villages for a mate, which might account for a number of their local quirks.  

I found Nether Slype by accident, as you must, for no one goes there or drives through it by design, because the narrow twisting lane that winds six miles from the A road is unsignposted and it then goes nowhere else, except Long Wallop and Threshers Bottom.  But many years ago I took a wrong turning.  I drove for miles with no clue where I was going; several times I nearly turned back, but when I'd almost given up hope of arriving anywhere other than a dead end in a farmyard, I came to a rise, and looked down through a gap in the birch trees.  It was autumn, and there below me, thrusting up from a tousled leafscape of greens, ambers, and reds, I saw a church tower, and on the further hillside two conical-roofed turrets peered over the trees towards me, as though a castle hid in the forest there.  I drove another mile, the trees  thinned slightly, and cottages appeared to left  and right, peeping slyly from behind high hedges of yew, beech, and blackthorn.   I saw an elderly couple walking arthritically up the lane towards me.  Winding down my window I leant out and called, "Excuse me.  I'm  lost.  I was wondering—"

With a sprightliness I wouldn't have thought possible, the old couple recoiled and scuttled behind the nearest hedge.  Their reaction wouldn't surprise me now, of course — they don't like talking to strangers in the three villages — but on that day it perplexed me.

I drove on; the cottages became closer and more regular, yet all seemed to hide behind something — hedges, large shrubs, or weeping trees.  The vista now opened before me and I drove out into a large space, grassed, with a few monumental oaks and a pond at its centre where ducks and geese clattered.  Close by stood an ancient stocks and whipping post that looked remarkably well maintained.  Dotted all around were cottages, old and timbered or tiled, tumble down irregular cottages with shutters, nooks, and crannies, cellars, rambling attics, and tall chimneys with weathercocks.  I saw a couple of shops with bowed and bulls-eyed windows, and what looked like a moot hall.  Behind it rose the church tower.  Outside a timbered pub curiously named The Seven Stripes, a group of locals sat on a bench drinking beer.  I drove up, but was only half way out of the car before they leapt up in alarm and scuttled inside.   I followed them in.  I needed directions and I was also thirsty.  As I walked into the bar, the conversation stopped like the fall of an executioner's axe.  I looked around to see twelve pairs of dilated eyes focussed on me.  Ahead, the landlord, a large florid man with red hair, was wiping the bar.

"What can we do for you, stranger?" he asked in a surly voice.

"I'm lost," I said simply.

He gave me a half smile.  "Strangers always are.  Where are you trying to get to?"

I told him.

"Well," he said, "you know the road you took to get here?"

"Yes."

"Turn round and take it back out again."

I stared at him hard.  What he'd said to me sounded like a roundabout way of hoisting two fingers and saying fuck off.    But he read my reaction and shook his head.

"I'm not being funny.  There's only one road out of Nether Slype that goes anywhere much.  So wherever you're going, that's the one you need to take."

"Then why did you ask?"

He shrugged.  "On the off chance you were looking for somewhere hereabouts."  He smirked.  "But I didn't think it likely."

It sounded fair enough.  I ordered a beer and looked around.  Country pubs are frequently hung with horse brasses and bits of tack, all ersatz, but the décor of  The Seven Stripes looked genuine, and seemed to reflect its history as a coaching inn, being an assortment of straps, whips, and what looked like bits and harnesses.  There were also some leg irons and manacles on chains, a scolds' bridle and a thumbscrew.  I assumed prisoners had once been transported through there, or kept there overnight. 

I have never drunk beer in such a tactile silence.  While I consumed my pint — which was excellent —  the suspicious eyes never left me, not a word was uttered, not a floorboard creaked, not a glass was lifted, other than mine.  I left reflecting that in remote village pubs such a reception is part of the local charm, and I soon put it from my mind, for as I drove round the village green, past all the quaint, old-world cottages, and back through the leafy lane, I fell in love with the place — it's charm, its antiquity, and most of all its remoteness, hidden in its folds of woodland, a precious perfumed relict of an England I had thought lost for ever, and I swore that one day that I would return to live there.

I am a writer by trade — I have no pretensions so I don't call it a vocation.  I published my first novel when I was thirty.  It was a middling success, but enough of one to encourage me to pursue my craft.  My reputation gradually grew, and finally I was able to give up the day job and move to the soft, secluded delights of Nether Slype.  I now had adequate means, so I thought it would be easy, but I discovered in the event that it was anything but.

My first problem was finding a telephone number for its estate agent.  None was listed on the Internet or in any telephone directory.  I tried to order a local paper from my newsagent but drew a blank there.  None of the main estate-agent chains had a branch there or had even heard of the place.  So I drove back there one late summers day.  The trees were more deeply in leaf than before and I found myself driving down the lane of yew hedges and set-back cottages before I even realised I had entered the village again.  It being a Saturday, more people were about, but as soon as I started to drive round the green, they all vanished like smoke into doorways, or down side alleys.  It was as though word had gone round that marauding Vikings had arrived.  I drove round the green until I saw a window with some photographs of properties in it.  As I entered, a grey man sitting at a large, dusty partnership desk looked up at me as though I'd sprouted a second head.

"Can I help you?" he enquired defensively, giving the firm impression that he wasn't prepared to help me at all. 

I told him that I was looking for a cottage.

"There isn't anything available," he said shortly.

"So what are the properties in the window?"

"Irrelevant.  You're not from the village, are you!" he asked in a tone of voice that sounded like an accusation.

"Er, no."

"Nor from Long Wallop or Threshers Bottom either, I'll be bound!"

"Well . . . no."

"Didn't think so.  I'd surely have seen you before if you were."

"Why should that be relevant?" I asked sharply, stung by his negative attitude.

"Because all the land and properties round the three villages are owned by Lord Shackles.  They're leased to villagers and no one but villagers."

My disappointment was crushing.  "Is there no way at all?" I asked.

"You could petition his lordship."  The man smirked nastily.  "But it won't get you anywhere."

"Why not especially?"

"Try, and you'll find out."

After much remonstrating, I obtained his lordship's address at Slype Hall, the turreted pile I had seen poking through the trees on my fondly-remembered previous visit.  Back home, I drafted several letters to him, but the estate agent's comments gave me pause.  If I enquired and he refused, as the estate agent's manner had suggested probable, then I would have shot my one and only bolt.  So I spoke to Celia, my literary agent who said she would enquire for me. 

This too was fruitless at the outset.  Try Googling Nether Slype, Threshers Bottom, or Long Wallop, and the engine returns "not found", and this result holds true for any Internet search.  The three villages were like Brigadoon, appearing only when you drove into them from the winding lane through the woods, and then vanishing from the face of the earth when you left.  At last Celia found a single obscure newspaper reference to a Colonel Flaythm from Nether Slype, who had mysteriously disappeared from the front in the Great War.  No body had been found, yet no trace of him had emerged since.  He too had mysteriously vanished.  At first glance, this appeared to be of no use to me, but my writer's imagination took hold and I invented a subsequent biography for the colonel.

He had suffered a blow to the head from a piece of shrapnel and had wandered into no-man's land (I thought it best not to imply that he'd deserted for any reason).  He had been captured but, as he was suffering from profound amnesia, his captors could not identify him and advise their British counterparts.  However, his ardent British blood remained pure.  He subsequently escaped from incarceration, still not knowing who he was, and, after many subsequent adventures through Europe, Siberia, and Tibet, he had finally surfaced in the remote outback of Australia, where he had lived out the remainder of  his life under the assumed name of Bruce Brown.  Late in life his memory had returned, but being married, and a pillar of his community, he had continued his subterfuge, confiding the truth to his son, my fictional grandfather, only on his deathbed.  Since then, his family had wandered the Empire, being pushed from colony to colony as it broke up.  Along the way the name had reverted to Flaythm and I, the alleged last of the line, had returned only recently to England in search of my long lost relations and my roots.   

Before acquainting Lord Shackles with my new history, I reinvented myself completely, changing my name to Flaythm by deed pole and setting all my affairs in order under that name.  I have always cherished my anonymity — I write under a pen name — and having no family, there was absolutely no emotional or other difficulty in this.  Indeed, I enjoyed the sense of adventure it gave me.  So this done, I wrote an tearful and harrowing account of the Flaythm family's history since that fateful day in 1915, posted it to Lord Shackles, and then sat back, prepared for a long wait, and the possibility of a blunt refusal.

I was overjoyed when, only a week later I received a reply, not from his lordship but his wife, Lady Griselda Shackles, telling me how my tale had moved her to tears, and inviting me to attend an interview.  This invitation I immediately accepted in the most excruciatingly servile terms, and a few days later, I was driving up from the village of Nether Slype to the turreted and secret pile on the hillside.  

2. Interview

Slype Hall is like a miniature fairy castle, topped with turrets, tall twisted chimneys, and dragons, looking like a product of William Morris's demented brother.  It stands in a charming wooded glade, surrounded by grasses, rampant wild flowers and the inevitable ring of dense trees that screens everything in Nether Slype.

I rang the bell and the door was opened by a grave butler in tail coat with a bald crown and two wings of iron-grey hair neatly combed back over both ears.  He confirmed that I was expected and directed me to wait in a gloomy wainscotted hallway where generations of Shackles scowled down at me from aloof heights.  While I waited patiently, the peace was shattered by a scream and a peal of diabolical laughter from the bowels of the mansion. 

"Bring me a wench and I'll flog her fucking arse off!"

I jumped up startled, casting about for the source of this violent outburst.  As I did so, the butler returned and told me that her ladyship was waiting to receive me in her office.  I asked him to lead the way, but we hadn't gone more than six steps before more diabolical laughter rent the air.

"Bring me a wench and I'll thrash her fucking cunt off!"

The butler coughed deferentially.  "His Lordship, I'm afraid, sir.  You'd might as we'll know.  He's, er  — how can I delicately put it ?"

"Suffering some mental health problem?"

"No, sir.  Stark staring mad.  We've been obliged to confine him to the dungeons."

"You have dungeons here?"

The butler looked aghast.  "Of course we have dungeons."

He opened a panelled door.  Beyond, sitting at a large desk was an aloof and horsey looking woman of about forty, typical of her type, with a large nose, a weak chin, and two prominent teeth that overhung her protruding lower lip.  Her chestnut hair was scraped back into a bun.  As she rose to greet me, I saw that she was dressed for riding in hacking jacket, jodhpurs and knee boots.  Her huge and apparently firm bust surged through the opening in the jacket like Niagara Falls in the wet season, and she was vigorously slapping her thigh with a riding crop.  She approached me and extended her free hand, and I noticed that it dripped jewels.

"Mr Owen Flaythm?" she enquired, lisping slightly through the front teeth.    "I'm Griselda Shackles.  Welcome to Slype Hall."

I almost took the hand and shook it, but somewhere from the depths of my subconscious, an alarm bell rang.  So stooping slightly, I took the tips of the encrusted fingers and lightly kissed them.  "A profound honour to meet  your ladyship."

As I rose I saw that she was beaming;  her riding crop smacked her thigh more enthusiastically. 

"I knew it, I knew it," she gushed.  "Every inch a Flaythm.  The manners.  The easy and natural deference to a superior."  She lurched towards me and seized my arm.  "Come!  Come to the window and let me look at you!"  She dragged me into a deep window recess where I posed for inspection while she clucked round me.  "No question.  No question at all.  You have the Flaythm nose, the Flaythm brow, the deep Flaythm upper lip — you could grow a magnificent moustache.  No doubt of it."

I heard the deferential  butler cough.  Lady Shackles turned.

"What is it, Thwacks?"

"I regret to inform you, ma'am, that his lordship seems to be becoming, er . . . agitated again."

Lady Shackles sighed.  "Oh very well.  Send a girl down!"

Thwacks bowed gravely.  "Immediately, ma'am."

When the butler was gone about his business, Lady Shackles directed me to a deep sofa.  She flung her riding crop on the desk and surprised me by stripping off her jacket.  As she flexed her shoulder back to slip it off, I saw that her bust was truly monumental.

"Might as well make ourselves comfortable, Mr Flaythm," she said briskly, lowering herself into the armchair facing me, and languorously smoothing her tight blouse over her jutting curves.  "Of course, some said you must be an imposter and I confess I entertained doubts myself, but now I have met you no doubt remains.  None at all.  You are every inch a Flaythm.  Every inch."

"I only hope the others concur, ma'am."

She swatted the notion waspishly away.  "They don't count, Mr Flaythm.  I am the mistress here, my opinion alone matters.   Now, you said you wished to trace your relations.  I'm afraid you'll be disappointed there.  Your great grandfather, the colonel, had but one sibling, a brother.  He in turn had only the one child, and that child died without issue.  I'm afraid you are the last of the Flaythms."

I affected prostration at the news, but I was secretly relieved.  Living relatives might have been a complication, one I was prepared to deal with, but life would be much simpler without them.

"So you'll have to find yourself a wife," said Lady Shackles enthusiastically.  "Get busy and produce lots of children.  In the meantime, I shall ensure that you are fully and immediately accepted into the three villages as is your due.  Otherwise it might take years."

I was genuinely elated.  "So you'll allow me to live here, after all, ma'am?"

"But of course.  The Flaythms have served the Shackles for centuries.  You are one of us, and you will enjoy considerable family prestige here."

"And I'll be gratified to serve you in turn, ma'am."

"I'm sure you shall," she said, slightly coyly, I thought.  "Now, I assume you have adequate means?"

"Yes ma'am, as I told you, my grandfather prospered in South Africa and produced a fortune in diamonds.  My father foolishly lost much if it, but I still enjoy a substantial private income."

"Yet, despite that, you still wish to live in Nether Slype?"

I feigned tearful emotion.  "Of course, ma'am.  It's my . . . my home."

Lady Shackles leapt towards me, perched herself on the arm of my sofa and her hand eagerly caressed my shoulder.  "Oh Mr Flaythm," she said with rapture.  "You are a prodigal returned, and you are more than welcome.  I look forward to our developing a close and fruitful — friendship."

"You fill me with rapture, ma'am," I croaked, biting back my crocodile tears in the way I thought a Flaythm ought, and reflecting that I'd well and truly fallen on my feet.

Lady Shackles withdrew to her chair again and we talked about where I might live.  To give my pose credence, I had converted all my assets into liquid form, and deposited most in a South African bank.  When I told her ladyship that I could install myself in the village at a few days notice it was the truth.  She appeared overjoyed and decided to give me a large, rambling cottage on the outskirts as befitted my apparent high status. 

"It's only six bedrooms but that'll do for the time being."

"Time being?"

"Until you find a wife, of course.  That won't be a problem for you; we have a massive surplus of available women here.  And you’re a Flaythm, so you can take your pick of them.  But I counsel you to choose wisely and not weaken your Flaythm blood.  And then," she added enthusiastically, "when you've found a suitable woman, get down to it with a will and impregnate her, time and time again!"

I blushed slightly.  "Yes, ma'am.  And I'll follow your generous  advice — naturally."

While we spoke, I had studied the room.  It was the sort of panelled affair you expect to find in such a building, lined with ancient, dusty, books of no possible interest or value, and even duller pictures.  Though one arrested me: a florid-faced scowling man in the naval uniform of Napoleonic times.  He was standing in front of what appeared to be a huge pile of steak tartare.  Beneath the picture, in a glass case, was a heavy cat of nine tails, though it looked as thought it had fifteen or twenty tails, and these were knotted at intervals and embellished with an assortment of, vicious hooks, spikes and other malicious ironmongery. 

Lady Shackles positively glowed at my interest.  "I see you've noticed my great ancestor, Admiral Lord Shackles."

"My grandfather spoke of him, many times, ma'am," I affirmed, hoping I wasn't lying myself into a corner.

"Of course he would have.  We're so very proud of him," she said, her face flushing with ancestral joy.  "Just think.  The only Royal Navy officer ever to flog an entire crew to death in a single session.  He did it with his own hand, you know.  Ripped their backs out in bloody gobbets."

I tried not to blench.  "So I understand, ma'am.  An outstanding feat of seamanship."

"And he was so efficient.  Amazing!  He started work after a late breakfast, you know, and finished well before elevenses."

"Stupendous," I simpered.  What else could I say?

"And as you must already know, his second in command, Captain Rickett Flaythm, stepped forward and gallantly offered to hold his coat for him while he administered the punishment." 

"Indeed, ma'am, it's a matter of immense family pride to us."

"Yes, a superb testimony to the captain's breeding and the Shackles Patent Flogger's efficacy."  She walked across the glass case, her face burning with enthusiasm.  I noticed how her well-developed horsewoman's buttocks heaved and strained like two bound slaves against the tight captivity of her jodhpurs.  "And here it is.  The very flogger the admiral used to achieve his stupendous feat."

"I'm overawed to be in its presence ma'am," I lied, trying not to look at the hideous thing.

She gazed up at the portrait, her hands clasped in schoolgirl rapture.  "And there he is, standing proudly before the product of his achievement.  Just think — eight hundred men ripped to pieces in under three hours . . . .  It makes the blood surge."

I suddenly realised what the steak tartare really was, and turned away. 

"Of course, had the navy been wise enough to adopt the Shackles Patent Flogger, there would have been no mutinies at Spithead and the Nore.  The men would have learned the true meaning of the word punishment."

"Without doubt, ma'am.  A criminal folly"

"Criminal.  Lamentable.  Softness, Mr Flaythm.  Softness.  That's the country's ill.  We seem to have forgotten all about discipline."

"To our great cost,  ma'am," I resolutely toadied.

"Except in Nether Slype, of course.  No silly softness here.  No insolence.  No disobedience.  The last stronghold of the firm hand, the disciplinarian, as I'm sure your grandfather told you."

"Indeed, ma'am, and thank heaven for it," I simpered, with no idea at all what she was talking about — though perhaps I should have twigged by then.

"Oh, Mr Flaythm!"  She positively skipped across the room to me, all girlish and gushing.  "This is a true meeting of minds.  A wonderful day for both of us.  Just think!  The Shackles and the Flaythms united again after all this time — mistress and servant.  And friends.  True friends, I hope."

"Your deep condescension overwhelms me with joy, ma'am."

She took my hands in hers wrung them with unnerving intensity.  I noticed that her breathing had shortened.  "Oh Mr Flaythm.  Not half so much joy as your return promises to give me."

"I don't quite understand you, ma'am," I stammered.

"Have you any idea what it's like for me here?  This life . . . this cold friendless existence.  Blue-blooded among peasants . . . and other inferiors . . . with a mad incapable husband.  No one I can trust . . . no one I can turn to . . . or confide in . . . open my heart to.  No one I can . . . can . . . ."

"Can what, ma'am?"

"Can I be brutally frank with you?  As a Flaythm I feel I can talk intimately to you as I could to no other without soiling myself.  Please?"

"You do me too much honour, ma'am."

Very well."  She paused and swallowed, smoothing her blouse over her huge bust again.  "I must be blunt.  Have you any idea how cold and empty my bed is, Mr Flaythm?"

"Ma'am!"

"I don't mean physically cold, of course.  I have countless hot water bottles.  And if I chose I could summon any well-hung man in the three villages to service me to satisfaction whenever I wished.  But, of course, I cannot."

"Cannot, ma'am?  But surely—"

"The considerations of class, Mr Flaythm!  How could I allow a dirty peasant to crawl up my nightie, no matter how well equipped he was for the job of gratifying me?"

I cleared my throat.  "Perish the thought, ma'am."

She paused and looked at me wistfully.  "You understand.  Of course you do.  And I assume you know all about Flavius."

"Your husband, ma'am?"

"Husband in name.  He's mad, Mr Flaythm.  Stark staring mad.  And worse — incapable of producing any sort of erection."

I blushed.  "How dreadful for you, ma'am."

"Totally incapable of pleasuring a woman, let alone a hot-blooded sexually-demanding one."  She flung herself down on the sofa beside me, gasped, and threw her arms possessively round my neck.  "And I'm very highly sexed, you see," she panted.  "I have needs.  Burning, desperate needs, that can only be quenched by a well-equipped, vigorous, and attentive man of the right class.  And I couldn't help observing, Mr Flaythm, the more than satisfactory bulge in your trousers, and I flatter myself that it distended when you first saw me."

"Ma'am?"

"Let us be frank with each other, as only true friends can.  When I spoke of a meeting of minds, I confess that I was dissembling.  I was thinking of our bodies too."

"Bodies, ma'am?"

"You correct me again, Mr Flaythm.  Can I hope that when we first saw each other, we were mutually aroused.  I know I was.  Dare I hope that our only thoughts were of our sexual organs — yours and mine — ecstatically copulating?"

"Ma'am, I—"

Her embrace tightened and her breathing became ragged.  She thrust her big bust into my face and started stroking the back of my head with fluttering hands.  "For God's sake call me Griselda when we're alone!"  Suddenly, her lips were working vigorously on mine.  Her legs splayed either side of me, and her jodhpur-clad crotch started rubbing vigorously against my groin.  The desperate power of her kiss felt as though it was wrenching my tongue out by its roots.  I tried to struggle free but this only excited her more, her legs thrashed, her crotch worked more feverishly, and her powerful arms crushed my remaining breath from me.  I felt the inevitable stirring in my loins but fought to suppress it; I was not sure whether I wanted to commit to being Griselda Shackles' sex toy.

"My God, you're well endowed, Owen!" she gasped.  "A true Flaythm!  How you stimulate me!"

Her crotch now flexed with increasing vigour for several minutes before she finally groaned, slowed, flopped on me exhausted.  Her powerful grip relaxed and she lay on me panting.

At that moment there was a knock at the door.  Lady Shackles leapt up from me as though electrocuted, and fled across the room, desperately smoothing her blouse.

"Enter!"

Thwacks the butler came in.  "My apologies, ma'am, but His Lordship is becoming, er . . . agitated again."

"But we've already sent him a girl."

Thwacks coughed deferentially.  "His Lordship appears to have . . . finished with her, ma'am."

"Already?"

"So it would seem, ma'am."

"Very well.  Send down another.  But that's the last for today — there's a limit to my indulgence."

"Very good, ma'am."

Thwacks bowed and withdrew.

"I thought you said your husband was impotent?" I said as the door closed.

"So he is."

"Then what precisely is he doing down there?"

"Never mind about him!" she cried, bearing down on me, her bosom leaping and swaying.  She threw herself back on top of me.  "Our time together is too precious to waste on him.  Let's talk about us."

"Yes, but—"

"I was such a selfish cow just now, my darling.  Masturbating myself on you.  Gratifying my seething lust for you while frustrating your lust for me."

I gritted my teeth, Flaythm fashion.  "I can bear it, Griselda—"

"I were already yours, I'd beg you to take me outside, strip me naked, and lavishly horse-whip me for my selfishness until your arms ached."

"Perish the thought, Griselda."

"No, my darling.  You would have the right and I would deserve it.  A woman needs discipline.  What right have I to take sexual pleasure from you without giving it in return?  It was unforgivable.  I should be thrashed."  She bit back a choking gasp.  "But I'm a married woman — if only in name.  If it were know abroad that there had been any sort of passionate exchange between us, your life here would be ruined before it had started, and my good name would be in tatters."

"I know, and it tortures me" I said bravely, though I hadn't a clue why.

"Please forgive me, Owen."

"It goes without saying, Griselda."

"Oh!" she panted, placing her hand on her heaving bosom.  "I don't deserve it, this Flaythm gallantry — allowing me to enjoy our bodies without giving pleasure in return.  But not for ever, my brave lover.  I'll be rid of Flavius within the year."

"You can't be sure of that, Griselda!"

"Trust me.  My mind is made up.  Now I've met you, I would dispose of him today if I could.  But I mustn't be precipitate.  Appearances are everything.  It must look natural.  After all, he is Lord Shackles.  But an opportunity will present itself, and then I shall be alone, free, available, still sexually frustrated — frantic to be pleasured and pleasure and pleasured until I bleed."  She seized me again with such abandon she nearly broke my ribs, and her frenzied mouth devoured my face.  "Then I'll pull out your gleaming manhood, Owen.  I'll suck it, I'll worship it, I'll devour every glorious inch of it in my every aching hole; I'll toss myself up and down on it like a mad woman until the sheets catch fire — O my stallion." 

"What have I done to deserve such joy, Griselda?"  I gasped, trying to conceal my mounting anxiety despite my inevitable erection.

"Isn't it obvious?  You're the only person here approaching my class.  How could I enjoy any but a Flaythm masculine capability without indelibly lowering myself?  It has to be yours, Owen, or no one's, and I'm tired of going without.  But enough of this," she said dramatically.  "We must part for now, before we drive ourselves insane with our frustrated sexual frenzy."

For a moment I could summon no appropriate rejoinder, and she gave me no time to think of one.  Leaping up from me, she rushed to the bell, pulled it, and Thwacks appeared quicker than geni out of a lamp.

"You rang, ma'am?"

"Mr Flaythm is leaving now, Thwacks," she said bravely, her jutting bust heaving so violently that it threatened to pop all the buttons on her blouse.  "Be so good as to show him out."

"Very good, ma'am."

She turned to me, her face wrought with emotion, and extended her hand.  I struggled painfully off the sofa and staggered across to her.  Bowing as low as my bruised ribs would allow, I kissed her fingers and withdrew backwards.  Thwacks led me out, but as I left the room Griselda called me back.  I turned to find her bearing down on me yet again.  I braced myself for the impact; her arm hooked round my neck; she dragged me back into the room and slammed the door in Thwacks' astonished face.

Out of Thwacks' view, she devoured me again like a starving tigress.  As I sagged against the door gasping for breath, I felt her fingers reach down into my groin and explore it.

"Keep it nice and stiff for me, Owen my darling.  Enjoy the women in the village for a year.  Exercise your fucker well and get it into training for me.  But when the year is up and Flavius is dead, this heavenly shaft of joy will be mine, and my dripping cunt will be yours and yours alone for ever.  Now go!"

3. Some quaint village customs

There were advantages and disadvantages to my remarkable progress.  I would soon be installed in the village of my dreams, and it was clear that I would be welcomed and given a status that I had never expected — and didn't particularly want.  I also had the close and avid support of Griselda Shackles — but that was a two-edged sword.   There would be clear advantages to a close relationship with her, and despite her nose and her front teeth, her body would be more than acceptable once the lights were out.   But I reflected that there would be consequences if I ever tried to withdraw from it, or she cooled, or if I disappointed her in any way.  Furthermore, I wished to bear no responsibility for her husband's death, no matter how mad he might be — for she clearly intended to murder him.  Thinking further, I was alarmed at the prospect of being murdered in turn if I ever became an encumbrance.

I had no doubt that she believed me to be Owen Flaythm.  I mollified my apprehensions by telling myself that in a year's time she would probably have found some other stallion to ride.  All the same, I would be wise to contrive a means of cooling her ardour without being thrown out of the village for it.  It seemed best to ensure her husband's continuing health, though the means of achieving this were unclear.  Nevertheless, I would work on it.  I persuaded myself that as I familiarised myself with my new environment, means would present themselves.

Meanwhile, I thought I would be wise to play along with her.

However, as those first few weeks passed, my anxieties abated.  She hadn't forgotten about me, but her ardour seemed to have cooled.  She gave a reception when I returned to take up residence, and she was a model hostess, in a brisk, horsey way.  I often saw her trotting round the village — booted and jacketed, hand imperiously on hip.  As she passed the men's hands would twitch to their forelocks, and the women would sketch a curtsey.  She ignored them all, but when she saw me her face would light up and she would wave.  On a couple of occasions when I walked up the valley to Long Wallop, along the lane through the fields that carpet the valley floor in that direction, a big black old Daimler swept past.  I noticed it because there are so few cars in the three villages, and I saw that Thwacks was driving it, and in the back sat Griselda, waving and smiling.  On one occasion, when it was raining, she offered me a lift, but if I'd hoped that she would sexually assault me, I would have been disappointed.  She asked me how I was getting on, if I was making friends, and all the usual things you ask a newcomer, but there was no frantic face-devouring, or crotch groping.  I suppose the presence of Thwacks in the front seat was a factor, but she made no attempt to extend even a finger to stroke my hand with, and she could have done that easily enough.  So her earlier behaviour perplexed me even more.  Had it been some sort of test?  I didn't know, but I would have been glad of her new-found restraint had there not always been a coyness about her suggesting a shared schoolgirl secret between us.

  The lack of personal cars is a peculiarity of the three villages, seeing that they are so remote.  I keep my Jaguar, of course, though I scarcely use it, and that I suppose is the reason.  People rarely travel outside their own village, and then only to one of the other three.  There are exceptions, of course: the doctor, the vet, and other professionals.  The local farmers have their Land Rovers.  You see more vans, tractors and lorries than private cars.  For the need to be always dashing here and dashing there is alien to Nether Slype.  There are several local taxis, as well as a minibus, and occasionally using these works out much cheaper than running your own car, given the lifestyle.  Not that money is the issue, the villages are prosperous and the standard of living is high.  People work in and around the villages, on the farms and in the woods which they coppice for timber as they have for centuries.  A number of large workshops make hand-crafted, top-end hardwood furniture, much of which goes overseas, and others turn out fence panels and the like.  They send top-quality free-range eggs, beef, lamb, game, and poultry to butchers and restaurants countrywide.  

My 'cottage' was a glorious rambling seventeenth-century timbered house, standing behind high yew hedges, far back from the lane at the end of  a snaking drive at the village's edge.  The ridiculously modest rent included a plump little maid, Ginny, who came daily, and a gardener who came twice a week, and it was made clear that a man of my means would be able to hire other domestic help without difficulty. 

Once installed, I threw myself into village life with zest, eager to recover years lost in grey modernity.  I joined committees and local societies, and Griselda's interest ensured that I was welcomed with alacrity.  I started attending church again, where my exalted position entitled me to use the pew directly behind Griselda's.  She, of course, occupied the front pew in splendid isolation, her husband being too mad to attend.  I did not attend from any deep religious zeal, but because it was part of my deep rediscovered culture.  I sang hymns I'd forgotten since childhood, and the feeling was good.  For some indefinable reason I felt a better person for it, and I assumed that those who sang alongside me were good people too.

They are, as the run of humanity goes, but appearance is deceptive.  In some respects, the world is the same everywhere, no matter how different it might look and feel.  During my first few weeks in Nether Slype, I thought I had rediscovered lost innocence, because despite the strange goings on at Slype Hall, the surface seemed so innocent.  But, with time you come to know a place better, like an angler knows his stretch of river.  He knows what lies beneath the placid, smiling face of the water — where the deeps are, where the hungry pike lurk, the subtle currents you can never see but feel tugging at your feet, and precisely where to cast your lure to catch the juiciest fish.

I've learned that Nether Slype is like that, benign, idyllic, serene — and deadly.  Deadly, that is, unless you learn to enjoy its darker undercurrents and secret pleasures.  But if you do, then the three villages soar beyond the confines of the humdrum world, and you enter paradise.

I should have twigged some of the dark undercurrent earlier, but I hadn't.  I had been preoccupied and besides, I had no reason to expect that the three villages were as unusual as I now know them to be.  But strange customs started to manifest themselves almost immediately after my arrival.

Perhaps there is inbreeding after all.  It is certainly true to say that nearly all the women in the three villages are, like Griselda, extremely busty, and like Griselda they have finely developed and prominent bottoms.  To put it another way, you'll hardly ever see a flat-chested woman or a scraggy-arsed one there.   I noticed this during my first few days — how could any red-blooded man not notice it?  It being late summer, and warm, there were wobbling buttocks and bouncing breasts everywhere, and the nipples that poked through the thin summer blouses and bras were fat and perky.  It is difficult for a single man  not to gaze at such things, and they drew my gaze like magnets draw iron filings.

I was leaving the post office one morning, a few weeks after my arrival and stepped aside for a woman whose breasts were truly magnificent, even by Nether Slype standards.  Her blouse was low-cut, her cleavage deep and freckled, and the nipples poking through her blouse were the size of my thumbs.  I ogled her, discreetly, I thought.

I felt a tap on my arm and turned to see Ted Foxter, the gamekeeper at Slype Hall.  Griselda had introduced me to him on my arrival and I had already joined him for a few pints at The Seven Stripes.

"You don't want to go ogling that, Mr Flaythm."

"Was I?" I said, disingenuously.

"You were, and she's a married woman.  Look too interested and you'll upset the husband."

"I'm sorry," I said.  "I meant nothing — and I didn't notice she was wearing a ring."

"Feel your way carefully, Mr Flaythm.  There are two classes of women in Nether Slype — excepting her ladyship, of course — those that are married or spoken for, and those that aren't.  You stay well away from the first class, and you can pretty well do what you like with the second — and God knows there's plenty to choose from.  You'll come to know who's who in time.  In the meanwhile, check before you make a move."

"And what are the rules if I find an available woman I fancy?"

"Get stuck in, of course."

"Provided she's agreeable."

"If she isn't, you show her the error of her ways, Mr Flaythm — until she is."

I didn't understand him, though, of course, I pretended to, replying to his sly wink with one of my own.  I had lived long in the outside world, the world of women's rights that eschewed any sort of sexism or assumption of predatory male domination.  I had yet to learn that these notions were alien to the three villages, so for the next few days I consciously avoided looking hungrily at any woman.  It was difficult with ripe temptation is everywhere, and although the women seemed very friendly, I became aware that there might be other local rules of conduct, so I remained wary.

The relationship between the sexes started to become apparent a few days later.  There are many shaded footpaths in Nether Slype, and one runs along the bottom of my long rear garden.  It provides a short cut to the village centre and I already used it frequently.  I was walking home from the library when I heard an abrupt bark of command.

"Liz!  Out here!  This instant!" 

I smiled, reflecting that few men in the outside world would dare speak to their wives in such a peremptory fashion. I was intrigued to see the outcome, assuming that the wife would march out and give her husband a mouthful in return.   I noticed that there was a small chink in the hedge, and my curiosity prompted me to look through it.  There I saw a long orchard garden much like my own.  A middle-aged man was standing there, not far from me, looking furious, his arms tightly folded.  I saw his wife, a blonde, broad hipped woman, come running out of the house towards us looking nervous.  She was wearing a tee-shirt and short, she had big thighs, and although I couldn't see it, I knew that her big bottom would be wobbling delightfully.  She drew up to her husband and he pointed furiously at the grass near his feet.

"You did that, didn't you!"

To my surprise she hung her head and flushed like a schoolchild pulled out before the class.  "Yes husband.  I'm truly sorry, husband," she said breathlessly.  "Please don't punish me."

"What precisely have you done?"

"I'm sorry husband.  I didn't see them.  Please."

"I said, what!!"

"I moved over the cowslips, husband.  I know I've disobeyed.  Please don't be severe with me."  There was a silence, she looked at her feet, and her arms hung limply at her side.

"So you knew what you'd done."

"Yes, husband," she whispered so softly that I only just caught her words.  "I know I should have confessed, but I was frightened."

The husband's face was stone.  He unfolded his arms and started to unbuckle his heavy leather trouser belt.  "Face the tree!" he snapped.

The wife's shoulders sagged.  Without another word she turned and stood as directed.  Her back was towards me now and I noticed that she was indeed a plump-bottomed lass.  Meanwhile the heavy belt was off and the husband wrapped it twice round his hand leaving about two feet of it hanging free.

"There'll be six for mowing down the cowslips and another six for not telling me."

"I understand, husband."

"Knickers down!"

The big bottom heaved and strained as she pulled down her tight shorts and then her knickers.  Both fell to her ankles, and I saw her two enormous globes, white above her sunburnt thighs.  My prick stiffened.

"Lean against the tree!"

She shuffled forward a few steps and leaned forward, bracing herself against the trunk.  The muscles in buttocks twitched in anticipation of what was to come.

"Count!"

The husband brought his arm back and the flying belt delivered a resounding blow across his wife's bare buttocks, and they quivered at the impact.

"One, husband."

The arm came back again, followed by a loud cracking retort and the plump bottom quivered again.

"Two, husband."

He whipped her with his belt as I've seen people whipping a dog with its lead, and I've never liked seeing the dumb creature so ill used.  Yet I felt no such qualm at watching this man ruthlessly spank his wife's bare bottom.  It was gloriously erotic, and I found that I had unconsciously started wanking myself as I watched.  The thrashing continued and it was only after eight sound strokes that the wife's count started to labour.  Her thighs were working now and her previously white cheeks displayed a broadening red stripe across them.  But her husband continued remorselessly.

"Ah!  Eight, husband."

Smack!

"Aaah!  Nine, husband."

I saw her head go back, and she was gasping and jerking at every stroke.

Smack!

"Aaaaah!  Ten, husband.  I'm so sorry husband."

He continued relentlessly.  Her thighs were twitching ceaselessly now and she was heaving her bottom up and down with a steady mechanical rhythm as people do when they're in pain.  I wanked faster.

Smack!

"Aaaaah!  Ooooh!   Eleven, husband.  Please be merciful."

I knew she was crying, I knew by the sob in her voice.  Her thighs wriggled and her plump darkening bottom cheeks twitched ever faster.  She was in severe pain now.  My wanking accelerated. 

Smack!

"Aaaaaaah!  Aaaaaaah!   Twelve, husband.  No more, I beg you."

Her whole body twitched, I could hear her cfrying, but the husband seemed unconcerned.  He slid his belt back through his trouser loops and buckled it.

"I'm finished now," he said calmly.

The wife collapsed weeping at the foot of the tree, her hands scrabbling and clawing at her soundly-thrashed and deeply-reddened buttocks.  I shot my load into the hedge.

But the husband merely turned away and continued surveying his garden.

The experienced perplexed me.  I was new to Nether Slype so I assumed the husband's behaviour to e an exception rather than a hallowed rule.  My main interest was in my own response to it.   I had never hit a woman.  I had been tempted to but had always considered it unmanly to use violence against a woman, besides which, it was taboo in the circles I moved in, and any man who beat a woman would have been despised for it.  Yet my prick had stiffened.  For me seeing the wife soundly spanked had been an erotic sexual experience, far more so than Griselda's attack up at the Hall, though I reflected that if that had been less of a shock, I would have enjoyed it more.  I remembered her comments about being horsewhipped and thrashed.  Surely that was just silly extravagant talk, the result of her self-induced sexual frenzy.  Certainly, that single instance of the husband spanking his wife was insufficient to make me revise this assumption.

My innocence was to be short lived. Only a couple of days later I was in the village shop buying groceries.

"I can't see any wholemeal bread," I said to Meg, the girl who usually serves behind the counter.

I expected her just to say "it's here", "it's there", or "we've run out".  But instead her face fell.  "Of course, Mr Flaythm.  You always buy wholemeal, don't you!"

"I much prefer it to white," I said casually.

"Then I'll fetch Mrs Bryce right away sir."

"No!  Really!  It doesn't matter," I remonstrated.

"I've been told I must, Sir," said Meg in a hushed voice, and she made for the back of the shop.

I hovered, feeling embarrassed at the fuss.  I heard Meg's voice through the open doorway,  "Another regular for wholemeal, Mr Bryce" and there was a note of deep relish in her voice as she added, "and Mr Flaythm of all people."

"Right!  That'll be double," said a stern male voice I assumed to be Mt Bryce's.  "Out you go, woman!"

Out from the back came Mrs Bryce, a pleasant –looking woman with a square face framed by dark-brown curly hair.  She walked up to me looking very contrite and stood before me like a supplicant, wringing her hands.

"I'm very sorry about the wholemeal, Mr Flaythm," she said quickly and slightly breathlessly, as if by rote.  "I forgot it was Friday, Sir , and I didn't order enough.  Please forgive me."

"Forgive?"  I laughed.  "Don't be silly.  I'll come back for some tomorrow."

"I'm dreadfully sorry for the inconvenience I've put you to, Sir."

"Forget it., Mrs Bryce."

"Thank you for being so forgiving, Sir," she said with a small curtsey, but her eyes never left the floor.  She turned and walked away towards the back of the shop.  Her hands disappeared round her front and she appeared to be adjusting her clothing; I heard the unmistakable sound of a fly zip.  Her hands reappeared and she hooked her thumbs inside her loosened waistband.  As she walked through the door to the back of the shop, her ample bottom was already emerging from her trousers.

"Leave the door open!" came the man's stern voice again.  "I want Mr Flaythm to hear this.   Get over the chair back!" 

Mr Bryce didn't tell his wife to count the strokes as the man in the garden had, but the sound of leather thrashing a woman's soft buttocks was the same.  I had clearly been mistaken to assume that the corporal disciplining of wives was an occasional and closet aberration in Nether Slype.

Meg sidled up to me, nodded and winked.  "She's getting double because it's you, Mr Flaythm.  Twelve.  I thought you'd like to know."

"How many others have there been?" I asked, wondering just how many strokes in total Mrs Bryce would receive for forgetting to order extra bread, and what the punishment would be for a genuinely serious offence.

"You're the seventh to voice disappointment," said Meg.  "She got six for each of the others."  She smirked.  "You don't mind when it's the boss's wife, do you, Sir!  And she's a real cow to me sometimes."

Out back, Mrs Bryce was grunting like a bull at each stroke.  It was hardly surprising seeing that she had by now received around forty during the course of the day and her bottom already must be sore, bruised, and swollen from her earlier ordeals.  Finally, the punishment ended, the door closed, and there was silence from the back..

"Can I get you anything else, Mr Flaythm?" asked Meg cheerfully.

I left the shop, stiff again.  My prick was stiff most of the time during those early days in the three villages, what with all the bouncing breasts and bottoms everywhere, and now the extra thrill of what promised to be participation in regular spankings, as an observer or auditor at least.   And I confess it did thrill me; it thrilled me very much, especially the spanking in the shop, which had been applied for my benefit.  A woman had had her bottom spanked, especially thoroughly, for my satisfaction.  The one disappointment was that I wished I were applying a strap to a nice plump bottom myself, and I saw no immediate prospect of doing this. I still assumed that a woman's bare bottom was only available for this sort of enjoyable attention from her husband. 

For this reason I made no move to either discipline or ravage my maid, despite her short skirt, low-cut blouse, and the come-hither looks she gave me.  I'd been told that the villages were teeming with available women, but I was sensible enough not to consider immediately rushing out and marrying one, simply for the undeniable pleasure of thrashing her bottom.   The same went for properly satisfying my prick.  There was stimulation everywhere and no release, or so I thought.  Yet I was soon to learn that I still hadn't plumbed the full pleasurable depths of Nether Slype.

4. Initiation

A few evenings later, I stopped by The Seven Stripes as I often do, for a pint or two and a chat with my new neighbours.  I had been in the village only for a few weeks, but I liked to think that they were starting to accept me genuinely, and not just because Griselda Shackles had told them to.  Their country reserve was breaking down, nearly everyone I passed in the course of the day stopped and chatted to me.  I was everywhere welcome, and I found them likable and neighbourly people. 

That evening I when walked into the pub, the four regulars round the bar all nodded.  I asked Dick Shag the landlord I'd met on my first visit, for my usual pint of local ale, for they have their own small brewery in Nether Slype.

"A pint of Nelly's Knockers, please Dick."

Dick's face fell.  "Dreadfully sorry, Mr Flaythm.  Nelly's Knockers are off Sir."

"Oh, well, what have you got?"

"Fanny's Fortune?  Rachels's Rump?  Easy Edna?"

"Whichever you recommend," I said

As Dick started to pour my beer, Ted Foxter sidled up to me. 

"You know you're entitled to satisfaction when the beer's off, don't you!"

"Satisfaction?"

"Aye, it's the custom," came a chorus from the others.

"You must demand it," said Ted impishly.

"Oh, I don't know," said Dick warily pushing my beer across to me.  "He's still new here."

"Nah, he's one of us," said Ted.  "He's a Flaythm.  And as a regular, he's entitled to satisfaction if his beer's off."

The chorus of agreement came again and Dick looked at me deeply for a few moments and then relented.  Reaching down under the bar he enquired gently,  "Would you like satisfaction, Mr Flaythm, Sir?"

I looked down to see what he was holding and there, and peeping discreetly over the back of the bar was the curved handle of a thin bamboo cane.  I blinked and was about to demur, but I was overwhelmed by a chorus from the others.

"Go on, Owen!"

"Show us what you're made  of, Owen!"

"Show us how the Flaythms do it, Owen?"

If I refused I would lose face.  So without properly thinking the suggestion through, I reached across and Dick pushed the cane into my hand.  It was long, thin, and very whippy, clearly made for the purpose.  I would have preferred to try my hand first in private, but I realised that I was facing a test I couldn't decline.  Come through it and I would be fully accepted; fail and I would be a laughing stock.  I made a few cuts and the cane whistled pleasantly, but what was the point of a cane and no bottom?  I turned enquiringly to Dick.

"Whose?  Which?  Er . . . ."

Dick put his head round the door behind the bar.  "Girls!  Out you come!  Mr Flaythm requires satisfaction.  Move yourselves!"

Immediately I heard the rattle of footsteps on the wooden floor behind and out trooped the three bar and kitchen maids.  They came round the bar, lined up in front of me looking coy but cheeky.  One of them giggled, nervously, as I later realised.  But at the time I feared that they thought me incapable of doing what was required, so I made a few more fearsome looking cuts through thin air

"What do you say to the customer?" said Dick sternly.

"Sorry about Nelly's Knockers, Mr Flaythm. Would you like satisfaction of our bare and willing bottoms, Sir?" chorused the three maids as though it was a huge joke.

I licked my lips now, sure that I was about to make a fool of myself.  I desperately wanted to try my hand on a nice ripe bottom, and I no doubt that the barmaids' bare bottoms were ripe and willing as they said, but I feared I was heading for a fall.  I dimly remembered hearing or reading somewhere that the cane is the aristocrat of corporal-punishment instruments, devastatingly effectively when expertly wielded, but much less so in the hands of an amateur.  I would be mercilessly exposed as a tyro.  "Well, I—"

"Don't mice words with wenches, lad!" piped up Old Horace, the retired shoe mender, shambling across to me.  "It's the cane and the strap that talks to a woman."  He turned to Nel, the youngest barmaid, who had giggled.  "You mind your manners, girl, or I'll tell your father to give you two dozen of the riding crop next time I see him!"

The girl whitened and hung her head contritely.  "Yes grandfather.  Sorry, Mr Flaythm."

"That's better," said Old Horace.  "Though too little too late, as you're going to find out, girl."  Then he turned to me, all solicitude, and patted me gently on the back.  "Don't be nervous, lad.  I've been whipping women for fifty years, and I know what I'm about.  I'll see you through it."

"Thank you, Horace."

"Right now," said Horace.  "The rule here is that every customer who misses a pint of his favourite gives each girl one stroke.  You're a three pint man—"

"Two," insisted Ted from behind the bar.

"Three!" chorused of regulars.

"Come on lads," pleaded Ted.  "I've a dozen or more regulars due later.  I want these girls to be able to stand up and wash glasses come closing time."

"Then you should have laid on the fucking beer!" snarled Ted.

"Aye," chorused the others in jolly unison.  "Three."

"Oh very well," sighed Ted, flinging down his cloth and folding his arms like a fishwife.  "Three it is."

"What do I do now?" I whispered in Horace's ear.

"What do you think?  Get Nel over a table, yank her knickers down, and give her plump buttocks three of the best."

"Right."  I tentatively extended my hand to take Nel gently by the arm.

"No, lad, you do it like this."  With one fluid motion, Horace stepped in front of me, took Nel by the scruff of the neck, summarily marched her across to the nearest table, and pushed her over it.  "Now the knickers, lad."

"Right."  I lifted Nel's full skirt and revealed a bulging pair of navy blue knickers.  I noticed the visible part of her buttocks and the tops of her thighs were already criss-crossed with half-a-dozen or more red welts.  I laid the cane on the table beside her took hold of her waist elastic and started to ease the knickers down.

"Sorry, lad," said Horace at my ear, gently removing my hand.  "Let me show you once and for all.  When you pull down a woman's knickers, whether you're going to feel her up, shag her, or thrash her, you don’t mess around — you do it this way."  He seized the elastic and whipped it down so fast that Nell's knickers fairly flew down her bare legs to her ankles, and her bottom, free of its restraint, bulged before me.  I felt my prick start to swell.

"Right, Horace," I said, taking up the cane again and flexing it self-consciously.  I was aware that five pairs of critical eyes were on me, not counting the other two maids'.  This was make or break for me.

I stepped back, and gave Nel's bare buttocks a few ranging taps, silently counting the raised welts to fifteen and wondering how many more they would receive before closing time.

"Excuse me, lad," said Horace, interrupting again.  "I take it you haven't done this before."

"Er — not with a light cane," I lied sheepishly.

"Then let me show you.  It's not like a strap, which only requires leverage and power.  With the cane it's speed and accuracy that counts.  For a start, you're too tense.  Relax!  Second, you step right back and use the full length of it.  Remember, the tip is travelling fastest under the greatest leverage.  If you apply a cane half way down its length you'll only tap her, no matter how much energy you put into it, and what's the point of that?  Third.  You don't aim at her bottom, but at a point six or so inches in front of her fanny.  In other words, you thrash right through the bottom with the extremity of the cane.  Understood?"

"Yes, Horace."

"Using the full length holds true whether you're using a strap, belt, riding crop, tawse, whip, or whatever: use the extremity and you can't go far wrong.  Correcting a woman is like hammering nails.  When you're hammering you use the full length of the hammer shaft and the same goes for thrashing a woman.  Now, relax, and cut right through, as fast as you can.  Start with the cane held right back behind your neck, and bring it right round in an arc through to that point in front of her pussy.  That way, she'll know what you're about."

"Right, Horace."

"Here, lad, let me show you."

Horace took the cane out of my hand  and stepped right back from Nel, tapping her bulging bottom several times with the extremity, his arm fully extended and her legs wriggled in anticipation.  "That's the range, lad.  Now watch!"  The brought the cane right back behind his neck, froze for a second, then with a brief high whistle, it whipped round.  With a piercing scream, Nel's bottom leapt off the edge of the table.  There was a murmur of approval from around the bar and I knew that I was in the presence of a master.  "Take note of  that, lad?" said Horace with pride.  "Unless she screams and her bottom leaps, you haven't done your job properly."

The cane went back behind Horace's neck again, froze for a second, then whistled again.  Nel screamed again and her bottom leapt even higher.  I saw that there were two more vicious red welts on it.

"Now, lad," said Horace with an expert's gravity, directing my attention, as though it were necessary, to Nel's bottom. "Notice my two welts.  Absolutely parallel and about an inch apart.   The art is to lay them on close.  Better still, on top of each other.  Ideally, you want to see one broad stripe developing, not a criss-cross.  Lay on a dozen heavy strokes on top of each other, and you'll be peeling her off the ceiling before you're done, and that's what you're aiming to do.  Now, I'm going to lay the third one between the other two, extra hard, like so—"

"Please don't grandfather—"

"Quiet, girl!"

The cane whistled, even more shrilly, Nel screamed her heart out, and her bottom leapt so high in the air that she almost dove head-first off the opposite side of the table.  I saw that she was quivering and crying, but that didn't stop the regulars from giving Horace a round of applause.  He handed me the cane.  "Now, lad,  Three more on top of mine."

"Oi, oi!" shouted Dick from behind the bar.  "She's had her three."

Horace turned on him.  "She's my granddaughter and I'll thrash her whenever I like — without your leave.  Now it's Owen's turn."

There was a another murmur of approval.  Dick raised his hands in surrender and carried on wiping the bar.

I stepped back from Nel.  The girl was sobbing but I couldn't appear callow in front of my audience.  Besides,  she had parted her legs slightly and her pink slit was winking at me between a fringe of downy brown hair.  My stiff prick took over from whatever remained of my conscience: I knew I was going to enjoy hearing her scream and I intended to watch her bottom and juicy little slit perform desperate acrobatic feats all over the table.

I brought the cane behind my neck, froze for a second and delivered a stinging swipe right through the red, twitching buttocks, missing Horace's stripe and catching Nell right across her slit.  She howled, jerked, and her legs writhed like fury.

The crowd round the bar applauded warmly.

"Not bad for starters," said Horace.  "Across her crack's as good a place as any."

Their was a murmur of agreement, then, as I drew the cane behind my neck, I saw a new red wheal across the crease between Nel's bottom and thighs and right across her slit.  The slit itself was splayed wide open, its lips quivering.  My work! I thought proudly.

The cane whistled, Nel screamed and leapt energetically this time.  Her legs wriggled even more and I noted with satisfaction that a second new stripe had appeared just above my first.  The cane came back a third time.  Aiming firmly through the gaping slit I consciously relaxed and then let fly with all my might.

Her scream was piercing.  Her whole body jerked off the table, jack-knifed, and she fell onto the floor, thrashing and clutching her crotch.

"Good shot!" chorused the regulars, and they rushed across to her, pulling her hands away and examining her.

"Three in a row," shouted one and they turned to give me an extended round of applause.

"Well done, lad," said Horace, gently patting me on the arm.  "You'll be on free beer all evening for that."

Two girls remained.  Despite Nel's suffering, these two looked remarkably uncontrite.

I chose Ruth, the kitchen maid next.  She was the slimmest and eldest of the three.  She must have been well over thirty and she wore her breasts lower than the other two did.  I'd removed her bra in my imagination several times when I'd drunk at the Stripes, fancying them to be pendulous, with large dark areolas.  I was pretty certain they'd be dark, for her hair was black, and her eyes and complexion also dark.  In former centuries she might have been presumed a witch.  It was a pity I could only thrash her bottom and not her breasts, but I wasn't going to enquire.  I foolishly assumed that tit-whipping was taboo in Nether Slype. 

I boldly took Ruth by the scruff of the neck and she came forward without resisting.  I marched her to the table and roughly pushed her across it..  My drinking companions cheered.  Next for her knickers.   I threw up her skirt over her back , took the elastic waist band of her black full-cut knickers in my hand and ripped them down. They fell no further than her knees but I was pleased with the result.  Her bottom was slightly slimmer than Nel's, and I noticed that, as well as a welter of strokes from earlier that night, it was criss-crossed with small scars, some white and ancient, others newer and still pink.  She'd certainly been comprehensively whipped in her thirty something years.  Although her thighs were also slimmer and didn't quite meet, I couldn't see her crack because of the forest of thick black hair that sprouted like a huge shaving brush between her lower buttocks and thigh tops.    

"Fucking Hell, Ruth," called one of the drinkers.  "When are you going to see a barber?  Nothing can get through that filthy jungle."

"Ha.  Ha.  Just because you can't get  your limp prick into a woman's cunt, Ned Ferris," quipped Ruth, and the men laughed.  "It doesn't mean a man couldn't."

"And the widest in Nether Slype at that," laughed Ted.

"Nah!  That was my wee hole you were fucking."

The men roared again.

"Thought I was being shagged by a dead maggot until I looked up and saw Ted Foxter on the other end of it."

The men fell about weeping with laughter.  One even spilled his beer.

"Come on, Owen, lay 'em on the mouthy bitch!" called Ted, who was less amused than the others.

Following Horace's instructions, I aimed for a point six inches in front of Ruth's extremely hairy pussy and laid on my first stroke with a resounding crack.  Nothing happened.

"Come on, Mr Flaythm, sir!" said Ruth cooly.  "Start!  I haven't got all fucking night to lie around here cooling my fanny."

The men roared.  I laid on another just above the first.

"Bloody hell!  Some filthy sod's trying to tickle my arsehole now."

I was laughing myself, now, so much so that I made a complete mess of the last stroke and merely glanced it off  her.

Ruth got up, curtseyed to her audience, and marched triumphantly off towards the kitchen to a great round of applause.

Rosie, the third girl, and by far the most buxom of the three, walked up to the table without prompting, dropped her skirt to show all the men she was wearing no knickers at all.  She sat on the edge of the table, leant back, and spread her legs invitingly wide, showing us all her orange pussy and pink open slit.  She flexed her muscles and her cunt winked open and shut for us several times, to a great round of applause.  My prick was so stiff now that I had to turn round quickly, and ease it past the elastic waist band of my underpants.  Meanwhile, Rosie pulled up a chair, knelt on the seat and bent over the table for me, sticking her big plump bottom invitingly in the air.

There were calls of "lay it on, Owen.  You couldn't miss that  one if you tried."

Rosie wriggled her bottom inviting again.  It was pink, with small freckles all over it.  It wobbled delightfully like a strawberry blancmange sprinkles with brown sugar, and in many ways it was as sweet..  I laid on three heavy strokes, but I'd lost my concentration in all the merriment, and although Rosie squealed and her bottom leapt at each of them, I guessed that she was performing for the benefit of  her audience.

When she'd been caned, she too marched triumphantly back to the kitchen, to a round of good-natured applause.  I received pats on the back for my efforts, and I decided I ought to buy a round of drinks for the entire gathering.  I could easily afford to, though I didn't make it a habit, considering it rather cheap to try to buy people's goodwill.

"Nellies Knockers are back on now," said Dick as he started to pull the first pint.

"I thought you were out of it," I said.

"No, I forgot to put a fresh barrel on earlier.  It hadn't quite settled when you came in."

Now that my desire was cooling, my conscience kicked back in.  The girls had been caned, not for their own negligence but Dick's.  I didn't feel bad about Ruth and Rosie, who could handle it and had made an entertainment of it.  But Nel was only about eighteen and it hadn't been so much fun for her.  I privately felt ashamed. 

One round followed another and as the evening wore on I became quite drunk.  My drinking companions left one after the other and, shortly before closing time, I was sitting alone in a corner, feeling content with the world, and wondering if I could be bothered to get up and take the short walk home.   

I looked up to see Ruth the black-haired, dark-eyed kitchen maid glancing at me speculatively.  Our eyes met and she walked across.  She was an attractive woman with a wide, well-shaped mouth, a pert chin and those glorious dark eyes shed dark light on me like pools of liquid night.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"I've had too much," I confessed, and I suppose my voice was slurred.

"Come on," she said.  "I'm done for the day.  I'll help you home if you like."

I almost refused, then I wondered why I should.  I looked up again, bathed in those glorious dark eyes, and an voice in the back of my reeling brain told me that I might be onto a shag here.  God knows I needed one.

"I think I might need help," I confessed.  "But I warn you I'm very drunk."

"You're not that bad, and the walk home will help sober you.  Come on!"

I hope so, I thought.  I won't be able to shag you unless I do sober up a bit.  And I desperately wanted to get inside a woman's knickers.

She leant down, her bodice filled, and I reflected that I also wanted to get inside her bra.  Not any bra either, but hers, and pull out those tantalising breasts.  She put her arm under mine, and with surprising strength she pulled me upright..  I staggered, and burped.

"Not going to be sick, are you."

"God, I hope not."

"Are you?  Tell me!"

"Don't think so," I slurred, staggering again, and the room revolved.  I realised that I probably wouldn't get home at all without her, and I probably wouldn't be able to shag, even if I did.

"If you feel it welling up, tell me immediately.  I'll help you."

"Feel what welling up?  A hard on?" I slurred, sagging against her.

She smiled.  "Not much chance of that.  I meant, if you feel you're going to be sick."

"God, I hope not."

"Do it!  All right?"

"Right."

She took my weight and helped me to walk unsteadily out of The Seven Stripes.  Outside the air felt cool.  I felt cold sweat on my forehead and scalp, and that was all I remember.  So I didn't see the large black Daimler that was parked outside on the green.

5. Ruth

When I woke next morning, warm sunshine was flooding through my bedroom window, my head was still slightly muzzy and I reckoned it would feel more so when I tried to get up.  Apart from my shoes, I was lying fully-dressed on my bed, though my collar and trousers were loosened.  I assumed that I had somehow managed to make my way up the stairs and done the necessary.  I suddenly realised that my bladder was bursting.  I jumped out of bed, staggered and headed for the door, missed it, bounced off the doorframe and somehow found my way to the bathroom, just before wetting myself.  Relieved, I stumbled back the bedroom, threw myself on the bed again, and waited for the room to stop revolving. 

It was then that I heard movement downstairs.  Alarmed, I leapt up, shambled to the end of the passage and peered round the corner down the stairs, and saw Ruth.

"Ruth?" I squeaked.

She was coming upstairs carrying a cup of dark coffee and she was wearing my dressing gown.  She accurately read the expression on my face.

"Hope you don't mind me wearing this. Mr Flaythm, but you needed looking after last night, and I wanted to wash my dress.  I don't want to go back to work smelling stale."

"When are you due back there?"

"Couple of hours."

"What time is it?"

"Ten.  Come on!  Lie down and drink this.  Then I'll bring you some breakfast."

I toddled back to the bedroom and flopped back of the bed.  She climbed on with me and held both me and coffee while I drank."

"Last night," I said.  "We didn't . . . I didn't . . . I mean we—"

She put her arm round my shoulder.  "Mr Flaythm.  Last night you were in no condition to do anything.  I managed to get you up here and you just sparked out."

"I just wondered," I said, taking another mouthful of the hot coffee.

"Why?  What if we had?  Would it have mattered?"

"Yes," I giggled — it must have been the after effects of all the booze.  "Because I'd have had no memories to treasure of the experience."

"No need to be sarcastic!" she said harshly.

"I'm not being."

"Yes you are.  I've seen the way you look at my tits, thinking, bloody hell, look at those horrible saggy old jugs.

"I don't think that at all."

"Oh really?  What then?"

"It's a bit embarrassing," I said, looking into my coffee mug and taking another mouthful, my head clearing rapidly.

"Why?  We're on your bed together, I'm wearing your dressing gown — and not a lot underneath."

"Really?"  I said, poking my finger in the neck of the dressing gown and trying to open it.

She slapped my hand away, but only payfully. 

"If you want to get inside my undies, Mr Flaythm, you'll have to tell me what you really think about my tits.

"Will I get inside them then?"

She gave me that dark, speculative look again, and her hand slid tantalisingly down my stomach, then stopped short.  I groaned.

"Let's say that if I believe what you say, I'll give you a fuck if you want one."

"Yes please."

"And if I also like what I hear, I'll give you a nice, slow, tight, extra-quality fuck.  What do you say about that?"

"Yes please."

Her hand moved slowly in circles around my prick.  She leaned close and whispered in my ear, her lips brushing it as she spoke.  "And whatever you might think about my tits and my hairy pussy, you'll find that I've got a very . . . very hot and satisfying cunt.  And that's a promise.  What do you say?"

My prick stiffened in jerks now.  I put my coffee down on the bedside table with a clatter and almost spilled it. 

"Well, If you insist on the truth—"

"Go on!  You're onto a fuck, regardless."

"To be perfectly truthful. I've always fancied you have really long breast with big dark aureolas and long nipples."

She hoisted an eyebrow.  "That turns you on, does it?"

I scratched my ear.  "Well.  Yes, actually."

"More than my cunt?"

"I don't know.  The way you describe it, that sounds pretty fantastic too."

"Hmmm!  We'd better find out then, hadn't we!"

She turned towards me, opened the neck of her dressing gown, showing me her generous cleavage and to tops of her black bra cups.  "Like to be turned on some more, mister big prick?" she breathed invitingly as she nuzzled up close to me, a single finger stroking my erection through my trousers..  "Would you like a feel first?"

He undid the cord, the dressing gown fell open and I felt inside.  She was warm and her skin was wonderfully smooth, like velvet.  I ran my hands over her bottom and between her legs, over her fully-cut knickers.

"Come on!" she giggled in my ear.  "You didn't have any trouble getting them off last night.."

"I thought we were going to show me your breasts," I reminded her.

"Perhaps you'd like to feel round my bra cups first, to be sure you really want me to get them out for you," she suggested

I moved my hand up to the lacy cups.  He breasts were very soft, and as I ran my hands over them, I felt that her nipples were indeed long and also hard."

"Yes, please get them out for me."

She pushed herself off the mattress, straddled me, and slipped off the dressing gown.  Her breasts swung bulky and low against her thin lacy bra cups, and I could see the tantalising shadow of large dark disks round her protruding nipples.  She leant forward to unclip the bra, the breasts surged forward towards me and I saw the full, glorious length of her  cleavage.   Kneeling upright again, she held the loosened cups in her hands to ensure that she didn't yield up her treasure prematurely, and then, ever so slowly, she started to lift.  The white undersides of their mouth-watering cargo slid from the slowly rising cups, half and inch at a time, then, just as it seemed it would slide for ever, I saw the first hint of her large, chocolate brown aureolas.  The bra lifted even more slowly now, tantalisingly so. Suddenly the breasts were falling free, they slapped her stomach, seemed to bounce, then swayed forwards toward me, ripe and heavy.

Ruth threw the bra across the room with panache.  "I imagine we won't need that for a bit."  She crossed her arms behind her back and thrust her breasts towards me.  "Satisfactory?"

I took them in my hands, gently stroking the undersides, and gazed admiringly at the large brown buttons and the long pink nipples dangling tastily before my face.  Ruth leaned forwards more and they brushed the hard teats against my lips, and  I put out my tongue to taste them as she swung them slowly back and forth.  She knew how to tease, but I didn't mind.  She put one hand behind my head, took a breast in the other, stroked it to make sure the nipple was fully up, then slid it slowly and deeply into my mouth.

"How do you like the taste?" she enquired, and her voice was smoky.

"Mmmm.  Wonderful.  Does the other one taste the same?"

"Greedy man!"  She giggled. "You'd better suck it and see."  She swung the other nipple so that it dangled just in front of my lips.  Reaching down, she put her hand behind my head and lifted my mouth to that one too.

"How's that?" she asked, lifting it out.  "Tasty as the other one?"

She lifted up out dangled it and then slowly lowered it into my gaping mouth again.  "Take your time.  I don't want you leaving the table hungry."

As she said this she unzipped my flies a stated stroking my rigid prick.

"I think you deserve the slow, tight fuck.  Would you like it now?" she enquired huskily.

"Yes please, Ruth.  Please."

She got up and I raised my bottom while she slid my trousers and pants off, then deftly unbuttoned my shirt and slid that off too.  Stepping out of her knickers she straddled me again, wonderfully naked.  Taking my swollen prick she started stroking it with her pussy hair.  I smiled.

"Like that?" she asked.

"Oh yes.  Ted Foxter doesn't know what he's talking about."

"I know, and I'll show you why."

With a quick stroke of her finger she parted her hair and slid herself over me, hot and moist.

"How's that?"

"Wonderful."

The sensation changed.  I felt my prick being slowly squeezed as if my a powerful, lubricated fist and as Ruth heaved her body the tight fist slid up and down the length of my shaft, pulling and pushing.

"How's that?" she enquired.

"Unbelievable," I croaked.

"Ted Foxter's never had it like this," she grinned.  "I only tighten my cunt and give the slow fuck to men I like."

"It's not a cunt, Ruth — it's paradise," I groaned.

Indeed it was.  My erection grew, and grew painful against its unyielding constraint;  The most it grew, the tighter she gripped it, Until I felt it was being crushed.  Yet if Ruth's cunt was an instrument of torture, it was a torture I didn't want ever to end.  Just as I thought my prick would burst, she loosened her hold and I ejaculated long and deep into her.   I shot and shot.  I thought I would shoot for ever.  Then I lay back, feeling blessedly at peace.

"Thank you," I said.

She leant over me and kissed me with surprising tenderness. 

"I can think of only two other men in the village who've ever thanked me for a fuck," she said a little later.

"What do the others say?"

"Nothing.  Your typical Nether Slyper unzips his flied, pulls his pathetic little cock out — shoves it in — jerk, jerk, jerk — squirt — then zips his flies up and walks away again.  Mind you, they don't get what you just got.  They get it loose.  I make the miserable fuckers work for their bit of fun.  But not you."  She stroked the back of my hand.

"Because you like me?"

"Yes," she said, her dark eyes looking frankly into mine.

"Why?"

"Because you you laughed at my comments about the limp pricks at the bar, but not theirs about me."

"How do you know? You were looking the other way."

She smirked.  "Oh!  I've a fine directional ear for a dirty laugh."

"You're a lot brighter and wittier than they are."

Her eyes widened momentarily.  She leant across the table and kissed me again.  "Carry on like that and I'll start falling in love with you."

"Why?  Because I paid you a well deserved compliment?"

"Men in Nether Slype don't pay compliments.  They just grunt and take."  She clasped my hand.  "Don't ever change.  Don't ever lose that."  She slipped on the dress she'd washed and ironed and picked up her bag.  "I'd best go.  You can guess what my punishment will be if I'm late.  And Dangling Dick can make even me squeal."

"And what about Nel?"  I asked, remembering the debauchery of the previous evening.

Ruth shrugged.  "Sore, but she'll learn.  She'll have to."

"Learn what?"

"What Rosie and I know.  Make 'em laugh and you get off lightly.  Act the poor frightened little wench and you inflame them, and you get it ten times worse."

"Inflame me, you mean," I said remembering how I had thrashed Nel with a will, and, now that Ruth had quenched my lust like no woman ever had before, I was ashamed.

"I wasn't your fault.  It was that revolting grandfather of hers.  It was the third time that evening he'd given that ghastly demonstration of his prowess.  His own granddaughter too, displaying her like a whore, and she's only eighteen.  It's his one skill you see, and of course, typical of a man, he has to show off his little bit of tawdry prowess to his boozy friends.  He was a lousy shoe mender, you know."

"Perhaps, but I did my bit too."

"You couldn't have done otherwise, Mr Flaythm."

"Owen."

She smiled and gave me the frank glance again.  "You couldn't have done otherwise, Owen — the way they were egging you on."

"But I wanted to, Ruth.  I wanted to.  And now I've done it I . . . ."

She squeezed my hand again.  "Not to worry.  You're a nice man deep down."

"I don't think so."

"But you are.  We all have to conform.  Anyway, must go.  And if you want the slow job again, just give me the nod.  I'd rather shag you than any of the others.  Anyway, must dash."

And that was wisdom of a sort, I thought.  Now I was in Nether Slype, I supposed I had to do what they did, to a degree, but it was a poor excuse.  Moreover, I knew that I would not only do it again but enjoy it again.  But I vowed that in future I would spare Nel and any like her.

6. Griselda

"Owen!"

I was walking along the bridle path back from the church when I heard the soft clip-clop of hooves on the sweet-rancid-smelling leafmould, for it was deep autumn now, and their had been rain.  I turned to see Griselda trotting towards me, in hacking jacket, boots, and jodhpurs, her huge bosom jerking up and down like a pair of pile drivers.

  "Hello."

She reined up, jump down vigorously and smiled at me while she walked round to the horse's head and pulled down the bridle to lead it.    

"Hello, Griselda," I said.  "I haven't seen you for a while."  I hadn't — not to speak to at least, though she'd waved to me when she'd ridden past a couple of times.

"I know," she pouted.  "I'm beginning to wonder if you care for me at all."

"Why?"  I asked disingenuously.

"I never see you."

"I never see you."

She kicked glumly at a stone.  "So many times I've looked from my bedroom window at night, hoping to see you standing below, looking forlornly up at my window.  But you never are."

I thought it would be best to play along.  "I couldn't withstand the temptation, Griselda," I said, too earnestly I thought.  "I'd know that you were lying beyond the window in your empty bed, aching—."

"Oh, my poor darling!"  She pounced on me, her lips working feverishly over my face and my throat, her strong arms crushing me as she forced me back against a tree.  Her hand snaked down between us to my crotch and she caressed my prick through my trousers, and it inevitably stiffened in response.  "Oh my darling, I can feel your need. "  She broke off.  "We can't . . .  we mustn't!  Not yet.  Not until I'm rid of Flavius.   Be brave a little while longer."  And she kissed me on the nose.

I dutifully summoned an anguished expression, wondering where this was all going to end.  "I'll try, Griselda.  But it's so hard."

"I know," she said forlornly, as though she believed all this play-acting was real and not a bizarre pantomime.  "Let me take your arm at least.  No one can see us, and after all, we are sort of engaged, aren't we!"

"Engaged?"  Dear God!  "How can we be?  What about Flavius?"

"Oh, don't keep on dragging him up, darling.  Let's forget about him while we're together."

She slipped her arm through mine and we walked together like two old and close friends.  Bizarre!

"We really must try to see each other more often," she suggested thoughtfully after we'd walked fifty yards or so in silence.  "It's a pity winter's coming on.  I was silly.  We could have met in the woods while the weather was still warm — I suppose we still could.  I take Phallus out most days and—"

"Who's Phallus?" I laughed.  Her nonsense was unfathomable.

"My dear horsey, of course."  She slipped her arm out of mine and turned to the large chestnut stallion who was waling behind us on his bridle.  She stroked his nose and planted three kisses on the end of it.  I'll swear the horse looked at me uncertainly.  "I have several other horsies, but Phallus is my favourite — though you mustn't believe the disgusting stories I've heard circulate.  There's no truth in them at all."

"Of course not," I assured her, though in reality I wouldn't have put anything past her.

"No.  I use Bronco for that."

So it was true.  Bloody hell!   Even so, my eyes must have popped.  "You mean you . . .  you . . . you know . . . with a horse?"

"Bronco's my rocking horse, silly."  She giggled, slipping her arm back through mine and squeezing it.  "He's my surrogate you.   He's on four powerful springs and there's a large dildo bolted to his saddle.  So when I'm feeling frussed — as I often am — I go up to my bedroom, climb on him, trot him for a while, then work him up to a really vigorous canter.  It's satisfaction of a sort, but when we're together, I promise I won't use him any more. "

We walked on together in a strangely companionable silence.  She hugged my arm and stroked it, just like a normal woman would.  The last of the leaves were falling and the trees clawed at a grey sky with gaunt, black fingers.  The years was almost dead, and that reminded me again of Flavius.

"Look, Griselda, I—"

"Oooh!" She pouted at me so sorrowfully that her two front teeth disappeared behind her lower lip.  "Can't you at least call me darling when we're like this.  After all, we're alone, and we are in love."

"But Gris . . . darling, we hardly know each other and—"

"But we went through all that, didn't we.  If we can't be in love with each other, then who else can we be in love with?"  She sniffed.  "Unless, of course, you think you're in love with that trollop from the public house."

"Ruth?"

"Ruth is it?  I don't bother with names where peasants are concerned.  I saw you one evening staggering out of the public house with her, blind drunk, and heading in the direction of your house.  No need to ask whether you ended up in bed with her.  And Thwacks has seen you on other occasions—"

"You're having me watched?"

"Just keeping an eye on you, my dear, because I love you.  You know that"

"I know that Ruth isn't a trollop!"  I said harshly, for I didn't like hearing her called that.  "And that's all I know."

"In other words, you are in love with her!"  Griselda sniffed again, like a wronged wife.

"I'm not, but—"

"But?  Huh!  I suppose you call her, darling!"

"No I don't!"

"Don't lie, Owen," she said bitterly.  "Of course you do!  I bet you say all sorts of things you never say to me when you're in bed with her!"

"Maybe because I'm never in bed with you."

"That's unfair.  You know why."

"And you did tell me to get another a woman and keep myself in training," I reminded her.

"Humph!  So long as that's all you're doing.  Anyway that was before us."

Dear God.  The woman's fantasies were depthless.  "But you're a married woman and—"

"Heavens, Owen!  Must you keep mentioning that excuse for a man?"

"But he's your husband."

"But he's not a husband.  That's the point.  He's ten limp inches of useless gristle — that's not a husband."

"Even so."

"Even so what?  Anyway.  Let's not have a tiff over him, darling."  She rubbed my arm vigorously.  "He's not worth it, and I'll be rid of him soon.  when I am, we'll get rid of the trollop too.  Understood?" 

"Dear God.  You're not going to murder her too?"

"Murder?" she blanked.  "Whoever said anything about murder?"

"Well, now else are you going to get rid of Flavius, as you put it?"

She smiled darkly.  "There's more than one way of skinning a cat, my dear.  We'll do to him what we always do to those who are a threat, but in his case I must find an excuse."

"So what do you do—"

"Oh, darling," she sighed, hugging my arm like a wearied and exasperated wife.  "Must you keep on about that limp, useless object?"

We turned off the bridle path and into my lane.  She dropped my arm for discretion's sake and walked beside me, leading the horse.  "Tell you what," she suggested brightly.  "Why don't you show me your house?"

"But what if you're seen?  The neighbours!"

"It'll only take five minutes."

"I warn you, it's a mess."

"A mess?  How come?"

"It just is," I grinned, and if I'd had my wits about me, I'd have know better.

Griselda marched round my drawing room in disbelief.  "A mess?  This place is a pigsty!"

I looked around myself.  It wasn't so bad, but I'm not the tidiest of men.  My workroom's usually a mess, and at present I was working in the drawing room.  I shrugged.  "I imagine I'll get round to sorting out a proper workroom come winter."

"You do it?  You?  A Flaythm?  For heaven's sake, darling, it's the girl's job, not yours."

"Ginny?  She's a great help.  She does my washing and ironing and cooks my dinner."

"And?"

"And what?"

"And what!"  Griselda cast me a withering and exasperated glare. "You're clearly not working her hard enough.  Where is she?"

"I the kitchen I think, but—"

"Right!"

"No!  Wait!"

I followed her as she stamped out of the room, down the passage, and flung the kitchen door open.  Ginny was sitting at the table reading a magazine while she waited for the washing machine to finish.  She looked up startled, leapt to her feet, and backed away towards the dresser in terror as Griselda bore down on her, riding crop swishing.

Ginny swallowed and dropped a curtsey.  "Good morning, Lady Shackles."

"Never mind about that, girl!"  Griselda glared at her, flexing the riding crop before her fearful eyes. "You've been slacking."

Ginny's lips trembled.  "No, my lady, I—"

"You dare answer me back, girl!"

"No, my lady, I—"

"Insolence!"

Griselda lunged at Ginny like a fury, seized her by the hair a positively flung her across the broad oak kitchen table.  With a flick of the crop, her skirt flew up over her head.  Griselda put her riding in her mouth and ripped down her knickers revealing two plump wriggling buttocks that wobbled like Rowntree jellies.

"Please, my lady—"

"Silence!"

"Griselda!"

"Quiet, Owen!"

Griselda took the crop in her hand again and enthusiastically launched into a long sequence of vicious cuts, while Ginny thrashed about on the table, screaming.  I shut my eyes.  Why was I so impotent?  The screaming became shriller and shriller, then stopped, and I could hear only sobs.  Finished at last, Griselda walked slowly and triumphantly round the table surveying her handiwork, slapping her own thighs with the crop.  "That's just a taste, girl, of what you'll get if I come again and find this place in a mess.  Understood."

I opened my coward's eyes.  Ginny lay on the table struggling and gasping like a fish that's just been pulled from a river, her hands twitching as they clutched at her cruelly lacerated bottom.   

"Speak up, girl!  Or I'll give you another twelve!"

"Y-yes, my lady," sobbed Ginny painfully.

"And stop that irritating noise!"

Ginny sniffed.  "Yes, my lady."

Griselda then turned to me and eyed me sternly.  "And I'm disappointed in you too, Owen.  You're obviously not using your whip on the girl.  A fine lapse for the descendant of the man who held Admiral Shackles' coat."

"Perhaps I should have held yours," I said bitterly.

"Don't be flippant!"

"Aren't you being?  At least Rickett Flaythm was my ancestor," I lied.  "You talk about the admiral as though he were yours, but actually he was your husband's?"

"My husbands?" she screamed furiously.  "My wretched — my . . . ."

And, to my surprise, she dissolved into laughter.  She was still laughing when we returned to the drawing room.  She lifted a pile of books unceremoniously out of the sofa, dropped them on the flow with a thump, and plunged her ample bottom into the resulting space, still shaking.

"I'm the Shackles, Owen dear," she said when she'd recovered herself.  "My father died when I was twenty-five leaving me as his sole heir, and I immediately realised that I needed a husband — well, I wanted one, and none of the local men were acceptable for reasons we've already discussed.  So I put a small ad in a well-known hunting magazine:  wanted for marriage, one blue-blooded eighteen inch penis—" 

"Eighteen inches?" I exclaimed.  "There's no such thing."

"Yes, but I worked on the premise that men exaggerate.  Anyway, Flavius arrived.  He wasn't very bright but I didn't want him for his brains, so I sent him along to Dr Specter in the village for an examination.  Specter was amazed, he'd never seen anything so big — ten inches flaccid.  Of course, I should have locked Flavius in a room with a tart — made sure he could do the required job — but I didn't.  More fool me!  Ten inches flaccid he was, and ten inches flaccid he remained.  What with that and his complete lack of brains, conversation, or any desirable attribute at all — he can't even ride a horse, for heaven's sake! — I lost patience with him within a month.  I tried sending him back to his family but they didn't want him either and they sent him straight back with a stiff note telling me he was no longer their concern.  So there was nothing else for it.  I chained him in the dungeon and there he's stayed ever since."

"So he was already mad when you married him?"

"No darling.  Well possibly.  But he was so dull and gormless you wouldn't notice.  You see, he's not chained in the dungeon because he's mad.  He's mad because he's spent fourteen years chained in the dungeon.  At least, Thwacks reckons he's gone mad.  I can't say I've noticed any change myself but I really can't be bothered to go down and check, so I take Thwacks' word for it.  Anyway, let's not waste more time talking about Flavius.  He's history, or soon will be."  She picked up the top book from the pile she'd dropped on the floor beside her.  "Writers' and Artists' yearbook?  What on earth do you want that for?"

"I'm a writer," I said negligently, and immediately bit my tongue.

She looked at me querulously.  "A writer?  But you said you had a private income?"

"So I do," I lied.  "I wouldn't be able to afford to write if I didn't.  It's a hobby — well, more than that, a pleasurable  occupation."

"Well," she said standing up and pacing round the room looking in a desultory way at the other piles of books and manuscripts around the room.  "I do hope you're not writing about Nether Slype," and there was a note of menace In her voice.  "We don't take kindly to people trying to parade our little ways to the spineless puritan world beyond."

"I wouldn't call them puritans," I scoffed.

"No, but they like to think they are.  And they're nosey.  And they like telling other people what they can and can't do.  So watch yourself, darling.  You wouldn't want to be sent away would you!  And I wouldn't want to see you go."

On the face of it, she was threatening me with eviction from my house, and as all the properties in the villages were hers, I would be forced to leave.  Yet there was a note in her voice as she spoke the words sent away that sent a small involuntary shiver down my spine.

"How sent away, Griselda?" I asked.

"Never mind.  I'm sure it won't be necessary.  You're an intelligent man, and your life here could be pleasant, especially as my husband.  But being a Nether Slyper requires discretion.  Other have been indiscreet and they've been forced to leave."

"But isn't that even more dangerous.  Once they're gone they can blow the whistle with impunity."

She wrinkled her mouth.  The two teeth vanished then appeared again.  "Not . . . necessarily."

There it was again, the threat, and as if that weren't enough she added, "Don't ever force me to do something that we'd both regret, my darling.  Duty comes before love."

I wondered whether to pursue it, but caution told me that she'd say nothing she didn't intend to, and she'd already done that, and I had nothing to gain by making her suspicious.  But I realised that Nether Slype like all nefarious and illicit pleasures, came at a price.

"Look," I assured her.  "I've absolutely no intention of writing about Nether Slype.  As you can see from my books, I'm a mediaeval historian, or rather, I write novels about mediaeval times — thrillers and whodunits mostly.  So there's nothing for you and the village to worry about.  I've been working in here, you see, and my workroom's always a mess when I'm right in the middle of a project."

  I'm going to organise an office upstairs, but the present project overtook me.  That's why I told Ginny not to clean in here," I added pointedly.  "She didn't deserve the thrashing you gave her, Griselda."

"Don't make a fuss about nothing, daring."  Griselda brushed my objection away with an airy flick of her hand.  "It's what peasants are there for.  If you want a peasant girl to work properly, you must keep her whipped, on principle.  I always do."

"So I notice, but unfortunately I don’t possess a whip, and I'm not—."

Griselda blinked, her eyes lit up, and she skipped across the room to me, suddenly girlish.  "Owen darling!" she exclaimed joyfully, throwing he arms round me and planting a big wet kiss on my lips.  "We're having our second  tiff."  She kissed me again.  "How exciting!  We must be I love.  Tell you what.  I'll make it up to you.  I'll send someone down with one.  How about that?"

"With what?"

"A whip, of course," she said gleefully.  "I'll tie a big red ribbon round it and a card: With all my love, Griselda.  Then you'll think of me when you're whipping the girl with it," she added, eagerly.  "Or better still, I'll send you an assortment.  That'll be romantic, won't it!"  She kissed me on the nose, just like she'd kissed her horse, and I felt as bemused as the horse did, like a pet being given a treat.  "Anyway, got to dash.   Phallus has been tethered out there for a while and people will talk.  See me to the door, darling!"

I dutifully walked her out into the hall, but as I put my hand to the door to open it, she seized me and devoured my face again for a moment.  "It won't always be like this darling.   Soon we'll be together, naked in our bed, enjoying ourselves as only lovers can."  She crooked one leg and vigorously scratched the crotch of her jodhpurs.  "God, my cunt's itching," she said briskly.  " I'll have to take Bronco out for a canter when I get home."

She kissed me again, softly and passionately, and gave me a last caress, then she was off down the drive.  I watched her climb on her horse.  She waved.  "Toodle pip!"  And she was off.   Her kisses and caresses were becoming more tender, and I realised that the dotty and dangerous woman wasn't playing a game at all; she really was falling in love with me, or thought she was, which was just as alarming.  Poor Flavius.

7. Celia

Next day, just after breakfast, I was at work on my new novel when the doorbell rang.  I opened it to an attractive dark-haired girl of about twenty holding a large brown-paper parcel.  She was wearing the grey dress and apron of a maid from the hall.

"With her ladyship's compliments, sir," he said breathlessly, and bobbed.

I took the parcel.  "Er . . . thank you."

I made to close the door but she slipped deftly past me into the hall.  I locked at her perplexed and she bobbed again.  "I'm Heather, sir," she said, still breathlessly.  "Her ladyship said. you were to use me. Rigorously, sir."

"Rigorously?  How?"

"Any way to like, sir.  Any time of the day . . . or night."  She gave me the coyest of blushes.  "If you see what I mean, sir?"

How could I not?  But I'd been with Ruth overnight and, anyway, I was full of my new book and I simply wasn't in the mood for fun and games.    

"Look, why don't you go into the kitchen and Ginny will tell you what needs doing."

"Don't you want to see my credentials first, sir?"  she said, smoothing her dress and apron provocatively over her ample bust, her coy smile now edged with wantonness.

"No.  I'm busy.  Go and see Ginny."

She bobbed again, inclining her head submissively.  "Very good, sir."

Back in my work room I opened the parcel.  The only surprise was the variety of whips Griselda had sent me, ranging from straps with ornately sculpted handles, several plaited jobs of varying lengths and weights, and a particularly vicious one with three knotted tails.  I took them into my drawing room come work room and, as I dropped them on the coffee table, something fluttered out.  It was a card written in black ink and a masculine looking hand.

Enjoy, my darling,  and think of me.  With desperate love, Griselda.

Desperate love!  She could produce a nice turn of phrase.  I couldn't help smiling at her screwy earnestness, and an evil thought entered my mind, that perhaps I'd baptize her gift on her own bare bottom.  She certainly needed a good spanking and I assumed no one was giving her one.

A little later, Ginny came in with my tea, put it on my desk, and hovered waiting.  I had ignored her since Griselda's tirade.  Not only had she not deserved punishment, but I was also embarrassed, feeling that I had lost control of a situation that I, as the man of the house, should have controlled.

"Sorry about yesterday, Ginny," I said, looking especially hard a my computer screen.

"That's all right, sir.  Will you still be wanting me then, sir?"

I looked up at her in surprise.  "What do you mean?"

She swallowed.  "Well, sir, I'm obviously not giving satisfaction, her ladyship has sent a replacement, and—"

"Not a replacement, Ginny," I assured her.  "I'm more than happy with you—"

"It's just that she's trained, sir.  Properly trained to work, trained to the whip—"

"Trained to it?"

"Yes, sir.  She's one of them as has been to Mrs Birch's Academy for Wicked Girls in Long Wallop, sir and she passed out top of her class.  Loves it, she does, sir.   And she's already told me what a tight, juicy cunt she's got, sir, and all the tricks she's been taught to play with it.  And as you've never shown interest in my very ordinary one, sir—"

"But you've got a boyfriend, Ginny," I exclaimed.

"Perhaps, sir.  But you're my employer, so you've got rights.  A girl expects to be tried out at least once.  And as you've never once shown interest I've been thinking maybe you're not satisfied with me and—"

"Perfectly satisfied, Ginny," I assured her.  "More than satisfied, and very pleased with you.  Look, I can't offend her ladyship by sending the other girl back straight away.  So set her to work, get her scrubbing and cleaning.  She can sort out all those unused upstairs rooms, she can go down and clean out the cellar.  If she gives you any lip, send her to me and we'll find out how well trained she is."

I noticed an evil glint in her eye.  For the first time ever she bobbed.  "Yes, sir."  To my surprise she leaned over me and kissed me chastely on the cheek.  "Thank you, sir."

I gave her a hug for that — nothing sexual, no groping, just a hug.  She was a nice girl and I liked her.  "Your job's perfectly safe with me, Ginny."

I was in a good mood when I entered The Seven Stripes for a lunchtime pint, where I spent half an hour in amiable conversation with a couple of my neighbours.  As I was leaving a hand touched my arm and I turned to see Ruth.  She cocked her head meaningfully and led me into a discreet corner.

"There was someone asking for you last night, Owen."

"Asking?  Whom?"

"Me thankfully.  A stranger.  A woman.  She marched in, looked around and made a beeline for me.  She asked for your address."

"What did she look like?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

"Quite tall, thin as a rake, long blonde hair . . . oh, and she was smoking a cigarette with a sold filter end."

I swallowed.  I knew who the woman was, Celia my literary agent.  I'd left detailed instructions on how she could contact me, and they didn't include walking into The Seven Stripes, bold as brass and asking for me.

"Did you give it to her the address?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because . . . ." Ruth looked around the bar to make sure that no one was prying, then she pulled me further into the corner and lowered her voice.  "She asked first for a Peter Jenkins."

That had been my real name before I changed it to Owen Flaythm.  "Go on," I said.

"Then for a Rupert Butler.  I told them I'd never heard of them.  So then, as if it was just a final, spur-of-the-moment thought, she asked if I'd heard of the name Flaythm.  She said she thought someone of that aname had just moved in."

"And you said?"

"I told her I'd heard of none of them."

And Celia would have strongly suspected that Ruth was lying.  And knowing Celia, that would set her devious mind working overtime.  Damn!

"Who else heard this?"

"No one."

"You're sure!"

"Yes.  She walked straight out again, got in her car, and I watched drove round the green and back down the lane out of the village."

Perhaps, but knowing Celia, she wouldn't take no as a permanent answer.  I knew I should have sacked her before I came to Nether Slype and hired less of a go-getter in her place.  Fool!

Ruth was eyeing me with concern now.  She clutched my arm tighter and drew me towards her.  "What's going on, Owen?"

"Going on?"

"Who's Rupert Butler?"

"Oh, that's easy.  I was a historical novelist — am a historical novelist, and that's the name I write under."

Her eyes popped with surprise and she smiled.  "Oh!  They've got one of yours in the library.  I've read it.  It's ever so good."

Actually, it was the worst thing I'd ever done.  But I thanked her for the compliment.  "I don't advertise the fact," I said, "but Lady Shackles knows about it.  She knows I'll be discreet."

"You'd better be.  And who's Peter Jenkins?"

"Ah!  He's . . . he's . . . .  O bloody hell!"

She was looking at me earnestly now, and her eyes were bigger and darker than they'd ever been.  "Look, Owen, you can trust me.  I am your friend, you know."

"And perhaps the only true friend I have here — and the only one I want to have."

Half an hour later, we sat out on the green, on a remote but open seat where we could talk without risk of being overheard.

"So, who is he?" Ruth asked again.  "Or perhaps I should say, who are you?"

I licked my lips.  "Why do you ask that?"

"Because I've slept with you quite a few times y now.  You've muttered one or two strange things in your sleep, though most men do, but there have been other times, when we've talked, and I've formed the impression you're being very careful with your words, and thinking before you speak.  I think you're a man with a secret, my dear.  A man with a history."

"Who have you told of this?" I asked, perhaps a little shortly.

"No one!" she countered fiercely.  "I'm your friend, Owen . . . or should I say Peter?"   

"Best stick to Owen for all our sakes," I confessed.  I told her my story then, about discovering Nether Slype and loving the place, the seeming impossibility of living here, and the subterfuge.  It was good to tell someone, though I worried that I might be compromising Ruth and the last thing I wanted to do was that.

"So you're not spying on us?"

"No!  Good heavens no.  I've told you the absolute truth, all of it.  I just came because I loved the place — a precious surviving piece of the old England I write about, and I had no idea at all of your local peculiarities before I moved in."

"Of course, to us, they're not peculiar.  It's the outside that's peculiar."

"And you're not far wrong either.  In some ways its better out there, women have much more legal protection and higher status, though I'm not sure that the upshot  of that is always as wonderful as it's cracked up to be.  It's a world of illusion, pretence, image, gloss, and little substance.  It's a grubby, murky place — at least I think so — and in many ways its far worse than anything you'll find here."

She digested that.  "And the woman?   Who's she?"

"Celia, my literary agent, though I told her to leave me alone, the nosey bitch."

"So why hasn't she?"

"That's what worries me."

"Could she be trouble?"

"Oh yes.  Most certainly."

And so it came to pass.

An hour after sunset there was another knock on my door.   The new girl, who appeared to assume she was a live-in, came into the workroom and bobbed.  "A lady to see you, sir."

I assumed it might be Ruth, or even Griselda, but my face fell when the workroom door opened again, and I was Celia.  She marched in with a triumphant smirk on her face that I knew spelt trouble.  Without thinking, I took her through to my workroom come sitting room, forgetting what was still lying on the coffee table.

"You're a hard man to find, Peter," she said provocatively, helping herself to my sofa.  It sounded strange being called Peter after months as Owen.

"What do you want?"

"That's not a nice way to greet me, darling."

"How did you find me?"

"Well, first I asked some drab in the pub.  I assumed you've know all the local all the local pub sluts."

"Watch your tongue!"

"Oh!  So you are shagging her!  Thought she looked your type.  Her knickers were positively round her ankles, and as for that bra she was wearing. . . ."

I fought to control my temper.  "She told you nothing."

"No, and I deduce that she's come running to tell you I was looking — which means your definitely shagging her."

"The what?"

"I came back tonight and played the poor lost little female, darling.  I found some ghastly old man out in the street somewhere and wiped myself round him.  He looked as though he'd never seen a woman like me—"

"I imagine he hadn't."

"Meow, darling!   I almost had to suck him off to get the info.  Almost, thank God."

"So now you're here, what do you want.?"

By way of reply, she looked curiously at the paper parcel in the coffee table before her.  She'd always been a nosey cow, so she lifted the edge and looked inside.

"Kinky!"

"Nothing of the sort," I lied, fighting the obviously guilty temptation to move the parcel out of her reach.  "They're research items for my latest.."

"Hmmm.  Sounds a sight more interesting than your last."  She picked up the card and smirked.  "Whose Griselda?  You whip slut?  Sounds more like a dominatrix to me."  Celia, for all her irritating ways, had a habit of hitting the nail on the head. 

This time I did snatch it out of her hand.  "That card was attached to something else entirely."

"Hmmm.  Not the drab from the pub then?"

I gritted my teeth.  "No, and my personal life is none of your damned business."

"I'm afraid you're wrong there," she said triumphantly.  "And as for your BDSM kit, it bears out my other discoveries."

"What discoveries?"

"Whispers, darling and a few juicy little piccies.  Things that would send the women's rights movement into gibbering apoplexy."

"Since when did you care about women's rights?"

"I don't, of course, but I'll become a fully-paid-up member if there's advantage to it."

"And—"

She got up and walked round the room with that infuriatingly smug look on her face that I'd seen before when she knew she held all the cards.  So often, when she's been acting in my interest, negotiating for me, it had been an infallible sign that we'd just won a point or were about to.  But I'd never liked it, and she wasn't acting in my interest now, but her own — that much was clear — and something cold trickled in the pit of my stomach.

"Nice place you have here.  Must be worth a bit."

"What have you come for, Celia?  I didn’t invite you."

"I was concerned for you, darling, and—"

"Cut the crap!  The only thing about me that's ever concerned you is the commission I pay you and how you can extend it."

"The commission I deduct, darling."

"Don't chop words!  Why are you here?"

She smiled smugly at me again, and the ice trickled once more.  Without asking permission, she produced her silver cigarette case, took out a cigarette, knocked it on the lid, and lit it.  "Got an ashtray, darling?"

I went into the kitchen and found a saucer.  When I returned, she was lying full length on the sofa, her expensively stockinged legs were crossed at the ankles, the cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, idly reading my latest manuscript — of pretending to.

"That'll be ready in about three months," I said, pulling it out of her hand.  "If you're interested."

"Perhaps," she replied, knocking out ash into the saucer.  "Perhaps not.  I'm onto something far bigger than a measly commission.  I might cut you in, but only for a small share."

"What?  Why?"

"Because you're compromised.  But as you might also be useful, I'm throwing you a bone."

She smiled a smile that says, I've got you by the nuts, and if you don't jump when I say, I'll crucify you.

I knew I had to tough it out if I could.  "I don't know what you're talking about.  How compromised?"

"The same way every other man in Nether Slype is compromised, darling.  They, of course, were born here.  But you . . . oh, well, you came looking for it."  She stretched out and nudged the parcel of whips with her foot.  "You can't very well claim ignorance.  Now can you?"  She let the point sink in, then continued.  "I wondered why you were so keen on this place.  I heard your tale about driving through here and falling in love with it . . . blah  — blah — blah.  But I was curious.  After all, there are many villages in England.  Why jump through such fantastic hoops to move to this one?"

"It happened to be the truth," I said patiently.

"Yes of course.  And I foolishly believed for a very short while that architecture, the oldie-worldliness, and the woods had captivated you."

"They had," I protested.

"Quite.  But that wasn't all, was it!"  She exhaled smoke extravagantly, as she so often did before delivering the death blow.  "I never realised you were a bottom freak. "

"I don't know what you mean," I said too hurriedly, and the shrewd glance that slanted at me through the thin blue smoke told me that she knew I was lying.

She took a photograph out of her handbag, put it on the coffee table, and slid it across to me.  I looked at it and cringed.  The vicar was there with his colleagues from the adjacent villages.  They were in one of the vicarage gardens having tea.  Their wives were there too.  One was carrying a tray, one was bent over the table, and one as on her knees sucking her husband's prick.  All three were naked from the waist down.  Their three bottoms were clearly visible, and all three bore multiple strap welts.

I cleared my throat and tried to affect an unimpressed shrug.  "Three kinky clergymen in a domestic setting.  What of it."

"Yes, I thought you'd say something like that.  There are others, too, though this is the best so far.  I've been skulking up on the hill over the village with my telephoto lens.  Vicars and bottoms — hardly word news, though it's still grist to The News of the World's mill."

"You despise The News of the World."

"I did, darling, but it's now a prospective milsch cow, so I've become enthusiastic about it's moral crusading zeal.  I mean, it will be absolutely appalled by this, won't it!  And its dull-brained readers will be so horrified they'll have to rush out and buy the story in instalments.  I think I feel an undisclosed six-figure payment coming on."

"For one dodgy photo?  The Internet's dripping with them."

"Yes, but there's more than that, to dig for," she said with maddening certainty.   When I came I thought only to enlist your help with my story."

"Story?  Since when could you write a—"

"But when I saw your kinky bondage whips I knew—"

"I haven't used them, for God's sake," I insisted, and it was the literal truth.

She shrugged.  "Perhaps, perhaps not.  But I have other photos — not as good, not as clear, but enough to know that this place is a hotbed of all sorts.  And I really think that the outside world, with its high moral values, should know about it."

Dear God, what a mess!  I thought of what it would do the people here.  I considered that not every man in the village was a vicious wife beater.  What would become of them.  They'd go through life hearing: so you lived in Nether Slype did you?  Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.  I thought of the loves ruined.  And what of the women?  How would they cope out there.  They'd find men to beat them, knock their teeth out, which the men in Nether Slype didn't.  What sort of interests would move in and be prowling around, ready to snap them up.  How many would end up of street corners, on drugs — which were nowhere to be found here — drink — which was not abused here — unable to deal with the debt and stresses of Celia's bright clean world outside.

Nether Slype had its flaws, no doubt of that, its illicit delights, and its injustices, but so did the world outside, and I came to the view that many of those outside were nastier, dirtier, more pernicious, and more downright dangerous.

"Don't do it Celia," I asked.

"Why ever not?"

"Just don't do it."

"Well, I'm sure I'd be most happy to oblige you darling, but money's money and one never quite has enough of it."

"No matter how much damage you do?  How many lives you wreck?"

"Not my lives; not my problem."

And that attitude irritated me beyond endurance.  It was so typical of the times, one of the things I had run away from when I came to Nether Slype.  I have never been averse to money, cleanly and honestly made.  I've made a good deal of it myself, but only because people wanted to buy my books, none of which were written for the purpose of making an obscene fortune.  In Nether Slype, those who prospered were those who worked, cleanly and honestly, and they did work too.  And despite their quirks they were honest in the old fashioned way.  There was no dirty money here — the sort of money Celia was after — the way money could made outside, where even as dead child had a market value — called compensation.  That struck me as the true obscenity, and what went on in Nether Slype was venial by comparison. 

"It's all right, darling," said Celia, looking at me with big mocking eyes, knowing that I was helpless.  "Play ball and I'll protect your blessed good name."

"How?  Why?"

"Well, I might believe that you didn't know everything that's going on here when you arrived."

"I didn't."

"Quite.  Tell me, what's the really juicy stuff — gay orgies in the church at midnight?"

"Nothing like that?"

"What about kids?  I bet there's plenty of child abuse."

"No!  Nothing like that.  It's all straight, and kids are brought up a damned site cleaner here than many are outside."

She pouted.  "That's a pity.  There'd certainly be money in that.  A real headline grabber.  Never mind, you can always drop some hints.  A few pregnant hint are often much more marketable than one miserable fact.  All you have to do is drop the question:  What about the kids?  Nudge-nudge.  Wink-wink.  See what I mean?"

"What do you mean — all I'll have to do?"

She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another.  "Didn't I say?  That's where you come in useful.  You write the piece.  You do the sleuthing.  You dig out all the lovely lucrative dirt — let's say twenty-thousand words, broken down into handy two-thousand-word chunks for the Sunday rags, and I'll market it.  I'll make sure your name — which ever you're going under at present — is kept out of it.  Then we'll split the haul — seventy-thirty."

"And who gets the seventy?" I asked, my mind racing for a means of stalling her.

"Me, of course.  You're hardly in a position to negotiate."

"Fifty-fifty."

"You're not listening, darling.  I said—"

"Fifty-fifty or go to hell!  Think of it Celia.  You can go running to the papers with your feeble half-cock yarn, but if Rupert Butler then steps forward with the whole story, claiming to have been working on an under-cover expose which you tried to pre-empt, breaking your confidentiality contract, and offering the real juicy dirt, I'll be the hero and you'll crawl away looking pretty bloody fifth rate.  So it's fifty-fifty."

She screwed out her cigarette with fury and lit a third, and I was lad to see that her hand shook slightly with stress.  "No need to make threats,  darling."

"Whose making threats?  I'm just telling you where you stand, as you were pathetically trying to tell me a while ago.  You're a clerk, Celia.  You're the sort of drudge creative people like me get to do their boring menial chores.  That's what I pay you for.  You're the vermin that crawls around talent licking up crumbs.  I'll pay you fifty-percent to do all the newspaper legwork, fill in the forms, attend the tedious meetings, the bloody lot, and keep my name out of it.  But the copyright remains mine, as per our standing contract.  Cross me and I'll sue, and you and your tawdry fucking agency will be the pariahs of the book trade.  Don't forget, Celia, a compromised author can make enormous money, but a crooked agent is dead meat.  So you'll do as your bloody well told!"

She looked scared now, and I enjoyed that.  It had been a strong bluff but it seemed to have worked.  I couldn't believe I'd carried it off .  Now it was time to close it for today and think.

"So I'll write your piece.  You'll return for it in fourteen days, and you'll return discreetly, like tonight.  Until then, sod off!"

  She sodded off, tail between her legs, and it gave me deep satisfaction to see her crawl away.  One thing was sure; when this was over I'd drop the cow and use another agent for my future novels.  But deeper down I was less elated.  The story was out.  Nothing would ever stop Celia whispering, and whispers beget whispers beget rumours beget scandals.

"Shit!  Shit!  Shit!" I yelled at the top of my voice.  I picked up a couple of books and hurled them across the room, and kicked furniture  in my anger and frustration.  "Shit!"

The workroom door opened and the new girl was leaning in the doorway.  She was completely naked, her firm young breast thrust at me almost accusingly, and her eyes smouldered.     

"You called, sir?"  She walked brazenly towards me, lithe and loose hipped, her triangle of pussy swaying and the fat nipples on her pert breasts nodding like elastic.  She was mesmerising, but I was angry and not in the mood for sex.

"Fuck off!"

She still approached, smiling.  "Heather would love you to fuck her, sir."

"I said, fuck OFF!"

"Heather would love you to toss her off, sir."

I rarely get uncontrollably angry, but this girl was tipping me over the edge.  "Don't you understand English, girl?" I yelled at her.

She stood right before me, challenging me, her eyes dancing with delight,.  Her hand slid to my fly and started slowly to unzip it.  "Heather only understands the whip, master."

Despite my stiffening cock, something in me snapped.  Slapping her twitching hand away, I seized her by the hair and flung her to the ground, where she lay squirming.  I reached for Griselda's parcel and grabbed the first whip that came to hand.  It was the big one with the three knotted tails, but I didn't care.  Standing astride Heather's naked body I lashed and lashed and lashed her with all my strength.  As I lashed her, she rose to her hands and knees and started to crawl, but not towards the door.  She turned towards me and knelt at my feet.  Still I slashed at her, her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, her thighs; all quivered under my merciless tirade, slender red wheels and cuts criss-crossing them.  She juddered; still plied the whip with all my strength — and felt her hands crawling softly and slowly up my legs.  I lashed all the larder now; the leather tails slapped harder into her soft flesh with pistol-shot retorts.  The hands reached my open flies and with well practised deftness, pulled out my rigid cock.

"Your so angry, master," she breathed. 

And then she was sucking, powerfully, frantically.  I felt her throat moving round my nob, her tongue moving like a wriggling snake on the underside, her firm lips circling it moving succulently back and forth.    

"Fuck!"

I was blazingly angry now.  I flung down my wip, pull her off by the hair, grasped her shoulders, pulled her to her feet and threw her across the desk, pinning her down by the shoulders.  Still she didn't stop teasing me.  He hand reached down stroking my swollen cock cock, her legs wrapped round me and I found my nob was inside her cunt.  The vaginal muscles tightened round it, flexing and toying with it..

"Enjoy yourself, master," she purred, as her legs wrapped round me, pulling me into her tight, juicy hole.

I was thrusting now, uncontrollably, thrusting deep inside her despite my anger, jerking her body rhythmically across the desk with each gigantic heave.  Thrust, thrust, thrust, thrust. 

Then my anger was gone, I was shooting my load right up her, long and thick.  The release was heavenly.  I flopped across her, relaxed and gasping.

"Sorry," I said.  "I was so angry."

She smiled up at me and her voice was gentle, controlled, and warm.  She kissed me on the nose and then softly on the lips.

"Not to worry, master.  That's what Heather is here for."

She came to bed, bringing the whip with hr in case I needed it again, but I didn't.  I fucked her twice more in the early hours, but neither were as good as the first.

8. Confession

What could I do?  I could turn and run with my tail between my legs too.  Return to the world of monotonous grey, relentless health warnings, free credit checks, shoddy ethics, and increasingly perverse human rights.  Or I could fall in with Celia's shabby little scheme — and I wasn't prepared to give her that satisfaction.  I don't think it was courage that decided me to remain and tough it out, or even stubbornness — for I'm a stubborn sod when I'm crossed.   Neither could I entirely persuade myself that I meant to do it for the sake of the villages.  If I'm honest, I did it for myself.  I liked living in Nether Slype, and I was damned if some dirty little money grubber was going to spoil it for me.

So, after mulling it over all night,  I fled to the one person whom I could trust and who knew the truth.

"So early in the morning?," Quipped Ruth with a grin as she opened her cottage door.

"I'm not after that, Ruth."

The smile vanished.  Her perceptive eyes read my face.  "Celia?"

"Celia."

"You'd better come in."

While she made me coffee I told her all about my confrontation with Celia. 

"Sounds as though you managed to get rid of her, although—"

"Not for long, Ruth.  I made a lot of threats, and they have some substance to them.  As my agent she's contractually bound not to compromise my interests.  I could make a lot of trouble for her if she did.  But she'd a devious and resourceful bitch, and she's got friends of the same type.  Next thing we'll know, some grubby reporter will be skulking around after dark taking pictures through windows.  Celia will find an indirect way of making her point and her dirty money, and I won't be able to stop it."

"And you say she's coming back in a fortnight?"

"So she says.  I've promised her a story.  I'm pretty sure she'll be back for it, though I'll fancy she's come a day or two late, just to make sure I'm sweating when we start horse trading again."

"But I thought you'd reached an agreement."

I laughed.  "Celia's agreements are like EU referenda.  She keeps revisiting them till she get's what she wants.  Still," I added more soberly.  "On this occasion I can't criticise.  I don't intend to keep my end of it either."

"So what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to stop her."

"How?"

"That's why I'm talking to you."

"Owen, we're not all stupid," said Ruth a little later, as we walked along the rain-sodden bridle path towards her work.  All the leaves were gone now, it would be Christmas soon, and I wondered what Nether Slype would be like in the snow come January and February.  "The villages cannot stay as they are forever.  Some are already saying that we must moderate, before there's a terrible commotion and drastic change is enforced."

"And prosecutions, and mental health workers, and God knows what else."

"So you'll have to steel yourself."

I swallowed; it sounded ominous.  She took my arm and stroked it gently while she spoke. 

"I'll give you all the help and support I can, though I don't know how much use it will be.  You'll have to go to Lady Shackles.  You'll have to tell her everything."

"And what will she do?"

"To you?  That depends if the rumours are right.  They say she's in love with you."

I snorted.  "I think she likes to play a game of being in love with me," and yet I wasn't really sure how much of a game it was.  Somewhere within her fanciful and bizarre mind, I was sure Griselda really did think so.

"I hope it's more than that."  Ruth squeezed my arm more tightly.  "Throw yourself on her mercy.  Tell her you're on her side."

"And Celia?"

"I'm sure Lady Shackles can handle that. There have been other occurrences, you see.  No many, but I can remember a handful of disappearances."

I too remembered.  I remembered Griselda using the term sent away.  Flavius was goin to be sent away, and I distinctly recalled her saying, you wouldn't want to be sent away would you!  And I wouldn't want to see you go.  But sent away where?  I had asked her but, as usual she had adroitly sidestepped the question.

"Were they sent away, Ruth," I asked.

She sighed.  "That's the term I've heard used.  Whispered, of course.  No one talks of it openly."

"Is there fear here?  Are people afraid of being sent away?"

She put her head on one side and cogitated awhile.  "I wouldn't say afraid.  But we're aware that we have to behave ourselves.  But so does everyone  — outside too, I imagine."

Oh yes.  Heaven help anyone outside who  spoke or wrote a word that might be construed, however incorrectly as racist.   But I was aware that I would have to go and confess my deception to Griselda.  She had already made the threat.  The question was: would she carry it out?  It would be bad enough to leave this place, strange as it was, and return to the grey puritanical world, but I feared that being sent away meant going further than that, and permanently.

"Do they ever come back, Ruth?"  I asked.  "The ones who've been sent away?"

Her large dark eyes found mine, and they melted.  "No.  Never."

She hugged kissed me when she left me to go to The Seven Stripes.  She had asked me if I wanted to her come with me, to hold my hand, but that might compromise her and I refused point blank.  Her eyes melted over me again, as though I were a soldier going of to war, and we might be parting for the last time.  I had seen newsreels of such parting, and now I knew what it felt like.  I turned and started to retrace my steps home with heavy heart, meaning to collect my thoughts and my words before making my way up to the hall.

"Owen!"

I turned to see Griselda following me on Phallus.  Her smile was sunny and she stopped when she drew up.

"Sorry, but I couldn't shout out darling, in case someone heard.  But I shall soon."  She hugged herself eagerly and giggled at the thought while I tried to raise a smile.  Then her brows creased a moment and she jumped down.

"Anything the matter, darling?  You look so glum."

"Well . . . ."

Her look of concern deepened.  "Don't tell me you didn't like my present!"

"I liked it very much,"  I mumbled, trying to persuade myself that it was the thought that counted, and I had to admit to myself that I'd enjoyed whipping (the girl), and shagging her afterwards, though Ruth was still more to my taste.  But my eyes were sliding over Griselda now, over her large heaving bust that was pushing open the neck of her hacking jacket, her finely developed horsewoman's bottom, even the two teeth slightly overhanging her pouting lower lip, and I fancied her much more — I fancied whipping her and making that fine muscular bottom wriggle and I also fancied the idea of shagging her, taking charge of her, mastering her.  But beyond that, I realised that compared with all the Celias of the world, and even the Heathers, she was a treasure.  Because she was real, genuine in her affections, no matter how strangely she expressed them.

"And you won't fall in love with the girl."

"Hardly!  She's . . . useful,, but I've always preferred the maturer woman myself."

She put her hand on her heart and gasped.  "You haven't gone off me then?  I'd die if you went off me."

"No, Griselda.  I haven't gone off you," wondering why a woman so desperate to win my affection should send me another as a casual gift.   It was the truth of course, if only because  I'd never been on her, physically or otherwise, but the idea of giving her a good thrashing for Ginny's sake, and a thorough shagging afterwards suddenly appealed.  But it wasn't just revenge, it was lust too.  My desire to get inside her knickers was growing on me.  It occurred to me that one way out of my problem would be to give her a good mastering, dominate her utterly, and dictate terms.  Yet I knew it wouldn't be as easy as that.  Hidden under the gushing and goofiness surface was steel.  This was the woman who'd incarcerated her husband, for God's sake.

"What then?" she was asking, her eyes bright and watery with concern.  "I'm sorry I whipped your girl."

"It's not that."

"Something's the matter."

"Yes.  Look.  Can I come up to the hall later, and we'll talk?"

"Of course, darling."  Something of her old coquettishness glimmered through the anxiety; she brushed my lapel with her hands.  "But you must promise to behave yourself, darling.  Remember, we're not married yet."

Nor ever will be, I thought, unless you really do love me, and can forgive my fault.  For the first time I prayed that she did.

"Look, Griselda," I said later, when we were ensconced on the sofa in her drawing room, before a roaring fire.  "I'm afraid I have a confession to make and a warning to give you."

"Make you confession first, darling," she said, sliding close and threading her hand through my arm.  "Then I can forgive you, and then you can warn me about whatever it is you want to warn me about."  She smiled eagerly but I could tell that she was forcing it.  "So why don't you make your confession, darling, or should I say, Peter?"

My mouth fell open and I stared at her like a loon.

"I knew you were an imposter from the outset," she said still sitting close, with her hand threaded through my arm.  "And the council insisted they kept an eye on you for a while.  It wasn't my doing, but there's.  For some reason, I always trusted you."

"But how did you know?"

"Oh, easy.  You look nothing like any of your Flaythm ancestors — we have a whole corridor of portraits here.  It was possible you took after your mother, of course, but you also answered the description of a man who enquired of Gripes, my land agent, if he might buy a cottage, and was referred here  by him.  Low and behold, a few weeks later, up popped Owen Flaythm, the very man who'd made the earlier enquiry, or his double.   And, of course, more recently I've checked on Rupert Butler, alias Peter Jenkins, published by Littlegood through his agents Merridew and Trollope, who's been resident in the UK all his life, and whose very few public-domain photographs bear a startling resemblance to you, darling."

"Then why did you allow me to come?"

"Because I fell in love with you at first sight — chemistry, I suppose.  I knew you didn't love me, of course — how could you?  But I hoped you might grow to.  And I believed your reasons for wanting to live here were deep and genuine.  At least the man who'd visited Gripes seemed so.  I behaved foolishly when we first met.  I am a terribly frustrated woman, and you drove me right over the edge — I couldn't contain myself, and were I an beautiful woman you'd have lapped that up.  I'm not, so I kept my distance for a while, hoping to start again, more sensibly.  But every time I met you, I lost control again.  You reduce me to an oversexed teenage girl, when I happen across you by surprise.  You press my button, Owen, like no one else ever has."

"Peter."

"No, Owen.  You are Owen Flaythm now, and will be for so long as you behave yourself and remain.  And that's not my threat — I don't make the rules here.  But I hope to God you do remain and behave yourself,  because I'm desperately in love with you.  I know you're not in love with me but—"

"I'm becoming fond of you, Griselda

"You don't have to say that."

"I know, but . . . ."

I had meant to play up to her, make preposterous overture to her on the mistaken assumption that she was essentially silly and believed her own nonsense.  But I now realised that would be a mistake.  Griselda was no one's fool, and moreover I realised that I liked her, despite her violent streak and her love of whips.  I would miss Ruth if I went away, but for some strange unfathomable reason, I would also miss Griselda.  But I knew I would have to be honest with her and not overplay my hand, the hand that was now stealing its way round her shoulder and drawing her closer.

"You're a one-off, Griselda," I said.  "If known a lot of women and I've bedded a fair number — and some very attractive ones at that.  But I've never met one quite like you.  Added to which, you have a magnificent bust."

She kissed my ear.  "That was honest at least. Would you like to feel it?"

"Feel what?"

"My magnificent bust.  I know you've always liked it.  You ogled it when we first met.  But you can only put your hand inside my blouse.  You'll have to give me greater assurances before you get inside my bra?"

"What about your knickers?"

"Greater assurances still.  I'm prepared to give you everything I have — but not for nothing.  You won't get a one night stand out of me."

"You're a sensible and intelligent woman too," I said unbuttoning her blouse and sliding my hand across her bra cup till I found her already-hard nipple and rolled it between finger and thumb. 

"So," she said, stroking my inner thigh so I stiffened.  "What's this warning?"

I told Griselda all about Celia.  Every detail.  At the outset I tried to keep Ruth's name out of it, but it soon became clear that she bore Ruth no ill will and believed she'd handled the situation well.  We agreed to meet again several days hence, the three of us, and formulate a plan.  It was clear that we would have to ambush and apprehend Celia.  It was also clear that we would have to find out who she might have told of her scam, and where she might have concealed evidence. 

"We have agencies who can deal with that."

"The same agencies that takes people away?"

"Their close cousins, at least."

"And where do they go, Griselda?"

"Far away where no one will ever find them.  Even Flavius has his price.  You've no idea how much some Arabs will pay for an English milord — even a limp-pricked wonder like Flavius.  All I need is an excuse to be rid of him, and this Celia might provide the expedient I've been looking for.  I wouldn't want to give them the real reason."

"Which is?"

She pulled a face.  "It's too disgusting for words."

"Go on.  I assume it have something to do with the girls you send down there."

"Yes but it's not what you think.  He doesn't whip them.  That's just talk..    Flavius likes urine and scat, dear.  He likes to use the girls as his toilet, and when he's suitably anointed them, and smeared it all over them, he likes them to suck him off.  It's the only thing that gives him an erection, you see.  On our first night be told me his requirements.  I refused.  So he whipped me, tied me spread-eagled on the bed, and used my mouth as his lavatory.  That gave him an erection, which he promptly stuck down my throat — all twelve inches of it — and almost asphyxiated me.  He went to the dungeon next day, and he's stayed there ever since."

My stomach churned.  "And is that what he does to the girls?"

"Not quite.  He's chained.  He can't overpower them or ram his cock down their throats as he did to me.  We have a few girls who aren't too fussy what he smears on them, and they're happy to suck him off provided they're well paid — and I do pay them well.  But Flavius is an animal.  I'm desperate to be shot of him."

I could see her point of view.

She warned me that extracting the information might prove unpleasant — and  knew that unpleasant by Nether Slype standards would be unpleasant indeed — but she claimed there was no choice in the matter and I couldn't demur.  I knew what she meant.  I knew that the methods used to extract information would be extreme — but I had few qualms about that.  Celia was prepared to destroy any number for her dirty money, besides, I've always believed whatever comeuppance blackmailers and extortionists and their like receive to be their just deserts.  Even so, Celia's punishment, when it came, was draconian by any standard.

9. Celia's ordeal

I threw myself into my work, but the calendar was always in the corner of my mind.

Celia didn't come to my door when the fortnight .  The days dripped past, like a slow irritating tap: fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, and I began to wonder if she would come at all.  I hoped that she had maybe forgotten about her money-spinner, but I wasn't sanguine about that.  More likely she'd found some other was and even now was out there in the dark, with a new accomplice, probably some shabby reporter, photographing, making notes.  We had men staked out in the woods all round the village, men at both ends of my lane, and others round the back in the footpath and the bridle path, but the sort that Celia would use would have a nose for that sort of surveillance.  I wondered whether we shouldn't simply have placed men in the house to apprehend her when she arrived, assuming she did come.  It was seventeen days now.

I tried to concentrate on my work.  As we'd agreed, I had lights on in my working room only, and the curtains were slightly parted so anyone spying on the house would see me working alone.

There was a knock at the front door.  I jumped.  I'd expected her to creep round the back.  I opened it to one of Griselda's senior foresters. 

"We've got her, Mr Flaythm, sir.  She's on her way to the hall now.  You're to follow."

I took a deep breath. 

"Right.  Let's go."

They had taken her downstairs, not to the dungeons, I was told, but to the cellars where they had a room equipped for interrogation.  There were some manacles attached to a wall, several suspension chains on pulleys hung fro the ceiling, though at present the ends of these were gathered neatly in wall rings.  There was also a large table, heavily built like a carpenter's bench, with restraint straps fixed to the four corners.  It was December now, and a roaring fire burned in the grate.  I noticed that several irons were thrust into the fire. 

As I entered, Celia was sitting in a chair with a heavy guard on either side of her.  Thwacks was busying himself with a decanter of sherry and some glasses.  Griselda was by the fire.  She stooped and withdrew one of the irons.  It's tip glowed red.  She spat on it and it hissed.

"You'll answer our questions one way or the other," she said calmly.  "Be sensible and make it easy on yourself.  Once we start extracting answers, we won't stop until were completely satisfied with them, and then we'll carry on a while longer . . . just to be absolutely sure.  You won't like that, Celia.  Really you won't."

Celia snorted.  "What's this — the village pantomime?  You bumpkins really don't think you can frighten me, do you!"

Griselda replaced the iron and walked back slowly towards Celia's chair, slapping .  "What can I do to make you understand the gravity of your predicament?" she asked.

Celia laughed now.  "Get over yourself you horse-faced bitch.  I'll already have you for assault and false imprisonment.  I'll sue you for every penny you've got.  I'll have this crumbling dump, your poxy village, the lot and turn it into a them park, and I'll hire all your  dumb yokels to amuse the crowds.  I'll make millions."

"Yes, fine," replied Griselda with magnificent calm.  "In the meantime we want the names of anyone you've divulged your discoveries to.  The locations of any relevant  documents and photographs—"

"Go toss yourelf on your dildo, horsey!"

"Complete with access passwords—"

Celia sighed.  "Oh, fuck off, you plumy cunt!"

Griselda stepped forwards, placed her hands on the arms of Celia's chair and leaned right forward into her, for that their faces almost touched.

"You've had your say, lady, now I'll have mine.  We are not interested in your career and your fortune, but only with protecting our way of life, which you have threatened for your own pecuniary ends.  Owen cautioned you not to proceed—"

"Owen!" scoffed Celia, but Griselda took no notice.

"Owen cautioned you not to proceed, but your greed was insurmountable.  You have been arrested in the act of commissioning a crime against us that we regard as unforgivable.  Whatever you might think of us, we have done you no harm."

"No." sneered Celia — she had guts for sure.  "But what about the beaten women, the—"

"Save your sermonising for the gutter press!" scathed Griselda.  "Your values run no deeper than your pocket or the bubble celebrity you hoped to achieve.  You'd sell any man, woman, or child if the price was right, and we both know it., so for God's sake don't bore us with your preaching.    You would have destroyed us for gain, paltry gain, and you leave us with no choice but to destroy you.   We have laws that have stood for centuries. You will be tried and your confession will be required.  If you're wise you'll confess now, and sign to it.  If you're a fool, you'll try our patience and we'll extract the confession the hard way.  I'll give you one opportunity to answer.  Which is it to be?"

"Stupid, poncy cunt!" sneered Celia.  "Go shag a fucking horse!" The she hawked and spat in Griselda's face.  Griselda flushed, stiffened, and stood back, wiping away the spittle with a small lace handkerchief.. The  she turned to the men and her face was stone. 

"Strip her!"

I stood impotently and watched as the men do it.  They did it the easy way.  One pinioned her while the other took a large peair of what looked like sheep-shears and cut up the front of her skirt and through her belt so the skirt fell away.  He the ripped of her tights and knickers in one go, so ruthlessly that her legs left the ground.  Taking the neck of her sweater , he ripped that down, felt inside for her bra and wrenched it out so that it snapped in the middle.  The other man pushed her forwards and pulled away the tattered remains of her sweater and bra.  Despite her frantic struggles and a continuous stream of obscenities, she was naked in inder fifteen seconds.

All the while she screamed obscenities.  As a writer I've always loathed the descent into verbal obscenity, not from prudishness, but because of its sheer stultifying monotony.

"You fucking cunts!" she screamed.  "You fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking cunts.  Let me go you cunts.  You fucking cunts."  And so on and so on, though it was amusing to see how easily the veneer of urbane sophistication was stripped from Celia, along with her clothes.

"Strap her on the table!" snapped Griselda, as soon as Celia was naked.

One man took her by her thrashing ankles, the other under the arms and they swung her up onto the table.  She fought like a fury but they were far too string for her.  One held the ankles while the other restrained her wrists by two straps that were already affixed near the corners.  Then they took an ankle each and strapped those to the bench too.

"You can go!" said Griselda imperiously, and the men left, leaving Celia naked and spread-eagled on the bench top.

I noticed that her blonde pubic hair was cut in a Brazilian.  I remember being mildly surprised.  I'd assumed that she shaved it, though I hadn't thought of it much — I'd never fancied the bitch.  But I couldn't resist wandering across to the table and stroking it, not for any sexual pleasure, for I felt none, but because of the power it gave me over her helplessness.

"How the hell are you going to get away with this you demented throwbacks!" she was screaming, trying to spit in my face too now.  "God, I'll sue you for this you fucking bitch.  I'll fucking sue for millions."

Meanwhile, I heard a deferential cough at my elbow. 

"Sherry, sir — before we start," said Thwacks, proffering a silver tray on which were two glasses.

I took mine and he offered the other to Griselda, who threw it back with one gulp.  "Carry on, Thwacks!" she barked, much as I imagined Admiral Lord Shackles would have done.

Thwacks laid down the tray and took a long wooden box from one of the shelves, laying it on the surface of the bench between Celia's struggling feet.  He opened it and retrieved a long needle, like a knitting needle, highly burnished with a long, tapering point, and I has the expression that it was not only viciously sharp, but incredible strong too.  Celia's breasts were quite small, but well-shaped and firm, standing up like two conical hillocks crowned with brown autumnal trees.  With his free hand Thwacks seized the left one by the nipple and pulled it vertically so it stretched like a balloon.

"Get off my tits you randy fucking cunt!" yelled Celia

Thwacks ignored her.  With the precision and detachment of a man decanting port he inserted the  long needle into Celia's  left breast, through the aureole, just behind the nipple.  She screamed.

"AAAAAAARGH!"

While she screamed and writhed pointlessly against her restraint, I watched the punctured breast with fascination as the skin on the further side of her aureole started to erupt to a blunt point, and pop back as the needle emerged from it.  Celia left breast was pierced right through, now.  Still she thrashed and screamed.

"AAAAAAARGH!  AAAAAAARGH!  AAAAAAARGH!  PULL IT OUT YOU SADISTIC FUCKING CUNT!  AAAAAAARGH!  AAAAAAARGH!"

Thwacks ignored her utterly.  He walked gravely round the head of the table, seized Celia's right breast by the nipple and stretched it vertically.  Slowly and precisely he inserted the needle through the right aureole, also just behind the nipple.  Celia was shrieking like a mad thing now, her whole body thrashing against her restraints.

Foolishly, I thought that was the end of the softening up and Griselda would now start the interrogation.  I watched her as she stood like a statue, as if cast in bronze and unable to move.  Surely she would step forward now and start bawling questions.  But Celia's torment was only starting.

Thwacks went back to the box.  He took out two pierced rings with wing nuts.  One he attached to the sharp end of the needle, above the tapering point, so that Celia's punctured and quivering breasts couldn't slip off it.  The other, I noticed, was slotted.  He snapped it onto the very centre of  the needle, equidistant between the two swelling nipples and turned the wing nit, locking it tight.  Walking slowly to the wall, he freed one the suspension chains from its tether and attached the end of it to the ring at the needle's centre.  Reaching out, he grasped a pulley rope and pulled.

Celia's back arched as her breasts were ripped skywards by the suspension chain and the needle. 

"AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!"

Tethered to the corers of the bench, her spread-eagled hands and feet scrabbled desperately to gain a purchase on the smooth wooden surface.   She wasn't screaming now; her head was thrown back, her mouth was open, her lips reaching, as if for air, and she was breathing in low moaning gasps. 

Thwacks now returned to his box and withdrew another, much smaller , black plastic box, with some leads and plugs attached.  He inserted a small plug into the needle's blunt, bulbous end, and the other he plugged into the wall socket.  He snapped a switch ion the small box. 

I expected to see a violent, jerking reaction as electric current surged through Celia's breasts, but there was no immediate change.  Seconds ticked by.  Celia twitched and whimpered, her back arched, her breasts cruelly punctured and stretched.  Then, as Griselda and I watched, panting became more bovine, her hands and feet scrabbled at the wooden surface, as if for life itself, and I saw that the needle's bright slender surface was growing dull.  Bloody hell, I thought,  It's heating up.  Celia's stomach muscles flexed now with a grisly gyrating rhythm,  her whole abdomen rolling like an expert belly dancer, only belly dancers don't pant and scream so. 

"AAAAAA—AAAAAA— AAAAAA —AAAAAAGH!"

For with the heat she had found her voice again.  Much as I loathed the bitch, I had to grit my teeth to endure that terrible screaming.

Her heels drummed on  the bench top, she strained to spread her thighs wide as if giving birth, trying desperately to bend the knees and get some purchase on the table with her feet — anything to take some weight from her stretched and burning breasts.  It seemed she could spread her legs wide enough.  She jerked her wide-open vulva into the air like a shameless, desperate whore, only whores don't scream like that, even when they're getting a thrashing.  But if I expected to see her breasts sizzling on the red hot poker, I was to be disappointed for a moment.

"Switch it off!  Let her down!"  Snapped Griselda.

Without a single facial muscle twitching, Thwacks switched off the heat and lowered Celia to the bench top, where she lay gasping and groaning.

Griselda looked down at her dispassionately.  "Let her recover her breath and her wits.  In the meantime, we'll have another sherry."

     We didn't speak as we drank our sherry, in fact we avoided each other's eyes.  I've learned since that in this situation you do.  There can be no small talk in a torture chamber while the necessary work is being done, not unless you're completely hardened to it.  Griselda wasn't.  I could see that by her stony expression and I noticed that her hand shook.  It was a necessary duty for her and the sherry was a comfort for her, not a ghoulish embellishment.  She had the stomach for Celia's torture — just, but no relish.  I suppose, if I'm honest, I enjoyed seeing Celia squirm.  How I loathed the evil bitch!  And for that reason too I couldn't meet Griselda's eye.  This was different from the sort of spanking and whipping that was common currency in nether Slype; this was brutal, mediaeval.  Yet from small acorns do great oak trees grow.  If you strap your wife for mowing over the cowslips, what do you do to serious and dangerous offenders?  I was finding out.

Griselda finished her sherry and walked across to the bench, where she stood for a moment gazing down at her victim with something akin to pity.

"Look," she said.  "Agree to tell us what we want to know and the pain will stop.  Refuse and it will get worse.  Believe me, it can get a lot worse, and you will tell us in the end.  You must see that resistance is useless.  Well?"

Celia's eyes rotated glassily, her mouth worked but no sound came.  I had no idea what was going on in her reeling mind.

"Take your time," said Griselda.  "I don't want to hurt you more than I have to.  Just give me some sign that you will cooperate."

Celia's mouth worked as though trying to summon spittle, but she had none to spit.  So she clenched her teeth for a might effort.

"Fucking cunt!"

She was mad.  The torture had driven her mad.   I knew she was stubborn but this was lunacy.  I sighed, Griselda sighed.  Whatever was done to Celia now, she'd well and truly brought it on herself.

Griselda turned away, and poured her own sherry now, her back to the bench, and downed it with a noisy slurp. 

"Carry on , Thwacks!" she said woodenly.

Yet if Griselda loathed what she had to do, Thwacks didn't.  he remained every inch the butler, and his face was impassive, but I glanced at his eyes, and they glinted with relish. 

"Ma'am."

He returned to his box and withdrew another shorter and more slender needle. Griselda and I were standing at the foot of the table and we clearly saw him reach down into Celia's crotch, push his finger into the vulva and stroke up her clitoris.  She groaned, though whether from pleasure of pain I'm not sure, but she shrieked as he took her clitoris between his fingernails and inserted the needle behind it. 

"If we sell her to the Arabs, ma'am," he observed casually.  "It will at least save them the trouble of circumcising her."

Griselda visible shuddered.  "For God's sake just do it!  Get it over with!"

Thwacks remained inscrutable u the eyes glinted again.  "Ma'am."

He then plugged that to into the small box, before seizing the pulley, stretching Celia's breasts towards the ceiling again, and clicked the switch.

We didn't have long to wait before the terrible screaming tore the air again.  As Celia writhed, her arched  body twisting in mid air, the needles canted this way and that, like rowboat sin a storm,  Her elastic smouldering breasts twisted and stretched as though she was desperately trying to rip them off their slender burning shaft, and lower down her crotch gyrated and pulled at the shorter needle in the same way — anything to be rid of the agony.   Small coils of smoke started to rise, and with them the savoury smell of roasting meat.  Never for had that smell so sickened me.

While thrashed the needles started to glow red.  Thwacks turned to us and inquired discreetly.  "More sherry, ma'am, sir?"

Griselda turned away.  "For God's sake!"

I too declined, but unlike her my eyes were riveted to the obscene contorting thing on the bench.  Celia twisted impossibly in air like a pitch-forked serpent as she danced her obscene limbo dance on the bench top. She'd had screamed herself hoarse now, and was bellowing like a stag, but no stag ever bellowed like Celia did.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!"

"How long does this go on for?" I asked Thwacks, unable to tear my tear my eyes away from the horror. 

"Until the lady decides to be reasonable, sir," he answered impeccably, and dusted a mote of dust from his black tailcoat sleeve.  "But I may say so, I don't think she'll inconvenience you for very long."

Celia evacuated her bladder now.  Such were her contortions that the golden rain showered and fell all over the bench and the floor.  Griselda fled to a far corner of the room and I followed, but Thwacks, the fastidious butler, pulled a face, set down the sherry bottle, donned pair of yellow rubber gloves,  and started to mop it up with a large sponge.  The screaming became unbearable, the stench became unbearable, and every time Celia drew breath, I could hear her breasts sizzling horrible.  I felt sick.  Griselda covered her ears and sagged against the wall for support.  I put out my hand to support her but she irritably knocked it away. 

Meanwhile, Thwacks drew close and coughed.   We could only just hear his voice above the inhuman screaming and the hiss of burning flesh.  "Excuse my interrupting, ma'am, sir, but I think the lady is trying to tell us that she's prepared to cooperate now."

"Yes, yes, for pity's sake.  Switch the wretched thing off and et her down."

"Very good, ma'am."

The men came back in and took Celia off the table.  She hung between them like a doll, and he face was expressionless, as if the woman had already fled elsewhere, and only the charred throbbing flesh remained.  Her nipples and aureoles were charred, scarred, black, and swollen right out of shape, and her crotch still quivered uncontrollably and she struggled to keep her thighs as wide as possible, for she could not bear the pain of closing her legs. 

"You understand, madam," said Thwacks  a little later when Celia had been lashed, spread-eagled to a St Andrew's cross, "that your ordeal so far was simply to make certain parts of your body receptive to persuasion.  For example . . . . "

He reached down between her legs.  I saw his fingers go up into her crotch as she whimpered and struggled.  Suddenly, the fingers gave a tremendous jerk.  Celia leapt against her bonds and screamed her lungs out.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!"

He turned to us.  "I think the lady has regained her voice and is receptive to persuasion, ma'am, sir."

Griselda put down her riding crop and when addressed Celia, I could see that her face was drained of colour.  "Now!  Let's get this over with as quickly and painlessly as possible."  She swallowed and her lips trembled.  "You know what we are prepared to do, so in your own best interests, cooperate.  Please cooperate.  Understood."

Celia groaned, her hanging mouth gaped, her eyes were dead and glazed, her chest laboured, and her breasts, recently so ripe and shapely, hung like dead, blackened meat.  She was scarcely recognisable as the cocky woman who had strutted into my house with demands two-and-a-half weeks previously.

"Now," said Griselda briskly.  "We need the names of any other person you have told about your discoveries here.

"Peter."  The word was only just recognisable.

"You mean Owen."

"Yes, yes. Owen.  Whatever."  She whimpered.  "Please stop the pain."

Griselda licked her lips.  "All in good time.  Who else?"

"No one.  Please."

"I said, who else!"

"No one, I swear.  Please.  I swear.  Pleeeease!"

Thwacks stepped forward again.  When she saw him coming Celia started to struggle against the  bonds.  Griselda turned away and her face was ghastly.  Celia screamed even before Thwacks touched her, but when her reached down into her crotch, took her swollen clitoris between his finger and thumb, and squeezed, she howled like a woman possessed.

"AAAAAAAA—AAAAAAAA—AAAAAAA—AAAAARGH!"

He stepped away again.

"Who else?" asked Griselda, still looking away.

"No one.  Please, please , don't let him hurt me again.  Please.  I'll tell you anything.  Pease . . .  please . . . please . . . "

"And where have you stored the photographs?"

"In my car, on my laptop.  Nowhere else.  Please believe me.  Please.  Please!  PLEEEEASE!"

She howled and leapt again as Thwacks' fingers went to work once more on her swollen clitoris.

"PLEEEEASE!  PLEEEEASE!  PLEEEEASE!"

Thwacks' fingers went to work again.

"Where else?"

"Nowhere.  PLEEEEASE!  PLEEEEASE!  PLEEEEASE!"

"Where on your Internet backup?"

"Nowhere.  OH PLEEEEASE!"

"On which flash drive?"

"None.  PLEEEEASE!"

Thwacks was still pinching and manipulating her clitoris, clearly enjoying it, though like all true sadists, he looked ever regretful.  Celia thrashed, pleaded, and screamed incessantly.

"AAAAARGH. NO. PLEEEEASE.  I'VE TOLD YOU EVERYTHING!  PLEEEEASE."

"Perhaps," said Griselda patiently.  "Let's just go through it again to make sure you haven't forgotten anything.

Celia's face hung grey and haggard.  She shuddered and her hips began to eave in a grisly rotating dance as Thwacks' fingers delved back into her crotch.

"Pleeease.  No!  Pleeease!"  she whimpered.  "Not more.  No more.  I can't stand any more.  Pleeease! " 

The merciless fingers jerked and pinched.  Celia leapt and bellowed her lungs out. 

"PLEEEEASE!  PLEEEEASE!  PLEEEEASE!  I'VE TOLD YOU EVERYTHING!  MERCY!   MERCY!  PLEEEEASE, I BEG YOU! "

Griselda turned enquiringly to me.  Her face was as grey as Celia's.  I too must have looked shaky because I felt sick and my legs tottered.  We stared at each other like ashes.

"Well, Owen?"

"She'd tell us if she knew," I said hoarsely.

"I agree."

"I know she's telling the truth," I said, not because I felt for Celia, but because I believed it to be so.  "She cares for no one; she'd hold out for no one.  And she'd have kept her little scam to herself for as long as possible, hoping to maximise the proceeds.  It's the way the bitch works."

"Well," Griselda demanded of the grey haggard wretch on the cross, for that's all she was now.  "Have you told us everything?"

Thwacks' eager fingers delved again.

"YES, YES, YES.  OH, FOR GOD'S SAKE!  PLEEEEASE STOP THE TERRIBLE PAIN!  MERCY!  PLEEEASE!"

Griselda considered for a moment and then nodded.  She turned to Thwacks.  "It's finished!  Clean her up.  Give her something for the pain.  Call the council for tomorrow morning."

"Very good ma'am."

The woodsman drove me back home in the land rover.  He'd been one of those who had stripped Celia, and strapped her to the bench and the St Andrew's cross.  We said nothing on the way to the village.  Such procedures breed reticence.  But I studied him.  He looked an ordinary and decent enough type.  I had always supposed I was too.  Imperatives breed necessary harshness.

10.  Trial

I was picked up and taken back to the hall next morning. I had noticed how quiet Ginny was at breakfast.  She usually prattled, sometimes irritatingly so, but that morning she was as quiet as a mouse.  I noticed how heads turned and stares followed us as we drove round the green and took the hill road to the hall.   It seemed that everyone knew something terrible was terrible, though not what and why, but terrible all the same.  Even inside the Land Rover I could feel the atmosphere.

The tribunal was held in the mansion's great hall.  It was a harsh affair and I wondered why they bothered with it.  But people seem to feel better when the ceremony of law is observed, no matter how bizarrely.  In the event, horror descended into farce, and I've sometimes wondered since if the farce was, in its way, worse than the horror.

It was a harsh affair, as one might expect.  He council of ten sat across the bench.  According to the rule, if their decision was hung, Griselda would decide, but that wouldn't happen today as Ned Grackley had died the previous month and not yet been replaced, so there were only nine of them. 

The charge was read.  The prisoner wasn't asked to plead as guilt was assumed.  As with all English trials back in the seventeenth century and earlier, it was merely a demonstration of guilt, not an enquiry into it.  Celia was asked to affirm her confession of the night before.  She was still naked and would remain naked now until she left Nether Slype.  This was symbolic and deeply traditional, though to me unnecessary.  But to the Nether Slypers, she was no longer a person, and as such she possessed nothing, she would take nothing away with her, not even the smallest pair of knickers would save her modesty, least of all modesty and dignity themselves.

Celia cared no longer for modesty or dignity, even if she had been allowed any.  She dangled before the council, her face grey and haggard like an old woman's, a man holding her up on either side, her private parts exposed for inspection.  Everyone could see the punctures near the swollen, blistered, and blue-black tips of her abused breasts, and you didn't have to look hard to see the scorch marks in her pubic hair, or where her mutilated and distended clitoris poked out like a bloody chancre between the misshapen lips of her pudenda.  And, of course, she couldn't close her legs, and the way her guards held her, shoulders back, they splayed apart and her whole crotch was displayed to casual view, as if she was offering her tortured sex to the council for their pleasure. 

But these clear marks of excruciating torture earned her no pity.

"The prisoner will stand forward!"

Her two guards jerked her forwards, her mutilated breasts swung against each other and she groaned.  

"The prisoner will affirm that her confession was freely and frankly given."

Celia seemed not to hear what she was told, she was in a daze, or another world entirely.  She hung between her guards like damp washing, open mouthed, dead eyed, and uncomprehending.

Thwacks stepped up to her.  "The word is yes, madam."

Her eyes rotated towards him her mouth lolled.  "Wha?"  She couldn't even articulate the word.

"You say yes to the judges, madam."

"Wha?  No . . . I . . . thy . . . ."

Thwacks turned to the bench and coughed apologetically.  The nine councillors gazed intently at their table top while he gently took hold of the tips Celia's mutilated breasts and started rubbing her nipples with his thumbs.  She gasped and gurgled, her body twitching, but in a half-hearted sort of way, her head lolling back as she struggled pointlessly against the men holding her, who also looked away.

"The word we're looking for is yes, madam."

"Wha?  No  . . .  I—"

Thwacks viciously squeezed the blue-back swellings.  Celia's legs thrashed in the air and she screamed a jagged, blood-chilling scream.

"AAAAAAAARGH!  YES!  YES!  YES!"

"The record will state that the prisoner confessed of her own free will," said the chairman, white faced, but otherwise unmoved.  "And without  undue duress."  He swallowed and turned obsequiously to Griselda.  "I believe, your ladyship, that you have other evidence to give?"

Griselda took a deep breath and rose. "Only insofar as it links the woman to the man.  Her guilt is plain."

The chairman simpered.  "As your ladyship says." He turned to the court and bellowed.  "Bring the man forward." 

I noted that the council never used named, I supposed because the prisoners, no longer being recognised as people, had none.  This was the most refined indignity.

Meanwhile, the man who had been Flavius was dragged forward also naked.  I had never seen him before and he appeared much older than I expected, though that might have been the result of madness and years in a dungeon.  He was short and grey haired, with a distended paunch and a flaccid penis that hung down to his knees.  His lower lip drooped like a simpleton's.

"Has the man confessed?"

Thwacks stepped forward again, lifted Flavius's penis revealing a distended but very full testicle sack.  Taking hold of the testicles in his hand, he jerked and squeezed.  Flavius jolted, his eyes popped, and he shrieked like a woman.

"It sounded to like yes to me, sir" commented Thwacks with impeccable gravity.

"I heard it quite distinctly," agreed the chairman, staring hard at the tabletop in front of him. "The record will state that the prisoner confessed of his own free will, without undue duress."  He then turned obsequiously to Griselda.  "In your own time, your ladyship."

Griselda rehearsed the story she, Ruth, and I had concocted, though I'm being overmodest putting it like that.  Primarily, it was my tale.

Celia was a freelance reporter — her signed confession said as much — hoping to sell a story about Nether Slype to the Sunday press.  We'd recovered pictures from her laptop, left in her car a mile back up the lane from the village.  These we showed to the council as 'proof' of the allegation.

Somehow — we weren't sure how, perhaps through his family — she had discovered, or suspected, that Griselda's husband was being kept prisoner.   Her proposed coup was not only to publish her scurrilous account, but to produce Flavius as living proof.  The two had conferred and agreed to this, their confessions confirmed it.

"But, excuse me, you ladyship," queried the chairman deferentially.  "How did they do this?  My understanding is that your husband has been incarcerated in the dungeons for years."

"She knew when Thwacks and I would be out, and when there would be few servants at the house," lied Griselda with remarkable steadiness.  "It was not difficult for her to gain access, hide to the hall, and make her way down to the dungeons when the coast was clear."

"You must improve your security, your ladyship," simpered the chairman indulgently.

"It's already in hand.  Meanwhile, we have learned how she knew so much about us and our movements, to make this possible."

"How, your ladyship?"

I stepped forward now and slapped down on the bench a component I had removed from an old laptop of my own the night before.

"Phone bug," I said.

They all looked at it amazed.  None of them had seen one before, which was as well.

"I suspected as much," I said blandly.  "My family used to mine diamonds in South Africa.  At one time there were attempts to intercept our randomly timed shipments.  We called the police, they checked security, and found a bug attached to several of our own phones.  They looked remarkably like this."

It was the merest moonshine, but it convinced them as it was intended to.  The logic was simple: if a bug was there, it was there for a reason and a purpose.  This was obviously the purpose alleged because no other was known.  Therefore the allegation was proved.

Ruth gave the fiction further substance with a slightly revised version of Celia's arrival at the pub.

"She started asking me questions about my lady's husband, and Mr Flaythm."

"And what did you do?" asked the chairman.

"Gave non-committal answers and immediately informed Mr Flaythm."

"And I immediately informed her ladyship," I said.  "We expected that she would return and we deployed men to trap her.  We had a couple of near misses.  She was seen lurking near here watching the hall one Sunday morning when her ladyship and most of her staff were at church in the village.  I thought I saw her on another occasion, lurking near my house when I arrived home.  On neither occasion could she be cleanly apprehended, so both I and the man who spotted her prowling round here hung back.  Neither of us was in a position to make a clean capture, and a bungled attempt might have scared her off and caused her to make some precipitate disclosure to the press."

"You both behaved very wisely," said the chairman, and the rest of the council rumbled agreement.

"However, yesterday we managed to make a clean capture." 

"We are in your debt," said the chairman.  "Indeed, we're obliged to everyone involved."

"Hear!  Hear!" cheered the councillors.

The case for the prosecution was complete — there was no defence.  The councillors huddled for only a few perfunctory seconds before reaching their verdict.

"We find the case against both prisoners proved beyond question," said the chairman.  "Their confessions are proof alone, and these have been corroborated by the three witnesses, and this nasty little gadget."  He pointed gingerly at my laptop component.   "We assume that when the female prisoner was loitering round your house, Mr Flaythm, that she intended to place another device in your own phone."

I'd never thought of that.  "That was my assumption too, Mr Chairman.  I've checked my phone and it's clean, as are all the phones here at the hall, which have also been checked."

"Much obliged for your thoroughness.  The sentence of the court is the both prisoners be banished, having each first received one-hundred lashes at the public whipping post."

"Mr Chairman!"  Griselda jumped up.  "I plead we dispense with the public lashing, given the identity of the male prisoner."

The council huddled again.

"Agreed.  We have no wish to embarrass your ladyship.  The sentence is banishment.  Your ladyship has our leave to make the appropriate arrangements."

"And my marriage, Mr Chairman?"

"Dissolved as an inevitable consequence, your ladyship.  Your quondam husband no longer exists so far as the community is concerned.  It shall be cried throughout the three villages."

Griselda bowed.  "I'm obliged to the council."

"The trial was a farce."

"Complaining."

"I can't very well, but—"

"It's the way it's always been done, darling" said Griselda, as we walked hand in hand through the December woods, for we both needed fresh air.  "I know it's theatrical but  it's the way they like it."

"And you?". 

"I understand that you cannot always save just part of a thing you cherish."

"Meaning?"

"Well, you say you came here because you loved the place — part of an old England you thought dead.  But can we save that without also perpetuating what we've just attended.  My father and my grandfather believed not.  We have a choice they said.  Perpetuate it all for as long as we can, or lose all.  An environment is not an a-la-carte menu, my father would say.  You can't choose to keep the bits you want and jettison the bits you don't."

"So we must either keep the torture and the trials, or we loose everything."

"I think we have to, don't you?" she asked soberly,

"Yes," I agreed.  "But we'll do it on our terms and salvage what we can."

"We?"

"Well, you can marry me now — if you still want to."

11. Aftermath

But we didn't marry straight away.  After the interrogation and the trial, a coolness developed between Griselda and me.  She invited me up the Hall for Christmas and I went, but there was none of the old canoodling in corners.  I discovered I missed it.  I missed it a lot.  I missed it more in February when Ruth let me know that she had a new boyfriend and was close to being spoken for.

"There's no future for you and me," she said.  "You're Griselda's, whether you like it or not.  It's best we act accordingly."

Her lot had risen in the village since the arrest and trial.  She was something of a heroine among the women, and Mrs Brittles had offered her a partnership at the village tearooms.  She snapped it up; who wouldn't?  As a result, men regarded her as a more attractive and respectable proposition than a pub kitchen maid any man in the village could spank for the price of a beer.

We remained friends, we still are, but she no longer came to my bed with those delicious long breasts.  I missed her warmth, and I missed Griselda's too.  In fact, in a way I missed Griselda's more.  She had been funny; she had brought sunshine and amusement into my life from the outset, and I knew she had a lot of warmth and love to offer too.  But still the distance remained, and the gulf seemed somehow unbridgeable.

Then out of the blue I received another invitation from her.  With Flavius gone, I had been elected to the council of ten.  More surprisingly Ruth had too, the first even woman member, apart from Griselda herself.  We had to attend monthly meetings up at the hall, but on this occasion, Griselda invited us all for dinner instead, with wives and partners invited.  Ruth's new boyfriend was with her, and Griselda and I found ourselves paired.  We played our parts sociably enough yet the awkwardness remained between us.

But at one point in the evening Griselda sidled up to me and whispered in my ear.  "Owen, will you stay for a while when they've gone?"

"Why especially?"

"We need to talk.  Don't we! "

"I want to," I said.  "I know that."

She briefly squeezed my arm.  "Later."  And she drifted off.

Later we sat by her large open fire, watching flames consume a log the size of a small tree trunk.  Neither of us had spoken for several minutes.  We'd just sat together and watched the flames.

"I've retired Thwacks," she said suddenly.

Then it struck me that I hadn't seen him all evening.  "Why?"

"I couldn't stand being in the same room with him.  Every time he said, sherry, ma'am, I wanted to run outside screaming.  The man is such a sadist.  He didn't do it because he had to, as we did, but because he loved doing it.  One of the maids told me that she heard screams from the cellars later, and saw him coming up from them in the early hours.  He'd been down there again to enjoy himself, hours after we'd finished.  The twisted sadist!"

"But aren't we all?"

She sighed.  "Yes.  We all like inflicting and receiving a little pain now and then, Owen, but there are degrees."

"There are.  And that's what's come between us, isn't it?  Where you draw the line."

"It has, and I wish it hadn't."

  "Me too."

She stared into the fire.  "Look, I know we're strange here, but we have our limits — usually.  Wives can divorce their husbands, you know, and appeal to the council for protection.  A real brute can be restrained.  It's basically consensual."

"Not always," I said.

"You mean your girl, Ginny."  She bit her lip.  "Yes, I'm sorry about that.  I thought she was letting you down and I so wanted to make everything right for you that I lost my temper.  It wasn't my place to whip her, but yours."

"Many would say it wasn't mine either."

"Perhaps not, but they wouldn't have been born here.  It must be interbreeding I think, down the centuries.  We all seem to be like that in the three villages.  I think it's in our blood, our genes.  We have to do it, give it or receive it.  It's the way we're made."

I laughed and she looked at me nervously.  "I think I might have Flaythm blood, after all.  I did rather hold you jacket while Celia was being interrogated.  Not physically perhaps, but you know what I mean."

"Shall I put on some music?" Griselda asked suddenly.

"Music?"

"I want to get that noise out of my head.  It still haunts me.  Now Thwacks has gone it will be easier.  He had to go.  He had a way of half-smiling.  Every time he did it I heard that woman scream again.  I've heard many girls scream when they're getting the strap or whatever, but never like that."

"I know."  And I did know what she meant.  I too couldn't stop hearing Celia's demoniacal screaming.  I squeezed Griselda's hand.  "At least we can talk about it now."

She walked across to her hi-fi, a surprisingly up-to-date one I thought, for I had half  expected her to crank an handle and put on a seventy-eight.  She selected a CD, inserted it into the slot, and a few seconds later I heard the opening bars of Vaughan Williams' fifth symphony, which I have loved since I was an adolescent.  It seemed almost obscene to hear such beauty after what had gone on downstairs, and yet, as the sound washed over me the screaming subsided to the back of my mind.

"I've loved this since I was a teenager," I said.

"Mmmm!  Me too.  I often hear it in my head when I'm riding on the hills.  It's what I fight for, you see.  But look" — she took a deep juddering breath — "that was only the third time Thwacks has used the needles since my father died.  The other two were men — both from the three villages.  One had tried to corrupt a child and the other had done something similar to the woman Celia.  Thwacks put the needles in different places, of course, but the result was the same.  Not pleasant."

I don't know why — it must have been delayed shock — but I laughed.

Griselda's eyes turned on me, large, and somehow vulnerable.  "What's funny?"

"It's the first time I've ever heard you use an understatement."

"I know," she said at last. "I was bloody ghastly.   But it's the way it's always been here."

"Then we'll have to change it," I suggested softly.

"And put all this at risk?"

"Then we might have to modify some of this too, the excesses at least, or lose it all one day."

There was a long silence, then she walked slowly across and sat on the arm of my chair, very close, like she had to a few seconds on the day I met her, but this time she lingered and her hand found mine.

"Will you help me?"

"Of course."

"I'm glad you're here, Owen, even if you don't want to marry me — especially after this.   I feel perhaps you don't, but duty had to come first you see, even though you would break my heart if you left."

"Would I?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Nothing to worry about then," I said huskily.  I drew her off the chair arm, and onto my lap, hugged her and, for the first time ever, I kissed her.  Then we sat in silence together, listening to the heavenly music.

We didn't jump straight into bed together, though I'd eagerly have taken her upstairs there and then.  For now that the awkwardness between us was dissolved and we could talk about necessary things, I was desperate to make up for lost time.  But Griselda had to do things properly. The bans were read three times and during that period there was no hanky panky, though she resumed pushing me up against trees, walls, doors and just about anything she could conveniently prop me against while she devoured my face.  But that was as far as it went.

One good work I did was to find Ginny another position with an elderly widowed lady, who thought the world of her and provided her with her own little cottage next door, so that she and her boyfriend would have somewhere to live when they married, which Ginny told me, they were planning to do. 

We married in early April, just as the trees were staring to leaf, and I was amazed to think that I'd still only been in the village for less than a year, but during that time my world had changed utterly.  For worse, and also for better.  When the day arrived the church was packed and the churchyard was full of people who couldn't get inside for the crush.  I waited by the altar with Ted Foxter, praying that Griselda wouldn't change her mind at the last minute.  When she did arrive, wearing a white dress — not a wedding dress but a simple thing of sheer white — her hand continually twitched as though she were slapping her thigh with a riding crop, though for once she'd left it at home.  She marched up to the front, grabbed hold of me, looked round to make sure everyone was there, and barked.  "Right!  Let's get on with it!"

I think horsewomen develop large nipples from all that jogging up and down.  Their nipples must be perpetually rubbed.  When I went into our bedroom that night, Griselda was sitting up in bed wearing a cotton nightdress with a low neck.  Her cleavage was deep and delightfully freckled.  Her nipples, I noticed were so long that her magnificent bust looked like a battleship's gun turret.  My mouth watered. I'd get to grips with all that in a minute.  In the meantime I marched up to the bed and tore the covers down.

"We're going to start as we mean to go on, Griselda," I said sternly.

"Whatever you say, husband."

"Nightdress off!"

"Yes husband."

She lifted the nightdress, her magnificent tits splayed out into full view and  salivated.  Lying back she opened her legs.  Her pussy was carpeted with luxuriant chestnut curls and her pink crack was open, waiting for me.  I'd get round to that in a minute too.  In the meantime I had an important point to make.  So I unbuckled my trouser belt and pulled it out of the loops, wrapping it round my hand twice, as I'd seen the man in the garden do.  Griselda's eyes were like plates.

"Are you going to spank me before you've fucked me, husband?" she asked eagerly. 

"You're going to get the strap for what you did to Ginny.   You've had it coming"

"Yes, husband, I know.  That was very naughty and I deserve it.  You're right to punish me severely."

"On your stomach!"

"Yes husband."

She rolled over on her stomach and her magnificently developed horsewoman's bottom can into view.  I almost burst my fly zip.

"This is exciting isn't it!" she said eagerly.  "I haven't been spanked since my father gave me thirty of the riding crop on my twenty-first birthday.  I'll feel like a real woman now""

"Quiet!  Grip the headboard rails!  Count!"

I raised my arm and the flying belt delivered a resounding blow across Griselda's big bare buttocks.  They quivered elastically and ecstatically.

"One, husband."

I lifted my arm again.  There was a loud and the plump bottom quivered again.

"Two, husband."

I whipped her with a will now, laying it on as hard as I could.  She had given it and now she would have to take it back.  One thing I was very sure of; she would know who her husband was and which of us was in charge.  She could forget all about sending me to the dungeons as she had sent Flavius, and I felt no qualms.  She had defended the custom and now she would live by it, and if she ever stepped out of line I would thrash her until she stepped back again. 

The thrashing continued and it was only after ten sound strokes that Griselda started to labour.  Her strong horsewoman's thighs were working now and her beautifully sculpted white cheeks displayed a broadening red stripe across them.  I continued remorselessly.

"Ah!  Ten, husband."

Smack!

"Aaah!  Eleven, husband."

I saw her head go back, and she was gasping and jerking at every stroke.

Smack!

"Aaaaah!  Twelve, husband.  I'm so sorry husband."

I continued relentlessly.  Her thighs were twitching ceaselessly now and she was heaving her bottom up and down with a steady mechanical rhythm as people do when they're in pain. 

Smack!

"Aaaaah!  Ooooh!   Thirteen, husband.  I'm so, so sorry.  Please be merciful."

She was crying into her pillow, I heard the sob in her voice.  Her thighs wriggled and her plump darkening bottom cheeks twitched ever faster.  She was in severe pain now.  The point was sinking in.

Smack!

"Aaaaaaah!  Aaaaaaah!   Fourteen, husband.  No more, I beg you."

Her whole body twitched, I could hear her crying, but I couldn't let that soften me, any more than Ginny's screams had softened Griselda.

"I'll decide when you've been whipped enough, Griselda.  And you haven't been whipped nearly enough get."

"Of course, husband.  Please forgive my impertinence.  Please whip me to your heart's content."

Smack!

"Aaaaaaah!  Aaaaaaah!   Fifteen, husband."

Smack!

"Aaaaaaah!  Aaaaaaah!   Sixteen, husband."

Smack!

"Aaaaaaah!  Aaaaaaah!   Aaaaaaah!   Seventeen, husband.  Mercy!"

Smack!

"Aaaaaaah!  Aaaaaaah!   Aaaaaaah   Eighteen, husband.  Mercy!  Please!"

I'd made my point, and I'd enjoyed it.  "I'm finished now," I said calmly.  "Back under the covers!  On your back!  Legs open!"

"Yes husband."

I undressed while she wiped her eyes and composed herself. 

"I'm sorry, Griselda," I said, "but you've given it, and now you'll have to take it back."

"Yes, husband.  You're right to correct my faults."

"Of course I am.  I'm your husband."

"Yes, husband."

I undressed, climbed on the bed, slid under the covers, and onto Griselda.  I rubbed my cock gently but pleasurably on her pussy hair.

"And now. My dear," I whispered in her ear.  "I'm going to take my rightful possession of your cunt."

"Yes husband.  It's waiting to pleasure you.  But please be gentle with me."

"Gentle?"  I laughed.  "It's been bouncing up and down on Bronco for God knows how many years.  It surely doesn't need gentleness!"

She swallowed.  "Bronco's in the corner husband, next to the wardrobe."

I squirmed over and looked where she directed.  There, standing in the corner of the room was a very small, old, and tatty child's rocking horse."

"Where's the dildo?"

I felt her blush.  "There never was one.  I just loved talking about sexy things with you, hoping that talking about them would make them real.  No girl in the three villages wants to admit she's a virgin."

"You're a virgin?" I asked incredulously.

She bit her lip.  "I'm sorry I lied to you, darling.  Shall I fetch your strap for my further punishment?"

"Don't be silly," I whispered and kissed her as I slid my prick into her hot, tight, and responsive cunt.  "Oh!  That's better."

She hugged me tightly and gasped with pleasure.  "I hope you enjoy it, my lord and master."