Hall of Infamy (29 page)

‘I do hope her Ladyship fairly skins that bottom for the proud little bitch.'

‘All right now, darling,' Lady Alicia's rich tones cut through the general raillery. ‘Come and put yourself over my knee.'

Amelia went almost eagerly. Eager, she was at least, to get the ordeal over with and to regain some shred of modesty. Her aunt helped her, as she could not use her arms for balance, to lower herself over the Marchioness's silk-skirted lap. The smock rode up in the process and she was horribly aware that her bottom was now naked for the amusement of the company. If she had not been, the comments would have soon let her know.

‘By God, what a beauty!'

‘Sweet as a peach. That bum looks to be a really tender treat!'

Amelia felt a hand gently stroke her naked buttocks.

‘
Mais oui
, her skin is still as smooth as that of a baby.'

Amelia endured Mademoiselle Isobel's fondling, and tried to close her ears to the comments of the crowd. Despite the depth of her humiliation, her clitoris still throbbed urgently. She shifted on her aunt's lap, seeking to press the tingling nub against something more substantial than skirt silk, but to no avail.

‘Your bottom will be the toast of Hatherby tonight, Amelia,' Aunt Alicia said fondly.

Amelia hung her head in utter shame.

The first stroke of the paddle put her humiliation in sudden and very sharp perspective. It felt as if her skin was on fire.

Crack
!
Crack
!
Crack
!

Lady Alicia brought the paddle down in quick succession. Amelia was engulfed in an atrocious wave of pain.

Crack
!
Crack
!
Crack
!

Amelia had witnessed the effects on Clara and had known that the little paddle with its drill-holes would be bad. Part of her, though, had thought her cousin feeble to have cried so bitterly and wriggled so much under its strokes.

Now she knew better.

The pain was extraordinary. Like the birch, it scalded the surface of her tender skin without dulling the nerves.

‘Ow! Ooh!
Ouch
!' she yelped and groaned and gasped as the strokes rained down on her unprotected rear.

‘Stop that silly kicking, Amelia, or you will get more strokes.'

By the end, Amelia was half-delirious from the pain. Consciousness came back but slowly, in fragments of awareness that there was something else in the world, apart from excruciating pain.

‘Good show! She felt that, I'll warrant!'

‘By God, that bum looks like a skinned tomato.'

Amelia blew and gasped and sucked in needed air. The paddling had stopped, she realised slowly. The pain must be subsiding, though that was difficult to comprehend; her poor bottom and thighs were still in a state of scorching agony.

‘There now.'

A pat, or was it a smack? Her bottom was now so tender it was impossible to tell; it made her squeal helplessly again.

‘Tsk, tsk, Amelia. No need to make such a fuss. Get down and stop snivelling, girl. The losing ponies are about to meet their fate.'

Whimpering pitifully, Amelia was made to stand between her aunt and Jamie. This position placed her excruciatingly tender bottom easily within the reach of both her tormentors. She gasped as Jamie grasped her right buttock and squeezed.

‘Good Lord, Amelia,' he said, ‘it feels as if you have been sitting on a stove.'

Amelia could not prevent the tears from coursing down her cheeks. Worse, she could feel another moistness trickling down her inner thighs from her naked quim. The slight breeze made the fluid feel cold, and horribly obvious, on her skin.

There was at least one small mercy, she told herself as a pinch from Aunt Alicia on her left thigh made her wince. Few of the Hatherby
hoi polloi
were watching her now. Almost all eyes were fixed on a position between the crowd and the finishing line; the place where the carpenters had erected the wooden frame.

If the whipping had been inflicted straight after the race, Blossom thought as she eyed the frame nervously, she would have barely felt it. The agony of her over-taxed muscles would have rendered her all but impervious to more pain. As it was, the results of the flogging she had received from Lord Alex's crop, which had barely registered as a mild stinging at the time, grew more galling by the minute. As she slowly recovered, the dread began to grow.

‘Sorry, girl,' Lord Alex patted her cheek as she stood quivering in the sunshine by the lake. ‘You ran your heart out, but they beat us on that hill.' He glanced at the whipping-frame regretfully. ‘Can't get you out of it, though. You see, it is the tradition.' He leant forward and kissed her tenderly on the cheek, between the bridle straps. ‘Afterwards, you will belong to Jack,' he said, his voice a little thick with emotion. Then he shrugged and turned to walk away.

Dick was looking upset, too. He had unbuckled her harness. The sense of relief as the leather straps came off reminded her of her first training days. The bridle and bit were pulled off, too, giving her lips the sweet sensation of release. He poured some badly needed water into her open mouth before leading her off to be sponged down.

Davy was already sponging Princess. The girl stood impassively as the lad rubbed the wet sponge over her magnificent physique. Blossom blinked, as she realised that the girl was steaming. Then she gasped as the cold water cooled her own well-flogged flanks. The sensation was delicious and she tried to lose herself in it, wondering if she was steaming with perspiration, too.

‘Well, now.' An amused voice brought her back with a start. ‘Let's have a little look at what I've won.'

The man was considerably shorter than Blossom. He looked up at her, his gold tooth flashing wickedly as he grinned. Blossom moaned as he seized both of her nipples and worried them between strong forefingers and thumbs.

‘Lovely titties,' he grunted. ‘Fabulously long legs.' He dropped one hand to feel between her thighs. ‘Hm, the filly's responsive, too.'

Dick continued to sponge her down as Jack Campion appraised his newly won girl-flesh with professional expertise. Powerless to stop her body responding to his knowing hands, Blossom gave a low moan. She sensed that Dick was bitterly disappointed; upset that he was going to lose her from the stables. The thought provoked a pang of sadness, almost homesickness in her breast.

‘I'll get two thousand guineas for this filly in the girl-markets of Fejr,' Jack said conversationally to Dick. ‘I'll race her first, on the flat, so they can see her run. Those sheiks will pay a fortune for a white pony-girl as fast as this beauty.'

Blossom struggled to make sense of his words as Dick led her off to the frame. What could he mean, “the girl-markets of Fejr”? Something knotty in her stomach told her that she would find out one day soon. She had more immediate concerns, however. Her wrists and ankles were being buckled into leather bands. Looking to the side, she saw a frightened-looking Connie undergoing the same process. The welts on the girl's back were fading but still visible on her pale skin. To the other side, Belinda was having her ankles fastened into place. Beyond her, Rose was already being spread-eagled in the frame.

Each girl had her wrists fixed, wide apart, to eyebolts in the crossbeam of the frame. Next their ankles were pinioned. Connie's right ankle was fixed to the right-hand upright post. Her legs were spread wide and her left ankle fixed to Blossom's right. Strong hands hauled Blossom's painfully stiff legs open, and her left ankle was padlocked to Belinda's right. Finally the process was completed, with Rose's left leg being affixed to the left upright post.

Blossom felt appallingly exposed. She was completely naked, but could scarcely move an inch to protect herself. To move her legs at all she had to fight the girls to either side, and after a few panicked moments, the futility of this dawned and they stopped struggling, lapsing into a state of tautly stretched, terrifyingly vulnerable, equilibrium.

The girls had been chained on the frame so that they faced the ornamental lake, their backs to the crowd on the rise. Some of the stable-lads and gardener's boys had lingered by the finishing line, and now stood grinning at the naked girls and fingering themselves. Blossom was used to being seen naked, yet this position, with her legs chained so wide apart, made her feel peculiarly exposed. However, the leering youths were a minor distraction. What made her flinch, and the girls on either side of her whimper with fear, was imagining what was happening behind.

They did not need a lot of imagination. All too soon, the losing riders trooped around to the front of the frame, chasing off the lascivious stable-lads and their friends: Lord Alex looking peevish, the Reverend Dawes whose countenance was stern, and Mrs Treadwell, seemingly tiny next to the great figure of Justice Ormorund. Each of the four carried a carriage whip.

‘Now, girls,' Lord Alex said, ‘as you may have guessed, you are going to be whipped. The losing fillies in the Silver Cup have been flogged since the days of the twelfth Marquis and, believe me, tradition will be fully honoured here today.'

Belinda gave a little wail of fear beside her.

‘Oh, do be quiet, girl,' Lord Alex said, as Justice Ormorund glared at his losing filly.

‘The procedure is as follows. The first whip, myself in this case as I came second, will give each losing mount a stroke. Next, the second driver,' he nodded at the Reverend Dawes, ‘will whip down the line, and so forth. When each of us has given one stroke, I start again, this time giving each girl two lashes in turn. This procedure is followed until the final round, in which the drivers will inflict a stroke for every entry in the race. Very well, let us begin.'

The drivers turned and trooped around the frame. Blossom was in a panic now. She knew how much those carriage whips could sting. Desperately, she tried to calculate the number of strokes. A mumbling to her right told her that she was not the only one.

‘Five and four is nine and three is twelve, and two is…'

There was an evil whistling sound and a crack of whipcord snapping against tender flesh. Rose gave a startled cry of pain.

There was a languid scattered round of applause, the sort of polite sound that might have greeted a boundary at a county cricket match.

Connie's calculations seemed to have been upset by these distractions because she gave a frightened squeak and tried again. ‘Is twelve and…'

Another whistle, another crack, another outbreak of clapping. Belinda hissed. Almost paralysed with fear, Blossom awaited the next stroke. There was the whistle again and her back was scored with a sizzling line of fire.

She was still gritting her teeth and trying not to cry out when she heard the next stroke of the whip lace Connie's back. Again there came that round of clapping from the picnickers, as the buxom girl beside her gasped with pain.

It was bizarre, strung out there in the afternoon sun, each seething stroke of the whip drawing its response from the spectators. It was the snap of leather on soft flesh, rather than crack of leather against willow, that provoked each round of leisurely applause. Yet the genteel parkland scene seemed oddly familiar to her, almost comforting, as if these were the sights and sounds of some lost dream of home. Another searing stroke, this time cutting across her naked buttocks, put all such musings right out of her mind.

The Reverend Dawes! She might have guessed that his stroke would be vicious. By the time the pain had started to subside, the next wave of strokes was hissing down the line. Belinda's leg jerked convulsively as Mrs Treadwell's lash laced the girl's shoulders, and Blossom was struggling against the yanking of her leg when a blistering stroke impacted on her back.

‘Hoooo…!' It was not the worst stroke, but the Reverend's brutal lash seemed to have loosened the moorings of her self-control. Chains rattled as she fought fruitlessly against her bonds. Then Connie was crying out in pain beside her, too.

The fourth stroke came with horrible inevitability. The worst thing about being in a line, like this, was that she heard the strokes approaching on the backs of the other girls. The sound concentrated the mind on what was coming. Justice Ormorund's whip caught her hard across the thighs. Blossom shook her head furiously and made a hissing noise.

‘Oh, God, oh, no, I can't bear it…' Connie babbled to one side. On the other Belinda was breathing brokenly and sobbing.

Hiss
…
crack
!
Hiss
…
crack
!

Rose let out a heart-rending shriek. There was no room for any doubt about what was coming to her. Belinda was trying to kick again, as the whip whistled and cracked across her back. Then Blossom felt Lord Alex's whip sear across her own skin. One blistering stroke striped her from right shoulder to left side; a second later, its twin bisected it, leaving a red-hot wire of pain from her left shoulder to her right side. Tears sprang to her eyes as she clenched her fists impotently. She was so tautly stretched in the frame that there was little she could do in response to the atrocious pain, but jiggle furiously on the spot within her bonds.