Deceived and Enslaved (10 page)

'Did you like that, Penny?' Willingham asked casually after the first stroke of the cane.

'It hurt, sir!' Penny answered, her weak voice showing how close to tears she was.

'But did you like it?'

'I don't know, sir.'

'You don't know?'

'It hurt a lot, sir.'

'Would you like Mr Everton to cane you again?'

'No, sir.'

'Is that the right answer? I don't think it is, Penny. I don't think it is at all. I think the right answer is yes, Penny, you do want Mr Everton to cane you again.'

Penny didn't answer.

'Penny?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Well then, I think you had better ask Mr Everton to cane you again, don't you?'

'Yes, sir,' the girl said submissively.

Lillian gasped; not only were they going to cane the poor girl again, they were actually going to make her ask for it!

'Go on, tell Mr Everton that you want him to cane you,' Willingham commanded calmly.

'Mr Everton...' suddenly Penny faltered. Lillian was sure she didn't want to be caned again.

'Go on.'

'Mr Everton... would you... cane me again?'

'Where, Penny, where?' Willingham spoke.

'On... my bottom, sir?'

The next time Everton brought the cane down it smacked against Penny's naked buttocks, an involuntary yelp issuing from behind her pursed lips, an audible response to the firm clear crack the cane had made against her fleshy bottom.

'Did you like it that time?' Willingham asked the girl.

'Yes, sir,' she said through clenched teeth.

'Then you had better ask Mr Everton again.'

Again! Lillian couldn't believe it. The girl's bottom must be tingling with pain. The second stroke had seemed much harder than the first.

'Yes, Penny, again.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Go on then.'

'Mr Everton, will you cane my bottom again?'

Everton was both precise and ruthless. He levered the cane behind him again, his face remaining impervious to any sign of emotion. He administered his punishment with a swift movement of his arm, his wrist twisting violently an instant before the cane made contact with the voluptuous flesh. Again she winced with the pain, her body jerking in surprised shock that the third stroke was even more harshly applied than the first and second.

Willingham's beaming eyes contained a fiery vivacity as he stared at the scene.

'Oh you did like that, didn't you?'

'Yes, sir,' Penny answered obediently, a hand automatically reaching out to stroke the pink-red weals of her bottom.

'Mr Everton, would you just check to see if the girl is telling the truth.'

Penny gasped as Everton reached under her to stroke her sex. She felt the light trail of his fingers along the engorged ridge of her labial lips.

'Is she wet, Mr Everton?'

'Yes, very,' Everton replied in a disinterested monotone.

'Well, we had better give the girl what she wants,' he commanded Everton.

Everton was a muscular man. His muscles rippled through the loose cotton of his shirt, his chest bulged as he arched the cane again and again, and with considerable expertise landed a blow over exactly the same spot until a red line had been etched across Penny's lily-white buttocks.

'Let me see,' Willingham said, leaning over Penny, carefully examining the red indentation that Everton had made with the cane.

'Isn't it beautiful to see an obedient girl like this? You know that afterwards she will thank you for introducing her to pleasures she could have never imagined.'

Penny did not seem so sure that gratitude for Willingham would ever be utmost in her thoughts; her eyes were still clenched over the pain that had been inflicted on her, that was now intensifying as Willingham painfully nipped her skin precisely where the cane had fallen. The only thing that Penny seemed grateful for was that her ordeal was now surely at an end.

'Now, Penny, please remove the rest of your clothes, so Mr Everton here can take you to the cellar and chain you up. You will like that, wont you, Penny?' The casual tone of Willingham's voice seemed to belie the actual content of what he was saying. In fact Penny didn't seem at all sure that she wanted to be chained up in the cellar and her feelings must have translated themselves to the expression on her face.

Lillian again gasped. After such a brutal beating they were actually going to lock her away!

'Well either you go there, my sweet, or I'll have to punish you again. It will be lovely, Penny, just think. You won't be able to do a thing until I come to get you. You'll be completely in the dark with no one to speak to. It will seem horrible at the time, but just think how excited you will be when you see the light coming from under the door and then the door will open and you will be brought to my room. You'll be a happy girl then, wont you?' Willingham spoke insistently.

'Yes, sir.'

'And what will you have to do then, Penny?'

'I don't know, sir.'

'Well, Penny, you will have to do everything I tell you to do, no matter if you like it or not.'

'Yes, sir.'

'You do want to please me, don't you Penny?'

'Yes, sir.'

'And you don't want to make me angry.'

'No, sir.'

'Because if you make me angry then I am going to have to punish you again and I don't want to have to do that.'

'No, sir.'

'So take off your clothes. You won't be needing them while you stay here.'

Penny obediently began quite listlessly removing the rest of her clothes, the high-heeled shoes, the black stockings, and the black bra.

'And in the morning, young lady, day two of your education begins.'

The screen went blank and Lillian turned back to Sonia, a shocked expression on her face. It was true that the idea of being beaten by the forceful but cold Everton had excited her, the idea of being temporarily taken control of like that, but she could never be totally submissive like that girl had been and listen to a gross man like Willingham barking orders at her. Never!

A message came from the hospital saying that Hyde-Lee was to be kept in for another night for more tests. Willingham was returning immediately from England. Lillian decided that the best thing that she could do was to go to Rome. She needed time to think alone, away from the manipulative clutches of the returning Willingham, Hyde-Lee, and his servants. She didn't trust any of them, not even Sonia, who had been the kindest to her.

She took the train from Viareggio, a few kilometres north of Willingham's mansion, and headed south to Rome.

As she passed through Pisa, a surprisingly ugly looking city, she thought, her mind was in a fiery torment. There was so much to consider. Leaving aside Hyde-Lee's diaries, the dubious machinations of Willingham, the callous cipher Everton, the person who occupied her thoughts most was herself.

She had never considered herself an unconfident person, nor had she thought that she was particularly unusual in any way. Emotionally she had often wondered why she found it hard to form relationships, a trail of three or four half-hearted attempts at domesticity lay behind her, a few one night stands, usually regretted, and a general disapproval of any hefty emotional commitment that would interfere with her chosen profession. Men had found her very attractive as a person, sometimes a little too domineering - she did not suffer fools gladly - but nobody so far could accommodate her strong will and intelligent brain. However, it was often in bed that they had found her most disappointing. Her last boyfriend had complained that she was too conventional, and strangely, considering her dominant personality, too passive.

She wondered now as the train sped through the Tuscan countryside, an occasional glimpse of the glinting Mediterranean coming into view, whether she had, as Sonia had indicated, hidden her true sexuality. To feel prey to another's desires, to be so weak, so vulnerable before them, manipulated by them. She thought about the pain in her dream, the sharp incisive pain of the leather strap on her firm flesh she always visualized. In her mind the pain was radiant, piquant; she could not but think that like Sonia's tales and Hyde-Lee's diary it had awakened her to her senses, to her desires, to something that lay at the core of her identity.

Why had she not realized this before? Was it really too frightening in this day and age to admit that her sexual desires were so? What being a biographer had taught her, if it had taught her nothing else, was that nobody's life, neither in their professional or personal sphere, was particularly normal.

Her thoughts focused on the dream, the recurring dream that had plagued her since childhood, the dream that she had always considered a fearful nightmare. Could it not be, she now thought, the manifestation of some unconscious dark desire within her?

Janus, the Roman god of doorways and gates and beginnings. Wasn't Janus also the patron saint of Rome where she was now heading? Janus, the two-headed god, literally double-faced, was Janus not her symbol too. She had looked for contrast when she had been researching Hyde-Lee's life. As a biographer, she always looked for disjunction, contrast, enigma. Maybe she had spent so long examining other people's lives that she had forgotten to examine her own.

She watched two old ladies sitting beside her in the carriage of the train. Two old ladies, maybe in their seventies, eating ciabatta, looking vaguely out onto the afternoon sunshine. She was aware how soon life could pass by, how difficult it is to even begin to understand the enigma of who we are, before it is too late. Surely what she had learnt about her father had taught her that. It was time to start, to learn about herself. For the first time in her life she was greedy for experience, for life, to explore the meaning of her sexuality. In fact, she thought again, she wasn't just greedy: it had more to do with necessity than want.

Arriving in Rome she booked a hotel in a narrow street off the Via Cavour. She showered and changed, her mind still dark and fretful, churning over her experiences, her thoughts, her memories, and what others had said about her.

As she opened the wooden shutters and keen shafts of dusk light illuminated the drab corners of her cosy, but less than lavish room, she thought especially of Hyde-Lee. Maybe illness had made him mad. She thought of all those Roman crazies, the Caligulas, the Neros, driven mad by power and self-belief, surrounded by sycophants and ciphers, abusers and manipulators and invariably sadists. Hyde-Lee was not an emperor, but he was in his own way a powerful man. Wealth had made him powerful, success had made him powerful. Maybe he too was mad. Maybe illness was finally driving him crazy. If she decided to continue with the biography, she would have to realize that she was taking on a mighty and responsible task. She would have to weigh up very carefully the wishes of Hyde-Lee with her own professional integrity and the damage that could be done to others, not only to the Willingham's of this world who probably deserved every ounce of opprobrium they would receive, but that of others. In her mind it was the clear image of her father that came to her. How far was he implicated in all this? Her kind, gentle father! It made her shudder to think of it. The consequences of writing what she suspected he had done would turn her world upside down.

It was such a beautiful night that she could not resist wandering around a city she had not visited since she was a schoolgirl. Making a detour to view the floodlit Coliseum, this great pagan memorial to cruelty and barbarity, she walked steadily through the car-infested streets.

She headed up through the narrow dimly lit streets to the Piazza Navone and sat to drink a glass of wine. She watched the tourists bustling around the ancient square, busloads of them mingling with the hack painters, congregating around the Fontana dei Fiumi, one of Bernini's masterful pieces of baroque art.

Momentarily she felt a kind of euphoric relief to be away from the claustrophobic confines of Hyde-Lee's world, to be a free woman in Rome, to be able to breathe in the humid air of the city, and for a moment, to forget all the heavy troubles that had weighed so heavily on her mind since she had arrived at Willingham's villa.

She noticed three men approaching her, three dark Italian men. The oldest might have been in his late thirties or early forties, the other two were possibly ten years younger. She knew all about Roman men, and how keen they were to try to pick up foreign girls in the city. She had visited Italy often enough to learn their spiel, to be able to deflect their unwanted attention.

It was obvious that they were watching her, walking towards her. She had noticed them as they stood in the centre of the square, casting their glance around at the available women sitting under the parasols by the row of bars at the side of the square. They were undoubtedly coming towards her.

If these had been normal times! If she herself had felt her normal self, she would have frozen her face to deal with their obvious chat-up lines, rebuking them with her eyes, warning them off with her clipped Italian accent. But this time something stopped her, something held her back from demonstrating her disapproving stare.

As they came closer she noticed that all three were quite handsome, the younger two were quite muscular, with sheeny black hair hung in ponytails. The youngest looking one of all had piercing blue eyes that were striking considering his dark, tanned complexion. The older man, although dressed as casually in T-shirt and jeans, had short, clipped hair, and as he walked up to her she noticed a small knife scar in the middle of his cheek.

'Miss, you mind we sit her?' It was obvious that the older man had only a basic smattering of English, no doubt picked up in pursuit of American or English girls.

She came close to making her usual response, to saying that she was waiting for someone, or to flash her eyes in the direction of the other vacant tables to show them that there were plenty of other places to sit. But she didn't.

'No.' She even motioned with her hand, splaying it out in front of them in a gesture of hospitality.

These men must have been used to rejection, indefatigable as they were in chasing women. They looked surprised that Lillian seemed so welcoming. The older man's eyes lit up in anticipation.