Belle Submission Read online

  ‘Maybe it’s because they are flapjacks, no-brain yankees, and we are southern belles.’

  ‘There is usually money involved in any conflict.’

  ‘New Albion doubloons are hard currency, just like our own, mamselle,’ Harriet said. ‘Two strokes for one of ours. Then, there’s trade. They have the wood and we have the manufactures. You’ll have to lead the trade mission and get drunk with Lady Juliet Gorges while you watch maids flogged in demonstration — demo girls are very proud, with big rewards in fessignats.’

  Harriet assisted Trina in dressing. It was optional for the intendant to wear bra and panties and Trina chose to do without, shivering at the silky cling of her tight blue skirt and thin blouse as Harriet slid them over her naked body. The garter straps and silk stockings were not optional, and the too-tight garter belt and straps pulling the stocking fabric taut made her unpantied cunt moisten. Harriet invited her to choose her cane of office, and Trina agreed to carry the whipple, still warm from flogging Harriet’s bare. She agreed too that Harriet might carry a whip, knotted at her waist, in testimony to her reputation as the hardest flogger among the watchmaids.

  ‘I shall be very cruel in your service, mamselle,’ she murmured, ‘and I beg you to discipline me accordingly.’

  ‘Why?’ Trina asked. ‘You, a dominant female — like me — why do you crave the lash on your own fesses?’

  ‘So I can think like a filthy submissive,’ Harriet drawled.

  Harriet leaped on Trina, pinioning her arm behind her back, and in a swift movement forced her to bend, while Harriet’s hand plucked Trina’s skirt.

  ‘Stop! What the —?’

  Trina wriggled but could not resist Harriet’s placing her over her knee, croup raised in spanking position. The maid raised her hand; Trina craned to look as the girl brought her palm down in slow motion and cupped her mistress’s left bare buttock. She left her palm on the naked flesh, sweeping the skin in tender brushing movement before raising her arm over her head. She repeated her slow caress, this time on the right melon. Her fingers penetrated the ass-cleft and stroked Trina’s anus and the lower cunt-flaps, getting further and further inside the wet vault until Harriet had four fingers inside Trina’s cunt. Holding Trina by the cunt, she lifted her arm for spanking and brought it down in a caress, repeating the movement six times. Trina moaned and stopped wriggling.

  ‘You are a bitch. Let me go,’ she gasped.

  Harriet released her and crouched at Trina’s feet.

  ‘Are you mad at me, mamselle?’

  ‘I was helpless. You could have spanked me and you didn’t. Yes, I am mad at you.’

  ‘Then you won’t deny me lashes? Hot, clean and raw?’

  Panting, and smoothing down her skirt, over her cunt fleece moist with new seepage of come, Trina blushed.

  ‘Damn you, I guess not.’

  ‘Such an honour, mamselle intendant,’ purred prefect Sophie Petrarque, beneath the festoons of ivy wreathing the door of the the academy of pomades and perruques.

  The lofty Grecian palace lay off the main thoroughfares and Trina had reached it through a maze of passageways broadening into an elm-lined avenue, with the gates to the Parc Flageolet at the end, beyond which seagulls swooped. The academy, giving right on to the cobbled street, abutted the high, crumbling limestone walls of the park, and the dense foliage of kudzu vine, clematis and bougainvillea enveloped the walls of both. Prudence Vile and three other thralls chosen by Harriet accompanied the intendant and her secretary on a twenty-minute walk whose informality Trina approved. She said to Harriet that her first impression of New Arras was of some antique yet strict backwater, like a sleepy Mississippi town, all classical courthouses and prisons, and yet away from the grand, crumbling palaces of Republic Place the town was livelier, its haphazard alleys and nooks almost mediaeval. The girls, though uniformed, seemed frisky away from the guardians of order.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ Trina said.

  After her second week as intendant, she had expressed herself weary of official receptions and banquets, always distracting her from GG’s agenda. In private, she dutifully fulfilled her obligations to her secretary, keeping her bare nates in a state of constant redness. Most of her public duties seemed to be signing warrants for thrashings or torture, and she wanted to go out and see New Arras for herself. Trina’s buttocks had been uncaned for those two weeks.

  ‘I’d expected some fanfare,’ said Trina.

  ‘People are busy, mamselle. There’s only fanfare when lashes are given,’ was Harriet’s reply.

  ‘They don’t look busy,’ Trina said, acknowledging curtsies from girls in military uniform — blue or grey denim — who lounged in the doorways of wine shops or coffee houses; some had their shirts undone, and even their bras, showing bare breasts dripping with sweat.

  ‘Sailors and soldiers on leave,’ Harriet said. ‘Scum, all of them, and disrespectful of the watch. Only the security corps has authority to discipline them with unlimited pertinent chastisement. Our strokes are limited by the rule book and we must make a report of any chastisement — as you know, mamselle. The darn security corps need not report. I blame the politicians.’

  ‘I’d like to stop and talk.’

  ‘With respect, mamselle, it is beneath your dignity, and would be the subject of a report — official or otherwise.’

  A clattering approached rapidly from Republic Place, and the girls loitering over pots of wine shrank into their doorways. A squad of bare-breasted girls, carrying canes and whips and wearing only clinging white athletic shorts and white calfskin jackboots, ran down the street in military formation. Their shorts bore gold braid, depicting a whip and cane crossed over two moons of female buttocks. The leader nodded and they dived into a doorway to extract the wriggling form of a wine-bibbing girl, who had no time to cover her undraped breasts before her entire uniform was ripped from her. Squalling and kicking, she was strapped to the clattering engine: a simple, wheeled flogging frame of wood, consisting of a top bar and a lower bar, four feet in length. The girl was bent over the frame, with her ankles and wrists knotted by ropes to the lower bar and her bare fesses exposed. Her body was longer than the frame and her heavy bare breasts drooped quivering over its end, while she had to hold her head up unsupported. Her melons and cunt-basin writhed as her pubic folds were ground into the bar.

  Without a word, the leader of the security corps detail lifted her cane and began to thrash the girl’s bare buttocks. Her strokes were a rapid volley, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, and when she lowered her cane her place was taken by her second. Again, the girl’s squirming bare endured five slashes of a willow wand, her naked fesse-skin darkening rapidly from pink weals to crimson. The whippers’ breasts jerked and bounced in the rhythm of their canestrokes. The third corpsmaid concentrated on the north buttocks and haunches, striping them purple, and the girl’s moans became shrieks, then screams. The fourth caner took her on the lower buttocks and the backs of her thighs, reducing her whole naked body to shuddering, with her legs jerking rigid beneath tightly clenched melons at each stroke. A fifth security maid took her, finishing the beating with repeat strokes in the existing livid gashes and darkening the whole bare buttock-flesh to a uniform blotchy purple. The girl’s ropes were undone and she was pitched, wailing and sobbing, face down on the cobblestones. Only when the corps girls had departed at a trot, and without looking at Trina or anyone else, did the wine shop girls venture out to collect the bruised body of their friend.

  ‘Fucking trulls,’ Harriet hissed. ‘Fucking martial law. Fucking war.’

  ‘Doesn’t anyone want peace?’ Trina asked.

  ‘What would be the point of that?’ exclaimed Harriet.

  The rest of their promenade was placid, though Harriet had to press Trina away from little shops selling trinkets, caps, knitwear, baubles, tacky plaster figurines of bare girls flogged, illustrated books and pottery, saying they were just souvenirs for tourists, from the mainland.

  ‘I hope yo
u enjoyed your promenade through our little cité, mamselle intendant,’ said Sophie Petrarque, loosening her blouse, open two buttons at the top, to show her full tit-jellies glistening with beads of sweat.

  Tall, tanned and blonde, a couple of years younger than Trina herself, she resembled the maid Prudence Vile, only with her breasts and rump fuller and less bony under her tight white blouse and blue scholar’s skirt, bow-tied at the back to show the minute thong of her string panties clenched by a muscular ass-cleft. Sophie’s skirt was open only two inches by her bow, yet those inches revealed delicate pink weals on her nut-brown naked buttocks. Without ceremony, Sophie ushered Trina into her office, obliging her to accept a cup of tea served by a maid in a short, frilly French uniform, with her breasts bare, the nipples studded with sequins, and her skirt drawn up at the front, showing her pantiless pubis and a pubic fleece so big Trina gasped that it could not be real: a jungle of sleek cunt-hair that stretched from her navel and dangled well below her cunt-lips over the nylon fishnet stockings sheathing her thighs. Sophie said it was a vison, or pubic wig. Trina duly admired ‘Sophie’s trophies’ as the directress called them: hung on the walls, beneath the portrait of Mamselle Flageolet, were models of flogging stools, racks, caning chairs, whipping frames and other apparatus of discipline, together with rows of shaggy hairpieces like the serving maid’s.

  ‘Some committee members would rather we built military equipment,’ Sophie said, ‘but how would mere girls learn to build siege engines and the like? Happily, my superior Mamselle Absorb, the supreme directress of the academy, is of my opinion. Our furniture is the best weapon New Arras can have.’

  Trina asked how Sophie would feel about switching production to bags.

  ‘Body bags?’

  ‘No! All sorts. Like packaging.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Sophie, tapping the bare tops of her breasts and crossing her legs with a slither of nylon stocking, ‘like the Trojan horse — body bags in pretty colours, for raiding parties to infiltrate our enemies. I like it.’

  She escorted Trina and her party down a corridor bustling with girls in pleated white tennis skirts and matching bras with laced Moroccan sandals.

  ‘We’ll see the furniture room first, mamselle,’ Sophie said, ‘and of course witness a testing. Then, the vison room, that is, our wigs. Devora Dykes was thrice-shaved yesterday, and I think she’s just your colour. You’ll forgive me, mamselle, for knowing that your mound is a little ticklish — those cropped hairs, how very mainland! — and will hopefully accept a fleece of new hairs from Devora, who will be very proud her hairs adorn the intendant’s hillock. She’s a lustful animal, I admit, but a useful auxiliary in the marines, and must shave for combat, lest she fall in battle and New Albion scum scalp her pubis. The savages!’

  ‘I’d like to see the pomades,’ said Trina.

  Sophie blushed.

  ‘Is mamselle sure?’ she said.

  When Trina insisted, Sophie explained that corners of New Arras still hid irrational superstitions, one being that the pomade could only be produced — or its production witnessed — by nude girls blindfold. Only pomade monitors, subject to the Bank of Arras, could witness the proceedings they supervised under oath of perpetual silence. Trina might observe the pomade-makers if she donned monitor’s uniform, that act equal to swearing an oath. Trina said she would be glad to enter into the spirit of things, and that she wasn’t scared of pomade, and what was it used for, anyway?

  ‘Why, the ingredients are oils from garden and forest, unique to our island, mamselle,’ Sophie said, ‘and another, which we believe also unique, to southern belles. Southern gentlemen use it to sleek their hair, as a refreshing body rub or anywhere that fragrant and effective lubrication is required,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Like a pick-up truck?’ Trina murmured, at which Harriet made a face, and Trina apologised for her mainland coarseness.

  ‘Mamselle the intendant cannot be coarse!’ Sophie retorted. ‘Making New Arras pomade is in no way scary, in fact quite pleasurable — just a little tiring, perhaps.’

  From the Journal of Mlle Augustine Flageolet, anno 1760 7 By a unanimous vote of our States General, the crew is permitted to watch public chastisements on deck, and maids are permitted equally to watch the floggings of the matelots, taken on the back with the cat-o’-nine-tails. It is natural for healthy young girls to stir at the striping of a muscular male back and allow their hands to wander under their shifts or petticoats, for only those garments are worn in this sweltering heat, their filmy substance leaving the body almost bare. Any masturbation, to which the sight of flogging stimulates them, must however be effected in a controlled, decorous and ladylike manner, preferably under the eye of a senior demoiselle, who may choose to take part. I tell my scholars that unfettered masturbation leads to fettered chastisement, and they applaud my wit. I confess that a flogging causes my own hands to wander inside my shift or petticoats, to find a pouch moist at the spectacle.

  8

  Butt Stud

  The vast woodworks buzzed with drills, adzes, saws and hammers as over fifty girls, all in white bra and panties, and with wooden clogs painted blue, fashioned disciplinary furniture: stools, frames, stocks, pillories, racks and gibbets. Monitors in blue uniforms with high blue jackboots, and wielding two-foot whipples, supervised the workers; their one-piece cotton tunics consisted of shorts and a halter top, carrying a name badge, and baring shoulders, arms and upper breasts. All the girls, monitors and workers alike, curtsied at the entrance of Trina, Harriet and Mamselle Petrarque. Trina wrinkled her nose at the clouds of sawdust and the acrid stench of varnish.

  ‘Mamselle Henek,’ said the prefect.

  ‘Mamselle.’

  A tall monitor with cropped auburn hair sprang to attention. As her palms slapped her bare thighs, the flesh quivered, with her heavy breasts responding, the jellies quivering in their narrow halter cups.

  ‘The new intendant wishes to see a demo. How many pieces are in condition?’

  ‘Seven varnished and ready, mamselle.’

  ‘Are miscreants expected?’

  ‘There has been no word from class, mamselle prefect.’

  ‘It’s not really necessary —’ Trina began.

  ‘Oh, but it is,’ said Sophie Petrarque, her face flushing.

  ‘Mid-morning already, and no mistakes in grammar or cosmography? You’d think me deceitful, and then it should be my fesses bared for the demo.’

  Her laughter was throaty and made her breasts dance under her tight white blouse, translucent with sweat and showing bare nipple.

  ‘Mamselle Henek, inform mamselle the professeuse that the new intendant wishes to honour her with a greeting.’

  A girl in her underthings was jerked from her task of sanding a flogging-horse, which another girl was drilling to fix bolts for straps and handcuffs at its end. She received instructions, covered her exposed body in a canvas sheet, and departed. Sophie showed Trina the workshop, inviting her to feel woodwork, suppleness of hinge and joint, polished cavities for cupping buttocks, chin or breast. They came to a half-finished rack.

  ‘I wonder if such an extent of correction is necessary,’ Trina said, shivering.

  ‘The rack is mainly for export, for those brutes in New Albion,’ Sophie replied. ‘The only language they understand. Trash, all of them — if you visit the POW stockade, you’ll find they don’t even curtsey. We have a few flapjacks here, on loan from the stockade. We can’t use them in the candle shop, because the beasts use the candles as dildos.’

  She pointed to the corner of the hall where the fumes of varnish were strongest. Trina saw a group of fully nude maids, their bodies dripping with lacquer, busy varnishing the frames and furniture frames under the raised canes of the monitors. Every nude girl had a croup well laced with fresh weals, and most had stripes across their upper backs.

  One, a coltish blonde, with a full mane and huge pubic fleece streaked and stuck with brown varnish, raised her head and gazed sullenly at Trina;
three monitors brought down their canes all at once on her bare fesses. Vip! Vip! Vip! echoed in the hangar, yet no girls looked towards the POWs. Her face twisted in a grimace as she doubled up, but she did not cry out or drop her paintpot. Instead, her jellies and melons trembling, and raw pink stripes streaking her bare buttocks, she curtsied to Trina, biting her lip and her grimace twisting to a smile. Sophie glared, hissing that the girl was the sassiest of POWs, but a good worker, being so strong. Odette van Kram, undoubtedly a nom de guerre, had been captured on a solo night raid from a fishing boat. Bent on theft and sabotage, nude and her skin blacked, she had refused to confess, even under repeated caning, back-whippings and the rack. Yet, without giving reasons, she refused to be traded for a New Arras POW, as if preferring the regime of corporal punishment on New Arras. She worked in the academy as a security measure, for Mamselle Toitte feared her wanton beauty exerted a lesbian influence over the camp guards.

  ‘I can bear witness that the rack is not just for export,’ Trina said.

  ‘Well, I guess the occasional hanging for the really incorrigible,’ said Sophie, before her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh, mamselle intendant, I’m so sorry! You yourself — what a welcome to New Arras! But you understand, in wartime, with so many spies around…’

  Trina laughed and said she fully understood, and was no worse for racking.

  ‘The rack was uncomfortable? Painful?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Decidedly so. Real agony…’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ Sophie said.

  The messenger returned, stripped off her canvas robe and returned to work. A scholar maid entered, head hung low and her hands folded at her crotch, but unescorted. She was scarcely nineteen, and her long dark mane sheathed a swelling breastwork, while the loose bowtie at her croup and the skimpy film of her high-cut white panties did little to shield two ripe melons, the unpantied portion of the moons liberally scarred with old welts.

  ‘Clara Latasse, again,’ Sophie exclaimed. ‘What now?’