"We'll make it twenty then," Royden said genially. He took away the box. Hanging suspended by my wrists again made me want to cry. My punishment was going on and on. A girl gets tired and scared and hurt, and she keeps wondering why men get so much happiness from giving her pain. About that time in a punishment it all seems terribly hopeless. I was wondering if I dared ask for another drink when the lash sang its warning whine and cut into my back. I am trying to tell you a story about me and Yolanda. You will already have realized I am a girl who gets whipped a lot. If I try and take you along to share every harrowing lash and stroke that slices my flesh it's going to be a bore. A whipped girl is a whipped girl any way you describe it. The variations of temperament by which girls endure their whippings all bring her to the same end. She is well striped with scarlet weals and very thankful when it's all over. The most pertinent impression of a girl being whipped is not so much the whip as helplessness. Always you are tied or strapped or chained. You have to be. You are naked and vulnerable. This is the paramount sensation: you have to stand there! Or hang. Or bend over! You never get reconciled to the seeming anomaly of having your bare skin whipped while you do nothing about it. You can't do anything about it! It was that way now with Mr. Royden. I was beautifully suspended. My nakedness was stretched from my wrists. I was all there to whip. I could generate a lot of motion, I could scream. But I could not get away from the lash that striated my skin, nor from the man who wielded it. It is an extraordinary frustrating impotence that everyone should endure once just to know what it's like so they can realize how lucky you are the rest of the time.
"You mark exquisitely, Euphemia."
"Thank you, Mr. Royden." The formal game we played satisfied some strange sense of propriety for both of us. Absurd! you say. Well perhaps but I'd swear the whip hurt me less because a gentleman was using it.
"Do they whip down to your knees?"
"Not usually. It hurts a nasty sexless hurt and isn't a bit aesthetic." He stopped whipping me. "You and this Miss Harding of yours place a lot of stress on aestheticism?" I was gasping with pain, but he had put his finger on a favorite theme. "Of course we do, Mr. Royden. To us the whole experience of two girls, one a slave to the other, is beautiful. Girls ought to be beautiful. Yolanda and I are. It sort of follows, then, we can't do anything ugly."
"A bit over-simplistic?" He hit me low so the tip snapped into my hip. It was hard to cope with the agony and carry on the dissertation, but I managed.
"You're thinking of the conventional pictures of brutality, Mr. Royden, in which it's always a man who flogs a girl. Most people would see it as disagreeable and unworthy of analysis. But I bet you see what you're doing to me right now as beautiful, don't you'!"
"It's you, hanging there naked, that's beautiful."
"But you're part of the scene. I wouldn't be hanging here decorated with lovely weals if it was not for you." He slashed the thong across the top of my shoulders. While I worked at absorbing it, he continued his casual observation: "Damn rummy, when you think of it. If I whip you for the pure cruelty of lust there is something transcendent and immaculate about the tableau the two of us create. But if I was whipping you as a real punishment for some delinquency the scene becomes sadistic. I'd probably feel sadistic in a way I don't now. The values are reversed somewhere." This time he was deliberately unkind. He wrapped a cut 'round my bottom on top of the cane stripes. It hurt like blazes, but I knew he was testing me, so I gave our small talk all I had. "It comes from a false premise, Mr. Royden," I pointed out innocently. "A thousand years ago no one would have given what you are doing to me a second glance. It seems wrong or brutal now only because society has decided it's not done. A matter of fashion or changing custom actually."
"Do you and your Yolanda chit-chat like this while she whips you, Euphemia?" I was framing my reply and tensing for his next stroke when the door opened. I was suspended at an angle which enabled me to see what then took place. It was very swift and very shocking. A man had entered. At sight of him, Royden's hand flew beneath his jacket and emerged with a pistol. But the shot from the doorway came too soon. The man who had been whipping me with such consummate finesse crumpled to the floor with a thud that, to my horrified eyes, spelled death.
"This is the place," said the man who had fired. He was joined by two companions. All of them were foreign, not distinctively so, nor by their speech, but by their complexions and the way they wore their clothes. I thought of the Arab states to the south and the East of the Mediterranean.
"We wanted Royden alive."
"Then he shouldn't have had a gun. It was him or me."
"I suppose that's the girl." All three gazed at me as though I was a piece of meat, but their eyes soon became carnal.
"Your name is Euphemia Carstairs?" I doubt it would have helped if I'd said no, I was Jennie Smith. They knew!
"Take her." I said no word as they tied me. There was that about them which told me pleadings would be useless. If I had known fear before, I shivered with it now. They let me down so that my feet found the floor. No sooner were my wrists released from the bar than they were instantly tied behind my back. When they also tied my elbows so tight they met, I knew I was for it. My captivities were rapidly degenerating. For the first time in my life I wished I was male and unmarketable.
"Search the house and get her to the car." Since they then tied my ankles, I was not hard to manage. A blanket tossed over my head and roped below my breasts completed my ensemble of what the kidnapped girl should wear. Somewhere along the way I passed out. I expect it was from lack of air.
"Pretty little bitch." The voice was male.
"I suppose the lot of you will screw her arse off?" This one was female and came from London. I opened my eyes and took in the scene. It wasn't much. A rotten little cell with none of Gyorkos's 'clean sheets', just a cot and a thin mattress on which I reclined, my arms and wrists hurting like fury. The man was mediocre. His trousers were a concession to the West, the rest of him was some sort of Arab. But the girl was London. But the wrong part of London! She was pretty enough in a wrong sort of way. Her dress was East End and skimpy. I weakly voiced my most demanding need.
"Please untie me. I won't fight." It amused them. But the man answered her, not me. "Ordinarily, yes," he agreed. "She's a prize of war. But take a good look. She's worth money. The Cause can use the cash."
"You'll spoil her with your tortures. I don't suppose she'll have the sense to talk. You'll screw her, won't you?" She looked at him accusingly.
"You're jealous, Jennie." He laughed. "Don't worry, screwing rarely loosens tongues."
"I don't know a thing about anything," I affirmed vehemently.
"See what I told you. She won't fetch much when you're through with her." Jennie eyed me without favor. He laughed again, enjoying her concern. "You underrate our skill. Fortunately, we have a lot of time."
"I suppose I'll have to look after her?"
"You know you'll enjoy a small victory over the upper classes. She will help your class consciousness."
"Have your joke," Jennie retorted without rancour. "I almost feel sorry for the poor little cunt. I've never seen anything more naked and helpless. Look at her!"
"Quite charming. I will leave her in your care. If you let her escape you will be killed."