A Gentleman's Property Read online

  At first Mrs Van Dusenberg struggled to retain some dignity and self-respect.. A charitable observer might have concluded that it was the pressure of the cat’s thrusting head that had forced her thighs a few inches apart. But when tom transferred his attention from her arse to her cunt, in which his rooting tongue lapped furiously for the remaining cream; when she felt his whiskers flickering along her sensitised lips, and his cold nose stabbing at her tumescent clit, she abandoned all pretence. The sophisticated lady had been reduced to a bitch in heat. She flung her legs backwards until they bumped against the wood, spread them as widely as anatomy would permit, and locked them in that strained position by hooking her ankles around two corners of the box. Her cream-splashed nylons, which until then had been held up by gravity, now began to slide towards her feet, giving a clearer view of her quivering thighs. Even through the solid box, even around her gag, Mary could hear the ghosts of Ginny’s orgasmic screams.

  At the ultimate moment Ginny’s ankles sprang from the corners of the box and her legs executed a wild and wanton dance in mid air before sinking gradually backwards into a slightly less strained version of her former position. She now lay quite still, exhausted or unconscious. Even when the cat, searching for any remaining deposits of cream, began to play with her labial rings, she did not move a muscle. Satisfied that his feast was over, and being fond, like most of his kind, of the highest available vantage point, tom now perched himself on Ginny’s upturned cunt and proceeded to wash his sticky face, pausing now and then to survey the cabin with lordly disdain.

  “Peace at last,” said Aki Morimoto. “Now, Miss Bowdler, it is time that we become better acquainted.”

  Casco Island

  It was not often that the Baroness Walter spared a kindly thought for any man, least of all her father. That fat and vulgar Canadian meat importer had been dead for thirty years, and she had seen as little of him as possible when he was alive, so her memory of John Walters was growing pleasantly vague. Luckily the Baroness had inherited nothing from him except his huge fortune. Her looks she owed to her aristocratic Austrian mother and her own determination. Her title was the reward for secret services to the ladies of the Viennese court in the dying days of the Hapsburg empire. Her social position had been earned by wit and intelligence. Her father’s name she still bore after a fashion, but she had dropped the ‘s’ and pronounced the ‘w’ as a ‘v’. Today, however, as she looked down from the terrace of her magnificent bungalow across the glades and sands of her very own tropical island she could think of him with at least tolerance.

  John Walters had few interests outside his business, but his ancestry did promote a taste for Scottish writers, and in particular for the works of Robert Louis Stevenson. Fired with enthusiasm by ‘Vailima Papers’ he had set out in 1910 to relive some of his hero’s experiences in the South Seas. The craze did not last long, but its legacy was the far from desert island that the Baroness inherited along with a less romantic roll of ranches, railroads, ships, and shares. At first it had passed almost unnoticed among the plethora of more immediately useful possessions, but when the Sisters of Sappho discovered the need for a discreet training camp the Baroness remembered Casco Island. That was how John Walters had christened the place. Its native name was unpronounceable.

  The few aboriginal inhabitants had been bribed to resettle themselves elsewhere, her father’s elderly caretaker had been pensioned, and the Sisters quickly established an all-female regime on Casco. Under the watchful eye of the owner it had been transformed from a neglected holiday home into a camouflaged military base and prison. From the sea things looked infinitely better manicured, but otherwise much the same as in her father’s time: the coral reef, the sandy beach, and then the vista through the palm glade to the lawn, the terrace, and the great bungalow on the hill. Beyond it, invisible from the sea, all was changed. Twenty-five years after the Sapphic takeover, surveying her work from the terrace, the Baroness saw that it was good.

  On the wide lawn immediately below her the Amazon Legion was exercising. It was as international as the Foreign Legion, and recruited its members in a similar way. Most of the young lesbian volunteers were also fugitives - from justice, from parental intolerance, from marital tyranny, from professional prejudice. The defiance or mere pique that had led the recruits to Casco was now being honed into fanaticism by a regime of iron discipline. Literally iron in one respect, for each Legionnaire had her enlistment number branded below her right breast, where an officer could check it at any time by lifting the nipple ring. Except when on active service, the recruits were always naked, except for their rings and chastity belts. Among the Amazons clothing was a mark of rank, with the result that uniform had become a matter of fetish among the officers.

  The Baroness and other senior Sisters believed fervently in the value of sexual control as the key to military discipline. The chastity belts worn by all non-commissioned Amazons eliminated the possibility of any serious sexual pleasures except those awarded by authority. Such indulgences could be won by meritorious conduct, but were far more often the reward for meritorious thoughts. Each step an Amazon made towards understanding and accepting the Sapphic philosophy opened to her a new chapter in the great volume of sexual delights created by the Sisters during half a century of experimentation. The ultimate pleasures involved the use and abuse of the Sisterhood’s slaves.

  The Baroness took the closest interest in the Legion, not only as its founder, but as its honorary Colonel in Chief. She had herself invented the exercise or game the Amazons were playing at this moment. It was a version of croquet intended to develop abdominal muscle, improve agility and stamina, and teach self-control. For it the players wore specially adapted chastity belts with a screw-sized hole at the vagina. A chunky wooden plug with a threaded hole at the outer end had been inserted in each player’s cunt before the belt was put in place, and the holes carefully aligned. The curving bat was then screwed into the plug through the belt. When the players were standing up the bat curved back between their legs, forcing them apart, with the meat of the blade facing the ground. But in fact it was illegal for the players to stand during the course of the game.

  When the officer acting as umpire blew her whistle to signal the start of play each Amazon had to fall backwards and take all her weight on feet and hands. Thereafter, the resting of any other part of the body on the grass earned disqualification and punishment. When the players were in correct position, their breasts and bellies exposed to the strong sun, the curving bats hung down towards the turf. While in scuttling motion, the players had to raise their cunts in a lewd gesture to prevent the bats from catching on the ground, but when resting between shots they were allowed to use them as extra points of support. Depending on the angle at which the bat engaged with the turf, the act of resting the weight of the loins upon it might cause the cunt plug to shift either up or down, with an effect that could be anything from excruciating to delightful, according to the anatomy or mood of the woman.

  But this was as nothing compared to the effect produced by hitting the ball. The slightest tap could begin sensational quiverings in the cunt plug, and a full-blooded stroke was apt to set off seismic vibrations. To play the ball with any accuracy required a complex of physical and mental skills that spoke volumes for the cunning foresight of the Baroness. It was impossible for the player to see the ball while striking it, and even to line it up before moving into position required great judgement and a very flexible neck. The Croquet Stroke, played with a player’s foot on her own ball so as to send the opponent’s out of bounds, was especially difficult in this version of the game, and many an Amazon had succeeded in hitting her own ankle rather than the ball, with disastrous consequences. To generate the speed and power necessary to propel the ball to any distance with a flick of the hips called for great abdominal power, and to resist the sensations transmitted from the bat to the cunt plug when hitting the ball hard required iron discipline. Th
e successful players were the ones who could hold an orgasm at bay, or else absorb it without breaching the rules by letting their elbows or bottoms touch the grass.

  The Baroness’s concentrated study of the game was broken by the tinkling approach of her butler Penelope, who hurried slowly along the great terrace from the far end. Her servants always did everything as quickly as possible, knowing only too well the consequences of keeping the Baroness waiting, but their speed was generally controlled in one way or another. Penelope wore short ankle hobbles and high heels, which gave a pretty, tripping teeter to her walk. As the Baroness disliked surprises the bells worn by her servants were tuned to different notes, so that she could recognise which of them had entered her presence without the need to turn her head.

  The reduction of the sound from a full peal to an isolated ping told the Baroness that Penelope had taken a humble station behind the chair, where the agitated rise and fall of her pert breasts still gave occasional voice to her nipple bells. The Baroness continued to gaze serenely down on the evolutions of the Amazon Legion until Penelope had caught her breath and there was complete silence on the terrace.

  “Well?”

  “The ladies are assembled in the lecture theatre, Milady.”

  “Tell them I will come immediately.”

  The Baroness waited until the sound of Penelope had faded into the distance before rising. At seventy-five she was still very brisk and upright when walking, and retained her famous figure, but struggling from a low chair was one of the actions that did betray her age. The Sisters of Sappho were rarely slow to do anything in front of, on top of, or indeed inside les domestiques, but this was one of the Baroness’s rare moments of shyness.

  The bungalow provided the only access between the public foyer to the island and its working interior. The lagoon off the sandy beach was the sole practicable anchorage. The beach led to the lawn and trim gardens in front of the house on the hill, but to nothing else. High walls attached to the flanks of the building curved away on each side until they reached the sea at points where sheer cliffs made progress along the coast impossible.

  The bungalow itself was divided laterally into two distinct portions, a suite of public rooms facing the beach, and the practical and confidential apartments facing the interior. The only communication between them was a concealed door in the library (with its collected editions of Stevenson, Scott, and others) which led into what the Baroness called her Private Case. She had lived much in Paris between the wars, and had collected every erotic text published in the capital of pleasure during those classic decades. Other Sisters had contributed salacious books from around the world, and over the twenty-five years since Casco was established its secret library had grown to be one of the finest in private hands. Meanwhile, the rows of leather-bound Scottish literature left by John Walters gathered dust on the other side of the partition.

  It was not possible for the Sisters to entirely exclude strangers from Casco. From time to time government officials, tax gatherers, diplomats, and naval commanders would make calls of business or courtesy. They would be politely entertained in the public rooms of the bungalow, served food by Amazon officers disguised as servants, given a leisurely tour of the garden and beach (“the walls are essential to keep the jungle in check”), and sent happily on their way. “I would say they are lesbians,” they would whisper later to their friends, “but very respectable people, and good for the economy.”

  Pausing to glance round the empty library, the Baroness extracted a small key from her locket, opened the concealed door, and passed into the Private Case. Despite its name, this was a larger room than the one she had left, and far busier. Several off duty Amazons were so engrossed in books that they failed to jump to immediate attention when the Baroness appeared in their midst. She waved them graciously back to their armchairs when they repaired the omission. The slave librarian (a real librarian until her abduction) had been quicker to spot her mistress, and fell at once into the prescribed submission pose. The books she had been shelving piled on the floor beside her, the librarian knelt with widely spread legs, her arms stretched backwards and her fingers wedged beneath her toes.

  “What’s the matter, Felicity?” said the Baroness, pausing to caress the girl’s pale nipples and flick her golden bells, “I hope you are not still pining for Oxford? No college could give you a collection like this to care for. If you are unhappy in your work, perhaps some outdoor exercise would be more to your taste? Well?”

  “I am very happy, Milady, entirely happy,” Felicity replied with eager haste.

  “Then let me see you smile, my dear. I like to see smiling faces about me.”

  It clearly did not come naturally to the grave and academic young librarian, but she earned full marks for effort. Her forced smile was as wide and sparkling as a toothpaste advertisement. The Baroness tickled Felicity’s neck and the underside of her chin, as if hoping to produce a purr as well, and then held out her hand regally for the librarian to kiss. She did so with unction, slavishly licking the wrinkled fingers and precious rings.

  The Baroness passed into a small ante-room, where she was pleased to find her slave bookbinder Monique hard at work. “Continue,” she said before the woman could down tools. The Baroness was a connoisseur of fine bindings, and was always impatient to see her latest erotic acquisitions properly protected, adorned, and extra-illustrated. The slave was currently finishing a grangerised Histoire d’O, for which the Baroness had commissioned exquisite drawings from six great artists. One was designed to face each page of the novel.

  Monique was, for the Sisters of Sappho, a comparatively rare example of a targeted abduction. They were usually opportunistic in their acquisition of slaves, but the Baroness had been so impressed by examples of Monique’s work shown at a fair in Brussels that she had ordered her Amazon press gang to acquire the binder at any risk, without even pausing to investigate her age or appearance. It was thus a pleasant surprise, when the thunderstruck binder was delivered to Casco, to find that she was reasonably young and quite presentable. Since then diet and grooming (and exercise when the Baroness could spare her) had turned Monique into a more than acceptable bed slave, but it was for her specialist skills with leather and gold leaf that her mistress valued her.

  “Ah, the owl,” said the Baroness, leaning on Monique’s shoulder while she admired the page on which the binder was working. “I really must look into the question of masks. It is an area in which we have been strangely slack. Would you like to be my bird, Madame, or my beast?” Monique had been happily married to a professional colleague at the time of her disappearance, and the Baroness liked to remind her of her former life.

  “I wish to be anything that will please you, Milady,” the binder replied, glancing up timorously at her mistress. Was it a trick question? But the Baroness seemed not only satisfied, but pleased. She pinched Monique’s ear lobe, always an excellent sign, and passed out through the French window onto the rear terrace, where a very different prospect met her eyes.

  The central plateau of Casco was spread out before her. Here many tall trees had been retained for shade and camouflage, but all the undergrowth had been cleared. Scattered widely beneath the trees were the unobtrusive working buildings of the island, the barracks, prisons, offices, and training houses. All were single-storey, though some covered deeply excavated cellars and dungeons. As the lecture theatre was one of the more distant buildings the Baroness clapped her hands sharply. At once the pair of duty ponies came trotting out of the chaise house to the right of the terrace, pulling a light carriage suitable for one or two passengers. Such a vehicle was kept ready throughout the day, the ponies being changed every few hours, whether used or not. More specialised requests could generally be met by the stable officers within minutes.

  The duty ponies at this moment were a rich young American widow and her black maid, who had fallen into the hands of the Sisters
as the result of an arranged yachting accident. Mrs Grant had taken a round-the-world trip to disguise her lack of grief for an elderly husband. At Sydney she had fallen in with a fashionable crowd of pleasure seekers planning a cruise in the South Seas. Their yacht was never seen again after leaving Tahiti, except by an Amazon raiding party, and all the passengers and crew were reported dead. That was true of the men, but the women were alive and chained on Casco. All, that is, except the undercover Amazon officer who had been the instigator and betrayer of the cruise, and responsible for ensuring that the female passengers and servants were all up to Sapphic standards of beauty. She had been promoted and placed in charge of the training of the new slaves.

  It had amused the Baroness, who had met and disliked Peggy Grant in Washington, to turn her and her maid Purity into a contrasting pair of ponies. The maid had a voluptuous figure, the former mistress was a slim and delicate blonde. Since her capture Mrs Grant had been kept out of the sun as much as possible. The tan acquired during her tour had now completely faded and the pallor of her skin was emphasised by a regular dusting with powder, giving her a matt finish. The blackness and glossiness of Purity’s skin had been enhanced by plentiful applications of oil to her generous curves. As she took her high seat, grasped the reins, and set the carriage moving with a flick of the whip the Baroness looked down complacently at the rolling buttocks and horizontal backs of her shiny black and her muted grey. As usual, she had done well.