The Prussian Girls (4 page)

“Don't be silly, Maria. Come over here and let me pour you out a glass of wine.”

But it was not to be. As the carafe tinkled, there came a knock at the door. Far sooner than expected. The Head worked fast.

“Already?” she moaned sickly.

“Herein!” called Ingeborg curtly and a maid came in, tall also and dressed in a short black satin costume with lawn apron spotless at her lap.

“Frau Direktrice…”

“I know, I know,” Maria said irritably, “she wants to see me. I seem to be rather popular in the East Wing tonight.” She tossed her head and tossed her skirt. “Te morituri…”

“I'll be here when you come back,” Inge whispered gently as Maria Daunitz followed the totally impassive maid.

She walked as she was supposed to walk, absolutely expressionless and in total silence, her shoulders back. She noted with a tremor, however, that these landings were empty, and that at each stair she passed stood another maid, face turned away, as sentinel. In short, the floor was “cleared” when a mistress was flogged. No one should see her going or coming. This time the maid led Maria up the usual steps to the Directress' wing, but instead of stopping at her door turned left along another corridor, neighboring. Here she halted at last, at another door, that of the Head's personal Chastisement Chamber. She dropped a curtsey and Maria remembered that she was supposed to have brought a coin; it was a custom to tip the maid taking you to correction a thaler at Rutenberg, it seemed.

“I'm sorry, Helen,” she said. “I forgot. I'll… I'll give it you after.”

“Oh, it doesn't matter, Miss. And if I may,” the girl gave a sweetly shy smile, “I'd like to hope it won't hurt too much.”

“I have an idea that it will though, don't you?” And chucking the girl under the chin she knocked.

There were three figures in this room which, like the Duty, was rectangular, barren, high-vaulted, but in this case brilliantly lit. Chandeliers hung overhead. Under one stood the Head, divested of her jacket, her frilled stock and gilet much in evidence. Beside her stood white-tunicked Wedell and in front of them both, with her back to the entrant, was big Else Gundling.

Maria curtseyed profoundly. “You sent for me, Frau Direktrice?”

“You stand accused of Loitering,” said the compact little woman to the Prefect. “Report of Fraulein Daunitz. Have you anything to say?”

“Nothing to say, Headmistress.”

“Do you wish to appeal?”

“No, Headmistress.”

“You know we require especial attention to rules on the part of our Praelictors?”

“Yes, Headmistress. I request permission to be punished for my great fault.”

Maria blinked. This was a different kettle of fish from the Junior. The broad-shouldered, broad-bottomed eighteen-year-old stood unflinchingly erect, head up. Only when she was told to make herself ready did she galvanize into action, stripping off her knickers and rolling her skirt high out of the way into her chain belt. She had long deep pear-curved arsecheeks, downy and unmarked.

“As this is a first offense I shall not strip you of your rank, Else. But you will do Duty Prefect for a week, write me out five hundred times, T must not loiter in passages,' and the next time you are found in the slightest fault I will see to it that you get three dozen, slowly, with the whalebone birch. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Frau Direktrice. Thank you.”

“Four strokes with the Sole.”

Maria had seen this implement, and saw it again now, reposing on a table to one side. She was surprised, however, at the sudden accession of wild, and most definite fear to the eyes of the girl as she went forward to where the Duty Mistress now pointed. Surely four was not too bad.

“Lie down on your back.”

On her back? What was this?

Her lips-yes-quite distinctly trembling, Else Gundling lifted her legs into an L of her body. Her ankles were subjected to stout straps, which were then shackled to a pulley Wedell had lowered from the ceiling. There was a squeak of a wheel and she was hoisted until she rested but on her shoulders; the pulleys were parted, as were her legs. By now she was looking ashen with fear. Her cunt was richly bushed with swarthy hair which streamed up her belly in a flat broad bar. The tackles were adjusted, the Duty Mistress pressing on the girl's hams to see that she was thoroughly held; then in a sudden athletic swing Wedell, grasping her victim's wrists, swung the girl's torso forward till her back arched. These wretched wrists were then likewise cuffed in leather and secured to the middle of a set of bars, evidently for the purpose. Maria breathed in deeply.

She faced the offender from the back. Else Gundling hung clear with widely parted legs, her upper body a bow attached to the bar in front. The oval purse of her pussy pouched downmost, its fat lips close. But the hair ran up the squeeze of bunched buttocks behind, the turgid flesh of whose inner sides were fully exposed, below-which was to say just above the closure of cunt.

A cold sweat started on Maria Daunitz' brow. Undulations in the tender flesh where thigh met hip showed her that Else was not indifferent to the enormity of her situation, either. Her slabby cheeks were ripe for whipping, were going to be whipped. Wedell pressed down on them again, creaking her pulleys, then went to get her instrument. This was the Sole.

It consisted in a wooden handle and a broad leather strap of some three feet in length. Not an implement to make an experienced eighteen-year-old pant and stretch in fear like this, surely. But it was curved at its conclusion and Maria Theresa knew why it glittered in spicules at its tip. The last third of the striking side had been sewn with minute needle-like nails. The way to strike with the Sole, Maria Theresa had been taught, was to draw or drag it in a currying motion across the flesh. Her tongue ran over her lips as Fraulein Wedell positioned herself with an attitude of relish some six feet back from the exact center of her victim's person.

“Slowly, Wedell.”

The Prefect began to tremor, her breath coming fast.

The mistress raised the tawse above her head with both hands and with both brought it down in a slapping crack that rang through the room like a pistol shot. She had chosen as target the inside of the left buttock and the pulpy flesh under and inside the thigh there. Else jerked like a fish, emitting a startled “Au je” and a fart. Then she twisted and panted with pain.

Clearly this had been considerable. The red weal that had been ripped into her was going dark at its rim, and already showing spicklets of rubby dew. It had cut close to her cunt but no more, yet such was her position terror of intimate violation arched her back, clenching. The second swiped across the right, and produced a collected cry-“Ooooh… nicht… bitte, bitte…”

The mistress had but four and to extract the fullest extent of learning from them had to draw down in a scraping effect at the very last moment. This she effected so well at the third, again on the sturdy left cheek, that the Headmistress was moved to remarks “Good, very good, Wedell.”

The puce blotch now extended into the buttock cheeks, at their juncture, and there were definite trickles of blood. The girl strove to clench these maddened surfaces with all her strength, gave up in a slackened pant-as the mistress struck. The strap thucked home athwart the right side, producing a positive frenzy on the pulleys. And let down, her lower limbs released before her wrists, Else Gundling writhed amain like some stranded shark, doubling up her knees, bicycling in agony as wave after wave of pain seemed to get to and engulf her — “Auch weh…”

By a miracle of control she rested as if exhausted on hands and knees a moment, head dropped, lost, freed. She kissed the reddened tail the mistress held out, pulled up her knickers which her raw weltings stained at once, as they did her tunic skirt behind, once it was put in order too. She prostrated herself on the floor, in slowly heaving motions.

“All right, Gundling, you won't be let off so lightly next time.”

For a second after the girl had gone the two senior mistresses seemed to forget Maria's presence. The Headmistress even smiled.

“It really is a most effective instrument. I must order it more often. You handled it superbly, We-dell.”

“Thank you, Frau Direktrice.”

“Have you ever had it?”

“Never.”

“You quite took the skin off the inside of her left thigh. A few more and she'd have looked like a skinned hare there.”

“And if you'd ordered her a few with the switch on top of it, Head, I'll wager she'd have jumped right out of her skin.”

They laughed in complicity a moment.

“Well, she's a good big girl and will be right as rain tomorrow. A sound whipping never did anyone a mite of harm.”

“Never, Head.”

There were indeed one or two spots of red on Wedell's ivory tunic. She ticked at them in annoyance, knowing she would have to soak them out with salt.

“Stand out, Daunitz. You're going to be flogged.”

Maria took two sharp steps forward and clicked her heels. Her eyes stared straight ahead at a spot in the wall above and to the left of the Headmistress. She was shivering all over like a mare in heat, and knew it.

“Drop your skirt. Now step out of it.”

For a second the Frau Direktrice's gleaming eyes fell to the bushy twat set on that sill where the plump thighs ended. Maria's leather now concluded at her waistbelt, beginning again at the tops of her bitingly tight boots, above which her skin bulged creamily. She felt totally nude, the lump of her cunt enormous.

“You will be figged.”

“Thank you, Frau Direktrice.”

“Do you know what that is?”

“A ginger suppository up the anus. If you please, Madam.”

“A cavalry trick. Prevents tensening and clenching-in of the cheeks. The cane does its best work inside.”

So it was to be the cane. Maria breathed in deeply. Wedell was approaching. A fingerlong stub of something glisteny in one hand. Maria felt herself turned.

“Lean forward.”

Finger and thumb puckered out her bunghole, as now she held her breath, and the suppository slid wetly in and up her entrails. Wedell followed it with an insistent finger, then two, worrying and working it unnecessarily home and high, so that Maria gasped and straightened under this unseemly goosing. It wasn't meant to go up her throat, after all.

“You will receive ten strokes of the cane across your buttocks.”

Heavens, worse than she had thought. Maria tried to keep her face as expressionless as that of the hefty Wedell, as the latter wiped off her fingers on a rag and took up the penal cane. Maria gulped. It was an aching, soulless length of round yellow willow, or ash, that the mistress was now rubbing with rosin at its gripping end, obviously capable of lashing agony. It was a thing of drill squares rather than girls' dormitories; its thumping whip would make a Westphalian plough pony dance. Ten strokes with… that?

But Wedell was walking, marching, and Maria knew she had to follow her, bottoms in apprehensive joggle, to one end of the room where sprawled a wooden trestle. As she moved there was a wet sensation at her insides, a smart at her sphincter ring. A sudden caustic burn made her want to pull her cheeks apart, physically. Perhaps the observant Frau Direktrice noticed this for she said, “Beginning to take effect?”

“Yes,” Maria could answer with feeling.

The stretched trestle leaked straps like hungry tongues. Broadly spread, her legs were fastened to it at ankle and knee. There was a leather pad at the center against whose slightly stained side she rested her pubis, her arms being pulled forward to the lower struts and secured at the wrists; as the front section, or headpiece, was lower, she found herself bent positively forward, and very much on display behind.

This sensation of utter vulnerability was intensified as a wide belt was drawn tight and buckled over her own. And when a thin tough strap dangling from the pad between her legs was drawn up her furrow and the bisection of her buttocks, to be hauled tight to the back of that same belt behind her, Maria winced with an admixture of both pain and shame. She was beginning to feel utterly trussed and strapped, out of breath and red of face; it hardly helped her general sense of shame that, in this state, the involuntary tremblings of her body all seemed to communicate itself to her lower person (now her highest!), nor that her increasingly oppressive anus seemed to be trying to turn itself inside out against its lining of saddle strap.

But Wedell had by no means finished. Things were not done by halves at Schloss Rutenberg. Maria had asked to be secured, and would be. From under her armpits two thin black straps bit into the cream of her shoulders, straining forward. Finally, a chain-a common curb or snaffle perhaps — was brought from behind her head through her mouth, and was fastened, after some oil had been smeared on the sides of her lips. She was bitted, no less! And in this process Maria heard a quick sympathetic whisper in her ear as Wedell leaned over her, fastening the chain-“Breathe deeply.” It was surely all she could do. Why, she could scarcely twitch. She felt… all bottom.

“Proceed,” said the headmistress, “begin with four a minute.”

A metronome was set going.

“Jau, Frau Direktrice.”

“Hau', was Du hauen kannst,” came the irrevocable order then.

Fraulein Wedeil stood behind Maria, waving the long, heavy Rohrstock in her right hand. She laid its cold wood on the parted, plummy posteriors a second, drew back, and swung.

It was a long sweeping stroke that cut upwards into the fat and Maria had known nothing like its bite before. Allmachtiger Gott! It drove her slack cheeks upwards, branding a band of burning agony athwart them. Then suddenly the true flame of pain drove through her, taking the breath from her half-uttered gasp.

“One,” said the Frau Direktrice. “Schon gut.”

After three every pore of her person seemed possessed of pain and she bit feverishly on the chain between her teeth.