Praefectus Praetorio
R.I.P. Brother of the Quill
Flaywell's Prayer (cont.)
Mina didn’t know what hour of the day it was when she was painfully and rudely awakened. Immediately her pain came roaring back, and for a moment she had no idea where she was or how she had gotten here, only that her pain was so awful she felt she must certainly be in hell. She groaned and cried out. Then she felt hands on her thighs. Desperately she tried to sit up, but was unable, as her legs were jerked and she fell back down on the thin mattress. She cried out with the lancing, burning pain as her buttocks and back were scraped on the mattress. Then she saw by the light of a lamp who it was.
The warden. He was leaning over her, opening her legs. He hiked the shift up past her hips with one hand, and pinned her down with the other. He stood over her, his eyes gleaming as he admired the soft bulge of her womanly mound. He reached his hand into the downy tangle of her pubic hair and began stroking his first and middle fingers up and down the slit of her sex.
Mina cried out again, this time in humiliation and dread at what the warden intended.
“Please, please, no,” Mina begged.
She had reached her limit. She couldn’t bear this any more. The physical agony she had borne and now this. It was too much! She couldn’t bear it!
“No, I beg you, please, no, don’t do this,” she pleaded.
It was hopeless, she knew. Now she was to experience the full dregs of suffering and humiliation. Even so, the spark of resistance still burned within her, and she tried to buck and kick and push him away. His finger on her private place, a place she had touched for her own pleasure even when she knew it was sinful and self indulgent, a place she thought no man would ever touch, was now being stroked by a beast, a demon from hell. It was irritating, insistent, agonizing, dreadful. He was so rough! His hands were like sandpaper!
“There, you see, you little slut,” the Warden said, “I can give you pain, and I can give you pleasure. Having your back whipped, or your cunny stroked; it’s the only things you whores understand. Isn’t it so?”
Mina gasped at the agonizing intensity of the violation.
“Stop!” she cried. She tried again to push him away, to kick him, but her strength was no match for his. Effortlessly he swatted her arms and legs away as though they were nothing more than an irritating fly. He smirked, and pushed her thighs farther apart.
“Stop, oh please, stop, stop, help me, someone, help me!” She tried to shout, her voice scraping and hoarse, and then howled her anger and humiliation.
A low chuckle escaped his throat as he gaped open her sex with his thumbs. At first, he didn’t know what the glistening membrane was that was partially covering the opening of her cunthole. Then it struck him.
“The devil take me,” he breathed. “You still have your maidenhead.” He chuckled again. “But no need to play coy any longer, my little strumpet,” he said. “You know you want this. It’s what you’ve been waiting for; admit it, to be fucked by a real man.”
“No, no!” Mina gasped.
Desperately, she writhed and twisted on the mattress, loosening her bandages and opening her whip cuts.
Easily pinning her, he slid his breeches down. He bent to kiss and lick and sniff her sex. The scent was delightful, and recalled to him the sights and sounds and smells of earlier that day: the aroma of her as he beat her arse over the trestle, the fig nestled deeply into her anus, his own sweat of effort and lust flying off him, her agonized, muffled grunts as he cracked the bull’s pizzle over the soft mounds of her buttocks again and again.
His erection was enormous, painful. He had been thinking of this moment since she had been brought here. She was in his house now, in his bed, wantonly teasing him, opening her thighs to him!
He eased his bulk down on her, pressing the tip of his engorged cock against the petals of her sex.
Mina was crying, pleading, but only in whispers, for she had no voice to cry out any longer.
Please no, please no, no, no, no, filled her mind in a haze of despair and helplessness.
“Warden.” A nasal, flat voice addressed him across the dimly lit cell.
The warden grunted, recognizing the voice: the distinctive, flat quack of the pipsqueak lickspittle. It was a voice he’d already learned to hate. He looked up at Flaywell. “Goddamn your fish eyes, Flaywell. What the devil do you want?”
“I thought we had an understanding.”
“Understanding.” the Warden said.
It was time to teach this fish eyed, skinny little bastard what’s what, the Warden decided. Slowly he rose from the bed, in no rush to pull up his breeches. He wanted to give the scrawny stripling a good look at a man sized cock. After he pulled his breeches up, and tied them at his waist, he sniffed and then wiped his glistening finger on his shirt just for show.
“Ah, pardon me, Mr. Flaywell,” he said, drawing the name out in mockery. “You must forgive my rudeness.” He stepped up to him. The man was skinny as a wire. The Warden was used to backing down others with his size and his willingness to use violence, and that combination usually worked. The milksop took a step back. The warden smiled.
“Miss Berkeley and I were in the midst of something I believe you toffs call a tete a tete. Now, I would ask you to tea, but why the fuck don’t you just piss off before you make me do something impolite to you and you have to go tattle to your Commodore?”
The Warden thought to grab Flaywell by the throat and throw him out of the cell. Simultaneous with the thought, his hand reached out.
The last few seconds of the warden’s life were an indistinct blur to him. He reached, but suddenly Flaywell wasn’t there. He didn’t see clearly the hand that deflected his, didn’t see at all the hand that gripped his hair, he only felt the sudden, violent pull as his neck was wrenched backwards. A solid blow to his lower legs as they were tripped from under him. A momentary sensation of falling, not even enough time to brace himself before slamming to the flagstone floor of the cell. The sudden impact, driving his breath from him. His head twisted to the side, his left arm trapped beneath him. In that split second, his body began responded with an adrenaline dump, and no doubt if he’d had another few seconds to get himself untangled and bring his heavier, and far more heavily muscled body into action, he would have won this fight as well as he had many others. But he didn’t have those few seconds. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a flash of silver. Something in his ear--
And that was the last thing he ever felt.
Flaywell kneeled on the warden’s body, swirling and twisting the handle of the ice pick he’d driven into the Warden’s ear. He watched the light go out of the Warden’s eyes. Then he withdrew the pick.
It was retractable. Set in a spring loaded, silver handle, it shot forward with surprising force. Flaywell took a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket, wiped the pick, swabbed out the ear. It looked like it had gone cleanly into the ear canal, penetrating the tympanic membrane and the cochlea, and into the brainstem. There was a spot of blood, and a careful dissection would reveal the wound channel, but who in Cape Coast was willing or competent enough to do such an autopsy? He would testify behind closed doors that he had found the Warden on the floor, in Miss Berkeley’s cell, with his breeches pulled down, dead. The unspoken conclusion would be that the had attempted to force himself upon the prisoner, which was after all true enough, and had suffered a brain aneurysm. Or perhaps had been struck down by God.
Flaywell carefully folded the handkerchief and replaced it in his pocket. He would be careful to dispose of it later.
He retracted the blade by pressing the point into the floor. It was not his preferred method, for this would likely dull the tip, but he would remember to resharpen it later.
Flaywell stood, and then started as he saw a dark figure lurking in the cell doorway.
The two men regarded each other for a long moment.
Flaywell was the first to speak.
“It seems your warden has had some sort of fatal paroxysm of the brain. I have seen this before. Several times. Most unfortunate.”
The man said nothing for a long moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “White men killing white men. I keep my nose out.”
Flaywell offered him a rare smile.
“What is it you want, Ebo, is it?”
Ebo thought about it, shrugged. After a moment he said “Her.”
Flaywell nodded. “And you shall have her. But not tonight.”
Ebo nodded. Now it was his turn to smile. “Maybe Warden Jenkins get his job back. You tell what happened. I stay out.”
As Ebo walked away, Flaywell approached Mina. She was staring at him, in shock from the Warden’s assault, and from what she had just witnessed, though in the dim light and in her confused state of mind she wasn’t sure what she had seen. All she knew was that she was no longer being attacked. And now the incessant pain returned, demanding all her attention, threatening to drive her to her wit’s end.
“Miss Berkeley,” Flaywell said, “I have brought you another dose of Laudanum. It will ease your pain. Help you rest.”
This time, Mina did not try to resist as Flaywell pulled her up to a sitting position, and tilted two spoonfuls of Laudanum into her mouth. Once again, Mina gagged at the bitterness of the concoction, but she almost eagerly awaited the relief and the release it would bring.
“I don’t know what you did, Mr. Flaywell, to drive that man away,” Mina said, “But thank you.”
Flaywell eased her back down. Mina closed her eyes and soon drifted into a profound opium slumber. Flaywell pulled her shift up to her neck, and stripped off her all her bandages. He would rebandage her.
Flaywell assumed that Ebo would be as good as his word and leave it to him to notify someone of the Warden’s death. Nevertheless, Flaywell was aware he didn’t have much time. The guard he had passed, sleeping soundly, could wake up any moment and check on the cells. Then Flaywell realized that surely the Warden would have warned the man not to check on this cell. He took a deep, cleansing breath and gazed in open admiration at Mina.
When Smythie and he had first plotted to entrap Mina, he, Flaywell, had hoped for her to come into his possession relatively unmarred. When he had seen the damage that she had sustained through her punishment he thought he would no longer be interested in her, just as the Commodore was no longer interested.
But as soon as the Commodore had granted her to him, he had opened his mind. Her wounds then had struck him not so much as regrettable but as interesting. He supposed that some of the deeper whip cuts, and certainly the brands, would leave permanent scars. But there was art in the brands, and in the seemingly random cuts and lesions. He surprised himself. Now that he could look closely, with full attention, he realized that the designs etched onto her skin truly were most interesting.
Beautiful, really.
He stroked her face, starting at her forehead, and gliding his fingers slowly down her relatively undamaged brow, nose, cheeks, and chin. Then over her clavicles, very lightly over the brands, over the gentle, soft mounds of her breasts, feeling the ridges where the tip of the whip had dug into the sides of her breasts. He felt every rib, then the flat, softly muscled expanse of her belly, and into the delicate thatch of her pubic hair. He stopped there. He lifted his hands, and clasped them together palm to palm, in a conscious emulation of prayer. He rubbed them against each other, as though spreading among them the tactile delights that each digit had experienced individually. He closed his eyes, and held his fingers to his face.
He was intensely aroused.
“What marvelous skin,” he whispered. “Most excellent skin!”
Why would she have thought that?a place she thought no man would ever touch,
Another gripping episode. Flaywell is revealed as a deep and complex character. Though I can't help but think he should have followed the family business and become a master flogger!