Arabella sat with half a dozen other women, of all ages, along one side of a cheerless stone vaulted chamber. It was well lit by lamps ranged round the walls and sparsely furnished with two large closets at each end, and a variety of frames, benches, blocks and a pillory.

Donna Magdala, the implacable President of the court, sat in the centre of the row and cast a stony eye on seven penitents, barefoot and clad in the simple red robe that Julietta wore. They stood, eyes cast humbly down, and their wrists crossed decorously across their bellies.

All the ladies of the house being assembled, their President called them to order.

"This court of honour is now in session, for the proper care of your souls through the suffering of your bodies. Step forward, Marina." A youngster of no more than eighteen stepped forward to the centre of the room, to stand directly in front of her judge. She looked very frightened and Arabella guessed that this was her first time attending the court, certainly as a penitent.

"You are in my book by your own report for wearing dirty linen, to wit spots on your cuffs and collar, while you have been reported by others for being late for meals and for not curtseying to your elders. Do you have anything to say?"

The girl's lip trembled as she mumbled a low

"No Madam."

"Very well then," the President continued, "for your failure to display a proper pride in your appearance you will receive two cuts with the cane. For your lack of punctuality two strokes, and for your failure to demonstrate a proper respect for your superiors four cuts; all to be delivered to your bare buttocks. Afterwards," she added, "you will stand in the corner with your hands on the back of your neck, and display your stripes to the room. Now prepare yourself."

The girl pulled her gown over her head, revealing that, as Arabella had suspected, the penitents were naked underneath. The young but well formed body shivered as she put the gown down by the wall and returned to her place.

One of Arabella's neighbours, a gaunt woman whose bleak face suggested that she would not spare the girl the full strength of the wiry arm revealed by her rolled sleeve, opened one of the closets and selected a long yellow length of misery, bending it between her hands, and making a slashing cut at the air as much to intimidate the girl as to test the quality of the rod. She indicated a spot on the floor with the tip of her

virulent weapon.

"Stand here and face the end wall, with your feet well apart," she commanded, "now, bend and lay your fingers on your toes. I must warn you that you will incur penalties should your fingers leave their place before you are given permission to rise."

Arabella was sure that the girl, brought up in this household, must have experienced the rod many times during her growth to womanhood, but this first encounter with the formality and intimidating surroundings of the court, to say nothing of a thoroughly adult cane, had undermined her resolve to the point where she was already sobbing with fear before a blow fell. Her knees trembled and the fleshy cheeks of her bottom clenched and unclenched in fearful anticipation of the agony to come. "Pull yourself together, girl," admonished the gaunt executioner, "remember you're a woman now, here to take a woman's part, and a woman's smart, for the honour of this house."

Encouraged so, the girl visibly took herself in hand and stiffened her legs, stilling her twitching buttocks, and stifling her sobs. With practised skill, the grim whip-mistress measured the full white rounds and laid on a cut that thrummed through the air before burrowing its way into the girl's soft flesh.

The cry forced from her throat was bitten short as she fought to acquit herself well at this, her first thrashing at the court now that she was woman, and not child. Her hinds writhed as the dark welt rose in them, but she battled with the rising pain, and readied herself for the next strokes.

As each cruel bite worried deep into her, just above the joint of thigh and buttock, her response became more urgent before she could cut it off, and her fingers clawed at her ankles to prevent the lift that would bring not only disgrace, but also more of these lancing lines of fire. Eight would be enough for her; she was not anxious for extra. The last two strokes thucked into a thick band of blueberry bruise, and nearly undid her, but she hung on to survive.

Permission granted, she straightened herself painfully, and clasped her hands behind her neck to keep them from unauthorised easing of the agony in her behind. As she walked stiff-legged to her place in the corner, watched by a line of very solemn fellow penitents, the President called after her.

" A good beginning, Marina. See that you behave as well on your next correction." Then, turning to the unhappy line in front. "I'll take you next, Violetta."

Violetta was a stunningly beautiful woman of about thirty. Her clear white skin was that of a girl, and her long glossy black hair fell below the straight shoulders. Her simple gown did not conceal the excellence of her tall feminine curves.

"You came here, Violetta, because your beauty, combined with your sensual nature had led you into such a sexual morass with both men and women that you did not know which way to turn. I ordered you a period of total chastity, but now, by your own report, you have been guilty of masturbation. Do I state your position fairly?"

"Yes, Madam," the beautiful penitent answered humbly, "I beg you to correct my fault, and help me control my sensuous nature."

The President considered her with a thoughtful expression, as the penitent stood with head bowed, before replying.

"In cases such as yours, it is often recommended that the clitoris should be either excised, or burnt out with a hot iron." The bowed figure stiffened.

"However," her judge continued, "I am very loathe to order mutilation of so lovely a body, and we will persevere for the present. You will receive one dozen cuts with the cane while bent over the horse, and a further four strokes of the leather thong, delivered with you on your back on the bench, and falling on your vulva and, especially, that part that I have just spared.

Moreover you will be secured in such a manner that you will have to voluntarily open your thighs to the thong." She fixed her victim with a steely eye. "If you are unwilling or unable to do so, then we shall have to revert to that mutilation that you are, no doubt, as anxious to avoid as I. Afterwards you will bestride the bar until the court is

dismissed."

A murmur greeted this dire sentence and the woman paled, but removed her gown and walked with a head held high to the leather covered horse. Standing with parted feet at one end, with her pubic mound pressed against the rounded padding, she bent forward and laid her body along the length of the horse. Since the far end was several inches lower than that against which she pressed

her belly, the effect was to cant up her pelvis and fetch her up on her toes. The same executioner then passed a broad strap of her waist, and under the horse, pulling it tight to the last possible hole, and then used lighter straps to secure the ankles to the near legs, and her wrists to the far. The position balanced the boon of not requiring the taxing effort to stay down

under torment, with exposing the buttock, and especially the

under-buttock in a stretched and rigid condition, where the cane would bruise and worry all the deeper, and even the slightest movement, to try and dissipate the pain, was quite impossible.

Fixed in this immobile attitude, the woman fought bravely to maintain control. As the yellow brand burnt into her sleek, curved haunches, she choked and gasped and in between moaned her agony, but a dozen is a long hard road, and the gaunt woman with the rod had already demonstrated that she combined accuracy with strength. As each blow cut into the same narrow

strip of underhang, each falling on darker and more empurpled flesh, Violetta's cries became more shrill, and each of the last three assaults on her beautiful rear was greeted by a scream.

Nor was the worst over for her. Released from the horse she was led, sobbing, to a leather topped bench and made to sit on her wounded behind at one end of it, then told to lie back along its length. Her wrists were drawn down and back to be secured to the feet at her head, and her waist again firmly fixed by a broad strap. Now her knees were together, and bent so that

her bare feet rested on the cold stone slabs.

The thong, for which the executioner had exchanged her terrible cane, was about two feet long, made of leather about a half inch wide, and a quarter thick, very black and supple, and

tapering along its length. Its merciless wielder stood at Violetta's left, her knee pressed tight against the penitent's left arm, where it ran done to be tethered to the bench foot.

"Open your legs, Violetta, and present your vulva for the thong," came the order.

Moaning, she obeyed, and the leather flashed down between her thighs, branding the belly, searing the labia and bruising the clitoris

sheltering beneath. The length of the blow had been carefully judged so that the tip just reached far enough to curl up and strike the already excorciated fold of the under buttock, where it was so sorely squeezed by the end of the bench, although, had it not been so, the way would have been open for the tip to have bitten the brown rose of the anus itself.

As it was, the combined agony was too much for the suffering beauty's resolve. She screamed aloud and her legs jacked together, her feet leaving the floor and threshing frantically in the air.

When she had calmed a little, she was ordered to expose herself again. With much reluctance she obeyed, and again the thong slashed at her secret places. Shrieks and convulsions marked the stroke, but her inexorable torturer growled at her to open again. Even through her agony, the martyred woman could feel her labia parting as their bruised flesh swelled, and opened up her red gash and swollen clitoris. As she spread her thighs the cool air on that tender bud, and the delicate inner lips, brought home to her that there would be nothing to impede the lash next time, and her pink slit and tumescent bud above, would be ravaged and devastated by the blow, beyond anything she had endured till now. Her courage almost failed her, as her thighs closed of their own volition. Twice she forced them open, and, before the lash could descend, they snapped shut on her. Finally, driven by threats of even worst treatment of her bud, she got them to stay open momentarily, and, as her knees wavered, the leather slashed between them directly into her unprotected softest parts.

It was as bad as her worst fears. The thong lacerated her inner lips and turned her crushed clitoris into a seething cauldron of unremitting agony. Her body shrieked and spasmed beyond her control for a minute or more before she subsided into racking sobs, her knees rubbing

desperately together.

More growled threats from by her head, failed to ready her. She tried desperately to open her thighs, and three times they parted an inch, only to clench defensively tight again.

"I see we shall have to cut or burn out your centre," observed the President coldly, "since you are unable to control your body." The terrified woman broke.

"Mercy, Madam, mercy," she babbled, "I could not face the knife or the iron. I beg you, let someone hold me open, for my body will not obey me."

Donna Magdala nodded to two of the remaining, and now ashen faced, penitents.

"This leniency will cost you a further stroke," she remarked. With a penitent at each knee, pulling her thighs into a wide vee, Violetta screamed her way through two more cunt splitting lashes before being released from her bed of pain.

But that was not the end of her torment. Torn by hiccpping sobs, the wretched woman was half carried, half dragged to the dreaded wedge. A simple and apparently innocuous trestle, but the top bar was formed into a narrow wedge, with its point uppermost. The pain wracked victim was made to stand astride the trestle, her feet on low stools either side, and lower her already lacerated vulva, its swollen lips gaping wide, onto the middle of the bar, where the sharp edged wood was already blackened and oily from the secretions of the many women who had suffered there before her. Her wrists were tied behind her back, and the stools removed, leaving her whole weight on her aching centre. Cords secured her ankles to the lower rails to ensure her balance, and make any attempt to ease her position impossible.

As she sat there moaning, Arabella reflected that the road to chastity was hard, but that this woman, for one, would not be in any condition to seek sensual satisfaction for a week or more, and that, for the rest of her stay at Petraverdi, the fear of knife or hot iron on her clitoris would keep her fingers from it.

While Violetta was being mounted on her agonizing steed, another youngster, new to womanhood, had been disposed of. She had been reported for running down the corridors in an unladylike manner, and received four stiff cuts with the cane, and was condemned to place six pieces of lead shot in each shoe every day for a week, to encourage her to walk with more circumspection. Arabella observed that, although the more mature women were treated with minatory severity, the youngsters, only just entering adult discipline, were not driven harder than their tender years could bear.

The President was addressing the depleted rank of penitents again. "I'll take you next, Julietta," she announced, and her niece stepped forward, her face pale and apprehensive.

"You have come back to your home, because you fear the responsibilities thrown upon you at such an early age by the high position into which you have been thrust and the dangers and threats from jealous new kinsfolk, to which you will be exposed. After careful consideration I have decided that your spirit should be harden, and your fortitude reinforced by a prolonged exposure to physical pain. You will therefore report to my room every night, for the duration of your stay here, and receive six strokes of the cane before retiring. This will, of course, be in addition to any discipline you may incur at our weekly courts.

" Moreover," Donna Magdala added, "you will wear a crotch chain, drawn up to the mark set for you, night and day, until further notice. Your regime of the rod will start tonight, with a double dose. Do you have anything to say?"

"No, Madam. I accept your judgement." Julietta swallowed nervously. "I have to report to the court that I have been guilty of embarrassing an invited guest by asking personal questions, prompted by observations made during the privacy of her toilette."

"Indeed. And what was the nature of these observations, and your impertinent questions?"

Julietta looked very unhappy, and seemed about to refuse to answer. Arabella leapt to her friend's aid.

"If you please, Madam, I am the guest refered to. May I speak on behalf of the Lady Julietta?"

Donna Magdala looked at her narrowly.

"You may speak."

Arabella stood, her eyes cast down and her wrists crossed on her belly, as she had seen all the other women do, when addressing the President. "I carry on my breasts the marks of a whip. They are the result of a duel I fought with another woman in London." A low murmur ran round the audience. "The Lady Julietta very kindly attended me when I was taking my bath, and, quite naturally, noticed and remarked on the bruises still visible, and my inflamed nipples. Although I had hoped to have left all reference to their cause behind me when I came to Sicily, I was not truly embarrassed to be asked about my wounds, and told my story freely, as I do now."

She lifted her eyes to look directly at the President. "I humbly ask that you pardon her fault, if fault there be."

Donna Magdala lips formed a thin smile.

"When you come to know this court better, you will know that its most cherished tradition is that nothing, but nothing, is ever pardoned, and leniency is very rare. I cannot overlook Julietta's fault, but, in deference to your pretty advocacy, I shall award her only three cuts, where six would be the norm."

Arabella bowed and took her seat again. Not much mitigation achieved perhaps, but she did not like to think of what penalty her friend might have incurred had she, out of mistaken consideration for Arabella's feelings, refused to answer the questions of the court.

Dutifully Julietta stripped and stood wide legged while the gaunt woman, who seemed to be the executioner of all the sentences that evening, fitted a strong leather belt about her hips. Hanging from the front of the belt was a silvery chain of

thick square links ending in a short strap, pierced with holes to engage with a buckle sewn to the back of the belt. Reaching through the spraddled thighs from the rear, she drew the chain between Julietta's legs, parting the labia with one hand to let it press directly on the clitoris and other sensitive parts,

before threading the strap part through the buckle. She pulled up on the strap to achieve maximum tension, and had Julietta arching up on her toes and gasping at the violence done to her soft parts, but the woman wasn't satisfied, and gave one more yank on the tab until the utmost tension was achieved.

With an awkward stiff-legged gait Julietta crossed the chamber and laid herself dutifully on the same bench where Violetta's vulva had been savaged, but on her front, the end of the bench just under her mons, and her breasts squeezed out to either side by the leather padding. Arabella subsequently learnt that the bench was customarily permitted for all whippings of

nine cuts or more. The poor youngster, with her eight, had been unfortunate in having to demonstrate the extra self-discipline involved in taking her cuts bending and unsecured. Perhaps Donna Magdala had set the dose with just that in mind.

A spreader bar was flexed between the ankles, holding them some two feet or more apart, the customary tight waist strap held her belly to the bench, and canted her hips up to meet the cane, and her hands were taken out of harm's way by tying them, wrist to elbow, behind her back. The flogging of the well-presented buttocks commenced.

Julietta was a mature Petraverdi woman, well used to the rod, and at first was able to absorb its bite with no more than a jerk of her body and a gasp of breath, but Arabella sensed that fifteen with that vicious rod in the hands of an expert, as the executioner undoubtedly was, could not be contained indefinitely. With her usual accuracy aided by being able to cut downwards in this position, the woman was laying the strokes right in the crease, and building a very considerable blood-blue bruise. By seven Julietta was greeting each cut with an anguished cry, and writhing in her bonds.

By twelve she screamed and after each stroke her body arched and flapped on the bench end like some great pale fish, fresh caught, and threshing on the thwart of the fisherman's boat. How beautiful she is, thought Arabella, despite her pain. No, not despite it. The black bar below her white buttocks, her arching neck as her head rocked back to let out her scream, the straining muscles below the skin, added an extra dimension to her beauty. Arabella felt a surge of desire in her belly. A little voice in her head wondered if she too would wear such beauty one day.

When it was done, and Julietta had been released, and had kissed the cane that had corrected her, she shuffled over to where Arabella sat, the restricted movement imposed by the crotch chain now further impeded by the flaming brand, and stiffening bruise across the very base of her buttocks. She knelt and laid her tear streaked face in Arabella's lap. "Take my hands, and hold them tight. Do not let me go," she begged, in a strained voice.

" But, dearest Julietta, would not it help to rub your hurts to ease the sting?" suggested Arabella, remembering how it had helped her own whipped bottom in the wash-house.

"Besides," she added, "I thought each penitent must display the marks of her correction for the benefit of those to come."

" Oh. I am certain there is nothing hidden from them as I bend over your lap, and display my poor seat," her friend replied, "and, yes, there's nothing I want more than to rub some of the smart from it, but I've no desire to go back over that bench again tonight, or any night, and that is what would happen if I'm caught touching myself before I reach my own room."

So Arabella held her hands for her while the remaining offenders were disposed of.

A woman of forty, a Duchess no less, come to Petraverdi as an antidote to the adulation, flattery and exaggerated respect by which she was habitually surrounded, and ordered to curtsey to all the ladies of the house whenever they met, reported herself for failing in this duty, and after the inevitable dose of the cane for her Grace's very mature buttocks, was ordered to curtsey to every resident, high and low, Mistress or servant, and to go about at all times barefoot, and dressed in a peasant's coarse striped gown.

Next for judgement was a rather sullen blonde woman in her late twenties. She had been found guilty of bullying one of the more

vulnerable younger girls, and received not only nine hard purple welts on her plump haunches, but also a further four across her fatted white shoulders to ensure, the President decreed, that they should be visible for weeks to come above her decolletage in the evening.

The session ended with the routine thrashing of a young woman who, like Julietta, had been ordered a daily six, as a continuous exercise in fortitude, but, unlike Julietta, who was just starting out on her 'via dolorosa', this young woman had been presenting her person to the rod nightly for some five weeks. Arabella was unprepared for the sight revealed, as the

oft-thrashed buttocks were uncovered. She felt Julietta flinch as the girl looked over her shoulder for a glimpse of what she might expect her own hinds to look like, in five week's time.

The whole under-buttock was one massy bruise. Sitting must have been unendurable although, knowing now the implacable rules of the house, Arabella had no doubt that she did, in fact, have to sit at least for formal meals. Welts of every hue testified to the long duration of her course, and scabs, some black with age, some so fresh and wet looking that they must represent last night's cuts, showed how the skin on her right flank had been broken, not once but many times, until now, the cane was opening up old scars.

With some bravery, Arabella thought, the young woman bent and kept her fingers on her toes for yet a further six lancing slices into that ravaged blue-black mass. She screamed at each cut, but would not let go. It seemed that fortitude could, indeed, be trained by exposure to pain.