turned a most serious gaze upon her captive. 'I wouldn’t laugh, miss. Honest. I wouldn’t! Me and ‘Islop thinks they knows what they’re doing.'
'How about taking the handcuffs off me on trust?'
They measured each other. There was no enmity in their assessment.
'I’ll unlock one cuff miss. You can ‘ave a good stretch.'
'Oh no you don’t! I want both wrists completely free from my stretch. You have no idea how I’ve come to hate those bits of steel.'
Once more the eyes questioned. Amity grinned. 'All right, love. You win. I got a good feeling about you…' She busied herself with the keys. A few moments later Dorinda was free. Her companion stood back, the shining cuffs with their single link dangling from one hand.
Until that moment the captive girl had not realised how badly her shoulders had ached. It was pure bliss to raise and flex her arms. She did so again and again in an ecstasy of sensuality. Even closing her eyes to better savour freedom.
'You do ‘have a loverly shape, miss, if you’ll excuse me saying so.' Amity’s tribute sounded entirely genuine.
It ended as all things must end. Dorinda did not push her luck. Nor would she evade an issue.
'Well?' she asked innocently.
Amity held up the wicked bits of metal. 'In front please, miss.'
'Do me a favor,' Dorinda pleaded like a little girl asking for candy. 'Let me hold and feel those rotten things for a moment before you lock them on me. It’s an urge I’ve got. I won’t try anything, I promise.'
Dorinda took the handcuffs from a quite willing hand. She sensed that her companion understood her strange need to hold and to handle the potent bits of steel that could so totally render her a helpless captive. She played with them. Examining them in a way she had never been able to. She had never actually seen them before. Locked behind her back they had been invisible. She slid the cuff round and round though its ratchet, savouring the series of clicks until it had completed its circle. Savouring her momentary power over the things that had prisoned her so long and which were about to prison her again. It came almost as a surprise when she realised that somehow in the past minutes while they talked she had come to accept the inevitability of offering her wrists that they might be once more locked within the metal bands.
Yet when the moment came it proved to be one of the most soul searching acts she had ever performed. Only by a compulsion of will could she return the shining circlets and hold out her hands. Every instinct cringed as she watched Amity cuff the proffered wrists. She winced at the small clicks as notch after notch was pressed home to make the inflexible metal snug with a dreadful intimacy.
When she was done she knew relief. Decision had been taken from her. It was Dorinda’s first glimpse of that small beneficence of bonds. Her first lesson in a new school. In fascination she held up her linked hands and found an unexpected beauty in their joining. The handcuffs were no longer a dangling shapelesness. They had become potently a living part of her from which she could never escape.
'I suppose now I have to walk over to that rope?' she inquired helpfully. She felt sure she had divined its purpose. She had read the books..
'Yes please, miss.'
Once more she must offer her hands and watch as they were secured. She rejected a silly instinct to run when she was left standing for the few moments it took Amity to reach the wall and press the switch. Unreality flooded her as the rope tautened and the prisoned hands began to rise. She followed their brief journey almost with disbelief as, starting from the waist level, they came up before her eyes, above her head, and stopped only when her nudity was as taut as the rope itself. Her heels were still on the floor. She was not suspended. But she must stand very straight and more helpless than she had ever been. She felt all breasts and pubes. Her first reaction was thankfulness that no male was there to see. But this was replaced by a tingling knowledge that Mark might walk in at any moment. No doubt she was stretched and exposed like this for some purpose! A sinister phrase from fiction drifted into her mind: ‘Held for questioning…’ It was a position in which few girls would be stubborn.
'Coo! You do look lovely, miss.' There was actually a trace of envy in Amity’s voice.
'Let’s change places then!' For a moment Dorinda managed to feel playful- 'I’m sure you’d look just as good. I expect it it’s a very flattering pose for any girl.'
The cockney girl meditatively ran caressing fingers up and down the planes and curves of the pinioned girl. Her touch was soothing. Dorinda found she could not resent the intimacy. The touch was reverent as in the handling of anything of beauty, an exploration of tactility.
'’Ow does it feel, miss? A bit draughty like?' She stood back and admired the living statue she had helped create.
'O Amity. I’m scared! I’ve never felt so vulnerable.'
Amity tittered. 'You mean if there is a gentleman around like! Get there’s a lot of blokes would give all they got to get a good look at you like this.'
'Amity…? Is Mark going to see me?'
'That would be telling, miss. Remember? No questions.'
The captive girl twisted in frustration. There had remained in her mind throughout a nagging memory. 'Amity, don’t be angry. But before he called you Mark was playing with a whip… He was just trying to scare me, wasn’t he? I mean… he was just joking..?'
Amity laughed delightfully. 'You know very well he was not joking, miss. That there whip is for pretty girls who ask too many questions.'
Suddenly she kissed her prisoner lightly on the lips. A moment later she was gone. The door closed. Dorinda stood naked and alone.
A quailing Dorinda felt quite certain Amity had gone to produce a whip with which to prove her assertion. Would she return in a moment and send the lash curling round her shockingly available person? How awful to stand and watch yourself whipped, denied all defence! But as the minutes passed the captive found her mind possessed by other imperatives.
Escape! That was the first thing in any prisoner’s thoughts, was it not? But she wasted little time on it. From the moment Mike had set her on the sand and rowed away, she had been robbed not only of liberty but of hope. There is no escape from an island. She was faintly ashamed of her tractability with Amity. She could have fought. She was unsure if her compliance had been dictated by the compulsions of helplessness or from her instinctive liking for those cheerful people who held her captive.
Her wrists were beginning to hurt. She stood on tiptoe to easy the strain. She guessed that if she was left long in this position she would come to feel very sorry for herself.
Why were they unkind? Why must she be their slave? She felt guilt in being infected by their rational approach to a treatment of her that was nothing short of outrageous. She could not use the word criminal in thinking of any of them. But they had kidnapped her! Actually she had been delivered into their hands neatly stripped and chained. They had accepted her as a gift. She posed herself the question that she now be confronted by a couple of rescuing policemen, would she press charges? She knew she would not. So where did that leave her?
It left her thinking of Mark Esmond. He had reached out touched her with that power men have over women and which women have over men. In love? Nonsense! She scarcely knew him. But a girl did not have to know a man to feel what she felt. He would stay in her thoughts as she had first seen him. A golden Apollo enjoying her nakedness.
The whip!
Dorinda considered thus with urgency. Hung as she was she would be a ripe offering for its lash. It could find her everywhere. She could deny no part of herself. But it was too unreal. It was out of character. Or was it? She had a memory of how Terry had suddenly dropped banter and obeyed, of how Mark had become when he had shown her the black horror and assured her earnestly that she would feel it. She suspected unhappily that she might have to be cut by its thong before she could sentiently accept its reality.
The whip would make her a slave! That was the theses. Unhappily Dorinda glimpsed plausibility in the postulate. She did not feel slave now. She felt herself only a frightened girl, stripped, her hands chained high above her head. If Mark was to have his way there must come a division, a sundering, a confrontation! She considered humouring him. In his boyish moods it would be easy to make a play of his desire. To enact a charade. To kneel in submission and call him ‘Master’. Even to do the same for Terry, and for Amity and Hislop. If she must. But she had
