Ravishing Chastity
"Please, your Grace, O please!"
Dorée sank to her knees, pleading for she knew not what. She was still flushed with arousal and overwrought with violent emotions. Her Lady was gone. There was no one to stand between her and the Duc. And the Duc's expression was as ominous as a thunderhead on the horizon.
"You have sinned, Dorée," the Duc pronounced. "You saw what happened to Berenice when she took her pleasure without permission. She was in line for severe punishment when you intervened –and believe me, what you suffered in her place was but a brief, ceremonial display. There are more dire consequences for those who are truly guilty."
Reaching down into the carven armrest of his judge's chair, the Duc drew out a wicked looking lash with many tails of leather. The tips glinted with barbs like rose-thorns wrought of silver.
Dorée bowed her head before him, tears flowing freely. At the same time, a dark delight stirred in her heart. Remembering the stinging stroke of the crop on her skin when she took Berenice's punishment gave her a voluptuous shiver. She had been denied such intense sensations for so long (or so it seemed to her) that she almost anticipated the cleansing pain of the lash. Instinctively she bent at the waist and placed her forehead on the floor, baring her naked back.
The Duc drew back his arm.
Dorée drew breath to scream.
The lash did not fall.
Long moments passed, so long that eventually Dorée dared to peek up at the Duc from under the thick golden mane of hair that had fallen around her face. He was looking at her with a contemplative expression on his face.
"You want this, don't you?" He said softly, stroking the lash.
"Y-yes, your Grace." Dorée admitted.
"Is a punishment desired truly punishment, then? Or is it not rather a reward?"
The Duc paced away from her, returning to his seat of judgement. Dorée sat back on her heels and raised her head to show that she was attending to his words. Clearly he was getting into one of his philosophical moods. She tried to quell her regret as he began his contemplations.
"Your body poses a riddle, Dorée, one that requires most a most subtle answer. On the one hand, you are naturally chaste. You do not seek to seduce others. You resist any who try to take your maidenhead, including my Chamberlain. You submit to pleasure only as far as obedience demands. This evening's slip was in fact the first time you succumbed to the temptation of your own flesh. Did you see any trace of blood on your hands, however small?"
"No, your Grace." Dorée said quietly, looking down at her hands. She had felt something stretchy around her opening, like a ring of filmy flesh with a hole in the centre that she could reach through, but there had been no blood, nor pain of tearing. The wetness on her fingertips had dried white.
"I see. Then your maidenhead is most likely still intact. Despite all that you have been subjected to, you remain a miraculous virgin. And yet. And yet, your maiden's body craves the most jaded and sophisticated of carnal acts –things that most of my subjects do not learn to appreciate for many years. I can usually punish willful servants with pain and reward them with pleasure. But you, petite innocente, I cannot punish with pain, for it would only lead you to the height of arousal."
Dorée could not deny it. There was a paradoxical power in her weakness.
"Now, how to discipline you? That is the question. We could try inflicting such extremes of torment that even you would not enjoy it. You might not survive a full crucifixion, but perhaps if we only disfigured you..."
Dorée's blood ran cold. She tried not to show how the prospect terrified her, lest it goad him into action.
"Or we could try the opposite extreme. Yes, that seems to be most effective with one such as you."
The Duc put away the lash and drew out instead another object. It appeared at first glance to be a walking stick, and a very fancy one at that: long, slender, and made entirely of silver polished to a mirror-shine. The handle was like that of an ordinary walking stick, though deeply engraved with erotic figures. But on the end, where the ferrule should be, it was smooth, rounded, and slightly curved. It couldn't be very useful for keeping one's balance with that flared bulb on the end. It rather resembled...
Oh.
"Come, Dorée. The Reception Bed is not suited for this task, but I have a space for just such an occasion."
Dorée began to rise. Apparently she was too slow for the Duc, because he snapped his fingers and instantly two members of his Guard appeared to haul her to her feet. Her sex began to pulse once again as she was roughly handled by the lean, handsome young men.
"This way, this way!" The Duc called impatiently from down the corridor. "Herald, there you are! Notify my Court at once of an event in the Terraced Room. There are some among them who would be most incensed to miss the Ravishment of a Virgin, so call the news loud and clear, for your sake."
"Ravishment? My Lord–" Dorée wanted to cry 'Please, no!' She bit her tongue, sensing that this would only provoke him further. Still, he heard her unvoiced protest. He strode back into the dark corridor, where she had stopped dead in fear, to take her chin in his cruel fingers.
"Tut tut, we just established that you have earned a severe punishment, which you also desire. To be given back by force the pleasure you tried to take would be a deliciously ironic chastisement."
He stood back and considered her again, as if she were a portrait-painting in progress.
"Or would you rather I clap you in irons and put you back in the oubliette instead? I can do so, should it prove a better punishment to have your hands chained away from your licentious body entirely. You could stay there for, say, a month? Two?" His tone was genuinely solicitous, as if he would he be just as happy to chain her up as to ravish her if that was what she truly desired.
Confronted with this choice not as a threat but as a genuine offer, Dorée had to give pause. Could she bear a month with no hand to touch her but the clasp of the manacles around her wrist? Two months with no voice speaking to her but the sound of murmured comments from above? Perhaps if she had not tasted the joys of carnal bliss and daily conversation with the Scarlet Lady, she would have begged for the punishment that kept her most pure. But now when she listened to her innermost heart, she found that it spoke a new truth. Her purity was already sullied. There was no going back to the Garden of her innocence. She had to try a new path.
"My Lord, I will take the punishment you have devised. The Ravishment."
"Tell me why."
Dorée shook her head slowly, struggling to put it into words.
"Your Grace, I am...I am poisoned with lust. But the herbalist in my town used to say that 'Like cures like.' So perhaps this will burn away my sin through its own excess."
"Formidable!" The Duc clapped his hands together in delight. "Have the noble Greeks spoken through the mouth of a village witch? It was written in Ancient times that when King Telephos was cut by the spear of Achilles, the oracle of Apollo decreed the only cure to be rust from the same spear that did cause the wound. This kind of cure is called pharmakon: that which is both poison and remedy. I will wound you, Dorée, and it will cure you. Eventually."
Dorée knew nothing of the Ancient Greeks, so she simply curtseyed and held her obeisance, head down in submission.
The Duc spun on his heel and vanished into the room, slamming the door behind him.
The Guards drew Dorée up from her curtsey and draped her with a white silken cloth, which they tied in a Classical style at one shoulder, leaving the fabric to drape diagonally across her breast. It was so sheer that Dorée could see her own nipples, hard and rose-tinted, through the fabric. She hoped that her wetness would not also seep through the cloth and make it transparent just where she most wished to be hidden. She tried to move carefully as the Guards guided her up to the thresh-hold of the door. They held her there with her nose practically touching the smooth-grained mahogany. Waiting. This close, she could hear faint clatters and scrapes and, after a while, something that sounded like a crowd entering a church. After a while there came the sound of muffled words. She couldn't make out the meaning, or even if the language was French or Latin, but by the cadence of the voice it sounded like the Duc was intoning the words of an unholy Mass.
Suddenly, the wood in front of her nose was pulled away and Dorée beheld what lay in store for her. There was an altar, yes, and candles and acolytes. But it was also like a theatre or Coliseum, since the room was open to the storey above where the walls were lined with boxes forming a tiered gallery. This must be why it was called the "Terraced Room." The terraces were occupied almost to capacity by gentlemen and ladies. To judge by their lavish apparel, they were all esteemed guests of the Duc.
Dorée might have crumbled to her knees if the Guards were not holding her by the arms. There was a rising susurration of voices as the door opened. Dorée stared up in panic, until she recollected herself and lowered her eyes modestly. The Guards walked her forward until she was inside the room, but not yet in the circle of candles that surrounded the altar.
