Prologue

 

"Forgive me Father for I have sinned." murmured the young woman on the other side of grill in the confessional booth.

Father Larenzo ran his tongue across his upper lip in deep satisfaction. "What sins have you committed daughter?" he asked, his gravelly voice loud in the quiet of the booth.

"Sins... sins of the flesh Father.

"Carnal sins daughter? The sin of fornication?"

"Y... yes Father."

"Recount your sins daughter. Omit nothing for Our Lord will know if you bear false witness."

"Yes Father." and so she did. It was little really, in the real world beyond the stern, unforgiving grey realms inhabited by Father Larenzo and his adamant, moral disapproval; a tumble with a young lad behind the goat sheds in the alp, a fumbling grope in the alley behind the Grotto Ticino and some wanton behaviour in the back of Roberto Almani's car in a forest ride off just off the main valley road. There was nothing there to appal the sensibilities in this more enlightened age; nothing more than the awkward, guilt strewn experiments that were part of the process of a young lass growing into womanhood.

But this was no corner of an enlightened age. This was a dark sanctuary of medieval approbation presided over by Father Larenzo and he was not a man to treat such innocent dalliances with charitable tolerance. "Have you no shame girl?" he growled "Whoring like some harlot of Babylon! You are a disgrace in the eyes of Our Lord. Sinful wretch! Beg forgiveness for your base lust and disgusting impropriety!"

"P...please forgive me Father."

"It is not I you should entreat for forgiveness, sinful child, but your Father in Heaven and only after you have made atonement for your sins."

"P... please Father.... will I have to pay penance?"

"Indeed you will! Your sins are too grave to merit a few Hail Mary's before you earn absolution however. You will come to redemption only through the mortification of your sinful flesh. You are to be whipped!"

"P... please Father.... no.... please not the whip!"

"Silence wretched girl! Save your pitiful pleas for your Lord God and beg him for the lash of the whip on your body that you may come once more to Grace in his sight and that he spare you greater torment in the life beyond this mortal realm."

The girl was weeping now. "Oh please Father...."

"You will crawl from this booth on your hands and knees. Crawl the length of the church, make obeisance before the altar and then crawl through the back door to the sacristy. Once there, remove all your clothes, commit yourself to God's mercy and await your whipping."

"Y...yes Father," the distraught girl whimpered.

Father Larenzo heard her shuffle from the booth. He peeped out from behind the curtain to see her crawling pathetically across the cold stone floor of the church. When she had disappeared from view behind the far end of the church, he stepped from the booth. He spied one of the choir boys laying out the hymn sheets for the evening's rehearsal. "You boy! Come here." The young man approached warily. "Go and find Brother Marco and tell him to come to the church sacristy. Tell him to bring a length of rope and his whip. I shall be requiring his services."

"Yes Father." the boy scuttled off in relief that it was not he who was to be the target of Father Larenzo's ire. Father Larenzo drew a deep breath. So another sinful girl was to be whipped. There was no end to the depths of a woman's wickedness. Well he would have the veniality whipped out of this one! Of course there was one other he would far rather see dance to the agony of the whip. She however was not here but hiding behind the walls of Castello Santa Maria. Well her day would come. The walls of the castle could not protect her forever and the day would come when she would pay, not only for her own sins but for those of her mother too.

In the meantime, this one would have to do. Setting his face in stern admonition, Father Larenzo strode toward the sacristy.

 

Chapter One

 

Christine fanned herself with her hand and wiped the back of her hand across her brow before laying aside her broom. She had been sweeping the path and steps leading to the restaurant and, here, away from the welcome shade of the vines that formed a canopy over the front terrace, the sun was a baking purgatory, searing the bare sandy ground in relentless intensity. Even in the shade, it was well into the thirties and the valley air seemed to dance in the shimmering heat, turning the mountain peaks to quivering haze. Even the river, a few metres away, had the appearance of a rivulet of molten metal although, in this case, looks were deceiving. However hot the weather, the waters of the mountain stream were inevitably icy cold.

"For heaven's sake Chrissie," a voice called from the restaurant terrace, "Leave that for the morning shift. It's too hot to be brushing the bloody path!"

Christine looked up and grinned. Valeria was leaning over the terrace parapet and looking decidedly wilted. "I've just about finished anyway." Christine told her.

"Well then desist with this overly zealous application to duty, sling that sodding brush away and come and have a cold drink. I've made us some iced tea."

Christine mounted the steps to the restaurant terrace gratefully. It was certainly cooler on the shaded terrace and she accepted the tall glass Valeria handed her, with gratitude. The iced lemon tea was not perhaps liquid ambrosia but as close to it as earthly sustenance could aspire to, as far as Christine was concerned. It was just heavenly. Christine had emptied her glass almost before it had touched the sides. "Phew! Is there any more of that?"

Valeria hefted a large jug. "Sure. Hand me your glass."

Christine sipped more slowly and lifted the collar of her blouse to blow a breath of cooling air down her front. "Christ it's hot isn't it?"

Valeria nodded, "Approaching the sort the sort of temperature range that Father Larenzo has promised us an eternity of for our lives of wanton debauchery, I'd say. Honestly Chrissie. I sometimes think you're tapped in the head. What possessed you to decide to sweep out the path in this frigging heat?"

Christine shrugged. "Dunno. Just something to do I suppose. I mean it's not as if we're rushed off our feet." It was true. The restaurant was remarkably quiet considering that it was a Saturday afternoon. It was high summer in the Southern Swiss Alps and they'd expected some tourists today but it hadn't happened. They'd had only three customers in the past hour.

Valeria pulled a face. "It must be the heat. Everybody must have stayed indoors or gone down to the lake front in Ascona. This is the quietest it's been for weeks. Suits me anyway. I've no real desire to be rushing about like a scalded cat in this weather. Thank God we've only another hour before we hand over to Lisa and Mel. It'll be cooler in the castle."

"That's true." Christine agreed. She lifted her head to look at the great bulk of the Castello Santa Maria, looming behind the restaurant, with great affection. Looked at dispassionately, the old castle could never harbour pretensions of architectural grace. It was a massive, squat structure in grizzled old granite that owed what charm it had to the weathering of the long ages of its history. Doubtless, when it had first been constructed in the 13^th century, it had been an eyesore of monumental proportions. Christine didn't care. She loved the ugly old pile of rock. It was where she, Valeria and seventy more young women lived. It was her home.

It was only newly her home. She had only been in residence in the castle for two and a half months. It felt as if she had always belonged there though. Over the past two months she had found a happiness she had thought forever lost to her in the dark days following her mother's death. There had been a year in the wilderness of loneliness and grief; a year when her only solace had been in alcohol, drugs and un-fulfilling sexual encounters with men whose names she could barely remember any more. Then, in the spring, Signora LaFranchi, friend and lover of her late mother, and matriarch of the Castello Santa Maria, had acted to bring her within the folds of the castle's community.

Christine had been horrified to begin with. Within the imposing old edifice, the community of some seventy odd Santa Maria girls led lives under regimented authority and Draconian discipline that Christine had thought positively medieval at best and barbaric at worst. Worse yet, the uninhibited sexual interaction between the girls had shocked Christine to the core and caused her to confront her own repressed sexuality. It had been a difficult transition and Christine had resisted assimilation into the community with obstinacy. It was difficult to believe now, but she had been truly unhappy in her first days at the castle and dreamt of ways to escape.

Then had come that frightful day when she had got disgracefully drunk in the village, come home late after curfew and contrived to fall in the fish pond, in the castle gardens, while trying to sneak back in unobserved. Signora LaFranchi had had her caned for that escapade and Christine had thought it the worst experience of her life. It had proved to be anything but. It had been the shock that bonded her in sisterhood with her fellow inmates at the castle, earned her her credentials as a member of the community and somehow metamorphosed her into a Santa Maria girl.

She had been a Santa Maria girl ever since and that gave her the most enormous satisfaction and pleasure. She could not imagine wanting to be anything else. She knew that her old friends from before her Santa Maria days would think her crazy. If she told them how every aspect of her life was now regulated; when she ate and what she ate; when she must go to bed and when she must wake up, they would be horrified. If she was to further tell them of the work she must do, the obligatory drills she must perform, the lessons and courses she must attend, they would start to think her deficient in reason. If they were then to hear how even her very dress was so regulated that to walk out of the house in anything other than acceptable attire for a Santa Maria girl was to invite being beaten with a rattan cane on her bare bottom, they would simply twiddle a finger at their temples and declare her to be clinically insane.

Christine would have thought it madness herself at one time. Indeed, for the first few weeks, she had thought it madness. Once she had come to understand and accept it however, she had taken to life at the castle like the proverbial duck to water. She thrived under the regulated, authoritarian regime. She loved the order and purpose it lent to her life; the certainty and security it offered her. Most of all, she revelled in the deep companionship and solidarity within the sorority of the castle. She supposed it to be somewhat akin to the special bonding under regimented life experienced by those in military service. Whatever it was, she was proud to be a Santa Maria girl.

The young women with whom she shared her life with at the castle were special. Many came from very chequered backgrounds but they were all beautiful, highly intelligent, vivacious and of enormous potential; seemingly cut from the same superior cloth of high latent ability, needing only the structured life they shared to blossom into extraordinary women; a sorority of the elite. It was a privilege to be counted among their ranks.

Christine shook some dust from her skirt. She was wearing the serving uniform adopted by all Santa Maria girls when called upon in domestic service or service in the castle's restaurant. It consisted of a flared pink skirt, a little short of knee length, worn over a lacy petticoat that peeped out from under the skirt's hem and matched with a short sleeved, low, square busted, white blouse that fell off the shoulders and was trimmed with lace and decorated at the sleeves and neckline with little embroidered, pink flowers to colour match the skirt.

That colour was always either rose pink or pale sky blue, which alternated every week. Sky blue and pink were the colours of Castello Santa Maria almost as if they were a parody of the maroon and dark blue of the cantonal flag of Ticino, the Southern Swiss Canton in which the castle resided. The castle's own flag, which flew from the top of the fifty metre high tower that was the tallest part of the castle, was somewhat different however, for it consisted of two horizontal bands; blue at the top and pink beneath, supposedly representing the pink of femininity beneath the blue canopy of heaven. The girls, while in service, in sporting colours or occasionally for formal occasions requiring uniform dress, always wore either pink or light blue.

There was a curiosity to this dress code. It was traditional at Castello Santa Maria that, when called upon to wear the colours of the house, the colour adopted on the outside was always counter matched with its twin on the inside. Thus, beneath her pink skirt, Christine wore pale sky blue knickers. Had she been wearing a blue skirt, her knickers would have been pink. This tradition even extended to sportswear. Thus the Santa Maria field hockey team turned out in a home kit of pink hockey skirt and shirt with blue knickers beneath. For away games they wore the reverse outfit.

Christine's current garb indicated her work in service in the castle restaurant. This was a somewhat newer, timber building grafted on to the front of the castle almost as an afterthought. Three weeks earlier, Signora LaFranchi had decided that Christine would benefit from some work experience in the restaurant. There was nothing unusual about this. Many of the girls were similarly drafted to work in the restaurant at one time or another. Christine had been assigned two shifts a week, in addition to her other duties, accoutred with the appropriate uniform and set to work to learn the ropes of waitress.

To her surprise, Christine had found that she enjoyed waiting on tables in the restaurant. It was certainly more enjoyable than the endless rota of cleaning and assorted household duties that were the inevitable result of living in an enormous old building requiring continuous maintenance and upkeep. It had the advantage of being close to home too. A number of girls were farmed out to jobs in other establishments around the neighbourhood and several girls even worked part time in jobs outside the valley; in Ascona or Locarno. Working in the castle's own restaurant kept her close to the heart of affairs and at the centre of gossip and rumour amidst the close knit community.

Of course, it was only a temporary measure whilst Signora LaFranchi decided on a more long term policy for Christine's future. Central to that policy was Signora LaFranchi's determination that Christine should complete her interrupted education. Christine had dropped out of university, after her first year, following the death of her mother. Signora LaFranchi considered that reprehensible and was adamant that the matter be rectified. Christine's stomach turned over at the thought.

It wasn't that she objected to the idea of completing her further education particularly. What really worried her was the thought of leaving Castello Santa Maria during term time to attend university. She had been terrified that Signora LaFranchi would re-enrol her for university for the coming academic year. Having just found such happiness, companionship and safety in her new home, the thought of being wrenched away once more and plunged into the uncertainties of life in the outside world, within a few months, had been more than she could bear. To her enormous relief, Signora LaFranchi had deferred decision until the following year; opining that Christine needed a period of stability and close supervision in her life for the moment. Christine had been ecstatic at the news. True the wrench had only been postponed but, to a young girl just twenty years old, an extra year of grace felt like an eternity.

Christine finished off her second glass of iced tea and wiped a hand across her mouth. "Whew! That's better."

Valeria frowned and pointed at the lacy white, waist apron Christine wore over the front of her skirt "You'd best put a clean pinny on before dinner." she remarked. "It looks like you used that one to dust the steps off with."

Christine grimaced. "Blast! I don't think I've got a clean one."

"Relax. I've a spare one you can borrow." Valeria assured her and Christine was grateful for the offer. Dinner at Castello Santa Maria was always a formal affair in the castle's refectory. Ordinarily the girls were obliged to change into a dress or blouse and skirt for dinner if they were casually dressed or on duty. Christine and Valeria, however, were working right up until dinner time and would have no time to run up to their rooms in the dormitory wing to change. Their working uniforms were acceptable dress for dinner in those circumstances therefore, as long as they were neat and tidy. Sitting down for dinner in a soiled apron was definitely not acceptable however. Only two weeks ago, one of their colleagues had suffered the indignity of being obliged to bend over a table, with her skirt and petticoats raised, and her knickers lowered to her knees, to receive the strap from the acting head girl, in front of the entire company, for a similar offence. Dress code regulations were inflexible in that regard and punishment for violations was swift and severe.

"What's this meeting after dinner all about anyway?" asked Christine. That afternoon a formal meeting of all hands had been announced that for evening.

Valeria paused uncertainly. "I'm not sure. Lucy says it's because Madame wasn't present for the usual Friday evening, post dinner briefing yesterday but nothing will convince me that the matter doesn't go deeper than that. If we were just convening the weekly meeting then we'd have done it in the refectory straight after dinner. It wouldn't have been scheduled for eight o'clock in the Great Hall. Carol says there's a rumour going around that it's a disciplinary meeting."

Christine pulled a face. "Ai! Are we in trouble or something?"

Valeria shrugged. "Probably. We usually are! Carol says that bloody old misery guts, Father Larenzo, has been bitching to Madame about our decorum in church on Sundays recently and, with the bishop visiting next month, Madame's after cracking the whip."

Christine drew a hiss of breath between her teeth at the mention of Father Larenzo's name. He was the priest at the church in the village further up the valley and, because of the castle's ecclesiastical connections with the church, held a position of authority amid the trustees of the Castello Santa Maria. Father Larenzo was a dour and rigid disciplinarian who regarded the young women of Castello Santa Maria with a jaundiced eye. It was his deeply held conviction that Signora LaFranchi was far too soft with her young ladies and that there was not a girl among them who would not be materially improved with the benefit of a sound whipping. He had taken a particular interest in Christine when she had arrived and had expressed the view, on more than one occasion, that she required particular attention. Indeed he had even offered to have her whipped by Brother Marco; a suggestion that fell only just short of an order. So far, Christine had managed to stay out of his way and Signora LaFranchi had ordered her to keep a low profile whenever he was present. It was by no means forgotten however and Sunday morning church parades had become tension filled encounters. Christine had felt him glowering at her in church and doubtless brooding on her. She was a little unsure as to just why he had taken such a dislike to her but she understood that it had its roots in the bad feeling that had existed between Father Larenzo and her late mother, who herself had been a Santa Maria girl.

Valeria noted Christine's reaction to Father Larenzo's name. "Yep... your old buddy... Father Fiddle About! No doubt he'll be bending the bishop's ear when he comes here so Madame will be trying to pre-empt trouble by putting us on notice of best behaviour."

Christine snorted. "Hmph! Fat lot of good that'll do! We could be as pure as the driven snow for all the difference it would make to Father Larenzo! The bastard made a bee-line for me after church last Sunday and, if Madame hadn't headed him off at the pass, I dread to think what would have happened."

Valeria nodded grimly. "I think we could make a guess though. He'll not be happy until he's had you stripped down for a whipping in the sacristy." Valeria shook her head sadly. "Just to make your happy anticipation of church parade tomorrow complete by the way, you'll be pleased to know that we're having lunch at the Grotto del Piazza!"

Christine groaned theatrically. "Oh hell!"

"Yep! I'm sure Signora Campani will be delighted to see you."

It was more bad news. Christine had already had a run in with Signora Campani, the proprietress of the restaurant, Grotto del Piazza, on the village square. It was in that establishment that Christine had drunk herself to intoxication, the night she had fallen in the fish pond. To add further fuel to the fire, she had been so addled that she had inadvertently left the restaurant without paying her bill. After her caning, she had been ordered by Signora LaFranchi to present herself at the restaurant to pay her bill with abject apologies. Furthermore she had been instructed to inform Signora Campani that she had received forty strokes of the cane and to humbly inquire whether Signora Campani considered that to be due correction for her sins with the understanding, that should she consider it to be inadequate, then she was authorised to augment it at her discretion. Fortunately for Christine, the other girls had rallied around and provided her with a protective escort for the painful interview. With her escort circling the wagons about Christine, Signora Campani had been sufficiently restrained to let matters pass although not without first expressing the opinion that, had she had anything to do with it, Christine would have been marched straight out into the back yard for a salutary birching. Signora Campani was another advocate of the Father Larenzo "more is better" school of thought regarding Christine's disciplinary correction and another local dignitary Christine was anxious to avoid.