CHAPTER ONE

 

The golden brown body of the girl tensed against the whipping post and she threw one fearful glance back over her shoulder; the supple muscles of her bare back rippling, the hot sun making the smooth, satin skin glisten with a fine film of sweat. She had been stripped to the waist. The thin, flowered dress pulled down low enough to show the flare of her hips below the slim waist. Her arms were stretched high, wrists securely fastened with leather thongs, as were her ankles.

"Begin!" A woman's clear precise voice rang out.

As in the old naval days of flogging, drums began to roll as a stocky Negro uncoiled a black bull-whip and moved in behind and to one side of the unfortunate woman about to be punished. The girl shut her eyes tightly and turned her head away.

Mrs. Julia Dawson stood amongst the small group of whites that formed part of the semicircle round the whipping post, seeing but not quite believing.

She looked round quickly, half expecting to find herself in a cinema watching some bizarre film of a bygone era. But no, the heat and the dust and the discomfort of clothes sticking to her perspiring body told her differently.

She watched the black muscular arm lift, the wicked looking whip flick back, pause, then flash forward with a high-pitched zipping sound, ending with a crack and a choked gasp of pain from the half-naked young woman as a dark weal appeared instantly on the smooth back.

Julia Dawson winced and bit her lip as she watched the girl's body jerk, her back arching, wrists tugging at the thongs that bound them. The stripe had been laid diagonally just below the shoulder-blades, the highest point curling round to disappear below the armpit.

The sharp vicious crack of the whip momentarily halted the writhing and the shapely body went rigid for an instant. Then she was jerking madly again with a hoarse shout of pain as another weal appeared about an inch below the first.

The Negro's face was impassive as he administered the flogging; it was as though he couldn't hear the pitiful cries of pain nor see the damage he was inflicting on the tender skin of the helpless woman.

And all the time the drums rolled but mutedly; an accompaniment to the measured crack of leather against soft flesh and the sharp cries of the girl at the whipping post as the whip worked down her back.

Julia gasped and turned her head quickly away as she saw the tip of the lash flick round the side of the girl's body and bite into the underside of one shuddering breast.

"Exciting, isn't it?"

She looked with horror at the eighteen year old girl standing at her side, the face tense, eyes shining with excitement. She gave her a look of disgust and started to walk away, her hands going to her ears to shut out the sound of the drums, the cries of the woman under punishment, the zipp and crack of that vicious whip. A hand closed over her arm, halting her.

"Mummy wouldn't like it if you didn't stay until it was over," whispered Jane Briggs.

Julia looked at the pretty face, noticing for the first time the hard, cruel tightness about the mouth.

She looked around the small circle of onlookers; they all had that same expression - they were actually enjoying the whole brutal scene.

The ones at the side were moving their heads as though they were at a tennis match, from the suffering girl's bared striped back, to the Negro who flogged her, and back to the girl again.

She saw one little group in a tight bunch, however, who did not appear to share the same feelings as the rest.

They were the women - the natives, as Mrs. Cynthia Briggs called them.

Their faces were tense, but not with excitement; they were worried and obviously present against their will.

One of them wept openly, her hands over her face. All were young - about the same age as the girl who was being whipped - between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. All were pretty, Julia noted, with lush figures.

The girl had been sentenced to ten lashes for trying to steal one of the small rowing boats and escape from the island. This worried Julia as she watched the eighth stroke curl about the slim waist.

She had thought she was merely taking on an ordinary job as private tutor to the son and daughter of a normal woman, but this was more like a prison camp.

Then her mind came back to the present, as Mrs. Briggs, standing near the tortured girl but out of range of the swinging lash, suddenly held up her hand and stepped onto the low platform on which the whipping-post had been erected.

Julia thought at first she was showing pity but she realized she was wrong, when she saw her pushing at the dress draped about the girl's hips. She was pushing it lower to bare more of her body to the whip.

When she moved away, Julia saw that the dress had now been pushed halfway down the girl's buttocks, showing the full flare of her hips and a more than generous portion of the plump, thrusting, deeply creased bottom-cheeks.

The woman nodded to the Negro and pointed to the girl's bottom. Once again the whip lifted, to come whistling down with a vicious crack across the top of the soft buttocks.

It brought a sharp scream as hips and bottom twisted madly from side to side, leaving a long welt that ran across the jutting globes and up over one hip.

The Negro's powerful shoulder muscles rippled as he raised the whip for the final stroke, bringing it sizzling down across the golden all but naked buttocks, ending the flogging.

Her punishment over, the girl sagged against the whipping post, sweat running down her striped back, her body shaking weakly with sobs.

Mrs. Briggs walked over and examined the punishment stripes, running a hand callously down the wealed back and buttocks.

As she stepped back, two of the women detached themselves from the small group of golden females and went to the girl, untying the thongs that bound her wrists and ankles to the post.

Even as she was released, her legs gave way and she would have fallen but for the ready arms of the two girls.

As the girl was helped away, exhausted after the punishment, the rest began to split up. The Negro who had administered the flogging ceased have any further interest in the girl, coiling his whip and pulling on his shirt, before hurrying to join the half-dozen other Negroes. Cynthia came across to Julia, with her son and daughter, flicking the whip lightly against one knee-length boot.

She was actually smiling.

"That made her jump about a bit!" grinned her son Peter.

Julia gave the eighteen-year-old lad a look of disgust and walked away towards the big, one-storeyed ranch type house.

She wanted to get to her room and be alone for a while to think things out. There were so many things she did not understand. She had only been on the island for just over a week, but every day she had noticed little things that didn't add up - felt the indefinable strangeness.

The blonde Cynthia Briggs had seemed an ordinary, fairly good-looking woman of thirty seven when Julia had first arrived. The two teenagers had looked the same as teenagers anywhere else. But gradually, Julia had begun to notice things; the tense jumpiness of the women, all of whom had the golden skins and blue-black hair of South Sea Islanders.

The men - all African Negroes - appeared to do little or nothing about the pearl fishing Mrs Briggs had told her was a source of income to her.

Tomatoes and sponge fishing, too, were supposed to be exports which helped fill the Briggs' coffers but the only tomatoes Julia had seen were on the table or in a sparse patch at the back of the house, and the only sponges were in the bathroom!

Altogether, she had seen perhaps twenty or so Africans and twelve or fifteen of the golden skinned women, whose main job, apart from the domestic work they did, seemed to be to keep the Africans happy.

She let herself into her room and sat down on the bed to think, questions crowding her brain. There was that ocean-going yacht moored in the tiny bay of this remote island of the Bahamas which had picked her up and brought her here from New Providence.

On two different occasions she had woken in the middle of the night and looked out and the yacht had not been there. Then, too, she had watched that unfortunate girl being flogged for trying to escape.

ESCAPE! She thought about that for a while. ESCAPE. Why had the girl tried to escape? If she wanted to go back home why hadn't she said so and left in the normal way, being taken to the nearest point from where she could pick up transport to wherever she wanted to go? And why had she been flogged for it? It was not for the worth of the rowing-boat - that hadn't even been mentioned. ESCAPE. That was the word that had been repeated over and over. ESCAPE.

She had seen the cruel streak in Cynthia Briggs several days before, now she had seen it in her children - they had actually delighted in watching the pain and humiliation of the young woman being whipped.

Apart from herself, Cynthia and her two children, there were three other whites, a woman about her own age- twenty-seven - and two men, both somewhere in their thirties.

The men were both hard-looking characters and wore pistols attached to Sam Browne belts about their waists.

The woman acted as a sort of personal maid to Cynthia Briggs, and, now that she thought of it, Julia realized that she, too, had that tight-lipped tenseness about her that the other woman had.

Something was wrong about the whole place and the people in it, terribly wrong.

What had seemed to her an island paradise on arrival now took on the aspect of a prison island. That had been her first sight of the whipping post, and she hoped fervently never to see it again.