Chapter 9
Bas-Relief Camoes
"Certificate from police . . . certificate from police. . certificate from police ..."
Miriam Marteau stamped the exit visas, the certificates, the passports. Three relieved travelers joined their luggage on the dock. The Customs Shed's great metal door had been raised. Light sea winds offered slight alleviation of the temperature in the galvanized steel hut.
"Ah, now, what's this? Expired certificate?" The tall blue-black woman held the paper high. "Does it not clearly state NOT VALID AFTER THREE DAYS in a bright red at the bottom?"
A pink-nailed finger touched the Ultrabold Demigothk Oblique lettering.
"But-I mean-the boat left-we couldn't-" Bright Caribbean sunlight shafted through a fly-screened window to glint off silver-rimmed glasses. The Greek letters sigma epsilon xi had been etched in the far lower corner of the left lens.
Gerry Vestry patted Jan Ladrone protectively. The younger girl resembled a frightened mole, blinking against the barely diffused light.
"Four hours ahead of schedule, last Tuesday's packet boat left. We've been used to delays, missed connections, having our seats booked concurrently with two other sets of people for Miami to Barbados. Oh, everything but something leaving ahead of schedule," the blonde senior explained patiently. "This cruise ship is the first vessel to dock since Tuesday."
"Your certificate expire, too, miss?" Miriam Marteau picked up a second sheet of official paper. "Of course."
The black woman smiled down at them. At six foot four, she found virtually all Caucasians cute. The only one she'd ever met on equal footing had been John Wayne. He'd addressed her class at University of Southern California.
She had startled him with a bear hug at the cocktail reception afterward. He'd reciprocated mightily, though. In spite of five margaritas, he'd waltzed genteelly with her a Dixieland combo rendering of The Green Leaves of Summer.
She liked Americans. "Well, in circumstances such as these, you may get them validated over there." She pointed to a doorway in the far wall. "Hurry, though. The cruise steamer will be docking in fifteen minutes. Sometimes the captain only puts out the gangway long enough to pick up the passengers on the dock and throw us a mail sack." "Why linger?" Gerry Vestry patted the shorter, wide-bottomed brunette. "I don't know about you, but I'm going to give The New York Times a columnload describing this when we get back." "The Enquirer may pay you for it, miss, and has a much larger circulation. They write terribly amusing head-lines about our country. I particularly enjoyed MOB FLOGS NAKED MADONNA." The tall woman checked the clock, "Fourteen minutes."
"You're sure . . . ?" The sorority officer waved the expired police certificate, "A protest may be lodged with the American Embassy. The ambassador's personal computer has a very firm form letter to lodge with our Foreign Office, and a copy goes to London, since we're Commonwealth."
"Oh wow."
Gerry Vestry led a terrified Jan toward the tiny doorway in the corrugated steel wall.
"I'm missing the pre-Pre-Reg for the fall term," the blonde muttered. "Your mother will have what's left of our hides, so Sigma can take it out of my bones, and nothing will be left to plead for my registration at St. Cloud but a ghostly voice."
Jan's fugitive hand strayed to her own lushly designed backside, exquisitely outlined in pink and green Parisian jeans. "All for . . . nothing."
"Builds character."
The older girl navigated her charge through the narrow doorway, spotted with rust. Shade and breeze dropped the temperature to a comfortable 80ø in a pleasant arbor. Bicycles headed lazily down the road paralleling the shore. Two black nuns in stark white habits meandered slowly towards them.
"Oh, God!"
"George Burns has nothing to do with this." Gerry Vestry took a solid grip on Jan's biceps. "I know this isn't a hell of a lot of comfort, but I've lived through worse than they can provide-and you've got more upholstery down below than I do."
A slender, sharp-faced youth of sixteen sat beside an efficient-looking trestle. Several very uncompromising canes projected from an umbrella stand.
"May I be of assistance?" He stood up. In flannel trousers, white shirt with tie, and horn rims, he reminded the sorority girl of a teen-aged Max Roach.
"Validation." She thrust forward the certificates. "Two."
"Ah." He looked from one to the other. "I presume on both of your . . . though since you are listed as guardian for her, I can-"
"The police offered that when we did this eight days ago." Gerry Vestry shook her blonde hair. "No."
"A bit of unpleasantry. As a minor it is only twelve for you," he reassured Jan, "but you know that."
The girl remembered the lingering dozen, when they'd purchased their exit visas. The commissioner of police had made it a point to watch, though a matron had done the logging.
"Which shall be first?" He pointed to the trestle with an excruciatingly long whipping cane, glossy from fresh suing.
"They used a lighter one at the jailhouse." Gerry Vester unbuckled her belt.
"Regulations for the validation of an expired certificate, under the Alien Travel Restraint Act." He shrugged apologetically. "It discourages Castro's people and any I.M.F. agents provocateurs."
Even-handed of you." The blonde struggled with her button-fly Levis. A blush touched her face. Those nuns seemed to be staring right at her as they walked. She jerked her pants and panties to her knees and bent over the wooden trestle. Her mortification spread to her ears. Jan stared unblinkingly at the creamy hindcheeks, speckled brown, green, and yellow in regular lines from last week's constabulary whipping. It anguished her to see an upwardly mobile young woman headed toward her masters in management and a Fortune 500 future laying there, bottom bent, jeans at half-mast--Thwack!
Jan flinched at the whistling stroke and thumping cut. The cane lingered, quiveringly imparting that last joule of corrective force.
The young American kept her legs ramrod-straight, though her hinds shivered and rebounded as the stick lifted. Her spine stayed rigid. Thwack!
The twin-tracked weal shimmied crazily across the pair as the cane swept away. Gerry Vestry's buttocks jiggled jello-ishly from the impact, but gave not a flex of other reaction. A third sailed in, and a fourth. The crevice betrayed a moment's agitated shiver, as if the slack mounds had some independent life after all.
The youth swung his punishing stick with a steady, implacable tempo.
The eighth brought distinctly spasmy knotting. The hotly lined rounds recoiled as the ninth lick bit solidly into the upper curves. The youth paused.
"Please-" The blonde hissed between set teeth. "The boat."
"Oh. Sorry, demoiselle." He immediately lashed her bare buttocks.
An abrupt, clumsy kick lifted Gerry Vestry's Levis at the thirteenth. Jan stared dry-mouthed. Every muscle in the sorority girl's body seemed taut, her hindquarters shifting in a finely controlled rumba of pain.
The stick had worked the whole bottom, its stinging tramlines rippling between cleft top and sulcus. The young islander let his final five cuts snap randomly across the bright weals.
The blonde's head twisted back, the corners of her mouth bone-white. She gasped and shuddered down to her toes.
"Steamer's docking." The dull whoot of an air horn beckoned.
Gerry Vestry jacked erect, arms clutched under her breasts. Her glasses shivered at the end of her nose. She puffed, eyes swimming. "Sorry. Jan-jeans."
The younger girl jumped and pulled up the sexy sorority vice-prexy's panties. She tugged the shrunk-to-fit denim over the martyred behind. Gerry Vestry made a sound in her throat. Tears leaked down her chin as the fly buttons closed.
The blonde nodded insistently toward the trestle. "Now.!"
Jan gulped. Twelve . . . only twelve . . . she'd done it before. That was why her bowels felt like hot mush.
She unzipped and showed the lazily advancing nuns her plump gluteals in profile. A bicycle bell rang. She heard giggling from the road.
An abrupt shock laced into her outthrust flesh. She winced. The feeling of violating impact melted into burning hurt.
Again the cane clipped her. She clung to the example she'd been shown, the throbbing twice-nine. A third whistler made her hindcheeks bunch. That weakness shamed her... by seven she danced, her feet churning her rumpled pants.
She cried freely, whimpering at the eighth ... the ninth ... she couldn't get her breath. Her ribs seemed frozen by her straining muscles. She fought the scalding sensation of the last licks.
"RUN FOR IT!" A hand yanked her upright. She stumbled over her pink and green jeans. Ducking and clutching, she hoisted them and ran.
Juliana Mellroot followed the battered grey canvas mail sacks down the gangplank. Men wearing the Mardi Blanc clenched fist and winding river flag on their shoulder patches hauled the bags onto their backs. They threw them onto a rusting jeep standing at the end of the long dock.
"Can we get a-" Juliana gestured futilely toward her impressive mound of luggage as the aged vehicle coughed to life. It roared down the wooden pier toward the iron shed.
"Guess not." Lucretia Sue Merydith stood behind her, both grips in her hands.
Three outbound travelers moved up the gangplank. The last, a bony Swede with sunblanched hair and skin like a wallet, chuckled nastily and knowingly at the two women.
An air horn blasted twice as the trio got on board. Black hands reached for the hauser mooring the steamer to the piling by the bow. The gangplank receded onto the ship.
"WAIT!"
Working men froze. The high-pitched voice rang with the brazen tones of command. Two figures flew down the wooden planking toward the cruise ship.
The shorter one had a suitcase in one hand and held her clown-colored jeans up with the other.
The gangway thrust back onto the dock. The two hit it it a dead run, collapsing onto the deck with frantic gasps of joy. The blonde rose. She tucked her silver glasses higher onto her nose, fixing her gaze on Juliana and Lucretia Sue. "Suckers!"
The men cast off. The gangplank vanished. The engines hummed as the cruise ship wheeled in its graceful arc away from the landing.
"What was that all about?" Juliana wondered.
"The pest house done bust loose?" the Okefenokee redhead speculated.
"Trews, I understand that in the States you have some new definition of obscenity, based on the violation of privacy-or civil rights-or something sacred about women."
"That's based on Andrea Dworkin's Minnesota thing, sugar, making it illegal to degrade and debase female folks." Lucretia Sue lifted a shoulder. "Me, I find it pretty uppity to have laws telling me how to think, but that's-" Juliana turned a stern eye on the Mardi Blanc flag. The Union Jack and Tricolor occupied opposite quarters. A black clenched fist on red and a blue twisting river on green lay in the other quarters.
"They can use this as my contribution. This," she held a mimeographed section of the Universal Civil Code aloft, "is obscene. And by 'obscene' I mean vile, filthy, loathsome, debased, unclean, unnatural, un-British-"
"You might had ought to consider cooling it, honey pie. I think they get the idea."
Miriam Marteau had a genial smile. "It keeps the revolutionary and reactionary elements out."
"Eighteen cane strokes across the bare bottom to enter your country-and eighteen more to leave?" Juliana seemed aghast. "How do you expect to nab tourist quid?"
"We do pretty good exporting nutmeg."
The complete contents of Lucretia Sue's two bags spread to the right along the varnished counter. Juliana's cases had all been emptied to the left. Passports and entry visas sat beside two vulnerable-looking toothbrushes. "Suppose we choose not to go along to your gaol and prefer to go back to civilization?" Juliana gave a frosty look to two deputy constables standing by another sturdy, antique jeep.
The black woman appeared composed. "You may always take the next boat. The packet steamer should be by in, oh, two days, unless there's engine trouble. You may stay on the dock, for a nominal fee for using the space, Don't try to pee into the bay, though. The Environmental Control Act requires a penalty." "Dare I guess?"
"Flogging." The two constables nodded in unison, "Suppose we sicken and die?"
"Unlawful dumping of carrion or refuse on public owned property. The penalty's heavier." She grinned. "Imprisonment with flogging." "Let's suppose I just want to chat up the British Embassy? My husband is in the Foreign Service, you know. A consul."
"The Alien Intercourse Act forbids contact with local or foreign-national residents without a valid police certification "Which costs-?" "Eighteen stripes."
Juliana turned to her friend. "Trews, is this some endless curse? Could you escape it if you separated from me? I can't even ring up father-"
"Father?" Miriam Marteau picked up one of the passports. "Juliana Christina Gloriana Bisque-Hardy Mellroot. "Why didn't you say so, little silly, instead of rattling on? The baronet posted your bond yesterday. That's valid in place of a whipping." "Oh." Juliana glanced further along the mimeographed section of Civil Code. "If you hadn't buried your patronym under all those useless names we could have straightened all this out immediately." She waved away the two deputy constables. "Sorry, another day. Cyril, Algy, put all this stuff back into their kits."
Two gangly lads began repacking the baggage.
"You mean, we don't get caned."
"Of course not, of course not." The black official chuckled. "Unless you violate a law or something. Then both the sponsor and the alien party catch a double dose at the station house and an administrative law judge reviews the case for possible deportation."
"Double . . . dose?" Juliana traded raised eyebrows with Lucretia Sue.
The customs woman chuckled. "Yes. Some fool of a Swedish girl on holiday dirtied the public road with a Wrigley wrapper. Violation of the Debris Management Act. She caught eighteen the first day, nine the second, and nine the third, along with the goose of a resident who sponsored her. The judge permitted her to stay, after a sound lecture on cleanliness, but she elected to take the ship you just arrived on. It was the first to dock after she felt up to the hiding for an exit visa."
"Jee-sus." Lucretia Sue looked respectful.
Miriam Marteau's eyes widened. "Blasphemy Abatement and Religious Observance Act."
The Georgian cleared her throat. "Je suis craintif, I meant."
Juliana had a rigid, anxious look. "I need ... I mean, is there a ladies ... do you have a loo?"
The black woman directed her. She ran.
"Thank . . . heaven she didn't violate the Evacuation Placement Act." Lucretia Sue accepted her two repacked bags. "The penalty's probably flogging."
"The Roadside Sanitation and Beautification Act, you mean," Miriam Marteau told her soberly. "Public flogging, following a strict purge."
"Too late, honey, we already been there."
"Mona has impressed me with your love of verse."
Professor Porter studied Rita Henshaw as she stood in her living room, bare to her waist. "I dabble in lit from time to time--Hobbitry 1A is my forte. Dear old Tolkien Studies packs the hall in droves. Like you, I incline more to Swinburne for recreation."
She didn't care for the emphasis he gave the word. The attention he devoted to her hefty, thrusting pecs went beyond flattery.
"Another modern maiden who eschews the benefits of artificial uplift. You have no idea how such progressive fashions enliven the lecture hall."
He still held that absurd harness as a wave of his hand commanded her to continue. She shed her shoes before unsnapping her skirt's waistband. The heavy khaki cloth felt reassuring, a final barrier against surrender.
The professor plainly enjoyed her lingering as she loosened and lowered her skirt.
"I'm surprised you didn't give our Mona those soul-stirring and revelatory lines: "I have passed from the outermost portal To the shrine where a sin is a prayer; What care though the service be mortal?
0 our Lady of Torture, what care? All thine the last wine that I pour is, The last in the chalice we drain, 0 fierce and luxurious Dolores, Our Lady of Pain.
"All thine the new wine of desire, The fruit of four lips as they clung Till the hair and the eyelids took fire, The foam of a serpentine tongue, The froth of the serpents of pleasure, More salt than the foam of the sea, Now felt as a flame, now at leisure As wine shed for me.
"Ah thy people, thy children, thy chosen, Marked cross from the womb and perverse! They have found out the secret to cozen The gods that constrain us and curse; They alone, they are wise, and none other; Give me place, even me, in thy train, Oh my sister, my spouse, and my mother, Our Lady of Pain."
Rita had her pantihose peeled to the knees. She bent and in a trice wiggled naked toes upon the carpet. The leg-warmed nylon joined her discarded skirt.
"Tan all over, with almost as much callipygian blessing as our arrogantly nether-globed Mo'." He circled her attentively. "Rounder, definitely curvier. Not quite as-ummm, fully packed, shall we say. Very sweetly turned up, by the bye. I've seen those tantalizing tambos merrily tilting their way down the lane more than once. You can't imagine how I pined for a closer look."
Maybe he's myopic, she thrilled with hope for a brief moment.
"Now, by the dancing ghost ships at Riga!" His voice came from low behind her. "What have we here? Varicose veins of the gluteal musculature? Stretch marks? No! Surely the work of a birch-those broadly splayed blue and green markings."
If he touches my bottom, she resolved, I'll belt him. No hormone-crazed stanza-wielding hospodar is going to feel my fanny!
"I thought you acceded to my demands rather quickly." His voice had the mildness of spring milk. "Is Toni's arm as savage as ever? Wicked violence on the tennis court, and relentless fury on the sabre mat."
"She hits."
"You used to take it better, darling." Her stepmother mocked the tears and quivering. ' 7 do suppose I'll have to repeat that last half-dozen just before you get into your car-unless you'd care for a second go-around now."
Rita had sniffed and accepted the second option. The imperious Antonia went for another birch. The young woman lay over the hated flogging block. A worn oak front kept her knees on the floor and her thighs perpendicular, Stepmama had commanded nylons and garter belt. These framed the scarlet crisscross seething across bare buttocks and upper legs.
Rita's torso bent downward along the inclined top, cursorily padded and leather sheathed. The pungent saddle-soap smell surrounded her. Her dress had been hiked to her tits, which objected to her body's weight crushing them against the block. Tough. The rest of her had problems, too.
Her fingers had scarred the old oak so often that Antonia'd trussed her stepdaughter's arms behind her back, wrist to elbows. The rolled dress lay above; naked, perspiring Rita extended below, to the garter belt. She hoped the dear lady wouldn't find it cute to add some licks from a martinet across her ribs. It had happened. "Now, no naughty words and rebellious jerkings around, Take your flogging like a lady."
The second Mrs. Henshaw laughed and lashed the slackly waiting rump. Curved and parted cheeks flared at the slow, hard strokes parading across the lower slopes. Eight blistering licks at half-minute intervals. Rita had expected only six. The final two set her twisting and gnashing. "Compensation for not having your freshly-limed bottom on the car seat tomorrow-or will you go home Sunday morning? We could brunch in Carmel." Dinner had been an exquisite salmon shio-yaki, with cold nutmegged spinach and inch-long fingers of asparagus steamed for 90 seconds. Rita's cold and angry fingers plied their Japanese chop sticks on the mantleplace. Her left hand kept her furled dress above her buttocks while she ate the salt-grilled fish.
Her father had complimented his wife on her thoroughness. The $1500 check covering the next three months had burned no less than the birching when Antonia pressed it into her hand. Rita drove away Saturday and found a San Mateo motel, an incredible pseudo-Tudor erection by the Bayshore Freeway. She took the last leg to Orinda Sunday morning, arriving to detect Mona at her mischievous slumber.
"I trust you know how to put one of these on." Professor Porter handed her the chrome and buckskin harness. It looked childishly simple, compared with some of Antonia's more advanced models. This appeared to be simple collar-and-belt, without even one rigid busk.
She buckled the broad waist-cinch in place. Two lean rein-like straps crossed between her breasts and ran through a collar. She snapped that shut around her throat. A suspicious ring protruded below her chin, ideal for a leash.
"May I?" He led the two long straps over her shoulders. They hung back from the collar. "Legs akimbo, please."
His fingers grazed shrinking flesh as he ran the straps under her buttocks, up the fluffily-haired crotch, and through two rings on opposite sides of the belt buckle. He stepped to his carpet bag.
"Now try these for size." Rummaging in his kit he brought forth wrist and ankle cuffs. She buckled them into place, noting bronze D-rings sewn strategically into the leather.
"Cross your wrists over the small of your back."
One loose strap stretched across her front and under her right floating ribs. He secured that to her left wrist. The other rein-thin line went around her left side and immobilized her right wrist.
Or-not quite immobilized. She could still move either arm, and bring increasingly intolerable pressure up on her cunt.
"I thought one of us was a gentleman," she complained as he snapped shut a six-inch chain between her ankle cuffs. He returned to his sinister bag of tricks.
"An officer and a pedant, Miss Henshaw." He saluted, then withdrew a longer, thicker strap.
"Wait a minute!"
"Just a tawse, the old Scots persuader of youth in my country-one of my countries, that is."
"You called this a-a demonstration. A warning."
She tried to retreat, but the ankle chain left her freedom to scuttle with awkward hip-switches.
"I only intend a kind of spiritual cleansing, a behavioral prophylaxis. Think of this as the dentist's."
"I'd rather consider it my home and my castle."
He caught her easily and held her elbow with steel-cored ringers. "Perhaps a more meditative posture."
Pressure of his hand brought her involuntarily to her knees with a thump. "Stop manhandling me-please."
"My apologies." He released her arm. "If you settle your bottom toward your heels, you can bow your torso and present your palms without falling on your nose."
"My . . . palms." Lips compressed bitterly, she hunkered back and leaned forward. She extended her fingers, feeling tension between her legs as she moved her wrists. Her toes started to ache.
The lean tawse end split into two rounded tails, reinforced with stitched leather and fire-toasted to harden the twin tongues. She knew Antonia's version entirely too well.
Her face glanced up and she saw him swing low toward her hands. She shut her eyes. Her right palm flared, jerking away. The buckskin line creasing her cunt tautened mercilessly.
She heard a second swish and had the presence of mind to raise both palms toward the striking tawse. The tails smacked meatily across her left hand.
Twin hot flashes scored each palm again. Her fingers spasmed.
"I believe we have a mutual understanding now." He stepped away, touring the room while she bent and swallowed her ire. It tasted of gall and lumped in her throat.
"You know, when last here with Mona I wondered why these sturdy ring bolts had been installed in the arch to the oversized closet you've outfitted as your home office."
Dear God, don't let him use them. She'd merely implanted them as a back-up, in case Mona should rebel and require some restraint. She hadn't used them on the girl.
"Yet, you have such a peaceful look, perhaps I'll simply leave you while I grade the papers I brought." He chuckled. "I'll use Mona's desk in the bedroom, if you don't mind. The place has such cozy memories. I won't be much more than an hour."
He lightly draped the tawse across her stung palms. "Oh, I've penciled you into my appointment book for 7:30 tomorrow evening. I expect you at my humble mud hut promptly, no earlier, no later. I recommend synchronizing to Naval Observatory time. You needn't wear anything under your street clothes besides that harness. My card."
He extended it under her nose. She had no choice but to take it in her teeth.
He carted his bag into the bedroom, whistling something coy from Noel Coward. The taste of pasteboard invaded her mouth. She didn't spit out the card, though.
Mona, my sweet, she thought, heaven help your lily hide if you try to get biology tutoring the same way. God grant me some justification-one crumbly flake of an infraction-so that I can turn your elegantly blisterable pretties up tonight. That paddle is growing dusty and I have a grave need to re-introduce it to your pouting crupper.
She quailed at the image of having to wear the damned, bisecting harness to his home. Change sweaters and wear the flaired slacks that sweep the ground even when I'm in heels . . . that pull-over with the endless floppy collar would hide the throat band.
This tears it, Mona Forbes. She set her teeth. No more Ms. Nice Guy.
Rita crouched and waited.
"Clare Boothe Luce once called your stepmother the finest American woman fencer she'd seen since the Thirties.
That was before Toni pioneered mixed sabre bouts, by the way." The professor freed the young woman's wrists. He gave the lines a firm tug that made her eyes widen, then clipped them together behind her slender waist. "Let's be sure to keep the harness on until tomorrow, shall we? You can cart me the tawse in your purse." He removed the chain from her ankles. She considered a heel-kick to the bridge of his nose. After all, it might drive the bone slivers into his brain; it always did in books, didn't it?
The opportunity passed.
She removed the saliva-soaked card from her lips. The sodden pasteboard showed an address quite close to St. Clouds campus.
"7:30 in the peaceful p.m. As Auntie Mame said, I'll open doors for you-doors you never even dreamed existed." He gave her a satisfied, insultingly proprietarian look. He finished loading his carpetbag and ambled to the door. "My love to Mona, if you mention my visit. Don't worry, I won't."
A wave and he was out. She leaped to bolt the lock after him. The tawse remained on her carpet, jeering. He had her, she knew-trussed and plucked and seasoned like a guinea hen waiting for the roaster. He had never even touched her sexually. He might do so later-or he might not. His ballgame, all the way. She could deal with her stepmother and her father. Awful as Antonia could be, the woman had predictable behavior patterns. Cooperation paid off in bankable checks, with an ample Christmas bonus from her mother's trust- painful to earn, delicious to spend.
This man . . . she had to glance at the card to remember his name . . . she felt starkly open before him, with no place to hide, no game to plan.
She reached back for the ends of the leather strips sawing at her tender crotch. Damn! The bastard had padlocked them together.
She touched herself below. The two straps didn't impede any vital functions. She could even still fit in the vibrator, though she wouldn't be able to wriggle very much once the pleasure-jolts started sparking through her.
Somehow the Dutch dong seemed far less inviting than it had right after Mona's departure.
"All I have to say, Mo'," she addressed the air grimly, "is that you better know a quantum leap from a quagmire by the end of summer, or you'll be taking your classes standing for the whole fucking fall term!"
Speaking of which . . . that Ron idiot ... if Mona had free time to polka between the sheets with this Porter fellow, perhaps her Incredible Hunk had some spare minutes for glandular recreation on the side.
Maybe she could talk to him about her cousin's studies-a nice, heart-to-heart physical conversation. It would serve her bed-bounding roomie right.
Her tawse-stung palms flexed. She'd get around to that project once she healed from whatever this Gustavus Fielding Porter, Q.E.D., R.F.D., L.S.M.F.T., had up his far too comodious British sleeve.
Limeys, she reflected as she paced barefoot to the bedroom for some clothes, pain-hungry bastards all.
Her glance caught the whipping cane she'd so often bent over Mona's cushiony chubs. Although the fog-bound beasts did have a few good ideas in some departments.