“You shameless little whore. You shall be taken from here to the Market Square where you shall be stripped naked and flogged. You shall receive two hundred lashes. Hangman, I charge you to pay particular attention to this thieving little slut. Scourge her soundly; scourge her till the blood runs! I want to see you draw blood with every stroke of the whip; see that I am not disappointed. You shall then take the slut to the House of Correction, where she shall spend six months with hard labour.”
I was the hangman tasked with carrying out this sadistic sentence and having been following the case with interest it was obvious that there was something else going on in this case because the original offence didn’t merit this savagery. I went down to the cells where the young woman was being held prior to the punishment being inflicted and she was sitting on the floor with her head in her hands. She was very neatly dressed and even with the dejected look on her face she was a pretty thing helped by the long golden locks that were flowing down her back. I dismissed the guard that was standing outside the cell and sat down on the bunk beside her.
‘What have you done to upset the Judge?’ I ask.
‘I can’t tell you’ the woman says obviously fearful of what will happen to her if the Judge finds out that she has talked.
‘You have nothing to fear from telling me what really happened because I know that there is something going on because he only gives those sorts of judgements when he is personally implicated in the case’ I say as the woman is looking up at me.
‘I was working in a local brothel that the Judge frequents regularly and as the newest girl he repeatedly raped and buggered me leaving me pregnant with his child and when he found out he demanded that I have the child destroyed. I refused to do this so he had the Madam set me up on a charge of theft by another client and his sentence is designed to ensure that the child is destroyed either by your flogging or during my time at the House of Correction so that there is no lasting evidence of his use of the brothel’ the woman explains and I can well believe it to be true because my position gives me access to lots of information. I know that the enemies of this particular Judge have been gathering all sorts of information on him because I’ve been a conduit for much of this and they are currently plotting how to use this information against him even though he is one of the most powerful people in the country.
‘Thank you I believe what you have said and I will try to make this flogging as gentle as I can get away with and will then ensure that your time in the House of Correction is safe. Take this flask of whisky and drink it all before you are led out to the whipping post. When I hood you for your flogging you will find another flask of whisky in the top of the hood and there will be a tube from this going into your mouth so drink it during the flogging to dull the worst of the pain’ I explain.
‘Why are you doing this for me? If the Judge sees that his sentence is not carried out fully then he will have you destroyed like he is trying to do to me’ the woman says.
‘I am doing this because I will not carry out the sick work of covering up his indiscretions and don’t worry before too long he will not be in a position to have anyone destroyed’ I say handing over the flask of whisky to the woman and she downs it in one before giving it back to me.
‘Bring that slut to me in twenty minutes’ I say to the guards while I head off to the square in front of the courthouse to prepare for the flogging. On my way I stop in my room to refill the flask of whisky and put it in a pouch at the top of the hood before connecting up the tube to it and running this down the front of the hood. As normal on a day when sentences are being delivered in court there is a large crowd outside the courthouse waiting for any sentence to be carried out because they are always carried out publicly and when they see me stepping out onto the platform with my whips they know that they are in for some action and almost magically the crowd multiplies.
A clamour of excitement goes through the crowd when they see the pretty young woman being dragged out by the two male guards who forcibly strip her before tying her wrists and securing the ropes high up on the whipping post stretching out her naked body giving me the best target and the audience the best view. I fold the woman’s long golden locks up onto the top of her head to completely expose her back and fit the hood over the top of this ensuring that the tube from the hood is discretely lodged in the side of her mouth.
‘By the order of the court this woman is sentenced to receive two hundred lashes with the cat and six months in the House of Correction with hard labour for the offence of theft’ I announce to the crowd.
I pick up the whip and inspect each of the long, hard tails with the biting knots along the length of the tails spotting the Judge watching on from the courtroom window during an intermission in his trials for the day. His position meant that he would have a perfect view of the woman’s back so that he could see that his instruction was carried out and for this reason I made the first four dozen lashes vicious tearing long cuts in the pale skin of the woman’s upper back and shoulders and curling round onto her sides and breasts. Each of these draws piercing, shrill screams from the woman and cheers from the watching crowd. After these the woman slips into unconsciousness and normally she would have been revived immediately but because I knew the Judge could not see this I didn’t have her revived until we were half way through the flogging. I signalled for the guards to step forward to douse the woman with buckets of ice cold water and this revived her with another loud scream.
As this was happening I took the opportunity to have a drink of water and during this I checked to see if the Judge was still watching the punishment but he wasn’t so I resumed the flogging but with gentler strokes although not so gentle that the watching crowd noticed. I had avoided hitting low down on the woman’s back and wrapping the whip round onto her stomach but her upper back, shoulders, bottom, thighs and breasts were scourged with marks just in case the Judge paid her a visit in the House of Correction to see that his sentence had been carried out although I doubted that he would do so as it was a very dangerous place for him to be given the number of people he’d put there who would not care about the consequences for themselves if he appeared.
By the end of the flogging the woman has almost passed out again and when her wrists are cut down from the top of the post she collapses down onto the ground. I remove the hood from her head and put it in my pocket so that I can get the flask out afterwards. I am responsible for delivering the woman to the House of Correction so I pull her to her feet and basically carry her naked form back into the courthouse and then the fairly short distance to the House of Correction where the Head Warden is waiting for us.
‘If this woman is harassed in any way by you, your staff, fellow inmates or visitors then you will pay a very high price. Remember that I know all about what really happened to your wife and about your lovers both male and female’ I state decisively as I hand the woman over.
‘It will be done’ the Head Warden responds through tightly gritted teeth obviously regretting that he will not be able to get his hands on this fresh piece of meat once she has recovered from the effects of the flogging as I have clearly staked my ownership to him and he knows that I have all the information that I need to destroy him. I visit the woman every week to check that she is not being harmed and clearly the Head Warden has taken my threat seriously because she is on the lightest possible of hard labour assignments and with each visit her bump is getting more prominent. I talk to the woman during each visit and I get the sense that she isn’t quite what she seems and this is confirmed when she eventually reveals her original name to me.
When I found out her name it was obvious why she had taken a new name and a new life as much as she could because she was from an aristocratic background but the rest of her family had been wiped out when she was just a baby during the revolution. I did a bit more digging after this and found that the family assets were still in existence but they are held in exile so I decided that it was time to get her out of the country where she could resume her former life. It was also time for me to get out of the country because my knowledge of the peccadilloes of all the Judges and members of the Judiciary system were coming dangerously close to the surface and there has already been one warning for me with the assassination of one of the members of the torture chamber who had shared some information with the wrong people.