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Jennifer
Jennifer (5)
The ship had been at sea for three weeks, and none of the girls knew where they were being taken.
There were nineteen girls in Jennifer's cabin, chained into a coffle. Some of them were scantily clad in their underwear or left of their clothes, others were completely nude.
Jennifer was chained towards the end of the coffle. She was naked down to her waist, and her legs and feet were bare. Much of the tiny denim shorts she wore was also torn into rags. Her wrists and ankles were locked in rough iron manacles, connected by a long chain that led up to her heavy iron collar. Two other chains attached her collar to those of the two girls on either side.
On her right was Mary Lou, a Princeton senior less than two weeks from graduation when she was kidnapped. On the left was young Christina, formerly a cheerleader at Beverly Hills High School, who spent much of the journey crying.
Suddenly a girl in the middle of the coffle called out: "Land! We are approaching land!"
It was, in fact, a small island that the ship was approaching. On the top of the green slopes, stood an old castle, or fort, built of rocks.
"Oh Christ!" Mary Lou groaned out. "What revenge!"
All the girls turned to look at her. After a brief silence, Jennifer said: "You mean...this is, well, this was one of the..."
"One of the slave-prisons that our own ancesters built," Mary Lou interrupted. "Off the African coast -- that must be where we are. They built these forts centuries ago to hold the black slaves before transporting them to the New World. And now...oh Christ! What an irony!"
Christina began weeping again, and was soon joined by several other girls, including Mary Lou. Jennifer caressed Christina's shoulder, and then Mary Lou's, with her chained hands in a vain attempt to comfort her companions, but could not think of anything to say. Before long her own face was covered with tears.
They heard the wistle blowing. The ship was getting ready to enter port. Through the small, barred window they could now see people, mostly Africans and Arabs, gathering on the docks along a narrow path leading to the slave-fort.
In a strange mood, Jennifer started to wonder how many dollars they would be willing to pay for her.
Jennifer (12)
"Jennifer! Jennifer!!"
Her mistress' voice was filled with a sense of urgency. Jennifer jumped up from the lounge chair on the little balcony outside her room, and ran as far as her leg-irons allowed, stopping only to turn around and open the door with her fettered hands.
She suddenly froze when she came to her mistress' study downstairs. Robby, her mistress' eleven-year-old son, was standing nervously in a corner, and staring her up and down. She stopped and hesitated, not knowing whether to step in or to withdraw. She had been in the house for more than two months, but her mistress had never confronted her with Robby when she was naked and chained.
"Come on in, Jennifer," her mistress called her. "Don't be shy. Now kneel down."
Slowly, Jennifer fell on her knees, sat on her heels and spread her thighs. Over the last few months she had grown accustomed to this position of submissiveness, but this time she felt more than a little uncomfortable exposing the most intimate part of her body in Robby's presence.
"All right, Robby," her mistress said calmly. "Now go ahead and touch her."
Jennifer lowered her head and flushed when Robby's small sweaty hands pressed on her breasts and fondled her nipples tentatively. Apparently fascinated to see how the round nipples became erect, he pinched and pulled them with great interest.
"Touch her all you want, Robby." Her mistress sounded more serious now. "You can even hurt her if you like. It's OK to do whatever you want with Jennifer. She's our slave.
"But," she suddenly raised her voice, "if you get caught one more time bothering the girls in your school, don't ever come home to see me again!"
Jennifer (18)
Jennifer looked at herself in the dressing mirror and felt puzzled. Ricky, her new master's six-year-old son, kept staring at her and giggling while she was trying to give him a bath before putting him to bed.
"What's wrong, Ricky?" she finally asked.
"Mommy says it's a shame not to wear cloths in front of other people," Ricky answered, still giggling. "How come you never wear any cloths?"
"Oh that!" Jennifer said with a sigh of relief. "That's because your mommy and daddy want me to be naked all the time."
"What for?"
"So that they can touch me or beat me whenever they want to," Jennifer explained patiently.
"How come?" A five or six year-old boy's curiosity was insatiable.
"Because I'm their slave." Having been a slavegirl for more than four years ever since she was fifteen, Jennifer had learnt to make this statement without any emotion.
"What's a slave?"
"A slave is...like a piece of property."
"What's property?"
"Property...it's like saying I'm not a human being like your mommy and daddy are. I'm a 'thing' that they bought. Like a horse in the stable, for example."
"But you are not a horse, Jennie."
"No, but they can treat me like a horse. They can do whatever they want with me, because they own me. Do you understand now?"
"Uh-huh," Ricky said, blinking and thinking. "Do I own you too?"
"...Well, I think you do."
"So I can treat you like a horse too?"
"I hope not; but yes, you can."
"And I can do whatever I want to you?"
"Yes yes yes, of course, my little master. Now stand up and let me dry you up."
At last, Ricky seemed satisfied with the answer and stopped interrogating Jennifer.
Early the next morning, Jennifer was waken up by Ricky's loud screams and cries outside her room. After a while, her mistress came in, looking completely frustrated.
"I'm sorry to get you up so early, Jennie," she said somewhat apologetically while detaching the night-chain from Jennifer's steel collar. "But Ricky would start the third world war right now if I wouldn't let you play with him."
Five minutes later, Jennifer found herself deeply regretful for what she had told Ricky the night before, when she was literally driven into the country road leading to town, walking on her hands and knees. Ricky had tied a thick flaxen rope around her waist. On the other end of the rope was his toy cart, in which sat Jennifer's little master, joyfully whipping the soles of her feet with a small riding crop.
Jennifer (19)
Jennifer could not wait till the end of the ceremony. She slipped out of the auditorium through the backstage door as soon as she had received the award, briefly answered a few questions from a small group of reporters who were smart enough to wait for her there, and, before the flock of other reporters realized that she was missing, she had already sneaked into the rented limousine and was well on her way to Vladimir's house.
She could not wait to share her joy with Vladimir; After all, she had just won one of the most prestigious award in classical music, after fifteen years of diligent practice. As Vladimir's protegee for the last two years, she was sure this latest achievement would make him very proud.
Jennifer wondered whether he was going to whip her for forgetting to mention his name in her little acknowledgement speech. She had been too excited at the moment, but she knew if he decided to whip her, no excuse would be good enough to save her a sore bottom.
Thirty minutes later, Jennifer was standing in front of Vladimir's large Tudor-style house. She rang the bell, and heard his voice over the intercom: "Come in."
She opened the door with her key and entered. In the dark hallway, she almost tripped over something. Turning on the light, she saw a small suitcase lying on the floor, with a note stuck on it: "Change before you come up."
She laid down her violin and opened the suitcase. In it she found an iron collar and two pairs of wide iron manacles, connected by a long, dark and heavy chain.
She did not need further instructions. Without any hesitation, she took off her black velvet evening dress, her underwear, shoes and stockings, and picked up the iron collar from the suitcase. The jingles of the chain and the touch of the cold metal on her bare skin sent a small thrill down her spine.
She carefully locked the collar around her neck, and bent down to place the manacles at the end of the chain on her ankles. Then, moving the chain behind her, she fastened the other pair of manacles, attached in the middle of the chain, around her wrists against the small of her back.
She hobbled upstairs and stopped at the door to his study. Turning around, she knocked lightly on the door with her fettered hands.
"Enter," he commanded briefly.
She walked in. He was sitting in a large armchair, facing away from her, and was watching her live performance at the ceremony on videotape.
"I'm back, my Lord," she ventured to say.
"Hm," was the only answer.
She knelt quietly beside his chair, careful to avoid the soft Persian rug. In the dim light, she could not see clearly the expression on his face, and this made her rather nervous. When her performance was over, she saw him nodding approvingly, which relaxed her a little. But by the time her speech started on the screen, she could almost hear her heart pounding against her chest.
Vladimir turned off the TV and the VCR after her brief speech ended, but did not say anything. For the next five minutes or so, a thick silence filled the air, interrupted only by the tiny crackles from the burning firewood.
Finally, he turned to Jennifer and kissed her on the forehead.
"You have done very well tonight, my little one," he whispered. "Congratulations."
"Thank you, my Lord." Jennifer kissed his hand in return, finally feeling assured enough to lean on his legs.
A contented smile on his bearded face, Vladimir reclined in the chair, and stroked her long wavy hair for a while. Then, detaching her wrist cuffs from the chain, he put his Stradivari violin in her hands.
"Play that Schubert piece for me again."
She moved to a designated spot by the fireplace, stayed erect on her knees, and started playing. The warm light of the fire danced merrily on her ivory skin, giving it the color tone of Boris Vallejo's nudes.
This was a familiar piece. Over the last few weeks she had practiced it hundreds of times in the same position, at the same spot, with him sitting in the same armchair. She could even remember exactly at which notes his whip had stung her unprotected back, or which measures she had been made to repeat again and again while the little teeth of a pair of alligator clamps bit into the tender flesh of her nipples.
It was beginning to rain outside the window, but Jennifer did not notice anything. She was swept away by the Danube spring breeze that sprang to life from the strings under her fingers. She had dissolved into the music, and the memories brewed into the music.
She hanged her head and closed her eyes when she had finished, immersed in an undescribable satisfaction, almost a kind of orgasm. She felt Vladimir's hands gently caressing her shoulders, and his warm lips kissing her on the back of her neck.
"Not bad. Not bad at all." In his vocabulary, this was the highest praise Jennifer could expect for her musical performance.
With a jingle of the chain, her collar and handcuffs were removed, but only to be replaced by a heavy wooden stock, which held her wrists on either sides of her neck. Then her anklets were also replaced by a foot-stock.
"But you still need to be punished. Do you know why?"
"Yes, my Lord," Jennifer answered without opening her eyes. "I know...I'm sorry."
"No, you don't, my little one. I'm sure you don't. Do you realize what you did slightly wrong when you introduced the second theme of the andante?"
