Sharon (episode 15)
Posted by admin on October 6, 2008I longed to see my collar, a purly feminine longing. But I had to content myself with an examination of the beautifully wrought bands tight upon my wrists and ankles. Each of them clutched me with an intimicy implacable yet strangely reassuring. Chained thus, a girl might find a small comfort in the loss of nagging decision and futile hope. I knew myself a prisoner many times over. I looked appealingly at my companion. “I’m so helpless… oh Trina!”
“It feels like that at first, darling. But if you sit on the cot and hunch your feet and legs up you’ll be able to reach your face and touch that lovely collar. I know you’re longing to. I did. You can even feed yourself.”
She made a wry grimace. “It really shocks a girl to discover how much she can manage to do when she’s chained.”
“Except escape.”
She laughed at my dolor. “Cheer up, dear. Oh, and forget about escape. Just forget it entirely. Girls don’t escape from Presteigne.”
“Then we are prisoners!”
Laughing, Trina went away and locked me in.
It was not as lonely as being tied to the pillar. Not because there was company, but because the passage end of my cell was all bars giving my small prison the effect of a cage. No one was there, but I could not shake off the feeling someone was watching. That’s what bars were for, weren’t they! To peer through! I’d have gone and gripped them and pressed my face against their enmity myself if my chains had not pulled me up short.
So I looked at my chains. Even with their weight heavy on my wrists and ankles they seemed unreal. I tried to make sense out of their confinement, and out of the cell in which I was locked, and to rationalize the chain
tethering me to the stone wall. But nothing about Presteigne made sense. The girl who had locked me thus had done so with seeming love. Chartreuse Carruthers had left me under the spell of her loveliness and charm. Lord Halcyon was pure enigma.
I had to do a lot of wondering. I was not yet of age. Life in my parents’ home had flowed smoothly in comfortable paths. St. Winifred’s School for Girls had been the same… except for one thing, the whisperings. We had done a lot of whispering in the cloakrooms and the dorms. I expect all teenage girls anywhere make these furtive excursions into speculation about afterwards. That wonderful and deliciously frightening “Afterwards” when we would “come out”, when we would meet men, where marriage loomed as a final
unutterable bliss, and when we would at last “know everything”.
It was the “know everything” I gave my thoughts to now. That “Everything” we had giggled about was always understood to cover all the things “little girls should not know”. This includes having babies and going to bed with your husband. But all of us had picked up more. There was something else! In fact, a lot of “Something else’s” which just had to be sinful and excitingly enjoyable. It was understood at St. Winifred’s that anything excruciatingly scrumptious was inevitably “Not nice” or downright sinful. Standing in my cell chained and naked, I could not help wondering if I had been precipitated into something “Not nice” long before my time.
But I wasn’t being sinful. I wasn’t being much of anything, except a prisoner. I was just “Being”. I was something others had a purpose with and an interest in. I was in limbo. I rattled my chains and sta on the cot. Then I experimented and found Trina was right. By compressing myself into a small package I got my hands back. The first thing I did with them was finger my collar.















