Chapter Nine

The week under the protection of the Camisards in the woods brought the girls and Florence news of the Cevenol revolt and the repression. The royal forces were devastating the highlands, burning villages, destroying temples, breaking leaders on the wheel, hanging pastors and sending males to the galleys, women to the prisons of Nimes and AiguesMortes. Joanne learnt that a timid approach of English men o' war before Sete had created a sudden panic diverting the troops to the coast only to see the enemy sail off. Whereupon the dragoons returned to the Cevennes to continue the war and pillage. Every Protestant parish in the diocese of Mende had been laid waste without quarter. For once the area round Pressignac was spared, most of the population having been condemned, dispersed or, like Joanne and Martine, otherwise disposed of. The sheep and stores - and such young women as remained - had been requisitioned by the dragoons.

Thus, civil war spread throughout the Cevennes, diverting regular troops Versailles and the Sun King could barely spare, the French forces being heavily engaged elsewhere.

By chance Joanne heard that her weaver husband, Jean-Jacques, had been freed from the galleys and enrolled by force into some regiment embroiled in the absurd war of the so-called Spanish Succession. But he had deserted along with others, been picked up near Perpignan on his way north and condemned again as a galley slave. The horrendous news made her listen more attentively to Martine who was obsessed with the idea of reaching the sanctuary of Protestant Geneva, the distant City of Refuge. Encouraged by several Camisards, Joanne finally agreed to risk the perilous journey with her, along with Florence and three others. In peasant clothes and clogs, the group set out with a guide up the wild paths of the Ardeche towards the Rhone valley where the escape route bore east into the kingdom of Savoy; being ruled from Turin, the mountainous area was considered relatively safe. At least, Geneva was nearer than the Netherlands, leave alone far-off England or Brandenburg, where other refugees had fled and prospered, despite the weird languages.

The going was hard, fraught with danger but goading on the other members of the group Martine's determination burned like a beacon. Only once, before the Savoyard border, did terror freeze the émigrés - near Tain l'Hermitage a roving company of armed Cadets of the Cross halted them. If discovered, being devoid of exit papers, Joanne knew the journey was at its end with the whip, rape and the Tour de Constance in its stead. After a search and finding no Calvinist bibles or Psalters, the troops reluctantly let the travellers move on. The scare had served to teach the group - and the guide - to keep to pathways and sheep tracks. Joanne had not liked how the booted militia had thrust into Martine's bodice to grasp her breasts, still bulging temptingly despite the convent's whips and scanty diet. As her welts had waned, the men found no valid cause to detain her.

The group trudged on, avoiding villages and even hamlets, sleeping in dells among the ferns, the guide encouraging them to move faster. Soon they would be over the frontier. But when they reached it, joy turned into alarm, for the guide left after indicating the route towards Aiguebelette and the Granier Pass. Extenuated and starved, they skirted the lake at Aix three days later, awed by the heights of the Grand Colombier towering above; there Joanne nearly gave up, only to hear her colleagues spur her on in the name of Gideon, Joshua and, for the first time, Calvin. Finally they crossed the Mont-Sion and at long last the hump of the Saleve lay ahead, Martine assuring them the spires of Geneva's cathedral would be soon visible. How she knew astonished Joanne. And on they plodded.

Just in time before the Forte de Neuve, on the Treille, closed its gates at sundown, the group entered the promised haven, the Protestant Rome. Once on the cobbles of Geneva, Martine fell to her knees and led the group in prayer before a crowd of virtuous Genovese taking the evening air and staring at this further group of bedraggled refugees.

The temporary lodgings were meagre but for the two girls paradise after Elodie's cellar. Joanne was amazed at the pluck Martine had shown on the way; she seemed to have exorcised the ghosts of Lassignac and the convent. The past resolutely behind her, those dark eyes seemed to be fixed on a Calvinist future. The long journey had been miraculous, even if Huguenots did not believe in miracles, and they were safe at last. What would have pleased them even more, had they known it, was that Cavalier and his Camisards had that very day defeated the royal forces - or Moabites and Philistines, as he called them - at Devois de Martignargues. But that was far away, in another land.

The following morning the newcomers, dressed in borrowed garments of solemn grey, gave thanks in the cathedral of St Pierre, Joanne offering up a prayer for her Jean-Jacques in galley chains. The thought of chains suddenly called to mind Francis-Etienne; he kept wandering in and out of her mind. It was ludicrous but she began to miss him...

***

The days searching for work went by in dreary succession; the stifling nights on her pallet next to a serenely contented and suddenly celibate Martine began to weigh on Joanne. Lying half-awake in the taper's flicker, strange reminiscences troubled her.

Francis-Etienne's pointed beard seemed to be grazing her breasts... while she hung naked, chained from that well-used beam in the west wing. The straps were wrenching her ankles outwards... locking her to those massive floor rings. Yes, she was moaning in pain and ecstasy after the initial whipping, the man's tributes trickling over her freckled skin. He was calling her his 'angel of an Aphrodite' - whoever that was - and his 'exquisite sex slave' with, so he said, 'the most tempting body I've ever lashed, naked as a candle'. Heavens, how she loved those honeyed words, now distant echoes of a vanished past...

In the sombre Geneva lodgings Joanne began to look haggard and distressed. Every night her fantasies became more vivid - the Marquis's handsome ghost, smelling of stables and leather, seemed to be sucking and tugging on her whip-swollen teats... the beard was edging down her belly to the scrolls of cunt frond fluttering like limed birds... Then, yes then, he would draw her erect stalk into his mouth along with the metal circle. 'Ahh, yes, master,' she remembered moaning, 'leave your teeth marks there, as you did in my tits... Bite sire, bite it hard! Or whip it... please, master..." And she would shift her neglected buttocks higher on the lodging's mattress parting her thighs for the phantom whiplash...

Cautious not to wake the sleeping Martine, Joanne held her breath, her trembling fingers spreading her wet vulva under the sheets, feeling the holes left by the slave rings. And in her imagination she would feel the chains splaying her open for the Lassignac guests to torture the liquid trench of vermilion membrane before wrenching her clit... in the penumbra of the shabby boarding house, it was not the same. Yet she frigged hard, there next to the torpid Martine, and careered rudderless into the eye of the cyclone as the orgasm towered, crested and devastated her - wave after wave crashing over a foundering wreck. And every night, as she spent, the tangled images merged into one; it was Francis who was filling her with spume, still holding his leather scourge, soaked in her sweat.

Somehow she managed not to wake Martine or Florence as she churned her ringless gristle and teats. Then she would turn over to sleep, blowing out the candle - for which she had other uses apart from illumination - and try to lay her dreams of Lassignac to rest. She realized her plight; it was well over a month since she had been thrashed and fucked in chains - an unconscionable time for a forlorn former sex slave to be deprived of what she needed most. Some solution had to be found, somewhere, somehow. It was unfortunate also that Martine in the bed next to hers had turned frigid... Even if the huge phallus of that tonsured swine, Dom Anselme, had appeared there in the lodgings, she would have encircled it with her lips, on condition that he beat her. Even Anthea... But no, not her.

Yet Joanne slept soundly until her neighbour's morning prayers wakened her, Martine giving her the customary three kisses of the Huguenots.

***

The days and then the weeks dragged bleakly by, stretching into exasperating emptiness. Existence beside the now austere, chaste Martine, already learning to read and training as a deaconess at St Gervais, had worn Joanne down into moody spells of despondency. What employment she had found as housemaid to a staid Genovese family on the Rue des Oranges, had begun to pall. Hounded by the lady of the house and deprived of any respite from work, life in the imperious shadow of the nearby cathedral was stifling; and she was without hope of sex. Moreover, the solemn bells of St Pierre adjacent chilled and inhibited her. She missed her bleating ewes and the breeze in the chestnuts and larches at home. Still deeper within her she yearned desperately for something else, something that she found was conjured up by the mere sight of a leather belt or even a length of cart rope.

It was on one Thursday in late June that Joanne made up her mind and decided to return to her treasured - and devastated - Cevennes. The Geneva summer with its plane trees and neat rows of privet numbed her. Down in the Cevennes the acacias, golden broom and honeysuckle would be in full flower and the grass loud with the tireless grating of the cicadas in the midday sun. And she would be nearer to the galley ports and poor Jean-Jacques - whether he was there for desertion or for his faith, or both, she could not guess, and anyway there was little she could do for him now.

Yet it was not only her native Pressignac, probably in ruins that coaxed her south where civil war still raged, but something more occult and secret. In the tiny attic room above the Rue des Oranges, Lassignac continued to visit her dreams, the sinister château beckoning her back. She would close her eyes and see Simone in her black garb; the archway and steep steps leading down to those mephitic, windowless cells; her former inmates - or what was left of them - oiled, their chests numbered, naked and submissive under Marie-Félice's sharp eye, if that shrew was still of this world. Joanne saw them lined up against the iron bars, their rings clinking as they awaited the guests, the sentencing, the whip and the iron flesh tongs.

On the Sunday long before the first bells pealed, she quietly left the house, dispensing with farewells, thrust some provisions into her satchel and, as the town gates opened, hurried through the Porte de Neuve. She followed the Arve river until the heights of the Saleve lay behind her. The peregrines hovering above the lush pastures greeted her casually, for she was not the sort of prey they had in mind. But the more sagacious rooks peered down from the elms with an air of surprise; it was rare to see a young female trudging south alone so early on a Sunday. They assumed the seductive blonde knew where she was heading and what she was doing outside the city walls while the faithful were being called to worship.

Oui-da, that she knew and a lot better than they. She was going home.

The great bell, known as the Clemence, boomed in the cathedral tower with its deep note of bidding but gradually its telling became faint, fading out of earshot as Joanne hurried over the frontier at Carouge. She just hoped she would not later encounter the dragoons again. She was in no mood to be raped. At least not yet.