Free Return to the Chateau by Pauline Réage Page A

over which, after they had been tied, they were made to lean. The whipping was never severe enough to mark them, but long and hard enough to make them scream, beg for mercy, and sometimes cry. The first morning that O, after she was untied, returned to her room and collapsed on her bed, still moaning from the burning pain in her loins, Noelle took her in her arms to comfort her. Her kindness and solicitous concern were, however, tinged with contempt. Why had she ever agreed to be pierced in the first place, or allowed those rings to be inserted in her nether lips? O confessed quite candidly that she was happy she had consented to the rings, and that her lover whipped her every day.
    “So you’re used to it,” Noelle said. “Then don’t go around complaining. You’d probably miss it if they stopped.”
    “Maybe I would,” said O. “And I’m not complaining. But don’t say I’m used to it. No, I’ll never get used to it . .”
    “In that case,” Noelle said, “you’re going to really have something to complain about, because the days will be few and far between when they only whip you once here. When they see a girl like you, men know right away that you’re made to be flogged. They sense it. And if they don’t, the brand and the rings give it away. Not to mention that it will be on your card.”
    “On my card,” said O. “What card? What are you talking about?”
    “You don’t have your card yet, but don’t worry, when you get it that information will be on it.”
    Questioned about the card three days later when O was invited to lunch in her apartment, Anne-Marie had no hesitation about explaining what it was.
    “I’m waiting for your photos,” she said. “We’ll transcribe on the back the information from the card that Sir Stephen sent me about you. I don’t mean your vital statistics, your description, age, and all that, but your special characteristics, your profession, and so forth … Oh, it’s brief enough; it will all fit on a couple of lines, and I know just what it will say.”
    The photographs of O had been taken. one morning in a studio just like the one where O had once worked, which was set up under the eaves of the right wing of the building. O had been made up the way she used to make up the models, in that not-so-distant past that, nonetheless, seemed further removed from her than her earliest childhood. She had been photographed in her uniform, in her long yellow dress; she had been photographed with her dress tucked up in front and behind; she had been photographed naked, from in front, from behind in profile; standing, lying down, half sprawling backward on a table with her legs spread wide; bent over with her buttocks sticking out; kneeling down with her hands tied. Were they going to keep all the poses?
    “Yes,” Anne-Marie told her. “They put them in your file. They make prints of the best ones and give them to the customers.”
    When Anne-Marie showed them to her two days later she was thunderstruck. Not that they were not all lovely; there wasn’t a single one that could not have been used in those clandestine photo magazines they sell under the counter at all the Paris kiosks. But the only one that O felt she honestly recognized herself in was a photograph taken of her full-face, standing stark naked, leaning against the edge of a table, with her hands behind her, behind her buttocks actually, with her legs slightly spread so that the irons were clearly visible between her thighs, and her lower lips as clearly defined as was her slightly parted mouth. She was staring straight ahead, as though lost in her own thoughts. She obviously was not alone in especially remarking that shot.
    “That’s the one they’ll be giving out the most’ Anne-Marie said to her. “You can look at the other side. No, wait, I’ll show you the card Sir Stephen sent.”
    She got up, opened the drawer of a writing desk, and handed O a thin card on which there appeared, in red ink in Sir