The Price of Hannah Blake Read Online Free PDF Page A

Is that what you wish?”
    Hannah began to sob, but she stepped to the side with one foot. “More,” said a woman beside her, and she complied. Then, she bent from the waist, very slowly, till she could touch her toes. Nothing, nothing was hers any longer. Was she a fallen woman, a fallen woman, a fallen woman? The words kept slapping her with all the force of the catastrophe hinted but never quite defined. At last, she opened her eyes and saw through the triangle of her legs, heavily fletched at her breech, with even the fleshy lips visible, the expressionless scrutiny by the woman in the red chair. “Even her arse is exquisite,” she heard her say. “Her pussy is delicate, I see only the suggestion of the lips…”
    After that Hannah knew nothing until she opened her eyes from a dream of unbearable anxiety—to see it was not a dream. The woman in the black skin, the first one, knelt over her, wiping her forehead with a cold cloth. When Hannah opened her eyes, the woman said, “She has come round, now.”
    Hannah murmured, “I dreamed I had died. It was wonderful…”
    “I felt that, once,” said the woman, speaking softly. “But it is not so bad to have a beautiful body that is seen.”
    Hannah started to rise; the woman let her. She thought she would be given her clothes and looked around for them. “They are gone forever,” said the woman. “Trash.”
    Hannah looked up; the red chair was empty. Only the first woman with the black skin, not “Lucile,” was with her. Hannah’s mind started to work again. She was some kind of prisoner with other young men and women, all beautiful—far more beautiful than she,. She would be naked whenever the people here wished. She had fallen, and now she would be ruined—when or how she could not guess. Her heart was pounding, her breath coming fast.
    At least she would never see her family or anyone she had known. No one would know how far little Hannah Blake had fallen, and how pitifully. She thanked God. Then, her brief reverie dissolved and she became aware of her surroundings, again. Unbelievably, for a moment or two she had forgotten that she was naked in front of this woman. She realized the woman still examined her. “You are shivering,” she said, “come stand where sun falls.”
    The sun was good. Hannah looked down at herself, so white in the sunlight, but with her weird garment of brown, a garment that covered nothing. She saw her nipples stiff with cold—or fear—and on the aureoles were goose bumps. Could she cover them? But now the sunlight did its work and the crinkles and goose bumps began to smooth.
    “When will I be violated?” she asked. She did not look at the woman.
    “I don’t know. You are a virgin?”
    Hannah nodded, blushing. With no further answer from the woman, Hannah asked: “Where am I?”
    The beautiful voice sad: “You will discover what this building is; it is elegant and complete and will be your home. You never will learn where it is...” Again, Hannah had forgotten for a few moments that she was naked with this woman. Hannah’s mind was a headlong rush of questions, protests, arguments—but none of it mattered. These people didn’t care. They did with her what they wanted—anything. Talk she had heard all her life of what “was done,” was “not done,” was “sin,” was “virtuous,” was “permitted” —that had been another world, now ended.
    A man from the anti-slavery society once came to her village. She had gone to hear him. She remembered his voice booming, full of righteousness: “It is a monstrous crime to take away the freedom of any person, it is against God, the work of the wicked—and they shall be damned.”
    She was among the wicked, but somehow they was not as she imagined, though what they were was unthinkable. They would not care what the righteous man had said; but God might see. She blushed. Everything ? Surely, God had averted His eyes when she bent and her whole womanhood was obscenely