Anne Rice - The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

He watched her long beautiful throat as she swallowed, and kissed her eyelids.

“Now listen to me, I want you to learn from this,” he said. “Everyone here can see you, all your charms, you’re aware of it. But I want you to be very aware of it. Behind you, the townspeople at the windows are admiring you as they did when I brought you through the town. This should make you proud of yourself, not vain, but proud, proud that you have pleased me, and caught their admiration.”

“Yes, my Prince,” she said when he paused.

“Now think, you are very naked and very helpless, and you are mine completely.”

“Yes, my Prince,” she cried softly.

“That is your life now, and you are to think of nothing else, and regret nothing else. I want that dignity peeled away from you as if it were so many skins of the onion. I don’t mean that you should ever be graceless. I mean that you should surrender to me.”

“Yes, my Prince,” she said.

The Prince looked up at the Innkeeper who stood at the kitchen door with his wife and his daughter. They came to attention at once. But the Prince looked only at the daughter. She was a young woman, very pretty in her own way, though nothing compared to Beauty. She had black hair and round cheeks, and a very tiny waist, and she dressed as many peasant women did, in a low-cut ruffled shirtwaist, and a short broad skirt that revealed her smart little ankles. She had an innocent face. She was watching Beauty in wonder, her big brown eyes moving anxiously to the Prince and then shyly back to Beauty who knelt at the Prince’s feet in the firelight.

“Now, as I told you,” the Prince said softly to Beauty, “all here admire you, and they enjoy you, the sight of you, your plump little rear, your lovely legs, those breasts which I cannot stop myself from kissing. But there is no one here, not the lowliest, who is not better than you, my Princess, if I command you to serve him.”

Beauty was frightened. She nodded quickly as she answered “Yes, my Prince,” and then very impulsively she bent and kissed the Prince’s boot, but then she appeared terrified.

“No, that is very good, my darling,” the Prince, stroking her neck, reassured her. “That is very good. If I allow you one gesture to speak your heart unbidden it is that one. You may always show me respect of your own accord in that manner.”

Again Beauty pressed her lips to the leather. But she was trembling.

“These townspeople hunger for you, hunger for more of your loveliness,” the Prince continued. “And I think they deserve a little taste of it that will delight them.”

Beauty kissed the Prince’s boot again, and let her lips rest there.

“O, don’t think I should really let them have their fill of your charms. O, no,” the Prince said thoughtfully.

“But I should use this opportunity, both to reward their devoted attention and teach you that punishment will come whenever I desire to give it. You need not be disobedient to merit it. I will punish when it pleases me. Sometimes that will be the only reason for it.”

Beauty couldn’t keep herself from whimpering.

The Prince smiled and beckoned to the Innkeeper’s daughter. But she was so frightened of him that she didn’t come forward until her father pushed her.

“My dear,” said the Prince gently. “In the kitchen, have you a flat wooden instrument, for shoveling the hot pans into the oven?”

There was a faint movement throughout the room as the soldiers glanced at one another. The people outside were pressing closer to the windows. The young girl nodded and quickly returned with a wooden paddle, very flat and smooth from years of use, with a good handle.

“Excellent,” said the Prince.

But Beauty was crying helplessly.

The Prince quickly ordered the Innkeeper’s daughter to seat herself on the edge of the high hearth which was the height of a chair, and told Beauty, on her hands and knees, to go to her.

“My dear,” he said to the Innkeeper’s daughter, “these good people deserve a little spectacle. Their life is hard and barren. My men deserve it as well. And my Princess can well use the chastisement.”

Beauty knelt crying before the girl who, seeing what she was to do, was fascinated.

“Up over her lap, Beauty,” said the Prince, “hands behind your neck, and lift your lovely hair out of the way. At once!” he said, almost sharply.

Pricked by his voice, Beauty almost scurried to obey, and all those around her saw her tear-stained face.

“Keep your chin up like that, yes, lovely. Now, my dear,” said the Prince looking at the girl who held Beauty over her lap and the wooden paddle in her other hand. “I want to see if you can wield that as hard as a man might wield it. Do you think you can do that?”

He could not keep from smiling at the girl’s delight and desire to please. She nodded murmuring a respectful reply, and when he gave her the command, she brought the paddle down hard on Beauty’s naked buttocks. Beauty couldn’t keep still. She struggled to keep quiet, but she couldn’t keep still, and finally even the whimpers and moans escaped her.

The tavern girl spanked her harder and harder, and the Prince enjoyed this, savoring it far more than the spanking he had given Beauty himself.

It was because he could see it much better, see Beauty’s breasts heaving, and the tears spilling down her face, and her little buttocks straining, as if, without moving, Beauty might somehow escape or deflect the girl’s hard blows.

Finally, when the buttocks were very red but not welted, he told the girl to stop.

He could see his soldiers enthralled and all the townspeople as well, and then he snapped his fingers and told Beauty to come to him.

“Now eat your suppers, all of you, talk amongst yourselves, do as you like,” he said quickly.

For a moment no one obeyed him. Then the soldiers turned to one another, and those outside, seeing that Beauty was retired down to kneeling at the Prince’s feet, her hair veiling her red face, her raw and stinging buttocks pressed to her ankles, were murmuring and talking at the windows.

The Prince gave Beauty another drink of wine. He was not sure he was entirely satisfied with her. He was thinking of many things.

He called the Innkeeper’s daughter to him and told her she had been very good, gave her a gold coin, and took the paddle from her.

Finally it was time to go up. And driving Beauty before him, he gave her a few gentle but brisk spanks to hurry her up the stairs to the bedchamber.

BEAUTY STOOD at the foot of the bed, her hands clasped to her neck, her buttocks throbbing with a warm pain that felt so much better now than the spanking she had lately received that it was almost pleasure.

She had for the moment stopped crying. She had only just pulled down the covers for the Prince, with her teeth, her hands clasped behind her back, and then with her teeth taken his boots to the edge of the room.

And now she waited for further commands, trying to watch him, though her eyes were cast down, without his realizing it.

He had bolted the door, and he was sitting on the side of the bed.

And his black hair, loose and curling at his shoulders gleamed in the light of the tallow candle. His face was very beautiful to her, perhaps because in spite of the size of the features, they were all rather delicately molded. She did not know for certain.

Even his hands enthralled her. The fingers were so long, so white, so delicate.

She was terribly relieved to be alone with him. The moments below in the Inn had been such an agony to her, and even though he had brought the wooden paddle with him and might spank her much harder with it than that dreadful girl, she was so glad to be alone with him that she could not be afraid of it. She was afraid, however, that she hadn’t pleased him.