The Dominafuhrer - THE GODMOTHER

Episode 54 - The Saga Of The Spitefuls

Dusseldorf, January 1933

“So, you want to be called Miss Spiteful” Sable took the long cigarette holder from her lips and looked thoughtful as she exhaled the smoke. She was sitting in her armchair with one of her legs resting over one the arms, dressed only in a silk housecoat which hung open at the front to reveal her naked breasts and the dark bush of her pubic hair.

Kathi, back again in her maid’s costume and wearing her slave collar and harness, knelt on the carpet in front of her mistress.

“That’s a sisterhood name with quite a history, although not many have taken it.” Sable gave Kathi a sideways look. “You might find it difficult to live up to.”

Kathi sat back on the carpet in expectation of one of Sable’s lectures on the history of the sisterhood.

“The earliest two that I can recall for the moment, both lived in the fifteenth century and may possibly have been the same person.” Sable stroked the underside of her chin with the fingers as she spoke. “Certainly, Vlad III the Impaler, who was Prince of Walachia, had a companion known as Mistress Spiteful. Vlad was known for the exceedingly cruel punishments he imposed during his reign, and was the inspiration for the vampire character in Bram Stoker's Dracula. He is regarded, however as a hero in modern Rumania and Eastern Europe, because he was a just and modernising ruler of his own people; most of his cruelties were inflicted on outsiders and, for many years; he was Europe’s last line of defence against the advancing Ottoman Empire. His favourite method of torture was a horse attached to each of the victim's legs as an oiled and sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body through the anus until it emerged from the mouth. Some victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or through the abdomen or chest, others were impaled so that they hung upside down on the stake and infants were sometimes impaled on the stake forced through their mother's chests. Death was slow and painful, some lasted for hours or days and corpses were usually left decaying for months. Vlad often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns like a ring of concentric circles. The height of the stake indicated the rank of the victim.”

Kathi shuddered and moved her bottom uncomfortably on the carpet as Sable continued.    

“There are claims that he had up to thirty thousand people executed at one time but impalement was not his only method of torture: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to animals, and boiling alive were all part of his repertoire.

He reigned three times, the first for only a year as a puppet of the Turks, who his father had had to send him to as a hostage. He was whipped and abused by them, his father was assassinated and his elder brother was blinded with hot iron stakes and buried alive. He had to flee into exile but returned in Fourteen Fifty Six and it was then that most of his cruelties happened as he took revenge and fought to defend his country and his throne.

Mistress Spiteful was a Dominatrix working in Bucharest, was known to Vlad and probably assisted him in his atrocities as her name is mentioned in poems published about him after his death and some of the contemporary drawings show a woman working as a torturer at his mass executions. The Ottomans deposed Vlad again in Fourteen Sixty Two and did a deal with the Hungarians who imprisoned him when he sought sanctuary in that country. His first wife had committed suicide rather than be held hostage by the Turks and it is said that Miss Spiteful became his lover when she too went into exile because the Muslims were after her head for her activities against them. Their affair certainly ended when Vlad married into the Hungarian Royal Family and was released from imprisonment and there is no record that she accompanied him when he later reclaimed his throne only to be killed in battle in Fourteen Seventy Six.

Anyway, another or as I said possibly the same Dominatrix, named Lady Spiteful was in Spain in Fourteen Eighty Three when Tomás de Torquemada was made Inquisitor General of Aragón, Valencia and Catalonia. She is named in correspondence to Queen Isabel as an advisor on methods of torture to the Spanish Inquisition although she had to wear a disguise during interrogations as it was unthinkable for a woman to be involved in what was supposed to be performed only by priests. Apparently she recommended the use of the garrucha, the toca and the potro. The first, also known as the strappado, consists of suspending the victim from the ceiling by a pulley with weights tied to the ankles, by lifting and dropping, arms and legs suffer violent pulls and are sometimes dislocated. The toca, also called tortura del aqua, introduced a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and forced them to take in water from a jar so that they thought that they were drowning, but the potr or the rack, was the instrument of torture she used most frequently. You might recognise some of those methods still being used by us today. She was reputed not to be Spanish born and to particularly enjoy any Autos De Fe when a Muslim was being burnt at the stake, so she could have been our Miss Spiteful from Walachia but nothing more is known about her after about Fifteen Hundred.”

Kathi pulled a face; she had enjoyed the bit about the torture but was not sure that she would have liked to have been a religious zealot.

“I think the next one is the most fascinating”, Sable lit another cigarette and indicated that Kathi should replenish her brandy glass as she went on.

“This Miss Spiteful was born in the English County of Suffolk in Sixteen Thirty and must have started in her profession at an early age because she was denounced as a Witch, probably by jealous womenfolk to John Hopkins, the Witchfinder General, and his henchman, John Sterne the Witch Pricker, in Sixteen Forty Six. The English Civil war was raging at the time, the Puritans controlled most of the country and people were ready to believe in all sorts of nonsense to account for the plagues, illnesses and bad fortune that beset them. Hopkins and Sterne were on to a good thing and wherever they went they stirred up hysteria; suspicions were turned into accusations which they investigated and, usually after torture, declared that some poor innocent soul was a witch. Towns had to pay them twenty shillings for each conviction and it is estimated that Hopkins alone was responsible for over two hundred executions.             

The young Miss Spiteful was arrested by the pair, kept in a solitary prison cell, stripped naked, beaten, starved and deprived of sleep before being subjected to torture by ‘Pricking’. Pins, needles and bodkins were stuck into her skin in search of spots that didn’t bleed which Hopkins and Sterne interpreted as a mark of the Devil. Next, she was made to sit cross-legged on a stool, bound into immobility and left alone for a whole day. While still suffering from cramp they then made her walk, naked and barefoot around the cold stone floor of the cell until her feet blistered and bled. Finally she was bound again thrown into a pond and the fact that she floated to the surface, rather than drowning, was declared to be final proof of her being a witch.

She was put on trial at Bury St. Edmunds but escaped from prison when the proceedings were suspended due the approach of a Royalist Army. She managed to evade recapture, which was just as well for her because most of her co-defendants were hanged after the trial resumed.

Questions were now being asked about Hopkins’ and Sterne’s methods and some communities refused to let them operate in their areas. Hopkins was on Miss Spiteful’s trail when she raised a mob against him and he himself was thrown into water and floated on the surface before managing to escape. He fled back to his home in Essex and died in disgrace there in Sixteen Forty Seven. 

Miss Spiteful seems to have kept out of the way of the law for a while but, four years later, was on the run again in company with the young King Charles the Second after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester. She helped him escape to France but must have stayed working in England because she was one of those named as being at Dover to welcome the King when he returned to claim his throne. She did well in the merry and dissolute days after the restoration, with a nice house in the City of London and a prosperous business but lost everything in the Great Fire. Nevertheless she bounced back, bought another house in Greenwich and resumed working there. She was Dominatrix to most of the Earl of Rochester’s debauched ‘Merry Gang’ and is mentioned by both John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys in their diaries, Pepys records having visited her professionally and most historians take it that she was a prostitute but we know different. Then, suddenly she married one of the English landed gentry, retired to the countryside and was never heard of again.”

Kathi was sitting, hugging her knees, fascinated by this history of her predecessors and it took a warning cough from Sable to remind her to keep Sable’s glass topped up.

“Not much is known about the early years of the next Miss Spiteful except that she was German like us, a Prussian in fact,” Sable, her throat lubricated, was back in full flow again. “She first made her mark, so to speak, with many of the titled delegates to the Congress of Vienna after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Then, strangely, she is credited as having given Napoleon so severe a caning on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo that he was distracted by the pain the next day and made the mistakes that cost him his victory.”

“I thought it was because he had hemorrhoids?” Kathi interjected.

“She probably gave them to him as well,” Sable replied patiently. “But you are missing the point. What was a Prussian girl doing in the Headquarters of the French Grand Army on the night before they went into battle against the Prussian, English and Dutch Armies?”

Kathi grinned and acknowledged her oversight.

“Anyway, she was found on the road the day after the battle by an English cavalry patrol, following the retreating French, sitting on a chest which contained part of Napoleon’s personal fortune and with her feet resting on a French Army Paymaster’s money box. One of Wellington’s Generals took her back to England with him where she bought houses in London and Brighton so that she could ply her trade in society and with the Prince Regent’s set. I believe that she retired a very wealthy woman just as Queen Victoria came to the throne of England.

Finally, the last one that I have heard of was a Miss Spiteful of Virginia, in the United States of America, who operated an establishment in Richmond, the Confederate Capitol, during the American Civil War.”

“She sounds like more my type,” Kathi said enthusiastically. “Do you think that she had any black slaves and beat them?”

“That is more than likely,” Sable replied, raising an amused eyebrow. “She was reputed to have had some members of the Confederate Cabinet, plus a few of their Generals as clients and many of her neighbours complained about the howls of pain that came from her house. After General Lee surrendered, the occupying Union Army wanted to her arrest as a danger to their troops’ morals but they cannot have looked very hard, because she just moved north across the State Line and set up business in Washington. General Custer always visited her for some discipline when he was in the Capital and it said that the young Teddy Roosevelt came to her to test his resistance to pain. And that is about all that I can remember for now....... Incidentally,” Sable continued. “You do not have to keep calling yourself Miss or Mistress Spiteful. You can also use the titles Madame or Lady.”

“Oh no,” Kathi said guilelessly. “They would make me sound so old.”

“Really,” the forty year old Sable said dryly, making a mental note never to use either title again.    



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