God's Crusade

Part Eleven

Chloe Hanson followed her sister into the house, jostling playfully with Ellie as they got out of their school coats and hats in the hall, both stretching up to hang their things on the pegs. It was late, as both had stayed for clubs after school, dark and damp outside. It was nice to get into the warmth, and they both headed through towards the kitchen, in search of their mother. Miss Robinson stopped them in their tracks, her imposing figure filling the doorway with only her eyes visible. Ellie and Chloe knew what she was and unfortunately they knew why she was there. Family discussions had been going on for some months, with Ellie almost sixteen. Bill Hanson had mentioned a guardian, because it was the only way to defer his eldest daughter's call up for National Service. Or at least the only way other than marriage and he did not want to marry her off at her age. But he did not want her in a convent either. It might be all right for a pious girl, and he knew a lot of Christian families thought it was a good thing for their girls, the modern equivalent of further education, as the government liked to portray it. However, everyone heard stories. He did not want Ellie, or little Chloe just over a year later, taking the veil, and then having to find them husbands to get them out.

"Open!" Miss Robinson barked out the command, using the surprise of her appearance in their lives to assert her authority over the two girls. She had been told they were usually well behaved, for heathens, and she was pleased with their response to her command, because they did not really hesitate or argue. Unfortunately their mother had not been quite so reasonable but she would learn quickly. Mr Hanson had taken advice. His discussions with his wife, and with his children when the two adults included them, had been going nowhere. But he was desperate. He turned to his parish priest, his pastor, not a man he had ever sought out before but someone he thought he could trust to find a way out of his problems. He knew some guys at work who had taken the same path, and their girls were still at home.

Miss Robinson fitted the muzzles quickly and quite roughly. Not because she really wanted to hurt the girls but because she wanted them silenced and in awe of her. That was what she had learned at Crowthorne College and she was quite prepared to trust her training on her first day. She did not feel particularly sorry for her new girls. Whilst her own transformation had been more or less voluntary, she still had to suffer the same things and her parents were not as rich as the Hanson's. And her dear father had not been prepared to defer her National Service when the time came. Her sister had married, and married well, so Bethany could be allowed to do her duty for the good of the family name. So she knew what Ellie and Chloe were being spared and she intended to teach them their good fortune.

Once she had them in mittens, she took them into the drawing room, to see their mother. It was better that way, before she changed them into their new clothes. Not that they could see anything of Mrs Hanson, beneath her blinding mantle.

۩

Mena had no real idea what was happening at first. The day had started normally enough with her being removed from her sleeping gown, placed on the toilet, naked apart from her mittens, and, of course, muzzled as always. Next came the humiliating time when she was cleaned and bathed with, for the only time each day, her hands liberated from mittens and gloves, but with her wrists strapped to the sides of the bath. Those bindings Mena did not mind, because it meant that for a few glorious minutes, she could stretch and flex her stiff fingers, slowly making them work again properly after hours of total immobility. The first attempts to get them moving again always hurt but that was a form of pain that Mena did not mind, for it meant the nerves were still alive and the tendons still functioning as normal in her hands. Also, by concentrating on her hands, she could forget the way she was washed with a coarse flannel and even with a scrubbing brush, if her guardian was in a bad mood. She could take being pushed underwater so that her hair could be washed, and even ignore the bath water being drained about her, until she sat in an empty bath, waiting for Miss Freeman to use the spray attachment to the taps so as to rinse her hair for a final time, and then to do the same for her shivering body.