LSF Publications: spanking fiction ebooks

Chapter 1
April Langthorpe looked sorrowfully round the dark, squalid dungeon and weighed up her dire predicament. The cold cobbled floor was damp and slippery. Even after three days, she still could not get used to the awful smells that percolated though the slimy stone walls. Traces of bodily fluids were evident amidst the green oozing slime and the timeless graffiti scored into the old Yorkshire stone.

"Oh what is to become of me?" she mused woefully.

Dressed only in a dirty grey dress, she dreaded what she must look like after three days of squalor. Her shoulder-length auburn hair was matted and lacklustre. Her skin itched all over from the dirt and infestation she'd had to endure. Her dirty face was streaked with the tracks of her salty tears, which had flowed freely and often during her incarceration. The condemned woman began to look back on her life and analyse the events that had led up to this latest and most drastic of fixes.

The eldest of nine children, April had led a hard life from the outset. She never really had a childhood at all, having spent most of her adolescent years looking after her brothers and sisters, helping work in the fields or scrub the family house clean and do never-ending laundry. A clever girl, she had an uncanny knack of predicting the future, and being left handed too, was viewed with suspicion by her peers and other members of the village community. But she worked hard and never complained, always doing her best to look clean and attractive. However, because of the local gossip mongers, and her huge workload of chores, April found it hard to mix with others of her own age group, and was relatively old when she eventually met a boy who had time for her.

Alex was also a hard working lad, and after a short courtship, the pair of them were married, and managed to get a small tenancy on the edge of the village, where they kept chickens, goats, and sheep. For the first time in her life April felt happy, building a home and tending her animals, while Alex worked as a woodsman in the nearby forests. Her happiness was soon to be compounded when she realised she was pregnant, and the pair made preparations for the forthcoming birth.

Alas, tragedy struck poor April. Her child was stillborn, and two days later Alex was struck by lightning while at work in the woods. He died instantly. The news of these events spurred further speculation among the superstitious villagers, and April became isolated in her cottage on the edge of the little settlement. Nevertheless, being clever and industrious, the young widow quickly overcame her grief and managed to become self-sufficient with her animals and garden.

The next year was a black one in the history of the village. Crops failed and chickens refused to lay.