Prologue

 

The girl stood in the corner of Signora LaFranchi's office crying quietly. She wore no skirt and her knickers rested around her knees. Her naked bottom displayed the livid marks of the cane that had decorated the orbs of her buttocks with thirty scarlet stripes. There were tears trickling down the cheeks of her face and there was a blob of liquid on the end of her nose that no amount of sniffling seemed able to shift. She dared not wipe it away. She had been ordered to stand with her hands on the back of her head and to disobey that order risked more stinging cuts from Signora LaFranchi's cane. She wriggled slightly; the pain in her swollen bottom still sharp and throbbing. The urge to rub that discomfort was forbidden too. She must stand there as still as she could and absorb the lesson of that pain as it seeped into the muscles of her buttocks. Only when she was finally dismissed would there be any relief.

Signora LaFranchi, sat behind her desk and looked at the young girl with affection. Now the girl's back was turned, she allowed her previous look of stern reproof to leave her features, to be replaced with a gentle smile that was partly amusement and partly pleasure. The girl was called Lisa, just turned nineteen years old and already blossoming into an extraordinary young woman. She had deserved her caning it was true but Signora LaFranchi could not stay angry with her. She was far too fond of her.

But then she was fond of all off them; more.... she was devoted to them. There were seventy one of them, currently in her charge, and she adored them all. They were all remarkable even if they scarcely knew it themselves. She blessed providence every day for the gift of them and if she had to punish them from time to time it was because she loved them all so dearly and cared for them all so deeply.

She would let this one stew for another ten minutes or so and then dismiss her with stern admonitions against her future behaviour. The girl would listen sombrely, thank her for her punishment and then scuttle off to the arms of her sisters in servitude. There would doubtless be comforting caresses and the inevitable consequences, for the girls were all inclined that way to one degree or another and possessed of the healthy sexual appetites that always seemed to accompany the keen intelligence that was common to them all. There would be no lack of girls wanting to offer consolation for they all knew that there was nothing like the aftermath of a good caning to stimulate the libido and ignite passion. Signora LaFranchi smiled at the thought. They'd be queueing up to offer their services in solace. It was highly unlikely that Lisa would manage to make it through the dormitory wing to her room with her knickers still on unless of course her special girlfriend, Valeria, claimed precedence and took her off to her own room. Well that was no bad thing. The girl could use a pair of loving arms about her now and she'd soon forget her aching bottom in the sweetness of another girl's caresses. It was a shame there was no one to ease and comfort the pain Signora LaFranchi carried with her.

Signora LaFranchi's eyes wandered to the framed photograph on her desk. As always, when looking at the photo, she felt a pang of pain so cutting it felt almost a physical knife wound through her heart. A year had passed since Rowena's death but the sharpness of that pain showed no signs of abating. She missed her so much she could barely think about it.

Perhaps that was why she had tarried so long before bringing Rowena's daughter to the Castello Santa Maria. Her daughter looked so like Rowena that just to look at her pained her all over again. On her death bed, Rowena had begged her to take care of her daughter; a daughter now sliding down the paths to ruin because of her neglect. Silently she begged Rowena's forgiveness. She should have acted earlier.

But now she had acted. After dithering for nearly a year, she had finally made her decision. Next weekend, Rowena's daughter would arrive at the Castello Santa Maria. Signora LaFranchi was excited at the thought. At last there might be some alleviation of her grief. Rowena's daughter was special. Even if set among the extraordinary girls of the Castello Santa Maria, she would be a special one. She had no idea just how special she was or how much her life was about to change. For the love of Rowena, Signora LaFranchi would love her, care for her and turn her into a Santa Maria girl her mother would be proud of.

 

Chapter One

 

Christine Berner bit her lip in concentration as she steered her car gingerly around the hair pin bends winding their tormented route up the mountainside. She peered nervously at the edge of the road to her right and regretted it immediately. There was no parapet or barrier. The side of the road ended abruptly, only a couple of feet from her right hand wheels, where the ground plummeted into the reason robbing abyss of the gorge below. She could just see the river down in the gorge, rushing in cascades over enormous boulders. She wondered just how many auto-mobiles had lost control on this road and taken a death ride into the gorge. Christine was afraid of heights and this was no place for vertigo.

She was, as she would admit in her more honest moments, not a good driver at the best of times; a failing to be readily observed in the rather battered state of her old Toyota and the sorry tale of her driving record. Indeed she had only recovered her driving licence the month before, following a mandatory ban for accumulated driving violations. Her driving was rusty as a result and the long trip she had taken today, culminating in this terrifying mountain road, was the most challenging excursion she had attempted in her car since being re-installed behind the wheel.

She had set off early from her friend's house near Zurich for the long trip south. The drive over the Alps through the Gotthard tunnel had been bad enough and more than once she had wished that she'd had the sense to take the train. But the train service ended at the town of Locarno and only the occasional post bus dared to venture up into the remote valley that was her destination. This was the Ticino, the southern, Italian speaking canton of Switzerland, and, away from the flat plain of the Ticino valley and the waterfronts of Lake Maggiore and Lake Lugano, the region was characterised by its high mountains and steep sided valleys with little stone built villages clinging in tight clusters on the precipitous flanks. It was a region where roads such as this were typical. A hundred years ago, Christine presumed, there'd have been little more than a goat trail up this mountainside.

To be truthful, Christine had only a vague notion of her final destination. She had a map pinned to her dashboard, for her finances would not stretch to anything approaching satellite aided navigation. If her reading of the map was correct, then she should, following this ascent, find herself in a high hanging valley that boasted a pair of villages and the edifice she was looking for. All the evidence suggested that this was hardly the sort of place where one would expect to find the kind of city diversions she was used to. It was more the sort of place where a dead sheep would draw a crowd. It seemed an unlikely place to come looking for a job.

Yet that was Christine's purpose on this hazard filled journey. She certainly needed a job. Since her mother's death, only a year ago, Christine's world had fallen apart. It had never been robustly constructed in the first place but her mother's death had destroyed what little semblance of structure there had been in it and she had drifted rudderless and bereft ever since. She had lost her job and home and essentially lived on the charity of the few friends who had not abandoned her. Even their willingness to support her had grown thin however and their demands that she pull herself together had grown more insistent.

In the desperate hour of crisis, the offer from Signora LaFranchi had seemed a lifeline. Signora LaFranchi had been an old and very good friend of Christine's mother and, Christine suspected, inclined to keep a distant but watchful eye on her late friend's frequently wayward daughter. Christine had no illusions that the job offer that she had received had anything to do with her own aptitude or suitability. It was far more a case of Signora LaFranchi's loyalty and devotion to the memory of Christine's mother that had caused her to extend a helping hand to her lost daughter. Even the details of the job she had been offered seemed vague and ill-defined as if it was merely some pretext of employment, patchily constructed for the aim of drawing Christine under the wing of protection of her mother's dear friend. It felt as if her mother was still looking after Christine from beyond the grave.

Christine didn't care if the job was just some make believe to tide her over until she could find meaningful employment. She was flat broke and essentially homeless. She'd managed to borrow some money to make it through the month and finance this trip but, once that was gone, she would be living on fresh air and boiled dish rag. She'd met Signora LaFranchi, by pre-arrangement, in a restaurant in Zurich and been impressed by the formidable lady. More to the point, Signora LaFranchi had offered her a generous salary that would amount to nearly two and a half thousand Swiss francs a month after taxes. With bills to pay that would not have amounted to a great deal but, significantly, the job also came with free lodging and board. Her wages would be what Americans would call "walking about money". She could live very nicely on that.

In any case, thought Christine ruefully as she eased her car around another heart-stoppingly frightening bend, there would be little scope for spending all her money in this God-forsaken backwater. The nearest inhabited place with any aspirations of calling itself a town was Locarno. Even Locarno, with a population of just over 15,000, could hardly qualify as a metropolis and, in any case, it was nearly an hour's drive away along these roads. You couldn't imagine driving down there for a night on the tiles. Driving up this road was bad enough sober and in daylight!

Finally the road did flatten out as it entered into a high valley. Here the river was less tumultuous and bubbled over gravelly beds strewn with rocks or deepened into large pools the colour of azure. There was a charmingly quaint village set aside from the road and another one perched on the mountainside a kilometre or two further; both of them just little collections of tiny granite houses clustered around their church towers. A few farmhouses and stone barns clung to the slopes and there were the odd little rustic restaurants they called "grottos" in these parts.

Christine drove slowly along this valley and gazed about in pleasure. There might not be much in the way of excitement to be had here but it was bewitchingly beautiful. She felt suddenly and oddly as if she were somehow coming home. If this job worked out then this little hidden and captivating valley would indeed be her home in the coming months. Even a city girl could find some compensation in that.

But she had yet to find the establishment where she would be working and living. In the event it was not hard to find for it was the largest building in the whole valley and occupied a prominent position above the river between the two villages. Christine drove up before it and stared in astonishment. As Child Roland to the dark tower came, Christine had arrived... at the Castello Santa Maria.

 

Chapter Two

 

Christine would never forget her first sight of the Castello Santa Maria (the place which would become such a pivotal part of her life) or ever forget the impressions of that first remarkable day. I say that she drove up to it but that would not be strictly accurate for the Castello lay on the other side of the river. A patch of sandy bare ground, just off the road, on the river bank provided parking space for the Castello but the edifice itself could only be reached by way of a high arched foot bridge constructed of rough stone, and with parapets only a foot high, that spanned the stream over a pool of clean, mountain river water so deep that spectral absorption had turned it a vivid hue of azure blue.

At some distance back from the river, on the far side, the Castello was set on and around a rock promontory rising from the floor of the valley. At the very front was the newest part of the structure; the restaurant that had been grafted onto the old castle in the middle of the 20^th century. The front of the restaurant consisted of a broad sunny terrace on a stone parapet. The body of the restaurant appeared to be partly at least of wooden construction which, while by no means out of place in the northern Alps, was unusual in Ticino.

Behind the restaurant rose the body of the castle itself. There was nothing of flimsy wooden construction about this building. It was a massive structure of patchily plastered solid granite, looking as if it had been carved straight out of the rock upon which it stood. It seemed a patchwork of styles. Signora LaFranchi had told Christine that the oldest parts of the castle dated back to the 13^th century but it had been heavily modified since with many additions and reconstructions over its history. The main part of the castle was three stories high but one large extension on the right, as you faced the building, rose to double that. The highest point of the castle however was an imposing, single square tower some fifty metres in height and topped by crenelated battlements high above the valley floor. The rest of the large rock promontory, upon which the castle sat, was edged with a high stone wall. Christine could see trees peeking above the wall and it was evident that it enclosed a large walled garden.

Christine stepped out of the car the better to peruse her possible new home. The heat of the afternoon struck her with almost physical force after the relative coolness in the car's interior. The Canton of Ticino, lying as it did on the southern slopes of the Alps, had a much warmer, almost Mediterranean, climate than the colder climes of the north she was more used to. It was only the beginning of May yet, despite the relatively high altitude of the valley, it was nearly 30 degrees in the sun. She had donned a smart suit of matching skirt and jacket over a simple white cotton blouse for this interview. She felt overdressed under the scorching sun. It was baking on the arid parking lot. The cool water of the river looked enticing.

Now she could see the castle properly she quailed at the sight. For some reason the word "Castello" had not properly registered with her when Signora LaFranchi had spoken to her in Zurich. She had thought it merely a fanciful name for the restaurant. Now, confronted with the reality of the great old medieval pile of stone, she saw that the name was no contrived deceit. This was a castle and damned forbidding it looked too. The place must have dominated the little valley with grim obduracy for centuries. It stood in adamant severity, like a disapproving head master, over its little world. You couldn't have made it look cosy if you'd decorated it in pink bunting and flower boxes. Christine bit her lip in uncertainty. This was supposed to be her new home!

Steeling herself to the task, she picked up her handbag, locked the car and walked to the bridge crossing the river. Of all the bridges she was burning behind her in her voyage to the Ticino, this was the least combustible she had seen. It was built in rough stone and you couldn't have set fire to it with a napalm strike. It was not without its perils too for it was only three to four metres wide and only a tiny, foot high parapet of stone stood between you and a ten metre fall into the river below. The smart shoes, with their high heels, that Christine wore were the least suitable footwear for crossing this perilous span, for it was paved in rough uneven stone. Negotiating it on a dark night after too many drinks in the village would be a very bad idea!

It was a relief to step off the bridge on the far side. From there only a few metres separated her from the steps to the raised outdoor patio of the restaurant. The restaurant garden terrace was typical of Ticino with flat granite paving, stone tables and benches. Shade from the sun was provided by a latticework of vines, forming a canopy over the terrace supported by roughly worked stone columns, for all the world like long fence posts chopped out of solid rock. In spite of the forbidding castle overlooking it, it was a cheerfully inviting spot to while away an hour or two over a bottle of wine and a snack. Indeed several guests were in evidence. In spite its remoteness, Signora LaFranchi had told Christine that the valley attracted a lot of tourists in the summer months and these accounted for a good deal of the restaurant's business. A number of the guests did appear to be tourists, many of them sipping dark red Merlot wine from small, glazed earthenware jugs in the Ticino style.

Christine stood on the terrace and hesitated in uncertainty. She had arrived but, in her haste not to be late, she had over compensated and now she was far too early for her appointment with Signora LaFranchi. She wondered if perhaps she should take a coffee whilst waiting. In decision she sat down at a table. Within seconds a serving girl had detached herself in her direction.

The girl was strikingly attractive, with long dark curly hair, tied in a ponytail with a ribbon, and dancing dark eyes in a face of exquisite loveliness. Her attire was clearly a working costume but, unlike the often very generic dull uniforms many establishments inflicted on their staff, her outfit was very feminine and becoming. She wore a flared loose skirt in soft pink that fell to just above her knees to reveal the frilled hem of her petticoat beneath. On top she sported the sort of old fashioned short sleeved and low, square cut blouse with lace trimmings in pristine white embroidered with little pink flowers at the neckline and puffed sleeves to match her dress. The ensemble was completed by a white apron, with lace trimmings and pink embroidery, that matched her blouse to perfection. The whole image was a very soft, feminine take on the dirndl you more associated with the servant classes in the more Germanic parts of the Alps. Her colleague, serving an ageing couple on the far side of the terrace was dressed identically and the two girls looked a picture.

The girl came to Christine's table. "Posso aiutarla Signorina?" she asked in a friendly polite voice.

Christine frowned. Although she could understand it well, her spoken Italian was sketchy. "Er do you speak German?"

"Naturally." the girl replied, changing instantly into Swiss German. "May I help you Fraulein?"

"Well actually I'm here for an appointment but I seem to be a bit early so perhaps a coffee in the meantime please."

The girl looked interested. "An appointment? May I ask with whom?"

"With Signora LaFranchi. I'm here about possible employment."

The change in the girl's demeanour was marked. She instantly dropped the polite professional deference and grinned in delight. "Oh my! So you're the new girl then? We've been expecting you but I didn't know you were so beautiful!"

Christine blinked in confusion. It was the last thing she had expected to hear. "Er... I'm sorry."

Christine had momentarily lost the girl's attention however. She was gesticulating wildly to her colleague and beckoning her over. The second girl joined them with an inquiring look. Her friend gripped her arm. "It's the new girl Lisa! Isn't she gorgeous?"

The girl addressed as "Lisa" brightened visibly with excitement at the intelligence. "Oh wow! Yes! She's lovely." She thrust out a hand. "Hi I'm Lisa and your name is...?"

Christine took the proffered hand in bemusement. "Er Christine." The restaurant presumably prided itself on the physical attractiveness of its waitresses for Lisa was another stunningly beautiful girl with straight black hair and the sort of slender lithe figure many a girl would have sold her soul to the devil for. Christine was aware that she was not unattractive herself but excessive vanity was not one of her faults. To have this pair of identically dressed beauties apparently so taken by her looks was bizarre in the extreme.

"And I'm Valeria," the first girl told her holding out a hand in her turn "but everyone just calls me Val."

Christine took the hand. "I'm er... I'm pleased to meet you."

"Does Madame know you are here yet?" Valeria asked her.

Christine took a moment to realise that "Madame" must mean Signora LaFranchi. "Er no. I'm running early. I wasn't quite sure how to find the place so I thought it best not to phone ahead."

Valeria nodded seriously. "I'd better go and let her know you've arrived. Do you want to wait here? Lisa can get you a coffee or something."

"Er sure yes." Valeria almost skipped away into the interior of the restaurant.

Lisa grinned at Christine and subjected her to such a look of searching overt appraisal that Christine found herself blushing under the scrutiny. "So how do you take your coffee? I can whip up a mean Mocca."

"Er it sounds fine." Christine watched the girl go in search of her coffee in some confusion. She was missing something here. The two girls seemed altogether too excited to meet her; far beyond any professional interest in a possible new working colleague. It was her first intimation that employment at Castello Santa Maria would not be quite as she thought it would be.

Lisa returned quickly with her drink. "One Castello Santa Maria Mocca special!" she announced triumphantly. She leaned forward to whisper conspiratorially. "I've dropped a shot of brandy in it. If you've got an appointment with Madame LaFranchi then you'll probably need a little fortification!"

"Good God! Is she that scary?"

The girl pulled a wry face. "Well we all love her to bits but a summons to her office is not a matter to be taken lightly. She had me in there last week and I didn't sit down for two days afterwards!"

Christine found herself wallowing in deep waters. To hide her confusion she reached for her handbag, "Er how much do I owe you for the coffee?"

Lisa giggled. "You don't have to pay silly! Just don't mention to Madame that I laced your coffee with brandy or both of us will be standing up for dinner tonight!" Lisa glanced around. "Oh hell! Table five wants to pay. I'll catch you later."

As Lisa scurried off to attend to her duty, Christine sipped cautiously at her coffee, more confused than ever. What the hell was going on in this place? She could make neither head nor tail of what Lisa was insinuating.

Christine was just finishing her coffee as Valeria returned. She thought it best to pop a mint into her mouth to mask the alcohol on her breath. Lisa had been somewhat generous in wielding the brandy bottle. "Madame will see you shortly." Valeria informed her. "I'm to take you to her office."

"That's very kind of you."

"Nothing of the sort! This old place is a labyrinth if you don't know your way around. You'd be lost in an instance if you didn't have someone to show you the way. Where's all your stuff?"

"Still in my car."

"Well you can leave it there for the moment. We'll sort it out after you've been assigned a room. So... if you'll follow me..."