INTRODUCTION - Narrator's Note:

 

The coming of the Lady Jennifer to Mathomdale and her subsequent enslavement, in the summer of 2003, by the reckoning of the Gregorian calendar then in use, marks a watershed in the history of the Line of the Goddess. It was a tumultuous year among those born to the Line; a year that saw the outbreak of armed conflict, the gathering of the Line, the discovery of the ultimate challenge of Prophecy One and the foundation of the dynasty which would dominate the House of Mathom for the rest of the century, and beyond, and ultimately determine the history of humanity itself. Yet, at the beginning of that pivotal summer, there was little indication of the momentous events to come.

The arrival of a very young (she was just nineteen years old) Jennifer Walstow in the Valley of the Goddess that summer seems, on the face of things, perhaps a small occurrence to place within the context of those events that would engulf the Line yet her coming to Mathomdale was critical. Before her arrival, it was still possible to perceive the world as defined by the old dynasty of the House of Mathom; still dominated by its great matriarch but in slow stagnation and decline. With the Lady Jennifer's arrival, all that began to change. It was not that she changed the world all on her own, of course, for many other people, we shall meet in these chronicles, contributed to the regeneration of the Line. Jennifer was the catalyst however; the pebble that falls in the mountains and initiates the avalanche of change. This remarkable young woman, by accepting her shackles of slavery in service to the amethyst, began a process that would forge the future.

This then, the first volume in this narrative, traces the very earliest beginnings that brought Jennifer to Mathomdale. Those beginnings may seem innocently naive, but it must be recalled that the Lady Jennifer was indeed a naive and innocent young woman with, at this time, no inclination of the nature of Mathomdale or any notion of the part she was destined to play in its story. This is just the tale of a very young and troubled girl tentatively stepping into a new and frightening world of her own sensuality and feeling only the ghost of the chains to be cast about her ankles.

 

Chapter One

 

The events that marked Jennifer Walstow's odyssey into slavery can be said to have started during the long hot summer following her nineteenth birthday. They were events attributable to her blossoming sexuality. Jennifer was an overly serious girl but, beneath the conservative persona that she most often displayed to the world, she was possessed of an intensely charged libido. She was by no means a bad young lady in that she wished no harm to anybody and possessed not a malicious bone in her body. It was just that she was cursed with an overpowering sexual desire that, on occasion, could overcome her reason and threaten to lead her into indiscretions. That they did not do so was due to the fact that Jennifer was essentially a shy and timid girl and the indulgences and indiscretions of her sexual leanings were carried out essentially in her mind.

She was possessed of a vivid imagination which, in her private moments, she indulged in formulating into lurid fantasy. It only needed a flirtatious glance from one of the boys or, let it be noted from the start, girls of her town to capture her imagination and lead to wild day dreams, in the privacy of her bed room, whilst she stroked herself between the legs and muffled the cries of her mounting passion in the folds of her pillow case. It was not that Jennifer was a forward or sluttish girl. Indeed, she was, as noted, very shy and most of her companions would have been shocked to know of the maelstrom of sexual tension that lay behind her diffident blushes. She was intelligent and a fine scholar at school; even considered a bit of a swot by her colleagues. She was such a pleasant and well-meaning girl, however, that, despite her reticence, she was popular although few could comprehend the innate sensuality that ruled her private dream-world. Her best girlfriends could hug her and kiss her, in the way that girls do, without ever having an inclination of the furious desire that threatened to overpower her every time one of them touched her in well-meaning affection.

She was well liked by the boys although she was never known to grant them sexual favours except within her own fantasy. She was certainly attractive although a late developer. For much of her school days she'd been a rather nondescript mousy little girl but, in her late teens, she'd bloomed into a warm, auburn haired beauty. To see that beauty it is best to see her, as she herself so often did, stood naked before the wall mirror in her bedroom as she admired her flowering womanhood. The long thick tresses of her hair were one of her finer points as they flowed in waves over her admirably square shoulders and down onto the long, velvet curve of her back. Her breasts were high and firm, neither too small nor disproportionately large. Her flat stomach, by now, contained not an ounce of remnant puppy fat as it arced down to her auburn bush, standing in the vee above her long shapely legs. Turning to look at her back in the mirror, Jennifer would see a long curve of spotless firm flesh before it met the full rounded pale swell of her buttocks giving way to the soft tender reaches of the backs of her thighs. If she opened her legs somewhat and bent forwards in front of the mirror the pink bud of her sex would be revealed, already moist and glistening invitingly between the cheeks of her buttocks. Undoubtedly at this point, the temptation to slide her fingers into that warm damp centre of desire would become irresistible and her lovely oval face with its tranquil expression would flush pink as her arousal increased. The full lips of her generous mouth would open slightly as her breathing became deeper and the lovely hazel eyes that held such demure attraction would dilate in pleasure as the probing fingers sought out her clitoris, stroking herself quickly to orgasm.

Such an exquisitely lovely girl was bound to attract the attentions of young men who regarded her reticence as somewhat of a challenge. Perhaps also there was a kind of animal instinct within the young gentlemen that detected the simmering explosion of her sensuality, hidden behind the lowered eyes and demure blushes with which she fielded their advances. Despite the obvious attention that Jennifer excited, she never became sexually active until long after most of her contemporaries. Whilst most of her friends boasted boyfriends Jennifer remained obstinately virginal almost as if she feared the release of her latent sexual potency. At school dances she was the perennial wallflower. Not a tease by any means but too shy to respond to the predatory young lads who so desired to examine the pristine young body concealed beneath the stylish, if rather conservative, clothes she was apt to wear.

In a sense, Jennifer's repressed sexuality was the result of her relationship with her parents who were, on the face of it, extremely conservative. Jennifer's father was the vicar of a small parish on the outskirts of town and, whilst a good and conscientious member of the church, had a domineering personality that appeared to command all within his household. He was not a cruel man; indeed he was capable of great compassion and generosity. It was just that he was strong willed, of an out spoken nature, with very fixed ideas and he expected obedience to that will within the walls of his home.

Jennifer did not fear her father. On the contrary, she loved and respected him enormously but it is difficult to escape the feeling that the natural submissiveness that pervaded Jennifer's character had its roots in the dominant role that her father had played in her life. He was a disciplinarian, to be certain, and there had been occasions, when Jennifer had been a young child, that he had considered it incumbent upon himself to chastise her with a spanking after some childish misdemeanour. This of course had not happened for many a year now. As Jennifer had grown towards womanhood her father had not dreamt of laying a finger on her.

This, it has to be said, was a matter of the most secret regret to Jennifer. Here we must enter very deep and intimate basements of Jennifer's psyche for there is little doubt that, among the highly convoluted and fantastic realms of her sexual fantasies, her father figured rather too prominently than may be discerned as healthy. Many young girls have a deeply hidden secret love of their fathers and in extreme cases may spend much of their lives seeking out a substitute for them in their male partners. In Jennifer's case this highly suppressed longing was tied in with her desire for her father's domination and exacerbated by her father's relationship with her mother. Jennifer's mother was almost the opposite extreme to her father. She was apparently entirely ruled by her husband and would not overtly oppose his wishes in anything. This was, however, not a submission born of fear since even the most casual observer could see that Jennifer's mother was in fact the true ruler of the Walstow household. The serenity with which she accepted her subservient role in the trivialities of life masked the fact that all major decisions ultimately originated with her. This quiet and self-effacing woman contained a core of steel. As a female role model, however, she was hardly the person to encourage a rebellious or independent streak within her daughter and Jennifer grew up in a household that fostered the idea of the female as subservient to a dominant male even if it was but a superficial gloss over a deeper reality. Jennifer's mother was a powerful human being, enormously self-aware and capable of immense subtlety. The face that she chose to project to the world concealed a character adamant in its self-resolution. She was a grand mistress in the game of life, a genius of manipulation. Her husband was entirely chained to her indomitable will.

Sadly, we know so little about Jennifer's childhood and often just what the relationship between Jennifer's mother and father was is somewhat obscure. One event, later described by Jennifer, perhaps sheds a little illumination on it however. It occurred when Jennifer was the vulnerable age of sixteen. For some reason Jennifer's mother had extremely annoyed her father and the result was a great outburst of rage from him. The vicar, looking very angry, had removed his jacket and ordered Jennifer to her room. Before she left the living room, Jennifer saw her father stride purposefully to a cupboard in the corner. Fleeing upstairs to her room, Jenny flung herself to the floor and, with her ear pressed to the floor boards, tried to hear what was proceeding downstairs. There came a series of muffled commands and stifled protests that she could not distinguish the gist of. There was a slight pause and then, shockingly, there came the loud report of a sharp slapping noise followed by an anguished wail from her mother. Another pause and then another crack preceded even louder squeals. Breathlessly Jennifer listened on as one slap followed another and her mother's howls and shrieks came up through the floor boards. Eventually the sounds of beating ceased and the cries descended into muffled sobs followed shortly after by the sound of the front door as Jennifer's father left the house.

After a while Jennifer plucked up the courage to creep downstairs. She found her mother sitting quietly, with her composure regained, on the sofa. Her face was stained with tears but the look of tranquillity, that was part of her acceptance of life, was back in her demeanour. Jennifer noticed, with a thrill, that her mother was sitting rather uncomfortably as if sore in her nether regions.

"Are you all right mummy?" She inquired anxiously.

"Yes of course I am darling."

"I was so afraid"

"There is no need to be Jenny dear. Your father's ill humour is quite forgotten now and, when he returns home, all will be forgiven."

"But... but what did he do to you?"

Jennifer's mother sighed and beckoned her over, taking her in her arms and hugging her closely. "Jenny my dear I did something that could have disturbed the harmony of our family and your father quite rightly punished me. Now that I have been punished, all is forgotten and there will be peace in our house now. Nothing terrible has happened; only that my sins have been corrected. One day you will be married too and then you will learn that there must be obedience within the house according to the rules agreed upon by its inhabitants and, should you transgress them, then it is necessary to accept your chastisement. You must try to be a good and obedient wife and endure whatever punishment it is necessary to inflict upon you. Get along with you to bed now and don't worry about me."

To say this incident left an impact upon Jennifer is to put it mildly. She lay there in bed that night and relived every sound of her mother's punishment through the floor boards with something approaching a storm of conflicting thoughts. When her mother retired to bed, Jennifer crept stealthily down the stairs. In the living room, terrified that her father would come home and discover her, she opened the mysterious cupboard and, peeping in, saw a thick leather strap hanging from a hook there. Back up into her room, she lay upon her bed and felt uncontrollable urges of sexual excitement descending on her. Time after time she imagined that leather belt lashing across her mother's buttocks. The vision was hopelessly erotic and she found that her right hand had slid beneath the waist band of her knickers almost of its own volition. Stroking herself to satisfaction she experienced an emotion that she had never before encountered in respect to her mother. It was jealousy.

This small incident is only a tiny indicator but, it is clear, that, by her late teens, Jennifer was experiencing a crisis of sexuality. We know of course the physiological reasons behind the psychological upheavals that brought Jennifer to Mathomdale. They are familiar to anybody who has had the responsibility of raising a child of the Goddess to maturity. What seems baffling, however, is that Jennifer's mother, who was perfectly aware of the physical and emotional changes of the onset of Alpha Sensual characteristics, never addressed those changes in her beloved daughter more directly. She never, as far as we can discern, told Jennifer exactly what kind of person she was. Jennifer grew up in virtually total ignorance of her own nature, and that of her inheritance, until she was confronted with it in Mathomdale. It seems incredible that Jennifer's mother never took her daughter to one side and sensitively explained to her the nature of the Alpha Sensual syndrome. Some historians have argued that this was the result of her deeply hidden role as an apparently devoted member of the church. Whatever the reason, Katherine Walstow deliberately concealed the Goddess within the walls of her house; so completely in fact, that she even buried it out of sight from her daughter.

It was curious however. Katherine was a deeply compassionate woman and she must have known how cruel it would be to let Jennifer face the rigours of her Alpha maturation in complete ignorance of what was happening to her. Perhaps it was that Katherine was undergoing a protracted crisis of her own in the years of Jennifer's upbringing; a crisis that made her temporarily incapable of attending to the looming one in her daughter. It is well documented that Katherine had abandoned her former family and had spent nearly two decades in denial of it. When she was finally confronted with the onset of Jennifer's crisis years, she ultimately turned to her first, true, family and manipulated events to place Jennifer squarely within reach of that family, handing over the responsibility of her troubled daughter to those people she considered better suited to exercising that responsibility. It suggests that Katherine Walstow was in a deep personal crisis and, at the crunch, found herself wanting. With a love she could only feel but not act upon herself, she sold her daughter to Mathom Hall.

This following tale outlines the story of that significant sale; of how Jennifer was manoeuvred onto the playing field of Mathomdale and towards her slavery within the walls of Mathom Hall. This is how the first of her chains were shackled to her in a process that would eventually see her assume the onerous burden of servitude that would make her Mistress of the Line of the Goddess. Yet, through the mists of time, it is still possible to discern that young Jennifer; the beautiful and ever so serious young girl holding out her slender wrists in great solemnity for her manacles in full knowledge that she was enslaved forever. Those who have followed her can take comfort in their own chains and love her for the sacrifice she made.