She pawed at the straw in her stable, trying to kick some of the soiled straw over into a corner. If she could only reach up to the itch between her naked shoulder blades…but no, that was not to be the case, not with wrists tied to the leather belt locked around her waist. That belt chafed her, but nothing like the belt that went between her soaking thighs.

The day was growing late; what little sun remained cast an orange golden glow over the stable walls. Thankfully the heat had begun to break some in the South Carolina fall. She remembered the summer heat of August, the oppressive humidity that sapped her body and her mind as she struggled to learn a new life – the life of a thoroughbred ponygirl.

How quickly her genteel ways had disappeared under the pressure of keeping the plantation alive, even keeping herself alive. And now she had even become grateful for the rude wooden bucket of food placed at the head of the stable where she bent over feeding, her legs spread. No longer did she worry at all about the view from behind. God help her, she had grown accustomed…no, more like desiring out of some unholy lust…yes, lust was the right word, lusting to be seen from behind as nothing more, nothing less than a mare in heat.

She rubbed her back against the stall walls already worn smooth by generations of horses also trying to scratch.

She wasn’t gagged now. She had grown mostly past that stage. In the earliest days she had worn the bit constantly. She remembered her distaste at her worn bloomers twisted up and behind the bit. That was the final humiliation, she thought, the humiliation that had crushed her only to release the sweet female fragrance of servitude.

She paced a bit in the stall, still irritated, aroused by the leather strap between her legs, unable to even reach the lock that fastened to the waist belt. The new plantation Master had been pleased to find that her elbows could be made to touch each other with the firm tie of hemp rope.

So much time now, she thought, so much time to think. Except when she was in harness working fields or pulling a sulky, what she had never had before she now had…time. And she thought about that first day, the day her life had changed.

Marybeth wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, wiping at the stinging sweat without much luck. She stood up for a moment from her laundry scrubbing behind the outside kitchen. The dog days of August were as fierce as a furnace. When times were good, her daddy had enough sense to get the family away from the plantation at that time and down to the cooling ocean breezes. There wouldn’t be any more of that, she thought with a grimace.

“Miss Marybeth, I need to speak with you if you can spare the time,” the soft, strangely cultured voice behind her spoke.

Marybeth glanced over her shoulder at Samantha, the last of the freed slaves left on Brimley Plantation. She knew what Samantha wanted; she could tell by the look in her eyes. It had been that way with every other freed slave since the first one left for the Western Territories in November of 1865.

“You don’t have to say it, Samantha,” she said more tired than death itself. “You didn’t have to stay this long, but I’m glad you did.”

“Miss Marybeth, I’m sorry to leave, but the Freedmen Society has told me that they can get me a job, a real job,” she hesitated, “and I know it’s not your fault you can't pay me. There’s just no cash, and you always treated me real fine, and…”

Marybeth never turned around. She was just too tired to talk anymore. Samantha stood still for a minute and left, the last Marybeth ever saw her. She finished and came into the indoors kitchen, sat at the table and sobbed. Now what to do, she wondered. Her misery seemed to know no depths until the sun was setting over the pines. Her mother dead of consumption, her daddy and brother away at war and no word. No word? No, she knew, somehow she knew; they were not coming back. Not now. Not ever.

“Hello, the house!”

The sudden voice at the front of the mansion made her jump. Who could this be, she wondered. Nobody comes here any more. It was a fine mansion, a fine plantation, once upon a time. Ladies and gentlemen with handsome footmen arrived at the front door for tea or balls. But that was a lifetime ago.

She crept around a corner past some dogwood. Astride a fine chestnut sat Colonel Murphy, owner of the Whitehall Plantation next to her own but with more and richer bottomland. His cotton crop had gone bust the same as hers, but somehow he had managed to keep a number of former slaves employed. Where could the money be coming from? Her eyes narrowed.

He tipped his hat in the sinking light. “Good evening to you, Miss Brimley. I was wondering if perhaps I might come in to visit with you for a spell?”

“Why, Colonel, how kind of you to stop by. But I am afraid I have nothing to offer you in these…hard times.”

Marybeth couldn’t see the smirk on his face in the half light. “”Well, Miss Brimley, perhaps I have something to offer you in these…hard times.

Marybeth motioned him around to the side door and into the kitchen. A few short years ago she would never have dreamed of entertaining in the mansion kitchen of all places. But she never dreamed that she wouldn’t be able to even offer a guest a cup of tea.

He waited for her to sit. She could barely see his face, there being no lamp oil either. So dead tired, she hadn’t the energy to even ask him why he would come to Brimley Plantation.

“Miss Brimley, I will not mince words with you nor make small talk. You were indeed right. The times are indeed hard. If it had not been for my willingness to cooperate with Union forces, to help prepare the way for a new South…”

She didn’t respond.

“Well, Miss Brimley, I’ve come to make you an offer, an offer for the plantation.”

Marybeth could feel his eyes staring at her across the table. “And what, sir, would you want with my run-out land? There is no cotton, not anymore. We’ve all lost our slaves. I can’t even keep them hired on. You saw Samantha leave no doubt. I’m hungry myself. There’s not a thing in the pantry, and I…” she finally broke down, sobbing again.

The Colonel waited her out. The darkness settled in. “Miss Brimley, do you have at least a candle about?”

Marybeth sniffled and stood up. She appeared in a bit with a stump of a candle which the Colonel lit and placed between them.

“As I see it, Miss Brimley, you don’t have much of a choice. Yes, I want this land, and I think it highly doubtful anybody will return to claim it,” he said looking down and then staring straight at her. “But what I really want is you.”

“Me?” Marybeth asked, her eyes wide and uncomprehending.

“Yes, I want you,” he said taking a deep breath. “I want Brimley Plantation as a sort of brothel, if you will…don’t look shocked, I know that you know what the word means. I will pay off your debt in Union greenbacks. You in turn will deed me the plantation. But you come with it.”

“Colonel Murphy, you are no gentleman!”

“That much is true. But Brimley Plantation will be no normal brothel,” he said and then leaned across the table, “and you will be no normal kind of whore. I mean for Brimley Plantation to be the place where rich Yankees and Union officers use women not as women, but as horses, as thoroughbred horses, the sort of breeding that the South has been famous for. And I also mean for you to be the first filly in the stables now that the rest of the livestock has been sold.”

Marybeth Brimley, debutante of the most genteel of plantation families of the region, sat back in her chair stunned. Her spread fingers covered her mouth in shocked silence, and for the moment she forgot to cry.

The Colonel sat back in his chair, crossed his legs and studied his fingernails in the candlelight. “Miss Brimley, I do believe you see my point. You really have no other option, unless, of course, you should decide to take your own life to defend your honor. That would be…unfortunate. Honor has gone the way of the Old South and so haven’t your fine Victorian morals.”

He hesitated for a moment, uncrossed his legs and stared at her, deep, malevolent eyes accessing her in the flickering light, undressing her, measuring her suitability for a life of whorish depravity as a naked animal. “You have no time, Miss Brimley. You must decide…now. I will not make the offer to you again.”

Marybeth’s mind recoiled from the horror of his demands. Of all the possibilities that she could have imagined in her worst nightmares, giving her life over to whoring, and a strange, perverted sort of whoring at that, had never occurred to her. Everything that she had ever dreamed seemed to evaporate in the heat of his gaze boring into her mind, her soul. I am lost, she thought, I am so truly lost. He’s the Devil. He wants my soul. And I am going to lose it, God help me.

She swallowed deep, trying to get some kind of moisture in her mouth, trying to work words out of her constricted throat. “You…oh, God help me…you would do this awful thing? It’s not enough that the damn blue legs have destroyed us, my family, my home,” she whispered. “You would turn me into a…wh…whore?”

“Shut up with your false piety. I won't turn you into a whore. You already are.”

Tears rolled silently down her cheeks as she sat as prim as she could maintain. The chair scraped as Colonel Murphy stood up to leave.

“Wait…please.”

“Yes?”

“What assurance do I have that you will keep your word?”

“And what assurance do I have that you will perform as required? Only by what we say, Miss Brimley. I will take my leave.”

Marybeth decided. God forgive her, but yes, these were desperate times. And she needed to eat…to survive. And she decided she didn’t want to die.

“I will do it.”

The Colonel turned on his heel and towered over her. “A very wise decision, Miss Brimley. Sign right here, and I will deal with the register and your list of debtors. And then you will come with me…tonight.”

Marybeth looked up in surprise from her signature. “T..to…tonight? But I thought…maybe… I don’t know…”

The Colonel took the papers and folded them neatly into a breast pocket. Without any warning he reached across the table and grabbed Marybeth by the hair, his fingers tangling, and pulled her out of the chair. Her hands flew up in protest, trying to pry his fingers away, screaming at him to stop. He dragged her to her feet and slapped her face. She blinked, shocked at his sudden assertion of ownership of Brimley Plantation…and her.

“You will shut up, whore. I need no longer treat you like Miss Brimley. I will treat you as I like. And you will learn a whore’s manners if I have to beat it into you, which sounds to me like a very attractive idea.”

The Colonel reached over to blow out the candle, ignoring Marybeth’s hands waving helplessly in the air, trying so hard not to pull at his wrist. In the dark he dragged her from the kitchen door, across the dew-slicked grass in her bare feet. She slipped. He pulled her back to her feet by her hair. He mounted his horse and pulled her up to lay over his saddle. The horse kicked up gravel as they sped off into the night.

“Take her from the stall and harness her to a sulky. I’ve decided on a late evening ride along the river. And make sure you’ve plugged her ass. I prefer to see her stepping high tonight.”

“But of course, sir. Shall I light a lantern for the sulky,” the deferential black girl said, her eyes downcast before the plantation master.

“And how do you expect me to see her step high, bitch? The moon is but a quarter full. Perhaps for such a stupid question I should harness you both as a team.”

She kept silent.

The Colonel spun about and strode out of the barn to smoke. The stable worker sighed with relief. She had no fond wish to be harnessed for an evening jaunt with Colonel Murphy; his buggy whip would find her ass dark or no. “Come on, darling,” she coaxed, “you need to pull the sulky for the Master yet tonight.”

Marybeth groaned. Her thighs ached with the day’s exertion, and she had looked forward to a rubdown, a blanket and sleep in the straw. Not yet, not tonight. She acted skittish as she was backed between the traces until the stable hand slapped her ass and demanded that she stop it.

The buggy whip flicked across her bare left flank as she trotted out the barn door. She jumped and picked up the pace. The Colonel was well known for his accuracy even in the dark. Around the circular drive in front of the Brimley mansion she trotted, not really seeing her former glory with the blinders that she wore. Former glory…she barely thought of it anymore, not with her days full with training and then working. And the fucking.

Yes, the fucking…that is what she thought of as she trotted down the long driveway past hedges of dogwood and wisteria. It might have been the fragrant odors loose on the night air. But the fucking…she not only thought of the fucking…over and over until her nipples were permanently aroused and she smelled like a mare in heat…she lusted for it, her Victorian morals now a dim memory.

Yankee soldiers and carpetbaggers, the same who funneled money into the pockets of Colonel Murphy, they were fascinated with the likes of a southern belle transformed into whore and horse. She had been at the hands of a stud for hours until she could no longer distinguish one cock from another, her juices and semen running down the inside of her thighs. She suspected that they were telling each other about the whore at Brimley Plantation…the one who was the pony, who would scream and whinny when she orgasmed, haltered and tethered to the latch of her stable and bent over, her ass jutting back, pushing against a cock.

It hadn’t been long before other girls, both white and black showed up, victims of the Colonel’s blackmail or destitute. Some had been destined to be common whores, the sort who would lift their skirts for the yankee greenback, not that they would see any of it. And others yet had been destined for training as ponies, the “stable fucks” as they were sometimes known.

The dreadful buggy whip flicked across her rump again. “Gid’up, bitch!”

Marybeth started to run, her sides heaving and foam flecking her chin under the bit gag. It wouldn’t be long before the Colonel would have to bring her to a walk, but for the moment she ran with grace, the sort of grace that almost nobody in her previous protected life would have imagined. Past the fields that had once been hers she ran, her hair flying out behind her, until on command she did slow down to walk.

The lantern cast a bit of yellow light which didn’t penetrate the woods very far, woods barely dappled by the quarter moon. He pulled at the reins, and she stopped. She tossed her head, anxious to get back to stable, a drink…perhaps to be fucked before she was rubbed down. She glanced up at the sliver of moon. For the rest of her life she would remember this moon as the “slut’s moon.”

She barely realized when he unhooked her from the traces and tethered her to the rear of the sulky. His sizable cock slid easily into her from behind; the sweat and slick juices left no doubt. She waited patiently as she was fucked, content that now and not before she had found her place.