Twenty minutes later and Penny is back in her room, her meeting with the owners of the house over. She has no way of telling time accurately, just the passing of the sun, so she does not know that her meeting lasted less than twenty minutes, it felt like hours.
The butler had led her down the stairs and out into the main part of the house. But before allowing her into to the main part of the building he had insisted that she washed her hands. She had told him that they were not dirty, but he looked at her with a look of total disgust and said "You are about to go into the home of the master. He does not want his home soiled with the dirt from the hands of the like of you. You will scrub your hands. You will always scrub your hands before entering the master's home. If I ever catch you entering the master's home without first scrubbing your hands, I will beat you." From the look on his face Penny could see that he meant it. She shuddered with fear.
Further down the corridor, on the same floor as the room Penny was in, there was a washroom. It looked like it had not been decorated in years, paint was peeling off the walls and the floor was covered in an ancient and badly cracked piece of lino. The window, like the one in Penny's room, was a sash window with rusty bars just outside the window. The glass in bottom part of the window was cracked, and the glass in the top part was missing, with just a few small triangles of glass sticking out of the putty to show that it had once been glazed, but long ago the glass had been smashed. The room itself contained two ancient shower stalls and three sinks, one sink had a scrubbing brush and a bar of carbolic soap beside the brush. Penny was shown to this sink, and instructed to scrub her hands using the soap and scrubbing brush. She did as she was ordered, and discovered that although the sink had a hot water tap, it only dispensed cold water.
As soon as the butler was satisfied that her hands were clean enough he pointed to a clean but tatty oblong of hessian hanging on the wall. That was the towel. Like the blankets in the room, the towel was made from an old hessian sack.
Penny was then led back down the stairs and into the house.
The main part of the house was so different to the servant's quarters that it was like stepping into a different world. The servant's quarters were simply whitewashed walls and floor, and from the scuff marks it looked to Penny as though the whitewashing had last been done many years ago. In main part of the house no expense had been spared. Thick carpet, expensive furniture, expensive ornaments, and paintings that hung in quality guilt frames (although Penny did not know this, the paintings were a mixture of portraits of the family and ancestors of the master, and genuine old masters, none costing less than a million, and most cost several million).
The butler stopped outside a door, and politely knocked. A voice called out "Enter", and the butler ushered Penny in. The room was again a study in opulence, and in it sat a man and a woman, both looked to be in their late forties or early fifties. The man looked up, said "Ahh, the new slave" and approached Penny, looked her over, then turned to the woman and said "Yes I approve."
The woman smiled, approached Penny and asked her "Do you know why you are here?" Penny shook her head "no" and the woman continued "Good, I wanted to be the on to tell you. One of our two maids left us a week ago, and you are her replacement. Normally we hire staff through an employment agency or advertise in a local paper. But this time, rather than hiring someone, paying them a fair wage, and then suffering the inconvenience of having them leave just when we've got used to them, we decided to buy a slave. That is you. We will feed you, give you somewhere to sleep, and in return you will do everything we order without question. We paid for you, we own you."
Penny wanted to cry, but she could see that the woman was enjoying her misery, and was determined not to give her the satisfaction of seeing tears. Instead Penny said "You can't do that, my parents will miss me, they will go to the police." The woman's smile broadened as she said "No they won't, they were the ones who sold you to us. Not directly, they contacted a broker who deals in matters like this, sold you to him, and he sold you on to us, no doubt at a high mark up." Penny shook her head in disbelief and said "But they wouldn't do that, they love me!" The woman replied "No doubt, but they would have been hard up, needed the money. Do you have a brother or sister? They probably decided that they could only afford to bring up one child. Rather than bring both of you up in misery, they probably decided that if they sell one of you, they could use the money to give the child they kept a better life. I'm sure you are right, they did love you, it would have been a hard decision for them, but face it girl, they love your brother more than they love you." The words stung Penny, all the more because she could see that the woman was not lying.
"Now I am not entirely without heart, I'll give you the rest of today to get used to your new status as a slave, you can start your duties tomorrow. But today we need to get your clothing correct. Slaves should be bare footed. Take off your shoes and socks and give them to butler. Stunned by all she had heard, Penny did what she was told without question. As soon as the butler had taken her shoes and socks the woman said to him "Throw them in the incinerator, she will never be wearing them again." Then she said to Penny "Good, now remove your blouse." The shock of this command surprised Penny out of her stupor, and she replied "No" while automatically wrapping her arms around her body protectively. The woman sighed and said "You are a slave, the rest of the servants are paid staff. We have to show that you are beneath them, so you are not allowed shoes, socks, or a blouse. You are a slave, only someone of a higher status can wear a blouse." Penny said nothing, but she also made no move to obey this last command, so the woman sighed again and continued "You have a bra on underneath, don't you? You can keep that on. It will be like wearing a bikini on the beach to sunbathe. And you will still have your jeans on, so you will be wearing even more than you would on the beach." Penny had never been on holiday, her parents had been too poor to afford a holiday. But she had played in the park, and, occasionally when it was very hot, she had swum in the lake in the park. When she swum in the lake she wore her mother's old bikini, so she knew what the woman meant. Besides, she could see the woman was getting angry with her, and it was making her even more scared, so she took off her blouse. This was handed to the butler, who was told to burn her blouse along with her footwear.
Penny felt very vulnerable standing there in her bra and jeans. And she hated the way the man was looking at her with lust in his eyes, he obviously wanted to fuck her. And the woman made matters worse. Penny could see that she also realised that the man wanted to fuck Penny, and the look on the woman's face told Penny that if the man did ever try to fuck her, the woman would approve. The woman had obviously enjoyed Penny's suffering when she told her about her new situation, and she had enjoyed watching Penny's embarrassment and humiliation when she had been made to remove her blouse under the lecherous gaze of this older man. She was obviously a cruel women who enjoyed other people's suffering.
Penny did not want be be a slave, but if she had to be a slave, these two people were the last people on earth who she wanted to own her.
"Well that is about all, girl, you can go back to your room now." Said the woman, but she was interrupted by a polite cough from the butler "Pardon me madam," he said "But did you not want to fit the girl with her collar now?" The woman nodded and replied "Thank you for reminding me Butler, yes I did intend to do that, do you have the collar?"
The butler handed the woman a metal collar, it looked like a thick dog's collar, but made out of some kind of metal. Penny made no move of protest when the woman fitted the collar snugly round her neck and locked it closed with a padlock. The collar was thick metal, the padlock was a small but sturdy one, there was no way Penny would ever be able to remove it without the padlock key. Then the woman said to Penny "Feels like solid metal doesn't it? It isn't. It is strong, but it is hollow. Inside it there is a tracking chip, puts out a signal, so if you ever run away we will know where to find you. And the metal of the collar act as an aerial, so it can be tracked from miles away, particularly in this flat area. It also contains one of those inertia generators, like watches used to contain. Every time you move it generates electricity that charges the battery to drive the tracking device. That way the battery will never run down, and we will always know where you are. The only way to stop it is to stand absolutely still, not even moving a fraction of an inch, until the battery runs down. And since that will take about a year, the only way you could stay still for that long is by being dead. So don't even think of escaping, because if you do I can track you down easily. And when I find you, I will punish you. Believe me, when I want to punish someone I can be exceedingly cruel, you don't want to be punished by me." Looking into the woman's hard, cold eyes, Penny knew that her last sentence was true, and probably an understatement.
After the interview Penny was led back to her room by the butler and again locked in. She sat on the edge of the bed, totally despondent, and began to cry. And it was a long time before she could stop crying.
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