Chapter 3 - The Plans.

The carriage ride that Gretchen took that day with her friend Jasmine was a seminal event in her life. When Gretchen returned to the academy in September after the summer vacation, she was eager to reunite with her cousin Anse and to inform her of the summer’s events, especially those concerning her trip to Jasmine’s plantation in America. Gretchen regaled Anse with accounts of the charmed life lived by plantation belles in the American south: morning horseback rides; picnic lunches spread out on manicured lawns; late afternoon canoeing on placid forest lakes; parties and balls lasting into the small hours of the morning. Anse could sense Gretchen’s enchantment with the gracious life and manners that prevailed among the plantation owners and their families. She guessed correctly that Gretchen planned to create one day a similar lifestyle at her own estate in the East Indies. Gretchen saved for last her account of the "plantation ponies". Anse was thrilled beyond words.

"Are you putting me on Gretchen?" She asked incredulously after Gretchen related her story of the erotic carriage ride she had shared with Jasmine that fateful day.

"No! No! It’s true I swear." Exclaimed Gretchen. "And we had this absolutely fabulous coachman. He was dressed in livery, can you believe it? And he had a long black whip, which he used to whip the ponies’ behinds. But, this is the most fascinating part: Jasmine told me that the ponies are related to her. I swear! She said that three of the ponies in the team which had drawn our carriage that day were her half sisters by blood. She told me that her father and his father before him and his father before him personally sired the children of their most beautiful female slaves. Apparently, this is a common practice on the plantations in America. I asked her if she felt compassion for her sisters, naked, harnessed, pulling her carriage, whipped by a mulatto coachman. She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about that at all."

"They are just slaves, Gretchen," she told me. "It’s not as if they were actually members of my family. They are just the offspring of Papa’s brood slaves."

Anse was fascinated with Gretchen’s account of her vacation experiences, especially the part about the plantation ponies. "Gretchen, wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could have pony girls on your estate?" Gretchen replied that that very idea had occurred to her as soon as she had seen the plantation ponies in South Carolina.

During their final year at the academy the cousins spent time making plans. Anse was already an accomplished horse trainer and she was convinced that training human ponies would not be too different from training horses. She told Gretchen that training any animal, including the human animal, required patience, determination and consistency. The one being trained had to learn who gave direction and who took direction. Obedience to commands was rewarded and disobedience was punished. But, before any training program could be undertaken, potential ponies were to be selected from a field of candidates. The selection of pony trainee candidates would be a joint effort on the part of Gretchen and Anse. Gretchen would make her initial choices from among the dozens of slave girls on the Van Cleef estate that fell into the optimal age range (eighteen to twenty-five), and who met the height and weight requirements (five feet eight to six feet in height, and one hundred twenty-five to one hundred fifty pounds in weight). Gretchen would order that all slaves who met these basic requirements be brought before her for screening. Once selected by Gretchen as a potential pony girl trainee, they would be further examined by Anse who would determine if the candidate possessed the strength and stamina necessary to perform the tasks required of an actual pony girl.

After graduation from university, Gretchen settled in at the estate on Tambura. Anse joined her cousin soon thereafter. When Anse arrived, Gretchen was already in the process of screening her slave girls. She issued orders to each of her foremen and women to have all young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five whom they supervised report to the main stables. There they were assembled in a harness room, ordered to remove their clothes and to kneel in a straight line to await their mistress. When Gretchen entered the room the girls put their foreheads against the wooden floor, as they had been taught to do from infancy when in the presence of a master or mistress.

"They smell bad," Gretchen said to no one in particular. "Have them washed and brought back here immediately." Once bathed and smelling much better, the slave girls were returned to the harness room where they stood with their feet wide apart, at attention, in a line, hands behind their heads, fingers interlaced, eyes straight ahead, awaiting their mistress’ inspection. Gretchen wore white riding breeches and gleaming black boots, a black leather quirt dangled from her right wrist. Those girls who were less than five feet eight inches in height Gretchen summarily dismissed. Gretchen would settle only for tall, blonde, physically perfect specimens to be her ponies. As she walked up and down the line of girls, she examined their complexions, felt their limbs for muscle tone, kneaded their breasts for firmness and tugged their nipples for stiffening and erection. The last was to determine the nipple’s suitability for piercing, since her ponies would sport the same bronze nipple rings as she had seen worn by the plantation ponies in America. As she held a nipple in the fingers of her left hand, she stroked the girl’s labia with the leather loop of the riding crop and closely observed her reaction to the stimulation. She wanted sensuous girls, girls who would later be conditioned by Anse to be in a state of sexual arousal when they were performing as pony girls. Some girls climaxed as Gretchen slid the tip of the quirt between their labia lips and contacted the clitoris. She put the quirt loop to the nostrils of each girl and commanded her to sniff it. Then she put the quirt to her lips and ordered her to lick it, all the while studiously watching the girl’s expressions. Each girl’s examination was consummated with a brisk slap on the buttocks with the business part of the whip, this done only partly for Gretchen’s amusement. She carefully observed the muscle play in the legs and buttocks in response to the pain.

If the candidate passed Gretchen’s inspection in all respects, she qualified for a further examination by Anse. A girl might appear to be physically qualified to be a pony girl, but only a rigorous routine developed by Anse would determine if the girl possessed the necessary physical attributes of an actual pony girl. A pony girl in service on the Van Cleef estate would possess extraordinary physical attributes. She would have the strength to pull a light carriage or sulky carrying two adult persons. Not only would she be able to draw this burden, she would be able to walk, trot, canter and gallop under the load. She would have the stamina to draw the load over a distance of miles, on level ground and up steep grades. As important as the physical condition of the pony girl was, her mental condition was even more important. It was critical, as Anse knew from her experience in training horses, that the "animal" respond correctly to its situation. The girl would be abruptly transformed from a human existence to that of an animal, a human horse. Her nipples and labia lips would be pierced and bronze rings inserted. Her rear teeth would be removed to facilitate the insertion of a metal bit, never to be removed. She would be harnessed to the shafts of the vehicles which she would pull, either alone or in tandem with other ponies. Finally, she would perform her strenuous tasks under the unforgiving lash of her mistress’ whip. It was Anse’s assignment to transform Gretchen’s choices from ordinary slave girls to superb physical specimens deserving of being their mistress’ magnificent pony girls.