#403402 - In The Hands Of The Inquisition Robert Bishop A de Granamour

In The Hands of The Inquisition
story by A. de Granamour
illustrated by Robert Bishop
Tao Productions, Inc.
Hollywood, California
1976

optimized for ebook viewing

and

optimized, pictures-only ebook

An obscure booklet of non-HOM Bishopiana, In the Hands of the Inquisition displays the master's airbrush virtuosity in an alleged clerical context. As the religion in question was invented and designed by men and its adherents monitored and controlled by men, the story exposes the fictional victimization of two women. Most pictures include men — or their hands — hurting women.

When pious Dona Inez refuses to marry dastardly Conde de Castlemar, he decides to obtain his bride by subterfuge. He bribes Fra Bartolomeo to allow the arrest of Inez on a pretext of disloyalty to the king of Spain and to function as her inquisitor.

Inez and her duenna, Dona Caterina, are brought to the dungeon of a monastery. There, the two virtuous beauties are bound, gagged, whipped, birched, caned, stocked and racked.

In the first sequence, Caterina gets tied to a long wood bench with center bolster that elevates hips, positioning her buttocks for caning convenience by prison guards in monk's robes. Gagged and tied to a pillar, Inez is forced to watch Caterina's humiliating ordeal in helpless silence.

Mr. de Granamour describes the scene like this:

The gaunt torturer wielding the slim birch over Caterina’s juttingly distended, upreared silk-sheathed oval buttocks laid on his dozen with pernicious slowness, letting the unfortunate mature brown-haired woman suffer not only the atrocious stinging of each cut which permeated the innermost threshold of her feminine nervous system, but also forced her to wait upon his sadistic prolongation for the following stroke. Eyes drowned in tears, face twisted back over her shoulder, panting, sobbing, imploring mercy in strident, almost incoherent tone, the duenna watched the bundle of slim withes rise slowly in the air, hover over her cringing, burning buttocks, and remain suspended over her excoriated womanflesh like a Damocles sword.

When she relaxed her muscles for an instant, her torturer perceived this and swept the birch down with emphatic vigor to make her lunge and twist and writhe on the flogging bench and utter a new, piercing, prolonged cry of suffering.

Inez de Cordoba, horrified at the injustice of this brutality, tried vainly to tug her slim corded wrists free from behind the stone column against which she was so tightly posed, and the choke-pear did not succeed in silencing her frantic, angry cries imploring the Inquisitors to end this cruel, unmerited torture.

As the whipper flung aside the slim birch after his companion had counted aloud, “And twelve!” the friar who conducted the interrogation, at the victims’ left, ordained, “Dona Inez remains impertinent and defiant of our obligatory process. Let her therefore have a taste of the strappado as a warning of which serious penance we shall impose on her if she does not soon show herself more docile to our holy order!”

At once and greedily, the two cowled torturers assigned to the black-haired daughter of the dead Hidalgo released the panting victim, only to fix her chafed wrists once again behind her back and, taking her by the shoulders, pushed her toward an overhead pulley rope which dangled in midair. One of them made it fast with a double knot to the cords fastening her wrists; the other stepped to the wall to turn the wooden windlass which would loft the rope and draw Inez’s beautiful ivory-sheened arms upwards behind her to force her to stand on tiptoe. As he did so, she uttered a cry of pain, her beautiful large dark-brown eyes widening, her brows furrowing with anxiety and discomfort, as she found herself forced to stand on the toes of her white buckskin slippers to ease the agonizing, searing, dislocating pain that shot through her shoulders at this unnatural elevated stress.

She did not know that the strappado was one of the favorite devices of the sadistic Dominicans. With an obdurate prisoner, they hoisted him or her high in the air. Then, at a signal from the Grand Inquisitor, the rope was released, only to be caught before the victim’s feet should strike the floor. The savage wrench invariably dislocated the shoulders, causing unspeakable agony.

Hoisted even as she was, Inez could sense the grueling pangs of the torture. It was simple by comparison, yet therein lay its fiendish efficacy. What was more, she was being placed so that she stared directly at her duenna’s lush oval cheeked posterior, elevated lewdly by the triangular bolster of the bench. Through the hugging, thin silk drawers, it seemed to her she could see the angry bright-red striata left by the switches, from chinkbone to upper thighs, horizontally marking both huddling, shuddering nether globes with their ominous and infamous weals. . . .

Mr. Granamour's colorful narrative details the many awful punishments the innocent women endure. He praises various aspects of their appearance and anatomy and describes how their torments affect their skin. Much of their dialog expresses outrage, anguish and entreaties for mercy.

The text has been re-set for the ebook. Few changes were made to the author's professional prose. More than 9000 words.

The ebook contains all content of the booklet, including the front cover and back cover, except interior advertising.

Twelve illustrations by the great Robert Bishop depict scenes from the story. In most pictures, his women are naked, displaying his compact female ideal in uncomfortable bondage predicaments.

Brightness, contrast and levels were adjusted, and shadows reduced. Forty optimized images enlarge fetish features and action with smooth edges and nice tonality. This presentation technique is intended to reduce the need for zooming and scrolling.

As possible, images were placed as they align with scenes in the story, but correlation here is approximate. To facilitate coordination of pictures and prose, the typeface is large.

All new scans. Female nudity.

A second optimized ebook contains only the artwork.

NOTE
Although some parts of pictures are obscured on this page, the ebook shows everything that's in the original.

Two optimized ebooks, delivered by download from your 30th Street Graphics account.