I was born in the year 1855 on the great Usher estate, in Devonshire, where my mother was a tweeny-maid.
Who my father was I never knew, nor I do now believe my mother was much aware, either.
She had a comely, careless build I was to inherit, strong of breast and buttock, as she strode the great house confidently on her sundry errands, always softly smiling, her fair hair coiled within her cap.
But I was dark and hoydenish from the start. With my firm straight limbs they said I should have been a boy.
When I turned ten they said so no longer. I grew up below-stairs and I filled fast, with good breasts by eleven and a warm black bush at twelve. I did my work well and was happy in those days, though naturally I knew there were times when I needed punishing. There is something in a child that needs to reck the rod; this mother never gave me, she was too mild and sweet by far and there is no doubt that if it hadn't been for the head housekeeper, Mrs. Wilson, I might sadly have abused the privilege. She it was who made sure I learnt of pain.
The Usher land ran down to a bay or cove, which it locked in heavy arms of beech and birch. I used to love to run down and watch the smiting sea, in those moments I had free, the big green waves crashing in, one after the other, so remorselessly. The beach itself was out of bounds to me but in summer was irresistible.
There was seldom a soul upon it for neither Lord nor Lady Usher ever went near and one early July day I was tempted down and took off my clothes in a cave to one end and plunged in the salt-smarting spray. No one discovered the escapade and I began to indulge it recklessly. I longed to learn how to swim.
Then one afternoon I dawdled too late on the cliff-top and was met with some tart remarks by Mrs. Wilson on return.
"Y'r mother's too light on ye by far, child. Here's all these pans to scrub. Where have ye been?"
I made a hesitant lie. Mrs. Wilson was known to keep firm rein on the understairs staff and I had heard giggling reference from the older girls, like Lilly or Joan, about something called "being sent to the stables." I heard it again now.
"Ye're growing a big girl, Thomasina, and need a proper straightening-out. Y'r mother should have done it long ago. You're that late and deserve to be sent to the stables, girl."
I mumbled something non-committal and turned to my work. Frankly I thought I had scaped off, this time at least. When Lilly came and tapped my shoulder ten minutes later I turned with surprise.
"You're wanted in the stables. Go to Mr. Jorrocks."
"W-whipping?" I asked her quickly.
Her big eyes gazed into mine.
"Poor Tommy," she said, smiling, "it won't last forever. Remember to keep breathing. Don't hold your breath."
It was with a mixture of curious excitement and excitement of curiosity that I crossed the yard outside and passed under the archway to the main set of stables where Mr. Jorrocks, the head groom, maintained his small saddle room, or office. I was going to be thrashed, I knew, and it had the stimulus of a new experience. My senses felt alert and alive. Above all, it made me a "big girl" now with a vengeance, sharing with the older servants in a closer way. As I passed through the main stables, a boy shoeing a horse looked up, grinned and made a motion of his right arm as though slicing the air. I knocked and was told to come in.
Mr. Jorrocks was seated behind his black desk in boots, breeches, a waistcoat and shirt-sleeves. He gave a stroke to his long mustaches and went to the point.
"You Wragg?"
"Yes, sir," I said.
"Going to whup 'ee. Come 'ere and bend over this."
He led me to a saddle horse or trestle and pointed. It was all singularly unceremonious but after a second's hesitation I did as bid.
"Na, na. Feet wide apart."
My legs lay along the splayed rear legs of the trestle, my torso on its surface, my hands gripping the lowered struts in front. The base of my being was its highest point and I blushed at the posture. But I went several shades darker of cheek when the man turned my shirts and shift, as a girl reaching but to my knees at that time, onto my back.
I did not know what to do. I simply clenched the trestle in my fists and hid my burning face. The head groom had before him my broadly parted behind clad in creaseless white batiste drawers, tightened with inserts of pale blue ribbon at the thighs, for mother was always careful over my underthings. They would afford me no protection, I knew, since I prided myself on their being as tight as the casings of those sausages which dangled from the ceiling of our inner pantry. It was quite unnecessary for him to draw them up further, but so he did.
"Five cuts," I heard.
He stood back and I looked back. Upside-down I saw his soiled boots and beside them the dangling serpent of a thin hard harness trace which he was presumably winding about his right hand now. Then that lank tail vanished from view.
There was a stirring of air and then the strap wrapped itself across me with a telling thwuck! I uttered a loud, "Ow!"
He belted into me again and the truth of the pain started to reach right through my skin. It gathered with the seconds. He hissed as he hit, laying his thong full across my broadest person, and after the third, an agonizingly stripe, I started up, gasping. "Ouuuww! No!"
He finished by whistling two more into me, both landing with loud thuds and the second fetching me almost full erect. He had given me them fast and when the full pain awoke I stood up and stamped, clasping myself behind where he had wounded me so, while thick hot tears were squeezed from my eyes as if by some mill within my mind. I staggered through the door which Mr. Jorrocks so solicitously held wide for me, my skirts still hoisted as my poor hands tried to stanch that fire across my hips.
The boy shoeing had a fine sight, of course, and threw at me a loose grin - "Nice and warm behind? Yer got space enow and to spare for it." One hand was on his fly.
I had to leave that insolent presence at once and did so, almost on the run, but it was little better in the yard which I also crossed hurrying. The cuts of that hard thong seemed to follow me and burrow beneath, growing smarter all the time. I was learning what I was later to know so well, that well-given strokes are most keenly felt some seconds after their impact. As it was the worst abated a bit, in the lower kitchen, but I could not keep from treating lolly and Joan and the others to that sight which never failed to put smiles on their lips - of a well-whipped girl (not themselves) hopping and jumping and holding herself behind as if for very life.
"How many, Tommy?"
"F-f-five," I gasped, red-faced.
"Lord, is that all. You wait 'ntil you have to take ten, and tied over too. Molly took a dozen once and stood right up after and said to 'im, 'Can't you 'it no harder than that?'"
"I'm not Molly," I said. "Those stung like billyho."
Mrs. Wilson chanced along just then. She too was grinning. She even gave me a kiss.
"All right, Thomasina. Did he lay them across you nicely? Come, did it sting a little perhaps?"
"Intensely," I said, with ducked head.
She laughed generously. "An' will do more next time. Now do you promise to be prompt in future?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Well, run along to y'r room and your Mother will see to you."
By the time my mother came to me, as I lay on the bed on my belly, my parts were a steady glow. It was not unpleasant and I moved myself against the bedding. I felt soft and relaxed, having come through the ordeal.
She too kissed my ear, tucked a stray black lock behind it, saying: "Poor Tom. Did it hurt very much?"
"I suppose I deserved them," I answered with a touch of pride.
She drew up my skirt and shift and undid my drawers, pulling them down over my poor cheeks that felt as if inflated now.
"What a man!" she exclaimed above my nakedness behind. "Oh he didn't have to weal you this bad. I could never get myself to touch this perfect skin, my dear, let alone mark it. Come, an' I'll bathe them for you."
The warm water she used trickled languidly over my hot and tumid cheeks, soothing me immediately.
Mother crooned as she laved me. I could feel the weals standing out hard and stern on the right, where the tail had lashed in toughly. Suddenly I began to be aware of another feeling.
"Mother. Please... "
"What is it, child?"
The water had trickled into the cleft behind and was running down my buttery crease, coursing into the center of my being.
"It feels... so... hot."
"Nonsense. It can't. Well, an' I'll fetch some cold for your poor bruises, Tom."
I was glad she turned from me then, because with a queer kind of inner panic I knew that something I could not control was coming over my flesh. I clenched my thighs together, panting. Some consummation was upon me. I felt a volted shock at the nubby core of my being, a violet haze before my eyes, and I tried to hide, as mother turned her back, my spasmic desire to buck, and gasp. The moment of tension stretched me like a bow, as if in some ecstatic reply to the traces of the whip, and then a mermaid rose and shook herself from my depths.
CHAPTER TWO
But it is high time I told of Lord and Lady Usher, my munificent employers, and my mother's. One of them at least to be for some while all my life.
Stephen Usher was a tall, ambling man of twenty-nine who had inherited his land, and his leisure, shortly after leaving Eton and seizing, in a desultory fashion, in the Guards. Loosely jointed, mousy of hair and mien, he lived a typical life of the time, riding hard to his hounds and his high-boned face showing the first flush from addiction to the fortified wine of Oporto.
Lady Julia was his junior by nine years, an amazing and indeed immense personage of - to me - quite immaculate beauty. Nearly six foot, and thus no more than an inch or two shorter nor her spouse, she possessed a superb, if weighty, physique shown to advantage in the many gowns of hanging velvet that she wore, swinging off the great proud churn of her haunches and always emphasizing the reciprocal shelves of breast and buttock, both thrusting and fleshy and full, somehow, of a slumberous life of their own. She was magnificent and I adored her, from the mane of her great red head to the tips of her well-nigh tyrranic heels, for she seldom booted less than six or seven inches high. Perhaps it was to come up to her husband. I did not know. All I knew was that I had never admired anyone as much as the evening I surprised her nude.
I had been sent "upstairs" to make some arrangements in a guest-room and told to recover a carafe of wine from Lord Usher's chamber, first profiting to scour out the tub there. Imagine my astonishment when, coming out of that bathroom, I saw extended on the bed, a four-poster, the recumbent Venus of Lady J. She lay on one side, her uplifted hip golden, and she answered my curtsey with an amused smile: "What! Don't tell me you've never seen a naked woman before, Tommy?"
I had a course, in the person of my mother, in our little shared room in the basements. But Lady Julia seemed to pasture on the bed. Softened by the baldachin curtaining the light poured on her in a mellow dew, from her tawny swath of hair to the rosy soles of her feet, soft, sexy, and excited-looking. Above all were my eyes mesmerized by the great red seam of her sex which bisected, with its furry furrow, the glazed basin of her bottom. She appeared to me some goddess. I mumbled something incoherent.
"Come on, Mouse," she said, employing a nickname for me she had lately invented then, and she beckoned to me mockingly. "If you're so curious, get a better look."
I should add that this bantering was by no means uncommon in the lady, who had begun to show more and more affection towards me, almost, at times, treating me as a sister. This preferential singling-out cost me dear in the pantries, of course, where jealous Mrs. Wilson seemed to like to find me more and more menial tasks to do. Even so, this was so by far the most intimate moment between us that I stood stunned where she had called me, at the foot of the bed, staring at the long pout of her quim between her thighs and at the precise base of her splendid buttocks. I confess I stared in awe. My own I had seen, and my mother's, but this sex was so purely sensual it was well-nigh spiritual, fatty, pursed and veined, vanishing into thick red fronds at the front. I had secretly wondered if a redhead had a bush to match and now I knew: milady was well-haired and auburn all over.
"Well?" she said, smiling from an elbow.
I was scarlet in the face. Before I knew it I had blurted out: "It... it's beautiful, milady."
I even ducked a curtsey.
She gave a ringing laugh at that.
"It's about to receive a visitor, and wants to look its best. And don't pretend you don't know what I mean, monster. Have you never had one up you?"
"No, milady."
"Well, you will one day, Tommy, and it's the most lovely sensation in the world. Nothing compares with it at all. Now give it a kiss and be gone."
Startled, but still in a blaze of sensation, I paused but a second before darting forward and placing a peck on the soft slice at her thighs, that was all my vision and view. She stirred, laughing.
"Come on, Mouse. You know you can do better than that. Here, and kiss me on the lips."
I went to her head and she took mine in her hands and planted on my mouth a wet and sucking kiss of protracted length. I gasped for breath. Almost I seemed to be drowning, drawn into her being then. She held me closer and suddenly the fish of her tongue flashed into my ever more open mouth, scouring its insides and finally causing me to choke, and draw back, wiping my face off with an elbow.
"I do believe I tickled your tonsils," she said, warm too in the face but still laughing. "One day I'll lick right down your throat, you mouse you. Now go and do the same for that poor disconsolate person below."
She drew up her knees a little and sitting on the bed I applied my lips to the gorgeous gash which seemed, if anything, to have grown in size since I saw it last. This time the grotto opened lushly at my touch and, blinded by the great soft buttocks about me, I pressed home a long, soft, and loving buss. It had its immediate answer in a squirm and a hiss beyond me - "Your tongue, silly. Stick it in."
She moaned when I did so and issued another practical instruction: "Higher in me. Still. Till you feel the button. Aaah, so!"
I laved that knowing stub of flesh, which, in her grand case, was large as an oily marble under my tongue.
She imprisoned my head between her thighs and I heard her gasping in some blissful distance: "Yes, yes... it's going to be rammed, stuck, plugged, poor thing... and this'll make it... a lot, lot easier for the darling. Uh, you have it. Just there, so. No!" All at once I felt my hair seized at the nape and my face drawn off, oh, all its desire. I confronted the mischievous and impassioned smile of my employer. "Oh no you don't, monkey. You're far too expert for your age and I don't mean to come, only to get ready. He likes to take me from behind, you see, and the first strokes plunge so deep that way, unless... but, quick, I do declare he's coming."
Perhaps there were sounds of steps on the central stairs, I do not know, I was in a maze of emotions, a riot of swimming senses, as once more my lips were given a libidinous kiss and I was bade on my way. From the door I gave a last glance back. Half-bedazzled, as if by extreme light, I saw Lady Julia hoisting herself to her knees at the foot of the bed; directly facing the door her immense hams were parted and presented, as she lowered her rich shoulders and round elbows to the bed before her. Someone coming in, I realized, would be met head-on with this vista of sheer buttock and cunt, as it were possessing the room with their presence. And someone was surely corning in.
Hastening out, with my collected carafe, I met Lord Usher on the gallery. He patted my bottom paternally as he passed, and I dropped my curtsey with an eye on his right hand, already gently rubbing an appreciative length of muscle at his groin. I saw him go in there with a queer kind of envy. But from that strangely spontaneous moment forth Lady Julia and I became emotional inseparables. She contrived to find more and more excuses to draw me into the upper house, honoring me with work meant for others, though she did not for a while repeat her intimacy. I felt it a particular present to me. We blushed when we saw each other. We touched in corridors. We exchanged long looks. My nights were frankly filled with dreams of that sweet sex skewered on a shaft of stone while I managed, wherever possible, to follow Lady Julia in some errand up the great stair. A corset yard dangled in her chamber and she had the waist, if not of a wasp, at least of a well belted-in girl in her teens. She had the real hour-glass figure of those days, so rigid from breast to buttock you felt she could but bend at right angles else topple, while the busk or "spoon" in front cambered the hips richly backward, like some impatient brood mare's. So I thought, at any rate, following my lady up the stair and seeing nothing but the manner, rhythmic and mesmerizing, in which those magnificent buttocks seemed to thump proudly at each other, under the fall of pure velvet. She caught me looking so once, and turned, albeit smiling: "You were enjoying the view, Thomasina? If I were Lady Mildmount," she added evenly, as I colored, "I'd have your hide for that, wouldn't I?"
"I'm sorry, Ma'am."
"You need not be. I am really very fond of you, Tommy, and would like to see you brought up well. You have all the qualities I lacked at your age. Have you 'been to the stables' lately?"
I did not know she knew about this, and quickly said I hadn't. At which she laughed and chucked my chin and went her way. But I was soon to visit them again, and in earnest.
CHAPTER THREE
It was lovely that summer in the sun. Everything seemed easier and slower, more relaxed and mazed in warmth. I was happy, helping both in the hall and on the estate; and I sneaked off more than ever to the bounding shore in my hour off in the afternoon though I was never more late. My hiding had had that effect, at least. Mrs. Wilson pointed out the moral more than once.
"A good whipping never did a girl no harm. It quickens the senses and, I believe, even whets the appetite.
Ye're growing to a big girl, Thomasina, but you need not put on ways just because milady has taken a fancy to you. Upstairs or below, ye'll mind y'r place else I'll see you leathered on that trestle in a trice."
Poor Molly, a woman approaching thirty, suffered so several times, I knew, Mrs. Wilson always picking on her, and some of the other help, too, but Prendergast, or "Prendy," as she was known, Lady Julia's personal maid, was above this personal discipline, as she was above us in her life at the top of the house in a cozy dormer room I had seen on several occasions.
So I would strip off my clothes in the cave and run full-tilt into the sea, my new breasts bouncing and my bottoms joggling behind. The sting and slap of the waves made me gasp as I flung myself into them pellmell, and came out with breasts aching, breath spluttering, drenched and swamped with the salt. It was doing so one late August afternoon that I had my shock; my clothes were no longer there.
I had been delegated that day to help with the early harvest, pitching and stooking the barley. I came off the field around five, dusty with chaff, my ankles scratched by the stubble and my shoulders and arms weary as if with weights. Excused by the bailiff, I was making for a wash-off under the pump in the yard when I bethought me that my steps could innocently lead by the cliff, whence I could drop to the sands and bathe.
Nobody was ever there. No one ever watched. I left my clothes in their usual place, on a ledge of rock at the back of the cave, and rinsed the day out of me delightfully enough in the brine. Minutes later I stood shivering and aghast, staring on the empty sill of stone. Where had my things gone? Who had been?
Heart in mouth I scampered to the back where the cave took a turn. It was a darkness I had not explored.
"Hands up, Thomasina," said a voice, and a boy of fourteen, well grown, with tousled hair, came forward into the half-light, smiling. "Caught'ee," he said, doing so and trying to plant a kiss on my lips and landing it on my twisting neck. I wriggled wetly free and stood ducked, hiding myself with my hands.
"Give me my clothes, you wretch," I told him. "Come on, where are they?"
For the boy was Reggie Shore, of course. The Hon. Reginald Shore, I should have said, only son of the widowed and dark-haired Lady Mild-mount, whose lands at one point adjoined our own. He had been at school a year, I believe, and the reason for our relative intimacy was not distant. He was often coming to our house with his mother, a woman I cordially dreaded, or riding past on his pony, but since helping me over a stile between fields had contrived to come in my way more often. He was cheerful and good-looking, with an open, sandy face and an infectious grin. He was a great tease. Had put his hand up my skirts more than once, and then had come the day when he'd helped with some haying. After the others had gone we had slid in the stuff, giggling and laughing, and playing like puppies, finally nuzzling into each other like such, too, bumping and romping. His hands had roamed my body and in the sunset I had not minded. Red of face and scant of breath I had scuffled back and suddenly felt his manhood stiff under its stuff. It leapt fishlike to my touch and I confess I found occasion to palm it more than once before we parted. We had played "Touch" in the loft of the barn several times after that, growing more daring and loving, and while his lingering fingers had traced me quite utterly I perfectly learnt the shape of a penis, one stout and bellicose for its few years, too. There was more than one of us ready to boil over as a result of those coltish wrestlings. Now I knew that he had been spying on me bathing.
"Give me back my clothes at once, Master," I hissed, huddling. "Come on, I can't stand here for ever now."
"You look awful pretty doing so, Tommy. I say, you have been getting hairy lately, ain't you."
My hand came out and smacked his smiling face, letting one breast swing full in view as it did so.
"What do you expect?" I said. "Feathers? Come on. I'll be in a frightful scrape at the house if you don't, quickly."
"Ah, that's just it," he said, miming an imposingly grave manner. "I'm afraid you've been a naughty girl, Tommy." He was tapping one toe with a peeled willow switch. "And will have to pay the consequences, Miss Wragg."
"Don't play the schoolmaster with me, Reggie Shore."
"You know you're not supposed to be down here, are you?"
"Nor are you," I retorted hotly. Lady Mild-mount was rumored to bring him up like a tartar, afeared lest in the absence of a father he might be raised too "soft." He winced wryly but did not change his grin. "Where are they, Reg? Please." I changed my tone of voice. "Oh, do give me my things and have done with it."
"Take your hands away and let me look at you first," he said.
"No."
He sighed and then sat down on the ledge, humming and looking away with that infuriating smile. I was at the wall of the cave opposed to him.
"All right," I said with sudden decision, turning. "But only my back, then." I was proud of my back.
I let him look at it in silence a while, dripping with spray as it was and comely, thighs tight; even so I knew that a tendril or two showed back, beneath my seat.
"My clothes, please."
"Legs apart first, Tommy, and lean forward."
"No! Absolutely not."
"Then I shall throw them all into the sea and you shall either have to return to the house buck naked or fetch them in and go back soaked. In either case, you'll get a whipping."
"And so will you, if I tell on you. And 'twould do you much good, to have the spunk well whipped out of you, young man. I'll wager that thing of yours doesn't stick out quite so stiff and proud after your mother has given you a licking."
"Turn round and let's see your front, Tommy."
There was a long silence and then I breathed out, "Damn you," and turned, my eyes on the wall above his head, my face crimson. He had me in his power, I knew, and the sooner this was done with the better. I did not want to see what he was doing. Anyway I was proud of my front by now as well.
"Hands right by your sides, mind."
"No touching, then. Promise?"
"Promise." He stared and stared. I could feel his eyes fairly boring through me, and mainly in one place, needless to add. At last he said in a hoarse tone, "God, but you're lovely, Thomasina, and I do love you, y'know." I was touched, and braced up my breasts and sucked in my belly, but perhaps it was only schoolboy talk for he went on, "It's such a sweet fat little slice, isn't it, and after that dip your nips are stiff as soldiers, I'd give anything just to be able to nibble one of them a moment, mayn't I, Tom?"
"No. Now give me back my clothes. I've done what you said and you've seen me all over. Nobody except mother has ever seen me naked."
"I shall treasure it for ever, Tommy," he said but with a mock sigh went on; "however, I fear there is one more penalty to pay for your indiscretion." His wand made a juicy whistle through the air. "You have to have a taste of this for your sins."
I looked at him with mute imploring.
"Reg. Please."
"Four," he said shortly.
"No," I said, "it'll tingle terribly."
But my time was running out and I was beginning to feel giggly with him, shielding my breast and self once more and seeing his thing stiff in its trousers. Frankly, I longed to touch it and feel it.
"Come on, naughty Tommy, 'tisn't such a souse. Four quick licks is all I ask. Lord, if we only got as little at school, in the bill. Why, it's never less than a dozen with the birch, and a good rod is seven or eight of these." He swung it whirringly again. "Lord, how those first cuts sting. But you have to stick it through."
"Does you good," I said, pouting.
"But I'd rather have a dozen at the block than my mater's switch any day. It cuts like a razor, that does.
Come on, I dare you."
I was shivery and excited and suddenly I said, "Three."
"Four."
"No, three only."
"Four it is."
"Three," I stuck out.
"Three and a half, then, cowardly." I giggled nervously and acceptingly. What was a half of a cut, I wondered?
"Where?" I asked then.
"Across the bum, of course, where did you think?"
"No, I mean where. I'm not going to bend over like this for you, Reggie Shore."
He stood up and went to a patch of sand where the sun came in and thrashed it. The bendy switch wrote a long weal there. Had I bitten off more than I could chew? This was obviously going to hurt.
"Here." The limb pointed and I lay down. I did so on the hot moist sand with my legs together, and put my head in my folded arms; I was determined he should not make me flinch.
There was a lengthy wait.
"Come on," I said, mouth muffled.
"You do have such tender buns, you know, Tommy, so soft and close and jouncy; it seems a pity to... "
"Don't comment," I got out primly. "Get on with it, if you must."
"I'm afraid this is going to hurt you more than me, Thomasina."
As there was another long pause I stole a glance back. He was doffing jacket on the ledge for the job. The switch looked unspeakably licky. Up the line of one leg I saw his manhood most manifest; it seemed to stretch itself, like some snoozing cat, as he sighed and came forward again. I hid my head instantly.
"The chaps at school say it's twice as bad wet."
The willow rested on my posteriors then, before it lashed across them with a long singing sweep - Pffffuikk! I gasped and stretched quickly. The pain came to me at once, much more stingy if not as brutal as Mr.
Jorrocks' thong. I pressed into the sand, striving not to satisfy that throbbing thing of his in front by any writhing or wriggling. He paused so long I hissed out angrily, "Come on. You don't have to draw it out so."
"You mark nicely, Tommy. This one's going to be tighter."
I was aware of him rising to his toes to gain full height for the second, which really slashed across me excruciatingly. I gasped again and twisted like a worm for a second.
"You don't have to... that hard."
"Get straight. Don't try to turn off your right side so."
Pffffuikk! The third was even harder and drove me burrowing into the sand which I suddenly realized had filled my mouth as well. It stifled my cry, but I knew he had the pleasure of my motions after it. It was impossible not to writhe.
"Now," I heard, "for the half."
I was expecting a stroke half as hard, but my curiosity was piqued when he said gently, "Legs apart now, a little."
My twistings made the command unnecessary in fact. I felt his hand palp my left cheek lightly as if to steady it there, and "Here's the half," he said.
With which he brought that fiendish switch whistling down precisely across my single sinister buttock. I jacked with a cry, fairly grabbing where he had cut. This was cruelty itself. The blade-like limb had buried itself about my separated left cub with the result that its timed tip, the agonizing part, had bitten like an adder inside my division, welting into the puppyish flesh just by, and beneath, my seam. I had never known such pain and turned, speechless, in the wet sand, doubled and rubbing. Then I heard myself saying, "No" and again "No!"
The Cyclops eye of his urgent young manhood, ready and rubicund, was staring angrily at me. I was bestridden yet oblivious to all but that single scalding weal.
"No, Reggie, no... please."
But I was on my back, my legs parted and lifted and my hands could go nowhere but to my smarting seat; so he impaled me easily enough, wet as I evidently was within and without, cutting my hymen as sharply as he had my bottom and with far less fuss or pain. To be truthful, I felt more when his ramming drove me to a rock, on which I scratched one shoulder. His inexperienced quick strokes were oddly merciless and shook me to the marrow; I squirmed back but he dug into me deeper. Then as the worst of the pain in my flesh subsided I realized I was coming to that lightning-like consummation again, only that this time it was to be ten times as racking, and twenty more sweet. My feet pounded, my fingers clawed the sand, which threatened to squeeze into me everywhere, ears, nostrils and quaking quim.
"I've always wanted to do this to you Tommy," I heard in the blue blaze over my head. "I hope you didn't mind."
I reflected that there was little I might do about it now.
"You're the first for me, my love, and I can't w-w-wait much longer."
And a voice that must have been my own responded: "Give it to me, Reggie... spill... cream it into me, darling... cram, jam, lam it right up... yes, my angel, yes...
juice... aaaaah!"
There was some blinding sense of sun and the spasm so contracted me that for a second I do believe I rested only on feet and head. Mine lasted much longer than his; compounded of the double rodding, switch and prick, it was for a minute eternal bliss, absolute sensation, pure consciousness.
"Look what you've done to me," I said, kissing him as I sat up. And I pointed to my bedewed and oozing cunt, all open and raw-looking and red.
"Look what you've done to me," quoth he, and we laughed. The little man who had been so furious and firm hung limply now, battered-looking, bleary with scum and streaked with my blood.
"We'll bathe it off," I said.
So we ran bare to the sea and bathed and stanched our aching limbs. It was very perfect pleasure, something one knows but once in a life perchance, and one of the easiest lost maidenhoods ever, I'll wager!
We kissed deeply ere we parted, vowing to meet on the morrow.
But back at the house pat comes Mrs. Wilson like catastrophe.
"Look at this picture," she declared directly, "wet skirt, sand on her heels, oh I know where you've been, beauty. You've been to that blessed beach of your'n, ain't yer?"
"Yes'm."
"Let's see if we can't make you rue it for good."
So I was "sent to the stables" once more, before bed, and this time Mr. Jorrocks gave me six. I was progressing, I thought, as I clung to the trestle with tightened eyes and outstretched bum, awaiting the first of his thudding welts. I am suffering for you, my beloved, I thought, and will do so again - I conjured the boy's fair face into my mind, trying to draw courage from my new-found love.
But it was a heavy, bruising beating on a bottom already cut with the switch and scratched on the sand and I was panting after only the second. The groom cut me with calculation and expressionlessly, as he might have his mare, and somehow he broke my spirit, so that I cried. This time there must have been half a minute between the last three strokes, which finally toppled me off the trestle and sat me on the saddle-room floor on my hands.
"Was it worth it?" said Mrs. Wilson, awaiting me below-stairs.
I raised my tear-wet eyes and, though I could not wrest my hands from my seat, I said proudly "Yes."
She grinned away as usual. "Next time it'll be eight, Tommy. You must make up your mind, of course."
That night I did not let my mother bathe the affected parts, lest she might see the switch weals under me, and ask - and see, too, that her daughter had been most signally deflowered.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lady Julia was at the yard when next she summoned me in.
The door of her room opened when I passed it that morning after my new beating and her personal maid, all lithe and dark and dressed in black satin, came out wearing a severe air and rarrying a torn corset string.
I heard a voice: "Is that Thomasina there? Send her in to me, Prendy, do. Perhaps she can comfort me in my travails."
She had seen me in a mirror.
If Lady Julia looked sumptuous striding impetuously about the great house in her swinging velvet gowns, she was quite queenly now; my curtsey as I approached was full of genuine reverence.
She had her back to me. And what a back. The entire room seemed full of it. She was standing at the corset yard to either end of which well overhead, her gloved wrists were belted. Her legs were together, in highheeled slippers. It was what she had on - or had not on - that impressed me.
The black and gleaming leather corselet ran up just under the breasts and bit into the flesh there, hauling back the muscles of her shoulders and grooving her spine down which teemed the auburn river of her bluntcut locks. It had been most tightly drawn and then, I saw as I came near, a string broken, over a brief gossamer shift which exuded as if apologetically some inches above and below. Dark brown stockings, tight tethered by jewelled garters at each thigh, silkily caressed and did compliment to her columnar twin legs.
"Come here and talk to me, Tommy," she said without turning back her head, but still surveying me in the glass in front of her. "Close the door. Prendy has been lacing me quite in two and gone for another string, thank heavens. And I do have something to tell you."
It was the rich arch of her blazingly powdered bottoms that mesmerized me; they were braced so decisively, and barely, back by the busk at the belly of the corset, as if by some ringmaster's sudden command, that I felt you could have perched a glass of water on the tray of their upper surfaces, behind. And I found myself wondering what Reggie's switch would look like playing about that perfect posterior.
She caught me and juddered them together, for my benefit.
"Always looking at the afternoon of my body, Thomasina. Well, I heard yours got an imperial walloping last night. Did it hurt very much?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Do you like being flogged?"
"No."
"Then you had better not go down to the beach again in a hurry, had you? Heavens, I can hardly breathe.
The slightest exertion and I am panting in these bones. No relief, no relief at all. Prendy swears I shall achieve nineteen with some more training, however, and if I keep the passages open, as she calls it."
"What's that, milady?" I inquired.
"Oh I must be extra tightly laced like this just before stool, it seems. And with this porridge stuff going through me, well, after I have voided it can be taken up another inch. I am helpless," she concluded on another shudder. "But lift up your eyes for a moment, you monkey-mouse, you."
"You do have such a wonderful... "
"What?"
"L-lower back," I improvised.
She gave a laugh. "Well, you may give my hindquarters a kiss. Go on. Each side. And now come round and let me look at you."
But it was I who looked at her. Lady Julia's face was flushed, her lips wet. Her breath came quick from widened nostrils. Above the corset in front her huge breasts thrust out sideways, strongly studded and so tense in appearance they might have been in milk.
"Wipe my brow," she said. When I did so she explained, "I'm sweating not only from the lacing, but really because I want to go. And shall do so when this is over. In a hurry."
"May I kiss them, milady?" I asked suddenly, then.
She gave a roguish smile. "There's not much I can do about it to stop you, is there, Tommy?" I drew the nubby left nipple into my mouth and sucked. She hissed with pleasure as I did so. Then I bethought me of what my boy had said - and nibbled: the morsel was resilient and rubbery, and truly thick as a thumb through to the tongue.
"Enough, enough," she sighed but I knew it was not. I moved to the other dug, laved the aureole a little and soon had her squirming again. With lips as wet as hers I stood back and looked at the closely closed thighs and the fatty pouch of the well-quiffed quim between them.
"No, Thomasina," I heard faintly. "You're a monkey monster mouse with that tongue of yours. And who am I to teach you these tricks... at your age? If you must know, it was taken three times by my lord in the night, and it's had enough."
It didn't look to me as if it had and I was about to drop to my knees before the treasure when there were footsteps and Prendy came in, with her new and well-waxed string. I did not want all the world to know of our intimacy.
"Il faut souffrir pour �tre belle," sighed Lady Julia as the maid approached. "Get the smelling salts ready, Thomasina." The new lace was threaded through and the big woman's red head was soon rolling on her shoulders as the strings were taken in. It was an impressive spectacle. Prendergast knew her task and did not spare her lady whose legs began to loll, and pace, with the swinging of the yard and to the creaking and groaning of the tautening glace kid. Twice I held the bottle of salts to the flushing and straining face, so much in contrast to breast and belly below. Frowning and intent, the maid raised one knee and pressed it into the small of her patient's back, levering the laces so.
"Ah... oooh... oh!" She looked at me beseechingly. "I shall suffocate. I can't breathe."
"Suck in your stomach more, Ma'am."
"I caaaaan't."
"You must try more, really. I shall never get you to eighteen at this rate."
"Does it matter Prendy?"
"Lady Mildmount laces a seventeen. Sometimes a sixteen and a half. But never more than seventeen, regular." She gave a sigh at another contortion. "There's no help for it, Ma'am, I must swing ye."
"Oh no, please. Not this morning. I'll be good tomorrow."
But the inexorable maid went to the wall where was anchored the line of cord which, running over a ceiling pulley, suspended the yard. Drawing it higher a little she had Lady Julia a-tiptoe and more, her massive body hanging down like a side of meat. In this position, it was apparent, dangling from her wrists, she could oppose little or no resistance to the extra notching. Prendergast returned to her laces.
It seemed impossible to get these tighter. The dependent body was a tube from ribcage to lower waist whence flowed out the snow of the hips.
"A glass of water, Tommy, quick." Puff, puff. "God, but I declare I'll break in two." Puff, puff. "I can't hold it for ever, you know, Prendy. Oh, oh. Would it be... ouff... might it simplify... ouff... matters... if Tommy... it might help... "
The maid paused in her implacable operations. There was a long silence. Each one of us knew what was meant.
"Very well," said the maid calmly. "If that is what you wish. It may well help a half inch or so."
My knees struck the bedroom boards. Staring me in the face, within its coy red curls, Lady Julia's sex, summiting two peerless, fleshy thighs, parted invitingly as she moved on her two muled great toes.
"You see, there was something I wanted to tell you, Tommy. Your mother has been offered another position, in a neighboring county, and wishes to accept it, but does not want you to lose your advantages here. Her salary will be double. So you see, we've decided... that's Lord Stephen and I... since we have never had a child... with the agreement of your... ach... uuuuu... ough!"
Listening to her talking, and the increasing creak of tortured corset, my forehead against the steely cold of the belly-busk, I commenced with a long swish of my tongue up the whole thorough furrow. She gasped and arched back, but I sought, and found, the gristly stub of her sensation in a flash. It grew at once under my kiss.
"God... Tommy... like... you, oh, you might have been born to it, child."
She bucked and lunged, bumping into and at me, thus providing, it was plain, precisely the elasticity of movement which would allow the laces to be taken up yet tighter. Boldly, to stabilize her, I let my hands go behind and clasped those munificent buttocks as if to me. The feeling was a tactile delight, a finger lining each fatty overhang and I went to it with a will. Her delicious clit was of the same grand scale as all of her and for a moment it was a very tongue-to-tongue duel within her striving self.
"Finish with it, Thomasina," said Prendergast dryly, from the mists above.
"Uh... ah... oh Tommy, I'm going to... but I have to go... I don't know if I'll... you've laced me far too tight...
aaaaaaahhhh!"
Her sour cream poured in a steady flow into my grateful young mouth and, since it jerked on so, as if streaming from the firmament of her depths, over my chin and adown her tensened thighs. At that moment I knew I wanted Reggie's strong self up me to the eyes.
"Uuuuuuuh!"
"Has she spent," Prendergast asked me.
"You mer-might describe it so, I fear," said Lady Julia exhaustedly. "But if you don't let me down at once, Prendy, there's going to be an awful, a horrible, a ghastly... accident behind." As the maid let her down and began unfastening her wrists from the yard, she shot me a flushed smile and shucked her mules - "Sorry if I was copious, Thomson. I'm afraid I always do a lot."
"It was lovely, milady," I said.
But she was already running nimbly, for all her size, on stockinged feet to the adjoining bathroom and her commode there. I was still kneeling and, I suppose, licking my lips like a cat after cream.
A swinging slap sent my head ringing.
"Degenerate hussy! You needn't think that that entitles you to any special privileges."
It was as I thought. Prendergast was furiously jealous.
"Lick it up," she said, pointing. And I bent quickly without minding, and licked up the hot drop that had fallen as if precisely, just between Lady Julia's perfumed mules.
"If I had my way you'd get a licking like last night's twice a week, regular."
"Don't worry. Prendy," I assured her. "I won't tell anyone." Categoric rumblings came from the bathroom.
"Anyway, I think you're the most beautiful of all. If ever I could honor you too, I would. Happily."
"When I need your tongue to lap my cunt.. oh run along with you, trollop, quick."
I went to put order in my dress and self, for I wished to appear my best on my tryst. My imagination had been all quickened and provoked and I yearned to see Reggie again and feel his warm spear sliding up me with those lovely pulsing strokes that; - my lady Julia was right - are the most precious caresses a girl may know.
Mother met me in the course of the morning and I told her what I'd heard. She confirmed that she was leaving, but would be back to see me from time to time, and we exchanged many loving kisses and sweet tears at the thought of this, our first separation. She was a soft, passive person who (I thought now) needed a man to support her in all senses, and such I hoped she would find in her new, and much advanced, post, for it seemed she was to fill a role not unlike that of Mrs. Wilson in our household. I was to be on my own.
"But," she ended, holding me on her lap, "it is to be a great test for you, darling. The Ushers have never had a child and Lady Julia wishes to take you into the upper house entirely. Yes, you are to be apprenticed as their ward, their youngling. Imagine your luck, my dear. To be brought up as a very noble. A room of your own upstairs, to eat and live with them and - if they like you enow - to be wholly adopted into their family. But you must not tell anyone about it yet. It is a secret."
I burst into tears of happiness on my mother's neck, and tears of sorrow too, that she was leaving me. There was too much for my young and untrained mind to soak in or swallow: first, Reggie, then tins - it was a surfeit for my undeveloped mental digestion. I resolved to obey mother, as always, in everything and not to tell him at our meeting. And I did not.
He was at the cave before me and we kissed with beating hearts, our mutual excitement intensified by the risk.
"Did you catch it?" he said, then.
I nodded with a smile, and it was a proud one, somehow.
"How did you guess?"
"Dunno. One can tell. See it in a chap's face, in a way. Hell, Tommy, I'm terribly sorry. Was it awfully tight?"
"Tight enough," I said. "Six of the best in the stables from the groom. I'd rather not repeat the dose, thanks."
"Golly! And I'd cut you first, too. Poor Tom. Did it hurt a great deal?"
"I thought so. But," and my eyes brightened, "it was worth it, Reggie."
He kissed me again.
"What with?"
"Harness strap. Hard."
"Bare?"
"No. Over my knickers."
"And did he give you plenty of time to think about it, between cuts, like my mater does?"
I nodded again. "But why?" I asked then. "Did you...?"
"Yes, I was caught out too."
"How?"
"Wet hair." He grinned and ran his fingers through his mop of light brown curls. "She kissed me and tasted salt. So I was taken up at once and it was twelve with the quirt. You know, whipcord switch. Sometimes I'm glad to be going back to school in a few days' time, she cuts me so tight. Worse than if I'd had a father, I'm sure. None of the other chaps I know get it so bad, I'll swear I rather go two dozen in the bill, that's with the birch, I mean, than even get six with that switch. I'm hoist with my hands behind and it's bare bum, so I can't void the cuts nor slip a kerchief in my trews, as sometimes we do at school, and the way she strokes I tell you I'm done by five, or six, though this time - 'cos I felt I was bearing it for you, Tommy - I got up to eight without shouting. But the last few undid me, quite."
"I've heard she brings you up hard. Poor Reggie."
"She's an absolute demon, I do believe she enjoys it. Knows exactly where to come in order to hurt most, and just when to hit in, too. She gets me in such agony by the end that she can drag it out for minutes. Well, look."
Turning to the wall of the cave, he dropped his trousers and took up the tail of his shirt behind. I gasped aloud. His sturdy boy's buttocks were brightly wealed from top to bottom. On the left these weals were dark red, rather short and thin; on the right they were darker and ran out to a cruel black where fang-like blotches and lumps clawed the white skin. I touched one wonderingly, and it seemed hard and hot.
"What's... that?"
"Where the trainer falls."
"Trainer?"
"Lash at the tip. I think it's three thongs of some 'specially hardened twine, or something; all I know is it's unbearable after a few, it bites in so. And if she can land one or two on the same spot... but come, Tommy, now show me yours."
This day I turned with the accepted complicity of our confidence and love, raised my skirt and shift and lowered my drawers.
"Ouch! He did put it across you too, didn't he. And got well inside 'em, eh."
"That's because I was bent over a trestle and spread so apart."
"This one," and he traced the lowest streak, "must have been a beaut'."
"It was," I admitted, "but I'd take them all over again for you, Reg. I'd go through hell and high water if needs be."
"Me too."
"Let me comfort your poor man, then."
His homunculus, which had been retracted and tiny while talking of his beating, had recovered at sight of mine and hung out half stiff; with the practice I seemed now to be acquiring I dropped to my knees before a second sex that day and took it in my mouth where it jumped like a strangled trout. I soaked it in my saliva, ran my tongue up its length once or twice, and teethed its underbelly. It was firm as a rock in a flash.
Suctioning my lips I slid them up and down the burly rod and was rewarded at once by his whispers of pleasure, and his hands in my hair at the back.
"Tommy... please... aaaah, so... but I'm afraid... you go on like this, someone not so far away is going to ger - get... a mouthful!"
Though I was working with gusto I had not expected him to go off so soon and tried to draw back. But master would have none of it and clamped my face to him with his hands, cramming my mouth till I choked.
At the first salt spew I managed to struggle free, only to meet his joyful ejaculation full in my face. The fisheye shot at my gaze in swift hot licks, until I seemed to recoil dazed, my face streaming with the stuff.
"I'm sorry," I heard from afar, "didn't mean to shoot off so fast, but I've never had that done me before."
"I'm sorry, too," I said, surveying the damage, "I wanted that lance up me again."
"Oh, it'll be right as rain in a jiffy. After a swim. Come, take your things all off, Tommy, though, I say, I'm sorry I did inundate you so."
I was mopping vaguely at the new baptism. "It's all right. I just hadn't tasted spunk before. It is salty, and that's the truth."
"Sorry I did such a lot."
Now where had I heard that before?
We plunged into the surf ecstatically, feeling it cleanse and rinse us. But we had no plans, either of us, to qualify for another hiding and came out soon, Reggie with his hair quite dry this time. He rubbed himself down in the sun, where his ball-sack began to relax from the cold of the sea and the anemone of his manhood to expand as he talked.
"The worst souse of all," he said, "is when she makes me dress like a girl. Yes, really, Tommy, just like you - short skirt, pumps stockings and bloomers. She flunks that keeps me at home - so's I won't show the disgrace - and it does. But... on your back and let me get at you, lovely."
I stroked my bruised buttocks. "I'd rather not sit it out today, if ye don't mind, Reggie."
"All right. Turn round then and grab the back of your knees. Feet further apart now."
So he took me from behind and it seemed to go twice as deep; it was a long, steady ramming once my juices were aroused and I came before he knew it. He kept on at me and, bending further yet, I could see the slick piston sliding in and out of the pout of my ready lips, with wettened matt and tangle of cunt-hair.
The sight excited me so I stiffened in bliss again, and staggered as he went on plunging. Now he was too long for me, if anything, and I wanted him to finish.
"We haven't got all day, Reg," I hissed over a shoulder. "Now come and have done with it. Shoot into me, you can't get any deeper than this."
"I could keep this up all day, and all night too," he declared, without desisting in his attack. "You don't know what it does to me to see your bum all wealed like this, rolling about. I'd like to see you get it one day, Tommy, and I don't mind confessing so."
"I'll bet you would, Master. But now give it to me, dash it. Come into my guts, you can't get any stiffer, you feel like a poker, an' I'm ready to juice again when you want."
"All in good time," he said, reaching over and grasping my breasts. And it was. And it was heaven again.
That evening we scaped scot-free and I was glad, because I could not have borne another across my bottom then; even the touch of my skirt seemed to irritate me behind. And we were lucky, too, the time after that. Then came the final parting. We made our rendezvous and it was to be the last - until the winter holidays, at least. Reginald was returning to school the following morn.
We were to meet at four. It was a clear sunny day with the clouds scudding smooth in the sky, like washed pebbles in the pale blue. I felt a phase of my life was ending, and a new one starting. The two people I loved dearest in the world were departing, my mother and my lover. And the first preparatives had been already made for my move into the great house above. Was my fortune to be made for ever? Fate had in any case smiled from above and I was happy in my luck.
The morning was enlivened by one incident belowstairs. Molly, the big scullery maid, had been caught lightfingered again and Mrs. Wilson had decided to send her packing. This was a dire fate in those days, when an employer's chit could ruin a servant for further employ for life, at least in the better houses. Apparently Molly had felt as much for, though a taciturn soul, she had begged to be allowed to expiate her sin on the trestle. Finally Mr. Wilson had agreed, grimly promising "a good 'un." Mr. Jorrocks being away at the horsefair that day, the correction was to take place on his return that evening or night. We under-girls discussed it as we worked, wondering how many the poor woman would get this time. I felt sorry for her from experience now and whispered, "Rotten luck, Moll" as I passed once. But she only shrugged, her round peasant face bovine and impassive; and I began to realize our difference in sensibility. It was clear the waiting meant little to her, though to me it would have been an agony of apprehension, conjuring up in my mind and imaginings trestle, bum and swinging strap, all perfectly occupied in punishment.
At three when I slipped into our room to secrete the small strip of oiled sponge by mother's bed, I found it to be gone. I may have been a silly billy in those days but my head was not entirely empty, and I knew that if Reggie was to hose all that stuff into me I'd better take precautions.
There had been times in the past as a child when I'd lain awake at night and seen mother coming in and washing and attending to herself between the legs and slipping out this spot of sponge. I was curious but unheeding, yet I knew what it was for. What man she had been with I did not know, only hoped he had made her happy. It was the same with Lily and Joany when I saw their expressions change of an evening at the housekeeper's whispered, "Milord would like to see you upstairs." And the girl would go off with a wink or a satisfied smirk. Now, however, I bethought me. Did Lord Stephen not find enough to content him in what commodious cunt of his spouse? Was he pleasuring his servants as well?
There was no time to debate. I was at the cave ten minutes before the hour. And I waited and waited. And grew more and more alarmed. At this rate I should be seriously late. But I had to see my beloved, or die.
Suddenly, in the low sun, I saw a girl swinging down the heather of the far cliff. I took fright and hid. Pelting steps on firm wet sand. I crouched ever further back. She was coming in. I had been seen at last!
Then she stood in the entrance, short skirt standing out from sturdy legs, arms akimbo, the sun behind her.
Her hair was short and she was tall and then I was bursting into laughter and throwing myself into her... his arms.
"You look so funny as a girl, Reggie."
He was grinning when we kissed. "I'm sorry I was so late but it was a frightful souse trying to get away, y'see. She was all over, like a cat, and I do hate that switch so, you know. I have to wear these till I go back.
Don't I look a fool?"
I stood and admired him, laughing. The stuff of the skirt was lifted in front by something I seized and wrung with one hand.
"I didn't know girls kept young crowbars under their smocks," I chafed. "Good Lord, Reggie, but it's hard.
You could hang a hat on this one."
"That's because it wants to do you proud," he said, undressing. "Quick now."
I shall pass over the moments that ensued, and which the reader can well imagine without the assistance of mere words. Suffice it to say that I returned to the kitchens drunk with content and sorrow at such parting, salty, sandy, soaked inside and out, oozing sperm and - thoroughly late. It was no surprise at all to be told I would be "sent to the stables" again.
"And this time it'll be ten," said Mrs. Wilson tartly, "if I have anything to do with it."
Until six I existed. I could not eat anything at all, and later wished I had. The other girls counseled me to sit on stone or, if possible, ice and other nostrums of the sort, but frankly I knew they were not really sorry for me least of all now I was being elevated to the great house. Joan, in particular, grinned as she went off to bed: "With a nice strong bum like yours, Tommy, you won't feel a thing."
And Lilly said, "Tell me what it's like in the morning."
At ten I was alone in the main maids' sittingroom with Molly and feeling very frightened, indeed. Our contrast in temperaments could not have been greater. She sat in leaden fashion, staring dully in front of her; I wrang my hands, got up and sat down and occasionally paced the room.
"But ten, Molly," I protested to her, "ten. You have had ten, have you not? Does it seem to go on and on? Oh I am sure I cannot bear the half of them, truly."
"It won't last for ever," was all she said.
By midnight I was blubbering, and had been out to the pot five times.
"I'm only... a g-g-girl... and I can't bear it like you do, M-moll... and he fair hewed me in half the last time...
and that was on'y six...
A snore was all that answered me. The woman had folded her arms and dropped her head and was sound asleep. Mrs. Wilson looked in then.
"Feeling nice and funky, Thomasina? Piss all ye like, me girl, I'm going to see to it you get a tanning you'll really remember."
"I der-don't... w-w-want... to be whipped... on the b-b-bottom," I wailed on hopelessly. "I won't... never... go down there again."
She laughed. "A little late for such resolutions, I fear." She sent Molly's head rolling with a swinging slap.
"Wake up, you. 'Tis good for you to sit here and reflect. Mr. Jorrocks won't be long now and with a little ale under his belt I wager he'll lay on. Oh yes, I think I can guarantee you a warm bottom shortly, wench."
And so it was. There was the clatter of horses' hooves across the stable yard and the slam of a door. I had pulled myself together somewhat now execution was so near but when Mrs. Wilson appeared with a lantern and beckoned, my heart slipped to my boots again. I followed behind Molly's impassive back. It might have been that of a cow going to slaughter.
We were led across and stood inside the main stable, to the smell of ammonia and the stamping of horses.
Mrs. Wilson went through to the groom and before she closed the door we heard: "I have two girls for you to whip, Mr. Jorrocks, if you please, and one on 'em's a corker."
"Oh Molly, I'm so frightened," I said.
"Do you think I'm not?" she answered. I looked into her clear, snub face in the half-dark; the wispy hair was held back in a slide but her brown eyes gazed out unblinking.
"Yo don't look it," I said.
"Say to yourself, it'll hurt perhaps but it'll soon be over."
"Oh but how it hurts, how it hurts."
"Try to relax your sides. It only hurts worse if you stiffen. The tail's the worst."
The door opened. "Come on, you."
"Me too?" I asked, gulping now it was really to begin.
"Won't do you no harm to see a proper whipping. Stand over here."
Mr. Jorrocks was already in his shirt sleeves and, in the light of the oil lamp, seemed flushed; a tankard stood on his desk.
"Tak' the big 'un first," he said, busying himself with some adjustments to the trestle, already brought forward and much in evidence in my eyes.
"Stand out, Molly," said Mrs. Wilson, "and strip off. There will be no question of shame as I shall be present.
Nor is it the first woman's backside Mr. Jorrocks has seen bare."
I stood stunned. So it was to be "bare bum," after all. I shivered as I watched the servant take off her clothes, one after the other, slowly and almost indifferently, folding them on a chair. Once she asked, "How many?" in a low voice that Mrs. Wilson seemed not to hear but that was all.
She stood in the light with her back to me, entirely bare but for her shoes and black lisle stockings, secured with two coarse elastic garters on either thigh. She was sloping-shouldered, almost narrow of upper body but from the waist down filled to a brace of really large bottoms, thick through and notably at their base where the overhang crease ran to the side. This was their widest point. I reflected how different feminine posteriors could be. Lady Julia's might have been more sumptuous, I did not know, for it was a matter of kind more than degree. Molly's bottoms were quite different, of another breed, hard, slabby and mottledlooking - fit to be beaten. I could not feel pity for them, least of all in the light of what she'd done.
"All right, Miss Lightfingers, put your hands behind you." They were secured in a cuff at the small of her back. "Now then. This is a last chance and let's hope the medicine is sharp enough to cure you for good.
Once more and ye'll be chucked out, understand?"
"Yes'm."
"I'm ordering you fifteen across the arse - right up and down, please, Mr. Jorrocks - and to make the punishment fit the crime, a dozen on each hand arter. You won't be able to hold a spoon by the time he's done wi' ye, let alone steal one. And as for her bottom," tapping the weighty masses, "take a curry to 'er first, Mr. J. With all this meat she'll never feel a thing, else."
Silently stroking out his mustaches, the man took something gleaming from the wall; Molly regarded it closely, and with distaste, as he approached her with it.
And I gave another gulp of dismay as I stood. Placing the teeth of the curry comb at the exact base of the right cheek the groom drew it strongly upwards over the ripe curve of buttock up which it directly ran a sheaf of thin red lines. That comb had been designed for a horse's hard coat not a poor woman's skin. The man hissed soothingly as he worked, first up the right, then up the left, pressing so hard that the flesh ran up in rolls over the comb.
"Right inside 'em, too, Mr. J."
Molly had so far made no sign at this cruel tenderizing of her backward self, merely parting her legs to balance better against the currying. But now she looked back, mouth open, hands tied. Though not actually bleeding, the skin was all grated and scraped and it was obvious the effect would double her punishment to come.
"More on the right, Mr. Jorrocks, where the tip's to work 'er."
Molly lifted a leg. "I'd rather another cut nor this," she said.
"Ye'll have had enow by the time we's done with ye."
"Aiow!"
"More. Down on the right. You're letting 'er off to light, Mr. Jorrocks. Now then, lime her. Lime her rightly and this time I want to hear her squeal."
But she did not. With her bottoms looking like lead Molly was bent over the trestle to which she was further secured by short straps around the thigh, just above the garters. She was wide spraddled and since the central strut had been lowered at its head so bent that I think we all became uncomfortably aware, at once, of her fiercely bushy sex. Glistening and red it accused her tormentor like an eye.
It did not stay him an iota. The oiled thong thudded pitilessly into the hard, firmed-out bottom, drawing a lurid weal across the grazed skin. I jumped where I stood.
"One," said Mrs. Wilson, tightening her lips.
Fourteen more to come. The punishment proceeded as all punishments must and it struck me, watching with parched throat, as severity personified. The strap bit into the bent bottoms with sounds that spoke of pain. The whole trestle shook.
I was amazed at Molly's fortitude. After the fourth she involuntarily farted but that was all the sound she made. However, she would have been more than human had she shown no sign under this drubbing and by the time half a dozen were done her head, which had begun lowered, was lifted up and back, straining. With her arms behind her she seemed to jump her torso off the bar each cut, which she now accompanied by a gasped-out "Yes, sir," or the like. One side of her bottom was a blue bruise.
But these few manifestations were not enough for Mrs. Wilson. When a swinging number ten had failed to elicit more than a puff or pant through an open, somewhat drooling mouth she said, "Wait," and went to the side for a sponge which she filled with water and squeezed over the plum-colored posteriors. "Now cut down at her, Harry. Come low, and lime her."
This had immediate effect. The thong whistled in to where the teeth of the curry-comb had been stuck, and most marked. I could not quite see Molly's face and was unprepared for the sight when, after a couple like this, she turned it back for our inspection. Still unexpressive of pain, it was livid in hue and she was panting like a runner for breath.
"Not there, sir, please. But come at me higher an' I'll bear it."
"What did I tell you, Mr. J.? I knew she'd appreciate it at last."
"Guv' me another dozen on the rump, sir, but come off my legs. For pity's sake, stay off my legs. NOOAW!"
"Beginning to wake up, art'er all. Thirteen."
But it was all the satisfaction she had. Though she appeared striving to crawl over the trestle in her traces Molly absorbed the last two with no more than grunts; and when she was let up, her hands released, she did not prance and gasp as I. She seemed more dullened by the blows than anything, carrying her hands back pensively to her welted bottoms.
"Hardened slut!" said Mrs. Wilson. "Now hold out your hand."
Curiously, the whipping on the palms seemed to affect Molly more. Perhaps it was the result of the belting behind. The groom steadied her fingers with his and, standing well back, fairly slashed down his strap, catching the womanly hand so that the tip ate hard into the sensitive area at the start of the thumb. Molly turned and squirmed, her eyes screwed up, and finally only endured it by holding out her right (under threat of extra cuts for flinching off) through the vehicle of her left, gripping its wrist. When it was over on both, she tucked her hands under armpits, ducking and whistling with pain; it was several seconds ere she could compose herself to put on her things.
"Let that be a lesson to yer, hussy. There ought to be a cart-tail for the likes of you."
Watching poor Moll pull up cheap cotton knickers over those tumified cheeks and knowing my hour had come filled me with awful dismay. I found tongue.
"Please, Ma'am, I'm not to get it on the hands also, am I?"
"No, Tommy," she said, turning to me with another voice and a smile on her flushed face, "I think ye'll find ye've got enough after ten on the bum. Take off your things now, and get ready."
"All of 'em, mum?"
"All of 'em."
"L-like her?"
"Like her. That way Mr. Jorrocks can see where he laid the marks, an' follow arter. You'll learn a little lesson in arithmetic, too, girl. Ten ain't twice five, it's three times as much. An' you can writhe and wriggle as you like, there's nothing for it, ye've to swallow each one down an' bear it. Jus' tell yerself what happens to a silly disobedient girl with a pretty bottom."
Mrs. Wilson's eyes were glittering, her nostrils wide. Molly, redressed and no more worse the wear than a lowered head, went out with a murmured "Thank'ee, sir," to the groom. I looked at his long oiled thong and my hands went 'tween my thighs.
"Please'm, please. Don't give them me like that. Milly's a grown woman, I'm only a girl. You can't expect I swallow licks like that."
She replied with a laugh.. "I'm afraid you're going to have to. Now hurry up and strip, else I'll order you extra."
I looked about.
"Please. I have to... "
"Can't hold her water," interjected the groom with a gloomy nod. "Use that bucket, miss."
I looked at it and I looked at him. In front of them both?
"It's all right," I said, beginning to unbutton my stays.
"Well, make up your mind," said Mrs. Wilson. "It's natural enough to want to piss beforehand, but you've got to go through with it sometime, Tommy. Ay, that's better. What nice neat underthings y'wear. Place them there, so. You have a fine bottom and needn't be ashamed. Now come and bend over for ten."
I went forward in my stockings like Molly, but I did so with my hands on my bottom. They were fastened behind me, as hers.
"Please. Couldn't it be eight?"
"It could be twelve if you don't look sharp. Here. Over you go." I was spraddled and spread, the straps cutting into my thighs, my whole bum helplessly on display and shaking like a jelly. Like two jellies, perhaps I should say. Yet I had no shame. I was too scared for that. Until Mrs. Wilson pressed that cold sponge upon my hinders and the water trickled over my cheeks and into the crease and onto, and into, my pussy. It was strangely humbling to be so watered, and prepared. I began to sob. I was a blubbering lump who would have begged off for any bargain by the time Mr. Jorrocks came to address me. "Give 'er a beating to boast of, Harry."
The first stroke brought me swiftly to my senses. I cried aloud but my tears oddly stopped. I am bearing this for you, Reggie, I told myself, and held to gurgling grunts for five or six. He was coming down hard at me from high and full across the center of the cheeks. It hurt like fury and I tried to contract in and climb up over the trestle, which seriously hurt my stomach.
"Give her time. Nice and slow."
He really reamed those last cuts in and of course I had to cry out, and pant. The position with lowered head was more exposing and vulnerable and when the last cut had fallen and Mrs. Wilson undid my wrists I treated them to that sight beloved of connoisseurs of the rod, as I came to understand. I could not but jerk erect and clutch my flaming cheeks in the classic contraction of agony, face hot, mouth wide, straining. I kneaded at my poor sore flesh behind as though to pluck out the pain there and, with my legs still strapped wide to the trestle, I presented in my heavings and squirmings a most immodest spectacle. I could not care.
I knew only that ten resounding strokes of a sturdy strap had been laid across my hide and it was infernal pain I was feeling.
Mrs. Wilson was watching with her usual smile and an arm tucked in the groom's. "You've no idea what a comic you look like that, Tommy. You might be trying to jump out of your skin."
"It huuu... oh how it huuurts!"
"It wasn't meant to make you laugh, silly. But here, it's over now and I'll let'ee down."
She undid the thigh-straps, I duly danced the penitent's jig, got clad somehow and went over to bed, still holding in both hands bottoms that weighed like ten tons each one. It was mother's last night, she was departing on the morrow, and I tiptoed in not to disturb her so late. But when I looked at her cot I saw it was empty.
CHAPTER FIVE
"That girl," said Lady Berinthia Mildmount across the ormulu tea table, "has had a flogging. I can tell it in her eyes."
It was three days later. Mother had left the morning after my hiding and I had been promoted to the great house at once. I had my cozy room on the same corridor as Lady Julia's, already some becoming new clothes and here I was, sitting at the late tea table with my benefactors, trying to crack a plover's egg in seemly fashion. What's more, Lily no less was waiting on us. But Lily was one of those sweet souls who knew no malice, and was glad I had gone up in the world, whispering to me whatever she could to benefit and prosper by it all I might.
"In her shifty, averted, fight grey eyes," added Lady Mildmount then.
Julia sighed. "Alas, I fear that's all too true. Tommy had to be sent to the stables."
"A good licking never did anyone any harm," pronounced Lord Usher from beside the fireplace.
"Gad," said Sir Horace Wide with oafish grin, "you and I know what it was like at the block, eh, Stevie?"
"Can't say I envy Reggie in the bill tins half."
"What for, girl?" asked Lady Mildmount. "And look me in the eyes when you answer."
I plucked up courage - it was still difficult in those days for me to look my superiors in the face always - and gazed at her. Reginald's mother was a perfect harpy. Aged somewhere in her mid-forties, she was a brilliant waspish brunette, her hair piled and her discontented, small-featured face so highly painted and glossed I almost expected the maquillage to crack. Everything about her was bright - lips, eyes and shining skin - and her lean, active body was keen and well-conditioned, so corseted that even now she creaked as she leant across to me on an elbow. She was, like Julia, wearing a habit since the four had been out riding.
"Out of bounds, Ma'am," I said uneasily. I had been taught to drop the milady.
"Where?"
"To the beach, I fear," said Lord Usher with a yawn. "Never go there m'self. Was it interesting, Minor?" he asked, using a term he had picked for me in my altered position.
"Most interesting!" Lady Mildmount checked my reply, her eyes still gimleting into mine. "I've had to flay Reggie for the same offense these hols. And he was down there again his very last day, even though I had him in his shame-clothes. Came back with sand in his shoes, y'know. There was nothing for it but to flog him, I fear."
"Gad, but you're a martinet with that lad," said Sir Horace, with (I thought) some admiration. "Saw the infliction myself. As did the whole household, come to that, for she summoned all the servants, y'see, and gave him it fore them in public, right in his girl's clothing, too."
"Which were removed for the purpose," commented Lady Mildmount.
"I'll certify they were," went on her friend. "Drawers dropped and skirts not simply pinned up his back, but to his back. Two safety pins through the skin."
"Berry," reproved Julia, "I believe you're a she-devil, darling."
Lady Mildmount's hard black eyes were still musing, as if amusedly, over mine. My heart was pounding and I was flushing deeply.
"There was nothing for it, after such direct disobedience. I had to cut him to ribbons."
"And did," asseverated Sir Horace. "With this." He took a long whipcord switch, braided in red, from a chair and sliced it through the whisperingly protesting air. "Ain't seen such a flogging since school. The poor chap tried his best to take it bravely but he was howling like a puppy by the end. I wouldn't want to be Reggie in the bill for a while. Wager he'll wear those traces under his trousers for a month."
My eyes blinked.
"I sent him with a special chit to his tutor, too," went on his mother calmly, noticing my inadvertent symptoms. "There's nothing for it but the utmost severity. It's all they understand."
"And they'll be grateful for it later, Berry."
"But direct disobedience I don't tolerate. I've decided that next holidays, the winter vac, since my son seems to like the sea so much I shall, with your permission, require him to run down to it naked before breakfast each morning and plunge in... "
"In January!"
"What a cold bath!"
"And come and show himself to me after, all wet and dripping," she went on evenly. "In addition, he'll get six each Monday morn, just to start off the week right."
"Berry, you're a Borgia!"
"But come," she said, re-addressing herself to me, "what did you get for your error, girl?"
I blushed and stammered - "T-ten, Ma'am."
They laughed at my mien. Lord Usher said, "Come, Minor. You can do better than that. Lady Mildmount wants details."
"Intimate details," she footnoted.
"Expatiate," said Sir Horace, grinning.
"Ten strokes... with the harness strap... bent over... over the trestle."
"Bare?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Say after me," said Lady Mildmount slowly. "Ten juicy licks of the strap across my bare bum, bent over tight."
"Berry," protested Julia.
I repeated the words, a trifle sulkily. There was a silence.
Lady Mildmount then said, "This child ought to be flogged regularly, until she develops a healthy fear of the rod."
"We were thinking of taking on a tutor and coaching her up, you see," said Julia. "Preparing her for Miss Ponsonby's, perhaps."
"She'll be flogged there," said Lady Mild-mount coldly.
"That's all too true," Julia nodded sadly.
"Plum has been doing some tutoring," said Sir Horace, thinking. "Remember Plum in the Library, Stephen?
He couldn't half wring a new boy's withers."
"Wilfred Pelham?" Lord Usher also thought. "Remember him well. Only too much so. He gave me a most imperial swishing once."
"This girl," came in Lady M. with what I considered to be a monotonous reiteration, "needs regular flogging, if she is to ever think of Miss Ponsonby's. Plenty of birch, really tight. No gel knows what a chastisement is till she's gone three dozen with the birch."
"I got four once," said Lady Julia, "and I'll never forget it."
"I'd like to see this girl get four right now."
"I know you would," chaffed Sir Horace. "You were hot as poor Reggie's bloody bottom after you'd whipped him."
Lady Mildmount turned to Julia thoughtfully. "I always find it twice as agreeable after exercise, don't you."
Julia lowered heavy lids. "I wouldn't know... after that sort of exercise, I mean."
"Nonsense, Ju. You know you can never have enough of it. Stephen ought to whip you once and take you, after. You'll find it twice as sweet."
"Berry, please. The child."
But the woman prattled on as if I did not exist and, for her, in a sense I did not.
"Confess, Horry, you got a liberal bedewing of that staff of yours in my bedroom later."
"It was running down her thighs before I started," said the grinning baronet in answer.
"I seemed to hear the lad shouting still. It was divine. Couldn't stop myself spending for minutes. No, this girl needs correction. And also body training. A girl her age isn't supposed to let her hips swing about like a prostitute's. Put her to the yard and corset her. Whip her bottom till she knows what punishment really means. Then she may get through Miss Ponsonby's polite academy." She sat back, fanned her face with a mouchoir and said, "Stand up and show your marks, girl."
"Berry, she's only a child," Julia begged on my behalf. "She's only beginning. And in front of the gentlemen."
Her intercession seemed to infuriate the vixen.
"What is this, Julia? She should feel nothing. To be truly trained, she must learn she is nothing. A stock or stone. Come, gel, show your buttocks quickly."
I did as bid. Frankly, the woman frightened me to death. I turned, pulled up my skirts and, albeit crimsoning, dropped my drawers to my knees. The company duly inspected.
"A sound drubbing."
"Jorrocks lays on."
"Did it hurt, Thomasina?"
"Yes, sir."
"Red, mauve, purple, black, and now green, gold and yellow," crooned Lady Mildmount, tapping one nervous nail-end on the table. "A good weal goes through all colors of the rainbow. The belt bruises, but the birch stings. You can go much longer with the birch. You can hurt more. Those bottoms were made for beating, purely. Do up your things, gel, and get out of here. And if either of you gentlemen would be gracious enough to give a poor deprived widow some glandular relief... "
"Stephen's, I fear," said Lady Julia with a chuckle, while I dressed, "is bespoke."
"I can recommend my escort's," said the implacable visitor, "strong Hampshire meat with well-filled potatoes."
"It's a recipe I haven't tasted," Julia laughed.
"I can guarantee the stuffing."
"I might have to ask my lord and master first."
Lord Usher ambled up. "I haven't run through Berry for years. As I recall, she's tight as the deuce."
"Not after the third effusion," corroborated Sir Horace.
"Not after seeing a well-whipped bum," said Lady Mildmount.
"Well, if you will give me permission, dear."
"I will, granted that somebody will stick something into poor little me before too long."
"I have no objection," said Sir Horace.
"I have no objection," said Lady Berry.
"Did you say little me?" said Lord Usher. "I warn you, Horry, you're dealing with a deep one. Even that prodigy of Pelham's - if you recall it - could be accommodated her. I tell you the first two inches scarcely count."
"Horace has nine," said Lady Berry.
Julia gave a mock-curtsey, and a merry twinkle. "Do you mean to make me feel it to the throat, sir?"
"Right behind the eyes," he said, grinning.
Lady Mildmount had arisen and I realized I had been staring. I caught a glint of her sharp even teeth. She flexed her aching switch in tow.
"Stare, stare like a bear, tell your ma to cut your hair."
I dropped my eyes.
"You certainly need a lesson in manners, child, and I do hope one day I may be privileged to give it you.
With this. I'd take you standing up, nice and fleshy, and I'd lace you till you wished you hadn't been born with a bottom. Now get out of here!"
I fled.
I even forgot to curtsey.
In the days that ensued it quickly got about that the Ushers intended to groom me up for a formal girls' boarding school in a year, as a first step to my taking my place in the aristocracy. It was pretty universally conceded, belowstairs, that I was woefully ignorant of how to set a table properly, let along Latin, Greek, maths and the pianoforte, those staples of young ladies' academies, without which our kingdom might totter, But the news that Lord Stephen was looking for a private tutor, to coach me up, was greeted by Mrs. Wilson, at least, with her customary maddening malicious pleasure.
"Ye won't half get it from him, Miss Uppity," was her comforting gratulation on the impending event "you wait till 'e takes a strong birch to that snippy backside o' your'n. For sheer sting it'll make the strap seem like child's play. The twigs flick at the surface, see, and it's like a whiplash, that is, every one, and yet you can go long count. Why, I seen a couple of dozen drawn out almost three a minute at the Charity, that's seven or eight minutes in all, you mind, and a big girl of fourteen or more fair hollering her heart out every second on 'em. Do ye know what it is to 'whip in,' child?"
"No."
"It's when the very tips of the twigs are made to cut inside the cheeks." I winced in sympathetic memory of Reggie's single "half." Mrs. Wilson smiled affectionately, "It catches a woman where she's made and there's no hell like it this side of paradise. I seen the very threat of it reduce big girls to blubbering dumplings of apprehension. No, you ain't known what punishment is, till you been 'whipped in,' my girl."
On such cheerful monitions was I prepared belowstairs. At the same time I could not help being flattered and happy that this was happening to mere me, and that I was to be taught. I had always nursed an ardent love of learning, and I had never imagined this to be accomplished without some necessary tears. I was young and in heart and if Reggie was being swished (as they put it) at school, I could endure the same. I looked at myself over my shoulder in the mirror last thing at night, when the firelight threw warm shadows on my flesh and said, "Bottom, be brave. I am going to have to ask you big things to bear a little smart, but it is the interest of my soul above, and I'm sure you will co-operate. It will all be over one day."
It must have been some four nights after Lady Mildmount's visit that I was lying in bed with my light out, dreaming into dying embers, thinking of my treasured Reggie and his curly locks and open face, and also (I confess it) of his rampant young engine. My hand was stealing to the moist pit of my person when the door was flung open and my benefactors burst in, Lady Julia stooping at once to turn up a light.
"Here's news for you, Tommy dear, and we had to come and tell. We didn't wake you, I hope."
"No. I was awake."
"Thinking virtuous thoughts, I trust," said Lord Usher, smiling. "As all girls should."
They had evidently been on the point of retiring and had decided on the idea, for they were partly dressed, milord in ruffled shirt and trousers and Julia resplendent in tight corselet, high heels, dark stockings, and cream cambric drawers that ran skin-tight to the trim and bows at her knees. She was standing with one arm slung about her husband's waist, its hand moving up and down restlessly, and one might have thought her pose affected or put-on, so pouted back, in profile to me, was the pigeon of her perfect posteriors - until one saw the inward curve of busk at belly where it strove to reach the close furry mat, visible under the muslin.
They both looked flushed, as after wine. Lord Usher, I knew, had just returned from town.
"Poor sleepy mouse, let me stoke up your fire."
She went to the grate, smiled and dipped for the poker and leant over slowly in that L which the corset only allowed her. Both Lord Usher and I watched as the thin stuff drew taut over the great jaunty curve of those haunches and, as if divining out appreciation, the magnificent woman turned, showing us her positive back.
It spread and glowed in the firelight, the slit in the drawers widening as she moved. I do not know whenever I have seen it look so well, even under velvet.
"I do declare you've been putting on weight, Ju," the man declared, on a growl. She rejoined him, flushed, immediately running an avid hand up and down the side of his trousers.
"What is it that the poker always reminds me of? You wouldn't know, would you, Tommy?"
"I'll give you one idea, shortly," he said.
Her eyes were shining and dewy with desire as she eyed me.
"It's been decided," she said. "Aren't you happy, Thomasina? Stephen was to town today, and it's all arranged. You are to have a tutor, that same Mr. Pelham we were talking on. He's to start in with you next week. A school chum of my husband's."
"A severe man," said Lord Usher pregnantly, "albeit a fair one. I fear he may flog to get results - it was a condition of his coming - but one day you will thank us for that, Minor."
"Yes, sir," I said, from under the sheets.
"You are joining a privileged class and life will be easy for you later. For that reason we insist on duties accompanying those rights, on a period of discipline of all the senses, to acquire self-control, the highest of virtues. It is a motto amongst us, as it is at Miss Ponsonby's academy, that we ask nothing of the lower orders which we would not bear ourselves."
"Yes, sir," I said.
"You will be thrashed at our girls' schools, so might as well start now."
"You certainly will," said Julia with an operatic shudder. Her caressing hand had become more categoric; it was rubbing up and down her husband's thigh. "Heavens, how those cuttings with the birch did tingle. The sting seemed unendurable at times, yet we was supposed to stick it out and bear it all in ladylike manner.
Poor comportment under the rod was a signal disgrace, and punished with extra cuts. Phew, I can feel it now." As if to mime out her words she ran her hands over her plump, protruding bottoms behind. "We got 'em from the Matron, you see, and after a long lecture from the Head we usually knelt over a chair, so." She turned and continued her imitation for us, reaching over the chairback she had selected in my room with two fluttering, dove-like hands. "A mistress held us forward, so. That was to prevent us sitting back on our heels, a dreadful crime. Then down with the pajammies and zisch... ouch! Zisch... houu... zisccch... ow!"
"An excellent 'personation," said Lord Usher contemplating his wife's admirably simulated writhings at the imaginary cuts.
"But that was only three," she said in mischievous surprise, rejoining her spouse. "Imagine twenty-one to come, or thirty-three to come, for a serious error of conduct. The mistresses watching and drinking in your contortions and the Head deriding you for lack of courage occasionally. But hello, what have we here? Now I know what that poker reminded me of." One hand now travelled the length of Lord Usher's visibly aroused manhood, under his trousers. She turned to me, however. "To think, talking of whipping has done that, Tommy. Aren't men beasts, really!"
"The stimulation was ocular as well as aural, m'dear."
"Well I'm glad you didn't lose all your energy at Mrs. Moat's today. You know, mouse, there's houses in London where our men go express to see girls flogged. Can't think why they go to the trouble. No girl ever got a better thrashing than at Miss Ponsonby's and that's the truth. But the worst of all was the soko."
"What was that?" I asked.
"Curious, are you?" she smiled. "Birch made of whalebone strips. Stung abominably, some said twice as much. Yet didn't break the skin. I never had it, thank heavens, I got me four doz once and slunk around out of harm's way for the rest of my days."
"I've always thought," opined Lord Usher, who was now being thoroughly massaged in front by his concupiscent companion, "that the bull's pizzle was the most logical, and symbolical, instrument for feminine fustigation. Y'know," he explained, "as used in Hungarian prisons, I understand. Never seen one m'self.
Bull's member stretched by weights."
"I don't believe this one could stretch any more," said Lady Julia on a kiss. "I say, Tommy, have all your marks gone from that tanning now?"
"Almost," I said. "Except on the right."
"I know, that's where it really fetches, isn't it. I say, you wouldn't mind showing, would you?"
Warmed by the talk as by the fire I rolled on my belly and, with a certain vanity natural to my age, rolled down my sheets and up my gown. Julia, now thoroughly worked up, it was plain, could not restrain herself and started stroking and crooning at once.
"It's a beautiful pair, Tommy, so soft and downy, and deep in the division. You can be really proud. If I were your husband to-be there's only one way I'd wish to take you, darling, but you aren't supposed to know about such things yet, I imagine."
"It's a full buttock," said Lord Stephen, a little hoarsely, "and I don't doubt but that Pelham will give it its due. I know I could, now."
"And I know you could, you battering-ram, you. Now roll into bed, Tommy. We two must go before we burst."
As she bent to kiss me good night her heavy breasts lingered smotheringly on my face, rubbing it a little.
"Do you know all about things, dear? You've helped put a stallion to a mare, haven't you?"
"A beauty," I confirmed.
"As regards what they call the facts of life I suppose it will be our task to educate you." She stooped to douse the lamp and stood up heavily flushed, and excited-looking, in the fire's dying glow. She appeared to be grasping her husband by his balls and suddenly she gave a sort of whinny - "Go on, Stevie, she showed you hers." And with her left fingers she sprang out of his flies the jack-in-the box of his ready erection. In the firelight it stood belly-high and big-veined, certainly bigger than Reggie's if somehow more cruel in appearance, and I gazed at it in awe. As if loath to let go any part of it she still massaged his balls in her right.
"And that's what goes into the feminine vesicle, Tommy. Isn't it a big angry-looking brute!" It approached me, by dint of her tugging and Lord Usher murmured gently, "Steady, the Buffs!"
"Kiss it, mouse. No. I said kiss it, not lick it, you minx. This particular item has got to come with me. Work to do, work to do." And with her most roguish wink she tugged her unprotesting husband out of my room by it like a nose. "At any rate, that she-devil didn't quite twist it off you, Steve," was the last I learnt from her lips.
CHAPTER SIX
Mr. Pelham alarmed me from the start. From the first moment I set eyes on him I knew that he was a man who could, and would, whip well. Tall and lean, with broad forehead and pale eyes, he stood curiously immobile and compelling before the hearth of Lord Usher's private study that cold October morning he arrived, a week later.
I had been helping with the mop that morning, more out of habit than anything, aware only that a leathertopped four-wheeler had drawn up outside the front entrance and a cart at the back, and that, amid much stamping and shouting, some heavy impedimenta was being unloaded from the latter and carried into the house. These did not appear to consist in trunks and I was unready for it when Mrs. Wilson met me with her worst wink: "Well, Miss, yer tutor's come, and what did I tell ye! He's got rods as long as you are, and I don't doubt but that he means to use 'em, neither. You're going to be wishing you stayed downstairs wi' me, lass. That man means to cut you to ribbons 'fore he's done, I can see it in his hands. Well, what are you waiting for now, silly? Off with you to milord's study, sharp. They're waiting for you."
And she sketched a sarcastic curtsey. I put away my mop, cleaned my hands, induced some order in my dress, and hastened along the passage to the East Wing.
Mr. Pelham was standing in commanding attitude before the fire, when I was bidden in, Lord and Lady Usher flanking him. He was dressed elegantly but without affectation, his close fawn trousers, strapped tight under the insteps, showing the muscular arcs of his thighs. But Mrs. Wilson was right. It was his hands that held. Hairless, freckled to their knuckles, they were currently engaged in bending elastically back across his chest two long and yellow canes - no three, I saw with a shudder, and then with a shock. I saw there were four. Perhaps my jaw dropped at sight of this superlative strength needed for such ease of grip, for I thought his eyes twinkled. Those large, oddly square hands were the strongest I had ever seen. The strongest I have ever known. All I can say now is that from that very first moment I felt they could punish through and through. The man was altogether capable of, and made for, his task: discipline by the infliction of pain. My heart dropped.
"Here's the young cub, Pelham," said Lord Usher with a smile at the timid dropping of my knee. "Due for Miss Ponsonby's come next September. D'you think you can lick her into shape within the year?"
"Have a shot at it." Then the tutor's first words to me struck cold: "Had a taste of the birch-twigs, have you?"
Julia Usher answered for me. "I fear Tommy has that pleasure still to come."
"Reserved for the near future, eh. I gather they do go a few dozen at Miss Ponsonby's these days, though."
Julia gave a pretty tremor, under green velvet. "I can vouch for that, sir. I was up for four myself once and can remember each lick as if it were yesterday."
"Bare bum?" the man asked bluntly, turning his pale eyes on Julia's brimming orbs. There was a silence, and she flushed.
"Oh the... unprotected person, sir, yes. It was considered that no punishment worthy of the name could be given with the birch over clothing."
"Excellent principle," he rejoined briskly, scanning her amplitude. "Yet I have heard, I do believe, they go as many as six dozen there these days."
Julia lowered her eyes. In her hung head there seemed to be some prescient consciousness of punishment.
"I did see two girls go as many. They had lied, and cheated, together. They was public-ally flogged before the whole school and were both in blood by half through, so strictly did the Matron cut. The last dozen was entirely unnecessary. One girl had to be helped out of hall when it was over. It was too many."
"I don't think so, Madam," Mr. Pelham came back quickly. "Did either repeat the fault, later? No? Then there you see it. No, I recognize only the use to the culprit of such service. And I believe girls can swallow their dose as well as boys."
"We had one mistress," Julia conceded, "who had been a governess to the young of both sexes. She admitted that there could be no discrimination in the matter. She even advanced the idea that, as regards the twigs, a girl could bear them better."
I listened, longing for some change of conversation, but it was not to be.
"Jove! How those first cuts stung," Lord Usher now entered with a grin. And I remembered Reggie.
"I must confess," Mr. Pelham pursued, "that the matter has until now remained academic for me, though I should be interested to see a good big girl go six with a well-pickled birch. I imagine it might be edifying."
"You have but to look in on our local Charity School then, sir," said Julia.
"Where but for the grace of God," came in Lord Usher, "Thomasina here would now be treading air over the back of a stout servant while a mistress hewed her about from behind like some convict."
"I have the feeling," interjected his sister, "that Miss Ponsonby will be even less clement."
"And it's for that we want you to train her up, Plum old chap. By George, I remember a swishing you gave one young Oppidan; he went out squealing like a stuck pig."
"Don't remember the occasion myself," returned Mr. Pelham, surveying my short skirt with icy eyes. "But, all the same, if I'm to do justice to this whippersnapper I'd prefer not to be handicapped, not by any nonsense about the weaker sex. Let's have her hair cut short and put her into proper boy's rig, what do you say, Usher? At least for her lessons. Then I can get to work on her properly; I can guarantee to harden her up for the worst that can happen in this vale of tears, if you give me a free hand."
"You have it and that's a prime idea." Lord Usher grinned round gratefully. "Mrs. Wilson will shear the lamb and, as for kit or rig, no trouble at all. I still have all my gear from that first awful year. Hard collar, short jacket, and trews - though they may prove a trifle snug on Tom's broad beam."
"Can work better on a tight breech," was the tutor's only comment on this.
"What do you propose to use, in particular?"
"Cane, birch and, when necessary, the leather. I've seen plenty of birch about here already, driving in. She shall put them up herself. Excellent training, thinking about it first."
"Well, don't cut her quite in two," laughed Lady Julia, looking down into my face. "She's a green girl, even if she has been to the stables once or twice."
"Oh I don't doubt but that she can go a few. A sound swishing never killed anyone. In any case, she'll just have to get used to it, that's all."
"Faith," said Lord Usher with ever-brightening eye, "I admit I shouldn't care to be in the bill to you with Tommy, for all the tea in China. Do you mean to make it Fridays, as it was for us?"
"Us too," said Julia.
"As it was, so it shall be," confirmed Mr. Pelham on a nod. "Fridays after dinner."
"The deuce but these rods look licky. What are they exactly?"
"Willows and, for serious work, an ashlar."
"Let me see them, old chap.'" The tutor surrendered the bundle of fasces, from which Lord Usher selected one. Its slippery supple quality as he flicked the air with it made my skin go goosey all over. The thing was pregnant with pain. "Understand they're introducing these all over. Quite the thing. In the schools, I mean."
"Yes," agreed Mr. Pelham, re-accepting the wand and doubling its great length almost in two, "Rugby has quite gone over now, I hear."
"Some say they are even more cruel."
"Than the birch? I have heard the complaint. Trouble is, a birching takes too long. If you hit hard, and I like to, you can slow a swishing to as few as three or four a minute, with maximum pain. As you may imagine, this impedes class work. For the classroom these canes are admirable. They cut sharp with but a few."
"But don't they bruise terribly?" asked Julia, frowning.
"Tolerably. But that adds to the desire to avoid repetition. A swishing on a bum already tender from the stick can be very salutory indeed. In my last job I started off by giving my two charges six of the best before breakfast each morning for the whole of their first week. You should have seen the result. Supple as gloves in no time. No, Ma'am, you must never let up when breaking a young'un into harness."
"And I doubt if you do, Mr. Pelham," she said with another chesty shiver.
He stared at her steadily an instant. "No. I don't. But this is my first essay with the fairer sex, as it is said. I'm afraid that will only, if anything, incline me to severity. What presumes to be weaker must be hardened all the more in the intenser fire. So come, let's see what we have to deal with here. Step forward, Miss."
The cane tapped a place on the carpet and I took up my stance there, dry-throated.
"Ever tried the cane?"
"No, sir."
This, it will be observed, was my first vocal declamation to date in the scene.
"Nor does she, Plum," guffawed Lord Usher, "appear over-anxious to make the acquaintance."
"It is no sparer of persons. Turn round and let's look at you."
My skirt swung over my filling thighs as I obeyed.
"Lean over with your hands on your knees. Hm. Let's say she may wear skirts after lessons at noon are over, but they will have to be briefer than this. I require a complete consciousness of her person at all times.
Now, girl, from me you'll always get it on the bum."
With a little contemptuous twitch, or flicker, of his stick the tutor flipped up my skirt behind. My pretty slip followed. Cream-colored silk bloomers, so tight they creased where I creased and dimpled where I dimpled, too, were all that obscured my robustly parted buttocks for the three pairs of eyes watching, and I flushed with unrequited shame. To my added horror, however, the man approached and began to palpate and prod with stubby fingers, separating the cheeks and weighing them in his cupped palms and generally acting as some butcher might to his meat.
"This is all in her interest," I heard Lord Usher reassuring his wife. "Quite a science in knowing where the nerves he, and applying accordingly."
"Now touch your toes," said that voice I was already growing to fear intensely. "And now," he said, when I had done so, "stand up and this time, girl, when I say touch your toes bend over as if your life depended on it. Mind now, I want your head on your knees. If you can't put your palms on the floor with straight legs in two weeks I'll have you doing special exercises for two hours a day. Over!"
"That's better," said Lord Usher, when I had lunged like a hinge. "That's what I call a tight bum, Minor."
"Pulls up the puppy-fat. Head right down now, Miss. Pull over with your arms." The cane tapped one flesh side. "Tighter still. Try now."
"I'm trying, sir," I puffed.
"Well, try harder."
I strained amain. This time as he approached I was aware that the thin silk perfectly outlined the fatty purse pushed back by the posture, between my legs. There was nothing I could do, however; I could not diminish its appearance, and indeed I knew all too well that its divided nature was perfectly apparent. I resolved not to move under his ministrations, whatever they might be, and did not do so while he again felt me all over - until he pinched the cloven fruit testingly, in his fingers, and ran a finger to the anal orifice. I gasped and halfrose, crimson, but he ordered me over again.
"This is a good solid buttock," he pronounced. "I could wish for more separation for the stick, which is an impact instrument, but there is no doubt she can go a few. No danger here of touching bone, the coccyx is even well covered. I suspect it will be most tender low down, in the gluteal fold, and I shall work there if need be."
"You are very exact," said Lady Julia.
"Now, Miss, stand up. Take off your drawers and let's see your skin."
"No!"
I recoiled with a startled gasp, frightened by my own refusal as much as anything. There was a long silence.
Finally, flexing his wand, the tutor said: "Is no the only word you know, child? I am afraid it is one to eradicate from your lexicon so far as I am concerned, as rapidly as possible."
"And which will cost her?" insinuated Lord Usher, avidly enough, with a loose smile.
"Six of the best last thing tonight," said the tutor, still staring at me.
"A hard start, forsooth. But it is as well to get off on the right foot, early."
"I seldom give less than six. Even with the ashlar."
Lady Julia smiled. "Poor old Tommy. I shall come and say good-night to you when it's over."
"Refusal to obey an order is a serious offense," continued the tutor. "It is a Commission of a grave nature constituting Insubordination."
"I will repair it, sir," I said, reaching under my skirt. But he merely shook his head.
"Too late. You will put it down in the Demerit Book I shall set out in the hall tomorrow. It will be left open there for all to see, and the account settled each Friday."
Lord Usher gave a nervous laugh.
"Severe as ever, eh, Plum. Settled by the twigs, I assume?"
"Insubordination is six with the birch, yes."
I had a strong desire to leave and, dropping a profound curtsey, asked if my presence were further required and, if it were not, that I might be excused.
"Mind now. Six strokes of the cane across the naked buttocks."
"Yes, sir."
"You may go."
The rest of that day was devoted to my transformation.
Somehow, I know not how, Mrs. Wilson soon got wind of my impending punishment and that afternoon, as she cropped my locks by simple means of placing a saucer on my head and chopping round it, delightedly dilated on the event: "Springy as an eel, yet hard as stone at the tip. He's already sent down for some size, he has, to stiffen 'em up a bit, you see. Oh I wouldn't want to be in your shoes tonight for a hundred sixpences, Miss Highhat. I've seen boys of eighteen blubber after a meeting with canes like that. They sting like fury. At first it's like a hot oil burn, then like a white-hot sword drawn across your bum, and then the true fire starts to mount. A good cut is at its worst fifteen seconds later - when 'e comes at ye again. And again. Arter three you'll be wishing that big impudent bottom of your'n were half its size. Oh I'd give anything to see it, I would. It's the best thing ever for ye, Tommy." Clip, chop, clop!
The heavy shears she used made juicy snips as she shore off my long locks and, untouched by scissor till now, they fell disconsolately to the flagstones around me. I began to sob as they did so. It was another reduction necessary in my education, I supposed, but I felt very small when it was over, and smaller still as I lay in bed that night, waiting for my visitation. I had left my dinner and fled upstairs, where I had undressed at once and bedded.
As I lay on my side with the light still on I stared into the fire which Lilly always lit for me, and I tired to remember what it had been like in the stables. A hot oil burn, that was all. My fingers went under my nightgown and ran over the warm puddings of my hinder halves, soon to be thrashed into by a pitiless round cane.
There were sounds downstairs, a slammed door, and I heard that purposeful tread which was soon to haunt my nightmares. Mr. Pelham had steel tips to the heels of his boots and he walked as he did everything, as if he meant it. My stomach turned. For a second I again doubted that I could hold my water.
He strode in briskly, holding a soullessly long yellow cane, shut the door behind him and said, "Turn out."
I jumped out of bed but for a moment he did not deign to look at me, moving about the room touching pictures and objects with the glittering tip of his stick: "All have to go. There's no need for you to have these comforts at this age. You may keep the miniature - I take it it's your mother? - but the rest must go. Hello, who's this? Lady J.!" He paused, regarding the enamel of herself my mistress had given me. Then he did a curious thing. He spat upon it, recovered and took up again: "Next time you are ordered punishment at bedtime you wait outside the door, in the passage, understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well then. You have any pets or the kind? No? That will save their disposal. Any favorite clothes? I shall find out from the housekeeper. They will be burnt." Turning his pallid gaze upon me he said, "Take it off."
This time I could not obey quickly enough. My nightie was on the bed in a flash. But the man's eyes did not drop, nor so much as stir to my nudity. My bush was by now thick and firm up my belly and in a wide bar across it. If I blushed he did not. He read my mind at once.
"You'll stop this silly flushing, child. You aren't a girl to me. You aren't a boy, nor even a person. You're a pair of buttocks that need to be punished. All I'm interested in is making certain you regret your action... "
"I do already, sir," I assured him.
"Don't interrupt me. And won't repeat again in a hurry. Now face your bed, feet together, and put your hands behind your head. Lean forward to widen yourself a little and let your cheeks hang quite limp. I want them relaxed for this first introduction. I'm going to take you full across the fat this time." I felt the cold of the cane in its measuring tap and he went on gently, "A little further still. Now this is the first time I've whipped you, Tommy, and I want you to tell yourself that every time I do so it'll hurt more than you think. I'll never let you off lightly, ever. You're going to get the rod again, and again, and again, until you're properly trained and in the right frame of mind. Six strokes."
At once the air soughed behind me, a sound completed by a fleshy smack. A hot oil burn was what I told myself as that cane bit round my hanging cheeks. No more nor a hot oil burn, PLEASE! But Mrs. Wilson was right once more. The pain drove up like liquid fire. This sting was incomparably superior, more subtle, than the bruising strap. I gasped and perked.
Thwllk! The same meaty whack told me he had cut again - two! This time I hissed, hopping in place. The spot struck by the tip was unbelievably painful. There was no withstanding it. I writhed.
Thwlllk! The third long, almost lethargic motion sent the stick lashing round my bum. There was a mirror opposed to me on the other wall and who was this I saw within it? A girl with elbows back, hands at nape, her face scarlet and writhen together, eyes squeezed up, the torso forward and her ripeness of belly receding into a darkness below. Come on, I wanted to beg him now in my extremity, get it over with, give me the next. But the waiting became too much and I grabbed back.
"Get into position."
"But it hu-uuuurts... so terribly."
"Three to come. If you reach behind again, I shall hit your hands."
I endured four, and five, though my feet might have been treading some blistering treadmill. Again the flame burnt too deep and I grasped my hotly wealed posteriors as if a horde of hornets had just been let loose there. Came a rapping crack and I squealed as he skinned my knuckles, dancing with pain, one fist to my mouth. Somehow I resumed my place and swallowed the last on a cry. After which I sat my raging bottom on the bed, my hands under it, rocking and weeping with pain. The cane was incomparably stricter than I had conceived it to be.
"Ah, sir... you didn't need... to be as severe."
He put on his jacket which for the first time I saw he had doffed for the task.
"It would be as well for you to get my regulations concerning correction by heart, Tommy. Any flinching off means taking the cut over. Moving out of position, two extra. Failure to wait for permission to rise after the last cut, three extra. You were not to know about permission but you will have to do much better under the rod than this, if you are to enter Miss Ponsonby's in a year. She requires total stoicism. You moved twice, thus meriting four."
"Please, sir, please... you can't mean... uuu, you hit so hard!"
"However, as this was your first essay at my hands, I shall be unusually lenient. You will be permitted to take them start of work tomorrow."
"Sir!" I protested, squirming. "I am but a girl."
He nodded at the door. "A girl who is going to get four cuts across the buttocks at nine sharp tomorrow. It is now you are learning your lesson, when the sting is at its liveliest, and you can promise that pronounced bottom of yours that I gave you now what will be child's play to what you'll have in the bill, Friday night, should you disobey again. Moreover, I shall profit by the fact of your sex to which allusion I am grateful. I shall not hesitate to set you on a stool with your trousers round your ankles, and your b.t.m. on display for all to see - servants and visitors alike - any time it's had to be treated in earnest. You've a strong pair and I'm not likely to let up on 'em an instant. Goodnight."
When he had gone I recovered somewhat and moving stiff-legged to a mirror inspected the marks made by that mercilessly licky stick. The weals were dark and hard, plump and lumpy and full of blood on the right.
My wondering fingers traced one place where three seemed to have fallen together. How had the poor skin, so contused, not broken? Heavens, you didn't half catch it, I thought, staring at those rounds. I went to bed and lay on my belly with their swollen fruits in my hands. Now that the worst was over I felt a curious glow again all over, a sense of fulfillment in having been so well-whipped, and come through.
Julia came in, wearing a nightgown. The fire beat through it as she smiled down at me.
"What, blood already? Was he that severe?" She pointed to a spot on the sheet.
"No. Just my knuckles. I put my hands back, I couldn't help it, the cane stings so, and he caught me."
"How vile." Her amused face hung over mine. Then she tenderly drew down the bedclothes, parting my hands. "Heavens! He didn't need to flog your buttocks as hard as this. And what an eye he has. Why, you could put a ruler over most of these cuts."
"It stung like billyho, Aunt Ju'," I confessed, using the name for her she now preferred from my Lips.
"Of course it did. That monster knows how to swish. Stephen told me he was expert."
"And I'm to have four again tomorrow, for moving, or something."
"Oh, poor mouse. But let me put some cream on them for you."
I hid my head in the pillows as she sat on the side of my bed, humming, the jar of cold cream in one hand.
She put a big dollop on each side and began massaging in, not only my weals, but my whole hot hips, crooning some lullaby to me the while: "Hush-a-bye baby, on the tree-tops... "
She ran her soft palms caressingly up each dulcet cheek, soon slippery with grease from the groove on up.
The manner in which her twin thumbs slid inside my thighs and on up between the pair was most delicate and soon had me moaning. I arched back, knowing I could not long resist such palpitation.
"... and the cradle will rock... "
"Please, Auntie Julia," I gasped, squirming at the sheets.
"Just relax, baby."
That was what was happening to me. My whole tautened nervous system was giving way, slipping out of my reach to some crescendo of ecstasy of relief. My wet lips pouted back, fairly asking for those two thumbs to slide up their surfaces, part them and rub within. Which of course they did.
She kneaded the pillows of beaten flesh, pressing ever deeper home at the culmination of each sweep, until those naughty thumbs touched my nub.
"Please."
"What?"
"I think I'm going to... if you go on like this... "
"What?"
"Relax."
She leant over me, breath warm in one ear. "I never knew you were this passionate, Tommy. The beating must have done it to you."
"If you... no, I can't," I gasped, writhing, "I'm coming!"
"No you're not, monkey," she said; and she dug one thumb into my guts right under the quivering, climaxing clit, holding it bent back hard against my innards there.
"Oooooh!"
She pressed ever harder. I squirmed forward, bringing up one knee.
"Please... let me... ooh, you're hurting, Auntie Ju... "
She held me there still, numbing my spasm, prolonging it in a sense and making me wriggle and butt to bring it on. Then suddenly I felt her other thumb, ticklishly greased, slip into my anal hole.
"Eeeeee...!"
Imprisoned between her thumbs either side of my center I gave a thrashing buck and lunge.
"Now gush all you like, Miss Mischief," was what I heard her say as my bowstring stretched and sent me arching up the bed. How long it went on for I do not know, but I was hot and wet and flushed when I stared round at her, to find milady meditatively sucking her left thumb. She was still sitting on my bedside.
"You taste sweet all over, Tommy, and I'm glad I relieved you. I hope a good strong man will do that to you ere too long. You have no idea of how affecting a spectacle you make, from the rear, writhing and twisting about like that. I've a mind to sit on your face and make you lap all over. Frankly, I could come just thinking of it, but that thing of Stephen's I showed you is going up there in a mo' and he likes it dry to start with."
"Well, I'm soaking," I said with a shamefaced laugh. "And it's still coming down."
She stood up with a irummative smile. "Perhaps Lady Berry was right, after all. It is better after a swishing.
But I don't think I care to try, not from that monster, thank you. Try not to think about your cutting tomorrow.
It'll be over one day. Night, night. Tommy darling, sleep tight and mind the fleas don't bite."
CHAPTER SEVEN
I awoke next morning to a perfect consciousness that something unpleasant was to happen to me. How sedulously does Nature protect her own! In later months I was to dread that moment of awakening to a day when I had been promised punishment, the sense and sum of it so close under the mind that it seemed to inhabit, and already emperil, the skin.
I touched my marks and again inspected my wealed bottoms in the glass. The man had done his work well.
Though his traces might have faded somewhat on the left, the right side was still sheer testimony to his strength and skill. I stared, shuddering. The buttocks seemed to have grown overnight. To receive another cut across those blatant bruises would be true pain. And how accurately the word cut described the activity of the cane, which sliced so into the flesh with the maximum of smart and minimum of cutaneous damage.
Quickly I washed, licked back my short black locks, donned my new dress - hard white collar, tie, short "bum-freezer" jacket ("The easier to beat you by," in Mrs. W.'s tender tones) and thin light-colored trousers worn over the skin and out of which my pair fairly seemed to burst. Brace high, these trousers cut me in the crotch and were so fine and worn and tight it seemed as I could really see the ridged weals right through them. Whether I could bend without splitting them was another matter. I hurried down anxiously to breakfast.
Mr. Pelham, noshing his, glanced at his watch as I entered. Lady Julia, by the fire with a cup, burst into laughter - "I'm afraid you'll never make a boy, Mouse, after all."
I dropped a curtsey before proceeding to serve myself at the sideboard but the tutor coldly told me that this was not necessary, since I was a boy till noon, with the "privileges" of such.
"A boy we're never going to get into Eton though, Mr. Pelham."
"Moreover," he went on, ignoring her, "lateness will in future constitute at all times a Demerit. You understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"I shall give you a schedule and set of rules directly. You will follow them to the letter."
"Did you cut the puppy to pieces last night, Mr. Pelham?" asked the big woman, into whose bright eyes I now stole a glance, over my gruel.
"Began my task," came the answer. "Child was recalcitrant under correction. So has four more to come.
After breakfast."
Julia, as if she had heard naught of this, rolled her moist eyes expressively.
"Oh ouch! Ten across that tubby sit-upon. I trust you're not overdoing it, tutor."
"If her... his... skin is so sensitive, he will have to pay even more attention to keeping it out of harm's way."
"Really four stingers?"
"They will be tolerably tight," said Mr. Pelham, cracking his knuckles.
"I am sure they will be," she said, taking his baleful gaze.
I was cordially dreading the moment, of course, but after breakfast given a resume of my hours and days. It was not a cheerful programme at all. Up an hour before the house to learn my "recitation," to be given him at nine, generally lines from the first six books of Virgil. Class work from nine to noon, with a brief break or rest period. An hour before luncheon to profit by, when I could change out of my boy's rig. After luncheon a period of "Deportment Training," when I should usually sit with my feet in stocks, and a backboard at my back. Physical exercise thereafter, including the selectioning and "putting up" of birch rods. Evening preparation. Supper, and so to bed.
"The backboard is a beastly thing," said Julia commiseratively, on overhearing some of this instruction, "but it's true, Miss Ponsonby hates fidgeters. Did you really bring one with you, tutor?"
Mr. Pelham did not deign to answer. He was telling me that punishment was to be by cane across the buttocks, by leather tawse across the buttocks, and by birch-rod across the buttocks. It would invariably be severe and the highest discipline beneath it was required. There would also be punitive detention, confinement to my chamber (already beginning to be stripped of ornament) by the writing of lines, and other "general" forms of restraint and compulsion. If these did not suffice, he assured me grimly, more serious methods would be employed.
Thus comforted I was shown in the hall outside, perched on a public lectern there, a large black Demerit Book, wide as a Bible, under whose several headings I had now duly to inscribe myself: WRAGG, T.
Date: October 13,1868 Offense: Insubordination Strokes: 6 Signed At ten before nine I was waiting outside the door of what, at one end of the house, had been allocated as schoolroom for my training. Promptly on the hour came along Mr. Pelham with Lord Usher, arm in arm. The latter chucked me under the chin with a grin: "Come, come, this will never do if you're to enter Miss P.'s classes soon." But Pelham passed me wordless.
The windowed room was large and bare, furnished with little now but table and desks, and that seemed all. I stood hopelessly while Pelham showed his old school friend over his selection of canes in a corner, surely rather excessive for their modest task. The tutor then took off his jacket.
"Now, Minor," said Lord Usher, approaching, "don't look so downhearted, it's only four. Let's see you take 'em with a bit of guts. Show yourself worthy of us. By George, though, Plum, you do have a breech and a half to work on here, I've seen girls of seventeen with less. Do you have nothing on beneath those trews, eh?"
"No, sir. As I was told."
Mr. Pelham came forward whipping his cane as if he, and it, longed to slice me in two.
"I'm going to give you a lesson in fortitude, boy. Teach you to hold up under punishment. I always cut harder for extra, and hardest of all for getting up before permission. This four will hurt you more than the sixer last night. Stand here."
The tip of his rod indicated a place in front of the fire. Although the logs were crackling there I was shivering.
The man plucked out my shirt behind, pulling it clear of my trousers so that it should not, I assumed, intervene and provide the smallest protection. He tugged up and ran a hand over the trousers behind.
"Bend over and grasp the grate."
I did as bid, holding the warm brass rail in my fingers.
"Brace back your knees."
"That's good," said Lord Usher. "That's very good, Plum."
"If you leave hold the bar, boy, it's two extra. And you'll take 'em over the Punishment Desk. Understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"Four cuts for irregular conduct under correction. You won't get an easy caning from me, ever."
Doubled in two and staring at a pattern of that carpet I was soon to know so well, I awaited the lisp of air behind. It was not long coming, completed by its wicked, ritual snap. I sucked in sharply. Again the pain took my breath away. He had indeed hit in much, much harder.
The second came more swiftly than before and in the silence I heard myself gasping and Lord Usher saying, "Well cut, Plum. Very tight there."
The third caught me on a previous wealing (I was already becoming more expert in assessment) and forced a dry whine from my throat, together with a band of saliva from my hanging mouth.
"Steady," said Pelham, speaking in the closest to an affectionate tone I had known him use to date, "one more, and 'tis done."
"One more nice and low, Plum."
It came so and I thought I had absorbed it till the fierce sting of the stroke started to spread and mount. I knew myself it was a perfect stripe and it seemed to drive right through my rump.
"Ough... ohff!"
"Stay right over."
"Excellent practice in self-control," opined Lord Usher.
Tears spurted from my eyes. I leapt up and clutched, crimson.
"Oh please, sir, please... it does sting so... I am not used to being beat so... "
"Not yet," said Mr. Pelham grimly. He was bending his brutal rod across his thighs and then he nodded, "For rising before permission, three extra. Come here."
I pleaded now in real desperation.
"Ah, please, sir, no more... I did try, I promise you I tried... "
"Not enough."
The greedily waving wand pointed out to me a kind of high pulpit or schoolmaster's desk, placed to one side.
I stared at it in total dismay. This time the four frightful clouts had fallen cleverly athwart my whole buttock.
My bottom felt whipped through.
"Please, please... not another, sir, please."
"Place your feet here."
"What is this, Pelham?"
"Punishment desk, late century. Purchased at Sotheby's. Stocks for feet and wrists."
"Gad, but it holds 'em, heh!"
"Get here, boy, and I'll fit you. I'm taking the ashlar to you this time and I wager you'll vote eight to three, with an ordinary cane, after a taste of her."
I was regarding the scene with some lost utter awe, so that it drew another lubberly laugh out of Lord Usher: "Deuced if I ever seen a young un' in the bill less eager."
I was half toppled over that horrid desk. My ankles, slightly separated, went into two stocks below, clicked shut by a mere tap of Pelham's polished toe, and my wrists depended in front, for a similar twin pair, evidently adjustable. There was a bar or band of wood across, which pressed above my knees and forbade them from flexing out of straight.
"What a pair for cutting, Plum!"
I quivered as the tutor stood before me, tugged hard up my trousers and pulled my wrists down tighter to the stocks in front. And as I went over I saw something that took the last strength from my being - up the line of his left leg, visible through the thin stuff of his taut fawn trousers, ran a solemn poker of gristle, all vibrant and portentous, magnificent in its amazing size and stiffness, but more especially in the wedge-like shape of its heavy head. Even the ring of its corona was defined and seemed to be throbbing. The very thought of that being inserted up a mere women filled me with an increase of fear. Below this prodigy of masculinity the ball-sack hung turgid and tumescent, too. With a shudder I averted my eyes, even before he left my vision.
Confined as I was, however, I could not close my ears.
"Jove, Plum, you must confess. No Oppidan ever showed a more juicy seat. So tight and yet so round. I envy you your task, old top."
The tutor selected a new stick, longer and heavier in my increasingly attentive estimation. I was shivering like a jelly, and particularly so behind.
"Ah please, sir, have pity on me... let me off but one... "
"I never remit a cut. Golden rule, boy."
"Good Lord, old man, you're having your effect on her but it's plain she's having hers on you!"
"Odd," came the tutor's confident tone, "never get hard as a rule, during. Only after."
"Well, if you ain't hard now I'll eat my... not to mention your... heavens, fellow, it looks twice as long as in those days you used to make that poor fag of yours lick it till it spat like a snake, and if he dared let fall a single drop... "
"Never been up like this with a boy before," Pelham answered, swishing his ferocious stick. "But I'm up now, all right."
"If there's one thing plain, Plum old soul, it's that that bottom don't belong to a boy. Why, her cunt looks fatter nor Julia's, if five times more reluctant."
"Aim to cut just above," said the tutor.
"By Jove! Drum taut."
"Ripe for whipping," conceded Mr. Pelham.
"Now you'll see why they chose the ashlar at Rugby."
But Lord Usher could not restrain himself. He came forward and ran his hands over my tightly stretched and parted rounds, joggling them to his satisfaction.
"Christ, but there's meat here for you to cut at, Plum. Demme if I don't feel stiff as you, too." His fingers now palped my pouting sex ("Ah, sir, not there"), squeezing its pouch appreciatively. "Can't remember whenever I have seen a pair so crying for the cane. Stiff upper lip now, Minor, mind. Stiff upper lip. The lower ones are soft now."
He came in front of the desk and, reaching, pulled my trousers sharply tighter till it hurt me in the crutch and I thought they would burst at the seams. And I knew then that the nobleman was also in a manly state by feel, not sight, since in leaning over me he left the impression of his impressive staff along my back It also seemed strong and tense and raging with desire.
"Cut 'er up, Plum. Cut 'er as she merits. Don't spare the little tyke."
The tutor needed no second bidding. I tried to steal a glance round. The man was standing well back and to my left, being engaged in rolling his right shirt sleeve off a bicep as big as a Dutch cheese. I endeavored to shrink in, but the position allowed little such security.
"Relax them, boy."
I sank my head and awaited the worst.
The very worst was not long coming either. This time Mr. Pelham took a lively pace forward, there was the monitory whirr in the air behind me, that sound which already sent terror to my soul, and then the unspeakable stick hewed in under me so fast and hard it seemed to drive me up the desk I gulped instinctively, then panted, then plainly squeaked like a shrike, as the pain possessed me utterly. It was unbearably more intense than the lesser wood. Whippy yet stiff, it lapped agonizingly about the widest part of me, its blunt end burying excruciatingly into my bursting right side. "Houuuu... ghh!"
"Shot, sir. That made her jump a bit, Plum."
"Noooo!" I implored as the man drew back for another. I contracted with all my strength and the frightful stroke beat into my tensened flesh precisely as promised, just above my center. I yelped, a-tiptoe in the stocks.
"Hurts more if you clench, boy."
"Oh please sir please oh no sir, please... I am... enough. I will be very good... "
"They all sing that tune in time," said Lord Usher, moving his beasthood up my back. "But a sixer with this must be deuced tight, Pelham."
"I've only given a dozen with it once and that was without a run, to a fibbing errand-boy. He said it was as tight as anything he had had in the reformatory."
"OOOW!"
The third, and last, was very hell. My whole body protested in a jump that thudded that desk itself. My bottoms writhed as if to try to throw off the pain that was upon them. He had caught me expertly again and I knew it to my soul. I had been punished.
"Heavens but that's a rare sight, Pelham.
Amazing how they do wriggle. Anyone would think she was asking you to jam it up her, all the way. Say, old chap, remember what we used to do, after a swishing, a proper one, I mean. Listen, I'm hot," he said, leaving hold on me and putting it upon himself. "We'll toss for who goes in and I'll bet the other will be spouting streams at the time. Look now. Leave the nipper bent like that. Do him good."
"Will do better," Pelham said. "Stand him on the stool for an hour, with his britches at his ankles." He drew near and undid my fetters. I leapt at once and clasped, hopping with the smart still. In doing so I saw that Lord Usher had taken out his tumid thing and was stroking it meditatively against his belly.
"Dance like that any more, Minor," he said with his foppish grin, "an' you'll have me coming im me clothes.
Spurting all over jus' looking at you. Anyone'd say you'd sat on a red-hot iron."
It felt like it.
"That was three with the ashlar," graciously explained Mr. Pelham, donning his jacket and putting aside his rod. At least, the one in his hand, I might add, the other being still poking at his trousers. "If you fault again today, boy, I shan't hesitate to give you six with it."
The entire hortatory scene ended with an intensely cowed girl-boy of rising fourteen standing in the public hallway on a stool, trousers round her ankles, shirt pinned up and a backboard at her back. This horrid instrument was in vogue in those days as a training for girls not to slouch. It was a heavy wooden board strapped in a yoke athwart the shoulders, with the wrists secured behind it at either end. It could become an achingly uncomfortable correction. On display, of course, was one chubby, blue-wealed buttock. Behind the back was hung a slate on which the culprit had previously herself inscribed: INSUBORDINATION Cane...
6 - - 13 "A butcher's dozen, indeed," said Lord Usher, surveying his old schoolfriend's handiwork. "Lord, but you were tight with those last three. All but broke skin on the right. Curious that it doesn't. Now, here, let's leave her and attend to this, er, pressing, and, uh, common, problem. For that pole of yours, if you win, Plum, I demand the pomade... I declare it must be greased... "
And they went off arm in arm.
I reflected where I stood. My promised tutor had arrived on a Friday, a Friday the 13th., and in his first twelve hours he had put thirteen blistering welts across my bottom, until it hung heavy and glowing on me. All I knew was that I never wanted to see that ashlar again. His whole incumbency filled me with horror.
"Ow, Miss. Lor luvaduck, Cripes and Crikey!" Lilly was the first to pass by me. She simply stood and gasped, hands on haunches. "Ow, but he's done 'ee well. Ye're whipped, Tommy, and that's the truth."
"Please, Lill," I murmured, scarlet with shame. "Go on your way. Don't stand and stare so. And, yes, it was dreadfully painful, if you must know."
"Oo-er, may I feel?"
"No."
But there was not too much I could do about that, and I had to bear her inspection too. After she had pattered off, somehow all the servants contrived to pass by in that horrid hour, with a variety of curious comments. Mrs. Wilson was among the most unfeeling, while my skin had the tickle of more than one impudent feather duster. My shoulders felt like dropping off, and then Prendy came up some quarter to the hour. She showed a genuine delight in what had happened to me behind.
"What did we tell you? That comes from being stuck-up. He's perfect, he is." (Feeling a weal.) "Lean over now and let me see how close inside he got."
I mutinously did not move.
"If you don't obey me I'll complain. I'll think up a peccadillo and he'll give you six in a trice."
Whether it was true or not I did not know. I had no resolve left to put this threat to the test. With tears behind my smarting eyes I rounded myself duly forward.
"Further yet."
"I'll topple... this... oh no... no!"
For that fiendish Prendergast had come prepared, I might have known as much. One pair of fingers parted my rose-bud anus while another slipped deep up my writhing rectum a lubricious suppository. Set in the back-board I could not look round, but I stamped with vexation as I felt the little thing burrow up me.
"Best glycerin. That'll have you hopping 'ere your time. If you tell on me, I'll have your hide." She went off on high heels.
I waited, wretched. For a few minutes, too few, nothing happened, then the powerful suppository - a rectal evacuator, in fact - began to take effect. It gripped me horribly. I had to duck and squirm, motions that pained my arms, secured in the rigid board. Dear God, what would happen were I forced, as I was going to be, to let fly? Now I begged for someone to pass, but the house seemed locked in silence. Somewhere a clock ticked frightfully slowly. Aunt Julia? But she was out riding at this hour. Sweating and stamping I at last heard steps.
"What is it, boy?" asked Mr. Pelham behind me.
"Sir, sir... I have to go... please."
"Urinate? You can wait for that till the hour."
"Number two, sir, number two!"
"What do you mean - shit?"
"Y-y-yesss!"
"Why don't you say so, then? But you went after breakfast, did you not? It was supervised by Prendergast."
"I must... I must," I gasped, nearly wailing.
"After breakfast is the time allotted." He seemed to draw out his watch. "Nor is the hour well up. I never remit a punishment, boy."
"Sir, please. I shall, I shall... "
"Perhaps this is different in a girl. Granted, good correction stimulates peristalysis, there is still no reason for all this flinging around. Here is another lesson in self-control. If you must use anything, there's this." And the feelingless tyrant placed an empty glass vase behind me. I wish I could write that I did not have to use it, between bent and parted legs, almost that instant; nor that the bulk of my endeavors was so intense.
At the true end of the hour I was let down, released, sent off to "clean up," and inspected once back in the schoolroom. "Drop your britches," was the command, this time no sooner uttered than obeyed. I was learning, in the rubric of the time. The man's strong fingers puckered the rubbery dimple of my sphincter behind and though I tried to tell myself he was but a doctor inspecting me, I nearly died of shame.
Still Pelham knew how to twist the knife.
"Show yourself to me clipped down tonight. All this hair here, especially the shag between. Make it neat and short. Clip it away from the lips, which in your case are rather large. Else I shall have Prendergast shave you close. Now, boy, do up your things and get to work. I want all this Cicero copied by tonight. Any idling, mind, and it's the ashlar."
With brimming eyes I bent to my work. I was not being trained up, I was being misused. But all I knew was the wicked flicker of that yellow tip, as Pelham paced about the room No pupil ever studied harder. Such was the way of those days, and it is not the intention of this record to mitigate or spare them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thus began that most arrant Calvary of my days. Lucky the children who are not asked to endure the like today. Ostensibly being trained "up" for the higher glory of Miss Ponsonby's elegant establishment, the constant insistence on "bringing me down a peg," seeing that I didn't get "above myself," struck me as strange. But a course in the cane, I can assure my gentle reader, leaves one unquestioning. After two or three weeks of it, all I knew was that I wished no more acquaintance with it at all, and would do anything to avoid its contact with my much-used "seat of government." After a month I awoke each morning with a single prayer on my lips. Unorthodox it might have been, but those who have suffered a regimen of the rod will recognize its litany - God, dear God, please God, spare me the stick today; do anything you wish to me, Lord, only please see to it that I am not whipped again today...
Pelham caned me and caned me again, with a finesse beyond compare, and a deliberation that was diabolic. Usually these inflictions were six, across the stretched meat of the posterior portions, duly bared, with a "fight" stock - the ashlar was a frightful warning in its corner, and reserved for very real tears. While not strictly unendurable, these constant minor corrections were always made truly tense, or "tight," in the schoolboy lingo of the day. I came to dread them one and all. Even today the words "Bend over,"
"Take down your trousers,"
"go over,"
"Turn out,"
"Touch your toes," and the rest fill me with a pounding reverberation.
To give the tutor his due, he did not make for monotony. One caning was never like another, so that I never knew quite what to count on, except, of course, total severity. He would vary the rod and mood to his whim, and my poor fault - errors of recitation, copying, dictation, sums, oh above all sums. For I was slow in arithmetic, and never shall I forget those moments facing swimming figures which I had to "solve" within a certain sum of minutes. I would grow more and more nervous, the clock ticking inexorably on, finally I would writhe and twist in desperation at my desk - while Pelham slowly shucked off his jacket and rolled up his right sleeve, exposing that immense forearm of his.
"I do hope I shan't have to... I was so hoping," etcetera - culminating in the sighed-out, "I'm afraid there's nothing else for it, boy, but to give you a caning. You have obviously been slacking in your homework. Stand out."
The pattern of the carpet. The warm rail of the grate. Each time it was an ordeal. This time I was to count the cuts.
Ththwuwu - leek! "One!"
Dear God, what a stroke. It seemed to sink right through me. And it means he's coming low. Oooh, how it hurts. I can't possibly get through five more like that.
Whu-whu-whu - ckkk! "Two!"
Merciful Christ, that was right in the crease... and he's c-c-c-coming again!
Thwooo-uppp!!
" Ahoooow!"
"Didn't hear the count, boy. You'll take that over."
"Oh please, sir, please... "
Thhkhwhhhh-iclk! "THREE!"
Or rather - four. I'm in inferno. My thighs are writhing. It can't be necessary to cause me this pain, just for...
Thwhthwhthwh - llllupp! "Oooh, sir... four!"
An agonizing cut, surely on my legs. Oh no I can't bear it, for sure I shall stand up, this panting pain is too much, you cannot ask a girl to bear this, this... OOOHHH!
As if sensing my struggle he accords me a long interval, during which I hear the usual runner gasping out his race.
"Brace back your knees."
THWHWH-UPP!
"Fiiiyyyve!" One more. Dear God, let me bear one more. I am whining with pain, my whole arse seems streaked with fire, and he is waiting his time till the blaze shall be at its worst...
WHHHHRRRRPPP!
"Six!" I scream, fairly yelping it out. I am hanging on to that brass bar like a drowning man to a spar. Please Lord Almighty, let me keep over... till... permission.
He leaves me. I see his boots, the fawn trousers tight under the insteps. He carefully replaces the rod in the new rack he has had installed on the wall opposite where I work, facing me in the way he has the cane on the wall opposite my bed now, so that it shall be the first thing I see as I awake.
I am in a seventh hell, my legs trampling.
"Au... haaa... ouuu!"
"Keep still, boy, and bend tight. Now when I say get up, stand with your hands at your sides. At your sides, I said! Control yourself."
"I can't, sir, I can't... really I can't help it, it stings so awfully... "
"Very well, since you disobey me. Hold out your left hand." And he goes for the leathern tawse, a tough instrument. It was six dancing slaps on each palm and then, "Now bend over and remain so for ten minutes."
And so on.
A routine punishment, just so that I should not get "above" myself.
To these corrections, after his initial visit to our schoolroom, Lord Usher paid scant attention, assuming they were taking place with regularity and ascribing them to the education of a gentleman, or gentlewoman.
"Aunt" Julia, however, seemed drawn to them by a morbid or hypersensitive fascination, seeking out their time and place, questioning me about them afterwards in detail, and "comforting" me upon her ritual goodnight kiss.
"You are strict, sir, you are strict," she remarked once, after I had been sent hopping halfway across the room, my hands behind me, for "Inattention." And there was admiration in her tone. "Those last two... which cut right under the fat... why, they would have drawn a cry from a stone."
"I do not mean to be lenient, Ma'am. The buttocks were made for beating. No harm is done. A trifling contusion or two."
Lady Julia ran one pensive palm over her opulent haunches. "I'm glad I never had the cane," she said at last. "Least of all, sir, at your hand."
They stared at each other a long while. Finally the tutor said gravely, "An' you had, Ma'am, you might have been grateful now."
"No, I don't mean to try it, thanks." And with an attempt at a laugh Lady Julia swung out. The laugh left a curious tinny tinkle in the empty air behind her.
Worst, however, was when Lady Mildmount watched. She fairly egged the tutor on, and she it was who was responsible for my hateful corset training, of which some more anon.
When she came out riding with the Ushers she would be all banter and deviltry, so far as I was concerned - of the kind a child feels inwardly, to the bones.
"Well, child, have you been beat today?"
"No, milady."
"What! What's this, Pelham? She ain't had her ration of the rod as yet? Just when I thought I was seeing some improvement in the morsel, too. What are you about, tutor, what are you about?"
"There has been no cause as yet today, Ma'am."
"Well, invent one, then." Her voice growing ever more excited. "Generality, sir, Generality. That's my way with Reggie. When there ain't a complaint, I have him up for Generality - being a 'general' nuisance, d'ye see."
But the tutor would not subscribe to this ethic. All he reiterated was, "There is no cause. I shall inform you when there is cause, Lady Mildmount."
There was a standing order to do so directly the ashlar should be brought into employment again, and I cordially dreaded the summons, by hard-riding stable-boy, of her hoofbeats on the gravel. One morning I was accorded a dismal salad of a hiding - for Sulking, and Refusing to Admit At Once I was Sulking. The correction was to be compounded of the usual six, plus an additional three with the ashlar, a frightful toll.
Milady was sent for, and arrived, post-haste. She burst bright-eyed, habit swinging, into the schoolroom where I sat alone, Pelham having profited of the interval to "size up" or stiffen his frightful wand. Lady Mildmount could not contain herself.
"Stand up when I come in, child. Yes, yes, feeling nice and shivery, eh, especially behind. Turn round. Good.
Oh all tight as the dickens, and bursting for a touch of the willow. Is this the desk? Are these the sticks?" And she detached a shivering wand from its rack and ripped it through the air; it was bright yellow from my polishing and burnt in its handle knob now were my own initials, TW. "Yes, yes, you're going to get it and you know it, don't you, silly. Drop your trousers and let me see 'em. Heavens! One of these fine days I'll teach you... teach you that you're a nothing... a potted plant, my girl... an indelible transparency in the universe... yes, yes."
Pelham came in, swinging his brutal rod.
"'Day, Ma'am."
"Heavens, what a splendid stick! More than a feter, surely. Do you mean to begin with the three with it? You should - and work on its traces. Or perhaps alternate... you could alternate, you know cut her tight, Pelham, cut her to the quick, make her squeal for me in earnest, man... and low, low, they don't feel a thing unless it's in the fold... oh Christ, her arse is asking for it, just... "
And so on, ad infinitum, and, I fear, ad nauseam. So far as I was concerned. But then, I was not conceived to have any feelings at all, in this great pedagogical purpose of my betters.
The latter comprised a number of exquisite refinements, each of which was soon weekly "improved," i.e.
aggravated - often enough under the aegis of the abominable Lady Berry who visited our house all too often now, sometimes in the company of the fatuous Sir Horace Wide but also in that of variable dissolute gents, her paramours for the nonce, it appeared.
For Fidgeting, for instance, there was "Restraint" for a period - namely a broad black belt with twin cuffs sewn in the back to fetter my wrists behind me, and throw out my breasts like brazen puddings in front. I would be kept like this a morning or more, learning off a page of rhetoric or two. For the frightful excess of Repeated Fidgeting I was indebted to a device of Lady Berinthia's, brought over express - the punishment corset. In this essentially simple yet fiendish device I was secured, in the nude, under the yard of my now starkly stripped room, by the all too vailing Prendergast.
The punishment or correction corset was the characteristic black leather and whalebone hideosity of its day, ending just beneath the bust and, in this case, above the first Ml flare of the hips. Two straps braced it over the shoulders. But its real feature was the infamous "saddle strap" of the period, a thin but tough leather strap of glace kid which buckled to the buck in front, passed through the indentation of the culprit's lower lips, through her legs and up her cleft behind, to be tightly buckled again to the center back. Phew! To say that saddle strap seemed to be trying to cut you in two was no exaggeration. The first time I bent in the correction corset I squeaked like a real mouse in pain. Dropping an inadvertent curtsey could be a frightful ordeal. One simply walked, high-heeled, as slowly as possible about the house in this horrid garment like some stately ship under way, striving not to make any motion of one's buttocks or thighs. It made one want to jut out behind, as if to throw the beastly constriction off, and I for one have always been able to discern when a punishment corset was being worn under clothing by this evidence of carriage alone - the whole body held stiff, as if it feared contact with the very air, and the hip-basin cambered back, like some craving mare in heat.
I remember late one afternoon, when I had been ordered this correction for a day, together with a form of restraint, being told by Mrs. Wilson to take out two glasses of hot grog and some cigars to Lord Usher and my tutor. They were evidently in a low thatched summer house, beyond the West lawn, used now as a kind of study by His Lordship and heated by a stove. I had on a short frock of good grey tweed, whose swinging skirt was barely long enough to cover the garters which bit into my creamy thighs and held taut there my dark seamed stockings; under this impertinently flared piece of material I was bare as the proverbial bird, as my punishment ordained me to be, barring that damnable strap slicing into my quim and crease. And, holding high that tray, with its stearning glasses, I trod the long lawn as delicately as any Agag since my "Restraint" had this day taken the form - pace Lady Berry, again - of loosely fettered wrists whose enchainment of slender silver ran between a ring in the front of my belt to link with a cross-chain at my ankles. Any undue raising of my arms naturally restricted, and brought together, my feet, while any spreading of the latter brought down my wrists. All in all, it was in a very ladylike manner that I crossed that snow-covered lawn, the December wind whipping punishingly enough at my thighs and hands. On the finest steps imaginable I approached the door, which was ajar, and posed the problem - how to knock?
The two men were sitting facing the ruddy stove, backs to me, smoking comfortably. They had not heard my coming, muffled as it was in the inch-deep layer of white. I could not tap with my hands, at least not without tripping, I supposed - and a spilt glass, Mrs. Wilson had assured me with pleasure, would mean a "sixer" at once.
It was Lord Usher's voice I caught first.
"She's been rogered royally and regularly, inside out, since the day the ring went on."
"Urn. Tried it from the back?" This in Mr. Pelham's leisurely accents.
"Mostly from the back. Heavens, yes. And what a back, old boy."
"The cervical slant... I was just wondering... "
"Gad, no, I've had her swimming in semen for a couple of years, Plum old man."
"And she?"
"Can't have enough of it. If she could eat it for breakfast, she would. And sometimes does. No, I've stuffed it into Julia from every possible direction and position." There came a long yawn. "There's nothing for it. I'm afraid she's barren."
"I wondered why you hadn't." After a pause.
"Had children? God knows I tried enow. And the fault ain't on my side, neither. Why, I've only to touch one of the serving girls, and I put her in pod. You take that Lilly... or Joany... why, she's a tight one but she'll spring a brat on me without hardly trying... "
(So that, I thought, listening, explains those "sendings-for" and smiling evening exists from the master's chamber... ) "You tried Lilly yet, Plum? A juicy cunt despite that... "
"I only bugger 'em," came the voice. (And that, I thought primly, outside, explains that wry face of disgust on Molly's usually impermeable countenance as I crossed her coming from the tutor's bedroom the other night.) "I've never buggered Julia," said Lord Usher meditatively. "I don't know as she'd like it."
"I would," said the tutor, "and discipline her else." There was a long, strong pause. "She... needs...
disciplining."
"Who? Ju?" Startled, sitting up.
"After all, she's not of age. You ought to, Stephen. Whip her bottom. I would."
"Do you think...?"
Having engaged enough slack on the chain I tapped at the door with a toe, and both men turned. As I teetered in out of the cold with the tray Lord Usher 'gan to laugh: "Lord, Minor, you look like you was walking on eggs. Set it here."
"Here" was a low brass table, to which I had to bend... I compromised with a wince-producing flexion of my knees.
"That saddle strap fairly sets you up, Tommy. Good deportment, very. Turn round and lift up your skirt." It was not hard to do. "Amazing. But your cheeks quite hide it behind. You've not been whipped for a while, I see."
"She has two dozen coming in this Friday's bill," said Pelham, then; "were you eavesdropping out there, by any chance?"
"No, sir," I said.
"Turn and look me in the eyes. Now - were you?"
"No, sir," I said.
"Bend over," he said. "That's enough."
A thin steel gun-cleaning rod was lying to hand on a table. He nicked up my skirt with it and gave me three.
Beauties. Each made my dancing chains tinkle, but when it was done he asked me again and again I said.
"No." Wild horses would not have dragged that truth from me, for which I should have had to pay by at least nine, and another to follow for fibbing, too.
"Write out five hundred times, 'I must not listen at doorways,'" he told me, resettling in his chair.
"And get some more grog," added Lord Usher, grinning at my grimaces. "This glass is cold. And - this time - run!"
The next day Pelham tore up my "lines" without even deigning to look at them.
There was another time when I was as nearly grateful to that grisly "saddle" as could be, however. I was in a particularly vexing version, with notched markings inside, that kept me very straight. Just before tea I had appealed to Prendergast for one of my four visits allowed during the day for intimate relief, and she had drawn it up unbearably taut, after. My wrists were cuffed to the belt behind, off which my short skirt, of soft stuff, depended. Lady Mildmount was to tea - she had been out hunting or cubbing, I know not quite which - and had with her a degenerate-looking youth of pimply countenance, one Philip, at the 'varsity, it seemed.
As was my lot, when in "Restraint," I had to lap my cup like a dog, while the bread and dripping I was made to eat was first solemnly masticated by the maid (in this case, Molly) standing behind my place and spitting it onto my plate for me. This process always caused universal amusement and was today much commented upon.
"Ton my word, this is learning her place," opined Lady Mildmount, watching me. "Though by rights she ought to eat it off the floor. Don't you think so, tutor?"
"Semolina pudding or simply saliva, which would you rather, Minor?" laughed in Lord Usher.
And Julia said (how did she know?) - "I'm afraid poor Tommy's in for another licking before long."
"Heyday! What for, child, pray?"
"Always the curious one, eh, Berry," scoffed Lord Usher.
"Naturally. Where a whipping's concerned."
I looked her in the eyes and said steadily, "Inky fingernails to lunch, milady. 'Twas extremely careless of me."
"Thoroughly deserved, then?"
"Thoroughly," I agreed. "I am grateful for the attention." I tried not to say it too sarcastically. I was learning, you see.
"One might almost think she enjoyed the swishing," said Lady Julia, "if only one knew she don't."
Suddenly, in a loathsome sneer of a voice, the youth said, "I've never thrashed a girl. Let me do it, Pelham."
There was silence, and I dropped my eyes.
"It's like caning a boy, really," said Lord Usher.
"Only slightly more exciting, eh," said Lady Berry insinuatingly. "As I can attest by the state of your person, you rascal Pip, you. D'you know, Philip has the most amusing warts... "
"Warts?" echoed Julia.
"Most amusing. I'll lend you Philip some time."
"I'll thrash her," he said in his stupid thick voice.
"Very well," said Pelham after a moment, as my pulses pounded. "Give her six."
"Make it eight. I always gave my fags eight."
"All right, eight."
"Bravo," said Lady Berry. "This I shall have to watch."
"Want to get it over with?" said the youth.
"If you wish, sir," I said, avoiding his infuriating and yellowish eyes. Somehow I felt deeply humiliated by the idea of this young dog, so little older than myself, being the source of my chastisement. I stood up and my mouth was wiped.
"Show me where, then," he said.
And I led the way out, aware of his eyes on my behind.
"Make her jump a bit, Pip!"
"Spoil the child and... "
"Don't worry," he assured them.
He followed me in silence to the far schoolroom door, at which I paused.
"I can't open for you," I said obviously enough.
But he laughed. "Oh yes, you can." And I realized and, facing him, opened the handle with my hands imprisoned behind me. The room seemed full of rods. "Get a cane," he said briskly, shucking his jacket.
I went to the wall, and again I paused. There was only one tidy way to reach and carry him the cane - and I was learning, you see. A second later I presented him with the wobbling willow, in my teeth. He laughed again as he took it. Then he slipped my skirt off and made me step out of it. I was naked beneath, but for my stockings, but I resolved to show him no reactions.
"How do you want me, sir?"
"Deuce, I've never seen one of these straps on before. Always heard about them, never seen one. It must be tight."
"It is," I assured him. And the purulent beast put a finger between belly and strap and yanked till I helped.
"Anyway it separates you nicely behind. Now stand to that table and bend over it, feet apart. We always took our fags with their legs apart. Hurt 'em more, I say. Wider than that."
In this intensely exposing position I leant forward with my head turned away on the table-top. At least he should not see my face. The tip made a cold tap on my right rump.
"Spread wide now, and arch it up. Come, cock up your buttocks, you silly girl, so I can get right underneath 'em. And let 'em hang limp too, I like a slack ass to cane."
The combination of circumstances was difficult, but I endeavored to oblige. He pressed down on the small of my back, however.
"Now throw it up quite, and spread it for the cane. And let it all go slack."
"I can't do both," I snapped.
"Yes you can."
"How do you know?" I asked.
But he replied, "Don't be cheeky, or I shall summon y'r tutor."
He walked away from me as if he had forgotten something, then turned and with a thudding rush ran at me!
Thrrrppp!
The licky stick wrapped excruciatingly around me, and I gasped, but it was the only sound I gave.
Two, three, four - one leg started back. Again that maddening long run - five! "Aaah!"
I had determined to show no sign and my big eyes were brimming with tears since I knew I had to do so. It was hard to lift my upper body with my hands secured behind like this, but I did so, whispering, "Just a minute, sir."
"What is it?"
"Give me a second, please."
"Why?"
"This... this strap... it's quite... uncomfortable, in front."
"Cutting you in the cunt?"
"If you must know... yes."
"Well that's your fault, foolish. Come, you're marking nicely and I'm enjoying this. Put it up for these last three."
"I suppose you couldn't give them me standing up."
"No."
"Nor... slightly higher."
"No."
I hadn't thought so, really. They were three saucy slices, deep in the sulcus, and I danced gasping in front of him after them, my hands tight at my back - "Hoouuu... haaaa... auuu... ieeee" - all the octaves of the damned.
"Now," he said, feeling for his flies, "after a good swishing, a proper one like that, we usually did bugger our fags. But this strap, there seems some padlock... kneel down here and lick this off, instead."
"This" was a sudden cucumber-thick and be-warted prick before my eyes, stubby and tough as leather; with flanks aflame I took it 'tween my lips and sucked it hard, hating both it and him and wanting it to spurt soon. I slurped and panted, mostly with pain, and he laughed and held my head, saying, "By God, I do believe ye're blubbing! What a baby!"
The naily and uncircumcised erection (first of its kind I had seen) seemed oddly feelingless, but for a leap or two in my moving mouth. So I took it in my teeth and shook it like a dog and this produced a hiss or two - "Christ! like that" - and so on. Suddenly the far door was flung wide and Lady Mildmount entered, brilliant.
She was staying with us the night, it seemed, and had changed out of her riding attire into a flowing gown which she instantly, with a licking of her carmined lips, kirtled to her waist, exposing the sudden arrogance of her black-bushed cunny, above the dazzling jewels of her twin high garters.
"Philip you pig! So I missed the fun, did I! Well you shan't waste good male spunk on the chit as well. Here, girl" - catching me by the lengthened hair at my nape she hurled me to a wall - "stand facing that, so I can see your welted bottoms, and don't dare look round, if you value your skin." She hoisted herself in an agile hop to the edge of the table where I had been whipped. "Now, Philip pet, stick that monster into me, screw me silly, darling, stuff, ram, ouch! yes, jam your oh my God that pole... oooh, angelic beast, did you give her eight? What glorious weals, and did she yield a yip? No? Just one, a small cry? Please. Deeper, it's divine.
Yes. Ungh. I'll swear I feel those w-w-warts to my... ungh!... womb! Let me hook my legs around your waist.
So. Now lam it... ugh... into me until, till... agh... I feel your ber-balls up my buttocks. So. So. So!" There followed a long silence, filled only with categoric sounds, of the squishy type, and then in a contrasting calm, orderly tone milady said, "Are you about ready to juice, Philip?"
"Any time!" came in the accents of a man being slowly strangled.
"I feel I could have rather a good one, actually. Bend over, girl, right double, so that I can see those lower cuts. Yes, good, you hit her well, Pip you devil... God, you're getting deep. Now shoot till my eyeballs pop out... deep, deep... eeeaarrhhhHHH!"
It was upside down, in odd perspective, that I saw the reversed underside of this very harpy, or most exigent wasp, as her legs clamped her lover to her and she arched in intolerable ecstasy, resting but on her head and outstretched hands, swearing and biting, while the youth grunted his gism into her. It seemed to last for ever, but once over Lady Berry slid elastically off her perch of paradise, said "Most agreeable," and stalked out, ahead of him. I might not have existed, nor did. But that was the one time I was grateful for the saddle, which had kept my second virginity at least.
"Come, I'll help you up with your skirt, Mouse. You can turn off the taps now, it's all over." This was Aunt Julia, who had also repaired to what we commonly now called The Squealery, too late to see the fun. She fussed over me, hugging and kissing until I felt enveloped in her perfumed, velvet person. "Gosh, Tommy, was it terribly tight?"
"I didn't cry out," I said, adding, "at least not loud."
"I know. Pelham says you're improving and can take up to five without writhing. Says he'll get you to ten, before he's done. Heavens, Tommy, what isn't so exciting, and frightening too, about this great plump botty of yours all streaked with purple, and, and... give me another kiss, a deep one, yes with your tongue. Oooh. I don't know what comes over me when I see you caned. 'Tis as if I felt it myself. I shiver, and shake. Is it wrong? And that man looks at me, behind, you know, as if he'd love to use me that way, too."
"I don't advise the application, Auntie," I said dryly.
"He's got the servants petrified. Oh yes, Mrs. W. asked Stephen if she could send 'em to the man and he said she could. Didn't you know?"
"I thought I saw Lilly looking a mite sorry for herself yesterday morning."
"Oh Good Heavens yes, he's getting us all in his grip. I fear there's only my own poor person left. But, to save you the souse, Tommy, I'd willingly offer it up, in place. Oh I wish there weren't this frightful strap... but do you think you could, just this once... I'm boiling over."
"Oh all right," I consented, dropping to my knees again as by habit. "Only, don't get it up my nose this time. It makes me sneeze."
The aggravation was everywhere. As I bent to my task with ready tongue, feeling Julia's wet slick thing stiffen to my ministrations, I realized that out of pain was distilled our pleasure. It was only fair, for what we suffered.
This was made stricter, all the time. It was a veritable progression of training, or taming. Thus, Prendergast was charged with what I may politely call my inner person. In short, she oversaw my stool, ensuring that I relieved myself promptly at the ritual hour after breakfast each morning under her observation, like a dog.
There was no commode in my room, as in the others, only a large glass pot that I had to be-straddle, and I soon came to know that this slim and silken minx had a morbid fascination, a detailed interest, in this functioning.
First, my morning porridge was now mixed up of psyllium seeds, which added bulk, as it was called, so that I squatted in front of her sharp dark eyes and excreted steaming turds of embarrassing size. No guardsman could have done better. If these had odor, or when I missed, I was at first dosed with hateful castor oil. As I was not corseted at stool, and had less power to push and squeeze, I missed more than once, and the maid decided it should always be the clyster. Now every morning I sweated in front of her, in nervous as much as physical effort, "keeping the passages open" as best I could. For these clysters were corrections in themselves, and to be dreaded accordingly.
"There's nothing for it, if you're so stubborn, but to give you an enema."
And she would go out, to return in brisk, businesslike manner with an old-fashioned brass syringe, with a longish, bent beak, and loaded with at least a pint of hot oil. I bent forward, was greased, and the tube slid up my rectum.
Knowing Prendy always let me wait a little, then, quivering and shaking as if for punishment itself. For if she were kind she would give me the dose in short, slow jets, but if I had been in her judgment "stubborn on the pot," it would be a single hard hot drive of the flushing piston that drove me gasping to my toes, in anxious effort to evade this liquid impaling of my anus.
"There. I shall be back in ten minutes."
Or fifteen, or twenty.
"Please, Prendy, please. I'll have an accident."
"If you do I'll tell your tutor," was the inevitable answer to that.
Oh those everlasting minutes writhing round my room, my eyes searching piteously - for the maid confiscated the pot on such occasions. Anyone watching would indeed have said I had been whipped, from my squirming and contortions.
"Please, Prendy, please," I would shout through the locked door, "it's coming down... it's coming down... I can't stop it!"
I would try lying down, sitting up, my legs in all positions... I was just deciding to do it in the grate, when I heard her fateful steps. "Quick, quick... "
She unlocked the door, holding the pot in one hand and looking at me with an amused smile.
"Well, ready to go now?"
"Yes, yes, please." With tightly closed and slowly thrashing thighs.
"And you aren't going to be silly again tomorrow?"
"No, no." Hands running up and down my sides.
"Ask nicely, then."
"Please, Prendy, may I go?"
"Better than that. Beg."
"Please, please, Miss Prendergast, may I have your kind permission to, to... excrete."
She frowned. "To what?"
"SHIT!" I all but screamed.
She placed the pot on a stool, to which I made a rush and on which I climbed... and, I fear, let fly with a fart.
As I panted to unload my entrails I heard her murmuring behind - "Good. Hard down on it, girl. Let it all come. Slowly, don't break this one, let it stretch... yes, yes. If you don't do me a couple like that tomorrow, I'll have the colon tube up you and make you wait for twenty minutes... "
Etcetera.
A "routine" diary of my corrections of a week at that time reads: Monday: 11.50 - 6 stripes with classroom cane, on the bare, for "Idling" (viz. letting my eyes wander) - a tight whipping just when I imagined I had got through the morning without one, and which sat me on pins and needles through luncheon; nothing more this day, though the tawse was got out after tea, to warn me; Tuesday: A blessed, blessed day, free of all touch on my poor abused bottom, a day to remember and treasure; Wednesday: Yes, yesterday was the calm before the storm, to wit: 9.0 - Recitation imperfect; taken touching my toes, it cost me three errors, thus precisely three cuts with the cane; 11.0 - at the break adjudged guilty of stopping work early since Mr. P. was out of the room. Demerit.
11.30 - For "Yawning and Slouching" a most lively and stingy six with the common stick across the bare bum, plus two extra for flinching, during; Score by luncheon - 11. But in the p.m. am late back from riding (stealing along a side track alone, towards the Mildmount's property, since I have heard my Reggie is home). A second Demerit, plus a third, later, for "Answering Back."
9.0 - Tawsed before bed, for not leaving my clothes tidy enough: a very painful twelve on my tummy, bottom up high on a pillow, with the tough tails fairly eating into my marks; Thursday: 10.10 - Six with the stick, for bad sums, only very low, across the top of the legs - I have learnt that Pelham is considerate on this day and the next, liking to leave my chubbier cheeks unmarked for their now almost inevitable Friday night birching; Friday: A "bill" of twenty. Terrible!
Then there were the Impositions, or "impos." The endless lines, and even more endless copying. This was now invariably linked to some homiletic text concerning whipping and beating. I had to copy out great sections of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Lea's History of the Inquisition in Spain, books on penal reform, slavery, and flogging in our brave Navy. I grew expert on implements and methods - the battledore, or battoir, with nails driven through the wood (a popular punishment for recusant females), the Jamaica cart-whip with "the tenacity and hardness" of wire for which ladies were "bowsed out" with tackle and pulleys, not less, the infamous knut or Russian knout, only abandoned officially a few years before, in 1845, our British cat, and Japanese bastinado, and heartless Yankee paddle. I knew them all, and suffered mentally under each - "I have seen them," in the words of one Catholic advocate I copied, "raise the garments of females and apply with heavy blows to the bleeding body this battoir to which they gave a name which my pen refuses to inscribe." And then there was the birch.
CHAPTER NINE
That clever instrument deserves, and shall have, a chapter of my modest memoirs to itself. For, if comparisons in the field of correction may well be considered odious, of all the items contrived to vex and cure me in those days I do declare it excited the most signal dread in my soul and skin. And Pelham was expert in its use.
The birch is a wood that absorbs and holds water. Accordingly, the rods that I "put up" each afternoon were left to steep in long shallow glass trays, on a sideboard in the library. The solution was a concoction of the tutor's, very vinegary, and it toughened the twigs, in particular their buds, considerably. These thin limbs imparted an inconceivable sting, each one, and a single rod was generally of five - Pelham never allowed more nor seven, since they then tended to swing together and dull the individual agony. The stone-hard buds, with which each had to be furnished at the tip, struck into the fat like fury, yet a good birch did not bruise, though it cut and flecked and grazed the skin intolerably. Perhaps it was a surface smart, unlike the cane, and I suspect it died down more rapidly than the latter. Even so, a protracted count would soon be hellish, and any more than a couple of dozen calculated to have the most hardened sinner howling. For this was an implement with which you could "go" many, since it did not stun and dull.
My first "bill" with Mr. Pelham was for fourteen - the six as described, coupled with two Lates, for which the Demerit (or Omission) carried only four. Only four!
The afternoon of the first Thursday I had "put up" my rods, some five of them, I recall, under the watchful eye of my tutor who took me to the woods and liked to keep his strength in by felling mighty trees. To watch him with an axe, and then imagine him using a rod on one's person, was a trembling terror in itself. Anyway, I showed him each limb I cut for his approval, and he would hiss it through the aching air, and nod, and say, "Good, but get them longer if you can. More swing, and lash." Or, "If you cut me another without buds like this, boy, you'll feel it round your legs." And I bound them at the grasping end with stout twine, and laid them in the trays so that all the sap should flow to the tips. By a further knowledgeable refinement the two or three rods to be used of an evening would be set to steep in buckets of boiling brine, some hour before application, beside the block, in a further toughening procedure.
All in all, in Lady B. Mildmount's phrase of it, the birch had "great charm," and she liked to drop by of a festive Friday evening, when my bill was settled after dinner. The ceremony attendant on these occasions was trying in the extreme, and calculated to be so.
I would come down in a short boy's shirt and stand outside the door of the library, situate at the far end of the mansion to The Squealery. There I would shudder a half horn or more till the company had had a sufficiency of port and nuts to please themselves to come along.
Then they would enter past me, Lord Usher rarrying the black Demerit Book, Lady Julia often with a playful pat under my shirt, behind, and Pelham invariably without a word. The shut door would again accuse my eyes, while the seconds turned into great pangs of dread. My imagination would run amok. I would see the block, the bent girl, the panther's claws streaked across her base...
"Come in."
Mrs. Wilson it was who always opened that door. The first and almost the only thing I could see in that long, stately chamber was the block, and the boiling birches beside it, at the far end, on a small bare dais. For me they were all the furniture it contained.
Lord and Lady Usher and my tutor would have taken up comfortable poses in low chairs in front of that dais, to which my trembling steps took me, accompanied by the tartary housekeeper. Good positions to watch the correction of a sinful girl-child.
Once facing them on the dais I would see Lord Usher open the Great Book. He would read out my fault, together with its date, and occasioning.
"Commission of insubordination," he would conclude. "Have you anything to say?"
"No, sir."
"Do you wish to make appeal?"
"No sir." I did not in fact know quite what this constituted, but had been assured that a "failed" appeal carried an aggravation of the dose. So never tried it.
"Six strokes of the birch against the naked buttocks," he would continue easily. "Tardiness, late for... "
Etcetera.
Finally, there would be a long and, to my modest mind, unnecessary lecture on my errors - "I am sorry to see you in the bill so soon, Thomasina, but I am certain you will already agree that the most efficacious method of extirpating mistakes is to make one dread their consequence. Which we shall regretfully proceed to do. These fourteen stripes will sit in your memory next week, and perhaps help you to avoid their repetition by error. Pelham," he would say, with a foolish grin, "do we have anyone here to birch a girl?"
"I think so," would come the reply.
"Present," said Lord Usher to me. And I had to draw a rod from its bucket and "present" it with a curtsey to the tutor, saying, "I humbly request correction, sir, for my great faults of Insubordination and twice Tardiness." " Then I would stand before the block until he had doffed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves sufficiently, and pronounced the gruff order, "Go over!" - at which Mrs. Wilson would delightedly secure me.
It was a beastly position. The block which Mr. Pelham had so thoughtfully brought with him that first day was properly black, but otherwise it generally ceased to resemble the Eton version, famous in fact and legend. It was bolted to the floor in some manner. I set my knees on its sawdusty ledge and bent right over. I believe it was an adaptation Pelham had contrived from some device for sheep-shearing, which he had helped with once in Wales, it seemed. The thighs were held vertical, and strapped above the knees (slightly parted) to the back - or was it the front? - of the horror. The upper body then found itself lying fully forward, the shoulders veritably on a level with the knees, so strongly did the forward (or backward) slope yield down.
There was a belt at the waist, forcing one over, two slender but effective straps that went under the armpits, while the arms themselves were strapped at elbow and wrist either side the base - so that one had the paradoxical sensation of being compelled to embrace this cruel and tormenting lover. Needless to remark, all modesty must perforce be lost to the sufferer, who found herself fully on view; the twin hemispheres were nicely separated and set up for their whip, while in a female animal the sex pouched back like... like... I will resort to Lady Julia's metaphor after that first Friday infliction, "like the slit pink stomach of a lizard."
The victim was in no mood to indulge such picturesque semantical luxuries. Already the longest birch had been picked out, dripping, having been replaced there after its "presentation." Recognizable were the limber limbs one had culled the day before, and seen slashed leather-hard into a tree-trunk for testing and checking. Already the tutor was drawing back, and instinctively oneself was drawing in, and turning back a trembling face, and...
Hhhhhrrrppp!
"One" - from Mrs. Wilson, counting.
"OH!"
Hhhhhrrrppp!
"Oh no!"
Hhhhhrrrruppp!
"Oh no, sir... please... it's... no, not... NOOOOHHH!"
That man made me pay every second of each count, until I was "taken down," gasping and grasping and grazed and ruddy, for he always "drew" by a dozen or less. Many is the time that poor shirttail was stained wet with my sins by bedtime. And still I had to thank him on bended knee, after.
For each one of us is individual, glory be to God. For each of us it is different, and to me the birch was the most "profound" of my punishments. Even when all pain, or most, was strictly over, it left me shuddering and trembling like a leaf with sheer emotion in front of my mirror, terrified at my terror. These would be the times Lady Julia would burst impetuously in, her stride outlining her thighs against the robin's-egg velvet of her gown, her high-heeled slippers clicking, while her own piled hair, combined with the false, seemed almost as tall as her bust was broad.
"Poor Minimus, all in a ruby dew, and on one to comfort her. Diddums. Shall Auntie suck it better?"
Alas, it was one of her "comfortings" later that cost me one of my smartest "swishings" of that winter. For the birch-rod was not merely reserved for Fridays. It could be called for at need, and was. I was even "given" the tormenting decision between nine with the cane and fifteen with the birch. I was birched a brilliant beetroot red for soiling my clothes outdoors. I showed blue wales from the buds and a blubb'ry face for failing to rise when Lady M. came in.
I could get to six or seven of these stingy flicks, but then it was all a steady agony of sin, of "Hou!" and "Auee!" and tattooing toes and tensening cheeks. So firmly, indeed, did my poor feet beat on the floor of that dais after a dozen it was considered wise to place a cushion under them there, whilst any turning off of my right side only roundened it for the rod. The very worst of all was when the tutor, at Lady Mild-mount's thoughtful advice, "whipped in," the tips finishing between the cheeks. I sang most lustily then.
My usual "bill" - if I was ultra-careful - did not amount to more than twenty, but for Masturbation I was once adjudged thirty, and it was the stingiest punishment I had had, until that time. It happened this way.
There had been a Friday bill of sixteen and somehow it had been singularly tight. Pelham had cut me keenly and low and made me wait an endless age for the last few stripes of the sum. Not to stain my sheets (as I thought) I lay on my belly on my bed, later, feeling my bloodied bum; for some reason I had thrown myself down in my shirt with head towards the bed's foot. It was all I could do at first to prevent myself rolling in pain. Whew! How he'd hewed me.
Came a rattle at the door handle and in a whispering rustle of perfume and lace Lady Julia strode in; she had divested herself of her gown and wore only her mules, stockings and a filmy Maline slip that barely came to her thighs. She moved on her magnetic errand with her usual emotional speed.
"Here, let me put some cold cream on them, pet."
At once she was bent over me, breathing, crooning, and humming, fingers sliding over my streaked cheeks which she greased with needless zeal, until they slipped around like bubbies in her grasp. She was standing with feet astride at the foot of the bed, over which she leant, to "comfort" me, and by turning up my head I could see her rich, fat, bush twat. Then I buried my face in the cushiony counterpane in order to concentrate on not coming, for this voluptuous woman could bring me to a climax quickly and as yet there was still too much pain left in my flesh for me to reach that pure pinnacle of pleasure only the flagellated can fathom, from where it lies buried in the ocean's depths. All the same I was bucking up my arse and generally heaving and moaning in response to her feeling thumbs. What girl could have resisted them, I wondered.
Perhaps because of the sun-like thudding of the blood within my head, or that I had buried my ears somehow in that coverlet, I do not know, but suddenly I was aware of a man's growling laugh. Lord Usher had come in. I started, turning up an eye. It met a sturdy blue-veined cock whose angry, emblazoned head was already nuzzling at the moist aperture "presented" by the pouched sex behind. Not only had Lord Usher entered unknown to me, he had stationed himself - evidently excited at sight of my marks - securely behind his wife. In a second she would swallow his corona, already wettened as it was by some initial jabs and thrustings.
"Yes, yes," I heard Julia hissing as she sank down ever closer over me, "she might as well learn now... for this is how 'tis done, Mouse... how it goes aaaah up you. So. Oh! Ugh!" She grunted and arched and I saw the stiff shaft sink gratefully into the ring of flesh that circleted it from her quim, until the furry balls all but banged over my nose! "Hngh! Ah! Yes! So... it is... so wooooonderful!" She leant further forward yet, so that the cool underside of her toughly nippled, colossal breasts lay on and truly "comforted" my beating bum. The wet root strained and throbbed - "If this don't get you with child, nothing will!" came in stertorous man's accents - then he was jamming into and through her, it seemed, while Julia screamed like one stuck. But, after some apologetic and flushed cossetings, she left me unsatisfied that night and as for me I could bear it no longer; when the couple had gone the pain had subsided enough to be purely provoking and I squatted on the sheets and had at myself, unreservedly.
That this was the preface to one of the tidiest hidings I ever had I was to know when prying Mrs. Wilson entered The Squealery next morning with a sheet over one arm - "Look at this, sir, look at this now."
Pelham considered the spot she showed him with a look of distaste, while I pretended to be immersed in my Livy.
"What is this?"
"Onanism, sir, 'tis nothing else."
"Boy, did you masturbate last night?"
"Yes, sir." The evidence was too damnatory to deny it.
"We'll soon put paid to that little habit," my tutor said grimly. "Cold bath and a birching last thing tonight."
"Yes, sir," said Mrs. Wilson with a satisfied tuck to her lips.
It took place in my bedroom as ordered, and only Pelham and the housekeeper were present. After sitting in a tub of water, into which ice had been put expressly, I was "horsed" for the first time. Mrs. Wilson took my two arms over her shoulders and leaning well forward inclined me over with her, placing her feet solidly apart to support and steady me. I was buck naked and three birches steamed in readiness. Furthermore, I was still tender at the seat from the tight tanning of the night before, so that atop my dangling legs it must be excused me if my darlings were all in a dither.
"How many, sir, how many?"
"Further over, Mrs. W., and further still. I mean to get under her."
"Yes, sir. Take your time, I can hold her like this all night."
"How many, sir, please? Oh please not more than a dozen."
And then I wished I hadn't asked - "Thirty cuts for playing with yourself."
"Thiiiiirty!" I wailed, in despair. "Make it a round three doz, sir, I can hold 'er for ye firm."
Zzzzzsccch! "OW!"
"One," said Mrs. Wilson, breathing firmly.
The man whipped me with a will. For the first ten agonizing slices I confined myself to little Oh's and Ah's and throwing out of my legs. At ten he changed his birch and went lower, changing his tempo and bringing me up to sixteen very fast. My squirmings merely spread me better for the twigs.
I was now making fishlike leaps about Mrs. Wilson's back, her fingers digging firmly into the flesh of my shoulders now. My own, I freely confess, wandered freely; used as a rule to scratching and writhing at the sides of the block, they now felt firm flesh and I believe I occasioned my "horse" some strange moments as I helplessly palped her big breasts with my hands.
"Uuuugh... owww... nooooh!" And so on.
He went to twenty-three with this birch, which he changed again. I was then in VERY HELL! The last cuts were accorded at amazing intervals, each one tighter than its successor, while I heard Mrs. Wilson's whispered commentary in one ear - "Yes, sir, that's how... twenty-four... yeees, that's how to give it to her, so!" Whether she excited herself to ecstasy I know not, but when it was over and I danced an unstately sarabande for their delectation, she was very red in the face indeed. That night I slept with my offending hands manacled to the head of the bed behind me and when I awoke the lower sheet was stuck to my bottom on the right. It was not a correction I cared to repeat. Forty-six cuts within twenty-four hours. I assure my gentle readers that such induces a most malleable spirit in the recipient thereafter.
Full winter came, with its bright berries and snowy frosts. Christmas passed, with its happy relaxations and reliefs, and I saw my mother on leave. She comforted and encouraged me, as I turned fourteen that January. But me, I wished to have a sight of my most adored Reggie, and could not. He was thoroughly sequestered from me that "vac" and I realized his mother was a knowing woman. I began to despair of seeing him again, if he was so kept from me. I only heard of his punishments, as he, I suspect, of mine.
'Twas indeed a strange, and incomplete, sort of sympathy, and communication.
On my side these seemed to be lessening, if not in number, perhaps somewhat in sharpness, else it was that I was growing used to them. The rod still terrified me, but not as much. Then came a sudden dire aggravation, in the fast grip of February, an unforgettable month, when all seemed locked in winter's grip indoors. First I was caught "padding." I will explain.
To save time it had sometimes been Pelham's recent habit to cane me clothed - that is, over my tightly stretched thin trousers of a morning. Invariably he would pull up my shirt behind so that it should not come between the rod and my person, to mitigate the smart, but I had noticed that a hip-pocket on the right remained, after. And one morning, ordered an eighter for Idling (plus "Idle Excuses"), I surreptitiously tucked a small ladies' pocket handkerchief - kept for "blubbing" into - into this same small pocket. By an evil turn of Dame Fortune's wheel Mr.
Pelham chose to turn out this pocket after I had bent. Lo and behold the offending protection.
"What's this? Padding? Were you thinking of padding, child?"
I burst into tears. "Padding," it seemed, was considered among the most heinous of offenses, in the young.
It never carried less than double the original count, plus a lively dose of the briniest birch as a "reminder."
The Ushers heard of the mortality of my crime at luncheon, after I had suffered a simply scalding eight. That afternoon, in their presence, I had an excoriating two dozen of the birch at the block and, all quivering and cut into behind as I was, had to go over the schoolroom punishment desk for a final eight, this time with the ashlar. It was a terrible correction and left even Lady Julia without a word, at sight of me after. I simply rolled on the floor of The Squealery, moaning, while Pelham looked down at me.
"That was quite a tight 'un, Plum," came Lord Usher's verdict, also subdued.
The tutor was breathing hard. "No pity. It is important to show no pity," was all he would say and, staring pitiably up at him as I now sat at his feet, holding my blazing bum, I saw the immense cock-head for which he was known at school, it seems, rampant up one side of his trouserleg, with the sardonic bulge of his balls couchant in between. Little did I know how soon I was to see this tremendous treelike monster in full action.
I was not long in doing so. That February and icy March Lady "Berry" would come to stay with us a weekend here and there, though the houses were so close. Reggie was at school, and she was "lonely," to whit - had some beau about her and wanted to indulge in communal love-play with the Ushers. It was one such Saturday night I mistakenly "lipped" her and she taught me my "place." She had been mocking me about Reggie, knowingly enough, and fearlessly enough I had looked her in the eyes and said, "I don't care, he loves me."
I regretted the tantrum directly it was uttered, for Lady Berinthia took my chin in kindly guise and held it up and said, "Bold child."
"She shall be chastised for that, for speaking up," said my tutor at once.
"Thank you, but I settle my own accounts, Mr. Pelham. I have been looking forward to this moment for a long time. I'll cut the cub to ribbons in my own sweet time. Thomasina will attend me outside my room tonight."
CHAPTER TEN
My Lady Berinthia's allotted room was at the far end of the West Wing of the house, and it was an extremely contrite girl who waited in the corridor outside it that night, wearing only heeled mules, a nightgown to the knees and shivering to her soul.
To say I was apprehensive would be an understatement approaching cant. I was white with fear, my knees shaking. But as I waited those interminable hours I conceded the meaning of punishment. I had "spoken up," I had "answered back," and something in me recognized the justice of proper correction. I quaked as doors slammed downstairs and laughter was exchanged and footsteps rang. No one as yet approached the west stair, however, and it was long after the hall clock had chimed its sonorous midnight that I heard the flustering pitter-patter of feminine soles and Lady Berry, holding her skirt at her thighs, came down the passage towards me. She swept past me into her room in a gust of profound perfume, and closed the door behind her, as if ignorant of my presence. And indeed, as the minutes ticked by, I began to wonder if she had seen the pale ghost in the passageway, and was preparing my trembling tongue to talk, and say "You sent for me, milady?" or some such, as I ordered my knuckles to knock - when sudden, in a blaze of light, the door was flung wide open and she stood there, smiling. The next thing I knew was that I was sent sprawling into the chamber, the method of propulsion used being by left ear. The door was closed and locked upon me. "Take it off."
The room was brilliant with chandeliers but as I obeyed the behest it seemed that somehow the source of all this bathing light was Lady Berinthia, the sun-goddess herself. She was absolutely brilliants bare naked but for a corset, long leather gloves, and thigh-high boots of the same winking glace' kid as the rest. Her face, high-colored, was so fantastically farded it gleamed with the polish of a shell. Piled raven hair replied to the wicked sheen of these five black leather accoutrements. She creaked as she stood astride, watching me with amusement, it seemed, as I hastened to divest myself of my only clothing, and flexing in her hands that appalling long switch of hers.
"Keep your shoes."
While she stared at me like some wasp about to sting, the brilliance of her personage began to take its toll on the last of my courage. Above all, the long-thonged switch, arched in half, spoke its volumes to my hanging head and goosing sides. I stood like a rabbit before its snake, unable for some reason to take my eyes off what the stance of my tormentress-to-be revealed; her thighs were lean and nice and from the wellfurred central seam a wide fan of thinning, flat hair spread out, even to the navel. There was this entire quality to her, of dark activity. She was all lean and laced and yet perfection in her way of grace, with a blackly downy quality to the dazzlingly white skin which I found somehow hugely menacing.
"Shivering, Thomasina?" I heard, in amicable accents; "I think you will soon find it warm enough, dear."
Suddenly a gloved and ringing slap sent my head spinning. Another voice snapped - "Who said you could look at my cunt?"
"I'm s-sorry, m'm."
"You were looking there, weren't you?"
"Yes'm."
"At what?"
"Your... your center, milady."
"My cunt, child. Say it."
"Your... c-c-cunt, ma'am."
"Spell it out."
"C - U - N - T," I said, trembling worse than ever.
"Now keep your eyes on my face, you'll get a closer view of that other thing in a minute."
It was difficult to do, like staring into the sun. I was literally shaking all over, and ready to burst into tears.
"It's time you graduated to the cord, Tommy, I always say all children should around fourteen. Ever tasted the whipcord, have you?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, you're going to now and we might as well get on with it. I'm going to cut you to pulp and peelings for your lip, and then I'm going to give you a lesson in your place in life. First, however, you'll do a little penance for your visual insolence just now. Kneel down and lick my boots. And by lick I mean lick, not kiss. Go on."
I did as bid, breathless in fascination at the incredible arch of instep and the spike-like gleaming heel. I applied my tongue to the leather with a will, hearing her creak as she bent to inspect my work and aware, too, of the whispery shudder in the air each time she caused the switch to move through it - as if it too longed to show its true punitive zeal.
"Right under. Go on. I want to see both of them quite wet with your slobber. Yes, ye-es, that's it. More still.
One of these days I'll teach you how to kiss a foot, Thomasina. I promise. I'll walk out barefoot in rich mud and mire, yes in cattle-muck if need be, and you'll be grateful to lick between each toe, until all is clean and, and... white... and, yes, stop yes now... "
There was a hissing fling, half of her tongue, half of her switch, and before my eyes it flashed down serpentine and bit into a leathern hassock there, drawing a puff of dust from its taut surface and leaving there, horribly visible, the traces of its power, in particular three fearful indentations from the "trainer," or braided end. She must have seen me goggling, for she laughed.
"For sheer insolence to your elders, and Betters, Thomasina, you are about to receive across your protuberant and impertinent bare bottom fifteen strokes with this switch. I think you'll find it wakes you up. In fact, I've never given Reggie more. He doesn't seem to need it." She gave a mirthless laugh and told me to stand up. I did so aghast. Fifteen! I would be cut through by fifteen. I stared at the... thing in horror. It wasn't a switch, it was a whip. And its embossed handle was being extended to me now.
"Take it," said the bare-breasted martinet coaxingly, and I did. Its length wobbled lovingly in my hand. Still smiling triumphantly she added, "I never give a punishment I couldn't take myself, Thomasina. Did you know that I was raised by a hard-drinking, hard-riding father, the late Earl, who, furious that he hadn't fathered a son, used to flog me with a horsewhip for a peccadillo. Every birthday till I came of age I'd to stand in the yard with bare arse 'fore all the gathered servants and take whatever my years were - twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen - without flinching. If I did, I got it over, double, secured. The blood fell in the snow, for like you I was a wintry child, born in February. I hated him, Tommy, but I learnt to take a beating. And after the last of all - twenty-one as hard as he could cut in - I managed to turn and spit. Now take this switch, girl, and give me three."
"Give... you?"
"With all your strength. As I don't choose to bend before you I shall merely turn my back." And she did so, most elegantly. "Whip across the buttocks. Follow through, don't flick. Detach yourself from the idea that these hips belong to me. Tell yourself you are thrashing an errant pony's rump."
It was difficult to do. Under the definition of the tightly laced corset the pair was high and neat and closelycheeked, if downy from within.
I did not know what to do. I shut my eyes and swung. The whirry whupp that traveled from my wrist up my forearm told me how elastically this switch connected. I stared in some dismay. I had just implanted a resonant weal across Lady Mildmount's fashionable behind. What had I done? What was happening here?
But she merely drawled without turning: "Too wristy, Tommy. Really hit this time. And make sure the leader doesn't bite too far over."
My second effort, delivered with all the strength of my shoulders, was approved, in these terms: "Very much better. That hurt quite a lot. For the last one take your time and aim at the same place."
Until this date in my sheltered life I had been the recipient, nor the server, of corporeal correction. As I looked at that brightly wealed pair of buttocks some first instinct of the pleasure of infliction must have come to me for I lashed the last with a will, and true purpose. I knew the cut was good before it bit and when it did so, the braided tail plucking up the jellyish flesh on the right, I felt a curious exultant satisfaction. A furious blotch of inky hue arose and I was rewarded to see milady put one hand back. She turned and stared at me meditatively.
"That was a very good stripe indeed, Thomasina. You have a genuine aptitude for the whip. So much so that I am going to give you a final chance. One more cut and if you draw blood I'll let you off five. How's that?"
I stared in a daze. I was more than desperate.
I had before my eyes the vivid traces of but three slices with this switch, and they seemed to brand the buttock with streaks of living flame. What would fifteen be like, and expertly laid on? The bargain was a real one and I drew back in a little panic.
"Christ," I heard her whispering suddenly, as her pearly shoulders sloped and she appeared to grip herself in front, "cut in, you little beast, give it me now... "
I did so with all my youthful strength. The switch whicked and lapped, clawing in its tip in characteristic way.
Lady Berinthia had slightly parted her legs for the onslaught and caught the cut fully. I looked vainly for a sign, but there was no sign given me. She rubbed more briskly at herself in front, then put a hand back, stroked her right cheek and looked at it. When she turned I was petrified. There was not only this hectic flush in her face, but her eyes now contained a steely quality, as if they were made of varnished glass, something that consorted only with cruelty.
"You didn't draw, did you, Tommy?"
"No'm, I der-don't think so."
"You didn't. You'll have a closer inspection of the area later on. I don't cut easily, which so used to annoy my poor papa, the late Earl - until he wound that wire into the tip-lash. This trainer," and she took the terrible swinging thing from my grasp and caressed its shining scarlet tail, the color of her strident nipples before me, "is merely tough twine though well waxed and, of course," here she once more mirthlessly laughed, "stiffened with blood, mostly Reggie's, as it happens. Really, it should be blue. No, those cuts enlivened me considerably, m'dear, just what I needed. Any brute can draw with wire, but I can do it with these braids, whenever I want. And I don't mean on the right side only. Right across. That requires skill. I'm afraid I'm going to give you a bloody bottom, Thomasina, and here's how I mean to do it. Come."
She came close to me, over me, above me, her black eyes glittering, and her whole body, I realized, quivering with the suppressed fury of her inner excitement. Gently, with gloved fingers, she tilted up my chin.
"Open your mouth."
She spat into it, paused, with writhing lips, collected a larger gob and spat venomously directly into my mouth again. I choked, and gasped.
"Keep it wide open," I heard.
She drew even closer, until I felt her perfumed breathing on my skin. Her intense excitement was perceptible to me all over. For a second I glanced up and directly into the dark funnels of her narrow nostrils, which she was pinching between her fingers in some manner, and then I was spluttering in earnest. In a single burst she emptied the sea-green snot of those nostrils into my mouth. I showed my natural distaste with a grimace that was slapped off my face at once.
"Don't swallow. Hold it there. A rare privilege, you little witch. By rights I ought to allow you to put your tongue up my nose, but you don't deserve it. So listen while I tell you how I'll whip you." She moved behind me, feeling and fondling my quivering buttocks. "Every inch of you is insolent, girl. You stink of it. Good Lord, but you're going to get it now. Here's how it'll be, then. I'll start you off with three target stripes, as I call them, reasonably well spaced across the center. If they mark well I need only two more between them to make a single unified band of operation, certainly on the right, for this little tickler spreads, as you'll find. So far five.
Say one more to fill in any white place completely. Six. Each one will be a terrific stinger, to shake you out of your skin, but I won't have drawn. In fact, I'm just beginning. The next two will take you to a higher plane of pain altogether. Spaced about an inch and a half apart they'll cut the skin. But because the first grazes sometimes give an odd relief it'll be necessary, I fear, to revive any numbed parts with pimentade. Mrs.
Wilson was so kind as to prepare some for me, it's chiefly a vinegar recipe. That will give me seven. Seven in between the last two, which will be going ridged and black. Seven of the tightest strokes you have ever had, even from that kind tutor of yours, seven flecks each of which will draw. Two minutes of literal hell, child, when you'll want to jump out of your skin and climb up the wall, followed by thirty seconds at the end when those braziers of the Inquisition you've been reading about would seem a picnic... "
"Please," I whimpered, lost, "please."
"Get over there," she said, "under the yard." And this time the method of propulsion was the toe of a boot, applied behind.
I stood under the yard, where the carpeting of the room had been taken up, digesting the disquisition while milady laced me in a short hard corset. Everything was occurring, as it does in such moments for the guilty, far too fast.
"By the time I've finished with you, minx, you won't be so much as able to twitch. There. Tight enough for you? See how it throws out your breasts, one of these days I'll swish those for you and really make you dance. Heavens, how I'm going to cut this tail off you in slices. Here," and she dropped two snakelike straps at my feet, "I told you I don't choose to bend. One round your ankles and one above your knees. Really tight mind, or I'll truss you with twine that will cut."
With trembly fingers I bent to obey. The corset was making it hard for me to breathe. There was a ring on its busk in front but I had no time to ponder its purpose since in a second I was strung up to the yard, wrists either end of the bar in the now customary Y. Frankly, I was trying to void my mouth of the excrescences let into it by the noble lady; somehow they would not go down my reluctant gorge. I was flushed and panting, already. But, then, so was she.
She was standing in front of me now with a slender chain, and something metallic, chinking and shining in her hands.
"I'm going to introduce you to a very interesting saddle, Thomasina, one that discourages undue movement, I do believe you'll find."
So saying, she hooked one end of the chain to the ring in front of the corset, above my lower belly, ran it through my thighs and drew it up behind, between my pressing cheeks. She adjusted it lovingly through the very groove of my person and suddenly it was tightened... "Eeeee...!"
My head went back. It was the required pose. Taking my jaws in one hand like a horse's Lady Berinthia first greased the edges of my mouth with the other and then slipped into it a hard, cold and heavy bit.
"Tongue down, or this'll hurt."
Before I knew it, I was truly bitted, my head wrenched up as the chain, now passing through a waist-ring of the corset behind, was attached in some manner to the back of this dreadful bridle. I gagged and sputtered, staring at the ceiling. The posture was perfectly pitiable and made the more so as milady drew up the yard until but the toes of my mules touched the floor.
There I most helplessly hung, arms wide, the highest part of my body perhaps my chin. My neck ran in a line down to my waist, for the slightest motion to alleviate the pressure of the bit drew on that deadly chain between my legs. Between my lips. Aaah! Ooooh! Everything was then drawn even more taut - corset, chain, leg straps, even the now dribbling bit which tasted foul, as if its anointment - presumably to preserve my lips - were castor oil, or engine grease.
"Now try to move, Miss Cheeky!"
It was a perfect whipping position, which was to say perfectly frightful, and I realized I was in the hands of an expert. Hanging a-tiptoe, divided by that frightful chain, I was as cut off from all bodily control by the corset, my buttocks parted and defenseless. I could not make the merest contraction of the part. Trying once, the chain cut excruciatingly within me. I felt all of myself limply concentrated there, tremoring with an anticipation that sent involuntary flutters up my lower flesh.
"Don't run away while I get the switch."
When she had done so I tried to turn my head, but could not. My mouth gaped, my eyes were starting. She stood well to my left, I sensed, the switch could not be that long, I was thinking, when - WHRRRRPPP!
The callous cord plucked at my buttocks. To say it was excruciating would also be common cant.
It was hellish, a rising bar of flame at my bottom that was joined, after an interval, with another - worse.
"Urrgh!" I gurgled, starting, and feeling the chain sink deeper as a result.
Reggie, oh Reggie, save me! I prayed.
The tartar whipped me as she had promised, with diabolic accuracy of concentration. The three cuts laced me right across, one below the other, and though I was not in the mood for comparative conclusions, of an academic kind, each seemed worth several of the cane.
After these she came to my face and stroked my panting chest with the tail of her horror.
"It does sting, doesn't it, Tommy. But those were merely warming-up strokes. Unfortunately I cut too wide - you must really enjoy the feel of that chain to wriggle so - and will have to now take four, to cover round them. But it doesn't matter very much, I've already drawn. The one in the middle, in case you didn't know.
There's a definite graze. I'm afraid this is going to be quite unpleasant."
Being unable to speak, to cry, to utter my pain, was a torment in itself. I whined in response to each whickering savage slice of those four. I was sweating. It was running down my chest, the groove of my spine, the cleft of my quivering bottoms.
"Now you're a nice red all over," she told me. "From here on it's going to hurt." A sponge was pressed to my grateful face, and the salts went to my nostrils; for a second I felt dizzy with sensation. "Now for the two liners."
I literally hopped in place, on my poor toes, as she gave me these perfectly fiendish strokes, with a long pause between, and then she swore.
"Too wide again, confound you, child. You're moving. I'm usually far more true than this. And I only have six left to make you really feel it. Curse and confound."
My situation was exacerbated. Weights were secured to my feet and some cutting cord of sorts threaded vertically around my hips through the chain. This was exquisitely secured under the very fall of my cheeks behind, in such a way as to hold them even closer. I gurgled my pain and protestation, and - very much like some recalcitrant steed under the spur - whinnied my pleas to be let off.
"Oh no you don't," she correctly interpreted. "This is the part that does most to correct pretty girls with chubby bottoms, of insolence, and lip."
I had thought she had completed her handiwork, being as I was virtually unable - as she had put it - to twitch. Or really to see. The ceiling was a curlicued daze overhead. But my straining eyes caught further preparatives. Was it a bowl that was fetched, a rough scrub brush?
"I hope she put in the Jamaica lime. The lime makes all the difference."
Suddenly I yearned to scream my feelings. As Molly's had been with the curry comb, my buttocks were brutally brushed up from under with the cold aching pimentade. The smarting stuff penetrated the flecks and blisters left by the switch and in my agony I lifted up my knees, literally hanging from the swinging yard. My Messalina rubbed and scrubbed and when she had finished my scoured bottoms felt like white-hot coals.
"There," she said, putting her instruments aside and resuming her rod, "I think you'll find that will make you appreciate these last licks nicely. The tip will drive it in the more as it cuts. I should have liked to apply a burr behind, the very best thing to prevent any movement of clenching - a spiny ball stuck under the base of the cheeks, which merely works deeper with contractions - but I didn't bring mine with me. One can't think of everything."
Reggie, Reggie, I suffer thus for...
WHIWHIWHHRRUPP!
"Hhhhhhhh... aoouuu!"
The braided tail popped at my encarmined left cheek. Physically I felt the thong lift the fat flesh there and then the atrocious pain flowed through me. I knew the source, and origin, of Reginald's once jesting "half" cut. Standing parallel to me, even, if anything, slightly in front of me, she had lashed but my left chub, yet how unspeakably she lashed it there. Pelham had beaten me with justice; this scalding whipping was one my soul knew to be, somehow, of an inner hostility. I twisted like a fish on its hook for, it must have been, some twenty seconds, and then, dear God my Savior, she was preparing her next...
Ha hou ho oh ha ouh I can't... not another... I can't bear a ou au touch... a single... one... she's c-c-coming...
ohahohaha...
FFFRRRRRPPPPP!
It was impossibly worse. This cut took my full two cheeks, the trainer digging in to a spot that felt wet, and oozy. I jerked and jacked, making most strange and elementary sounds, like jungle grunts. I was no more part of myself. I was hanging pain, praying now that the third of this sedulous store would be on the left once more, so as to spare me at least the added contact. It was.
When she addressed me some half-minute after this, and the worst of my spasms had subsided, I was aware that an element of the chain had been rubbing at the nub of my being. I was near numbed down there, yet contradictorily moist, and if anything was being insolent at that moment, it was my swelling clit.
The saucy thing was a tough bud of being, thrusting at that steel like a mussel or cockle "alive, alive-O." It was not pleasure I felt, of course, I was a single coursing flame of pain behind, but there was some impending immensity of pleasure-pain upon me too. Like everything uncontrollable it was inconceivably delicious, and intensified by the knowing words she spoke, pantingly, behind me now.
"I've been looking forward to pulling you down a peg a long time, Thomasina, and after these next three I think you'll consider before being lippy to me again. Eh? You're getting nicely done behind. I never fail to keep a promise, do I? A bloody buttock's all you children understand. You'll remember these last three a long, long time."
To describe them - right, left, right - would be a work of supererogation. Each was infernal, and after the third I felt my whole self fisted by some giant hand of sheer sensation (was it pleasure? was it pain?), as I shook on the hanging yard. It was unlike anything I had ever known, some other principle of existence, yet hardly consummatory since there was no detumescence. I was still afire in my self and my center; and when milady took off my bit I was beyond yelling, I merely drooled and dribbled, panting. The cutting cord was taken from under my things and my hips could express more actively their agony.
Drawing the slender chain through my legs and off me, Lady Mildmount tscked and said: "I do believe you came, you filthy little thing." She put the chain to her nostrils. "Did you?"
I tried to shake my head. Had I, had I?
"It was agony, ma'am," I gasped out, pleading.
"Agony or ecstasy, Thomasina? If the latter, you're incorrigible and will have to be dealt with in other ways."
She put a finger to my spot and looked at it, but whether since her hands were gloved, or not, failed to remark on the nature of its slime.
Then the weights were off my ankles and - "Here, I don't want you rubbing behind." Released of the yard, where they had been sympathetically clenching and unclenching, my little hands were fastened behind, by an ingenious strapping of wrist to reverse elbow. My chest thus thrust out like a chicken's, it was more like some startled jack-rabbit that I then hopped three paces across the room.
The pain was finding me exactly and I hoo'ed and haa'ed to the considerable amusement of my tormentress.
Finally I fell and lying well strapped on my belly felt the volted lightning flash begin within. My legs jerked back, my buttocks clenched, I went off in that spasm only those who have known it can attest, as to its immensity of emotion. I shed my being and reached the climbing moon and lay limp, panting, after. I prayed the woman watching had indeed taken this for the very ecstasy of the agony she had inflicted, and rubbed my center on the flooring to remove that moment's traces. Now I was oozing behind and before. Fortunately, the aristocratic lady had been busying herself with something else for my entertainment, so it all too soon seemed.
She came and stood over me. The tail of that abominable switch trailed near my face.
"Kiss the tip, Tommy. It was he who taught you your lesson."
And I fastened my full lips on the fiend. It would be unreal to say it was red with blood, but it was wet - where now my own had conjoined that of my beloved's. Breaking her rule about not bending down, though doing so perforce, she undid the straps about my legs and threw them on the floor. My thighs thrashed, pouring feeling back into my center, but she made me stand still and breathe deeply of the restorative salts. Then I was led to a long mirror, told to stand legs apart and bend double to look through them at my poor aching bottom ("The only way you ought to see it"), no easy task with my arms tied behind, but one I effected nevertheless.
What a whipping! I had never been so well wealed. Oddly, as I looked at those empurpled cheeks, my feeling was one of awe, mingled with a certain awful admiration Frankly, I had felt my whole buttock to be covered with welts. It was not so. They had been laid across me expertly, in a single flaming band, into which, on both sides now, though principally on the right, the black blisters of the tail marks showed, with more than one perfect pearl. The right thigh had received a trace of one of these, I saw.
"That's what you get for insolence, child. But I haven't finished with ye yet. I'm now going to show you your real place in life. Come over here."
She strode excitedly to an end of the room she had been preparing and I, I creakingly, achingly followed.
Anything, anything, rather than another single cut of that unbearable switch...
"Did it really hurt very much, Tommy?"
"Terribly, milady. It still does. I've never been flogged like that in my life."
"Not even by Pelham?"
I shook my head. "It was worse than anything he's given me, I think."
She seemed to approve this answer. With a pleased smile tossed over one shoulder she said, "And did you truly come?"
"I... no... I don't know, ma'am."
"Well, lie down there."
"Liedown'm?"
"That's what I said. On your back. With your head in - that."
The switch made a tinny tinkle and I a dismayed gulp. "That" was a commodious porcelain bedpan and I began to have misgivings. Still, I had but to see and sense that trailing switch now to obey. I lay full length, my nape along its sloping surface and my head, short-haired, well back in its container. Lady Berry was chuckling. She straddled my face, where it lay.
"I promised you a closer look at my cunt, Thomasina, and you shall have one. Part your legs and draw them up, wide. And in case you didn't know, you did come, child. Which will make this all the more entertaining for you, I'm sure. I'm going to give you a sherry restorative and I want your eyes and mouth held wide throughout. Else... " And the switch-tail tapped... no, it damnably bit - me with a well-placed flick at the base of one cheek. My mouth went wide, as did my eyes. My bound arms, stirring uncomfortably behind me, arched up my opulent bosom invitingly.
She bestrode me like some Colossa of Rhodes, the twin shiny boots leading irrevocably upwards to the bunched and nervous buttocks across which my strokes had left their stripes; in this perspective her farded face was as if bearded by her thick dry muff, but she was still smiling as her fingers felt among its contours and conclusions.
"To be spat and pissed on is all you deserve, trollop. Head right back. I mean to get some of it up your nose."
Again the switch reminded me and I heard a small voice babbling hectically, "Please'm no more with the not the please no more with the whip I'll never... "
"Stop talking and open wide. I had a bottle and a bit of champagne to dinner so you should get your fill. Gad, but I must beat your breasts one of these days, Thomasina. Here, here... it... comes!"
As come it did. The rich jet first did in fact strike my braced-back chest, then I was gulping and guggling under the inundation as my eyes smarted, my mouth welled full and I was doing my utmost not to swallow. A flick bit.
"Keep open, I say."
I was urinated on expertly too, and for an eternity of degrading time. As my eyes took in the torrent cascading from its mossy sheath and I swallowed rather than choke, my punishment became too much for me and I wept unseen, shuddering tears into that tinkling tray, where all my hair was wet.
"There. Now you've been pissed on, you infamous nothing. Say you're grateful."
"Th-thank you, ma'am."
"Stop those crocodile tears and get your nightgown and wipe up the drops you've let spill."
Kneeling now I looked up at her with supplicating eyes.
"But how, milady, how?"
"With your teeth, dungblot," she fairly snarled at me then, "with your teeth. Here."
And seizing the mere garment she bunched it up and thrust it in my mouth and so it was done. I knelt double with the new-made mop in my mouth and wiped the floor around the brimming pan, the while the tail touched my cloven self behind; it was the most humiliating thing I had ever done.
Finally she took it from me, looked at it, fretted her front with it and said, "I haven't finished with you yet.
Kneel up straight now, for I mean to show you your real position in life. Ever played 'kiss-m'-arse'?"
"No, ma'am."
"Well, you're going to now. You know what I mean, of course?"
I was silent, crying softly. Frankly at that moment I felt close to breaking down, but I knew that my best interest was to pleasure this harpy, in order to escape that room the sooner.
"You have heard of the game, among kitchen wenches?"
"Yes'm."
"Well. What is it?"
I looked up, imploring. "Oh please, milady, molest me no more. I have been so thoroughly whipped, I promise I shall never, ever, be impolite to you again... only please don't... "
"Explain the game!" she raged. She was growing ever more excited, it was plain, working my nightgown into her like some veritable organ.
"It means... it means," I began, crying, "kissing the... the behind... the bottom hole of the other... "
"It means, you minx," she stormed in sexual fury then, punctuating her words with a box to my ears, "sticking - !!! - your - - tongue - +++ !!! - up!! - my - ANUS!"
She turned her brilliant back. "Now do it," she commanded. "Get it right up and keep it there, or I'll give you a brown nose as well. Count yourself lucky I don't make you do what one of my father, the late Earl's mistresses required of me - to insert a sweetmeat and swallow it after, so flavored. Essss... yes... there...
deeper... ah... ouh... hou... can you taste shit, you slut, or simply the silken lining of my lovely bowel... oh-oh now keep it still, and stiff, dear God I'm feeling lush tonight... "
The awful reaming had profound effect. My face pressed to the white and quivering bottoms of this ardent lady I tasted her tallow, not wholly with disgust, I confess, until she started bucking herself back upon me - "Keep it stiff, I said" - and ominously opening her sphincter.
I should dearly love to pass over what ensued in silence, but the honesty of my diary, its utility to another generation, vetoes this proposal. I must expose myself mentally as I was that night physically. It will be for the good of posterity to see the underside of another century, I feel.
I was dragged across the floor. I sat on the floor, my head back on a chair. I was milady's cushion, no less.
"Now get it right up me this time, hear. Aaah... essss... oooooh. Now move it around a little. So." Two strokes fell on my legs. "I'll cut you to strips if it escapes." She began to maneuver and move herself on me, across my face, in such a manner that I was breathless and blinded both. She was coming and squirming and I knew my troubles would be over in a moment. But what a decade that moment was. She doubled, hissing, gripped my nipples and twisted each hard. "Up... you can get it further than that... " The while she was frothing down my chin. It went on and on, another Niagara, and my face was trotted sore.
At last she stood up and rubbed herself, behind and before, with my gown, threw it aside and picked up her switch once more.
"Very agreeable. You have a firm tongue, Thomasina. I plan to employ it again. Now then, before I decorset and undo you, let's have a last game as a reward. Put your straps on the sideboard there."
The two straps which had confined my legs during correction were lying on the floor near the yard. I went to them, realized I was meant to pick them, too, up in my teeth and bent to do so, when - THHHWWWRRRLLLP!
"Eow!" I danced back in sudden pain.
The cut had caught me on the thigh, the right.
"Hurry, dear."
She was watching me amused, indeed laughing at my miserable mien as I warily approached again, eyeing her length of cord, and trying to put as much distance between it and my bruised b.t.m. as possible.
"Oooow!"
The switch flick drove me off once more, then hardily I ducked and ramassed it in my teeth and deposited after a slow, squirming stroll to the sideboard that, I am sure, was much appreciated.
"One more, Thomasina."
This last cost me a lively three ere I could embraven myself to bend, and endure.
At last, released quite, I was handed back my gown, soiled and smeared with milady's aristocratic urine, and her come, and my own poor blood, and - too - my heartfelt tears. Likewise was my face soiled with more than tears, with spittle, piss and smeary stuff, as I stood and listened to my lecture.
"If I could have vomited over you, I would, my dear, or made you drink the water of a high colonic. Do you feel well punished now, less saucy?"
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Still feel like taking Reggie from me?"
"No."
"I'll have your hide in tatters fore that happens. I have a jewelled switch, at home, with cutting diamonds set in its texture. I think there might be considerably less chance of cow's-eyes between you two if it was twentyfive with that for each tryst at the beach." I held my breath. And so she knew! Had thrashed it out of Reggie, perhaps. Then she added in an odd way, "I enjoyed flogging you, Thomasina; if I'd been fucked just after, I think I'd have died. Now go along with you and show yourself to that Pelham. Show him a woman can punish, too."
Reggie my dearest, it was a degraded and bedraggled sparrow who trailed her steps to that pale-faced tutor's end of the house, and knocked on the door. After a second it was flung open and I started back. I was confronting the sun. Or so it seemed. Pelham was naked and I was head-on with the tremendous pole of his prick.
"What? Oh it's you. Come in."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
What a magnificent monstrosity of unsated desire! I had seen it along the line of his fawn trouser-leg, of course, but now it sprouted at me angrily, full of fell purpose and darkly slimed. It was like some foot-long lead pipe with this terrible wedge-like head, cobra-hooded and copper in color, a huge thunder-cloud, salivating semen from its slit. Its great girth and strength were emphasized by the narrow and hard hips in which the tree was set, while his athletic belly was flat to his backbone in outline. There was a whimpering going on in the room.
"What? Yes? Don't stand there staring, then."
"I w-w-was told to... show myself to you, sir. By Lady Mildmount." And I turned, raising up my gown.
"Oh? Yes? Damn good, made you sit up a little, I expect. Now then, you come handy, child," he said, speaking more thickly and breathily than wont, "I mean to service... that is to say, you may help me service...
this servant... "
"No, sir, please, sir," came suddenly, in trembling tones I recognized from over his shoulder, "not that way...
stuff it up my cunt, but not that way, sir, please."
I looked beyond him to the bed. And saw a buttock. Molly was on knees and elbows at one end of it, throwing up her big peasant's bottom which was barred with the grillework of some strokes. Pelham had just been punishing her, it was plain. But what further punishment was intended her person now, and so made her whimper and weep, was all too plain, as Pelham strode between her legs, which he planted even wider, and presented his great pulsing prick to the chasm of her arse-cheeks.
"Stop all this fuss instantly," he said. "I mean to have you this way, and shall."
"But it won't go in, sir," Molly wailed, "it's... too big!"
"Come here, child," (signaling me) "and introduce this organ while I hold her. First grease her with that." He indicated an open can of saddle soap.
"Not all of it, sir... I can't take all of it there... and you go on so long... "
"Now oil me, too," he said, after I had introduced a dollop of the stuff into Molly's protesting bung-hole.
Remunitioned, I approached his enormous knob with really religious awe. Its head was like shot silk, deepening in color at the edges. I anointed it thoroughly, with wondering fingers, and in tracing the vein at the underbelly was rewarded with a mule-like kick of the thing.
"The corona, too, sir, under it?"
"Yes, yes, but only the head on the whole. This is a tight sphincter-ring and I want to feel it. Yeees!"
He leant over and put his strong arms under Molly's, bringing back the hands and twining them behind her head in the classic wrestler's full-nelson. Virtually he seemed to hold the whole of her there.
"Now put it in," he told me.
I gripped the prick halfway down and approached its immense nozzle to the shy aperture. Molly whimpered and tried to rise as she felt it, but the man was kneeling on the back of her knees on the bed. I drew down on the pole in my palm, tautening the slick skin for the assault until the eye of it was winking as in anticipation.
Like a thoroughbred testing its starting-gate the prick leapt of itself and lodged within. A ring of rubbery muscle encircled the plum of head for a moment, then Molly wriggled frantically to lose it, and did. Almost at once I represented the tool and with a shove he thrust a good third of it up her entrails. Molly shrieked.
Indeed, a veritable wrestling match ensued.
"I can't, sir. I caaaahhhn't... no more... don't give me more... "
"Clumsy oaf," Pelham grunted, "you shall have it all up you, I swear."
He was like a man trying to gaff some prize catch. I watched in horrified amazement of emotion as the woman's struggles only further impaled her. Forcing her nape into the bed he got good traction for a minute or more, burying himself well inside her. Then the strong servant contrived to draw high a leg, a foot made purchase on the bedside and she was half-standing there, squirming. Pelham, sensing his prey escape, took a full pace back and, still holding her in the fullnelson, seemed for a second literally to carry her there on his prick.
"Naaaaooww! 'Tis going right through me... noooooh!" she screamed, thrashing. "No more... no more up, sir... I can't bear... "
It was a different spectacle from the stoical Molly I had watched in the stables. As her legs writhed she sunk ineluctably, still shrieking, onto the gristly dragon of manhood, he gave a sudden thrusting pump when somehow she managed to unskewer herself from him and drop to the floor at his feet. In its freed upward leap the furious prick suddenly spurted an arc of sperm clear across the room, where it spattered on the floor, in some new milk way.
"Curse you, woman! I've a mind to make you pay for that, and dear."
"Whip me as you wish, sir, but don't, don't, I beg you, ask me to take that... thing up me there. It isn't fair to, sir... to neither man nor beast."
"Are my services any longer required?" I asked, from close to the door to which I had tiptoed.
"What? Uh?" The man looked at me Wearily, his smeared tool still dribbling. Then he said something that struck dread to my soul - "Get out of here, child, before I decide to make a real boy of you, too. It's long time I did so. Ever been buggered?"
"Never been buggered, sir," I said.
"Well, if you aren't out of here in two shakes you're likely to be." He gave his only slightly inclined manhood a vigorous shake. "For I do mean to have someone's hole tonight."
You are welcome to Lady Berry's, I was on the point of replying, it is lushened for you ready, but Molly was breaking into another lost long wail - "Beat me, sir, if you must, beat me but don't bugger me, please. I never could bear it, sir. Beat me, don't bugger me... "
"Squat on that stool and bend right over quite."
It was time for me to retire, and I took my butchered buttocks to bed in a hurry. Whether or not the man had his will with Molly that night I know not, but he extracted a frightful revenge later, as I shall presently relate.
For myself his gnarled monster of a thing or dong mesmerized my imagination for a week, and more than once I had to pull myself up in the schoolroom, musing on its prodigy of girth, as he stood with his back to the fire, the trousers tightly outlining his brawny thighs and slender hips. But at that time there came the sudden change in my fate and fortunes which was irrevocably to alter all.
In the weeks that followed my frightful visitation to Lady Berinthia's chamber Pelham did seem to assume some new domination of our house, and my new home. It was in subtle touches, concise orders that took over Lord Stephen's, a complicity with the heartless housekeeper, an increasing allegiance to Lady Berinthia, coupled with almost a contempt for Auntie J. He paced the great estate like an almost owner, his pale high forehead set and intense, his broad hands swinging. He was a figure of dread to me then, and is still, now.
Yet, it must not be thought that there were no fighter moments, too. With him there often were. Pelham was capable of a tenderness surpassing that of any mother for her child, where animals were concerned. I have seen him bind a spaniel's foot with a delicacy few women know. One such evening we were sharing together in a little morning-room. All work was over and he had read me a story, a stirring tale of England's Empire and a boy's devotion there. It had half-pierced my soul not to be the other sex, then, and go out and do grand things for my country. We had finished and were lying side by side on the floor, Pelham repairing the lion's paw leg of an old chair, myself at his side watching. There was a knock and Celia came in. My tutor was in his best mood, and I cherished such instants.
She was a new girl on our "belowstairs" staff, about seventeen but very tall and gangling and utterly fair, with thin hair taken back and a sweet expression as if butter would not melt in her mouth. She stood there, and Pelham did not look up. Poor girl, I knew just how she felt.
"I was to report to you, sir."
"Report?" Pelham was humming, a nail in his mouth.
"Yes, sir. For, for correction, sir."
"Oh?"
"Yes, sir. Clumsiness, sir. I broke a crock, and, and Mrs. Wilson told me to report to you, sir and... "
"And?" Though Pelham was frowning I myself exchanged a twinkle of the eyes with him. He loved being dense on such occasions.
"And... ask for a whipping, sir." The poor girl was growing quite desperate - as I might have done, standing there.
"Really. And did she specify with what?"
"Ner-no, sir. I suppose... with the rod."
"What do we use on a clumsy girl, Thomasina, hm?" he asked me.
"I'm afraid it's the cane," I said hypocritically.
"I'm afraid it is," he said, equally playfully. "First flogging in this house, girl?"
"Yes, sir."
"Take it without question?"
"Yes, sir."
"Whipped at home, were you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Know where the canes are kept here?"
"Yes, sir."
"Fetch one."
The man said no more, and we returned to our task. After a few minutes there was the returning patter of feet and soon a slim yellow tip came into my recumbent view.
"The cane, sir."
Pelham let her wait, continuing to chat with me, which he broke up suddenly by saying, "Arrange her for me, would you, Tommy. I have an idea a clumsy child not far away has no need of underthings for a while. Bend her for me nicely, so I can come under, you know."
"Come, Celia," I said with alacrity, a little prim frown pleating my forehead as I approached her, "down with your knickers now. You need have no shame. We all have to do it. Now put your hands here."
I bent her over a low leather pouffe, on which the weight of her arms and upper torso rested. Her legs inclined a little back at an angle, and when I had lifted skirt and shift up her back I really preferred it so. Celia wore no stockings and her long coltish legs blended imperceptibly with her pure very white buttocks, the under-shelf of which positively invited the stick. "It's going to be eight."
She tensened back, a frond of hair threading through between her high thighs, as Pelham approached with the rod.
Thhhwlcck! "Hou!"
He cut almost lazily, but upwards at an angle to the underseat. The thin wood whipped into it visibly, with a sudden excoriating finish of its lash and lap. I had the feeling he was whipping this evening to impress me.
The poor girl did her best to bear it, but by four had clearly had enough. Her knees came up, flexing her bottom even more and pushing out her quimpouch.
"Ou... hiee... oh, sir... "
He gave the final three with a venomous flourish, each on top of the other, and with a cry the girl fell to her knees, hugging her behind and doubling over the hassock. We contemplated the sight in silence broken by her gasps, noting thick weals and a hairy cunt. Finally she stood up, still holding herself, and said with a shy glance.
"I'm sorry, sir... " (puff, puff) "I ain't been caned as stiff, like that, afore."
"You deserve extra, for flinching. What do you say, Thomasina?"
I bit my lip. "Yes, sir. Two at least for moving away." And the poor girl had to have them, standing up and holding high her clothes. When she had gone Pelham sat down in a low leather chair, still flexing the cane in his fingers.
He smiled at me suddenly and it was like a ray of sunshine from the granite cliff. He patted the arm of the chair and I went and sat on it gratefully, beside him, first lifting my skirt as told.
"New girl?"
"From the Charity, sir. Recommended."
"Hm. That was quite a charming buttock, to whip, I mean. Long, if narrow."
"What do you call a 'charming' seat, sir, for the rod?"
"It all depends on the individual, Tommy. Yours, in case you did not know, is quite ideal. Plump as a Percheron, yet lively too."
I laughed. My heart had suddenly commenced to pound. Under his trousers the giant snake of his member had given a stiffening lunge.
"A juicy rump, Tomson."
"Tender, sir," I said and tried to laugh again. His eyes had seen my own. "I do confess I prefer seeing someone rodded, than receiving the same myself." With bated breath I dared my all - "And so, it would seem, do you, sir."
He laughed with me, then, and everything was sweetly and most excitingly relaxed between us. Taking my hand he put it on the iron of his prick.
"Know what you mean. Feel it. Stiff as the devil. And always is when you're around. I say, I hope you weren't offended the other night. With Molly, I mean."
"Oh no, sir." I hung my face with fastened eyes (the head of the thing!), my cheeks crimson. "But I did just wonder... I mean, if you ever... did put it in the other place."
"Up the cunt?" He most mournfully shook his head. "Foreswore cunt some years ago. I killed a woman with my cock."
"What!"
"Or at least it seemed so. A randy widow near Buxton, she'd come a dozen times and then when I pumped into her at last she just stiffened, and well... "
"Good Lord!" I said.
"Probably a heart attack. But it had its effect on me. She, poor soul, couldn't have wished for better. Died in action, eh."
"But couldn't you, I mean... to rid yourself of this inhibition, that... just once... jam it into... "
He shook his head. "Prefer not to risk it, actually. A good bugger is what this fellow likes." And he gave its plump length a pat. The prick lurched. "Here, look," he said, unbuttoning, and I was looking so close by then that the bounding monster clubbed me on the chin as it sprang out of its confines and we both laughed together. "Feel game to try?" he asked.
"Heavens no!" I said, sensing it in my fingers, feeling it a privilege to look on this giant. "Up neither hole, thanks. It is big, isn't it!" I added in equal admiration, "And so broad, at the top."
"After a few inches up the arse you don't feel it. You feel you want to go, but you can't. That's all."
"Quite enough," I said. "No, all in all, I think I'd even go a dose of the ashlar, a good one, before that little idea." Then I gave the puce prick a measuring, steady look, holding its root in my fingers. "But if you wish, sir, I should be honored if you would allow me to, to... melt this down a bit."
"In your mouth, you mean?"
"I confess it really requires some form of sword-swallower, which I am not, but at least I'll try the knob."
The royal kidney of the cockhead alone filled my mouth. It indented my working, slurping cheeks as I gave Pelham a long, slow sucking until I felt purely gorged with his meat. Good God, what a thing. It had a greedy life of its own, seeping thick gouts of semen as I teethed beneath it, and knocking my head from side to side while I worked. Until I heard, "The balls, boy, the balls... milk 'em." And I grasped the huge hard things and pulled and heard him suddenly whispering, "Start swallowing now, now... keep swallowing quick... "
I snorted as the first jet hit my epiglottis and then gobbled, gagging, as the flood filled my mouth and spilled from my lips and I swallowed and swallowed as frantically as I could. It was incredible. The head just jerked on my tongue and spouted - thick, hot, and with the consistency of porridge. Finally, to find some breath, I drew back and the prick pursued me, spraying onto my face and on my clothes, while Pelham chuckled and, yes, aimed it. At last I stood up all dazed and drenched and with a hand before me felt, as it were, for the door.
"If you'll excuse me, sir, I think I'll seek a towel."
"Any time you want an enema with that, Thomasina... "
An imperial splashing and dousing I was long to remember. And from that day forth, though he never mitigated a cut, the relationship between my tutor and me changed subtly. And then came that event, early in March, which was to chance everything for me. There had been, that wintry week, some stormy talk between Lord Stephen and his lovely wife, the drift of which I had not placed altogether myself. It did not interfere with the routine and regimen of my life with Pelham, all I knew was that some tiff was going on.
Then suddenly late one afternoon when I was sitting in the gas-lit schoolroom, scanning my Caesar for the morrow, Pelham at ease over some book in a chair, there came the sound of thudding steps in the passage outside, and Lady Julia strode in, her soft face tense and hectic, her gown of greet velvet swirling angrily at her feet.
"All right," she said, drawing up like some ship under sail before the tutor and speaking in an accusing tone, "it is decided, then. I am to be chastised. Come, get it done with. Flog my buttocks, since you must."
Pelham looked up in feigned surprise - at least I knew him well enough by now to know it was put on.
"Madam. Explain yourself."
"Come now. Do not prevaricate, sir. You know there is an agreement between you. I have been deemed idle, and sluggish in lying abed this morning, and," she held high her tawny head, "and am to be whipped about the seat of my person. Like, like Thomasina, here." And she shot me a furious glance.
Pelham stood up slowly. Tall as he was, he only slightly topped her. Aunt Julia's heels were high to day.
"Do your duty, sir."
"Only if you are in the true mood for it, Ma'am."
"What does that mean?"
"Do you admit your fault?"
"Inasmuch as I... committed it, ay."
"Make appeal?"
"None save my person."
Pelham looked at her long and, yes, lovingly. "This pride must be thrashed out of you," he said, with a quick flicker in his eyes. "I shall have to cane you rudely, I do fear."
"How many?"
"In this state of your soul," he said slowly then, "I dare not make it less than a dozen."
"Twelve!" she cried, with color draining from her face and looking round at where I sat as if for help. "Why, you never give - her no more than six, or eight, or ten, or so. Twelve will hurt most terribly. Twill be more than I can bear. Oh, I do not merit twelve."
"You will receive them," he said simply, adding, "Tommy, put her to the Punishment Desk, tight."
Seeing her hour (as it were) upon her, as so oft I had seen my own, Lady Julia strove to seek out some delaying tactic. Anything, as too well I knew, anything to slow the dread pace of that gorgon Punishment.
"Stay, sir. Is it to be - on the bare?"
"On the bare," he confirmed. "Hard and low."
"I will not bare for you," she said dramatically, then. "You cannot ask me that."
"You must confess there can be no real getting at you through your gown," he said, in an ironic drawl.
"Well then, well then, over my... my... things. Not on my skin, at least."
"Show me," he said, selecting a long shiny cane and cutting the air with it hungrily.
Julia was panting. With a sudden swallow, and unhappy glance at the mesmerizing rod, she hoisted her skirt, and cambric shift beneath, clear to her waist and turned. She had on the prettiest pajammies you could imagine. They were all of dark blue silk, or thin and sleazy stuff, a material that might almost have been wet and which fitted her from the plump knees up like a second skin. Beneath the knees were white lace frills and ribboning. Pelham tapped the proffered rump, which clearly had no protecting in this stuff, and it gave a slabby shiver.
"Nothing on beneath?"
"No sir. Mer - mayn't I take them over these."
"But this stuff, sir... it will offer no impediment at all." Then suddenly her head came up once more. "No, sir. I shall not bare before you. There was no compact that I should be naked in front of a stranger."
"Then it's fifteen," said Pelham with a sigh, "and you will chalk the cane for me first, Thomasina."
I did so - a trick of the tutor's so that he might see the placement of each stroke, when deprived of the guiding weal - and then led my new-found Aunt to the awaiting desk.
Which she approached with miserable mien, thrusting herself forward over it almost hastily. I fixed her ankles in the stocks and then pulled down her hands for the apertures in front. These had to be lengthened somewhat, owing to her longer arms than mine. Her great red mane hung down dejectedly. And then I lifted all the skirt and shift over and off her impending punishment point.
She was superbly bent. The slinky stuff seemed to hold her fat and parted cheeks quite perfectly for the whip. Though she was leaning right forward the massive buttocks were still flaccid and limp, trembling with little convulsive shudders that sent fatty quivers all over her lower person.
"Stand on the far side and pull tight her knickers," Pelham ordered, surveying this prime target. And I did so.
In fact, the material could scarcely be tensened, but I gave a peremptory haul to the waistline which tugged up their lower portions and made milady gasp. Pelham measured his meat with the stick and, standing astride in my abbreviated skirt, I began to feel intensely excited. My middle body pressed just against Julia's nape, her big round neck dividing my thighs. I knew this was going to be a "tight" swishing, and it was.
Thhhhrupp! She gasped with a jerk as the rod first met her. Pelham cut with a long, low, tigerish stride that rapped the rod across her bent buttocks. The wood fairly eat in each time, and each time it bounced back a little exusion of dust and a white line athwart. My view was a loge to the playlet, no less. It was the biggest buttock I had ever seen whipped, grander than Molly's by far, and the best.
Julia panted as the wood whucked into her, visibly lifting her mighty masses as it did so. Her head came up and I found myself exciting myself further against the back of it. Oooh, how he was lashing her. After the fourth I did not know how she could possibly go a dozen, let alone the allotted fifteen.
Pelham spaced out his attack, depending on her reactions. She gave short stifled animal grunts and cries - like "One... yaiow!" - and the like, followed by long whimpering moans that made me grit my teeth. I was going to come on her neck, and I knew it. And all at once I wanted him to cut the thick fat things till she squealed.
She did so at eight, well-nigh lifting me off my feet with the jerk up and back of her noble head.
"Christ in Heaven, sir," she cried, from under my skirts, "you are hewing me in two. I have never known such agony. Remit the three, sir, remit the extra three, I... implore you."
"Nonsense. You have barely had half," came back the answer. "Let us take our time over these last."
Nine made her whinny with pain. And ten. And eleven. And twelve whunked in with such a solid sound where he was working well under the buttock now... and, and... but I was fainting with bliss, rocking myself on the back of that nobbly neck and strong round head. I wanted to time my ecstasy to her spasmic leaps and did, shooting off inside myself as Pelham slapped the fifteenth straight into her sulcus, visible through the material although she was bent. I was bidden undo her and had to hide my confusion in some supposed "difficulty" with the stocks for a moment or more.
Let up, Lady Julia presented a majestic spectacle in the effects of corporal punishment. Arched back like a bow, she stood with feet together, grabbing her beaten bottom as if striving to drive her fingers through it.
Her face was a mirror of misery, dark red and writhing at its edges, with lips bitten bloody. She mastered herself under her eyes to lower her gown, shoot me (especially) an indignant stare and then make, stifflegged, for the door.
Holding its handle, she turned and confronted Pelham.
"You didn't have to hit that hard, sir. I am not a mule."
Pelham said, "Next time, Ma'am, an' you are in the same mood, it will be the ashlar."
"Do you never... relent?"
"I am not employed to be lenient, Ma'am." With a frigid bow he repeated one of his favorite dictums.
Lady Julia flung awkwardly out.
But the next day she joined me in my lessons. In my lessons, sums, recitations, and yes - in my awful corrections, too. That night she stormed into my room in her shortest shift and turned to me from the fire, hitching it.
"Look what the monster did to them!" The weals were blunt, and blue, worthy of the bulk of buttock they had beaten, and I gave an admiring hiss of sympathy. "And you, Tommy, you monkey," she prattled on, "wanking off on my back like that, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You know what you got last time you let yourself go on your bedclothes."
"That was your fault, Auntie Ju," I protested, laughing.
"Well, I suppose it ain't just to refuse ourselves a spot of solace after slicings like that. Oooh," she said, back braced to the flames and lifting up her chemise in front till the bushy lump of her cunt seemed to stare me in the face, "slip out of bed for a second, you do it so we - well... "
"What about His Lordship?" I inquired, obeying.
"Oh him. I'll have to suck him off or something, so's he doesn't know. Yeee - esss! There... the button, you mischief!"
Julia joined me in my morning lessons with her titian mane caught straight back in slide, or tortoiseshell comb; her concession to school dress consisted of a pair of stone-hued velveteen knickerbockers, silverbuckled beneath the knee, absolutely skintight and which her husband made her wear, I knew, over nothing.
They dimpled deeply, as she did, either side of her profound cheeks and followed her fat beneath with tension. Pelham caned her over them mercilessly and, to be honest, I began to take a new interest in my surroundings when he did so. Furthermore, the black Demerit Book now bore her name by mine - Usher, J.
Inattention, etcetera. It was profoundly exciting to watch the way she opposed her will to his, trying her gamest not to give him the satisfaction of a twist, a cry; it was a veritable duel between them, one the rod had to (and did) win. But he drew it out like a master playing on a keyboard. Pelham knew he was in the presence of perfection, and could bide his time. He beat her beautifully, never brutally, but always - as was his motto - slightly harder than expected, or desired. Her husband sauntered in to inspect these whippings, and normally left, red-faced and stiff of prick, perhaps to assuage himself with one of the housemaids.
It was after only a few days, and just before her first "bill" at the block, that Milady Julia first gave in, and took yet one more step down to the Plutonic shades. Pelham had found her culpable of the usual iniquitous peccadillo and gone for his rod. Julia stood glumly up at the little-girl's desk opposed to mine, at which she now had to labor. She had on her velveteen toreador pants.
That morning, lining up at the schoolroom door at nine, she had given my arm a pally squeeze and whispered, "Come on, buck up, old thing, let's try to show the beast we don't mind it at all, and perhaps he'll get tired of hitting us, after all."
"Would you like to... give up?" I asked, shooting her a roguish look, but steps in the distance had cut further debate on the question short.
"Standout."
"How many, sir, if you please?"
"Nine. Tight."
"If I were to... my things... and bare...?"
The tutor paused. His lids fell momentarily. "Six," he said at last, flexing his wand. But he did not let her off as lightly as that. After Julia had hectically lowered her knickerbockers to her knees, as if engaged in some competition for speed, he had her bend over, then part her legs wide, and bend to put her palms on the floor. The vision and view were immense. Not only Julia's fat and fronded sex-slice, but also the wrinkled ring of her rose-bud, were on full display. Evidently she had steeled herself to shame for, when he slowly inserted the tip of his stick into the squidgy quim and turned it there, she made no sign at all. I bit my lips.
"Now come up a little," he said, extracting the tip and wiping its wettened end on her dangling trousers, "and hold apart your buttocks. I mean to come in at your legs."
He did so, swiftly, eliciting loquacious whines of pain, and shudderings that a visitor from Mars might almost have taken for ecstasy.
A visitor from Mars might have been excused from some surprise a new week later, when we were sitting to a late tea together in the great house. Lady Berry was there and, needless to say, enjoying herself hugely.
Sir Horace Wide was also to table, his silly eyes sliding, and also Sir Horace's son, still at school, it seemed, and no older that my darling Reggie Shore, though a coarse-faced lout of some sixteen. It should be added that, together with myself, whose destiny she had wholly embraced, Julia now wore a short girl's frock after luncheon, and until evening - when she might still entertain her husband's guests. This was still, at tea, the period of her mental martyrdom, however, and it was augmented on this day I am remembering by the fact that she had been ordered two afternoons "bare-arsed," for the frightful crime of having failed to lift up the pan of her skirt behind when sitting; the result was that she was demurely tucking in to her scones and jam in an outfit that made her a really mouth-watering spectacle - tight white silk shirt, accentuating her broad bust, hard collar and school tie, wide belt and brief skirt of pleated navy, with long smoky stockings secured by brazenly bejeweled garters - as high as might be, in face almost under her bum, since this was bare. The morsel was too much for Lady Berinthia, of course, who rapidly steered the conversations around to her obsession (and, must I confess? my growing own).
"And how have the two puppies been proving up, Mr. Pelham? This one," and she tapped her lorgnette towards me, "looks as if she'd had a recent thrashing. Am I right?"
"Six before bed last night," agreed Pelham. "She's slow, very slow."
"Show us your bottom, Thomasina."
"Certainly, milady." I was learning, you see, I was schooled already, and stood and turned and took down my knicks and up with my skirt and let them have their happy comments. Just so long as I didn't feel the cane. Bad words break no bones, as the saying runs.
"You hew low, tutor," cackled Sir Horace with admiration.
"Hurts more low," said Stephen Usher, sipping.
The schoolboy gave a sneering laugh. "We aren't allowed to cut the legs at school. If we do and a chap appeals, why there's a frightful souse."
"Are you swishing already, then?" inquired Lord Usher.
"Getting my hand in," conceded the boy. "But with a girl I'd guess it hurts all over. All up and down."
There was general laughter at this and Lady Mildmount said, "And what do you say to that verdict, Thomasina?"
"Yes, Madam, it hurts all over."
"Only, slightly more behind the cunt?"
"Yes, milady, rather more just behind the cunt," I said steadily.
"Do up your things and sit down." As I did so I saw Julia studiously contemplating the pattern of her plate.
"Now then," rattled on the black-haired raven of our collective hades, "what about this other sanctimonious little sinner here? Ain't you glad you put her under the rod as well, Stevie?"
Lord Usher's brows went up. He appeared to wrestle with thought, or port. "Capital idea, very. Though novel, I do confess, novel."
Julia continued to stare at her plate. Perhaps she was a trifle more dewy-eyed than before, but that was all.
"Responds to the birch," said Pelham slowly. "A dose of the bill works wonders here."
"But it's such a well... protected seat, tutor."
"Birch and tawse. I tawsed her only this morning. A round dozen."
"Oh really," said Lady B., sitting up straighter in her chair. "And what was that for, pray, Julia?"
"Sulking," said Julia, sulking.
There was an awkward silence. Then, "Stand up," said Lady Mildmount.
As Julia rose, very gently, so did her color. For her pleated skirt was so short behind as to show, in walking, the undercurves of her... behind. It was arranged so by Prendergast. And as she stood there at her place it scarcely covered her pulpy cunt The schoolboy was agog.
"There is too much feeling in this soul," said Lady Mildmount in her most menacing tone. "A lot to eradicate yet, tutor. Turn round, Julia."
She did so in slow motion, trying not to stir her hem.
"Now lean forward over the back of your chair."
We were all watching tensely, and intensely. Finally Sir Horace gave his fatuous guffaw, "One would almost say she didn't want to do it."
At which with trembling lips Julia turned in stately sway again.
"Funnily enough, Sir Horace, it isn't the thing I most want to do in the world just now, if you must know. Odd as it may seem to you, it doesn't fill me with joy, the idea of baring my person to a boy."
There was a horrified hush - "Insolence!"
"Rank impudence."
"Needs taking down a peg."
Lady Mildmount was triumphantly smiling.
It was Lord Usher who said softly, "Get the cane, Minor."
"It shall be twice nine," Pelham said gravely, as I darted off.
When I came back, one end of the room had been cleared, and Julia and the schoolboy stood there. She looked superb, her calves strong and round under the taut silk, yet yielding to such small knees that one was surprised at the mellowness of hips above. Her skirt was an apology of material in front. I handed the youth the cane since, it seemed, he was to thrash her, and he coached up in the act by the inexorable tutor, who had taken a closer chair at one side.
"Let's see how you swish 'em at Shrewsbury, then," said Sir Horace.
"First nine," said Pelham promptly.
"Bend over here and touch your toes," said the boy with a frown.
Julia gave a quick desperate look about, as though for hidden escape, and obeyed. She was in half profile to us, but doubled hurriedly, as if anxious to get it over with. Hardly was it necessary to raise her trifling skirt, and expose the already tumified heavy hemispheres. The tails of the tawse had prepared this meat in earnest.
"Use the bruises," counseled Pelham, "even if it don't mean cutting low. She cuts tight all over, as you said.
And follow through."
The beastly boy cut in as had the other at me.
To give Julia her due she took it like a Trojan.
Three, four... five made her stumble a bit... six made her scratch her shins...
"Wait longer, boy," advised the tutor. "And use more wrist at the end of the swing. Good. Good shot, sir, very."
"Oheh!"
"Right down," said the youth, in a discontented tone.
She whistled and panted like a grampus for the last strokes, but absorbed them stoically, though allowed up she grabbed and stretched in agony, dark-faced.
"Now stand in the corner for ten minutes," said Pelham. "Tuck your skirt in your belt, and hands at your sides."
The second instalment of the heartless "twice nine" was thrice worse. The stick eat into the fruity bruises brutally, till she was weeping with shame and pain. Somehow she took the whole dose, but once it was over she fell to the floor and squirmed there like a severed snake.
"Too much whip in this cane," complained the boy, watching her, "also she was moving all the time."
"Resume your seat at the table, Julia dear," said Lady Berinthia coaxingly, and with a look of complicity at Pelham. It was with immense effort that Julia did so, sweat beading the roots of her hair. "Now then. Let's see if that little lesson has had effect in eliminating a lot of unnecessary nonsense such as human feelings.
We've seen your lovely buttocks, dear - and don't keep moving about so, sit still in a ladylike fashion - so I think we ought to see your breasts. One breast. A big one."
"As big as possible," chuckled Sir Horace.
"Show your breasts, Julia," said Lord Stephen.
Slowly she unknotted her tie, undid her hard white collar, and set them beside her on the table; then her fingers unbuttoned her shirt in front. She had nothing on beneath and put on display her huge, dug-like, left breast with its marvellously mottled aureole and thumb of rigid nipple.
"Is that the bigger of the two? Let's have both on display."
It was done. They stirred with Julia's movements of pain on her chair. And they trembled still more when Lady Berry pasted them with best British marmelade.
"Now then. As a reward, I think our young friend here should be permitted to lick off his jam ration, don't you."
This, too, was accomplished, to much laughter, while thick tears lolled down Julia's cheeks. Finally she was ordered to apologize to Sir Horace "in person" - "On the floor, dear, on the floor."
Julia slid crying under the table. The sound of her slurping was only broken, in fact, by her sobbing.
"Is she apologizing nicely to your fellow, Horry?"
"Very. As a matter of fact it won't be too long before... ah... he reciprocates!"
"They say it's good for the liver."
"I know it's good for my... my... " he tried, starting forward suddenly over the table. But broke off. His eyes roved the ceiling, his grasping hands took the trunks of her udders, and he grinned at Lord Stephen, "Sorry, old boy, to be so impolite, but I'm 'fraid... I'm going to spit in the face of your... wiiiife."
"Be my guest," said Lord Usher calmly.
Julia was whipped as I was whipped, and I would be a hypocrite to pretend I was not grateful for the relief of a caning-boy in my schoolroom. But quite how far the complicity between the tutor and Lady B. had gone I only learnt some three weeks later. It was still frosty outside, the ground hard under the hooves of the dogcart in which the groom had carried me to see my mother, as I returned that evening - to find the house oddly, and ominously, quiet and deserted.
No one was about. A child knows. A whipped child knows even better. Dread sank into my soul, and as the shadow swam towards me in that flickering upstairs corridor I drew back in alarm. A hand took my wrist, a voice whispered in my ear; it was Julia, in deshabille, and she was trembling like some willow in the wind.
"Stephen's gone. Yes, yes, it is all agreed. We are to have... oh my dear, I dare not say it... an especially Spartan course, yes for two weeks... particularly severity, so that in his absence... it is all agreed, all... "
As she clung to me a white light slotted the corridor at the far end. The tall figure of the tutor stood outlined against it, bending a rod.
"Come here, you two," we heard. And we fairly fled to him in anguish.
"In future," he said, when we had come under his pale gaze, "you will not talk in corridors. You will go about your errands, in silence, modestly. It has been decided," and he cleared his throat, "that for two weeks you will be handed over to me wholly, and in total empire. Your improvement was deemed to be lagging. For the next fortnight you are both to be subject to a more strict regimen. It seems I have been too lenient with you."
Too lenient! How far could sarcasm go? I felt Julia's big body shuddering against me as he went on, "Tomorrow morning I will acquaint you with your new rules, and routine. Each will start the day with a cold bath and six cuts. Prendergast will show you your new clothes and I some new canes. For it is my reluctant duty to instill a true terror of the rod in your minds, once and for all. You, Madam," he said with a grave nod at Lady Julia, "I will take to your new chamber, where perhaps you will allow me to give you a caning for disorderly dress. We are not keeping a lupanar here. It will be ten."
"Aunt" Julia followed him with bowed head. I stood there alone and aghast, all hope gone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
If what we had known so far had been Hell, we were now plunged into the darkest regions of Tartarus.
To start off with, we were now sequestered - in a silence to be broken on pain of cuts - in twin rooms either side a cold corridor at the very top of the house, Prendy's domain. There we slept on board beds, in whitewashed rooms furnished only with minimal washing requirements, and the inevitable items of correction. There was a wide wash-room at one end, and it was the scene of our icy early morning baths. I thought of my Reggie storming down to a January sea.
Although they were "only" administered by the housekeeper, the six wake-up cuts after our plunge stung like the dickens and we came to dread them particularly. Her only chance for personal infliction, Mrs. Wilson made it memorable, slicing into our bent bottoms, one after the other in the shared bath chamber, just as hard as she knew now. Any recalcitrance could be guaranteed for a reward from the tutor. She thoroughly enjoyed her job, and took her time about it, while we shivered... and sweated.
For the morning's work we each now wore a simple short Grecian tunic of soft black leather, widely belted and with apertures in the skirt fore and aft so that a "saddle" could be joined at will between our legs, and secured to the waist. We wore high heels and coal-dark stockings, gartered perilously high, close under our bums. Nothing else was worn under this skirt which was so short, and slightly slitted, it revealed us amply when we walked. Cuffs for wrists were in the belt in back, while most mornings we found ourselves with a wide collar round our throats, to keep our chins high. As Pelham put up the minimum tariff for the stick from six to ten, and made some form of castigation daily unavoidable, our poor round chubbies were extremely tender by even the third day. Including Mrs. W.'s diurnal "sixer" I had had by the termination of that third day no less than thirty - eight cuts with a thin cane, and a dozen with the tawse, across my incredulous buttocks.
Julia had had more. We only bent over that Thursday morning after considerable pleading with Mrs. Wilson, and her six on our wet flesh became a sorry test. Apart from her taunting and badinage, however, the rest of the servants passed us with averted eyes and in silence; they did not speak to us, nor we to them. We were the infected, and guilty. By the fifth day we were close on desperate. Pelham was driving us hard. Even the flip of skirt on my bottom now made me aware.
Meanwhile, Prendergast increased her attention to our "inner person." After breakfast we evacuated into glass pots, side by side on a wide bench in the washroom, backs to her, and if we did not, it was a clyster of hot oil up the anus with a bung to keep it home until our morning "break" at eleven. This bung was a stub of black rubber, thicker than a man's thing, kept hard home by being threaded, via a ring in its base, to a saddle strap. Well oiled, this horror seemed to work in as one sat at the desk all morning, like a perpetual buggering, behind.
Once, when we both failed to produce satisfaction on the stool, we met a frightful fate. Julia and I had to kneel down side by side, in the famous "knee-chest" position, faces flat on the floor, and absorb a double enema, in long red tubes from a canister. Then we had to stand and hold this in for twenty minutes. Our naked convulsions and contortions are to be imagined, and shall be left to a less pure pen than mine; suffice it to say that we writhed arid squirmed under threat of dire penalty, and when Prendergast came back she put one pot on the floor and told us to take it. Julia got it first by dint of barging weight and I watched her unloose the burden of her bowels in inconceivable racking pain, my sphincter rim oozing. It did so enough, I fear, for sweet Prendy to see fit to rub my nose in the trickly exusion, then at last I was allowed to "go." Nor was that all, or enough. Kneeling side by side once more, thick tubes were put up our now suppled channels and attached to a tap - which was turned on hard. I barked with pain. It was hot! But we had to hold the flood, be plugged behind, and take our lessons that morning twisting on our seats and looking as if pregnant in front. Allotted ten for Fidgeting Julia actually flung herself to her knees, weeping, in front of that inexorable and most fatal man.
With haggard eyes she bathed his calves with kisses.
"A disgusting spectacle," deemed Pelham. "A rank new schoolboy would have more courage."
Ten! The tip broke flesh at five, and she got up twice. She rose before "Permission." Seven with the ashlar, over the Punishment Desk. Julia opened her lungs to their fullest width. Score that day: twenty-three strokes. Pelham was, as he promised, caning the backsides off us, bit by bit. We did not go to bed that night in desperation, we went in terror. T - E - R - R - O - R!
For on the morrow there was the "bill" and each had amassed a very palpable count - myself some twentyfour, and Julia no less than thirty - eight.
"This isn't punishment," she whispered to me, "it's torture."
Lady Berinthia had promised to be there to watch. But our skins were saved by Molly that day.
Shortly after dawn Julia had slipped into my bed, inundating me with her heat for a second as her breasts bent over me. Her perfume thrilled and stung me. With eyes still shut with loaded sleep I winced under the heat of her kisses up my throat and face. Her nipples burnt like sullen brands. She laughed as she slid beside and onto me.
"I should like to crush you to death, darling."
Veined and swollen, golden in the first light seeping through the windows (dormer here), one great breast was a gourd above my head. I pressed my lips to hers. Her face colored with a fiery cloud and her fingers drew across my fatty flesh.
"Poor sweetling," she crooned.
"Poor you," I moaned. I was stifled by her kisses, the relaxing heaps of her massive hair.
"God send the sea sorrow," she was humming, "and all men that sail through... " Suddenly she rolled on me inversely and the golden casket of her glorious quim was on my face, her legs beyond my head. Her tongue darted in my depths, her hands cupping my bum.
"Wer-we'll... ess - stain the s-s-sheets," I protested in a whisper.
Her head came back. "Not if we both swallow hard, silly." Then she said, "Mmmn. You smell of violets in a hot sun, Tommy."
My fingers grabbed the turgid rolling mounds of flesh that were her buttocks above me. Once more I sank into her steamy seam, under her waled underflesh. Her button was a bobble, engorged and veinous. A flick on it with my tongue made her whole hips undulate. Finally, she came in gushes, splashing my face and neck and as I gave her its kind beneath, I thought it was the nicest morning dew ever. Her rough rippling tongue laved me inside and out, like that of some pure animal.
But a few hours later we stood naked, shivering at the foot of our beds, waiting for Mrs. Wilson. She came in and beckoned with her cane and we went along to the bathroom where the cold tub had been drawn, so thoughtfully, overnight.
"Milady," she said and the cane pointed. With a quick hiss, like the broken reluctant ebb of a spent wave, Julia flung herself into the icy water till it spilt. I remembered the slash of the defeated waves as Reggie and I had bathed together. The housekeeper gave her two minutes in it, not long enough to numb her, and then called, "All right, mum, come and bend over."
Beautifully Julia bent, her great breasts hanging and her skin the pink of the inside of a shell. She gave a sharp sob at the first cut, appeared to wrestle in a rage with her hands at the second, but stuck it to the stingy end, when she stood up, her hot wet face all chewed with pain, chin tucked in so as not to cry out while both hands clasped her sides as in most wrathful despair.
"Thomasina, in you go."
I gasped as I sank into that anguishing dip, unable to restrain a note of protest, my cheeks tingling to the underlids. Afterwards the strokes swished furiously tight and we both donned our simple tunics with tightened lips and tremulous eyelids. God preserve us from more punishment that day, we prayed. As He did.
Working through the morning with a bung up my anus, and some hot oil doing its damnedest within me, I was concentrating on keeping still - for something called a Fidget Stool had been introduced into our schoolroom, a gift of Lady Berry of course, a sort of high horror ending in a saddle which bristled with many tiny spikes or pins, guaranteed (according to Mrs. Wilson) to make raw the insides of your legs if you sat on it and rubbed. I had no envy to ride it, thanks, nor from the looks of things did Julia, neither. I was aware of much coming and going, between Pelham and the keeper, and then in the break I was occupied voiding my loins - which Prendergast was gracious enough to let me do publicly, in a bucket in the yard. When I returned, having been "wiped" by a hose, I learnt what had happened: Molly had stolen again.
Looking back on it now, I do think the poor woman had this itch of theft in her fingers like a disease. In any case she was for it, if she elected correction before dismissal, which, it seemed, she once more did. Lady Mildmount was in the house, striding about in boots and habit, swigging white port and thwacking her welt with her whip.
"She needs her back scratching. Nothing less than the cat will suffice, Pelham. Come, I trust you will not be soft. 'Tis what she would get in the Reformatory. I have one of hard cord I can lend you. Make the slut scream and then stick 'er with your tool, that's how they'd handle it in Bridewell. A dozen screamers, or 'pussies.'"
"She shall have two," said Pelham quietly. "In three doses of eight. You will find that an eighter will fetch her, as I give it, Ma'am, and the third night will be tolerably sharp."
Lady Mildmount's inky eyes sparkled. "You're a man after my own heart, tutor. The ends of each cord are bound in wire."
"Dip them in tar first, Ma'am," he added sourly.
We saw the fiendish instrument that afternoon. It was brought to Pelham by Lilly, in the little oak-grove where he was axing a trunk and where we were collecting birch twigs. He had commanded us to keep on our tunics beneath which, but for our stockings, we were both bare from the waist down. The maid held out the shiny wooden handle to him as if it was infected, curtseyed and left hastily. Pelham let the five fangs of hempen rope hang by his side a second and then smacked them into the bark of a tree. The turgid thuck of impact told of their weight. The thing stripped five separate weals in the bark. Our mouths must have been agape when it fell back, for he smiled at our mien and said: "The tails are of uneven length, to prevent them winding in together and so that they will bite better into the back. I intend to skin a cat tonight," he went on jovially, "and you two will watch me. It will do your souls good. If you turn your eyes away for a second I'll have your hide, mind with this." And he made another flourish.
Molly was "taken" at ten. We two had entered the Library after dinner bleakly, with a sense of trespass, as if invading a tomb. The ends of the terrible flail soaked in a basin of water (to add it weight, it was plain) on the dais, where other straps and ropes lay about. We stood together like soldiers at the side, contemplating the boring rectangle of the room, pregnant with pain. Then came footsteps and laughter and we were curtseying together, as Lady Berinthia entered, closely accompanied by the tutor.
He went at once to work, shucking his jacket and - yes - this time his shirt. She was brilliant, high-corseted beneath the breasts, which were bare, and there was a mere ruffle of Malines exuding from the busk below so that her coarse dry tuft paraded arrogantly where her quick thighs parted. She carried her tailed switch menacingly.
"Come here, you," she beckoned to Julia. "Stand there and tuck your tunic in your belt. Now then. Are you beginning to learn that you're but a random accident in the universe? A nothing, a naught?"
"Yes, Madam." Towering over her, Julia was impassive, obviously she was going to give her tormentress no change. "Thank you very much."
Lady Berry spat. "Lick it up." Julia did as bid.
"Masturbate."
A linger slipped into the hairy paid of flesh at Julia's opulent twat. It agitated mechanically. "Well, can't you come?"
"No, I don't think so. Ma'am."
"Why not?"
"I'm too... frightened."
Lady Mildmount gave a belling laugh. She whirled her quirt and called, "Bend over, then."
When Julia had doubled herself the exigent woman stuck a gloved middle finger up the nervous, brownringed anus. She worried it there a second, extracted it with a plop and held it out.
"Stand up and lick that clean."
Julia did so.
"What did it taste of, bitch?"
"Shit," said Julia expressionlessly, if now a trifle flushed. She was learning too, you see.
"Slave shit," amended the other.
"Slave shit," echoed Julia promptly. She was dismissed with a flick of the switch to one ripe round calf. I was beckoned next.
"Sit down there," I was told, and did so at the foot of her chair. "You have been my cushion before, Thomasina, I believe, but tonight I want you to have the privilege of getting your tongue right up me, d'ye hear? Head back on the seat, so. Now then, I wear rowel spurs, you minx, and if you don't work up me in earnest you'll be galled to the quick, understand?"
So I did not see Molly get her first instalment of the dreaded "cat." I was suffocated under Lady Berry's vivid bum, my tongue up her insides, while cold and cruel steel pressed warningly against the insides of my drawn-up thighs before her. Yet though I could not see I could well hear. I heard Molly brought in, grimly sentenced by the tutor, triced up ("bowsed out"?) by the keeper, evidently with legs apart and secured to ringstraps on the dais, with arms drawn high above, strippped to the waist for the whip.
"The buttocks," Lady Berinthia called, rubbing herself all over me, "let us see the buttocks, woman."
I heard the wet thick muffled thuck of impact as the thongs wound round the culprit's back, and even Mrs.
Wilson's contented - "One!"
"Ho!" gasped Molly.
"Deeper, you fool, work it round and up" - was the imperious hiss in answer above my head.
Two, three, four...
A sudden shout of protest from the victim. I was suffocating under Lady Berry while she frigged herself excitedly with one finger.
"The ribs, man, good... that fetched her... "
There was a devilish interval between the thudding slices now and suddenly I felt the cold steel of the spurs inside my thighs. Inside my buttock cheeks, low down, either side my quim. Five, six...
Suddenly it was I who was screaming, stifled, as her right spur dug cruelly into my tenderest fat there. My hands flailed, trying to push my burden off.
"Keep it up me, bitch!"
A nipple was gripped and twisted, agonizingly, as I was cleverly rowelled beneath. The spiked curb ran up the outside of my lip and occasioned me amazing pain. At the same time her anus was dilating, I was dying, it seemed, and I truly believe I lost consciousness for a second, to awaken panting as Molly was led from the room, moaning. Julia accompanied her, it seemed. I came truly to life again as my vision, with my head still back on the seat of the chair, was darkened above - like a great bruise in the air overhead Pelham's prodigious prick quivered over my face, presented to Lady Berry's demanding bum - for she had turned herself round on her knees, I now saw.
"Yes, yes... stick it up me... if you can."
Steadying his meatus in his right hand, the tutor puckered up her well-laved anal hole in his left; it showed pink and fruity for a second, then he slid into her slime.
"Ooooooh! CHRIST! What a size!"
She wriggled forward, gripping the seat-back, her ankles hammering on the arms. Pelham lunged, got about a third in, drew back and shoved in halfway. Lady Berry squealed.
"God, but you can make a woman feel full up. I can't take another inch of... th-this!"
But placed where I was, I could see there were still six.
"Relax yourself," he gasped, holding her where she squirmed.
"Cer - can't... "
"Sit back on it. Try to shit it out, woman."
"God... nnngh... no more, for pity's sake... ungh! This is... I declare... impalement, not buggery... for mercy, man, shoot, come, spit it into me... NOOOW!"
Out of kindness to her, though she had shown none, I took the furry ball-sack into my mouth and lapped it there. The root bulged, glowing, and in a second I saw its pulses pounding as Pelham shot his boiling load into the aristocratic bumhole. Doing so he skewered her further, so that she wailed, flailing, but no more than two-thirds of his monster was truly swallowed, e'en though his juices poured back down over it as he gismed into her.
"Thank you, Tommy," he said, extracting with a fat sucking sound. "I shall not forget that favor."
Thus our own bill was delayed. For the next night Molly got her second dose. This time I watched it all, saw her half-dragged in by the housekeeper, defeated and weeping, tackled-out feet astride on the dais with her wrists hauled high to a ceiling pulley above her. Then her upper body was stripped like a convict's.
"Heavens, what weals the cat had left. Truly she had been "scratched" in earnest. The tail marks were black under the right armpit. She hung there quivering, like a side of meat. Lady Mildmount chose Julia for her cushion that evening and for this purpose had put on pencil spurs. Such were steel shafts which, under pressure, released a sharply digging dart into the recalcitrant flesh of a steed - only tonight they were pressed against the insides of Julia's massive, upraised thighs, trembling in anticipation of their release as she sunk her tongue into the tallow above it. Her great breasts bulged out, vulnerable, in front.
The rope cords lashed into the cringing flesh with weight. Molly jerked forward in agony as Mrs. Wilson called out, "One." The full-blooded lash from the muscular arm branded the upper back and muscles under the shoulder. By five the jerking figure was pouring with sweat and crying loudly. Yet there was a higher cry from the back, as Lady Mildmount sank her first pencil spur deep into the underbuttock of her "cushion."
I shall pass over the agony of that flogging, which culminated in a weeping, drooping maidservant helped out of the room by the keeper. I was dismissed, yet not before I had seen Berry bend over one bursting breast and bite it hard, with her sharp and even teeth.
The house was all grim and silent the third day. But evening came as evening must. All staff was assembled to watch this most magisterial thrashing, and the hearts of that wretched line in which I found myself one side of the room sank into their shoes as we heard the victim being pulled forcibly to her torment. The door opened and Mrs. Wilson, assisted by Prendergast, were seen hauling the big maid forward, while she fought dementedly and cried out - "D-don't whip me... no more, sir... please don't whip me no more... "
She was soon stretched out in her straps, however, her head twisting back to see the dreaded thongs, sobbing.
"She can take them," called Lady Berinthia coldly.
This time Molly was stripped altogether. And Pelham was holding a cane. It seemed that during the day the poor maddened maidservant had pleaded her "period" to get off the dose, been examined by faithful Prendy and passed fit - a liar. Then later she had been apprehended by Mr. Jorrocks endeavoring to run away. He had returned her, exhausted and bedraggled, at his stirrup strap. Consequence: as an aperitif she was to receive fifteen strokes of the cane across her bottom.
The cane flashed and flickered as it whipped into the meaty bum. Bare to the waist, his white muscles tensing, Pelham clearly hit as hard as he could, sweeping the cane up under the arse so hard it lifted the flabby fat visibly there. Molly gasped and grunted, jerking in her bonds, but it was clearly a pain she knew, and could somewhat control, lesser than the thongs.
Directly these were picked up again, she started babbling dementedly and in a manner that sent shivers to our souls: "Oh no, sir, please sir, oh sir, not the whip... don't whip my back, sir... no more... oh no oh please aaaaaaah!"
The martinet thumped into her lustily, knocking the breath from her body. Pelham gave her two under the armpits, came down for two that twined about the ribs, then allotted a most painful pair to the upper waist.
Lady Berinthia was in ecstasy at the bounds and shrieks elicited by each stripe.
"The buttocks," she begged finally, "give her the last on the buttocks, man."
But Pelham knew his task too well. He wound two absolutely terrible strokes across the full meat of the back, sending the tarred tips round and into the beginning of the upraised right breast. Molly opened her mouth and screamed silently. Only air came out. She had to be helped out of the room, from which we filed in most awful apprehension, too. But there was no blood at all.
It was two days later that it happened.
Julia... hardly dare I write the frightful word even at this late year... she... rebelled...
No sinner ever got off anything from Pelham and he had given us our bill as promised. The following morning we were both especially tender behind, but little did that avail us 'gainst our diurnal sixer on rising.
Then halfway through the morning Julia started soundlessly weeping at her schoolroom desk. Pelham looked up.
"Stop blubbing," said he.
Julia dried her eyes with the back of one hand and went on with her Livy. But those lovely orbs began brimming again.
"Stop these silly tears instantly."
Julia's sobbing increased. Pelham stood up.
"Come here. Bend over and touch your toes."
Taking a cane he flipped up the pan of her leather tunic behind; Julia's well-beaten bottom, punctuated by the ripe gash of her sex, was firmly displayed.
"Bend over tighter than that. Eight."
Thhhwick! "One, two, three, four, five... "
"Haaieee!"
Six... he was catching her slap across his birching, the fiend...
Seven... and suddenly Julia was jumping up, grasping her smarting pears behind.
"Come, I thought you had more courage than that, Madam. I shall have to give you extra over the desk."
Julia stared at him with hatred. With tears on her cheeks she cried out - "And if I refuse?"
There was a deathly silence in the room. I think I went quite white. I was staring at Pelham's impassive face, and great square freckled hands, before I had quite realized what was going on.
For what was going on was some terrible insanity. With a half-human sob Julia had flung herself on the rack of canes at the side wall and hysterically she was breaking them up. This could not be happening, she could not be throwing their severed pieces at the implacable tutor like this, striding at last frantically, chest heaving, from the room.
"Silly girl." was all he said, as she went.
Well, it had happened in grim truth. Julia's tantrum - that of some petulant child, forsooth - carried her to her own original room, where she lay closeted all that day... and the next. Lady Berinthia was summoned but it was no use. The door was locked. And no menaces might undo it.
On the third day Lord Stephen returned, for it was now nearly the end of our fortnight. Apprised of the facts he hurried upstairs, and was let in. Julia lay on one side in her bed, remorseful, resolved to atone and take the worst her fit had cost her. It was indeed a most terrible penance she paid some five days later.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I could wish I did not have to write this chapter, my unlucky thirteenth. Only the strictest honesty obliges me to do so, and to record the most severe cas'tigation I have ever witnessed, before or since.
Place: the Library, well cleared at the dais end.
Time: eleven p.m.
Dramatis Personae: Lord Stephen, Lady Mildmount, Sir Horace Wide, all well wined and dined, Lady Berry in particular being in a state of veritable intoxication of erotic excitement, pacing uneasily in a becoming gown of ominous black. Add to these that excellent tyrant and notable scholar of the rod, Wilfred Pelham, in shirt and trousers, lounging in a long chair apart from them before the fire, a cane dangling from one muscled hand. Add myself, in tunic, behind the row of three who faced towards the dais, serving drinks and tight-lipped with apprehension too.
The chief feature of the furnishings that night was a long low whipping bench that Lady Berinthia had produced from somewhere, bringing it over in her chaise. Pelham pronounced himself most pleased with this feature which was placed not on the dais, but beneath it, its foot facing the audience. It was of coarse broad wood, liberally supplied with straps and provided centrally with a boss or knoll of a triangular shape, inclined upwards. I myself had, for the delectation of the company, taken my place on this machine and knew this knob to be provided with several short sharp tacks and, since it arrived under the pelvis, or mons, it gave one a most ardent desire to buck one's bottom off it, and back.
Julia was brought in by Prendergast and Mrs. Wilson precisely as the clock struck, and she made a most liplicking spectacle doing so. All converse hushed. She had long repented her crime, it seemed, and acquainted with its enormity in several interviews with her spouse, who seemed to take it as an insult of hospitality as much as anything, she had resigned herself to the very worst. She had been bathed, powdered, perfumed - even enema-ed - and swept forward like an actress to the center of the stage, our room, clad in a stunning ivory satin gown that hugged her flesh perfectly and under which she wore nothing.
Before she turned and faced us one could see how her arms had been secured behind, each wrist strapped to its opposite elbow, thus throwing out her prominent bosom whose nipples stood like studs under the stuff.
She had been well rehearsed for this, her last act in complete subjugation to the tutor, and her eyes barely glanced over the vision of the bench, though she gave a nervous wince, as if the skin were aware of danger.
Her face, under a wide velvet hat of palest blue, matching the armpit-length tight gloves of the same material, was pale but impassive, almost sullen in its beauty of determination. Only the merest trembling of her knees and outward shivering of those slabs of breasts attested to the fear flowing through her. She awaited her verdict of pain, her green eyes dewy under loaded lashes. The mouth trembled once at its edges, like a roseleaf taken up and crushed for a second, but that was all. She was at full height, the torrent of her tawny tresses hanging beneath the ribboned hat behind.
"Julia Usher," said her husband, staring at her sternly, "You stand here accused of the gravest crime before.
That of rank rebellion. How plead you, Julia Usher?"
"Guilty," she said in a low voice, staring straight ahead of her and over those watching heads.
"Have you anything to say why you should not be punished?"
"No."
"Do you desire to make appeal?"
"No."
"Kneel down."
Julia's knees struck the floor.
"Repeat after me. Our father... "
"Our Father... "
"Who chastiseth the sinful... "
After a moment she repeated impassively, "Who chastiseth the sinful... "
"Hallow Thou these lashes. Make them sharp as Christ's were." The rote continued dryly, yet with effect.
Now she knew she had to be whipped. The destiny was dreadfully within her, more and more fearful. "Give me this day my mead of pain... To eradicate my trespasses... And make me dread the thought of trespass again... So let me know no pity... But deliver me to agony... For Thine is this sinful flesh, its sting and its suffering. Forever and ever. Amen."
"Amen."
"Stand up. First, to show your true spirit of atonement, you will request and accept the correction which was your due before your error of rebellion."
Julia hesitated, then turned and biting her lip, approached the tutor who was already trembling his limb through the ready air.
"I beg punishment for my great fault, sir."
"Of what?" he drawled.
"Unnecessary crying, sir."
"Very well. We will do our best to make you regret it. Stand out."
All eyes were on the taut stuff across the hips of the woman now standing sideways to us. She looked ridiculous in a way, her hat flopping as Pelham with a monitory tap to her calf got her part bent over, her arms braced behind so her big dugs hung, pressing her dress.
"I will pin her skirt up for you, tutor," came a cry and Lady Berry strode forward, brandishing two golden safety pins.
She took a fold of flesh from behind the armpit 'tween finger and thumb and veritably pinned the satin skirt up through it. Julia gave a quiver, her head came back, but her chin was steady. A small stain threaded on the dress behind.
But now she was bared for the beating, though the skirt still protected her modesty in front. Her stockings were of a sheeny taupe in hue, very taut and high.
"Hit her just above the garters, tutor," was Lady Berinthia's advice as she returned to her seat, "leave the buttocks for the birch."
There was a thick swish completed by a dry rap that echoed through the silence in the room. Pelham, intent on his task, delivered his strokes after a run of two paces with the full length of his limb. The second made Julia catch her breath on a sharp sob. The cane whipped with relish into the very top of the legs, just under the bum, writing deep red traces there. Julia held to it pluckily. Forsooth, there was little alternative, else she wanted extra.
"Tight, brace back your knees," came Lady B.'s call in a tone of strident dislike as five made the woman writhe. "Bend more over."
The blink of her eyes, her bitten lips - oh she was fit for sculpting by Polycles. Her knees rubbed, she clenched in, but still she made no sound, striving with all her strength to disappoint Pelham and his public.
With each lunging stride as he swept the stick through to the thickest part of her legs the man grunted now.
Finally, he had to win, cut coming on previous cut, until a rushing whine was forced from Julia's throat with the last - "Aiee!" - as she stumbled.
She cringed and squirmed as Mrs. Wilson let down her dress and she was brought to face us again. Now she had begun her calvary and was panting and pale, beginning to be cowed.
"She's a little warmer now," said Sir Horace Wide, patting up under my tunic skirt. "Get me another glass of port, Tom, please." His member was stiff as a ramrod in his trousers.
"Julia Usher, you will stand be sentenced," said her husband then. "A jury of your peers has agreed that this disgraceful crime of which you stand convicted must be extirpated soundly, once and for all. Lest it prove a temptation to others like Thomasina here, its fate will be made terrible. I am charging Mr. Pelham to give you the licking of your life. You will be stripped and whipped. Your buttocks will be bared. You will suffer urtication... "
"And figging," put in briskly Lady Berry.
"... you will be stretched and strapped on a bench for the purpose while six dozen stripes of the birch rod are applied to your naked posteriors."
At this news Julia's shoulders visibly slumped. She looked despairingly around.
"What is more, the birch twigs have been wound with wire for toughening, and the last twelve will be with the soko. Proceed. Strip her, Plum."
Julia glanced round aghast. It was happening now. There was no halting her fate. But six dozen, six - the full measure of the... law.
Pelham came forward stripped to the waist, his muscles rippling. He stood in front of her with a slight smile for a second, murmured "Come" and, placing his fingers in the bust of her gown, ripped it off her in a single sweep. Lady Berinthia clapped loudly.
For now Julia was bare, and more than bare. Held up and out, her great breasts swung like blancmanges either side her torso, while atop the stockinged pillars of her lovely legs her venus mound bulged out nakedly. Julia had been shaved - perhaps better to appreciate the boss on the bench, I know not - and looked curiously swollen and slotted. Pelham fingered her there, pressing the pulpy purple lips, then Lady Berry cried out, "Fig her."
Prendergast came forward in a businesslike way. I was pouring from a dark decanter at the time and only observed Julia, gasping, rise to her toes and arch forward, away from the maid behind.
"Ginger suppository up the anus," grinned Sir Horace at my side. "Warms 'em up no end, heh. Makes horses keep their tails up. She won't want to clench in a minute."
"Make her pickle her first birch, Pelham," the harpy was shouting out now, however.
A vase - the very same I had used in my extremity on the stool - was brought forward, and placed between Julia's legs.
"Urinate. In short, pee," said Lady Berinthia.
It took Julia a minute to do so, then she let go with a voluminous rush, gushing a good foamy jet into the receptacle, and in this, when she had finished, her first birch was set to steep.
"Now give her the nettle, and give it her well!"
For this she was taken to the dais and her legs held open in the ring-straps, as had been Molly's. From a bucket at the side Prendergast, well gloved for the task, extracted a bunch of dark green leaves, mauve at their centers.
"Devil nettles," explained Sir Horace as if divining my thoughts, "Caribbean, y'see. Don't resemble ours, but they sting like the dickens. Sting through a man's breeches and last an hour. Worse if you scratch 'em, so you can imagine she'll be hot beneath the birch, the sting just works in... see, what did I tell you!"
At the first touch of the innocent-looking leaves Julia had uttered a loud "Ow!" and turned back her head.
This was something she didn't know and its pain surprised her. The sleek maid frisked her bundle about the buttocks to and fro and soon had her "mistress" bounding. Angry white blotches were drawn up all over, reddened at their edges. Julia writhed, fingers fluttering in her fetters.
Lady Mildmount was excited by the sight. Crossing and recrossing her legs she gave advice - "All up and down, girl. And right between them. So, go on. Hold one apart and work them right in... from waist to knees... oh come on, you're letting her off."
"OUAWWW!" Julia threw her head back in her hat. "Please not the nettles... any more."
Her plea was a mere catalyst for Lady M. Who strode angrily forward, declaiming, "You're being too lenient, you fool. Give them me and I'll show you how." Leather-gloved she drew out a new bundle from the bucket and leapt lightly to the dais. She did not merely parade these leaves across the ample seat, she thrust them hardily into it. Julia cried and, in the intense agony of pain, attested by the lumpy whiteness of her blisters behind, tried to bend her knees in evasion, half-squatting in so far as her bonds would allow her. Lady Berinthia seized her moment and worried the bundle home into the very base of the body, the thick fat flesh around the cunt. Julia screamed, jacking upright, clenching in her buttocks protectively. But the other merely pressed them through her legs and drew them up the jellying cleft. Julia was richly stung all over and her tormentress saw to it that she was equally treated from arse-bud to navel.
"That's the way to urticate," she said finally turning and glaring at Prendergast, who backed hastily off the dais. "Now where's that cane? And come here, you. Get out your bottom."
"Excessive leniency," laughed Sir Horace Wide. "Can't let that go, can we?"
I had never seen Prendergast flogged and I confess this was one spectacle I was looking forward to. Lady Berry sent her hopping with ten beauties, tripping in her knickers and grasping back in pain. I cordially enjoyed the event.
But now Julia's hour had come. Mrs. Wilson brought her to the bench. Though her massive thighs were still thrashing she faced the tutor across it for a second before she went down and her great brimming eyes seemed to send him some special message. Make it quick? Do your damnedest? I do not know.
She was fastened with her feet to us, in their mules and glib stockings, her long-gloved arms drawn tight in front and strapped there. A strap secured her waist and two indentations in the bench took her knees, which were likewise strapped. She arched up with a groan as she felt the needles under her cunt, and Pelham had before him a perfect, hopeless exposure. The creamy thighs were tight together, and above them those amazing poetic buttocks now all a-shiver with their poisonous contusions. Down the central valley of this landscape the anus seemed to wink in the furrow, opening sensitively under the stinging salve within.
"Now make her dance," said Lady Berry grimly.
It was a frightful licking. The first cut shook her head and made her gasp. The thrilling sting drove tellingly, with the twigs now withed in wire. Pelham took her just above the veined and swollen gourd of her pouching sex, streaming the cheeks with purple and red.
"Good, good... that'll teach them to look so cheeky."
"Yes, that's strict," said Sir Horace as the fifth wound in plumply.
Julia cringed in, gritting her teeth till the muscles on her jaw stood out.
Thwww - iscch! "OOH!"
Pelham changed rods at ten, by which time the buttocks were throbbing and well covered with lean black weals, congealing on the right. He knew better than to flog too fast and the second dozen must have taken minutes. Julia was losing the frightful struggle not to give him satisfaction.
"Nooo... ooooooh... wait... enough! OOOH!"
"She's feeling it now."
"Bravo! He's drawn."
The fatty flesh shrank in, instinctively, as Julia breathlessly awaited the impending cut. Then the boss at her front made her jerk back, beaten rigid, spreading out as if seeking the whip - when Pelham cut again.
Great great Heavens! How he cut. The thin tough twigs sliced in to the cushiony skin with venom. Julia jerked, then opened licentiously and the monster placed his fangs with a surgeon's precision. By the end of two dozen she was in blood, and Lady Berry calling for the soko. She appeared to be going out of her mind, a puppet on its strings of lust.
"Flog... cut her to pieces, man... lower still... on those cane marks, confound it... don't let her recover...
thrash her to an inch of her life."
The third dozen was beginning. Julia, her head thrown back, eyes bulging under the broad-brimmed velvet hat, was causing the bench to bound in her agony. The raw and maddened fat of the right side seemed scarcely able to bear a touch and when the new wire-bound twigs sank in, she howled from her heart.
Somehow this dozen, too, was done and Pelham, panting himself, said, "Take her out and rest her a while.
Put some sharp vinegar on those cuts. Bring the smelling salts for the second half."
Sobbing, Julia was helped out, one arm round each servant, and her bulge was bloody in front as she went.
"Christ, that's tight. That's the way to treat those balloons. She won't want to cross your path in a hurry again, tutor."
"I intend to be tolerably severe with these last cuts," he said, pouring himself a glass of water. "I hope you won't mind, Stevie."
The man addressed stretched on his seat. He looked round at me and it was a look without liking. His face had been transformed in those minutes. "Come here and lick my prick, Minor. Suck me off sharp now and if there's a drop spilt I'll cane you really hard. It'll be twenty."
On this note of encouragement I went to work.
Sir Horace said, "Suggest we give her the pear for these last. Berry's got a good one. And me ears are sensitive. I can't stand screaming."
"Dip it in something first. Flavor it a little for her."
"Ouch, that's cold," came Lady Berinthia's giggle after a moment. "No, that's quite far enough up, thank you, Horry. It's nice and slimy now. By God, I wouldn't mind beating that Prendy again."
It was with a mouth of semen, then, that I heard the sobbing of Lady Julia's second approach. She came in scorified before and behind, and by now utterly broken. Her arms were secured behind, her lids swollen with weeping, her eyes restless under the great swinging brim of her hat. Pelham awaited her with a smile and his briniest birch drawn over his thighs a tiger awaiting his prey.
Julia threw herself at his feet.
"Please," she begged, bending her streaked and waled posteriors as she struck her head on the floor before him, "but one dozen more. You do not know how it hurts. I can scarcely walk for pain. Oooh, oh God do not whip me more. Oh ah oh... please... I beg... "
She gazed round despairingly at her husband.
"Come, Madam," said the tutor coaxingly, "you do not want to give up now, just when you are learning your lesson, do you? The next ten minutes are going to be of the utmost importance to your soul."
"Sliver her to shreds," shouted Lady Berinthia. "Cut her fat in slices, man."
"Open your lips." He was very erect in front, I saw, as he slipped the well-called "pear of agony" in Julia's mouth. The slimed steel gag sprang wide at once, forcing open her jaws. Her eyes seemed to pop in some similar distension, too. She was seized and secured in a trice.
This time she had given up all control. With knees fastened, and unable to express herself vocally, all the agitation of her physical self communicated its activity to the basin of her buttocks, which were shuddered through and through with nervous quiverings, the spincter ring opening and shutting.
"Third dozen, begin."
Zzzzzssch! "NNNNGGG!"
The twigs whicked in bitterly, throwing shredded ends and spits of blood. Julia was perfectly in a panic of pain, lunging and plunging. Then suddenly after five or six her contortions took on a spasmic quality. She would await, face turned back and hips shuddering, the hiss of air, and kiss of twig. When it cut, her great crisscrossed masses jumped together, in a muscular clenching bound, accompanied by a grunt. She would remain thus for a prolonged second or so, then fall back, panting, limp. The man would bide his time, and cut again.
This very ecstasy of agony was watched with respect, and a certain awe. Even Lady Berry was silent, masturbating openly. The man was playing on the poor tumified flesh with genius. The rod fell now with a wet sound, on skinned bruises. And yet there was still some twenty to come. The smelling salts were pressed beneath her nose repeatedly.
Finally, she had received sixty cuts and from the center of her buttock to well down her thigh was all a fervent, swollen red.
"Now take the soko," said Lady Mildmount slowly, "and... whip in!"
It was surely questionable how many more Julia could bear, but a refinement of finesse was in store for her.
The whalebone birch, or dreaded soko, was of long white, or grayish, strips of the tough material and she was sobbing openly, through her bit or gag, as the tutor stationed himself with it at her head, actually straddling her there as he stood on the bench itself. A drawn-out wail rattled from Julia's throat as she realized what was happening.
For this was whipping in.
Ffffrtttt!
The dry tails hit down hard as the tutor swung over her into the inside of her cheeks. First the right, then the left. Her starts and contortions were inconceivable now. The tenderest flesh at the very base of the quim was sliced into mercilessly. Its sides were attacked and its round red lips nipped into in the acme of agony itself.
"Cut her cunt. Now, idiot, now!!! Lady Berinthia was bawling, as she twisted on her seat like a snake. "Now...
she's spreading... give it to HER!"
How she bore it I do not know for the last three whipped visibly along that fatted purse or purse or pouch, trying frantically to press under her buttocks. She was sweating and twisting when the twelfth fell and Pelham slowly unleashed his manhood above her.
"Now you know what it is to be beaten," he hissed, holding his furious stony erection. "Let me show you what it is to be buggered."
No, no! I wanted to cry. But then everything happened at once.
Pelham stationed himself behind his victim, one leg either side the bench; with a pair of thumbs he widened the lining of her bumhole, presented his purple cockhead to it and pressed. Suddenly he sank home to the balls.
Julia screamed, impaled. I dashed forward, I had to help her - only to be sprawled on the floor as Lady Mildmount's lash agonizingly en-coiled an ankle and sent me tumbling there. Everyone was standing up.
Lady Berry was shouting. Pelham was thrusting.
"Me... me," I heard vaguely, in a woman's voice. "Give it me!"
I doubled, retching, as another lash wound round my belly and left me gasping like a stranded fish.
"Stick it up me, Pelham," the fiend was yelling, "fuck me, man, fuck me. Oh God I can't stand it. Get out of her. Fuck me up the cunt. Get that pole up my twat or I'll... "
What the alternative was I never knew, for I fled from the room nursing a wet red patch where the trainer of that harpy's lash had fallen near my navel.
It was only very much later, in the middle of the night, that I woke up in a fever, realizing I had witnessed a nightmare.
Someone was standing in my room. I realized with sheer terror that it was Pelham, and shrank back to the bedposts.
"I licked her, didn't I, Tommy," he said in a vague gloomy voice, in the dark.
"It was the most frightful hiding I've ever seen, sir," I said.
He nodded, as if flattered. "I beat her, and then I buggered her," he pronounced thoughtfully.
"And now I suppose you want me to lick you off again," I said tartly, taking courage from his disconsolate mien.
He laughed. "I wished it had been you, all along," he said in a tone of immense melancholy. "Especially towards the end."
"It must have been unbearable," I said. "You didn't have to cut the skin off her in little pieces. Do you know no moderation?"
"Not in correction," he averred. He stood there with bowed head. And when I think of him now 'tis with sad pathos of recollection, strangely to say, a lonely man in a wet fir wood, with a spaniel at his feet. He was something of our time, and all time, a dread dreamed, a dream dreaded, a fervor disallowed. He was part of my youth, and part of my life. Somehow, even then, I knew he was not to marry, and he never did. English to the ears, less of an aristocrat than Lord Stephen with whom he'd schooled, he was yet an integral part of our great mercantile civilization of the time, with its stern laws and passionate control. His end was worthy of him.
"Do you want to beat me?" I said suddenly then.
He shook his head. "I've finished with that now, Tommy."
I was shaking and in a fever of madness and I said, "Well, did you come up here to have me, sir? Is that it?
Am I to be privileged to have the skin taken off the inside of my cunt by that... thing? Or did you shoot off into Lady Julia's bowels? Or did you stuff it into the Mildmount cavern?"
Was this a vision or reality? Was I really saying these things?
"I fucked her," he said.
"Right up? Did she scream with delight as she was ploughed, sir?"
"She died," was all he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There is but one simple sequel to this scene, and story.
It took place one wet London afternoon a trifle more than a decade later. I had married long since, just had my second boy, and was walking up Wigmore Street under an umbrella when I bumped into a lady. It was a softish bump.
"Tommy! Darling!"
Time had not changed Julia Usher an iota. The full bloom of beauty still blushed strong on her cheeks, even though she had bestrewn the intervening years with children - much to the gratification of Lord Stephen. My mother had died and he, indeed, perhaps had been my father, romping with her when a boy. I do not know, and do not want to know, but it made me strange sister, under the skin, to this lovely personage standing before me. We had met occasionally but this was unexpected. After an exchange of greetings I asked her where she was going. Could I carry her anywhere in my carriage, which was stationed round the corner?
She seemed to hesitate a second, then said brightly - "Come."
I followed her superb back and embonpoint a little further up the street and into a formal house, one of a kind, there. We were ushered into a morning-room by an impeccably clad maid. I began to grow curious.
Was this some doctor's abode?
She stayed my hand. "Wait. Let yourself be surprised."
After looking at some magazines a moment I chanced to glance into the hall. A long corridor led off this and at that moment a boy clad as I had been opened and emerged from a door. For a second he stood there, massaging his bottom, his face all writhen, and a sudden stab of recognition traveled through me. Then his feet came along to the door out and I turned to Julia. She held up an engraved card with a mischievous grin - "In case you think I'm on some errand of dalliance, darling."
It had on it Wilfred Pelham, Private Tutor, and an address, with hours.
The blood beat behind my eyes.
I said gently, "You still see him?"
She looked at me squarely and steadily. "When I feel the need of it, yes."
"Doesn't Stephen...?"
"It's not the same. Nor at Mrs. Moat's. With Pelham it's different. I have this need of punishment, from time to time, it's deep within me now... you will tell no one, Thomasina?"
"No one," I confirmed.
"And will you meet him with me?"
"Now?"
"Why not?"
The maid was back at the door.
"Mr. Pelham will see you presently, Ma'am. If you will come this way " Oh Lord, oh God, my pulses roared. I was waking down the passage, the door at its end was opened, and we two went in - to more or less the duplicate of our schoolroom of old. We spoke in bated whispers for, yes, here were the racks of canes, and dangling straps, and the same old punishment desk, too. Julia's eyes were bright. Then Pelham came in.
He was the same as ever, harder, gaunter perhaps, but with the same large hands. And they were holding a cane. At sight of me he stopped.
"Surely you remember Lady Mildmount," said Julia then.
"Lady? Ah yes, you married Reggie shortly after... that is to say, good-day, Ma'am."
"Hello, Pelham," I said in a friendly way.
The man who had beaten me black and blue gave me a long and level gaze from his great pale eyes.
"No hard feelings?" he inquired at last.
I laughed aloud. "Except where they hurt most. No, you flogged the living daylights out of me but it did me good."
"I've never known anyone who knows as much about pain as Pelham."
He bowed ever so slightly. "Is... Lady Mild-mount here... for corrective treatment, too?"
Julia paused. She glanced at me, then in her impulsive way blurted - "Oh T. Would you, darling, please?"
"What?" But I knew.
"Let him cane you first. In front of me, I mean. Heavens, how I loved seeing you whipped into, Tommy. You don't know " My senses were roaring. There was a curious singing in my head. Suddenly, blazing beet to the neck, I turned with a frown to Pelham and said, "I should be profoundly grateful if you would do me the favor of caning my buttocks. I will bare for you, of course, and suggest you set me tight over that there desk."
"How many, Ma'am?" he asked, on an ironic smile.
My frown went deeper. "I'm afraid it's going to be necessary to give me twenty-five."
"Twenty-five!" said Julia.
"Spaced out over five minutes, if possible, and over the full surface of the buttock, concentrating on the tender portions low."
"Quite like old times," said Pelham. But already I was stripping, in some mad haste. When I had done so and was trembling before them he said, "You have richened and roundened. I never did bugger you, did I?"
"Repair the omission after you've beat me," I said, turning with a sob to the desk.
What a swishing he gave me then. He seemed to cut me to the cunt. And afterwards, sweating, moaning, Julia took my head and hands as he stuck me up the arse.
"Is there much more?" I begged her, gasping.
"Not much more. Relax, breathe in deeply."
"Ow! Oh God... ouu, darling, frig me... while he... HOOOO!"
When it was over and done with, and I'd left them, I could barely sit with comfort in my carriage. That evening Reggie returned from the City to our new town house early. He'd had a hard working day and wanted to take me instantly. But I pleaded womanly disorders, and he was discontent.
"Well then, let me swish you a bit and then suck me. I have but to see your behind, Tommy, to want to put a crop across it. Remember those days in the cave."
"All too well," I primly retorted, knowing that if I bared my bum for his quirt this night, he'd wonder where I'd been so wealed. So I dropped to my knees, pulled out his mannequin and sucked him till he spouted. He thanked me and yawned. We were going to the theater later.
"Isn't there a maid who needs thrashing?" he complained. "I've an itch to see a bare bum streaked with carmine, and a bush as big as yours beneath."
"Fuck me, darling," I said then, lying painfully back on a desktop, "get stiff again and stick it into... up... ah, dear, I can't wait for a royal rogering."
After the pain it was unspeakable pleasure, of course, only interrupted by our youngest maid who came to replenish some candles. I seized one from her and thrust it up my bum and came deliriously, for ages.
There is but one final postscript too, to this story, or these passionate memoirs. It occurred one morning when Reginald brought in The Times daily newspaper to the bedroom where I was breakfasting. He had run through me a couple of times in the night, as usual, and had - as usual - consumed a huge second breakfast as a result. And was off (as usual) to the City. Outside, our terrace shone with wet brown leaves, and the Thames moved like a brown arm before us. He kissed my neck, said "Gad! we're losing good men out there, but I must be off, my darling." And was so.
Perhaps he respected some sympathy in my soul. Idly I picked up the paper he had let drop. It opened as of itself, in a forward page. Under "Latest Casualties" I saw a blazing name: PELHAM, Wilfred. Brevet Major, KOSB...
The lines squirmed like snakes before my eyes. I went to the long glassy window that gave on our river, and its dream of greatness there The man had died, as all men must. He had died in the itinerant service of his country, unasked, unasking, calm to the last, dedicate to his endeavor, and our own glory. I could picture Pelham, as many times I have done since, falling unflinching on the savages' spears, with perhaps a faint, slightly grateful if not ironic smile, at his lean, unforgiving lips. He was a man who would always ask of himself ten times what he required of another. And I was not surprised when a short, breathy little man delivered to me one cold morning a month later a small packet sealed up in a distant foreign clime. It contained some few poor used twigs, or tips, of a birchen rod, perhaps one once employed on my own humble person. I nodded as I saw these morsels, and said to the bearer, once his batman, it seemed, "Yes, yes, I understand. If there is anything you require... "
The man said respectfully, "I'm sorry, milady, but 'e wanted me to say, as 'ow... well, he thought of you to the last, yer see. I brought 'im back an"e was cut across by the spears so it was right awful an' one on 'em had caught 'im across... "
"No more," I said.
He nodded his head and looked at me, a small man wearing the uniform of the Queen. One shilling a day.
When he had gone I went to my windows again and in the faint light from the flowing brown water I read these words on the dirty piece of paper torn from an exercise book there:
FOR THOMASINA
There are no sweeter fields, nor higher sky, The private dream that you and I...
