Graduation Day

Ariadne Soames-Ayr frowned. Squirming her bottom on the leather seat of the mahogany chair outside the dean’s office, she snatched a fifth impatient glimpse at her watch. Her breasts rose and fell as she sighed aloud, their swell rippling the sensuous silk of her clinging blouse.

Three-thirty. What could the dean possibly want with her? Tomorrow was graduation day and there was still so much to be done; fresh panties and stockings to select and a final steam-ironing of her black graduation gown. It was going to be a scorcher tomorrow. She wondered if she could risk just a black, demi-cup bra, a thong, a garter belt and black seamed stockings under the flowing gown. She shivered with mischievous anticipation at the thought of the cool gown rasping her nipples and tickling her stocking-clad thighs. She would glide up to the podium and receive her degree in delicious near-nakedness before the assembly. She squeezed her bottom cheeks together imagining the thong biting into her moist cleft as she stood before the bishop and the sheriff of the county. She grimaced at the thought of her family, who would also be there, arriving in the Volvo, her father undoubtedly fussing about parking and her mother proudly tearful in a ridiculous hat. And her aunt…

Ariadne blushed, and beneath her wriggling buttocks the leather squeaked softly. Her aunt… the blush became a slow blaze spreading across her face just like the reddening glow of a freshly beaten bare bottom.

She swallowed hard, almost gulping, as she tried to suppress the sudden sense of unease triggered by the memory of her aunt; a sudden memory that, though vague and instantly suppressed, left her feeling distinctly queasy.

Closing her eyes she concentrated on the dean. Why had she been curtly summoned to ‘Old Fashioned’s’ office? And what an office it was – a jumble of astrolabes, dog-eared textbooks, yellowing parchment scrolls dating back to Isaac Newton, pencils scattered across the dusty carpet and sprigs of thyme sagging from sticky, unwashed sherry glasses. Chaos and disorder everywhere. On the wall opposite the large desk, a sepia print depicted early designs for a computation machine designed by Charles Babbage, predating and upstaging the microchip and laptops by over a hundred years. The dean even used log tables instead of a calculator. ‘Cheating’, Dr Hilary Mellstock would sniff dismissively, thumbing her battered old book of log tables until she came to the cosines.

Cheating… Ariadne squirmed again uncomfortably… and then it all flooded back to her, leaving her with her head bowed and gripping the sides of the chair so fiercely her pink knuckles whitened.

It was the day after she completed her last A-level maths paper. She was out on the tennis court all afternoon, and returning home hot and perspiring, she dashed upstairs to shower and change. It was a Friday evening. Father had taken mother away to the Cotswolds for the weekend, leaving Aunt Julia, who was staying with them for a while until she sorted out some personal problems, in charge. Aunt Julia, never auntie; she had always been so strict and stern.

Ariadne recalled the surprise of hearing the click of the bathroom door opening while she was in the shower relishing the downpour of deliciously hot water. Then she heard the door being closed again… and locked.

‘Have you finished yet, young lady?’ Aunt Julia’s firm voice enquired from inside the steamy bathroom. ‘I trust you have.’

Startled by her aunt’s sudden presence, Ariadne almost slipped on the wet tiles.

‘Well, have you?’ the woman demanded sternly.

Blinking through the fierce stream of water plastering her hair over her eyes, Ariadne pawed frantically for the tap and then for her towel, wondering what on earth Aunt Julia was doing intruding upon her ablutions.

‘Have you washed properly, young lady?’

The opaque plastic shower-curtain stuck to Ariadne’s left buttock as she edged away from it instinctively, the towel clutched over her breasts, tummy and thighs.

‘Show me, my girl.’

‘Aunt Julia!’ Ariadne gasped, utterly bewildered.

‘At once,’ came the terse command.

‘Aunt, please, I’m having my—’

But before another word of protest could be uttered Aunt Julia flung the curtain aside and snatched away the scant modesty afforded by the towel. Startled and dumbfounded, Ariadne skidded slightly on the wet tiles in the cubicle, and she was no match for the capable hands that caught and pinned her wrists to her sides, and after a brisk visual inspection by the woman, spun her around.

‘Aunt Julia!’ Ariadne gasped. ‘Wh-what on earth are you doing?’

‘What am I doing? I am inspecting you, my girl, to make sure you are thoroughly washed. I never punish a dirty girl.’

‘P-punish?’ she stammered in disbelief and alarm.

‘Punish,’ the older woman confirmed humourlessly, and then a ringing smack echoed in the tiled bathroom and left a pinkish blotch on the bare buttock her hand had visited so abruptly. ‘Very good,’ she concluded. ‘Here.’ She offered Ariadne the towel. ‘I want you dried and out of there this instant. Quickly, girl, the sooner you’ve been punished, the better.’

‘But, Aunt Julia—’

‘Dry your bottom, girl, at once.’

Ariadne obediently, if sullenly, dabbed the towel against her pussy, and then, burning with shame, she passed its gentle roughness into the warmth of her anal cleft.

Aunt Julia moved silently across the tiles to the wicker laundry basket, flipped open the lid, and fished out a crumpled blouse; Ariadne’s white uniform blouse; a crisp cotton shirt that always seemed to emphasise rather than conceal her budding breasts.

‘And what have you to say to me about this, young lady?’ she demanded, following the length of the left sleeve down to the cuff and folding it back.

Ariadne saw the dark squiggles scrawled inside the cuff. She saw the tiny mathematical formulae she had inked onto the inside of the cotton cuff just before going into her A-level exam. She blushed furiously as she remembered sitting on the toilet ten minutes before the exam scribbling the four equations of motion. ‘N-no…’ she protested, shaking her head, ‘no, you don’t understand…’

‘Oh, but I think I understand all too well, my girl. You were cheating; it’s as simple as that. But what I fail to understand is why. Can you explain that to me? When I quizzed you four days before the examination, you recited the laws of motion and their attendant equations perfectly.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘But?’

‘But the pressure,’ Ariadne said, without conviction. ‘There’s so much to remember. It was just a little bit of insurance against—’

‘It was just a lot of cheating,’ Aunt Julia cut in abruptly.

‘No, I didn’t even look. Honestly.’

‘Honestly?’ Aunt Julia snorted. ‘After I find this,’ she waved the cuff and the scrawl of incriminating evidence in Ariadne’s flushed face, ‘you dare to use the word honestly?’

‘But I didn’t cheat!’ the shamed girl insisted desperately. ‘I didn’t even do the laws of motion question on paper three. I didn’t need the equations.’

Aunt Julia raised a hand to quell the outburst of pleading. ‘Nevertheless, you cheated. Not by actually using the copied formulae, but by scribbling it on your cuff in the first place. Now come here, girl.’

‘But Aunt Julia, I swear—’

‘You are to be punished, my girl, and deservedly so. What your poor parents—’

‘Oh no, please, Aunt Julia,’ Ariadne pleaded. ‘It would break mummy’s heart! She wouldn’t understand. And daddy, he fusses so. He’d never be sure I hadn’t—’

‘Then we will keep this matter strictly between ourselves,’ her aunt promised solemnly. ‘I will spank you, spank you very severely on your bare bottom, and we will consider the episode forgotten. Understood?’

Her head bowed, her frightened eyes lowered, Ariadne shrugged silently.

‘Are we agreed, my girl? A severe spanking on your bare bottom, and the ugly matter of your dishonesty will be closed. Are we agreed?’

Knowing there was no other way out of this shameful predicament, Ariadne slowly nodded, still avoiding her aunt’s accusatory stare.

‘Head up, girl, and look at me,’ Aunt Julia pressed, and the naked young woman’s breasts rose and fell as she took a deep breath, and lifted her worried countenance.

‘Now quickly, hands behind your back,’ the older woman ordered, and Ariadne’s pert breasts quivered vigorously as she hastily obeyed.

‘Now kneel.’

Her hands clasped above her bare buttocks, Ariadne winced as her knees pressed down to the hard tiles.

‘Keep your head up,’ her aunt commanded, ‘and look at me.’ Reddening even more with shame, she obeyed.

Hands on hips, her full bosom heaving, Aunt Julia towered over her penitent niece. ‘Do you admit it now?’ she demanded insistently. ‘Do you admit you cheated by writing those equations on your sleeve, whether you used them or not?’

‘Um, yes…’ came the contrite whisper.

‘And are you sorry?’

‘Yes, aunt, truly sorry.’

‘Sorry and ashamed?’

Ariadne nodded.

‘And you will be sorry, my girl, very sorry and deeply ashamed when you’re lying across my knee having your bottom spanked.’ Tossing aside the incriminating blouse, Aunt Julia unzipped her black skirt and palmed it down over her hips. It slithered down to the tiles, completely burying her shiny court shoes. Stepping out of the skirt’s dark puddle, and then out of her shoes, she stood resplendent before her young niece in sheer pearl-grey hose.

Peeping up timidly, Ariadne could discern the gentle swell beneath the stretchy sheen where white knickers sheathed her aunt’s pubic mound. The shy peep became a sustained, mesmerised gaze as she watched her stern relative unbutton and roll up both sleeves of her blouse. Then she rubbed her palms together slowly for a full minute before removing two rings from her right hand. Her spanking hand.

‘On your feet, girl.’

Ariadne stood up slowly.

‘Come along. Across my knee with you.’ Seating herself on the lowered lid of the toilet seat, her plump buttocks splayed within the clingy hose, Aunt Julia summoned her naked niece to her.

Ariadne reluctantly approached the grim woman, then bent over and positioned herself for punishment. Easing herself across the waiting softness of the older woman’s thighs, she whimpered as a firm hand gripped the nape of her bowed neck, forcing her naked body fully over her punisher’s lap.

‘Hands down… no, not like that,’ her aunt’s voice snapped waspishly, ‘arms forward. Touch the floor with your fingertips.’

The pre-punishment preparations seemed endless, heightening Ariadne’s shame and humiliation. Stretched helplessly across her aunt’s glistening hose, her face blazed as her pubic nest crackled against their taut sheen as her warm fingertips touched the cool tiles. The sudden rush of blood to her head left her giddy, her bare bottom rising up in utter helplessness while her toes supported her tautly braced legs.

A dominant fingertip dimpled her left buttock’s tender swell. ‘Open your legs for me, girl.’

She clamped her thighs even more tightly together, but then cried out as her aunt spanked her, and instinctively spread her thighs wide to avoid another punishing blow.

Aunt Julia drew her thumb up and down across the girl’s exposed cleft several times in swift succession, before dipping the fingers of her spanking hand into the shadowed warmth. A brief but blistering lecture on the merits of honesty and the futility of attempting to cheat then followed. It was a very stern sermon, and the drumming of the fingertips at her cleft, and then upon her vulnerable anal whorl, filled Ariadne with delicious dread, and before her aunt’s lecture was over she found herself almost wishing the spanking would begin. She was growing strangely confused, and she felt warm and moist in her most private places.

Then, at last, the punishment began, exploding across her upturned cheeks with a savage staccato of spanks, eight blows in total followed by a pause. She held her breath and squeezed her tear-filled eyes tightly closed as the palm revisited her warm flesh to rhythmically smooth and caress her punished cheeks. Then her aunt recommenced the chastisement with a flurry of harsh smacks that made Ariadne’s bare bottom bounce. Her squeals escalated to shrill shrieks before transforming into broken, muffled sobs as the strong hand ravaged her increasingly red buttocks. The blows were swift and searing, crimsoning every square centimetre of her helpless cheeks as they quivered beneath the blistering onslaught. Then another pause followed, during which she clenched her buttocks tightly as the heat and pain spread down to her wet quim.

Afterwards Ariadne tiptoed gingerly along the landing, and as she passed the spare bedroom into which Aunt Julia had withdrawn, leaving the door slightly ajar, she paused to listen, and heard low moans emanating from within. Daring a quick peek, she saw her aunt stretched out naked on the bed, masturbating furiously by rapidly skimming her knuckled tights over her sex.

Then later still, in the darkness of her own bedroom, Ariadne thrust her sore bottom up against its own reflection in the full-length mirror by her bed. And as her reddened cheeks kissed their own cool image frozen in the glass, she came uncontrollably.

The large old bell in the tower overlooking the quad struck the half hour. Ariadne Soames-Ayr blinked, wriggled on the chair and out of her reverie, glancing at her watch again. It was almost four o’clock. She sighed. She would miss her dreadful tea and bun now, and it was her last chance to partake in the time-honoured tradition. Tomorrow was graduation day. After that, London and a career. Actuarial work, perhaps, or fund management. Or had the dean secured something a little bit special during last month’s ‘milk round’ when the multi-nationals had come to cream off the brightest brains? Could it even be the Treasury itself? Had ‘Old Fashioned’ squared it with the men in grey to secure her star pupil such a plum post? Ariadne flushed with pleasure at the thought. She had, after all, got a double first with honours, achieving the highest marks. It would mean a terrific salary, she realised suddenly, absently plucking at the cotton panties over her pubis through her skirt, panties now wet from her recent recollection of Aunt Julia’s spanking.

A post at the Treasury would command an excellent salary and secure her a small flat just off Sloane Square. She would settle for a bed-sit, for anything, even a broom cupboard, so long as it had the desirable SW3 tag. She smiled, easing the gusset of her tight panties from her hot cleft by inching each thigh up from the seat a fraction. The leather creaked beneath her rippling buttocks. Yes, a bed-sit within the golden triangle of Peter Jones, Hans Crescent and the Lower Brompton Road visible from her room, but not a flat-share. No, definitely not a flat-share.

Her pulse quickened at her throat. Flat-share… she shivered in sudden delicious dread as more buried memories bubbled up from their deep well of shame. Seconds later, images flooded her mind…

She found herself at the start of her second year – late parties, never any milk and always someone hogging the payphone – living in town in a flat-share with two third year girls above a kebab house. The flat-share and the two third-year girls; a bossy blonde and a silent brunette, both always chivvying and chasing her to wash up the dishes or put the black bags out on bin-day. And she, busy at her books, ignoring them. Too engrossed to shop – the dean had promised a double first if she worked hard – she pinched things from the fridge, swapping those silly little post-it notes with Mine! scribbled on them from one carton to another to cover up her crimes.

After Christmas, back for the Spring term, red, green and silver decorations wilting in the window of the kebab house below, and the reception committee – the bossy blonde with the brunette bringing up the rear – burst into Ariadne’s cramped little room.

‘We’ve decided you’re going to get only one more chance,’ the blonde informed her. ‘There’ll be a schedule and you’ll do your bit.’

‘And no more eating what we’ve bought or cooked, understand?’ the brunette added.

Ariadne had been flippant, defiant, which was a bad mistake. The blonde grew furious. Kicking the bedroom door closed, she produced two table-tennis bats from beneath her jumper, gripping one and tossing the second to her friend. The dark-eyed girl caught it, and thumbed its red rubber surface menacingly.

‘One beating and one more chance,’ warned the blonde. They overpowered her easily, and choosing not to fully undress her, they yanked their struggling captive’s jeans and cotton panties down to her knees. ‘Get her hands and tie them.’

The brunette thrust her table-tennis bat between Ariadne’s thighs, and then used a single nylon stocking on her wrists. The nylon burned slightly as it bit into her flesh, leaving her hands helplessly bound behind her.

Stumbling as she screeched in protest, Ariadne was propelled facedown across the narrow bed. As she fell her bared buttocks shamefully exposed to the punishing bats, she saw her teddy bear tumble tipsily down from his perch on the pillow.

Crack! Crack! Crack! The blonde proved brutal with the small round bat. A blistering triple echo broke out as she swiped it down urgently, vehemently, across the upturned cheeks. As the bat barked the buttocks flattened, wobbled and trembled in their sudden crimson glory. Crack! A telling swipe jiggled the poor cheeks, fleetingly depressed beneath the rubber-coated bat. Nine strokes were administered in a ragged staccato of three, three, one, and a final flurry of two. The blonde was panting from the exertion, her heavy breasts rising and falling swiftly, while beneath her on the bed Ariadne sobbed brokenly.

After the ninth stroke the blade of the bat was placed down with tender dominance across the swell of the beaten buttocks. Then the cruel punisher, tucking her disarrayed hair deftly behind her ears, angled the rubber surface of the warm bat against Ariadne’s lips. The punished, bare-bottomed girl wriggled violently, but the red surface returned to dominantly smother her moaning protests. ‘Promise!’ the blonde hissed. ‘Promise to clean and tidy up and follow the schedule!’

Ariadne refused, turning her head away defiantly, but swiftly repositioning the levelled bat under her captive’s chin, the blonde gazed contemptuously down at her. ‘Promise!’

Ariadne, tears jewelling her sorrowful eyes, finally nodded and panted, ‘Okay… okay, I promise.’

‘That’s better, bitch. Now seal it with a solemn kiss.’

She kissed the bat that had just blistered her bare bottom.

Crack! In her surrender and submission to the rubber prickling her dry lips, she had forgotten the second girl. Straddling her victim by tucking her heels under her armpits, gazing sternly down at the reddened buttocks, the brunette wielded her table-tennis bat competently, briskly delivering four brutal strokes.

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!

Wriggling and shrieking, Ariadne jerked and fought with all her strength to dislodge her punisher, but was merely rewarded with a furious flurry of three more harsh blows. Then, twisting the bat in her grip, the punisher aimed the thin edge down between the ravaged cheeks, and with a deliberate sawing motion she administered the most delicious torment to the wet cleft at her mercy.

Ariadne froze. Surely not… surely she was not about to come. But the inexorable waves were cresting in her pelvis and her pussy was dangerously hot, her slippery labia blooming open, lewdly creaming and exquisitely tingling. The red rubber dimples of the bat’s surface teased and thrilled the inner curves of her punished cheeks as she squeezed and clenched them, causing even more juice to flow from her quim.

Planting a controlling hand firmly down on her victim’s back, the brunette exposed her deep cleft. She applied the thin edge of the bat with intimate ruthlessness, skimming the tight little bud of the puckering anal crater. Then it skidded across the velvety skin buried between the clenched cheeks as juice from the opening sex lips lubricated the rubber trim.

The bat was then brought to Ariadne’s lips and she was forced to submit to it with a kiss; forced to kiss and lick the bat that had just visited her bare buttocks and the sticky cleft between them; forced to kiss and taste, to taste and smell, her own feral juices glistening wetly on the dimpled red surface.

And as her two flatmates caressed her and stroked her hair and shoulders, licked and softly bit her punished bottom and untied her bound wrists, Ariadne raked her pussy against the now slippery duvet. Crushing her open sex down and wriggling and writhing, she spread her labial lips apart before splaying them deliciously, and her beaten buttocks still blazing, she smothered her screams of pleasure as she started coming…

The chimes in the quad sounded again. No tea and sticky buns today. Sticky… she winced slightly feeling how wet she was from the recent rush of turbulent memories.

The approaching tap-tap of high-heels on the polished wooden floor announced the arrival of the dean. Dr Hillary Mellstock swept up the corridor, black gown billowing, steel-rimmed spectacles flashing fire as they caught the afternoon sun pouring in through the window.

‘Ah, the Soames-Ayr girl. I shall see you presently.’

As the office door closed behind the disappearing dean, Ariadne tossed her head angrily. Girl, indeed! A third year graduate who had achieved so much with honours, and who was about to embark upon an important career, was hardly a mere girl. Then she relaxed, her frown softening to a fleeting smile; ‘Old Fashioned’ was quite eccentric. Everyone knew that.

After a short time the door to the dean’s office opened again and she was instructed to enter. Her mind vaguely acknowledged the sound of the door being closed behind her, but she attached no particular significance to the scrape of the key turning in the lock.

The dean ignored her visitor at first, busily preoccupying herself with the blinds, which refused to come down until bullied into submission, and then with a floor lamp. The four dim bulbs glowed grudgingly in the gloom of the darkened room as she snapped on the main lights. A double fluorescent strip flickered and blazed down from above. Ariadne blinked. The sudden flood of light illuminated the dean’s office mercilessly. She saw the dusty leather chair behind the cluttered desk and the disorderly chaos everywhere.

As if indifferent to her presence, the dean continued to fluster about her office, tidying up and arranging things as neatly as possible. Then she opened a deep oak cupboard and produced an abacus, which she cradled gently against her bosom. Closing the heavy cupboard door with her knee, she placed the abacus down upon her desktop and briskly dusted off her large bosom. Ariadne saw the full breasts wobble and bounce.

‘Well, girl, what do you think of it?’

‘It is a beautiful counting frame, Dr Mellstock,’ Ariadne admitted, gazing down at the row of beads.

‘Beautiful? Fiddlesticks, girl, it is of unique interest. And why is it of unique interest to the mind mathematical?’

She concentrated hard on the winking line of five red beads flanked at one end – the end next to the wooden frame – by a single silver bead.

‘Well, girl, can’t you see?’

‘There are only five counting beads.’

‘Exactly. Unlike the Greek and later Roman counting base of ten, early Arabic arithmetic was founded upon the counting base of five, representing the right hand. Nowadays, only the nomadic tribesmen of the North Yemen use such an abacus. The tribesmen, who herd their goats on horseback, devised this five-beaded saddle top abacus for one-handed use. But watch.’ The dean’s straightened forefinger alighted on the line of beads and flayed them, whizzing them along the taut wire. They rattled almost eerily, and tapped softly as they bunched together in a sparkling huddle at the other end. With a click the final red bead sped home, and suddenly clutching and tilting the counting frame, the dean held it aloft, allowing the single silver bead to slide down the wire. ‘The northern Yemeni women punish wilful young village maidens in a most remarkable manner,’ she remarked. ‘I was privy to such chastisement five years ago when travelling from Aden up into the Blue Mountains of A’qaar.’

Ariadne frowned, wondering what on earth the mad old dean was twaddling on about.

‘That is, I think, why I purchased this little gem in a particularly noisy market. Observe.’ She flicked the silver bead and the single red bead across the stretched wire. ‘When a young woman has misbehaved, the rest of the village females take her to a tent on the very edge of the encampment. There they bare the young woman’s bottom and beat one cheek – just one cheek, mind you – with a short, cruel whip fashioned from plaited goatskin strips. Very supple goatskin.’

Ariadne felt her tongue thicken in her suddenly dry mouth.

‘They whip one cheek until it is quite painfully crimsoned, leaving the other unblemished.’ The dean’s thumb toyed with the two separated beads, turning over the red against the silver. ‘This allows the unfortunate girl to continue with her chores and domestic duties for three days, sitting precariously upon a stool on her unmarked buttock. After the third day,’ her voice nearly dropped to a whisper, ‘the miscreant is dragged back to the tent on the edge of the encampment and, her buttocks bared, she receives the plaited goatskin whip across her unpunished flesh. It reddens swiftly under the savage lash and a most pretty result is achieved. When perusing such a punished maiden by moonlight, one cannot but appreciate the delightful effect of the whipped cheek against the unpunished twin. The red against the pale cream.’

Ariadne’s stomach grew heavy as she watched, spellbound, while the dean turned the fat little red bead against its silver partner, very much like a punished buttock bunched against its unmarked twin.

‘This frame allows a herdsman on horseback to count his goats single-handedly.’ The voice was perfectly neutral – quiet, calm.

‘I see.’ Ariadne sighed as the uncomfortable moment passed. ‘Yes, I see.’

‘Even on a wild stallion, in the torrid heat and swirling, blinding dust, the northern Yemeni tribesman can be sure of a true and accurate count.’

‘Yes, Dr Mellstock.’

‘True and accurate,’ the dean repeated slowly, fingering the little red bead and the little silver bead gently. ‘So important to the mind mathematical to achieve a true and accurate tally, is it not?’

‘Of course.’

‘Indeed, truth and accuracy could be said to be the very basis of the queen of sciences, could it not?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ Ariadne nodded decisively. Her sixth-sense warned her to agree enthusiastically with the dean; Dr Mellstock would make a formidable foe in any intellectual discussion. She watched as the woman gently plucked the steel-rimmed spectacles from her nose and placed them carefully down on the freshly dusted desktop. They glinted brightly, the lenses reflecting the harsh fluorescent light.

‘Warm afternoon,’ Dr Hillary Mellstock remarked, slowly unbuttoning the cuffs of her blouse, after shrugging off her black gown.

‘Mm,’ Ariadne agreed, her eyes seemingly unable to do anything other than follow the fingers over the large bosom within the blouse.

‘And it’s very warm in here.’

It had become rather hot and stuffy in the study, but Ariadne shivered slightly despite the heat as, bizarrely, the dean finished unbuttoning her crisp blouse and peeled it off. Dr Mellstock was wearing a seamless, deeply cupped, flesh-toned brassiere. The satin was slightly dark with perspiration, and Ariadne’s tongue flickered out to wet her dry lips as she saw that both the large cups strained to contain the full breasts squeezed within their stretchy sheen. But for some perverse reason Ariadne found the sight of her dean devoid of her blouse far from abhorrent or weird, and the prickle at the watching girl’s pussy became a pleasurable warmth as her labial lips juiced and peeled apart, kissing the panties snugly encasing them. Her clitoral thorn hardened as she glimpsed the mulberry-dark nipples pressing against each bulging bra cup as she began to feel more aroused than alarmed. ‘Old Fashioned’, as everyone knew, was quite eccentric. So she lowered her eyes and pretended not to notice as the dean continued undressing with no loss of her austere composure; after all, it was hot, she reasoned.

The skirt, unzipped, was lowered and discarded, revealing flesh-toned knickers and a garter-belt holding up bronze-hued stockings. From beneath her fringe Ariadne surreptitiously watched the shoes being kicked off and tidied away beneath the desk, but surely no more would be removed…

Dr Mellstock raised an accusing finger and pointed it directly at her. ‘So, girl, you deign to agree that truth is important in all matters mathematical?’

Ariadne tore her gaze from the carpet and looked up directly at the severe face of the dean, trying to avoid and ignore her odd state of undress. Everyone knew the old bat was eccentric, after all. ‘Um, yes,’ she whispered, finding even those two short words difficult to articulate.

‘Absolutely sure?’

She nodded.

‘That is all I need to know. Get undressed.’

‘I, um, dean?’ Ariadne gasped, incredulous.

‘I said get undressed,’ the woman repeated. ‘There are some questions I wish to put to you as I spank you. Oh yes, girl,’ her voice rose imperiously, ‘I propose to spank you as you supply my questions with answers. Eventually I will get the truth out of you. And if I deem it necessary, I will then cane you.’

‘No!’ Ariadne protested. ‘You can’t!’

‘I can, and most certainly will, cane you if it proves necessary. Now get undressed this instant and bend over my desk.’

Ariadne was aghast, and staggered back a few disbelieving paces. ‘B-but…’

‘If I have to cane your bare bottom, Miss Soames-Ayr, you will thank me for having spanked you first. Receiving strokes from a rattan cane across unprepared cheeks can be almost an unbearable experience. Almost. Much better, Miss Soames-Ayr, for you to be prepared for my bamboo by being given a warm bottom…

‘What, still dressed? Do not provoke me, girl.’

‘No, p-please, I mean, I don’t understand,’ she stammered, her thoughts as incoherent as her tumbling words. She edged back towards the door, and forgetting it was locked, her scrabbling fingers stretched out blindly behind her. They found the handle and twisted but the door remained stubbornly closed, and then, at that precise moment, Ariadne’s mind remembered the click of the lock after she entered the stuffy office, remembered and finally attached full significance to the ominous sound.

The dean was leaning on the edge of her desk, her legs crossed, her stockings gleaming in the bright light. ‘An anomaly in your examination paper has drawn attention to itself, my girl,’ she stated ominously.

Ariadne, her bottom pressed against the locked door, looked towards the desk, her eyes wide and sparkling with consternation.

The dean, slowly stretching out to finger the red beads on the abacus, adopted a brisk, no nonsense tone. ‘You wrote out in full, and demonstrated mathematically, that zero cannot in fact be an infinite quantity, applying the Zoll-Zimmermann principle. Now that I found truly amazing since I omitted to explain the Zoll-Zimmermann principle in my tutorials. Omitted it altogether, I must confess. And yet you anticipated the question in the exam paper and answered it completely.’

‘I was lucky—’

‘You stole into my study the day before and sneaked a look at the exam paper. Then you went to the library and checked the Zoll-Zimmermann principle on the Internet. I have a log of the site.’

‘I didn’t open the exam papers, they were sealed…!’ Ariadne protested desperately, and then stopped herself, too late, as she realised the enormity of her mistake.

‘They were sealed, yes,’ the dean chuckled triumphantly, ‘but you unsealed one, didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t—’

‘Then resealed it and slipped it back into the pile. The fifteenth in the pile, to be precise.’

‘No…’ Ariadne denied without conviction.

‘Because you carefully calculated you would be sitting in alphabetical order for the exam, putting you in the fifteenth desk. You planned to receive the resealed paper and, of course, not remark upon it. But you made an elementary mistake, Miss Soames-Ayr.’

‘Mistake?’ she echoed, trying to contain her mounting dread.

‘A miscalculation, my girl,’ the dean clarified. ‘A simple counting error. You forgot the first paper is always placed upon the desk of the invigilator.’

Ariadne, biting her lower lip, reddened.

‘Ah, I see you understand me. So, Miss Soames-Ayr, you received the sixteenth paper from the pile. The girl in front of your desk was given the paper with the broken seal. Quite properly, she quietly informed the invigilator. The matter was brought to my immediate attention, and the contents of your exam afterwards clearly indicated to me the nature of the wrongdoing and the identity of the wrongdoer. You see, Miss Soames-Ayr, how easy it was for me to deduce both the crime and the culprit? Now get undressed this instant and bend over my desk.’

‘No, please, Dr Mellstock, I didn’t… I mean, I’m sorry…’

‘Are you denying your guilt, or apologising?’

Ariadne’s silence was self-damning, and the dean nodded knowingly.

‘Undress, quickly,’ she said. ‘I want you bare-bottomed and bent over.’

Knowing she was lost, Ariadne’s fingers fumbled nervously at her buttons.

‘Your guilt in this unpleasant matter places me in a very difficult position – a very difficult position, indeed,’ the dean went on. ‘Your achievement of a double first with Honours could be deemed to be… hmm.’

Ariadne stripped awkwardly, shrugging off her clothes in clumsy haste. Trembling, she stood before the locked door in only her white bra and panties, her discarded uniform lying in a heap at her feet.

‘No,’ the dean whispered softly as Ariadne reached behind to unclasp her bra, and the blushing student’s hands fell down by her sides.

Tapping the desktop, Dr Mellstock invited her to approach.

‘Please don’t punish me,’ she whimpered, stumbling obediently across the carpet towards the desk.

‘Bend over and give me your bottom, you wicked girl,’ came the crisp reply.

Reluctantly, and reddening deeply in shame, Ariadne planted her hands down on the desk, her splayed fingers trembling.

‘Right over, girl.’ The dean loomed. ‘Face down, bottom up, if you please.’

Bending obediently, Ariadne crushed her soft bra-encased breasts against the hard wooden surface. She caught the whiff of lavender water as the dean stepped around her, and flinched, shrinking slightly as the woman’s stocking-clad thigh brushed against her left leg.

Dr Mellstock questioned her closely between each harsh spank. The required answers were supplied between gulps and squeals. The blows raining down across the proffered buttocks were fierce, but not ferocious. Red-bottomed and squirming, the punished girl blinked away her tears of pain and shame and braced herself for the next flurry of stinging slaps and searching questions.

Smack! ‘Briefly but accurately expound for me the Zoll-Zimmermann principle.’

Ariadne did so, mumbling the answer into the desktop.

Smack! ‘Expound the proximity of absolute zero to infinity.’

The young student obliged, tearfully acknowledging ‘theta’ as the differentiated axis of projection.

Smack! ‘Give me an account of your first chastisement, girl, your first real bare-bottomed punishment. I want the details. The exact details.’

Ariadne moaned softly and squeezed her poor buttocks together, but another sudden, unexpectedly severe spank opened them immediately.

‘Answer me,’ the dean demanded, so in a throaty whisper, one Ariadne barely recognised as her own, she recalled and recounted the spanking administered to her by Aunt Julia. And at the dean’s insistence, no detail of the punishment was omitted. She felt the egg of shame crack against her stomach wall as the dean extracted every detail from her, and felt the yolk of humiliation slither inside her. It was a cold, raw feeling not quite like fear, but more akin to a delicious dread as all the time, relentlessly, ruthlessly and dominantly, the dean’s firm palm caressed her punished bottom. And before she finished relating the details of Aunt Julia’s chastisement, she sensed the slithering yolk of shame seeping from her pussy in the form of her own warm juices.

The dean’s forefinger, fully extended and rigid, stroked the tightened cleft between the girl’s crimsoned cheeks. ‘And what of punishments since?’ she asked softly, almost tenderly.

Ariadne, fearful of the hovering hand above her sore bottom, quickly confessed to the treatment meted out to her bare buttocks by the red rubber bats wielded by her disgruntled flatmates.

‘And how did you respond to these punishments, my girl?’ the woman probed. ‘Did you experience any reaction,’ the dean emphasised the word, ‘to each or either chastisement?’

‘Reaction?’ she echoed in a faint whisper, clenching her spanked cheeks even tighter.

‘Arousal,’ the dean explained, her voice neutral, as it was when she was defining a difficulty in Euclidean geometry.

Ariadne hid her mounting confusion with silence.

Smack! Smack! The reddened buttocks bounced and jerked beneath their renewed torment. ‘I mean to know everything, girl. Everything. So tell me, at once.’

‘But I’m not sure I understand what—’

Smack! Smack!

Ariadne squealed. ‘Yes, yes!’ she cried, reaching back in an effort to cup and protect her scalding cheeks.

‘Hands back across the desk, young lady,’ the dean ordered sternly. ‘No, right across. Further…’

Ariadne’s fumbling fingers sought, and found, the desk’s far edge. She gripped, swallowing hard as her stomach stretched and her breasts moulded against the unyielding wood, threatening to burst free from her straining bra. At her ankles her stretched panties prevented her from kicking her heels to relieve the pressure.

The dean maintained a meditative silence. Then, abruptly, she snatched away Ariadne’s panties. Moving quickly, bending over her victim she unclasped and tore away her bra, instantly and painfully unburdening the cups of her breasts’ warm weight. The girl shrieked, confused by the new onslaught, writhing in renewed shame and distress.

Then towering over her naked, punished student, the dean demanded to be told how Ariadne responded to corporal punishment, and utterly broken, the young woman spoke haltingly but truthfully of her sensations of excitement and arousal when receiving bare-bottomed discipline…

A brief silence settled over the woman and the naked girl across the desk, which was eventually broken by Dr Mellstock, who delivered a short sermon in words that burned deep into Ariadne’s whirling brain. ‘The case against you has been proved, my girl,’ the dean concluded. ‘I believe you deserve your double first with honours. You have a first class brain but only third class morals. You have been previously punished, and most deservedly so, for your dishonesty, and you have responded, to some extent, to such punishment. There is hope for you yet. At university,’ she continued, caressing the spanked cheeks before her, ‘we consider it our duty to turn fully rounded young people out into society. You, Miss Soames-Ayr, remain somewhat deficient in matters of probity. As such, you must remain here until that deficiency has been thoroughly corrected.’

‘Remain here?’ Ariadne could not believe what she was hearing.

‘Be silent. You will graduate tomorrow.’

Ariadne sighed her relief aloud, her cheek still pressed to the old desktop.

‘But you will return next term to participate in my research project. I shall be your personal supervisor.’ Gripping and squeezing Ariadne’s taut yet beautifully malleable buttocks, she continued in almost a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I propose to supervise you closely, my girl. I shall be keeping a very sharp eye on you from now on.’

Ariadne quietly moaned her alarm and dismay into the desktop, clouding the wood with her sweet breath. Then the soft rustling of papers quickened her senses and, twisting slightly, she craned her neck to see the dean rummaging through an open drawer, unearthing a sheaf of forms.

‘Your application for postgraduate work here at college has been accepted, Ariadne.’

‘But I—’

‘All that is required now is your signature.’ The dean placed the completed paperwork down next to her face, and then moved the abacus gently so its wooden frame nudged her naked shoulder. ‘But before you sign, I will cane you.’

Ariadne gabbled her protest and began pushing herself off the desk in an effort to escape the threatened punishment, but the austere dean, serenely unruffled, levelled the length of rattan cane she was gripping against her student, almost effortlessly taming and controlling her lovely victim. A consummate dominant, she stilled the spanked girl against the wood by depressing the cane’s quivering tip down against the nape of her neck.

Mysteriously, the touch of the yellow wand stilled and silenced Ariadne into complete submissive surrender. Bamboo had never visited her flesh before. But she knew its first kiss would be excruciatingly potent, and she shivered in delicious apprehension. Pinned down and rendered motionless, she whimpered helplessly. It was an ambiguous whine; part hunger for and part dread of the dark delights to come. The tip of the rattan cane left the nape of her neck and traced a tremulous line down her spine before tap-tapping and dimpling the left cheek of her hot, spanked buttocks.

‘What is the fifth perfect number, girl?’

Frozen beneath the light pressure of the cane against her bottom, Ariadne’s brain failed her.

‘Come, come, the fifth perfect number, if you please?’

Ariadne’s brain whirled. Flinching from the dominant touch of the bamboo, she quickly calculated aloud. ‘Nought plus one, one. One plus one, two. Two plus one, three. Three plus two, five. Five plus three, eight.’

‘Eight?’ the dean echoed. ‘Quite sure?’

She nodded mutely.

‘Eight strokes it is, then. Bottom up a fraction more, if you please.’

Swish, swipe!

The first cut of the cruel cane was applied immediately. It whistled down to slice-swipe Ariadne’s vulnerably exposed cheeks, Judas-kissing their helplessness with a thin crimson weal. The caner grunted softly as she administered the stroke, while the caned girl squealed aloud as her bare buttock received the cruel lick.

Taking a step back from the lovely young body across the desk, the dean quelled the writhing buttocks with a light touch of the cane that had just lashed them. ‘With my whippy stick, I will correct the tendencies towards dishonesty and cheating your behaviour manifests so blatantly, Miss Soames-Ayr. Brilliance of intellect, I so often discover, is frequently found to be morally flawed.’

Swish, swipe!

The cane rose swiftly, sparkling in the harsh fluorescent light, and lashed down for the second stroke.

Ariadne hissed like a scalded cobra, bucking her whipped bottom in a frenzy of delicious pain, and jamming her pussy and breasts down against the wood. Abject beneath the quivering cane, she pressed her belly and pubis into the hard surface, rasping her clitoral thorn into the wood. Across her whipped cheeks the cane had bequeathed a second livid line of torment.

‘I will correct you, my girl. And punishment with my whippy stick,’ Dr Mellstock purred, raising the cane high for the delivery of a third stroke, ‘shall play a prominent part in your post-graduate experience under my strict supervision. A prominent part.’

Swish, swipe!

Ariadne screamed and gripped the far edge of the desk even more tightly. The fierce heat across her beaten buttocks melted and merged into a warm rivulet of arousal that seared down along her cleft.

The caning continued at a slow, measured pace. Between each vicious stroke, the dean adopted the practice of levelling the cane down at the abacus to deftly flick a single red bead across the taut wire, tallying each lash with maddening precision and mathematical exactitude. And as she did so, she enunciated each stroke aloud. ‘Four!’ Swish, swipe!

Despite the hot blood singing in her ears, Ariadne heard the fourth click as the bead sped home.

‘Five!’ Swish, swipe! Click.

‘Six!’ Swish, swipe! Click.

A slight pause between the administration of the sixth and the seventh stroke of the rattan cane caused Ariadne to whimper pitifully.

‘Patience, my girl,’ the dean chuckled darkly, momentarily pausing to rub the tip of the cane down against her pubic mound.

‘Seven!’ Swish, swipe! And yet again the dreadful click of the tallying bead.

It was a cruel cut. Ariadne kicked out, treading the empty air with her foot, and the tip of the cane angled down instantly to quell the movement into stillness. Then the tip of the cruel bamboo travelled slowly up over the smooth curves of her leg. Arriving at the almost invisible crease where her upper thigh melted into the swell of the buttock above, it probed inwards between the caned cheeks, aiming directly at the partly exposed glistening fig within. The tip of the questing bamboo darkened as it made contact with the wet heat shimmering at Ariadne’s plump young labia.

‘My goodness, girl, it would appear you have turned my whippy stick into a sticky whip,’ the dean quipped, sniffing as she scrutinised the moist tip of her yellow cane before once more savagely lashing the supple bamboo down across the crimson-striped buttocks. ‘Eight!’ The final stroke was duly tallied by a little red bead whizzing across the stretched wire.

But Ariadne scarcely heard it. Still gripping the far edge of the desk as though hanging on for dear life, she ground herself wantonly and frantically against the polished wood.

A few moments later she climaxed with a soft scream, and as she did so, the dean flicked the cane in against her parted thighs. The whipped girl whimpered her delight, and shuddered as a second orgasm engulfed her.

‘Kneel,’ the dean commanded gently, after giving her student time to recover. ‘Kneel down on the carpet, my girl.’

Ariadne’s perspiring breasts slid back across the slippery wood as she collapsed drunkenly on her knees before the desk.

‘Use your hands and fingers,’ the dean urged. ‘Go on, girl, you have my full permission to achieve absolute satisfaction.’

So keeping her recently whipped bottom cheeks just above her heels, Ariadne lowered her fingertips to her smouldering pussy and caressed her inner sensitive lips mercilessly, deploying both thumb-tips at her clitoral bud. Then suddenly she tensed and collapsed, succumbing to yet another climax that ravished her as ruthlessly as had the cane.

‘The pleasures of punishment are something of a philosophical conundrum, are they not?’ the dean murmured, pausing briefly to kiss, and then suck, the wet tip of her cane. ‘The sweetness of pain. The pleasure of suffering. A sugared sorrow, as the Chinese ancients deemed it. Yes, to be sure, a sugared sorrow.’

Utterly spent and exhausted, the student curled up at the dean’s feet.

‘Now you know my terms and conditions, Ariadne, are you willing to sign?’

She nodded, swallowed silently, and then hoarsely whispered, ‘Yes…’

‘Just as I thought,’ Dr Mellstock murmured, a glint of triumph sparkling in her eyes. ‘Tomorrow, you will receive your double first with honours, but I think we shall both come to agree you graduated with me, bare-bottomed across my desk, today.’

Parson’s Penance

‘Be still, little one. You have been sinful and so must be punished. With all sin must come retribution. Retribution, penance and punishment. Be still, I say, or it will go hard for you, my girl. Very hard, indeed.’

Despite the stern warning, the girl continued to wriggle and squirm across the lap of her punisher. She felt the firm hand at the nape of her neck tighten as it forced her bowed head even further down. Whimpering, she attempted to toss away the dark fringe of hair curtaining her eyes. She felt the brutal fingers busy at the buttons of her calico under-drawers, and burned red with shame as, swift and sure in their task, they opened and unfurled the flap of soft material covering her bottom.

‘Naughty girl,’ the parson murmured, his eyes glinting sharply as they drank in the delightful swell of her plump cheeks. ‘No,’ his stern voice warned, ‘I mean to punish you. Be still.’

The wriggling ceased and the young woman slumped obediently into silent submission. The parson nodded approvingly and relaxed his fierce grip on the nape of her neck, settling her warm weight across his supporting thighs. Pinned helplessly down, the dark-haired penitent remained mute in her surrender. Her fringe tumbled straight down, covering and hiding the tears in her large, sorrowful eyes.

Beneath the warmth of her belly, the parson’s cock pulsed. The pulse quickened to a throb. He swallowed and closed his eyes. He groaned softly and whispered a hurried prayer. It was the devil at work, the arch tempter. Trying to ignore what he could not deny, he opened his eyes again and resolved to do his duty, which was to punish.

‘Well, Edwina? Come girl, what have you to confess to me?’

‘Nothing, sir, truly, sir,’ came the whispered response.

‘Have a care, young lady. Today being the Sabbath, the time for confession has come. Today is the just and fitting occasion for contrition. Tell me of your wrongdoings and I will shrive you of your sins and mete out your penance.’ His free hand alighted on the softness of her sweet young buttocks and began firmly massaging their clenched flesh.

‘I have nothing to confess, sir,’ she insisted quietly.

‘Nothing?’ He increased the pressure of his massaging palm, bunching the captive cheeks slightly as he pressed down more urgently upon the bare bottom he was about to punish. ‘Nothing? I think that is not entirely true. Speak of your sins. Come, confess all to me. Confess and be prepared to do full penance.’

Edwina whimpered, but the parson remained ominously silent – ominously impassive to her distress. He already knew of her misdeeds. His housekeeper – who conscientiously spied on all three of his distant cousins living under his roof – had informed him of it not an hour ago.

‘I am waiting, Edwina. Pray do not add mendacity or insolence to your catechism of woes.’

‘I remember now, sir, there was a mouse,’ her words spilled out anxiously, ‘but I did not mean to err or sin, sir, I—’

‘A mouse, you say? What of this mouse?’ His flattened palm smoothed the curves of the clenched cheeks in his thrall. He asked, even though Miss Strappleton, his vigilant housekeeper, had told him all about the mouse.

‘A mouse, sir, it was in a trap, a cruel trap. I set it free.’

‘Free, you say?’ He lightly skimmed his thumb down between her tightened buttocks. ‘How so?’

‘It was so piteous to behold, sir, so I set if free.’ It was obvious from her tone she believed she had done nothing wrong, at least as far as the mouse was concerned.

‘Set it free?’ he echoed, grimacing sternly even though her position made it impossible for her to see his face. ‘Do you know that just such a mouse, set free in my house, can eat through a whole tallow candle every night at a cost of a full farthing to my beleaguered purse? And,’ he palmed the soft cheeks with increasing fervour, ‘that just such a mouse can nibble through sixpence worth of cheese each week?’

‘I am sorry, sir, I did not know, I am sure. Please do not punish me, sir!’

‘A mouse,’ he continued suavely, ignoring her fervent pleading, ‘is never a single sorrow to a house, child. They, like all contagion, come in vexing numbers. They are legion.’

‘I thank you for your instruction, sir, and I promise to think hard upon it from this day forth.’

‘Pretty words from a penitent do not postpone just punishment, girl.’

‘No, sir,’ she sighed, submitting to her doom.

‘And what else have you to tell me?’

‘Please, sir, nothing, sir…’

‘Nothing else?’

‘I – I’m sure not, sir.’ Her soft cheeks hollowed in mounting dread.

‘And are you quite certain of what you say, little one?’

Edwina nodded vigorously, and across the parson’s knee her bare buttocks danced seductively. His cock, now hard, rose and thickened with a sweet ache. He breathed heavily, for the moment staying his spanking hand. His housekeeper had informed him of a theft on the night of the heavy rains, a theft of small coals. The silence grew loud between them, during which she wriggled restlessly across his knees.

‘In a little while from now, your bottom will be hot, girl. Does that word not suggest your misdemeanour to you?’

Suddenly reminded of her sin, Edwina blurted out the details of her wrongdoing. ‘Oh I remember now, sir. I stole small coals and took them up to my bedroom. It was for a cat I found out in the rain all shivering and wet, the poor thing. I brought it up to the fire for creature comfort, sir.’

‘These are not grave errors, child,’ the parson concluded aloud. ‘Foolish impulses, no more.’ He sensed the body across his moleskin breeches relax as she detected the tone of forgiveness in his stern, authoritative voice.

‘Thank you, sir, for your clemency.’

‘You are but seventeen summers old, child, and have so very much to learn.’

She snuggled comfortably across his lap, obviously daring to hope the threat of pain and punishment had passed.

‘But even small and slight transgressions have their price and must be paid for in full. Consider, little one. The mouse you set free no doubt ate a good nine pence worth of tallow and cheese, and the small coals stolen to warm the wretched cat add yet another burden to my purse. I have lost a full shilling, girl. Be sure of it. And the cat, to be sure, lived only to catch and kill the mouse.’

She cried out in dismay.

‘Small sins, but with still some price to pay. They still require some penance from you. Bottom up, my girl, if you will.’

‘No sir, please!’ she squealed, stretching back her arms in a frantic effort to cover and protect her naked cheeks.

‘Edwina,’ the parson snarled softly, ‘you must be subject to my will.’

‘But sir—’

‘Give me your bottom, child,’ he ordered, his voice a rising growl.

Timorously, her fingers curled in fearful expectation, the girl drew her hands away before dropping her arms down.

The parson raised his chastising hand above the tensed cheeks. ‘And what do we say for our penance, Edwina?’

She maintained a sulky silence.

‘Edwina?’

‘Out of your charity, sir, chastise me,’ she mumbled sullenly. ‘Helpeth me repenteth truly…’

‘And?’

‘And please spank me for my sins.’

His flattened palm cracked down. The smacking blow rang out harshly as the open hand visited the proffered buttocks, which wobbled slightly after being fleetingly depressed beneath the savage impact. And as he lifted his hand again, the parson noted her buttocks reddening as the stinging pain spread across their satin contours.

Smack! A second swipe of his unforgiving hand across her suffering flesh made him grunt and wince as his stiff cock poked up into her tummy. She jerked in response to the second blow, but the pinioning hand planted on her neck forced her to submit absolutely to his will and purpose.

Smack! Smack! The jiggling cheeks bounced as they suffered a sharp double blow from the parson’s punishing palm. She twisted in a desperate effort to escape the scalding agony, but only succeeded in causing her bottom cleft to part lewdly.

Grunting his suppressed pleasure on espying the dark path between the crimsoning hillocks, the parson swiftly drew the knee of his moleskin-sheathed right leg in against the trembling thighs to further confine and tame them. ‘Now you are trapped, my little mouse,’ he rasped hoarsely, breathing hard with mounting excitement as well as from exertion. ‘Now you shall do full and most deserved penance for your foolish, girlish sins.’ He swept his durable palm down four times in swift succession, stinging and scalding the helpless bottom swelling out of the unbuttoned calico drawers. The furious flurry of chastising spanks left his hand tingling and his victim’s buttocks ablaze. As the punished cheeks grew hotter their blush of pain and shame burned brighter, and as the blush burned brighter and deeper, the shrill cries issuing from the lips of the writhing penitent grew louder in agonised protest.

Bucking yet again in response to a particularly savage blow, Edwina thrust her scorching bottom up. Tense and swelling in the grip of fierce pain, her cheeks threatened to burst out of their calico frame.

The parson gasped sharply, troublesomely thrilled by the delicious contrast afforded by the white fabric surrounding the crimson of the punished flesh. As her hips rose and her spine arched seductively, her buttocks quivered and her cleft became a sharp crease before suddenly parting. He caught his breath as he spied, deep down in the shadowy space between the spanked cheeks, her tiny pink anus winking. ‘Eye of Satan, turn thy gaze from me!’ he shouted, gripping the two cheeks he had so thoroughly chastised and squeezing their scalded domes viciously. The pink rosebud of her anal whorl disappeared, and swallowing hard, he brought his hand up to wipe his fevered brow.

Across his fierce erection, grinding her belly down innocently onto its thrusting tip, Edwina sobbed softly in her blazing shame. The cruel fingers of her chastiser relented, relaxing their savage grip at her cheeks. Then, as though ordained to punish the very source and fount of all wickedness and sinfulness in the world, the parson arced his hand down again, and again.

‘Let me hear your atonement, little one,’ he commanded, a full five minutes after the final blow rang out. A full five minutes during which the palm sweeping smoothly across her hot cheeks formed a fist to knuckle her moist cleft.

Innocently riding the parson’s erection, the punished girl craned her head around to gaze up at her stern punisher. ‘Thanks be all thine, sir, for the penance you so kindly and in all justice meted out to me,’ she whispered huskily, and then lowering her face to his thigh, her dry lips kissed the moleskin obediently.

The parson shuddered and his engorged cock speared up painfully. Pushing the bare-bottomed minx hurriedly off his lap, he spoke softly. ‘Only doing my duty, girl. In all conscience, it was only my duty I have done.’

Luncheon was a capital meal. Miss Strappleton served up a whole roasted goose generously stuffed with apple, sage and onion. Carving himself a third plateful, the parson briefly wondered if a plain boiled fowl would not have been the more prudent choice. At either elbow, heads bowed over their earnest task, his three young distant cousins were eating him out of house and home with unrestrained relish. Edwina, to be sure, fidgeted from buttock to buttock, squirming uncomfortably on her chair.

Yes, the roast goose was succulent. Torn between the dictates of his appetite and the inevitable damage to his purse, the greedy parson swallowed his claret and helped himself handsomely to the spiced pears stewed in port the capable Miss Strappleton had brought to the table. As he finished a fourth such fruit, he wished for the sake of his purse it had been an apple apiece for the Sabbath tide dessert, or an even more economical sliver of cheese cut from a truckle of honest cheddar.

After luncheon, he shouldered his fowling piece and strode out into the surrounding waterlogged levels of Spixby-cum-All Sorrows. Beasts of the field ignored his passing as they trod their steaming dung into the abandoned crop of cabbages. The sweet reek of rotting vegetation pervaded the noisome, clammy air.

An hour later the parson was stamping the damp and cold out of his boots at his back porch. Dark clay soiled the red bricks Miss Strappleton scrubbed religiously every morning. He was in a good humour, having bagged a brace of plump woodcock with a single shot, the ball passing clear through the hen to catch and stun the accompanying cock in mid-flight. The cock fell to earth alongside the dead hen, flapping pitifully. Its neck had felt soft to the parson’s strangling hands.

In his study he unearthed his tithe books and conned them keenly, the better to calculate revenues and incomes since Lady day last quarter. Since the fields flooded, and the Bain used to drain the levels was still in a state of disrepair, rents and tithes were down and diminishing. The living of Spixby-cum-All Sorrows was a lean one, and a recent appeal to his bishop had proved fruitless.

The parson, a high churchman of stern Tory provenance, was not in favour with his sleek bishop, a Whig of no marked religious fervour.

‘Fellow empties his pews with all that blood and thunder,’ the bishop was heard to remark once at a game of backgammon. ‘I sometimes think he is a little mad. Had the effrontery to bring a plea against my rural dean, damn him.’ When the bishop brought himself to reply tersely to his parson’s request, no mention was made of the possibility of an increase in stipendiary support.

‘Fripperies and fal-de-lals, young lady. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.’

‘That is neither fair to me, sir, or true,’ Rebecca countered spiritedly. She stamped her dainty foot impatiently. ‘You should not see fit, sir, to frustrate me and deny me the smallest essentials.’

Miss Strappleton had dutifully informed the parson that Rebecca, two years older than her sister, Edwina, had squandered housekeeping monies away on ribbons for her shining golden hair and – the temerity of the girl – on a saucy pair of satin slippers.

‘My purse cannot support your profligacy, Rebecca. You disobeyed my express wishes in the matter of economies, and now I find you unrepentant as I attempt to remonstrate with you. Very well, I will more than remonstrate with you, young lady. I will speak plain and deal severe with you, understand?’

‘Economy is another word for meanness in your book, sir,’ she retorted hotly.

‘My book, maid, is the Good Book, and therein are many lessons to be learned.’

‘Sermons are for simpering schoolgirls!’

‘Silence, Rebecca, do not be pert with me. A pert wench is soon brought to sorrow. The sorrow of punishment—’

‘No, sir!’ gasped the willowy blonde, shaking her head vigorously. ‘Pray, I meant no mischief with my wanton words. Forgive me, please, sir.’

‘Hold thy prattling tongue.’

‘Sir, I beseech thee, do not beat me.’

‘Silence!’ he thundered. ‘Be done! I chastised your younger sister before luncheon, and I mean to hear your howls before sundown. Come here, baggage.’

Emitting a shrill squeak of alarm, Rebecca backed around the study, putting a polished mahogany table between herself and the wrathful parson. But despite her agility and his heavy luncheon, he gained upon and grasped his struggling charge. She wrestled pathetically in his fierce embrace before slumping abjectly down to her knees before him.

‘How much were you emboldened to squander, my girl?’ he demanded to know.

She shrugged, tossing her golden ringlets insouciantly over her shoulders.

The parson, smouldering with rage in the knowledge – supplied by his prying housekeeper – that Rebecca had squandered a couple of pennies short of a half sovereign on her fripperies, demanded a full answer from her. ‘How much, harlot?’

Flinching, she swayed and sank back, shrinking from his anger. Resting her round buttocks on her heels, she bit her lower lip before whispering her remorse.

‘Like the whore of Babylon, your contrition comes too late,’ he sneered. ‘Remove your skirts, petticoat and farthingale, young lady. I propose to punish you, bare-bottomed, with a most fitting instrument.’

Rebecca rose and steadied herself at the mahogany table. Then she lifted trembling fingers to her bodice and plucked it open slowly, reluctantly divesting herself of her outer garments.

The parson was indifferent to her discomfort. As she bared and prepared herself for his impending chastisement, he peeled away his coat and unbuttoned the cuffs at each sleeve. He approached her, treading softly on the Turkish rug.

He bare buttocks pressed against the smooth wood of the table’s edge, Rebecca shivered in her nakedness and shame, cowering before his stern gaze.

His narrowed eyes raked her nudity, glinting at the sight of her pink nipples, and as they took in the golden fuzz of her privy part.

Sensing his searching gaze she covered her bosom with her left arm, squashing her breasts and bunching them up into deliciously full mounds, and hid her cunny with her right hand.

‘I am blighted to struggle with a living that yields little profit and less reward, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘The souls hereabouts prove to be as resistant to spiritual guidance as they are reluctant to pay their tithes. And since last Michaelmass, I have had to bear the additional burden of you three wicked girls. It is, I consider, both unjust and inequitable. But it is my duty, and I will do my duty. Bend over across the table, young lady. Present your bare bottom to me, for I mean to beat you.’

‘I am a good girl, in truth, sir, and I thank thee for giving succour to myself and my sisters, but—’

He held up his hand, and then waved it dismissively recalling the day his three distant cousins arrived, orphaned by the Napoleonic wars and quite destitute, in a pony and trap. ‘You will obey me, Rebecca. Am I to be rewarded for my charity by impudence, impertinence and improvidence? Across the table, now, my girl, for I mean to do my duty.’

‘No, please, sir…’

‘You three girls are wanton and most wicked. I will break your venal spirits and instil the righteous fear of God in each of you. Bend down across that tabletop my little sugared whore. Down across the table with you now.’

Abruptly subdued, she submitted to his will. Spreading her naked thighs slightly apart, she dug her toes into the Turkish rug as her nipples kissed the polished mahogany and her full breasts slowly flattened their soft warmth into their own reflection.

The parson stretched out a dominant forefinger and tapped the swell of her right buttock. The flesh dimpled and the whole cheek quivered a little. ‘Draw your legs together, harlot. Have you no shame?’

The wet pink of her gleaming fig disappeared as she squeezed her thighs together obediently.

He had snatched away the two blue ribbons fluttering from her twisting fingers before she undressed for her chastisement. Holding them, he stepped up behind her, pressing himself against the naked warmth of her thighs. His urgent manhood, already prompted into thickness by his wrathful ire, stirred and straightened as his taut moleskin breeches kissed her soft flesh. Trying to ignore the tumult building in his groin, he brought her wrists together and bound them tightly against the small of her back with the first ribbon, leaving her hands quite helpless just above the swell of her bare bottom. In his exertion to master her and bind her thus, he was forced to pinion the naked girl down by planting his knee in the small of her back. In doing so, the bulge of his cock briefly but disturbingly rode the ripeness of her naked rump. He swallowed hard to relieve the tightening in his throat.

The second ribbon he brought down to her ankles, tying it fast around them. Her legs and thighs now pressed tightly together, Rebecca’s buttocks bulged invitingly. Then he bent over again and snatched up a single satin slipper, thumbing its supple sole.

‘A most fitting instrument for dispensing your penance and punishment, young lady,’ he decreed. ‘Let us see if you will still desire, nay, demand, the kiss of a satin slipper at your flesh within this quarter hour, hmm?’

‘You are most mean and cruel, sir!’ she wailed into the polished wood at her soft lips. ‘Mean and—’

‘Silence! All I presume to hear from you, my little harlot, are the words of your confession and true contrition. This being the Sabbath, you have sore need to be released from the coils of your wretched devices and dark desires. Speak.’

‘No sir, I will not.’

‘It is a bold and impudent jade you are, Rebecca. Let us see, shall we, if this slipper applied judiciously to your naked haunches will not spill forth words of repentance.’

‘Never!’

During the silence that followed her rebellion, she squeezed her upturned cheeks together while the parson sniffed the sole of the slipper, and then furtively licked its soft suppleness.

‘Well, girl?’

The young woman bent over the table remained stubbornly silent.

The satin slipper spoke in her stead, barking sharply as it was brought down repeatedly across her rounded buttocks. She angled her knees inwards as she writhed under the stern chastisement, her skidding nipples raking their pointed peaks into the mahogany.

Swish, crack! Swish, crack! The stinging slipper whispered malevolently as it struck the jiggling buttocks again and again. After the ninth searing blow the parson paused and absently brought the warm sole up to his lips again. He kissed it fleetingly, and then slapped it harshly down against his moleskin-sheathed thigh. ‘I demand to hear your words of repentance, Jezebel.’

‘No. I will defy you, sir. I will defy—’

‘Daughter of Gehenna!’ he snarled, plying the slipper viciously, and she screamed shrilly as it lashed down to scorch and scald her six more times in rapid succession – rapid, savage succession. And each blow addressed the smooth crown of her scarlet left buttock.

‘Speak, girl. I desire, and demand, to hear true words of atonement spill from your stubborn lips. Own your sin and admit your shame.’

Sobbing as she writhed in her bondage, the punished nude trod the Turkish rug awkwardly with her feet, and the parson stood directly behind her addressing the curved right buttock with the slipper’s hot sole. ‘Repent, girl.’

‘Damn you, sir!’

Swish, crack! Swish, crack!

Six blistering strokes ravished her pale right buttock, turning its soft swell a cruel shade of crimson.

Perspiring freely, the parson stood back to peruse his handiwork. ‘Now your rump is as red as the lips of a Drury Lane drab, young lady. And, to the grave peril of your soul, a Drury Lane drab is what you will become if you insist on spending my monies on ribbons and satin slippers. What, jade, you seek to speed your passage into licentiousness? Remember, my pretty little whore, that bare feet are well suited to the penitent. Satin slippers, indeed. To quicken your steps to perdition? “She that runneth hasteneth to her folly and despair”. Luke, chapter four.’

A tiny trickle of wetness glistened at the juncture where her squeezed fig peeped below her crimsoned cheeks. The parson grunted thickly and swiped the slipper harshly against the wet cunny.

‘I confess!’ she cried, writhing in renewed anguish.

Briefly lost in a trance, he examined the wet stain on the slipper’s sole. ‘What, girl, you confess?’ he asked vaguely.

‘Yes sir, I will own all,’ she whimpered.

‘I await your full contrition.’

She sobbed for a moment, and then rapidly confessed to all of which she stood accused. The frivolity. The vanity. The unpardonable largesse when times and circumstances were so straightened.

‘Fair words, young lady. Fair words, and meekly spoken. You have taken unto yourself a bridle and you scold and muzzle your pert tongue most seemingly. I am pleased.’

‘As you say, sir.’

‘But what remains to be said? What more do I need to hear, girl?’

‘I repent me of my sins, sir, and beseech you to rule me with thy rod of righteousness.’

‘And?’

‘Do your duty by me, sir, and do with my sinful flesh what you deem fit and proper.’

The parson surreptitiously and inquisitively touched his tongue-tip to the wet stain on the slipper’s sole, before levelling it up above the squirming cheeks, whilst squirming her engorged nipples into the table’s polished surface, Rebecca emitted a series of low, carnal moans.

Taking these to be the true sounds of sorrow and remorse, the parson gripped the slipper fiercely. ‘Whisper your penance as I beat you, girl. It will cleanse you of all ungodliness.’

Inching up onto her toes, Rebecca pressed her pubic mound against the table’s bevelled edge, and the smooth wood received the slippery crown of her vulva, pressing firmly against her clitoris.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

The parson swiped the slipper down, biting it into the blaze of her punished cheeks. At each remorseless stroke the naked girl thrust the warmth of her juicy fig into the hard wood. With each merciless stroke she rode the smooth mahogany, jerking and tightening her ravished cheeks in mounting ecstasy.

‘I will make and keep thee chaste,’ the parson snarled, oblivious to her lascivious self-pleasuring against the table’s edge.

‘Beat me, sir! Oh beat me! I am a sinner and must suffer sorrow at full measure!’

The perfume, the very scent of Sodom from her weeping pussy, pervaded the room, stabbing at the churchman’s flared nostrils. Snuffing up her feral odours, his hand spasmed and the slipper dropped silently to her naked feet.

Staggering slightly, as if he had partaken of too much claret, he turned away from the naked girl sprawled across the table. Breathing sharply, he clutched his groin and climaxed violently inside his moleskin breeches.

Warmed hare soup, an excellent saddle of Canterbury mutton served with capers and followed by Stilton and port, made a most agreeable dinner. In all conscience, the parson would have accepted a lighter supper of toasted cheese and four penny ale. Stern stringencies, he reflected, pouring out another pint of the capital port, must be more strictly observed.

After dinner he busied himself with the pile of dusty papers concerning the case he proposed to bring against the rural dean at the Courts Consistory in the Spring term following Rogation Sunday. The rural dean was evidencing, the parson felt, somewhat popish tendencies. And what would follow? Schism, doubt and a scandal. The matter of the rural dean’s Romish proclivities must be brought to book, no matter what feline wiles the bishop brought to bear as a result. Mindful of the time told to him by the half-hunter watch at his elbow, he ploughed on through the thicket of fine theological points he was arranging to place as pleas against the rural dean.

Silence filled the study. The glowing logs settled softly in the grate, sending fierce orange sparks shooting up the wide black chimney. His eyes flickered from the page before him. The half-hunter warned the parson it had just passed the tenth hour. Soon it would be midnight. Midnight, and the Sabbath spent.

After rolling up his legal documents and tidying them away in the recesses of his cluttered desk, he snuffed out the candles in their pewter sconces. Rising, he left the darkened study and climbed the stairs. It was his intent and purpose to visit the bedroom of Judith, the elder of the three distant cousins, and discharge his stern duty.

Standing at the door of Judith’s bedroom, the parson brought his ear gently to the wood. His throat tightened and his fingers twisted feverishly in response to the low, sweet moans emanating from within. It was just as the housekeeper had said. The wench was wantonly indulging in a bout of self-pleasuring. Soiled and stained bed sheets unearthed from the laundry basket told their own tale. He held his breath, wishing his loudly beating heart would be still, the better to hear the young woman at her sins beyond the closed door. Then a soft shriek pierced the dark silence. He twisted the doorknob violently and stormed into the bedroom.

A flickering taper cast a dim glow over the bed. On it, lolling back almost drunkenly against the bolster, Judith gazed up at him in wide-eyed alarm. Wriggling, she tightened her hands over her cunny, and between her squeezing arms, her bunched breasts bulged.

‘So this is how it is, girl,’ he seethed. ‘Not joined in prayer as is meet and fitting for the Sabbath tide, I see your hands have been at the devil’s work.’

‘No sir, I was just—’

‘Whore,’ he snarled.

She clutched the hem of her linen shift, which was hiked up around her hips and thighs.

‘Cover your maidenhead, girl. Have you abandoned all shame and decency?’

Whimpering softly, she covered her cunny with her cupped hands. Her firm breasts burgeoned within the tight linen binding them. The thin material sculpted the delicious mounds, clinging to the perspiration-damp curves. The ripe bosom heaved, rising and falling after her bout of exertion and the tumult of sexual excitement.

‘You have stumbled upon Eve’s knowledge, whore.’ He licked his dry lips as he spied two berry-red nipples peeping boldly through the taut linen. ‘The knowledge of carnal sinfulness. You have tasted, nay, you have eaten, forbidden fruit, have you not?’ His nose quivered as it caught the haunting whiff of her sweet musk.

‘I did not mean to sin, sir,’ she whispered.

‘Do not lie, young woman. This is not the first occasion you have been so wicked, is it? You have bitten deeply into the apple of abomination, I believe, the wretched fruit of wormwood. And that worm within has entered into thee, wench.’

‘No, sir,’ she protested weakly.

‘I see how you give lusty glances to the waggoners that pass by. It is a canker within you, girl. It burns, does it not?’

‘Burns?’ she echoed.

‘There,’ he roared, jabbing a forefinger down at the hands cupping her cunny. ‘You must be thrashed.’

‘No, please, I beg you, sir!’

‘I would be unkind not to punish you, girl. Unkind and unjust if I was to let these sins go unpunished. Turn over this instant.’

‘Out of modesty I would not, sir.’

‘Modesty?’ he thundered. ‘I mean to punish you. Turn over and present your buttocks.’

Judith squealed and flipped over onto her belly, burying her anxious face in the bolster. The linen shift still rode her hips, fully exposing her beautiful bottom to his stern gaze. He took a step closer to the bed, and the soft cheeks squeezed together in a spasm of dread.

‘It being the Sabbath, and you being taken in your sin, it becomes my solemn duty to beat you, Judith, to beat your bare buttocks.’

‘No, pray, do not speak of beating me, sir, please!’

‘It is my solemn duty to beat your bare, brazen buttocks, girl,’ he reiterated coldly. ‘You shall suffer the full twelve strokes.’

‘No, I beseech you!’ she wailed, writhing as her sentence was passed.

‘The full twelve strokes, and at each stroke you will name one of the dozen apostles. If your memory fails you, the whipping will commence all over again.’

She gripped the bolster between her clench fists and sobbed into its soft whiteness.

‘It is well said that idle hands do tempt the devil, girl. So be it. When you have been well whipped, we must make those hands busy, must we not?’

Squirming deeper into the bolster and mattress, her only answer was a muffled sob. As she pressed herself down into her bed of shame, her naked bottom cheeks wobbled deliciously. The parson, gripping the brass bedstead until his knuckles whitened, growled quietly. And as his growl became a soft, carnal groan, she bucked against the bed, lifting her rump as if eager for the taste of pain he had promised to impose upon her nakedness.

‘Where is your Psalter?’ he demanded. ‘The Psalter you should have been attentive to this Sabbath tide?’

Raising her head out of meek submission and twisting her face up to his, she nodded in silence towards her dresser. He turned, followed by her anxious eyes. On the pear wood dresser rested the large black Tewksbury Psalter. He gathered it up solemnly and returned to her bedside with it. Opening the book with due reverence, he thumbed the pages. Grunting softly, he paused to extract the bookmark – a broad strip of pale vellum four fingers wide and some eleven inches long, as strong as it was supple.

Judith shivered and clenched her thighs together as the Tewksbury Psalter was snapped closed. Then she moaned and buried her face in the bolster again as the tip of the vellum bookmark skimmed the curves of her fear-clenched buttocks.

‘Be still and obedient while I speak to you of wickedness, girl,’ the parson said quietly, dangling the length of supple vellum just above her taut cheeks. ‘Give your haunches up to my leather and contemplate both the nature of your sins and the penance I propose to meet out to you.’

Obediently, she inched her bare bottom up towards him and her soft cheeks kissed the dangling length of hide submissively. Whimpering softly into the bolster, she stretched at full length across her bed to receive the stinging homily. But then, as the parson’s withering words burned a deeper flame of shame into her face, she shrank timorously from the teasing torment of the vellum at her buttocks.

‘Bottom up if you will, girl.’

‘No, please, sir…’

‘And be so good as to recite the venerable names of the sainted twelve,’ he commanded, ‘as I thrash you. As I thrash your sinful flesh.’ He raised the vellum up and whipped it back down again. The first stroke licked her upturned cheeks with a vicious snap that left a blazing broad pink band across her quivering bottom.

‘Simon!’ she cried.

He raised the vellum again, and held it aloft. The second stroke, delivered smartly after a deliberate pause, lashed her quivering cheeks devotedly, burning a second, deeper pink badge of shame into her tender flesh.

‘Peter,’ she groaned, naming the second apostle.

Resting one bent knee on the mattress, and steadying himself by gripping the brass bedstead with one hand, the parson loomed large over the defenceless, twice-striped bottom of the quaking sinner below him. He struck again, relishing her just penance.

‘James!’ she gasped.

Snap, crack!

‘John!’

Snap, crack!

‘Matthew!’

All twelve strokes were delivered with equal severity, eliciting sharp squeals and soft moans from the parted lips of the whipped girl, but she somehow managed to name all twelve apostles correctly.

‘Philip,’ she sobbed as the twelfth searing stroke crimsoned her fiery cheeks.

The parson stood back from the bed and palmed the vellum, squeezing it hard before spreading it across the soft mounds it had just ravaged. ‘A moment for you to reflect, girl, to ponder on your penance and punishment.’

Hating the touch of the firm leather across her blazing cheeks, Judith jerked her buttocks up, rebelliously attempting to rid herself of the added torment, but the parson spanked her and effectively stilled her writhing. She shrieked, but her sore bottom, quelled by the harsh hand, submitted to the leather strap draped across her smouldering cheeks.

Gathering up the bookmark again, he fingered each reddened cheek to inspect and examine the effects of the vellum more intimately. He dimpled both crimson buttocks fleetingly as his stern forefinger dug briefly into each hot flesh-mound in turn. ‘Well whipped,’ he murmured, nodding his satisfaction. ‘Well whipped, as every whore must be.’

She squirmed as if she hated feeling his dominant fingertip against her naked skin.

After bringing the vellum up to his lips to kiss it, the parson ordered the red-bottomed girl to kneel on the floor alongside her bed.

‘For prayer, sir?’ she asked faintly.

He shook his head and offered her the vellum strap. ‘Take it.’

‘Sir?’ she repeated, even as she obeyed him and knelt beside the bed holding the accursed bookmark.

‘The devil,’ he grunted, pointing down at the junction of her thighs where her pubic coils glistened. ‘The devil tempts idle hands, Judith,’ he rasped hoarsely, his voice thickened by his mounting arousal. ‘The remedy is pain. The devil must be punished and your idle hands kept busy. Punish the devil, girl. Punish the devil.’ Snatching the strap from her trembling fingers, the parson swiped it down, aiming the flickering tongue of supple hide between her parted thighs.

The penitent young woman tossed her head back and screamed as the lash burned her wet cunny.

‘Take it, Judith. Take the strap and punish the devil. Drive sin out of your venal flesh, girl. Let me see your hands busy at their work.’

Snivelling, she accepted the strap and raised it until it fell back across her left shoulder. She flinched, causing her linen shift to loosen and slip down to her thighs, shielding her cunny from the lash.

‘One moment,’ he said, bending to pluck at the hem of her thin garment. Straightening up again, he peeled the linen away from her kneeling body, once more revealing her crimsoned cheeks and glistening pussy. She raised her arms as the shift was pulled free from her shoulders, and her naked breasts bobbed invitingly in their sudden freedom.

The sight of her naked bosom, the nipples thick and proud, provoked the parson into a paroxysm of righteous fury. ‘Drive Lucifer from thine flesh, whore!’ he shouted. ‘Lash Satan!’

Judith, her thighs parted, her ankles supporting her scorched buttocks, whipped the firm vellum down against the base of her belly. The edge of the supple hide stung her cunny and she screamed again, jerking forward and thrusting her naked breasts out in wanton abandon.

‘Lash!’ came the cruel command.

Dazedly, the young woman whipped the vellum directly down over her vulva again and again, screeching and rocking on her heels as her maidenhead seethed.

‘Lash Satan!’ he repeated, noting that the tip of the vellum, flickering up and away from the punished cunny, was stained dark with the wetness of the kneeling girl’s sinfulness. ‘Lash!’

Judith moaned as she obeyed him, and unbuckling his moleskin breeches, the parson sank to his knees behind her. Clutching at her abandoned shift he covered his erect member with the rasping linen and grunted, whilst unbidden by her stern chastiser, she continued snapping the vellum strap down between her thighs, until she suddenly collapsed on the floor, her body convulsing in the throes of a searing climax.

Behind her, clutching the linen around his gnarled length, the parson cried out aloud to Beelzebub as his pulsing release soaked the lovely penitent’s shift.

Hanging suspended from the game pole down in the cool pantry, the parson twisted like a crow on a gibbet. Beside him, the brace of woodcock bagged earlier that afternoon spindled slowly from their single chain, tiny drops of scarlet dripping from their gaping beaks. He jerked against his chains, causing other specimens of well-hung game to stir as if coming alive again.

‘Be still, good sir. The Sabbath tide is over by some hours, but you have yet to be shriven of thy sins.’

‘Purge me with punishments,’ he whispered thickly, eyes glinting as if with greed.

‘I will purge thee, sir. Pray tell me of your sins.’

‘I confess all. I espied the girl’s privy parts when punishing her and—’

‘The girl, sir?’ the housekeeper demanded. ‘Tell me,’ she quizzed sharply, ‘which girl?’

‘The youngest.’

‘Miss Edwina, sir?’ she pressed, studying the tip of the cane she gripped tightly in her strong right hand. ‘You speak of Miss Edwina?’

The parson’s moleskin trousers, unbuttoned and dragged down, bound him at the ankles. ‘Yes, Edwina. As I chastised her, I saw that which is damnation to behold.’

Behind him, Miss Strappleton palmed her free hand down across her pubic mound, and shivered. Her hand paused at her secret flesh, paused, cupped and squeezed as the bamboo cane in her right hand rose and quivered. ‘Tell me, dear sir, what was the nature of your sin, exactly?’

‘As I chastised the girl, my flesh grew hot and hard.’ Stepping back briskly, the housekeeper brought the bamboo cane swiftly and sharply down across his buttocks. The parson gasped and threshed helplessly in his bondage, rattling the chain noisily and causing the woodcock beside him to dance. ‘Purify me through pain,’ he pleaded.

‘You can depend upon it, sir. I mean to do just that.’

‘Beat me,’ he begged. ‘Rule me with thy rod of righteousness.’

‘In truth, good sir,’ Miss Strappleton purred, kissing the tip of her cane before sucking hard on the shaft, ‘I will be your confessor for the Sabbath. For is it not written that the confessor must be made to speak out his sins? Must not the shriver of sins himself be shriven?’

‘I confess…’

‘Yes?’ Her voice was urgent.

He spilled forth his sins, admitting to lewd thoughts and licentiousness at the punishment of Edwina.

‘Confess all, sir,’ the housekeeper urged whilst dominantly caressing the crowns of his caned cheeks.

The parson freely confessed to enjoying the forbidden pleasures of the spanked girl riding his manhood as she writhed across his lap, and of glimpsing her tiny rosebud deep between her chastised cheeks.

‘The jewel of Sodom, you say?’ The cane hung interrogatively in the air above his naked buttocks. ‘You spied her jewel of Sodom?’

‘Verily, I spied her jewel of—’

Swish! The cane cut viciously down again and the parson screeched. ‘Silence, sir. You must suffer your penance in silence. No more noise, sir, or I will lash you until cock-rise.’

Slumping in the chains the parson twisted and spindled helplessly, his stretched arms and caned buttocks burning.

‘And what of Miss Rebecca? Did her punishment bring about an occasion for sin, sir?’

‘Yes, I own that it did.’

The stern housekeeper took a couple of paces back and positioned herself squarely behind her bound captive, and levelling the cane at his bottom cheeks, she slowly brought the tip of the quivering bamboo to his tightened cleft. Smiling as she heard his grunt of surprise, she probed the clenched, striped buttocks. ‘Confess,’ she commanded.

Tumbling over his hurried words as the tip of the cane annoyed his sphincter, the parson freely confessed to all that had passed through his feverish mind and aroused flesh during the disciplining of Rebecca.

Swish! The sinister whisper of the bamboo broke the silence four more times in swift succession, and four fresh scarlet welts slowly faded to a pale blue tint of pain in the flickering light of the tapers.

‘And Judith, sir? What have you to tell me of the chastisement of the eldest girl, hmm?’

The parson remained silent, bowing his head in blushing shame, while standing behind him, the cane resting against her right shoulder, the housekeeper perused the beaten parson. ‘Nothing to confess, sir?’

He remained silent.

‘It were better to tell me, sir. I cannot abide the silence of a liar, nor can my cane.’ Her eyes narrowed as she watched his whipped cheeks clench in mounting dread. Lowering the length of whippy wood down to his thighs once more, she inserted the cane between them to tease, tap and torment his hot sac.

‘Satan’s stones, sir,’ she hissed.

He convulsed in his bondage.

‘Did not the chastisement of the little whore cause you to spill your seed of shame, sir?’

‘You saw?’ he croaked, his parched lips working anxiously.

She tapped the cane upwards, churning his balls. ‘I see everything, sir. No keyhole in this house is blind to me. You know that full well, sir. It is my duty to kneel and spy, sir.’

He trembled, discovered in his sin. ‘Yes,’ he confessed hoarsely, ‘I confess. I did spill my seed.’

‘So be it,’ she responded sternly, her voice potent with menace. ‘It shall be six strokes for you, sir. Six strokes from the stick of sorrow that stingeth like a serpent and biteth like an adder.’

Swish, swipe! Swish, swipe! Six times the glinting wood lashed down across his defenceless buttocks. Six times Miss Strappleton grunted with exertion. Six times the chain rattled as the whipped parson jerked in anguish.

‘And have you no more sins to speak of, sir?’ Her words were mumbled indistinctly as she sucked hard on the tip of the cane. ‘No more to confess to me?’

‘No, no more,’ he managed to reply through clenched teeth. ‘Free me now and set me down to kneel at thy feet where I may repent my—’

‘Hypocrite,’ she snapped. ‘You, sir, will remain in your chains until I have heard your full confession. Heard your full confession, sir, and dispensed fitting punishment and pain.’

‘But I – I,’ he stammered, his voice rising in alarm, ‘I have naught to—’

‘Silence, sir. Think well before you speak and then tell me of your wickedness. Or must my cane beat out both your confession and your penance?’

His eyes dulled with fear and perplexity, and twisting his head around to face her, he spoke rapidly. ‘There is no more, I swear.’

‘Liar,’ she snarled. ‘You dare to lie to me, sir?’

‘Good Mistress Strappleton,’ he pleaded, his eyes wide with terror.

‘Be quiet.’ She fished out a roll of parchment from the pocket of his jacket, hanging limply from a pantry meat hook. ‘These words will silence thee for my rod.’ Thrusting the rolled up copy of last Sabbath’s sermon, delivered to deserted pews, between his teeth, the housekeeper rendered the parson silent. Then dropping the cane onto the tiled pantry floor, she circled his waist with her strong, punishing arm – the arm that had wielded the whippy wood – and hugged him to her bosom. ‘Remember, sir, I see all that passes in this household. And so now I will tell you of your sin, sir. And when we are both agreed you did indeed commit this sin, I will pick up my cane and use it fiercely, sir, most fiercely, until I see you spill again your seed of shame.’ She grimaced as he jerked in his helpless bondage and her firm embrace. ‘It was last Thursday evening, sir, a little before supper, the night I served up beef and dumplings. Did you not entertain a visitor, sir?’

Gagged and mute, the parson could not even grunt his protestations.

‘Was it not the apothecary’s sister from Spixby Magna, sir, Miss Catchpole?’ She felt him twist as he writhed within her strict embrace. Releasing him, she positioned herself at his striped buttocks and caressed them slowly, and then allowing her straightened index finger to penetrate between the cheeks and torment the dark cleft with her fingernail. ‘In the parlour you two were, sir. I was watching you.’

His hot cheeks tightened, trapping her fingertip as she drove it deeply into the wet warmth of his anus. ‘She had come for her music lesson. Learning to finger the hautboy, was she not?’

Pinioned by her firm finger, the parson squirmed.

‘I spied upon you, sir, as music is well known to be an occasion for sin. I saw the instrument pass from your mouth into hers. Wet from your lips, it was, sir, all wet and shiny.’ Her other hand slid in between his thighs and cradled his sac. ‘Straight it went to her eager tongue.’ She squeezed.

The parson threshed in his chains. He spat out the roll of parchment from his mouth and begged the housekeeper not to beat him again.

She scooped up the sermon and read the opening words aloud. ‘Let the rogue feel the rod and the lecher fear the lash,’ she intoned. ‘Fine words, sir. Now, will you not eat them?’

She forced the rolled up scroll firmly back into the parson’s mouth, and he bit down into it, his spittle making the ink blotch and smudge.

‘It was sinful, sir, you and the apothecary’s sister. Susan Catchpole is a Jezebel and I must save you from her. It is a kindness I do thee, parson, a kindness. And afterwards, I will serve thee a handsome game pie and a glass of good claret to help you heal. But it was sinful, sir, thy wet lips and Susan Catchpole’s eager tongue. The devil’s music was being played betwixt you both, sir, and now you must pay full penance.’

Biting down hard into the choking parchment, the parson tried in vain to blink away the beads of sweat scalding his eyes. The queer note of jealousy in his housekeeper’s voice was curdling into the crooning of one quite mad, of one driven insane by jealously. The realisation of his helplessness before her unbridled fury burned deeply in his brain and he began shivering. Then, as his body trembled to the sound of her snatching up the cane from the tiled floor, he began to pass water, and the steaming urine scalded him much more fiercely than the sweat of fear in his eyes.

‘Jezebel,’ she whispered.

The madness in her voice sent more steaming urine spurting from him, splashing and soaking the curled feathers of the brace of woodcock beside him on the gibbet. As the last golden dribble sparkled in the dancing light of the guttering tapers, a cold thrill of terror crept down his spine that quickly melted into a nameless dread in the heat of his caned cheeks.

She thrashed him savagely, loud in her prayer as she striped him remorselessly. Like his fowling piece earlier that Sabbath afternoon, his manhood cocked and rose. Stiff and straight he was fully primed. The discharge was imminent. Then a final vicious stroke of the evil cane exploded across his blazing buttocks and he squeezed his thighs together tightly.

Dropping the cane and unbuttoning the shirt over her bosom, the housekeeper flung herself upon his groin, cradling his stiff shaft between her full breasts. Gripping his whipped cheeks with her hands she dug her nails into the flesh she had just lashed, and caught the parson’s penance as it spurted into her deep and welcoming cleavage.