CHAPTER 10

BOOTS AND TWOS

It was some time later that the door once more creaked open. There came the returning clatter of Daphne Larkspear’s high heeled shoes, the dreaded sound now accompanied by the shuffling of a pair of flat-heeled school shoes. One single thought rang through Alice Lamberton’s pretty head: What new shame did this signal? One reassuring thought resonated back: Whatever it was it could not be more shaming than what she had just experienced... Could it? But there she was much mistaken. A pair of glossed-black high-heeled courts drew to a halt in front of her, the toe of one pointedly blocking the path of the brush in her hand, and a soft, ladylike clearing of the throat broke the contemplative silence. The Edinburgh lilt came across as patient yet forceful, yet Alice knew only too well how quickly that tone could harden to deliver a harsh, spitefully scolding reprimand capable of reducing her to tears in its own right.

“Sit up straight, young Alice - fingertips on shoulders, back straight and up on your haunches as I’ve shown you.” The woman’s voice sounded disarmingly cheerful yet still made Alice nervous, hesitant; for a few seconds she fumbled with the wooden nailbrush she had been scrubbing the floor with. “Och! Just leave the brush where it is, you silly thing.” It left Alice feeling stupid, being spoken to in this way. It wasn’t fair; she hadn’t always been so nervous, so awkward. This awful, dictatorial woman had made her this way - she was expert at leaving a person feeling idiotic, inadequate like this. Once she had been confident, self-assured; once she could have stood up for herself. Not any more.

Red-faced and feeling suddenly close to tears Alice left the brush where it lay on its side and sat back on her heels. For some unaccountable reason she felt the need to brush down the front of her overall with her hands, flattening down both the button-through skirt and the white nylon pinafore she had on over it in a single downwards sweep of both hands, before raising her fingertips tentatively to her shoulders. “That’s better. Keep your back nice and straight mind - and get those shoulders and elbows back. That’s it; right back, as far as they can go. Good!”

Alice felt the woman’s hand ruffle her hair behind the raised front of the maid’s cap. Her head bowed shyly, she caught sight of the woman’s tweed skirt and realised that the woman had had time to change at some point as well as presumably supervising Angel, her fellow ‘pupil’, in the schoolroom. It brought home to her how distorted her sense of time had become these past months - it was a frightening thought to realise she no longer knew exactly how many months.

As the teacher leaned closer she recognized the close-fitting tailored panelled suit skirt that went with a matching jacket and that the woman often favoured when not in the dark ‘governess’ dress she usually wore for ‘lessons’. She could smell that ‘tweedy’ smell, the faint overtones of cigar smoke, the rather old-fashioned floral scent the woman favoured and even the leather of the heavy Scottish tawse that perpetually hung from the woman’s belt whatever her dress.

She could hear the whisper-like muted rasping of her nylons, the papery swishing, sound of the woman’s nylon slip moving with her body and slithering beneath her blouse and suit and even the rubbery creak of her corset, girdle or corselet or whatever old-fashioned foundation garment had been today’s choice. Each new characteristic seemed to go to fuel a rising sense of tension in her stomach as it came into focus, her senses seeming painfully acute. Her heart, which she now realised had been pounding away in her ears for some considerable time prior to the woman’s return, thumped heavily in her chest as if about to explode and a dull sensation of dread began to drag at her, fighting against her efforts to maintain the erect posture the woman demanded.

“Right, young Alice, pay attention! Angel, here is going to demonstrate a technique I have trained her in that you will find will come in useful when it comes to maintaining your stepmother’s boots and shoes, but particularly when it comes to getting that real mirror shine she likes to see on her boots. Wax and a cloth are all well and good, but when it comes to buffing-up such high quality vulcanised rubber as you will have encountered used in her exclusive custom fashion Wellingtons, something softer, more delicate and moist is required...”

The woman had broken off abruptly, in mid sentence, and Alice felt her blood run cold. She could feel the woman’s eyes boring into her - something was wrong, but she didn’t know what. She could only remain demurely kneeling back on her haunches and await the outcome with her fingertips touching her shoulders and her head, her chin having initially risen when bidden to ‘pay attention’, again passively bowed.

She had seen enough, though, to know that she had been mistaken about the jacket - a pale pink Merino wool twinset and a rope of pearls were the order of the day; though she had been right about the skirt. She had been right, too, about the woman’s ‘foundations’; though large-busted and cursed with a propensity to plumpness, the woman had managed to carve out for herself a notably waspish, if broad-hipped, silhouette, the triple-string rope of beads overhanging from an aggressively high, almost mountainous bustline.

The woman’s companion, by contrast - the cowed and down-trodden Angel - had appeared positively flat-chested under her fully-buttoned Terylene long-sleeved grey school cardigan. The latter’s ‘V’ neck displayed a school tie knotted suffocatingly close about the high collar of her green and white striped school blouse.

Angel’s brief grey pleated-back wrap-around school gym-skirt now danced about the midpoint of thighs that looked a little too thin as a result of the strict diet she had been placed on and that had stolen, too, from her hips and bottom with the result that her waist had all but disappeared. Her long, once coltish, legs still seemed to go on forever from where they sprouted from the white anklets and bottle-green flat-soled T-bar buckled school shoes, but had lost much of the sensuality she would have gained at adolescence and instead now lent her a gawky and awkward ‘outgrown’ appearance that bordered on the knock-kneed. The latter was not helped by the fact that neither Angel nor Alice herself had been allowed to shave nor otherwise depilate their legs since this whole ‘home-schooling thing had started’ and a light peachy blond fuzz now caught the light and drew the eye from what contours remained. The two beautiful long plaits she had arrived with had long since become the sort of boyishly-short side-parted style the teacher favoured, the natural ringlet-prone curl crushed out of existence by repeated applications of perming lotion with the result that the poor things hair had become dry and brittle.

All in all, this girl - Angel - now undoubtedly embodied the sort of juvenile image the once-disgraced teacher had probably been hankering for all along. Alice could only thank her good luck - what there was of it - that as yet her stepmother had not let this woman entirely have her own way with her in that she had at least thus far been allowed to retain her figure, though all her clothing was designed to play-down if not fully disguise her curves. All this, though Alice had expected. After all she did see - and was with - Angel every single day, even though she had never been allowed to speak to Angel, nor the girl to her. What she hadn’t expected to see was Angel carrying before her, out from her body so as not to dirty her school uniform, a pair of potentially highly glossed, stylish exclusive designer Wellingtons, similar to one of the pairs her stepmother owned, but in a bright eye-catching pink. Strangely, while one boot had looked near enough pristine, if in need of a good polish, the other was splattered and speckled with mud - dollops adhering to the thick vulcanised rubber sole and threatening to fall at any minute.

The latter, when she had glimpsed it, had put Alice in fear of her freshly scrubbed floor, lest she have to repeat the tediously back-breaking task she had only just completed. And she had only just completed the imposition when the woman had walked in. The squeaking of the door hinges had almost perfectly been in synchronism with her scrubbing at the last couple of square inches - in fact the timing had been uncanny. Now of course doubts were setting in and adding to the sickening feeling of panic fluttering in her tummy. The woman had murmured quite encouragingly when she had initially glanced about, but had she now seen something, some mark or blemish she had missed. Alice couldn’t believe there could have been anything she had overlooked.

After all she had worked her way systematically across the room with her nose practically to the floor, always in fear of the ever-present CCTV webcam system and the knowledge that the images were always instantly available on her stepmother’s laptop and were relayed to her smart-phone, if working around the stables or, indeed, out riding. But then again; why had the woman broken off so abruptly and what the earth was she staring at, craning over like that?

It was as the woman bent over her that the fluttering, building, sensation of anxiety Alice had been experiencing hit a crescendo. For a moment Alice felt as if she were about to faint. Then an even clammier sense of dread suddenly gripped her - one born more of realisation than of simple fear, whether rational or irrational. It arose suddenly, along with a sensation akin to a cold steel vice tightening around her heart, chilling it to a standstill, while simultaneously a heavy weight, abruptly bearing down on her chest, refused to suffer her to breathe. A panicky thought flustered its way through her brain: How long had she been working, scrubbing away in here? Was her medication wearing off? Was that why she was feeling so nervous, so... so... jittery? Was she due to have another couple of those tablets?

She wanted to look up, implore the woman with her eyes to notice what was happening to her and yet feared to do so even more than she feared the consequences of missing her drug schedule. A strangely ‘spiky’, jagged sort of agitation began to overcome her, niggling and needling her to jump up and just run and run and run - blindly, anywhere. But ‘anywhere’ in this space meant perhaps eight or ten brisk paces to the nearest wall or a secure heavy iron door, which in any case only gave out onto the ‘schoolroom’, or perhaps, to duck in flustered desperation behind the huge wingback armchair that dominated centre stage along with its associated restraint-festooned footstool. The latter course of action would be particularly futile and only likely to generate hilarity - and earn her a good, hard caning once she had been given time to calm down. But then again she wouldn’t calm down - how could she be expected to calm down without her medication?

She was sure she had begun shaking by the time the woman next spoke, but the woman’s voice instantly put paid to further introspection. And it had nothing to do with the cleanliness or otherwise of the floor - not that that would be much compensation as it was to turn out.

“What’s this? Why is your cuff unbuttoned? That is not just a work dress or overall, you know; you should consider it as part of a uniform. By now you should have learnt to view your dress or overall or whatever, your cap and your apron as just as much constituting a uniform as the school uniform your stepmother and I have you wear for lessons. Uniforms help define our station in life, you know; they are important to maintaining the social fabric. This happens to be part of your uniform and uniforms have to be worn as prescribed - that’s what it is all about; discipline. And no one, but NO ONE, gave you permission to undo your cuff... did they?”

“N.n.no Miss Daphne”

“Do it up at once, you stupid little girl!” The woman hadn’t raised her voice, it still retained that lilting Scots silkiness, nor had she changed her superficially jovial attitude; she had simply placed a little extra emphasis on the word ‘stupid’. Somehow that fact made it all the more disconcerting to Alice. She had rolled the sleeve up from the hand with which she had grasped the nailbrush - just a little, just enough to minimise the risk of soiling the cuff while scrubbing the floor. The cuff had dropped down anyway once she had knelt up - as she had known it would, but she had expected to have had time to quickly re-fasten it before it became discovered, surreptitiously out of sight of the webcams scattered around. As it was she had been caught by surprise and just plain forgot.

She had had the cane for getting her cuffs dirty before, despite the fact that the bri-nylon (for that was what it said on the label) was eminently washable - wasn’t that supposed to be the point of it, the ‘practicality’? She hadn’t wanted to get the cane again for that reason. It was one of those irksome things sent to try her, that the overall she had been given had long sleeves and yet had to remain spotless. It was worse now that she had been compelled to wear an apron over the top - the nylon pinafore was the snowiest of snow white and showed every tiny speckle. And the work didn’t help. Whether scrubbing floors, cleaning toilets or scrubbing and painstakingly polishing her stepmother’s rubber boots, it was all equally filthy work. And it was all, cynically, somehow justified under the banner of domestic ‘education’.

Red-faced, Alice hastily refastened the glassy button at her wrist and quickly returned her fingertips to her shoulders, pinching her shoulder blades together as best she was able and straightening her spine. It was a posture as uncomfortable as it was humiliating.

“That’s better, hen. We’ll make a domestic of you yet!”

Alice bristled: a ‘domestic’ was the lowest denomination of household servant, something below the housekeeper and even the stable girls - or stable maids as her stepmother preferred to refer to them as nowadays. At the same time the sensation of anxiety was continuing to rise in her like a seething cauldron of bubbling molten laver and a heavy feeling of despondency was settling, layer upon layer, weighing her down. It was all she could do to stop herself toppling forwards in a heap at the woman’s feet. The woman’s next words, though, did at least lift that dreadful fear of punishment that was threatening to freeze her blood in her veins, if only temporarily - and there was always the chance that the woman would later forget. It had happened before, if only rarely; and it was such a little thing, a little teeny-weeny thing.

“We’ll deal with the issue of uniform infringements later. For now I want you to watch this little demonstration Angel is going to perform for you.” She turned to the girl who was standing a couple of paces behind her, a pink Wellington boot held upside-down by its foot in each hand. “Angel, put the boots down here, if you will, hen.” She indicated a place on the floor between the armchair and the footstool, waggling a finger to show exactly where. Angel did as ordered, her skirt riding up as she bent, displaying the usual - if nowadays somewhat reduced - expanse of snug interlocked polyester-cotton school knickers, the bottle-green fabric puckering deep within the cleft of her bottom. Alice could see that the leg elastics still managed to bite quite cruelly into the girl’s thighs, despite the latter’s slenderness, and the narrow but strong strip of fabric that ran between the two rubber-lined openings like some manufacturers mistake was pulled tight by the movement as her knees parted.

As the now profusely perspiring Alice Lamberton looked on Angel withdrew, having been told to “pop your apron on over your school uniform, that’s a good child; then skip back here and sit yourself down on the footstool”. Almost as if Alice did not exist and without a further word Daphne Larkspear sauntered across to the wingback chair and, pausing to smooth down her tailored tweed skirt, slumped down in its depths. Shuffling forward to perch on the edge of its seat, brushing aside the straps and the head harness Alice had fallen foul of earlier in the day, she began unbuckling her high heeled court shoes, the darker reinforced heels of her fully-fitted stockings coming into view as she stretched out first one leg and then the other.

“Angel! Come, help me on with my boots, child. Alice; you just watch and take note from Angel, hen. She’s a good little boot-licker - aren’t’ you hen”.

“Yes Miss Daphne.”

Alice could see the other girl’s face colouring even though now partially side-on to the girl. Angel having shuffled across, tying her pinafore over her school uniform as she went, was now squatting on the footstool at her teacher’s feet, flattening out her pinafore across her lap as she settled herself.

“Make sure you don’t get any mess on your apron, or there’ll be trouble.”

“Yes, Miss Daphne.” The girl was so contrite, Alice thought; it was embarrassing. She actually felt embarrassed for the girl, despite her own predicament, kneeling like some dumb idiot. And that term ‘boot licker’ - surely she must have misheard that? But she couldn’t afford to be so empathetic; she was beginning to shiver now. And the stomach cramps were starting. The latter, she had been told, where a psychosomatic manifestation of her anxiety and brought on by her fear of withdrawal, but they always felt real enough to her.

With a growing mishmash of fear, anxiety, dread and real physical pain going through her head and her brain feeling now as if on fire Alice looked on, shivering from head to foot, as Angel helped the overbearing woman on with her boots, the moulded rubber conforming closely to the woman’s attractively appointed calves. Then came the real horror, so far as Alice was concerned...

It sounded innocent enough: “Now show young Alice how you clean my boots Angel; how it should be done when one respects one’s betters.” But there was no cloth in Angel’s hands, nor wax waiting in a tin by her side. Instead there was a pair of well-fitted pink Wellington boots cradled in a fawning teenage girl’s lap, the girl’s soft hands dutifully cupped and supporting the heels lest any mark mare the pristine whiteness of her frill-laden nylon pinafore. Daphne Larkspear, having settled back to sink into the loving caress of the deeply upholstered armchair had now stretched out her long stocking-clad legs, interlocking her finger’s carelessly behind her head and trifling with a tendril that had dared escape from her tightly pinned bun.

Alice watched as the woman languidly lifted one leg from the girl’s lap, a dark stocking seam momentarily showing, and placed her foot on the floor alongside the footstool. The tall glossy pink boot on that foot was the pristine one, the one that looked never to have been worn. The other, the one that now remained in the girls lap, by contrast was filthy; mud and what looked to be a caked pudding of horse muck and other farmyard detritus all threaded through with a matting of fermenting composted hay entirely filled the vulcanised rubber treads of the sole.

When the girl raised the boot to her mouth Alice still, at some level, thought it was some sort of sick joke being played out at her expense. Even when the girl, craning her neck, begun planting little butterfly kisses on the rubber uppers and around the toe she thought it was a jest. When Angel began licking and lapping the worst of the mud splatters from the boot’s leg, Alice convinced herself it was a sprinkling of chocolate, perhaps with a little spread melted chocolate as well for good measure - she still expected the two of them to jump up and laugh hystericaly at any moment. Such was the unthinkable enormity of what she was watching.

It was when she saw the girl bring her lips to the edge of the sole and begin to nibble at the loose dollops there that she started to feel a cold despair come over her. Those little chunks just looked too realistic and she could see the hay was real; a little had now dropped of and skidded across the floor and she could just make out that sickly-sweetish smell of horse manure.

The vomiting didn’t begin in earnest until the girl had carved the first of the mouthfuls from the bottom of the sole with her teeth and begun munching like a cow chewing the cud. She could see the brown around the girl’s mouth, the brownish-yellow streaks on her cheeks speckled with fragments of semi-digested hay like small yellow wood shavings. Worse, now that the mess had been disturbed, that stable-block smell was coming through in all its true, horrible stomach-churning pungency. The awful liquidised fishy slop she had been fed for lunch came splattering down the front of her pinafore, some trickling down the front of her overall and missing the pinafores bib but finding its way between the overalls buttons. Involuntarily she dropped the disciplinary posture she had been placed in, wrapping her arms around her body as, sorrowfully, she retched again and again, more part-digested remnants of ground fish heads, livers and kidneys being disgorged with every mouthful she witnessed Angel scrape off with her teeth.

But the horror of what she was witnessing was also more and more merging with the agonisingly yearning hunger growing within her, a craving born of both psychological and physical dependency. The moment was not long in coming when she could no longer differentiate between the nausea born of revulsion and that due to her need for her medication. It was at this point that Alice felt her bladder empty, the warm, wet stinging sensation spreading as the close-woven fabric of the whipping drawers wicked away the urine, taking it up like a sponge and tightening still further around her bottom and thighs as a result.

In the background the other girl’s ordeal was going on and on and on. The sole eventually unclogged, it was duly licked clean until the thick chunky vulcanised sole was as black as the graphite the dense black rubber had been coloured with in manufacture. Muddy streaks and much worse were lovingly kissed and licked and plucked with pouted lips from the upper parts as the seated woman twisted her foot this way and that, providing the girl’s soft mouth with ease of access to all those awkward, little, hard-to-get-to spots. A velvet-pink tongue lapped and polished and polished and lapped until the soft pink rubber shone with a showroom spotlight gleam, polished to perfection by a pretty young girl’s tongue.

While all this was going on in the background a yellow puddle had been slowly spreading between Alice’s bended knees, rivulets wending their way to meet the more viscous pool of regurgitated goo. Now, even as young Angel’s ordeal was drawing to a close, the woman having been satisfied that her once muck-marred beautiful pink Wellington boot was in fact once again just that - beautiful - Alice was hitting an all time low. Staring at the puddle of mess in front of her the realization had suddenly hit Alice of what she had been brought down to. The thought had hit her - as if the most natural conclusion she could have come to - that here was something else she’d have to clean up, that more likely than not she would have to scrub that floor all over again. It was the instant her self-esteem had finally hit rock bottom... Or so she fondly imagined...

“Up you get, sweet little Alice. You can put your hands down by your sides now, fingertips pinching the sides of your apron, as you’ve been taught, please.”

As she rose stiffly from her knees Alice turned her head to one side, gritting her teeth and for the moment refusing to meet the woman’s smiling eyes. She felt sick with self-disgust now just as much as, if not more than, she had for the other girl and the weak-willed compliance to authority she had displayed. It was a different kind of nausea; it mingled with the more physical aspect instigated by the tang of vomit in her mouth and the smell wafting up from her soaked pinafore and nylon overall. And all of it was augmenting and building on the gut-twisting wrenching and flu-like head pounding of barbiturate withdrawal.

That latter aspect was rapidly becoming the worst of all - the sheer clammy bone-chilling shivering panic; she feared its power of persuasion, she feared that given sufficient time it might overcome even the most soul-damming sense of revulsion. She had already bent for the cane on many an occasion and learned to accept indignity upon humiliating indignity under its humbling power. She knew for sure now that it was already way past time for her medication - it could only get worse from here. Was the woman deliberately holding back on her medication or had it merely slipped her mind? Didn’t the uncaring woman realise she was sick, just how ill she really was? Her prescribed medication was well overdue now, perhaps even dangerously so. And all the woman could do was stand there now, dangling a glossy pink Wellington boot in front of her face. It was the one that had seemed unworn and she could smell the pungently shoebox-fresh scent of rubber - but she still felt sick. And she hadn’t even been aware of the woman taking off her boots, let alone changing back into her stiletto court shoes.

A person couldn’t just stop taking tranquillizers, just like that, not abruptly; that was what Dr Ecclestone said. That was always embarrassing too, meeting with her stepmother’s doctor. Nowadays, when Dr Ecclestone visited, she insisted Alice meet her in the front parlour wearing one of those hospital examination gowns that fasten up the back with ties and a pair of loose fitting disposable white crepe-paper knickers. Barefooted and with the gown coming to no lower than mid-thigh she always felt every inch the hospital patient, standing there under the scrutinizing gaze of that stern woman with those black-rimmed glasses of hers. Once the doctor was gone, though, it was always straight back into school uniform and off to the schoolroom. Indeed, she often wondered if the doctor knew what was going on. After all, the doctor had never seen the cane marks on her bottom and Mrs Larkspear was never far away, meaning she never felt particularly inclined to talk.

That was what was so galling about having to wear that examination gown and those huge baggy paper knickers. In all the time she had been coming to visit Dr Ecclestone had never once actually examined her. What passed for an examination consisted on her being ushered in front of an already seated doctor, the woman invariably relaxing back in one of the two armchairs set by the side of the fire, and undergoing, while standing awkwardly before her, what amounted to some sort of psychological appraisal.

The latter involved among other things all manner of probing questions, many of a highly personal and embarrassingly intimate nature. In particular Dr Ecclestone seemed to have an almost obsessive fascination with her masturbatory habits and in her ability to reach orgasm coupled with an uncanny ability to see through any smokescreen or circumvent any diversionary tactic her patient cared to invoke. She could, and did, wheedle out every tiny little detail. Words such as remorse and guilt would be used. Did she feel remorseful after the moment of release, as the doctor quaintly termed it? Did she ever feel a sense of guilt while in the act? Did that sense of guilt, perhaps even of shame, ever interfere with her reaching her ‘release’? Could she sometimes sense those feelings of shame and guilt building as ‘culmination’ approached, perhaps worry that one day she would fail to reach ‘release’ because of the way she felt and the remorse she knew she would feel afterwards?

It was all so belittling, and yet the doctor was right - those words and ideas did indeed intrude on her thoughts; she had cried herself to sleep in frustration more than once of late. Dr Ecclestone always advised her to try not to think of words such as ‘shame’ ‘remorse’ and ‘guilt’; Alice was to block them from her mind as the ‘end point’ approached and if she felt at all worried that she might not ‘succeed’ - if she felt the slightest seed of doubt begin to germinate - she was to stop there and then, lest she risk building up what the doctor called a ‘repression complex’. This was something dire that had to be avoided at all costs. She was to try to avoid failure no matter what - even if it meant ‘doing without’ - as each failure contributed to and made more likely the next as day followed night; that was how one developed a ‘repression complex’. It meant becoming ‘psychosexually crippled’ so that one could never again find sexual pleasure or release. In that way one became ‘sexually neutered’.

Poor Alice already felt ‘sexually neutered’; there had been many nights of frustrated fumbling she had had to call a halt to as the doctor’s warnings had come tumbling into her mind. Her room, she felt sure, was festooned with hidden sub-miniature webcams and the light was left on all night - the switch was on the outside and her stepmother always locked the door at night; ‘one can never be too safe, these days, that is why there are bars on the windows’. That was why there were all those webcams about too- supposedly. Notwithstanding all those security precautions and prying eyes she had felt, if she was very, very careful, if she kept her movements, slow, deliberate and controlled, she could do much below those thin sheets on her bed without the embarrassment of detection. In fact it had sort of surprised her that neither her stepmother nor Mrs Larkspear - Miss Daphne as she was supposed to address her - had suggested restraining her hands at night; it seemed just the sort of thing the two of them would do. With so little movement available - lest she disturb the sheets - and the ever-present concern that her furtive attempts at self-pleasure be recorded on some security tape for posterity someplace, it was little wonder it had always taken an inordinate amount of time to reach the pinnacle she sought. Nowadays that pinnacle seemed to be becoming all but insurmountable.

Dr Ecclestone always seemed to be trying to help, but her aid in this direction, when it came to her sexuality, seemed often somewhat other than helpful - if not to be downright backfiring. And then there were those unsettling aspects to the good doctor’s character. On occasion she would talk about that clinic she was involved with in some manner, waxing lyrical as to how bright and cheery it was there, how she, Alice, would feel so at home among girls of her own age.

There were pictures too, photographs Dr Ecclestone kept in an official-looking folder with a sky-blue cover carrying an embossed gold-leaf crest surmounted by the name of some sort of private hospital or institution. She would skim past pages depicting clinically-white rooms arrayed with hospital beds and corridors lined by unmarked doors with covered spy-holes and that gave the impression of snaking on forever while leading nowhere. Passing by all this frightening grimness with neither comment nor explanation she would invariably alight on some cheery shot.

One that came to mind was of what appeared to be a sunny room with four hospital type beds in view, a hand basin under a frosted glass window and a large free-standing blackboard in one corner that looked depressingly like the one in the corner of the ‘schoolroom’ upstairs. Another showed a superficially pleasant room with a circle of grey plastic school-type ‘stackable’ chairs set up in the centre and a set of girls - around six in number and all looking to be of around Alice’s own age - standing around forlornly in the background. All had been barefooted. All had been dressed in too-brief, tie-back blue and white check hospital examination gowns and had their hair, either cut short or pinned up - it was impossible to tell - covered by disposable elasticated paper mob-caps.

The closest to the camera, Alice remembered, had been angled almost side-on, providing an ample view of disposable paper knickers covering a plump full bottom that jutted out from where the back of the gown didn’t completely close. In fact the two halves of the rear of the gown hadn’t even remotely met. With only three butterfly ties, one at the neck, one at around the height of the girl’s shoulder blades and another at the lower part of the mid-back, the whole of the girl’s bottom would have been on show at the rear if not for those thin, paper knickers. Not that the latter covered much - and what they didn’t cover strained incredulity. Three or four raised, thin red tracks could just be made out, emerging from beneath the side of the powdery-white paper of those loose-fitting panties. Trailing around the side of the girl’s peachy behind these had had all the appearance of the marks of the cane, the ‘stigmata of discipline’ as Miss Daphne had once remarked. And in the far background, beyond the milling group, another of those frosted windows could be seen covered by thick white-painted bars. In fact there had seemed to be steel bars featuring somewhere in the background of most of the photographs, now she came to think about it.

The place looked anything but pleasant; in fact it looked more like a prison, or at least some diabolical cross between a hospital and a prison. She often wondered why Dr Ecclestone would show her those photos if she were so keen on her going there, ‘under her care’ as she put it. Surely those shots would have seemed certain to put anyone off - they made the place appear downright sinister. And Alice certainly had no desire to be permanently attired in a far-too-revealing examination gown, paper knickers and that ridiculous paper hat thingy. She doubted that could really be the case, but that was the unfortunate impression given by the doctor’s photo selection. She had never seen anything else worn, other than in one shot that had a blue-uniformed nurse in the foreground.

Decapitated by the photographer’s poor framing Alice remembered that the nurse had looked as if to have come from an earlier era. A white bib apron with a silver fob watch pined over the breast at one side had been covering a royal blue dress with a high-buttoning white collar and was cinched around the waist by a typical elasticated nurses belt which fastened with a nickel plated clasp shaped like a giant ornate butterfly. The latter had not been that unlike the belt Miss Daphne sometimes wore, other than hers had a much less ornate clasp- and of course featured a tawse hanging from a clip at one side, which the nurse’s belt decidedly had not. The nurse’s belt had featured a sinisterly jailor-like bunch of keys hanging on a silver or stainless steel chain, though - And that was just like Miss Daphne.

But keen on Alice going there Dr Ecclestone patently was, for some reason. She had actually said on several occasions when she had been giving Alice her photo presentation tour of her clinic how much she’d love to have Alice, as she put it ‘under my supervision’. At such times, leaning forward in her chair, she would as often as not give Alice a reassuring pat on the bottom that to Alice was anything but reassuring; the woman’s hand lingering far too long for Alice’s comfort.

What were depicted in the doctor’s photomontage were apparently scenes recorded from an ongoing study of the efficacy of behavioural modification therapy in the rehabilitation of those displaying ‘addictive personality traits’. To Alice it all sounded - and looked - a little too much like being shunted off into a psychiatric hospital for her liking. After all; what were all those bars on the windows all about? She didn’t trust her stepmother as it was - and she wasn’t so sure, now, that she trusted the doctor either. She certainly wasn’t about to allow herself to be tricked or manoeuvred into committing herself into a private institution of some sort or other - she wasn’t that naive.

Those unsettling thoughts were still running through her mind when the terror really began to strike home. A small resealable polythene bag had been plucked from somewhere and was being waved under her nose and then drawn slowly back, like a carrot being offered a stubborn donkey. Suddenly, as abruptly as it had appeared it was gone, snatched away by a hand as quick as any street magician’s. The woman teacher stood back, playfully toying with the empty bag. Empty bag! The bag was empty! It took a moment for that fact to sink in - Alice could only stare, open mouthed. It was the way her daytime prescription would normally be parcelled, in one of those resealable transparent bags, but there was no foil-backed ‘bubble pack’ and no sign of the two fat capsules of calming serenity the latter would of held either.

“Och! Not to worry lass...” There were times the woman could sound like the eponymous overbearing Scottish teacher in the 60s film ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ - Alice had seen it once on television, and under different circumstances might have found the comparison amusing; certainly worthy of backchat. Muriel Spark, the novelist, had had her character mouth the words: “Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life”. That was where Daphne Larkspear differed from the fiction: Obsessively possessive and dictatorial, she didn’t require a girl be any particularly impressionable age to weave her spell; there was no backchating Daphne Larkspear.

“...I left your medication on my desk. I was going to give you your capsules before I brought you in here but it seems it somehow slipped my mind. As I say; not to worry, child. We’ll get this lesson done and dusted, get you cleaned up all nice and smart in your school uniform, and then we can pop back in the classroom and you can have your medicine. How does that sound?”

Alice Lamberton did not care at all for how it sounded. She needed her medication now, right now, not later. And she wanted out of these ruined things she had on; she was covered in sick - the nylon overall was sticking to her skin because of it - and she’d wet her pants, or rather she’d wet her whipping drawers. And that told another story: She wouldn’t have been put in a pair of those whipping drawers the woman had come up with unless there was a reason - and there was only one raison d’être for whipping drawers; the name said it all. She groaned, and then began to gently weep, ever so gently. She hated herself for that, too, this character she had developed of bursting in to tears at the drop of a hat.

Where had all her inner strength gone? She hadn’t seen it leave; it had just slowly drained out of her, drop by drop, disciplinary imposition by disciplinary imposition, petty rule, by petty rule. Each new stipulation she had knuckled down to, each new behavioural restriction, had taken away a little bit more. She felt and arm come around her shoulders, comforting, almost motherly. It was all so cynical - it was what the woman did when about to leach away a little more of a girls’ self-respect; she’d switch to coaxing, and it was so hard to resist.

“The quicker we get this over with, the quicker we can get out of here - and then you can have your nice clean school uniform on, get back to your desk and I can give you your medicine.” The glossy pink Wellington was now being held out towards the deflated, stunned Alice, the near pristine boot balanced upright in the woman’s hand and grasped by its sole. The embossed designer’s brand mark around the top of the leg was unmistakable even viewed in profile, the metal button at the side catching the light. “Now Alice, just think of this as a game if you must, but I want you run your tongue over this boot, polish it just as you have been taught to polish your stepmother’s boots, only now using your tongue instead of the cloth you would normally use. There is nothing to be afraid of; it’s perfectly clean, just as if it were straight off the shelf in the shop. Now I don’t want to have to fetch my cane; and just as soon as you have done it you can have your medicine.” Daphne Larkspear could see that even at this stage Alice was looking set to refuse - it was time to play her trump card:

“If you don’t do it I’m afraid you’ll have to forgo your medication until tomorrow. And then I’ll make sure you take half a dozen with the schoolroom cane before you can have your medicine, bent right over my desk in front of Angel - and your stepmother and her housekeeper.”

Once again she held out the boot to Alice’s lips, half turning her head towards the waiting Angel, the brown and yellow staining plain on the latter emaciated teenager’s otherwise pretty face. “I want you to take notice of this too, Angel Larkspear.”

Tentatively Alice ran her tongue along the side of the proffered pink rubber boot as the woman slowly twirled it in front of her face, the rubber pungent in her nostrils and slightly tacky on her tongue. It wasn’t physically unpleasant - in fact there was something strangely reassuring about the tang of the vulcanised rubber - but mentally it was agonising. Then she pulled away, suddenly acutely conscious of the ridiculous spectacle she was presenting, her cheeks burning scarlet with embarrassment.

The one-time school teacher laughed gently, again glancing back over her shoulder at her other ‘pupil, the shy and timorous Angel Larkspear: “You see Angel? And she hasn’t been through nearly anything like I had to put you through before I could make you do this.” She returned her gaze to the freshly recalcitrant Alice, her voice hardening and her face taking on a stern appearance. Shaking the rubber boot a little to underline her point she brought it once again to Alice’s now pouting lips, pressing the toe meaningfully forwards. “Come along now, Alice child, or there’re be no medication for you today - or even tomorrow at this rate. And you’ll be getting a good caning too; and double the six strokes I promised if there’s another hint of defiance. You have been told to do something, so do as you’re told, or no medicine; I mean it.”

Alice burst out crying. The woman, grasping the moment, eased the boot yet again towards Alice’s generously proportioned sensuous mouth, easing the toe past the girls parting lips. Defeated Alice took the toe of the pink rubber boot into her mouth almost absentmindedly now, sucking on as if it were an infant’s pacifier and licking with her tongue, all pride for the moment subsiding under the combination of her all-consuming hunger for her medication, her fear of the cane and the sheer dominating power of the woman’s all-conquering will. With the woman twisting and turning the Wellington this way and that she lapped her way with her tongue all the way up one side of the boot, right around the top and then down again to the sole, being told more than once to keep her eyes open. Then she repeated the process again and again, polishing the rubber with saliva and sensuous overlapping tongue strokes, inch by humiliating inch, until the dazzling shine the rubber was taking on began to make her eyes ache.

Finally it was over, the rigorously domineering woman stepping back with her arms folded below her more-than ample bosom and carelessly tossing the boot to the floor as if to underscore the sheer futility and pointlessness of the task she had just coerced her charge into performing. To Alice’s increased chagrin the discarded boot bounced side-on to where she had been earlier kneeling, skidding into the puddle of vomit and pee Alice had left behind. “Oh well, you’ll just have to clean it up again later - practice makes perfect.” Shrugging her shoulders the woman laughed before again calling out to the awkwardly shuffling Angel standing, head bowed, in the background:

“Do you see, now, Angel, why you won’t be going anywhere? I know you have been trying to think of a way of getting away from me, of wheedling your way out from under my thumb - and there’s no use in your denying it, you ungrateful child. But you can see now what drug dependency can do to a person; young Alice, here, was at least partly broken well before anyone ever took a cane or a strap to her backside. Addiction, even to prescription drugs, can be a very humbling experience for a young woman, Angel. I don’t think poor Alice has quite taken in yet just how addictive the ‘drug substitute’ her doctor has been prescribing her actually is in its own right - have you Alice?” Alice could only dumbly shake her head in the negative as the woman continued addressing Angel, the pencil-thin teenager now looking decidedly pale.

Daphne Larkspear continued, relishing the effect that what she had to say was having on her two young charges, but on Angel - as the focus of her diatribe - in particular: “Nor, I imagine, has Alice ever had any inkling that the tranquilizer she has since been switched to is even more prone to inducing dependency than the original drug she was put on - both physically and psychologically. Well I have had a word with Alice’s doctor, through her stepmother, and she agrees with me that you’re far too highly strung, young Angel Larkspear. So... as from today you are going to be started on the same tranquilizer that Alice has been on. And under conditions that are planned to assure the rapid development of a nice healthy...” she laughed lightly “... psychological dependency”. The physical side of it - the stomach-knotting craving - will develop later. But not to worry, dear; apparently with the incremental dosage scheme Alice’s doctor has in mind you’ll soon catch Alice up. So as from today it is going to be: two capsules or the cane, for you my girl. Or strictly speaking ‘two capsules and the cane’ or the ‘cane and two capsules’...” again she gave a little laugh “...because we both know that once you’ve had a few strokes of my cane across your naked backside you’ll do as you are told. You always do in the end.”

It was that very moment that Alice heard the door again open, the jangle of keys making her jump nervously - she was becoming increasingly jitterier by the second now, her flesh crawling and seemingly no longer satisfied to contain her skeleton. Wave upon wave of nausea was battering away at her strangulated twisted and churning guts and her brain had started to swell within her skull, or so it seemed.

The pair of boots that drew to a halt in front of her were caked in sludgy loose muck. Instantly recognisable as her stepmother’s latest acquisition, the berry and black split-colour rubber of each of the boot’s uppers was largely unscathed other than for discrete streaks, spots and speckles of dark brown mud and the occasional yellowish streak of something as yet unidentifiable. Behind her stepmother - and leading right up to where she was presently standing, smiling condescendingly at her stepdaughter - extended a trail of loose clods of mud, dollops of what to Alice looked to be horse droppings, and watery slurry-like puddles.

Alice immediately burst into fresh floods of tears. At the back of the room Angel, too, had begun to weep, though with her the cause was somewhat more complex; she had just been informed that she was going to be deliberately turned into a pathetic addict, just like Alice. Both teenagers had reached breaking point. The floor was ruined and both girls knew the filth-laden trail would lead back right across the schoolroom too; both room’s floors would have to be scrubbed and polished all over again, right from the start. Whatever happened now, the rest of the day would see the two of them again down on their hands and knees in their ‘domestic education’ overalls and pinafores with nailbrushes in hand; it was a spirit-crushing prospect.

“Well, well, Mrs Larkspear. Well done - I’ve been watching on the security system.” Smiling she turned her attention to her crestfallen stepdaughter. “So, Alice... You enjoy polishing rubber boots? Is it the taste of the rubber you like, or the smell perhaps? It’s nothing to be ashamed of - unless it becomes an obsession, of course; then we’ll have to have a word with your doctor about it. Meanwhile I’ll do my best to understand what it’s all about - I’ve read a lot about fetishes you know.” Filled with a mixture of dismay and disbelief Alice slowly shook her head, her head hanging in shame, her eyes averted and unable to meet those of her stepmother.

“Well, it looked to me, from where I was standing so to speak, as though you were most enthusiastic. Though I have to say; I was standing in the stable yard at the time - I can pick up the webcam feeds on my smartphone you see. Anyway; I have never seen such enthusiastic work! And such attention to detail, too! I just thought I’d pop up and see if you wouldn’t mind giving my new boots a quick brush-up and shine... Perhaps if I were to sit myself down in the chair and put my feet up... I am a little weary...”

Alice could feel her head shaking, almost as if it were an involuntary reflex she could do nothing about. She could only watch with horror as Daphne Larkspear stared at her, anger glinting in the diabolically twisted woman’s eyes, the realisation dawning slowly that she was refusing to do as she was told, almost as if it had not been her decision to make. She was still trying to nod, to say yes, when she felt Mrs Larkspear grasp her by the back of the neck and felt herself being roughly hustled towards the side of the armchair, before being flung over the arm that doubled as bolster cushion when she was bent across it for the cane...or worse. Licking an already clean, new and practically unworn rubber boot held up to her face by Mrs Larkspear had been one thing. Kneeling in defeat before her hated stepmother had been another. She still had some pride - but knew only too well that she was about to regret having retained that morsel of self-respect...

Dampened by Alice’s mishap of earlier, the sheer but strong fabric of the whipping drawers glistened across the tight spherical contours of her dimpled chubby bottom, seeming to shimmer where the glossy material curved inward at the centre before disappearing from view entirely as a shadowy ‘’V’-shaped valley of white fabric that sunk deep between the girl’s deeply-cleft buttocks.

Daphne Larkspear tapped the tip of the plaited leather riding switch against first one cheek and then the other in turn, watching in pleasure the exquisite quivering of tightly compressed flesh and drum-skin-tight fabric rippling together in choreographed perfection, as if one bonded entity. The sensation that ran through her as she raised the switch high, back behind her right shoulder, was something most akin to ecstasy. She paused for moment, a fleeting instant, savouring the taste that power brought, devouring the helplessness of the teenage girl bent double before her, soaking up the unimpeachable, glossy pinkish-white succulence of the girl’s bottom, squeezed, sculptured and moulded into two perfect outreaching half-moons by the tightly-laced Victorian style whipping drawers. Then she slashed the riding switch in, surprising herself with the viciousness with which she brought it lashing down, watching as the plaited leather bit deep into the compressed out-curving flesh across the centre of the girl’s bottom, the tip momentarily curving around the far flank before springing back.

For a split second there was only the reverberation of the crack of leather against drum-skin-drawn fabric pulled humanly tight over resilient, springy girl flesh. Alice’s head, thrown back in a moment of impact, lolled wildly, her eyes bulging with something akin to insanity and her mouth gaping silently as if mute. Then with a huge gulp of breath that could be heard echoing off the blank walls the scream came. It was a high-pitched grating screeching scream, one that seemed to wind itself ever upward in pitch, as if grasping for an ever higher register in seeking somehow to offset the agony growing across her scorched behind.

One stroke with Daphne Larkspear wielding her stepmother’s riding crop and already Alice was regretting with all her heart refusing to lap at her stepmother’s boots. Indeed her eyes, having sought out her stepmother’s feet and the glossy but mud splattered designer Wellingtons, now stared beseechingly at them, her lips moving as if in prayer, the word ‘please’ forming silently and going unheard through her own now subsiding cries, gasps and sobs. In the face of such a shattering flogging as clearly she was about to receive, the humiliation of licking those boots clean seemed suddenly so insignificant. It seemed such an easy thing now to have shut her mind to the gritty, earthly taste of mud - for she was sure that was all it would turn out to be - after all she hadn’t been instructed to go anywhere near the soles, just run her tongue up and over the legs and uppers. It would have been a humiliating but merely symbolic surrender, that was all.

Standing directly in front of her errant stepdaughter, towering over the prone form helplessly bent tightly over the bolster strapped to the armchair, Karen Lamberton-Marchment found herself shuffling awkwardly. She was absentmindedly kicking the drying muck from the vulcanised rubber soles of the glossy split-colour berry and black custom designed boots that had become the focus of the whole affair as she looked on. Even viewed through the Dacron fabric of the whipping drawers her ex-teacher had put her stepdaughter in the weal that had immediately flared up across Alice’s behind was vivid enough to make her wince. A deep poppy, tending to purple towards its centre, the weal’s raised edges could be made out even through the fabric. The thin, biro-red, thread-like line beginning to weave its way along the very centre was testament to the fact that with this, the very first stroke, her ex-teacher, Daphne Larkspear, had managed to split the girl’s skin right across her bottom. It was something she knew would not go down well with Alice in view of her stepdaughter’s vanity; it both horrified her and excited her at the same time. She knew too that it would be something that her ex-teacher would now work on, even if she hadn’t intended to have gone so far so soon in the progression of the girl’s punishment. In forming that latter notion she was not mistaken and she watched in fully comprehending silence as laying down the riding crop along the armchair’s seat and practically under the girl’s pretty, upturned nose Daphne Larkspear moved round in front of her weeping stepdaughter, taking the girl by the chin and gently tilting her tousle-haired head until the girl’s eyes met those of her chastiser.

It was Alice who spoke first, before her teacher even had time to begin, her voice broken, hesitant, the words spluttering out between shuddering sobs: “p please, I can’t... please... can I, may I... please let me...” She was interrupted by a sharp slap around the face, Daphne Larkspear drawing back her hand as if to strike again... and then holding back, satisfied that the warning alone was enough to silence her distraught ‘pupil’. Holding up a finger she placed it to her lips in the classic gesture to be quiet before placing it to the girl’s lips in turn.

“Sssh! You know we don’t speak to our betters until spoken to first - I can see we are going to have to set you to copying out the school rules again once this is over; and young Angel here too. That’s how it works, you know that; one breaks the rules, you both get punished. How’s about the full set of official stipulations, one thousand times apiece in your very best handwriting? What do you think about that, Angel?”

From the back of the room there came a despairing groan. Young Angel Larkspear didn’t think she could go through all that again. Surely it would send her quite insane, eventually, page after page after page with no letup, no window she might gaze out of to ease the tedium - the classroom windows were mounted far too high up for that - no sound other than the scratching of the pen, her own breathing and the incessant invariant tick, tick, tick of that damn old classroom clock. Somehow that bloody old broken down school clock was the worst part of it - and it didn’t even tell the time, the hands didn’t even revolve. The teenager was still standing on the pedestal in the corner where she had been placed, her nose pressed against the highest of the four circles painted on the wall, her hands hitching up the pleated rear of her school skirt to display her school knickers as required with her elbows awkwardly tucked in tightly to her sides.

Whether or not it was Daphne Larkspear’s intention to ultimately send her insane was neither here nor there for the moment. At present Angel Larkspear had other problems to focus her mind on: Her neck had already developed a painful crook in it from having to keep her head tilted back at such an acute angle and the muscles between her shoulder blades throbbed from the effort of keeping her elbows in as close as possible to her sides while simultaneously keeping her skirt hitched, up as she had been instructed. Now, to make matters worse she found she was desperate to go for a wee.

It was the most humiliating, embarrassing situation an attractive teenage girl might find herself in, dressed from head to toe in a proper, genuine school uniform, placed standing facing a corner like a naughty girl and feeling as if about to wet herself. But she knew there was nothing she could do about it. This place had been set up as a sort of private prison for that other girl, Alice; there were bars on the windows, locks on doors and everything that went to make up a prison. But even had she been at Mrs Larkspear’s home, or anywhere else in fact, she doubted there would have been anything she could have done - she just could not stand up against Miss Daphne, she just didn’t have the self confidence or the strength of personality, Miss Daphne was always telling her so.

Momentarily glancing across at Angel Daphne Larkspear smiled to herself; the diuretic she had added to the girl’s orange juice had been a strong one, it wouldn’t be long now before there would be a darker patch spreading across the dark bottle-green rear of those knickers. A few more such accidents and she planned to start the girl in adult diapers - and by that time she’d have Angel herself convinced that she needed such ‘protection’; that was the beauty of her approach. This time it will be as clear as day and in front of witnesses; and it would be all more devastating for it. Turning away she again returned her attention to the task in hand; the chastisement of the headstrong young Alice, her present ‘boot licker in training’. She looked deep into the terrified girl’s eyes as she spoke:

“Now what was that you were trying to say? Is it that you have changed your mind; and so soon, too?” Alice nodded wildly, her face red, part in pain, partly from humiliation, and her eyes wide in the terror of what this woman might yet do to her. Horror and dread were just about to be added to that mix.

“I expect polishing your stepmother’s boots with your tongue doesn’t seem such a bad idea, now... am I right?” Alice had to struggle for words; she had momentarily caught sight of her stepmother’s gloating smile out of the corner of her eye and the woman’s face, all steamy-eyed as if through lust, made her choke. It was more than triumph she could read on her stepmother’s face; there was something sexual about the pleasure the woman was getting from this. The dawning realization that both women were getting aroused in some sick and twisted way made her feel suddenly nauseous - more so, even, than the idea of having to get down on all fours and lick that woman’s vulcanised rubber boots. Nevertheless she somehow ground out the required reply, with all the little nuances stipulated by the ‘school rules’ appended:

“Yes, Miss Daphne, I am sorry, Miss Daphne.”

“Then ask nicely then.”

“Please may I lick my stepmothe... I mean Lady Marchment’s boots, please Miss Daphne.”

“Well, perhaps you should have thought about it before you refused the first time but...of course you can, dear.” The domineering teacher smiled pleasantly now as she spoke, her voice softening. Then her voice hardened again, just a little, just subtly: “But don’t you think there should be some penalty attached? After all you did defy both your stepmother and I. And you failed to use the correct address...which is?” Still smiling sweetly she left a pause, waiting for her ‘pupil’ to fill in the gap. Alice gulped, feeling her pride and self esteem seeming to slide down along with the air. Still sobbing and nearly choking with indignation she at last managed:

“Mother.” It was the most foul, horrid, self-surrendering, soul-plundering thing she had ever had to say - and she felt some part of herself die as it struggled past her lips. Daphne Larkspear continued to beam that self-satisfied, cynically sympathetic smile of hers - it was one of those things about the woman that grated on Alice’s nerves; she felt sure she did it deliberately.

“Well today, this first time, I was only going to ask you to polish up the uppers of your stepmother’s boots with your lips and tongue just as you did that nice new boot I held up to your lips earlier. I wouldn’t have dreamt of having you go near all that muck caked on the soles - God knows what she’s stepped in out there.” Daphne Larkspear pulled a face as if to describe the sickly-sweet farmyard ambience that had been steadily flavouring the atmosphere since the other woman had made her entrance. Glancing over at Alice’s stepmother she laughed, her Scottish lilt somehow making her teasing guffaw seem even more mocking than it might otherwise. The other, returning her ex-teacher’s knowing look with delightedly glittering smiling eyes, responded, giggling girlishly:

“Lord knows! There are all sorts of unmentionable stuff that gets stirred into the stable yard mud, Mrs Larkspear, what with the horses, the two dogs and the hunt meeting here, as they did yesterday. Whatever it was, it has certainly left a mess on the floor for the two of them to clean up later - and it sure as hell doesn’t smell too good!”

Daphne Larkspear once again returned her attention to her restrained ‘pupil’: “As I was saying: As the state of play was, when we started out today, I wouldn’t have dreamed of having you do more than, say, cleaning off some of those muddy speckles - and polishing the rubber of course. The rest I would have let you deal with using a cloth and the boot brush, as usual. As it is, though, we have that stubborn, defiant streak of yours to manage and to deal with. So...” She paused as if for thought. “...I think an apt penalty might be if you were to miss out all those intermediate stages I had planned to put you through - breaking you in gently, giving you time to acclimatise yourself, so to speak, to all those new tastes, sensations and odours you’re going to have to get used to. Instead I think what we’ll do is we’ll have you graduate right away. I think we’ll put you straight up to the top of the class, straight up to the level that young Angel over there has reached... as the fully-fledged bootlicker that she is.”

Another muffled, anguished groan issued from the teenager whose head was still remained tilted back, face buried in the corner. A dark stain was just beginning to diffuse up from the crotch of the latter’s school knickers and was beginning to spread across the seat, droplets trickling down the insides of her coltish thighs were now glinting like tiny amber beads in the spotlight. Glancing up Daphne Larkspear addressed the fidgeting teenager, her smile broadening: “Och!” It wasn’t often she used that peculiarly Scottish exclamation. “Now, just look at you. You’ve only gone and wet yourself again, you silly bairn. And in front of Lady Marchment, too! If you carry on like that, we’ll have to put you in a nappy.” The Scottish lilt seemed grow stronger on the word ‘nappy’ as if to emphasise that she had no intention of ever referring to the solution she had in mind as ‘adult diapers’, let alone by the politically-correct clinical wording they carried on the wrapper they came in.

She looked back down at Alice, bending and lifting the girl’s chin even higher until her nose was almost touching that of Alice. “ So... Just say how much would appreciate being allowed to chew the filth off of the soles of your stepmother’s boots, those really nice, really expensive shiny fashion ‘wellies’ of hers, and we’ll get on.” She had estimated Alice’s limitations well - and gone well beyond them, as had been her intention. Stunned by the sudden crudity, and even more by the enormity of what she was being asked to do, Alice could only slowly shake her head in shocked silence.

Daphne Larkspear straightened up, dropping Alice’s chin. Moving around alongside the bending girl she ran her hand over the surface of the balloon-taut whipping drawers, the fabric as fine as a lawn handkerchief yet as strong as denim, trickling her fingers over the throbbing welt running across the very centre of the girl’s buttocks, then tracing the ridges back and forth with a single finger, feeling the outlined criss-cross pattern of plaited leather embossed in the skin. Tutting to herself she let the remark tumble out from her mouth quite casually, quite matter-of-factly, as if mentioning the weather.

“This one will be permanent, I’m afraid - It’s split the skin you see. Not so bad as a single line across the middle, although I don’t suppose you’d want your boyfriend to see it.” Reaching across the girl’s shoulders from behind, having wandered around behind her while talking, she retrieved the incredibly pliant riding crop. Without further comment she whipped it back over her shoulder and slashed it in diagonally, the tip curling up and under the overhang of one of Alice’s buttock cheeks and just catching the outside edge of that tender crease. If anything the stroke was even harder than the first. The sharp gunshot-like crack reverberated as before and she let the girl’s screams subside before continuing where she’d left off:

“A basket-weave of lines is another matter; I suppose that can be a little disfiguring for a girl. Mind you, I don’t think you’ll be seeing much of your old boyfriend anyway - he’s got twelve years as I understand it and some of the marks may have faded by then - a little.” She slashed in another, just below the first and parallel with it, watching the pliant switch mould itself momentarily around both buttock cheeks before springing back and once again waiting for the girl’s anguished screams to die down before continuing her diatribe, spending the time tripping her fingertips over the developing wheal and satisfying herself that for the third time within three strokes she had again succeeded in likely permanently tattooing the girl’s bottom.

“Still, I imagine you’ll still be able to get away with wearing a bikini if you’re careful - something a little more full around the bottom regions, mind, something a little conservative, not one of those brief modern things.” The air whistled as the next shot cracked across Alice’s tender bottom, this one landing lower still and almost coming up underneath the overhang.

“Landed a little low, that one, dear. Sorry! Still, a fuller-bodied style of bikini bottom and you’ll be all right for the beach - as long as it covers up your bottom properly as it should. “Did I mention a letter came for you from that no-good boyfriend of yours - he only expects you to be waiting for him when he gets out? Thinks he’ll get parole for good behaviour, apparently. Well, I think it would be best if you wrote back and told him in no uncertain terms where he can get off with that idea, don’t you? Just as soon as you’re finished munching your lunch off Lady Marchment’s boots here, of course. Perhaps it would be kindest if you were to say you’d met someone else and would be moving away? Hmmm?”

Alice was still shaking her head in the negative when the next stroke, the first of a pair to land in rapid-fire succession, whooped in, confused by this alternation of demands and the constant reference to her jailed fiancé. Both landed just above the lowest extent of the Victoriana whipping draws, right across the sensitive flesh of the backs of her thighs and well below the point that would be covered up by any but the most old-fashioned of full-bodied knickers. Both split the skin.

“Now look what you have gone and made me do! I’ve told you before about where your stubbornness will get you. You put off my aim with all that bottom wriggling and head-shaking going on - and a few more landing across there and I dare say that will be your bikini days over. I doubt you’d even find a vintage one-piece swimsuit that would cover those marks on the beach. Those regulation school uniform knickers of yours will still do the trick, though - and it’s not as if you’re going to be gallivanting around the bedroom, not with all the embarrassing questions that bottom of yours would raise.”

Again and again Alice’s head sharply jerked up, the crack of the lascivious woman’s dressage whip ringing in her ears and its lick of flame besieging her tender pink bottom. Again and again the plaited leather instrument bit deep into her flesh leaving vivid raised flaring wheals that could be clearly made out through cruelly tight fabric of the whipping draws as the initial blood red developed into a deeper purple. Her bottom, thrust outwards by the bolstered padded leather arm of the armchair, twitched and quaked and rippled and juddered, spasmodically between each stroke as the bruised muscles involuntary reacted to the out and out, mind breaking agony. The unforgiving leather cuffs locked around Alice’s ankles and pinioning them to the front and back legs of the armchair, drawing her legs wide apart in the process, along with those that drew her wrists together over the far arm, were sufficient to hold her in place against even her most energetic struggles yet allowed sufficient leeway to provide an entertaining display of bucking feminine eye-candy.

Alice had long ago been broken, truly broken. Her voice, reduced to almost silently hoarse screams and pathetic squeaky rusty mews under the fall of the dressage whip, whispered near-inaudible pleas for clemency and mercy in the tortuously long and drawn-out periods of cruel respite between the strokes. She had been ready long ago to abase herself in any manner that Daphne Larkspear or her stepmother might demand of her. But still the thrashing went on, Daphne Larkspear occasionally pausing to stroll around to other side of the armchair, standing in front of the restrained, weeping teenager and flexing the horse whip in front of the girl’s eyes, arching it between her hands into something approaching a full circle before releasing the tension and letting the tip spring back through the air with a swish, all the time berating Alice, worrying away at that weakness of hers, her vanity with florid descriptions of how defaced her backside was becoming.

On occasion she would run a finger under the guitar-string-taut round strap that ran up along the centre seam of the whipping drawers, pressing its tip into the centre of the little fabric-outlined toroidal bud of the girl’s anus and performing little teasing pirouettes. At other times, between strokes, she would run a hand up the inside of one of the girl’s thighs and down the other, pausing at the centre to roll that same cylindrically sectioned strap side to side in the declivity between the virginal lips, the latter now particularly clearly delineated through the saturated contour-hugging fabric of the crotch.

From time to time she would rub the urine picked up on her fingers in such a manner under the girl’s nose, gently drawing a fingertip back and forth along the girl’s upper lip and touching little droplets to the insides of the girl’s nostrils. “Only a child wets herself - perhaps you’ll prefer the smell of your stepmother’s rubber Wellingtons now, learn to love the taste of the rubber.” Then she would step back before bringing in the curving dressage whip arcing agonisingly across the girl’s behind yet again. “Or should I leave you here until you mess yourself as well, and I have to put you in a nappy - as I’m going to have to do with Angel, in the corner over there. Alternatively perhaps I should fetch that Victorian prison cane I have, and use that to tan your backside until your bowels move. How would you like that? And it would only stop once you’d evacuated your bowels into your knickers - just imagine how you’re going to feel if you make me do that to you. I’ve done it to Angel you know, in the past - and look what it has done to her”.

It was only after Alice had received a further five, particularly vicious strokes, delivered in rapid-fire succession across the backs of her thighs that the woman finally put down the horse whip. These last few strokes had slashed in low, biting deep into the sensitive flesh just a few inches up from the girl’s knees and had coaxed one last long-drawn-out wailing - if hoarse - scream from the girl’s now parched lips. It had been a most harrowing howl indeed, one that came from the very soul and went soul-deep to any within earshot.

Once again running her fingers to and fro between the restrained girl’s legs Daphne Larkspear brought the dampened tips to the girl’s face as she had before. This time, though, she slowly drew her index finger along the girl’s top and bottom lips, tracing their outline and depositing a snail-trail of little golden droplets around the girl’s gentle mouth. Holding her fingers flat and just shy of the girl’s lips - in the manner one might if feeding sugar cubes to a pony - Daphne Larkspear softened her voice, the tone coaxing and belying the bizarreness of the instruction being given:

“Come along, clean off my fingers, child -that’s a good girl. Don’t make me have to go get that old prison cane of mine, not that ‘whalebone’ one I have”. Her voice sounded sympathetic now almost pleading. A smile spread across the striking if hard face of the Scots teacher as the velvety-pink tip of the girl’s tongue slowly appeared, emerging from between pretty red cupid-bow lips. The smile spread as she felt the heavy wetness run up along her fingers across her palm as the girl began to quietly lap and nuzzle like a house trained puppy dog.

For now the girl was broken but Daphne Larkspear knew that deep down inside some part of the girl’s defiant spirit would have survived. The human spirit could be a quite resilient thing and, given time, Alice’s individuality and spirit were bound to resurface to some degree. Yes, in the future there would undoubtedly be resurgences of defiance, but this was something to be welcomed; it left the field open for a repeat performance of the same treatment. The girl’s spirit and self-esteem would recover to some extent each time, but never fully. Each time there would less of the real Alice left alive and kicking inside and more of what appeared to be Alice would be merely dry husk.

She began unbuckling the restraints, helping the pathetically snivelling girl to her feet. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the girl’s stepmother preparing to take her place in the plush leather folds of the armchair, impatient to at last sit back and have her muddied, manure-caked boots attended to by her stepdaughter - and in the most profoundly personal way imaginable. But there was something in the girl’s eye, a glint of defiance? And was she really trying to pull away - after all that?