The carriage lurched, and bounced noisily upon its springs. The sound and sudden motion set a score of rooks wheeling and cawing furiously from the clump of tall elms. The birds’ mournful croaking sounded harsh and ominous, providing a perfect complement to the Honourable Amelia Colinbroke’s bleak mood.
She turned to watch the towers of Hope Hall slowly disappear from sight through the small back window of the Reverend Dawes’ carriage. The irony of Amelia’s situation did not escape her. Only a few hours previously she had been longing to escape from that infamous place, and now her wish had been granted.
The Gothic shape of the west tower was the last part of the Hall to disappear behind the rhododendron bushes that lined the drive. Amelia was not sorry she had never found out exactly what happened in that ancient keep. There were still some secrets that, as far as she was concerned, Hope Hall was quite welcome to guard from her forever.
Even passing through the iron gates in the great wall that encircled the park did nothing to lift Amelia’s spirits. To be leaving behind the humiliations and vexations, the spankings and the whippings that had been her lot all the long summer was all very well. Unfortunately, there was the matter of her destination.
‘The Reverend Richard Dawes,’ she muttered bitterly. Even the simple act of pronouncing that hateful name sent a shiver down her spine. Of course, there were few young ladies of quality who did not pale at the sound of those particular syllables. The small, leather-bound book which had first brought the Reverend to the world’s attention loomed large in the upbringing of many a girl.
Dawes’ Domestic Discipline, more often referred to as ‘the bircher’s bible,’ was a grim little manual of correction and restraint, dealing exclusively with the chastisement of females and written with almost palpable relish.
Amelia’s agitation as the carriage lumbered towards the town of Hatherby, however, was not due simply to the Reverend’s fearsome literary reputation. Her dry mouth, moist palms and hammering heart bespoke an all-too-intimate acquaintance with the man himself.
The wind was picking up, driving horizontal rain straight into Kirsty’s face till it was impossible to tell how much of the moisture on her cheeks was rain, and how much might be tears. Some of the water must have been salt, though, for her face was contorted with pain as she struggled to hold the rocks she gripped in outstretched hands. She had been standing here, stark naked on the hillside, for half an hour now, and the discomfort in her arms had slowly turned from discomfort to muscle-wrenching agony.
Kirsty gritted her teeth and stared straight ahead as some shepherd boys stopped to peruse her nude form. It was a comely shape, she knew, full fleshed and firm, and her cheeks flamed as if seeking to complement the red of her hair and rain-slicked pubic bush. She would not look down or away, however. Was she not Kirsty MacSlat of that ilk, rightful chieftainess of Clan Slat of Glen Sgiursar?
The boys knew it, too, and, lust emboldened though they must have been, they did not tarry once her cold gaze fell on them. She might now be a distressed girl, forced by her tormentors to stand naked in the rain, but she would be twenty-one soon enough, and things would be very different once she came into her inheritance.
‘I told you to keep those stones held high.’ Minister Peebles’ reedy hiss was the first Kirsty knew of his presence behind her. She hardly heard his tawse whistle through the air against the moaning wind, but she felt it all right, as the tines of fire lapped around the backs of her thighs. Pain engulfed her for a moment.
‘Keep them up, you wicked, disobedient girl!’ her tutor shouted. A second and then a third stroke cracked across her cheeks. Kirsty had to grind her teeth to avoid crying out with pain. For such a spindly little man, Minister Peebles swung a remarkably mean belt: a fact she’d had only too many opportunities to discover.
‘She is a hardened, insolent wee chit, Minister. Give her a few more or she will no’ feel the benefit.’
Kirsty bit her lip to prevent crying out in fury. The owner of the voice stepped into view. Marie, known in the glen as ‘Marie Nip’, glared at her, the young woman’s pretty features marred by an expression of malice.
‘You should show your benefactor more respect, Kirsty,’ Marie said, reaching forward with the long fingernails that inspired her nickname. ‘Try to be more like young Malcolm.’
The talons closed on Kirsty’s nipple and pinched. Simultaneously the tawse bit into her flesh again. Kirsty groaned. The stroke produced a convulsive jerk, meaning her nipple was tugged in Marie’s grip, producing another flowering of agony.
‘I’d stand still if I was you, girl,’ Marie said quietly, with a sly smile.
The tawse cracked across Kirsty’s bottom once more, but no amount of good advice could stop her from jerking. As she tried to still her quivering body, she gripped the rocks so hard she felt she must crush them.
‘All right, missy,’ Minister Peebles spat once he had given her time to appreciate his leather work, ‘put those stones down and go cover your nakedness. You must be at Kinloch Sgiursair to meet the train at three.’
Marie Nip released her grip, leaving Kirsty’s nipple throbbing like fury.
It was also agonising to put down the rocks and swing her arms in search of relief, but Kirsty was well used to pain and the fiery jolts in her shoulders could not quite kill her curiosity.
‘Doctor Peebles, sir,’ she gasped as she followed his black-clad back through the heather towards the ruinous keep of Eilan Ban-traill Castle, ‘where is it that I am going?’
‘Charlotte... really, do you think we should?’ Arabella Huntingdon-Wickham stared, wide-eyed, at her friend. Lady Charlotte Letherbridge-Lacey furrowed her much-admired brow in concentration and ignored her.
‘Don’t be such a wet blanket, Bella,’ Charlotte chortled as she took the chamber pot and poured the golden liquid, via the funnel, into the decanter. ‘I can’t wait to see old Anthony’s face when he sips his favourite malt!’
Lady Charlotte disguised the scent of her own urine by topping up the decanter with the fine malt whisky she had poured off into a jug. She smiled to herself at the thought of Anthony sipping the liquid.
Charlotte’s golden-haired beauty and fine figure had provoked much interest from eligible young men at her coming-out. Indeed, she still had half-a-dozen moonstruck admirers amongst society’s higher echelons, despite – or perhaps even because of – her deserved reputation for capriciousness. Some men, Charlotte had noticed, seemed to lap up her slights, and come back panting like whipped curs for more abuse. Spotty, chinless young Anthony Persimmon was one of the most persistent, and most detested.
Even so, Charlotte thought, as she followed Bella to the attic that had been the chums’ hiding place since girlhood, this last prank was a bit stiff, even by her own outrageous standards. Though she would not have admitted it for anything, part of her could understand Bella’s obvious unease. This summer she had seemed driven to ever more outrageous escapades, as if terrified boredom might engulf her if she paused for thought.
Charlotte poured the purloined whisky into borrowed beakers and handed one to Bella.
‘Don’t look so glum, Porky, it will be a lark!’ Charlotte laughed and swigged her own malt down with a grimace.
‘Don’t call me that, Charlotte,’ Bella said, taking a sip of her own drink. The nickname was an old one but, seemingly, it still had the power to annoy her friend. Chestnut-haired Arabella had always been bigger and more buxom than blonde Charlotte. Indeed, she had been rather a plump little girl. Womanhood, however, had seen her body blossom into voluptuous curves, much appreciated by the young men of the district, and her legs had grown long and shapely enough to put Charlotte in mind of one of Bella’s beloved thoroughbreds. Bella’s propensity for riding and other boisterous sports had also made her enviably fit and given her firm, well-muscled thighs.
Charlotte had found herself thinking about her friend’s thighs more frequently of late than she would have cared to explain, even to herself. As if to drive away such troubling images, she went on the attack.
‘You are becoming a regular old misery, Bella.’ Charlotte took another hearty swig of whisky. ‘Stop frowning and take your medicine. After all, a girl has to have some fun!’
‘This is the final straw, Charlotte, and you can stop smirking this instant.’ The dowager Lady Peaslake glared at her granddaughter through an old-fashioned lorgnette. ‘You can wipe that stupid smile off your face as well, Arabella!’
Lady Charlotte swayed, trying to focus on the black-clad old lady, but the malt whisky she had imbibed was making this feat remarkably difficult. The Honourable Anthony Persimmon stood next to the dowager, his pasty face even paler than usual. In fact, Charlotte thought, he did not look altogether well. A glance at the doctored whisky decanter and the cut glass tumbler told the story. Her little trick had worked, it seemed. For all Lady Peaslake’s palpable displeasure, she could not quite suppress a giggle. Beside her, she heard Bella let out a tipsy snigger.
‘Look at them. Quite incorrigible. I am deeply sorry about this, Anthony.’
‘It really is all right, Lady Peaslake, I’m sure that Charlotte did not mean...’
So even peeing in Anthony’s whisky was not enough to put him off. Charlotte fought another wave of giggles.
‘Not to worry,’ Lady Peaslake said. ‘I am afraid this behaviour has been going on for quite some time. What they do not know is that, as a result, their names are down on a very special list. Stern measures are called for and stern measures have been put into effect. If I cannot curb your wickedness, girls, you must be sent to someone who can. You will leave on the early train for Hatherby. You can chortle all you like, Charlotte. I suspect that, where you are going, you will soon be giggling rather less.’
‘Well, woman, are you ready?’
Gretchen’s nerves were so taut that her husband’s voice provoked a little squeak of fear. She snapped the well-thumbed copy of Dawes’ Domestic Discipline shut and stuffed it into her carpet bag. Since she had heard she was to go to Hatherby, to experience the famous chastising chaplain’s discipline at first hand, she had hardly been able to stop reading the man’s most famous book. It seemed to exert a horrible, almost hypnotic fascination. As the dreaded day had grown nearer Gretchen slipped into a trance-like state, as if mesmerised by the appalling prospect. Every time she was alone she felt compelled to open and read a passage from that little brown tome.
If Gretchen had hoped for reassurance, she had not found it in those pages. Instead, the programme Dawes recommended filled her heart with terror. Still, she could not stop leafing frantically through the damned book at every opportunity. It was as if she was some sinner who, having sold her soul to the devil, was searching for an escape clause in the fine print of the contract. There were no loopholes to be found, however, in the Reverend’s cheerless manifesto.
Mr Mortimer stepped into the parlour, looking grave. He was a small man, much smaller than Gretchen herself, for she was a buxom woman. He looked at his fob watch with an irritated expression.
‘Well, you had better get down to the station, madam,’ he said sternly.
‘Albert, I really am not sure this is such a good idea...’
He looked up at her, his eyes cold. There was no pity in them, no sympathy at all.
‘Well, Gretchen, you might have thought about that before. You have made your bed, I believe the expression is, and now you must lie in it. You would not listen to me, and you must suffer the consequences of your wilfulness. There is nothing more to say.’
He closed his watch with a decisive snap that sounded to Gretchen like the click of manacles closing around her wrists. There really was to be no escape from this fate, she realised, perhaps for the first time. For six months she would be under the rule of the terrifying Reverend Dawes. She bent down to pick up the carpet bag, and could not help but notice that her plump hand was trembling as it reached out.
‘Linnet! Where are you, you wicked child?’
Linnet had been swinging, lost in her thoughts, when Nelson’s voice disturbed her reverie. She looked around to see the plump servant waddling across the lawns towards her, red-faced as usual.
‘Your aunt wants you this instant, you disobedient little girl,’ Nelson said nastily. She grasped Linnet by the ear and hauled her back towards the house.
It was useless to protest that she had merely been sitting thinking. Useless to protest that she was not a child but a young woman of eighteen. Linnet had learned these lessons at her great aunt’s house, and confined herself to a gasp when Nelson tugged at her ear.
Aunt Hermoine was discussing something with Mr Simpson the lawyer in the drawing room. Linnet guessed the discussion had been heated, for she heard raised voices as Nelson hauled her by her ear along the hall. They fell silent when she entered the room, however. Linnet stood anxiously, her ear throbbing, as Mr Simpson peered at her and Aunt Hermoine glared.
‘It’s been decided,’ her aunt said quickly. ‘I can no longer tolerate your tantrums and your wilfulness. You are to be sent to someone who knows how to deal with wicked girls. Go and pack your things.’
Linnet hurried up the stairs with her heart thumping. The ‘disciplinary course’ sounded quite ominous and she felt more than a little trepidation at the name of the famous Reverend Dawes. However, Linnet did not care a jot how strict his course was. She would be out of this horrid house. Away from her horrid aunt and all her horrid, spiteful servants. There was anxiety in her breast, but it was not fear that made her heart beat so. It was joy.
‘Not more letters?’ The Reverend Dawes looked up at Faith with an irritated expression. The slight furrowing of his brow provoked a surge of adrenaline in the young maid’s breast. Although she could hardly be held responsible for the volume of post, any sign of displeasure from her employer always made her feel distinctly nervous.
As he had not dismissed her, however, Faith had no opportunity to flee. She stood by his desk, keeping her face impassive and trying not to look at the canes and belts he kept hanging on the study wall.
‘More pleas for me to visit and impose discipline in disharmonious households,’ the Reverend muttered as he slit the envelopes with his paper knife, one by one. ‘Why on earth these fools cannot flog their own females, I shall never understand.’
He leaned back in his chair and perused another missive.
‘“Sir, Felicity is a wilful girl of twenty-two. The best finishing schools have failed to curb her extravagances and intrigues. Your course sounds as if it is exactly what she needs...” Another one for the waiting list, put it in the file.’
Faith took the proffered letter and pulled open the mahogany filing cabinet. The waiting list already consisted of several well-stuffed files. She took out the chronological list and added the girl’s name at the bottom, before filing the letter, which was from a Lady Congreave, under ‘C’.
‘Ah, Gretchen Mortimer arrives on the five o’clock train,’ the Reverend read with approval. ‘With Kirsty MacSlat and Linnet Tremaine due on the eight thirty-five, and the other pair coming by Lady Peaslake’s coach, that means all six of the trainees should be here tonight, after all.’
Faith relaxed a fraction. The irritation the earlier letters had engendered seemed to have been banished by this news. The prospect of fresh bottoms to attend to seemed greatly to have improved the Reverend’s mood. He stood up with a satisfied air and took out his pocket watch. The maid licked her lips and waited hopefully. Perhaps she would escape a skipping, after all.
‘In fact,’ he said, ‘Amelia should be here shortly.’
There was something in his voice that Faith did not much like. It was always the same when he mentioned Miss Colinbrooke. Faith had seen Amelia in church and had been struck by the auburn-haired girl’s particular beauty. She was quite tall and looked to be particularly shapely, even allowing for the emphasis her curves undoubtedly received from fierce Hope Hall tight lacing. However, it was the loveliness of Amelia’s face that had caused so much gossip in the district, and Faith was not the only one to sense her employer had taken a most particular interest.
‘I tell you what,’ the Reverend said, interrupting her train of thought. ‘Before this place becomes a bedlam, why don’t you go and pick yourself out a nice whippy cane? I think there will be just time for me to give you a thrashing for idling.’
Familiar as the church had become, Amelia had never been inside its neighbouring rectory. Indeed, she would have paid good money not to visit the place now. As the carriage turned up a gravel drive she could not forbear to crane her head out of the window. The rectory was a roomy, well-appointed building, which had been much improved and enlarged upon over the years. It had been built for rural parsons with enormous families and a good parcel of servants, and seemed far bigger than a bachelor like the Reverend Dawes could really need.
The bachelor in question stood waiting outside the front door, stock still, his back ramrod straight. Amelia pulled her head back into the carriage quickly, the sight of the man giving her an almost electric jolt. Stupid girl! she berated herself as she tried to stop her hands from trembling. He was but a man; albeit a brutal and rather intimidating one. She must not forget that she was the Honourable Amelia Colinbrooke. Nor was she some swooning schoolgirl; indeed, she would be twenty in November, and she was a match for any jumped-up country parson, however strong his whipping arm might be!
Still, her heart was hammering in her breast as she got down from the carriage. Six months incarcerated in the nursery at Hope Hall might have failed to vanquish Amelia’s proud spirit, but that purgatory had undoubtedly gone some way towards curbing her hauteur.
‘Amelia, my dear.’ The Reverend Dawes’ voice was rich and sounded odiously self-satisfied. ‘Welcome. I’m so glad you could join my little course.’ There was no warmth in his smile and his grey eyes were as cold, and every bit as penetrating, as Amelia remembered them. ‘Faith will take you to your quarters and help you change into your new uniform.’
Amelia followed the maid up the narrow servants’ stairs, thankful to get away from the Reverend’s baleful presence. Her silk skirts rustled busily as she climbed the steps, making her aware of her dress and causing her to wonder, with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, what her ‘uniform’ might prove to be.
The maid moved gingerly, making Amelia wonder if her bottom had been recently striped. The thought provoked a shiver of cold fear to run down her back. She was trapped in the Reverend’s own domain now: the realisation hit her like a whip stroke, and the prospect made her almost dizzy with anxiety.
‘This way, miss.’ Faith gave a curtsy as she stood aside for Amelia to enter the room first. She was a lovely girl with an almost melancholy beauty, Amelia thought, regarding the maid for the first time. Faith had fine blonde hair, pulled back behind her neat cap, and pale, flawless skin. For all her fear, Faith’s submissive air stirred something in Amelia’s loins. If only things were different, she thought regretfully. How she would like to thrash this sweet-faced girl until she heard those cherry lips plead for mercy.
Suppressing a sigh, Amelia entered the room. Her heart, which had scarcely been buoyant, sank altogether as she looked around. It was an attic room with several small windows set into the slope of the roof. The floorboards were bare, the walls whitewashed and stark. Six iron bedsteads had been placed in the dormitory, three spaced out along each of the longer walls. On the end of each bed was, rolled up, the thinnest mattress Amelia had ever seen. On the wall, by each bed, a crook-handled cane dangled dolefully. Amelia looked around and licked her lips, wondering how she could ever face six months in a place like this.
‘If you undress, miss, I’ll fetch your uniform. Um...’ the girl blushed and looked embarrassed, ‘you are to strip altogether naked. The Reverend is very particular about underthings.’
Fuming, Amelia watched the maid bustle out. She stood in the centre of the room with clenched fists. It was almost too much to endure. After a summer forced to wear shaming costumes at Hope Hall, she had at last been given respectable garb only that very morning. Now, a few hours later, she was expected to relinquish it again.
Amelia very nearly balked altogether at that moment. The sight of the canes dangling by every bed, however, left her in no doubt of the consequences of any mutiny. The beast would simply relish an altercation, she told herself glumly. With a sigh, she began unbuttoning her dress.
‘I told you not to put that pee in the whisky,’ Bella muttered, staring moodily out of the carriage window. ‘Now look what you have done.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport, Bella,’ Charlotte said with more gaiety than she felt. ‘Don’t you see? Grandmama must have had this planned for months. It was so boring at Cresham, perhaps it will be more amusing on this “course”!’
Arabella turned and looked at her with an exasperated expression. ‘Amusing? For heaven’s sake, Charlotte, the man’s a clergyman. This is a disciplinary course, run by a man of the cloth at a rectory. “Amusing” is about the last thing it is going to be!’
Charlotte shrugged, unwilling to acknowledge there was much in what her friend said.
‘Oh, pish, Porky,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘If we do not like it we can just sneak away. Jeremy is up at town, we can steal away to him.’
Jeremy Sewell was another of Charlotte’s suitors; another chinless young man in whom she had not the least romantic interest. The plan was reckless, even scandalous, and they both knew it. Arabella did not even bother to argue, but simply turned and looked out of the window once again.
The corset was pretty much what Amelia had expected. A short affair in white coutil, it left the breasts and buttocks altogether, and most vulnerably, free. In fact, she recognised the beastly device as a punishment corset – or, rather, a refinement of a design she had already learned to dread.
‘What are these for?’ She could not quite contain her curiosity. All around the bottom of the corset, beneath the fine lace trim, were little holes, reinforced with eyelets, whose purpose she could not guess.
‘Oh, they are for the whipping drawers, miss. But it takes too long, so you are not to go into them tonight.’
Mention of ‘whipping drawers’ sent a frisson of fear through Amelia. She remembered seeing the things in Mademoiselle Isobel’s emporium in Hatherby, garments that could be tightened to an almost absurd degree by means of lacing on either side. There had been nothing to correspond to the eyelets in the corset, however. A tight feeling in her stomach told Amelia the Reverend must have refined what had seemed an already diabolical design.
Part of her was relieved that she was not to be laced into the things just yet. That relief was muted by the question stealing into her mind. Why she should be so spared? She realised it might not be altogether good news if the Reverend Dawes required her to keep her bottom bare.
The uniform did nothing to reassure her: black silk stockings and high-heeled shoes; a navy pleated skirt which altogether failed to reach her garters; a white blouse with a stiff Eton collar and a tie, and a straw boater for outdoors wear.
There was no doubt that the skirt was scandalously short, and the blouse a good deal tighter than she would have liked. Her breasts were left bare by the corset and she had been given no chemise; thus Amelia could not but be aware of the way her nipples jutted out against the thin material. Although only Faith was there to see her, she could not prevent a blush suffusing her face as she looked down glumly.
‘If you are ready, miss, I am to take you down to supper.’
Faith’s soft voice made Amelia jump. She took a deep breath and followed the girl down the stairway, terribly aware of her lack of drawers beneath the neat little skirt. Worse, her nipples seemed to be swelling as they rubbed against the tight cotton of her blouse, protruding ever more infuriatingly with every step she took towards the Reverend.
‘Amelia. There you are. Yes, very neat, the uniform suits you.’
The Reverend Dawes let his cold gaze drop to her breasts and Amelia felt her cheeks burn red. She clasped her hands impotently at her sides, finding that her palms had become moist with perspiration. There was a long, awful moment of stillness as the Reverend perused her unhurriedly and Amelia fought the absurd desire to cry.
Eventually, it seemed, the Reverend tired of staring at her breasts. He turned to a woman who had been waiting on one side, blinking anxiously at the little tableau, looking distinctly ill at ease.
‘This is Gretchen,’ he said crisply. ‘She will be one of your fellows on the course.’
Amelia stared at the newcomer. The woman must be in her thirties, she thought with some astonishment. Gretchen was blonde, with a matronly figure. She had already changed into clothing like Amelia’s and there was something particularly absurd about the big, rather ungainly woman in the abbreviated school uniform. Certainly Gretchen seemed no happier than Amelia felt, forced to wear this humiliating costume. Her pale cheeks were blushing scarlet and she was wringing her plump hands together miserably.
The shortness of the skirt revealed tremendous thighs. Nipples as thick and rigid as thimbles pressed against the straining cotton of the woman’s blouse. The full, suffocating shame of her own appearance struck Amelia like a blow to the stomach as she stood and stared at her companion in humiliation.
‘Gretchen seemed to feel it improper to disrobe in front of me, although I did explain that, as I am a man of the cloth, there can be no question of impropriety.’
‘It’s just...’ Gretchen began miserably.
‘It is just the little matter of your drawers, girl,’ the Reverend Dawes snapped. ‘Faith, fetch me a number seven cane. We shall see if we cannot persuade Gretchen of the errors of false modesty.’
Amelia watched the maid scurry out, then turned her attention back to the other woman.
‘Take out one of the dining chairs and place it for me, Amelia. Yes, that’s the ticket. Now, madam, if you would be so good as to assume the position. No, do not make cow eyes at me! Bend over the chair.’
With palpable reluctance, Gretchen bent over the back of the chair, corsets creaking in protest as she did so.
‘Amelia, would you be so good as to raise the miscreant’s skirts?’
Amelia obeyed with alacrity, pulling up the woman’s navy blue skirtlet. Gretchen gave a frightened moan, but held her position uneasily. Amelia’s action revealed the biggest, fattest bottom she had ever seen. Gretchen’s drawers were cream cotton, and very voluminous, but even so the big buttocks filled them and, as Gretchen had bent, she had pulled the material quite taut.
‘Drop her drawers, girl, she will not be needing them for a while.’
Not daring to protest, Amelia reached under Gretchen’s belly. Ignoring the outraged gasp that came from Gretchen’s lips, she found the knot securing the drawstrings and undid it. The garment would not fall unaided, and Amelia had to tug the cotton down, past the massive upper thighs, and past the tops of the woman’s silken stockings. Then she stepped aside.
‘Thank you, Faith.’
Dawes took the proffered cane from his maid. It was a long one, thin and of a dark brown colour unfamiliar to Amelia, though the sight of it gave her a prickling feeling of panic down her spine. Something told her it was going to be an utter beast.
The Reverend Dawes lined the cane up, touching Gretchen’s bottom, which was already trembling in anticipation, and provoking a startled little gasp.
‘You must learn, Gretchen, that my orders are not matters for discussion. I will ordain, and you girls will obey.’
Amelia watched the cane go back and pause, ready to do its work.
‘Or else,’ Dawes continued in a conversational tone, ‘I do assure you there will be hell to pay!’
He unleashed the stroke. The cane moved too fast for Amelia to follow it. There was a barely visible blur, like a brief shimmering in the air, a whooshing sound, as cold to her soul as the whistling of an arctic wind, and a muted ‘thwuck’. Amelia watched Gretchen’s cheeks wobble after the impact. For all its size that bottom must be remarkably firm, she thought. Gretchen must be a stoical creature, though, for she hardly gave an indication that she might be in agony.
‘Oooh...!’ The belated cry was let out at last.
Not so stoical after all, Amelia thought. The woman had just been too stunned by the pain to speak for a few moments.
‘Oh, mercy, please, sir. I’m sorry, sir, no more, it’s too...’
‘Be silent,’ the Reverend said quietly but firmly. Then he struck again.
Amelia watched Gretchen’s bottom wobble after the impact. The woman seemed to be jiggling it in a vain attempt to disperse the pain. Two livid tramlines marred the pale perfection of her smooth rounds. Amelia licked her lips and tried not to think about what that cane would feel like on her own tender behind.
The thrashing continued at a deliberate, even leisurely pace. The Reverend Dawes was evidently in no hurry for his supper and he took his time. He would unleash a stroke, then wait, allowing Gretchen ample time to feel the full pitch of the resultant pain. Perfectly at his ease, the clergyman stood flexing his rod thoughtfully as a fresh welt bloomed on her bottom. He allowed the woman to gasp and jiggle and even writhe around. Only when she stood up, yelping, after the fifth stroke, a blistering crack across her upper thighs, did he intervene.
‘You will bend over, girl!’ he fairly roared. ‘You will get into position now and hold it, or by God I will make you sorry. I shall double your tariff if you do not assume the position right this instant!’
All too obviously reluctantly, Gretchen forced herself back over the chair. She was sobbing now, looking round with a red face that displayed all the signs of panic and was splashed with tears. Her buttocks trembled violently as she awaited the next stroke.
Watching in thunderstruck horror, Amelia found her mouth had gone quite dry. She could not take her eyes off the thin brown cane as he flexed it, then raised it. How long could it be before she felt the beastly thing on her own bottom? Her stomach turned a somersault as she watched the cane whistle though the air and hiss into Gretchen’s bottom.
Kirsty pressed her snub nose to the carriage window and watched the passing countryside with fascination. The landscape was like nothing she had ever seen. The rugged mountains and tumbling waterfalls of her native glens had long since turned to moor and rounded grassy fells. Now the fells were turning to rolling wooded countryside as the train steamed on and on. She had to change trains in a grimy town full of sooty chimneys and peculiar smells. Kirsty, who had never so much as heard of industrial pollution, much less seen it, wrinkled her nose and hoped the south would not prove to be all so noxious.
She need not have worried. Industrial blight gave way to farmland; farmland to wooded hills. As the train progressed the countryside grew ever more beautiful. Not as wild and rugged as the glens, but with its own real charm.
Still she felt a deep sense of unease; not so much for what she was going toward but from what she was leaving. Kirsty knew this course must be another stage in Dr Peebles’ plan. Her tutor had long wanted her to relinquish the lairdship in favour of her youthful cousin and his own ward, Malcolm. It was not hard to understand his aims. Clan Slat still scarcely bothered with the modern world, and the clan chiefs wielded enormous power in their remote glens. As Malcolm’s guardian, Peebles would have years of wealth and power, ruling in the weak-minded youth’s stead. Kirsty alone stood in his way. For two long years she had resisted his efforts to make her relinquish the lairdship. This ‘course’ was his last throw of the dice.
‘Of course, Kirsty, my dear,’ he had said at the little station at Kinloch Sgiursair, ‘should you become homesick and wish to leave the course early, all you need do is let me know that you are ready to sign a deed relinquishing the lairdship.’
As the train pulled into Hatherby station Kirsty could still see his pasty face, eaten up with greed and malice. Marie Nip, as ever, had waited behind him, smiling. However bad things were on the course, she swore to herself, she would endure it. Kirsty MacSlat would never sign her birthright away to Peebles and his slut. That much was certain!
‘You cannot be serious.’ Charlotte stared at the Reverend Dawes disdainfully. ‘My dear vicar, or whatever it is you are, I am twenty-one years old!’
‘Too grown up for a uniform, then?’ the Reverend asked mildly.
‘Quite. As is Arabella, too.’
Dawes looked at Charlotte’s companion and smiled. ‘Ah yes, we must not forget Bella, must we. My dear, would you be so kind as to follow Faith up to your quarters? Just a moment, Lady Charlotte, there was one other thing.’
Bella went with the servant girl, leaving Charlotte on her own with Dawes for the first time. Not that this made her nervous, exactly. A little more circumspect, perhaps.
‘Now, my dear, I expect you feel too grown up for corporal correction, too?’
‘Corp... you mean flogging, vicar? Really, that would be quite absurd. Indeed...’ she paused before continuing untruthfully, ‘I really never heard of such a thing.’
The Reverend Dawes had turned to the far wall as she spoke. For the first time she noticed the astonishing selection of canes, belts and riding crops that hung there, waiting. He picked a two-tailed tawse and turned to her with a confident smile. Charlotte stared at the thing in his hand as her voice trailed away.
Crack! The Reverend Dawes suddenly struck the leather top of his desk, producing a retort like a pistol shot. Despite herself, Charlotte jumped, startled by the sound. Before she had time to recover he had rounded the desk and grabbed her by the hair.
‘Aaoow... let go! Ooh!’
The struggle was as brief as it was one-sided. The Reverend Dawes simply hauled her by the hair until she was bent over the desk. Then he put the handle of the belt between his teeth and used his free hand to haul up her skirts.
‘No, for shame, sir! Let me go!’
He did not let her go. Charlotte found it difficult to struggle; his grip on her hair was too strong. All she could do was reach back with her arms. The masses of silk skirt he had pushed up around her waist obstructed her hands; her sense of shame at her exposure sent her into panic.
‘Oh, please sir, unhand me. Please, let down my skirts.’
‘Not just yet, miss, there is a job still to be done.’
‘Oh, ah... what are you doing, sir, desist!’
To Charlotte’s mortification the chaplain gave a throaty chuckle as his firm hand explored her bottom through her drawers.
‘What are these, girl, silk? You won’t be wearing such fine underthings here for a good while. Still, I’ll warrant they will offer scant protection, so I’ll not fight you for them, just this once.’
His hand stopped feeling her. There was a pause, then a sort of whuffling noise. Charlotte heard the crack of belt on bottom flesh an instant before she felt the scalding pain.
‘Aaooow...!’
It was simply indescribable. Her bottom seemed to be on fire.
‘Tsk, tsk, Charlotte, I had heard you were a terrible little tartar. I expected more fortitude, for I have barely kissed your pretty bottom yet with my strap!’
There was another horrid whuffling and another white-hot flash of pain. Charlotte got her right hand protectively over her seared bottom. There was another crack and then her fingers were ablaze. ‘Ah, oh, aaoow!’
‘Foolish child. Put your hands back and I will belt them for you. I should grip the front of the desk, if I were you.’
Charlotte was not quite beaten. She struggled violently, for all that this meant her hair felt as if it was being pulled out by the roots. She put her left hand back and got an agonising crack across the knuckles for her trouble. Another stroke impacted hard across her upper thighs. The pain was so intense she could not even gasp for a few seconds. After that, she could do nothing except follow his suggestion. She leaned forward and grabbed the edge of the desk, screwed her eyes shut, and gritted her teeth.
Crack!
‘Aaooowww...!’
‘That is a little better, Lady Charlotte. Hold that position for me, there’s a good girl.’
Crack!
‘Oh, oh, God.’
Her bottom felt as if it had been boiled. Charlotte had never experienced such intense pain. She could think of nothing but how she might get him to desist. Pride, anger and determination seemed to have had been utterly annihilated by the strap’s venomous tails.
‘Oh, please sir, please, oooh, I cannot...! Please stop, have mercy. I’ll do as you say!’
A particularly wicked stroke of the tawse impacted on already welted flesh, and Charlotte lost the power of speech altogether for a moment. All she could do was clutch the desk edge until her knuckles were quite white, stamp her feet and emit a strangulated grunt of utter agony.
‘I am so glad that you have reconsidered your attitude, my dear.’
There was another heart-stopping whuffle, and Charlotte’s thighs were ablaze with pain. She was powerless to stop the tears that coursed down her cheeks, and quite beyond feeling ashamed of so craven a display.
‘For obedience will, undoubtedly, make your stay here much more pleasant.’
Another sharp retort echoed around the study as the tawse tails bit her bottom. Charlotte felt the pain rip through her, so intense she was unable even to shriek.
‘Corporal correction will be your regular lot, even if you essay to obey.’
‘Ah, ah, oh, oh, p-please, sir...’
Crack!
Charlotte hissed in agony as her scalded thighs were stung again. If she survived this ordeal, she realised in a panic, she would never dare to disobey this man again.
‘But,’ the Reverend Dawes continued, in his casual, conversational way, ‘should you be disobedient it will be very much the worse for you. I shall have your obeisance and compliance, madam.’
The final stroke across the centre of her bottom was so vicious that Charlotte was engulfed by a red rip-tide of pain. She leaped up like a flushed pheasant, gripping her blistered buttocks in both hands and making a strange, deep-throated gurgling sound. She fell, or perhaps tripped on her voluminous skirts and collapsed on the study floor.
Charlotte could barely register anything except the incandescent agony of her welted flesh. She lay on the study carpet, clutching her rear and writhing like an eel as she gasped with shock. After a minute or so the pain began to subside, terribly slowly. An appalled awareness of her situation stole into her soul.
The Reverend Dawes was standing over her. She looked up in shamefaced fear, eyes blurred with tears. He towered over her, immovable as a tree. The strap swung easily in his right hand. Charlotte blinked and looked down at his brilliantly polished shoes.
‘Tsk, tsk, what a disgraceful exhibition, girl.’ His deep voice sounded amused. ‘You will learn to take your punishment with much more decorum than that.’
He bent and grabbed her hair. Charlotte felt her head wrenched back until she was forced to look into his pitiless grey eyes. There was something about his gaze that seemed to paralyse her, as if he could see straight into her soul. She was barely aware of the cold leather of the tawse being tapped gently against her cheek.
‘Now, my dear. The uniform. Perhaps you would care to reconsider taking off your dress?’
‘Oh, oh, oh...’ Charlotte whimpered as she lowered her evidently tender bottom on to the mean mattress of her bed. ‘I swear that beast has blistered my poor bottom.’
She stuck out her pert chin defiantly, but Amelia noticed she could not quite stop it from trembling. Lady Charlotte was an exquisitely pretty blonde with a trim, but not ungenerous, figure. For all that she had stripped down to her corset and silk drawers, she still looked every inch the spoiled young aristocratic madam, used to getting her own way. Amelia smiled, perhaps recognising something of herself in the girl’s demeanour, and wondered how long that hauteur would endure under the tutelage of the Reverend.
‘Ach, that man, he is very strict. I do not know if I can survive many more whippings the like of this,’ the big woman, Gretchen, said in an aghast, awe-struck whisper. She was standing by her bed in nothing but her corsets and her stockings, her large bottom facing Amelia as she twisted, trying to examine the purpling welts inscribed by the Reverend’s cane.
‘Buck up, girls. After all, it’s only six months.’ Bella had taken the bed next to Charlotte’s. ‘I’m sure we can survive it if we do our best.’
Her hopeful words were not matched by her tone, and Amelia noticed that the leggy girl’s eyes never left Gretchen’s striped bottom as she spoke.
‘Och, he has barely tickled you, woman.’ The new arrival, Kirsty, snorted as she wandered over to Gretchen. She turned and winked at Amelia, then gave Gretchen’s buttocks a hearty slap.
‘Ow, that’s so sore! Please, don’t.’ The woman gasped, clutching her cheeks protectively as Kirsty laughed.
Amelia had been first to bed. Now, as she watched her new companions disrobe around her, her fingers began to stroke her inner thighs under the blankets. Almost of their own volition her fingertips made little circling movements, up towards her urgently tingling sex. She turned back to Charlotte, who was still whimpering about the soreness of her bottom. Amelia licked her lips and let her fingers slip between her lubricated nether lips. Her other hand came over and started caressing the skin around her now urgently throbbing clitoris.
To her disappointment, Charlotte did not drop her silken drawers and expose her freshly tawsed rear to Amelia’s gaze. Blushing and muttering about privacy, the girl got beneath her sheets before wriggling out of the rest of her underthings. How long would such coyness be countenanced? Amelia wondered, with a thrill of excitement.
‘You don’t think... he won’t whip me, will he?’ The voice was small and tremulous. ‘Not if I’m good. I mean, if I do what I’m told.’
Amelia turned to the speaker. She had almost forgotten about the sixth occupant of the small dormitory. Linnet was such a quiet little thing that it had been easy to overlook her amongst the bustle of the other stripping girls, as she sat on the bed behind Amelia’s. Now she looked at her properly, Amelia thought, she really was a pretty piece. Long brown hair framed a pale oval face with light brown, doe-like eyes. The girl wore only her chemise, and was wringing her slender hands nervously. There was something mouth-wateringly vulnerable about her, making Amelia smile for the first time since breakfast.
‘Oh, no,’ she said insincerely as Kirsty snorted behind her, ‘I wouldn’t worry, sweetheart.’
The limpid eyes turned to her and Amelia felt herself melt in response. The girl blinked at her anxiously, her plump, cherry-red lower lip trembling ever so slightly.
‘If you are very, very good,’ Amelia continued, smiling slyly at the girl as she continued to caress herself furtively beneath the sheets, ‘I don’t expect our good Reverend will feel the need to thrash you... at least, not more than two or three times daily!’
‘Tighter? But, but... oof! How can it possibly be any tighter?’ Charlotte expostulated between grunts and gasps. Faith looked at her tape measure and shook her head.
‘Sorry, miss,’ the maid said, politely but firmly, ‘it’s the Reverend’s instructions. You are to go down to nineteen inches, Miss Arabella to twenty.’ She paused and looked around the dormitory. Gretchen was hauling on Amelia’s corset laces whilst Kirsty performed the same office for a red-faced Linnet. ‘The figures are all here.’ She waved the sheet of paper and then pinned it to the wall. ‘All of you must lace down to the figures as ordained or, make no mistake, we shall all of us be for it.’
There was a chorus of sighs and half-hearted complaints. Amelia gritted her teeth and gripped the end of her bedstead as big Gretchen hauled away again. Used to formidably tight lacing, as she had been at Hope Hall, this ordeal was perhaps less vexing to her than the others. In any event, her nineteen-inch target was soon achieved and confirmed by Faith’s tape.
Gretchen was another proposition. The Reverend had ordained a waist of thirty-one inches for the plump woman, a figure considerably exceeding the natural, uncorseted circumference of any other girl’s waist. In Gretchen’s case, however, it was a figure that took some prodigiously tight lacing to achieve. Amelia took one of the laces in both hands, Kirsty hauled at the other, and Gretchen grabbed the end of her bedstead with her chubby hands and held on for dear life.
‘Ach, oof! Please, it is too – oh, too tight.’
Faith signalled Amelia and Kirsty to haul harder and stepped forward to whisper into the groaning woman’s ear.
‘It has to be done, miss. The Reverend will be furious if we do not get you down. You would not want him to be angry with you, would you?’
Gretchen gave a whimper of fear that turned into a groan as Amelia and Kirsty gave the laces one last heave. Faith told them to pass the free lengths several times around Gretchen’s impressively nipped in waist. Then she measured the result.
‘Thirty inches!’ she declared. ‘There you are, you see.’
‘Please, if there is a spare inch, for mercy’s sake unlace me that little...’ Gretchen gasped, breathing in a flurry of little pants.
‘Heavens no,’ Faith said, with a hint of a smile. ‘These targets are just the Reverend’s starting points. Later he is bound to revise them downwards. You had all better begin getting used to some serious lacing whilst you are here.’
This news caused a chorus of groans and wails around the dormitory. Amelia held her peace, however, admiring her handiwork. Gretchen looked truly astonishing in her ferocious corset, her great breasts, wide hips and big bottom seeming even more impressive now her waist was so pitilessly moulded by the thing. To Amelia’s chagrin, she was given little leisure to contemplate the sight.
‘Quickly now, ladies.’ Faith clapped her hands. ‘Breakfast is at seven and the Reverend promised to allot a cane stroke for every ten seconds that anyone is late.’
This news brought a renewed sense of urgency to the dormitory. Unused, it seemed, to such tight lacing, Gretchen had to sit on her bed for a moment and recover, leaving Amelia to lace up Kirsty’s corsets with only the rather feeble help of little Linnet. This was no easy task. Kirsty had a full figure, with generous breasts and a sweetly jutting young bottom, yet she was possessed of a waist that was already very trim. The problem was the tariff. The Reverend Dawes had put her down for seventeen inches and, trim waist or not, achieving this figure was nigh on impossible. Fortunately, Kirsty endured Amelia’s pulling with remarkable stoicism, her only complaint as the laces tightened being the occasional grunt.
By the time it was done Bella and Charlotte had also, somehow, achieved their ordained waists.
‘All right, ladies, here are the drawers the Reverend wishes you to wear.’
Faith picked up a bundle of white cotton garments and began handing each girl a suitably sized pair. Amelia took as deep a breath as her constricting stays would allow and took the drawers from Faith. There was a murmuring of astonishment from the other girls. As soon as she picked up the garment, she felt herself go faint.
Now she understood. The man was an utter fiend! Since she had seen them modelled in Mademoiselle Isobel’s Emporium, the Reverend Dawes’ patent ‘whipping drawers’ had been cunningly and diabolically refined. As before, they were made of two panels of finest white cambric, a front and a back part, with legs that reached halfway down the thigh.
Bella was the first of the trainees to be put into the strange drawers. She was a generously proportioned young woman, with the strong thighs of a girl who had spent many childhood days with powerful hunters gripped between her legs. Amelia found herself staring at Bella’s sleekly muscled legs in frank admiration.
The laces linking front and back panels of the drawers had been loosened, so Arabella could step into the things and haul them up. Leather strips with eyelets for the laces reinforced the sides of the fine cambric panels, and these laces were tightened just as the stay laces had been. Arabella stood stoical at first as Faith tugged them taut, tightening one side a little and then the other. As the fine cotton was drawn ever tighter over Arabella’s mons, she had begun to blink furiously and emit some startled-sounding squeals.
‘You see how they work; the rest of you had better put your own drawers on now and start lacing them tight,’ Faith said. Amelia tugged her own laces taut, feeling the constricting material grip her bottom and thighs, biting her lip as the pressure of the thin cloth against her clitoris turned from pleasant firmness to uncomfortable constriction, by slow, inexorable degrees.
Faith raised her hand. ‘All right, that will do for now.’ All six girls stopped tightening their drawers with relief. ‘You are going to have to do this quickly,’ she warned, and handed each girl another long narrow lace.
In fact, it proved quite impossible to complete the next task rapidly. The waistbands of the odd drawers had also been reinforced with leather, and provided with a row of metal eyelets. Faith showed the wide-eyed young women how to thread the lace through each eyelet, and then through the corresponding hole at the bottom of their corset. Before she had half completed this fiddly task, and well before she began tightening the lace, Amelia, with a sick certainty, had understood the scheme.
She watched Charlotte, directly in front of her, struggle with her laces. The drawers were cut short, leaving a gap between the corset bottom and the top of the strange pantaloons that was at least two inches wide – at least to begin with. Two inches of pink flesh bulged from the gap between the wickedly tight corset and impossibly constrictive pair of drawers. This ribbon of flesh was soon scored, criss-crossed by the zigzagging line of the lace that hauled the two garments together, with ever more perilous tension as Charlotte tugged at her lace.
‘All right,’ Faith said with a concerned expression, ‘is everyone laced up?’
‘I’m no’ quite... Ach, this is awful fiddly!’ Kirsty complained.
Gretchen was struggling, too, and Amelia had to wait while the maid helped the slowcoaches complete their task. She found herself looking at Charlotte and Bella. Charlotte had an anxious, rather glum expression on her face that contrasted markedly with her hauteur of the night before. One taste of the tawse and she is terrified of the man, thought Amelia, a little contemptuously, wondering how she would have stood up to the rigours of Hope Hall.
Still, she had to admit the young aristocrat looked exceedingly lovely in her little corset and bizarre, side-laced drawers. The corset left the girl’s firm young breasts entirely bare, and Amelia felt a sudden urge to take one of Charlotte’s pink nipples between her teeth. The desire provoked a maddening tingle in her clitoris, already being tantalised by the pressure of the taut cotton drawers.
Quickly, Amelia turned her attention to Bella. It was an alternative that did not offer much relief. Bella looked equally toothsome in her excruciatingly constrictive undergarments, her long legs and powerful thighs emphasised by the tight grip of the whipping drawers. Linnet looked even lovelier, if that were possible, her chubby little bottom sheathed impossibly tightly by the thin white cambric stuff. Amelia closed her eyes and tried to think of something that would not provoke the tingling. When she did so, however, she found herself imagining the merciless gaze of the Reverend Richard Dawes.
‘Right,’ Faith said, when Gretchen and Kirsty’s laces had, at last, been attached. ‘Time to tighten up.’
‘Arabella, you are thirty seconds late. I shall give you three strokes of the cane after breakfast.’ The Reverend Dawes snapped his fob watch shut as the last of his trainees sat down, rather gingerly, at the table. Glancing across at her, Amelia noticed the usually rosy-cheeked Bella had gone a little pale.
A plate of porridge had been placed in front of her by Rose, the Reverend’s second maid. Amelia looked at it without relish as Arabella was given her plate.
‘Now, girls, let us say grace together,’ the Reverend said as he took a plate of bacon, eggs and mushrooms from the maid.
‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ Amelia kept her eyes on her plate of porridge as she spoke, but oatmeal was not what the familiar words brought to her mind that morning.
‘Amen.’ There was a real and ominous relish in the way the Reverend Dawes pronounced the word.
‘Tuck in, girls,’ he said as he attacked his breakfast. ‘You will all need to keep your strength up. I mean to exercise your bodies, as well as your mischievous minds!’
There was a strange atmosphere around the table. Amelia did not dare leave her porridge, but she found the unsugared gruel very hard to eat. Indeed, she found it hard to think about anything but the extraordinary friction produced by her flogging drawers.
Before Faith had let them don their uniforms she had gone around each of the girls, tightening a vertical side lace here, pulling on the horizontal thong that linked the drawers to the corset there, until each of the trainee’s drawers gripped her loins tighter than an anaconda’s coils. The net result was that Amelia felt she was being slowly crushed by the things. The upwards pressure of the lacing was so great that a crease of cotton had been pulled right up, and into, her labial folds. Simply sitting still was a distracting ordeal. Moving even a fraction brought tears to her eyes.
Amelia somehow swallowed another spoonful, and looked across the table. Charlotte had a glazed expression in her brown eyes and seemed to be having trouble eating, too. Linnet was pale and kept her eyes downcast as she slowly chewed with the demeanour of someone eating worms. Bella was visibly fidgeting, reaching down from time to time, all too obviously trying to ease the pressure of her drawers. Only Kirsty ate the porridge with what seemed like relish, though, sitting next to her, Gretchen had scraped her bowl quite clean.
‘Well, girls, I think it is time to start your lessons.’ The Reverend Dawes put down his knife and fork and looked around. ‘Six months is not very long, and we shall need to use every second of it if I am to have a hope of introducing you to the benefits of truly rigorous discipline.’ He looked around the table, fixing each of the six girls with his gimlet stare in turn. ‘And correcting your all too manifold faults.’
Amelia kept her gaze on her plate, but she sensed his gaze fall on her, a cold prickle of fear stroking her spine until she felt his hungry stare pass on to rest upon another victim.
‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘I think we might as well make a start. If you have finished, girls, we might go over to the schoolroom. Bella can have her three for lateness, and both she and Amelia will get six of the best for fidgeting at breakfast. Well, girls, what are you waiting for? Let us get on with the day!’
Swoosh... Crack!
‘Oooh... ah... si-six, ah, oh, th-thank you, sir.’
The contortions of Bella’s face were truly a sight to be seen. Amelia might have enjoyed the vision a lot more, however, had she not known she was about to take the girl’s place.
The schoolroom was a grim little hall with bare floorboards and a few barred windows. Six small desks with attached wooden seats were arranged in two ranks of three, facing the front. There awaited a table and a blackboard for the Reverend and, with sickening inevitability, a rack supporting a selection of belts, paddles and canes.
‘I apologise for the spartan nature of the room, girls,’ the Reverend Dawes had said jovially as his class filed glumly into the cheerless chamber. ‘We can decorate it as we go along.’
Bella had been sent to select a whippy rattan cane and made to bend over the Reverend’s big table, facing the rest of the class. Without more ado he had taken his jacket off and set to his work. Amelia nursed few illusions about the Reverend’s zeal, but her heart nearly stopped as she watched Arabella being magisterially thrashed.
The man was truly a brute, she thought. Each meaty crack as his cane lashed into Arabella’s flesh produced a fluttery burst of panic in Amelia’s belly as if in echo. Utter agony distorted Arabella’s lovely face as the next stroke fell. Amelia watched, transfixed, at her little desk. Was there no escape from this? she asked herself in growing terror. Her hammering heart answered in the negative.
The class watched in appalled, almost paralysed silence. The only sound apart from that of stick on tender flesh was Arabella’s whimpering as she tried to gain control of herself.
‘If you have quite finished grunting and groaning, girl,’ the Reverend said disdainfully at last, ‘that completes the six for fidgeting. I hope you will remember them and, in future, sit still for your meals.’ He looked up at the other girls, his gaze raking the rows of desks, for all the world like a hunting harrier quartering a reed bed in search of prey. Amelia sat so still that, for a moment, she quite forgot to breathe.
‘I shall operate a system of escalating tariffs. That means you will not receive the same punishment for a repeat offence,’ the Reverend informed them. There was nothing jovial about his tone now. His face was set and his voice as dry as the dust of any catacomb. ‘I require and expect improvement. If it is not forthcoming, you must expect more severe penalties for further infractions. I trust I make myself clear?’
He stepped towards Arabella’s bottom and reached down. Amelia could not see what he was doing from her seat, but it seemed he was squeezing the recently caned flesh, for Arabella’s face contorted in pain.
‘This is a magnificent bottom, Arabella. Fine and big and firm. Excellent for the rod, if I may say so. Such well developed buttocks and strong thighs will take a healthy count.’
The expression on Arabella’s face had changed to rather startled distraction. The girl closed her eyes tight and bit her bottom lip. Amelia could not but wonder what the Reverend was doing with his fingers. She felt a surge of anger course through her. How dare the swine? she thought with impotent fury. Has he no respect at all for the proprieties?
‘Now, your three for tardiness, my dear.’
The expression on Bella’s face changed once again, becoming a picture of apprehension in a second. Without more ado the Reverend Dawes stepped back and raised his cane. Amelia watched the yellow stick go up; she could no more have looked away from it than she could have ignored a snake that was poised to strike.
Whoosh... Crack! The venomous stroke was too fast to follow.
‘Ooh... ah, ah, ah. Seven, th-thank you, sir,’ Arabella managed between gasps as tears coursed down her flushed cheeks.
With every lash, Amelia knew, her own appointment with that blistering rod was coming closer. Her heart was thumping in her breast now. Goosepimples bloomed like a rash of tiny flowers on her arms and legs. If only the damned drawers were not so distractingly tight. If only she had made more effort to sit still. If only...
The cane came down again, the snapping sound echoing around the little schoolroom. Amelia heard Gretchen, who was seated to her right, give a terrified squeak. There was a long pause before Bella could say anything. She merely grimaced and made a strange hissing sound.
‘Oooh... that was tight, sir! Ah, eight... thank you, sir.’
The last stroke was a sizzler. Amelia knew before it struck. This time the sound of the cane cutting through the air was the leaner, meaner whooshing of a nastier blow. She heard the ripping of thin fabric, blended with the sound of hard cane punishing firm flesh. Then all she heard was Bella’s howling. Meaty bottom or not, a glance at the girl’s face, let alone the shrieking she was making, would have told any observer what a wicked stroke the Reverend had unleashed.
Bella’s control seemed to have deserted her completely. She stood, though she had received no permission, and clutched her bottom cheeks, jiggling up and down and howling. The Reverend stood aside and watched her with a cocked eyebrow and sceptical expression, waiting patiently until his victim settled down.
‘Oooh! Sorry, sir – th-that was a real blisterer...’ Bella got back into position hurriedly. ‘Nine, sir, th-thank you, sir,’ she gasped.
‘A disgraceful exhibition, girl. You have earned yourself a detention this evening. I shall essay to instil in you a little self-control. One thing you will learn here, girls,’ he turned his gimlet gaze on the rest of the class, ‘is how to comport yourself like well brought up young ladies whilst under the corrective rod. Very well, Bella, you may resume your place. Now then...’
The blood began to pound in Amelia’s temples as she found herself transfixed by the Reverend’s gaze. He swung the cane casually and Amelia found her eyes drawn to the thing and then back to his pitiless stare.
‘Amelia, my dear. Perhaps you would care to step this way.’
‘Now then, girls, who can tell me what this is? Amelia, surely you must know?’
Amelia blinked and tried to focus on the figure in front of her, a feat that took every ounce of her self-control.
‘A – a martinet, sir?’
The Reverend Dawes gave her a nod of approbation and swished the wicked little whip through the air for emphasis.
‘It is indeed a martinet. Gretchen, stand out, girl, and bend over the table.’
Amelia was in a state of such distraction that she could hardly concentrate on what was happening. Her own caning, by some miracle, had not split her whipping drawers, but the Reverend had laid the six strokes on with real zeal, perilously close together, just below the middle of her bottom. These welted buttocks were now throbbing painfully against the hard wood of the bench seat of her desk as Amelia struggled to sit still.
The flogging drawers seemed to have become even tighter, the act of sitting down increasing the remorseless pressure against her crotch. The corset made her sit up rigidly, and if she wanted to write in the notebook on the desk before her, her only option was to lean forward, stays creaking, from the waist. At least this meant the fiendish tension on the lattice of lacing temporarily eased, reducing the force that tugged the cotton of her drawers into her most delicate folds. Sitting back brought back every ounce of excruciating pressure. She hoped the Reverend would soon make her write in the book again.
‘Write it down in your books, girls, and draw an illustration, while Gretchen helps me to demonstrate the effect.’
The first lesson of the course was ‘instruments of correction’. After caning Arabella and Amelia, the Reverend Dawes had informed them that every week would start with this cheery subject.
‘It will benefit you greatly, girls, to learn the names and uses of the principal implements for bestowing corporal correction. Now, as we have two miscreants to chastise, I suggest we begin the lesson with an introduction to the rattan cane.’
After the caning, Charlotte had been called out to help demonstrate the efficacy of hand spanking. She had proved a refractory subject, squealing and kicking mightily as she was spanked over the Reverend’s knee and receiving a detention as a result of the fuss she made. In contrast, Kirsty had taken several tawse strokes on the hand with a practised impassivity that bordered on insouciance. Now, it seemed, it was Gretchen’s turn.
The older woman glanced back at her companions mournfully, as she walked towards the front of the class.
‘Bend over the table and hoist your skirts. No, the other way. Let the girls see that great big bum!’
Gretchen bent over the table reluctantly, her bottom pointing towards Amelia and seeming even bigger than before, gripped as it was in the impossibly tight cotton of her whipping drawers. The Reverend put a hand on the mounds, almost reverently. Gretchen gave a little wail of fear.
‘You have a fine bottom, my dear, made for whipping.’ The clergyman stroked the tautly sheathed rounds appraisingly. He took his time, apparently quite unconcerned about what his audience might think. Gretchen whimpered in anticipation and Amelia watched, dry-mouthed, as the woman’s buttocks flinched.
At last the Reverend stood back and raised the martinet. It had a turned wooden handle, about a foot in length, and a dozen rather stiff looking leather thongs, each a little longer.
Swish...! The thongs whipped through the air and across Gretchen’s bottom. She gave a gasp and shifted her stance.
‘If I wished to administer a proper martinet flogging, I should require this girl to uncover.’
The Reverend struck again. Amelia blinked as she watched Gretchen’s cheeks quiver like a tuning fork in response to the impact of the thongs. Gretchen gave a prolonged moan and raised her right leg, before putting it down again.
‘However, as this is a demonstration rather than a punishment, the subject has been allowed the modesty of retaining her drawers.’
The third stroke lashed the back of Gretchen’s right thigh, hissing into the tight cotton that gripped her limb and wrenching a strangulated groan from her lips.
‘Which, of course, means she can barely feel it.’
This time he lashed the left thigh. Gretchen gave a startled cry and stamped both feet in turn.
‘The lashes being, after all, rather light, and the implement being one merely for surface scouring of the skin.’
The final stroke was harder than before, and whipped into the centre of Gretchen’s bottom. The woman shook her blonde head, stamping her feet and snorting in a way that put Amelia in mind of a carthorse galled by hornets.
‘Not a very good show, Gretchen. I expect better comportment under correction, especially for such a gentle tickling as that. You will take a detention, too. Now, dear, back to your seat and draw a nice picture of the martinet for me.’
‘The best silver for the Reverend,’ Faith said as she straightened the tablecloth, ‘plain pewter for the girls.’
She used the lace trim of her apron to measure the edges of the cloth, keen to ensure it was placed evenly over the table. The Reverend Dawes was quite capable of producing a ruler and measuring the overhang at either side, punishing any discovered slovenliness with a cane stroke for every eighth of an inch judged out of place.
‘Pewter is better than those little sluts deserve,’ Rose spat, polishing the Reverend’s silver cutlery with no less concentration.
Faith smiled as she began setting out the place mats. Rose seemed to be having difficulty adjusting to the new arrivals. The red-haired girl was jealous, she supposed. For her part, Faith was rather glad to see the house filled with vivacious girls. Anyway, she reasoned, as she positioned the last mat, with six pert new bottoms to preoccupy the Reverend’s disciplinary zeal, life was sure to be a little easier for the maids.
She hurried to the pantry for the butter dish and cruet. As she placed them on the table Faith heard emphatic footsteps stalking down the hall. The familiar fluttering in her belly began at once. She felt a sudden guilty fear, as if he could somehow have read her hopes that the trainees might cause a distraction and spare her some of her master’s more rigorous attentions. Spare her tender bottom, anyway.
‘There you are.’ The Reverend looked from Rose to Faith and back again with a fierce hunger. There was a husky, slightly strained tone in his voice. Though she kept her eyes downcast, Faith had glimpsed the cane in his hand as he entered. There was no doubt about it. The master’s blood was up. He seemed to be making some sort of choice.
‘Faith, bedroom, stripped!’ he growled. ‘Rose, present!’
Faith fled, heart pounding in her breast. She recognised the symptoms, although she had never seen the Reverend Dawes quite so furiously aroused. If that was the effect teaching his class had on him, then her earlier hopes were perfectly forlorn.
Rose must have recognised his mood, too, and moved quickly, in a rustle of silk, to raise her skirts and bend over the back of a dining chair. Even though Faith fairly scurried to the door, she heard the whooshing of the cane and a meaty crack of impact as she fled. The sound echoed in her ears as she hurried up the stairway to the Reverend’s bedroom. She paused before the door and took a deep breath before entering, for this sanctum always filled her with a sense of dread and awe.
The Reverend’s room was large and luxuriantly furnished. At first sight it was conventionally decorated and thoroughly respectable. Faith knew what the engravings on the walls depicted, however. Long evenings spent chained to the brass bedstead, awaiting her master’s pleasure, had given her the leisure to admire the draughtsman’s skill, if not his choice of subject matter. The prints depicted the flogging of comely young ladies, of all races and complexions, from around the world.
Faith found these pictures exerted a horrid fascination, but she knew she had no time to peruse the scenes today. How long would Rose’s plump bottom distract him? she wondered as she quickly unbuttoned her dress. The answer came almost at once as the door flew open.
‘Good God,’ he bellowed, ‘how long does it take you to strip, you lazy little slut?’
Faith had finished struggling out of her uniform. She wore no drawers, only a long black satin corset and silk stockings, but the corset was a devil to get off.
‘Leave it!’ he said hoarsely as her fingers began to tug at the beast’s front fastenings. ‘Come here and get down on your knees.’
Faith needed no further bidding. As quickly as she could she scuttled over and sank to her knees before his towering figure. The only sounds in the room for a long moment were the ticking of the mantel clock and the creaking of her corset as she got into position.
‘Flies,’ he growled.
Faith knew her fate now as her fluttering fingers unbuttoned the fly of his coarse tweed trousers. The cane swished in his right hand still, cutting through the air impatiently as she completed her task. His left hand caused the blood to surge to her cheeks, however, for in that he held the butter dish.
His erect manhood sprang out of his fly like some long-incarcerated prisoner, suddenly released. The sight of it, as always, filled Faith with almost reverential awe. She bowed her head towards his purplish glans and began to lick.
‘No!’ The slap caught her across the face, knocking Faith sprawling sideways across the carpet with a gasp. ‘Not today, you greedy little slut!’
The Reverend seemed to be having trouble maintaining his self-control, not a phenomenon Faith had often witnessed before.
‘Bend over the end of the bed,’ he ordered.
With a whimper, Faith hurried to obey. Her corset creaked lustily in protest as she struggled against the resilient whalebone stays. Feet wide apart, for this position was not new to her – and the penalty for closing her thighs had been enthusiastically demonstrated time and again – she clutched the satin eiderdown in desperate hands and waited for her bottom to explode with pain.
‘Do you need a few stripes to warm you up, girl?’ The Reverend sounded very strained now.
‘No.’ Her own voice sounded weak with fear. ‘Th-thank you, sir...’ Faith scarcely dared believe she might escape a thrashing at this stage, but his question had sounded genuine enough.
The cane landed on the eiderdown beside her right hand. A startled gurgle escaped from deep in her throat as strong fingers probed. ‘Good God,’ the Reverend’s voice rumbled close to her ear, ‘you little slut. You’re dripping like a tap.’
Faith felt herself blush to the roots of her hair as he continued his brusque appraisal of her state of arousal. He gave a low chuckle that made her want to disappear with shame. Then she felt his fingers withdraw and pat her bottom fondly.
‘Your juices are running down the insides of your legs.’
There was a moment’s pause and then she felt his finger probe her anus.
‘Hold still, you saucy bitch,’ he murmured as he applied the butter. ‘I shall still give you a few licks with the stick if you do not keep that sweet bottom in place.’
Faith could not prevent a moan escaping. She had no wish to earn herself a whipping, but the maddening sensation of his lubricated finger as it explored her anal ring was driving her way beyond distraction. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed to stay in position as he teased the sphincter muscle into relaxation. All Faith could do was to bite her bottom lip and grip the eiderdown in white-knuckled hands.
There came another pause. Her corset creaked a little as she failed to keep quite still. The mantel clock continued to tick away ominously. Still, she was sure she could make out something else. A quiet, rhythmic noise that could only be the heart-stopping, toe-curling, clitoris-tickling sound of a man diligently lubricating his erection with best butter.
‘Ooh...!’
‘Quiet!’ he snarled, sounding to her terrified ears more savage dog than man.
Faith moaned despite his order as she felt his glans nuzzle against the ring of tender tissue. She let out another little cry as the nuzzling became a push. Then she groaned as his lubricated cockhead slipped inside. Her whole body squirmed in response.
‘Wriggle all you like, you won’t escape me now, you little slut!’ the Reverend chuckled as he worked himself, inch by inch, into her hole. Faith whimpered as his great cock pushed deeper inside her. She would split, surely. It was too big. She was too tight. A gurgling noise came from deep in her throat as she squirmed helplessly on the relentless fleshy skewer.
Faith turned her head and sought respite from the sensation by biting into her own naked shoulder. Surely it was not this big before?
Suddenly, the strong hands that had gripped her hips reached around and grasped the top of her corset, unhooking the front of the garment with almost contemptuous ease. Faith, whose eyes were screwed tight closed, felt her full breasts spring out of their prison.
‘Ooh, sir...’ she gasped as he took her breasts in his hands, kneading the tender flesh with a brusqueness that was very close to painful. She squealed as he thrust himself ever deeper, completely captive in her master’s iron grip. A growling sound escaped him as he reamed her. Faith had never heard anything quite like it. The Reverend Dawes took her engorged nipples between finger and thumb and twisted until she shrieked in mindless response.
Faith had been buggered before, over this very bedstead, but this time there was something new; a more furious intensity. The Reverend thrust deep inside her, then eased his cock at least halfway out. Then Faith squealed like a piglet as he pistoned in again. Dawes fucked her ruthlessly. She shrieked as he buried his teeth in the back of her neck.
‘Please,’ she moaned, completely lost in a red mist of sensation, ‘I must...’
Normally Faith would never have dared ask it, let alone beg, but the buggering was taking her to a place somewhere beyond fear and pain. Amazingly, the Reverend responded, releasing her left breast and dropping his hand, searching out the necessary place.
‘Oh, oh, yes... don’t stop,’ she moaned as he withdrew and then thrust deep inside once again. His hand had found its target, closing over her crotch, and her pelvis did its best to move in response. Each brutal thrust of his cock now forced her forward, grinding her clitoris against the heel of his hand. It did not take many strokes before her body simply exploded with pleasure.
‘Oh! Ah! Yes, yes, yes, yes!’ Faith howled as ecstasy engulfed her, barely aware of what she was saying or doing. Perhaps it was her abandoned bucking that triggered her ravisher’s response, or the convulsive tightening of her anal ring around his cock as she squirmed in her climax. Whatever the catalyst, she felt him grind his manhood even harder into her rear and the air was filled with the blasphemous oaths that frequently preceded the Reverend’s thunderous ejaculations. Swept away on a tidal wave of pleasure though she was, Faith could have sworn she felt something hot and wet and impossibly copious hose deep in her entrails.
Her master recovered himself first, although his erection was slow to subside and he still filled her.
‘Come on,’ he chuckled, releasing a throbbing nipple to slap her cheek gently.
Awareness of her situation seeped into Faith’s mind all to quickly. She was still bent over the end of the bedstead, the Reverend Dawes’ manhood still wedged deep inside her. Opening her eyes, the first thing she saw was the cane, lying on the coverlet. She pushed away the memory of abandoned behaviour in her crisis.
Strong hands gripped her corseted waist and she was lifted, still impaled, and carried around to the bed. Only then did he pull her up and off him, with an audible plop. Faith found herself held out, stockinged feet some inches from the floor, before he tossed her easily on to the bed.
‘Grip the bars behind you, girl, and spread them.’
Faith did not need telling twice. On her back, she reached behind to grip the bars at the head of the brass bedstead, making sure her legs were spread wide before she dared turn to her master.
He was naked now, washing his detumescent cock with water from a bowl. Faith watched her master’s lean body with a sort of anxious admiration. As he towelled his manhood dry it began to swell and stiffen again. He turned to her and his cock twitched in his hand as he perused her. Faith felt her whole body quiver under his gaze. She had to grip the bars tight to fight the urge to cover her exposed cunny.
‘Right, you saucy little baggage,’ he growled, ‘ready to go again?’
‘Would you like some of this on yon weals, lass?’ Kirsty proffered the cold cream with a cheery smile.
Amelia paused. The sense of relief she had felt in loosening the dreadful drawers was passing, and it occurred to her that the Scottish girl might speak to her more respectfully, but the cold cream did look inviting, and her bottom still throbbed so...
‘Very well,’ she said with rather ill grace, after a moment’s hesitation, resolving that she would not put herself over Kirsty’s lap. Kirsty did not seem put out, however, but was apparently content to smooth the soothing ointment over Amelia’s welts as she stood in front of her.
‘God, Bella, the man is an absolute brute. These weals are raised like burns...’
‘Ow, not so rough, Charlotte, they still sting like the devil.’
Charlotte smoothed cold cream on her friend’s martyred rump while Kirsty performed the same office for Amelia. Gretchen fiddled with her drawer laces whilst Linnet watched the others with wide eyes. Having been granted permission to unlace for ‘quiet time’ after lunch, all the girls were now naked except for their silk stockings. Only Gretchen still struggled to unfasten her drawers.
‘Ach, it is a knot I cannot undo...’ she muttered as she struggled fruitlessly with the lacing. Amelia could not help but watch her with amusement. Despite her cruelly tight stays and drawers, Gretchen had eaten greedily at luncheon. Now, as she battled to remove her constrictive underclothes, her face had gone quite puce. At that moment there was a loud ripping sound and every pair of eyes in the dormitory turned her way.
‘Oh no, what is...?’ Gretchen craned around to try to see the source of the sound.
‘That’s torn it!’ Bella chortled.
‘I wonder what the punishment is for that?’ Amelia said slyly.
The woman’s drawers had split from top to bottom along the seam that ran between her bottom cheeks. Instantly several inches of pink flesh appeared in the gap. Gretchen felt the damage mournfully.
‘You think he will punish me?’ she asked fearfully.
‘Course he will, you fat trollop!’ Bella chortled.
‘But yours split, too...’ Gretchen looked at the other girl, tears brimming in her pale blue eyes.
‘Different,’ said Bella, getting up off Charlotte’s lap and patting her own bottom ruefully. ‘The Reverend split them with the cane. Don’t you remember? He said it was no disgrace to have one’s drawers split by the rod, but if we were to rip them through poor deportment we should expect no mercy.’
Gretchen had finally got her lacing loosened and pulled her corset off. Her plump body was pink and softly inviting, and the mournful expression in her eyes almost melted Amelia’s heart.
‘No mercy,’ she repeated distantly.
‘There is no mercy for any of us from that terrible man,’ Charlotte said bitterly as she sat on her little bed.
‘No, the Reverend Dawes is not known for it,’ Amelia said, unable to quite rid her mind’s eye of that pitiless grey gaze.
‘He is a real tartar, that’s for sure,’ Bella said cheerily. There was something hot in her eyes, however, that Amelia found she did not like at all.
‘Away, he’s no’ that bad,’ Kirsty said calmly as she got into her own bed.
Five pairs of eyes looked at her in complete astonishment.
‘Not that bad?’ Charlotte spluttered, utterly incredulous.
‘I do not understand,’ Gretchen gasped, amazed.
‘You must be joking, surely?’ Amelia said, blinking at the figure in the bed.
‘What constitutes bad in your book, then?’ asked Bella with a laugh, but she was not destined to get an answer.
Kirsty’s bed was at the far end of the dormitory and all the other girls were staring at her, and away from the door. Something in the girl’s green eyes sent a sudden prickle of cold fear down Amelia’s spine.
‘Quiet time,’ the Reverend Dawes said in a calm but displeased tone, ‘is a time for quiet rest, not idle chatter.’
There was a little chorus of shocked gasps as the six young ladies blushed scarlet and did their best to shield their naked charms from the intruder’s gaze. The Reverend, however, seemed quite untroubled by what seemed to Amelia the scandalous impropriety of the situation.
‘As you all seem to have so much energy to spare we must put it to constructive use. Faith will issue you each with sporting kit. I think it is time you girls were introduced to the wholesome pleasure of a bracing, cross-country run.’
Amelia stared at the new outfit with utter horror, but it was Charlotte who voiced the girls’ common concern.
‘Really, this is too much. He cannot intend for us to go out in public in these,’ she spluttered, her pretty face quite crimson.
Charlotte had already pulled on the white shorts and short woollen singlet Faith had brought up to the dormitory at the Reverend’s departure. The clinging jersey of the singlet did little to disguise the shape of her firm young breasts; indeed, Amelia could make out the girl’s jutting little nipples perfectly clearly. The shorts were legless and seemed to be skin-tight. Knee socks and white plimsolls completed the strip.
‘Come on, Charlotte, we had better make the best of it.’ Bella’s statuesque body looked particularly splendid in the gym kit, her full breasts straining perilously at her singlet whilst her long legs and powerful thighs were shown off by the shorts. With a sigh, Amelia pulled up her own shorts. After the constriction of the flogging drawers they felt quite comfortable, though there was no denying the fact that they were almost obscenely tight.
Pulling the vest on hurriedly, Amelia glanced around. Charlotte was still blushing furiously and looking utterly aghast. Kirsty, as usual, seemed quite unworried by the outfit, which hugged her generous curves most flatteringly.
It was Gretchen who looked most absurd in the get-up. She blushed a deeper shade of beetroot even than Charlotte, aware that her body simply was not made for such athletic attire. Her breasts seemed about to burst out of the flimsy constriction of the singlet, whilst her shorts were barely able to contain her behind. Gretchen’s more mature features and matronly figure combined to make the girlish little gym outfit seem quite absurd.
‘I really would not protest, if I were you,’ Faith said softly in response to Charlotte’s shrill complaints, though she also looked meaningfully at each of the other girls in turn.
Another man might have looked ridiculous in those baggy khaki shorts, Amelia thought as she stood in the line of girls outside the rectory. The Reverend Dawes in shorts and singlet, however, appeared even more formidable than he did in dog collar and tweed jacket. Partly it was the fact that more of his body was revealed. His biceps might not have been massive, but there was a well-honed power about the man’s lean musculature that Amelia found strangely compelling in an ominous way.
Then there was his carriage. As always he stood erect, shoulders back, stance well balanced. The gym kit made him look more like an army drill instructor than a prelate. Certainly Amelia felt every bit the hapless conscript, quivering before his baleful gaze.
The final element making him seem so formidable was the thing he swung casually in his right hand as he glared at the glum row of blushing trainees.
‘After luncheon, every day, we shall have a spot of exercise. Whilst the weather is fine, this will be a nice long run. Make no mistake, girls,’ he slapped the short riding crop in his hand for emphasis, ‘I mean to mould your bodies, as well as your minds.’
He produced a stopwatch from one of the pockets of his shorts. ‘The course will take us into and around the grounds of Hope Hall. The Marquis and Marchioness have graciously given me their permission for us to use the park. I am sure Amelia in particular will appreciate their generosity.’
Amelia stared at the ground and clenched her fists.
‘It takes me just under half an hour to complete the run,’ the Reverend continued. ‘I shall allow one hour today, as some of you,’ he gave Gretchen a meaningful stare, ‘are flabby and unfit. Take more than one hour and, make no mistake, it will be a good hard slippering on your return.’
A slight sound behind her caused Amelia to turn. Faith and Rose, both attired in gym kit, came out of the rectory. Amelia remembered seeing Rose hauling the Reverend’s pony-cart in the Silver Cup. As a loser the girl had been flogged unmercifully. A few fading welts could yet be seen on her pale upper thighs, but otherwise she seemed to have recovered.
‘Rose will lead off as she knows the course. Do not go too fast, girl; the others will need to keep you in sight. Faith will bring up the rear and keep an eye out for stragglers.’
The Reverend looked at the quailing row of girls, stopwatch in one hand and riding crop in the other, and it seemed to Amelia that he almost smiled. ‘All right, girls,’ he said quietly, ‘go!’
Even before the run started terror had engulfed her. As soon as she heard the dread phrase, ‘cross-country run’, Gretchen had felt sick to her stomach. She knew the other girls were, without exception, younger, slimmer and fitter than her. There was no doubt they would be faster too. The next hour or so, she knew with hideous certainty, was going to be the purest form of hell.
Nor was she mistaken. Rose had led the little pack of runners off up the rectory drive, the Reverend running back and forth along the line of girls, shouting encouragement and swishing his crop by way of punctuation. By the time they reached the road out of Hatherby Gretchen was already last. Faith ran beside her with a concerned expression.
‘Come on, Gretchen, you will have to run a bit faster, at least.’
The road out of Hatherby wound gently upwards on its way towards Hope Hall. This easy slope was quite enough to leave Gretchen gasping within the first few dozen yards. Despairingly she watched Charlotte inexorably pull away. Though she was the next slowest of the group, every time Gretchen looked up, panting, the girl was more distant.
‘Hurry it up! Hurry it up!’ Gretchen looked up just in time to see the Reverend Dawes lay a sharp stroke with his crop across Charlotte’s well-filled shorts. The crack of crop on bottom came back to her as she laboured up the hill, as did Charlotte’s startled gasp of pain.
She knew in her soul what was coming, but it did not come for a short while yet. The Reverend concentrated a little longer on Charlotte, chivvying her up the slope with a judicious mixture of sharp strokes of the crop and blood-curdling threats.
Gretchen had a stitch by the time she reached the little gate in Hope Hall’s surrounding walls. Tears misted her eyes as she stumbled up towards the iron gate and the man who stood awaiting her there.
‘Not a very good show, is it Gretchen?’ he asked mildly as she reached the gate.
‘Ha... I... oh, I can’t...’ she gasped as she staggered through.
The Reverend Dawes fell into a slow lope at her side.
‘Faith, go and up and keep an eye on Lady Charlotte, she is falling somewhat behind,’ he said, breathing but little more heavily than usual, while Gretchen was now gasping desperately for air. Faith increased her pace and soon disappeared from view amongst the rhododendrons and camellias that lined the gravel drive.
Gretchen tried. True terror ensured no one ever tried harder, but it was no use. Too many cream cakes and lazy afternoons had taken their inevitable toll.
‘You are a fat, lazy trollop, aren’t you, girl?’
Gretchen did not have the breath to answer. Between her broken breathing and the sound of feet on gravel she did not even hear the warning whistle of the crop.
It caught her square across the broad beam of her bottom and pain lanced through her, so sharp that it turned a laboured gasp into a sob.
‘Come along, you great tub of lard!’ Again the crop cracked across her behind. Gretchen gasped and stumbled and this time she fell. Too winded to rise, she panted, quivering like a jelly, as the gravel of the drive abraded her hands and knees.
‘Come on, get up!’ The Reverend Dawes ordered pitilessly.
‘I c-can’t, s-sir,’ she panted, the stitch still piercing her side.
‘Very well, you lazy slut. Stick that fat bottom up and out.’
Still panting, her hams trembling violently, Gretchen somehow forced her bottom to obey.
There was a whistle and a crack, and she was in agony. She had neither enough breath to howl her distress nor enough time to catch it, before he unleashed the riding crop again.
Amelia’s lungs felt like they were bursting as she hurried through the rhododendrons, desperate to keep Kirsty in view. Leggy Bella had pulled away with Rose right from the start, and Kirsty was evidently also fit but, somehow, Amelia had managed to stay in touch, whilst slowly outpacing Linnet. She did not know what would happen if she lost contact with the leaders in this race, but she was learning how the Reverend Dawes’ mind worked, and she did not like the prospect one little bit.
There was something else on her mind as she scrambled along the drive that wound through the overcast shrubbery. The course was taking her ever closer to Hope Hall. To her relief the leading runners did not take the route that led to the Hall’s courtyard and stable block, but it was short-lived relief, for she realised the route would take them in front of the great house.
As she rounded the corner she knew the worst. A group of elegantly dressed gentlefolk were sitting on the bench before the house and taking tea. Mortified, Amelia recognised the relatives who had so cruelly consigned her to this fate. Lord and Lady Feversham – Amelia’s Uncle Alexander and Aunt Alicia – sat sipping tea with that damned young dandy Jamie Fanshawe and her thrice cursed cousin, Clara. They turned at the sound of her feet pounding the path and smiled smugly as she panted her way towards them. Amelia clenched her teeth. She might have known the Reverend Dawes would not miss an opportunity to humiliate her further. The company clapped languidly as Rose led Bella past them and a suppressed surge of fury took over Amelia’s proud soul.
Why should she be humiliated like this? Why should that little blonde slut Clara, who was younger than Amelia by almost a year, get to sit in comfort and laugh at her as she stumbled past? Tears of frustrated anger misted Amelia’s eyes.
‘Come on, Amelia, pick those legs up, you old slowcoach!’
Jamie’s amused comment as Amelia pounded up the drive towards her relatives made her want to weep. Cousin Clara could not disguise an amused smile. Lady Alicia let out a peal of laughter and Lord Alex clapped languidly as she laboured past the party. Desperate to get out of sight of the grinning foursome, Amelia put down her head, ignored her aching legs and ran.
Kirsty was fit, but she was somewhat shorter than Amelia, whose long legs soon ate up the gap between them. Amelia overtook her even before the course wound down the rise that was known as Holly Hill.
To Amelia’s distress, Rose turned at the bottom and ran along the edge of the lake, back across the front of the house and in full view of the watching company. There was nothing she could do about this, but she thanked God that, this time, the audience would be a good deal further away. Amelia ran as fast as she could along the lakeshore, desperate to get out of sight of her tormentors. So fast did she run that by the time the course wound back up into the woods and out of sight of the house, she had almost caught up with Bella and Rose.
The effort caught up with her as she pounded after their backs. Her lungs were bursting now and her thigh muscles shrieking their distress. Amelia gasped and slowed a little, thankful that Gretchen had delayed the Reverend way back along the course. Then she raised her head to follow Rose’s route. What she saw made her knees go weak.
The Reverend Dawes was standing by the side of the path, leaning casually against a tree and looking perfectly collected. With horror, Amelia realised he must have cut across the route of the run to intercept them. As Rose and Bella ran past him he swung his arm almost lazily and laid a stroke of his crop across the tight seat of Bella’s shorts.
Amelia’s stomach contracted at the sound of the impact. Bella stumbled and gave a little gasp of pain, then she was running even faster, away into the woods. Now there was no one between Amelia and the smiling Reverend Dawes. She put her head down and tried to ignore him, running as fast as her aching legs and laboured breathing would allow.
‘Come on, Amelia, buck up. You can do better than that!’ the Reverend called out to her as she drew near. As she drew level, she saw him smile and raise the crop.
The stroke caught her right across the centre of her bottom. The pain was so intense that Amelia closed her eyes for a second, and narrowly avoided colliding with a tree. A strange, agonised hiss came out of her lips, but as the pain subsided she congratulated herself that at least she had got past the waiting Dawes.
She heard his step and the whistle of the crop a split second before pain shot through the top of her right thigh.
‘I said buck up! Come on, girl, pick those legs up now!’
There was another whistle and another excruciating crack. Amelia could not stop herself from sobbing as she ran. He kept pace with almost contemptuous ease, raining blistering crop strokes down on her bottom and thighs. She was running as fast as she could manage, but still he whipped her mercilessly on down the little woodland path. Yelping with pain, tears streaming down her face, Amelia stumbled on blindly, anxious to get away from the wicked crop.
So desperate was she, so intensely did her hindquarters burn and her legs ache, that she was not even aware, for the first few seconds, that the punishing rain of crop strokes and the Reverend’s exhortations had ceased. Still she dared not look around in case he was keeping pace behind her, ready to start whipping her again. Instead she gasped lungfuls of air and ran on as fast as ever she could.
The sound of crop on bottom and a cry of pain in Kirsty’s voice behind told her the Reverend’s whip had found another target. Saying a prayer of thanks, she followed the girls ahead back on to the road, and ran down the hill to the rectory with all the concentrated haste of a gazelle pursued by a particularly lean and hungry wolf.
‘Oh, God, I will never survive six months of this!’ Charlotte gasped as the hot water hissed out of the showerheads on to the pink bodies of eight completely naked girls.
Amelia, whose bottom still throbbed like the very devil, knew what Charlotte meant. All the same, the presence of so much fetching female flesh around her made her feel, at least for the moment, slightly more sanguine about her awful fate.
‘Ach, it’s no’ so bad,’ Kirsty said with her usual cheeky grin. ‘Hey, Amelia, want me to soap your back?’
Amelia gave Kirsty a disdainful nod and turned to let her do so. She found herself facing Gretchen, who looked very sorry for herself. Gretchen turned, wincing as the hot water hit her body, and Amelia’s mouth went dry as she stared at the mass of livid welts on the pale mounds of her bottom.
‘You really caught it,’ she said, something in her voice sounding almost like sympathy.
Gretchen turned back and gave her a shy smile. ‘I deserved it, I suppose,’ she said sadly. ‘I am very lazy and very slow.’
‘Well, he did not have to thrash us as brutally as that,’ Charlotte put in, feeling her own well-striped bottom gingerly.
Turning, Amelia was in time to catch the maids, Faith and Rose, exchange a furtive glance.
‘The Reverend,’ Faith said anxiously as she soaped Rose, ‘does not like to have his actions questioned.’
Kirsty handed Amelia the bar of soap with a sardonic smile. Amelia began to soap the girl’s flawless back. Kirsty’s skin was as smooth as wet satin. Amelia tried to ignore the insistent tingling between her legs as she lathered away. ‘And who exactly tells him what is said?’ she asked.
Faith flushed and exchanged a look with Rose again.
‘That’s clear enough,’ Bella put in, having noticed the glance as well. ‘Remember girls, watch what you say around the Reverend’s maids.’
‘No, you don’t understand.’ Faith looked appealingly at the other girls. ‘He has ways of finding things out. If he asks... well, I just have to tell the truth.’
‘I can’t imagine lying to him, if that is what you mean,’ little Linnet said softly as she soaped Gretchen’s back.
The two made a delightful tableau, Amelia thought as she looked over Kirsty’s shoulder at them. Delicate, slender, Linnet with her tight little bottom and exquisite, apple-sized breasts next to big Gretchen, whose breasts were like honeydew melons in comparison.
Kirsty winced as Amelia, a little distracted by this vista, reached her bottom. She stood back and looked down. Six lurid weals still stood out on the girl’s jutting cheeks. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.
‘Och, you’re all right. I’ve had a hell of a lot worse than these wee cleg bites.’
The water ceased and there was a mass sigh of disappointment. She was not the only one who had enjoyed the communal shower, Amelia thought with a smile. As she towelled herself dry she thought about what Faith had said. She imagined herself being interrogated by the Reverend Dawes, his cold eyes holding her in their hypnotic stare. She realised that, even if she could hold her tongue, few of the others would withstand him.
She resolved to be particularly careful about what she said.
A groan from several female mouths brought her out of her reverie. She turned to find that Faith was pointing to a pile of corsets and the dreadful whipping drawers. Amelia’s heart sank at the sight. The tight drawers would be even more galling over a welted bottom.
‘Oh, no,’ she said out loud before she could stop herself, ‘not those bloody monstrosities!’
The Reverend was waiting for the girls as they filed into the classroom. The combination of their impossibly tight drawers, punished bottoms and leg muscles stiff from their exertions ensured that every one of the trainees moved gingerly.
Amelia moved to her desk and stood up straight, anxiously awaiting further orders. The Reverend looked at each of his charges in turn. She swallowed hard as his eyes fixed on hers.
‘All right, sit down,’ he said at last.
Amelia winced, even before her sore bottom met the hard wood of her seat. The action of sitting tautened the cotton of her drawers uncomfortably. Then her martyred flesh did meet unyielding wood, and she winced again.
The Reverend Dawes stood before his table, leaning forward and supporting his powerful frame on straight arms that ended in clenched fists. He raked the rows of trembling girls with his pitiless raptor’s gaze.
‘Only one word could describe the performance of this class today,’ he said slowly. ‘Pathetic!’
Amelia felt her stomach clench as he spat the word viciously.
‘You are a lazy, disobedient, idle, fidgeting shower of brats!’
The Reverend stood back and shook his head in mock sorrow. He turned and strolled over to the rack of straps and canes. There was a horrible silence as he perused his implements at length. No girl dared to make a noise; Amelia barely dared to breathe. Eventually he selected a cane and swished it thoughtfully. Amelia’s knees had started trembling and she simply did not seem to be able to keep them still. The Reverend Dawes turned and stalked towards his class. Amelia’s mouth felt dry as blotting paper.
He walked through the desks until he was behind them. Amelia strained her ears to try to chart his progress, not daring to turn. The tension in the room was dreadful, a suffocating blanket of clammy fear.
‘All of you deserve a salutary thrashing on general principles.’
Amelia closed her eyes at the word ‘thrashing’ and tried to keep the tears at bay. Not more, she prayed. Her bottom was too sore for more. It simply was not possible to bear it...
‘However, in the interests of discipline I must appoint two of you as prefects. Two of you have shown slightly more promise than your wretched companions. These two girls will have the privileges and the responsibility of prefecture. They will have the duty of maintaining order in my absence.’
Let it be me! A faint ghost of hope tiptoed into Amelia’s heart. Please, she prayed silently, let me be a prefect.
‘The prefects will have food and dress privileges. Flogging drawers, for example, will be optional for them, outside of the classroom...’
The idea of being free of those wretched garments, even for part of the time! Amelia wanted it so much that she almost choked with hope. Why was he taking so long to announce his choices? She bit her bottom lip and tried to stay her trembling. The Reverend was playing with them, she realised suddenly, dangling the possibility in front of every girl in the class, simply to have the satisfaction of then snatching it away. Still, she reasoned as his measured footsteps paced behind her, she must be in with a good chance. After all, it would scarcely be Gretchen or Charlotte, and she could not see timid little Linnet being picked. With a sudden thrill, Amelia remembered, she had come in second on the cross-country run.
‘In order to maintain discipline in the dormitory,’ the Reverend continued after a long pause, broken only by his measured tread, ‘prefects will be authorised to administer up to four strokes of the tawse or cane, without reference to me.’
Amelia’s whole body was trembling now. He must pick her, he simply must! The idea of being punished by her fellows was intolerable. On the other hand, the idea of being able to punish these little trollops...
‘Right then,’ Dawes said crisply, stepping back into view as he walked back to his table. He paused, and placing the cane on the table he picked up two enamel badges. He turned to face the class and Amelia dropped her eyes to avoid his gaze.
‘Lady Charlotte Letherbridge-Lacey and the Honourable Amelia Colinbrooke. You are, as you know, the trainees from the most exalted families.’
There was a low growl from Kirsty’s direction. To Amelia’s astonishment, the Reverend merely smiled.
‘I am, of course, excluding barbarous tribal chieftains,’ he said dryly.
Emboldened by her good fortune, her suppressed pride in her ancestry seeping back into her soul, Amelia risked a glance at Charlotte, who smirked back at her. At least the man had the decency to appreciate the importance of good family, Amelia thought. Indeed, she realised, she might not have been entirely fair to the Reverend Dawes in the past, never having really acknowledged the man’s undoubted qualities, not the least of which was judgement.
‘Such a pity, then, that this breeding does not show in your deportment,’ the Reverend said dryly. ‘Mayflies show more fortitude, and I have known farmyard sows with better manners than you two spoilt little brats.’
Hope melted like butter on a griddle. Amelia felt bitter tears well as he chuckled at the disappointed girls.
‘Gretchen, come here, girl.’
Blinking confusedly, Gretchen stepped over to him. Amelia clenched her fists in impotent fury. No, she raged inwardly, not that fat trollop. Surely it cannot be?
The Reverend sat for a moment and perused Gretchen, fingering the badges thoughtfully. Gretchen was clearly agitated; in fact, she was trembling visibly.
‘Shall I make you a prefect, my dear?’
‘Um, I don’t know, sir,’ she mumbled. ‘If you wish...’
The Reverend shook his head. ‘Of course not, you great lump of lard!’ he bellowed at her. He leaped out of his chair and Gretchen flinched away. The Reverend stalked over to a cupboard.
‘I have a special status for you,’ he chuckled as he opened the door, ‘but prefect it is not.’ He pulled a tall, conical cap out of the cupboard. The word ‘dunce’ was inscribed around it in wide letters. He beckoned the now beetroot-faced Gretchen over to the corner and slapped the hat on to her golden head.
‘Very well,’ the Reverend said, picking the badges up from the table once again. ‘Bella and Kirsty, you two will be the prefects.’ He flung the badges over to the named girls.
Amelia tried to blink back the tears of disappointment. The idea of Kirsty and Bella in authority over her tasted like wormwood in her mouth. She almost wished herself back in the nursery of Hope Hall. This course was proving even more dreadful, if possible, than that purgatory had been. A fat tear rolled down Amelia’s cheek and splashed on her bare thigh above the gartered top of her stocking. It was uncanny, she thought glumly; just when things seemed as bad as they could be, the Reverend had the knack of making them even more horrid.
‘Right, girls, dismiss,’ the Reverend said. ‘Tea is in one hour. Bella, Gretchen, Charlotte, I will see you here afterwards for your detention. Oh, and Amelia, perhaps you would care to join us. I will not have pouting or unnecessary blubbing.’
‘Faith!’
There was a note in her master’s voice that made the maid stiffen. She turned from the table she was laying and curtsied.
‘That girl, Linnet,’ his voice was a low growl. Faith knew the tone only too well. ‘Run and fetch her. I will be in my study.’
The door closed with a click. Faith looked up and met the gaze of Rose, who was setting out cutlery. Laying table was getting to be a real hazard.
‘Someone’s for it,’ Rose said, with a glint in her eyes. ‘That little trollop is going to get one sort of rod or another, I should say.’
Faith left her colleague to complete the preparations and hurried up the stairs to the girls’ dormitory. Rose was right, she thought. When her master got into that mood, no girlish bottom within a mile of the rectory was safe. Her own had been spared at lunchtime. To escape twice in the same day would be no less than a miracle.
‘What do you think he wants?’ Linnet’s heels clacked down the corridor forlornly after her a few moments later.
‘I don’t know,’ Faith said. ‘But don’t worry, you’ll soon see.’
The girl looked at her with wide eyes as she knocked on the study door. Faith could not prevent a smile. Linnet certainly looked toothsome in her little uniform. The girl’s hair was caught in a loose ponytail, framing a pretty face that seemed to have gone very pale.
‘Enter.’
Faith took a deep breath and opened the door.
‘Linnet Tremaine, sir,’ she said and waited.
Linnet seemed to be too nervous to move. She stood as if frozen in the doorway.
‘Well, come in, girl,’ the Reverend snarled, ‘for God’s sake!’
Tentatively, Linnet stepped into the gloomy, book-lined study.
‘Close the door, Faith, I might require your help. Bring the little baggage here.’
Faith swallowed hard. She had nursed a hope of quick dismissal to her duties. Instead, she put her hand in the small of Linnet’s back and pushed her towards the Reverend’s large desk, blocking any attempts at escape in case the victim bolted.
The Reverend resumed his seat and perused Linnet, putting his fingertips together and regarding the girl contemplatively. Close behind her, Faith found herself staring at the girl’s exquisitely slender neck which, like the rest of Linnet, was now visibly trembling.
‘How are you settling in, my dear?’ The Reverend’s tone was friendly but, to Faith’s ears, about as reassuring as a king cobra’s hiss.
‘Ah, all right... sir,’ Linnet stuttered desperately.
‘Good...’ the Reverend said, breaking into a blood chilling smile. ‘Not too strict or exacting, I hope? I’m not working you too hard?’
‘Oh, no,’ Linnet blurted in a panic-stricken voice.
The Reverend raised an eyebrow and Faith closed her eyes and swallowed.
‘Ah, I mean, no, sir,’ Linnet mumbled, and Faith breathed again.
‘Good, good,’ Dawes said with an amused twinkle in his eyes. ‘I tell you what, why don’t you come around here and sit on my knee?’
This suggestion produced a small but audible squeak of panic. Linnet seemed almost too terrorised to move. Quickly, Faith grabbed the girl by the elbow and steered her around the desk to the waiting man. A strong arm scooped Linnet on to his lap, and Faith smartly stepped to the side.
‘There now,’ the Reverend said, and chuckled.
Linnet licked her lips. The girl was now sitting sideways across the Reverend’s capacious lap, his left hand gripping her tight-laced waist. Faith stood to the side, knowing to wait for further orders, trying to breathe regularly and still her pounding heart.
The Reverend’s right hand rested upon Linnet’s silk-clad knee. Linnet gave a little gasp and her hands fluttered anxiously at her side, as if she did not quite know what to do with them.
‘Place your hands behind your head, dear,’ the Reverend said quietly, as if reading her mind.
Linnet looked from side to side, reminding the maid of a cornered rabbit, before doing as she was bid. The action further tautened the girl’s blouse. Now it was seriously straining to contain her pert breasts. Linnet’s dainty nipples seemed to be swelling as the Reverend squeezed her knee, impudently indenting the thin cotton with little pink protrusions. Faith found herself licking her lips, unable to take her eyes from the scene.
The Reverend’s hand had begun travelling up the girl’s trembling thigh, toying with her garter and then stroking the thin strip of bare flesh between her stocking top and the constricting band of her flogging drawers. The girl failed to suppress a moan as his fingers began to trace a path over the taut material that encased her inner thigh.
‘And how are you finding these things, my dear?’ Faith heard a husky, strained note in her master’s voice. ‘Not too tight, I trust?’
‘Oh no, sir,’ Linnet lied hoarsely.
The girl’s cheeks, so pale a little while before, were now flushed a deep pink. Faith watched, enthralled, as the Reverend pushed the little skirt up and out of the way. Then he took hold of her cotton-sheathed thigh. Faith winced in sympathy as she watched him pinch.
‘Oooh...!’ Linnet gasped.
‘Be quiet, girl,’ the Reverend said sharply.
He shifted his left hand from her waist, grasping the skirt and pulling it entirely out of the way. Faith’s eyes widened at the view of the girl’s crotch this revealed. She blinked, and looked again. It seemed Linnet’s vulva had swollen, stretching the taut cotton to a perilous degree.
‘Open your legs, wider.’
For once the compliant girl did not obey immediately, but looked around with a panicked expression, blushing furiously.
‘Oooh... aaah...!’
Faith knew what those pinching fingers felt like and her stomach fluttered in sympathy. Linnet opened her legs with new-found alacrity.
It was not just the swelling of her sex that made the sight so extraordinary. The Reverend chuckled deeply as Linnet hung her head in shame.
‘What’s this? I hope you have not wet yourself, girl? Faith, come here and see.’
Faith did as she was ordered, stepping forward and bending from the hips as much as her corset would easily allow. She swallowed hard and tried to ignore the tingling in her own loins. The girl’s secretions had entirely wet the gusset of her straining drawers, turning the thin cotton quite translucent. The swollen pussy lips that strained against this moist material made, it had to be admitted, a truly fetching picture.
The Reverend’s fingers began to stroke this moistness. As she had not been given further orders, Faith stayed bent, a few feet away, and watched as he caressed Linnet’s pussy.
‘Oooh, please, sir...?’ Linnet’s voice sounded beyond strain now, and halfway to distraction.
‘I want you to be silent, girl,’ the Reverend said sharply, ‘and I wish you to keep still.’
This last order was clearly quite impossible. Linnet had closed her eyes and was biting her bottom lip desperately. She could not stop her pelvis from squirming in response to his touch, however. After a few more seconds of cunning manipulation, the girl’s self-control deserted her entirely.
‘Hoooo... ooooh...’ she moaned, as she began bucking furiously on his knee. The Reverend chuckled and continued, until there was a sound of ripping cloth. Faith hardly heard it however, for demure Linnet was now writhing and groaning wantonly.
‘You have split your drawers, my girl.’
‘Y-yes, sir.’ Linnet seemed to have returned to her senses, though she was still rather red-faced and panting heavily. ‘S-sorry, sir.’
‘You disobeyed my order to be quiet and to sit still.’
Linnet licked her exquisite lips anxiously. ‘Sorry, sir,’ she whispered, blushing a deeper shade as if at the memory.
The girl was still sitting on his knee. Faith watched as he began unfastening the buttons of Linnet’s blouse from the bottom up. Linnet’s eyes widened and watched his progress nervously.
‘Yes,’ the Reverend Dawes said dryly. ‘Sorry, you will be.’
Linnet bit her lip as the last button was undone and her blouse fell open, exposing her shapely breasts to Faith’s rapt gaze. Suddenly, the Reverend looked up and straight at the maid.
‘Faith, fetch me a two-tailed tawse, a medium but with a touch of stiffness to it. Oh, and slip off your uniform. I want you to horse this chit, and it might get in the way.’
Faith made haste to obey. She scurried, skirts rustling as she did so, to where the Reverend’s main collection of corrective implements was displayed. As usual the sight made her feel a little dizzy. The collection took up almost all the wall. Canes were arrayed on racks. Riding crops and dressage whips of every size and shape dangled mutely from neatly arranged rows of wooden pegs. There were polished paddles and wicked martinets. Terrifying bullwhips dangled next to sleeker signal whips and a wide selection of both cord and leather cat o’nine tails.
Trying to ignore the cumulative aura of menace that, as always, seemed to hum from this display, Faith quickly picked a split-tailed tawse from the wide selection. She hurried back and placed it on the desk before her master, with a curtsy.
The Reverend did not even acknowledge her existence. He had made the now topless Linnet stand, and was helping the girl to step out of her skirt. Aware that the tension in the room was increasing by the second, Faith began unbuttoning her dress.
‘Ruined!’ The Reverend’s tone seemed almost jovial to Faith, though it still contained a distinct note of strain. ‘We better have those things off as well.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Linnet said glumly, looking down at the split crotch of her drawers and blushing furiously.
‘No, don’t bother.’ Linnet had begun fiddling with the laces of her drawers but the Reverend stopped her and withdrew a pruning knife from his trouser pocket. ‘The girls are waiting for their suppers. At that rate we will be here all bloody day!’
The idea that the Reverend Dawes might worry a jot about keeping his girlish trainees waiting was so utterly absurd that Faith had to fight the sudden mad desire to giggle. Linnet, however, watched the knife with obvious terror, the red of her blushing cheeks draining away in seconds.
‘Oh, please...’
‘Shut up and stand still, girl,’ the Reverend growled, as he cut the connecting cords between the girl’s drawers and her corset with swift dexterity. ‘I won’t nick you if you stop hopping about and quivering.’
By the time the things were off, Faith was also ready; stripped to the familiar dishabille of black corset and silk stockings. She felt her cheeks burn as the Reverend turned and dropped his gaze, briefly, to her exposed sex, before turning his attention back to the girl who was trembling before him.
The white corset and black silk stockings suited the slender girl, Faith thought. The tightness of her lacing emphasised her narrow waist and exaggerated her modest curves. The little nest of dark curls below her belly contrasted with the porcelain perfection of her skin. Her exposed breasts, no bigger than peaches, were high up on her chest and exquisitely shaped.
The Reverend Dawes apparently shared the watching maid’s opinion, because he reached up and began to stroke the girl’s breasts with both hands. Faith watched the nipples swell as he caressed the flesh around them. Linnet flinched and her fingers fluttered at her side, but she had the sense not to cover herself or try to step away. When he took the erect nipples between thumb and forefinger and squeezed, however, the girl gave a lost little cry and twisted in response.
‘Turn around,’ the Reverend said quietly, releasing her suddenly. Blinking anxiously, Linnet obeyed.
He had barely whipped her on the run and the pure alabaster of her pretty little bottom was marred by no more than a couple of fading lines.
‘Bend forward, girl. Place your hands on your knees.’
This posture meant Linnet’s bottom was thrust back towards him and he began to stroke the flawless flesh, almost tenderly.
‘You have a very pretty sit-upon, my dear,’ the Reverend said in a strained growl.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I generally prefer a good deal more meat to beat,’ the Reverend continued, stroking the girl’s bottom with evident pleasure. ‘But there is some flesh here,’ Linnet gave a little yelp as he pinched. ‘And such silken skin...’
To Faith’s utter amazement her master lowered his face to the proffered bottom. With a rapt fervour he closed his eyes and kissed the trembling flesh. Faith blinked at the spectacle in astonishment as the Reverend nuzzled and kissed the girl’s perfect behind for some moments. She had never seen him consecrate a host before communion with a fraction of this reverence. His face was transfigured with all the spiritual fervour of a pilgrim in some sacred shrine, worshipping an image of the Madonna.
‘It seems almost a desecration–’ at last he raised his lips from Linnet’s quivering cheeks, and gave Faith a wink ‘–to mar this perfection.’ The Reverend shrugged regretfully and gave Linnet’s buttocks a friendly pat. ‘But discipline is discipline, I am afraid.’ He looked at his maid again and smiled. ‘All right, Faith,’ he said with a grin, ‘horse the little wriggler. Let’s see if she if she squeals as prettily as she trembles!’
‘Yaaaooooooowwww...!’
To hear Linnet yell you would have thought her bottom was being flayed. The girl bucked on Faith’s back and her hands kneaded the maid’s breasts with frantic desperation.
For all her burden’s writhing and agonised squealing, Faith knew the punishment was, at least by the Reverend’s fearsome standards, quite a light one. She knew the sound of the tawse on bare flesh only too well. The whoosh of the tails through the air and the crack of leather on tender skin had been branded indelibly on her memory, along with certain other unforgettable sensations.
There was another whoosh, and the tone told Faith it was another light one. The crack was sharp enough to echo around the study, but did not have the sickening depth of a really wicked stroke. Linnet, however, hoisted helplessly over her bent back, seemed not to share the maid’s assessment.
‘Haaooow...!’ Linnet shrieked and wriggled with renewed vigour.
‘Hold her steady!’ the Reverend’s voice ordered sharply.
Faith tried, clutching Linnet’s arms just above the elbows and fighting to stay still as her squirming burden bucked like a gaffed salmon. Linnet’s hands had found purchase on Faith’s breasts after the first stroke, and now she clutched them like a drowning girl’s fingers grasping at a buoy. And her blind groping was doing strange things inside Faith’s loins. It was becoming hard to concentrate. If only Linnet would stop wriggling and squeezing...
‘All right, enough,’ the dread voice said. ‘Linnet, raise your legs.’
Faith suppressed a sob, for she knew what was coming. Linnet had her arms around her neck, but her legs hung down between those of the maid. The Reverend was now lifting the limbs of Faith’s lithe burden, pushing the whimpering girl higher so she was in the position of a piggyback rider. Faith felt the slender, stocking-clad thighs wrap around her waist, and fought the desire to wail.
There was only one reason for her master to require this position. Faith knew her own bare bottom was now exposed below Linnet’s. She waited, buttocks tensed in anticipation, as Linnet sobbed and gasped into her ear.
‘Oh, ah, oooh.’ Only Linnet’s sniffles broke the silence. Faith found breathing suddenly impossible.
Whoooosh... Crack!
‘Haaaooooowww...!’
Faith’s burden bucked again and shrieked in her ear. The dainty hands frantically kneaded her breasts. Still Faith said a silent prayer of thanks that the Reverend had chosen the upper bottom of the piggyback pair, although it was again not a particularly vicious stroke, from the sound of it.
‘I said keep her still!’
There was another whoosh. This time the tone was deeper. Another crack, as loud and sharp as a pistol retort. Faith did not need to judge the sounds to gauge that this was a blistering stroke, for it had caught her on her upper thighs. A searing starburst of scalding pain engulfed her.
‘Is it sore, dear?’ the Reverend enquired, patting Linnet’s now scarlet bottom gently.
The girl winced. ‘Y-yes, sir. V-very sore, sir,’ she sniffled, as new tears trickled down her almost equally red cheeks. A good deal of her dark hair had escaped from the ponytail as she’d struggled on Faith’s back. Some strands were now stuck to her wet cheeks.
Faith fought a wave of resentment; the Reverend did not ask about her bottom, which was still on fire. The maid felt as if she had been sitting on a hive of angry bees. It really was not fair.
‘Just one thing before supper.’ The Reverend took hold of Linnet’s hips and steered her to face him as he sat in the chair by his desk. ‘I want you on your knees.’
The girl obediently sank to her stockinged knees before him, eyes wide. The Reverend reached out and stroked her hair with affection.
‘Faith,’ he growled, ‘stop snivelling, you silly chit. Come over here and show her what to do.’
Faith did not need ordering twice. Quickly she joined Linnet, kneeling before her master. She took the girl’s right hand and guided it to the Reverend’s bulging fly.
‘Undo the buttons,’ she whispered, and watched the girl obey.
Linnet’s fingers were as delicate as any Faith had ever seen. If the girl was nervous it did not affect her dexterity, for she soon had the flies entirely undone.
‘Get on with it,’ the Reverend Dawes grunted.
Licking her lips, for this always made her anxious, Faith took Linnet’s hand in hers and guided it into the open trousers.
‘Take it out... be gentle,’ she said, glancing to see Linnet’s nervous face.
Linnet guided the man’s erection out, blinking as if in alarm at the rigid thing that twitched impatiently in her dainty hands. Faith was not surprised. The first time she had seen that swollen cockhead it had made her feel quite faint. In fact, the sight still left her a little dizzy.
Faith touched the underpart of the upcurving shaft. ‘Kiss it, here,’ she said, her voice rather hoarse. To her surprise, and perhaps her secret chagrin, Linnet proved naturally skilful at the task in hand. She bent her pretty head and began kissing and licking, working her pink tongue up towards the bulging glans.
The Reverend groaned. He had taken a fistful of Faith’s hair in his left hand, whilst retaining his grip on Linnet’s locks with his right. Faith winced as he twisted her hair, in apparent abstraction, as Linnet’s tongue did its work.
‘Mouth, now!’ he suddenly shouted.
Panic seized Faith. Linnet looked at her questioningly, but it was too late to explain. The girl had lifted up her head to look for instructions.
‘Stay!’ was all Faith could think to say, for the Reverend’s seed was squirting unstoppably across the girl’s breasts.
There was a long, slightly stunned silence when he stopped spending. Linnet still held his deflating cock, the creamy semen dripping from her breasts onto her naked thigh flesh, above her stockings.
Faith barely dared raise her eyes to her employer, but in the end she had to look up inquiringly.
The Reverend was looking down at Linnet, one eyebrow raised disdainfully.
‘Yes, well, not exactly what I had in mind,’ he said dryly. ‘Still, there will no doubt be plenty of opportunities to teach you how to perform this task properly. Lick me clean, now.’ He turned to Faith. ‘I shall deal with your failure to instruct her tonight. In the meantime you had better lick that up. All of it, and be quick about it, girl.’
The maid took a deep breath and bent to lick the still-warm fluid from Linnet’s breasts as the girl lapped the last dribbles from his deflating manhood.
‘Hurry up, girls,’ the Reverend grunted, as Faith swallowed a mouthful of the viscous stuff and bent to lick the dribbles from Linnet’s thighs, ‘all this exercise has made me rather hungry!’
It was a distinctly subdued little knot of girls that waited in the corridor outside the schoolroom after supper. Every time Amelia so much as twitched a muscle, the pressure of the whipping drawers on her bottom made her aware how very sore her behind already was, and how little she desired more punishment. Placing a hand, gingerly, on her tender buttock, she suppressed a wince.
The thought of having to kow-tow to Bella and Kirsty was appalling. By rights it should have been her strutting around with a prefect’s badge pinned to her blouse and cane gripped in her hand. Instead, Amelia faced ‘detention’, and heaven only knew what that beast of a prelate meant to do to her. She had to clench her fists and will back tears when she thought about the unfairness of it all.
‘Wait in silence,’ the Reverend Dawes had told them, helping himself to a slice of fruit cake. Supper had not been meagre in quantity, but the fare had been distinctly plain. Amelia had seen the expression on Gretchen’s face when she’d realised she was not going to get a crumb of the big cake. At least the Reverend had seemed in an unusually good mood, and had found no further fault with his trembling charges as they dutifully munched their bread and dripping around the table.
Gretchen was still pouting glumly as the four girls stood waiting by the door. Charlotte did not look a great deal happier. She scowled mutinously and kicked disconsolately at the skirting board. Amelia knew how Charlotte felt, but the time had long since passed when she was foolish enough to display her displeasure quite so recklessly. Amelia looked away. Bella alone seemed, if not exactly cheerful, at least resigned to her fate.
‘I suppose that ginger slut is having another slice by now, or sucking something more savoury, perhaps!’ Clearly Charlotte could hold her peace no longer. ‘It was a damned poor go making her a prefect. Bella, it should have been you and me.’ She looked at her friend for support.
Arabella put a finger to her lips and frowned. Charlotte gave her, and the others, a despairing look, then shrugged. ‘For God’s sake, Porky, the little cow is not around us now. It’s not as if these two would peach...’
Bella drew herself up to her full height and looked down her aquiline nose at her erstwhile friend.
‘Do not call me that any more, Charlotte, unless you want to find yourself on the wrong end of my stick,’ she almost spat.
Charlotte looked at her old friend with incredulity, but there was no doubting that Bella meant exactly what she said. If Charlotte had been about to reply to this rebuke she thought better of it as she stared into Bella’s unflinching gaze. Charlotte licked her lips anxiously, and after that she held her tongue in check.
The four girls waited glumly for another fifteen minutes. Amelia was almost out of her mind with apprehension by the time she heard the Reverend’s footfall in the corridor. He came into view, followed by a solemn-looking Faith, who was carrying a large tray loaded with straps and all manner of other peculiar objects.
‘Right, girls, ready to do a little atoning for your sins?’ the Reverend asked brightly.
The girls’ ragged response was particularly unenthusiastic.
‘Good, good,’ he said mildly. ‘Very well, go in, my dears. Do go in!’
First he ordered the girls to move the desks back. Amelia worked with Gretchen, who was visibly trembling now, lifting the desks and putting them back against the wall. Next he unlocked the big stationery cupboard at the back of the hall and passed out things which, to Amelia’s astonished gaze, looked like shallow wooden boxes or drawers.
These trays were about three-foot in length by two in width and fashioned from varnished beech. A strap, which Amelia did not like the look of, was affixed near the middle of the box, across its width. The Reverend Dawes had them set these out in a little row. Gretchen was first, then Charlotte and Amelia. Finally Arabella’s box brought up the rear.
‘All right, girls, remove your skirts and blouses, please.’
Amelia began unbuttoning her blouse even before she had time to be outraged. Once she would have protested, even balked. Now she just obeyed, wondering as she did so at the change in her attitude.
Gretchen also did as she was bid, with alacrity that bordered on the craven. Bella blushed a little, then gave a shrug and began to unbutton her blouse. Only Charlotte seemed to find the order too much to obey.
‘I’m sorry, Reverend Dawes,’ she said, the tremulous note in her voice undermining her determined expression, ‘it simply is not decent.’ She stuck her little chin out firmly, and struck a pose that was evidently meant to display firm resolve. Unfortunately, she could not prevent herself from blushing red, nor her chin from trembling, and these factors combined to rather spoil the effect. ‘I am quite sure that my grandmama would not permit me to...’ Charlotte’s cheeks went a deeper shade of red, ‘...to expose myself to you in this way.’
Shut up, shut up, you stupid little fool! Not very long ago it might have been Amelia who spoke Charlotte’s words; now she stared at the other girl and willed her to be quiet and not make more trouble for them all. The Reverend Dawes looked at Charlotte without concern.
‘Of course, my dear,’ he said quietly, ‘if that is the way you feel, I could not allow any question of impropriety. I tell you what, if you would bear with me whilst I get these others ready, why don’t we go and telephone your grandmother, and see what she says?’
Charlotte looked nonplussed at this proposition, delivered in the most reasonable and amiable of tones. She licked her lips uncertainly, eyes darting about as if looking for a trap, then hesitantly gave a nod of her head.
‘Good,’ the Reverend said, ‘that’s settled. Come along, you three, fold up your skirts and blouses neatly and put them on the desks.’
Amelia could not help but be aware of the sight she presented, for Arabella and Gretchen were identically clad. The wickedly tight corsets left their breasts entirely bare, and the bizarre whipping drawers were designed to leave no part of their charms to the imagination. Indeed, as Gretchen walked awkwardly over to the desks, Amelia could clearly make out the dark pink lines that striped her bottom though the thin tight cotton of her drawers.
‘They will not be needing their hands for a while, Faith,’ the Reverend Dawes said with a meaningful wink. The maid got straight to work. First a supple belt, in a figure of eight shape, was slipped over Amelia’s shoulders. The strap went around the front of her shoulders, crossing in the middle of her back, where it was tightened up. Amelia was still wondering about this as leather cuffs were buckled firmly on to her wrists. Then she wondered no more. Faith hauled up her right and then her left wrist, clipping the cuffs to the middle of the shoulder belt. It was mildly uncomfortable, like having her arms pinioned in the wrestling move known as a back-hammer. A sick feeling in her stomach told Amelia the discomfort would get rapidly worse.
As she stood helplessly in this bondage, the Reverend Dawes stepped in front of her. He smiled, watching her reaction. Amelia dropped her gaze. She saw his hand come up. He stroked her breast gently, finger circling her nipple until it stood out like a little strawberry.
‘I hope you do not feel there is anything indecent about detention?’ he said softly.
Amelia bit back a moan. She wanted to step back, but did not dare; she felt horribly vulnerable with her arms bound behind her. Closing her eyes she whimpered as he took her nipple between thumb and forefinger. Of course it was indecent! It was an utter outrage! She wanted to voice her objections, but did not.
Strange things were now happening in her crotch: a tingling that could drive a girl quite out of her mind. Part of her wanted to tell him to unhand her, another part to beg him to grant her some relief before she went insane. Fortunately for Amelia, residual pride and her sense of self-preservation somehow prevailed a moment longer.
‘N-no, sir,’ she managed to whimper.
The Reverend raised her head with his hand and planted a kiss on her perspiring cheek. ‘Good girl,’ he said with a wicked smile. ‘Right, shall we get on with the game?’
Gretchen and Arabella had been trussed up as tight as Amelia now, and the three girls each gave him an uncertain nod of assent.
‘Very well, Faith, the peas if you please.’
Amelia could not imagine what he wanted with peas, until Faith took the container from the tray. She walked over to the first of the three boxes and opened the tin.
The hard sound of dried peas bouncing on wood struck fear into Amelia’s soul, as profound as any crack of whip on bottom or back might have engendered. A couple of dozen peas covered the bottom of the box. The Reverend took hold of Gretchen’s elbow.
‘Now, my dear, would you care to step this way.’
Gretchen gave a sob as she was helped down until she knelt in the box.
‘Oooh,’ she said. ‘Ach, please sir, how long must I...?’
‘Be silent, or I shall have you gagged, girl,’ the Reverend said sharply in response.
Faith buckled the strap that joined the sides of the tray closed over Gretchen’s calves. She did not fasten it particularly tightly, but Amelia realised with mounting terror that with her arms pinioned, it would now be next to impossible for Gretchen to get out of the box unaided.
The rattle of dried peas in the next box cut short such thoughts. Amelia’s mouth went dry as the Reverend Dawes took hold of her upper arm. Gently he steered her over to the box. There was little she could do about her situation so, looking around wildly, she let him guide her down on to her knees.
Right away Amelia found herself in the most acute discomfort. Several of the stone-hard peas were lodged beneath her knees. Her pinioned arms hurt almost as much, but Amelia had no doubt that the pain in her knees would soon eclipse this. It was going to be exactly what the Reverend had promised them. No less than a little trip to purgatory.
‘I do apologise for bothering you with this matter, Lady Peaslake, but I am afraid Charlotte has voiced certain objections to her treatment. No, no, my policy is to meet any reasonable objections. If she does not wish to uncover in front a man, I quite understand... What? Yes, she is here...’
The Reverend Dawes handed Charlotte the telephone. Nervously she spoke into the handset.
‘Grandmama, please can I come home? I promise I will stop behaving in such a... But, Grandmama...’
A minute or so later the dainty hand that returned the telephone to the Reverend was trembling slightly. Charlotte felt a surge of anger at her grandmother’s treatment of her, but it was not so hot that it could dispel a mounting sense of terror.
‘Yes, naturally.’ The Reverend’s eyes were on her as he spoke. ‘Of course, Lady Peaslake, with the utmost rigour. Yes, well... I have to pay a visit to the police station anyway... Yes, quite, cords I thought, though those judicial birches they use are also salutary.’
He smiled at Charlotte as the words conjured terrifying images. Police station! Cords! Judicial birch! Charlotte felt her dimpled knees go very weak indeed.
Amelia could see the perspiration beading Gretchen’s back where it was bare above her appallingly tightly laced corset. She could see the plump shoulders quivering and her fingers clenching and unclenching helplessly in their bonds. Gretchen gave a sob and continued her strange motion, a sort of slow, desperate writhing as she moaned in pain.
Biting back a groan of her own, Amelia tried to move her legs again. The peas beneath her felt like crucifixion nails being pounded into her knees. Moving, even an involuntary fraction, sent jolts of agony lancing through her. The discomfort had built distressingly quickly, until it was simply too much to endure. Her arms ached abominably, too, and the tightness of her drawers was terribly distracting.
The maddening throb of her clitoris beneath the cotton was more difficult to ignore than the excruciating pain in her legs, if that were possible. Tears of unendurable frustration began to trickle slowly down her cheeks. Gretchen’s shoulders heaved again as she moaned in her discomfort.
A groan came from behind Amelia. It seemed Bella was also having difficulty enduring the pea box purgatory. How long had they been there? Amelia bit her lip to prevent another wail. It seemed to have been hours, days even, though she suspected she had been kneeling there for less than ten minutes. The design of the box was simple but diabolically effective. With hands bound behind her and the strap fastened across the backs of her calves near to the knee, there was no way to get out of the thing unaided. She looked around wildly, blinking tears away.
The only person in the room not in bondage was Faith. The maid had been left in charge and was dutifully waxing the Reverend’s canes. Amelia looked at her with pleading eyes.
‘Faith, please, let me out, just for a minute. I’ll do anything... Oh, God, this is torture. Please, let me out just for a little break.’
It was hopeless, of course. Faith seemed to live in terror of her master. At any rate, Amelia had yet to see her do the least thing to disobey the Reverend Dawes. But that did not stop Gretchen and Arabella begging, too. It was as if Amelia’s appeal had broken the other girls’ ability to suffer in silence.
‘What is this noise?’ The familiar, dread voice came from behind the kneeling girls. Amelia gave a startled sob. How long had the Reverend been standing there? When had he come in?
‘All three of you mewling like boiled cats after a mere five minutes,’ he continued. ‘I’d hate to think what you will sound like at fifteen!’
Gretchen’s shoulders slumped at this and Amelia could see the woman’s body was racked with desperate sobs.
‘There, there.’ The Reverend stepped into Amelia’s field of view and patted Gretchen’s head fondly. ‘That is not a fate you must face quite yet.’ He turned to the maid. ‘Unstrap them, Faith. I need to take this little baggage down to the police station. Before I go I think it is time these girls met the bristle pigs. But first, you had better help them to get out of their flogging drawers.’
They walked the short distance to the police station, and no two companions ever seemed so mismatched, partaking of an evening stroll. The Reverend Dawes strode along confidently, cheerfully pointing out places of interest to his charge and exchanging cheery greetings with neighbours met along the way.
Charlotte, in stark contrast, hung back with palpable reluctance, her feet fairly dragging. The truth was that she was already regretting refusing to disrobe. She did not know, exactly, what awaited her at the police station, but she did know she had no desire at all to find out. Indeed, it was all she could do not to recant, to beg the Reverend to forgive her recalcitrance and take her back to the rectory to rejoin her fellow sufferers in detention.
‘Good evening, Reverend, I trust I find you well?’ The speaker was a weaselly man of modest height, whose gold tooth glinted in the gaslight as he grinned at Charlotte with all too evident interest.
‘Indeed, Jack. Lady Charlotte, say hello to Mr Campion, worthy winner of this year’s Silver Cup. Curtsy, girl, curtsy!’
Charlotte bobbed, blushing at being made to do so for such an ungentlemanly type, but not daring to defy the Reverend Dawes. To her chagrin the man grinned and winked, then dropped his eyes to her breasts, staring at them openly.
‘One of your trainees, eh, Richard? Very nice – very sweet. I could get a good price for her in the flesh markets of Fejr.’
The Reverend Dawes chuckled. ‘I’m sure you could, Jack, but I am afraid the young lady is being trained for her place in society, not for the harem of some heathen potentate.’
‘Pity.’ A hand went out and raised Charlotte’s chin, fingers rough on the tender flesh beneath her jaw. ‘A pity, indeed. I am thinking of making another trip in a couple of months, actually.’
‘Oh, really?’ The Reverend said urbanely. ‘And what of the cup winner, will you...?’
He was cut short by Jack’s throaty chuckle. ‘Sorry, Richard, I have already sold Princess to Lord Alex. I thought it only fair after winning his precious Blossom. The sheikhs of Fejr will pay good money for a filly as pretty and as fast as that young baggage.’
‘Damn! So Alex has her?’ The Reverend shook his head ruefully. ‘I shall have my work cut out next year if I am to win back the cup.’
‘You will need a new mount for sure,’ Jack said with a mischievous grin. ‘Your Rose is game enough, but she does not have the legs to match Princess. Mind you,’ he shot the Reverend Dawes a sly, sideways look, ‘roans are rare enough where I am going to fetch a premium, and you have already broken her to harness...’
The Reverend Dawes furrowed his brow thoughtfully. ‘Well, she is very useful to me, but I might be persuaded to let her go, if the price were right. I tell you what, I meant to ask you to give my girls a lecture on the whips of the Western Hemisphere; I know you have a fine selection of quirts. Why not come up and have dinner before you leave?’
The matter was apparently resolved and Charlotte and her guardian resumed their stroll. The young woman was puzzled by the conversation she had just heard, but she had little time to consider the matter. They had met Jack Campion outside Kimblewick’s, the saddlers’, which was in the row of shops that made up Hatherby’s main street. The blue lamp of the police station had been visible at the end of the thoroughfare, even as Charlotte waited for the men to conclude their peculiar conversation. In fact, she had found it hard to look away from the ominous beacon, and now it was but a few short strides away.
‘Reverend Dawes, very nice to see you, sir.’ A rather portly sergeant beamed at the Reverend as he entered the police station, then he looked at Charlotte and licked his lips in a way which made her distinctly nervous.
‘What have we here then?’ he asked. ‘Been a naughty girl, have we?’
The Reverend Dawes chuckled. ‘She has indeed, Sergeant Billings. A very naughty girl indeed. This is Lady Charlotte. She is a modest, delicately brought up young lady, who did not wish to uncover for correction in front of me. As my position and cloth can permit of no breath of scandal, her grandmother and I thought we would ask if your female constable would mind standing in. Then there could, of course, be no question of impropriety.’
‘I should think not.’ The sergeant stared so coldly at Charlotte that goosepimples came up on her arms. ‘Though such a question ought never to have been put. All the world knows the Reverend Dawes to be the most upright of men!’
Charlotte felt herself begin to blush under this rebuke. She stared at the floor and swallowed hard.
‘Cane, cords, birch or spanking strap?’ the sergeant asked, opening a large book with the easy air of one performing a familiar task.
‘Oh, I think it is time the young lady experienced the cords.’
The sergeant picked up his pen, then looked up at Charlotte and winked. ‘Aye, that old cat will make this kitten mewl, I’ll warrant. On the bare?’
‘Most certainly on the bare. As she has elected flagellation by a feminine hand, there can be no issues of propriety that might necessitate protection for her person.’
‘Quite, quite.’ The sergeant nodded in agreement as he inscribed the decision in his book. ‘Number of strokes?’
‘Well, as it is a first offence...’ the Reverend Dawes fingered his chin thoughtfully.
A fist seemed to churn in Charlotte’s vitals as she waited to hear her fate.
‘Two dozen should suffice,’ he said at last, catching Charlotte’s elbow as she swayed. ‘Lift your skirt, girl.’
‘Lift my...’ Charlotte mumbled. After all the talk of propriety she was stunned by this order. There seemed to be no help for it, however, so she gripped the hem of her uniform skirt and obeyed.
‘I say, that is quite a grip. I’d heard, of course, but...’ Sergeant Billings chortled as, blushing furiously, Charlotte exposed her whipping drawers to his gaze.
‘It will take a little while for her to take them off. I wonder if you have a private place?’
‘Of course, she can disrobe in one of the cells. Constable Prentice will be half an hour or so, in any case.’
It was warm in the classroom, with several gurgling, slate-topped radiators fashioned of intricate cast iron pumping out a steady heat. Warm enough to ensure that Amelia perspired freely as she shifted on her stool.
She almost wished she was back kneeling on the dried peas. That torment had rapidly become unendurable. Her current tribulations provided an altogether more leisurely descent to hell.
When the girls undergoing detention had been told to take off their drawers, Amelia – she almost laughed bitterly to think of it now – had been mightily relieved. She should have known better, of course. As soon as she had struggled out of the hateful drawers her wrists had been secured once more, high behind her back.
Faith and Rose had brought the devices the Reverend called ‘bristle pigs’ out of the anteroom, one by one. Amelia had just stood and stared at the first one, whilst they busily fetched the remaining two. It was a most peculiar device, a sort of tall, iron-legged stool. Two flat planes sloped together at about forty-five degrees, like the ridge of a miniature roof, to form the seat of the stool. It was a roof topped with the strangest of thatch though, for this odd seat was covered in the sort of bristles one might expect to find on a stiff scrubbing brush. Amelia blinked at the thing, as if she might somehow make it disappear.
Nor was she mistaken in her misgivings. Gretchen was first on her stool, allowing Faith to guide her feet on to two flat metal flanges protruding out by some mechanism at either side of the pig’s stout iron legs, about a foot above the floor. Gretchen stood on these with legs splayed wide, the bristling rides but inches from her naked cunny.
Faith had then turned to Amelia, guiding her on to the metal steps of the next stool. As before, the devices were arranged in a little row, so once again Amelia found herself looking at Gretchen’s naked back. The sight made her stomach tighten with apprehension. The welts on Gretchen’s bum had faded almost to invisibility now, but her cheeks were quivering uncontrollably and Amelia felt her own legs tremble, as if Gretchen’s obvious fear was contagious.
Rose stood beside her as she heard Faith position Arabella behind her. The maid put a hand on Amelia’s bottom and began to stroke.
‘Half an hour; that’s quite a long time on these sweet little seats,’ she said in mock commiseration. ‘You’ll be going quite out of your mind after ten minutes.’
Amelia took a deep breath and counted backwards, trying to control the anger surging through her heart. Much as she would have liked to tell the common little trollop to go hang, she was horribly aware that her arms were bound, and the maid’s were not. Indeed, she winced as the girl gave her bum a vicious pinch.
‘You think you are so high and mighty,’ Rose murmured. ‘Your kind love to see girls like me being whipped. Well, we’ll see who’s for it now, eh, you stuck-up little slut!’
Faith had clearly finished with Bella, because she now trotted over to stand by Gretchen. She looked up and regarded all three girls standing on the stools.
‘It is best to grip the sides with your thighs, for as long as you can. I know it is hard, but believe me, it is a lot worse when you slip down to the ridge. Once down...’ she shivered, as if remembering a particularly grisly nightmare, ‘...there is no getting up again, believe me.’
With that she depressed a lever by the leg of Gretchen’s stool. Without warning the little steps collapsed inwards and Gretchen clamped her legs together on the bristly slopes of the seat. She howled, but Amelia was scarcely aware of it, for Rose had done the same to her a split second later. She might have had no warning, but she had been all too aware of the ridge waiting below her most intimate parts, and her thighs clutched at the stool in an automatic reaction.
It felt as if she had tried to ride a giant hedgehog. Hundreds of spiny bristles galled the tender flesh of her inner thighs. Only the terror of the ridge beneath her labia kept her legs clamped on the viciously abrasive surface. She gritted her teeth against the acute discomfort, trying not to groan.
Rose reached up and stroked her breast, gently at first, then tweaking her nipple nastily.
The maid laughed. ‘That’s it, Amelia, ride the nice horsy. It’s only half an hour you have to sit up there!’
Charlotte sat on the bench that was the only furniture in the little cell, and tried her very hardest not to weep. She could not stop herself from chewing her knuckle, though, as she waited for her nemesis to come for her.
The horrid whipping drawers were on the bench beside her, neatly folded with her skirt, boater and blouse. All she wore was her punishment corset and her silken stockings, below a simple, short grey shift of the coarsest fabric. This grim garment was adorned with the arrows that marked its wearer for a felon.
‘Put this on girl,’ the sergeant had said, thrusting the thing at her before he locked her into the cell. ‘It is a flogging shift, the traditional wear for purposes like these.’
As soon as Charlotte had pulled the thing on, she knew why. The hem only reached halfway down her thighs, and it was split at the sides, with slits that ran higher than her waist. There were buttons sewn on to the shoulders, and a moment of appalled investigation had revealed buttonholes, sewn into the corners of the back part of the hem. The very wearing of the thing made her feel guilty and condemned in some overwhelming way. Furthermore, the material was rough against the tender flesh of her naked breasts, and it rubbed her nipples most infuriatingly as she fidgeted.
She stood up and paced the length of the little cell again. If only it were over, she thought, clenching her fists with agitation. But for it to be over, the whipping would have to happen first. If only it would never be time. If only the time would pass and it be done. If only she had not refused to uncover. If only she had not dared to disobey!
Without a single stroke caressing her back, Charlotte found she had already learned a hard lesson. The Reverend Dawes always seemed to be ahead of her. If one objected to his treatment, he smilingly concurred, but then one simply seemed to find oneself facing something worse. As she paced the cell she felt the resistance slowly leach out of her soul. She knew, with cold certainty, that after this night she would never dare defy the man again.
Oh, come on, she thought desperately. Just get it over with. Then she heard the rattle of the key in the lock and a voice in her head shrieked, ‘No! I did not mean it. I take it back. It’s too soon. I’m not ready!’
‘Haa...!’ Amelia could not stop the gasp escaping as her thigh muscles twitched involuntarily and she slipped down another half an inch.
She was in absolute agony now. The scratching of the bristles on her inner thighs vied with the cramping muscle pain caused by clenching the steep slopes between her legs for far too long. The only thing keeping her straining away was the sight of Gretchen in front of her, pitifully writhing and groaning.
Gretchen’s thighs had given out five minutes earlier, and she had slipped the last few fractions of an inch with an agonised sob. Somewhat to Amelia’s surprise, she had given a relieved gasp as she settled on the wicked-looking ridge between the bristle slopes. For a few moments, it seemed, having the weight off her thighs gave some ease. All too soon, however, an urgent pleading came from her lips. ‘Ach, no, this is not possible...’ she had grunted in a disbelieving tone, before starting to gasp in pain and beg for mercy.
‘Be silent, woman,’ Rose had said smugly, ‘you have a good fifteen minutes to ride the ridge. Hold your tongue or we shall have to bit you. Believe me...’ she reached out and began stroking Gretchen’s ample breast, ‘...things can get a lot worse than this.’
Gretchen had not been able to stay silent, however, and Rose made good her threat, inserting a rubber gag between the woman’s lips. This was affixed, by means of rings on either side of her mouth, to a short strap attached to Gretchen’s wrists. Now her head was wrenched back as much as her arms were hauled up behind. Perched on the ridge, she pressed her quivering thighs against the bristle slopes in a desperate attempt to fight the force of gravity. Her almost naked body perspired freely as she writhed, utterly helpless, in her excruciating bondage.
Amelia guessed the muffled noises Gretchen was making through her gag were some sort of plea for mercy. If so, they were not having much effect. Rose stayed by Gretchen’s side, caressing her breasts and cooing at the writhing woman, occasionally leaning forward to give the perspiring globes a bite.
Increasingly panicked noises from behind her told Amelia that even Bella’s powerful thighs were proving unequal to the task and that she must be slipping down her slopes.
Amelia’s own thigh muscles were twitching now, the strain becoming too much to sustain. Desperately, she fought against the waves of pain, battling to maintain the pressure of her thighs against the bristles, brutal though these were. To no avail. With a defeated sob she felt her muscles give. Inexorably she slipped the last few inches down the slope, the tender tissues of her crotch settling on the narrow, stiff bristle ridge.