By Governess
Copyright 2024 by Governess, all rights reserved
[2,473 words]´
* * * * *
Chapter 97
Mrs Innes had told me
that, after I had cleared the room, I was to bring the hot water for
her final ablutions in half-an-hour’s time. This I did, keeping a close
watch on the clock fearing to be a moment later than instructed. Taking
the bowl and large jug of steaming water up to her room, I placed in on
the table outside the door and knocked. I pushed open the door and on
hearing the usual curt command to enter, placed the jug and bowl on the
table beneath the mirror.
She was sitting on a small embroidered chair reading a book, which she put down.
“You showed a faint glimpse of promise this evening, Arbuthnot. I
bitterly regret that I did not have the opportunity to school you from
an early age and break that arrogant and deceitful spirit of yours”
She stood up.
“Lay out my nightwear and my clothes for tomorrow and then change into
a dressing robe yourself. You may say your prayers and I want you back
in this room in exactly half an hour.
I changed quickly, and
sat on my bed, wondering what Mrs Innes intended. Her regret at not
having had the opportunity to shape and discipline me was worrying. The
men at dinner had shamed me, but only for a moment had I been the focus
of their interest. Although I was to be flogged tomorrow along with
Emily, somehow that was less dreadful than facing Mrs Innes alone. I
was sure, she would want to master me and etch her will upon me like
acid on a copper plate. I shivered. The minutes ticked by. When the
hands of the clock had registered thirty minutes, I knocked on the
door.
"Enter"
She was again seated on the chair and pointed to the floor in front of her.
“Stand there.”
Her eyes were hard and her expression without warmth.
“I am sorry not to have had the opportunity to discipline you from your
earliest years. Your stubborn spirit and deceitfulness, all speak of a
lack of discipline from the outset.”
She paused.
“When I speak of discipline, what do you think I mean, Arbuthnot?”
I knew all too well what she meant. I wanted to refuse to answer,
refuse to indulge her appetite for shaming and dominating me, but
already I had learnt that the consequences of refusing to obey were
grim indeed.
“I . . . I think you mean that I was not beaten sufficiently when a small girl.”
“And was that the case. Were you not beaten sufficiently?”
I flushed.
“P . . . probably not . . . Ma’am.”
“And why do you think that was?”
“I . . . I suppose my parents and the governesses they appointed, didn’t provide it.”
She nodded.
“After, the ladies had left the dinner table last night, what did the gentlemen discuss?”
“How . . . how they had been punished as boys, Ma’am.”
“And did Mr Innes mention his sister, and how she was punished?”
“Yes, Ma’am, he did”
“And how was that?”
I was becoming quite breathless.
“Please, Ma’am, she was spanked.”
“Yes. Spanked by her older sister with the back of a hairbrush. And
when that went missing, she was caned. But you didn’t have an older
sister, did you, Arbuthnot? You had an indulgent mother and, until Miss
Strang belatedly took you in hand, a series of equally indulgent
governesses.
She looked at me in way I had once seen my father look when he found a fly in his soup.
“And listening to the gentlemen last night, after the ladies had withdrawn, what did you learn about their governesses?”
I looked down. She reached out and put a hand under my chin and raised my head.
“Answer me. What did you learn about their governesses?”
“Th . . . that, they beat them.”
“Yes. As your governesses should have beaten you.”
She paused, tilting her head back.
“If I had been your governess, Arbuthnot, do you think I would have beaten you?”
“I . . . I think so Ma'am.”
“You are right. I would have beaten you as I did my own daughter.
Severely and thoroughly, from the time you came off the pot. And
suppose you had been a boy?”
She paused, narrowing her eyes.
“There is one thing a governess will always beat a boy for. Something that boys find irresistible. And what is that?”
I felt my whole body become hot and my skin prickly.
“Come along, Arbuthnot. You have two brothers What is that shameful thing boys do that requires them to be regularly beaten?”
“M . . . masturbation . . . Ma’am.”
She smiled.
“Yes. But it is not only boys who masturbate is it, Arbuthnot?”
Again she stared at me, saying nothing for a moment.
“Are you guilty of that, Arbuthnot? Of abusing yourself when you first
wriggle between the sheets? Or first thing in the morning when you
wake, still sodden with sleep? Or perhaps at other times when you can
creep away and indulge yourself in secret? Well?”
I knew my
face must be scarlet to the roots of my hair, and my guilt would be all
too evident in my whole demeanour. I stuttered a reply, hardly being
able to form the words. I knew it was fruitless to dissemble.
“Ye . . . ye . . . yes . . . Ma’am.”
She gave a grim smile.
“On the chest of drawers, Arbuthnot, is a hairbrush. Fetch it.”
I picked it up and went to hand it to her.
“In a moment, Arbuthnot. But first smack it across your palm.”
I did so. It was a good-sized brush with a hard rosewood back. She
stood up and held me firmly by the wrist extending my hand with the
palm uppermost.
“Now smack it again, Arbuthnot. But this time
imagine you are smacking the bottom of a boy into whose bedroom you
have crept and found him abusing himself between the sheets. You’re his
older sister and you are not about to give limp-wristed little smacks
that can be laughed off, but a hard spanking that makes him cold with
the fear of the birching it promises before school the following
morning.”
I screwed myself up and brought the brush down as
hard as I could, imagining I was spanking the bottom of a boy caught
with his pyjamas pulled down, shamelessly abusing himself. I gasped.
“And again.”
Ten times she made me beat my open hand, until I was sobbing and inwardly raging at her cold calculated cruelty.
“Now give me the brush. And remove your nightgown.”
I stood naked before her. And as she tapped the brush menacingly across
her own palm, she stared at me, relishing my exposure and discomfort.
“Strangely, Miss Strang seems to regard a girl's masturbation as less
reprehensible than that of a boy. But a girl who inserts her fingers
into herself and drives herself into a frenzy of hot sticky excitement
is, in my book, as deserving of punishment as any boy. Indeed, I would
flog her with even greater severity. And why is that Arbuthnot?”
I realised that no response was expected.
“Because Arbuthnot, she is a girl. A girl is demure. She waits on
others. She neither seeks her own pleasure nor her own satisfaction.
She is submissive. She never flaunts herself in public, and even in
private her behaviour is seemly and never an outrage.”
She paused.
“Your father sent you here to be humbled for rebelling against God’s
gift of womanhood. He recognised that this household with its structure
and my rule over it would be the place for you to learn submission. He
knew, too, that I would take a particular delight in teaching that
arrogant little rump of yours to know its place. Those bottom cheeks
that you flaunt so brazenly under the soft clinging cotton of your
maid’s uniform. And where is that place, Arbuthnot?”
She rose and placed the chair sideways on to the end of the bed, and sitting down, beckoned to me.
“The place, Arbuthnot, is over my knee, or over a flogging block, where the only lesson you will respond to can be taught.”
I hesitated, shrivelling at her harshness and lack of warmth. Many
would consider Miss Strang to be hard and unforgiving, but I knew, that
on the contrary her commitment to the rod was a means of strengthening
a child’s resolve to turn from evil and do good. Ostensibly, Mrs Innes
shared that commitment, but it was weakened and rendered futile by a
judgment that was devoid of even the slightest love for the sinner.
“When I give an instruction, Arbuthnot, I expect instant obedience. And
why is instant obedience required of children? Because it shows
unquestioning acceptance of the God-given authority set over them. But
you hesitate in your obedience. You believe you know better. And that
belief needs to be beaten out of you along with the arrogance which
feeds it. Tomorrow you will be birched by my daughter Rachel, who will
treat you like one of the boys at the Reformatory. She tells me she had
the pleasure off birching your brothers a few days ago.”
She paused.
“As I’m going to have the pleasure of spanking you now, of wearing away
the skin of your backside so that even the brush of the bedsheets will
have you gasping and screaming.”
She beckoned.
“Over my lap.”
I stepped forward and lay across her lap, stretching my body forward to
rest on the bed. And I sensed her pleasure at the sight of my buttocks,
round and firm, twitching with the nervous anticipation of any child
awaiting that first smack of the brush.
Mrs Innes had not
raised children with the rod of correction without acquiring the skill
of a true disciplinarian. She knew how to vary the intensity of the
strokes, and the interval between them, allowing both time to smart and
then with a longer pause for the false hope to grow that the beating
might be about to end. She spanked the backs of the thighs, working her
way slowly down to the hollow of the knee. And she would select a spot
on the buttocks and spank it repeatedly again and again. And she new
how sensitive was that place, that crease, where the bottom and thighs
meet.
At last there was a longer pause, and I waited,
tightening myself. Then, as I relaxed, I felt her hand against the heat
of my inflamed flesh; and she scratched a fingernail across the surface
of my bottom. I winced.
“Uncomfortable, is it, Arbuthnot, that little scratch?”
And without a further word, the spanking was resumed. All inhibition
had been stripped from me and I screamed until my throat was as raw as
my bottom. In older times, a man or woman would be punished by having
weight after weight placed upon them as they lay naked and stretched
out, pegged to the ground. And although held in the vice of Mrs Innes
displeasure and suffering a spanking that any child would rightly
dread, in reality no weights were pressing on me. Nor was I bound to
the grating like a sailor flogged on the quarterdeck, or a slave nailed
by his hands to a post for the flagrum to tear at his flesh. I was held
by no more than a hand pressed against my back. I could have protested,
struggled against my tormentress. But instead, I rested across her lap,
inwardly resentful but outwardly compliant.
For I was
choosing to submit to her will, and to offer my body willingly to the
lash. To accept the worst she could do. She might plunge me into the
icy waters of her displeasure, to be tossed and buffeted against rocks
in the freezing waves, but still I would rise unconquered to triumph
over her. She might enjoy inflicting such suffering, but the victory
was mine. She was correcting my arrogant and stubborn spirit, but deep
within me was that secret place which she could never reach, never
subdue. I recalled what my father had said to my brother about
fortitude when he had beaten him, quoting from Prometheus Unbound.
To defy power which seems omnipotent.
Neither to change nor falter nor repent.
This, like thy glory Titan, is to be
Good, great joyous beautiful and free
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.
Afterwards
I had crept into the library and found a volume of Shelley’s collected
works and learned that ending to his drama by heart. And as I rose from
the lap of my tormentress, with my bottom a hot, smarting mass of
sticky agony, I knew, whatever she might think, that the Empire and
Victory were mine.
“Stand to the right of the door, Arbuthnot, with your hands on your head.”
Despite my inner conviction of having outlasted her, I was nevertheless
still sobbing and heaving from my ordeal. Suffering is suffering even
in victory. She stood studying my tear-stained face and wet swollen
eyes with all too evident satisfaction.
I longed to examine my
spanked bottom in a mirror, to view my ravaged flesh, to delight in the
evidence of my martyrdom, and I resented having to stand exposed before
her.
“No sitting comfortably for you, Arbuthnot, for at
least a week and that’s how it should be. A thirteen-year-old girl of
your disposition needs constantly reminding of her lowly status. And
that is best done by regular chastisement until she mends her ways.”
I am sure she could see through my tears that although outwardly
subdued, inwardly I was still unbroken. For a moment, I thought she
might resume my punishment, but after a long pause, she folded her arms
and addressed me.
“I have told Miss Strang that your arrogance
and self-will render you unsatisfactory as a lady’s maid without a good
deal of harsh training which, in the circumstances, cannot be readily
provided. She accepts that you need to be punished for your deceitful
behaviour and will be present when you are flogged tomorrow morning.
And with a great deal of reluctance I have agreed to regard that
flogging as bringing to a conclusion your service in this household.
Surprisingly, given your character, Miss Strang wishes you to assist in
the tutoring of the Orphanage boys that are to arrive tomorrow. But as
a young girl still resident in this household, I am suggesting that on
those occasions when you require discipline she should refer you to me.
It would seem hardly appropriate to punish you before the boys you are
tutoring.”
She smiled.
“Now lay out my night garments. When you have done that, you may retire yourself.”