The Modesty Cure

by Emily Tilton

  “Oh,” she said again, when he had broken the kiss. “Must I do it now?”

  “No, not yet,” he said, his cock however growing even stiffer at the submission in her voice, “but soon. This is what I must tell you. I am taking you to a place where you will learn to give me my own conjugal rights, and to please me with your young body’s charms, but not as you would have done for that oaf who whipped you and made you suck today. Whether or not we become man and wife, darling, I will undertake to make you the happiest girl in the world, even as you yield up to me all your modesty, and cry out under my mastery.”

  “But…” Amanda pleaded. “But… you cannot. I m-must… Mr. Podgins!”

  In her face, James saw a resistance that he knew must come from the propriety of her upbringing, and he knew immediately what he must do.

  “Hush, darling,” he said. “Mr. Podgins will not stop for you, but only for me. And now I must punish you for attempting it. Lay yourself over my lap.”

  Amanda hesitated, but James knew he must show her the strength of his resolution, in order to ensure she felt secure in his protection. Though she struggled, he pulled her down over his thighs and raised her skirts, nothing loath to see the lovely bottom he knew would now belong to him, or to spank her—if gently, seeing the treatment Charlton had given her—to teach her that he intended to exercise his right in that regard as well.

  She whimpered as he pulled down her drawers, and he did indeed have a pang of guilt when he saw the tracery of red and purple left by Charlton’s wicked strap. Amanda Eaker’s bottom looked so lovely in the moonlight that James could not resist caressing it before he chastised her, but when he heard her whimpers change to moans of pleasure he knew he must proceed to the punishment, and he did. He raised his hand and brought it down firmly, over and over.

  “Will you call out to stop the carriage again?” he asked after he had spanked her ten times.

  Amanda sobbed, her bottom squirming under his hand, and she writhed under his left arm as he held her fast. The marks from Charlton’s strap had grown livid, and James knew that whether or not she capitulated he must stop the punishment soon—though the sight fired his blood so extremely that he also knew he would have trouble restraining himself from taking further liberties despite knowing Dr. Brown would wish him to wait.

  But to his great happiness, Amanda whispered, “No, sir. I am sorry.”

  James contented himself with a final caress of her round little bottom, and then he restored her drawers and her skirts, and took her back into his arms. Amanda cried out her grief and her distress into his shoulder, then fell asleep a few moments after a whispered “Thank you, Mr. Coventry” that brought joy to James’ heart.

  Chapter Seven

  The barest hint of grey light had begun in the East, behind the carriage, when they arrived at the big manor house. Amanda had fallen asleep in the swaying carriage an hour before, with James’ arm around her, after he had gently said, to her alarmed questions, that the ways of the house—the college—to which he now brought her required that she know no more than the terrible things he had told her so far: terrible, and yet somehow each one with some strange, ready analogue already inside her soul.

  As she woke with the carriage’s stopping at last, and looked out in her first awareness of the Tudor manor house that loomed out the coach window, those terrible things came back into her mind, broken out from her angel’s address to her into separate propositions, or perhaps—Amanda thought with something between a shudder and a shiver—promises.

  You will learn to please me.

  You will yield up your modesty.

  You will cry out under my mastery.

  You will suck my cock.

  You will be the happiest girl in the world.

  Married girls were always the happiest girls in the world, weren’t they? And James, her angel, said that he might well marry her. What a funny thing to say, Amanda thought, in the dispassionate way that a person may think, upon waking, even of an idea so very material to their well-being and contentment as her marriage.

  Her angel had said it, too, in a way that suggested that he meant more by it simply than that he had not yet decided whether Amanda were worth wedding, or even that she would now stand her trial, here at this mysterious institution. James had said that he might marry Amanda as if marrying her did not matter to him—no, rather, as if I must not regard marriage as that which will make me the happiest girl in the world.

  Dear Mr. Podgins opened the coach door, and James alit, handing the coachman the promised half-crown. As he turned to hand Amanda out of the carriage, she saw a man who must be the butler of the house (surely colleges didn’t have butlers?) emerge from the grand front door.

  If marriage would not make her happy, what would? Mrs. Bates, and Amanda’s mother, had—she suddenly realized—given her this single standard of happiness, had they not? That a girl married, and lived happily with her husband.

  Jane had married, and Jane had found herself strapped down to a trestle and caned by Mr. Penny, until at her husband’s command she begged for his prick up her bottom, and he gave it to her long and hard. Amanda had been going to be married to Mr. Charlton, and she had found herself whipped in her own family’s parlor, then sucking her so-called bridegroom’s stiff manhood until he spurted his burning, bitter seed down her throat.

  To marry, in the storybooks, meant to keep house and care for children, and perhaps some girls experienced that sort of union with good, industrious husbands. Amanda supposed that when she first saw James Coventry she had thought that perhaps he would make that sort of husband, and when he said he would save her, that idea had grown in strength.

  But at the very same time another notion as to what sort of man her angel might be had traveled by the side of the first, one that had a dark attraction for her. Might James not also be the sort of man who would… guide her? She blushed even to think of it in those terms, but in the carriage he had given her other terms, too—much more shameful ones.

  For it seemed he was indeed the sort of man to guide her: in pleasing him, in yielding to him, in obeying him even when he told her to take his hardness in her mouth, between her legs, up her bottom.

  Was it not even worse then, that a man should tell a girl he would guide her that way and, well, use her that way, without a promise of marriage, than that a recognized suitor or a wedded husband should demand such shameful service? As Amanda took her angel’s hand and stepped from the carriage, looking around her at the grandeur of the isolated park surrounding the enormous house whose farther reaches remained shrouded in darkness, she couldn’t answer the question. She felt sure Mrs. Bates would say that it was much, much worse—that it would have been far better to have stayed in Renford-on-Tees and to have submitted to the pleasures of Mr. Charlton, the whippings and the other thing he had said… Amanda whispered it even in her mind: fucking.

  “Mr. Coventry, is it?” the butler asked.

  “It is,” James said, “and Miss Eaker.” He led Amanda forward a little.

  “I am Mr. Andrews, porter of the college.”

  Porter, Amanda thought. That’s what colleges have.

  “I’ve only the one valise,” James said, as Podgins handed it down from the carriage.

  “A junior porter will see to that,” Andrews said. “The young lady has no baggage, I imagine.”

  Amanda studied Andrews’ face. The blood had rushed to her face at this reminder of her shameful status: a young woman, a miss, traveling alone with a gentleman. Had the porter’s voice implied that she didn’t deserve to receive any of the customary respect accorded a miss, because she had clearly come to his house for immodest reasons?

  If his voice did imply it, his face remained impassive as it looked into James’, and Amanda had no way to determine whether that expression indicated delicacy or distaste.

  “No, that’s right,” James said. He turned to the coachman. “Thank you, Mr. Podgins,” he said warmly. “Have a good journey
back to Renford.”

  Mr. Podgins tipped his cap, and gave Amanda a little smile. “Best of luck, miss,” he said. “I shall tell your parents you’ll write, and I’m sure it will be with happy news.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Podgins,” Amanda replied, thinking that once the man had departed, she would be entirely in the power of James Coventry and his friends at this ‘college,’ whoever they might be. She shivered despite the relative warmth of the air on this spring morning.

  Podgins got up, and turned the carriage around the broad circle of the drive before the house. He tipped his cap a final time, and then the horses took him quickly out of sight along the Durham road.

  She turned back to Andrews, expecting to be told where the master or mistress of the house—or perhaps the don? or tutor?—would receive them. Instead, the man said to James, “The young lady will have to take off her clothes now. The head sister will come and fetch her in a moment, and bring her to her cell. Dr. Brown has just risen, and will meet you in the breakfast room for a brief word, and after that I will show you to your bedroom.”

  For a long moment, Amanda truly did believe that her roiling fancies had deceived her ears, and that Andrews had actually said something more like The young lady will have need of refreshment. But James turned to her with an expression that mingled apology with something else—something that alarmed her even as it made her feel that same yielding that had seemed to possess her when he kissed her in the carriage.

  “You must take off everything, darling,” he said. “Gown, petticoats, corset—”

  Trying desperately to find some small thing on which to pin a hope, she said, “Surely not my shift or my drawers?”

  James glanced at Andrews, whose face remained impassive. Then turned his gaze back to Amanda, his brow now more set, his eyes narrower. The alarm rose inside her, but so did the fluttery, yielding feeling that quickened her breath even more, it seemed, than the fear did.

  “Those too, darling. You must be naked when you enter the college.”

  “But—”

  “This instant, Amanda.”

  “But I have no one to help me undress!” Her mother always helped her, and she her mother, so as not to tax the already overtaxed maid-of-all-work.

  But just then a woman, wearing the garb of a nursing sister—black frock and white apron, with the snow-white cap atop her grey curls—emerged from the door.

  “Does the young lady require assistance?” the woman said in a voice whose supercilious authority belied the words’ solicitude. She stepped toward Amanda, and Amanda instinctually shied away, trying to remove her hand from James’.

  He held her fast though, with a disapproving look upon his face. “Yes, sister,” he said. “Miss Eaker would be grateful for your help in undressing. Wouldn’t you, darling?”

  Amanda felt her face pucker toward tears as she looked from James’ handsome, unyielding face to the nursing sister’s much less attractive though equally unyielding one. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “Why… why must I undress… outdoors?”

  The sister turned to James. “Mr. Coventry, my name is Sister Stone. I shall take care of this little trouble, with my strap if necessary. You should go in and talk to Dr. Brown, and then get your rest. When Miss Eaker is ready for her examination, I shall let the doctor know, and he will rouse you for it. You’ll see Miss Eaker’s charms then, I promise.”

  “Very well,” James said, but he did not drop Amanda’s hand at once. He looked at her in silence for a moment, and she understood for the first time that the strangely dark expression in his radiant eyes told of a hunger that made her heart beat fast because she knew that hunger sought to devour her. “Darling, you must try to be a good girl for the sister. You don’t want to have another whipping, do you? I’m afraid to say that I’m sure Sister Stone will use her strap if she must.”

  “Oh, please,” Amanda wailed. “Please don’t… Mr. Coventry, don’t go!”

  “I must go, Amanda. It is time for your training to begin. I promise you will understand more, soon.”

  He stepped toward her, and, to her amazement, kissed her, in front of the porter and the sister, wrapping his arms about her and making her open her mouth to his probing tongue just as he had in the carriage. She had blushed furiously enough in the closed coach; now her face felt as hot as the sun, not only to be kissed that way, outdoors and in front of others, but because she felt her body now give itself up to James even more than it had when their kisses lay hidden from the world’s sight.

  How could he kiss her that way, and not promise to marry her? Instead of receiving a proposal, Miss Amanda Eaker must, it seemed, now undress in the spring air of what it seemed would soon become a lovely Westmoreland morning. Even if she did not receive another whipping, from this terrible Sister Stone, the sister would see the marks from her erstwhile suitor’s strap, whose lingering smart, Amanda felt, had somehow led to some large part of the confused emotions she now felt about James and the queer college to which he had brought her.

  “Goodbye, darling,” James said softly, after he had broken the long kiss. He held her at arms’ length and turned her toward the sister. “Be a good girl for me, now.” He gave her a little push, gentle but definite, and Amanda could not help taking a fearful step forward.

  “I’m sure she will, sir,” Sister Stone said to James. “Turn around, child, and I’ll unhook you. No fuss for me now. You have a fine gentleman, and you will make him a fine bedmate, soon enough.”

  As she allowed herself to be turned by the nursing sister’s strong hands, she watched James follow the porter inside the house. She couldn’t help a little sob when she felt Sister Stone’s fingers begin to unhook her simple blue calico gown.

  “Weep as much as you like, so long as you don’t give me any trouble, girl,” the woman said.

  “But I don’t understand!” Amanda said again, her hands balling into fists of outraged modesty. “What is this place? Why… why must I undress this way?”

  “Hush, now, miss. ‘Tis a place girls must enter naked, and that’s all you need to know at present.”

  Chapter Eight

  Dr. Brown examined Miss Amanda Eaker at four o’clock. Until that time, according to the doctor’s protocol for the admission of new girls, Amanda had remained, naked and of course under close observation, in her cell. Sister Stone had brought her breakfast and then, after Amanda had slept a while upon the comfortable bed, a simple dinner of meat and potatoes.

  The cells of the College for Advanced Study truly only deserved that name for their general configuration: only six feet wide and ten feet long and possessed of a single window placed too high in the wall for the vast majority of young women to see out. The comfortable bed itself was of a greater width than one would ordinarily find in such a room, however, in order to permit a man to have coitus easily with the cell’s inmate. A thick Persian rug lay upon the floor, and an oil lamp, standing on a table next to the bed, shed a warm light.

  In this cell Mr. Coventry would deflower Miss Eaker not long after her initial examination. She did not of course know this fact yet, and the first hours she spent there gave Dr. Brown nearly as much important information about her case as the examination itself would.

  Deprived of her clothing and in a strange room whose more cell-like aspects could not but stir thoughts and even fantasies of dungeons and gaols, Miss Eaker must contemplate why her savior had decreed a residence in such a place.

  “That’s a well-punished bottom,” Sister Stone had said, after making the girl bend over the bed for an initial inspection. Dr. Brown observed through the peephole let into every cell door. “You’ll want to touch it, miss, I’m sure, but that’s forbidden right now. So is touching between your legs, of course.” The nursing sister’s hands roved over the shapely little bottom with its delicate tracery of marks from the strap. Miss Eaker whimpered.

  “Are you wet, child?” asked Sister Stone softly, skillfully beginning what Dr. Brown called the priming
process.

  Miss Eaker could render only the least articulate of responses, as the sister’s fingers sought out the answer.

  “You certainly are wet, aren’t you?” the older woman said insinuatingly. “That’s just fine. You’re ashamed now, I know, but you are here to learn that you must lose that false modesty when it suits your gentleman for you to lose it. When I shave your vulva later, it will help you understand.”

  A sob came from Miss Eaker’s throat as Sister Stone continued her manual inspection, undoubtedly stimulating the clitoris directly for just a moment before she removed her hands and dried them on her apron.

  “Hop into bed, now, child. There is a bun and a glass of milk for you there on the table. I shall return in a few hours with dinner, and you shall see the doctor after that.”

  “M-must I be… naked the whole time?” Miss Eaker asked plaintively.

  “Of course,” the sister replied, as if the question were absurd. “New girls are always naked. After you have learned to please the cocksmen, the doctor may allow you to wear clothes again sometimes, but that won’t be for days and days at least.”

  From his station outside the cell, Dr. Brown had a very clear view of the way Miss Eaker, in the act of climbing into bed and obviously relieved to have at least the bedclothes to cover her nudity, dropped her jaw without having a single thing to say. The account he had received from Mr. Coventry over breakfast, of Miss Eaker’s encounter with her would-be bridegroom the previous afternoon, indicated that the ‘gentleman’ farmer had demystified coitus for the girl somewhat. The doctor’s knowledge of human nature, too, made him feel quite sure that words like cock, cunt, and fuck, now made a part of Miss Eaker’s passive vocabulary. Many new girls, on hearing the term cocksmen, would think of roosters—but Miss Eaker’s face showed that her priming continued apace.