The Piano Teacher

by Sophie Elliot

  ‘Yes?’ she said, in a voice that, while not overtly hostile, was certainly not overtly friendly.

  ‘I’ve come to see Miss Martin,’ replied Lucy. ‘Is this the right house?’

  ‘It is,’ said the maid. ‘You were meant to come at four.’

  Lucy glanced down at her wristwatch. It read three minutes past.

  ‘I see,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry - I had no idea I was late.’

  The maid smiled at her. It was a strange smile - not entirely pleasant, with an air of ‘you’ll see’ about it. Lucy decided she didn’t quite like her, although she couldn’t put her finger on exactly why. The girl opened the door wide and stood aside to let her enter.

  ‘Go into the drawing room,’ she said. ‘First door on the right.’

  Lucy nodded, and stepped into the great house. At once the air changed, as if she had entered the rarefied atmosphere of a long sealed tomb. There was a faint sweetness, like crushed flowers, and the whole ambience was one of carefully cultivated languor. The walls were covered with an exotic printed wallpaper and the carpets were deep pile, claret affairs in which Lucy found herself longing to bury her toes.

  Once the heavy door was closed behind her, the world seemed to halt altogether. Sounds ceased, except for the distant ticking of a clock, and the light was at once warmer, intimate, older. Having a maid clearly helped Miss Martin keep the place looking tidy; in fact, the house was immaculate. A glass-fronted bookcase on her left was neatly lined with elderly editions, and crowned with a pleasingly symmetrical arrangement of porcelain. Lucy would have paused to examine the volumes within had she not been late, not to mention the almost malevolent presence of the maid behind her. A little gingerly, she knocked politely on the first door she came across. From within Miss Martin’s taut voice intoned, ‘Come!’ She turned the ivory handle, and entered.

  The drawing room was as elegant as the hallway, and possessed of epic proportions. Miss Martin sat at a desk to Lucy’s left, engaged in what looked like editing a score. She was sitting much as she had done in the café; cross-legged, erect, the epitome of grace and poise. Opposite her was the piano - a great upright, seemingly hewn from a single great slab of mahogany, inviolate, splendid. It was decorated with a baroque tracery, its Olympian size perfectly suiting the room in which it was placed. On the right was a music stand placed in the bay of the great front window through which sunlight surged in a series of warm, velvet beams. Outside, the leaves murmured in the breeze, but the ambience within was timeless.

  Lucy closed the door behind her quietly. Miss Martin made no move to greet her, and so she stood waiting. At length the music mistress placed her pencil down on the desk with a faint snap, and slowly turned her head towards her.

  ‘Lucy,’ she said, in a quiet voice, ‘I believe we were due to meet at four o’clock. Was I mistaken?’

  Her voice was not unkind, but there was a firmness in it which took Lucy a little aback.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s right. I was supposed to be here at four, but my lecture overran. I’m sorry if I kept you waiting.’

  ‘I see,’ said Miss Martin.

  She rose from her chair in one fluid movement. She wore a black dress, cut high at the neck and below the knee, adorned simply with a row of pearls. It clung to her classically beautiful frame tightly, augmenting her icy allure. Combined with her black stockings and high heels, the ensemble contrived to exude a devastating ambience, a kind of restrained yet ineffably potent attractiveness that positively enticed the beholder offer their service.

  She stood in front of Lucy and looked at her, as if momentarily undecided. Then she turned away.

  ‘I shall be lenient with you this time, Lucy,’ she said, absently. ‘But I must say, I expected a little more punctuality from you on our first encounter.’

  Lucy was destroyed.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I really had no idea of the time - it won’t happen again.’

  Miss Martin raised a gloved hand. ‘Very well,’ she said smoothly. ‘Let that be an end to it. It shall be forgotten...’ an eyebrow was raised, ‘...this time.’

  She turned back to her pupil.

  ‘Now that you are here, though,’ she said, ‘we may commence with your uniform fitting. Would you follow me, please.’

  Miss Martin glided past her, and back through the door through which she just entered. They passed further down the hall until they reached a smaller room near the back of the house. Inside was an ironing board, and a table upon which sat a sewing machine. On another table rested a pile of clothes, from the look of which Lucy guessed was her prospective uniform. A twinge of unease entered her; with it, however, was also an unusual rush of faint excitement.

  ‘Now,’ said Miss Martin, ‘let’s see what we can do with you.’

  She picked up a brilliant white blouse, just like Lucy had worn at school, and held it up to the light, inspecting it. Almost immediately a frown passed across her sculpted features.

  ‘Oh, that girl!’ she muttered, almost in a whisper.

  She then examined the skirt - a pleated navy-blue item that was conspicuous for its shortness. Under this was, as far as Lucy could make out, a pair of white socks, a striped necktie, a plain white brassiere, and a pair of white knickers. Beneath the table were several pairs of highly polished black buckle-shoes. She presumed that these items were extraneous; after all, how far was Miss Martin planning to take this uniform business?

  The music mistress continued to inspect the skirt. At several points she tutted out loud, clearly unimpressed by something. She turned the garment over in her hands, evidently getting more and more dissatisfied. Lucy stood quietly, waiting to be spoken to. Eventually Miss Martin seemed to reach a decision, and briskly she rang a bell that was placed beside the sewing machine.

  Almost immediately the door opened and the maid poked her pretty head in.

  ‘Yes, mistress?’ she said. Her demeanour had changed markedly from the assured, slightly surly figure who had greeted Lucy at the door. Now she looked nervous, and wrung her white apron slightly with her fingers. She seemed unwilling to enter the room completely, and hung back a little.

  ‘Come in, Jenny,’ said Miss Martin, in a commanding voice. It brooked no argument, and the mollified maid edged towards the dominating figure of her employer. Lucy shrank somewhat into a corner, all too content to keep out of the situation. For whatever reason, however, her indistinct sense of excitement intensified.

  ‘What is this?’ Miss Martin demanded in a crisp, almost terrifying voice.

  The maid stared at her in an almost comical confusion. ‘Um...’ she began, clearly flustered.

  Miss Martin whipped up the blouse. ‘What is this?’ she repeated, shaking the white garment at the recalcitrant maid.

  ‘Um, it’s a blouse, mistress,’ mumbled Jenny.

  Miss Martin smiled coldly at her. ‘Yes, Jenny,’ she said, ‘it is a blouse. It is the blouse we are going to dress Lucy in, isn’t it?’ Her voice had changed somewhat. It seemed kinder, more reasonable, but no less powerful.

  ‘Yes, mistress,’ replied Jenny, hesitantly.

  Miss Martin moved closer to the maid, and began absently to stroke her cheek. ‘Now, what did her mistress tell Jenny to do to with the blouse and the skirt this morning?’

  Jenny was trembling, although it didn’t seem quite like pure fear to Lucy. ‘To iron them, mistress,’ she replied. It seemed that she was obliged to end each reply with an honorific. Clearly, Miss Martin was in total control of her young employee. The situation was charged with an undeniable frisson, and Lucy found herself entering more and more into the theatre of it. Arcane it was, certainly, but there was a torrid attraction to it that she found herself unable to entirely escape.

  ‘And did you do as you were asked, Jenny?’ cooed Miss Martin, almost in a whi
sper. ‘Did you do that one little thing for your mistress?’

  Jenny began to look a little panicked, as if she knew there was no answer that would extricate her from the situation. Her arms hung limp by her sides, resigned. ‘Yes, mistress,’ she said weakly.

  Miss Martin drew away from her and frowned. ‘Then why, my girl, are these clothes covered in creases?’ she asked in an icy voice. Her anger, cold and assured, was something to behold. Without losing composure for a minute she seemed to grow inches taller, to become a figure of dynamism and pure energetic force. She swept back to the ironing board with the blouse and skirt in hand, her eyes flashing with a dark potency. She came to rest facing Jenny, hands on hips, framed by the window behind her.

  Jenny trembled. ‘I don’t know, mistress,’ she said in a weak voice, and hung her head.

  Miss Martin sighed and cast a half despairing, half eager look at the diminutive maid. ‘You have done a bad job, haven’t you, Jenny?’ she said.

  Jenny merely nodded meekly, as if resigned to her fate. Her body, though, told a different story. Standing next to her, Lucy could see the taut expectation in her clenched fingers, the raised hairs on the nape of her neck.

  Miss Martin tutted. ‘Well, at least you’re honest,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘But I can’t have this shoddy work go unpunished.’

  She looked back at Jenny, the ghost of a wicked smile playing on her perfect lips.

  ‘What happens to naughty maids, Jenny?’ she asked, in a voice dripping with sensual suggestion. Lucy caught her breath. Under her jumper, inexplicably, she felt her nipples rise, and she could feel the blood pump around her body with vigour. Surely not, though. Her imagination was getting the better of her. Surely Jenny would not be getting...

  ‘A spanking,’ mumbled Jenny, her cheeks bursting into redness, her ankles twisting against one another in embarrassment.

  A spanking! But, it couldn’t be... Lucy clenched her fingers together to stop herself from revealing her excitement.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Jenny,’ Miss Martin persisted, in a voice that seemed to revel in her maid’s discomfort. ‘I’m sure I didn’t quite hear that, and I’m quite certain Lucy didn’t either. What, exactly, happens to maids who fail to perform their duties properly?’

  Jenny looked up, her pretty face torn between fear, humiliation and an embarrassed, suppressed arousal.

  ‘Please, mistress,’ she said defiantly, as if reciting, ‘Maids who do not perform to the satisfaction of their mistress are to be soundly spanked on their bare bottoms.’

  There could be no doubt about it now; Lucy was going to witness Jenny being spanked by Miss Martin. A rational voice whispered briefly in her ear that she should be appalled, that she should attempt to intervene, or to leave, but she couldn’t. The truth of it was, if she admitted it to herself, that she rather wanted to see Jenny punished - the whole idea was fascinating. It had nothing to do with the maid’s surliness at the door, but by now Lucy was so taut with excitement, nothing but a proper climax to the unfolding drama would suffice. Her stomach was tight with expectation, and she felt the first tingling pangs of stimulation as Miss Martin spoke again; she was getting turned on by the thought of witnessing a spanking, she knew, but it was a hard thing to acknowledge.

  ‘Very well,’ came the calm, capricious voice. ‘Assume the position, Jenny.’

  Miss Martin indicated by a nod of her head the second desk, towards which Jenny gingerly edged, blushing furiously. She stood before it, her head still bowed, facing away from both Lucy and her mistress. Miss Martin positioned herself behind Jenny and to her left.

  ‘Now bend over,’ she commanded, obviously relishing her total control, each word pregnant with a sexual charge. Lucy watched in fascination as the maid, completely submissively, bent over the desk, her legs tightly placed together and her bottom in the air. Once in position, her left hand clenching the far leg of the table, she put her right hand beside her and placed her face meekly down against the tabletop.

  Miss Martin went up to her, and ran a slender hand absently over Jenny’s rump.

  ‘You have been a very bad girl, Jenny,’ she said. ‘When I tell you to iron clothes for me, I expect it to be done well. I am in the mood to teach you a severe lesson today. You are lucky that I don’t have my cane here, or it might be much worse.’

  She slowly lifted Jenny’s black skirt over her hips, and placed it gently over her back, exposing her pink knickers. They did not do much to cover her generous bottom, which was full, white, firm, and smooth as milk. Lucy found her eyes following the curve of her bottom-cheeks in fascination, tracing the faint line of shadow from her trembling thighs to the dark, cool, intimate place at the juncture of her legs.

  Miss Martin let Jenny stand thus exposed for some time, lecturing her on the duties of a maid, all the time pacing up and down behind her. The words were largely lost on Lucy, who found her attention completely absorbed in the glorious sight of Jenny’s bottom, upended, exposed, and primed for a spanking. As Miss Martin spoke it wriggled slightly, as Jenny twitched and shivered in expectation of what was to come.

  ‘And now I’m going to spank you, you naughty girl,’ said Miss Martin, which appeared to be the end of her edifying discourse, ‘and I hope you will learn your lesson.’

  At that, she pulled down Jenny’s knickers, completely exposing the poor girl. She let them rest halfway down Jenny’s thighs, which had the effect of binding her legs together. She then hiked Jenny’s skirt higher, so that her entire body from the lower back to her knees was naked, and twisted the maid’s right arm behind her back with her left hand. Resting her weight on Jenny’s pinioned wrist, Miss Martin made ready.

  Lucy swallowed nervously.

  The music teacher braced herself for the first swing. Her right hand lifted into the air. Jenny’s bottom clenched. She drew a quick breath.

  ‘One!’ cried Miss Martin, her palm smacking down into Jenny’s bottom with startling force. A resounding slap reverberated around the room, accompanied by a squeal from the unfortunate maid, who buckled under the spank. As Miss Martin’s hand swept up a great red handprint was etched on the smooth skin of her victim’s bottom.

  ‘Two!’ cried Miss Martin, as the hand whipped down again almost immediately, this time marking the right cheek with a crimson hand-shaped weal. Jenny’s behind bounced and bucked. More smacks rained down with speed and force, Miss Martin each time calling out the number as she mercilessly laid into her hapless charge. Jenny wriggled and squealed furiously as the spanks became smarter, but her mistress kept her firmly pinioned to the desk. Lucy silently drew towards the scene, tingling with disbelief, her eyes wide open. The rapid slaps of rigid palm against bottom echoed around the room as Jenny was remorselessly spanked. Her legs kicked under the onslaught, but to no avail. As the punishment went on her bottom got rapidly redder, each cruel smack finding its target with deadly accuracy.

  Throughout, Miss Martin remained implacable, determined, and quite oblivious to the discomfort of her maid. As she spanked Jenny the announcement of the number of smacks given was coolly called out. Her left arm remained firmly in place, clamping Jenny firmly across the desk in the face of all manner of squirming, while her right hand swept up and down with a forceful regularity.

  Jenny herself, unable to hinder her punishment in any way, was spanked thoroughly and comprehensively. Even the tops of her thighs were not exempt, and when these were struck her yells were additionally piercing. Occasionally, in the course of her bucking her legs would briefly and slightly part, in which case Miss Martin’s practised hand would immediately fly between them to deliver a stinging slap on her most intimate parts, engendering the most intense yelps of all. She was cool, effective, and efficient, making sure that Jenny was spanked evenly all over, and that no part of her nether regions escaped the sting of her palm. It was a clinical job, the punishment of an erran
t servant, and one that Miss Martin performed with all the attention she might have lavished on the basting of a turkey. Safely gloved, her palm was free to smack Jenny with unrestrained vigour, and her strong forearm was put to good use as she rigorously set about the unfortunate maid’s naked bottom.

  Her victim, under the combined effect of so many spanks, positively writhed under Miss Martin’s firm auspices. Jenny kicked desperately, but the binding of her knickers impeded her legs, and her frantic efforts to evade her punisher’s smacks were curtailed by the firm grip on her wrist. Her gasps and squeals of discomfort and embarrassment had risen in intensity, so that as each blow fell her voice would join the sharp crack of the smacking in a crescendo of sound. Her blonde head jerked off the table as her chastisement continued, one spank after the other on her beautiful red bottom.

  The impact was becoming eye watering even to Lucy, and Jenny eventually began to splutter into tears as her rear end was mercilessly punished. As the spanking session drew to its finale Jenny was evidently very sore, with the gorgeous cheeks of her bottom glowing a bright, warm crimson. The final smack fell with the most force, a great slap on her thoroughly polished rump that echoed around the room. Jenny cried out, convulsing like a fish out of water, and then went limp, exhausted. Miss Martin smiled at her handiwork while Jenny sniffed weakly, her spanked bottom positioned as if for Lucy to take note.

  And Lucy did not know quite what to do. It was like a dream, and yet the strange sensations she felt in her nether regions attested to the fact that it wasn’t. Strangely, she found she couldn’t take her eyes off the scarlet bottom in front of her. The whole episode had seemed almost feudal in its anachronism, and there was an element of the tribal in the spanking ritual. And yet, for whatever reason, Lucy was quite, quite sure that Jenny had not been the unwilling victim she had appeared. The tears were real, as had been the yelps of discomfort, but there had been an undeniable enjoyment in the writhing of her naked nether regions, as if she had actively liked being stripped, pinioned and punished. That thought was a little perverse for comfort, and so she kept silent, hoping Miss Martin would forget she was there altogether. In fact, the music mistress seemed to take on a quite different personality now that Jenny had been completely humiliated and brought to heel. She gazed down on the bare bottom of her employee with a tender, loving look.