“A thrashing! Show me at once.”
Blushing even deeper, I stood and removed the loose wrap I had donned, for she had told me breakfast was to be an informal occasion. Beneath I had only my shift, which I hoisted onto my hips, exposing the rounds of my buttocks, which I turned towards my employer.
“Goodness, child,” she exclaimed, “what heinous offence did you commit to deserve that?” A worried look crossed her open countenance. “I hope you are not dishonest or dishonoured.”
“Do not be concerned,” I said, “it was not done as punishment, but as a parting gift, a reinforcement of that discipline and behaviour inculcated in all Lowood girls, imprinted in their persons with the rod and the cane. It was not done in anger, more in love and concern for my future well-being.”
My explanation seemed to satisfy her, but she continued to ‘tut’ over the ravaged bottom I displayed. It was hardly surprising, since I made a colourful spectacle. The welts had darkened overnight, and it was too soon for them to have subsided much. Mr Brocklehurst did not deal in light swishes, every one was a whistler, leaving a finger thick welt, and two dozen, even spaced on my rather fatty underbum, must needs merge to form great slabs of blackish bruise. Several shorter, telltale tracks, starting on my left thigh, following its white curve inwards and upwards, but failing to reappear opposite, on the right thigh, marked the ‘short’ cuts, where he had reached my poor aching vulva, still throbbing, even now, nearly twenty-four hours after it had been so cruelly sliced.
I resumed my gown, and we continued our conversation. I asked after my charge.
“She will be here directly,” I was informed, “I gave instructions to the nurse that they should not hurry down this morning, so that we might meet under less rushed conditions than last night, and get a little acquainted.”
I enquired what her daughter was named.
“My daughter!” she exclaimed in some surprise, “I have no children. I would have liked children,” she added wistfully, as if to herself, “but never became fruitful. Mr Fairfax, for all he was a dear sweet man, and we were ever very companionable in bed together, had spent too much time in Arab lands. There they do not use a woman as is done here, you know.”
“Not as men do to us in England?” I exclaimed. “How so then?”
“Why he liked mostly to take me from behind, in that other channel. He claimed that it was tighter, and excited him more. Though it certainly aroused him to great passion, and I was not unmoved myself, no children could come of it.”
“Then who is it I am hired to teach?” I asked, surprised in my turn.
“Why, AdŠle is Mr Rochester’s ward. He has brought her here from France to be given a good English education.”
“And who is Mr Rochester?”
“Why the Master of this house, and your employer.”
“But I thought that you were my employer,” I said in astonishment.
“Oh, no, my dear,” she said in a surprised tone, as if taken aback that I did not know. “I am only the housekeeper, though distantly related to Mr Rochester through my late dear husband’s family.”
I must have looked bewildered for she went on.
“I see I have not been full enough in my letter to you. Mr Rochester asked me to find a governess, as soon as maybe, and I answered your advertisement in haste, since the little girl was due here imminently. She is the daughter of a friend of his, from France, recently deceased and, as an act of charity, he has taken her in, she having no other guardian. Mr Rochester is the owner of this estate, and several other properties in the district, and a great fortune besides, but he is seldom here, seeming to spend all his time travelling, principally on the continent I believe.”
Just then the door opened to admit a trim nurse and the little girl, my charge. AdŠle at that time was about eight years old, a small, pretty child, with a mass of ringlets falling to her waist. She was well dressed, but in too fancy a fashion for a child, in my opinion. I was not given to extravagant dress in the young. I myself, wore mainly plain black, perhaps dove grey for special occasions, pale blue and apple green in summer.
She addressed a question to the nurse, Sophie, asking, in French, whether I was the Governess she had been promised. It happened that I had some fluency in the language for I had been taught by a French lady at Lowood, Mde. Pierotte, from whom I had acquired, not only some skill with rod and cane, for it was she who taught me how to cut the bare bottoms of the great girls in my charge until they howled or, better still, clasped their hands to their seats and thus earned themselves extra strokes, but also a good accent and pronunciation. Soon we were in conversation in her own language. She was overjoyed, for her English still lacked ease and fluency, and prattled on about herself, her history and her accomplishments.
It seems she had lived in France, with her Mamma, who had now ‘gone to the Holy Virgin’, in a pretty house in a clean town, where many ladies and gentlemen had come to visit, ‘to play with Mamma in her bed’, amongst them Mr Rochester. When she had lost her Mamma, Mr Rochester had asked her if she would like to come and live with him in England, and she had said yes, ‘but he lied to me, for, though he brought me here in a great ship across the sea, he does not live here with us’.
She asked if I would like to hear her sing, and she rendered a song from an opera, most unsuitable for a little girl, being about a woman parted from her lover, wet, warm and weak-kneed with passion for him, and anticipation of their conjunction on his return. Then she would recite for me, then dance. Though pretty and lively, indeed her movements mocked those of a Grande Coquette, I could see she was spoilt and self-willed, and I would have to work hard to make her what an English girl should be.
My task would not be made any easier by her extreme youth. I approved of the use of a penal cane on the developed buttocks of great girls of sixteen or more, who had acquired with their growing womanhood, some fatty padding that would respond well to a smart cutting from tough rattan or malacca, and, indeed, deemed it an essential adjunct to a grown woman’s spiritual health, that there be someone to exercise firm discipline and correction, father, brother, husband, an older woman at a pinch, if none other could be found, who would not hesitate to quell any wilfulness, any lack of that submissiveness that is the hallmark of a real woman, but I could not condone the infliction of such severe punishment on one of such tender years as my charge, and only the lightest of corrections would be allowable. If the child fell short of grace, it would be the teacher who was at fault as much as she.
I was to be confirmed in this judgement later from a most unexpected quarter, and to my own cost in pain and suffering, but my conscience was clear on the matter. I searched through the collection of corrective instruments that, as in any well regulated establishment, the house provided, and selected the thinnest strip of cane, the lightest strap available, resolving to use them as sparingly as possible, and then only on the palm, and to spare the child the humiliation of having her lean buttocks beaten. Time enough for that when she entered into womanhood. Though sometimes trying and unruly, she was not wicked, nor unintelligent, and learnt well, her English, especially, progressing to the benefit of both herself and others, like Mrs Fairfax, with whom she came in contact.
A Plump Cook
That is not to say I had no occasion to exercise those skills with rod and cane that I had learnt of Mde Pierotte for, as in any great house, there was constant need to ensure the female staff were kept well disciplined. I had already observed how that pert minx Leah was wont to stray if spared correction, and others too were frail, being women.
Mrs Fairfax soon called on me to help with the onerous chore, once she learnt of my skill in such matters. I particularly remember the whipping of Ada Bradley, our cook. The thrashing of an eighteen year old tweeny, still in her bed at six o’clock, when she should have been busy blacking grates and rewarded with a dozen cuts into her pink nether cheeks, a dog whip lashing the soft white shoulders of a housemaid caught stealing cake, these were
common places in a house like Thornfield, but the flogging of a plump cook was a novelty I had not come across before.
Ada’s crime was to have been too hospitable to the young man who called each month from Hay with the kitchen supplies we needed. A mug of beer, a plate of food, some discreet congress in a store room, would have been winked at, though perhaps some warning word passed, but Ada was found, her voluminous drawers discarded, her skirts about her ears, bent over the kitchen table, while the young grocer’s assistant filled her larder with the rich cream from the monstrous Savaloy he kept between his legs, and now hers.
It could not be condoned for, in addition to the lack of discretion she displayed, together with her fat bare hams, she was still of an age to bear children, her monthly flows having not yet slackened. Not only would the scandal have disgraced the house, for her title of Mrs was purely honorific, but we would have lost an excellent cook, and have had all the trouble of having to find, and make used to our ways, a replacement.
If she had only had the sense to offer him that narrow anal passage, of which the late Mr Fairfax was so fond, it might have been overlooked but, when caught, the thrusting pole was deep in her wet vagina, spurting its sticky load against her very womb. More in sorrow than in anger, Mrs Fairfax decreed that the woman should be soundly flogged, for her own good, and as an example to others who might recklessly risk their bellies in like fashion. Deeming my youth and strength more suited to the task than her own age and weakness, she asked me to carry out the sentence.
In order to have the maximum influence for good, both on the plump delinquent, and the frailer females of the house, she was to be lashed in public; specifically, over the same kitchen table that had been the scene of her disreputable excursion into the realms of Eros, and in front of the assembled females of the staff. I had her strip to the buff, the more to shame her. With the males banished to the stables there was no need to consider decency, and she had to peel off every covering to reveal a body that Reubens and Rembrant would have filled their palettes for, loading them with great dollops of blush pink, some carmine for the great teats, jet black for the glossy curls between her legs.
I made her stand wide-legged at the end of the table, and had a maid secure her ankles firmly to the table legs, for this was to be an exemplary beating, and I did not think she would be able to keep her position without restraints throughout the thrashing I was determined she should have. Once secured below, I had the same maid tie her arms, wrist to elbow, tightly behind her back.
She stood there, a lovely rotundity of pink and white flesh, all smooth voluptuous curves, not a flat or a plane on her, her belly billowing. What might it look like if the grocer’s boy’s seed took root and sprouted? Her haunches flared behind her, balanced by the great pillows of her breasts. The only suggestion of hardness were the rock like peaks of her dark teats, quiveringly erect with fear and shame at her exposure.
I had seen many great girls stripped at Lowood, who boasted full voluptuous figures, but there was all the world between the burgeoning curves of a seventeen or eighteen year old, just coming into womanhood, and the mature swelling flesh of a woman of thirty-five, well nourished, she was our cook after all, and as full of flesh and juice as a September plum or sun-warmed melon. Her abundance was not that of dough or unbaked pastry, but smooth and ripe, like a grape about to burst with its excess of juice and sugar. I intended to make sure it should split and exude some liquid tribute to the rod before she should quit the room.
When I ordered her forward, she bent and laid the great globes onto the scrubbed top of her own kitchen table, displaying for us her swelling buttocks. As I looked at their generous and welcoming spread I could not but have sympathy for the young man who could not resist to plunge his manly weapon between those lovely cheeks, resting his belly on those pillows full of blissful promise. He should have had the good manners to take her in the wrinkled anus, just visible still in the deep cleft between the bountiful halves of her magnificent rump, or the good sense to withdraw as he spurted, letting his copious jets splash on the splendid moons, not on her still fertile womb, but who could not feel for him in his ecstatic seizure? How could he tear himself away from those pneumatic cushions, how not drive deep, deeper, letting his accumulated passion flood her to the gills?
No, one could not blame the lad, but the woman should have known better, and she would be taught, in a lesson I intended she should not easily forget. For the instrument of her instruction I had chosen a weapon worthy of the quality of the posterior in question, the most intimidating of the doleful sticks kept in an umbrella stand in the Master’s study.
I am not familiar enough with the botany of Africa and Asia to declare from what species of jungle plant, or desert palm it came, but it was of such a dark shade of honey as to be almost bronze, as much from age and wax as from nature I supposed, about three feet long, a dense material with weight to drive into that deep soft flesh I had before me, with whip and weight together slicing her to the core.
Those soft white hinds would cut like the butter she spread so thickly on our teatime toast, rise in dark swellings the colour of the damsons she turned into conserve for the same, burn hot and crisp as the toast itself. I took my stance behind that voluptuous bottom.
“Two dozen, well laid on, Ada,” I pronounced. “You deserve nothing less for hazarding your belly in this fashion.”
She whimpered, and I drew back my arm.
The very first stroke told me this was going to be a sensual pleasure that would leave me warm and, no doubt, somewhat wet, before it was done. The rod sank deep into the cringing flesh, which seemed to wrap itself around it, as if it would not let it go, then the fold gaped open, the visitor too hot to hold, and spat it out. I could feel the sensation transmitted back through the rod to my arm, just as my delighted eyes watched her jerk and squirm. Her head, which had lain on one cheek as she awaited the stroke, lifting slightly, coming down with her chin on the table, her mouth open, her breath rasping hoarsely through as she rode the obvious pain in her rear.
A thick red welt had sprung up where the rod had fallen, darkening even as I watched, bisecting her buttock across its fullest part. I listened to the rasping in her throat, until I judged she was on her peak, then, using the welt as my guide, sent the rod in again, just an inch lower.
Again the ample figure bent over the table jerked in anguished spasm, another blood filled welt tracked her bottom as her harsh breath betrayed the pain flowing into the swelling bruise. She endured the rest of her first dozen in this fashion, not giving way to the urgent rod, however hard it gnawed, the fullness of the sumptuous hinds soaking up the strokes.
I paused to draw my own breath at twelve, while she lay like a beached whale, panting through her mouth. I had hoped to make her cry out by then, for my own satisfaction as much as the edification of the younger domestics, but she had resisted, though I had covered the great bottom from crown to under bum with thick pulsing weals. I took up the rod again, and resolved to do better.
Now I stood back a trifle, so that I could spring forward with one foot, as I delivered the blow, adding to it velocity and whip. I set my eye on the creased junction of ham and thigh, and let fly.
It was a real whistler, as I had intended, and caught her in the very fold. Her body arched in a bow of pain, her head thrown back, her mouth agape as she let out a great cry of distress, then thrashed up and down, her great breasts striking the table-top with a sound like wet cloths slapped on a washboard.
I had her now, and pressed home my advantage, giving her time to drink the best of the bitter brew, but striking again before she could recompose herself. Now she was singing well, and I kept her screaming loudly for the rest of her dozen, threshing about on the table like a landed fish, one of those great white skates she would fillet there, the elbows of her pinioned arms sticking out just like the wings of the fish, though what fish sported such a red streaked pair of globes behind, as she did?
Her flesh
was lush and absorbent, but white and soft. It could not resist the impacts of that formidable weapon I deployed against it without yielding eventually, and I was rewarded with, first, bright beads of red dew on her right, followed shortly by a more generous welling, that trickled onto the thigh and wound its way down to her dimpled knee. When the demonstration was complete she could only lie on the table sobbing. Released, she gathered up her discarded clothes and hobbled from the room, the awe-struck eyes of the rest of the staff watching, as if hypnotised, the empurpled balloons wobbling behind, and the telltale trickle down her leg.
I had cut her so well her wounds were still weeping, two days later, when that other wound between her legs began to bleed, to the great relief of us all for, as I said, she was a most excellent cook.
The Meeting In The Lane
And so we continued our quiet lives, all content, I think, myself especially, having found a home after all these years when Lowood was all I had to own, and, in Mrs Fairfax and AdŠle, something akin to a family. But the house lacked a man, and there was no word of its owner, the mysterious Mr Rochester. I tried many times to gain something more of him from Mrs Fairfax, but that lady seemed oblivious of matters not requiring her immediate attention, and quite disinterested in those things that excited my questioning, his character, his appearance, his friendships and interests, all those subjects that a normal woman delights in probing and, in the absence of information, speculating on.
Winter had come. The weather was cold, ice lined the lanes around us, but the day was clear and sharp. I resolved to clear my head with some fresh air and exercise, electing to walk to Hay, our nearest village some two miles distant, making my pretext some letters that wanted posting there.
I set off after lunch, calculating that I could walk there and back, if I were brisk, and come home with daylight most of the way. About half way along the road I paused at a stile to remove a small stone that had entered my shoe. For five minutes I had endured it, like the pilgrims doing penance on their way to Canterbury or Compostella, but I felt no need of penance at that moment, or I would have hobbled on.
Jane and Her Master Page 2
