I am, Madam, etc., etc.
James Eyre, Madeira
It was dated three years back.
I found the sisters seated once more in the sitting room, Georgina somewhat red faced, and squirming on her chair. No doubt her stripes were as sore as mine, if not so numerous.
“Was Mamma satisfied?” enquired Eliza, when I returned from exhibiting my nineteen striped bottom to my ruthless Aunt, still limping a little from the cuts in my thighs.
“She pronounced herself so,” I replied, “and I would have been surprised had she not. Your strokes would have been worthy of Mr Brocklehurst himself.”
“I would be honoured to think so, for he has been my inspiration and shaper.”
“I remember that, when he visited here, to interview me for Lowood, you were much impressed and even expressed the hope that you might experience the grace of his correction some time. Did you so?”
A slight vacancy, as of one reliving a dream, passed over Eliza’s visage.
“Yes,” she said, “just the once, and it transformed my life.”
“How so then?” I cried in astonishment. “He came here again then? What happened to impress you so?”
“He came quite frequently, for Mother could never get enough of his battement. He would leave her shattered but satisfied and then, before a month had passed, she would be importuning him to visit again, to ram her once more. We saw him here above six or eight times a year.”
“I am aware,” I said, “that Mrs Reed would entertain him in her bed from time to time. How did it come about that you experienced his rod though? I know Georgina did, on that same occasion when I met him first.”
Again that visionary expression crossed her face.
“You will remember then how he subdued her. With her plump hams Georgy could take any rod, she thought, and laugh it off, but the Reverend Brocklehurst uses a rod of the spirit, not just of rattan, and he reduced her to a cringing babe, even before she had to bend for him. After, she crept around the house like a mouse for weeks.”
Georgina flushed even redder, and dropped her eyes to her lap, as Eliza went on.
“It was then I made my mind up that I, too, would seek to know how it was.”
Eliza’s Vocation
“But you were never found guilty of crimes meriting the rod,” I objected. “How came it that you were subjected to his?”
“You are mistaken. Agreed, I was seldom punished for actual misdemeanours, since Mamma held that the eldest daughter had a rank that should be honoured, just as she thought that Jack, as a son, should escape altogether. However, whereas she held him totally immune to the rod, she was of the opinion that women should taste it from time to time, so that they were prepared for a husband’s discipline, and for the general good of their souls, so that, although I was never punished as such, I was, from time to time, made to submit to discipline.”
“And Mr Brocklehurst?” I asked.
“Not for some two years after the time you speak of, although the memory of that visit and Georgina’s state were often in my mind. Two or three times a year Mamma would send for me and inform me I was to prepare myself for a disciplinary flogging. On one occasion I could contain myself no longer. I fell to my knees before Mamma, clasping her around the legs and begged her that she might send for Mr Brocklehurst to perform the correction.”
“And what said she to that,” I asked, for it must have been a strange request for a young woman to make, Eliza being, as I calculated, about two and twenty at the time.
“She seemed a little put out at first, but she soon realised that this was no ploy to escape fustigation and, in any case, it served as an admirable excuse to invite the gentleman over. After flogging a bare buttock, he was always especially aroused, and she could look forward to such a pounding of her belly as to satisfy even her.”
“I can imagine. So the gentleman accepted?”
“At once, although prior appointments prevented him from coming for a whole week, in which time I spent no moment in which I did not anticipate his visit, in a state ranging from ecstatic expectancy to shuddering fear. He arrived on a Friday evening, and at once sent for me to attend him in the study. You may imagine my feelings of terror and elation, mixed, as I made my way to that feared room.
“When I had knocked, and been bidden enter, he said no further word to me, leaving me standing on the carpet in front of the desk, while he, first, stood looking me up and down with a piercing gaze, then walked slowly round me, taking in my trembling form. At last he spoke to ask me if it were true that I had especially requested that he might give me the disciplinary flogging that Mama had decreed. I admitted it was so in a very small voice, my limbs turned to water at the enormity of what I was undertaking. Then he commanded me to strip.”
“What!” I exclaimed, astonished, “a young woman strip before an unrelated male, with none other present?” Although I remembered another scene, when it had been I that had stood naked and stripped before him, on the occasion when, as with each Lowood resident on reaching puberty, he had forced my maiden passage in a brutal deflowering.
“Why, so I thought too, for I had never been naked before a man before. Except, of course for poor Jack,” Eliza corrected herself, “it’s true he saw me often enough, and more than saw.”
I remembered how Jack from an early age had been used to making his sisters expose themselves to him and, once his member was capable of the act, used those exposed bodies for his pleasure, and not without their active co-operation at most times; even some jealousy between the girls over who he had the most often. It was a wonder that they had reached adulthood without motherhood, but this may have been because he generally made use of their fundaments, having practised the method on the ‘fags’ that served him at school.
“When I demurred,” Eliza continued, “he commanded me in a voice that I could not disobey, telling me that he was to assess my physical health, just as a doctor might, and the matter was to be treated with no more fuss than a visit from my physician. He halted my disrobing when I wore no more than my stays and stockings, and had me bend over the desk while he palped my buttocks, passed his hand between my thighs, and squeezed the flesh on the backs of them. I am only sparsely haired in that region, but he pinched a few tendrils that protrude back towards him, and tugged them painfully, until they parted from my flesh.
“He bade me rise and resume my clothes and, when I had done so and stood in some little disarray and confusion before him, he pronounced my doom and the exact manner of it.
“First he produced a fearful rod. I am not sure to this day from just what plant or clime it came, but it was obviously some species of cane or palm of a dark brown hue, almost black, whether natural or from the application of subsequent treatment I could not tell. It was seamless, except for one joint near the tip, which served to swell that part a little over the general thickness, which was about that of my middle finger. It was near a yard long. I had to kneel and extend my hands in front of me. When he laid the rod on my open palms, I was surprised and appalled at the weight of it, and its suppleness, for it quivered on my palms.
The next evening, after dinner, he told me, I was to receive two dozen strokes of this dreadful instrument, inflicted on my bared buttocks, while bending over the desk. Tonight I was to maintain a vigil, in which I would think over my coming ordeal, and how my soul might best profit from it. I was to spend the night kneeling, with the rod set on a chair before me. At each hourly strike of the clock, I was to pick up the rod, bend it in my hands, kiss it and, finally, wax it and polish it with a soft cloth. I would maintain this vigil and solemn rite from the time he dismissed me, until it was time to descend for family breakfast.
The next evening, when it came time to dress for dinner, I was to disrobe and stand with my feet apart, bending to grasp my ankles. In this position I was to have my maid pluck out every hair that might be seen from the rear. Especially, he mentioned the tiny wisps between my vulva and my anus; he was m
ost particular about the need to remove each and every one. When all was smooth and bare, she was to scrub the whole area from my waist to the tops of my thighs with hot water and pumice, until it glowed. Only then might I dress and come down to dinner.
Afterwards, once the gentlemen had joined the ladies in the drawing-room, I was to discreetly withdraw, and await him in the study.”
“Such a preparation!” I exclaimed. “But it is typical of the man. His methods are designed to reach into your very soul, and leave you totally defenceless before him.”
“Indeed they did,” Eliza agreed with feeling, “he peeled away all my protection, layer by layer, until I went before him that evening feeling already as if he had flayed me to raw meat, before he had ever laid the rod on me. In the event he kept me waiting for him above three quarters of an hour, and, by the time he entered the room, I was as a mass of jelly, quivering, helpless, mortally afraid. I had no strength or will remaining and, when given the order, stripped without protest, and laid myself naked over the desk, my legs wide set, my hands reaching over to grasp the far edge, my breasts pressed to the cold hard surface.
Mr Brocklehurst informed me that any undue clenching of my buttocks, or movement of my hips might lead to the stroke being disallowed, and it would have to be taken again. Should I let go of the edge of the desk, I might be awarded extra strokes as he thought fit, and failure to control my cries to his satisfaction might also earn extra. Altogether he made it clear that this would be in some measure a contest between myself and the rod, and that the degree of my suffering was to some extent in my own hands. I set my teeth and gathered up my dissolving resolution to face the task.”
I had listened to Eliza’s appalling narrative with a sympathy I never thought to feel for her. In the past we had been sworn enemies, she using her position of power to gain me many grievous welts, many harsh restraints and terrifying incarcerations in the ‘Red Room’, and I had hated her for it. But that was years ago and now the shared experience of Mr Brocklehurst’s soul twisting methods, and infamous ‘Black Rod’, had made us sisters and I could no longer hate her.
My buttocks cringed in sympathy with her own, as she recited her tale, despite the fact they still throbbed and smarted from the thrashing she had given me only a bare hour before.
Once I would have resented a beating she had earned me, for it would have been done in a spirit of illwill and mischief making. This Eliza had little of love in her, even now, but what she had done had been in a spirit of stern duty, in response to her mother’s command, as transmitted by me, and I could not blame her for that. Meanwhile, I could guess only too well what she must have suffered that night, some five or six years gone, when she had spread her bare buttocks before the Master, her soul already made raw by his fiendish preparation.
As she described it, he had delivered the strokes at careful intervals, extracting the utmost from each one, letting her cling to the desk for a half minute or so, that she might feel the rising agony surge to its peak, before he proceeded to the next. I had experienced his skill in this judgement on more occasions than I cared to remember, and knew only too well how she must have writhed and mewled, then jerked and screamed as the cresting wave was crowned with the next searing stroke, for she told me she had been so wrought by the way in which he had primed her, the all-night vigil depriving her of sleep, the plucking and scrubbing, focusing her mind on the tender parts that were to be scourged, the long nerve-dragging wait in the deserted study, that her strength to resist had been undermined, and she had shrieked after only three or four strokes, and, once undone, could not win back her control.
As she described the flogging, I could see it clearly in my minds eye, for I had been there myself often enough. Mr Brocklehurst’s powerful figure, the pale buttocks bent over the heavy mahogany desk, the dark wand descending, almost too fast to follow, driving into the once white flesh, burrowing in, biting, burning, bruising, the bright red line it left as it fell away, the thick dark welts of the preceding strokes. I could see the full hips writhing as they tried to absorb the atrocious pain they were enduring from the cut, the little hands scrabbling at the hard wooden desk, like a drowning swimmer seeking salvation, but finding none, for the waves continued to beat behind, one after another into that tender flesh, as if they would never cease.
Eliza told me that, somewhere in that dreadful sequence of cuts to her screaming body, a sudden change came over her. She still hurt as much, the cuts still drove screams from her throat, her body still jerked and writhed, but her soul found peace, a stillness at the centre of this appalling storm.
It was the turning point of her life. Until then her ambitions had been those of any well brought up young woman of her class; to make a good marriage to a suitable man, which in her case included the ability to reproduce those voluptuous spasms that her brother Jack had so accustomed her to with his penetrations of her orifices, front and back.
Now she would dedicate herself to attaining that still small centre again, by submitting herself to the most rigorous regime she could find. I asked her how she intended to accomplish this and she told me that, once her mother was no more amongst us, she would take her portion of the inheritance and seek out a closed order of flagellant nuns. She would serve a probationary year with them, before committing herself, and her inheritance, irrevocably.
“I doubt a probation would be required of you. With your ample dowry and obvious vocation, they would accept you at once,” I ventured.
“It is not I who would be on probation, but the order,” Eliza replied a little stiffly. “I would have to be satisfied that they would provide a sufficiently stern and unbending regime. Meanwhile I mortify my flesh with such means as are within my reach. For instance, I wear hair against my body at all times, and have had the shoemaker drive brads into the soles of my shoes.”
“Ah!” said I, “I thought, when you stripped to inflict my birthday gift, that there was something unusual about your under clothing.”
It was amazing the change that had come about with this revelation of shared Master and rod, and Eliza’s new ambition. As I have remarked earlier, we were now like sisters and, like sisters, were eager and happy to share confidences.
“Indeed, let me show you,” Eliza said and, without more ado, stood and pulled her gown over her head, standing once more in stays and stockings, as I had seen her when she had prepared to inflict on me those nineteen swingeing cuts that still throbbed in my buttocks.
Now I understood fully the meaning of the coarse mat of hair protruding from the cusps of her stays. Woven horsehair pads had been inserted so that they were in contact with every part of the tender breasts covered by the corset. Not only were the prominent teats pressed into the rough pricking material, but it extended round under the soft moist fold below, the movement of her body, even her breathing, fretting the delicate flesh until it was almost raw.
As I had observed before, she wore no drawers, and I could see now that the dark mass between her legs was another quantity of horsehair, plaited into a great rope, such as might adorn a dray horse’s tail or mane. It was drawn up tight between her legs, held to the bottom of the corset before and behind, and rubbing hard on her vulva and rear crease with every movement, however slight, she made.
She loosed a small strap and buckle that tensioned it in front, and peeled it out of her fork, grimacing with pain all the while. I looked on horrified, as it came away and revealed a band of raw flesh on the inside of each thigh, her labia red and sore. I did not like to think how it must have affected that so sensitive button at their junction, or the tight crease about her anus.
“There is a further band,” she said, as she retightened the strap tensioning the braid in her fork, “but you cannot see it unless I remove my stays, since it is a girdle round my waist.”
I flinched physically. No wonder all her movements were so stiff and deliberate. While she adjusted her dress, I examined her shoes, which she had kicked off, so that I might try
them. Inside, each sole was studded with low dull points. They were not sharp, so as to pierce the skin, but dull, about an eighth of an inch high.
I tried my foot in one. It was uncomfortable just to be in it, and, with my weight on the sole, the discomfort rose severely. I remembered how painful it could become to have even a small grain of wheat, or a bit of grit, in one’s shoe for any length of time, and could imagine how these must hurt after a short time of wearing. I could see that any institution would have to have high standards of severity to match Eliza’s.
I did not see Mrs Reed again alive. After the funeral, Eliza put her plan into action without delay, travelling to Portugal, where she entered the Abbey at Bless‚, an institution notorious for the severity of its regime. Her noviciate must have been to her satisfaction, for she presented her dowry, and entered it permanently, becoming in a short while Mistress of Novices, much feared for the harshness with which she inflicted on the new intake the flagellations and mortifications of the flesh from which she did not shrink herself.
Georgina took herself to London, where she soon exchanged her lush flesh, and more modest fortune, for a coronet.
A Rough Courtship
I returned to Thornfield to find that my presence was eagerly awaited. It seems that AdŠle, without me to pester for amusement and instruction, had taken to plaguing Mr Rochester. Though he understood that children can disturb one’s peace without any evil intent and had, in any case, packed her off to pester Mrs Fairfax instead, I was, by the terms of our agreement, responsible for her behaviour, and must pay for it out of my own hinds.
I groaned at this news, for it was not a week yet since Eliza had laced my thighs so sorely, and I was still bruised behind, but I made no protest when ordered to attend the Master and then, in his presence, take off my drawers and lift my skirts.
“Ah ha,” says he, on observing the still pronounced tracks of Eliza’s cane, “I see someone has been here before me,” and I told him all that had befallen at Gateshead, though not the letter, and the cruel trick that Mrs Reed had played on me, to deprive me of the chance of a kind guardian, and a substantial inheritance.
Jane and Her Master Page 11
