Reforming Rebecca

by Emily Tilton

At that a titter came from one of the maids, and a guffaw from a man. Rebecca’s face felt as hot as the sun.

  “Really, your ladyship,” Mrs. Rand protested. “Can you not…”

  “My servants,” said Lady Ambers, “know how to enjoy the edifying spectacle of a young woman’s correction. I do not seek to deny it them. Proceed, Mr. Oakes, if you please. Twelve cuts, and let us see if she thinks better of her defiance then.”

  From the corner of her eye Rebecca saw James’ legs move to the side, in the brown suit that made him look so different from the footman he had been. What did it mean, that Dr. Brown had sought him out? What did it mean that the physician had insisted on James Oakes being the one to deliver her punishment?

  “Miss Adams, I mean—”

  Lady Ambers interrupted, “That is unnecessary—”

  But James, to Rebecca’s astonishment, cut her off. “Milady, with all due respect, I am the one who will give this correction. I believe you agreed to that.”

  Dr. Brown, who along with Mr. Rand had faded so far into the background of the scene that Rebecca had almost forgotten they were there, said, “That is correct, Mr. Oakes.”

  “I never—” Lady Ambers began again.

  But James seemed to pay the noblewoman no mind at all and said, as if content with Dr. Brown’s confirmation of his authority, “Miss Adams, I mean to teach you that your duty to those of a higher station may sometimes be unfair, but that it is your duty nonetheless. I mean to convince you to apologize to her ladyship. As Lady Ambers said, after I have caned you twelve times, I will ask you if you will express your penitence and receive her ladyship’s forgiveness.”

  Rebecca almost cried out, after hearing James’ calm, almost soothing words, that yes, of course, she would apologize, for no one had put the matter so clearly to her before, but the part of her that needed to defy, that needed—yes, she used Lady Ambers’ own word now—to be broken, seemed suddenly to ally itself to her troubled, too-warm feelings for James himself.

  “You will count your lashes after each stroke, Miss Adams.”

  Then, silence fell. What was happening? Was James raising his arm? Oh, no, please… I did not mean it! She gave a cry of fear, and strained against the straps, utterly in vain.

  Then a terrible sound, of rattan slicing through the air, and an even more terrible sound, the crack of it that seemed to precede the sensation, if only by a fraction of a second.

  Then the pain, that made her yelp at the very first lash, building and burning and stinging across the bottom that squirmed helplessly now with Rebecca’s discomfort.

  “Count, girl,” said Lady Ambers.

  “Milady,” James said, with a warning tone in his voice that made Rebecca admire him despite the tears that prickled now in her nose and welled up in her eyes.

  Then James himself said, “Miss Adams, please count the stroke. If you do not count, I must cane you until you do, and those lashes will not tell toward the twelve.”

  “Oh, heavens,” Rebecca sobbed. “One.”

  Instantly the cane whipped through the air again, and she heard the crack and felt the burning line. Rebecca tried to remain defiant now, for she had at last felt what a real thrashing was like, and though it did hurt terribly she realized that it had not killed her, and would not kill her.

  “Two,” she grunted.

  But James must have been able to sense the resistance in her, or else his determination to make her understand what true discipline comprised made him more resolute. He caned her again, and again, until she was screaming and writhing and struggling against the straps just as Lady Ambers had desired. She cried out the numbers in a piteous, sobbing voice, and her bottom clenched and unclenched over and over in an unavailing quest to soothe the terrible burning the rattan inflicted, the lines of fire she had earned for her willfulness.

  “Ten,” she screamed. “Oh, please… please…”

  The cane struck again, and Rebecca gasped, her backside squirming, showing all those gathered in the drawing room just how well punished a girl who insulted a lady would always be, then wailed anew. “Please…”

  “Count the stroke, if you please, Miss Adams,” came James’ steady voice, and then he caned her again, her first extra for not counting. Rebecca sobbed and sobbed in the agony and the shame of it.

  “Eleven,” she said, feeling all the fight go out of her.

  He struck again, and Rebecca cried out, “Twelve,” to the floor of Mrs. Rand’s elegant drawing room, where Lady Ambers had now, she knew, won her victory over the flirtatious Miss Adams.

  Chapter Eighteen

  James looked down at Miss Adams’ well-punished bottom with a pang of regret that he had had to thrash her so severely. His cock had grown as hard as iron as he whipped her, for the act of disciplining her had made him long to master her in every way. Dr. Brown’s ideas of the proper conduct of the natural man had assumed more and more the appearance of settled truth as he contemplated Miss Adams’ needs for guidance both in amorous and in ethical matters as the punishment continued, though it pained James to know that he could not be the one to complete her training and enjoy her as her husband would, when the time came for her to submit to the man to whom she would belong.

  His liberal principles meant that his stance on what the writers on political life had begun to call the woman question lay in the camp of those who believed in the full emancipation of women, and the putting of an end to the old way of understanding how a wife must belong to her husband—that is, as a piece of furniture might belong to him. At the same time, though, the complexion of his amorous character declared loudly for an idea of his relations with the opposite sex according to which it was meet and right for him to master the girl he fucked.

  He had not hitherto found himself able to resolve the conflict of wishing to possess a girl utterly, both in the bedroom and outside it, and his political notions. Dr. Brown’s ideas, however, contemplated at a leisurely pace at the back of his mind, while he caned the beautiful Miss Rebecca Adams until her naughty bottom showed the severity with which wayward conduct must be checked, seemed all at once to accomplish that resolution.

  Perhaps not all girls needed the same sort of correction Miss Adams clearly needed. That must of course, James could see, be the reason Dr. Brown had come to examine her—that is, to ascertain that her needs lay in the purview of the theories he propounded in the treatise. James must read that treatise, he knew now, as soon as ever he could, but much of it he thought he could divine from his own thoughts as he gave Miss Adams’ pretty young bottom the thrashing she had earned for her misconduct.

  Emancipation for women did not entail, for girls like Miss Adams, freedom from a natural need to submit to a natural man. He reflected for a moment on the strange coincidence that an illegitimate child should so often be called a natural child. Did Miss Adams’ birth into that precarious social status put her in more need of correction than some other girl might have been? Be that as it may, James had recognized the girl’s need for taking in hand as soon as he had told her to go back into her chamber so that he might follow, and spank her to teach her to take more care of her virtue.

  I would emancipate you, darling Rebecca, he could not help thinking to himself even as he had to whip her an extra time for her failure to count. But only as much as you need freedom, and no more, for the joy of us both.

  James would, he felt certain, have easily recognized in himself the qualities of Dr. Brown’s natural man, had he been given a copy of the physician’s treatise and asked to consider what he thought of it. To have the doctor’s confirmation on the matter based on a true understanding of what had occurred in Miss Adams’ chamber the previous day, however, both gratified James and assured him that his new notions concerning erotic matters held great importance for his future.

  Now, after the twelfth stroke, Miss Adams’ squirming bottom, with the beautiful, horrid stripes he had made there with the cruel rattan, seemed to call out to his natural impulses. Without
even remembering Dr. Brown’s advice on the subject, he shifted the cane to his left hand and put his right down to soothe her. He knew, without the slightest doubt, that by that gesture he would be able to put an end to her suffering and to this terrible scene.

  Miss Adams, when she felt his fingers rubbing a gentle circle on her right bottom-cheek, gave a very different cry: a startled, whimpering noise that seemed full of longing.

  Whether at that sound or at the sight of the erstwhile footman touching the aristocratic bottom, Mr. Rand exclaimed, “I say!”

  But Dr. Brown admonished him immediately, “Mr. Oakes clearly knows how to handle this sort of discipline.”

  James heard a murmur, too, from Lady Ambers, in an angry tone, but her ladyship could hardly object after the positively indecent way she herself had fondled Miss Adams’ bottom.

  Nor did anything any of the audience might say or do have the slightest effect on James’ purpose. He said, “Miss Adams, are you ready to apologize?”

  “Yes,” the girl sobbed. “Lady Ambers, I—”

  James, feeling sure of what her ladyship would demand, interrupted. “I will unfasten you now, Miss Adams, and you will go and stand before Lady Ambers and give your apology thus.”

  The well-disciplined penitent gave a pitiful little nod, and James went about loosing the straps that bound her to the block. Silence reigned in the drawing room until Miss Adams, beginning to rise, gave a sharp cry at the renewal the motion brought of the agony in her bottom.

  “Keep your chemise raised,” James cautioned. “Her ladyship will wish, I am sure, to inspect your bottom.”

  Miss Adams sobbed and obeyed, shuffling with her hair all disarranged around her bright red face, the cheeks wet with tears. Standing before the peeress, she gave her full, humiliating apology, and then Lady Ambers did turn her around, and even made her bend a little so that the marks of the cane could receive a minute examination.

  Even as Miss Adams had to admit to her fault, James could sense in her, however, that she held something in reserve—that she refused truly to mean this capitulation to the unjust standards of society. While her ladyship clucked over the state of the penitent rump, as the girl stood next to the chair that might as well have been a throne, turned back toward the block, and held her chemise to allow her backside’s full inspection, Miss Adams’ eyes suddenly came up from the Persian carpet to meet James’. He understood in an instant, and it made his cock leap in his breeches: she had yielded not to Lady Ambers but to him—to the way he had touched her and the way he had spoken to her, the way he had given her the discipline she needed, and even the way he had fulfilled her need to resist to the point of earning that painful lesson.

  The moment of wordless conversation between James and the girl for whom he could never now deny he held a tender—if extremely complicated—affection lasted only a moment. As Mrs. Rand led her away, still sobbing softly, though, he formed a resolve that he meant to carry through the instant he found himself again alone with Dr. Brown.

  Indeed it did not prove especially difficult to find the occasion, for the doctor pulled him aside into Mr. Rand’s study as soon as the servants had returned to their duties. Mr. and Mrs. Rand were speaking in low voices with Lady Ambers, perhaps in an attempt to determine just how much damage Miss Adams had done to her prospects and to the Rands’ political alliances. Dr. Brown, however, clearly had in mind a different sort of discussion.

  “Mr. Oakes,” he said. “I mean to propose you as Miss Adams’ husband.”

  James felt his eyes go wide. “Propose me?” he asked. The very phrase, though it used familiar words and would indeed in another context have rendered itself perfectly intelligible, seemed on the present occasion to make no sense whatever. The remainder of what Dr. Brown had said made so much less sense that James found himself able only to consider propose me, in hope of discovering its hidden meaning and thus also the true meaning of the words concerning Miss Adams.

  Dr. Brown smiled. “I am sure I have confused you greatly, Mr. Oakes, but I mean precisely what I say, though it will perhaps not seem comprehensible until I have told you about the special situation of Miss Adams with respect to a group of gentlemen and noblemen who have undertaken to assist in the provision of happiness to her and girls like her, natural daughters of prosperous natural men.”

  James frowned. “By which you refer again to your theory of natural masculine rights?”

  The doctor rewarded him with an appreciative expression. “Exactly. Exactly, Mr. Oakes. As a natural man yourself, albeit one who lacks the means available to gentlemen and peers like those to whom I refer, you will, I think, quickly understand the need such men see to dispose properly of the girls whom they love but cannot acknowledge, when it comes to their lives once they have come of age. Do you begin to grasp my meaning?”

  James did, though at first that meaning seemed so outlandish that he could hardly believe he had in truth understood the physician. He nodded slowly. “These men, then—”

  “They call themselves the Society for the Correction of Natural Daughters,” Dr. Brown supplied. “They have dedicated a good deal of their considerable resources to a rational approach to the problem of finding natural husbands, or, in some cases, natural keepers, for girls like Miss Adams. The Duke of Panton who, as I believe you must know, it being less even an open secret than a verified rumor, is Miss Adams’ father, subscribed to the society as one of their charter members. He himself has no involvement in the matter of identifying the man who will train and master her…”

  Try as he might, James could not prevent his chin from lifting at those words, or his cock from stirring between his thighs.

  “…but he has pledged himself to provide both for Miss Adams and for her bridegroom, in whatever situation the society deems best for her. As you may perhaps already have guessed, I serve as consulting physician to the society, and generally my recommendations find easy acceptance. For Miss Adams, as I have said, I intend to recommend you, Mr. Oakes, if you will consent.”

  “But, Doctor, surely these men will not approve of a man of my station and means wedding a girl of Miss Adams’ birth, however natural the circumstances of that birth might be?” James had felt his heart leap, for how could he have failed to grasp at the hope the doctor gave, however impossible the notion seemed? That it could not be anything but impossible, he knew for fact. Even illegitimate daughters of dukes did not marry former footmen.

  “Perhaps not all of them,” the doctor admitted. “The vote, when the society meets to decide Miss Adams’ fate, will, I imagine, be a close one. But I have made it a condition of my assistance to these men that they be willing to entertain just such a proposal as one of their daughters marrying a man to whom they would otherwise not give the time of day, provided I certify that he be a natural man.”

  James tried hard to suppress hope’s further progress in his heart. He covered over the struggle with a bark of laughter. “And you ask my consent?”

  “I do,” replied the doctor. “It is an article of the society’s charter that a sufficiency of means be provided to any man to whom a natural daughter is awarded, to keep her in comfort, if such a dowry be necessary. I must ask if you are willing to receive that dowry, should the society award the young lady to you. I must also ask if you are willing to come up to London and to reside in the society’s clubhouse for the next few months, in order to train her and to demonstrate to the society your natural character.”

  The furrow in James’ brow grew again. The matter of the money disturbed him. “If such a fantastical thing were to occur as my wedding Miss Adams, I would expect to keep her as my wife in the station to which providence has called her by giving her to me. I would need no dowry, nor would I seek one.”

  Dr. Brown gave his warmest smile yet at this response. “Very well spoken indeed, Mr. Oakes. I would expect no less of a natural man. But the society lays it down that the girls whose happiness they guard may not go into the keeping of a man in such a
way as to lose anything in respect of material prosperity. Strange as it sounds, if you should wish to marry Miss Adams, you would have to accept enough wealth to become a gentleman of independent means. I happen to know from Mr. Rand that you had some hope of a political future, before the incident in Miss Adams’ chamber deprived you of his patronage—at least as far as appearances go. Would you consent to allow the Duke of Panton assist you to that future, as Miss Adams’ husband?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Miss Rebecca Adams came up to London in May, to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Rand for the remainder of the season, with her presentation at court docketed for the first day of June. Her apparently ordinary launching upon the waters of British society did her wicked, unacknowledged-but-universally-known father great credit, even the most censorious matron might be heard to say, for the girl seemed well equipped to fulfill the necessary functions of the maiden in her first appearance: to wit, looking charming and saying very little.

  The rumors of irregularities in the country had received a firm quashing by Lady Ambers, and it seemed that that estimable peeress had once again taken the naughty duke into her good graces. A whole wing of the liberal party, comprising three whist tables at the Reform Club, breathed easier.

  Miss Adams, most said, seemed a truly lovely young woman. If she did not blush quite as much as might be expected, that could only arise from her having had to learn the hardness of the world from an early age, as her school friends could not have helped looking down upon her, thanks to the girl’s conception on the wrong side of the sheet.

  The young lady’s bosom friend Miss Thomasina Perkins, too, had recovered some measure of her own fortunes, pursued as she now seemed to be by the presumptive heir to the earldom of Hobberly, the incumbent—a well-known rake—being, everyone said, utterly incapable of producing a legitimate scion. The girls were often to be seen riding in Green Park, adding to one another’s luster by the contrast between the dark beauty of Miss Perkins and the fair enchantments of Miss Adams. Their companions varied, though the Hobberly heir, John de Gerner, seemed to make one of the party upon all occasions.