The Duke's School for Young Ladies Read online

  Anne felt her face crumple into renewed tears. To be removed from her home thus seemed simply too cruel. The thought of the cruelty to come, though, seemed to make it even worse. Utter disgrace: not even the servants, who had always been much kinder to her than her parents had been, would dare to come say goodbye—Miss Plympton had seen to that, with her tales of the immorality of the Solmes household. The servants themselves had met with the opprobrium of their peers in other houses, and how could they help but blame Anne for that?

  The first man led the way out the door, opened by the butler, who refused to look at his young mistress. Anne’s eyes sought his in vain, hoping for one final benediction, however small, and not receiving it. She could not see in front of her, of course, with her head slung over the back of the second man, so she did not even see the carriage into which she was thrust, but received only an impression that its paint was black as midnight.

  Then they had thrust her inside the closed landau, lying on her face across the front seat, and closed the door behind her.

  “Good evening, Miss Solmes,” said a voice behind her.

  Anne struggled to turn herself around, and sit facing the other occupant of the carriage. At the same time, she heard the first man, now at the reins, say, “Ha!” and the carriage began to move, jouncing along the cobblestones.

  On the other seat of the carriage, her face visible only by the occasional rays that found their way from streetlamps into the carriage windows, sat a beautiful but severe-looking woman dressed in a dark green silk gown.

  “G-good evening,” Anne stammered.

  “I am Miss Halton,” the woman said, “your new schoolmistress. I am afraid it makes no sense at all for me to disguise the situation into which your conduct, your governess’ silly notions, and your parents’ avarice have thrust you. Your training shall commence at once. Remove all your clothing.”

  “Wh-what?” Anne gasped. Her mind whirled. Miss Plympton had sometimes had Anne remove all her clothes before a caning, so she supposed Miss Halton planned to show her just how seriously Anne’s new school took discipline, but it seemed untoward to begin so very quickly! “H-here? In… in the carriage?”

  “Indeed, yes, Miss Solmes. It would unfortunately be inconvenient to have to enforce the removal of your gown and petticoats and shift while we are traveling, but I assure you that if you do not obey me this instant, my men—your new school warders—will remove them for you when we break our journey, and you will not like the penalty I exact for your willfully causing such a delay in the start of your training.”

  Anne swallowed hard. “May I… may I not simply raise my skirts?” she asked meekly. “I understand that… That is to say, I have heard that I will be punished at your school, and though I find it very hard, I am willing to accept the consequences of my… indiscretion. B-but to have to remove… and to be…” her voice fell to a whisper, “…naked! And it is so cold! Surely you cannot truly require it of me.”

  “I do require it, Miss Solmes. I can, and I do. If you are a good girl and do as I tell you, I will begin to inform you as to why I require it. And I will cover you in this lovely fur blanket, as well.”

  Miss Halton patted a rather large, very soft-looking heap, next to her on the seat. Suddenly Anne, without understanding why, longed to feel its softness. Her eyes traveled back from the fur blanket to Miss Halton’s face, and she saw a smile there that seemed terribly knowing.

  “Come,” she said. “Let me help you with your laces. We have an hour before the warders must water the horses, and I would like to spend it beginning your instruction properly. After that, we have another two hours before we arrive at my establishment. If you have shown yourself willing, you will spend those warmly wrapped in my fur blanket, slumbering, if you wish, with an easy mind and sweet dreams.”

  “H-how…?” Anne whispered. She could not think what else to say. How could her mind be easy, knowing her dishonor, and knowing the shameful nature of the school to which her parents had consigned her?

  “Tonight, Miss Solmes, you have set out upon a journey that will take you through your dishonor and your shame to a different realm, where you may turn back and look upon those things very differently. Turn aside, now, and let me unlace you.”

  Anne, feeling as if she were in a trance, did turn, and allowed Miss Halton to help her off with her shoes and stockings, and then with her blue woolen gown. She untied the waist of her petticoat, and let Miss Halton unlace her corset.

  “Now the shift,” said Miss Halton, reaching for the hem of the thin cotton garment. Anne shrank back against the seat, suddenly feeling that it must all be some terrible mistake. She looked wildly into Miss Halton’s eyes, and to her surprise the lovely woman with the dark hair and the piercing green eyes gave her a sad smile. “I do not want to have to spank you at present, Miss Solmes,” she said. “But I shall if I must. Remove your shift, if you please.”

  Trembling with fear and cold, Anne reached down and began to lift the hem of the shift, biting her lips in the terrible consciousness of how much Miss Halton would see: the golden hair upon her private part and her round breasts that had grown so much in the past year. They were not terribly large, but they were certainly bigger than the tiny ones of Tilly, the chambermaid.

  Miss Halton helped her tug the shift off over her head, and then it was done, and Anne shivered in the cold of the carriage before Miss Halton threw the blanket over her, so soft and warm.

  “Come sit with me,” said Anne’s new schoolmistress, and drew her to the other side of the carriage, continuing to hold Anne’s hands in her own, upon Anne’s lap, when she had settled her pupil upon the seat next to her.

  “Look at me,” she said gently. Anne looked into the green eyes, and found them to her surprise full of sympathy. “Your future, Miss Solmes, will be very different from any you ever imagined.”

  Miss Halton’s voice held such solemnity that Anne began to tremble, and felt tears rise again in her eyes. She had had such hopes: she would attract a nobleman, and he would take her away. She would live far from her parents, perhaps in the North. She would ride every day, have a household of servants, and write letters to her friends.

  “I have required you to remove your clothing because I must express to you from the very start of your time with me both the difficulty and the enjoyment—both the pain and the pleasure—of the position in which you now find yourself. I must make you understand that you are naked before me in both a real and a figurative sense, and that I will dispose of your nakedness according to my own judgment of what will profit me, and your parents, most.”

  Anne felt her eyes go very wide in alarm. She tried to withdraw her hands from Miss Halton’s grasp, but found the older woman’s grip surprisingly firm.

  “That, Miss Solmes,” Miss Halton continued, “is in the nature of my trade. I am employed by a man of fashion who wishes, in as discreet a manner as possible, to have at his and his friends’ mercy girls whom the generality of society has cast aside, but who nevertheless retain that air of breeding that is impossible to feign. Fallen girls, Miss Solmes, who have not fallen all the way into the abyss of the street. Girls like you.”

  Anne’s breath came in panicked gasps. “At… at his mercy?” she whispered. “What does that mean, Miss Halton?”

  “I may not tell you that,” Miss Halton said, “though I promise you will experience it before very many days have gone by at my academy. For the moment, I wish you only to understand that you belong to me, utterly and in your nakedness, and that the women and especially the men to whom I entrust you, in my establishment, will treat you as they please, with my approval. From this moment, my word, and their word, is law for you, no matter how shameful the things we require of you.”

  Anne’s mouth fell open, but she could not speak a syllable.

  “To be absolutely clear,” her schoolmistress continued, “if you fail to obey me or one of the mistresses at my school, or one of the warders, or one of the gentleman callers, you will quickly feel the recompense of the fault delivered to your bare bottom. Do you understand, Miss Solmes?”

  “Gentleman callers?” Anne whispered.

  Miss Halton’s eyes turned hard and flinty. “Do you understand, Anne Solmes?”

  “Y-yes,” Anne sobbed, feeling more frightened than she had ever felt in her life.

  Chapter Three

  Clarissa Halton smiled. Anne Solmes was neither the first, nor would she be the last, to be taken away in this carriage for the unpardonable crime of self-pleasure, but her beauty certainly stood in the very highest rank, and heaven had coupled that beauty with a demeanor—and, it would seem, a nature—so sweet that Clarissa felt she wanted to spare the girl the shocks to come.

  But Clarissa knew, from experience, that had Anne managed to weather the storm set upon her by her horrid governess, she would doubtless have been married off to a husband utterly unsuited to her: a man chosen by her idiotic parents for his upstanding virtue. She would have led a life without pleasure and without responsibility, taking joy, if she were lucky, in her children—but more likely simply growing more and more discontented without even knowing why. When she pleasured herself, it would be with the utmost guilt, and without allowing herself to explore even the nearest reaches of what Clarissa could already see was a rich and extensive imagination. Her climaxes, if they ever graced her furtive practice, would be tiny, and they would leave her feeling even more unsatisfied than she had been before.

  From that fate the duke of Panton had saved Clarissa, and now Clarissa could save Anne, too, from it—and without even having to pass through the horror of a wedding turned into a lifeless marriage. All at the price of the erotic cruelties that Anne, like Clarissa, would come to find she could not, in the end, do without.

  “There we are, Miss Solmes,” Clarissa said. “Was that so hard?”

  Anne’s face made a mask of fear and uncertainty. Clarissa broadened her smile of satisfaction at Anne’s acquiescence into one of reassurance.

  “Yes,” she said confidentially, “it was very hard, I know, Miss Solmes. You do not know who I am, or what I do, and you have just heard the most alarming things.”

  “Shall I… shall I be whipped?” Anne blurted out.

  Clarissa made her face go very grave. “From time to time,” she said gently.

  “Even… even… even if I am very good, and… I never, ever…” Anne’s words came out in little sobs.

  Clarissa gathered the younger girl into her arms, then, making certain to keep the soft fur blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Anne gave a little gasp of surprise, and then yielded to the embrace gratefully, clinging to her new schoolmistress as if to a rock in the ocean.

  “Anne,” Clarissa said tenderly. “I know how hard it is to hear, and to understand, but you will do it again. And you will be whipped for it, just as all London says you were whipped by your governess until you could not sit down for days.”

  “Oh, heavens,” Anne moaned in her shame.

  Now Clarissa moved her left hand from Anne’s shoulder, and slid it slowly but relentlessly inside the fur blanket, until she could weigh Anne’s adorable right breast upon her fingers.

  “M-Miss Halton,” Anne said, “wh-what are you… doing?” Her voice held a note of alarm, but already the removal of her clothes, the wrapping in the sensuous fur, and the strange things Clarissa had told her about her new school, had begun to have their effect.

  “Hush, Miss Solmes,” Clarissa murmured. “I am merely showing you what I mean.” She pinched Anne’s sweet nipple between thumb and forefinger. Anne gave a little cry of helpless pleasure. “I am merely showing you what you are.”

  “Heavens,” Anne sobbed. “Miss Plympton… oh, heavens, was she… correct, then? Am I that… that horrid thing she called me?”

  Clarissa smiled, and moved her hand to Anne’s other breast. The bouncing of the carriage springs always seemed to make Clarissa’s own cunt ache with denied pleasure whenever she was required to go a long journey: the little release she got from awakening Anne made her long for much more—to command certain things from Anne that were not yet appropriate. She remembered that one girl from the previous year—Jenny Mason—whose fall had already gone so far that Clarissa had no compunction about ordering her to her knees, raising her skirts, and enjoying the most pleasant carriage ride Miss Halton had ever had. She sighed a little at the thought, before her mind turned back to the matter at hand: Anne Solmes, who needed more delicate treatment.

  “What did she call you, Miss Solmes?” Clarissa murmured.

  “A… a voluptuary,” Anne whispered.

  Clarissa laughed. “May I tell you a secret, Miss Solmes?” she asked softly, as she moved her hand slowly from Anne’s left nipple back to her right, and then, even more slowly, began to let her hand creep down the girl’s bewitchingly smooth belly.

  Anne’s eyes grew wider and wider. “Y-yes, Miss Halton?”

  “I am a voluptuary.”

  Anne’s mouth dropped open. “B-but…”

  “But voluptuaries are wicked.” Clarissa felt the soft curls of Anne’s cunt beneath her gently questing fingertips. She looked into Anne’s still-wide eyes. “They cannot be redeemed. They must end upon the streets.”

  Anne nodded at each of Clarissa’s statements, but she had also begun to breathe harder and harder. Instinctually and, Clarissa felt sure, against her will, the golden-haired girl spread her thighs, to allow her schoolmistress’ fingers to find the tiny, aching bud of her passion. Being a very naughty schoolmistress indeed, Clarissa wished there were more light in the carriage: they had passed out of London now and the only illumination came from the moon’s weak glow behind heavy clouds. But there would be a great deal of time to inspect Anne Solmes very thoroughly, and Clarissa knew want of patience as her greatest fault.

  Anne cried out as if thunderstruck. Panting, she stared into Clarissa’s eyes. “Is it not true?” she gasped.

  Clarissa kissed her, and Anne tried to draw her head back, but with her right hand Clarissa enforced the girl’s mouth’s attendance upon hers, until at last, caressed below and kissed above, she yielded, and their lips moved deliciously against each other for a long moment. When Clarissa broke the kiss, she murmured into Anne’s ear, “Am I upon the streets, Anne?”

  “N-no?” Anne said, as if questioning not Clarissa’s status as an upstanding schoolmistress—which of course, by the world’s standards, she had every right to question—but the truth of her very presence in this carriage, on the way to Miss Halton’s school.

  “No,” Clarissa said quietly but firmly. “And neither shall you come upon the town, Miss Solmes. You will not have the debut you expected and dreamt of, to be sure, but I promise you that the debut you do have, though I am afraid you will find it difficult and even terrifying as you undergo it, will be one upon which you look back with much more satisfaction than you would have looked back upon the one your parents were to give you.”

  “I… I do not understand, Miss Halton,” Anne said with a quaver in her voice. “How can a debut—that is to say, I imagine that I would have been a little anxious, but certainly not terrified…”

  “I shall say no more now,” Clarissa said, “of your debut itself, Miss Solmes. That is a matter that I must keep hidden from you yet a while. Indeed, much of the terror you may experience will arise from not knowing what is to happen. But I do wish to assure you that it will be a debut that befits a voluptuary much better than the ones your erstwhile friends in town have had would befit you.”

  Anne opened her mouth as if to speak again, but Clarissa continued, “And for the moment my task is merely to convince you that the lewd practice in which your governess discovered you, while certainly something about which you should feel a laudable sense of shame and modesty, is nevertheless something that makes a central part of your nature.”

  Clarissa began to move her left hand even more naughtily than she had hitherto: she pushed her two middle fingers further down, while pressing firmly with the ball of her thumb upon Anne’s tiny clitoris, and ran those fingers gently into the wetness that had gathered just inside Anne’s cunt. Anne responded with a cry of pleasure so loud that the warders on the box, outside the confines of the landau’s enclosure, must have heard it.

  “Once I have convinced you of that, dear Anne, I need only tell you that at my academy, though you will pay a condign price for such delight, you will find happiness—and indeed ecstasy—that you have never imagined. Best of all, because of your education with me, that happiness will open out before you into a path of life that, while it is lamentably condemned by society at large, will bring you prosperity and fulfillment that any sane woman would envy. Now tell me, dear Anne, what were you thinking of, when you lifted your night rail before your mirror and put your own fingers here, where I now have mine?”

  Anne’s eyes were closed. She had listened attentively, Clarissa thought, to her new schoolmistress’ speech, her lower lip caught between her teeth at the sensations Clarissa awakened between her thighs. Now she opened her eyes and whispered, “He was whipping me, and touching me, and looking at me.”

  “Who?” Clarissa asked softly.

  Clarissa wondered if even in the dark of the carriage she could see Anne’s blush. “Joseph,” she whispered, “…our big footman.”

  Clarissa could not suppress a little chuckle at the way Anne described the subject of her first erotic fancy. She remembered a big footman in her own parents’ house, the things she had wondered about him, and the glimpses she had tried to obtain of him in a state of undress.

  Then she murmured, “I want you to think of him now, and I want you to imagine that he has a punishment strap, that he puts you over the front seat of this carriage, he tells you what a naughty girl you have been, and then he starts to whip you.”

  Anne breathed harder and harder, but Clarissa could also see in her face signs of her intelligence, and the resistance to voluptuous feelings that her governess had managed to instill. “Why?” the younger girl asked, a troubled look coming into her eyes. “Why… why do I want to be whipped? Do… do you want to be whipped, too, Miss Halton?”