Her Shameful Training Read online

  “Indeed?” Lord Stephen had said, at loss for words for several seconds.

  “I promise you that after the hussy receives the hair-brushing she deserves, she will inquire as to whether the drawing room is occupied before entering so brazenly and disturbing my noble company.”

  Lord Stephen had nodded, having collected his thoughts and determined to garner as much helpful information as he could. “You spank her often, then?” he had asked, not needing in the slightest degree to feign the curiosity he expressed.

  “Very often, I fear,” Mrs. Mund had said, her eyes suddenly seeming to shine in the twilit drawing room. The widow had seemed extremely eager to impress upon his lordship the complete propriety of her proceedings with Miss Middleton, and perhaps also to ensure that he view the girl as unworthy of his notice. “I find she responds well to it, as it puts her in her place most effectively. Those bewitching eyes do not seem so alluring or so impertinent when she has spent a quarter of an hour with her bottom bare, paying for her faults at the hand of her mistress. A girl who bears upon her nature the blot of wickedness from her very birth, as this one does, requires the sternest possible correction. I assure you that I will not hesitate, if the need arises, to send her to the stable to receive the strap my butler keeps in store for the stable lads. She will not look so charming, I think, bound naked over the trestle there with her bottom raised for a condign chastisement severe enough to make her keep her bed for a day or two as she thinks upon the lesson expressed in the stripes upon her young backside.”

  If Mrs. Mund had intended that Lord Stephen’s interest in Miss Joanna Middleton should abate as a consequence of hearing that this terrible punishment lay in store for her at some future date, she had calculated most incorrectly. He had rather suspected, however, that Mrs. Mund had been carried away by her envy of Miss Middleton’s youth and beauty: the widow’s own apparent interest in whipping her companion as severely and as frequently as propriety might allow should perhaps have given her some inkling that her noble listener might share her inclination. Lord Stephen, too, believed very strongly in baring the bottoms of naughty girls and teaching them difficult lessons in obedience with a firm hand, when necessary for their happiness and his satisfaction with them.

  He therefore had asked, in as innocent a tone as he could manage, “And surely you will wish to be present when the girl is whipped that way, to see it done with all justice and with her modesty respected, despite the need for her to feel as fully as possible her dependence upon you?”

  Mrs. Mund had nodded, though a slightly guarded expression had appeared upon her face, surely at his lordship’s ready sympathy with her motives. “Indeed, though I fear you are sadly mistaken, my lord, about the element of modesty. A girl like this one has only feigned modesty, a pretense she has learned to put up before the world to cover the sin in her soul. She must be taught true modesty by degrees, over my knee or in the stable as the occasion warrants, her naughtiness uncovered. I assure you that when she feels the sting of my hairbrush, her kicks expose the most shocking lack of decency in her, as under the smart of the lash, as it were, she shows her true colors. To her shame, and mine, Miss Joanna Middleton exposes all of what a man—not a nobleman such as you, Lord Stephen, of course, but the sort of man whose eyes can deceive him into thinking a chit of a girl more worthy of his notice than she is—might call her secret charms.”

  The widow had studied his lordship’s countenance as she delivered herself of this speech, which held such extraordinary interest for Lord Stephen that he found it rather a trial neither to shift himself upon the settee nor to smile in the way he would have had his interlocutor been of the masculine persuasion. He would have inquired further, indeed, and perhaps attempted to ascertain whether Miss Middleton were ever to be found out of doors, for his lordship had already determined that he would find a way to put himself in possession of the girl.

  The butler had at that moment, however, announced Lady Renfrew, whom Lord Stephen simply could not abide and who, moreover, knew enough of his lordship’s career as to warn Mrs. Mund should the matter of Miss Middleton continue as a topic of conversation with him present. He had therefore pretended the pressing nature of the same fictional engagement he would have mentioned twenty minutes sooner had Miss Middleton not intruded, and departed to find the estimable Mark Shepard, valet and confederate-in-ordinary to so many pleasurable arrangements thus far in their three years together as master and man.

  “Easiest thing in the world, my lord,” Mark had said on hearing of Miss Joanna Middleton and Lord Stephen’s designs upon her. “Leave it to me. Your companions are a sorry lot, as I hear, even when their employers treat them kindly. If this widow whips the girl on the regular, mark my words...”—this was a joke between Mark Shepard and Lord Stephen that never failed to draw a smile to his lordship’s lips despite its well-worn character, simply because of the open delight his valet took in the freedom it manifested between his menial nature and his master’s noble one—“...you may have nothing at all to do but watch and wait for the girl to run away all on her own. In the ordinary course of things, they would bring her back, to be sure, and though the idea doesn’t sit well with me—and I am a man who doesn’t spare the rod when it comes to training girls as have reached their eighteenth birthday, as your lordship well knows—the widow would doubtless break the girl’s spirit at last.”

  Lord Stephen had nodded, his smile broadening. “But should we place ourselves by, so as to assist Miss Middleton in her flight...”

  Mark had laid his finger alongside his nose and nodded, a grin of his own breaking out upon his apparently honest face. “Your lordship may find himself with a pretty filly well in harness and a naughty cunny to train for hard riding.”

  Chapter Three

  Joanna, awake in the strange bed, tried frantically to remember how she might have gotten there.

  “You won’t open your eyes, Joanna?” the gentleman’s voice asked in a chiding tone. “I shall have a look at you, then.”

  Joanna gave a startled cry as she felt the bedclothes snatched away. Her eyes flew open of their own accord. Over her stood a tall man, dressed in a fine linen shirt and buff breeches. His dark hair hung to his shoulders and his posture seemed to tell of an active life: the arm that had pulled the coverlet back and now held it at the man’s side showed lean and sinewy through the fabric of his shirt.

  Joanna’s mind concentrated at first on those details, she supposed, because the more troubling aspect of the man’s appearance terrified her so thoroughly: to wit, he had a black mask of stiffened leather upon the upper part of his face, hiding from her all knowledge of his identity. Behind the eye slits of the mask Joanna thought she could discern dark pupils, gazing down not into her own eyes but upon the naked expanse of her young body, looking hungrily—for something in the set of his chin seemed to convey a greed to consume the charms he saw—at her little breasts and at the place the awful Mrs. Mund had taught Joanna just the previous day to call her cunt.

  She put her hands down, desperately, to cover herself, her left arm across her bosom and her right hand before the tender slit where a sparse golden thatch marked her womanhood. Then the dark eyes in the mask met hers. “Take those hands away, Joanna,” the man said, “if you please. I wish to see what belongs to me.”

  The voice still conveyed gentility: Joanna could not escape that impression despite the fear occasioned by his mask and even more urgently by his eyes and his lewd command. The phrase if you please, too, seemed to recall her initial idea upon waking that nothing terrible could befall her because a gentleman would behave with honor.

  “Please, sir,” she said, not moving her hands. “Please, where am I? What has happened?”

  “Move your hands, girl,” the man said. “I shall not ask again. In this house you will learn to obey me much more readily even than you obeyed the mistress from whom you stole those hairbrushes we found in your reticule.”

  Joanna shook her head, tears comi
ng into her eyes. “Oh, please, no. Sir, I beg you...”

  The man turned his head, looking behind him into a corner of what Joanna noticed now for the first time was a large bedchamber, well if not elegantly furnished. A log fire lay upon the grate, making it not disagreeable to be naked, as to climate at any rate. Whatever comfort might be given by the cheery fire, however, the scene took away in an instant because Joanna discerned, standing quietly in the corner into which the masked man had peered, another man, just as tall and much broader of shoulder, dressed in a brown coat that told her he must be a servant. This man, too, wore a black mask over half his face.

  “I shall whip her,” the gentleman said. “Make her ready for her punishment.”

  “Oh, heavens,” Joanna cried. “Please... please do not whip me... I shall...” The gentleman turned back to her, and Joanna thought she could discern curiosity in his eyes and the slight curl of his lip. She had removed her hands from her bosom and her private part, to clasp them in an aspect of pleading, while drawing herself up to curl against the headboard, but when she saw the mask turn back to her she could not help it: she tried to cover her nakedness again.

  “You will show me your sweet bosom and your maiden cunt?” the gentleman asked. “Yes, Joanna, you will, for my man will render you unable to do otherwise, as I teach you your first lesson in obedience to the man who will make a woman of you, and train you to give pleasure.”

  Having uttered these terrifying words, he looked again at the man in the corner, and nodded once.

  “Yes, my lord,” that man said in a gruff voice, stepping forward so swiftly that Joanna cowered back, feeling the polished wood of the headboard against the bare skin of her back. My lord. Was the masked gentleman not merely that, then, but a nobleman?

  The servant advanced to the head of the bed as his master moved further down, to give room. Joanna’s lips parted and her breath came in short gasps as the big man in the brown coat loomed over her.

  “Don’t make this difficult, miss,” he said without any cruelty. “Kneel at the foot of the bed and bend yourself down, then take your knees in your hands so I can get you ready for the strap upon your little bottom.”

  Joanna felt her chin move side to side without willing the gesture of refusal. Her eyes darted from one mask to the other. The nobleman had folded his arms across his chest and the set of his chin conveyed satisfaction with the scene, now that to all appearances he would soon avenge himself thoroughly upon Joanna’s backside.

  “Come now,” the servant said. “His lordship is going to whip you now—there’s not a thing you or I can do about it. You’ve a lesson to learn, miss, and his lordship is the sort of man to give it to you properly. Once his lordship sees you begin to obey, you’ll see how kind a man he is—not like that horrible widow.”

  The nobleman spoke then, perhaps as he saw the heat flood to Joanna’s face at the realization that these men knew, somehow, about Mrs. Mund’s spanking her.

  “Yes, my dear, I know your lovely bottom has experienced much correction. I even know that Mrs. Mund spanked you in the nude yesterday, and spoke to you of what I suppose we might call womanly matters. So you are well prepared, I think, for another sort of naked punishment—and a much better sort, so far as I am concerned.”

  Joanna’s chin stopped moving: there seemed not the slightest use in expressing her refusal of the servant’s instructions and the master’s matter-of-fact expression of these terrible things. She caught her lower lip in her teeth and looked into his eyes, a plea for mercy that she knew would be in vain but which seemed to her the only remaining hope of averting the progress of his shameful plans.

  For a moment she thought the man might have pity on her: a sort of softening seemed to occur behind the mask, as if—so very unlike Mrs. Mund—he actually did care for Joanna’s well-being despite the starkly vicious appearance of his abducting her and placing her naked in this bed, of his promise now to have her bound so he might thrash her for refusing to show him her maiden charms. Then he turned to his man and said, “Go ahead, if you please.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said the servant, with satisfaction evident in his voice, whether at his master’s resolution or at his own anticipated pleasure in securing Joanna’s compliance she could not tell. Joanna cried out, but the big man in the brown coat merely leaned over and plucked her away from the headboard, left hand upon her upper arm and right hand around her waist. She struggled in his strong arms, but the feeling of her naked skin against the rough serge of his coat seemed to her so shameful that from the moment he had her off the bed and began to carry her to its foot, Joanna felt faint and feeble.

  When he placed her there, upon the mattress again—bare now because the nobleman had finished the removal of the coverlet to leave the bed without any clothes but the bottom sheet—she seemed unable to manifest even the little strength her limbs possessed. The servant put her on her knees and bent her face to the linen sheet.

  “If your lordship will just put a hand on the girl’s back,” the servant said in an easy, conversational tone. “Won’t take much, I think, but just hold her down, if you please, to remind her she can’t get away, while I truss her for you. That’ll make the job a deal easier for me.”

  Joanna did cry out a little when she heard this, and as the servant’s hands left her and the nobleman’s descended she tried to rise and crawl away, as if she might reach a door and run naked out into the dawn—for she could see through a window that the sky had begun to grow light outside.

  “No, Joanna,” the nobleman said, and then he held her hip tight in his left hand and began to spank her with his right, very hard.

  Mrs. Mund had always used the hairbrush, and never her own hand. Joanna had wondered at that, when her regular spankings had begun, but the size of the nobleman’s hand made her conscious immediately of what the reason had been: a widow’s little hand could never make a young woman feel the kind of authority this aristocrat could. Even the hairbrush seemed to Joanna a poor imitation of a man’s strong palm and long, thick fingers, brought down with force, over and over, right in the center each time.

  She wailed, and struggled more, but to no avail at all.

  “You... will... hold... still.” The masked man spoke steadily and sternly, and when Joanna willed her body at last to cease attempting escape he stopped the spanking suddenly, and said, “There. Good girl.” Then he said, “Bind her.”

  Joanna couldn’t help it: she started at the terrible command, tried for a moment to rise, and emitted a little shriek. But the nobleman held her down and delivered another hard spank, and the resistance went out of her with a whine of discomfort, her thoughts and feelings balanced in the terrible dilemma that this man would certainly whip her, once the servant had bound her, but he would doubtless whip her more if she continued to struggle. Weeping, she let the man in the brown coat take her wrists and pull them back behind her knees so that he might tie them together with a stout leather strap.

  The mere picture, in Joanna’s mind’s eye, of the posture into which the servant had placed her with this trussing, made her cry out in shame. She closed her eyes tightly, trying to concentrate her attention on the feel of the linen sheet against her cheek and the sensation of her disheveled hair around her face.

  To her dismay she felt a hand—the nobleman’s surely—brush back the golden tresses from her cheek and smooth them over her shoulder. She felt her brow crease deeply and then a deep blush as she thought of him looking at her face as well as those other places—the ones of which Mrs. Mund had spoken so cruelly and crudely.

  As if he read her mind, somehow, the man said, in a gentle voice that seemed to confirm what his servant had told her, about his kindness once a girl began to show she knew how to obey, “Mrs. Mund made reference, I am told, to this pretty cunny, when she punished you yesterday.”

  Then Joanna cried out in shame and fear, and with another feeling she could not name, for the man put his hand there, between her legs, on the cleft of
her private part. His long, thick fingers held her firmly, but not forcefully, and he squeezed the place Mrs. Mund had accused of such natural wickedness. Joanna’s cry changed in pitch, moved lower into her chest, as she suddenly felt she had begun to understand what the widow had meant.

  “My informant tells me that the woman even spoke to you of what a man likes to do with a girl’s cunny, when he decides she is ready to become a woman. Is that so, Joanna? Did you hear about fucking? About what a man has between his legs, and how his wife must learn to receive it when he chooses to enjoy his conjugal rights?”

  Chapter Four

  Mark Shepard knew very well indeed that the dried-up, vengeful, self-righteous—and yet astonishingly lewd when she chose to display it—Mrs. Mund had said such things. He had after all lingered outside the window of the widow’s study during the greater part of Miss Joanna Middleton’s very diverting discipline session.

  Mary the parlor maid had summoned him as soon as she heard Mrs. Mund summon Miss Middleton to the study, sure as only a servant can be that the widow’s tone could mean only that miss would have her naughty bottom bared. Mary had gone over Mark’s knee several times herself by then, showing each time the natural good grace with which girls of Mark’s own class always took their spankings. He had seen in her face the very first time he watched her walk along the village street upon her day off that Mary Wilkins was a saucy girl who would nevertheless respond well to the command to prepare herself for punishment.

  Such young women represented Mark Shepard’s favorite sort of conquest, because their sauciness made it clear that a man had won something worth the having, when his cock at last entered her sweet young cunt and then, even better, the little bottom he had spanked until it glowed merrily in the firelight or the filtered green light of a tree-covered country ramble. He would not be the first to fuck Mary, she had blushingly confessed when Mark took her over his knee within half an hour of meeting her, but no other man had it seemed known to use a firm hand with her.