Innocence Examined Read online

  Beneath her nightshift, she had felt the oddest sort of warmth between her legs, and she had found that by rubbing her thighs together and squeezing them a bit, she could increase it. To make the feeling grow had both its benefit and its harm, for although it felt more delicious, in its way, than anything Caroline thought she had ever felt, it made her long for something more, without having any idea of what that might be.

  Was it the thing that Miss Anne was doing with Sir Gerald, when she had stolen into his bedchamber? The bouncing on top of him that made her cry out as if he struck her with a cane or a strap? Lying in her bed, squeezing her little cleft between her thighs, seeking a release that she could not find, Caroline wished—though she knew how very wicked the desire was—that she had lifted Miss Anne’s silk chemise to see what was happening underneath it to make her cry out thus, as no girl ever cried out when bouncing on a gentleman’s lap, in the ordinary course of life.

  “Do as Mr. Vance says, Caroline,” said Sir Gerald. In front of her, Miss Charlotte and Miss Anne still knelt on the floor, where Mr. Vance had been doing that strange thing with them that it seemed Miss Anne did very well, but Miss Charlotte not as skillfully, so that Mr. Vance had said he would punish them both.

  Mutely, trembling, with eyes widened in fear and excitement at the thought of watching the two older girls severely punished, as Caroline was sure Mr. Vance intended to punish them, Caroline walked past them towards Sir Gerald’s study.

  That strange thing that Mr. Vance had been doing with the girls’ mouths… what was it? And what had he been doing it with? Caroline had said that she had seen it, but that had been a half-truth, at best, for the lamplight was low, and all she had really seen was Mr. Vance lowering his trousers and standing in front of Miss Anne, holding her head and pumping his hips firmly.

  She had heard wet sounds, as if Miss Anne had something in her mouth—some part of Mr. Vance’s body, the nature of which Caroline could hardly guess… until Mr. Vance had pulled away from Miss Anne and moved to stand in front of Miss Charlotte.

  Then, Caroline had caught a glimpse of something that stuck out from the front of Mr. Vance’s hips, something like a pestle. It glimmered a bit, perhaps with Miss Anne’s spittle, in the lamplight, and then he had stuck it into Miss Charlotte’s mouth and begun to pump his hips again. Mr. Vance had changed mouths again, and Caroline had got another glimpse of the pestle-thing, and suddenly she had wondered if Sir Gerald had one, too, and if that explained the bouncing of Miss Anne in some way.

  Then Mr. Vance had told the girls they must be punished, and Caroline had interrupted, her first instinct to save Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte from punishment. Really, she’d had a lovely time in their bedchamber that morning, and the spanking Miss Anne had given her had been strangely pleasant—much more so than the birching on the previous day.

  Then Sir Gerald told Mr. Vance to stop, and Mr. Vance said that strange thing… Caroline tried to remember it as she opened the top drawer in Sir Gerald’s desk, where he kept the punishment cane. That Miss Anne was a good ‘cocksucker’? So was the pestle-thing called a cock? Suddenly, though she didn’t understand why, Caroline felt a rush of the same damp warmth to her private part that she had felt thinking about Miss Anne bouncing on Sir Gerald’s lap, and the birching, and the spanking. Something about how Mr. Vance acted and what he said told her that the mystery had begun to come clear: men had cocks, and girls must suck them. If a girl sucked cocks well, she earned praise, and perhaps she got taken to the theatre, and wore fine clothes. If she was not a good cocksucker, men punished her to teach her how important it was to please their cocks properly.

  Carrying the cane back to the parlor, Caroline felt herself blush terribly, for she knew that she wished to suck cocks, and to learn to be good at it. From what Sir Gerald had said about marriage, she understood now that she should only want to suck the cock of the husband her guardian would find for her, but a shameful vision filled her mind nonetheless: of Caroline herself, on her knees in front of Sir Gerald and Mr. Vance, learning how to suck their cocks.

  But what of the bouncing of Miss Anne? That must surely also involve Sir Gerald’s cock, must it not? Had Sir Gerald somehow been making Miss Anne go for a ride upon his cock, and did it hurt to go on that kind of ride?

  Too many questions rushed in upon Caroline’s mind at this new thought for her to begin to answer them, no matter how slowly she moved her feet on the way back to the parlor. When she arrived there, she found that Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte had been made to remove their shifts and kneel in front of the settee, side by side, with their faces bent down to the seat cushion.

  “Ah, there you are, Caroline,” said Mr. Vance very jovially, apparently having recovered his good humor completely. “Give the cane to Sir Gerald. As the ruler of the house, he will punish both these naughty girls.”

  “Oh, please,” Caroline said, “please… it’s my fault. I was spying.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Sir Gerald. “I think it is better that you should see the trouble you have caused, inflicted on these naughty bottoms. Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte are no less deserving of punishment because you, too, deserve to be punished, my dear. Sometimes it helps teach us a lesson when we see others undergo punishment. Since the birching yesterday appears not to have ended your furtive little expeditions, we shall try this course of action.”

  “And,” added Mr. Vance, “you shall be seen by Dr. Brown tomorrow. We hope he will provide you with some answers to the questions that seem to be troubling you, as well as give us some further ideas of how to ensure your future happiness, and your husband’s happiness with you.”

  “Quite right,” said Sir Gerald. “Give me the cane now, child.”

  Caroline looked at the cane, half-inch thick rattan. She had never felt it across her own bottom, nor had she seen it used upon Miss Anne or Miss Charlotte, though she had heard the results, and once—the previous month—glimpsed them, too, when she stole a peep through a keyhole at Anne after she had been punished for some reason not disclosed to Caroline. The weals of the cane were long, red double lines that looked terribly painful, but… Caroline blushed even as she handed the cane to her guardian, for perhaps it had been the sound of Anne’s screams as Sir Gerald sternly counted out twelve strokes of chastisement, and the sight of her poor, punished bottom as she lay on her belly on the bed with Charlotte beside her, applying some salve to the well-striped rondure of her pretty bottom-cheeks, that had begun Caroline’s wicked investigations into the nature of how Sir Gerald and Mr. Vance conducted themselves in private with Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte.

  Sir Gerald took the cane and whisked it through the air four or five times. Caroline realized that Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte had begun to cry softly.

  “Go comfort them, Caroline,” said Mr. Vance. “Kneel next to the settee, and hold the hands of the one who is being caned, while she receives her just reward.”

  “I shall begin with Charlotte,” Sir Gerald said. “Twelve for her, and then twelve for Anne, for the Sapphic misconduct. Then a dozen more for Charlotte for the spanking of Miss Caroline, and a dozen more for Anne for the same offense.”

  Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte uttered terrible sobs. “Please, Gerrie,” Miss Anne cried. “Please, no! I can’t bear it! Not twenty-four!”

  “Do not think of calling me by my Christian name now, girl! You are impenitent and rude, but I can at least make you very sorry for abridging your masters’ rights.”

  Caroline wondered what ‘Sapphic misconduct’ meant, but she did not dare ask. On trembling knees, she went to take up a position by Miss Anne’s face, on the left side of settee. She took Miss Anne’s left hand in her right, and felt Miss Anne squeeze her fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Miss Anne. “I’m so, so sorry, Miss Anne.”

  Miss Anne gave her a wan little smile. “It’s alright, Caroline,” she whispered. “It’s not your fault, really.”

  Then Sir Gerald began to cane her,
and her face crumpled into tears; the tears became sobs, and then screams of agony. Sir Gerald caned her slowly, speaking all the while.

  “There you are, Anne Loomis. There you are! Another stripe for your fine young rump! That’s six, I believe, and I hope you are already sorry.”

  “Yes, sir,” Anne sobbed. Her bottom clenched and squirmed, which made Caroline feel lightheaded with more of the strange excitement.

  “Hold that disobedient rump still, miss. Hold it still, or you shall have more than twenty-four before we are done here! I am glad you are sorry, after six. Now, here are… six… more… to make… sure… of your penitence. I should have much more to say about your lewd conduct with Charlotte Dalrymple if there were not innocent ears in the room.”

  “Caroline, go to Miss Charlotte now,” said Mr. Vance. “It is her turn.”

  Caroline looked at Miss Anne’s face, a mask of woe, with her tears running down and wetting the embroidered cushion over which the girls had been made to bend for their punishment. She released Miss Anne’s hand, though she wished she could keep hold of it to comfort her, and got up to change sides, unable to keep herself from looking at the terrible state of Miss Anne’s backside already, with twelve clearly marked stripes from the top of her bottom to the middle of her thighs. The warmth between Caroline’s thighs was tremendous and terrible. Was this the lesson she was to learn? This excitement and the guilt of how exciting it was to watch older girls punished?

  She knelt next to Miss Charlotte and took Miss Charlotte’s right hand in hers. “I’m sorry, Miss Charlotte,” she said. Miss Charlotte, apparently more fearful than Miss Anne, or perhaps made so after the sounds of her friend being caned beside her, could only nod, amidst her tears of fright.

  Caroline watched Sir Gerald lay his hand—possessively, somehow, Caroline noted with some fascination—upon Miss Anne’s hip, to help him reach across to strike Miss Charlotte’s bottom, and then he began to cane Miss Charlotte.

  “And you,” he said as he lashed the cane down at a slightly quicker pace. “You are the girl we trust to know better.”

  Miss Charlotte shrieked and screamed from the first cut of the cane. Caroline looked at Mr. Vance, who stood leaning against the mantelpiece, and saw a smile on his face as he nodded at each stroke his girl got from Sir Gerald. She thought about his pestle-thing… his cock… and suddenly she had an urge to go and kneel before him and ask to learn how to be a good cocksucker. Only her grip on Miss Charlotte’s hands, and the responsibility she felt to comfort her as Mr. Vance had told her to, seemed to prevent the wicked thing from happening.

  The caning went on forever, it seemed to Caroline, as she had to change sides, and with each dozen it seemed that her strange urges only grew and multiplied. At last, though, it ended, and Mr. Vance told Caroline to go get the salve from Miss Anne’s and Miss Charlotte’s room.

  When she had brought it down, Sir Gerald and Mr. Vance watched while Caroline applied it to the bottoms of the well-punished girls.

  “Are you sure that’s wise?” Sir Gerald had asked in his usual ready-to-be-persuaded style.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Vance, and so Caroline, panting with the excitement that had by this time made her thighs damp with the wetness of her little cleft, rubbed the pretty bottoms, thoroughly and agonizingly chastised now, with the oily balsam. Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte made noises that fell somewhere between sobs and moans, and each of them said, more than once, “Oh, Caroline, please.”

  Caroline could tell, though of course she knew she mustn’t say anything of it, that the feeling she evoked with her soothing touch must have an element in it that gave Miss Anne and Miss Charlotte a pleasure far beyond the simple relief from the pain of their cane weals. She wondered if she could see the same wetness glistening by the lamplight upon the thighs of Miss Charlotte that she knew would glisten upon her own, if she should be similarly positioned.

  That thought, to her distress, led to imagining what it would be like to be the third girl with her face in the cushion, and of what might happen then. So it was a relief when Sir Gerald at last said, “You may go, child. And remain in your bed, if you please. None of your stealing about, do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Caroline said and left the parlor. But to her shame she could not forbear standing outside the parlor door after she had closed it, and crouching down to look in at the keyhole. What she saw, though, made her face so hot and her breathing so labored that she ran up the stairs on the instant: Sir Gerald and Mr. Vance, their trousers down and their cocks out, standing with bent knees behind their girls’ bottoms, bringing the cocks ever closer, as if to… what? When Caroline lay snug in her bed, she instantly regretted the decision not to stay and see. Her little cleft burned between her thighs, and no amount of squeezing seemed to help. Suddenly she didn’t care how nasty Dr. Brown would be: she would make him tell her how to get Sir Gerald and Mr. Vance to use their cocks upon her.

  Chapter Six

  Dr. James Fairleigh, late of Shropshire, now of the Royal College of Physicians—though only as yet a junior member—arrived with Dr. Reginald Brown, the mentor to whom he had recently been assigned, in Cadogan Square at ten o’clock the next morning. Dr. Arthur Grey, president of the college, had so assigned Dr. Fairleigh with a very special purpose, of the seriousness of which James felt he could be forgiven feeling rather proud.

  “Dr. Brown espouses some rather strange notions, Dr. Fairleigh,” Dr. Grey had said. “I do not know if you have heard anything about them, or about him.”

  James had shook his head, though in truth he had heard certain rumors.

  “Well,” said Dr. Grey, “they concern matters of an… erotic nature, so my investigation of him must proceed with some degree of delicacy.”

  “Investigation?” James felt his eyebrows rise.

  “Indeed. Dr. Brown has recently published a pamphlet, under a pseudonym. I have it on the best authority that he is in fact the author of the work, though it probably cannot be proven.”

  Now James’ brow furrowed in alarm. “Of what nature is the pamphlet?”

  Dr. Grey cleared his throat. “It is entitled On the necessity of men’s exercising their masculine rights in erotic matters.”

  “Truly?” James could hardly contain his astonishment.

  “Indeed. It purports to be an argument from natural science that men should not hesitate, as the author—that is, I am convinced, Dr. Brown—posits they do hesitate in our contemporary world, to bend young women to their sexual will.”

  James felt a strange double instinct rise in him at Dr. Grey’s words. “Surely he does not advocate rape?”

  “No,” admitted Dr. Grey. “He is actually quite specific on that point, and says that if a man should be the sort entitled to ‘exercise his masculine rights,’ he will easily find young women who themselves wish to be employed by him for his sexual enjoyment. I will not dispute that from a scientific point of view, excepting all morality and religion, the idea is very difficult to dispute. Mr. Darwin’s theory has seen to that.”

  “But…” James found that his inclination to seize upon this argument of Dr. Brown’s as a justification of feelings he had long sought to deny that he himself possessed stood somewhat in the way of the vigorous moral stance he felt he must take on the matter. “But what of marriage, and of the furtherance of civilization? Would he have us live as the apes do? Or the sheikhs of Arabia?”

  “Precisely,” said Dr. Grey. “Dr. Brown says in the pamphlet that he does not object to marriage, for such men as do not feel so strongly as those he calls ‘the natural men’ the need to exercise what he calls ‘the right of the phallus.’”

  “No!” James did his best to simulate the outrage he knew he should feel.

  Dr. Grey nodded. “Thus he can claim that he does not truly seek to overturn all morality and religion. But as you can see, were such views to gain currency, many more men would declare themselves for this so-called state of nature than would choose to marry.”


  James nodded. “It would certainly be so.”

  “Thus, I feel the need to keep an eye closely on Dr. Brown. It may be that this pamphlet is simply a flight of fancy, which does not affect his physicianly duties in the slightest. I do not wish to prejudice you in any way, but I have now laid out for you the reason I have decided to assign you to him as your mentor, as an initial step in my inquiry. All I ask of you, Dr. Fairleigh, that you fulfill your duties as his assistant, and, if you should observe anything that troubles you—above all with regard to the intimate matters we have just discussed—that you speak to me of them.”

  Now, as the butler admitted them to Sir Gerald Carruthers’ elegant townhouse, James wondered if Dr. Brown could possibly be the author of the lewd pamphlet of which James had wasted no time in obtaining a copy, after leaving Dr. Grey’s rooms. He had read the strange essay at his desk in his tiny student’s room, his cock erect from the very first words—“It is a sure and provable fact that men have a natural obligation to enjoy women in whatever manner they please, and above all in sexual affairs”—to the very last—“until her mouth, her vulva, and her anus grow used to receiving what the natural man wishes to give them.”