by Sarah Steel
Utterly spent and exhausted, the student curled up at the dean’s feet.
‘Now you know my terms and conditions, Ariadne, are you willing to sign?’
She nodded, swallowed silently, and then hoarsely whispered, ‘Yes…’
‘Just as I thought,’ Dr Mellstock murmured, a glint of triumph sparkling in her eyes. ‘Tomorrow, you will receive your double first with honours, but I think we shall both come to agree you graduated with me, bare-bottomed across my desk, today.’
Parson’s Penance
‘Be still, little one. You have been sinful and so must be punished. With all sin must come retribution. Retribution, penance and punishment. Be still, I say, or it will go hard for you, my girl. Very hard, indeed.’
Despite the stern warning, the girl continued to wriggle and squirm across the lap of her punisher. She felt the firm hand at the nape of her neck tighten as it forced her bowed head even further down. Whimpering, she attempted to toss away the dark fringe of hair curtaining her eyes. She felt the brutal fingers busy at the buttons of her calico under-drawers, and burned red with shame as, swift and sure in their task, they opened and unfurled the flap of soft material covering her bottom.
‘Naughty girl,’ the parson murmured, his eyes glinting sharply as they drank in the delightful swell of her plump cheeks. ‘No,’ his stern voice warned, ‘I mean to punish you. Be still.’
The wriggling ceased and the young woman slumped obediently into silent submission. The parson nodded approvingly and relaxed his fierce grip on the nape of her neck, settling her warm weight across his supporting thighs. Pinned helplessly down, the dark-haired penitent remained mute in her surrender. Her fringe tumbled straight down, covering and hiding the tears in her large, sorrowful eyes.
Beneath the warmth of her belly, the parson’s cock pulsed. The pulse quickened to a throb. He swallowed and closed his eyes. He groaned softly and whispered a hurried prayer. It was the devil at work, the arch tempter. Trying to ignore what he could not deny, he opened his eyes again and resolved to do his duty, which was to punish.
‘Well, Edwina? Come girl, what have you to confess to me?’
‘Nothing, sir, truly, sir,’ came the whispered response.
‘Have a care, young lady. Today being the Sabbath, the time for confession has come. Today is the just and fitting occasion for contrition. Tell me of your wrongdoings and I will shrive you of your sins and mete out your penance.’ His free hand alighted on the softness of her sweet young buttocks and began firmly massaging their clenched flesh.
‘I have nothing to confess, sir,’ she insisted quietly.
‘Nothing?’ He increased the pressure of his massaging palm, bunching the captive cheeks slightly as he pressed down more urgently upon the bare bottom he was about to punish. ‘Nothing? I think that is not entirely true. Speak of your sins. Come, confess all to me. Confess and be prepared to do full penance.’
Edwina whimpered, but the parson remained ominously silent – ominously impassive to her distress. He already knew of her misdeeds. His housekeeper – who conscientiously spied on all three of his distant cousins living under his roof – had informed him of it not an hour ago.
‘I am waiting, Edwina. Pray do not add mendacity or insolence to your catechism of woes.’
‘I remember now, sir, there was a mouse,’ her words spilled out anxiously, ‘but I did not mean to err or sin, sir, I—’
‘A mouse, you say? What of this mouse?’ His flattened palm smoothed the curves of the clenched cheeks in his thrall. He asked, even though Miss Strappleton, his vigilant housekeeper, had told him all about the mouse.
‘A mouse, sir, it was in a trap, a cruel trap. I set it free.’
‘Free, you say?’ He lightly skimmed his thumb down between her tightened buttocks. ‘How so?’
‘It was so piteous to behold, sir, so I set if free.’ It was obvious from her tone she believed she had done nothing wrong, at least as far as the mouse was concerned.
‘Set it free?’ he echoed, grimacing sternly even though her position made it impossible for her to see his face. ‘Do you know that just such a mouse, set free in my house, can eat through a whole tallow candle every night at a cost of a full farthing to my beleaguered purse? And,’ he palmed the soft cheeks with increasing fervour, ‘that just such a mouse can nibble through sixpence worth of cheese each week?’
‘I am sorry, sir, I did not know, I am sure. Please do not punish me, sir!’
‘A mouse,’ he continued suavely, ignoring her fervent pleading, ‘is never a single sorrow to a house, child. They, like all contagion, come in vexing numbers. They are legion.’
‘I thank you for your instruction, sir, and I promise to think hard upon it from this day forth.’
‘Pretty words from a penitent do not postpone just punishment, girl.’
‘No, sir,’ she sighed, submitting to her doom.
‘And what else have you to tell me?’
‘Please, sir, nothing, sir…’
‘Nothing else?’
‘I – I’m sure not, sir.’ Her soft cheeks hollowed in mounting dread.
‘And are you quite certain of what you say, little one?’
Edwina nodded vigorously, and across the parson’s knee her bare buttocks danced seductively. His cock, now hard, rose and thickened with a sweet ache. He breathed heavily, for the moment staying his spanking hand. His housekeeper had informed him of a theft on the night of the heavy rains, a theft of small coals. The silence grew loud between them, during which she wriggled restlessly across his knees.
‘In a little while from now, your bottom will be hot, girl. Does that word not suggest your misdemeanour to you?’
Suddenly reminded of her sin, Edwina blurted out the details of her wrongdoing. ‘Oh I remember now, sir. I stole small coals and took them up to my bedroom. It was for a cat I found out in the rain all shivering and wet, the poor thing. I brought it up to the fire for creature comfort, sir.’
‘These are not grave errors, child,’ the parson concluded aloud. ‘Foolish impulses, no more.’ He sensed the body across his moleskin breeches relax as she detected the tone of forgiveness in his stern, authoritative voice.
‘Thank you, sir, for your clemency.’
‘You are but seventeen summers old, child, and have so very much to learn.’
She snuggled comfortably across his lap, obviously daring to hope the threat of pain and punishment had passed.
‘But even small and slight transgressions have their price and must be paid for in full. Consider, little one. The mouse you set free no doubt ate a good nine pence worth of tallow and cheese, and the small coals stolen to warm the wretched cat add yet another burden to my purse. I have lost a full shilling, girl. Be sure of it. And the cat, to be sure, lived only to catch and kill the mouse.’
She cried out in dismay.
‘Small sins, but with still some price to pay. They still require some penance from you. Bottom up, my girl, if you will.’
‘No sir, please!’ she squealed, stretching back her arms in a frantic effort to cover and protect her naked cheeks.
‘Edwina,’ the parson snarled softly, ‘you must be subject to my will.’
‘But sir—’
‘Give me your bottom, child,’ he ordered, his voice a rising growl.
Timorously, her fingers curled in fearful expectation, the girl drew her hands away before dropping her arms down.
The parson raised his chastising hand above the tensed cheeks. ‘And what do we say for our penance, Edwina?’
She maintained a sulky silence.
‘Edwina?’
‘Out of your charity, sir, chastise me,’ she mumbled sullenly. ‘Helpeth me repenteth truly…’
‘And?’
‘And please spank me for my sins.’
His flattened palm cra
cked down. The smacking blow rang out harshly as the open hand visited the proffered buttocks, which wobbled slightly after being fleetingly depressed beneath the savage impact. And as he lifted his hand again, the parson noted her buttocks reddening as the stinging pain spread across their satin contours.
Smack! A second swipe of his unforgiving hand across her suffering flesh made him grunt and wince as his stiff cock poked up into her tummy. She jerked in response to the second blow, but the pinioning hand planted on her neck forced her to submit absolutely to his will and purpose.
Smack! Smack! The jiggling cheeks bounced as they suffered a sharp double blow from the parson’s punishing palm. She twisted in a desperate effort to escape the scalding agony, but only succeeded in causing her bottom cleft to part lewdly.
Grunting his suppressed pleasure on espying the dark path between the crimsoning hillocks, the parson swiftly drew the knee of his moleskin-sheathed right leg in against the trembling thighs to further confine and tame them. ‘Now you are trapped, my little mouse,’ he rasped hoarsely, breathing hard with mounting excitement as well as from exertion. ‘Now you shall do full and most deserved penance for your foolish, girlish sins.’ He swept his durable palm down four times in swift succession, stinging and scalding the helpless bottom swelling out of the unbuttoned calico drawers. The furious flurry of chastising spanks left his hand tingling and his victim’s buttocks ablaze. As the punished cheeks grew hotter their blush of pain and shame burned brighter, and as the blush burned brighter and deeper, the shrill cries issuing from the lips of the writhing penitent grew louder in agonised protest.
Bucking yet again in response to a particularly savage blow, Edwina thrust her scorching bottom up. Tense and swelling in the grip of fierce pain, her cheeks threatened to burst out of their calico frame.
The parson gasped sharply, troublesomely thrilled by the delicious contrast afforded by the white fabric surrounding the crimson of the punished flesh. As her hips rose and her spine arched seductively, her buttocks quivered and her cleft became a sharp crease before suddenly parting. He caught his breath as he spied, deep down in the shadowy space between the spanked cheeks, her tiny pink anus winking. ‘Eye of Satan, turn thy gaze from me!’ he shouted, gripping the two cheeks he had so thoroughly chastised and squeezing their scalded domes viciously. The pink rosebud of her anal whorl disappeared, and swallowing hard, he brought his hand up to wipe his fevered brow.
Across his fierce erection, grinding her belly down innocently onto its thrusting tip, Edwina sobbed softly in her blazing shame. The cruel fingers of her chastiser relented, relaxing their savage grip at her cheeks. Then, as though ordained to punish the very source and fount of all wickedness and sinfulness in the world, the parson arced his hand down again, and again.
‘Let me hear your atonement, little one,’ he commanded, a full five minutes after the final blow rang out. A full five minutes during which the palm sweeping smoothly across her hot cheeks formed a fist to knuckle her moist cleft.
Innocently riding the parson’s erection, the punished girl craned her head around to gaze up at her stern punisher. ‘Thanks be all thine, sir, for the penance you so kindly and in all justice meted out to me,’ she whispered huskily, and then lowering her face to his thigh, her dry lips kissed the moleskin obediently.
The parson shuddered and his engorged cock speared up painfully. Pushing the bare-bottomed minx hurriedly off his lap, he spoke softly. ‘Only doing my duty, girl. In all conscience, it was only my duty I have done.’
Luncheon was a capital meal. Miss Strappleton served up a whole roasted goose generously stuffed with apple, sage and onion. Carving himself a third plateful, the parson briefly wondered if a plain boiled fowl would not have been the more prudent choice. At either elbow, heads bowed over their earnest task, his three young distant cousins were eating him out of house and home with unrestrained relish. Edwina, to be sure, fidgeted from buttock to buttock, squirming uncomfortably on her chair.
Yes, the roast goose was succulent. Torn between the dictates of his appetite and the inevitable damage to his purse, the greedy parson swallowed his claret and helped himself handsomely to the spiced pears stewed in port the capable Miss Strappleton had brought to the table. As he finished a fourth such fruit, he wished for the sake of his purse it had been an apple apiece for the Sabbath tide dessert, or an even more economical sliver of cheese cut from a truckle of honest cheddar.
After luncheon, he shouldered his fowling piece and strode out into the surrounding waterlogged levels of Spixby-cum-All Sorrows. Beasts of the field ignored his passing as they trod their steaming dung into the abandoned crop of cabbages. The sweet reek of rotting vegetation pervaded the noisome, clammy air.
An hour later the parson was stamping the damp and cold out of his boots at his back porch. Dark clay soiled the red bricks Miss Strappleton scrubbed religiously every morning. He was in a good humour, having bagged a brace of plump woodcock with a single shot, the ball passing clear through the hen to catch and stun the accompanying cock in mid-flight. The cock fell to earth alongside the dead hen, flapping pitifully. Its neck had felt soft to the parson’s strangling hands.
In his study he unearthed his tithe books and conned them keenly, the better to calculate revenues and incomes since Lady day last quarter. Since the fields flooded, and the Bain used to drain the levels was still in a state of disrepair, rents and tithes were down and diminishing. The living of Spixby-cum-All Sorrows was a lean one, and a recent appeal to his bishop had proved fruitless.
The parson, a high churchman of stern Tory provenance, was not in favour with his sleek bishop, a Whig of no marked religious fervour.
‘Fellow empties his pews with all that blood and thunder,’ the bishop was heard to remark once at a game of backgammon. ‘I sometimes think he is a little mad. Had the effrontery to bring a plea against my rural dean, damn him.’ When the bishop brought himself to reply tersely to his parson’s request, no mention was made of the possibility of an increase in stipendiary support.
‘Fripperies and fal-de-lals, young lady. Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.’
‘That is neither fair to me, sir, or true,’ Rebecca countered spiritedly. She stamped her dainty foot impatiently. ‘You should not see fit, sir, to frustrate me and deny me the smallest essentials.’
Miss Strappleton had dutifully informed the parson that Rebecca, two years older than her sister, Edwina, had squandered housekeeping monies away on ribbons for her shining golden hair and – the temerity of the girl – on a saucy pair of satin slippers.
‘My purse cannot support your profligacy, Rebecca. You disobeyed my express wishes in the matter of economies, and now I find you unrepentant as I attempt to remonstrate with you. Very well, I will more than remonstrate with you, young lady. I will speak plain and deal severe with you, understand?’
‘Economy is another word for meanness in your book, sir,’ she retorted hotly.
‘My book, maid, is the Good Book, and therein are many lessons to be learned.’
‘Sermons are for simpering schoolgirls!’
‘Silence, Rebecca, do not be pert with me. A pert wench is soon brought to sorrow. The sorrow of punishment—’
‘No, sir!’ gasped the willowy blonde, shaking her head vigorously. ‘Pray, I meant no mischief with my wanton words. Forgive me, please, sir.’
‘Hold thy prattling tongue.’
‘Sir, I beseech thee, do not beat me.’
‘Silence!’ he thundered. ‘Be done! I chastised your younger sister before luncheon, and I mean to hear your howls before sundown. Come here, baggage.’
Emitting a shrill squeak of alarm, Rebecca backed around the study, putting a polished mahogany table between herself and the wrathful parson. But despite her agility and his heavy luncheon, he gained upon and grasped his struggling charge. She wrestled pathetically in his fierce embrace before slumping abjectly dow
n to her knees before him.
‘How much were you emboldened to squander, my girl?’ he demanded to know.
She shrugged, tossing her golden ringlets insouciantly over her shoulders.
The parson, smouldering with rage in the knowledge – supplied by his prying housekeeper – that Rebecca had squandered a couple of pennies short of a half sovereign on her fripperies, demanded a full answer from her. ‘How much, harlot?’
Flinching, she swayed and sank back, shrinking from his anger. Resting her round buttocks on her heels, she bit her lower lip before whispering her remorse.
‘Like the whore of Babylon, your contrition comes too late,’ he sneered. ‘Remove your skirts, petticoat and farthingale, young lady. I propose to punish you, bare-bottomed, with a most fitting instrument.’
Rebecca rose and steadied herself at the mahogany table. Then she lifted trembling fingers to her bodice and plucked it open slowly, reluctantly divesting herself of her outer garments.
The parson was indifferent to her discomfort. As she bared and prepared herself for his impending chastisement, he peeled away his coat and unbuttoned the cuffs at each sleeve. He approached her, treading softly on the Turkish rug.
He bare buttocks pressed against the smooth wood of the table’s edge, Rebecca shivered in her nakedness and shame, cowering before his stern gaze.
His narrowed eyes raked her nudity, glinting at the sight of her pink nipples, and as they took in the golden fuzz of her privy part.
Sensing his searching gaze she covered her bosom with her left arm, squashing her breasts and bunching them up into deliciously full mounds, and hid her cunny with her right hand.
‘I am blighted to struggle with a living that yields little profit and less reward, Rebecca,’ he said. ‘The souls hereabouts prove to be as resistant to spiritual guidance as they are reluctant to pay their tithes. And since last Michaelmass, I have had to bear the additional burden of you three wicked girls. It is, I consider, both unjust and inequitable. But it is my duty, and I will do my duty. Bend over across the table, young lady. Present your bare bottom to me, for I mean to beat you.’