Notebooks of the Young Wife

by Tara Black

‘In order for your bottom to be spanked you will need to remove your jacket and skirt. I shall begin over the knickers, but they are to come down after a while to complete the operation.’ I stopped speaking and watched the crimson-faced girl strip to her shirtsleeves and tug at her zip. When she was ready I took the clothes from her and placed them on a chair. I had one more thing to say.

  ‘You may have noticed that I have not lectured you on the conduct that has brought you here; nor shall I. It is none of my business. Nor yet do I intend to humiliate by taking you across my knee. The position provides close contact, which I think important, and is simply the most efficient for my purpose. That is to cause you the pain of acquiring a very sore behind – one more tender than it may be possible for you at this point to imagine. Right. Enough of words; let’s get down to business.’

  Perhaps I’d overdone the little speech: my audience had become open-mouthed and was seemingly rooted to the spot. So I took hold of an arm and led her gently to the chaise longue that stood against the far wall. It is the ideal piece of furniture for an over-the-knee spanking of one of adult size. A chair has the recipient literally over-lapping, hands awkwardly on the floor for balance, whereas if one sits at its open end, the main body of the couch supports the torso while the legs slope down leaving the buttocks in prime position to be soundly slapped. In such manner I guided the first-timer into position and watched her settle in apparent comfort. I had already been struck by the expressive face framed by dark hair cut close to the shape of the head; now I was able to take a good look at the hindquarters that swelled enticingly in a swathe of silk. Perhaps such an item was the regulation underwear of the institution she attended, but that seemed unlikely. I was going to assume instead that I was honoured with a show of the Sunday best.

  I smoothed out a crease at the leg elastic and let my hand rest on the bare flesh below. Under the fine material the cleft between the mounds showed dark and there was a wisp of hair where the gusset disappeared between the legs. A sharp stab of lust brought me back to myself: the girl was to be spanked, no more, no less. I cleared my throat.

  ‘I am going to begin. It goes without saying, I hope, that I expect no unseemly struggling.’ No reply was called for, nor came one, so I raised my hand and brought it down smartly on the right cheek, then repeated the action on the left. I fell easily into a rhythm of quite hearty smacks and was rewarded by a deepening blush that was visible clearly through the sheer covering. Ms Miles herself was behaving in exemplary fashion, silent apart from a kind of throaty mutter and a small jerking movement at a particularly well-judged slap. Before very long the colour I was raising had extended well beyond the boundary of the knickers and I decided it was time to take them down.

  ‘Right, up on your feet. Let’s get you ready for part two.’ She stood biting her lip, with downcast eyes not meeting mine. But there was no resistance as I took hold of the waistband and lowered it over the hips. The crotch clung briefly between the thighs and I longed to test below the pubic triangle with a finger. But it was not to be – not then – and I remember sighing as I eased the girl back into place and ran my hand over the fiery cheeks. As if inspired by their heat I spanked with gusto, savouring every bounce and ripple of the bared parts. The new vigour had an immediate effect: though she wasn’t fighting me, the body twisted and writhed at each stinging crack of palm on flesh. My hand was holding up remarkably well, but the lower curves of the crimson globes were a smudge of purple bruising. Then all at once came tears and great gulping sobs.

  ‘No, please! Oh please, that’s enough!’ I held her tight while the spasm passed, then spoke quietly.

  ‘Twelve more, as hard as I can. Then we are done. Agreed?’ There was a sniff and a croaked ‘Yes’, and I proceeded to count out, in slow time, the dozen full-force blows I’d promised. Each set off a wailing that had to be fully audible in the office, and Miss Marston, at least, would no longer think her trip wasted.

  Once the girl had calmed I helped her back into an upright position. Her face was flushed and there was still a catch in the breathing, but she looked little the worse for her experience. I watched as she stood with almost a meditative air, hands gingerly exploring her bottom.

  ‘Ouch and double-ouch. I am sore.’ After some more rubbing she continued. ‘It’s hard to believe just a hand did this. And I bet you use other things too.’ She was looking at me with something of the old spirit; not defiant exactly but very perky for one who’d just had her first ever spanking. In response I beckoned her over to the corner cupboard and opened its two doors wide. On one side hung a row of punishment straps while the other held a set of many-tailed whips. There were two shelves of paddles, including a vintage English tapette, and beside them a fistful of canes sprouted out of an upright stand. Her eyes flitted from item to item with a look of awe and I selected one that would augment that impression.

  ‘This is a tawse, a genuine three-tail Lochgelly. Eight-millimetre gauge leather, heavy yet supple. Feel it.’ She took the instrument from me in one hand and slapped the business end of it lightly against the other. Her mouth made an ‘O’ and I guessed she was wondering how it would be to experience its forceful application. ‘Memorable,’ I said with a smile, and the answering flush confirmed my supposition. I leaned over and gave her bare bottom a little pat. ‘Just a few strokes would leave these pretty cheeks red raw and throbbing for the whole day. But I’m afraid we must bring this occasion to an end: your chaperon will be getting restive. You should get dressed and I’ll take back the strap. Not in its league, of course, but I hope the encounter with my hand will stay with you for a while.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She pulled up her panties and zipped up the skirt then paused, jacket in hand. ‘Dr Greene, what I said before wasn’t true. I know a girl in the sixth who was here once. I mean, she wouldn’t say anything except about the hand and I got kind of, er, really curious. So I wasn’t actually forced into anything.’ Jacket on, she straightened her tie and smoothed down the collar of the shirt. ‘And by the way, it’s Becca. Becca Miles.’

  ‘Then it had better be Jane.’ Apart from a slight redness around the eyes, the girl had a colour that exuded well-being, and even her hair seemed to have acquired an extra gloss. ‘Do try to look just a touch woebegone, Becca dear, or I’ll be accused of failing in my duty.’

  She suppressed a giggle behind her hand and was gone. I returned the solid piece of leather to its place and closed the cabinet on the array of implements. Whatever else I did, the delectable Becca had to be nudged into a return visit. One in which the firm ‘hand’ could use some carefully chosen back up.

  As soon as I heard the outer door bang shut on our departing visitors I called Dominic in. He’d already served me well that day but I was confident he could be relied upon to rise once more to the occasion. Masturbation was an option, of course, but chastising the schoolgirl’s virgin curves had brought me to the kind of high-voltage state that would be best discharged by the work of an active partner. When he entered with a querying look I was ready with a leather paddle behind my back, which I produced with a flourish.

  ‘I had an idea that the breakfast six of the best might need a little refreshing. If, that is, the thought appeals...’ The dark-jowled, slightly stolid face lit up with a crooked grin.

  ‘She must have been hot.’

  ‘She took what I dished out like a real sweetie. But that was it – no hanky-panky – so I’m the one who’s hot.’

  ‘Okay, boss, I get the picture. Wish I could have played peeping tom.’ He opened his belt and I undid the metal buttons on his jeans one by one. Underneath was a black satin jockstrap, already bulging, that I lowered along with them so I could take the growing erection into my hand.

  ‘Good start, my boy. Now let’s do what we need to pump it man-sized.’ He bent over in a practiced gesture, legs apart, so that the garments stayed bunched around the thighs. The rounded backside bore the fading tracks of t
he morning’s cane and jutted provocatively as if asking for more. He was by no means a fully-fledged masochist, merely a young man who was turned on by the idea of being beaten, particularly it seemed, by a woman who was his superior and more than ten years his senior. I gathered girlfriends of his age came and went with whom he behaved in a largely conventional fashion. I took the paddle and rubbed its surface over his bare bottom.

  ‘Six plus six is what I have in mind, all right? Be warned I’m going for the full swing on each one.’ I cracked the leather oval hard across the centre of the left cheek, then the right. Running my hand over the area I waited for the colour to come up, then delivered a second pair of blows. After a third I announced the end of the first half dozen and caressed the hot red flesh. He did colour beautifully and I could see the full erection straining between his legs. The second six proceeded in like fashion, except on the final stroke he yelped and sprang up, grabbing his behind. Dominic was always a model of decorum in the receiving of discipline, so that could mean only one thing. I smiled to myself: it was his way of asking for more.

  ‘Tut, tut.’ I pushed him back down with the instrument and pressed it against the glowing rounds. ‘What do we do, boy, when the agreed number of strokes has been given?’

  ‘We wait to be told before we move.’

  ‘That is so. It will be six for your impertinence. You may express your gratitude in advance.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am.’

  ‘That’s better. We’ll make a young gentleman of you yet. Brace yourself.’ I lay on as hard and fast as I could, but though he gasped and squirmed the hands remained locked round the ankles. When I’d done they stayed put until I reached down and took them in mine. I steered him to the couch and he lay back with an ‘Ow’ when the tender buttocks made contact with its surface. I grinned at him and took the pole that sprouted from his groin between my fingers. While it was my firm belief that a man’s body was never the object of my truest passion, I was not keen to forswear a stiff member primed to oozing point and entirely at my disposal.

  On that occasion, the encounter with just such a thing came close to perfection and remains vividly in the mind. My threadbare 501s were all that stood in the way – I can’t abide any impediment to the feel of that seam tight in the crotch – and they were discarded in a trice. Then I straddled the boy and eased down until the engorged head slid by my throbbing clitoris into the mouth of the vulva, where I held it, gently rocking. And held it, and held it, quivering with lust while long seconds ticked past. The face below me was contorted with desire so intense it was as much pain as pleasure, and I could resist no longer. I thrust down just as he pushed up and, awash with juices, cock and cunt squelched into orgasmic union. I remember a great yell – from me, from him, more likely both – and a delirium of pumping bodies, and then a slow slide into the torpor of satiation.

  How long we lay in blissful languor I do not recall, but I do know it was very much the end of that day. For me, I should say. Dominic took himself off muttering in the way he often did after sex; I could never quite work out whether it was a general post-coital malaise from which men are said to suffer or a more specific sense of being used. Which of course he was. I’m afraid that once I discovered his predilection I was quite shameless in exploiting it for my own purposes. Women I was accustomed to bed in a more reciprocal fashion; I took pleasure in perversely treating men as they are commonly held to treat us. That disposition, however, was to be challenged by the improbable affair that came at me out of nowhere. Indeed, neither was there back then a hint of the gallivanting in store to secure the return of the missing notebooks.

  No, all I knew was that there was very probably a large mass of disreputable materials up for grabs. The Everett name was a byword for aristocratic depravity but my acquaintance with the history of the house was sketchy. To be honest, I wasn’t very sure even where it was. However, I decided that any research into these matters would keep until morning. I was too spent even to contemplate banter over a jar or two round the corner at the Hellfire Tavern. Instead there was the remains of a bottle of Bruaichladdich in the flat that would send me pleasantly into oblivion, and to that end I let myself out of the back door and headed up the stairs.

  Uxor Studiosa

  The morning had started well. Ardingley End was easy to find online in the Country House Index, which delivered the basic facts. Begun in 1610, it contained a Jacobean core that was later flanked by wings with rooms by Robert Adam. The Everetts came into the picture by acquiring the property in 1695, and stayed with it from generation to generation until Monty popped his clogs and brought the line to an end. But then my luck ran out. I searched the usual sources like Ashbee, Porter, Hitchcock and so on – any commentary I could lay my hands on that was indexed – only to find they contained no mention of the family name. It was common, of course, for disreputable items to appear under a false name or no name at all, but the pen names of particular eighteenth-century enthusiasts like Perry or Ireland had often been cracked. Not so with Everett, it seemed, if indeed there were any original materials to be had.

  I ground up a quantity of beans and set the coffee machine hissing and bubbling while I racked my brains. We knew about the interests of the present – or rather, late – Sir Montague, and through him of the fact of likeminded ancestors. Had any of them published flagellatory erotica copies would be preserved in his own collection, and it was unlikely that they’d have been left to lie in scholarly oblivion. Not at least by one of Monty’s aptitude for self-promotion. I glanced again at the clutch of books I’d hauled upstairs from the basement. At the bottom was the imposingly titled Organum Venereum: a recently acquired nineteenth-century reprint of the 1787 original. I had put it aside for reason of its lack of index, but now it occurred to me that it may be worth a quick scan, since it contained material from an earlier period than the rest. Earlier, and therefore thinner on the ground.

  Coffee poured at hand, I settled to the task. The main body of the book was a dissertation on the medical or pseudo medical works that purported to explain why a good whipping of the buttocks inflamed lechery, while in the process dwelling lasciviously on all the bodily details. At another time I would have been diverted, even titillated by evidence of preoccupations like my own two or three centuries in the past. That day, however, they were a source of irritation and I skimmed hastily through on the lookout for names. I saw there was an appendix entitled Incident & Anecdote, and without any real expectation turned to it. And struck gold.

  The third entry ran to four pages under the heading An Educational Use of the Servant, and at the end of it I found,

  A–––– E–, in the County of ––sex.

  The Month of June in the Year of 1728.

  Uxor studiosa scripsit.

  It had to be. Academic caution always goes out of the window when I think I’m on to something and I just knew the piece was from Ardingley End, Essex. But the last three words made me gape. I was familiar with scripsit, meaning literally ‘wrote’, and for use after the author’s name at the end of a letter or document. Uxor studiosa, though, was a turn up for the book. Wife, of course, and not merely studying, but keenly so. ‘By the zealous wife’ might do as a translation. With a slightly unsteady hand I turned back the pages to read what she had written.

  I am scarce one Month wed and my Husband’s Course of Lessons is underway in earnest. This Day we are gathered – that is my Abigail and I – in the Morning Room where a Space has been cleared for an Article of Furniture that I am most desirous of viewing in use. At last the Footmen enter – it is they shall play a vital Rôle in the Drama we are to witness – and bowing under its weight bring the Item to the Centre of the Floor. At first Sight it could be taken for a kind of Seat, possessed as it is of a slatted wooden Top curved as might fit the Shape of an Arse. Yet a Glance at the festooning Straps and the Timbers enclosing the four Legs that extend a Yard fore and aft suggests otherwis
e. Indeed, the Apparatus is concerned with posterior Matters, though not in the Mode of Sitting. One may rather be sure that when its Function has been discharged, that very Position will be one best avoided. For the thing is a Whipping-Bench, no less, made out of the finest Oak to a Plan drawn up by Sir Montague’s own Hand. It is unique to the House and I hope to see it become the Envy of the Circuit.

  The Housemaid arrives who is to be the principal Subject of our Staging and casts a nervous Eye over the Frame. We ready her for the Event by removing the outer Garments, with the Observation that while there may be some trying Minutes, they will become as nothing in the final Consummation. From the Calves and Shoulders that have come into view, Martha is a well-built Girl and I tell her that having survived, as she has, the Strictest of Upbringings there will be nothing in today’s Exercise to cause her undue Alarm. She is reassured, it seems, and stretches over to embrace the Frame. I send Nabby to the left and together we cuff the bare Arms to the forward Struts. At the other end we take the hem of the linen Smock at each side and between us fold it up until it is able to be held under the broad Belt that I buckle tight across the lower Back.

  What a Moon has risen on the Scene in response to our action! I catch my Servant’s eye and make with my Hands the form of the two resplendent Hemispheres that lie uncovered, but we stifle our giggling. I do not wish my Husband to surprise us in a state of foolish Levity, so we bend again to our Task. Now the Refinement of the design becomes apparent in the placing of the Straps that circle each Thigh close to the Knee. The Distance between their fixing Posts is such that when they are drawn tight the Legs pull apart into an inverted V. The Consequences of this are, it seems, apparent to our Volunteer who gives out an ‘Oh’, while her Muscles strain to undo what we have just done. It is to no avail. Despite the ripeness of the Buttock its lower portion is split wide to expose the pink Folds of the Quim.