It must be said I was half fainting with a mixture of emotions, among them fear, submission and a strange anticipation, as I drew up my knees, clasped them with my arms, and parted my legs, feeling my whole underneath, the tops of my thighs, the underhang of my buttocks, my swollen labia, my weeping vagina, all completely exposed to her mercy, and what was that?
Again she cut me slowly and thoroughly, three from the left, three from the right, laid almost lovingly across the crease, and the base of the buttock. I was becoming very tender now, those parts had each been impacted two or three times over, at least, and the cane was bruising bruises, but she kept me to my post, exercising her command of me to see I did not flinch and close my legs, or put my hands to my suffering seat. Again, I felt she could have made things go another way, if she chose, but chose instead to show her power to make me take her cuts, and not quail. For the last she warned me what she would do, and I lay trembling as she went back to my left, then cut down very short, to find my empurpled pouch, inflicting another atrocious shaft of pain that ran through the tender flesh like a knife, indeed after, I found she had split the lip on that side, but so tightly had she bound me with her spell, that I merely screamed, but did not try to grasp my wounded pudenda.
The next night she again informed me that AdŠle had transgressed in some way, and I must pay for it. When I crept to her room on time, her clock tallied with that in the hall by which the household ran, but she took issue with the fact that, knowing I would have to strip once I arrived at her room, I was only lightly dressed. In particular for having discarded my drawers, since they were already stained with blood where they had been against my flank, from where I had been sitting that evening, and I knew well I would never bear to pull them on again after she had inflicted the new six, more probably seven, stripes I was due.
It served to ensure that it was, indeed, seven, and I took them in the now accustomed manner, on my back on the couch, walking away, after, very ansty now, with my face streaked with tears and pain.
The next evening was the fifth of this dreadful odyssey, and I took my seat in pain and fear. This time she did not come to where I sat but, catching my eye, crooked her little finger at me. I limped stiffly to where she sat among her cronies.
“Miss Eyre,” she said, “we have some business to conduct. Kindly attend me at the usual hour.”
There had been nothing of AdŠle’s behaviour to complain of, but I could not protest in front of the other guests.
“Very well, Miss Ingram,” I replied, “I shall be there.”
I was aware of a number of curious looks from some of the other women, and a buzz of interrogation as I left, but I do not believe she said anything to enlighten them. The secret was too good to share and, in any case, it might not have been a good idea to risk Mr Rochester becoming privy to it by entrusting it to a parcel of tattling women. In her room that night I screamed at every stroke, and earned another for my ‘noisiness’.
The next morning I could scarcely drag myself down to breakfast, though I could not absent myself since AdŠle must be supervised. I had found a small soft cushion to sit on, but still groaned as my seat met that of the chair. Blanche was early to break her fast, I think she had given up her practice of taking her early repast in her room especially to see me coping with the soreness of my bottom, and grinned devilishly at my squirms and moans.
That afternoon, by chance, I met Mr Rochester in the corridor. He stopped me and remarked that he had been observing AdŠle’s behaviour in the drawing-room after dinner and, though it had improved a little, there was still reason to find fault, and I might expect to be punished for it again in the future. It was too much for me, and I burst into tears.
“Ah Sir,” I wailed, “do but do it yourself, and I will try and bear it with fortitude, but do not send me to Miss Ingram again.”
“What! I thought better of you Jane. A mere six from a lady and you are snivelling like a child. Where is your pride?”
“Six Sir I could have taken without flinching, and did, but it is six times six now, and my buttocks are like raw meat. Do not ask me to take more from her, I beg you.”
“Six times six? What does this mean? I said you were only to have six.”
“Why so I did, the first night, though she awarded me extra for flinching, but there have been six or seven every night since, and I am growing sore beneath.”
I had not meant to inform on Blanche, but I believed he knew, and that I was telling him nothing he was not already aware of. As it was his indignation was awesome. An icy tension that spoke of volcanic pressures below.
“Show me girl,” he said through clenched teeth.
I lifted my skirts, and lowered my drawers, turning my back towards him so that he could see clearly my ravaged buttocks, the cheeks swollen and discoloured, thick tracks of varying age and hue crossing them in profusion low down, some encrusted with dark scabs at their extremities, others so low that they crossed my crease and vanished into the swollen pouch between my thighs.
He appraised them with a surprisingly gentle finger tip for a man of his strength and vigour, saying only, “Ah ha!” as he traced their course and read the pattern of my sufferings, then bade me pull up my drawers and accompany him to his study. There he had me kneel on a thick cushion, his consideration almost reducing me to tears again, and extracted my story from me, leaving no aspect unexplored, quizzing me in detail until he had it all. It was clear from his reactions to my account, that Blanche had not actually spoken to him about AdŠle’s alleged sins on any of the occasions that I had seen her in conversation with him, but had merely bluffed me into thinking he had given permission for my chastisement.
“It is clear,” he said, “that you have paid for all AdŠle’s crimes likely to be called to account, for a month at least, and you may be confident of being left to heal your bottom for four weeks. In the meantime I will speak to Miss Ingram about her presumption.”
That evening Blanche approached me again. At first I thought she was about to direct me to attend her for punishment yet again, and was in a state of confusion as to whether to comply, or insist that we get Mr Rochester’s confirmation first, but then I realised her manner was not as before. She seemed to be speaking under some immense strain when she invited me to come to her room at the usual time, and explained that Mr Rochester had asked her to communicate something of some moment to me.
I agreed therefore that I would come at ten o’clock, and awaited the hour with a mixture of doubt and curiosity as to what she might have to say. I could not rule out entirely the possibility that she had used her considerable charms to convince him that she had acted properly and that she would now punish me for, as she would see it, complaining unjustifiably to my employer. It was a possibility that filled me with no joy, for I was immensely sore underneath, still walking with stiff legs, limping as my whipped thighs protested. The thought of having to bare them again for her to lash that merciless rod into their raw welts was more than I could face.
But when I entered her room, knocking on her door promptly at ten, and being bid enter, I found her in a state of relative agitation, though her noble upbringing and natural command of herself kept her from giving way to her feelings altogether. Instead of ordering me to strip, or prepare the bench, she invited me to sit then, when I declined, my poor sore bottom unwilling to be pressed against even the softest cushion, she paced up and down in front of the fire place, while she said her piece. And a set piece it was too. She told me that Mr Rochester had instructed her in what she had to say, almost to the framing of the words in which it was to be expressed.
He had it appears, expressed his grim disapproval of her deceitful conduct towards me. I could imagine what it had been like to have been on the receiving end of his tongue lashing, and she was to do penance by receiving from my hands, over the next six nights, exactly those strokes that she had given me over our last half-a-dozen meetings in this room, even down to those searching cuts to my vulva that
had so undone me.
I was amazed that she could bear to abase herself to recite this shaming litany, but put it down to the force of Mr Rochester’s personality, and the attraction of his fortune, and the match that would secure it. What else could induce a young woman of her high position and physical beauty, that brought all men, and some women, to her feet, to agree to take such a whipping, and at the hands of one so far beneath her in all respects as myself and, moreover, to have to declare in explicit terms, what she was to suffer and invite me to execute the same.
I heard her out in silence, but with a great noise of thought pounding in my head. Reader, I must confess something unworthy here. I should have been thinking in terms of offering her the forgiveness and clemency she had denied me. It would have been the Christian thing to do, to turn the other cheek, but both my cheeks were sore and raw, and the horrid black demon of revenge rose in my breast, just as my nipples at my coming triumph, and I said merely, “Arrange the bench, then strip.”
She said nothing, but moved to the foot of her bed and drew out the bench into the centre of the room, where she had placed me for my whipping. Then, still in silence, she began to strip. She had made no concessions to her coming chastisement, perhaps to have done so was an act of surrender she would not make until it became unavoidable. In any case I had to wait while she disrobed, something that caused me no concern, since the delay only served to whet my appetite, knowing now what was to come. Moreover I found this slow piecemeal uncovering of her voluptuous body strangely arousing, my nipples hardening, my belly twitching, a wet warmth gathering in my vulva, sore though it was, as I watched each delicate garment discarded, each portion of rounded pale flesh exposed, until she stood as naked as I had for the last six nights.
Nor did I have to tell her to mount the bench. When the last piece of clothing had dropped from her and been gathered up and laid on a chair, she crossed to the bench and laid herself on it as she had had me do, lying back, parting her legs and raising them high, grasping them behind the knees so as to hold them up, her thighs widely parted and drawn back onto her chest so as to expose herself completely to my cuts. She had put the rod ready on her bed and I took it up, an unworthy exaltation filling me as I approached this proud imperious beauty, surrendered to my will and whim.
I could not fault her courage. She did not flinch when I laid the rod across her crease to make my mark for my first stroke, nor even when that stroke fell, parting the air before it with a whirr to bite crisply into that same white flesh. I thrashed her with all the vigour at my command, twice from the right, then twice from the left, and she took each with a gasp of breath, an anguished hissing as the full pain sank in. As I crossed back yet again for the fifth stroke I saw the first small flicker of fear cross her face, despite her best efforts to suppress it. She knew what was coming now, though I doubt she had any idea of how it would hurt, merely that it would be horrendous. I did my best not to disappoint her.
I measured her carefully again, this time rewarded with a small involuntary twitch of her threatened vulva, then summoned all that skill and experience I had learnt from the estimable Mme. Pierotte at Lowood. She had taught me the management of a rod and the best means to ensure, despite my relative lack of strength, that the cane should cut exactly where I chose, and with a velocity that would ensure that bite was deadly, and so it was. The last several inches lay across the near thigh, the extreme tip overhanging so that its momentum carried it down and round into the space between, which was filled by the pouting fig of her pudenda.
The tip sank into the plump flesh of her lower lips, brushing aside the last black curls that curtained it, until it seemed as if it had begun to penetrate her vagina itself. When it sprang back it left angry red marks on each fleshy pad, which rapidly darkened and swelled. Blanche bit off a scream that tried to get passed her throat and moaned after, as the pain flowed into her, her legs waving as if caught in a sudden breeze, her head thrown back in her agony. I crossed to the other side and repeated the cut from there.
She could no more contain it than I had. This time she cried out loudly and dropped her legs to the floor, exactly as I, and put her hands between her thighs to hold her wound. I waited until she had stilled a little, it took her a mighty effort to achieve it, then informed her she would have an extra. My lust was in no way abated by the strokes I had already scored into her defenceless flesh, on the contrary it was fanned to even greater heat by the sight of her suffering there, as I had had to before her, but I was not so far gone as to forget that she was in this position now because she had abused the authority Mr Rochester had deputed to her, and I must not commit the same error.
I delivered the stroke without aggravated venom, catching her across the under buttock just above the crease, keeping the cane ‘long’ so that her already wounded vulva was not at risk. I laid the cane on the bed and left the room, leaving her to compose herself as best she might for the night.
For four nights she matched me stroke for stroke, dutifully inviting me to join her in her room each evening, preparing herself without demur on my command, taking the strokes exactly as I had, and becoming as sore and distressed as I, although carrying it off well, and concealing her wounded state from all but the keenest eye, and they could only discern that something strange was afoot, without being able to guess the precise nature of her discomfort, or the manner of its infliction.
On the fifth night I looked for her in vain. She was not among the ladies when then retired to the drawing-room after dinner, nor joined them later. We were subsequently informed that Miss Ingram had returned to her home to take care of a sick relative. To be fair to her, I do not think she was a coward, and she might well have played out the game to the last excruciating stroke, had not intelligence been conveyed to her, at Mr Rochester’s instigation, as I subsequently discovered, that his fortune had been much overestimated and that unwise management had reduced it to only a fraction of what it was generally held to be. With no glittering prize to fight for she had, quite prudently, conceded the field to another.
A Summons
The light seemed to go out of the party with Blanche’s departure and, one by one, or rather two by two, for the couplings had become so consummated as to be inseparable, the guests departed, most of them to reassemble at one or other great house of the county to prolongate their amours, or propagate fresh ones. Soon the house was empty, save for its regular inhabitants, but my Master made no move to go after the riotous throng, and the household settled back into its untroubled existence. The old routines were re-established, I tutoring my little charge in scholarship and manners, and accounting for her lapses with my little red notebook, and redder bottom, on a monthly basis.
On a day, Mrs Fairfax sent to say there was a visitor enquiring for me and, when I came to see, I found it was John, Mrs Reed’s coachman from Gateshead, he that had married my only ally at that unhappy house, the waiting woman Bessie.
“Your Aunt is sick, Miss Jane,” he said, “and like to die. She says she will not rest until she has seen you again.”
I was astonished by this intelligence, since she had never shown any desire for my company before. On the contrary, she had displayed an active dislike of me and a propensity to work me harm whenever she could. I asked John how matters had changed so remarkably.
“It’s Master Jack,” he told me. “The young Master got himself into so much trouble, the drink you know, and women. Especially the women. He treated them very harshly.”
I could believe it. Hadn’t he treated me cruelly, making me fetch his horrid cane, and lift my skirts to have it thrashed into my poor cringing buttocks? Nor were his sisters safe from his nasty ways, for he slaked his lust, stoked by the sight of my poor riven hinds, in the tight fastnesses of their rear openings, only the fear of giving them a swollen belly preventing him from using them in front as well. It must be said in mitigation though that they hardly discouraged him. Indeed they would compete for his favours and complain loudly if
either thought the other ‘had’ him more often than she.
“But he always was a rakehell,” I protested, “it is nothing new. She has always known he was bad and always will be.”
“Not any longer, Miss,” John corrected me, mournfully. “Things got to such a pass, even he could not abide the disgrace, and he blew his brains out these two months gone. The Missus took to her bed and never left it. Now she has declined so much she cannot last much longer and the shadow of death has awoken her to something concerning yourself. She cries out night and day that she must see you and make her peace before she dies.”
How could I refuse such a charitable act? I bade the servants make John comfortable and went to seek out my Master, to tell him how I was sent for, and to beg leave of absence. He was at first all solicitous that I should go to Gateshead and asked me what funds I had to maintain myself on the journey. When I explained that I had only a few coins in my purse, he remarked that he had paid me no wages so far and offered me the equivalent of a year’s salary on the spot. I protested that it was too much, and he should pay me only the quarter’s salary outstanding. At this point he seemed to be taken by some sudden doubt and protested that if he paid me what he owed, I would leave and he would never see me again. At length I was persuaded to take half the money he offered first but then he turned to another form of account.
“You have said you do not know when you will return. That you will stay until your Aunt no longer needs you. You have still to settle your account with me for AdŠle’s behaviour and your own. Do you intend to decamp without settling your debts?”
Jane and Her Master Page 9