Jane and Her Master

by Stephen Rawlings

  I dropped to my knees, as the occasion demanded, and looked up, expecting Miss Temple and her cleansing rod. Instead my eyes encountered a pillar of black, a tall austere column topped by the forbidding features of the Reverend Brocklehurst in person!

  “Sir,” I stammered, foolishly, “I did not think to see you here. I thought you in Scotland,” for had not Miss Temple told me just that when, naturally, I had enquired after him during those polite exchanges, all those weeks ago, while we were sipping tea, before settling the exact nature of my reformatory correction.

  “Indeed, Jane, I was,” the Great Man replied, “I had undertaken a tour to spread my own theories on the education and correction of girls, and to learn from some of the stricter Dominies with experience in the field. I was able to convince several that our penal canes are more corrective than the tawse or strap they favour, and thus have made a small start on bringing its benefit to the Scottish girls in their schools. However, when word reached me that you were to be broken by the rod, that the normal bounds of its use were to be set aside, I abandoned all my arrangements and returned poste haste, to conduct the operation myself. Miss Temple has kindly lent me the use of the room. I have brought my own instrument.”

  I followed the direction of his glance and saw, balanced on a small table, a deadly length of polished whalebone. It was known of, of course, in our little scholastic community, but no-one I knew had had experience of it, it having been declared too wounding for the tender buttocks of growing girls. As if reading my thoughts, they must have been only too obvious on my fearful countenance, Mr Brocklehurst continued.

  “I do not think you have experienced this rod, Jane. It was considered too fierce for young girls’ soft flesh, and I conceded the point, allowing that it might be more beneficial in any case, to award a larger number with a more normal cane, since the correction would be prolonged to the good of soul and body, but you are a grown woman, with well developed parts,” he shot a glance at my figure as I knelt still before him, “you will be able to take the full force without danger to health, and we are agreed your tally is unlimited, as many as is needed to break your rebellious spirit, and render you as docile and submissive as a woman should be.”

  “You do me much honour, Sir,” I blurted out, shaking with a mixture of emotions, fear, appreciation of the honour he paid me, dread of what he was capable of doing to me, the searing of the soul, as well as the body, that he accomplished so inexorably.

  “Then we shall begin,” he ordained, “bare yourself to the rod, Jane. Strip your buttocks so that it may search them out, cut into your soul, break your stubborn will. Remove those flimsy protections that cover your hinds and present your flesh for the cleansing.”

  I did as I was bid. I could see now how wise Miss Temple had proved, in having me bathed and dressed, fed and in my right mind, my toilette complete, before sending me to meet my fate at Mr Brocklehurst’s iron hand. It would not have done for him to have had the offence of my befouled and sweat stained body presented to him rank and naked, while the very act of stripping myself of my coverings before him sapped at my obstinate will.

  I removed my garments one by one, until I stood before him in my stays and stockings, all else below the waist gone, my trembling buttocks quite bare, as were my thighs to the garters at my knee. He offered me the ivory hardness of the whalebone to kiss before it started its work, and I pressed my lips to its polished thickness, my legs turning to jelly, my belly squirming, those fatty roundnesses that would, no doubt, bear the brunt of his attack, clenching behind me as if trying to hide in one another from the terrible visitation to come.

  “Let us see how far your obstinacy will take you before it bends,” he said, in considered tones, “you shall take your strokes bending, a dozen at a time. Should you flinch from the rod, it will not be counted. When you admit failure, I shall secure you, so that the exorcism may proceed despite your weakness.”

  I advanced to the familiar board, over which ‘duty’ strokes were customarily taken. It was a strong timber structure of horizontal planks, well braced, and coming to about hip height, but equipped with a movable leaf that enabled it to be set to suit each girl condemned to it. The leaf carried a padded leather boss, against which one pressed ones pubis. At the base the wood protruded in a shelve carrying two slots, about half a yard apart, into which ones ankles slotted. One then bent forward, the boss under your belly, forcing one to rise slightly onto one’s toes. The top of the board was furnished with a stout, spring loaded bar, which could be hinged down to press into the small of ones back, canting up the pelvis, making the buttocks, and especially the underparts, open and accessible to the rod.

  Ordinarily it was not thought possible that a girl could endure four strokes or more of the dreadful ‘duty’ cane and hold herself still, so we were always secured to the board, by the bar, and rods across the slots holding our ankles, our hands either held by the duty prefect, or holding grimly to a bar set low down on the far side of the board, but this time I was to be bereft of the comfort of any restraint, and made to offer myself voluntarily until my courage failed.

  I set my legs apart, my ankles in the slots, pressed my throbbing pubes against the sweat stained leather of the boss and bent to grasp the bar below.

  Oh, how many times had I done so before, but never in such fear as this. Before a stroke had fallen he had reduced me to quaking terror, my soul already pleading, though I tried to put as brave a face as I could upon it, taking my place quietly, and keeping my stretched buttocks from clenching as best I could though, despite me, they still flinched, giving little fatty quiverings of fear as I waited for him to proceed.

  With deliberation, he removed his jacket, and undid the cuff of his right sleeve, rolling it back until his sinewy arm was exposed to above the elbow. He took up the rod and gave a trial cut or two through the air behind me. My buttocks clenched of their own accord at each thrumming whirr as it sliced the air. In a moment it would slice my nether flesh as fiercely. There was stillness for a moment, and then the thrumming came again. At its end all hell broke in my buttock, the flesh there seeming to have been pressed by a bar of red hot iron. My body rocked under the impact, my fingernails scrabbled at the bar. I gasped sharply and hissed between my teeth at the surging pain that followed. He held me thus for quite fifteen seconds, to let me savour it fully, then dealt me another such.

  The first had fallen quite high, across the fullest part of the buttock; he had no need to proceed from a lower point for there was no limit to the number of strokes I might be given. The second fell a bare half inch below the first, he was going to cover all the ground, and the effect was no less.

  Stroke by stroke he laid on the first dozen, taking me from above my centre down to the very crease. I could not maintain my first resistance very long and by five or six was in such agony I rewarded him with a strangled cry at each cut, sobbing gasps filling the intervals between, stretched out until he judged I had the full benefit, before extracting the next vocal tribute.

  At the end of a dozen, he let me rise for a moment to gather my breath, then ordered me into position for my second tranche. I set myself as best I might, but the rod was a brute, and it could not go on for ever. Soon I was screaming openly, and despite my resolve, my hands flew to my beaten rear on the eighth of that set, costing me a further stroke, and again on the next. I took fifteen to complete that dozen. I was crumbling now, and could scarcely manage two strokes in three the next round, shrieking my pain at every stroke, and needing eighteen to reach the end of the dozen.

  By now my buttock was a solid beaten mass, the thick welts merging to form a blue black pad across most of the under curve, from greatest width, right down into the crease below. I pleaded with him to secure me for the next, but he refused.

  “No, Jane,” he replied, “you must be defeated if you are to be saved. Bend again and present your buttocks. Only when your control is gone will I proceed to the next stage. For now you still have too much wil
l remaining.”

  Sobbing and tear stained, my face red, my hair in disorder and my behind in torment, I bent for him once more. Again and again he cut me, the rod slicing excruciatingly into tumefied flesh, where, already, bright droplets showed where the devastation wrought by the rod had caused the skin to give way. I could scarcely manage to hold my position well enough to keep my score advancing, jerking upright with a scream in my throat, my head thrown back, my fingers seeking the burning wounds in my rear, but still he would not grant me the boon of bondage.

  My dozen became two before I had another respite, and still he would not grant my tearful plea for the blessing of restraint. Crying helplessly, I forced myself to go down again, to stretch the stiffening bruises in my haunches, opening up the ground for the rod to fall on. He held me sobbing there for a long moment then struck. I shrieked my way through three atrocious strokes, three whistlers that lifted my whole body with their force, then collapsed on the floor, my legs giving way from weakness, clasping my wounds, and totally defeated.

  Now he accepted my surrender. Grabbing me by the hair, he dragged me to my feet, and threw me over the board again, first raising the boss a notch. He spread my ankles and set them in the slots, shooting the bolts that held them fast. He forced me to bend by a further tug on my hair, tying my wrists down tight to the lower bar. The upper bar closed over my back, canting up my pelvis and causing me to go up on my toes. The air on my vulva informed me how exposed I was behind, how open to his view, how vulnerable to that terrible rod.

  Now everything was out of my hands and will, poor broken thing that it was, and all I could do was lie there as he hewed my buttocks, as a woodcutter fells a tree in the forest.

  Stroke after stroke cut in, each drawing a scream of agony from my defeated throat. He thrashed me on and on, my wounds opening until the blood flowed down my thighs, basting every part from the fatty fullest, down to the crease and beyond, lacing my thighs with finger thick welts, that lamed me for weeks thereafter. Only when my shrieks and screams became so hoarse as to be almost inaudible did he cease.

  I remained conscious throughout, though my world was limited to my own body, and a red mist around it, in which I seemed to float as sheet after sheet of searing pain enveloped me. I was no longer conscious of myself as self, only as thing, a mewling cringing animal, governed by pain. I had passed from wilful woman, to will-less woman, to Mastered woman, and was the better for it.

  I was scarcely conscious of being taken down from the board, nor of the domestics carrying me out to where John waited with the carriage to take me back to the manor-house. Someone forced cordial down my throat, before laying my broken and bleeding body on the cushions of the conveyance, and after that I remember only the painful jolting of the road, and a feeling of being whole again, fit to return to my Master.

  It was evening when our long ride ended at the door of my loved home. I had recovered enough for my mind to clear, but my body still hurt, nor would my limbs function as they ought. John stopped the carriage at the foot of the steps that led to our front entrance, and opened the door for me. He would have helped me out, even carried me to where my Master stood, peering with his poor sightless eyes towards me, at the top of the steps, but I waved him away. This was something I must do myself, cast myself at my Master’s feet, proclaim my repentance and penance and beg his forgiveness for my wicked breach of what a woman owes in submission and deference to her mate.

  I slipped from the carriage, but could not stand. Never mind. I would crawl, it would be more proper so. On my hands and knees, clad only in the corset and stockings I had worn for my flogging, my hair dishevelled, my raised and naked buttocks displaying the appearance of raw meat, I dragged myself up step by step, until I reached my Master’s feet.

  Considerate as ever, he had understood my need and made no move to send me help, but let me abase myself as a true woman will. I covered his boots with my kisses, put my arms around his dear knees, and confessed my sins, declared what penance I had performed, avowed my heartfelt repentance, and my resolve that I should never offend again, and begged his forgiveness, which he readily accorded me. Absolution came in his arms and his bed, which Diana and Mary had tactfully vacated, retiring to their own rooms to leave us together to our reunion and reconciliation.

  Conclusion

  The next day I had my reward so richly that I nearly fainted with happiness. As we lay in the hot rumpled sheets, dampened with the secretions of our love, and further stained with my blood, for the vigour of our passion had opened my wounds afresh, he turned me on my breasts, to trace my wounds and welts, while I told him again, in full detail, what had befallen.

  “These must be where he hurt you most, for they are the ripest welts of all,” he mused, placing a finger on a sore spot. “No, I am mistaken,” he corrected himself, as I winced under his new touch, “this looks even darker.”

  “It is certainly sore,” I conceded, then turned suddenly into his arms, “Looks?” I exclaimed, “what mean you, looks? Can you see the marks?”

  “Yes, they are so large and so pronounced against your white skin, I can make them out, just.”

  “My Master, my darling, my love,” I cried, “your sight is returning! When did you first find it so?”

  “But yesterday. Diana leant over me in play. You know how large and dark her teats are,” indeed I did for we had often sported in bed together at the Moor House, naked, lipping each others nipples into life, pleasuring each other to quivering conclusions, “well, to tease me, she swung her dugs across my face, her teats only inches from my eyes, asking if I could smell their scent. I could, for she was hot from amorous sport, but I could see them as well, could make out a dark circle against the snowy background, and today I can see your poor welts.”

  “Never call them poor, they are the richest thing I own, for they have made me whole again, and dearer still that they are the proof that you are mending, and can once more Master me with your rod of cane, as well as that other rod with which you subdue me.” I bent as I said it, to kiss the monster in question.

  And so it proved. I never had need to take myself to Lowood again, for, by the time my welts and wounds had healed, a process requiring nearly two months, my Master’s sight had improved so much that he trusted himself to take his cane, and my care, in hand again, and I never fell from grace anew without him correcting me immediately and effectively to the satisfaction of us both.

  Some nine months after my return from Lowood, wounded and healed at the same time, I was delivered of our first born son, another Edward. By coincidence, Diana and Mary each presented their husbands with heirs the same month. They visit us frequently, and we are all on the most intimate and affectionate of terms.

  My refuge in reminiscence had taken me through the mid point of my correction, to where I could surrender with honour. I had endured the fifth stroke, and three more besides, with no more than strangled cries, my body writhing as much as the tightness of my bonds would permit. By the ninth I pleaded with him for mercy, futile though I knew it to be, for he would never neglect his duty towards me so far as to deprive me of the full value of my correction. At ten I could no longer hold back those bubbling screams that struggled to escape my clenching throat. My head back, my mouth gaping, I shrieked aloud, letting my pain pour from my lips.

  Two more such shrieks and it was done. He released my wrists but left my ankles tied, my stretched thighs widely parted, and placed a straight-backed chair in front of me, such that I could slump across it in my weakness, the upper edge digging into the soft undersides of my full breasts. I grasped the edges of the seat to support myself, my head hanging down, tears streaking my cheeks and chin. I felt him behind me, then his strong hands grasping my welted buttocks, arousing new fires within them, but other, more passionate sensations as well.

  His unsheathed manhood probed at my pouting vulva from behind, then sank into its streaming warmth filling me completely. With hardy vigour he thrust and thrust again, hi
s hairy belly rasping on my wounds, but now the pain was welcome as I filled with sensation until I nearly swooned, our passion bursting together, his seed spurting against my womb, as it had when our first-born was conceived.

  Happiness flooded through me as I bent there, naked, bound, beaten, but filled by my Master, Mr Rochester, whose loving weight, slumped satiated on my back, I gladly bore.

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