Reforming Rebecca

by Emily Tilton

  “You will hold this mirror, Miss Adams,” he said, “while I examine you, so that you can observe the things it is important for you to understand about your body.”

  “But…” said Miss Adams very weakly.

  “Miss Adams,” Dr. Brown said, increasing the authority in his tone greatly. “I would rather not have to resort to unpleasant means in order to obtain your compliance in your medical care, but I will if I must. Your father has given me the authority to whip you, if necessary, to persuade you to the necessity of my ministrations.”

  He put the mirror back in his bag and fetched out the short leather strap he used on house calls to ensure young ladies’ obedience. Miss Adams gave another cry, this one louder than the one drawn from her by the first sight of the hand mirror.

  “I would prefer not to have to use this, Miss Adams, but if necessary I can summon a footman to hold you in place while I bare your backside and teach you to mind me. Young ladies generally regret their refusal to do as I say when they have to begin their examinations with a whipped bottom.”

  He had known of course that the mention of the footman would have a strong effect upon Miss Adams, and he had included it in his little discourse particularly in order to see how precisely that effect might show itself. Her startled eyes, her further backward step, and her hands thrust instinctively behind her as if to ward off bare-bottom discipline, all told him just what he needed to know—and also exactly what he had expected to find. The footman Oakes had made punishment by a firm masculine hand, and its erotic consequences, a very fraught matter for Miss Rebecca Adams. No further doubt could exist that she belonged to that broad class of women whom Dr. Brown’s research taught him to see as fit candidates for sexual training and pleasurable use by a natural man.

  “Shall I ring?” he asked more gently. “Or will you do as I have asked, and have your examination?”

  Miss Adams’ brow furrowed deeply, and for a moment she remained irresolute and motionless, her hands behind her still clutching the bottom spanked by James Oakes the previous day and quite probably remembering that unusual punishment of an aristocrat by a servant with great vividness. Then, softly, she said, “I will… I will… lie down.”

  She did not immediately bestir herself to do so, however, and the crease in her brow grew deeper. Dr. Brown knew with fair exactitude what the girl underwent, and how to assist her: he turned to his bag and returned the strap there, then rummaged for the speculum, without yet bringing that article into the light. From the corner of his eye, he saw Miss Adams begin to climb onto the bed, her modesty having ebbed a little, the doctor knew, when she saw his attention diverted from her nearly naked form. Even in that ebbing, of course, Miss Rebecca Adams would learn a good deal more about the inescapability of shame’s power over her—above all because when Dr. Brown turned back to her, holding the speculum and ready to lift her chemise’s hem above her waist, she would experience a very great deal of that power all in a rush.

  He waited until she had laid herself on her back, his hands still inside the bag. Then he said, looking at her posture with a critical eye, “Move yourself a little further down, if you please, Miss Adams. Then, as I said, raise your knees and spread them as wide as you can, so that I may easily access your vagina and anus.”

  Miss Adams’ lips drew into a tight line, and her brow continued to show the distress occasioned by the emotions the doctor knew so well how to raise in a young woman’s breast. She obeyed, though, so that her chemise hung like a scarcely adequate veil, barely covering her spread knees.

  Now Dr. Brown removed the speculum, and held it in his right hand, with the hand mirror in his left. He extended the mirror toward Miss Adams, who regarded it rather as one might a poisonous adder. The lovely girl’s eyes darted from the silvered mirror to the metal speculum, apprehension growing there with each passing second.

  “Take the mirror, if you please, Miss Adams,” he said.

  “Wh-what is that, Doctor?” she asked imploringly, her eyes fixed on the article in his right hand, rather than the mirror in his left.

  “That is my speculum, Miss Adams. I will use it to examine the inside of your vagina and anus.”

  “But…”

  “I am sure you have never been examined this way before, Miss Adams, but my methods are up to date, and necessary for your well-being. Take the mirror, now, or I shall have to fetch my strap after all.”

  Chapter Nine

  Rebecca simply did not understand. How could he use the metal thing in his right hand to… to examine inside those places? She still could not reconcile herself to any notion of how the coquette should behave when confronted by such frankness from a physician sent by her father. Should the brazen hussy Rebecca pretended to be simply show her most private charms, without shame? Could even the most resolute flirt bear to hold a mirror not up to her pretty face but down… down there?

  Yes, she had blushed when James had demanded that she submit to his discipline for what she had done with William, but she had decided that James must be a very special, unusual sort of person. She supposed she had blushed, too, when William showed her his prick, and when he had uncovered her pantalets so that he could look at her, at what lay exposed in the split between their legs, and touch her there so saucily before he got between her knees and entered her for the first time.

  But she had got over her shame with William, had she not? And she had written that note, intending to put modesty even further behind her. If first James and then Mrs. Rand had not interrupted, she would surely have received a second fucking from William, and her blushes would have been fewer on that occasion, she felt sure.

  Nor did she feel much embarrassment before Mrs. Rand, who—though Rebecca felt very grateful to the older woman—wished only to keep such matters hid, no matter what the cost to the freedom of a girl like Rebecca. Moreover, Mrs. Rand herself had told Rebecca she might flirt a little, and now, it seemed, the hypocrisy of that sentiment stood revealed—even without the matron knowing what had happened in the little woods, but rather only having seen its strange sequel in her chamber.

  But James… and, now, Dr. Brown… They seemed very different from William and even from Mr. Rand. They seemed to understand something about Rebecca’s intentions, and even about her most secret desires, that gave them a sort of power over her. James’ big hand, coming down upon her bottom. Dr. Brown’s strap, ready to chastise disobedience. It seemed monstrous to her, but somehow the idea that a man such as they might teach her a lesson, so as to cure her of her brazen ways and restore her modesty and love of virtue, had forced her to contemplate the path of the coquette and its pretty flowers in a new light.

  And the doctor worked this change not by telling her to feel ashamed of her private parts but by speaking with perfect frankness about them: by saying that they must discuss her vagina, as if one could simply utter a word like that in a normal voice. When James had told her to call it that, the place William had called her cunt, the place where she had received the hardness of the footman’s prick, he had spoken lowly, if also with what had seemed to Rebecca a manly frankness miles away from William’s naughty randiness.

  When Dr. Brown spoke it out, though, announcing that it would constitute their first topic of conversation, it had made Rebecca feel that not just the physician, but the whole social order that he seemed to her to represent, would now discuss the desperate need of Miss Rebecca Adams to have a prick inside her. She felt she could withstand any mortification Mrs. Rand might seek to bring upon her. Dr. Brown’s clinical manner, though, and his mirror, and the metal thing it seemed he meant to put inside her where the prick had gone, paradoxically raised in sharp relief the shameful idea of why it was that Miss Rebecca Adams must undergo this humiliating examination.

  Miss Rebecca Adams should be a well-behaved young lady, but she must now have her vagina inspected. She must have a discussion about that place that even a coquette knew not to be the subject of polite conversation. She must hold a hand mi
rror and look at the tender furrow that William’s eyes had feasted upon so greedily, the place she herself touched at night, under her night rail.

  Thus, she blushed, though it made her furious with herself, and that seemed only to make the blush deeper. But she could not bear, she thought, even to see that terrible black strap again, let alone to feel it across her backside. She took the mirror in trembling fingers, still looking at the other thing… the speculum, had the doctor called it?

  “Alright, then,” said Dr. Brown, now again genial, “let’s have a look at you.” Rebecca felt the crease in her forehead deepen, and she bit her lip as the doctor reached down with his left hand and drew up the chemise, tugging the hem all the way to her navel, so that the fabric gathered above Rebecca’s hips. She knew she wouldn’t see much from her position, even with her knees up, for she had tried, once, when completely alone in her bedroom, to get a glimpse of what the ploughboy would see if he turned up her skirts to do what the husband had done to his wife. Still, though on that occasion she had craned her neck desperately, now she found she must close her eyes so as not to see Dr. Brown examining her from his much more favorable angle.

  “Lovely, Miss Adams,” he said. “Open your eyes, if you please, and hold the mirror above your belly, so that you can get a good look at yourself and at what I am going to do.”

  “Please, Dr. Brown,” she said, her eyes still closed. “I would much rather not see that. It is alright.” Thoughts and feelings warred ceaselessly in her mind. It seemed a betrayal of her flirtatious character and her idea that she must be the shameless natural daughter of the Duke of Panton, but the physician’s didactic tone seemed to restore to her the modesty of which she felt so desperate to rid herself.

  “I am afraid I must insist, Miss Adams,” said Dr. Brown. “It is entirely necessary that you understand what I am going to tell you. I am a little surprised to find you so foolish, but thankfully I have the remedy.”

  Rebecca heard what must be the speculum being set down on the nightstand. Her eyes flew open.

  “No—please, Doctor,” she cried when she saw that he had indeed again removed the short strap of black leather from his bag. “I will… I will…”

  But she did not mean it, did she, this promise of compliance? She understood suddenly that her character had to it an aspect at which she had never guessed, perhaps because at school the threat of the birch had never manifested itself with the slightest degree of reality. Her face burned as she realized it, but Dr. Brown and James between them had indeed taught her a lesson, though she wondered greatly whether either of them would be pleased to hear it, since it seemed to work so thoroughly in opposition to their professed aims: Miss Rebecca Adams would defy the world—indeed, she needed to defy the world.

  Miss Rebecca Adams would require discipline, if a footman or a physician felt it necessary to secure her compliance in something the world would think shameful, not because she did not want to do that thing, but because she did not want to be known to want it. From that elemental source came this modesty, this shame: from that spring welled up the burning of her pantalets. She did not mind in the slightest that she had enjoyed being fucked by a footman, after the first pain of it had passed, and she did not mind that a part of her wanted to hold the mirror as Dr. Brown had instructed her to do, and look upon her vagina. She minded only being adjudged weak, and she would not shirk from a test of her strength.

  So, as Dr. Brown said, now, “Yes, Miss Adams, you will hold the mirror as I have requested, but first you shall be punished, so that I may make clear to you the importance of your compliance.”

  Then, to her shock, he swept her knees off the bed with his left arm, and pressed them firmly to her breast.

  “Young ladies generally find this position the most embarrassing for a whipping,” the doctor said matter-of-factly, “and I hope you will learn from that embarrassment as well as from the discomfort occasioned by my strap.”

  A good deal of the defiance Rebecca had felt only a moment before vanished as she understood what he meant. He intended to whip her this way, with her private parts exposed so very fully that her resolution of shamelessness again received a severe check. Much as she wished to pretend that as a brazen hussy she would have no reservation about riding naked through the town like Lady Godiva, she met modesty anew, in the posture Dr. Brown enforced, his arm now rising high, the wicked strap ready to strike.

  “Oh, please,” she cried, but the strap flashed down across her bottom, and the cry for mercy became a yelp of pain. He whipped her once, twice, three times, so sternly that Rebecca knew the welts would stand out clearly, and be terribly visible in the mirror she must now hold. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she whimpered like a punished puppy.

  “There,” Dr. Brown said with a satisfied air. “Are you ready to proceed, Miss Adams?”

  “Yes,” Rebecca said meekly, knowing that her face wore a little girl’s pout, mouth turned down and nose wrinkled.

  “Are you sorry you defied me?”

  “Yes,” she said automatically.

  Was she, though? Rebecca certainly didn’t want any more cuts of the terrible strap; her backside hurt awfully. But she also felt… Well, she felt proud. He had had to whip her, before she would do the thing any girl would call shameful. She didn’t know whether she really found it shameful, any more than she knew, really, whether what she did with her fingers in her bed at night was truly immodest.

  Then, too, she felt an emotion that seemed even stranger under the circumstances: gratitude. She knew that whipped young women were often required to thank the authority who had delivered their discipline, but she did not think that her gratitude was of the hypocritical variety they were meant to feel. No, Rebecca felt grateful to Dr. Brown—and to James—for teaching her not so much as to follow their orders as to express her will in her provocation of their stern reprisals.

  The doctor let her legs descend, and she spread her knees and kept them raised.

  “Hold the mirror as I told you now,” he said. “You’ll see, among other things, three pretty red stripes that weren’t there before.”

  He delivered these words in a jovial tone that Rebecca thought she could discern he meant in a kindly way. She felt her brow crease again as she complied, and she could not suppress a little whimper to see her prediction and his description proven entirely accurate: three red welts displayed that Miss Rebecca Adams was a naughty girl who needed a lesson from a firm hand before she would do as her physician bid her.

  She also saw, and it did make her blush, she knew not why, the place where William’s prick had thrust, covered in the loose fair curls in which she loved, under her night clothes, to twine her fingers before she moved them further on, for the more purposeful caresses that would bring relief of the warm ache they also stirred. She saw the complicated coral folds just peeping out from inside the simpler, paler lips that she liked to stroke, too, though they held so much less feeling than the inner ones did. Nor did those pink, wrinkly inner ones have anywhere near the feeling of the greater complications above, where Rebecca now felt some little surprise to see that the folds of flesh that felt so prominent when she caressed them seemed much more reticent in the mirror—and greater surprise still at the impossibility of discerning where the sensate center of it all, the little bud, might lie hidden from her view.

  “There you see it now, Miss Adams,” Dr. Brown said. “Not only your vagina, which is properly the sheath itself where the footman’s penis ruptured your hymeneal membrane, but also your labia, both minora and majora, and the hood of tissue that hides your clitoris, which I imagine you enjoy touching when you are alone.”

  Rebecca’s mouth had fallen open, and her eyes had gone from the mirror to Dr. Brown’s face, as soon as he mentioned William’s fucking her. For a moment she fought with the wave of shame that engulfed her, so that she felt her whole body had caught fire with it, but who can fight against the waves of the sea, or the waves of emotion?

  Chap
ter Ten

  Dr. Brown had to admit to some surprise that it had proven necessary to whip Miss Adams. His initial evaluation of her character had suggested that she had a naturally lubricious element in her composition, but he had not expected that lascivious streak to be accompanied by the oppositional one he now observed.

  As he watched her react to the news that he had learned of her defloration in the woods, Dr. Brown cast his mind back to the inquiries about her school he had made of the duke. Miss Adams’ conduct, it seemed, had not posed a disciplinary problem, but her headmistress was known to be a lenient woman. The rebellion the footman Oakes seemed to have discovered in her, which Dr. Brown himself had now awoken further, had perhaps not had an opportunity to develop previously.

  Natural men such as those to whom the society consigned the girls whose happiness they undertook to secure generally enjoyed training a girl with such a defiant side to their behavior. Miss Adams’ need to have her resistance overcome, together with her apparent decision that she would fight down in her heart the modesty demanded by the censorious world and play the coquette and the flirt whatever the cost, made indeed for a very intriguing challenge—one that Dr. Brown knew from long experience a great many natural men would enjoy accepting. Frequent bare-bottom trips over her master’s knee, or perhaps midnight journeys to his room of punishments for sound whippings as Miss Adams rode naked upon a discipline horse’s monstrous phallus, would manage the girl’s defiance, if not cure her of it.

  But the oppositional aspect of the girl’s personality also posed a special difficulty for Dr. Brown, who must do his best both to determine what sort of situation, and what sort of master, would best suit her and to ensure that her character not be ruined in the eyes of society as he managed Miss Adams’ placement with the man who would train and use her. The latter task now seemed even more difficult than the former, for unless he could persuade her to adopt his ideas concerning the importance of a sort of modesty of which the doctor felt certain the girl had no notion, she could quite easily expose herself to the world’s opprobrium and ruin the expectations that the Society for the Correction of Natural Daughters intended her to fulfill as the wife of the man they chose.