Blushing at Both Ends (17 page)

Emma recollected, blushed and was sorry, but tried to laugh it off. ‘Nay, how could I help saying what I did? Nobody could have helped it. It was not so very bad. I dare say she did not understand me.'

‘I assure you she did. She felt your full meaning. She has talked of it since. I wish you could have heard how she talked of it – with what candour and generosity.'

‘Oh!' cried Emma, still trying to treat the matter lightly. ‘I know there is not a better creature in the world. But you must allow that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her.'

Mr Knightley's eyes flashed with anger, but he yet spoke quietly. ‘They are blended, that I acknowledge. And, were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance. But, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and if
she
live to old age must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. No, Emma, it was badly done, indeed! Nor can I forbear to add that your efforts to pass it off, in this frivolous fashion, as mere matter for amusement sorely compound your offence.'

While talking, they had walked on further, round the slope of the hill, and now found themselves in a secluded dell where the woodsmen had been felling trees. The trunk of one of these, a venerable oak, lay horizontally near by. To Emma's surprise, Mr Knightley took her by the hand and led her towards the fallen tree. Not since she quit childhood had he permitted himself so intimate a gesture with her, and her heart beat faster while she wondered what he could intend.

When they reached the tree he turned to face her, still holding her by the hand. ‘Emma,' said he gravely, ‘do you recall what I told you some weeks past, when you were instrumental in bringing Harriet Smith to break off with Robert Martin?'

As his meaning sank in upon her, Emma felt herself gripped by a thrill of apprehension. She could only gaze at him, unable to utter a word, as he continued.

‘I said then that, should your conduct not improve, I must feel constrained to chastise you in the manner best fitted to the correction of spoilt young women. Your inexcusable behaviour towards Miss Bates convinces me that the time for such treatment is long overdue. Emma, you may never find it in yourself to forgive me for what I am about to do – but I know that, should I fail to do it, I could never forgive myself.'

Before Emma could utter more than an incoherent sound of protest, Mr Knightley sat down on the log, drawing her down until, much to her astonishment, she found herself lying face-downwards across his lap. ‘Oh!' she exclaimed. ‘Mr Knightley! This is shameful conduct, sir! How dare you subject me to such indignity? Release me at once, I insist!'

But Mr Knightley seemed in no way inclined to release her from her ignominious posture. Rather the contrary, indeed; his left arm, laid firmly along her waist, left her quite unable to escape, and Emma's struggles, though spirited, availed her little.

‘This will not be pleasant to you, Emma,' said he, ‘though it would be hypocritical were I to claim that it will be wholly unpleasant to me. But, pleasant or no, it is a task long overdue – and, since it has fallen to me to perform it, I mean to do so with all due thoroughness.'

Indeed, the prospect which now met his eyes was one which few gentlemen would have found unpleasing. At 21, Emma was at the peak of her youthful ripeness, and her figure wanted for nothing of girlish charms. The weather being seasonably warm, she wore only a light muslin dress, and in her prone position the fine material moulded itself closely around her curves of her lower torso, revealing them to be well defined and appealingly rounded. Not only, Mr Knightley reflected, was Emma Woodhouse eminently deserving of the chastisement he was about to inflict upon her; she was also ideally shaped by nature to receive it.

Emma, for her part, was now in no doubt that Mr Knightley was resolved to execute his threat. She knew him to be both vigorous and resolute, and was uneasily aware that the thin muslin, her sole covering, would afford scant protection to her tender flesh. She retained but faint recollection of her childhood punishments, and these had in any case been rare and lenient; whereas the spanking that Mr Knightley proposed to administer would, she felt sure, be both prolonged and painful.

Surely, she thought desperately, he might even yet be deflected from his purpose? But he was impervious to her protests; let her try what penitence might do.

‘Oh! Please, dear Mr Knightley,' she cried, ‘forgive me, I beseech you! I acknowledge my misdeed, and am
truly
sorry for it; pray spare me this once, and I promise faithfully to amend my ways and not offend you again!'

‘I have no doubt that you are sorry, Emma. But, were I now to let you off your punishment, how long would your repentance, or your resolution to reform, be likely to last? No, I fear that steps must be taken to impress this reprimand distinctly upon your memory, and I can assure you that the treatment you are about to receive will leave a most lasting impression – both on your mind and on your person.'

With these words he took a firmer grip on Emma's waist, while lifting his right hand high in the air. At the sight of his upraised arm Emma, peering fearfully over her shoulder, could not suppress a tremor of alarm.

The next moment she gasped in surprise. Mr Knightley's palm, descending with the full force of his arm, smote sharply upon her upturned posterior with a ringing slap. The smart it inflicted was acute; to Emma, wholly unused to such treatment, it was as though a hot iron had seared her flesh. This stroke had fallen upon the rightward of her tender mounds; an instant later a second stroke made itself felt, with equally vivid effect, upon its twin.

Poor Emma! Almost before she had time to cry out in protest against such cruel treatment, this opening salvo was succeeded by a whole volley of smacks, landing with fearsome frequency now right, now left, upon her near-unprotected nether cheeks. Never could she have believed that a mere spanking, administered by no instrument more severe than an open hand, could sting her tender flesh so flagrantly. Already, after barely half a minute, a burning sensation suffused all her rearward parts, and Mr Knightley seemed set on prolonging her correction for many minutes yet.

‘Oh, sir,' she cried piteously, ‘pray have mercy! Oh, how you pain me! It stings – it burns! Oh! Ah! Spank me no more, dear Mr Knightley, I beseech you! I have
been
punished in full measure, and shall truly reform, I promise you! Ah! Alas, I can bear no more! Help! Oh help! Will no one come to my aid?'

But no help came. Whether the remainder of their party were now out of earshot, or whether, hearing the distant sounds of Emma's punishment, they deduced what was happening and felt that it was no more than she richly deserved, can only be surmised. At all events, no other came to intervene, and the unfortunate Emma had to rely on Mr Knightley's forbearance to bring her ordeal to an end.

Alas for her, he felt in no hurry to do so. On many occasions the warm affection he bore towards Emma had been tempered by a no less warm sense of exasperation, and more than once it had crossed his mind that physical chastisement of the most traditional kind might provide suitable outlet for both emotions at once. And so it proved. Never had he felt more beguiled by Emma's charms, never had he felt more infuriated by her conceit and thoughtlessness, than now when he held her lovely person prone and wriggling across his lap, roundly smacking her shapely bottom with all the force at his command.

But gradually, as his initial anger abated, his satisfaction grew. From the moment when he had first resolved upon this course of action, Mr Knightley had foreseen that to spank Emma Woodhouse would afford great relief to his feelings; what he had not realised was that it would prove such a deep and intense pleasure. Her frantic squirmings; her gasps and increasingly tearful pleas; above all, the delectable sensation of her soft plump flesh-cushions trembling as he smacked them; all this contributed to a voluptuous delight such as he had rarely before experienced. Nor, somewhat to his surprise, was there the least sense of impropriety. Quite the reverse; to hold Emma thus pinioned across his lap, and to spank her long and hard, felt wholly and undeniably
fitting
. It was as though this transaction between them were pre-ordained, a natural and salutary stage in their intercourse.

Disinclined to curtail so pleasing and salutary an occupation, he continued to spank her with unabated zest. For five minutes or more his palm rose and fell, and the sound of the smacks inflicted upon Emma's anguished posteriors echoed round the little dell. Well before her ordeal was over, she was reduced to small inarticulate cries of distress; and when at last he desisted from punishing her, and raised her gently from off his knee, she could only cling whimpering to him, her hands clasped to the blazing conflagration he had ignited in her ill-used nether quarters.

‘Dear Emma,' he murmured as she sobbed in his arms, her tears dampening the shoulder of his coat, ‘I blame myself. Not indeed for having spanked you, for that you richly deserved; but for having delayed so long before doing so. Had you an elder brother, a male cousin, or indeed a father of a more determined cast of mind, no doubt my intervention would not have been required. But since I have always stood to you as both friend and in some degree
in loco parentis
, I ought to have seen my duty sooner. Emma, I should have taken you across my knee and spanked you long since. But, now that I have at last made belated amends, I hope you will profit by your ordeal, and see it as having been truly intended for your improvement.'

She could make no answer. But the glance she cast upon him from beneath her tear-fringed lashes conveyed no anger or resentment, rather a sincere contrition. As he guided her gently out of the dell in the direction of her carriage, she found herself seized by a strange confusion of emotions, and could not trust herself to speak.

As they approached the point at which they might once more be overlooked by any of the party yet
remaining
, Mr Knightley tactfully withdrew his arm from Emma's shoulder, and side by side they walked in silence to her carriage. With his habitual grave courtesy, as if nothing untoward had passed between them, he handed her in, and before she could speak the horses were in motion.

The journey home was a torment to her. Never had she felt so agitated, mortified, grieved at any occasion in her life. The circumstances of her chastisement, in all its shame, were vividly before her eyes. Even had the incident not been so fresh in her memory, each jolt of the carriage served to remind her, in the most tangible form, of the assault that had so recently been inflicted upon her tender posteriors.

Yet still more shameful than the treatment she had endured was the awareness, not to be gainsaid, that she had not found it altogether distasteful. It had hurt a great deal; it had been utterly humiliating; yet Emma could not conceal from herself that, in the innermost part of her being, she had derived excitement – pleasure, even – from such masterful behaviour on the part of a man she respected and admired. What he had done was beyond all question inexcusable; nonetheless Emma found herself wondering whether, given sufficient provocation, he might not feel called upon to do it again?

Gripped by these strange and contradictory sensations, she could not prevent herself from weeping. Happily, Harriet, her only companion in the carriage, seemed out of spirits herself and very willing to be silent; and Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way home.

But all ends happily.

Barely a month after the marriage of Harriet Smith to Robert Martin, the services of the Rev Mr Elton were
once
more called upon, this time to join the hands of Mr George Knightley and Miss Emma Woodhouse. The wedding was very much like other weddings; but the wedding night was, at any rate in its preliminaries, a little out of the ordinary.

Once all the guests were gone, Emma Knightley – as we must now call her – awaited her newly wedded husband in the quiet of the bridal chamber, a warm dark place lit only by a pair of candles and the flickering of a well-banked fire. There where she stood, a picture of bridal loveliness clad in a fine linen nightgown trimmed with pale-blue ribbons, he came to her, took her in his arms and kissed her.

‘Dear Emma,' he murmured in her ear, ‘do you remember that day of the picnic on Box Hill, when for your impertinence to poor Miss Bates I turned you across my knee and spanked you soundly?'

‘Cruel! How could I forget it? My poor bottom was stinging hot for the rest of the day!'

‘Even as you deserved, my love. But let me confess a secret – it was then that I resolved to make you my wife.'

‘What! For my impertinence?'

‘No – for the great pleasure I derived from spanking you. Though perhaps for your impertinence too. For I knew well, my sweet Emma, that you were incorrigible, and therefore as my wife would give me frequent cause to smack your sweet bottom – a duty which, I must confess, I should find it small hardship to discharge.'

Half-laughing, half-outraged, Emma began to protest in lively fashion.

But he stifled her outburst with a kiss, and proceeded: ‘In earnest of this, I made a vow: that my first act on our wedding night, once we found ourselves alone together, would be to put you once more over my knee and administer a loving husbandly chastisement. And this, my sweet girl, I now propose to do.'

‘But that is most unjust,' cried Emma, ‘for I have done nothing to deserve it! My behaviour today has been beyond reproach!'

‘True, so it has. But think of it as a token punishment for all those many past occasions when you so richly deserved to be spanked – and were not. A heavy debt, my Emma! Indeed, were I to spank you every day for a year, I think you would scarce receive your just deserts. So reckon yourself fortunate, my love, that you may discharge so great an account in a single payment.'