Rectory of Correction (23 page)

At last the next stroke came, and it was a real scalder. It caught her on the underhang of her bum. A line of Gretchen's flesh suddenly felt on fire. She screeched, unable to stop herself from straightening up, jumping in the air and dancing an agonised little jig whilst grabbing her striped rear.

‘Oh dear,' Jamie said mildly, ‘the Reverend warned me about your poor deportment under correction, girl. It is a good thing he left me these ropes. Don't you agree?'

Blinking away hot tears, Gretchen glanced over towards him. Thick ropes of raw cotton dangled from his hand.

‘Right, get the butter from the pantry,' Jamie said softly, ‘and then stand by that big upright chair.'

 

‘It is a lovely morning, girls,' the Reverend announced as they were finishing their breakfasts. ‘Too fine for skulking in classrooms. What do you say to a nature trail? We can go up to the groves and cut some switches. The birches should be nicely in bud. You may retire to the dormitory before we set out, and remove your drawers.'

It was indeed a fine early April morning. The spring had brought with it the prospect of release. Amelia looked forward to the day with curiously mixed emotions. It was not that she had got used to the Reverend's discipline. It was just that the constant, ever-increasing state of frustrated arousal in which she had spent the last few weeks made it impossible to know what she wanted.

One thing was certain, however, sunny spring day notwithstanding: Amelia did not relish this expedition one little bit. She had visited the birch groves before, and once was quite enough. His announcement provoked an anxious fluttering in her vitals. As she unlaced her drawers, a few minutes later, she sensed she was not the only one. A nature trail could only mean one thing. The Reverend intended to test their botanical knowledge, and that was why he had ordered them to take off their flogging drawers.

‘I remember nettles,
urtica dioica
, but what about butcher's broom?' hissed Charlotte as she pulled her own drawers off.

Amelia looked at her, appalled. The Latin name of the spiny evergreen completely eluded her. Her stomach gave a lurch. The botany lessons the girls had been given previously had entailed a demonstrative element she had no wish to repeat.

‘
Ruscus aculeatus
,' Bella said, in slightly contemptuous tones.

With an effort of will, Amelia averted her eyes from the undressing girls and the glimpses of shapely stockinged leg and bare thigh that were revealed as they removed their flogging drawers. The night had passed fitfully, and she had awoken more than once, moaning with unrequited desire. As she placed her flogging drawers on the chair by her bed she bent and gave herself a quick, surreptitious stroke or two, trusting that the prefects would still be occupied unlacing their own pantaloons.

‘Aaaow... let go!'

Kirsty chuckled as she swung Amelia around by the ear.

‘I told you, not allowed,' Kirsty said. ‘Now touch your toes whilst I give you a couple of reminders.'

Amelia glanced at the cane in her companion's hand.

‘No really, Kirsty, it's not necessary. I'll—'

‘Just tell the Reverend she refused punishment for self-abuse,' Bella suggested.

With a defeated sigh Amelia bent and touched the toes of her patent leather shoes. She swallowed hard as she felt her little skirt flipped off her bottom by the tip of Kirsty's cane.

‘Now that is a nice sight,' Bella said.

‘Yes, pity we have so little leisure to enjoy it!' Kirsty agreed.

There was a whistle and a meaty crack and Amelia's bottom blazed with pain. Somehow she managed to stay bent over.

‘Straighten those legs, Amelia. No clenching now, my dear. I still havenae decided whether to report you.'

The second stroke thwacked across the tops of her thighs. This time Amelia could not stop a groan escaping.

‘All right, get up, we had better get a move on. We wouldnae want to keep the Reverend waiting, now. Would we, girls?'

Despite herself, Amelia had to smile.

If anything, the unassuaged tug of her desire was the worse for the cane strokes, and her bottom throbbed quite horridly beneath the silly little skirtlet. Being punished by Kirsty, a girl scarcely older than herself, was particularly galling. Worst of all, there was the coming trip to the birch groves; not a prospect to gladden the heart of any girl in Amelia's situation. Thus, as she waited for the Reverend with the others on the rectory porch, she did not feel particularly cheerful. However, Gretchen looked so comical that as the Reverend led her around the corner, it was all she could do not to smile.

Gretchen was, as usual these days, dressed in nothing but her little black corset and woollen stockings. Apart, that was, from a gleaming leather harness and bridle which was furnished with gleaming horse brasses and shining buckles.

Amelia had seen girls made to play the part of ponies before, of course, yet there was something quite different about Gretchen's rig. The hefty, straw-stuffed yoke around her shoulders, for instance, and the fact that her bridle included blinkers. Instead of a dainty sulky, she pulled a small but solid flat-topped trailer.

It was Bella who said it. ‘Crikey, I've heard of pony girls but she looks more like a carthorse woman! Giddap there, Gruntie, or should we call you Dobbin?'

An anxious giggle ran around the knot of girls which, for once, the Reverend did not quell with a glare but seemed content to allow. It was not hard to see why, for Gretchen's cheeks had flushed to a bright scarlet.

Big and strong she might have been, but the journey to the groves was almost all uphill, and the cart she hauled was evidently heavy. More than once the Reverend Dawes gave the reins to Bella and ordered the other girls to push the cart from behind to help it up a steeper slope or dislodge the wheels from a rut. It was not a task Amelia relished, for bending as she pushed revealed far too much bare bottom for comfort. As the Reverend always followed behind, cane in hand, on these occasions, this was more than mere concern for her modesty.

However, the bright spring morning seemed to have put the Reverend in a jovial frame of mind, for she reached the groves having received nothing worse than a few blush-inducing observations about the sight she, and her companions, had presented to his gaze.

The birch groves of Hope Hall were just as she remembered them. Long rows of ancient coppiced trees wound their slightly eccentric courses up and down an irregular series of sandy knolls. The Reverend set off to look for botanical samples, leaving the prefects to supervise the work.

‘Longer than that, Linnet, don't you know how to cut a birch rod?'

‘Sorry, Bella, I've never done it before.'

‘Never mind, just touch your toes, quickly now!'

Linnet obeyed reluctantly and the sound of birch twigs hissing against flesh disturbed the clear spring air.

‘Yipes, that really stings!'

‘Not as much as if you had cut it long enough. Bend over again!'

Charlotte got a couple of licks after Linnet, being adjudged to be cutting too slowly. Bella prowled the bushes with a bunch of twigs in her hand, like a young panther prowling lithely through the woods in search of prey. Amelia escaped, however, for grim experience had taught her how to cut a proper birch limb. As Bella made Linnet bend for her twigs a second time, Amelia glanced at Kirsty. To her surprise, the prefect had cut few birch rods, and in fact seemed to be miles away.

‘Kirsty!' Bella said at last. ‘The Reverend will be back soon. What has got into you?'

‘Oh!' Kirsty looked about her, startled. ‘These birks remind me of Glen Sgiursar. We always put up a rare store of rods this time of year. It seems strange not to be part of it. I was just wondering what was happening up there...'

‘Hurry up, you lazy good for nothings. You, girl! You should have cut thrice that by now. What is your name?'

‘Morag MacSlat, minister.' The girl looked at him with wide green eyes. She was a pretty thing, about seventeen, Peebles guessed, and looked shapely underneath her sack-like plaid.

‘Strip to the waist and hold your paps up for me, girl,' he said, unable to keep the quaver from his voice. As the girl stripped to her skirts he saw that she indeed was blessed with a comely form. Though she was a little short, her body was curvaceous and her breasts both firm and full. It would be a pity to mar the perfection of those white bosoms, he sighed. But to permit the sin of sloth through misplaced pity would, he reflected, be but to fall into one of Satan's traps.

The girl lifted her breasts, her pretty face full of anguish. The sight made his manhood swell beneath the cassock, but Dr Peebles was not the man to be deflected from his duty by mere physical discomfort.

Raising the rod he carried, a mere foot or so of thin birch twigs, he lashed her right breast and watched the girl's face contort with pain.

She gasped and gave a little wriggle.

‘Stand still, you wicked little chit!' he spat, and whipped the other breast.

This time the girl howled and clutched herself as she doubled up in pain.

‘Stand straight and take your punishment, unless you want to visit the castle, where I have the means to make a naughty girl stay still.'

The girl regarded him with terror and stood up, trembling violently now, cupping her breasts from below. These both sported a fine tracery of red lines, dotted with thicker crimson spots, for the birch trees were in bud. Dr Peebles smiled at the sight. He raised his hand and brought the birch twigs whistling down again.

 

‘All right, girls.' The Reverend Dawes' hearty tones made Amelia turn. ‘Leave that for now.'

The girls trooped over to Gretchen and her cart, which the Reverend had used as a makeshift table.

‘Still a bit early for nettles,' he gestured at the plants, which were rather stunted, ‘but I expect we can make do.'

Amelia looked at the collection laid out on the cart bed and felt her heart hammering in her breast.

‘Who would like to go first? Kirsty, what about you?' He picked up a sprig of birch.

‘
Betula pendula
,' she said confidently, ‘sir.'

‘Very good. Now, Gretchen cannot really talk with that bit in her mouth, but I think we can assume she would have got that question wrong.'

On hearing her name, Gretchen had turned her head. Amelia saw panic in her blinkered eyes.

‘Well,' the Reverend demanded, walking over to her and waving the birch twigs in the woman's face, ‘would you have known the Latin name? Do not lie to me, girl, simply nod or shake your head.'

Gretchen shook her head reluctantly. The Reverend pursed his lips. ‘Very poor,' he said. ‘Kirsty, take this and give her inner thighs a tickle, whilst I continue with the test.'

Amelia found it very hard to concentrate, distracted as she was by the sounds of birch twigs sizzling into thigh flesh and Gretchen's gasps of pain.

He picked up a slender stick of ruddy hue.

‘Bella, care to have a stab?'

The colour drained from Bella's cheeks. ‘Um... dogwood?' she said, a little hoarsely.

‘No need to look so nervous, girl, dogwood it is. One of the easiest this time of year because the stems are red. Latin name?

Bella looked about her as if she might read the answer in the face of one of the others. ‘
Cornus
...
Cornus
...'

‘Tut, tut, Bella, I expect better from a prefect.
Cornus sanguinea
. Easy, really. Come now, touch your toes.'

Three swift strokes of the dogwood switch laced Bella's bottom in quick succession. She took them well, with no more than a grunt or two of pain.

‘I'm only giving you three as you got half the name,' the Reverend said, bending to examine the welts left by the thin switch.

Bella gave a gasp as he patted her bottom and then pinched a weal between forefinger and thumb.

‘
Sanguinea
!' he said, grinning at the thunderstruck girls. ‘See girls, easy to remember.'

Amelia reflected that it would be hard to forget in future, for in truth the welt was only a little paler than blood red.

‘Charlotte now, another easy one.' He picked up a bunch of glossy holly.

‘Ho-holly, sir,' Charlotte replied.

‘Latin name?'

There was a sudden silence, broken only by the whispering sound of birch twigs cutting through the air and Gretchen's high whinny of pain.

‘I don't know, sir,' Charlotte admitted with a sob.

‘Oh dear.' The Reverend shook his head sadly, arranging the holly bunch on the platform of the cart bed. ‘I tell you what, dear, whilst you try to remember why don't you have a little rest? Come and sit down here.'

 

The day was wearing on. Dr Peebles' vigilance had ensured a good harvest of birch and he regarded the stacks of bundles with some satisfaction. Not a few young women were working naked to the waist now, blushing at the ribald comments of the men. The girls he had been forced to punish were made to work on uncovered, their breasts or their shoulders, if not both, bearing the fading tracery inscribed by the minister's twigs.