By His Command

‘I thought to break you,’ he said. ‘But you are stronger than you look, Walters. I may have to rethink my strategy.’

After a short silence, he said sharply, ‘Well?’

‘Well, sir?’

‘You have not thanked me for correcting you.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Tell me that you deserved it.’

‘I deserved it all, and more, sir.’

‘Eh? “And more”? What’s this?’

He came around in front of me and rubbed the end of the crop along my mouth and over my face.

‘Have I mistaken you? Are you one of those unnatural girls who enjoy this kind of treatment? Eh? Can I give you away as a whore to one of my flagellant friends?’

‘No, sir, no. I thought only to please you.’

‘To please me?’ His smile was a slow one, curving into wickedness. ‘Larkin liked to please me, Walters. Are you another such?’

‘I … do not know Larkin, sir.’

‘No, you do not know her. Do you know what she would allow me to do after a whipping?’

‘No, sir.’

‘She would part her legs still further, so that the split at the crotch revealed what lay within. It was an invitation, Walters. Do you know what she was inviting?’

‘Sir?’

‘Are you an innocent, Walters? I don’t think so.’

‘She invited you to sin with her? Sins of the flesh?’

‘Exactly so. Sins of the flesh. Have you ever done anything like that?’

God, more bloody storytelling practice when all I wanted was for him to put his hand between the layers of cotton and touch me, rub me, fondle me, feel me, make me come, oh, yes …

But I had to get my head together instead and fabricate some scullery fumble or other.

‘I … I’d rather not say, sir.’

‘Oh, you have! Well, you will tell me all about it, Walters, or I shall fetch my cane from the study and then we will see how long your eyes remain dry.’

He laid on a smart stroke of the crop, making me jolt with surprise and suck in a breath.

‘Ow!’

‘I’m waiting.’

‘The master’s eldest son, sir,’ I said.

‘He took your maidenhead?’

‘No, sir, it never went that far.’ I tried to cast my memory back to what I had read of My Secret Life and the stories of liberties taken with maidservants. Jasper had a first edition, but I had not been allowed to touch it. Probably the pages were gummed together with nineteenth-century jizz.

‘How far did it go?’

‘He would try to catch me alone, sir, at all times of the day. He would tell me at first how pretty he thought me and how lucky the men below stairs were to have a chance of courting me. Flattering me, as it were, sir. Buttering me up.’

‘Buttering up a buttered bun,’ said Jasper.

‘Sir!’ I exclaimed, knowing a little too much rude Victorian slang. ‘At first I thought him harmless enough, just a young fellow with an eye for the girls.’

‘How old was he?’

‘He was at that time eighteen years old, sir, and just back from boarding school. I was bent over the grate polishing the coal scuttle in his bedroom, sir, when he came in and put his arms around my waist and began to kiss the back of my neck.’

‘Did you fight him off?’

‘In truth, sir … no, I did not. I liked the lad and I had thought of him a lot since he had started paying these compliments to me.’

‘You allowed him licence with you? How much licence?’

‘I would let him touch my breast, sir. I would let him lift my skirts and touch me there too.’

‘Touch you there? Until you spent?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I whispered.

‘But you saved your maidenhead?’

‘Yes, sir, for after a week of private assignations had passed, he began to court a young lady from a neighbouring town and I was heartbroken.’

‘The assignations ended?’

‘Not quite. I still let him … when he came upon me, alone, sometimes … I could not give him up. But I held out when it came to my virtue.’

Jasper snorted. ‘Virtue. What virtue is there in a thin sliver of flesh? You had given him very much more than you should have done already.’

‘I know, sir. I am ashamed.’

‘Ashamed, are you?’

‘But I have learned my lesson. I shall not give my heart again.’