By His Command Page 3

  ‘We were called forward in reverse order of seniority. The scullery maid got it first. In turn, we bent over the big deal table and the housekeeper lifted our skirts and petticoats. The more senior you were, the more strokes you got. The scullery maid got ten, on the seat of her drawers.’

  ‘Drawers were kept up?’

  ‘Oh, yes. The men were there! But if it was a proper punishment, it was given in the housekeeper’s office and the drawers came down then.’

  ‘A private whipping on the bare?’

  ‘Not private, sir. The other maids were called in to watch, for purposes of instruction.’

  ‘Ah, very good. So – where were you in terms of seniority?’

  ‘I was the senior parlourmaid, sir. I came last.’

  ‘And how many strokes did you get?’

  ‘Between twenty and thirty, sir, depending on how much time we had left before getting ready for church.’

  ‘You must have hoped for the ritual to go on longer than the housekeeper intended, every week.’

  ‘I did indeed, sir. She had a very strong arm and she laid a firm stroke. It was no easy thing to sit on those hard church benches and listen to the sermon afterwards.’

  ‘I am sure of that. Well, Walters, you will not find it easy to sit on your hard chair in the kitchen tonight either. Keep that bottom high. How long is it since you were whipped?’

  ‘But a fortnight, sir.’

  ‘Then your skin will be tender and ready for the crop.’

  It was longer than a fortnight in truth. It had been six weeks since my fond farewell spanking in the bedroom of our Riviera villa. ‘Something to remember him by’. It had certainly made the plane journey memorable, shifting constantly in my seat to try and ease my bruised sit-spot.

  ‘May I ask how many strokes you intend to give, sir?’

  ‘You may not.’

  It was a test of my character’s stoicism, I knew, but I always hated it when a whipping was open-ended. I needed to know from the start how to stretch out my endurance, how to school my body to release its endorphins at the right rate.

  There was always my safeword – not that poor old Walters had one of those. I wondered for a moment if such a thing had existed in the sketchily researched Victorian BDSM underworld. Or had it been assumed that women, as property, could be taken beyond their endurance with impunity? It wasn’t a comfortable thought.

  Even less comfortable was the first shocking stroke, making me jolt to the side in an effort to protect my bum from another of the same.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You will not break position, Walters. You will learn. This lesson will not end until you are taking each stroke in silence and without moving.’

  This was something we had worked on over the summer. I had never quite achieved it. I was vocal when it came to pain and that was just the way it was. Sometimes Jasper wanted to hear me yell and sometimes he wanted to test me. Cruel Bastard insisted on the latter technique – typical, I supposed, of a cruel bastard.

  Jasper wasn’t Cruel Bastard, though, and he deliberately lightened his stroke so that the pain was of that manageable kind that soon turns into a glow of pleasure. I gave silent thanks as each fall of the crop stoked the sensual fire on my eagerly proffered bottom.

  ‘Yes, this is good, this is true obedience,’ he said. He had worked out that he could make his stroke harder now without reducing my enjoyment. ‘You are not a sniveller like Larkin before you. She would have been bawling by now. It’s part of the reason I gave her to one of the fellows at my Club. She was far too easy to bring to tears. You will be different.’

  He had covered both cheeks now with scalding welts. The tight cotton chafed my swollen, punished skin. It felt almost too tender to be borne.

  He turned his attention to my upper thighs with strokes that were laconic but cruel. Earlier, they would have made me squeal, but now they made me sigh, very quietly, the tiniest of exhalations, for I did not want to reveal my shameful responses to him. In due course, however, the sighing turned to panting and I knew myself to be well roasted – if not overdone.

  He stopped and laid the crop gently on the curve of my bottom, rubbing at its tight, sore surface.

  ‘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 sav
ed 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.’

  ‘But your body?’

  I wondered what the best answer would be to that. I didn’t know how Jasper’s film was going to develop. Would Walters allow her master to touch her intimately? I decided, in a flash, that Walters was a sensual woman who wished to be bedded, but who did not wish to give anything of herself to any man. She would want Cruel Bastard to think he was forcing her. She would make him think that he was taking something she did not want to give. But he would be quite deceived.

  ‘My body does not belong to me,’ I said. ‘I am in your service.’

  Jasper gave a little gasp, of admiration, I think.

  ‘That is an excellent answer,’ he said, and I think he addressed me rather than Walters. ‘Excellent. Perfect.’ He swallowed.

  The tension in the air was affecting us both. Sweat beaded on my upper lip and I was grateful that Jasper had moved back behind me and was not watching my face.

  I wondered if he had any inkling of my reading of the character, or if he thought I was being sullenly defiant. Either way, the scene would work.

  ‘In that case,’ he said, recovering his tone of authority, which had wavered a little, ‘I will use my property as I see fit. Part your legs, Walters.’

  I spread them and, as he had described in his talk of Larkin, the split cloth revealed my most private parts to him.

  ‘I can see how red you are,’ he said. ‘Although, that much was clear through that thin cotton. But to see it uncovered …’

  His fingertips brushed my skin, settling themselves around my lower lips, which were lightly downed with pubic hair, since I hadn’t been expecting him. It was more Victorian that way anyway.

  ‘This is what your young master got to toy with?’ he said, running one finger up and down each lip in turn.

  My clitoris was straining for his touch, throbbing with need. It had been making its presence insistently felt since about the third stroke of the crop.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You let him put his fingers inside and get them good and wet and sticky, did you?’

  He suited his actions to words, treating my clit to a judicious fingering.

  ‘Many times, sir,’ I whimpered. ‘Many times a day.’

  ‘Did you ever suck his prick?’

  ‘Yes, I did, sir, I did. I drank him down, sir.’

  The rubbing grew firmer and he planted a thumb between my bottom cheeks, the better to hold me in position.

  ‘Even though you knew he cared nothing for you?’

  ‘Even so, sir. If he asked it of me, I did it. I could not refuse.’

  ‘You can’t refuse?’

  I was strung as tight as I could be now, gritting my teeth against the enormity of sensation.

  ‘Whatever you ask … sir … anything … you … want … ohhh.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he whispered, stroking me through it, bending low over me so that his cheek touched mine. ‘She belongs to me.’

  I did, body and soul, but I didn’t want him to know it. I was too mixed up in my own heat and stickiness to disentangle the threads of what happened to me and what happened to Walters. We had, for that moment of undoing, become one.

  Cruel Bastard had left the building, though, because Jasper lifted me gently to my feet and held me close, kissing my hair, caressing my still-hot bottom through the slit in my drawers, making me feel his heartbeat pound against my own.

  ‘It’s so good to be back,’ he said.

  ‘What, back in the Victorian museum?’ I said, with a yawn and a slight giggle.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  I thought I did, and it was a monumental admission. He was glad to be back home, but he wasn’t home – he was with me.

  Did that make me his home?

  Chapter Three

  A few days later, my day off arrived and Jasper took me on a trip to London.

  He had promised me treats and gifts and general spoiling, but I wasn’t sure what he had in mind when we turned into a narrow cobbled street in Spitalfields and he led me up it.

  ‘Are you taking me to the Dennis Severs House?’ I asked, excited at the prospect. I’d visited this museum many times – indeed, it was the inspiration behind our own Victorian house – but another visit was always a prospect to be treasured.

  ‘Not quite,’ he said.

  I looked around me. The shops were all small fashion boutiques. It was Hallowe’en and a few of them had made a concession to the season, with cobwebs and rubber bats in the windows, but most were too cool for that kind of thing.

  Our final destination was a shop that sold vintage clothing and accessories – lovely stuff with swirling 50s petticoats or flapper gowns glimmering with tiny seed pearls.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ I said, fingering a silk kimono-style wrap that came complete with a long, lacquered cigarette-holder, but Jasper whisked me away, tilting his head at the woman behind the counter.

  ‘We’re not here for this. We have an appointment upstairs.’

  ‘Go on up. She’s waiting for you,’ said the woman, whose multi-coloured bob fascinated me so much that Jasper had to drag me to the narrow stairs at the back of the room.

  ‘Who’s waiting for us? What’s happening?’

  ‘I told you I’d get you into a corset,’ said Jasper.

  ‘Oh, my God, really?’

  ‘Yes, really. Don’t you want one? Don’t worry – it won’t be the type to crush your ribs. No whalebone.’

  We had stopped on the top stair. A door stood in front of us, bland and unassuming enough, but somehow it made me shudder as if it were a portal to the underworld.

  Jasper knocked and was bade enter by a low female voice. I imagined the possessor of it in a spangled housecoat and turban, smoking a cigarette and drinking a pink gin.

  In fact she wore a sharp black suit – vintage, from the shop downstairs, I supposed – and her hair was scraped back into a bun. She looked severe, almost mannish, but also magnetically attractive. Behind her was a large bright skylit room, its walls entirely hidden by shelf after shelf and rack after rack of ravishing undergarments.

  ‘Miss Frost,’ said Jasper, and he took her hand and kissed the fingertips, which seemed to be the done thing.

  ‘Mr Jay,’ she said. ‘And your charming companion. Do come in.’

  It was all thrillingly old-school and I was captivated from the start, despite feeling a little intimidated.

  ‘This is Miss Wells,’ Jasper introduced me.

  ‘How do you do, Miss Wells?’

  ‘Very well, thank you,’ I replied, out of my depth, swimming in a sea of luxury ribboned knickers and social anxiety.

  ‘You must take a seat. Can I offer you anything? I have all the teas you can think of, or coffee, or perhaps a glass of something?’

  ‘Actually, I’d love a glass of water,’ I said, while Jasper ordered a strong black coffee.

  Miss Frost disappeared into a back kitchen, giving me an opportunity to gawp at my surroundings.

  The corsets took up an entire wall. Every colour, every pattern, every fabric was represented. Some covered the bust, some didn’t. Some had chains and straps hanging from them, and were made of PVC or leather.

  Oh, God. Was that what Jasper had in mind?

  ‘Which one were you thinking of?’ I whispered. Not sure why I whispered, but it wa
s a bit like being in church for some reason.

  ‘Oh, you won’t get it today,’ he said. ‘This will be bespoke, my love. Made to your … to my, actually … personal specification.’

  I took in a quick breath.

  ‘You’re going to tell her what you want?’

  ‘Yes. And then she’ll make it.’

  ‘And I don’t get a say?’

  He shook his head and patted my hand.

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  As I tried to formulate a reply, Miss Frost interrupted me by returning to the room with a tea tray. Once drinks were dispensed, she came to business.

  ‘When you made the appointment, you mentioned having Miss Wells fitted for a corset,’ she said to Jasper.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, turning to me. ‘Miss Wells is very interested in the Victorians and I thought it might be a nice surprise for her.’

  ‘Ah, the Victorians. Tight lacing. Much tighter than a modern young lady might wish to tolerate.’ She was speaking to me now, and I appreciated her warning.

  ‘Yes, I know they were frowned upon by the medical establishment, even at the time. I’ve no desire for a twelve-inch waist, though. I don’t want an instrument of torture.’

  ‘Very sensible. Some do, of course …’ she said, trailing off and opening a desk drawer. ‘The first thing we must do is obtain measurements. If you wouldn’t mind stepping behind that screen and removing your clothes …’

  ‘Oh, there’s no need for the screen, is there?’ said Jasper.

  Damn him. I knew he would do this. Turn the whole thing into some kind of elaborate humiliation-kink foreplay. But my nipples perked up the minute he spoke and a delicious fizz of erotic anticipation frothed up inside me.

  ‘What does Miss Wells think?’ asked Miss Frost dryly, taking out a tape measure and a notepad and pencil.

  ‘Oh … well … it’s OK, I …’

  But Jasper spoke over me.

  ‘Miss Wells will do as she’s told.’

  He put a hand in the small of my back and shoved me gently, helping me to my feet. I needed the help. My legs had gone quite wrong. The way he had said that … it was shocking and it was exquisite. But what on earth must Miss Frost think of us? My face was so hot it must have matched some of the bright scarlet basques and teddies on their hangers behind me.