Rectory of Correction (4 page)

He bent and grabbed her hair. Charlotte felt her head wrenched back until she was forced to look into his pitiless grey eyes. There was something about his gaze that seemed to paralyse her, as if he could see straight into her soul. She was barely aware of the cold leather of the tawse being tapped gently against her cheek.

‘Now, my dear. The uniform. Perhaps you would care to reconsider taking off your dress?'

 

‘Oh, oh, oh...' Charlotte whimpered as she lowered her evidently tender bottom on to the mean mattress of her bed. ‘I swear that beast has blistered my poor bottom.'

She stuck out her pert chin defiantly, but Amelia noticed she could not quite stop it from trembling. Lady Charlotte was an exquisitely pretty blonde with a trim, but not ungenerous, figure. For all that she had stripped down to her corset and silk drawers, she still looked every inch the spoiled young aristocratic madam, used to getting her own way. Amelia smiled, perhaps recognising something of herself in the girl's demeanour, and wondered how long that hauteur would endure under the tutelage of the Reverend.

‘Ach, that man, he is very strict. I do not know if I can survive many more whippings the like of this,' the big woman, Gretchen, said in an aghast, awe-struck whisper. She was standing by her bed in nothing but her corsets and her stockings, her large bottom facing Amelia as she twisted, trying to examine the purpling welts inscribed by the Reverend's cane.

‘Buck up, girls. After all, it's only six months.' Bella had taken the bed next to Charlotte's. ‘I'm sure we can survive it if we do our best.'

Her hopeful words were not matched by her tone, and Amelia noticed that the leggy girl's eyes never left Gretchen's striped bottom as she spoke.

‘Och, he has barely tickled you, woman.' The new arrival, Kirsty, snorted as she wandered over to Gretchen. She turned and winked at Amelia, then gave Gretchen's buttocks a hearty slap.

‘Ow, that's so sore! Please, don't.' The woman gasped, clutching her cheeks protectively as Kirsty laughed.

Amelia had been first to bed. Now, as she watched her new companions disrobe around her, her fingers began to stroke her inner thighs under the blankets. Almost of their own volition her fingertips made little circling movements, up towards her urgently tingling sex. She turned back to Charlotte, who was still whimpering about the soreness of her bottom. Amelia licked her lips and let her fingers slip between her lubricated nether lips. Her other hand came over and started caressing the skin around her now urgently throbbing clitoris.

To her disappointment, Charlotte did not drop her silken drawers and expose her freshly tawsed rear to Amelia's gaze. Blushing and muttering about privacy, the girl got beneath her sheets before wriggling out of the rest of her underthings. How long would such coyness be countenanced? Amelia wondered, with a thrill of excitement.

‘You don't think... he won't whip me, will he?' The voice was small and tremulous. ‘Not if I'm good. I mean, if I do what I'm told.'

Amelia turned to the speaker. She had almost forgotten about the sixth occupant of the small dormitory. Linnet was such a quiet little thing that it had been easy to overlook her amongst the bustle of the other stripping girls, as she sat on the bed behind Amelia's. Now she looked at her properly, Amelia thought, she really was a pretty piece. Long brown hair framed a pale oval face with light brown, doe-like eyes. The girl wore only her chemise, and was wringing her slender hands nervously. There was something mouth-wateringly vulnerable about her, making Amelia smile for the first time since breakfast.

‘Oh, no,' she said insincerely as Kirsty snorted behind her, ‘I wouldn't worry, sweetheart.'

The limpid eyes turned to her and Amelia felt herself melt in response. The girl blinked at her anxiously, her plump, cherry-red lower lip trembling ever so slightly.

‘If you are very, very good,' Amelia continued, smiling slyly at the girl as she continued to caress herself furtively beneath the sheets, ‘I don't expect our good Reverend will feel the need to thrash you... at least, not more than two or three times daily!'

 

‘Tighter? But, but... oof! How can it possibly
be
any tighter?' Charlotte expostulated between grunts and gasps. Faith looked at her tape measure and shook her head.

‘Sorry, miss,' the maid said, politely but firmly, ‘it's the Reverend's instructions. You are to go down to nineteen inches, Miss Arabella to twenty.' She paused and looked around the dormitory. Gretchen was hauling on Amelia's corset laces whilst Kirsty performed the same office for a red-faced Linnet. ‘The figures are all here.' She waved the sheet of paper and then pinned it to the wall. ‘All of you must lace down to the figures as ordained or, make no mistake, we shall all of us be for it.'

There was a chorus of sighs and half-hearted complaints. Amelia gritted her teeth and gripped the end of her bedstead as big Gretchen hauled away again. Used to formidably tight lacing, as she had been at Hope Hall, this ordeal was perhaps less vexing to her than the others. In any event, her nineteen-inch target was soon achieved and confirmed by Faith's tape.

Gretchen was another proposition. The Reverend had ordained a waist of thirty-one inches for the plump woman, a figure considerably exceeding the natural, uncorseted circumference of any other girl's waist. In Gretchen's case, however, it was a figure that took some prodigiously tight lacing to achieve. Amelia took one of the laces in both hands, Kirsty hauled at the other, and Gretchen grabbed the end of her bedstead with her chubby hands and held on for dear life.

‘Ach, oof! Please, it is too – oh, too tight.'

Faith signalled Amelia and Kirsty to haul harder and stepped forward to whisper into the groaning woman's ear.

‘It has to be done, miss. The Reverend will be furious if we do not get you down. You would not want him to be angry with you, would you?'

Gretchen gave a whimper of fear that turned into a groan as Amelia and Kirsty gave the laces one last heave. Faith told them to pass the free lengths several times around Gretchen's impressively nipped in waist. Then she measured the result.

‘Thirty inches!' she declared. ‘There you are, you see.'

‘Please, if there is a spare inch, for mercy's sake unlace me that little...' Gretchen gasped, breathing in a flurry of little pants.

‘Heavens no,' Faith said, with a hint of a smile. ‘These targets are just the Reverend's starting points. Later he is bound to revise them downwards. You had all better begin getting used to some serious lacing whilst you are here.'

This news caused a chorus of groans and wails around the dormitory. Amelia held her peace, however, admiring her handiwork. Gretchen looked truly astonishing in her ferocious corset, her great breasts, wide hips and big bottom seeming even more impressive now her waist was so pitilessly moulded by the thing. To Amelia's chagrin, she was given little leisure to contemplate the sight.

‘Quickly now, ladies.' Faith clapped her hands. ‘Breakfast is at seven and the Reverend promised to allot a cane stroke for every ten seconds that anyone is late.'

This news brought a renewed sense of urgency to the dormitory. Unused, it seemed, to such tight lacing, Gretchen had to sit on her bed for a moment and recover, leaving Amelia to lace up Kirsty's corsets with only the rather feeble help of little Linnet. This was no easy task. Kirsty had a full figure, with generous breasts and a sweetly jutting young bottom, yet she was possessed of a waist that was already very trim. The problem was the tariff. The Reverend Dawes had put her down for seventeen inches and, trim waist or not, achieving this figure was nigh on impossible. Fortunately, Kirsty endured Amelia's pulling with remarkable stoicism, her only complaint as the laces tightened being the occasional grunt.

By the time it was done Bella and Charlotte had also, somehow, achieved their ordained waists.

‘All right, ladies, here are the drawers the Reverend wishes you to wear.'

Faith picked up a bundle of white cotton garments and began handing each girl a suitably sized pair. Amelia took as deep a breath as her constricting stays would allow and took the drawers from Faith. There was a murmuring of astonishment from the other girls. As soon as she picked up the garment, she felt herself go faint.

Now she understood. The man was an utter fiend! Since she had seen them modelled in Mademoiselle Isobel's Emporium, the Reverend Dawes' patent ‘whipping drawers' had been cunningly and diabolically refined. As before, they were made of two panels of finest white cambric, a front and a back part, with legs that reached halfway down the thigh.

Bella was the first of the trainees to be put into the strange drawers. She was a generously proportioned young woman, with the strong thighs of a girl who had spent many childhood days with powerful hunters gripped between her legs. Amelia found herself staring at Bella's sleekly muscled legs in frank admiration.

The laces linking front and back panels of the drawers had been loosened, so Arabella could step into the things and haul them up. Leather strips with eyelets for the laces reinforced the sides of the fine cambric panels, and these laces were tightened just as the stay laces had been. Arabella stood stoical at first as Faith tugged them taut, tightening one side a little and then the other. As the fine cotton was drawn ever tighter over Arabella's mons, she had begun to blink furiously and emit some startled-sounding squeals.

‘You see how they work; the rest of you had better put your own drawers on now and start lacing them tight,' Faith said. Amelia tugged her own laces taut, feeling the constricting material grip her bottom and thighs, biting her lip as the pressure of the thin cloth against her clitoris turned from pleasant firmness to uncomfortable constriction, by slow, inexorable degrees.

Faith raised her hand. ‘All right, that will do for now.' All six girls stopped tightening their drawers with relief. ‘You are going to have to do this quickly,' she warned, and handed each girl another long narrow lace.

In fact, it proved quite impossible to complete the next task rapidly. The waistbands of the odd drawers had also been reinforced with leather, and provided with a row of metal eyelets. Faith showed the wide-eyed young women how to thread the lace through each eyelet, and then through the corresponding hole at the bottom of their corset. Before she had half completed this fiddly task, and well before she began tightening the lace, Amelia, with a sick certainty, had understood the scheme.

She watched Charlotte, directly in front of her, struggle with her laces. The drawers were cut short, leaving a gap between the corset bottom and the top of the strange pantaloons that was at least two inches wide – at least to begin with. Two inches of pink flesh bulged from the gap between the wickedly tight corset and impossibly constrictive pair of drawers. This ribbon of flesh was soon scored, criss-crossed by the zigzagging line of the lace that hauled the two garments together, with ever more perilous tension as Charlotte tugged at her lace.

‘All right,' Faith said with a concerned expression, ‘is everyone laced up?'

‘I'm no' quite... Ach, this is awful fiddly!' Kirsty complained.

Gretchen was struggling, too, and Amelia had to wait while the maid helped the slowcoaches complete their task. She found herself looking at Charlotte and Bella. Charlotte had an anxious, rather glum expression on her face that contrasted markedly with her hauteur of the night before. One taste of the tawse and she is terrified of the man, thought Amelia, a little contemptuously, wondering how she would have stood up to the rigours of Hope Hall.

Still, she had to admit the young aristocrat looked exceedingly lovely in her little corset and bizarre, side-laced drawers. The corset left the girl's firm young breasts entirely bare, and Amelia felt a sudden urge to take one of Charlotte's pink nipples between her teeth. The desire provoked a maddening tingle in her clitoris, already being tantalised by the pressure of the taut cotton drawers.

Quickly, Amelia turned her attention to Bella. It was an alternative that did not offer much relief. Bella looked equally toothsome in her excruciatingly constrictive undergarments, her long legs and powerful thighs emphasised by the tight grip of the whipping drawers. Linnet looked even lovelier, if that were possible, her chubby little bottom sheathed impossibly tightly by the thin white cambric stuff. Amelia closed her eyes and tried to think of something that would not provoke the tingling. When she did so, however, she found herself imagining the merciless gaze of the Reverend Richard Dawes.

‘Right,' Faith said, when Gretchen and Kirsty's laces had, at last, been attached. ‘Time to tighten up.'

 

‘Arabella, you are thirty seconds late. I shall give you three strokes of the cane after breakfast.' The Reverend Dawes snapped his fob watch shut as the last of his trainees sat down, rather gingerly, at the table. Glancing across at her, Amelia noticed the usually rosy-cheeked Bella had gone a little pale.

A plate of porridge had been placed in front of her by Rose, the Reverend's second maid. Amelia looked at it without relish as Arabella was given her plate.

‘Now, girls, let us say grace together,' the Reverend said as he took a plate of bacon, eggs and mushrooms from the maid.