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Lucy continued to struggle and kick out until Edward said, “Settle yourself, Lucille. You have earned a good birching, and shall receive your due. Get back into position or those strokes won’t count and will be given again.”
Lucy heard him, but couldn’t wrap her mind around the threat. Her bottom burned, and the backs of her thighs felt as if she had sat on hundreds of nettles. “Nooo, please… no more, Edward. I-I can’t!” Edward heaved a loud sigh and took Lucy’s arm and helped her to stand as Mrs. Bremmer moved away. His ward was sobbing, her face streaked with tears.
She looked up to see him staring at her and she sobbed harder. “Please, Edward. Please. I’m so sorry and I’ll never disobey you again. Please, please don’t spank me anymore.”
Edward kept his voice firm as he responded, “I appreciate that you’re sorry for your actions, Lucille, but I am not anywhere near done with your discipline. I am not spanking you, you are being birched. You will not die from your birching but since firm discipline seems to be something that was sadly lacking in your childhood, I will give you a choice.”
For the first time since she’d walked into the headmaster’s office and seen him standing there, she felt the first flicker of hope. Sniffing loudly, she swiped the tears from her face and nodded for him to continue.
He gentled his voice, saying, “You have only received three strokes. You have two more to go in this first set. The choice is this. You will either accept the consequences of your choices and the need for this lesson by placing yourself back into position and take the remainder of your birching without breaking position, or ask that I apply your intended strokes to your sister’s bottom after she has taken the remainder of her own count.”
Lucy heard her sister gasp though she didn’t speak. Lucy looked over at the prostrate girl and saw the marks from the birch, vivid across her bottom. She also saw that her sister remained in position as if simply waiting for her turn. Lucy looked down to see Louisa’s eyes tightly shut but saw a small tear leak from beneath the dewy eyelashes. Finally truly accepting full responsibility for all that had transpired this horrid day, it broke her heart knowing that Louisa was in this position only due to Lucy’s forceful nature. She’d rather die than extend any punishment to her beloved twin. Sobbing but determined, Lucy laid herself across the desk, took hold of the edge and once again spread herself open and lifted up onto her toes.
Even as Edward stepped back, she stated more clearly than before, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sorry I was naughty and that I have delayed my punishment. Please continue m… my birching.”
Her determination to prove her courage was immediately tested as Edward did just that. After two hard strokes had been given, Lucy felt the birch rod being placed across the small of her back.
“I’m very proud of you, little one. You may lower yourself until your feet are flat on the floor, Lucille, but keep your hands on the edge of the desk and be prepared to lift that naughty bottom again.”
Lucy sobbed at the fire on her bottom, but gratefully lowered her feet to the floor, allowing her legs to close in an effort to regain even a modicum of dignity. Her eyes followed Edward as he walked back around the desk and picked up the birch lying upon his wife’s back. She was soon in the proper position and accepting her next set. Lucy sobbed with every stroke of the birch as it fell across her sister’s bottom five times and then was shamelessly begging for mercy as she was given her second set.
Edward allowed the twins a few moments before picking the birch rod up off Louisa’s back for her third count of five. Lifting her bottom high when instructed, and forcing her legs open for the third time, Lucy felt as if Mrs. Bremmer had been wrong. Surely it was possible for someone to die from such a horrific thrashing. Lucy was sure there was not an inch of skin left intact on her bottom, every bit of her bottom felt as if she were sitting in a roaring fire and yet, when Edward quietly told her to present herself, she had done so and had indeed lived through not only her third but fourth set as well.
After each girl had been given twenty strokes, the desk’s surface was slick with their combined tears. When Edward stepped behind his wife once more, Louisa finally joined in her sister’s pleas for mercy when he once again took the birch that was beginning to loosen from its bindings from her back.
“How many extra strokes did you receive from the cane, Louisa?” he asked, ignoring her pleas as easily as he’d ignored each one of his ward’s.
“One, sir.”
Edward nodded and lightly drew the rod down across her welted bottom. Lucy saw her sister shudder, both women knowing what was coming and fearing the pain.
“Extra strokes mean you haven’t submitted yourself properly, by admitting your need for chastisement, my love. I will double your extras so that you might learn a proper lesson. Rise up and present yourself for your extras, Louisa.”
How she obeyed, Lucy truly didn’t know, but she watched as Louisa forced herself up onto her toes, though she was clearly exhausted. Lucy watched the tips of the branches that made up the rod trail slowly down Louisa’s back before it disappeared from her sight. But when her sister gasped, her body jerking, her face flaming as she turned her eyes away from her twin’s for the first time, Lucy felt her body flush as well. Her innocence not so complete as to render her ignorant of where exactly he was applying the awful implement on his wife’s open body. She might be in the same room as her twin, might be just inches from her, their breaths mingling and their cries joining to fill the air, but Lucy did the only thing she could think of to provide her twin with the privacy they’d been denied. She too turned her face away and closed her eyes, not opening them even though it was several moments before the pair of slaps was given with the mangled rod. Lucy didn’t have to see it to understand where those last two strokes had landed. Not once in the previous count of twenty had her twin’s cry been so piercing. But all Lucy could do was grip the desk harder and remain still as she felt the air stir when her guardian moved once again to stand at her side.
“Position yourself, Lucille. I promised that extra strokes earned double the count. How many extra were applied to your bottom in your headmaster’s office?”
“Two, sir,” Lucy managed, easily doing the math and knowing that her answer assured she had yet another four strokes to go before she’d be done. She was terrified, wondering how she could survive the humiliation of knowing he was placing the extras in a place meant only for the man she wed to see… to touch.
“For your first birching, you’ve done very well, Lucille. Don’t fail now. Relax your buttocks and push them out.”
It took every ounce of her courage to do so and though her cries bounced off the walls with every fall of the rod, she felt nothing but thankful because each awful stroke landed across the surface of her bottom. Despite her fears, her guardian had not broken any moral law by touching her intimately. Still gratitude did not keep her from squirming on top of the desk, willing to sell her very soul for the simple granting of permission to rub frantically at her ravaged backside. She heard the clatter of sticks hitting the surface of the desk near her face as Edward placed her rod next to her sister’s. It took her a moment to realize the silence was to be broken by her.
“Than-thank… you, sir.” Lucille had just received the most intense punishment of her life and she’d not only lived through it, she’d thanked the man who had delivered every cutting stroke.
“You did well, little one.”
And with his words, some place deep inside her, a place she’d never been aware existed before, bloomed in realization that not only did she finally feel she’d atoned for her choices, she’d made him proud.
“You may stand and go to your corners.”
The girls stood, and though their legs were unsteady, the gait slow, they obediently shuffled to their corners. Lucy pressed her nose against the wall, lifting hands that craved a different place to soothe above her head, linking her fingers together, the wafting of air across her heated buttocks reminding her of her exposure as tears continued to course down her face.
Chapter 14
Mrs. Bremmer removed the birch rods from the desktop and returned them to the cabinet. Shutting the doors, she sat down on the sofa to wait until the naughty girls’ corner time was spent. He had no doubt she’d agree that it would be quite some time before either chanced to bring shame to the Wintercrest name again.
A half-hour passed before the sniffles coming from the corners became the occasional hiccup. Edward had spent the time catching up on some estate paperwork, while Mrs. Bremmer simply kept her eyes on both corners, as if assuring herself that the occupants would remember to behave.
