From the Top Shelf - In a Mist, Chapter 11

The story so far:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10

We now resume our regular programming and return to In a Mist. After their narrow escape from the river, Elizabeth and Lennox are off to borrow a boat from the mysterious Diana Farquarson. I think it would be good to note that when the two set off for their afternoon at the beach, Elizabeth was barefoot. Her feet must be in worse shape than her bottom after all the cliff-climbing, and now more to come.

IN A MIST - Chapter 11 - In which Lennox meets Diana Farquarson, to Elizabeth's regret.

He watched closely as Elizabeth drew her swimsuit pants up over her crimson-striped bottom. Once in place they concealed the worst of the weals, but there was nothing she could do to hide the purple ridges across the backs of her thighs.

He didn't tell her he'd drawn blood. He thought it best to let her discover the extent of the damage herself when they got home. To tell the truth he was a little worried at how far this compulsion to inflict pain on her had made him go.

They continued along the river bank, Elizabeth walking stiffly and painfully, taking care not to step on the green slimy coils of seaweed that lay strewn in their path like octopuses' tentacles.

They arrived at a cobble-stone quay, at the end of which was an old boathouse. In front of its open doors a fisherman was seated on an upturned bucket mending holes in a net. Two others were engaged in painting the upturned hull of a boat. They looked up from their work and stared curiously at the partly-clad figures of Lennox and Elizabeth - but especially Elizabeth.

The men's presence disquieted her. What would they say when they saw the marks of the whipping on her thighs?

Luckily she remembered a small cliff path leading off to the right. Not only would it take them, by a circuitous route, to Mrs. Farquarson's house, it also skirted the rest of the village - for the house lay sequestered from the rest of the tiny community.

"This way," she whispered, pulling Lennox impatiently by the wrist over to the base of the cliff where the path began. Quickly she started up the rocky slope, only too glad to escape the dreadful embarrassment of the fishermen noticing the tell-tale ridges on the backs of her thighs.

The path rose steeply. After a strenuous climb they found themselves high above the quay. The three fishermen below looked like tiny dolls. Out in the river basin, a natural harbour, brightly painted yachts and two sleek motor launches bobbed at their moorings.

When they reached the top Elizabeth took them along a path that followed the direction of the river upstream. The grass on either side was a colourful splash of wildflowers - red campion, blue meadow cranesbill, and yellow spearwort. The gleaming river to their left disappeared behind a tall screen of trees.

After a quarter of a mile the path suddenly climbed to the right between dense clumps of rhododendrons.

They emerged once more into the open sunlight, on the edge of a cornfield. Twenty yards away, beyond a five-barred gate, was a road leading back to the village.

Diana Farquarson's house lay halfway down the hill. It was by far the grandest house in the village which, apart from grey church, public house, and general-store-cum-post-office, comprised two rows of white-walled thatched cottages belonging to farm labourers and fishermen.

By contrast "The Laurels" as it was called, after the rich evergreens that clustered around it, was a detached grey-stone building with high slanting roof and attractive green wooden gables. It was approached by a gravel drive and its lawns were immaculately tended. A mulberry tree grew on a little grassy island in the middle of the drive.

Goose-pimply with cold and feeling rather nervous, Elizabeth rang the bell. She gave her name to the maid, neatly starched in cap and apron, who led them into the drawing room.

"Elizabeth! This is a nice surprise!" Mrs. Farquarson threw down the book she had been reading and rose from her chair without once taking her eyes away from the largely unadorned male figure standing beside the girl.

She was a tall restless woman with cold almond-shaped eyes below thinly-pencilled eyebrows. Despite her impeccable manners and breeding there was something almost gypsyish about the thick black shoulder length hair. Her skin had a sepulchral pallor about it that was vaguely repellent. She smiled at everything and everyone - but only with her mouth. Her eyes remained expressionless.

She wore modish grey slacks, wide in the leg but tight around the buttocks, and a beautiful cream voile blouse open at the neck.

Elizabeth felt completely naked in the presence of such cool elegance. She wished she hadn't brought Lennox there. She'd seen how the woman had devoured him with her eyes. She was still doing so.

"Elizabeth, aren't you going to introduce us?" she said languidly in a plum-like voice that bespoke of boundless ease and self-assurance.

"This is Mr. Lennox, my tutor."

"Your tutor? Gosh, how gorgeously old fashioned that sounds! Do you smoke, Mr.Lennox?" She opened a richly engraved silver cigarette case. He took one gratefully and accepted a light from her silver lighter.

"We've come to ask if we might borrow your boat to get back across the river -" He paused and puffed hungrily at the cigarette. He rarely smoked cigarettes, but the strain of the afternoon had told on his nerves. "- I know it's a frightful imposition, Mrs.Farquarson, but Elizabeth and I would be most awfully grateful. You see we got cut off by the tide-"

"Oh do please call me Diana - and of course you could borrow our boat - if Lou, like the complete idiot she is, hadn't managed to lose it!" She spoke drily and succinctly, tapping the end of her cigarette into the cut-glass ashtray on the coffee table. "After she'd gone out in it yesterday morning for a spot of fishing, the stupid girl forgot to beach it properly. It must have slipped its moorings and drifted out to sea in last night's storm. She's been confined to her room all day in disgrace!"

Elizabeth frowned. She thought the punishment grossly disproportionate to the crime. Louisa surely hadn't been responsible for the storm? Storms were an 'Act of God'. She sensed there was a deep streak of cruelty behind that exquisitely refined exterior.

"I say, you two, why not stay for tea and I'll run you home in the car afterwards?"

"That's very decent of you, Diana," Lennox said warmly.

"Think nothing of it. Only too happy to help out." After admiring the strapping torso and powerful thighs of Lennox, she turned to Elizabeth and surveyed her critically, as though weighing up a rival. "What a lovely young woman you've grown into!" she purred, padding around Elizabeth like a cat stalking its prey. When her sharp almond eyes caught sight of the tell-tale weals on Elizabeth's thighs she pounced triumphantly. "Goodness me, what have we here?" she exclaimed in mock horror, relentlessly probing the purple ridges with her index finger until Elizabeth winced in pain. "Looks to me as if your tutor has taken a stick to your backside, Elizabeth - am I right, Mr. Lennox?" She looked up and smiled at him knowingly.

More than a little taken aback, Lennox thought it best to come clean. While Elizabeth blushed and hung her head in shame, he related the whole episode that culminated in her whipping on the river bank.

Diana Farquarson listened avidly, her dark eyes shifting from Lennox to Elizabeth, noting with amusement the girl's mortification. When Lennox had finished, Elizabeth's face was bright scarlet.

Diana opened her mouth, displaying two rows of pearl like teeth and laughed brittlely; "You must admit, Elizabeth, it was a well deserved swishing! I wish I had a man in the house to keep Lou in such good order. Do tell me all the spicy details, Mr. Lennox, otherwise, -" she pretended to pout in displeasure "- I shall withdraw my offer to run you home. Did you whip Elizabeth on her bare bottom?"

He thought for a second then nodded, satisfied beyond all doubt that she shared his views on the disciplining of girls. Besides he had his own good reasons for telling the truth. It had occurred to him that someone in the village - maybe someone with a pair of powerful binoculars - had witnessed the scene. He thought it in his best interests therefore to furnish a local person with a full, uncensored version of things in case, village gossip being what it was, some prurient Peeping Tom should turn his tutor's perfectly legitimate chastisement of an erring pupil into a criminally indecent assault.

"Golly, this takes me back a bit!" Diana enthused, lighting another cigarette. "My father used to regularly take his riding crop to me. Great mountain of a man he was, with a big red face. Master of the North Devon Hunt - hence the riding crop!" She grimaced nostalgically. "He was always at his worst after a bad day's hunting. He'd just pick on me for no reason at all. Next minute I'd be lying across the sofa and he'd be taking out his frustration on my bare b-t-m! My God, how it stung! And the marks!" She raised her eyebrows in mock horror.

Elizabeth was acutely embarrassed by such talk. It was too near home for comfort. Lennox listened open-mouthed. One or two mothers of the young people he'd tutored had regaled him with similar stories, but none quite as graphically.

"Be a sport, Elizabeth!" she pleaded. "Slip your pants down and show me your bruises - just for old time's sake! At my old boarding school we had an unwritten rule. Every time a girl got the cane she had to 'display' to the rest of her form, or she was 'sent to Coventry'. Yes" she nodded proudly at Lennox, "I was caned at school too - but that's another story! Come on, Elizabeth, be a brick and show me, else I promise you, you'll be walking home after tea!" She smiled teasingly at the pair of them and winked at Lennox as if to say "pray indulge me in my little whim".

"Oh no, do I have to?" Elizabeth wailed, appealing to Lennox for arbitration.

"Do as Mrs. Farquarson asks this instant," he insisted, amused and fascinated by the general drift of the conversation, "unless, that is," he warned her darkly, "you want a spanking for disobedience." How he loved to display his power over the girl to someone else!

"Spankings, eh?" Diana's dark eyes lit up and she ran her tongue lasciviously across her lips. "Now they're a very different kettle of fish. It's highly embarrassing when you're an innocent young girl to have to go across a man's knee, eh, Elizabeth - but quite exhilarating in a funny-peculiar sort of a way!" She obviously spoke from past experience and Elizabeth felt sick. She wanted the ground to swallow her up. Here was this awful woman, systematically laying bare all Elizabeth's innermost dreams.

"Mind you," Diana went on, "I don't think Lou would react to it in quite that fashion. She's probably bawl the place down - she's such a baby." She looked wistfully at Lennox.

"You've never spanked Louise, then?" he asked, surprised that a woman so clearly in favour of corporal punishment should abstain from practising it.

"Oh no, I don't think it's a mother's place to do that kind of thing," she replied coyly, "it needs a strong masculine hand like yours, Mr.Lennox."

Elizabeth seethed with possessive fury. How dare Diana Farquarson presume to flirt with her tutor! He belonged to her alone - just as she belonged to him.

"So you've spanked her, have you?" Diana threw back her head and gave a well-bred tinkling laugh. The fact that she found it vastly amusing infuriated Elizabeth even more - although what she hated most of all about their conversation was the way they were discussing her as if she wasn't there.

"Yes indeed, I put Elizabeth across my knee several times when she misbehaved in the schoolroom." He felt relaxed and expansive now that he knew he was on safe ground. "But I have discontinued the practice in favour of the cane."

"You felt that spankings were too lenient a punishment for her?"

"Partly that - but also because I felt she was enjoying them."

The room fell silent. Elizabeth's face turned deathly pale with humiliated rage. He had gone too far. He had broken their precious unspoken confidence. Did he think so little of her feelings that he could play Judas and blab her secrets to the first attractive woman to catch his eye?

"Here then!" she cried hysterically, "If this is what you want ! Why don't you invite the whole village in to take a look?" She tore her swimsuit pants down to her knees and bent right over to display her naked bottom to the astonished pair of onlookers.

The weals were darker now and stood out more boldly than before. The places where the skin tissue had actually been broken were plainly visible. There was barely a square inch of white unblemished flesh to be seen anywhere from hip to thigh.

Diana caught her breath in amazement, then she laughed heartlessly. "Poor Elizabeth! She won't be doing any sitting down for a few days, will she!"

Sliding open a drawer in her escritoire she produced an expensive-looking box camera and calmly photographed the girl in the shameful act of exposing her well-whipped behind. The late afternoon sun streaming through the stained glass windows of the drawing room illuminated the tableau. Pierced by the shafts of multicoloured light the girl's scourged flesh glowed blood-red and gold. It reminded Lennox of a mediaeval painting of a martyred saint he'd once seen in Florence.

Ethically he knew it was disgraceful of Diana Farquarson to have taken advantage of the girl in such an underhanded manner - but aesthetically speaking the picture might well turn out to be a masterpiece. He'd give anything to possess a print of such a photograph...

Sensing his acute excitement Diana took another snap, this time from a lower angle and slightly to the side, emphasising the erotic rondure of Elizabeth's arse cheeks. Their fragile femininity, coupled with the savage flogging they'd received, drove Lennox nearly out of his mind.

As the camera clicked again Elizabeth looked round and saw it in Diana's hand. With a squeal of outrage she immediately straightened and hid her bottom in her cupped hands.

"Don't be alarmed, darling," Diana chided gently, "it's just a little hobby of mine, although maybe 'obsession' might be a better word to describe it!" She laughed. "I simply can't resist snapping everything in sight - your sweet little b-t-m included! Would you like copies of the prints? Or perhaps, " she added, turning blithely to Lennox, " they should go to you. You could frame them and hang them on the schoolroom wall as a salutary reminder to your pupil."

Lennox chuckled. He thought it was an excellent idea. What an extraordinary woman she was, to have conjured up so thrilling a fantasy for him! It was as though she could read his thoughts.

Elizabeth stared at her in dismay. How could such vulgar depravity dwell in a woman whose outer shell was one of polished refinement? Tears of humiliation glistened in her eyes as she hastily covered up her bottom.

"Oh dear, I see my little prank has upset you, Elizabeth. I'm sorry it was unforgivable of me," Diana murmured, replacing the camera in the drawer. "I can't bear to put a guest out of humour. We'll have to do something to cheer you up, won't we? Now let me think - ah, I know the very thing!"

She rang for the maid. "Millie, please ask Miss Louisa to join us, will you?"

So Louisa has never been spanked? I do believe that may be about to change.