From the Top Shelf - In a Mist, Chapter 17

The story so far:
Chapter 1	Chapter 12
Chapter 2	Chapter 13
Chapter 3	Chapter 14
Chapter 4	Chapter 15
Chapter 5	Chapter 16
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11

We continue our story five years later, and find out what has happened to Elizabeth and Arthur.

Chapter 17 - In which the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Half a decade went by, Hitler invaded Poland and, for the second time that century, England was plunged into the maelstrom of world war. Old Mr. Harker, gentle Victorian soul that he was, had been thankfully spared the shock of seeing German bombers roaring above the downs on their way to blitz London, for he had long been laid to rest in Lymchurch graveyard in whose trees a brightly plumaged congregation of birds gathered every summer to serenade their old friend.

Elizabeth, the sole beneficiary of her guardian's will, now the proud mother of three children - two pretty daughters as well as her beloved little Arthur - had been unable to confront the reviving of quiescent memories that a prolonged visit to Lymchurch House would bring, so she instructed her late guardian's lawyer to oversee the sad business of closing the place.

The latticed windows, gay with May honeysuckle and clematis, were shuttered; the blinds were drawn; the Regency tables, chairs, and chaises longues shrouded in dust-sheets. The ageing servants were handsomely pensioned off. All, that is, with the exception of Mr.Tomms and Florence who, to Elizabeth's surprise, had become a respectably married couple and whose services were required as caretakers. They retained their comfortable living quarters above the old coach house.

For painfully distressing though her latter memories of the house had been with her tutor's sudden and inexplicable abandonment of her, still Elizabeth Montague could not find it within herself to commit the irrevocable deed of selling the place.

Her husband was both puzzled and angered by her stubborn refusal, against all his advice, to put Lymchurch House on the market. What possible use could they put it to, he reasoned, when she clearly had such an aversion to going anywhere near it, and when they already had everything that money could buy?

"Darling, please give me time, and let the future decide," she would say with a defiant toss of her head and a steady look of emerald-eyed stubbornness.

Though it irked him greatly, for there were many questions about his wife's former life to which he'd never received a satisfactory reply, nevertheless, because he loved her, he allowed her to have her way and Lymchurch House remained shuttered and silent, save for the cooing of pigeons in the loft above the clock tower by day, and the nightly hoots of preying owls.

And what of Arthur Lennox during this time?

As is so often the case, after a while the old itch returned, his old demons conquered and prevailed. In 1938 he had accepted a summer post abroad, in the old walled city of Lucca in Tuscany, tutoring two sisters, Rita and Carla de Gregorio. Their father, a pleasure seeking patrician in his middle fifties and a widower, was a confirmed Anglophile who insisted that his sixteen and seventeen year old daughters profitably employ their long summer vacation from their local Acadamia by receiving, as he called it, "a proper knowledge of the grande poeta Shakespeare, and molto, molto bene discipline Inglese! They must learn to respect their professore Inglese, so you will kindly do me the honour, Signore Lennox, of beating them whenever they make you, how you say, malcontento?

This on the very first day of his arrival! Lennox coughed to hide his embarrassment and turned away, pretending to study the walled garden from the terrace where Signore de Gregorio and he were strolling. The fountains, ornamented with beautiful cherubs, lent a welcome aura of coolness to the sultry evening air fragrant with oleander and hibiscus.

The villa was on the Via de Battistero, a stone's throw from the Piazza del Giglio (the Square of the Lily) dominated by the Romanesque cathedral they call the Duomo, on whose enormous marble fronted facade the sculptor Guidetto had superimposed wild fantasies derived from mediaeval bestiaries. Shady pavement caffes with their gay awnings lay dotted around the square, and on the west side stood the Opera House.

From his bedroom balcony Lennox could look out over a panorama of churches, belfries, palaces and piazzas, with the purple hills of the Apennines cradling the city on every horizon.

Signore de Gregorio, it soon became apparent, had little time for his daughters. Most days and nights he spent at his elegant little appartamento in Pisa, some twenty kilometres distant. Lennox more than half suspected he had a mistress installed there, but all the same Signore de Gregorio was strict and unyielding when it came to Rita and Carla, allowing them little if any freedom. Lennox was enjoined to chaperone them constantly,even on their trips to the baker's shop on the piazza to buy brioches.

Rita and Carla were devoted sisters. They did everything together and were so alike with their exquisite doll-like features, their pale porcelain skin, their proud dark eyes, and their cascades of glossy shoulder-length hair, that people often mistook them for twins despite there being a year's difference between them. Their pretty scolastico uniform of pink gingham knee-length frocks, black silk stockings, and dainty black leather sandals with pearl button straps did nothing to hide their shapely figures - their firm ripe breasts and the lavish curves of their Mediterranean bottoms.

Rita was a shy, introspective girl given to daydreaming but, as Lennox soon discovered, her younger sister Carla, with her mercurial moodiness and her habitual impending pout, had the very devil in her. How she mocked him with those imperiously flashing eyes of hers! She had a willful stubborn streak and refused point blank to obey his simplest injunctions.

It was not long before Lennox was compelled to use his cane on her well-rounded Italian bottom, after first seeking and gaining her father's wholehearted approval.

One afternoon at 3.30, after taking his customary siesta, Lennox quietly entered the upstairs "schoolroom" overlooking the terraced garden with its limpid pool, flowering shrubs and veined marble statuary, and caught Carla in the act of executing an obscenely crude caricature of il professore, himself, on the blackboard.

Her sister was perched conspiratorially on top of the teacher's high desk, lazily fanning herself with a rare leather-bound edition of Keats, a Mona Lisa smile of suppressed mirth on her face.

Uttering a loud exclamation of anger, Lennox strode over to Carla who stuck out her tongue at him, threw down the chalk and raised her hands in the air in a gesture of mock terror.

He unhooked the slender yellow cane from where it hung on the wall beside the blackboard and, gripping Carla tightly by the earlobe, propelled the vociferously protesting girl into the centre of the room.

Ignoring her unladylike torrent of Italian imprecations, as well as the vicious kicks she aimed at his ankles, he yanked her downwards by the ear until she was compelled to bend over and support herself with her hands on her knees.

Without letting go of her lest she try to escape, which she had succeeded in doing on several previous occasions, he deftly flipped the hem of her pink gingham frock up over her back with the tip of his cane.

Her white cotton panties would afford her minimal protection. They were almost transparently flimsy and immodestly failed to cover the white porcelain summits of Carla's fat little bottom-cheeks.

Lennox gazed with excitement at the girl's deeply defined bottom crack, noticing how, like a second skin, the drum tight gusset of the panties adhered to her provocatively bulging private parts, with curly wisps of black pubic hair peeping out from either side.

Carla's energetic cursing changed immediately to shrill lamentations of "Oh Signore, loro sono troppo severo!" as he brought the long whippy cane sharply down again and again across those broad, soft bottom-cheeks of hers.

She struggled frantically, an erotically prick-stirring sight for Lennox who liked nothing better than to see a pretty girl's bottom wriggling sexily at cane's length. But by now he was perspiring freely with the effort of chastising Carla and he was in danger of losing his grip on her ear. Therefore he delivered four whistling cuts - two to the top of each plump thigh - warning her in a crisp angry voice that unless she took the rest of her punishment docilely he would continue to cane her there - on that tantalising gap of translucent flesh between the tops of her black silk stockings and the soft fold of skin where her bottom began.

Those last four strokes must have proved excruciatingly painful for the girl because they left thick ridged weals on her smooth alabaster thighs, and she greeted each sizzling cut with piercing screams that set the sparkling cut-glass chandelier above their heads tinkling musically.

Satisfied that he had at last succeeded in subduing the tempestuous Carla, who was now howling and sobbing wretchedly, tears streaming down her pretty face, Lennox released her ear. To his utmost gratification she still remained obediently bent over and her shrill operatic cries grew somewhat calmer and less insistent.

Tucking the cane under his arm he reached out to pull down Carla's panties, concluding her punishment with a traditional 'six of the best' on the girl's completely bare buttocks.

The acute shame and humiliation of being thus denuded before a man's eyes sent Carla into fresh paroxysms of tearful wails, which rose to a frenzied crescendo as the cane rose once more and fell pitilessly upon her erotically plump bottom six more searing times.

As the caning of Carla reached its noisy climax Lennox glanced across at her sister. The big dark eyes of the dreamy seventeen year old shone with excitement at the extraordinary spectacle of her beloved Carla's saucily bare bottom, the soft peach of her vagina plainly visible, being dealt with so forcefully by their handsome young professore inglese.

Still perched on top of his desk, Rita was quite unable to stop herself from wriggling her hips about in sensual delight. Worse, the panting, red-faced girl was squeezing her shapely thighs together - then opening them to allow her hand furtively to shoot up under her skirt and stroke her most intimate parts.

Consequently her pink gingham frock had ridden up high above her stocking tops. It didn't take much imagination on Lennox's part to guess that the crotch of her panties was by now soaking wet.

Then she realised he was looking at her. Hastily she withdrew her hand and guiltily re-adjusted her skirt, blushing scarlet that he had found her out. He pursed his lips grimly, shot her a look that signified "Just you wait till it's your turn, my girl!" and turned back to conclude his business with the unfortunate Carla whose upturned naked rump was now a heaving mass of thickly clustered red weals.

Carla's low groaning sobs gave way to long self-pitying sighs as her trembling fingers tentatively explored the damage inflicted on her schoolgirl bottom. Wincing, she touched the parallel rows of raspberry-coloured cane weals, some already darkening into purple.

To complete the subjugation of proud Carla, Lennox unbuttoned the girl's gingham frock and removed it from her, whisking it over her head. Clad only in a tiny white cotton chemise that barely contained her plump uptilted breasts, her panties twisted comically around her ankles, she was made to hobble over to stand in the far corner of the room, hands on head, her soundly thrashed bottom on full blushing display.

As for the crafty, lascivious Rita, Lennox decided to deal somewhat differently with her, befitting the nature of her crime.

She gasped, and murmured "No, Signore, please no, I beg you" when he seized her by the wrists and drew her down from the desk. She landed so awkwardly that she fell into his arms. Lennox quivered with excitement to feel his hands encircling the soft yielding contours of Rita de Gregorio's bottom, while her panting breath and fluttering hands betrayed her true state of agitated arousal.

Maneuvering a slatten-back oaken chair, mellow with age, into position he quickly undid Rita's frock and, deaf to her embarrassed protestations, slipped it down to her ankles. As he had done with her sister, but this time from the start, he peeled down Rita's little cotton panties. Then he sat on the chair and drew the luscious young Italian girl across his knees.

Rita was less of a child and much more of a dignified young woman than her tomboyish sister and she beseeched him not to humiliate her thus by subjecting her to a shamefully demeaning bare-bottom spanking. She was no longer a little girl to be dealt with in such an abject manner, she complained, her voice shaking with injured pride.

"Non desidero una sculacciata! Please do not spank me, Signore Lennox, I beg you! It was Carla, not me, who was impertinent! I have done nothing to deserve this!"

But Lennox simply pulled the wriggling girl further over his knee so that her bare bottom was even more prominently raised than before.

"It is precisely because you are older than Carla," he said sternly, tightening his grip around her waist, "that I am going to punish you in this childish way, simply to bring home to you just how childishly you behaved, Rita. If you are the responsible adult you claim to be, why then did you not step in and call a halt to Carla's stupid schoolgirl prank? Instead of that, you condoned it because it gave you the opportunity to sit back and have a quiet snigger at my expense!" While lecturing her Lennox indulged himself in the pleasure of patting Rita's plumply receptive bottom. It was a larger, more expansive bottom than her sister's, due no doubt to her constant craving for sweet things. In addition he had noticed that being a more placid, sedentary type than Carla, she spent more time sitting on it.

The erotically fattened orbs were pale as ivory yet deliciously soft and yielding. In between her cheeks the deep dark cleft beckoned invitingly. Lennox smelt the musky aroma of female arousal.

A brief investigation confirmed his suspicions. Her vagina was swollen and flowing with intimate scretions. Despite all her protestations to the contrary, the lovely Rita de Gregorio was being driven frantic by a strange sexual perversity over which she had no control.

Lennox felt his penis stiffen. He found himself wondering if Rita, too, was becoming aware of it, rigid as a poker beneath her palpitating belly.

She must have felt its presence once he started to spank her, alternately on each broad buttock with loud ringing slaps that echoed around the sparsely furnished room, because she began to thresh her hips about excitedly, pumping her bottom up and down to meet each spank, rubbing her pubis blatantly against his erection.

Lennox refused to be hurried. He spanked her leisurely, his arm rising and falling in high looping arcs. He concentrated on the well-fleshed summits of her buttocks, where she could take it most. But he frequently ventured lower, his outspread palm making loud stinging contact with the soft undercurve of her cheeks - even the tops of her sturdy thighs, causing Rita to jerk violently, kick her ankles, and utter low gasping wails of obvious distress.

All the time her bottom moved up and down vigorously, ever more swiftly. Lennox guessed by her bodily movements as well as by the loud moans coming from her lips that Rita was approaching her climax.

Carla, still snivelling babyishly in the corner, her jouncy young buttocks ablaze, obviously derived no pleasure whatsoever from being physically punished. But Rita was a different case altogether.

At the end of Rita's spanking, despite being the owner of a flaming red and doubtless very sore pair of buttocks which would prevent her from sitting down in comfort for an hour or more, nevertheless the look on Rita de Gregorio's face could best be described as one of blissful contentment - a fact her sister observed with some astonishment.

After despatching the girls to their respective rooms Lennox sat down at his desk and pondered awhile. An interesting phenomenon, Rita and her penchant for discipline. He resolved, as daringly and as single-mindedly as his unique position in the household allowed, to explore it further.

Arthur Lennox has certainly landed on his feet! I am a bit disappointed that we learned so little about Elizabeth's new life, but perhaps she will return in a later chapter.