Chapter Seven
The next day the inexorable Directress went into action with a vengeance. She had made up her mind to deal stringently with the affair and shortly after breakfast Prafekt Seckendorff was standing in front of her Headmistress literally shivering in her high heels. Her anxious face, from which the blonde braids drew back her hair, was entirely different in expression from when she had strapped little Anna Erland, and her eyes kept dropping, despite herself, to the long inky rapier of the whalebone switch on the table there. Her tunic merely accused the full flesh it gently covered. Euphemia Seckendorff knew her Directress, and was extremely frightened.
“So you know absolutely nothing about why this… shaft of bone was found in your Dorm, then?”
“Nothing, Headmistress.”
“I take your word for it, Euphemia. In fact, your Dormitory has been quite a model until now. Nevertheless,” went on the matter-of-fact tone sending chills down the girlish spine, “I shall have to have you thrashed since this lapse did occur there. I mean to get to the bottom of this matter, and a good lashing of that rump of yours will lend a little zeal to your helping me in the task. You have no idea who it might be?”
“None, Headmistress. But I guarantee to find out…”
“You will,” came the curt answer. “By tomorrow at noon you will report to me with the culprit who has been using this masturbatory device in your Dormitory, together with any other girl involved. I don't mind how you acquire the information, I simply want the sinner in question. If no one owns up, you can tell your Dormitory it'll be three dozen each with the birch plus ten nightly with a Dorm cane for a week. As for you, you will be stripped of your privileges, reduced to the ranks, publicly birched and join scum for the rest of the term. To start off with, Euphemia, I shall send for the Duty Mistress and have your bottom thoroughly flogged. Go in there, take off your things, and summon up your courage.”
The Praelictor curtseyed slowly, turned and with small steps and an utterly sick look in her face made for the far door indicated, that leading, as all too well she knew, to the Head's personal Chastisement Chamber. Her buttocks churned turgidly, as if knowing, too, the menace which they were under. A bell-pull made a distant resonance that echoed through her marrow. She suddenly, quite definitely, wanted to pee.
Five minutes later she was standing to attention, nude but for stockings and shoes, the strong ledge of her mons softly flossed above her downy thighs, and her insignificant garments folded on a nearby stool. What little courage she had left vanished as the Headmistress entered, close followed by the ironically smiling Duty Mistress of the day, elegant, black-haired Jacqueline Bellais. Euphemia Seckendorff prostrated herself, and then arose on bidding. The French teacher was by no means the strongest, but she was known as a refined punisher, skilled in the subtler nuances of the rod. It was all too obvious from her smile now that she was looking forward to the task for which she had been summoned.
“You realize,” said the Head, addressing the stock-still figure of the girl, “Prefects have to be especially strictly punished, when so. You are going to be thrashed for Negligence in your duties; have you anything to say?”
“Nothing to say, Headmistress.”
“Give her a dozen, please, Bellais.”
“By which you mean, Head,” slyly insinuated the now frankly grinning mistress, running a hand over her own saucy posterior under the silk, “thirteen, I take it?”
“Very well,” assented Frau Grumkow, taking a seat to one side and pulling on a newly lit cheroot. “Do you think you can drive home the lesson on a big girl like this with a butcher's dozen, Bellais?”
“I do,” said the mistress calculatingly, “if you would let me use the Hauter, Directress.”
There was a pause.
Then Frau Grumkow said, “Very well. It won't do her any harm to have her fat hams well thrashed.”
“Please, Headmistress,” came in the girl's worried tone.
“What is it, Seckendorff?”
“I… if I might be permitted to speak… I feel sure I could extract the information for you, without this… trouble. Our Dormitory is a true team. If you please, Headmistress.”
The good lady thought. She frowned, then said, “You have never had the Hauter, have you, Seckendorff?”
“Never,” came in immediate, and hollow, echo.
“I am glad to see it instills such respect in your soul. But it will do you a world of good to know what true pain is before you leave the Schloss. Not many girls get it. You should be proud. Make this a thoroughly significant experience for her, Bellais. You may add on two for Making Idle Excuses.”
“Thank you, Head,” said the mistress deferentially. “And with your permission I shall use Position Five.”
“By all means.”
Jacqueline Bellais approached her victim who had visibly abandoned all hope. She ran her hands over the full satiny globes behind inspectingly; spongily solid, they were unmarked, very white and curiously well downed up the crease. They would be lovely to whip. There was, for the little French mistress, only one pity-that they were not those of Maria Daunitz. She had pined to flog the newcomer all this term, and an idea had come into her head whereby perhaps she might. Fifteen with the Skinner-as the Hauter was locally known- what utter, utter bliss!
Jacqueline Bellais knew how to whip. Which was to say: she knew how to prepare the mind of a culprit until her imaginings of disaster reduced her to a jelly of emotions inside. It was important now to let this sinner see the weapon-see it, hear it, if possible even smell it, before she felt it on her person. The mistress went to one wall- noting with satisfaction that the Duty Maid of the day had left a tub of boiling brine and other impedimenta to hand-and took down the dreaded Hauter. It was a simple enough instrument.
“Afterwards you can put her on the saddle. I shall interrogate her at that time.”
“Very good, Headmistress.”
The Skinner consisted in a small polished walnut-wood handle in the shape of a T, in the bar of which-no longer than ten centimeters or so-had been inserted three leathery-looking limbs of ash, or sometimes willow. These were fresh cut by the Duty Maid of the day, full of sap, and-in added refinement-wound in wire, latticed along their great length, and this dreadfully compounded the difficulty of accepting a “Skinning,” as the girls called it, with any stoicism since the wire so abraded and grazed the skin. Jacqui Bellais saw with approval that the three greedily wavering tips had been especially well twined with the cutting wire.
“Every girl ought to have the Skinner once before she leaves,” said the Headmistress in a grumbling undertone, watching the trinity of wands shudder the air in the mistress' hand. “I declare it's even better than the Sole.”
Prafekt Seckendorff watched it with a visible gulp. She did not have to be top of her Arithmetic class to know that fifteen strokes, which she was going to get, meant exactly forty-five agonizing weals across her bottom with this evil-looking instrument-a bottom on which, if rumor and appearance were correct, she would not care to sit for a good two days. She was rescued from her trance of apprehension by an order.
“Position Five!”
She did an about-face and went to the wall for the straps. This much she knew, having secured a Senior in the celebrated position as Duty Prefect on one occasion. There were seven straps, the mystic number, and each carried sewn into it a small brass ring. Two she tightened on her ankles, with the rings outermost, two just above her knees with the rings behind her; the broad waist-belt had to be breathtakingly tight with the rather larger ring in front, while one strap went on each pulsing wrist. With a tug to her stockings she pulled back her shoulders and went to her fate. If she had to go through with it, better to do so bravely. She felt no resentment, and the aspect of that awful instrument, which made her whole being cry out, “Au weh!” in advance, was, she well knew, a proper part of her punishment.
The sturdy girl was bent over, facing a wall. Her legs were well parted and ringbolts on the floor were attached to her ankle-straps. Her wrists were drawn to a bolt about a meter high in the wall. Next, a chain was fastened to the ring on her left leg, taken through a ring in the flooring behind her and brought up to be secured to the ring on her right leg. This simple V most effectively braced back the legs, which could not now bend in the slightest at the knees. Finally, the ring at her belly was connected with its mate on the flooring beneath her, also by
