“Oh, let her do it instead, sir-oh please-AIIII!”
I cut short her prayers by drawing back my right arm and lunging the rod across the tops of both naked hips. With a dreadful scream, Wilhelmina lunged forward, her back bending deliciously, her buttocks wriggling and tightening, until the pulley ropes returned her to the range of the swishy birch.
I dealt out her cuts mercilessly, like a magistrate, slowly, unmoved by her sobs and tears and cries until the sixth, which flailed the base of her saucy bottom.
At this she completely broke down and cried out: “Oh wait, oh no more, you are killing me! If you will only stop, I will tell you the truth! Only do have mercy on me, I truly can’t bear it any more! If only you knew how much I’ve been whipped where I came from-you wouldn’t do this to me, you wouldn’t! Oh, if you knew, you’d have pity-have pity now!”
Again intrigued by this novel turn of events, I lowered the birch and said sternly: “It was in the interests of the truth that I sentenced you to this birching, Wilhelmina. I will give you two minutes to tell me your story, and if I am not then convinced of its veracity, we will start over again from the beginning and you shall have a good and full fifteen hard and severely laid on. Begin!”
She uttered a sobbing cry and then, apparently trying to turn her face back to me over her shoulder, and despite the fact that the shirt over her face still blindfolded her, sobbed out: “Oh, sir, I did lie, it’s true, but I had a good reason. I–I’m an orphan, and I ran away from a private orphanage where the superintendent tried to make me-tried to make me be a wicked girl! He had me birched and caned so often by the matrons, and I couldn’t stand it any more, and the last night he had the matron tell me that if I didn’t come to his rooms after everyone had gone to sleep, I should be whipped on a block in front of the entire orphanage, and so I ran away. And I met this boy, this Davey, and that’s the truth, sir. And he told me this Mr. Willoughby needed waiters, and that why I got the job. It was Davey showed me where to get a waiter’s clothes, and I had just a few shillings with me, and the man was kind enough to let me rent them. Oh sir, will you not spare me now?”
I lowered the birch and looked at Alice. “What do you think of that, my dear?”
“I think she’s telling the truth.”
“I think you are right, my darling. I shall make inquiries, Wilhelmina, and you are going to tell me who the superintendent is and where the orphanage is as well. Have no fears-if you are telling the truth, I certainly shan’t return you to them. But I must find some means of removing from you the further temptations of theft, for your next victim may not be quite so humane as I am,” I told the sobbing young woman. The birch had certainly marked her rather well, for her saucy oval buttocks were scratched with angry welts superimposed over the flaming red which Alice’s little hand had left. She kept moving from foot to foot and I knew that she was in atrocious pain, so I finally showed leniency and allowed her to be untied and taken to the W.C., with Alice in charge.
I poured out a glass of sherry, and when the still sobbing young woman hobbled out, her arm around Alice’s shoulder but her breeches restored as if she were once more the young waiter from Willoughby’s, I could not help smiling at her rueful appearance. I let her drink the sherry and gave her a few biscuits, and then Alice and I questioned her more closely. We obtained the names of the superintendent and the orphanage over which he was in charge, and Alice told me that on the very next morning she would make investigations and let me know if what Wilhelmina had told was true.
In the meantime, I had a guest room where the young woman could sleep, and I told her that she could take a bath and go to bed and that we would talk about what was to be done with her on the morrow.
Once she had been safely ensconced in that room, wearing a pair of my pajamas, I returned with Alice to the Snuggery and locked the door. Then, before I could say a word, my brown-haired darling, my wife-to-be, swiftly began to undress, and when she was all naked began to undress me in turn. We fell upon the couch with glad cries, and in a trice I felt my prick drive to the depths inside Alice’s moist and churning cunt. She fairly consumed me with her passion, winding her ivory legs around my buttocks, her fingernails digging into my armpits, her teeth clashing against mine in the fury of our union. And when it was done and we lay spent with spending, and in our delightful languor on the couch, my sweet fiancee heard from my lips the earnest proposal of marriage that would make her not so much an honest woman but my wife, my accomplice, my mistress, my all-and my sweet sharer of joys to come… of which perhaps Wilhelmina might herself provide a future… for Alice confessed to me with many a blush and wink that she was enamored of the slim young beauty who looked so remarkably like a boy, and that she had an overwhelming desire to cuddle with her and to fondle her and see if she was a virgin.
In the afternoon Alice and I would both go to post our banns and obtain the license, and then we would determine, before the glorious date when we two should be one, what to do with Wilhelmina Ponsonby.
Chapter 15
Alice and I had decided that we would not taste all our marital pleasures in advance by sleeping together this night in my apartment, but rather reserve that for what the French so aptly term la lune de miel. So I slept on the couch in the Snuggery, while my fair bride-to-be took her repose in my own bed, and our pretty and provocative boygirl found her repose in the guest room.
Alice showed the next morning that she was quite adept at cooking, which augured well for our happy domesticity. As soon as breakfast was over, she took her leave of us and rode in a hansom cab to make inquiries of the orphanage from which, according to her story, our guest for the night had run away.
Shortly after lunch time, she returned to inform me that the pseudo-waiter at Willoughby’s had not at all prevaricated, but that such an orphanage did exist and that the superintendent was named such and such. Alice had even gone so far as to inquire of the neighbors in that vicinity, and what she heard did not set well with the benevolent aspect which such an institution is supposed to have. There were reports of cries and tears from many of the younger girls who in the recreation yard were seen being slapped by the officious matrons, and there were even more lurid tales that some of the punishments were extremely severe and that the superintendent himself appeared to have, as one old lady told my fiancee, “an eye for a pretty wench even though she is in his charge.”
Accordingly I penned an anonymous letter to the authorities, urging them to investigate this nefarious and inhuman institution so that others might be protected from the fate which had impelled our slim young orphan to run away.
But now there remained the problem of what to do with this charming waif, for at eighteen she would surely present a problem to any parent, and I myself was not inclined to give her employment, not with a wife about to be wed who had her own delicious maid Fanny ready to serve the new household.
Wilhelmina seemed very grateful to us, and apparently, though she still blushed to recall it, had forgotten the chastisement we both had given her the night before. We therefore put her on her honor not to run away, and left her in my apartment while Alice and I went to the license bureau, and thence to the minister of my parish so that we might set the date for our wedding.
It would be two weeks hence and on a Saturday, an ideal time indeed for the first nuptials, since there would be no need to waken early on a Sunday morning!
We celebrated the formal announcement of our wedding date by a champagne supper at Simpson’s, to which I had proposed we invite Alice’s sister Marion. But to my surprise, my lovely brown-haired wife-to-be emphatically refused to let Marion share in this joyous news as yet. And when I enquired why, she peevishly remarked, “Oh, Jack, you know how she has always stood in our way from the very outset. Why, I talked to her only the other day, and she was very surly and almost rude to me. I hinted then that you and I would soon have very important news to give her, which as you know was as much as saying that we were going to be married. And all she could say to me was ‘Well, Alice, I hope for your own sake that you’ll be able to hold him once he puts the ring on your finger!’ Now what in the world do you think she meant by that, darling?”