“You’ll prepare for your caning now, darling,” he said, taking the control card out of his pocket as he spoke and seeing without surprise the blinking notification that the governor was actively regulating Priscilla’s arousal. “I’m going to set your governor to one, which is the recommended setting for moderately severe marital discipline.” He moved his finger across the edge, and Priscilla gave a little whimper. “Go upstairs and ask Jenny to help undress you, and then to strap you over the punishment horse. I’ll take a glass of wine, and see you when it’s time for your thrashing.”

  Priscilla started to rise from her chair, her face so red it seemed almost purple in the candlelight, and bright tears appearing in the corners or her eyes. William reached out and took her hand.

  “I know you’re frightened, darling,” he said softly. “But after what happened this morning it’s very important that I return you to the normal life of a proper bride. The cane is the traditional way to correct a young woman who has gone astray, and so you will have it this evening until I am satisfied that you understand your duty.”

  She turned to him and looked down at him with wide eyes, gripping his hand firmly—almost clinging to him by it, it seemed to William. In her gaze he thought he could read a question she did not have the courage to ask, and he resolved that he would help her ask it, and do his best to answer it, before the sun rose on another day.

  “Yes, sir,” she murmured.

  Still he held her hand. “I love you, Priscilla,” he said and brought her hand to his lips. She rewarded him with a shy smile, though her eyes shone bright with tears.

  “I love you, too, sir,” she said. He released her hand, and she turned to leave the dining room, walking steadily into the dimly lit hall, graciously saying goodnight to Renton as he came in with the decanter. William’s heart did indeed fill with love, and as he watched his lovely wife’s receding back he suddenly knew that beyond the vicissitudes of Prosperian law and custom, and beyond the strange world of the renegades, that love would stand as strong as the ancient tree where he had found Priscilla watching what, according to the normal course of things, she should never have seen.

  As he sat then with his claret, letting himself at last reflect upon the strange events of the morning, William tried to approach things in as orderly a manner as he could manage. He wondered first of all if one was the proper setting for Priscilla’s cunt during this first caning. The wisdom of allowing a little arousal during a real punishment seemed quite clear to him, of course: it made the wife ache for the erotic stimulation her husband might or might not want to provide afterward. When a young married woman received a caning for masturbation, the opportunity to encourage her submissive sexuality presented itself in the very nature of the occasion: to set the girl’s governor to zero would replace that encouragement with the frustration of her natural desires instead.

  If he had caught Priscilla sitting on the bench by the dock with her hand beneath her skirt, dreamily stroking her clit while she looked out at the lake—something William rather thought he might well have expected from her nature and her history, with the incident of her masturbation at bath time—he would not have hesitated about setting her governor at one. But the circumstances of the incident in the forest made him wonder whether he should consider a different approach.

  He set the question aside for the moment, deciding that he should allow himself to be guided by what happened once he stood over his wife with the rattan in his hand. Before he finished his wine, he knew, he must also decide how he would approach his duty to explain—or, he supposed, to refuse to explain—the gangbang in the woods.

  The problem’s difficulty was increased by William’s own ignorance of what precisely such a sexual practice meant to the renegades. He knew what a gangbang was, of course, and he knew it had its pleasures both for the men and for the girl, even a pleasure girl with her governor set to low. But there had been something so wild and deviant about the scene he and Priscilla had witnessed, that he hardly knew how he could explain it. Gangbangs at the houses of pleasure happened in elegant rooms, and the men, he knew, didn’t remove all their clothing though of course the pleasure girl did. And something about what the renegades had done had an almost ritual quality as well, as if the red-haired woman were a priestess of some nature cult.

  She had clearly been in control of the scene to some extent, William felt sure, unlike a pleasure girl being gangbanged by a group of administrators out for a naughty night on the town. He felt sure also that Priscilla had seen the same striking expression on the renegade woman’s face that he had, or she wouldn’t have asked who the woman was with such urgency in her tone.

  Nor, he thought, would she have said the strange thing after her bath about what would happen if she were the one being gangbanged. Nor perhaps would she have asked, so eagerly, to suck his cock, a request that had of course gratified him even as it had surprised him—but also a request that a proper wife should not have made, even with her governor at ten, and one for which many husbands would have spanked their wives for the indecency of it. Prosperian wives did not ask to suck the penis: a Prosperian bride received her husband’s manhood in her mouth when he chose to enjoy her that way, and she swallowed his seed when he decided to come there, but she did not confess that she wished to do something so indecent.

  While he caned Priscilla, then, he would have to instruct her as to how she must think of what she had seen. He must ensure that she did not associate the renegades’ indecency with the sort of free pleasure that had appeared so visibly on the red-haired woman’s face. No, his wife must associate the sight of the gangbang in the forest with the feeling of her husband’s cane across her bare bottom, with the knowledge that she must be strapped down for punishment, that bottom well presented over his punishment horse for the purpose of training her properly. With the sight afterward in her mirror of a backside that told the tale of what happened when she touched herself between her thighs.

  William rose to go upstairs, in order to punish his naked wife.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Priscilla had not the slightest idea how she would be able to bear it. Knowing that she would have to bear it, because of the stout leather strap Jenny had just fastened over her waist to complete the task of immobilizing her mistress over the wooden frame of the punishment horse, seemed not to help at all.

  “I’m so sorry, ma’am,” Jenny had said when Priscilla, now with tears running down her face, had told her that William wished his bride prepared for a caning.

  “How shall I bear it, Jenny?” she had asked then, too, but Jenny’s words, gentle though they were, held little comfort for her.

  “It will be alright, ma’am. I’ll strap you down nice and tight. Your bottom is going to hurt for a few days, but I’ll take good care of you. The servants are always kind to a lady after she’s had a caning—especially Mrs. Barnes. You’ll be allowed to take your meals here in your room, standing up. Now let’s get you out of your gown and your underwear and over the horse—no use delaying.”

  As the maid helped her out of her clothes, Priscilla asked, “Have you ever been caned, Jenny?”

  “Goodness, yes, ma’am,” the girl said. “Twice, by Mr. Renton.”

  “But you seem so… so respectful and good,” Priscilla said, puzzled and glad at least to have something to think about besides her own punishment.

  Jenny giggled as she took her mistress’ drawers from her and folded them. “I wasn’t always, ma’am. And I still like to stand up for myself when I probably shouldn’t. And…”

  Priscilla saw the maid blush. Desperate to take her mind off the necessity of removing her shift and rendering herself completely naked before a servant, she probed further. “And what, Jenny?”

  “Well, you’re a married woman, now, so it’s alright to tell you such things, though it does seem a bit rude. Mr. Renton… well, he’s the butler, ma’am?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Priscilla said, even more mystified.

  “Well, the butler gets to come to the maids’ rooms, if you know what I mean?”

  Priscilla felt terribly glad to have her shift over her face, to hide just how red her face must be at the thought. But then she had to hand that garment to Jenny as well, and stand naked before the serving girl in her black gown and white apron. Nor could she resist asking another question, though it brought a brief flare of the itchy warmth produced by the governor’s control between her thighs.

  “Does Mr. Renton come to your room often?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jenny said, “and like I was saying one time he caned me with, you know, with my governor turned up to high.” Priscilla could tell now that the pink in Jenny’s cheeks must match the same hue in her own. The maid’s voice fell to a whisper. “He said it increases the man’s pleasure to know that he has marked a girl’s backside just because he felt like it, and that I would like it, too.”

  Priscilla felt her eyes go wide, and her lips parted as if to say something in protest, but all that came out was, “Did you?”

  Jenny bit her lower lip at that and nodded quickly, looking into her mistress’ eyes and then quickly looking away.

  “I was sore the next day, but… when Mr. Renton was, you know, having me, I got so excited that he had to hold me still, and… well, that was kind of nice, too.” Her eyes darted back to Priscilla’s, as if seeking forgiveness for the pleasure to which the butler had forced her.

  Priscilla’s mind had strayed so thoroughly now from the subject of her own caning that when she caught sight of the punishment horse, whose straps would hold her just as still as Mr. Renton must have held Jenny in his bed, she started and then shuddered.

  “Do you think Mr. Verner will do that?” Priscilla couldn’t help asking then.

  “I don’t know, ma’am. It seems some men are like that, and something about the governor makes us girls enjoy it… or maybe it’s just the way we’re made.” She glanced from side to side as if making sure no one were near, then said in a confidential voice, “If you’re a good girl for Mr. Verner, ma’am, and cry a lot and tell him you’re sorry, I’m sure he’ll turn you up and have you over the horse, after he canes you, to make you feel better.”

  Jenny kissed Priscilla’s cheek after she had strapped her down at knees, wrists, and waist. “Be brave, ma’am,” she whispered. “Remember that Mr. Verner loves you.”

  Then the maid departed, and Priscilla had to wait long minutes she could not measure. She had thought she felt naked the first time William had made her take her clothes off, when he had his premarital visit. Then she had somehow felt more naked in the lacy underwear, in the carriage that brought them here to her magnificent new country home. But to be strapped down in place, naked, with parted knees so that even a footman who decided he would like to see what his mistress looked like between her legs, where his master’s governor claimed her and her maid had bared her so that everything revealed itself to the lascivious eye, made her feel that she had not even known what naked meant before this evening.

  Again, though she tried to press the thought down and back, out of sight in the recesses of her mind, she thought of the red-haired renegade woman. That woman would never allow herself to be strapped down over a device of discipline. Priscilla felt absolutely sure of that fact. Probably she would not even allow a lover to hold her still the way Jenny said Mr. Renton had done on the butler’s visit to her room.

  The visit the butler made to fuck the young maid. To cane her, and to fuck her.

  The itch flared at the thought of Jenny’s caning and fucking, and then died away as the governor regulated her. Priscilla sobbed at the frustration of it, and longed for William to come to her despite the terrible instrument he would brandish in his right hand when he came.

  Nice Mr. Renton. Nice Mr. Verner. They caned the girls they fucked.

  Five naked renegade men, looking like they belonged naked even more than they belonged in the buckskin Priscilla had seen the renegade man by the road wearing. Not nice. Fucking the red-haired woman, one after the other and three at a time, in the forest, as she screamed out her pleasure as if she didn’t care who heard.

  The itch rose and died away and rose again, in the place her husband had commanded should be exposed atop parted knees, over his punishment horse.

  “Priscilla.” William’s voice came from only a few feet behind her. In her terrible reverie she had not heard his footfalls as he entered the boudoir and walked around the enormous four-poster bed, to take his stand behind the horse, ready to thrash his bride.

  “Yes, sir,” she sobbed softly.

  “I must flog you now. You touched yourself between your legs without permission, even though you were wearing training pants that should have reminded you to whom your cunt belongs.”

  “I’m so sorry, sir.” She felt the furrow in her brow deepen.

  “That would have earned you a caning on its own,” William said in the stern voice that Priscilla had already learned her husband used when he had decided the time for discipline had come. “But the reason that you touched yourself, it seems clear, is that when you heard those renegades, you did not turn around and come back to the house but instead tried to see what they were doing. And when you saw that they were engaging in acts so indecent a young woman should not even know of them, let alone see them, instead of flying from that indecency you hid yourself and began to play with yourself, even though—as you shamefully proved just after I arrived—you needed the toilet very badly. Is all that not so?”

  He knew it all, had guessed it all, somehow: the way she had crept forward even though she knew she should go back and tell her husband that she had heard renegades in the woods. The way she had hidden herself when she had seen the terrible things they were doing.

  He knew it all, except how Priscilla had felt about it. He couldn’t guess, could he, the thrill of wicked adventure that had gone through her heart—her dreamy heart, as she supposed William would call it. He couldn’t guess that something about the cries of the renegade woman had seemed to pull her forward, because even before she had seen a hint of the naked bodies through the trees she had known somehow that it had something to do with the warmth between her legs and the way the punishment drawers clung to her private lips and even the tiny, burning bud atop them.

  Above all, William couldn’t guess—how could he?—the soul-searing shock of seeing the pleasure on the renegade woman’s face, as if she wanted to have all the hard cocks in the world inside her. If he didn’t know that, understand that, how could he possibly understand the confusion that kept pushing its way to the front of her mind and the questions that seemed to keep asking themselves, in the voice of a woman she had only heard scream and moan in lewd ecstasy without uttering an intelligible syllable?

  Do you not wish to be free, as I am? Do you not yearn to be able to say to five big men, “Come with me into the forest, into the park of Vernerwood where the trees are tall, and fuck me there, all of you together”?

  No, he couldn’t guess it, she thought. But in the forest, when he had cupped her between her legs while she peed over his hand, and then taken down her training pants and plunged inside her, when he had fucked her so hard up against the tree, she had supposed he did.

  What was she to do? What was she to say?

  “Yes, sir,” she whispered through tears of fear and shame.

  Then she gave a startled cry, for William had laid his hand upon the bare little furrow between her thighs. He rubbed her there, but with the governor turned down to one, the only sensation was of the little itch that made her long for much more.

  “To whom does this belong, Priscilla?” he asked sternly.

  More tears prickled in her eyes. “To you, sir.”

  “I shall fuck it after I cane you, to teach you to remember that. And I shall fuck your bottom as well and put my seed there, so that you understand that as your husband I shall enjoy you as best pleases me. After I have finished fucking you, you will stay on the horse for an hour to consider your behavior.”

  Something in William’s voice as he pronounced this terrible sentence, which held none of the consolation Jenny had predicted he might bestow upon her, seemed to lessen Priscilla’s impression of the severity of his wrath. He spoke not with regret, exactly, but perhaps with a kind of resignation, as if he truly didn’t wish to be so harsh with her, but felt that the circumstances of the scene in the forest merited nothing less than what he had decreed.

  “Yes, sir,” she whispered, still trying desperately to be his good girl, in hope that he might soften her punishment.

  With two fingers of his other hand he rubbed firmly at the little ring of her anus, then, as she whimpered in shame and surprise at the sensation of having both her husband’s hands upon her most private places that way. She struggled against the horse’s straps for a moment, so greatly did the treatment startle her.

  “She had a cock in both places at once, didn’t she, darling?” William whispered in her ear, his voice utterly different from how it had sounded a moment before. “And in her mouth?”

  “Yes, sir,” Priscilla gasped. Oh, if only he would turn up the governor!

  His right hand, the one between her legs, deserted her, while the fingers of the left kept probing lewdly between her bottom-cheeks. Then she cried out at the ecstasy that flooded her body, because her husband had indeed turned her up, and then returned his hand to her suddenly soaking wet cunt.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  William wished he felt sure he was handling Priscilla’s punishment correctly, but the submissive way she had just responded to him turning up the governor to ten again gratified his dominant masculine pride so thoroughly that he felt he could do nothing but continue on in the path upon which he had decided. As he moved her toward an orgasm without at first speaking, letting his wife’s sobbing screams of pleasure make the only noise in the room, he grew entirely certain that though a government panel of marital physicians might hesitate to recommend his method, it would work for Priscilla, and for him.

 

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