Jane and Her Master Read online

  Title Page

  Jane & Her Master

  By

  Stephen Rawlings

  Publisher Information

  Published by Silver Moon

  Jane & Her Master converted and

  Distributed in 2012 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.

  Copyright © Stephen Rawlings

  The right of Stephen Rawlings to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Author’s Preface

  A decade ago that Master of the classic S&M novel, P.N.Dedeaux, gave us AN ENGLIGH EDUCATION, a version of Charlotte Bronte’s JANE EYRE, in which he peeled away the prudish coverings, required by the reading public of the day, to reveal to the modern public at large, what scholars had always recognised, the seething mass of submissive masochism that heaved beneath - whether that of Jane, or Charlotte, or of the young females of early nineteenth century England that she wrote for, is not clear, but probably all three.

  Mr Dedeaux followed Jane’s story from the bullying of her uncaring relatives, the Reeds, through the extreme severities of the Rev. Brocklehurst’s infamous school at Lowood, to the point where she leaves that establishment, with its rods and cruelties, for a post as governess, promising us a further volume telling of what befell her there and, indeed, in the electrifying vignettes inserted at the beginning of each chapter, giving us a tantalising taste of how it might be treated.

  Unfortunately Mr Dedeaux, having whetted our appetites, has cruelly left us suspended in limbo, hungry for a feast that was never served. There seemed only one thing to do. Take on the task myself!

  The first action was to read the book in its original. In common, I suspect, with a large number of my contemporaries, I have discussed the book on the basis of reviews, essays, quotations, film scripts and the television plays, but never actually read it from cover to cover. It was a revelation! Dedeaux, in his own preface, points out some of the key passages that reveal the thinly concealed sadism of Jane’s treatment, the utter submissiveness of her nature, and I had assumed that he had picked the bones clean in listing these choice quotations. How wrong can you get!

  Writing ostensibly from the view point of ten years of marriage to Mr Rochester, and at least one child, Jane refers to him from first to last as ‘my Master’. To the telltale lines quoted: ‘The house had a Master; for my part, I liked it’ - ‘the room to which I had so often been summoned for chastisement… a once dreaded switch which lurked there, waiting… to leap out and lace my quivering palm or shrinking neck’, one could add such revealing items as, ‘the audacity that needs chastising out of you’ - ‘pain and pleasure more acute and exquisite than they could inflict or bestow’ - ‘Rochester’s smile, such as a Sultan might bestow on a slave his gold and gems had bought’ - ‘it was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an authority supported like hers and to bend, where my conscience and self-respect permitted, to an active will’ - and many more besides.

  Indeed, one can hardly turn a page of the book without unearthing some evidence of the underlying theme of female submission.

  It is no wonder that the book has been the favourite reading of generations of young, nubile females grappling with their unconscious sexual submissiveness, be it the Victorian virgin, squirminq on her velvet seat, a bodice-ripping Gothick novel by Mr Dedeaux, better so enriched, yellow pages in her trembling hands, a twenties flapper, lubricating over Valentino’s exploits on the silver screen, dreaming he would bear her away to rape and slavery in the desert, or a modern feminist, agonising over the feelings boiling in her hot belly, and rubbery knees, that she cannot reconcile with the dogma preached in the ‘Women’s Studies’ group. Perhaps, one day, scientists will identify the gene responsible, that evolution hatched to ensure the survival of the race.

  Meanwhile, let me raise for you those prim cambric petticoats around the loins of the daughters of Howarth Parsonage, and give you a glimpse of the twitching bellies, the glistening deltas, the tight-clenched cane-striped cheeks hiding beneath.

  Yorkshire 1995

  Thoughts On A Triangle

  I was to be whipped, then inseminated. Naked, my arms drawn up above my head, my wrists secured to the apex of the triangle, I would have been with my weight off my heels in any case. When he made me part my legs, so that he could fasten my ankles to the corners of the frame, I was up on my toes indeed, my body stretched, my slightly fleshy nether cheeks cringing in anticipation of what was to come. For my feelings were mixed. I knew joy as always, that my Master was well again, and could see to my management himself, and fear, for his renewed strength enabled him to inflict upon my well-used buttocks, agonies that searched out the last vestige of my pride, and called upon the uttermost limits of my courage. His black rod could bite and worry my poor flesh so that my very soul seemed in pain, though, later, cleansed and whole again.

  It was some small consolation that that flesh was well able to sustain the fierce purging. Maternity had filled my previously frail frame. My breasts were now full and smooth. They had for some time thoroughly satisfied their role of providing comfort for a man, and physical communication between two people in sexual congress. Now, having amply fulfilled their other function of suckling a babe, my teats were large and firm, especially when, as now, fear and anticipation rendered them engorged and erect. Below I had always had just enough fattiness in my buttocks that I could sustain a proper whipping without injury, but now my whole body had a healthy sleekness. Gone was the almost pitiful frailness, and I was all woman.

  For sometime my Master, out of consideration for me, had been taking his pleasure and, I almost blush to admit, mine, between my nether cheeks, in my tightest orifice, that I might not have to carry one child while feeding another, but with our first-born son off the breast, he intended to impregnate me again. He did not, however, neglect my well-being by overlooking that correction which, as I freely acknowledged, a woman needs from her Master if she is to remain a loving and loved companion. I would be well laced before he entered me, and I would receive his seed in my womb with tears of contrition on my cheeks above, throbbing welts in my cheeks below.

  Now he stood behind me, his jacket removed to give him free play, and tested the formidable Malacca that he used for my correction, by cutting the air, as he was about to cut my buttocks. Those parts heard the keenness of its passage and cringed beyond my control.

  “You are clenching, Jane,” he said, “relax your cheeks, or I shall not begin.”

  A part of my mind cried that in that case I would never relax them, for I could not endure the pain, but the better part fought to let them hang limp so that the correction might begin, and hence end the sooner. The very tautness of my position encouraged me to tighten them, but I overcame the weakness and let them open to invite the rod to cut deep.

  The first stroke fell. It was every whit as bad as my fevered imagination had remembered from my previous visits to the triangle, sending a wave of flame through me, the agony seeming to seep through to my womb itself. I gasped at the shock of the pain in my hinds. It had begun.

  A second followed, its bite as keen and perhaps two fingers width below the first, nearly in that most tender
crease that my fatty cheeks engendered at the top of my thighs behind, for he was ever wont to cut me low, holding, with some truth, that a woman would feel it the more keenly there and hence take more benefit from it.

  The third stroke landed exactly on this most tender point. I knew now it was going to be bad. Not only was he in a fine physical condition today, his wrist lending a force to the blows that I could feel in my belly and, indeed, all the way up to my thickening breasts, if not behind my eyes even, but he had marked out his ground well, the three welts running even and level across my buttock, defining a band less than three inches wide from the crease upwards, all in the juicy underhang. He would work this now. A dozen strokes, which was the tally I had been promised, would have to be accommodated in that narrow field, a ploughing that would leave me furrowed, and harrowed too, and ready for planting with his seed. I set my teeth and awaited the next.

  Four! My buttocks bounced under its weight, the cane sinking in until almost lost in my soft folds. I would not scream, to scream would have shown weakness and brought disgrace, yet I wished that he would make me scream, that I could surrender to him completely. To delay that inevitable outcome I set my mind to recalling how I had come to have him as my Master, and the strange adventures that had intervened until I could be truly his. It was not possible to shut out the terrible hurts that were being inflicted in my lower parts, but the recollections of the past served, for a time at least, to divert me from the need to shriek my agony, so that when I did capitulate, I would do so, with honour and gratitude.

  Arrival

  I cannot say that my arrival at Thornfield Hall was an occasion of unmixed pleasure. True the house itself was pleasing enough, and I was looking forward with some considerable excitement to meeting my new employer and my charge, but I looked back too, to the manner of my departure from Lowood School, where I had been eight years a pupil, two of them as pupil-teacher, since my haughty Aunt, Mrs Reed, had banished me from her home at the tender age of ten.

  For all those years I had served and suffered under an iron discipline and a rigid rule, enforced with severity by all the staff of that establishment but, above all, by the Rev. Mr. Brocklehurst, its Patron and ultimate source of all authority. Such formative and reformatory exercises, performed upon our bare buttocks with cruel rods, had extended right up until the moment of my departure to take up the Governess position I had been offered as a result of the advertisement I had placed in the County paper. At eighteen years, though slight of frame, I was woman grown and ready to set off into the wide world outside Lowood.

  That morning Mr Brocklehurst had sent for me and delivered me a lecture on how to comport myself in the great world outside the school and, to reinforce his point, and serve as a remembrance, for days physically, years mentally, as severe a whipping as any I received at his hands, and he had often whipped me to both blood and tears; a full two dozen, taken over the board, my feet parted so widely that I had to go up on my toes, the rod slicing in from beneath, the last four delivered ‘short’, so that the cruel tip whipped in and bit into my most tender and intimate woman’s parts, where they pouted back between my spread thighs.

  I climbed into the coach, my buttocks throbbing and bleeding, my vulva aching, to sit on them for hours as we crossed the county to the distant house that I would henceforth call home. You may imagine that I was very glad to descend, my legs stiff, my gait uncertain, hoping that the blood that had oozed from my welts had not stained my gown right through.

  It was dark when we came to the hall, but I could still make out a long lowish building of three stories, a light showing in one curtained bow window.

  Trying to walk with something like a proper poise for a young woman of refinement, and succeeding in producing something nearer to what one might expect from a lame cow, for he had hurt me deeply and my wounds had stiffened from the long journey, I crossed the paving in front of the house and knocked at the great oak door of the hall, to be answered by a pert maid.

  As Leah, as I soon found was her name, preceded me, I observed her firm, large haunches moving under the thin black stuff of her gown. I never saw a girl built more fairly for rod or strap, which was just as well, considering the forwardness of her demeanour which, I was sure, would oblige any proper employer to award her frequent and severe chastisement. These jouncey hinds led me to a modest sized, but comfortable room, where a lady of past middle age, but still sprightly, sat knitting before the fire.

  “Good evening,” I said, dropping as polite a curtsy as my sore thighs and bottom would permit, “you must be Mrs Fairfax. I am very happy to make your acquaintance.”

  “And I pleased to see you. Come to the fire, you must be cold after your tedious journey. Leah, fetch Miss Eyre some hot cordial, and some small thing to eat, then you may fetch something to warm yourself. I have not forgotten your need, my girl.”

  Forty minutes later and the world had become a more cheerful place. I was rested now, and warmed and fortified by the hot stimulant and the cold meats that Leah had produced. I had already entered into the beginnings of a cordial relationship with Mrs Fairfax, but as yet I had not met my pupil by reason of the lateness of the hour. Leah cleared away my tray, and returned bearing a thick strap of black leather.

  “You will excuse me, I’m sure,” Mrs Fairfax said, “but the hour grows late, and this impudent chit has earned herself a smarting behind by her insolence, and I do not like such matters to be held over to another day. A girl should take her welts to her bed, and seek to learn from them to do better the next day.”

  It is of course, a commonplace for mistresses to whip their servants for the betterment of their behaviour, and I made as if to leave.

  “No,” said the lady, “wait until she has had her dose, and she may show you to your room.”

  Accordingly I took my place again, and watched to see how matters would befall. Mrs Fairfax read the girl a stern lesson on the ease with which she might slip into familiarity beyond that proper in a servant, and the danger that, if not checked now, she might commit the same folly when gentry were visiting. She was then ordered to remove her gown, leaving her clad only in her stays over a short chemise.

  Leah was a comely country girl, very well built, round rosy cheeks above, and the same below, well set out before us as she was made to bend over a table, stretching across to grasp the far side. Her buttocks, though plump, were parted by her wide legged stance, and deeply cleft, so that her plump purse, framed in a glossy nest of dark curls, was clearly visible between the tops of her thighs, for she wore no drawers, as was common amongst the servant class at that time.

  Mrs Fairfax rose from her chair before the fire and, taking the strap went to stand behind the bending girl. Now that she stood I could see that, despite the fact that she was no longer young, yet she retained a wiry leanness that suggested that this might be no gentle swishing, but something the girl might have reason to fear, as indeed she did, for the fatty halves of the buttocks twitched and flinched as the mistress approached.

  Clearly this scene had been acted out before, probably many times, for the girl was of that irrepressible kind that will always exceed her station if not checked, and then only mend her manners for as long as the bruise in her bottom are sore enough to remind her of her failings. Mrs Fairfax lifted her rigorous right arm and brought the strap down with a whistling sound, to wrap itself round the full curve of the generous hinds, printing a scarlet band across them like an exaggerated and burning version of the equator on the schoolroom globe.

  Leah squealed and wriggled, until silenced and stilled by the mistress’s sharp command, then jerked again as the strap descended to paint its fiery band across the Southern hemisphere of the gluteal globe. At regular intervals, six more snapping cracks, six more squeaks and yelps followed, until all Australasia was coloured with the red of Empire.

  “Mercy,” the girl howled, “have mercy Mistress.”

  “Hush you silly girl,” Mrs Fairfax replied, “you know you
have a dozen due you, and there are four more to come. Brace back your thighs, for I intend that they shall receive the benefit of your remaining stripes.”

  If she had squealed before, now she shrieked, as the merciless length of heavy leather lashed the backs of her solid white thighs, leaving the top four or five inches on either side quite as red as any part of the South Seas above. When it was done the girl lay on the table, wracked by sobs.

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” her Mistress declared, “now stop snivelling and put on your gown. Miss Eyre is fatigued from her long journey and needs her bed.”

  Still snuffling the girl did as she was bid, and presently showed me into a small but comfortable room, where I bid her good night, and advised her to think twice before she next let her impudence show.

  “Indeed, I will Miss,” she replied, “for my poor bottom hurts so, I doubt I shall find much comfort in my bed.”

  I too, I thought, as the girl departed, still sniffling, and grasping her tormented bottom in her hands as she left, for I was very conscious of the soreness in my own haunches, and, especially between my thighs, where Mr Brocklehurst’s whalebone ‘soko’ had wounded me deeply.

  But, in the event, my fatigue was such that it soon overcame all my hurts and, by the morning, though I was very stiff and sore and still walked with a limp, the worst was over, for young and healthy women are well adapted to receive and benefit from the rod without enduring serious or lasting harm, even from as salutary a thrashing as the Reverend Brocklehurst’s valedictory flogging of my own poor flesh.

  Adele

  At breakfast, which I took with Mrs Fairfax in her room by invitation, she remarked upon my lameness.

  “I noticed you were somewhat stiff last night, and took it to be the result of your tiring journey from Lowood, but you seem still to be suffering pain when you move.”

  There was nothing for it, I must confess.

  “It is the effect of the thrashing I underwent before leaving the school,” I said, feeling a pink warmth rising in my cheeks.