Given to the Club by Emily Tilton
Chapter 21
Helena
“We’ll put her on the horse now, I think,” Gerard said. “A punishment ride should loosen that tongue.”
I tried not to turn, but I simply couldn’t help it. The idea of a punishment ride—especially considering that I felt I had just received three disciplinary fuckings that might be described the very same way—made my heart jump and my face burn. I felt I had to see again that ambivalent expression that perhaps only I could detect, the look that told me my guardian didn’t mean to break my spirit entirely.
But this time I saw him framed by the other two men, all of them just finishing putting their manhoods away inside their trousers and all of them regarding me with visages so stern that I felt my brow furrow in a weak, pleading way. Gerard, in the middle, folded his arms across his chest as he looked at me. Suddenly I became terribly conscious of my posture and, much worse, of the seed of the two gentlemen trickling from the tiny hole they had used for their pleasure, just as my guardian’s seed had done in the shower after he had deflowered me in every orifice. I swallowed hard, and forced my blazing face into the hardest expression I could manage.
“I don’t know anything, gentlemen,” I said, doing my best to fill my voice with scorn. “Mr. Miniver discovered the whole extent of my resistance activity. My treason, as you call it.” I forced myself to forget the humiliation of delivering these words while bent with my thoroughly punished, roughly fucked backside raised and my wrists tied to the whipping post, and I continued. “Though I must confess that I still cannot conceive of it that way—especially now that I have your horrid, tyrannical device installed in my body against my will.”
I saw Gerard’s eyes widen slightly, and then narrow again, suddenly ablaze, it seemed to me, with vengeful fury. For a moment, I had a full realization of how thoroughly I had just betrayed the truth that lay hidden in my heart, and I almost let my defiant demeanor slip. I angrily pressed down the will of my body, the ache that would have me beg my guardian to raise the governor’s threshold just a single notch, in exchange for the one bit of information I still concealed.
But a plan had come to me, a plan that would save me some shred of my dignity, I hoped, in the end—a way to save the man with the scar. If I could pose some resistance to the terrible ordeal I felt certain lay in store for me now, and then show my repentance, perhaps these implacable gentlemen would relent, and leave me with a final triumph. I would become their bed girl, their sexual plaything, and I would pretend to submit, but they would not know what I had seen in the street.
All of this flashed through my mind in much less than a second. Then it all flew away again for the moment, as Gerard strode forward to grasp me around my waist with his right arm, while he used his left hand to free the cuffs about my wrists from the clips that bound them to the whipping post.
“We shall see, you little whore. I knew enough not to trust your hypocritical show of remorse earlier. If I must break you entirely, I shall not hesitate. Your lovely body will still provide me and all the gentlemen of my acquaintance with a great deal of pleasure, at any rate, after you learn the true meaning of justice.”
I gave a startled cry, trying to conceal the abject fear in it beneath a simple yelp of surprise at the way he began to haul me around to my left, to behold an article of furniture I had seen when Jones had first brought me to this chamber but which I had not recognized at all, let alone comprehended.
Behind me, Mr. Miniver said in a horrible jocular tone, “What do you think, Justice Warren? I should say you may already have taught the slut the meaning of justice. Isn’t a stiff prick all the way up her insolent young bum a fairly good representation?”
He laughed, and the magistrate chuckled. I, now fighting against Gerard’s movements, struggling out of pure fearful instinct, had to resist the urge to spend some of my strength in turning to look at them. I wished them to see the face of the young woman they thought to teach some masculine moral lesson. I knew if I did, however, they would only mock me, and Gerard would have all the easier a time bringing me to what I knew must be the horse.
“Oh, certainly,” Justice Warren replied. “But the professor, I believe, said the true meaning of the word. I should say that to complement a good, hard arse-fucking with a ride on the discipline horse, with the cunt paddle attending to her proper training, may perhaps, shall we say, provide an even truer representation.”
I gritted my teeth over the fearful whimper that threatened to burst from my throat. I transmuted it, inside my chest, into a grunt as I defied my guardian’s forceful movements, his inexorable conveyance of my body toward the bench that bore at its far end, I saw to my horror, a sort of mockery of a horse’s head, as if to remind the rider of younger days, of a childhood rocking horse.
My lips pursed, forming a p. The word almost came out—yet another weak please. I didn’t allow it. Instead I raised my tongue, and with a force that I knew betrayed my fear much more than my defiance, I shouted, “No!”
But Gerard had exhausted the strength of my resistance, now. My muscles ached and burned, and though I continued to writhe feebly under his arm as he hauled me across the wooden floor, I couldn’t impede my progress toward the horrid horse any longer.
The bench had fixtures, for the cuffs and belt I wore, and to these my guardian bound me, once he had with distressing ease maneuvered me astride it. The cuffs he fastened to the sides of the horse’s ‘neck,’ such as it was. I twisted my head around, setting my face into a look of scorn for the benefit of Mr. Miniver and Justice Warren, who had shifted to observe me more closely in my new position in the room.
To my horror, they had each taken an implement from the rack close to the chamber’s door: Mr. Miniver had a cane while Justice Warren had taken a wooden paddle of some sort, with holes in the blade that I understood must be to allow the awful thing to travel faster on its journey to a young woman’s bare bottom. I felt my lips move as if to betray my scowl into a pleading, lip-quivering expression, and I turned away with an attempt at a toss of my head. If I could show myself defiant and rebellious for a time, I told myself and my traitorous body, they would never doubt their own prowess in having broken me, and my secret would remain safe.
Meanwhile Gerard saw to my feet. I made no attempt to resist as he placed my feet on the wooden shelves that extended from the lower part of the horse in the guise of stirrups, though my heart quailed at the feeling of him bending my knees and fastening stout leather straps around my ankles. He had placed me fully in the crouched posture of a girl on a rocking horse.
Between my thighs rose the bench, which I understood now had something of the shape of a saddle, to which Gerard had clipped my belt at either side with the assistance of short lengths of metal chain, which clanked softly but menacingly as I moved. Gerard pressed down upon the back of the belt, so that with a startled little cry that I changed into a recalcitrant grunt as it passed my lips, my private part descended firmly onto the leather surface.
I felt instantly how exposed my backside was in this posture, and that understanding nearly made me whimper in fear, as my guardian made the ordeal much worse. He turned a crank at the front of the horse, and the ‘neck’ between my bound wrists descended toward the floor, bending my back and pushing my bottom upward so that I felt how the ‘saddle’ supported only the front of my body’s most tender part. The air moving behind me, over my exposed private lips and even my bottom-hole, made my cheeks burn with shame.
Despite my efforts to remain rigid and silent, the gentlemen’s own silence seemed to force words of resistance from me. I turned to look at them, now standing again as a trio behind me, contemplating the humiliating position into which Gerard had put me. To my horror, my guardian had in his hand the terrible thing I had seen in the painting on the door, the thing he had called a cunt paddle, though the very thought of that name sent a thrill of mortification through my whole body.
“I don’t know what you hope to accomplish,” I said, putting the scowl back on my face. “I don’t know anything. I copied documents and I brought them to the place where you saw me, Mr. Miniver.”
“The most important goal of your presence here, Helena,” my guardian said, “is to begin your reformation by bestowing on you just punishment. Miniver, let us commence. Six strokes of the cane.”
“Wait!” I said, as Mr. Miniver stepped forward in response to this instruction from Gerard, which had taken me completely by surprise. I twisted myself as best I could atop the horse. Its ‘mane,’ made of brown yarn, brushed distractingly against my face as I turned it first one way and then the other, vainly trying to look Mr. Miniver in the eye. I could see to my horror that he had raised the cane in his right hand, putting his left hand behind his back in what seemed like a terribly formal posture, as if he knew the proper etiquette for whipping a naked, disobedient girl.
He had stopped his motion, however, and now I heard him say, “Why, Helena? Is there something you’d like to tell us?”
For a moment I thought I had entirely destroyed my plan: I had shown them clearly that I did indeed have something to tell them, for why else would I say Wait! My mind seemed utterly clouded and unable to reason in my terror of the cane, but then I hit upon a desperate solution. I need only give them something babbling and useless.
“I… I… saw an advertisement!” I blurted. “I sent a letter to an address in the city, and… they… they put a note in my hand… I didn’t see the person…”
“Whip her, Miniver,” Gerard said coldly. “Helena, it is of the utmost importance that you understand that with your compliance you will only soften your punishment. You will not avoid it.”
“Oh, heavens,” I cried, and then I swallowed hard and regained possession of myself, so that I could look back at my guardian again with a modicum of defiance.
“You are a vexing creature, Helena Breverton,” said Justice Warren, “despite the heavenly tightness of your anus. I’m sure your guardian won’t object to me informing you that the six strokes will not begin until you do as you have been told several times, and face the wall while you are having your bottom whipped.”
The conflict among my mind and my body and my heart grew into a storm in my chest. My muscles won the battle of that moment, for though I wished to turn my face slowly and scornfully, the fear that thrilled through all my limbs at the simple notion of having to take extra cuts of the cane made me move with alacrity that must have shown the gentlemen my fear. With my heart thudding audibly in my ears I gripped the ‘neck’ of the horse, my whole body tensing though I knew from my painful experience so far that the tension would only increase the pain.
“There,” said the magistrate. “Now cane that naughty backside well, Miniver.”