Given to the Club by Emily Tilton
Chapter 6
Helena
“Helena Breverton,” my guardian said, placing his hand back on my bottom, “it seems you have been a good deal naughtier than I thought you capable of.”
I felt my brow furrow against the roughness of the carpet, and my chin worked hard; another, even greater surge of gratitude rose in my bosom that he could not see my face. If he had caught a glimpse of the mingling of need, fear, and guilt that I felt certain beamed from my eyes, I knew Professor Simmons would instantly have detected the terrible truth of whatever the minister had told him.
My face remained pressed against the floor, however, and I had the wild hope that I could yet extract myself from this danger. If I could only prevail upon my guardian to let me go from his rooms, I could perhaps vanish into the outskirts of the city, where I had often heard my father say the off-worlders permitted to remain on Prosperia lived. I didn’t know what I would do if I reached an off-worlder, of course, but surely they would aid me, a refugee from my oppressive culture?
“Sir,” I said, with all the dignity a naked girl prostrate on a gentleman’s floor with her backside in the air could muster, “I have no idea what you mean.” My hope of escape drove my mental processes now, and my mind seemed to come back under my control at least for the moment. I saw a thread of falsehood, and I began to weave it into a tissue of lies. “I meant to use your dataport to see how our enforcement services were doing in cleaning up the terrible scourge of treason that my father—and Mr. Jacob Miniver—have told me about.”
Yes, I thought. That’s it. Mr. Jacob Miniver was one of the three suitors my guardian himself had chosen, a man from his gentleman’s club. My face grew hot for an instant as I remembered what the professor had said into his handheld about that club, but Mr. Miniver’s membership in it held nothing of importance to my present attempt to invoke his name.
Mr. Miniver, despite his brooding good looks and golden locks, had not impressed me in the slightest, but he worked at the Ministry of Law and he had indeed spoken, in a vague way, of the same troubles on Prosperia my father had often mentioned. I did not, of course, mention to Professor Simmons my own consciousness of being an important part of those troubles, as what amounted to a Vionian spy.
I had never truly thought of myself as serving my world’s enemies. As an intelligent young woman, however, I had certainly understood that the documents I stole would help the other side in the war.
That war in the end had lasted mere weeks. In the month leading up to it, and once during the brief period in which everyone on Prosperia knew that hostilities had commenced twenty lightyears away in the Magisterian expanse, I had delivered a grand total of three sets of printouts to the dead drop appointed in the note pressed into my hand, from behind, in a crowded shopping center.
Refuse barrel Little Houghton Street, under lid. Destroy this note.
It all flashed into my mind, there in my guardian’s study, still in my humiliating posture. I knew my guardian would see it, or at least some small indication of my guilty thoughts, in my face, and so, feeling a sudden surge of pride in my newfound cleverness, I attempted to rise, struggling against his strong grip.
I had known what his response would be, and he did not disappoint me: he pressed me more firmly to the floor, so that my guilty face remained safe from his dark, discerning eyes.
“Stay where you are, Helena,” the professor growled. “You are not to move until I instruct you to do so.”
“I demand,” I said, in a sob that I rendered as piteous as I could, “to be allowed to go home and consult with my father about this matter. I merely wished to see what had happened in our world’s efforts…”
Theatrically, I choked back another sob, using the feeling of my nakedness and the slight roughness of the carpet to motivate my performance.
“Our world’s efforts… I clicked the wrong… the wrong…”
I felt my guardian’s hands relax a little on my back. I let out a plaintive wail.
“Mr. Miniver…” I gasped, remembering another girl’s hysterical fit in school at the news that war had come to our great civilization and trying to adhere to the memory as an outline for my own flood of feigned tears. I began to think I could face the professor now, so long as I could appear overwrought; that aspect would conceal my guilt, surely, for I had noted in my limited experience that men had great difficulty even looking at a weeping woman.
His hands left me, and I sensed him standing up and withdrawing a pace from me. In order to continue to seem as pitiful as I could, I remained on the floor, turning my head to gaze up at him, confident in the effectiveness of my tear-stained visage.
I expected to see the dawning of sympathy in his eyes, if he could even look me in the face. I hoped even to see shame in his expression, and those piercing eyes turned away from my weeping plea.
To my utter dismay, my guardian looked back at me coldly.
“This fabric of lies would perhaps have worked better, Helena,” he said, his mouth quirking up into a mirthless smile, “if Mr. Jacob Miniver had not followed you to Little Houghton Street yesterday, a street that crosses the one where a certain Miss Viola Hammersmith dwelt, before her arrest.”
My lips parted, my tears suddenly forgotten. “Sir…” I began, but realized I had nothing to say. My heart pounded in my chest as I watched the professor move to his desk and open the terrible drawer where he kept the cane.
“Sir,” I tried again. “Please.”
He did not bring out the cane. My guardian instead produced from the drawer a length of stiff black leather with a wooden handle. Idly he tapped it against his other palm as he walked slowly back around toward me.
With a cry of alarm I tried to rise from the carpet, but as soon as I moved the professor sprang upon me, his left hand on my back to hold me firmly down and his right hand bringing the horrible strap to my bottom with a crack that seemed to fill the little room with its sharpness.
Somewhere inside me, a part of my mind tried to cling to rationality by asking itself whether the thick stitched leather hurt more than the cane. On the whole, at first the strap didn’t seem to inflict quite as much agony, for the sharp, fiery line of the cane, with its terrible promise of a welt one had to look at in the mirror for the next several days, was not present.
The posture, however, in which my guardian held me, seemed a great deal more humiliating even than his securing me over his desk had been. For that reason even those first few lashes with the strap seemed the most awful thing that had ever happened to me. The strap’s flexible surface followed my backside no matter how I tried to escape by weaving to the side or bending my knees to offer him less of my bottom. When I crouched more tightly, the professor didn’t command me to offer my posterior to him but rather growled and kept wordlessly whipping me in his wrath for my treason and my falsehood.
“Please,” I screamed. “Sir, please… I can’t… I can’t bear it!”
For he had given me so many lashes now that my poor bottom felt like he had pressed me into a chair made entirely of thorns. I wouldn’t have the terrible neat lines of the cane, but I would have a network of purple bruises to show the mirror, as I blushed to see the evidence of my lesson from the professor.
He responded to my screaming plea by shifting his left hand’s grip, moving it to my hip so he could pull me close against his legs, almost over his knee like a naughty little girl. To my horror that allowed him to raise my backside back into the posture he had commanded earlier, with my bottom and my private part offered for his discipline.
I could flail with my arms, now, and I did, crying out and trying to find leverage for my hands or perhaps to strike my guardian. To no avail, for he held me tighter and kept whipping my bottom, as if he wished me to understand that what I had done required retribution so fierce and painful that he could be bothered to do nothing but bring the leather to my bare backside.
I went limp, then, for my strength had nearly exhausted itself, and the consciousness of how much trouble I had gotten into broke upon my mind with the fury of the professor’s chastisement.
At last he spoke, and as he told me of my terrible fate he slowed the pace of the whipping, but did not cease it, so that every few words I was made to punctuate his speech with a sobbing cry of agony.
“I keep this strap for naughty girls, Helena. It is meant to punish a young woman as a little girl is punished when she has done something so willful and disobedient that she has lost all title to adulthood. Where you are going now, though, we will make a new, better adult of you, with the help of strict discipline and a new life of service to the men who bestow it on you. You will confess to us all your misdeeds, and if you learn your lesson well you will be allowed to return to your family and to marry one of the men who uses your body for his pleasure.”
He gave me one last lash, low down on my bottom where the strap had already visited my tender flesh so many times. I cried out, my naked body jerking against his serge-covered thigh.
“I don’t understand,” I sobbed, as he held me there, close to him.
“You will understand soon enough,” my guardian replied coldly. “Certainly you have done enough illicit research, it seems, to grasp the general outline of the thing. You have been given to my club for interrogation, correction, and service. Come, it is time to get up and to dress. The doctor will meet us at the clubhouse, to install your governor. Then we will give you some new underthings to wear, and I shall have the pleasure of questioning you and enjoying you first.”
Something in his voice told me that the professor had mixed feelings for all his apparent wrath—that he regretted the necessity under which my treason had laid him. That thought made me shudder, and wrenched another sob from my chest even as he lifted me up and forced me to my feet, cowering before him. He gestured to my clothing on the table.
“Do as I say, Helena,” he said, his voice rough now, as if he tried to conceal the ambivalence I had thought I heard before. “Put on your clothing. I shall call a cab. I hope you don’t need to be reminded of what happens when you disobey me.”
I felt my face crumple and tears spring to my eyes. I had put my hands instinctively in front of my breasts and my pussy, and they trembled violently at his words as I remembered my first visit to this room, and how I had supposed it to be the worst thing that could ever occur. He did not even tell me to take them away, now, and that frightened me even more, because it seemed to indicate that soon enough my guardian would not even have to issue such a command: in the place to which he would take me, in the clubhouse, it would not matter whether I tried to cover myself—or attempted any other means of defense.