The Housemistress

The Housemistress

By

Keira Michelle Telford

www.venaticpress.com

Copyright © Keira Michelle Telford 2014

Venatic Press

All Rights Reserved

Cover image copyright

Aleshyn Andrei/Shutterstock.com

Featuring the public domain lyrics of

Quant l’aura doussa s’amarzis
(When the sweet air turns bitter)

Credited to Cercamon, a twelfth century troubadour, circa 1140

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination, or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

www.venaticpress.com

Special Thanks

to

Mick Addleton

Anthony Boussetta

“What you call sin, I call the great spirit of love, which takes a thousand forms.”

— Elisabeth von Bernburg, from the film
Mädchen in Uniform
(1931)

(adapted from the book
Das Mädchen Manuela
, written by Christa Winsloe)

CHAPTER ONE

Larkhill Boarding School smells like plasticine. At least, the main foyer does. Sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair outside the Headmistress’s office, seventeen-year-old schoolgirl Rylie Harcourt taps the toes of her polished leather shoes against the tiled floor, wondering how much longer this is going to take.

Her parents are inside the office with the Headmistress, finalizing her admission, and she can hear every word they’re saying about her. Why they bothered sending her out of the room in the first place is a complete mystery.

“We thought the discipline of a boarding school might be good for her,” she hears her mother say with a heavy sigh. “It certainly can’t hurt.”

That’s parent code for: We’ve tried everything, and we don’t know what to do with her anymore, so now you can have a go.

It’s par for the course as far as Rylie’s concerned, and she hadn’t been in the least bit surprised when the threat of boarding school was first mentioned. After all, they did the same thing to the family dog.

Wingles wouldn’t stop humping the sofa cushions, so they sent him to a boarding and training facility called The Dog House. He was kept there until he started behaving in a more socially acceptable manner, then he was shipped back home, a reformed pooch.

Poor Wingles. His spirit was irreparably crushed.

Sliding her hips forward in the chair, Rylie leans her head back and stares at the ornate ceiling. Plaster reliefs frame a large chandelier at the center, mimicking floral vines spreading outward and creeping down the walls. It all seems overly fancy just for the sake of being so, which is in keeping with pretty much everything else she’s seen since her arrival forty minutes ago, starting with the large and totally pointless marble statue of the school’s founder at the head of the driveway, the Larkhill motto inscribed on its base: Virtutem Et Musas.

Virtue and Learning.

The main school building itself is a sprawling Jacobean mansion with numerous additions added over the many decades since it became a privately run educational institution. This place is posh—as you’d expect for a private boarding school in Cambridge—and for Rylie’s parents, that’s even more important than the school’s impressive exam scores and outstanding Ofsted inspection reports.

As time drones on, the
tête-à-tête
between her parents and the Headmistress continues, and the doublespeak abounds. When questioned as to why they felt the need for such an abrupt mid-term transfer instead of waiting for the new school term to begin, her parents reply simply: “She had some difficulty with a teacher.”

Translation: She’s disobedient, unruly, and insubordinate.

Upon being quizzed about their decision to enroll their only child in boarding school rather than moving her to another private day school, they say: “We thought the experience might be able to teach her a bit of responsibility.”

Translation: We want her to grow up.

On their selection of Larkhill Boarding School in particular: “She needs a strict routine and some discipline.”

Translation: We blame ourselves for her wayward behavior. We’ve indulged her far too much, and what she really needs is a good spanking.

Expounding on that: “She has fanciful ideas, shows no respect for the feelings of others, and needs to be given a healthy dose of reality.”

Translation: She’s displayed some lesbian tendencies, which we find deeply shameful, and she needs to be straightened out—in every sense.

Rylie’s not quite sure how they think they’re going to achieve that by sending her to an all-girls school, but she’s definitely not complaining. She is sick of listening to them slander her, however, so she gets up and meanders around the foyer, killing time.

What started as a light drizzle an hour ago is now a downpour beating down outside. The full length glass doors at the main entrance offer an unbroken view of the school’s lacrosse field to the right—large puddles already forming in the turf—and covered tennis, badminton, basketball, and volleyball courts to the left.

Catching her reflection in a mirror hanging on the wall beneath a large sign that reads ‘Are you presentable?’, Rylie ponders the pros and cons of her new uniform. The slip-on leather shoes are the same ones she wore at her old school—no change there. The knee high socks are almost identical, too, except these are black and her old ones were white. The pleated, plain black A-line skirt is a few inches longer than she’d like; it comes down to her knees. The white shirt is starchy and stiff, the top button undone; she feels like a rebel.

Her blue and gold tie hangs a little loose, which she’ll probably get in trouble for, but she prefers it that way. Having something close against her neck makes her feel as though she’s choking, and she hates that the tie is a compulsory part of the uniform. At least the colors are a vast improvement over her old school, which was a shade of orange so bright it almost fluoresced. It was the color of puréed carrots, but they called it tangerine. Either way, it was vile.

The worst part about this new uniform is undoubtedly the navy blue cardigan. When she first heard there was an option to wear a cardigan instead of a blazer, she thought that would be liberating. The blazer at her old school was heavy and thick, weighing her down and restricting her movement, but this cardigan does something far worse: it masks her boobs.

They’re not that big to begin with, and now they’re almost invisible. Perhaps that’s the point of it, she thinks. The longer skirts, the flat shoes, and the potato sack cardigans are all designed to make the students look less sexually appealing to one another. Ugh. Now she’s going to have to put more effort into her hair.

She drags her fingers from crown to tip, teasing out the tangles in her long, naturally blonde, wavy locks. Did she remember to brush it this morning? She hasn’t the foggiest. To add insult to injury, makeup is strictly forbidden. She’d been permitted to keep on a subtle shade of pink lip gloss, but was forced to remove everything else. Never before has she felt so grateful for having a smooth complexion. Her only real complaint is that her pale blue eyes seem somewhat lost on her face without any mascara or eyeliner to make them stand out.

Bugger it.

She pivots away from the mirror, looking for something better to do than pick faults with herself, and a large notice board by the main doors is the first thing to draw her attention. It’s chock-full of flyers for all sorts of different after-class clubs, but the sign-ups closed weeks ago. She’ll have to wait until next term to start doing Pilates, or learn how to fly a kite like a champ, or take up wrestling, and the music group isn’t going to be taking on any new members until after the summer.

Fortunately, things start to look better when she hears the clippety-clop of high heels and turns to see a woman skip up the steps to the front doors, sheltered from the rain by a large royal blue umbrella bearing the school crest. As she reaches the top of the steps, protected by the overhang of the building, she turns her back to the doors and shakes off her umbrella, trying to close it up without dropping a bundle of books she’s carrying in her arms. At the same time, she backs into one of the glass doors, pushing on it with her bum, her cheeks pressed up against it, trying to open it without the use of her hands.

After a few seconds of watching her struggle, Rylie makes a move to help, but the brief hesitation costs her and someone else gets there first. The girl—uniformed, her hair matted from the rain, her clothes damp—runs up out of nowhere, her timing perfect. She takes the umbrella from the woman’s hands, buttons it, then holds open the door.