The Prussian Girls (2 page)

This was not relieved, for Monika, by the sight of the two mistresses. The one who stood closer back to the fireplace was Fraulein Holz, of whom Monika had inadvertently asked a question, without being addressed, or raising her hand first, that morning. Thus incurring mandatory chastisement. The one in front was much more impressive, however, since she was not in the customary uniform. Fraulein Wedell, as Duty Mistress for the day, did wear the gleaming, creaking thigh-length boots, it was true, but above these what she had on was no more than a most skimpy tunic of spotless white, a heavy Tours silk, caught in at the waist by the usual wide belt but the skirt falling, in a slight flare, over the firm slopes of her hips from which it depended briefly, in suggestive reign, on the tops of her brilliant boots. She had on the chain of office and a golden P was embroidered between her breasts. At thirty-two Fraulein Wedell was a massive beauty with a rather flat face, slumbrous eyes and a mane of brown hair held back in a slide. Under her tense, gourd-like breasts, whose nipples prodded like thumbs at the stuff enclosing them, she bent a long and springy cane, yellow, highly polished and concluding in a knob, at the grasping end. She looked as if she could cane extremely hard, which she could, and enjoy doing it, which she did.

All this had Monika's gaze, fixed straight in front of her like a soldier's, taken in, as well as-to her right-the outlines of a leather-padded vaulting horse. These occasional punishments could be treated in various ways. In this case they had probably decided to take her over the horse. But her thoughts were interrupted from further speculation on her fate.

“Monika Vorst?”

“Yes, Fraulein.”

“You stand accused of speaking to a mistress without permission. Report of Fraulein Holz. What do you plead?”

“Guilty, if you please, Fraulein.”

“Have you anything to say?”

“No.”

“Do you wish to appeal?”

“No.”

This ritual over, Monika waited with bated breath.

How many?

“You will receive eight strokes with the cane.” Eight!

“Thank you, Miss,” she said hastily.

“Strip,” came the command and again hurriedly, as if there were suddenly no time, Monika reached under her tunic and slid her green knickers down and off, leaving them neatly folded on the floor. Then she tightened up her stockings and folded her skirt into her chain-belt. After which she stood to attention again.

The Duty Mistress came forward and for a second inspected her naked front. Monika had a heavy bulging mound adorned with strong curls rather darker than her hair; her vulval lips were pulpy and close-seamed. Evidently satisfied the mistress went behind.

“Lean forward, hands on your knees.”

She palped and pressed the flesh of the young buttocks carefully for a moment. Monika knew she had marks from a previous beating behind and the good Fraulein was feeling the extent of bruise left, if any, in order to see if she should use the same spot again. For maximum pain within the just limits of allotted discipline was a sine qua non of Schloss Rutenberg, as elsewhere in the kingdom.

“Bend over there.” The quiver of willow indicated the horse.

It was a low one and Monika stretched over it in the correct pose-feet astride, her belly on the leather top, which inclined slightly down, her arms in front of her, her hands gripping the wood at the side. She stared ahead at a far wall, on which was a rack of canes in parallel lines. She heard Fraulein Holz come forward, the two exchange some comments, and she heard the Duty Mistress step well back and to one side. Above all, she heard the sudden thumping pace and that tearing of stretched silk which was the noise the cane made as it whirred through the silent air about her, more compelling a sound than any in her memory and, indeed, more frightening than the little dry thuck of its licky impact.

By then it had happened. The limber limb thrashed round her fatted flesh low down, causing her a blaze of excruciating pain. She gasped and clenched her teeth, so as not to cry out. Seven more.

There was a long pause, for these mistresses were expert in the minutiae of physical chastisement, knowing that the feeling of leisurely endlessness was an essential ingredient, and timing their cuts to succeed at the maximum moment of mounted sensation.

Tthhhrrrrrllll-wuck!

Two.

Monika said nothing. She was being thrashed now, and she knew it. She was a privileged member of a master race, a race of gods and goddesses, descended from the mists of old, ancestors of glory, and she put her tongue between her teeth, bidding herself bite through it rather than disgrace her body and cry out. All she uttered were stomach-deep grunts-“Huink!”

Three… four… five… you could get to five or six with one of these light canes, but anything more began to be a problem.

“Lower,” murmured Fraulein Holz, from behind her.

Phrrrrwuppp!

It was a good thrashing and, though low, well spaced-out so that the whole of her bottom stung, hard. Wedell always had a lot of weight in her cuts. If only she'd get these last ones over with quickly. Monika knew just what she looked like from behind-a pair of welted buttocks which, try as she might, could not keep from squeezing and squirming and rolling, the slotted oval of her sex shamelessly on display beneath. She jammed her knees into the woodwork and found that her fingers were scratching at the same in front.

“That one made her jump a bit.”

There was low laughter.

“Anyone would think she wanted it… up her.”

“One of our Emperor's lange Kerle!” Ph-ph-phrrrrrpp!

Monika lost and found her tongue-“Haiee!”

That had hurt very considerably indeed. Oh God, how that beastly cane could sting. She shot out a leg. Christ! Could she hold it for another! She had to… for Brandenburg, for… Prussia. She knew the Praelictor outside would be counting the cuts, which would come to her as thin flicks of air and she wondered if a finger would be under her skirt working up a hungry tongue of gristle in her slit.

Phhhhrrwpppp! Over!

But this was the worst. The pain was at its very worst about thirty seconds afterwards, and lasted so for a full minute; she had to show her control by waiting for Erlaubnis, the ritual word of permission to get up, and then she had not to rub herself after. She tried to freeze herself to the horse, tried to still the seething writhing of her ribbed cheeks in her rear.

“All right.” she heard.

She stood up a trifle unsteadily, clamping hands to her sides to stop them wandering, out of control, made weakly for her knickers, which she shiveringly pulled up. Having frantically tugged down her skirt she approached the Duty Mistress, dropped to one knee, said, “Thank you for punishing my fault, Fraulein,” and kissed the tip of the cane. To her dry lips it seemed somewhat warm. Then she was blundering out.

The Praelictor waiting outside, just under the well-known Duty List, frankly grinned when she saw Monika's writhen lips, and miserably fisted hands at her flanks. Although she was not supposed to speak, she said, “Good caning? I hoped you were going to get ten.”

She started striding back. Monika stumbled into step behind, but was now able to grab her beaten buttocks and knead them beneath her tunic. The Praelictor walked fast, knowing (as knew mewing Monika) that the pain was still mounting nicely in the pair of whipped bottoms and that self-control on re-entering the classroom was going to provide a salutory task of will-power. It was for that one went to places like Schloss Rutenberg, after all.

“Hey, keep in step,” she more than once turned back angrily to declaim.

A good caning? Monika knew it had been. Excellent. Eight sweeping strokes right under her chubbiest parted person, a seething cauldron of purplish weals that made her suddenly pant and stop, squirming, her forehead pressed to the ice-cold wall.

“Please, Gundling. Just a second. Honestly. We-dell cuts so tight.”

“Come on. Or I'll have to report you for Dawdling.”

The Prae was pulling at her tunic when, from an intersection ahead, a mistress appeared. She was young and pretty, with rather mousy hair, and under normal circumstances they would have detected her approach by the jingling of keys at her belt. This mistress as yet wore none. She was new this term and her name was Maria Daunitz, from near Gentin. By chance she had got to know Monika Vorst and came forward, smiling shyly, at the already much embarrassed girls. Stopping in corridors was a caning offense. In some schools you had to run in all passageways.

“Poor Monika. Have you just been caned?”

“Yes, Fraulein,” came the answer, after both girls had curtseyed.

“Let me see.”

The mistress parted skirt and panties and inspected. The weals were thick and hard and hot. Another caning across them could be agonizing, if well applied. Which, at Schloss Rutenberg, it invariably was.

“Hurt a lot?”

“Yes. I was j-just…”

“Well, you'd better be on your way, hadn't you? I know the Head doesn't approve of Dawdling in corridors. Any more than I do.”

She tapped the slabby butt and watched it joggle out of sight, round another turn of the corridor, as Monika followed the martial Prefect. As the latter finally opened the schoolroom door for her charge to enter she, too, smiled. The girl was doing well. It might be interesting to find out one day, one night, if she… and just which dormitory was Vorst in?

“Thanks, Gundling.”

“Just as well it was that new mistress. Or, she'd have had both our hides.”

Red of face and wet of eye, but hands beside her, Monika went up to the Monitress and requested permission to return to Prep. It was granted and, when she resumed her desk, stood at it, as was required of any girl who had just suffered correction. In the total silence of the softly ticking room, every aspect of it proclaimed one thing and one only: I have been caned… I have been well caned across the naked buttocks and it stung like such sheer hell I wished I didn't have any. Eight slow juicy strokes, driving in just above the sulcus until I wanted to scream and squirm but I couldn't. I couldn't, because of my country's honor. At Magdeburg a soldier had just had his ears and nose cut off. Probably been decapitated or shot thereafter, she wasn't sure. What was a trifle of stripes on the seat in comparison? All the same the tip did eat in like fury. She could feel it still.

Across the aisle Barbara Mack saw sidelong the little fatty quivers that shot through that jut of rump. Her eyes were moist and gleaming.

Yes, it was still hurting a very great deal-as each single breast, beating beneath those thin green tunics knew. Monika herself bore no resentment. Such a notion never even got near to her mind. She was happy she had again “come through,” without disgrace, and that was simply that. It had been a routine beating, and thus another ordeal and challenge to rise to. Like an athletic activity, in many ways. She had broken a rule, and reaped the consequences. She admired Wedell for making it so painful, so “tight,” and knew she had got everything out of her eight strokes she could. Once or twice she had been a trifle wild, she had “overhit” perhaps at the end, but by and large it had been a methodical, calculated caning of the type that made you feel corrected through and through. Monika's burning bottom now felt thrice its size, heavy as lead, but she knew corporal punishment achieved its goal. If she made that same mistake again, she'd be more likely to get a dozen. And anyway the worst of the smart was now subsiding nicely, melding into a pervasive heat, and sense of satisfaction at her center. Relaxed and torpid, she stared at Caesar's rank prosaic prose and knew she would have to borrow Barbara's bone thing from her again tonight.

“What I am at a total loss to understand, Fraulein Daunitz,” said the figure standing behind her desk, almost exactly one hour after this scene, “is why you allowed this to happen both so early in the term, and in front of a Prefect. You know our rules by now.”

“Yes, Frau Direktrice.”

She did. As a new mistress, Maria Daunitz had arrived at Schloss Rutenberg three weeks before first classes. She had been thoroughly drilled in the regulations by the permanently resident Matron, a grim woman called Steinkopf, and for five days prior to school opening assigned to one of the younger mistresses, Ingeborg Untermacher. She knew the regimen by heart, had been familiarized with all the tricks of the trade, such as soaping the skin or sitting on stone, on the part of the girls, to try to lessen corporeal sting, as well as devices on the part of their superiors, like leaving off one's key ring in order to move more quietly and catch out offenders.

For such, it seemed, was their relentless and unremitting task at Schloss Rutenberg. No girl was ever to feel free of the suddenly descending Damoclean sword of “tight” chastisement. The mere passage of a mistress, with her thinly dangling switch, ought to, and did, inspire a frisson to ripple the skin of even the Seniors. Nothing was “let off,” nothing allowed to get lax. Finally, each evening for five days Inge had taken her charge to the gymnasium where, under the expert eye of Frau Dick, gym mistress and champion high-diver, Maria had practiced her aim with cane, switch, strap and martinet on a leather-simulated buttock for the purpose. Those had been among the merrier moments of her preparation, while Frau Dick would call an encouraging “Good shot!” or advise more follow-through, and transfer of weight, and grinning Inge would “ouch” and rub her bum. For if in the new Army the officers were more feared than the enemy, at Schloss Rutenberg the motto was that the mistresses should be feared more than fear itself. And the Headmistress, Elizabetha Grumkow, had her name spelt in the souls of several past sinners t-e-r-r-o-r. She had never been known to forgive a single offense. That was why Maria had shivered in her steeple heels when the maid had knocked at her door-“Frau Direktrice would like to see you, Miss.” It was an invitation that boded no good. Nor, she found out soon enough, did it do so in fact.