When she kicked up her legs at the continuing pain, he pushed them down and admonished her to keep them still. “You’ve no right to resist this strapping,” he said. “You earned every stroke. Keep your legs down and your hands flat on the desk.”
He had long since surpassed the number of licks he’d given Minette. Josephine supposed that was only fair. In fact, she was being punished for wronging him
and
hurting Minette, who might not even remain her friend after this. She felt so guilty and so bleak, and each relentless blow brought more hot tears to her eyes. She began to weep, all her begging and whining replaced with pure, miserable devastation.
She spread her palms against the desk, her body wracked with shuddering sobs. The strokes were not increasing in intensity…they were only so steady and so unending, each one a hotly blooming pain upon her right cheek or left cheek, or both cheeks at once, or the sensitive skin at the apex of her thighs. Her entire backside burned with a throbbing, aching fire. “Oh, please,” she cried out between blubbering sobs and hiccups. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. Please!”
His palm moved higher on her back, holding her still as her body instinctively tried to push up and escape the unending torture. The pause between blows lengthened, each crack resonating with greater force so her entire body shuddered at the pain. Tears coated her cheeks, running into her mouth as she screamed out at each stroke.
Whap! Whap!
She gasped, making frantic, pleading sounds, waiting for the next one.
Whap!
She couldn’t bear much more. She sobbed so hysterically she could barely catch her breath.
Whap!
That one was the hardest blow yet. The sting spread out, radiating down her thighs and into her middle. She went limp against the desk, her fisted hands opening and then clenching again beside her head. She screwed her eyes shut. She couldn’t bear any more, she
couldn’t
.
But no more blows came. She heard him set the strap on the desk. “Stay right where you are,” he said. “Don’t move.”
She lay still, wrung out and drowning in tears. Was there to be more? Was he only having a break? But he didn’t take up the strap again, or spank her with his hand, or touch her anywhere except for the place he held her down. She gulped in air, trembling beneath the carefully exacted pressure of his palm at her back. Her bottom felt swollen beyond its normal size, throbbing and pulsing so badly she thought it might burst into flames.
At last he removed his palm, but he wouldn’t let her stand. “You shall remain in this position a few more minutes, and think about whether you wish for such a punishment again.”
“I don’t,” she sobbed. “I know I don’t.”
“Still, think about it. It’s important, Josephine. If you haven’t learned anything from this, I’ll have to punish you even more harshly next time.”
A ragged cry escaped her lips. A harsher punishment than this one?
He walked across the study while she lay there. He poured some brandy from a decanter, then returned to pick up the strap and stow it in one of his lower desk drawers. Through all this, she remained with her bottom in the air, skirts bunched around her ears. It was a different kind of punishment, to be stung with shame rather than hot, sharp pain. She wiped at her tears until her cheeks were dry, and closed her eyes.
After fifteen minutes or so, he came to her and rubbed a hand across her exposed bottom cheeks. They still ached, but it was less hot throbbiness and more a deep, nagging discomfort that reminded her she’d just been thoroughly strapped. He lifted her from the desktop, steadying her when she swayed on her feet. Her skirts fell down over her punished backside, both a comfort and added torment as the petticoats scratched at her sensitive skin.
“Now,” he said, gazing into her eyes. “You are going to tell me everything that troubles you. Everything.” His grip tightened on her arm. “You are to leave nothing out.”
“It’s just… The ball…” she said miserably.
“No, it’s more than that. Something greater is at work here.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Go and sit,” he said, indicating a chair near the fireplace. “I’m going to ring for tea while you compose your thoughts, and then we’re going to have a very frank discussion, during which you will explain to me the source of your distress and fears.”
When she didn’t move, he guided her to the assigned chair and settled her into it. She winced as her freshly-punished bottom came in contact with the firm seat. She had endured the punishment to avoid this very outcome, the telling of her secrets, the baring of her soul. Lord Warren’s servants were too quick with the tea, so a tray arrived while Josephine was still trying to think of a means of escape, or some falsehoods she could tell to satisfy him.
He brought her a cup balanced atop a saucer, fine Warren china with ivory trim, as if he hadn’t just had her in screaming agony. She was sure her face was encrusted with tear trails, and her hair a mussed-up disaster upon her head. He sat across from her with his own cup and gave her a look as if to say, “Talk.”
And to Josephine’s utter surprise, she did.
“I dream about tigers,” she said.
Lord Warren added more sugar to his tea. “Why do you dream about tigers? Did you see them on your travels? I confess I’ve only seen them at various zoological displays.”
His tone was so mild, so conversational, that Josephine continued in a halting voice, relating a story she’d never meant to tell anyone.
“When I was young, we traveled in India a lot. There were English people there, but my parents avoided them, staying away from the colonies and setting up households in the native areas. I always had an
ayah
, a native girl, a nursemaid or minder to look after me so my parents wouldn’t be bothered. They had never really wanted a child.”
Her throat closed up at the pain of that revelation, which she had known from her earliest age to be true.
In the lengthening silence, Warren asked in that same mild and guiding voice, “Did your parents abuse you?”
“No. They never raised a hand or voice to me, except to tell me to go away. They ignored me and left me in other people’s care. I think they always assumed a fever would take me, or that I wouldn’t survive the places we went to. They never tried to protect me.”
“But you thrived nonetheless,” he said with a slight tilt to his lips. “You were speaking of India, and your…i-yah?”
“
Ayah.
I don’t even remember this one’s name, but she didn’t look after me properly and one day I wandered off. I don’t remember this. I was told about it later.”
“You do have a way of wandering off.” He said it so drily she almost smiled. He, however, looked sober. “What happened?”
Josephine stared hard at the arm of the chair. “When it got dark and my parents realized I wasn’t at home, and that my
ayah
didn’t know where I was, they told all the servants to go looking. I was found…” Her voice faltered. “I was found in a clearing near a river bank, in the company of a…a tiger.”
His brows rose. “How terrifying. What did the servants do?”
“They tried to scare the animal away. It paced back and forth by the water, they said, as if it did not wish me to toddle into the currents. When they screamed and threatened it with torches, it finally bounded off.”
“Amazing.” He watched her expectantly. Of course there was more to the story, to the tragic arc of her life.
“The servants checked me over for bite marks or scratches, and finding none, they took me home to my parents. From then on, the natives called me
baga lika
in their dialect. It meant
tiger girl
or
tiger child
.”
“I expect they admired you very much.”
She shivered, so her cup rattled on her saucer. “No. They feared tigers, and they especially feared anything unexplainable. They believed, from what they saw, that I could commune with the tigers, that in fact I was half-tiger, and all the villagers regarded me with suspicion. Few of them would work in my parents’ house after that. They believed my parents must be powerful sorcerers to give birth to a half-animal child. I suppose my wild tantrums and dirty, neglected appearance did nothing to dissuade them. My hair was very much the color of a tiger’s coat at that time, and my eye color…” She glanced up at him with her golden, striated, feline-amber gaze. “In the end my parents were forced to leave that village. I only learned about this later. They taunted me with the story, when they wanted to show me how troublesome I was.”
“Oh, Josephine,” he said. “I see now why you hated them.”
“I’m the reason they died.” She bit down on her lip, but she couldn’t stay the rush of tears. Lord Warren put down his cup and saucer and came to her, and took her cup when her nerveless fingers threatened to drop it.
“I’m sure that can’t be true,” he said in a brisk voice, as if he could take this unalterable fact and discipline it to some other reality just as he disciplined her. He knelt before her, his features grim. “If people told you that… If they led you to believe that, they only meant to lie to you and hurt you. Lord Baxter said it was robbers.”
“That’s the story, but that’s not what really happened.” She drew in a stuttering breath. “You see, we had been away from India for some time, traveling in the Sub-Sahara. All the while, the tale of the English couple with their
baga lika
had been passed from mouth to mouth so that when we finally returned to India, all the natives seemed to know it, even though we went to a different region and a different village. Again, my parents couldn’t find servants for the house. I had to go into the village whenever we needed food or supplies, since we had no help, and my parents were incapable.”
“Incapable?”
“They’d become addicted to a number of medicinal substances in their travels. They had become very sick.”
“Why didn’t you go for help?” he asked. “Were there no English nearby to assist you?”
“If I had gone for help, what would have become of my parents? I was afraid to approach the English, or bring them to the house. I didn’t… I didn’t want them to see…” Her face screwed up with tears. She’d shed so many tears back then, tears of shame and loneliness. Tears poured out of her now like one of the Indian monsoons. Lord Warren produced a square of linen from his coat and dabbed at her cheeks.
“I knew enough of Englishness and manners to know we were peculiar,” she sobbed. “I knew we weren’t quality people, no matter what my mother claimed. I didn’t dare socialize among the English, and when I went into the village, people avoided me or looked at me like I was a ghastly thing. When I tried to buy meat and vegetables for our house, some of the sellers would turn away and mutter spells of protection. This went on an entire year, and then…”
She took the handkerchief away from him and mopped her own cheeks. She had already told him enough, but she found she had to tell the whole story now, the violent, vile ending that festered inside her and haunted her dreams. “The following spring, bad things started to happen. Livestock died without reason, and insects swarmed and ruined the villagers’ gardens and crops. It didn’t rain for weeks on end, and the sun baked the land and dried the rivers and streams. The tigers came down from the hills in search of food and water, frightening the people in the village. One afternoon, a tiger attacked a young child and killed her. That night…”
She buried her face in the linen handkerchief. It smelled like him, like sandalwood and freshly pressed clothing. “That night, the villagers stormed our house, screaming of evil and sorcery and the
baga lika
. I ran away. I hid in the woods.” That was all she could say. She couldn’t speak of the screams and the fire, and that she had left her intoxicated parents behind.
“Of course you ran away,” he said, pulling her into his arms. She rested her head on his shoulder, sobbing into the fabric of his coat. “Of course you did. You had to. No one could blame you for that.”
“But…” She choked out another sob. “I blamed myself. It was my fault the natives came to the house. I ran through the forest in the dark until I reached the English houses and even then I was afraid to speak to them. But I was more afraid of another tiger finding me, or the villagers. So I went and knocked on a door and told the English that my parents had been attacked. They went to the house and found my parents, and arranged for them to be buried, and treated me with such kindness, but I never told them the rest, that it was my fault.”
“Josephine.” His voice sounded pained. “Don’t say that it was your fault. You can’t believe that. The tiger wasn’t your fault, and your parents made horrible choices. It’s a miracle you’re alive, and they… Well, in my opinion, they are better off dead.” He leaned back, brushing fingertips across her cheek. “Were you going to keep these wretched memories inside you forever? Why didn’t you tell me before now?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want to punish you again for keeping it from me, all your pain and suffering.”
She stiffened, her eyes going wide. “Please, I beg you, no more.”
He gathered her closer. “Of course I won’t punish you, but you ought to have told me this sooner. I wouldn’t have been so hard on you. I understand now why you’re so afraid of society’s judgment. Why you wish to be left alone. People haven’t been very kind to you.” He gave a great sigh. “Including me. I’m sorry. I couldn’t have imagined such a tragic history, not in a thousand years.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you. And now, with this ball, and your expectations… I’m so afraid.” He massaged her nape as she broke into another barrage of tears. Letting the story out from the dark angst of her soul had been almost as painful as living through it.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” he said. “We don’t kill people here for being different. We don’t believe fantastical tales about tiger children and sorcery.”
“It’s not that. It’s the feeling of scrutiny, and disapproval, and having to endure it over and over again.”
At some point in her crying breakdown, he had lifted her and settled her in his lap. He tilted up her chin so she had to face him. “You won’t need to endure scrutiny and disapproval if you’d only make an effort to go about in society as you deserve. You’re a titled, intelligent woman. I know you’re afraid, and expect the worst, but no one knows you’re that tiger-child, Josephine. No one but you.”