The Bottom Line (13 page)

Thwaite then departed again in search of Lucinda, the daughter of some eighteen years whose forthright instruction had provoked the crisis. Holwick was also about to depart but Lady Romaldkirk motioned him to wait, which he did, standing tall and somewhat aloof in front of the fireplace. He did not have long to wait.

Thwaite arrived for the third time, preceded into the room by Lucinda, whose face betrayed a mixture of cockiness and concern. On seeing Holwick already in position she sensed the reason for the summons.

‘Oh dear,' she said, ‘has Lurch been telling tales out of school?'

‘I should advise you, Lucinda,' said her mother, ‘to adopt a more respectful tone when you are speaking to, or about, Holwick. It is precisely because of your colourful language that I have been obliged to send for you.'

‘Oh, come on, mummy,' she said, in a tone that indicated a mixture of surprise and affection, ‘he surely didn't take it seriously.'

‘Lucinda,' her mother responded, ‘this is not the first time that I have been aware of your habit of addressing the servants in tones which are discourteous in the extreme, and I will not have it. We are very fortunate in our staff and I will not risk losing them because my daughter prefers the language and manners of the stables to those of her upbringing. You will apologise immediately to Holwick and you will ask him how you may make amends for your unseemly behaviour.'

‘Of course I won't apologise to him,' Lucinda retorted. ‘He's only being a stuffed shirt and it will all blow over in a day or two.'

‘Very well then,' Lady Romaldkirk continued. ‘I am disappointed but not surprised. That is exactly what I thought you would say. You leave me no alternative but to teach you a very sharp lesson.'

‘Oh really, mummy,' said Lucinda. ‘I'm eighteen. I'm legally an adult. What on earth do you think you can threaten me with now? You're not going to ground me, are you?'

‘No,' replied Lady Romaldkirk, ‘I'm not going to ground you. I'm going to give you a good hiding. And what's more, I'm going to do it in front of Holwick so he can see exactly what I think of the daughter who treats him so disgracefully.'

There were three simultaneous responses. Thwaite began to intercede on Lucinda's behalf; Holwick attempted to say that he couldn't possibly be present while Lucinda was corrected; and Lucinda told her mother precisely what she thought of the proposed punishment.

‘A good hiding? Mummy, you haven't laid a finger on me since I was about twelve. I thought I grew out of spankings when I started... well, you know.'

‘I thought so, too,' came the reply, ‘but it seems that nothing else is likely to persuade you to behave more respectfully. There will be no arguments. Now go behind that screen,' she pointed to a large embroidered screen in one corner of the blue drawing room, ‘and remove whatever garments you have on underneath that skirt. I'll spare you the embarrassment of being stripped in front of Holwick.'

Holwick again tried to negotiate his withdrawal from the scene that seemed likely to follow, but for the second time his protest was drowned by Lucinda's protest.

‘Mummy, you can't mean to give me a bare-bottom spanking. Not in front of Holwick. I'm a grown woman. Spare my blushes, please.'

But Lady Romaldkirk was having none of it. ‘It's precisely in order not to spare your blushes that you will be punished in public,' she told her daughter. ‘Holwick may not like it any more than you do, but he has a right to see that you can't get away with your outrageous behaviour. And since you mention of it, of course it will be on your bare bottom, like it always was when you were little. What other way is there? Anything else would be like washing one's feet with socks on. You won't embarrass me, I can assure you.'

Again it was Thwaite who tried to intercede, but Lady Romaldkirk was resolute and the fact that Lucinda's face was now white indicated clearly that she knew, as she had known all her life, that arguing with her mother was a waste of time. Better by far, she thought, to get the pain and humiliation over with. It surely was something she could stand at her age. And although Holwick had never seen her naked, as far as she knew, Thwaite, who was her personal dresser as well as being housekeeper to the household, frequently did and took no apparent interest in the sight. Lucinda moved resignedly towards the screen.

Final attempts by Thwaite to argue in favour of a less serious sentence, and by Holwick to seek permission to absent himself from the scene, were both resisted, and it was a meek-looking Lucinda who emerged from behind the screen, ostensibly dressed as she had been a few moments earlier. Her mother had moved to the centre of the couch, the hairbrush concealed for the moment.

‘Come and lie across my lap, Lucinda,' she instructed her daughter, who did as she was told. Lady Romaldkirk raised Lucinda's skirt above her waist to expose the deliciously round and pale buttocks of the teenage girl. Holding her daughter in position by pressing down with her left hand in the small of Lucinda's back, she administered several sharp slaps and then paused.

‘Listen very carefully, Lucinda,' she said. ‘This will be a far more severe punishment than you have ever received before. It is going to hurt you very considerably and you will probably feel some pain for several days. You may wriggle and scream as much as you like, but if you attempt to break loose or in any way to prevent me from further punishing you, then Thwaite and Holwick will not merely be spectators, they will be instrumental in holding you down. Just for the avoidance of any doubt, I am going to give you two dozen strokes with my hairbrush and, when I've finished, I shall then instruct you on the further steps which will be taken to ensure that Holwick remains with us.'

There followed, almost immediately, the first two strokes of the hairbrush, one on each cheek. Each stroke, though not particularly severe, produced a yelp and wriggle from Lucinda, but otherwise the errant daughter remained in position and seemed disposed to accept her punishment. The third stroke however, on the left buttock, was considerably harder, the result being that the yelp and wriggle were replaced by a shriek and jerk but, before any further reaction was possible, the fourth stroke followed, equally hard but on the other cheek.

This time the shriek was louder, and Lucinda broke free from her mother's grip and pushed herself upright, her skirt falling about her knees as she did. ‘Mummy,' she gasped through heaving sobs, ‘you can't do this to me. I can't take another twenty strokes. I'll be black and blue. Please, please let me go now and I'll apologise to Holwick.'

‘I'm afraid it's too late for apologies, Lucinda,' her mother told her. ‘If I let you off now it will only be a matter of time before you behave just as badly again and then I really shall face the loss of Thwaite and Holwick. Making sure you suffer enough to behave better in future seems to me a small price to pay for keeping our very loyal staff.'

Lucinda looked imploringly at her mother, then turned towards Holwick, who remained totally impassive, before finally turning to Thwaite in the hope that her closest confidante among the staff might intercede on her behalf, but all to no avail.

‘Come on, Lucinda,' her mother told her. ‘At least you knew how to take your punishment when you were younger. Now, are you going to lie across my knees again or do I have to ask Holwick to hold you down?'

Still sobbing and clutching her smarting bottom with both hands Lucinda moved back towards her mother, sniffed, moved her hands away and knelt across her mother's lap before lowering herself into the punishment position and allowing her skirt to be hitched up again.

Although she must now have known exactly what to expect, the next four strokes of the hairbrush seemed to take her by surprise, so that her squeals were no less piercing than her initial ones had been, but conquering the initial impulse to strive for freedom after each fresh blow, she remained in position without the intervention of Holwick.

Her bottom was already colouring dramatically, a general suffusion of dark red punctuated by a bluish-purple mark at each point where the brush had landed. If Thwaite thought, as she probably did, heaven help the poor child who was only a third of the way through her beating, she said nothing. She watched instead as Lucinda moved her hands so that, rather than have them simply rest on the cushions of the settee, she was now gripping the arm as tightly as she could.

Another four strokes followed, carefully targeted so that they fell slightly above or below the previous ones, and each produced the same reaction from Lucinda, whose shrieks were now less staccato than at first, since they merely punctuated her unending sobs. There was another pause during which the coloured area could be seen to have widened and the purpling deepened.

The next four seemed to fill in the gaps, as though Lady Romaldkirk was intent upon creating some semblance of a pattern, which she probably was to the extent of completing the coverage. If the protestations were slightly less pronounced and the jerks and lunges slightly less violent, it was probable that Lucinda had, by now, accepted the inevitably of what was happening to her and, while nothing in her upbringing had inured her against withstanding such a level of pain, she had at least acquired a sufficient measure of stoicism to hold herself in check.

Eight strokes to go, and Lady Romaldkirk seemed to wait even longer before launching the next salvo of four, but there was no lessening of their severity when they did come and this time, falling as they were now bound to, upon the bruises inflicted earlier in the proceedings, they produced a reaction from Lucinda as heartrending as anything seen or heard before.

In contrast the last four strokes, which Lady Romaldkirk directed quite deliberately toward the centre of operations, produced a far less dramatic effect. Thwaite probably thought to herself that Lucinda was quite numb by now and incapable of experiencing the same level of pain to which she had been subjected earlier. Her bottom had two broad and mulberry-coloured patches through which the darker bruises were showing ever more clearly. It seemed likely that sitting down would be very uncomfortable for some days to come, as the bruises yellowed and intensified.

Oddly enough, with the twenty-four strokes completed, Lucinda did not move. She lay there semi-inert, her grip on the arm of the settee loosened, her sobs subsiding to a low moan. Thwaite moved forward as though to help her, but Lady Romaldkirk motioned her to stay where she was, and herself helped Lucinda to revert to a kneeling position, pulling her skirt down as she did so, and finally to stand bemused, her hands on her bottom and looking towards her mother.

‘I hope I never again have to do anything like that, Lucinda,' her mother said to her. ‘I found it deeply disquieting.'

She paused, and Lucinda muttered something inaudible but apparent conciliatory as she awaited further instructions.

‘Now,' said Lady Romaldkirk, ‘let's see. It's four o'clock now. Thwaite, you may take Lucinda back to her room and see to her. Lucinda, I shall have something sent up to you early this evening, since you clearly won't be coming down to dinner. What you do in the meantime is entirely up to you, but you will not leave your room before nine o'clock, at which time you will report to Holwick and make your formal apologies. Should Holwick feel that you are not sufficiently penitent, you will listen very carefully to whatever he says. Do I make myself clear?'

Lucinda nodded ruefully, whereupon her mother indicated that she might withdraw, and not looking at Holwick or even at Thwaite, she turned slowly and walked out of the drawing room. Holwick remained where he was but Thwaite, at a slight signal from Lady Romaldkirk, also turned and left the room.

Undecided at first whether to follow Lucinda or not, Thwaite decided to wait for some time before going to visit her former charge. It was half an hour before she finally went up to Lucinda's room and knocked gently upon the door.

‘Who is it?' came a faint response. Thwaite identified herself and was told that she could enter. Lucinda was lying facedown upon her bed, the lower part of her body naked and her legs spread wide. Even after Thwaite had ceased supervising her bath at the onset of puberty, Lucinda had never bothered about her state of undress when the woman was with her, but never before had she so deliberately exposed herself to scrutiny.

Her bottom had retained the overall mulberry shade but the general colour was darkened in several places by bruises, while in one or two places there were raised weals where the edge of the hairbrush had caught her an unusually sharp blow, perhaps more than one in the same place. It seemed likely to Thwaite that the bruises would be there for several days to come, and that the accompanying discomfort would never be far away.

‘Come on, Miss Lucy,' Thwaite said to her, reverting to the mode of address she'd been used to using in the nursery days. ‘I'm sure it hurts but you shouldn't really be lying like that. Suppose it had been somebody else and not me.'

‘Oh don't be silly, Thwaite,' came the sharp rejoinder. ‘Who else could it have been? I shan't see mummy again before tomorrow and Holwick's hardly likely to come and see how I am, seeing that it's his fault I got beaten.'

If Thwaite had even thought of intervening on her husband's behalf, such thoughts would have disappeared quickly as Lucinda continued. ‘It's the pain, Thwaite,' she moaned to her. ‘I can't think of anything else it hurts so much. That's why I'm lying here like this, to get some air on it.'