John Wright - Orphans of Chaos

Now he smiled, and stepped towards me. Since I was pulling against him, the sudden relaxation made me stumble a step or two and I caught myself against the balcony railing.

Headmaster Boggin stepped around me and seated himself on the rail. My elbow was still in his fist, I was pulled half-turned around, not quite facing him.

“In fact, to throw a monster who tries to escape into a dungeon is a good policy, but it is clearly not the right thing to do to a girl who breaks her word and tries to break open a teacher’s head with a rock.”

“What are you going to do?” I said. There was a gleam in his eye. Call it a Grendel gleam, but I have seen it in Colin’s eye, too.

I knew from that gleam what he was going to do. But there are some things that just come out of your mouth, no matter how dumb they sound, whether you want them to or not. The only thing possibly stupider to say in a situation like this is something like, “You wouldn’t dare!”

Boggin looked deeply into my eyes, as if pleased at the uncertainty he saw growing there.

“Miss Windrose, our agreement was not that you would not make me ashamed of you. Our agreement was that you would do nothing to make me regret my decision. I have a terrible headache because someone hit me in the head with a rock. Surely, I am right to regret that?”

I would have had as much chance resisting the force of a wild stallion as I did resisting the strength of his arm.

He pulled me facedown across his knees. The railing he sat on was high, and I could not reach the floorboards with my feet. My hands flailed in midair a moment, and then I grabbed the poles of the railing, which were to my left.

“I must see to it that you regret it, too, and in a fashion which will bring home to you quite forcefully that you are not as old as you think you are.”

I was breathless; a shy feeling was actually sending tremors through me. All my skin trembled with goose pimples as all my little hairs stood up. This made my skin more sensitive; I could feel every nuance of the texture and fabric of my skirt, which suddenly seemed quite flimsy and thin on my bottom. I could feel the air on my exposed upper legs. I could feel the muscles in his legs beneath my stomach.

I said the dumb thing again, “What are you going to do—?!” It did not sound any better the second time around. Higher-pitched. More girlish.

He did not bother answering that, but he held one hand on the small of my back, and waited while I kicked my legs in midair. There was nothing within the range of my feet to get a purchase on.

What was he going to do? I knew what he was going to do.

I cannot say that I did not deserve what was about to happen. That little dark knot of guilt in my stomach I had felt ever since I realized that I had a duty, a duty to Victor, to bonk Boggin with a rock, that knot began to relax into a warm and pleasant fear.

Why pleasant? I cannot explain my emotions. I am not sure where they come from. But, at that moment, I felt a strange combination of fear and gratitude.

Why gratitude? Because I did feel bad about what I had done. Clonking my red-haired savior angel with a rock. This man has raised me from a child my whole life. That has to count for something. Being saved from Grendel Glum counts for something.

This will sound like a paradox, but: if a man too big and too strong for me to resist punished me, I would be relieved of the responsibility of feeling any guilt. There is no guilt after you’ve been punished for it, right? And he is too strong to fight, so even Victor could not expect me to get out of this, right?

When you feel bad, you want to apologize. It’s natural. But you cannot apologize to an enemy in time of war, can you? That is not the way people who are serious about winning a war act.

But what if you were forced to apologize? Even the little imaginary image of Victor I carry around in my head in the spot where other people keep a conscience, even he could not complain that I was not “serious,” because I could always tell him I had been forced. See?

And there was an even darker, naughtier pleasure trembling beneath the fear and confusion in my body. Because I knew this wasn’t a teacher punishing a schoolgirl. This was a man spanking a woman. He certainly would not have done this to any man. And he might not even have done it to Vanity. It was something for me. A bad thing, maybe even a terrible and humiliating thing, but it was mine.

So I said, “You wouldn’t dare!”

“Miss Windrose, I want you to count.” There was a smile in his voice.

I could see the upside-down floor of the bell tower, and through the square gateway formed by his legs, my own legs hanging down into my view. I kicked again, but now he merely reached out and took both my ankles in his grasp. His one hand was large enough that he could close his fingers around both my ankles.

“I don’t want to count.” My voice was clearly trembling now.

His chuckling voice floated down from somewhere above and behind me. “I will, of course, go to a number twice as high, if I must do the work of counting myself, Miss Windrose.”

OK. Maybe I did not feel that guilty after all. I looked over my two options; defiance plus twice the ouch, or nondefiance…?

“Would it help if I said I was sorry?”

“If you actually were sorry, yes, it might. It might help a great deal. I suspect, however, that you are not sorry at all. Nevertheless, despite that, I would like you to say you are sorry before every number you count. I will do twenty full strokes less than I would have done otherwise.”

I was beginning to feel lightheaded. Clearly he intended a number much higher than twenty if knocking off twenty was such a light matter.

“How high am I counting?” My voice, even to my own ears, sounded small, and frail, and faint.

“It is five more than it was before you asked that question.”

After a moment, he said, “Well, Miss Windrose?”

I could not seem to catch my breath or gather my wits. My heart would not stop pounding. Had you ever been upside down on the knee of a man who you looked up to when you were a girl? Not an ugly man, not a weak one. He had that quality Victor called serious. Serious about winning. Serious about overcoming me. Serious about forcing surrender. He was going to win.

I said, quietly, “I’m sorry.”

He put his hand on my bottom. He waited.

I said, quietly, “One…”

No, he wasn’t kidding. Yes, they put me in a jail.

He was not even kidding about the chains. There was an iron collar around my neck, with a heavy lock on one side, a crude iron hinge on the other, and a ring just above my collarbone. A chain led from the neck ring to a staple in the middle of the ceiling, next to the light fixture. The slack of the chain described the radius of my freedom.

Directly below was a cot, fixed to the floor. To one side was the barred window, as promised. To the other, the barred door. Next to the door was a shelf for a food tray. A water bucket rested on the floor beneath. There was a tall, three-legged stool of wood.

The room was a cube of gray blocks. There was a drain in the floor. Oh yes, there was a chamber pot. Let us not forget the chamber pot.

There I lay on my stomach, both hands on my red, red bottom, tears making a little puddle in my gray-green blankets, which stank of starch.

I didn’t hate him. I could not think of him as an enemy. Mean, yes; foe, no.

I do not pretend to understand myself. I don’t know why I think certain things. But the mere fact that he had spanked me made it impossible for me to hate him. Imagine, for example, that Wellington, having routed Napoleon at Waterloo, has the Emperor of France pulled from the saddle of his white horse, dragged before the drumhead court… and told to stand in the corner and go to bed without any supper. Or imagine that Adolf Hitler, instead of committing suicide in his bunker, is hauled in chains before the international war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg… and Prime Minister Churchill tans the hide of his backside with a belt strap, and washes out the mouth of Minister Goebbels with a bar of lye soap.