Ringing the Changes, by Mark Danelaw
The first part: Introduction, can be found here.
Hadley Hall
Lady Josephine Horton-Grange had heard rumours of issues at St Denise but for the moment she had too much else on to worry about it. If it came to it the trustees would call and she would be summoned to a meeting.
No what was concerning her just then were her daughters. Katherine had gone quiet about this business venture of hers, which was not a good sign as her daughter was always quick to crow about success and had been full of it for days after finding a shop.
Now she had the crushing news that her daughter Amelia had been suspended from school again pending permanent exclusion; news that had been delivered in the form of said daughter sheepishly turning up on the doorstep with her luggage.
“Now don’t be cross Mummy, it was only one little joint and I was ever so stressed about getting suspended and…” there was more babble all of it delivered without Amelia making the least eye contact with her mother.
“One little joint? But that is the reason you got into trouble the first time,” Josephine finally interjected, “Anyway what are you doing here, you are supposed to be at school?”
“Well no… I was suspended because of grades and for selling a joint in a catch up class to the other girls who were stress…” she tapered off. Her mother’s face was supressed thunder and Amelia suddenly had an instinct that she might to duck lightening. She took a deep breath and handed her mother the letter.
Josephine tore the missive open and read it so fast her lips could not keep up. “Suspended forthwith pending permanent exclusion,” she read the pertinent part aloud, “You have been expelled,” she exclaimed.
“No it’s not quite settled, they only say exclusion there not…” Amelia came back smartly.
“Amelia,” Josephine snapped her eyes closed and her hands held up in protest, “Be quiet and go to your room.”
Amelia thought to say more but the growing storm had not broken she cut her losses.
Josephine waited for her 18-year-old daughter to complete an eye-roll and then stomp upstairs as if leaning into her immaturity. Then she opened out the letter from the school carefully. Damn the girl for coming home on a Saturday when she presumed the school would be closed, where had she been all night? She rang anyway.
She surprised when the headmistress of Donnington answered almost at once. “Dr Keate…?” Josephine said, “I am glad you caught you…”
“Lady Josephine, I have been expecting your call,” Donnington’s headmistress said dryly.
“I see,” Josephine now feared the worst, “My daughter has only just arrived home…”
“We could not reach you yesterday and Amelia was supposed to stay in her room overnight as we hoped she could be collected this morning,” Dr Keate sighed, “It seems she absented herself and left school under her own power.”
“Now I know she has been a trial, but I don’t suppose… no, I see…” Josephine threw herself into the conversation for some long minutes, but the outcome was definite and final.
She put the phone down and glared at the ceiling in the general direction of her daughter’s room. She wondered if she went up to confront the girl then if she might actually kill her. Months away from her A Levels and a university place and Amelia throws it all away. She took a deep breath and then opened a draw in the 18th century Lincoln hall stand she glanced down at the three brushes. They were each an heirloom and all had played a significant role in her own upbringing. She picked up the middle-sized one, a black oval wooden affair and patted it against her palm. Then striding out Josephine made her way upstairs to her daughter’s room..
Amelia was sprawled on her bed reading a magazine.
“Was that old Keate on the phone?” Amelia yawned; doubtless she had not slept anywhere savoury the night before.
“Where were you last night?” Josephine asked.
“I got as far as London but I missed the last train,” Amelia didn’t look up. “Katherine wasn’t picking up… so I stayed over at…” She saw the brush in her mother’s hand and sat up. “Um… what’s that for?”
“You know what it is for,” Josephine sighed.
Amelia swallowed hard and her mouth moved in protest. “You do know I’m 18?” she said lamely.
Apparently the sister’s didn’t talk. “I spanked Katherine only a few weeks ago, twice in fact,” her mother countered.
The revelation was a shock and added to disconcerted fizz in her head and the sudden tumbling in her tummy. “I’m not Katherine,” she snapped.
“No,” her mother sighed again, “Nothing like if I have anything to do with it, which means we are going to have a little chat right now, the first of many I fear.”
“Listen Mother,” Amelia opened negotiations.
Josephine sat on the bed next to her daughter and tried to find her eyes. Amelia looked down and began babbling in a tone that sounded reasonable and adult, but was largely incoherent nonsense.
“Amelia, in a moment you are going across my knee, I am going to bare your bottom and then I am going to spank you. I am going to spank you very, very hard and for a quite considerable time… then you can explain yourself. If I don’t like the explanation I am going to spank you again… as many times as it takes.”
“Hello Mother…” Amelia said in a mocking tone, I’m 18, you can’t do…”
Josephine silenced her daughter by reaching out and taking hold of her ear and some of her hair.
“Ow, owie, oooh,” Amelia protested as she was drawn inexorably nearer and down across her mother’s lap, “N-n-n-n-no, can’t we talk about this?”
“No,” Josephine said once her daughter was head down and bottom up across her thighs. The denim jeans were affixed by some buttons at Amelia’s left hip and were easily popped to release the clothing as they were dragged down to her knees and finally her ankles.
“You can’t do this,” the 18-year-old said angrily as her underwear followed the jeans.
Josephine regarded the split dome of the now exposed bottom and sighed. It had been a while, but… “Oh well,” she said, and brought the flat side of the brush down with a sharp crack.
Amelia gasped and kicked up both legs, bound as they were by her clothing at her ankles. The second spank followed and the third before the girl could say or do much more. “Ow, ow, it hurts,” she wailed.
“Ah-ha,” her mother said and spanked her again, this time paying attention to the underside of the upturned bottom. Year’s before Josephine’s mother had landed justice to the same spot.
“Mummy,” Amelia shrieked.
“Such a fuss so soon,” Josephine sighed and spanked her daughter again and yet again and once more. The brush stung on impact leaving a deep pink patch tightly packed with goose-pimples in the shape of two ovals which closely cupped the underside of Amelia’s bare bottom.
“Mummy, mummy, mummy, please… I’ll be good… I’ll… I’ll…” the younger woman’s frantic protests dissolved into tears.
“Really, but why change the habit of life time?” Josephine upped the rhythm of the punishment, spanking harder and faster, “I am furious with you, absolutely… livid,” she growled and increased the punitive pace of the spanking.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Amelia babbled.
“I know, I remember, I was sorry too under much the same circumstances,” Josephine sighed, “The trick is to be sorry before it gets to this point.”
“Ow, ooh, Jesus…” Amelia continued to protest even as her bottom became a deep red and the sting became a burn.
“Now tell me what happened, from the beginning,” her mother paused the spanking.
Amelia sniffed and sobbed as she tried to pull it together. Her bottom felt like it had been gravel-dragged and then flambéed. “I… I… I…” she wept.
“Deep breaths, we have plenty of time, and mark me, we are so not done here,” Josephine said sternly. “Why don’t you go and stand in the corner… well the wall facing the door, just while you get your story straight? I will leave the door open, you know, just in case you are tempted to take your nose form the plasterwork.”
Amelia swallowed some tears and winced as she adjusted her position.
“It wasn’t really a suggestion,” her mother barked.
Amelia got her feet and in utter misery went to face her bedroom wall so that she was framed by the open door for anyone passing the hallway outside.
***
Luckily for Amelia the staff didn’t usually work on Saturdays and if her mother had any visitors they probably wouldn’t be walking around near the bedrooms. At 18 it was still so embarrassing to be standing in a timeout position in front of the open door of her bedroom. She could not believe her mother had spanked her.
As she pulled herself together she felt the light chill of the air where it met hot boiling bottom and never had she felt so naked. It was childish, it was… she kicked the wall angrily and then wondered if anyone had seen or heard her… she hated that she even cared.
Her mind raced over all the roads that had led her there and decided it wasn’t fair. It had been one little joint in the first instance, if her grades had been better she would have just got a detention like the first time. Mother had got her a second chance so why had a second joint been such a big deal? Okay so her grades were still shit, but she would have muddled through… if they had given her a chance.
When Josephine came back she regarded her daughter’s humble posture and wondered where she had gone wrong. She had spanked two near adult daughters in the space of a few weeks and now she was obviously going to be re-parenting her youngest for a while and just before she reached the home straight of her A Levels and a place in university.
“Right young lady, get into you night things and come downstairs,” Josephine told her youngest.
Amelia half turned and felt a tantrum coming on. “Come on mother its day time I’ll feel stupid in my pyjamas, besides I thought I would go to the pub and say hello…”
Josephine strode angrily through the open door and seized her daughter to turn her around. “The pub, you think you can go to the pub? You’re not going anywhere, I am keeping you in until… and… and get changed and come downstairs you have some explaining to do…”
“’Keeping me in,’ why not sat gating me or some other Victorian shit…? They could it grounding these days. And you can’t ground me because I’m 18 and it would be absolutely nutzoid…”
“You have driven me nutzoid, if that is even a word and I don’t care what they call it, grounding if you like… you’re grounded, you’re damn well grounded until you’re 40 if I say so… now do as your told.”
“No,” Amelia shot back, “this has gone far enough, you can’t just…”
Josephine held up the brush she had used as a warning and Amelia fell silent with a visible swallow.
“I am not going to regale you with clichés about ‘living under my roof,’ I am not even going to give you the option of packing a bag and have you ending up in some druggy hovel,” Josephine hissed, “You are done, I have had it with your attitude, with your defiance and your childish behaviour…”
Amelia tried to interrupt, but her mouth was suddenly very dry and for once she thought shutting her mouth was an option. Perhaps this was what people meant about reading the room.
“You can call those child people, you can call the police, you can damn well call a cab if you fancy knocking me down to get at it… but apart from that you will get changed and march that backside of yours downstairs to the main drawing room and put your nose in the corner. Do you understand me?” Josephine rasped.
Amelia thought of a million comebacks and a million reasons why this was so ridiculous and considering all her options just then she said, “yes.” There was no way she was going to stand in the corner downstairs or anywhere else, but… well apart from…
Josephine left her to it with the parting words, “You have five minutes.”
Five minutes later Amelia entered the drawing room feeling 10-years-old and somewhat chastened. Her mother would calm down but…
“You can step out of those pyjama bottoms and go to face that corner there,” Josephine said sharply as her daughter entered the room. She still held the brush.
“Look can’t we…”
“Corner now, or I will spank you so hard you won’t sit down for… and you will still have a spanking to come so… so… Amelia, just do as you are told. I will not tell you again.” Josephine was getting angrier and not calming down. Her daughter’s A Levels were over. No other school would take her and she would just drift like Katherine.
Amelia flushed and did the reading-the-room thing again. Before she lowered her PJ bottoms she almost asked if there was anyone else home but the two of them, but she decided that her mother really didn’t care.
Josephine took three determined steps towards her daughter before the flannel trousers dropped to Amelia’s ankles and she scurried to the actual corner of the room like a pre-teen.
Taking a very deep sigh and putting the brush down, Josephine pored herself a stiff drink of scotch. Then addressing the still red stained bare bottom in the corner she said, “Now from the beginning… where did you get the drugs and why did you take them… everything… your grades… your unhappiness… whatever psychobabble you have to get off your chest.”
***
“Young lady, I am really not impressed,” Josephine sighed.
Amelia had explained about her friend Annie’s boyfriend who had got the weed and the midnight feats that had turned into a party and the informal group that had met up in an empty attic room after that… about how she took the weed to take her mind off he poor grades… some of the answers had bene evasive and contradictory, but nothing suggested that Amelia had been a scapegoat or a minor player. Then she had said she didn’t need any A Levels because she was going to be an actress or a supermodel.
It had been the final bit of nonsense that had Josephine reaching for the brush again. “I am going to have to get a bigger brush,” she said as she tugged her daughter by the arm back across her lap where she sat on the sofa.
“What are you doing? You spanked me already,” Amelia protested.
“I don’t like your explanation, or your story,” her mother said as she pressed the brush against the already red sore bottom. She thought about getting the foot long one from the draw in the hall, and would have done if her daughter hadn’t already been spanked.
“But I can…” Amelia began, but she really had nothing left to say. “It’s not fair.”
“I’m a terrible mother,” Josephine told her youngest, “I was hopeless with Lucy and worse with Katherine… with you it seems I learned nothing. However it is not too late…”
“You’re not a bad mother; I love you and you…” Amelia had another idea.
“I love you too,” her mother sighed and spanked the brush down hard.
Amelia yelled, the sharp impact cut through the fuzzy soreness that had settled on her previously spanked bottom and rekindled a real fire. “Please I…” then she yelled again and thereafter each spank that landed.
The spanks were slow and steady, setting a funereal beat, Josephine was in no hurry; this was going to be a very long hard spanking.
The effect on Amelia was a spanking that was hellish on her bottom but that she could just about handle… for the moment. There was time to recover between spanks for her to be ready for the next: a seemingly slow wait for an inevitable impact that drew a pained yelp. Also time enough between spanks for her to consider her past choices that had led her here.
“Please mother, please I will be good, so good I will… ow,” her eyes raced back and forth focussed on nothing, her back was arched and the curve of her bare bottom was jutting up and well presented to her mother’s relentless spanking arm.
It took perhaps 10 minutes for the slow steady spanking to break her down. There were already tears rolling down her cheeks but suddenly her cries got louder and more pained. “I’m sorry,” she screamed in angry desperation and then she was bawling.
“There she is,” her mother sighed, “Finally.”
Josephine steadily increased the pace as if the spanking was really getting going and Amelia wondered if the spanking would ever really stop and knew that if it did she would do absolutely anything she was told.
Amelia’s bottom was a dull burgundy by the time her mother stopped spanking her. “In a minute you will go to the corner again and there you will stay until I send you to bed. You are grounded as you so creatively call it and you will be kept in indefinitely. You will also make yourself available for any chores Mrs Partridge has for you. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Amelia was hiccoughing with sobs.
“Do you understand?” Josephine said sharply and spanked her daughter again for emphasis.
“Yes mummy,” Amelia said miserably.
“Now, nose in that corner and don’t move,” her mother said taking both the brush and her daughter’s pyjama bottoms away.
***
St Denise
It was a wet Monday morning and the rain fell like it wanted to wash away the world. Margret Clements might have welcomed that, but it also seemed to her that her world had already been swept away, the world as she knew it anyway.
There was burst of wind and the rain rattled against the glass until it seemed it would break. It was her fault and she knew it. Oh for certain someone had distracted her, her sudden bout of stomach upset at the end before she saw the first year of accounts, the little distractions and deceptions hiding in plain sight. She should not have trusted or taken things at face value. She certainly should have asked more questions. She sighed. Now it was time to face the music.
Margaret turned back to the others sitting at her desk where Lady Avebury and Elspeth Cardwell poured over the accounts laid out before them on her desk. Next to the paperwork were Ducky’s graphs, although her assistant had not bene included in the room. The situation was too dire.
“You don’t think Rachel Denton should be here?” The Countess of Avebury said, her mouth was a hard straight line.
“I was wondering that,” Elspeth murmured.
“Two years of accounts, two years and a huge spike in donations and nothing to show for it. I knew of course, but then again I didn’t. The books balanced, the total in and the total out matched, I didn’t notice how much was moved through the school, it was all small amounts, amounts…” she jabbed a finger at a multiple of £490 that had been signed off, apparently by her, but actually not, “that all fell conveniently under the threshold that I had to authorise.”
“But you did authorise them,” Elspeth countered.
“No, no I didn’t… had they been over £500 I would have had to actually sign off on them… this was kept on the down low so that no one else… not Ducky, no one in the main office… no one thought to bring it to my attention,” Margret only grasped the true extent of the deception as she explained it.
“If not you, then who?” Lady Avebury asked.
“I don’t know Elizabeth, but someone at the school, someone who had access and knew the system and procedure,” Margret was fuming.
“Ducky you think?” the Countess suggested.
“No… not possible, she wouldn’t, but in any case it was she who brought this to me,” the headmistress sat down and put her hands in her head.
“Several of the admin staff had the knowledge and the access but… also apart from them, you and Ducky… well there is Rachel Denton,” Elizabeth sighed. There it had been said.
“Preposterous,” Elspeth said sharply, “She has been here years.”
“And I haven’t, have I?” Margret said.
“Hmmm,” Elizabeth Avebury sat back and frowned, “The school accountants will have to do a full audit…”
“I have already set that in motion,” Margret said.
There was a knock at the door and without waiting Rachel Denton hurried in. “Oh sorry to… so sorry I thought Margret would be alone first thing…” she appeared flustered.
“What is it?” Elspeth said smoothly.
“Eh… well I was catching up on payments and the like and well… why are we buying 50 porcelain elephants? And why are we paying £450 for them, I mean each… maybe they are worth every penny but even so…” Rachel was apparently confused and concerned, “The odd thing is… well we are making 50 separate payments for them, no bulk buying. I checked, and there are other odd payments like this.”
“Did you sign for this order?” Elspeth asked, but her gaze was firmly fixed upon the headmistress.
“No, that is why I raised it, Margret ordered them… I wanted to check,” Rachel said, her face was a studied neutral as she turned to look at the headmistress.
“Can Margret and I have the room please?” the Countess of Avebury said.
***
The room fell quiet and for the first time in as long as she could remember Margret thought she was going to cry. Biting the inside of her cheek she looked up at the ceiling as if from the bottom of a bottomless pit and felt her whole world melting away from under her. “Elizabeth I didn’t… I haven’t…”
“I know Margret,” the Countess said, “Still this is a mess. Someone has been embezzling school funds or as I suspect using us to channel funds that were never intended for us. On the face of it you are the guilty party, that is what the police will think and I can see no way of not involving them.”
“I see,” the headmistress sagged into her seat and sighed as if she would die. “Then I will have to resign… I see, I will of course, my watch, my fault… I don’t know how I missed it.”
“You missed it because you were not intended to see it,” Elizabeth Avebury told her sharply, “I see the accounts too… I missed it, for whatever that’s worth, but you are right… I trusted you to hold a tight rein and… well it is done.”
“So…” the headmistress nodded, embracing the moment.
“Here is what we do,” the Countess said decisively, “You take sick leave or whatever, you don’t resign, you aren’t suspended… you just go for now. Everyone will assume it is just a forgone conclusion that you are out. That will either make them complacent or provoke someone into covering their tracks. I will try and get an independent investigator on the case; and the accountants of course. At the very least we can prove your innocence and maybe… just maybe keep this out of the newspapers.”
“Or confirm my guilt,” Margret groaned, “Who knows who deep this goes.”
“Indeed,” Elizabeth said, but her thoughts lay elsewhere. “Don’t speak to anyone, just leave and go home.”
The Head of the Board of Trustees watched as Margret Clements methodically collected her personal belongings, her coat and with a studied dignity left the room. Then she sat back and frowned. Rachel Denton, how bloody convenient that you should spot a suspicious element in the books on the day it had been spotted anyway. Elizabeth considered the angles.
Rachel had desperately wanted the headship at the last appointment and had lost out to Margret Clements. She had not taken it well and Elizabeth knew that she had almost resigned over it. In her wildest ponderings Elizabeth would never had believed that Rachel would go so far. If indeed she had. But it made a certain sense.
Who else though? Someone on the Board… it had to be.
The next part: Setting traps
Leave a Reply