Chapter 8
Betty had hastened to her room while her mother swiftly replaced the borrowed leather sole in its box and put it on the top shelf of her closet, then went out of her room and down the stairs. As she reached the first-floor landing, she called down to the basement, "Hester, go upstairs and look after your sister, if you please. I have to go out for a little while."
Meanwhile, golden-haired Betty, her eyes suspiciously red and swollen from tears which were in no way feigned, and gingerly holding her discarded panties, had gone back to her room and, leaving the door open, swiftly removed dress and slip and, discarding these together with her panties on a chair near the bed, promptly stretched herself out on her tummy, naked except for bra and sandals. The fiery bunting of the leather sole had darkened now, and her delightfully plump round young bottomcheeks were quite impressively inflamed. The smarting sting of the sole was, Betty decided, something she would just as soon dispense with in future, and she fervently hoped that her mother had only borrowed the implement from Louise Gilmore just this one time.
Hester, trembling and very pale, ascended the stairs and made her way down the hall. She saw Betty's open door and then she uttered a loud gasp: "Ohh!"
"Hi, Hes," Betty greeted her, without turning her head. "I sure can use your help right about now, I'll tell you that. Would you mind awfully soaking some cloths in cold water and putting them on my heinie?"
"Of-of course not, Betty," Hester stammered. Her eyes fixed on those discolored, swollen rotundities and it looked to her as if her stepsister had taken a far more serious thrashing than even brunette Janet last week. A novice to castigation as she was, Hester Hadley could not distinguish the fact that the broader surface of a leather sole when wielded energetically as Eleanor had done covered considerably more area than a thin little rubber dog whip, and that its broader impact left the tender skin and flesh exacerbated for a considerably longer period at the outset. In a few days, Betty's lovely bottom would, however, be once again as pink, as the proverbial baby's skin, except perhaps for one or two tiny bluish splotches where the very oval end of the sole had wrought particularly emphatic castigatory vigor.
"Hurry, please, Hes," Betty plaintively entreated, squirming uneasily on her tummy and glancing back at her older stepsister. "I'm just about burned up."
Hester gulped and headed for the bathroom, where with trembling fingers she dampened several washcloths under the cold-water tap, wrung them out and then came back into the bedroom and laid them over the golden-haired teenager's flaming bottom.
"Ooooh!" Betty sighed, "That's more like it! Golly, that was a real good one, that was!"
"I-I know, Betty," Hester stammered, her cheeks red with embarrassment, "I heard it. I felt so awfully sorry-but you ought to have been more careful with Father's china."
"Sure, I know. I guess once in a while I feel like horsing around. Well, my heinie sure paid for it, that's for certain. Put some more cloths on, Hes, that feels so good," Betty declared.
Hester readily complied, feeling a kind of guiltiness now come over her at having not tried to placate her stepmother when the latter had so sternly admonished the golden-haired girl for clumsiness. "Just the same," she said hesitantly as she put another cold cloth on her stepsister's quivering, discolored posterior, "It was really cruel of her to whip you so terribly! It looks so sore, so swollen!"
"I'll be all right in a little while, Hes. When this dries, you can rub some cold cream. It's in that pink jar on the bottom shelf of my medicine cabinet. Would you mind awfully?"
"No, of course not. You poor dear! I don't care even if you did break a dish, that wasn't any reason to beat you like that," Hester began to feel strangely confused, not knowing exactly on what side her loyalty was. Since she had always respected and admired her father, the thought that her stepsister had carelessly broken one of their finest plates had at first made her righteously believe that Betty had punishment coming. But now, seeing that flaming behind and watching her almost-naked stepsister squirm uneasily on the bed, the auburn-haired, precocious girl found her compassion deeply aroused. Even more than that, subconsciously, the sensual overtones of this intimate conversation and the sight of her younger stepsister's luscious near-nudity had begun to work with telling effect on Hester's hitherto aloof psyche.
"She didn't beat me cruelly, and I wish you'd stop saying things like that, Hes!" Betty looked 'round at the bespectacled auburn-haired girl.
"I had it coming, that's what. And it was over real quick, and it's all forgotten now. Whenever Mummy, spanks me, we always make up and then it's forgiven. And I try hard not to make her mad because she really doesn't like to punish me. No parent really does, Hes."
"How can you say that, Betty, when even at Malibu my father told me how she punished you for playing around with those fellows," Hester broke out.
"Open that top drawer in my dresser, and bring out the stuff you find in there."
"All right." Wonderingly, Hester walked over to the dresser, opened the drawer and saw the buckling strap used for Betty's wrists and the ominous, polished spanking strap. "Are these what you mean?" she stammeringly asked as she lifted them out.
"Sure. Bring them over here."
When Hester had complied, Betty explained, "You really mustn't feel too bad about it, Hes. It could have been lots worse. See, when Mummy tells me to go up to my room and prepare, I come up like this and take off everything except my bra and sandals. Sometimes I don't even wear my sandals. And I put out the strap to tie my wrists with alongside me and the spanking strap too. Then Mummy fixes my wrists real tight, sometimes behind my back but usually over my head so that I won't try to cover up my bottom when I'm getting it. Then she uses the spanking strap on my heinie. She usually puts a pillow under my tummy so my rear end will be a good target-boy, she doesn't miss anyway, no matter what position it's in," she giggled reminiscently, and Hester's blush deepened even more at this casual reference to punishment which had become so quiveringly and disturbingly emotional for her. "Then, after I've had my spanking, Mummy lets me wait a while before she loosens the strap so I can get at my bottom and rub it. I think that's almost as much punishment as the spanking itself, sometimes. And of course I have to hand her the spanking strap even after my wrists are tied. But then when it's over, I sit in her lap and we cuddle, and she explains why she had to punish me and I see why, and then we feel awfully close. Now I think I'm about ready for that cold cream, Hes."
Hester Hadley stared at the buckling strap and the punishment weapon, and shook her head. It was beyond her how this lovely, serene, happy-go-lucky girl could accept punishment so stoically and dismiss it so casually. And as she began to rub in the cold cream into those jouncy, resilient half-moons, she dimly sensed that another subtle bond in the chain of family intimacy was being forged for her....
Louise Gilmore had taken Janet and Constance into her confidence and related to them Betty's heroic self-sacrifice for the worthy cause of pulling Hester Hadley down from the untouchable and elegant pedestal on which she had placed herself from her very first day in Claremont. Janet's admiration for Connie's dear friend and her own knew no bounds. And that evening, after supper, she determined to prove that she was of the same mettle, realizing that even at eighteen she had for quite some time now rebelled against her parents' decision to keep punishing her even though she thought herself far too grown-up for any such juvenile and humiliating correction.
Accordingly, when her father was sitting in the armchair reading his newspaper, she went over to the radio and turned it up. He put down the paper and frowned and said, "Turn it down, please, Janet, you know I don't like rock-and-roll music."
"But I do, Daddy," she flippantly observed as she slyly turned the knob up another quarter of an inch till the electric guitars of the recording blared furiously through the spacious Gilmore living room.
Fred Gilmore flung down his paper, an exasperated look on his face. Then he walked over to his brunette daughter, took her by the earlobe and led her back to the armchair, flung her down across his lap, pulled up her skirt and slip, rucked down her brief panties to her ankles, and, tucking her in with his left arm, proceeded to deliver a handspanking which, to describe Janet's own words for it the next day when she met with Betty, "was really piping hot!" Janet ground her teeth and closed her eyes and bravely endured some forty really stinging whacks from her father's energetic hand, and when at last he righted her, tears were streaming down her cheeks.
"Pull up your panties and go up to your room now, Janet," he sternly instructed.
"Why-yes, D-Daddy. I-I'm sorry I made you mad," Janet sobbed as she hastened to obey, not without many a grimace at the way her bottom flamed and ached when she gingerly stooped down to retrieve the crumpled, twisted garment clinging around her ankles.
But that very same evening Barbara Carruthers was unfortunate enough to have a falling out with both her mother and father, and all about her handsome suitor Tom Jeffrey, whom she had been forbidden to see. Dave and Mabel Carruthers had teken the family car that afternoon and gone off to visit Dave's second cousin in Whittier, and so Barbara had believed they wouldn't get back until late at night. She had gone down to the Claremont Sweet Shoppe in the mall for a soda, knowing that she would meet her suitor Tom Jeffrey, the carroty-haired, freckle-faced varsity tackle for whom she had experienced her first passionate crush.
They had a double chocolate soda together in the corner of a dark booth, and Tom's sly fingers stroked her thigh above her skirt until, emboldened by her humid, ardent gaze, he dared to run his hand under her short skirt and tickle her soft furry pussy through the thin white nylon panties. Barbara moaned and squirmed, and actually had orgasm from that finger-friction, after which Tom nervously proposed that they take a ride in his jalopy. They went out to the forest preserve, and there in a shady glen, getting into the back seat, Barbara surrendered herself to exciting soul kissing in which both youngsters explored the amorous delights of twisting their tongues into the other's mouth and fondling wildly in their new discovery of each other. Tom led one of Barbara's trembling little hands towards his crotch and, zipping down his fly, let her take out his prick and play with it till suddenly he uttered a groan and spurted into her hand. Meanwhile, his other hand was busy foraging at the brunette's slip until once again she had a violent creaming. They promised to see each other on the sly when school began again, and Barbara sealed her troth with another passionate French-kiss.
After this ardent interlude, Tom Jeffrey drove her back to within two blocks of the Carruthers' house and let her out. It was her dismay to see her father's Buick parked in the driveway. When she entered, Mabel and Dave Carruthers were in the living room, having just come in a few minutes earlier.
"Where have you been, young lady?" her svelte, attractive auburn-haired mother irritatedly demanded. "We were looking around for you because Verna is over at a friend's house and your father and I wanted you to go to the store to get some things for dinner."
Barbara had the bad fortune to blush hotly at this pointed question of her whereabouts, which further called her parents' attention to her. Her skirt was rumpled, as was her hair, and her cheeks were a most becoming red from the happy if forbidden adventure she had just experienced with her virile, forbidden young lover.
"I-I was out with Connie Gilmore," she lied glibly, seizing the first thing that came into her mind, an understandable decision in view of her parents' irritability threshold when the topic of dicsussion concerned a steady boyfriend. For this was one of the real taboos in the Carruthers household.
"I see," Mabel Carruthers tartly responded. "That's funny. Just before we got into town, your father and I stopped at a service station and I telephoned Louise Gilmore to ask her if she could come over to dinner, and there was only Hilda at home and she said that the girls and Tony were out with their mother in the shopping center buying clothes for school."
Barbara's jaw dropped, which was a telltale admission of her falsehood. "So you lied to me, did you, Barbara? Now I want the truth," Mabel Carruthers snapped. "Where were you and with whom?"
Caught in her own trap, Barbara broke down and confessed, tears running down her cheelJs, that she had just gone into town for a soda and just happened to meet Tom Jeffrey. She didn't have to go any further. Mabel Carruthers turned to her husband: "Dave, I think this calls for a little discipline on your part as well as mine." Then, turning back to the unhappy, creamy-skinned brunette, she directed: "Go upstairs to your room and take off everything except your bra and panties, Barbara. Your father and I will be up presently. And when we finish, we're going out to dinner and pick up Verna, but you can just stay home and fend for yourself out of the refrigerator to teach you not to lie and also not to do something that I've strictly forbidden you to do, you understand me?"
"Yes, M-Mother," Barbara snuffled as she resignedly trudged upstairs.
A few minutes later, she lay stretched on her bed, hiding her face in her hands, clad in only her pink bra and matching panties, her creamy legs bare. Her broadly oval, tightly spaced buttocks were tensing in nervous anticipation of what was to follow. Dave Carruthers had un buckled his belt and doubled it in his hand, as he waited for his wife to begin their naughty daughter's punishment. Barbara was ordered to slip her panties down to her kneehollows, and then lie with her hands under her so that she wouldn't be tempted to cover up her plump ivory naked seat. This done, her mother lost no time in pressing her left palm firmly down in the small of her daughter's back, and then administering a sound and noisy handspanking of about fifty stinging slaps which soon had Barbara kicking and squealing and sobbing promises never to disobey again.
When the spanking was over, Mabel Carruthers took a pillow from the girl's bed and pursed it under her daughter's stomach, then remarked, "Your fathers' going to give you twenty-five swats with his belt. Barbara. And tomorrow morning, as soon as you get up, you're to come in your pajamas to my room and get an extra little dose for lying. It's something I just won't tolerate, young lady. Now, are you ready?"
Barbara blubberingly and reluctantly assented, and while her mother knelt down on the side of the bed and pressed both hands against the girl's shoulders to keep her in position, Dave Carruthers took over with his belt. Twenty-five smacking times, the black leather belt rose in the air and then swept down to flatten vigorously against the upturned, crimsoned bottom ovals. Barbara's screams and pleas for mercy began almost at once, but they availed her nothing. When it was over, she lay frantically rubbing her bottom as she wriggled from side to side to ease the furiously burning heat which this dual punishment had implanted to her naked seat. And the next morning, tearfully, head bowed and squirming nervously as she stood before her mother's bed in her pretty blue satin pajamas, the young brunette heard herself ordered to take off her pajama pants completely and then hand her mother the hairbrush, after which she had to stretch out across her mother's lap over the bed and endure a brisk but extremely painful chastisement of forty hard spanks equally distributed over the still discolored oval cheeks of her well developed behind....
It was Saturday afternoon, and the weather was unseasonably warm. Betty and Hester Hadley were out in the garden, doing some weeding at Eleanor's tacit suggestion. Hester had discovered the garden hose, and mischievously decided to play a prank on her younger sister. Slyly she went over to the tap and turned it on full force, then adjusted the nozzle and pointed the hose squarely at Betty. Her aim was bad, and the forceful spray went off towards the left and against Eleanor's clothesline on which some of her summer dresses were airing. Betty squealed, "Look what you've done.
Hes! What's got into you?"
But Hester Hadley, in a newly found spirit of wanting to belong, and reverting to the principle of extremism in her still immature outlook on life in general, was not to be daunted by this warning. Instead, seeing the Gilmore's big shaggy springer spaniel trotting down the street minding its own business, she whirled and directed the hose at the dog, with unerring aim this time.
"What in the world? Who's playing games with poor old Prince?" Eleanor Hadley's richly contralto voice vibrated from an upstairs window.
With a guilty gulp, Hester hastily shoved the hose into Betty's hands, and beat a hasty retreat towards the back of the garden just as Eleanor emerged.
"Oh it's you, Betty," she said angrily as she espied her golden-haired daughter in the process of turning off the spray by twisting the nozzle and looking very flurried. "Well, young lady, you can just march right upstairs and get yourself ready. The very idea, a big girl like you!"
But at this moment, Fate intervened in the person of the jovial Negro maid Jennie. " 'Scuse me, Ma'am," she called from the door of the kitchen, "But it wasn't Betty's fault at all. I saw the whole thing, Mrs. Hadley, and it was that Hester who hosed that poor dog."
Eleanor stared hard at her golden-haired daughter who lowered her eyes. Then the dominatress smiled tenderly. "You brave little darling!" she murmured. "So you were all ready to stay there and keep your mouth shut and take a spanking that wasn't coming to you, were you? Well, darling, at last the time has come for your new sister to learn her proper place in this little family." And then, raising her voice sternly, she called out: "Hester Hadley, come here this moment!"
Hester disconcertedly disengaged herself from the shelter of a flowering laurel bush and came hesitantly towards her stepmother.
"So it was you who turned the hose on Prince," Eleanor Hadley exclaimed. Then, suddenly catching sight of her own laundry flapping on the line and observing how wet it was, "And soaked my wash, too! And when I came out blaming Betty for it, you didn't have the gumption to admit it, did you?"
"I-er-I was going to," Hester finished lamely.
"I'll bet you were," Eleanor sarcastically interposed. "All right, young lady. I have been very patient with you all these weeks, but I can't let this little game of yours go by any longer. It's not fair to Betty, and it's certainly not fair to you either. Now then, Hester Hadley, you are going to march upstairs to your room, and prepare yourself. And by that I mean, you're going-to take off everything except your bra and panties and stretch out on the bed, do you understand me?"
"But, Mrs.- Mrs.- Mrs. Hadley-" Hester stammered, growing very red in the face.
"And that's another thing," Eleanor Hadley sternly continued. "It's high time you accepted me as your father's wife, and gave me at least the respectful title of 'Mother.' Imagine, calling me Mrs. Hadley! Yes, Hester, even though you're going to start college in another week, you're still extremely immature, even more so than my own sixteen-year-old youngster. Now march up the stairs and get yourself ready. You are going to get your first good sound spanking."
"Oh-please-Mrs. H-I mean M-Motherplease wait until F-Father gets home-Can't we talk this out?" Hester gasped, tears welling into her dilated eyes behind the harlequin glasses.
"You're going to obey me, Hester, that's what you're going to do. Your father and I have already discussed this, for your information, and he's given me full authority to proceed in the way I think best. Betty gets spanked whenever she's naughty, and from this day on you are going to fall into the same regimen. There will be no exception, young lady. If anything, and if you refuse to obey me now, I intend to tell your father when he comes home tonight and insist that after I've punished you as you deserve, he add to your chastisement for your mutinous behavior. Do you want that?"
Hester Hadley wrung her hands, biting her lips, her cheeks purple with embarrassment. "N-no," she quavered in a very small little-girl voice.
"Very well then. Upstairs with you, young lady. And I may say that proper discipline is going to help you overcome a lot of your handicaps, Hester, quite apart from getting along with people. Like that case of acne you've got, for instance. It's mostly nerves and irritability. Well, you'll be surprised to find out what a salutary thing a good spanking can be. Now go upstairs and prepare. I'll be up to see you in about fifteen minutes. And I want to find you ready just as I've instructed."
Her hands on her hips, the brown-haired dominatress stared inflexibly at the shrinking, consternated, precocious and pampered auburn-haired girl. Betty watched intently, inwardly excited at this final turn of the tables which would impose her mother's stern justice on someone else besides herself after all these years. She was dying to know just how Hester was going to take it all, what Hester would do when she had to submit to having her panties pulled down and her bare heinie exposed for the spanking. How brave she would be when the first spanks fell, and how her mother would actually spank the girl. Would it be with the strap or the hairbrush or the martinet, Betty wondered. But of course she knew better than to ask such questions, or even to be allowed to witness the red-letter event-for such it was in the Hadley household!
Dolefully, her shoulders shaking, her face covered with her hands, Hester moved towards the house, while Jennie triumphantly looked on from the kitchen door and nodded emphatically to her mistress, as if to assure the latter of her own hearty endorsement of this decree....