That evening, Davenport comes into the drawing room and closes the door behind him. I set my embroidery down and give him my full attention.

“Would you care to tell me why Cahill came back from the ride looking like a lovesick calf?”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that. What happened out there?”

“Nothing much. We talked for a while and rode back. Ask Jack if you don’t believe me. He was there chaperoning us the whole time.”

“Was he? Good. It’s good to know that at least one person follows my orders.”

I let that one go without a response, and I pick up my embroidery again and start working the stitches. Davenport comes and sits nearby.

“What is this thing you’re always working on?”

“I don’t know yet. I might make it into a new fire screen.”

“Very pretty, but getting back to Cahill...”

“I don’t know why he’s looking like a moon calf. I certainly said nothing to make him believe there’s a chance.”

“What did he say?”

“He said I had captivated him.”

Suddenly, the smirk is wiped off his face. He sits stock still, looking a little glassy-eyed. I think in that moment he saw our entire future together go down like a house of cards. And though I’d taken that horse ride with Mr. Cahill to deliberately hurt him, I now feel sorry for him.

“I will forbid it,” he tells me.

“And so I told him.”

“You don’t feel that way, too, do you?”

I set the embroidery aside again and start tucking things away in the sewing table at my side, because it’s plain as a pikestaff I’ll not be able to work on it anymore tonight.

“Captivated?” I ask him. “Only by you, my darling.”

“You’re not thinking of running off to Gretna Green together, are you?”

“Even I’m not so lost to propriety as that.”

He looks relieved, and comes to take my hands in his.

“I am very sorry for what’s been happening around here the past few days. Do you forgive me yet?”

I turn my glance to his very slowly and say, “You must have lost your mind.”

His jaw tightens, and he jerks his hands away. “Perhaps I will send you to that school,” he tells me. “Maybe they can teach you to mend your manners.”

“Then perhaps I will accept Mr. Cahill, after all.”

He says nothing. He just gets up and leaves the room. I don’t know if it means I’ll be punished later, but I assume the answer is yes. I call for tea, and Foster looks surprised that I’m alone.

“Tea just for me, if you please.”

“Yes, Miss.”

After tea, when I’ve exhausted all hope that he’ll come back, I go to my bedchamber, too.

I can hear him through the adjoining door, moving about the room. I look a question at Emerson, but she just smiles.

“He’s in rare form tonight, Miss,” she whispers. “I’d be careful if I were you.”

“What’s he been doing?”

“A-pacing the floor and talking to himself.”

“Can you make out what he’s said?”

“Yes, Miss. He said if you were a man, he’d whip you in the stable yard for all the household to see.”

All of a sudden, the door that adjoins our bedrooms together opens up and Davenport comes in. He’s got the paddle in his hand, and he takes one look at Emerson and he tells her to get out. She steps in front of me as if to protect me, but when he bellows for her to get out again, she quails and hurries away.

I glance over at him, and he seizes me by the upper arm and marches me up to the attic.

“Not that bench again,” I say, but he laughs ruefully.

“It’s either that, or the stable yard.”

He unlocks the door and hurls me inside. I trip over one of the bigger trunks, the one with the dome top he made love to me over before. I barely right myself when he grabs my arm again and drags me over to the spanking bench.

“Get undressed,” he tells me. I’m too afraid to disobey, so I shed my clothes as quickly as I can. He’s been busy up here, I see, for there are spanking implements laid out in a neat succession all across a nearby table. He notices me looking and smiles. “Which one to choose?” he asks. “Shall it be the paddle? Or what about the tawse? Or shall we start with the belt again?”

“Start?” I ask, my heart beginning to pound dreadfully hard.

“Yes, my defiant one. Start. Now get on the bench, and I don’t want to hear a word out of you.”

I do as he says, and he fastens the straps to hold me down again. He steps over to the table and picks up the first implement, a riding crop.

“Much easier if we just start from the beginning, don’t you think?”

He slashes it through the air, making a frightening noise, worse, even, than the one taking off his belt makes. He sets the crop back down, and turns toward the table again. I see him grab his penknife, and a brown object, and it’s then that I realize I can smell ginger.

Clamping my mouth shut, I am determined not to beg or cry while he punishes me. I watch as he pares the knob of ginger into the same sort of shape as before, and then he comes up behind me and stuffs it into my bottom hole, none too gently.

It burns, but I keep quiet. He picks up the crop again and whizzes it through the air, slapping my bottom with it. I’m shocked and surprised, but I bite my lip to keep from crying out. He comes near me again, and I feel him touch the welt he just raised.

“You’re going to be very sorry when I get through with you, Gypsy.”

Of course, I’m already sorry, but I won’t tell him that, at least not yet, not until I just can’t take anymore.

The crop snaps against my bottom again, and I squirm a little, unable to help myself. This he finds encouraging, for he slaps it against my bare flesh several more times, as if trying to get a reaction.

Satisfied, he sets it down, but then he comes and settles himself on the stool behind me. He traces the outline of my outer lips with his fingertip. I am still trembling from the suddenness and ferocity of his attack, and I hear him chuckle.

“Poor little Gypsy. So, you want to leave your old guardian and seek protection elsewhere? Don’t you know you can’t marry him? He’ll never be able to support a wife, once I turn him off without a character reference.”

I don’t think he would really do that, but who knows?

He gets up and gets the phallus and its harness, and he returns with both of them.

“Hold this,” he says, stuffing the phallus into my hand. He uses the harness like a belt and whips me with it four, five, six times before retrieving the phallus and sitting back down on the stool with it. He uses it to trace the same path his fingertip just traced, and I squirm a little more, not from the pain, but from desire. “Yes, you want this, don’t you?” he asks gently. “I can tell you do.”

He dips his fingers into my juices and traces them across the bridge of flesh separating my cunny from my bottom hole. It makes me tighten up my muscles, which also makes the ginger burn more, too. I squirm around as much as I am able, and he slaps my ass with the end of the leather harness.

“Be still,” he tells me. He pushes the phallus inside of me and buckles the harness around me, and then he gets up and gets an ostrich feather and a leather dancing slipper he finds on the table.

He means to torment me. That much is clear. He uses the feather to tickle the tiny bud at the top of my cunny. I lie as still as I can and he repeats this procedure a few times, and when he finally gets me to squirm, he smacks my bottom soundly with the leather slipper.

Next, he uses the feather to trace the wheals on my bottom, and uses his free hand to tap on the end of the phallus. He feathers my bud again, this time more intensely, and when I strain towards it, he slippers my bottom a few more times.

“My little Gypsy likes the feather and the slipper, doesn’t she?” he asks, and when I shake my head, he gets up and sets them both back down on the table. Instead, he picks up the cane and says, “Little girls who lie must be caned.”

He goes around to the other side of the bench and lines up his shot, and then he brings the cane down over my bottom. It’s hard for me to keep quiet, but I just manage to. This he apparently finds provoking, because he canes me again, a bit harder.

I shake my head and bite my lip in an effort to bear the pain, and he canes me again, several more times. When he stops, he sits down on the stool between my legs and uses the end of the cane to search out my bud. He tap-tap-taps it, increasing my desire, but I can’t do anything about it, since my legs are strapped open and into place. I squeeze the muscles in my cunny again, but it only makes the ginger burn worse.

The next thing I feel is his fingers, playing with my bud. It’s such a relief I want to cry, but it is very short-lived, because he snatches them away again and stands to smack my bottom with the cane a couple more times.

I try to remember what other implements I saw there, but I cannot. I only know what’s next when he starts wielding it.

A clothes brush. I remember now. One wouldn’t suppose it to be much different of a pain than the paddle itself, but one would be wrong, because it is thinner and narrower and bites into the flesh more. He spanks me with it for at least a whole minute, which doesn’t sound like much until it’s happening.

I know I can’t take much more without crying. He says, “I think we’ll have the tawse next.”

The tawse hurts my backside every bit as much as it hurt my hands the day he used it on me in the schoolroom. It’s stiff, and it’s also rough on one side, which is the side he uses, of course. It hurts in its own right, but also irritates the various welts and wheals that already crisscross my backside. When he’s done with that, he takes the belt after me, making good and sure to spank only my upper thighs with it.

I don’t know how much more I can put up with, and there’s still the paddle to go, but he gives me a break for a minute or two by teasing my bud again, rubbing it with the rough underside of the tawse. I don’t know what’s worse, the teasing or the whippings. I can neither increase my pleasure or decrease my pain, and the ginger is just a constant, constant burn.

“What have we left?” he asks me. When I don’t answer, he supplies the correct reply. “Why, your favorite, the paddle.”

I start crying then, because I don’t want him to use the paddle on me without my being over his lap.

“Please,” I whisper.

“Please, what?”

“Not over this bench. That’s for over your lap.”

“But you must have something to finish you off.”

“Anything. Anything.”

“Then I’ll give you thirty with the clothes brush, yes?”

I nod, and hear him exchange the one for the other, and then he begins. I suffer it as best I can, trying not to cry out or even cry at all. When he’s done, he puts the clothes brush back on the table, and then he finally removes the nob of ginger from my bottom hole. I feel sore and raw from it, and I expect him to unfasten the restraints, but he leaves them where they are and reaches for his can of lard.

I don’t even have to ask. I know what’s coming next. He leaves the phallus harnessed inside my cunny and he greases up my bottom hole. The grease seems to cool some of the burn, but there will be a new burn in a moment, when he starts riding my bottom.

He enters me carefully, and slides his manhood all the way in to the hilt. The bench holds me helplessly fastened in place as he takes his pleasure from me, and I just lie there waiting for it to be over. When it is, I think he will release me now, but he leaves me tied down while he removes the phallus. I am sure he means to beat me again, but instead, he sets the phallus aside and begins teasing my little bud again.

I break down and start crying for real now, and he runs his hand over the tortured mass of pain that is my bottom. It’s the first kind and loving thing he’s done all day, and I relax, laying my head on the padding of the bench and letting my body turn to jelly.

“Hush, little Gypsy. Daddy’s going to make it all right.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, too, my sweet little Gypsy.”

He sits down on the stool behind me, and a moment later, he inserts two of his fingers into my cunny while he rubs my bud with his free hand. It doesn’t take but a minute or two for him to make me come, and when I do, I am finished for the day, worn out and exhausted from all the punishment I’ve endured.

“Please don’t dismiss Mr. Cahill,” I weep. “It’s not his fault. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know about us.”

“Hush now, while I undo these restraints.”

He has to help me get dressed, and even has to help me back to my bedchamber. He gets me into my nightdress, and then he lays me down between the cool linen sheets and tells me to go to sleep.

I sleep fitfully, dreaming of being back home with my people, dreaming of my burnt-out wagon and its contents. Everything I owned was in that wagon, including the small gifts my people gave me in anticipation of my marriage to Besnick Camomescro, small, useful gifts, like a bag of corks, and a tin saucepan. It doesn’t seem like much, after living here, but I truly felt blessed to have them.