Wanton Spirits – The Cane for Ameila Green

Sir Elias awaits. Sir Elias expects. In his own controlled, contained way, Sir Elias lusts. And soon, satisfaction will be knocking on his door.
Quite literally. It has been six months since he dealt with his beautiful, wayward Head of Foreign Exchange. The experience had been electrifying, exhilarating and yet, ultimately, he had to admit, disappointing. The clever, talented beauty had succumbed to a weekly ritual of chastisement and humiliation for a month in exchange for keeping her position in the bank. Each appointment had seen her take an increasingly severe physical punishment which only ceased when she was completely subdued and compliant. Yet each time she arrived cool and unruffled for the next instalment, allowing her responses to progress from dignified resignation through rising passion to flagrant self-gratification, riling Sir Elias to whip her with a frenzy he had never recognised as being in his emotional lexicon.
She had been an almost perfect subject. If only she hadn’t managed to derive so much personal pleasure from the process. When he remembers Harriet Jago, Sir Elias lets the image of her hand thrust into her panties pass swiftly and moves on to the part where he would force her into some humiliating pose and flail her wanton arse with his implement of choice. The cane had been the start. The birch had been the culmination at their final session.
Harriet has moved on. She ensured she still commanded the respect of her peers and superiors, despite her recent suspension, then secured a job in the Middle East. A volatile market in every sense, but brimming with opportunities for those with no ties and fewer scruples.
He stirs at his desk. His home desk. Meeting in the gentlemen’s gym had been fine for a few encounters with Harriet but it had involved bribes and fabricating tales to appease sceptical security staff. This is far more discreet.
It’s his second home: the house he inherited from his mother last year. The house that could be very convenient if he should want to hold regular private meetings with errant subordinates. It still feels like the home of an old lady: furniture inherited through at least three generations, mixed with ‘modern’ innovations over the past half- century. Eclectic.
She’ll be here soon. Sir Elias reads again her report on banking trends in immigrant populations. It shows promise. Or, as he has told Ameila Green, it isn’t up to the expected standard. Ameila is anxious to improve; she’ll do anything to progress. He can see her now, across the road, intimidated by the large house in the genteel road.
The doorbell. The knocker. She isn’t sure which is appropriate and so tries both. Sir Elias won’t help. He ignores the summons and remains seated as his visitor realises the door is unlocked and she can enter.
The creaking floorboards as he turns to face his study door guide her to the stairs. She ascends gingerly, feeling more like a trespasser than an expected guest. As she reaches the upper floor she sees her employer framed in the doorway and wonders – not for the first time – why the exalted Sir Elias would single her out for this special attention.
Ameila was Harriet’s protégé. She doesn’t have Harriet’s moneyed background, social connections or formal education, but in their place she has determination, a pleasing personality and good instincts.
Sir Elias, still not speaking, watches as she tries to decide whether to enter the room or wait for his permission. He steps back; she moves forward.
She has come a long way since first joining Gouldings Bank as a gauche sixteen-year old. In previous years, she would never have been employed and, in fairness, would never have applied for a post with the august institution. She had been part of an initiative to get young people with few or no traditional qualifications working in the City. She came with a group of school- leavers for a visit and was the only one to ask questions. She did a two- week unpaid placement and asked about training opportunities. She started work on a pittance and a day- release programme. She studied at college, learned on the job, observed Harriet Jago and progressed on her own merit. Five years on, she isn’t the bank’s most sophisticated employee but her character and determination will ensure she climbs the corporate ladder slowly and steadily.
Sir Elias waits just long enough for Ameila’s nerves make her fidget with her dress, then launches into the tirade he has been rehearsing in his head.
‘So this is what you think constitutes a report?’
‘I tried to address the brief, Sir Elias. I may not have presented it conventionally, but the data is sound and the conclusions justifiable.’
She is perceptive. The only real faults with the paper are stylistic. He must move quickly to retain his advantage.
‘If something isn’t 100% correct, it’s wrong. “Good enough” may be concept that is acceptable in other institutions, but not at Gouldings.’ It pleases him to see her bite her lip and struggle to decide where to place her hands. He tells her sit in his recently-vacated chair.
Point by spurious point he criticises the document she worked so hard to produce. An indentation here; a bullet point there. Subtle ambiguities caused by the use of colloquialisms; esoteric passages resulting from over-applied jargon. He pads out his lecture until the poor girl feels all her old insecurities rise up to convince her she doesn’t belong in this world of high finance. She actually whimpers. The banker makes his first move.
‘This so-called report isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. I may as well tear it up and put it in the bin where it belongs!’ Ameila is devastated.
He pauses.
‘Unless you want me to show you where you’ve gone wrong? Highlight your errors and show you how to put them right and improve your chances of having a successful career? Hm?’ He cups her chin in his hand, gently encouraging her to stand. Moist eyes silently beseech him to set her on the path to success. She does not trust herself to speak.
‘I’ve met young women like you before. Showing promise but not fulfilling their potential. I’ve been able to help some. Those who do exactly as I say.’
He tells her to kneel on the chair. He strokes her buttocks through the skirt of her dress. High street rather than designer, but better quality than the chavvy athletics outfit he’d first seen her in. She flinches, then relaxes. This is Sir Elias Fortescue; he knows what he’s doing, she tells herself.
He raises her skirt and she reaches back instinctively to pull it back. He pauses without speaking and slowly she puts her hand back on the chair and acquiesces. Sir Elias; knows what he’s doing. Her new mantra.
Her skirt raised high; his hand caressing the flesh between her black lacy pants and her charcoal stocking tops. The stockings she had thought were sophisticated and now feels are tarty. She’s got it wrong again: she must let Sir Elias correct her.
His hand smacks her right buttock. She is surprised. He spanks her harder across the centre of her buttocks. She flinches. When he strikes again she reaches back and he grabs her wrist. He holds her fast and then hisses at her.
‘Don’t be silly, Ameila. I can help your career soar or sink. You need discipline and I am giving up an evening of my time to help you acquire it. You have ten seconds to make the most important decision of your life: accept my chastisement or go to the Job Centre instead of the office tomorrow.’ As some of the banking boys would say over after-work drinks, it’s a no-brainer. Her body slumps and she resigns herself to another searing swat. Sir Elias does indeed know what he’s doing. After five rapid stinging slaps she is writhing despite her best intentions. The tussle is unseemly and Sir Elias does not like unseemly behaviour. When Ameila slips to the floor he manoeuvres her round by her hair until he is seated and she is across his lap.
In this position she is virtually helpless. She is pinned by one of his arms while the other swings in a wide arc to impact again and again on her reddening rump.
Her high heels (the most expensive she has ever owned) have been kicked off, pins are flying from the hairstyle that not so long ago was casual chic and now is more shabby and cheap. Her panties are rolled down to her thighs.
She hears herself howling, then her rising cries are drowned out by the crack of a wooden backed brush striking against her fleshy nates. For a moment she forgets to breathe, then she is bucking on her tormentor’s lap, trying to evade each successive vicious swipe. Still, inside her head, a voice chants that Sir Elias knows what he is doing. And a similar message is circulating in his brain.
Suddenly it stops. She is thrust to the floor and allowed to tenderly probe her burnished cheeks. She gasps and tries to imagine how she must look, wondering when she’ll be able to visit the bathroom and repair some of the damage to her tear- streaked face.
Not yet is the answer. Sir Elias drags her to a small sofa draped with throws to disguise the ravages of age. He shows her the brush; it is so close to her face she can smell her body spray on it. She knows she is being
positioned for another thrashing and comforts herself with the thought that her bottom cannot possibly hurt any more than it already does.
But she is wrong. She should listen to that constant subliminal chant that tells her Sir Elias knows what he is doing. Amazingly, the pain crescendos and no matter how much she writhes she cannot escape the onslaught. If her arm escapes, it is captured; if her hips swing they are contained; if she slides off the sofa, Sir Elias straddles her. She is vanquished.
Grabbing a handful of the tousled hair he leans in close to her face. ‘I expect you want to play with yourself now?’ He says it, not because it is what he believes, but to see how she will react. Will she emulate her predecessor’s self-indulgent performance because she thinks it is what he expects of her?
The answer is, no she won’t. Instead of her hand reaching between her thighs, it swings in a wide arc and impacts on the esteemed banker’s face. Nobody has ever had the nerve to strike him before.
She will pay for her audacity. Behind the sofa is a cane. Soon it will be on her bottom. Plunging his hand once more into her hair he raises her up and shows her the rod. ‘You definitely need to learn about discipline!’ he rumbles. And the fight, for the moment, goes out of her.
Her dress peels off easily, exposing the even tones of a sprayed-on tan. With her pants once more at thigh level, she turns to let her boss inspect his handiwork.
‘A lovely shade of crimson,’ he tells her. ‘It needs to be set off by some burnished magenta. Take up the position on the chest over there.’
The chest is obviously an heirloom dating back to his grandparents’ days in the Raj. Without being told, she knows “the position” involves kneeling on the unyielding oak.
The cane is savage. She had thought the hairbrush imparted the ultimate in pain but this is indescribable. Each stroke cuts cleanly through the general aching throb in her behind and leaves an electrical streak that makes her think of branded cattle. When she collapses, Elias Fortescue delivers a stroke across the sole of her upraised foot. The sensation is beyond words: for a moment she feels nothing, then pain snakes through her body, ending at her eyes. Then she finally feels it across her foot. Somehow that is the most humiliating aspect of her evening’s tribulations. For the sake of symmetry, he strikes her right foot in the same way, and again there is the momentary delay before her body jolts and a sense of nausea overwhelms her.
‘Sir Elias knows what he is doing’ the voice in her head says, but she is becoming less inclined to believe it.
‘Lie flat and I will deliver four strokes of the cane to your bare bottom. If you move, protest or cry out, I will start counting again. I will do so until you willingly take four consecutive strokes.’
With all the determination she can muster, she obeys his instruction without fault. He is disappointed.
‘Turn over.’
When she lies on her back she is shocked to find the cane drawn lightly across her flattened breasts. ‘Good girl,’ he says, so close she thinks he is about to kiss her. Then suddenly there is a line of prickles just below her nipples as the cane lightly grazes her. ‘There’s more of that if you don’t do as you’re told.’
Wordlessly, he raises her feet so her legs are vertical. ‘Four strokes without protest.’ he tells her, delivering the strokes in rapid succession. When she once again disappoints him by taking them with minimal protest, he raises her higher so she is supporting her weight on her shoulders and arms.
The cane shrieks through the air and Ameila holds her breath as four strokes are aimed to cut across as many of the existing weals as possible. She cries out on the first one, so it is repeated. She is a quick learner. The pain is excruciating but she knows it will end if only she stays still and quiet.
One. She grits her teeth. Two. The pain reaches her ears. Three. Sir Elias knows what he is
doing. Four. She’s made it. She knows what she’s doing.
He helps her stand. He tells her to wait by the fireplace and to hold the cane and reflect on what she wants from her career until he comes back.
He takes off his jacket. He leaves the room.
She thinks about her career. She thinks about the progress she has made from being an under-achieving dropout from a comprehensive school and where she wants to be in five years’ time.
Her bottom smarts from the thrashing she has endured. She holds the cane in her hands. Elias Fortescue is coming up the stairs. She twists and bends the cane until it snaps. Watching her form the doorway, Sir Elias sees tear-blotched face and the unnameable shades of red streaking the skin on her bottom and thighs. And he sees the glint of wanton rebellion in her eye.
She’ll be a challenge, but he knows what he is doing. She will be rewarding.