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Scent of Ginger Ch. 03

By: Case21



Chapter 03: Discoveries

I vowed to forget what the Doctor did to me. But the way he treated me made me deeply aware of my body. The more I attempted to discipline myself, the more disobedient I felt. Even in attending to my duties and serving the household that has supported me since childhood, I was sometimes overcome by reverie, my gravest fault, and led into temptation at the very thought of punishment. It is a strange and terrible thing. Should we not be deterred from doing evil by the thought of discipline? Is that not the function of 'correction'? I had thought so, and thought myself full well corrected. I was determined not to undergo his treatments again.

And yet, this very morn, as I knelt on my hands and knees to wax the parquet, I felt myself once more on all fours in the Doctor's office. I recalled with a strange sort of pleasure the cool of air playing on my back, and the resounding sting of his blows against my flesh. Memory sprung fully-formed from memory, until his cool hands seemed to pull once again on my fever-taut flanks, and the hallucinatory scent of spice filled the air. The ginger-root's line of heat burned once again inside me, as vivid as life. So immediate was the sensation that I was compelled to visit the privy to check and clean myself. 

Naturally, my intention was to tend to my cleanliness only in the most chaste of ways. I do not even own a mirror, so that I might not be tempted by the sight of my nakedness as I dress. And yet I could not help but feel the softness of my thighs, once divested of linens, and the even softer tissues between them. I could not help but move the cloth slowly and let it linger, especially at first touch when it slid in so smoothly, came away so slick, and I, remembering a certain rich, familiar flavour--

O Saviour, see what a shameful thing I have written now! I begin to fear even this, the expression meant to save me. Because as I write it I experience anew those sensations I describe, and my hips begin to shift, my voice to stir in the back of my throat. They will surely hear your sighs, Hannah! Hush, hush, put the pages away!

I cannot put them away. I read them again and again, late at night. I read:

Am I irreparable? I think I am. I, who have never pined for husband nor lover, who feel only disgust at the thought of motherhood, I, frigid and unnatural creature, must admit that I nonetheless yearn to be treated by this Doctor in the harshest manner. I cannot bear what he does to me, and yet I long for it. I believe he seeks to treat me so as well, in his clinic. When he said that I must repeat the lesson thrice to learn it, was it a threat or a promise? What must I do, to have him fulfill those words? How might I find again the opportunity to raise my troublesome voice high, so high that it is freed from me and becomes the most sublime silence, that of the acceptance of my body's desires?

I try to recall what I did to merit punishment before so that I may repeat my sin and find absolution, but I find only a record of my innocence: false accusations of my conduct with the groom, a bothersome illness that I could not have foreseen and did not intend. Should I consider seducing the groom in fact, or harm myself so that the Doctor will treat me? No: neither option suits my way. I must wait. And as I wait, I must make do by myself.

***

Now, quickly, before he comes for me, I must record what has happened.

It was late at night. All was hushed, save for the whisper of snow settling on itself and the drowsy breath of the women around me. While they slept, I lay awake. Lay, and stirred. As stealthily as possible, I turned onto my back and stretched out on my low, flat pallet. I lay my writing-book open to the scene of my punishments across my breast, hidden in a volume of 'Beeton's Book of Household Management.' I had thought to claim that I was reading it by the light of moon on snow if detected. Meanwhile, under the volume's heavy covers, I unlaced the front of my nightgown.

My fingers were cool against my throat, my breastbone. I intended to slide my hand down the length of my body, directly into the site of my past penetrations. But instead, I found my fingers straying of their own accord to my bosom. I am slim and not full-bosomed as some of the other maids are, but still, when I passed my hand over my heart and cupped my breast I found it full. In the centre of my palm was the hard, insistent nub of my nipple. Pressing it down only caused it to rise. A sudden worry lanced through me. Might not milk spurt out, as with a cow? I twisted it with my fingers to stem the possible flow, but that only sent a queer shivering sensation through my body, that prickling of nerves all drawn to the surface. Fascinated, I slipped my other hand under covers, so that I was gripping both breasts at once, and squeezed. Harder. In response, I felt my hips shift. They moved just the way they did when he put the ginger in me: curving, evading, and yet opening.

Stroking down the length of my body, I tentatively pushed in under my nightshift to my bloomers. I felt momentarily grateful that I was not a great lady with layers of fine linens. Only one more barrier of cloth separated hands from flesh, and I transgressed it with quiet ease.

Inside, I felt for the first time that soft slickness I had not allowed myself direct contact with before. Wracked with terror at the thought of discovery, and with guilt at the knowledge of my sin, I was nonetheless seized with a great curiosity. What is there, in there, between?

Must I describe it? Yes. Something is there, where we are taught to think of nothing. Something too complex to be visualized, something that must be known by feel alone. It is warm and wet as fresh egg yolk, and yet deliciously textured. I felt it avidly, and feeling it also stirred sensations there, action and reaction following so close on each other as to be near indistinguishable. A sweet pressure began to build in my loins, as of something waiting to blossom. I slid my fingers deep into my sex and then drew them up, exploring. At the top of my cleft, between folds of lacy flesh, my fingertips found a small bud. I pressed hard, as I had with my breasts, and pain lanced through those sensitive tissues --yet such a pain that I wanted only for it to continue.

I reached. I delved. Deeper in, and then back up and down again, tracing valleys and peaks of smooth sensation. The Mer de Glace...impenetrable wilderness...the pressure becoming a rushing like the wind across peaks and valleys, singing, speaking...

Speaking, my voice speaking words strange and thick.

Speaking aloud, and high. Crying out my pleasure.

I had not even noticed how the unstable ground of my body shifted: my arms had pushed the book from my breast, and my legs had raised themselves, knees steepled and spread. When Lottie the chambermaid sat up to throw her cushion at me, she saw me silhouetted in the moonlight, and what I was doing was eminently clear.

"Hannah!" she exclaimed. The others stirred and I, fingers wet deep in myself, froze. Like a pheasant under the hunter's gun, I stiffened and then took to flight under the covers in a thrash of limbs that was more revealing than if I had not moved at all. 

"What has she done now?" Polly from the kitchens asked sleepily.

"She--she's an onanist. I saw it just now, what she done!" 

"That I may be, but I am a virgin yet, unlike many here!" I protested, rising to my knees wrapt in blankets. "I have never touched another, I do not wish another to touch me--"

"Except for the Doctor."

I stopped, flushed with shame.

"Spot on, Lottie. Shall we call the Doctor?" Polly's wide-awake eyes gleamed in the dark like a cat's as she turned them on me. The younger girls huddled on their pallets, listening but not daring to look.

"Yes, shall we call the Doctor? Let's send for him right now." Lottie chorused in whispers. The suggestion shocked me in its disrespect, and without thinking I said, "At this hour! No, you mustn't disturb him."

"But you want him to come for you."

The pair of them were converging on me, crawling across the pallets.

"I want no such thing!" I covered my face to shelter the truth from them.

"Admit it." Lottie seized my hand. She ran a finger over the wetness there.

"Admit it." Polly seized the other hand. Together they pulled my arms apart, revealing my open gown, my body still visibly aroused.

"Admit you want him to punish you, or we'll do it for him!" Lottie said, and at that she pinched my breast. I gasped and tried to pull back, but she held so tight that it only twisted the tender flesh even more. I felt myself flush again, the burning awash from my cheeks through my body, down between my legs. The burning heat of ginger. I crouched and pressed my hips down to snuff it, grinding into the blankets once. Then again. Again.

"Oooh, lookit 'er go!" Polly giggled. "Right you are, Lottie, a nonanist!"

"Please stop!" I cried, kneeling straight up again with effort. "Leave me my dignity!" Lottie only gave a scornful laugh. "Dignity? We're serving girls. We takes what we gets. You pretend to be the Good Miss, the Cold Little Lady. But we hear what you say, and you're worse than the rest of us. 'Hurt me,' you say, and 'Please don't do it, please, do it to me.'"

"I seek redemption!"

"An' you think you'll find it down 'ere?" Polly slapped my bottom twice, hard. Her blows evoked the crop, the iron, I could taste it in my mouth. My legs collapsed, knees spread.

"Oh, don't!" I cried. "Ah! No, no, not now!"

Unstoppably, my thighs clenched around the blankets, my tissues around themselves. I couldn't, I couldn't control myself. Still held in the grip of my enemies, I arched as the suffusing heat burst into full flame, high, brilliant, and dancing within me.

I fought it, I fought so hard. Finally, the force of my limb's spasms was enough to tear them from the hands of the two women so that I fell into my pillow, gasping for breath. I could not even cover myself, so overcome was I by continuing sensation. I had not yet reached the peaks I'd experienced under the Doctor's ministrations, but the simple thought of what my body was capable of feeling was enough to set me shaking again. Still surrounded, however, I could not act. I lay quiet, clenched in the simultaneous shame and elation of my discoveries. I could not see the women's expressions, but I could hear their whispers. Their tone was disturbed, querulous. "What is to be done with her?" "She can't stay with us, not like this." "We don't want her here." "The Doctor." "We must send for the Doctor." 

And at that, even through my humiliation, I smiled. 


Scent of Ginger Ch. 04



Chapter 04: Lessons in Restraint and Decorum

'Ravenscourt.' The gatepost sign catches the last light of the setting sun as the hansom cab drives past it. The letters are faded and nearly unreadable, but I know them well. It was the manor at Ravenscourt that took me in, suckled me, taught me to do useful work, and raised me into a woman. If I felt stifled there, still I counted myself fortunate that I had a roof over my head and a key to the library bequeathed to me by my young mistress Clara, whose childish lessons I took as my own. If I grew with an imagination twisted like the trees on the moor, it was not only the fault of this manored landscape, where affections blew hot and then, with Clara's passing, chill again. Perhaps those gusts tossed my branches some, but in my grain already there was imbued a certain tendency. 

Always, was I distant. Always I disliked physical touch. But I endured certain physical pains with something more than stoicism. A rap on the hand for pinching sweetmeats; a game of Pony with saddle and reins. I was never ill-used, not 'that way.' If I had been, perhaps my inclinations would be more understandable. The tree twisted by gales of abuse is easily explained. I am not such a being. Ravenscourt tried to train me up true, and my limbs are straight on the surface. It is on the inside that I am as knotted as the oak tree that imprisoned Ariel in its entrails. And I grew this way of my own accord and inclination. Hannah Ravenscourt I am, Ravenscourt's creature I am not.

This is all true. And yet, I cannot say how deeply it saddens me, to be finally and forever rejected by the place which gave me, as an orphan, its name. Lottie and Polly may stay. Though they were the ones who held and teazed me into convulsions, they get to stay, while I am cast out. 

'Is it not what I wanted?' I ask myself now, as I sit stiffly writing in the cab that is drawing across the dim plains towards the institution that haunts my dreams. Did I not want to be placed once again in the hands of the Doctor? Remembering his treatments, I feel the heat begin to rise in my cheeks. But at the same time there is an ambivalence, a counter-impulse in me. I do not like what he represents. I do not want for me to be a woman, and he to be a man, and he to do to me what he will because of this. The reactions in my body to what he does are undeniable. But is it to him that I react, or is it to my own imagination, the liberation of my voice, my experience of my own body reaching the limit of its capacities and crossing over? 

***

Such questions were still running through my mind as we pulled up to the gate. No rufous cabbie now, but a closed-faced, square-bodied orderly, opened the door and lead me to a room quite different than the one I'd had before. The cell I was kept in during my first stay here, with its single low bed and desultory bedpan, was not fit for long-term habitation. This room, though spartan and still dominated by an iron-framed, white-sheeted bed, had at least a washstand, a table, and a sturdily-bound chest for storage. It suggested a longer-term stay.

I was brought to see the Doctor almost immediately following my installation in this little room, and as I suspected, he confirmed that I had been committed to stay in his sanitarium for an indefinite period of time, due to my 'delicate condition.' He laid down the rules for me in quiet, severe tones. I was not to leave the building unaccompanied. I was not to wander the corridors. I was to follow the strictest regimen concerning diet, grooming, and conduct. And I was to report to him weekly for sessions aimed at curing my disorder.

"To begin," he said, "remove your servant's robes, and adopt those of a patient here."

"Must I disrobe now, here?" I asked. Involuntarily, my hand crept up to the bosom of my dress, where my papers seemed to flutter their wings with my quickened pulse. His cut-glass eyes narrowed as he noted my hand's destination. He said,

"Yes, I see now that you must. What are you hiding, crafty Hannah?"

A panic seized me. He mustn't get the pages. He had seen my body's shame already and heard my cries, but for him to read this most private of confessions--no! My head snapped round like a sparrow's when the falcon is on it, seeking escape. I flew impulsively for the open door behind me.

"Door!" the Doctor called, nonchalant. Someone just outside gave the heavy door a push, so that I was dashed like a wave against the wood. My breath was suddenly loud in my ears and hot on my face against the finished oak. I could hear chair-legs scrape behind me as the Doctor rose. 

"Now, now, Hannah. For all your irrationality you are more reasonable than this. Give it to me, whatever you have secreted there."

I turned to face him and shook my head, silently pleading. His tone sharpened into a whip-stroke of command.

"Come to me. Now." 

I knew I should obey. My every impulse was to submit to him. And yet, terror at what I would be revealing froze my limbs in what must have seemed a posture of defiance.

The Doctor sized me up for a long, long moment. His gaze seemed to pass through me to the papers concealed at my breast. Then, in two long, swift strides, he was on me. He pushed me back against the door and with a flash of cold silver he slit my dress from belly to neckline. It was as if he had cut my living body open: I gasped and tried to clasp the wound closed with the hand that was not pinned between the door and my back. 

"No! No, please!" I cried. But he caught my wrist in his free hand, and with the hand that was still holding the knife, he plucked the pages from my bodice. The air seemed to fill and hollow me at once: cool and empty was I, flooded with bereft space. He gave my beating heart, which he held in his hands, the barest glance before pulling me forward and calling to his doorman again to open the way.

"Take her to her room." He ordered. "Make sure she is dressed properly. And make sure she sleeps. Use the chloroform if you must."

I did not see him take up my papers. Not then, not ever. But read them he did, while I was made through a noxious compound to sleep.

Now, I write at his command. 

***

At our next meeting, the Doctor looked upon me with a fresh and avid eye. He seemed excited by some new discovery, and wasted barely a moment in discoursing upon it. 

"Ah, Hannah," he exclaimed as I entered. "Sit, and listen well. What I tell you now will greatly impact the course of your treatment." I sat apprehensively on the leather couch he indicated. He began at once.

"To date, I had believed yours to be a simple case of hysterical nymphomania. But now that I read your very interesting confessions-" here I flinched, and here he smiled "--I believe yours to be a more complex and interesting case. Have you heard of the new classifications of Kraft-Ebing?"

I remained silent. 

"No, of course you haven't. This good German doctor has collected many fascinating case studies of sexual perversion. It is fortunate that I was able to send for his volume through a dear friend of mine in Heidelberg --for you see, though I am a country doctor, I have my connections throughout the continent."

I plucked at my gown in impatience. The Doctor rapped his desk with his cane.

"This concerns you, so do attend. Among the studies in this volume are cases of women, much like yourself, who find erotic pleasure in pain and humiliation."

"I do not—"

"'I recalled with a strange sort of pleasure the cool of air playing on my back, and the resounding sting of his blows against my flesh,'" he quoted verbatim. A chill went through my belly to hear my words in his voice --a chill, and then a heat. 

"You do take pleasure in pain." He continued. "You do not wish to, being at the same time frigid, and yet you do. I see now that my previous methods of treatment have only exacerbated your condition, which incidentally is known in the literature as 'masochism' after some wretched German fantasist or other." 

At the mention of literature and fantasists my interest perked; but he seemed to see that this was a distraction to me, and sighed.

"We must proceed with another course of treatment. It is clear to me that these impulses cannot be eradicated through the traditional corporeal punishments. We cannot beat out of you a desire to be beaten. In order to become a sane, civilized woman, then, you must learn to first express, and then to restrain yourself. You must learn decorum. Speak, Hannah; but temper your speech."

"How am I to do that?" I asked intemperately. "I cannot control my voice. That is why I write. I try to control myself, but I am only incited more by all those around me, by memory, by my body's presence so close, always. How can I control it?"

"With training. We will train your body, as we train your mind. We will train it to first find a healthy release, and then to practice restraint and decorum."

I could not imagine what he meant, so I merely bowed my head.

"Good girl," he murmured at my submission. Then, he stood and said, "Come with me."

I followed him out of his office and down a long, windowed hall. Shafts of pale, watery light layered the corridor. I passed through this striated space in an agony of apprehension, as each diagonal pane of light seemed like a membrane I shuddered to breach. But he led, and so I was forced to follow all the way to the end of the corridor.

At its terminus, we passed through a doorway into a room filled with the strangest scent. Not ginger, but what they call 'ozone,' like the scent of the air after lighting has struck. In the centre was a table bound tightly in leather, with cuffs in all four corners, and near it an engine of some kind. It appeared to be a 'steam-engine.' I was so fascinated by the workings of this device that I did not notice the Doctor behind me undoing the ties on my linen shift until fell from me and left me naked, exposed before the machine. I cried out, my hands covering myself defensively, but the Doctor seized me by the arm and walked me across the room.

"You want this, Hannah. You do not know it yet, but I am about to grant you the release you crave, in a way that will be eminently suited to your constitution."

"I do not want it!" I protested. "You mustn't touch me!"

"Oh, I don't plan to. You are about to experience the wonders of modern Science: clean, objective, dispassionate, and wholly effective. Consider it fortunate that a poor orphan and servant such as yourself can contribute to the development of this great cure for women's hysteria."

At that, he strapped me to the table. I must admit that though I struggled, I could feel at the same time a slickness welling in me. The posture, with my arms and legs spread wide, recalled that fever-dream of being bound in my sickbed, and the chill and flush of that fever seemed to rush over me once again. 

"You see how already it affects you," the Doctor murmured. He raised with his hand a metal wand that was connected by a thick shaft or armature to the steam machine. As he spoke, he slid the wand's tip into me, along my cleft, just once: a single stroke up that made me shiver violently with its very lightness. Then he inspected the tip. It glistened. I know not whether it was me or the machine he intended to test. But after some moments, he pressed down on a lever, made a contact that set the machine roaring, and lowered the shaft yet again.

The second time, it was not at all like being touched by metal. It was like being touched by sound. The wand, powered somehow by the engine, was vibrating like the lowest notes of the pianoforte, only with double, treble the force. It moved and resounded at once. And this he placed on the tenderest tissues of my body.

The sensation was indescribable. He was not touching me, not at all with hand nor tongue nor cock, not even its approximation in vegetable flesh, and yet spasms wracked my body almost at once as if I were approaching the heights I yearn for and fear. The sensation was continuous, constantly modulating yet unceasing in intensity --or if anything, building in intensity as my body grew more and more attuned to it. 

My mouth opened, but rather than words, I found that I could only make inarticulate sounds, moans cut short by my gasping breath. My voice too was already transformed, made into the expression not of wild fears and fancies but of direct sensation. My whole body began to weave and flex in its bindings, and he followed its coursings perfectly with the wand, now thrusting it deep into my bottom or between my lips, now drawing it up to the little bud I had found for myself. He explored, to see which site generated the most dramatic reactions.

"Still in the retrograde phase of clitoral orgasm," I heard him murmur as he pressed the vibrant wand harder into my complex tissues. But the words meant nothing to me; only my body meant, if feeling can be equated to meaning. I began to cry faster, faster as he adjusted the dials, upped the frequency. He raised the tone of vibration until I began to keen with it, my voice in tune with the machine until suddenly I pitched much, much higher. As if a star had burst inside of me, I arched my body hard against the wand, and screamed and screamed until in my fullness I overflowed, and was left warm, slippery, wet, and sensual against the leather table.

"That, little Hannah, is the new scientific means by which we rid hysterics of the excess energy they accumulate, which disorders the female system. It has proven quite successful in other cases, and seems initially effective on you."

"There is, however, a second step to be taken in your case. You are not merely hysterical or frigid. You are masochistic. You will come to seek this treatment more and more, rather than being weaned off of it into normal sexual functioning. You may even seek to inflict further pain on yourself, through your troubling self-abuse. You have experienced release. Now you must learn some restraint." He paused, then tilted my face towards his own with his hand.

"Hannah. Look at me. You may not touch yourself after these sessions. I, as your physician, am the one who knows how much sexual stimulation is correct for you. You mustn't upset that balance through onanistic activities."

"I won't, I swear it." I whispered, still prone and languid on the table. It seemed very easy to promise, in the fullness of sensation.

"So you claim. But women of your type are not like men, who can be satisfied once and have done with it. See here."

With that, he turned the machine on low, and once again slid its appendage in between my legs to touch the little bud he calls the clitoris. Languid though I was, pain and pleasure yet stirred in me. Like embers ruffled by a breath, I felt the glow revive. He was right: the fire in me was not doused, only smouldering. It could be stoked again, and soon. My mouth opened, but all I did was sigh. He knew what that meant.

"Yes. You feel arousal again, already. I can hear it. That is why you need this."

Striding over to the wall, he opened a cupboard and took out something made of a sleek black material. Returning, I saw that it was in fact a kind of corset, though one more elaborate than any I had ever seen, with a thick leather band running from the front to the back, where it was laced through an elaborate buckle.

"This is a garment design to prevent unwanted nightly behaviours. You will wear it at all times, until our next appointment. Doorman," he called out over his shoulder, and at that the square, taciturn orderly returned. He undid the straps at my wrists and ankles and stood me up beside the table.

"Hold her," the Doctor murmured, almost absently.

As the Doorman held my arms, the Doctor spread my legs and pulled the opened corset's undergirder between them. It was smooth and cool between my thighs, and loose at first, as my whole body still was, in trembling afterglow.

Then, however, the Doctor began to do up the laces. The corset covered my chest entirely, and he pulled the top laces so tight that I could barely get a finger in to either side of my breasts. He pulled at the waist too, so that suddenly I found myself gasping again --not just at the restriction of my airways, but at the sensation of my entire core, from breast to hips to between my legs, embraced tightly all round. He pulled sharply, perhaps too quickly, so that the laces burned against my skin, and I felt a long, deep shiver that I had to work to hide. When he tightened the buckle that held the strap between my legs, I did gasp aloud in excitement. But for once he seemed distracted, shifting his own narrow hips uncomfortably, and did not notice that what he did was inciting me to pleasure again. He tied off the laces and ran his hands down my body, now curved and yet hard as a seashell. Metal stays crafted my waist, leather pressed against my sex without entering me. I felt the glow and it was all I could do not to squirm with it. And yet, I began to realize that if I were to wear this restraining device all week, I would be in suspension, in a state of approaching yet denying pleasure that seemed unbearable.

"Please," I said weakly, "May I not remove it to sleep?"

"Certainly not. Especially not then. We will remove it only at designated times so that you can attend to your bodily functions, with supervision. No release, Hannah. You have had it already. Think now of restraint. I will see you again in one week."

He walked out of the door. And I walked out behind him into torment.



Scent of Ginger Ch. 05



Chapter 05: Denial and Disobedience

It was impossible to sleep. 

The days were a challenge, as I was given work around the hospital and expected to perform diligently despite the corset that cut my breath shallow and the strap that dug between my legs. Simply moving about caused the stays to clasp and the leather to rub me, building a tantalizing friction through my core that was not yet enough to become pleasure. My step wavered as I carried washbasins and hung out laundry, and I have no doubt that my eyes held some wildness which caused visitors to the asylum to flinch from me as I stood aside, docile, while they passed. They had no way of knowing what an effort it was, what a humiliation, to stand passive before them given the sensual agitation my body was continually experiencing. 

Still, during the days at least my hands were occupied, and I could distract my mind by watching the flight of birds and hearing their calls as I fetched the sheets from the courtyard. At night, when my eyes were closed and the thick stone walls muffled all sound, the only sense left to me was touch. The feeling of my tightly-bound body filled my entire physical world. My breasts, always tender, ached to be pulled free and caressed back to their natural modest fullness. My skin, so sensitive, was patterned by lacing and boning. And between my legs, where so recently I had discovered an eminently tactile something, there was nothing to meet my fingers but hard, unyielding leather.

I aimed at first for restraint and decorum, as the Doctor ordered. I tried to sleep properly arrayed on my back with my hands outside the blankets, giving no sign of the powerful, confusing new needs that coursed through me. I did not speak in my sleep because I did not sleep –or at least, I dozed so lightly that the slightest stir of my voice woke me. I placed my cushion below the small of my back to support the tight arch the corset wrought there and prayed to the Virgin Mary, at first for chastity, then simply for comfort.

But the lack of rest slowly wore down my resolve. On the third night, I took to lying with my hands under my pillow. On the fourth I allowed them to move under the covers. After the moon set but before the pre-dawn light, in the darkest part of the night, I gave in to compulsion and carefully began to explore my curved, corseted body. It felt nice, to my hands, to follow the smooth slope of my flat, black-satin-bound breasts, down the valley of my waist and up again to the flare my hips. I traced the voluptuous line on my thigh where sensation began again. But down my centre line, from breast to cleft, I could feel only the steady, restrictive pressure of the binding, which embraced and stimulated me all over, but denied me any way to either concentrate or release the grip. My body was no longer my own. I belonged to him. Or so it seemed.

As the fifth day dawned, I began to feel a kind of erotic panic growing in me that came ever nearer to overmastering my self-control with each passing moment. My hands stroked my sleek waist over and over, my hips squirmed almost uncontrollably. Even as my desperation mounted, however, I refused to request an appointment with the Doctor. He would not have the satisfaction of seeing me beg. Instead, I conducted myself as coolly as I could when the nurse he'd set over me came to bathe me. 

"And how are we today, then?" The Head Nurse –a severe woman of indeterminate years– inquired as she undid my buckle to allow my morning wash. 

"As well as may be expected under the circumstances," I replied tersely. Frowning, she launched into one of her habitual monologues. 

"Complaining again, are we? Well, it is your own fault that you find yourself here, I am sure. I have never met a patient yet who could not improve herself with a little more self-discipline. Yes, discipline! Discipline is what is lacking in today's servants! And discipline is what you shall learn here. We are not an institute of incarceration for common criminals here, we are an institute of education for the mind and soul. Hygiene is your lesson, and a proper sense of proportion."

"'Proportionate hygiene'?" I allowed the slightest irony into my voice.

"Just so." She stamped my irony back down with her own iron-heavy tones. 

"In the name of hygiene, then," I replied, and wiped my bottom soundly. As I reached the end of the stroke, my fingers delved in perhaps more than was strictly necessary.

"Now now, none of that, or we'll delay you another day," she snapped, and made a disapproving mark on my checklist for the day. I could have slapped her then and there, or cried, or both. Instead, I simply muttered,

"You insist on civil behaviour here. But it is demeaning to be watched at my toilette as a child is watched in the nursery."

"A pity you need to be watched so." She parried heartlessly. "That'll do. Fetch your corset now, and I will lace you in."

How my hand trembled as I picked up the object that tormented me! The urge to toss it out of the window gripped me so strongly that the muscles of my fore-arms twitched. Seeing this, she took it from me and turned me roughly to face the wall.

"Brace your hands here, and mind you don't struggle. I will be quick."

Quick she was, quick enough to burn my skin with the lacing. And yet, as always, her cruelty had the opposite of its intended effect on me. My legs shook and my belly grew taut as my helplessly oversensitive body responded to the pain. The Nurse tsk'd as she drew out a cloth from her skirts to wipe the liquid that trickled between my thighs. Then she clasped the leather over my sex more firmly than ever. I pressed my flushed face to the wall's cool plaster. If she had looked, she would have seen my lips moving a silent irrational plea: hurt me, pleasure me, O anything, but let me feel-!

That night, driven by desperation, I began to work in earnest at my bindings, seeking any way out I could find. I lay on my belly, twisted my arms back awkwardly and fumbled with the buckle. It was locked. I wove my fingers through the lacing, tearing at it. I had not enough leverage to break the cord. Finally, I tugged on the strap between my legs as hard as strength and stealth permitted. Though the leather did not give, it did something else to me. Pulled tighter than ever, it dug into my bound flesh in ways that, while painful, caused my already-shallow breath to catch. I pulled again, then again. Even the slightest changes in pressure there were now amplified by my heightened perceptions. A pleasure born of pain flooded into me, hot and sharp and genuine. My frantic hands acquired a rhythm. I felt the strap grow slippery with my fluid arousal, allowing me to move it more freely, to move myself against it. My hips flexed, pressing forward. I had to bite the coverlet's edge to stifle a moan. Closer, closer now-

My movements must have reached some tipping point of frenzy, for at that moment the bedsprings gave a shocking squeal. I tried to still myself, but the sensations I had built up were so strong that they were like a floodgate opened: the momentary jolt of frozen terror only caused me to convulse with pleasure again, harder, a moment later. The bedsprings resounded a second time, echoing loud. Footsteps in the hall gave me just enough warning to free my hands from the strap and thrust them out from under the blankets in a parody of innocence.

But no, it was too late. There stood the Head Nurse in her uniform, and arriving behind her the Doctor, a dark red silken dressing gown thrown over his nightshirt. He set down a reflecting oil lamp on the table, so that it cast a brilliant steady light onto my bed, like the limelight of the stage. My cheeks were inflamed, and he could not mistake the sweat on my brow.

"Feverish again, Hannah?" he suggested mildly. 

Before I could respond, he stripped the coverlet from my bed and bared my curled-up body, my legs crossed tightly around the strap that bound me to suffering. His suspicions were immediately aroused by my posture. With the Nurse's help, he wrestled me onto my back and forced my legs open. I cried out a protest, but a single dagger-glance from his impatient eyes was enough to still my tongue. He probed methodically with one finger at the edge of the leather strap. It came away slicked with the wetness that seeped between leather and flesh. He shook his head in mock-sorrow.

"This won't do. I suppose we have no choice but to further restrain you," he said with relish. "Head Nurse, kindly fetch a strait-jacket."

After she left, he turned to me and continued to lecture. 

"The strait-jacket is not an ideal solution for one of your type. But given that you continue in your defiant ways, it is necessary. Naturally, the release scheduled for the day after tomorrow must be postponed---"

"No!" I shouted without a thought of restraint or decorum. "Let me free! This binding is inhuman. No woman could be cured by such torment as this in a thousand years!"

"I shall inform the medical establishment of your expert verdict." He smiled his wicked taunting smile at me. I struggled to sit in a fury of passion.

"You say I want punishment and humiliation. Then prove it! Do it to me! Punish me as you used to, with ginger and crop! Whip me, leave me bound to the machine! Only don't deny me any longer or I—I—" 

At this I had to stop because the tight lacing of the corset hindered my breath, and indeed I could hardly draw enough air in the stifling room to speak, much less shout. But even as I choked my passion still burned in me, as demanding as a hot iron. Breathlessly, I rolled onto my belly to shield myself and gripped the leather strap once again, pulling until it cut my thighs and bottom deep. My mouth opened as I cried without sound, my whole body spasming in a hysterical fit. The laces—so tight—worms of black lace gnawing the corners of my vision, moving inwards as waves of dark pleasure rise to meet them from below—

"Nurse!" I heard the Doctor call distantly. "She's having an attack! Shears, now!"

At the very edge of consciousness I felt his hands hot on my back pulling my strings up to cut them. My head fell to the side and I saw his robe part to reveal a bulge straining against the fine linen of his nightshirt. I fancied I saw a glistening dampness spread there between his legs, at the very moment he cut me open. 

But oh, who knows what I saw? For the instant my laces snapped I surged up gulping air in one ecstatic gasp, and with eyes closed I pressed my breast to the sky and my hips to the bed, crying out in defiant joy as my body took its course before him. He too made a strangled sound, a protest or growl or throaty gasp. As I fell panting to my side, he closed his robe hastily and stepped back as the Nurse held up the strait-jacket she had brought.

"Secure her," he said curtly. The words had barely left his lips before he left the room.

And so my supple, pulsing body was bound again. I was closed up tight until the next morning. My scheduled release was cancelled, and I was left to wait even longer. And yet I felt for once that I had the victory, even in my physical unseemliness. For the very morning after this incident, my monthly indisposition began, and the freshly-laced corset was necessarily put aside for looser linens that would not disorder the movements of my wandering womb nor hinder the flow of my blood. I had found respite. I saw nothing of the Doctor during this time. I could only wonder what he was preparing next.



Scent of Ginger Ch. 06



Chapter 06: Cold Kisses

I expected him to punish me for my transgression. I had disobeyed his express command to not touch myself before his very eyes, using his own instrument. The corset he crafted to deny me pleasure granted me a satisfaction all the sweeter for long suppression. I flaunted that subversion before him. My defiance ruffled his feathers, showing me a peek of what lay beneath them: the desire he felt for me, revealed despite his efforts to hide it.

I couldn't believe he would allow me the upper hand for long. In fact, I was not only expecting punishment, I was counting on it. As my monthly flow trickled to a halt and my energies rose again, I found myself listening for his step in the hall. I breathed deep in hopes of catching the scent of ginger on the wind. However wrong it was, my chief emotion was anticipation.

'Surely,' I thought 'there will be consequences for my actions. I deserve to be punished. He will come for me.'

With such thoughts a-whirling in my brain, it's no wonder that when I was finally ordered to appear in his office, my heart was in my throat. I followed the Doorman down the long hallway to his office. The very same hallway I had dreaded to pass through before I now trod with guilty excitement. Glancing down it in the opposite direction, I could see the door that led to the steam-engine room, and the very memory of it set my nerves ringing. How angry would he be? Would he use the machine on me, or would he punish me some other way, through pain, humiliation, or further denial? Why did I want to see him so? I had to fight to still my shaking hand as I knocked on his door.

When I entered and curtseyed to him, however, I could detect not the slightest trace of anger or spite in his demeanor. He was cool, collected as always. He greeted me cordially. To my consternation, he held not a crop nor a corset, but a pair of sensible overshoes. Lying across the desk beside him were a long, narrow skirt and trim-cut jacket in olive-grey broadcloth, suitable for travel or exercise out of doors. With a terse nod he indicated that I was to don both in the adjoining room. 

"Get dressed, Hannah, and let us walk out on the grounds. We have much to discuss."

***

How long had it been, since I had walked in the forest? Since I had left Ravenscourt? I was disoriented to find that the season was spring. The plane-trees dropped their balls of downy spines, the privet-hedges pushed out vivid emerald beads, and the air was thick with the scents of mud and new life. As I strode through it all my senses were dazzled with the discovery that such things as trees still existed. 

"Yes, trees still exist," my strange unselfconscious voice murmured. "Birds exist!"

"Had you forgotten them?" said a sardonic voice at my back. I jumped and glanced back to see his faint, mocking smile. "Had you forgotten me?" 

"Forgotten? Well. I have lost a great deal in my life. It is only natural for one such as I to remember less than others and lose herself in fantasy more." I replied, using generalities as a shield.

"Your papers suggest otherwise. For instance, you seem to remember Clara."

"Yes, of course. My young Lady Clara." The very name, so long unspoken, brought a bittersweet smile to my lips. 

"Tell me about her."

"Why should I?"

"Because I ask it. Do you dispute my authority?"

"No, sir."

But I continued walking in silence, hesitating at the injustice of being made to speak the intimate details of my childhood while he refused to discuss his own motives and history, or even tell me his name. He stopped me with a warning hand on my arm and leveled his gaze at me. 

"This is a therapeutic experiment, Hannah, and it will benefit you to cooperate. Unless you would rather try my second line of action, solitary confinement?" 

At that I shook my head. I began to walk again as I spoke Clara's tale and mine.

"Lord Ravenscourt's only child Clara was born the same year I was abandoned at the manor. I was two or three years of age at the time. I was not the only one bereft: the Lord lost his Lady in her childbed, while the babe, a slip of a girl born too early, was sickly and not consolation enough for him. 

"In consequence, she and I were raised together by a succession of wet-nurses and nannies. We grew together, 'Golden head by golden head / like two pigeons in one nest.' Or, golden and copper at least." I fingered my curly red hair, which Clara used to praise though the maids mocked it, then continued.

"Though I was of lower station, I was yet old enough to help in caring for her, and so I became her companion, friend, and servant in one. I was her protector; she, my patron. Whatever Clara wanted me to do was done. I made lessons in reading, writing, and feminine accomplishments a game for her, but learnt them in earnest myself."

"Ah, yes. This, then, is why your diction and written expression are more refined than the common servant," he mused aloud.

"Are they?" I asked in a remote voice. My mind was still on her.

"You were close to her."

"Yes."

"But she is gone now."

"Yes."

"And you are evading the memory of what happened."

After a long pause, I began again.

"No. This too I remember. I killed her."

He looked at me sharply, sucking in his breath. 

"I am guilty, but it's not what you think. You see, I tried to protect her. Only, she was a willful, capricious girl. She loved adventure. And what she wanted to do, I did, always. So I agreed when, one warm day in early spring, just such as this, Clara said she wanted to go swimming. She claimed to know of a spring where Naiads bathed, and claimed that if we bathed there as well, we would keep the beauty of our youthful girls' bodies forever. Her very words."

"How old was she at this time?"

"Perhaps 10 or 11. And I, 13."

"Why would a lass of her tender years make such a remark about preserving your bodies?"

"I don't --yes, I do know. Being so close to me, she saw when my, my menses began, and observed the development of my figure. She saw how it hurt me, how it made me weep." My hand caressed my abdomen. "She sought to cure me of my womanhood."

"And you let her."

"I was touched by her childish, sisterly concern. And I wanted to believe I could be healed of my wound. So I went with her. 

"Of course, in her impulsive way, Clara supposed that if we simply set out in any direction we were bound to encounter the Naiad's spring, like the heroes of ballads who find their way to Faerie and back with nary a map in sight. Life, however, is not so beautifully structured as literature. We wandered around the dun dull hills as the spring skies greyed and lowered. Cloud became fog. We could not find the spring, nor find our way back before nightfall. Still, we were not so afraid, at first: Clara saw it as an adventure and laughed at the darkness, until...well."

I struggled for the words to say what had happened next. 

"In truth, the vigorous activity triggered my monthly flow, which was irregular and sometimes very heavy when I was young. Such inconvenient things never happened to Janet of Carterhaugh in 'Tam Lin,' did they? It was as if reality intruded on our game. She was distraught by the blood that stained my skirts, to the point of tears. She insisted on giving me her fine wool cloak to cover and warm me. Whatever she insisted on, I did, always. But in her summer dress, she was soaked through to the bone by the heavy mist. She caught a chill which moved into her chest. From this illness, she died."

So raw, even after all these years. My throat closed painfully. Some figure of speech was needed to soften the hurt.

"To this day," I managed, "she remains, just as she promised we would, young for all eternity in her Naiad's body. I kissed her cold lips once on her death-bed in farewell, then never again. I have not kissed another since."

There was a long, thoughtful silence.

"This explains many things about your dysfunction." The Doctor finally concluded.

"No." A swift revolt rose up in me. "It is not an explanation for me. It proves nothing, except that you want a narrative, a cause, a traumatic origin for everything. Clara is a part of me, but she is not the cause of my 'dysfunction,' as you put it. I am who I am! Can't you see me here before you?!"

My final words echoed loud in the forest around us, much louder than I'd intended. I was shouting at him. I bit my tongue as his eyes refocused on me like a hawk's. Only then did I see the trap, the way he maneuvered me into the vulnerability of confession. I had laid myself open to him, and he was now the one to judge me. The rising tilt of his chin and the gleam of satisfaction in his dark eyes told me that he once again had the upper hand. He drew closer.

"Everything has a cause." He murmured to me, almost whispering in my ear. "Your sexual dysfunction has a cause. You are inhibited due to the early trauma you experienced around your bodily functions. And that inhibition can only be overcome by returning to the source of the trauma and transforming it into a proper social behaviour."

"Transforming behaviour? How shall I—?"

"Kiss me. Now."

My heart constricted as if I stood at the edge of a cliff and stepped one foot into the empty air. I balked.

"No, I don't—"

Before I could say another word, he pulled me close and kissed my lips. I shuddered in his arms, tasting hot iron in my mouth.

"On your knees, Hannah. I will teach you how to kiss a man."

"Should I not learn how to kiss a woman?" I exclaimed, trying to work through his logic of cause and repetition.

"Certainly not. Kneel."

His hands were rushed as he pushed me to my knees, nearly frantic as he undid his trousers. He did not pull up his shirt-tail, but I saw outlined against it the same bulge I had seen when he cut me from my corset. 

"A woman's kisses must be sweet and gentle, Hannah. Begin at the tip and work down, to start."

"Please, I don't know how, I can't!" I begged. At that, he seized a fistful of my hair and brought my face to his crotch. He twitched the shirt aside. I could barely comprehend what was before my eyes, it was so close, but I could feel it on my lips, and taste it, strange and salt, so unlike the scent of my own wetness. Despite myself, my mouth opened so that my lips brushed his flesh in the faintest kiss. At that, his whole body jerked.

"Kiss me there and learn," he commanded. 

So compelled, I moved my mouth more avidly on him, eyes closed, discovering with my tongue what shape he had. The shape of a stripped branch, I said once of the shaft of ginger he had carved in his own image, but it was hotter and more alive than that. It moved. I was intrigued --and, I realized, aroused, as my own hips began to shift in response. Instinctively, as if seeking the comparison between us, my hand fell to the cleft of my thighs. But to my annoyance I discovered that I was kneeling on my long, tight hiking skirt, and could not lift it or nor press my fingers deeply into myself through the thick broadcloth.

"Mmm—Doctor, sir, I can't reach—I want to—"

The Doctor's head, haloed in the bright sun piercing through the trees, tilted down to me so that his face became visible, shadowing my own. A colder, more beautiful expression of triumph I have never seen. 

"You thought I wouldn't punish your disobedience, Hannah? You still have not earned your release. You may not touch yourself, and you may not come. Your lesson today is to please me, nothing more."

I opened my mouth to respond, but as soon as I did, he thrust his cock into it and filled it utterly, pressing rhythmically. My tongue worked around, trying to find a way out, stroking and lapping at him all the while. In a flash I became vividly aware of my entire body, kneeling on the rough leafy clutter of the forest floor with my back arched and straining, his hand entwined in my copper curls, my own sex slick and throbbing with a need I could not satisfy. His cock pressed so deeply into my mouth, even my throat, that I felt I might suffocate, and yet the choking sensation only increased my helpless arousal, the heat rising in me like ginger's burn. I clutched at his hips, his bottom, pulling him forward even as I struggled, legs clenched, to maintain control of myself. His breath came fast, fast, gasping out, a growl growing in him like a bear's and his body heaving, spasming, suddenly—oh! I choked in earnest on what came next, tears filling my eyes. But I swallowed deep and felt my body twist and fall as he pulled out to stagger back against the bole of a plane-tree. 

I crouched in the leaf mulch on my hands and knees for a long time. My heaving breath eventually slowed. Nothing stirred but the wind. When something soft touched my hair I thought at first that it was a plane's falling seed-pod. But it was his hand, brushing my curls. I looked up, and he reached down to caress my wet cheek, wiping away my tears.

"That was good, Hannah. Very good. I believe, at last, that we are beginning to make progress."

A single gentle touch was all it took. I began to cry as I had not since Clara's death. I cried out my loss and frustration and fear. And though I knew it only made me more vulnerable, when he put his arms around me I leaned into him as he stroked my back and tilted my face up to his lips. The trace of his kisses on my eyelids and cheeks stood out cool in the chilling air. Cold kisses they may have been, but comfort all the same. 

This time, I knew the way back to the clinic, whatever awaited me there.



Scent of Ginger Ch. 07



Ch. 07: Compromised

The Doctor and I had reached a turning point. He referred to it as a 'breakthrough.' I would call it the point at which I compromised –or was compromised, depending on how one sees it. At any rate, I realized for the first time that if I could please him enough, I might be able to convince him that I was recovering from my 'dysfunction,' and persuade him to grant me the pleasures I desired. What sort of pleasure I actually wanted still eluded me. My body yearned for bondage and liberation at once, a contradiction which confused me endlessly. Still, it seemed to me that submitting to the Doctor's program offered me a way to work through my confusion. At the very least, I could offer my obedience in exchange for certain small concessions.

"Sir," I ventured when next we met, "since our conversation in the forest, I am beginning to understand a little of the nature of my treatment. Its necessity, for one such as I."

"Is that so, Hannah?" he smiled, humouring me. "Pray tell, what have you understood?"

"I have long sought to cure my night-voice and... and other behaviours myself, through writing. But for me to cure myself in this way is like a dog trying to cure itself of fleas by biting its back. It only causes more damage, in the end. The dog must be cleaned and collared, so that it will not harm itself while it heals. Your efforts to teach me restraint in handling my body are quite like this."

"An apt image, my girl."

"I see that you are teaching me not to bite. And I truly don't wish to harm anyone, myself or you. I wish to be good. I wish to be healed. And so" -here I took a deep breath before forcing myself to continue- "I will cooperate with you fully in my treatment from now on."

"Splendid." His skeptical amusement, I fancied, held a note of genuine approval. I drew on this in broaching my next request.

"I will not bite any more, sir, if I can help it. And yet, the dog that is starved snaps at meat instinctively. The dog that is whipped flinches and snarls, unable to help itself. If I am to be docile and obedient for you, I too must be sated and soothed in some ways."

"What is it you're angling for, Hannah? Put aside your roundabout feminine metaphors and speak plainly."

"Yes, sir. What I propose is a compromise. I will be obedient to you in every respect when it comes to my treatment. But I should like access to my own sources of pleasure as well, when it is acceptable to you."

"Such as?"

"Books, sir. Paper, ink. And your permission, sometimes, to explore my own body as I see fit." 

At this he looked thoughtful. He deliberated a while before answering.

"Your desire for these things is a symptom of your condition, I think. We will need to test your ability to practice restraint and decorum, and to find appropriate releases, before you can be trusted to take your treatment into your own hands again."

"I will agree to be tested. Whatever conditions you set, I will meet."

"And if you should fail, and it becomes necessary to punish you again?"

"I will accept that as well. Please, punish me when I deserve it. I will learn."

"Then it's decided. We shall find out what you can do."

***

Throughout the spring and summer, the Doctor and I worked intensively on my training, or as he called it, my 'therapy.' He had other patients to attend to, but I could tell that he put me first. He met with me several times a week for sessions in which my mind, voice, and body all were subject to his program of discipline. As part of my duties I wrote out detailed descriptions of all the sessions afterwards: a full record of my treatment would span volumes. As I flick the edges of these pages, however, some seem to catch my fingertips and stand out, like the flash of brilliant leaves falling scarlet and gold among the greens of a kindling autumn.

Among the scarlet memories I have are the times I failed to control my impulses, the times I was punished. All of my punishments were somehow symbolic, reflecting my transgression so that I could better recall the slips and discipline myself in the future. At first, it could be something as simple as wearing a gag to correct an interruption or impertinence in my speech. I was also literally collared at times, to remind me of the figure of the collared dog I had used. This he did especially when I pulled away from being touched or refused to touch him. Though I have always had an aversion to anyone touching my body, he said that I needed to be tamed to it in order to one day do my duty as a wife. The feeling of the leather band clasped around my sensitive throat, the sensation of him pulling it as he stroked my breasts and belly from behind, was at once a gall and a strange sort of pleasure for me.

But these were fairly minor incidents. At other times, the punishment itself became a major test of my ability to control myself under pressure. 

I had been arguing with him about a point of my etiquette training. He wished me to demonstrate that I could properly set a formal dinner table, but I insisted that I had learned this material as a servant already. I stated that I wanted to learn useful new skills, implying that what he taught me was useless. I admit that I was pushing the limits of good conduct that day. I had not been allowed a release in quite some time, and even the prospect of punishment was beginning to seem increasingly appealing.

"Has it occurred to you that I may have a better sense of what I know and what lessons I need than you?" I asked boldly.

"Don't presume, Hannah," he warned, brow darkening.

"Is speaking the truth presumption?"

"Questioning my judgment is presumption, and I will not have it. On your knees, now."

"Yes, yes sir." 

I could barely keep my breath from going shivery. I hoped for the gag. The feel of his fingers brushing back my hair, the metal bit smooth and hard between my lips. My perverse body was reacting already, flushing wet at the thought.

I must have betrayed myself by my blush or the wildness in my eye. The Doctor, catching sight of me, suddenly paused.

"Ah. I see how it is." He dropped the gag back into his desk drawer and shut it with finality. I bit back a groan.

"This will not do. You've gotten quite good enough at releases. Now you need to learn your lesson before you take your pleasure. But how to make you see that?"

He gazed at me with that disturbing abstraction of his, until a wicked gleam came into his eye. He had an idea.

"Get up, Hannah. Return to your room, and study your volumes on household management well. In three days' time, I will require you to prove that you can lay and serve a formal dinner for myself and a guest of my acquaintance. And you will do it under conditions that require your utmost concentration. I warn you now: take care and do not treat your task lightly. Your failure would be an embarrassment to this institution, and your therapeutic sessions with me would necessarily be at an end. I will not hesitate to commit you to an asylum for incurable cases. Understood?"

He had never set me such an intimidating task, nor threatened me with such grave consequences before. I rose, curtseyed, and whispered, "As you say, sir." I vowed to do my best.

***

I studied hard. I honestly did. So when the time came to prepare the dinner table, I was fairly confident in my abilities. I had, after all, served the high table in Ravenscourt many times when Clara was alive and her doting uncles and aunts came to visit. The etiquette had not changed greatly since then. I had reviewed thoroughly and was certain of my skill.

Just as I was preparing to dress in the maid's clothing I had been given, however, there came a perfunctory knock at the door, and the Doctor entered. I hastened to cover my half-naked body out of habit. But with a gesture of his hand he commanded me to stand still, so I straightened and stood before him, my breasts bared, with just my bloomers on.

"Before you dress, there is one additional item you will be required to wear during the evening's service." He spoke in a tone that brooked no argument. "You will find it familiar, I don't doubt."

'The corset. Oh no. Oh, yes! I can work with that!' I thought rashly.

But I was wrong. He had an earlier memory in mind.

"Lower your bloomers and spread your legs," the Doctor ordered. Then, from his doctor's bag, he brought out a harness. A harness worked in leather with something long and pale attached to it. The sharp, rich scent of ginger filled the room. I began to tremble but didn't dare protest. I had agreed to be tested, and he knew my weaknesses through and through. My desires, my torments, oh, how he knew them!

Obediently I lifted my bare feet and stepped into the harness as the Doctor held it before me. He pulled it up. The root glistened, slick with juice and seemingly massive. With deliberate cruelty he slipped the shaft in just lightly between my lips and tilted it up, spreading its oils into my delicate folds so that the entire length of my sex would feel it when the burn began. My nipples grew taut, and my entire body quivered minutely with the effort of standing still and holding my moans in. He centered the ginger directly over my hole and pressed in with agonizing slowness, half-penetrating me and then withdrawing. Again. Again. I held my breath—

Then, with sudden, shocking violence, he thrust the root entirely in, filling me inside with its shaft of heat. He pulled the harness tight and buckled it in the back, the same kind of locked buckle he had used on the corset. I couldn't get it off. I was bound tight.

"Your task tonight is twofold, little Hannah. You must lay the table and serve my guest with all due etiquette, as you claim to be so adept at doing. And you must maintain perfect control of your carnal impulses. Should you slip, we will all see you for the incurable masochist that you are, and I will have no choice but to send you to an institute more suited to your condition. Understood?"

My voice cracked as I replied, "Understood, s-sir."

"Now, now. You will have to do better than that at dinner. Until then."

I could barely walk without stumbling as I set the table to prepare for the Doctor and his guest. The ginger inside me caused the most intense sensations of burning arousal possible –and yet, just as in my fever-dream, I was not able to find release without some more direct stimulation. I had to walk very carefully to prevent my undergarments from chafing my swollen clitoris, a difficult task given that even the lightest touch of linen there seemed amplified a hundredfold by my heightened sensitivity. I gasped on the edge of climax several times, and had to stop against the wall to collect my bearings.

I sensed that the Doctor was watching me from somewhere, but I could not tell where. I hoped that he was not counting this private struggle against me. Imagining myself under his gaze, I straightened my skirts, stood tall, and tried to turn my slowness to a swaying grace. Swinging my hips made the ginger burn more than ever, but the way I wanted to move, in coltish leaps, was ridiculous. I had to conduct myself properly. I could already hear the door-bell sounding, imperious echoes in distant corridors. I stationed myself in the servant's niche between the table and the passage to the kitchens, took a deep breath, and composed my face into an expression of pleasant blankness.

It was a lucky thing that I had such a firm grip on myself by the time they entered, because had I not I might have exclaimed in surprise. The Doctor's guest was no stranger at all, but someone known to me: Lord Ravenscourt's youngest brother's son, Goderic. I had seen him a handful of times in my childhood. He was a boisterous youth who acted as if he owned Ravenscourt when his father Godfrey brought him to visit Clara. It had been some ten years since last he saw me at her funeral, however, and he showed no sign of recognizing or even noticing me. He and the Doctor were deep in familiar conversation.

"Wine," the Doctor's tone of command suddenly rose out of the stream of discourse. I stepped forward as quickly as I dared to pour the wine, first Goderic's, then the Doctor's. As I stood beside him, the Doctor trailed one hand up my inner thigh underneath the high table. With one finger, then two, he stroked between my legs, pressing my sensitive flesh through my dress. I splashed a gush of red wine into his glass, pouring far too fast. It was only by luck that no drop spilled onto the white cloth. I stepped back as smoothly as I could to return the decanter to the centre of the table. I quickly learned to brace myself when approaching the Doctor, for he took every opportunity during the meal's many courses to fondle my unbearably aroused body unseen. I could not even glare daggers at him, for Goderic, seated across us, could plainly see my face if he chose to look. My humiliation was complete, and completely intense.

My mind was taken up with many things, then. And yet even in this state, I could not help but hear the conversation of the two men. It was intriguing for one so sheltered as I: gossip from the surrounding manors, allusions to scandals in London-town whose true meanings I could only guess at. Finally, Goderic brought discussion around to a matter that concerned the Doctor.

"You have of course heard of our dear friend the Countess of C—'s daughter, eh, Theo?"

Theo. The Doctor's given name was Theo. I grasped it like a feather plucked from the gale.

"Ah, yes. What has our poetess been up to now?"

"Causing a bother, apparently. Seems she fancies herself quite the Ophelia of late."

"Been mucking about in lakes, has she?"

"Oh, I say, it's all quite dramatic. Half-drowned, she was, when they found her. A taste of your therapy might be in order, what?"

The Doctor frowned.

"Is that why you came to dine, Goderic? You needn't have bothered. Such cases are not within my purview."

"Ah, well. It may interest you to know that her beloved Hamlet is by all accounts a 'Hamlette.' Devotees of Sappho, the both of them. So I've heard."

"Ah. Perhaps, then. Do give Countess C— my card. I will consider the case."

"Good man. Now, how about some brandy?"

"Certainly. Brandy!"

There was a long pause. The Doctor looked pointedly at me and said, "The brandy, girl."

I jumped, my attention suddenly returned to my service –and the state of my body. I cursed myself for the slip and scurried to obey. I had to go to the sideboard for the brandy, and the brisk walk brought the ginger's fading glow to life again. I was flushed as with fever by the time I returned to the table.

"Your maid blushes prettily," Goderic remarked.

"She does, doesn't she?" the Doctor replied with a small, knowing smile.

"Best to keep this one away from Countess C—'s daughter!" 

Both men laughed. I moved discreetly to the wall, returning only to refill their snifters. I suffered in silence there until finally, the chime sounded midnight and Goderic took his leave.

The instant Goderic was gone, the Doctor returned to the dining hall and gestured for me to follow him to his office. His face was grave. I was very nearly in tears, thinking that surely he would condemn me for my slowness to respond and my obviously flushed face. But once we got into his sanctum, he turned to me with a laugh and said,

"Ha! You've done wonderfully! He didn't suspect a thing!"

"But, my blush, he said–"

"Oh, Goderic says such things of all the pretty maids, the rogue. You were splendid!"

"I, I thank you, sir." I stammered. "Now, please, may I—oh, take it out!"

"Ah yes, the ginger, of course," he replied disingenuously, as if he had forgotten about it. He rose at a casual pace, watching me squirm desperately out of my uniform and under-clothes. He crouched in front of me and unlocked the harness by touch, reaching behind my back, so that he could watch as he drew the ginger out of me.

"So wet," he murmured. I very nearly convulsed at the sensation of the ginger slithering out between my lips, drooling strands of fluid across my full thighs.

"Oh please, please," I begged incoherently. At this, the Doctor smiled.

"Why, you're quite hysterical, Hannah. In cases like this, the most recommended treatment is the pelvic massage. Lean your backside against the desk, here, and open for me."

I pressed my bottom against the hard edge of the table, leaning back with my arms braced on the desk-top. I spread my legs with shameful eagerness. The Doctor removed his fine evening-coat. Then, he began to run his hands down my abdomen to my thighs and back up. He massaged my flesh, stimulating circulation, and also the flow of my juices. With each breath I gave a little whimper, and with each stroke he drew closer to my slick, gasping sex, until finally his fingers found their way between my lips. He stroked into me deep, so deep, then pulled up to my weakest point, where it hurts and elates me the most. He squeezed my budding tissues hard. I cried out "No!" but I wanted more than anything for him to continue, so hastily I added,

"You too, I want to please you too! Show me how, my Doctor!"

"Mmm, you've been a good girl tonight, but there can be no scandal here, no child by any means, we can't--"

"Then do anything, anything else you can think of!"

"Let us try the Greek way, then," he said. "Turn around." 

I did so, placing my hands palms-down on the table before me. With a rustle I heard him shed his waistcoat and trousers. Then, coming up behind me, he slid his cock in between my upper thighs. He did not penetrate me, yet he pumped the flesh of my legs and bottom in a way that stirred me beyond belief. As he held me to him, he twisted my nipples hard in his fingers, the pain lancing down my belly and sending a jolt not unlike the steam-machine's vibration through my sex. We were both gasping hard with one rhythm.

"Hannah, Hannah!" he called rapturously. At the sound of my name cried out in joy my heart and body soared. As my peak arrived, I called back to him,

"Theo!"

The first of my spasms wracked me, sweet and high. But suddenly the heat of his body against mine vanished. Glancing back, I saw that he had pulled out. He was still very hard, leaking fluid, but not the rush I expected to see. 

"Never, NEVER call me by that name!" he wailed. 

He collapsed into a chair at the desk, holding his head in his hands. At that sight, my eloquent night-voice burst from me unbidden.

"Doctor, Doctor, sir, I'll never do it again if it hurts you! But please, I want you, I want you to take me. If you have something, what the maids call a 'capote,' to keep scandal from our door, then use it. Only, we need release, both of us! We can't think in this state! Take me, and when we're calm again and the, the energies are dissipated, you can say whatever you need to me or send me away."

He looked up at me, his dark eyes burning, half-mad with lust and yet needing to regain control of the situation. I had never realized how harshly he must have been restraining himself until that moment. To show my absolute submission, I knelt down before him with tears in my eyes and said,

"I beg you. I beg you for what I cannot stand and have never wanted before. Penetrate me, use me. Then confide in me as I have in you. If your power over me can connect us, then you have the power already. My body is yours. Let us join over that."

For three, four, five heartbeats we were frozen in an engraved tableau: myself, naked and flushed, on my knees before him, and he equally naked at the desk with his sweat-damped hair in his eyes like the fallen angel of Paradise Lost, sunk in sensual torment.

Six beats. Seven.

"Yes." He said quietly. 

He stood and approached me. 

"Now, you will learn it all."



Scent of Ginger Ch. 08



Chapter 08: Release and Revelations

Within this volume there are many scarlet leaves. I have preserved memories of the harshest imaginable punishments, a course of "treatments" designed to at once incite and discipline my wayward body. But among the scarlet, there is one golden leaf. It is a memory still shot through with force: once again, I was held down, hurt, and brought to the highest possible degree of sensation by the Doctor's treatment. But here, for the first time, I admitted that I wanted it, wholeheartedly and without reservation. I wanted him to use me for his pleasure. I begged him for it. And he, who had restrained himself for so long in the name of teaching me restraint, unleashed his fullest power over me.

"Walk out before me, Hannah," he said, that night in his office after my service in bondage. He handed me my patient's shift to cover my nakedness. He donned his silken dressing robe, too hard to attempt his breeches. Then he motioned me out into the night-stilled corridors. No lamps burned, nor moon shone down on us on this night of late summer rains. It was like walking into a curtain of clinging black velvet. I reached out to get my bearings, but my fingertips met empty air.

"But where shall I—?"

"Ssst." He hushed me with a hand across my lips from behind. Then, he compelled me forward by pressing his palm to the flat of my back. He walked me forward, until I began to walk myself.

So it was that I found my way through the night hospital by feel. Whenever we came to a ghostly corner or dim staircase, he guided me by laying his hands on my body. A firm touch at my left waist turned me left; a hot hand lifting my buttocks encouraged me up the stair. Like a horse guided by the touch of the reins, I moved at his will. When I hesitated, he spurred me on with a light slap or a pinch.

"Mm!" I gasped as he struck my bottom hard enough to sting.

"Ssst!" He hissed again, and pressed his body to mine as he silenced me. I could feel his hot, stiff member through my thin linen shift.

"Mmmm..." I let the softest possible vibration into my breath, and continued.

A moment later we reached a door which the Doctor unlocked with a key strung at his throat. A fire smouldered low in the room's hearth, too low to see his chamber's features until he stirred the blaze to life with impatient thrusts of a poker. At that, furniture loomed and flickered around me like heat-born illusions in the dull red light: a smallish four-post bed with the linens all in disarray, a writing-desk strewn with pages and quills, and, to my joy, walls all lined with books of every size. His bedchamber was also his library –or his library a bedchamber. I turned to him in exaltation, but he was not looking at me. He was looking at something he held in his hand. The "capote."

Or, so I guessed. In fact, I had never seen such a thing. The chambermaids whispered in salacious tones about things made of silk or India-rubber or intestine which would keep a man's seed from entering a woman, but it was all a rumour to me, and a distasteful one. I had not the slightest idea how it might function, whether it was to be placed in myself or onto him. I had also heard it said that using the capote was sinful, like the sin of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground. To my horror and delight, I found I did not much care if it were sin or virtue. It was something I had not seen before, and I wanted to know about it.

"You have not seen one of these in life." The Doctor said, voicing my thoughts aloud so that I jumped.

"No, sir." I whispered.

"You have much to learn, then. Come."

I went to him in my inmate's garb. He had thrown off his robe, and his body caught the fire-light all slim and taut, each limb bespeaking a wiry strength. He pressed me down so that my face was level with his cock, all limned with a line of red light glistening orange and gold at the tip. Without thinking I moved to take him in my mouth, but he tilted my chin and held the capote before my eyes.

"Lesson number one: preparation. Use your hands to press this down. I am quite ready for it now."

I took the capote. It was made of a thin, warm, stretchy material, animal or plant-matter I could not say. It was long and narrow, and I could see how it might fit his form. Taking a deep breath, I worked its mouth over the tip of his cock and then smoothed it down with my fingers. He shuddered and drew a sharp breath, struggling to control himself. I had never seen him struggle so visibly to master his own body. It intrigued me. In my curiousity, I clasped my hands around his sheathed member and gave it a squeeze.

"No!" the Doctor gasped suddenly. He seized me by the arm and cast me to the floor. "You will take no liberties with me!"

"But I want to know you!" I replied, my blood stirred.

"Oh, you will know me. I will make you know."

He took me up again only to drive me by force to the bed. He stripped me of my robe, tearing it into strips like a methodical madman. He straddled my waist and held my body down with his own as he tied my wrists and ankles by long bonds to the posts of the bed. He rose to fetch something, then returned to survey his handiwork: my long smooth figure stretched prone before him, completely helpless. 

I struggled and cried out. And yet, I could not help but feel myself caught up in some dramatic performance. I played the role of my submission with a new consciousness. When I heard him approaching, the warning slap of leather against his palm, I let my back arch hysterically and bared myself to him with such purpose that he must have seen my resistance for the desiring play it was.

With a sharp snap, he struck me with a belt across my bared breasts. The sting warmed me, wetted me, made me cry out shamelessly for more.

"I know, I know you like it this way," my night-voice called, "You like to hurt me, I deserve to be hurt by you, oh, do it again! I want it!"

"Lesson number two: confession. Full score. Brace yourself for your reward." He said wryly. 

Then he flogged me again with the belt across my breast, moving down to my belly, my flanks, my thighs. My body thrashed in elation, straining freely against its bonds. He struck me until I cried again,

"I know you need more, you need to do more to me than this! Oh pierce me, release me in restraint, now!"

"Lesson number three: submission. Repeat it, Hannah. Beg."

He climbed on top of me, pinning my shoulders down with his clenched hands. I swore I could smell ginger on him. It drove me mad.

"Do it," I panted "No, don't, oh do it to me! I can't stand it, I need it, do it to me, I beg you!"

At that, he thrust with jarring force into my aching sex, unable to tease any longer. Despite his treatments I was still to my mind a virgin, and small and narrow as I was his first thrust made me scream in pain, then gasp in amazement that my body could take so much. He half-withdrew, so that for a moment I feared he would pull out again, but instead he only thrust himself back in even deeper than before. Like the pounding of the hot summer rain outside he pushed into me again, again, again.

Only then, once I was pierced through by his cock, did he deliver the coup de grace. Opening his clenched fist, he revealed a slip of ginger, a carved wedge he must have fetched with the belt. In one swift movement he lodged it between our bodies, between my lips, directly over my clitoris. The frictive heat between us kindled it with fire, and as he pounded into my tight, throbbing hole, he burned me and kissed me with biting passion. Bound, penetrated, and inflamed with the scent of ginger, the taste of iron, I pressed my arching body to his, threw my head back wildly and keened as the height of suspension took us and held us weightless together, convulsing for an eternal moment as one ecstatic pleasure doubled.

***

My release, it seemed to me, went on and on. I lost track of time, of my climaxes, of my senses. Dazed and overcome, I must have subsided from pleasure into sleep eventually. But I don't recall the end of it. When I next became aware of myself, the fire had died to embers and a haze of pale light below the drawn curtains bespoke a cloudy dawn.

I only gradually realized that I was still lying in the Doctor's –in Theo's– bed, my limbs entangled with his. The ginger had fallen from me some time ago, and I was no longer bound. My muscles ached in strange, yet not unpleasant, ways. I was curled with my back pressed warm to his chest. His hand lay on me as if he had been stroking or soothing me. I glanced over my shoulder and saw him still asleep, breath deep and even, dark curly hair in his eyes. Even asleep he had a little furrow between his brows, a remnant of his harshness. But his mouth was soft, open just a little, almost vulnerable. I smiled and snuggled down again.

Still, such is my constitution that once I am awake of a morning, I cannot sleep again. I didn't want to wake my bedmate, so I lay still and let my eyes wander about the room. So many books! Indeed, on the bedside table was a volume he had apparently been reading of late. It was bound in blue-grey buckram, with the title in gold on the spine: 'Venus in Furs.' 

Quietly I reached out my hand to pull it into bed with me. Cradling the volume, I opened it to the flyleaf and saw there a nameplate written in the Doctor's hand.

It read: Theophilus Ravenscourt.

Ravenscourt? No!

"Yes." 

His voice was soft yet piercing behind me. I had not even known I spoke aloud. I twisted around in shock, dropping the volume so that it clattered off the side of the bed to the floor.

The Doctor's eyes were wide open, staring directly into mine.

"My name is Ravenscourt. My family has long taken the name of the manor as our surname, as well you know. I am the only son of Lord Ravenscourt."

"Lord Ravenscourt has no son," I breathed. "There was only Clara."

"I am the son of Lord Ravenscourt, but not of the late Lady Ravenscourt."

"You, a ba—"

"Say the word and you will suffer in ways I promise you will not enjoy."

He raised himself up onto his elbow and I was suddenly very aware of my soft, naked body prone before him. I hushed to let him speak.

"You wished to know me," he said, "and this is my tale. I am the illegitimate son of the Lord Ravenscourt and a mistress he kept in London. Like you, I was abandoned by my mother at Ravenscourt at the age of four or five, some years before Clara's birth and your own arrival there. My father wanted nothing to do with me. I was raised by my uncle Godfrey, the current Lord's youngest brother and a man of, shall we say, lesser reputation. He claimed me as his adopted son and raised me along with his own, Goderic. I was, however, too old by that time to be kept from the truth. I knew my heritage. My vengeful mother told it to me. When I came of age, I demanded my birthright. The reply was—". 

Here he broke off for a long time, gaze distant. Finally, he asked me, 

"Did it never occur to you that this clinic is on Ravenscourt land? It is my consolation for not inheriting the manor. I take in strays from the neighbouring members of Society and keep them from scandal, as I hide the scandal of my own existence. A neat arrangement."

"The Countess of C—'s daughter." I murmured. I covered my mouth fast, realizing I had let slip that I knew more than I should. He, however, took no notice.

"Oh, I am forever hounded by maidens in love with one another. Or by their mothers, rather. It does no good to meddle with them. Either the girls grow out of it or grow old with it. I would not have such problems on the Continent."

"The Continent?" 

"Yes. Germany, perhaps, or France. A clinic to rival the Salpêtrière. If I could only shed these provincial shackles, this petty worn heritage! I won't be under his thumb forever. Not the Lord Ravenscourt nor his brother, nor any man will rule me. Never again!"

He was nearly shaking with passion now, but his dark eyes were bright as with tears. I saw more anguish than anger in him. I placed one hand gently on his arm. His gaze refocused into the present, onto me. He sighed.

"Ah, Hannah. You are my crowning achievement here. Your obedience, your docility. I have not eradicated the perversion in you, but I have made you fit and able to both restrain and release your energies. I have taught you discipline. This is the true work of psychiatry. The world should know it."

I bowed my head, unable in that moment to answer in agreement or disagreement. He stroked my cheek, then looked at me again more narrowly. He pulled the covers from my breast, then my belly, as if to examine my every feature. I shifted uncomfortably at his intrusive inspection but did not withdraw from his hands.

"Yes. The world will know it. You performed well last night, Hannah, and you should have the chance to perform again your symptom and your cure."

"How do you mean, sir?" I asked.

"A formal demonstration. It is common in France. Charcot's demonstrations of hypnosis using hysterical patients, for instance. Yes, yes," he sprang up muttering names and dates to leaf through papers on his desk.

"But, what can you mean?" I asked, pulling the sheets up to cover myself.

"I mean, Hannah, that you have learned your lessons well, and now it is time for you to pass your public examination. We will show the world just what you are capable of, and seeking funds for my cause at this event, I will move my clinic to the Continent, away from Ravenscourt where my independent work will be appreciated. Brilliant!"

"You wish me to do before others what I did for you last night?" 

"I do not wish it. I require it."

Already, my head was shaking, my body balking. How could I reveal myself so? 

"No. No, I shan't do it!"

"You wished me to test you, did you not? In return for the chance to read and write as you will? This is the final test. Will you submit to taking it, or commit yourself to incurability?"

I trembled all over at the thought of allowing him to hurt and pleasure me before the eyes of others. My skin burned already with the humiliation of it. And yet, I could not tell whether it was the flaring of distress or desire that shook me so. And so I could not tell whether it was myself or my night-voice which spoke next.

"Yes, sir. I shall do whatever you say. Command me. I am yours." 



Scent of Ginger Ch. 09



Ch. 09: Scientia Sexualis

I bowed to his will. After I confessed my desire for him, for what he did to me when we slept together, something changed. I did not lose my mind and become his soulless slave. Nor did I become a weaker or a lesser woman. But I did give my body to him and allowed him to craft my performance in ways that pleased him. Because that was also what pleased me.

It occurred to me that no one had ever taken the time before to learn my physical and emotional responses so well. He came to know my reactions to being touched –or struck, or slit– in certain ways, as I came to know how he wished me to touch him. In this way, we discovered many different scenarios to please each other.

He learned, for instance, how it stirred me to be caned as I lay over his knee, wearing nothing but a shift pulled up round my waist. Each stroke of his rattan cane on my blush-red bottom made me moan as much in ecstasy as humiliation. Whenever he wished to excite me quickly and easily during the day, to induce me to take him in my mouth or between my thighs, he could always spank me this way first, since to any passing ear it simply sounded like I was getting the punishment a mad, disobedient girl warranted. But in truth, there was only the pretense of punishment between us now. We both wanted it, and knew each other's desire. We played the roles of the intransigent patient corrected by the strict Doctor in ways that almost parodied the reality that gave them birth.

He was also the first to discover, during our games, my perverse affinity for the operating table. While these sessions began as genuine physical examinations in which he would draw my blood or measure my secretions, his hawk's eyes could not miss the voluptuous shivers it caused me to be laid out on this metal surface before him. Guiding me to place my feet into stirrups on each side of the table, he would spread my legs so that he might insert into my quivering sex all manner of instruments to open and prod into me. All the while he would quote to me from the 'Psychopathia Sexualis' case studies of women such as myself who sought medical examination only to attain the highest possible degree of orgasm. His descriptions alone, sometimes, were enough to make me flush –but what he did to me excited me more. 

In order to measure my reactions to his treatments, he would expose me fully, legs and lips spread wide, and then run various instruments over my entire body. He grasped my breasts in calipers, my nipples in finely-graded clamps, to record their increase. He tried to induce currents in my abdomen with magnetized bars and tuning forks. He ran long, fine blades over my skin to test its sensitivity, teasing me until I begged him to sink them in. Sometimes he cut hard and sharp enough to cause me gushes of sweet elation –but never so deep as to scar me. He wanted my flesh pure and whole for my public display. 

Finally, he came to see that I needed to be stroked gently after my "hysterical paroxysms," as he called my climaxes, or else I would fall into melancholy withdrawal for days. I needed him to bind my wounds as well as inflict them. And he did it. He did it all to me. But did he do it all for me? 

I believe now that each cry I uttered, each protest and sigh, was a sign for him in a vast system of scientific meaning. He wanted to know the truth of sex, and to make me demonstrate it just so, as a proof. I only wanted him to read me deeply, so deeply that he could satisfy in me the desire that nobody else would even recognize as "sexual." I hardly wish to call it that, even now. I certainly felt physical arousal, and sometimes it was even excited by sexual congress. But for me, arousal was simply a sensation of my body. I did not want to be defined by it, as he wished to classify me, but only to experience it as one among many pleasures. In this way, our aims were at odds, though our bodies corresponded perfectly.

Ah, well, I digress. I only meant to say that my training was intensified, and these were some of the best times I spent in the clinic at Ravenscourt. As the weeks passed, however, our sessions together became less about play and more about practice for a very real test: the formal public demonstration of my most intimate desires. 

***

"No, no, NO!" The Doctor slammed down the baton he has been running across my abdomen, and reached under me to lift my back high off the table where I lay.

"This is how you move when you are having an attack! You are practically on your tip-toes in desperation, I have seen it a dozen times or more. It is a classic hysterical arch, Hannah. You must demonstrate this for us."

"Oh, stop sir, you're hurting me!" I protested.

"Fine! Maybe that will get you to perform." He pressed my back higher, straining my neck til the bones rubbed together.

"No, no, it's the wrong kind of pain. Oh, let me be a moment and I will try again to please you!"    

He dropped me, throwing up his hands. He paced across the theatre space he had made out of the clinic's main hall and sat down heavily in a red leather armchair. I slid from the operating table and padded over, kneeling beside him with nothing but a shawl around my shoulders. After a long silence, I dared to speak.

"Sir, please forgive my impertinence. I am trying my best to obey you. But this practice, this scenario, it is false."

"False?" He looked at me skeptically. "How so?"

"You want me to pretend I am in the throes of desperation. But it will never be genuine unless you are in earnest in your desire to hurt me. Unless you take your pleasure from it, so that I can, too. I am...sir, I am ashamed and afraid, when I think of exposing my body this way in public. You have to make me want it with the force of your own desire." 

I spoke quietly, with my eyes downcast. Then for the briefest moment, I glanced up to him. I whispered:

"Please, my Doctor. Make me want it."

I let the shawl drop, baring myself. The Doctor's eyes narrowed for an instant and I feared a mis-step. But then his wicked gleam returned.

"Are you trying to provoke me, my cunning actress? You know what happens when you do that."

He reached for my left breast. I closed my eyes as he pinched my softest tissues, bringing my nipple to attention. He caught the right with his other hand and drew my bowed body up. I made a tiny sound in the back of my throat, nestling up to his knees to place my hands on them in supplication. But still, we had to come to an agreement over practice and presentation.

"Sir," I said softly. "When I perform in public, why don't you do it to me for real? Not a script. A live performance. Improvised."

"Mmm," he murmured in agreement, his mouth buried in the side of my throat. Then suddenly, he shook his head as if coming to his senses.

"No. It's impossible. If I do it to you in reality, they will see me for what I am in reality as well."

"What are you?"

His lips twisted as he deliberated over what to tell me.

"Do you believe," he asked finally, "that I am as mad as yourself?"

"No, certainly not!" I protested.

"Ah, but if it is a perversion to find sexual pleasure in receiving pain, is it not a perversion to be aroused by giving pain as well?"

"Why, logically, yes. I suppose."

"The term for this is sadism. After yet another wretched fantasist, a Frenchman, no less." He looked uncomfortable as he said this –perhaps the first time I had seen him look so.

"I see." I sat back on my heels for a time and thought about this. I did not see him as mad or criminal. I did not see myself as mad either, for that matter. I simply saw us exploring a new experience, as one does when opening a new novel.

"Perhaps there are no 'terms' or categories in truth." I suggested. "Perhaps I am not a 'masochist' and you are not a 'sadist.' Rather, we are people doing things together. In so doing, we are becoming something else than what we were, each in relation to the other. We are becoming...otherwise."

The Doctor laughed.

"'Becoming otherwise'? You are frankly incoherent! But you are correct on one matter."

"What, sir?"

"If I cannot enjoy this demonstration, it will be hollow because it will lack the strength of conviction. Therefore, this is how it will be conducted. Listen well."

I sat up straight at his tone of authority.

"I am your Doctor. You are my patient. We will play this scene perfectly. It will be the perfect imitation of a formal demonstration. But during the entire display, I will be fucking you in public, in ways the public does not even recognize. You will not know in advance what I am going to do to you. You will do whatever I please, and you may not stop me nor contest my methods. You must trust me unconditionally. If you perform well, you will have the option to accompany me to my new clinic or seek your pleasure elsewhere, as you will. Understood?"

I bowed my head to hide the tremor of my lips as I replied "Yes, sir."

"Very well. There will be no more empty rehearsal. There will be only the final performance."

***

My hand trembles as I write these next recollections. I cannot say whether it is anger or passion that shakes me. It is surely some combination of both. Because he did fulfill my request, my desire: he made me want what he did to me, before all of those people. And yet, he betrayed my trust, he took me against my will even as I wanted it. How to explain such a paradox?  

It was a chill autumn evening, much like the night he came to see me in my sickbed, such a long year ago. I waited in an antechamber just outside the theatre. I could already smell the smoke of cigars from the room just beyond the door, a thick, masculine scent. The Doctor was already out there, lecturing in authoritative tones that rose and fell as he emphasized now one point, now another. The words "feminine masochism" and "hysteria" surfaced early on; the phrases "strict discipline" and "new procedure of induction, release, and restraint" followed. He was describing my treatment in detail. They would know it all, what I had been through, when they saw me. My shameful desires would be written upon my skin for all to read. Suddenly I could hardly fathom how I had agreed to this, much less asked for it. I turned, seeking a way out of the room. If I could just get into the hallway, it would be easy to pull a man's long overcoat over my shift, tuck my hair into a hat, and slip away into the night. I lay my hand upon the door-knob—

In that very instant, the room's other door, the one leading to the theatre, was opened. An intern came in and took me by the arm. I resisted for but a split-second; there was truly no escaping now. I took a deep breath, then allowed myself to be lead to my fate.

The front of the theatre where the Doctor stood was lit brightly with many reflective lamps. They could all see me plainly, while I had only a hazy impression of a room packed with men, their eyes catching the glint of the light as they turned to look upon me. I tried to walk proudly, but under the weight of their gaze my step wavered, as if they were physically driving me to and fro.

"And here we have the subject." The Doctor pronounced, stepping forward to take me from the intern. He gave my arm a severe squeeze, and at his firm touch I straightened obediently. 

"You will note, first of all, that the patient's body displays some of the dysmorphic features that mark her condition. There is, for instance, some asymmetry in her figure, particularly of the buttocks."

He turned me around, and to my horror he raised my skirt, under which I wore no linens at his command, to bare my bottom to the crowd. There was a great murmur of interest among the men as the Doctor pressed something cold and sharp-edged in under my curves: a metal rule, I thought. He gave each cheek a deliberate tap with the rule, triggering memories of the times he had caned me, and what had followed. He was saying something else, but the rush of blood in my ears drowned it out.

My skirt dropped. He turned me around again. By this time my eyes were firmly fixed on the floor. I could not bear to look at that crowd in my humiliation. The Doctor, however, had other ideas. He lifted my chin with the rule, ostensibly to make some remark about my throat as an aberrant erogenous zone. But in tilting my head up, he forced me to look at the men. When I saw them staring at me, it was as if they could touch me with their eyes. I felt each steady, incisive gaze as a hand violating my body. The Doctor pulled down my collar to display my breasts, but it was the many fingers of the assembled crowd that stroked me there. 

My breath began to come faster, and my heart was pounding. Sensing this, the Doctor pressed his body imperceptibly against mine from behind so that I could feel between his legs a modest hardness growing. He was signaling his desire to me. He was making me want it. Suddenly, my own sex blossomed open, aching to be touched. I was at once elated and terrified of what would happen were he to expose me there, revealing the wetness glistening on my thighs. And that only made me pulse harder. 

But apparently, even a scientific demonstration knows some bounds of propriety. The Doctor did not (or could not) strip me completely before them. Instead, he drew me to the operating table and had me lie down upon it.

"Gentlemen," he announced "I will now demonstrate for you the new cure for this condition being developed in my clinic, namely, the course of induction, release and restraint. Gone are the times when we must think only of the suppression of base instinct. In cases which are themselves aggravated by the suppression of animal energies,  expression, followed by its management, is the only effective cure."

He walked around behind the low table, leaving the room a clear view of my figure. Then he took up a baton. He told the room that it was an instrument used in my training to induce hysterical attacks. When he touched it to my mouth, I knew why. It was made of ginger. Soon my sensitive lips began to burn. I parted them to lick when I could not bear it any longer, and he slid the root in, penetrating my mouth for just long enough to make me feel the heat. The taste was pungent, overwhelming. Already aroused, I squirmed in fresh desperation. He pointed out my "spasms" to the crowd, who noted with interest my strong reaction to being touched with what looked to them like an ordinary wooden stick.  

"Now, I will induce her to release her energies through a hysterical paroxysm." He said. "Please take careful note of the stages of progression here."

At this, he reached down and pulled up my skirts again. Since I was in profile to the crowd, some semblance of modesty remained. However, the Doctor could see me perfectly from his vantage above me, and a small, wicked smile played over his lips to see the moisture that trailed between my thighs. 

"As the ovaries and uterus are the seat of this subject's hysteria, it is often necessary to manipulate them to induce an attack," he explained. He pressed the ginger against my belly, and kneading my flesh in rhythmic circles as he moved down from just under my navel to stroke each side of my abdomen. Then he pressed lower, to the base of my mound, the cusp of my lips just where I furrow and divide. Unable to help myself, I thrust my hips up spasmodically and drove my clitoris against the ginger-baton. 

"Aah!" I gasped. My back arched hard. 

"Yes, yes!" the Doctor said. "We see here the beginning of the hysterical arch or 'arc-de-cercle.' My fellow, you may want to take this one, it is of great scientific interest."

I had no idea what he was speaking of, until a loud "crack!" sounded, and I was blinded and overcome by the scent of black powder. I jumped and twisted towards the sound. Through the spots in my eyes I could see a device mounted to a tripod, a figure shrouded in black –yes, it was a photography camera. My image, taken. My shame, preserved and perpetuated. I was paralyzed in my half-sitting posture at the thought of my image-body printed and pored over, rifled and touched by innumerable strangers.

"Hannah, lie back," the Doctor whispered to me. But I only trembled with tension. Seeing this, the Doctor quickly gestured to an intern, who scurried to fetch something. He strolled out from behind the table, apparently fully in control of himself.

"In order to calm the patient and induce a further attack, we will now administer inhalations of amyl nitrate."

"Inhalations of what?" I hissed through my clenched jaw. 

He reached a hand behind his back and held up a warning finger.

"This chemical compound is known to increase blood circulation and induce relaxation of the smooth muscles, particularly in the anus and vulva. It thus has profound effects on the hysteric."

I wanted to protest, but his gesture silenced me. The intern returned holding a leather mask designed to cover my mouth and nose, with a sort of rubber breathing bladder attached at the front. The Doctor took it from him, and walked back around behind the table. I shook my head as he moved to put it on me, but it was no use: he held me down and forced it over my face. I tried not to breathe for long moments, holding my breath until my chest felt like bursting. But finally, I had to give in. With a great gasp, I drew in a deep, bitter breath, and then another and another, inhaling the noxious compound.

The effects of the drug were immediate and indescribable. It was as if I were being flooded from deep inside my womb with hot currents that radiated outwards, filling and coursing through me. My already-slick vagina seemed to melt and expand at once. The sensation spread through my anus, my abdomen, and flickered into every limb, making my toes curl and my fingers grip the sheets, yet with a tingling, enervated weakness. My head spun in free-fall as my body soared, buffeted in turn by gusts of fury and euphoria. Muffled inside the mask, my night-voice broke from me wildly.

"I never wanted this, Theo, but I need it so badly, so hurt me! I'm always alone, but I need you to be with me! You can't own me, but rule me! You can't love me, but fuck me! Do it, do it, do it now!" 

The Doctor talked over me continuously, masking my confession with his voice. But he heard it. As I begged for it, the Doctor pressed his baton down onto my clitoris, taking full advantage of my helplessly compliant body. At his will, my back arched high, as high as the perfect arc of the moon, so that I felt split open wide and completely exposed inside-out to the world. I was shocked with chemical electric current into the shape of a new age, a new sexuality I could see before me for a hundred years and more. His hands were on and inside me, the crowd was on and inside me, I felt the entire assemblage as if they stood up shocked by my erotic panic and pressed around me to penetrate every inch of my surface. All the men and women of that country and beyond, they all wanted me like this bared under their eyes, their hands, and I flowed in pleasure and thrashed in agony as this sexual torment was forced onto to me by the world. The Doctor was opening me out in public –and it was the public that fucked me, hard. The lights of the camera were flashing around me like bomb-blasts, burning their will to desire onto my skin.

"No! No! Ahh, please, aaah!" I screamed, words failing into animal sounds. At that moment I swore the Doctor thrust something massive into the fissure that was my body and pounded me so hard I convulsed, gushing with a force that tore through me until lost myself in eternity.


Unfortunately, it was a short eternity. I came to again with another sharp scent in my nostrils: the scent of smelling salts waking me from a faint. I opened my eyes to find myself still on the table. The mask was gone. To all appearance, I had not been violated by the watching crowd, nor even by the Doctor, whose hands and clothing were as clean as ever. The rush of the drug had passed. Though I still felt a kind of twitching tingle in the muscles of my thighs, even that was fading.




Scent of Ginger Ch. 09



"As you can see, the subject is now in full possession of her faculties. Having experienced release, she is capable of restraint. Hannah, please stand up and introduce yourself."

It was the first time he had spoken my name or given me a direct order. This, I realized, was my test, my public examination. Having experienced such intense physical and emotional sensations, could I still stand before a room of respectable men of medicine and conduct myself like a proper woman?

Slowly, I sat up on the table. My skirts had already been arranged. I slipped down off the edge carefully, stood, and curtseyed.

"Welcome to all our honored and esteemed guests." I said in my mildest tones. "My name is Hannah. I was once a maid-servant at Ravenscourt Manor. I had difficulties there with speaking and acting out in my sleep, which disturbed the household staff. Now, I am a grateful patient of the Doctor—" (here I sought and obtained his permission with a glance) "—Theophilus of Ravenscourt. Under his care, I have improved a great deal. I ask that you please support his continued efforts. I wish you all a good evening." 

I curtseyed again. I nearly fell. Seeing this, the Doctor motioned to one of the younger, stronger interns, who took me from the theatre back into the antechamber. The Doctor did not touch me, nor guide me out of the room himself. He had not even a glance at me. It was clear: he was finished with me.

The instant I was out, my tears began to flow.

"How could he be so cold?" I whispered. Then, more loudly, "How could he?!" I lashed out at a table, upsetting it. The intern stepped forward to grip my shoulder.

"The Doctor requires you to lie down and calm yourself now. Come with me."

"No! I must see him, now!"
	"He has ordered it. I don't wish to call the night-watchman, but I will."

I struggled half-heartedly, knowing there was no way for me to resist the intern's strength but still trying to make things difficult. He lock-stepped me to a ward room with many empty identical beds and strapped me down to the one nearest the door. I heard his footsteps echo as he left me.

Then, against all expectation, he paused and returned.

"He will come for you after the reception, miss. I swear it." 

There was a surprising compassion in his voice. I looked up and saw before me the horrified face of a young country man, not much out of his boyhood. But I didn't want a country boy. I wanted my Doctor.

"Send for him now. Please. Please."

"He will come. You must wait."

What choice did I have? It was always my part to wait.



Scent of Ginger Ch. 10



Ch. 10: Hannah's Choice

Maybe it was a lingering effect of the drug the Doctor forced me to inhale as he exhibited me before his congress of scientists. Maybe my thoughts were addled with the intensity of my physical and emotional sensations. But as I lay strapped to the tiny ward bed, I became convinced that time, like my still-damp body, was a coursing fluid. In moments of passion, time evaporates into the immanence of pleasure like steam into the air. But as passions cool, it slows and congeals, becoming an amber trap for fragile bodies.

I almost lost myself in the amber trap of time that night. Always, when he used me harshly without tending to my needs afterwards, I would grow sad and still. This time, I withdrew so deeply from the pain and longing that I began to believe I would never feel again, never open myself again. He must have known how I trusted him in exposing my most private needs for his benefit. He asked me to trust him. But in the end, he sent me away without a word, except a cold command through a servant to "calm myself." If I was meant to calm myself, I thought, then so be it. I would become so calm that I could never again be roused. I would close myself off, catatonic. This would be my last submission: one order obeyed to its absolute extent.

I might have lost myself, frozen in that drop of time. Only, as I was freezing over, something happened to shiver the crystal and break the silence. It was the sound of a single word in a familiar voice:

"Stop."

The Doctor was standing over me, looking upon my bound body.

"Stop, Hannah." He repeated quietly. "Stop crying this instant. I won't have it."

Was I crying? Yes. A cool breeze chilled my face, and I realized my cheeks were streaked with tears. At the realization that I could still feel the hurt he'd caused me, a sob broke from my throat.

"Have you lost your capacity for obedience so quickly?" he persisted.

Choking on the words, I gasped out, "You broke it. I obeyed. But you didn't even. You didn't even look at me."

I closed my own eyes, refusing to look at him. I heard his voice in the darkness.

"How could I? If I had looked at you, Hannah, they all would have seen plainly how much I wanted you. I wouldn't have been able –I would have lost control of myself. Don't you realize? I would have ravished you then and there, professionalism be damned."

He gripped the iron rung of the bedstead hard enough to shake it. The vibration coursed through me. My hot eyes flashed open.

"You are using me. Using my body for your own gratification."

"Why, yes." His tone held mild surprise. "And you are taking pleasure in your service. At least, that was my understanding. What would you rather? That I marry you and father your children and settle you down in a cottage in the Lake District?"

"No!" I exclaimed instinctively. Then, through all my tears, I smiled. It was true: the treacly closing scenes of marriage and motherhood so common in sentimental literature have always felt more restrictive than a strait-jacket to me. 

"No, my Doctor. You've diagnosed me well. My 'dark and repugnant heart,' as you called it, won't be tamed that way."

"I thought not. You don't love that way. But you do love what I do to you. You love it when I whip you with my crop and pierce you with ginger. You love it when I pleasure you almost against your will. You loved it when I brought you to orgasm on the table tonight, even through all your resistance. I could see it. I could read the conflict and elation in every line of your taut, ecstatic body."

A little moan of assent escaped me despite my anger. Hearing him describe my desire so intimately, his voice so velvet-soft and dangerous, stirred a slippery, spreading warmth between my legs.

"There is one more thing you love, though. And that is a gentle touch after a hard slap." 

He caressed the damp red locks from my brow and kissed it.

"Yes," I breathed. Evaporation.

"You need me, now, more than ever. You are completely dependent on me. Completely vulnerable to me."

"Yes, oh, yes."

He leaned over close to whisper to me,

"And I need to do this to you. Now."

With his words still lingering as warm, damp steam on my cheek, he reached up under my shift and hooked his long middle finger in between my smaller lips. He pulled up slowly but firmly, pressing me just inside where I curve. That spot. Unable to help myself, I cried out,

"Ahh, yes!"

"Hush now. The guests."

I stared at him in questioning wonder, asking with my eyes: "Guests?".

"What is that face you're making? It has barely been a half-hour since the display. I'm wanted at the reception. And yet—"

"And yet you need me, too." I finished, radiant. "Take me then, just as I am."

He pressed down on the leather strap that ran across my breasts. My voice caught in my throat with a little hiccupping gasp at the pressure. 

"Mmm, I see. This is good. Just one minor adjustment." At that he got up and unbound the strap that held my ankles together. 

"Spread your legs." He commanded. 

Flushing hot at his masterful tone, I did so. He re-bound them, one foot at each corner of the bed so that I was held open. Then he came back to my side. 

"I will let you make a choice. Hard or soft, Hannah?"

"Hard. Do it to me hard."

"As I suspected."

In one fluid movement, he was on the bed, on top of me, gripping my hair to pull my head back. His lips burned on my throat, seeking the sensitive space just below my ear, then my lobe, where he bit me so sharp it made me yelp. He had already freed his cock from the top of his tight dress-trousers. I could feel the hot oils of his first arousal streaking my thighs where he rubbed against them.

"The capote—" I began.

"I haven't one here. Will you risk it?"

"Yes, oh, just take me!"

He had never entered me bare before. It was strange to feel his skin brushing mine, his full heat, the coursing of his pulse and his fluid. He was breathing heavily in moments, but he had an incredible ability as always to hold himself back while hurting me, using my pain and his restraint simultaneously to build our pleasure.

As he pressed the tip of his cock just against my flushed wet opening, he leaned forward with both his hands on either side of the strap that held me down at the chest. I was pressed down into the bed, my tender breasts cut across and my chest constricted. He held and held the posture. My head began to rush. My mouth opened soundlessly. My legs contracted— 

Just then, he let up for a moment so that I could catch my breath. In the pause, as if struck by inspiration, he tore the pyramid-cut jet cufflinks from his wrists and flattened them out. Reaching under the leather strap, in through the collar of my shift, he placed them with their points down, one on each of my nipples. The pointed stone felt chill as ice resting against my hot skin, so that my nipples pricked up erect instantaneously. 

"Oh no, oh yes," I gasped in anticipation.

After a delicious, deliberate wait, he pressed down on the strap again, driving the sharp jet brutally against my budding tips. The sensation lanced through me as if my nipples were being pierced through with twin needles so cold they burned. My sex blossomed wide at the intense pain of it. Feeling my reaction, he thrust his naked cock in hard. My hips pressed up to meet his, my back arching in the way that caused him such satisfaction. My wordless voice soared like a bird's, and he growled his tiger-cat's growl of pleasure.

"That's my Hannah. That's how she does it. Her beautiful soul, in such a perverse little body."

He began to thrust fast and deep into me, then, pressing and lifting and pressing my bonds in time to his strokes, so that I had to gasp my breaths in with his own. The scent of ginger was still on his hands from the demonstration, and with each draught of air I could taste it, I could feel its heat infusing my entire body. As I gulped it down stroke by stroke I began to cry, each high, sweet burst of sound a word in my own new-found language. 

Yes.

Now.

Hurt me!

Theo!



"Theo! Theo, my God!"

It was not my voice. Some voice, some other man's voice, was calling from the doorway. Unable to help myself, I convulsed in a terror that became runaway pleasure. My sex flowed liquid, vibrant, and alive, so much so that I did not even care who was watching. The Doctor too jerked back and cried out as he came hot and messy across my belly, my back still arched so high that his cock was pressed between us though he had pulled out.

"Aahh!" I cried

"Go!" He shouted.

But the man in the doorway did not go.

"Theo, lad, what are you doing with a, a madwoman? I suspected from your demonstration, but I never—! Well—!"

The Doctor struggled off of me while covering himself and stood proud with affronted dignity as if he were the one offended.

"Goderic, go. You must leave us, and breathe not a word of this to my father."

"Theo. He knows. He is in the corridor. He heard everything."

"Blast. Bugger and blast it!" 

The Doctor began to stalk out, but then he turned back to where I lay still bound and panting in afterglow. He stroked my hair gently again as he murmured,

"I will come back for you, Hannah. I will tell the intern to take you to your room and clean you up, and then I will come for you again. Have no fear, darling. And no shame. Never be ashamed. Not in front of him."

I wondered even then whether he was speaking to me, or steeling himself for the confrontation.

***

It was several days before I saw the Doctor again. As he promised, the intern, the kind-faced country boy, came and took me to my own little room. He brought me hot water to clean my sticky flesh, and took my stained shift away in tactful silence. Overall he said little, beyond that his name was Thames, "after the river." But in his quiet, undemanding presence he helped me to recover from the series of shocks I had experienced.

When I finally saw the Doctor again in his office, he would have seemed to any outside eye the same cool, severe authority I had met upon my first arrival at the clinic. He greeted me with the same cordial words and routine inquiries about my health as always. However, I had known him long enough to see the new lines of care on his brow, the dark shadows under his eyes that betokened a lack of sleep. His office was in unusual disarray, with many books and files missing.

"Hannah," he finally said, "it is the end of the Ravenscourt clinic. My father will no longer permit me to carry out my 'sinful' work on his land."

I bowed my head, speechless under the weight of an overwhelming distress and guilt.

"I have long wanted to be free of this place. Only, not quite in such an abrupt manner. I haven't the funds to move to the Continent yet. As you might imagine, I could not meet much success at raising capital during the reception I did not attend."

"It is my fault!" I burst out. "You have lost it all because of me."

"On the contrary. I have gained what I did gain because of you. Several of the esteemed medical practitioners who saw you were impressed by your performance. I have been offered another position closer to London, in a larger hospital. It will not be my own, but I will have charge of the wing dedicated to women in delicate conditions."

"Women—?"

"Such as yourself, Hannah. So now I will give you another choice."

He took a deep breath.

"Will you come with me? Or will you stay behind, to live on your own?"

I searched his face carefully for any sign of what he wanted. But for once he exerted no will over me. He truly wished me to decide on my own, for my own happiness and well-being. It was a gift. I took my time and care in unwrapping the answer.

"My Doctor. My Theo. You know my inclinations. I love to be your patient. But I fear it will not be the same in London. You will have many more cases to attend to. And I will not be what I am now forever. I am still...becoming."

"Ah, yes. Your famous 'becoming otherwise.' I believe that we are both becoming other than what we were, now."

"Yes. I do not want to be without you. I still need your treatments. But I won't compromise you in your new job as I have done here. And I won't live my life in an institution forever, no matter what you do to me." 

I thought a little more, then continued.

"Perhaps I could be...an out-patient. Perhaps you could take up your new position, and return when you are able, to treat me privately. I know you must have many clients among the nobility who require your services on their own estates. I could be a side-trip among those."

He nodded slowly throughout my tentative effort to parse the future.

"Yes. Many doctors still call upon country patients in their homes. And I will certainly maintain some connections in this area. It is a clever plan."

At the thought of what we could do truly in private, my spirits began to lift.

"Write to me when you are coming. I will write to you when I need you. Oh," I smiled "I will write so many things for you to read!"

The Doctor gave one of his wicked, sardonic grins.

"I have no doubt that you will. And I believe that now, you can handle your own care. I will see to some private accommodations for you, and perhaps a small charitable stipend for a recovering madwoman. You must also find work to do, perhaps connected to your writing."

I nodded eagerly.

"I know just what to do. There is a great market for confessionals of late. I will confess all that has happened to me in this past year in a novel. I will disguise it all, of course. But when you read it, you will know that it was I who wrote it."

"Then it is settled. We will both fly Ravenscourt. But our lines will cross again."

"Yes, they will cross, on the page and in the flesh. The lines I write lead back to you, and they will lead you back to me. Always."

***

Now it is time to lay down the quill. That is all my story from Ravenscourt clinic. It has been almost a full year since these last events I record. I live alone in a few small rooms now, but I am content to write my tales and take my pleasures as I see fit between my Doctor's visits. If at night my voice cries aloud in ecstasy, I feel no shame, and indeed I hope I can make something beautiful out of that nightingale voice one day. I am not there yet. But I feel I am on my way.

Finally, my dearest Reader, I address the last lines to you. For you who are still seeking a new becoming, I hope that these lines may open the way for your flight, whomever or wherever you fly to. 

Words fade. Writing remains. And so I remain,

Your most obedient servant,

Hannah 

~The end~