A few months later, Lady J. intimated a coming change in regime for her young charge. Her training under Colette would continue, her aunt told the niece, but in addition her training under her aunt and under Pelham would become more sexually specific - but first, it was time for Jayne to submit herself to a modest test of the self-control she had learned thus far.

'Be so kind as to disrobe, my dear' invited Lady J. In the exquisitely furnished drawing room, Jayne felt vulnerable as she quickly divested herself of her formal but ultra-feminine, full-skirted dress, her shoes, silk petticoat, wide-legged silk French knickers and stood before her aunt in tight-fitting apricot silk waist corset, suspenders and tall, taut stockings. Lady J admired her niece.

'Completely, if you please my dear' she added - and with some difficulty (for she was used to having Colette to fasten and unfasten the tapes of her corset) Jayne complied. When she looked again at her aunt, the older woman had from somewhere conjured a wicked-looking long rattan cane.

 

Lady J flexed the yellow rod. 'Now my dear, turn around and face the wall.' Jayne obeyed, her pale nude body quivering as she turned, the full, firm breasts jiggling, the rounded buttocks rippling.

'Keep your feet firmly together my dear, clasp your hands behind your neck and lean well forward from the hips to let your bottom spread.

Jayne posed as bidden, her torso angling forwards.

'Oh, a much more exaggerated pose than that, my dear: you must be at almost the point of over-balance, so that when the cane strikes it becomes a real test of your ability to stay still. Lean right forwards - that's right - but don't let your breasts hang so. Hold your head well back, otherwise the bosom merely dangles, like a cow's udders - and don't stare at the floor, my dear. Pull your head and shoulders back, and bow your spine. That's better. It firms the bosom prettily. Now your breasts thrust forward, as they should.

'Now my dear, relax your buttocks completely.'

Trying as hard as she could to obey her aunt's instructions to the letter, Jayne put herself in position. With her torso held at such an acute angle her breasts did indeed tend to hang freely, although when she pulled her head back to stare straight at the wall the action, stiffening her shoulders and slightly curving her spine, had the effect of tautening the twin, firm mounds, thrusting them forward, the thick nipples pointing slightly outward, away from each other.

The smooth pale mounds of the twin-mooned bottom curved invitingly, unblemished, the marks from Jayne's last session under Pelham's strict tuition having faded to invisibility. As her aunt had predicted, the bent-forward pose caused the lovely bottom to spread and open, widening the valley between the twin hills, revealing the red fringe that lined either side of the anal groove and the darker russet tufts that grew so thickly along each plump sexual labium. Forcing herself to breathe evenly, Jayne relaxed the muscles of her haunches, allowing the plump buttocks to sit as naturally as the pose permitted. It would be the first time that Lady J. herself had ever administered the cane to her niece. Jayne wondered how she would compare with Pelham. Would she be able to use the switch quite as hard as the strong-armed groom? She hoped her aunt was not so skilled at using the rod to quite so painful effect as her tutor - if only to allow her to perform better in the test. And as the question posed itself, Lady J gave her niece an answer she did not like to hear.

'Now my dear' warned the aunt, not unkindly 'these are going to hurt like blazes - so try very hard to keep still.'

There was a brief, silent pause - the mantelpiece clock ticked loudly - then the air in the quiet room hummed and hissed briefly.

Thwack!

Aaaaah! was the only response from the obedient young woman.

 

A few minutes later, six heavily ridged weals traversed the pinkly-glowing buttocks, their original scarlet already turning purple. Jayne's eyes were serenely closed, while her face remained passive and calm. She had stood silent and unmoving as the stripes had been administered, and her aunt now voiced her approval.

'Excellent, my dear. You have learned well under Pelham's rod. Now, as I say, I think we can move on.

'It is my intention that you will not surrender your virginity until we both feel you are ready, my dear - and when that time comes I have just the person in mind to initiate you in that regard. But before then, there will be plenty for you to learn. Let us regard the removal of your maidenhead and the opening of your virgin grove, as the classical Romans called it, as the final confirmation of your readiness to join the society I shall place before you. Nonetheless, we need not wait until then for you to learn how to develop your already advanced sexuality.'

 

Lady J told Jayne she planned to give the young woman a sophisticated "grown-up" dinner party, to mark her passage into adulthood. Among the guests at the latter would be a German professor of anthropology, a long-standing friend of Lady J., whom Jayne, her aunt assured her, would find most interesting.

The professor arrived during the early afternoon of the day of the dinner party, was shown to his room by Mrs Pelham and joined Lady J. and her niece in the spacious sitting room of the big house. Over tea the conversation naturally turned to the subject of Jayne's coming birthday, and the significance of birthdays in general as milestones in life. Although (or so Jayne presumed) the professor knew nothing of the special conditions which surrounded Jayne's life with her aunt and the Pelhams, the fact that he was an anthropologist quickly led to wide ranging reflection upon such occasions and soon he was expounding upon initiation rites of primitive tribes, and the concept of the ordeal as a rite of passage.

As the professor talked, his tales becoming ever more frank, Jayne's tummyflies began to flutter and stir. Perhaps hoping to shock, with this frankness, the Professor (Gudeweir was his name) spoke quite openly of painful ordeals undertaken or imposed upon young men and even young women as what he called 'rites of passage'. His tongue loosened, perhaps, by the liberal quantities of sherry with which Lady J. Plied him, his talk was soon concentrating upon female rites of passage.

'Imagine, my dear,' he had said to Jayne by way of illustration, ' having to stand stock still while a heavy roll of straw thickly crawling with angry stinging ants is pressed against your bare front, even touching against your breasts - and you must not move or cry out while it is held there, the ants fiercely stinging and biting. That is a test applied to young women in many parts of South America - and not just in jungles or in primitive places. Even in cities, among the descendants of South American natives, such ceremonies still exist. While in many tribes in Africa, it is part of the initiation rites that the young women must lie on the ground, on their backs, their breasts and bellies and even their sexual organs smeared with the juice of a highly stinging plant and endure being sprinkled with a particularly virulent and aggressive species of soldier ant, to demonstrate their fortitude for child birth.

'If you had lived in ancient Sparta, for instance, and once you became of marriageable age, each month you would have competed quite naked in organised games, including running races and wrestling matches, with the young men of your village there to watch, until one had chosen you as a bride.

'And if you had been - even until very recently - brought up with the Dyaks of Borneo, you would as soon as you reached puberty been taken regularly to an old woman to have your body covered in tattoos - each area covered in turn, according to tabu - the ancient law - and ritual. Your shoulders, then your back - all using simply a sharp-pointed thorn mounted on the end of a stick and tapped repeatedly incessantly with a second stick, used as a hammer. The tattoo pattern would first have been painted on with coloured vegetable dye, and the tattooing would go on until the entire pattern had been pricked into the skin. After the shoulders and back, then the breasts and then the torso and abdomen. And once a husband for you had come forward and your marriage date set - your pubic hair scrapped off with a sharpened cowrie shell, and your pubic mound and finally your labia majora, you sex lips - I hope I do not offend with my frankness - themselves tattooed. And of course, at your wedding, your virginity taken first by the chief and then you would be taken sexually by every married man in the village, your head resting on a wooden pillow, beginning with the oldest and ending with the youngest.'

If Professor Gudeweir had sought to alarm or shock Jayne, or goad her into calling a halt to his increasingly frank and sexually explicit tales, he signally failed. Privately, the young woman was recalling how reading stories of such things even as a young girl aroused her pubescent sexuality even though, then, she did not fully understand why. She would play games, imagining herself undergoing such ordeals - and it was these games, she inwardly admitted, which were what brought her her first recognised experiences of sexual arousal.

After tea, Jayne prepared for dinner with the first stirring of an outrageous plan forming in her head. As she thought it over, she began to steel herself, to dare herself to go through with it. By the time she was ready to meet her aunt's chosen guests, she had made up her mind. She would do it.

Over dinner Jayne deliberately raised the afternoon's topic of conversation again. Obliquely at first, then more openly, she brought the professor on to what was obviously a favourite subject. As the evening progressed and the port began to relax the inhibitions of those around the table (all carefully chosen by Lady J - Jayne's self-imposed task was not quite as difficult as she imagined) the conversation became more detailed, more explicit, as he once again, but to his wider audience, luridly described examples of cruel initiation practices in the primitive tribes and bygone cultures he had studied. The talk again ranged wide, from the tests endured by Spartan youth to the ordeals undergone in the rain forests of Borneo, not to mention the rigours of a Prussian upbringing even for aristocratic young ladies of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When the professor talked of cold showers and vigorous exercise, Jayne smiled inwardly, occasionally catching the also smiling eye of her aunt. When the professor talked of stoic fortitude under the needle-pointed bone and hammer of the primitive tattooist, or of submission to ritual defloration in ancient religions, the trembling initiate required before the assembled elders of the cult to impale herself on the unyielding erect phallus of a stone idol, Jayne's pulse quickened and her tongue occasionally flicked across her pearl-white teeth to moisten her quivering lips.

'The cult I am currently studying' the professor was saying 'is particularly interesting. Its initiation rituals apparently form a perfect bridge between those of the more primitive tribes, which are primarily painful ordeals with little or usually no overt eroticism, and those of sophisticated groups throughout the ages where eroticism - or sometimes merely sexual licence - is the prime intention. I say apparently, because the cult in question existed over two thousand years ago and has, like the civilisation in which it flourished, disappeared almost, but not quite, without trace. We have been left with only the smallest fragments of the jigsaw. In this case, just one - incomplete - text of a ritual. And in all the other rituals I have studied I can find no modern or even historical equivalent. It is fascination, tantalising - and frustrating.'

The guests, including Jayne, listened with interest, prompting the German to continue.

'I read of the cult in Summerian writings in a language so long dead that many of the texts have been indecipherable. However, there is a professor at Cambridge who is quite brilliant - together we have been able to translate- or perhaps reconstruct would be better - much that has remained secret for millennia. In the cult I describe there were - as is so usually the case - different initiation rituals for women and men.

'The female ritual involved the complete unifibrillaic removal of the anterior and ventral tomentum: or in layman's language the plucking, one hair at a time, of the young woman's entire growth of pubic and anal hair.'

'My oh my,' remarked one of the older woman guests with a laugh 'that would surely have brought tears to the eyes' and a chuckle of laughter rippled round the table.

'That's the point,' sighed the professor, 'one doesn't know. The text is at once both highly specific and infuriatingly vague. For example,' he went on, so enthused with the academic interest of his subject matter that he could have been discussing the fascination of splitting the atom rather than an evidently bizarre ancient sexual ritual, 'the precise mechanics of the ritual are spelled out - but little about its reputed effect upon the subject. While there is in the ritual a complete and absolute taboo on any sexual contact or stimulation of the young woman during the ceremony, it appears she would nonetheless reach a considerable sexual high while enduring the rite. It is an example of what is sometimes called "altered state", well documented in other forms of painful ritual or ceremony. The famous Sundance ritual of the Apache is perhaps one of the best-known examples, having featured so graphically in the film A Man Called Horse. Having transcended the discomfort of having her hairs slowly pulled out one at a time, the initiate became transported to a plane of sexual ecstasy - or so the text indicates. The difficulty is, one does not know whether to take the text as literal truth, erotic fantasy - or some halfway house.'

Professor Gudeweir paused, and the woman who had spoken earlier continued:

'But surely there are other, parallel, sources?'

'No' said the professor without hesitation. 'Of course there are other rituals involving depilation - but none quite so painstaking' he chuckled mischievously 'no pun intended, indeed - quite so painstaking or laborious as this - in any society I have studied either modern or, as in this case, so archaic that only a few fragments of writings about it remain to us.'

'Perhaps someone should try it, some day,' said the woman with a chuckle. 'It sounds quite fascinating - although I'm not sure I would want to volunteer,' and she chuckled again.

Professor Gudeweir laughed, and gave a little shrug:

'I'm afraid that is exactly it,' he said, 'everyone finds it fascinating, but no one wants to try it. You know - I have repeatedly asked among my research students if there is among them, or if they know of, any young woman who would be prepared to submit to the rite, in a properly controlled scientific experiment of course, to allow me to test the veracity of the text.

'Sadly, I have never found a volunteer. So much for the inquiring mind of the modern young. One or two have indicated an interest - but when they learn the full extent of the trial - according to the text the ritual can take over two hours - they quail at the prospect. As I was saying earlier: no fortitude. Our soft, modern European way of life has robbed our young people of their hardihood.'

Professor Gudeweir's expansive gaze swept the table and its seated guests with a smile, and then another little shrug:

'I am sorry - I have monopolised the conversation. Please forgive me...'

Another guest took up the conversational torch and the talk flowed on. At the far end of the table, a bright-eyed Jayne listened but with half an ear, trying to contain the excitement of an idea growing in her brain, her mind elsewhere.