Read The Dominant Male for Free Online Page A

for playing pranks. Still, there were worse duties.
    ‘Hope and Comfort,’ Mrs Snodgrass paused and eyed the two remaining maids, a hint of malice in her expression.
    Comfort’s palms were perspiring now, and her mouth was dry. There were other things that they might be detailed to do. It was not every day that maids were required to clean and polish in that particular place. Mrs Snodgrass kept the tension building. It was so quiet now that just the three of them remained that Comfort could hear the ticking of the big pendulum clock that regulated all their lives below stairs.
    Mrs Snodgrass smiled a slight smile, fixed the two girls with her gimlet gaze and said simply, ‘rod room.’
    It was a long way to the rod room from the servants’ hall, a rare chance for once for the maids to talk one another.
    ‘Oh,’ said Hope, as the two girls’ heels echoed down the long corridor. ‘Do you think that they will come in today? Do you think that Mr Ellington will come in? He is down from Oxford again, Serenity said. Once he is ordained he is going to take up the living at St Knickerless’s.’ Hope was a pretty girl, quite short with blonde curls and a trim figure that she was foolishly proud of. Her infatuation with Richard Ellington, a young friend of the family, was a source of great amusement to the other maids.
    ‘For Heaven’s sake, Hope. Forget about him. That young man can only bring you trouble. And it is St Nicholas ’s, you nitwit.’
    ‘Oh, is it, really? Anyway, he is so handsome. And so kind…’
    ‘Kind? Your bottom was so striped it looked as if you had sat on Cook’s griddle!’ Comfort could hardly forget as she had had to apply soothing unguent to Hope’s plump and welted bottom. The way that Hope had wriggled and squealed had been memorably distracting.
    ‘Oh, but as he said, discipline is very important. And he comforted me so nicely after.’
    Hope’s eyes had gone a little glazed and Comfort simply shook her head.
    There was no one in the rod room. A relief but no surprise as it was as yet very early. Unlike the adjacent gun room which was a compact and very secure little chamber, the rod room was spacious and well lit. Originally an annex to the orangery which had been built onto the side of the existing house, it had large, south-facing windows that flooded its horrid contents with sunlight. Comfort thought it like a sort of temple, a temple dedicated to the gods of pain. Certainly the maids felt a sense of awe and reverence as they entered.
    There were great wooden racks of beech wood on the walls. Those on the side walls, which were shaded to an extent from the sun, supported a veritable waterfall of whips. They dangled, looking to Comfort like nothing so much as squadrons of sleeping snakes, suspended by their tails. Short dog whips in black plaited leather, maroon signal whips, longer but still usable in larger rooms, black-and-tan bullwhips so long that they needed to be kept coiled, nasty multi-tailed whips, some with leather thongs and others with whipcord tails, martinets and cats aplenty. Then there were the quirts, Arizona style, Mexican, Colorado, at least two dozen of these. All this seeming little more than a garnish to the main event, which was the scores and scores of horse whips: racing crops, hunting crops, dressage whips and more.
    As the two maids entered the morning sun was still on the end wall, bathing the massed whips in a luminescent glow. Both girls paused for a moment, awed by the sight, and Comfort licked her lips.
    They knew better than to dawdle, however, and so they set to work. The long back wall was for the racks of canes and paddles. There were several hundred of these and the first job was to take the whole lot down to polish the racks, replacing them and checking that every peg had its appropriate instrument of correction, oiled or bees-waxed as required, and buffed and put back in good order.
    Hope, it seemed, was still lost in her reverie. Indeed as she