by Karl Quentin
The tall, well-built young woman, with long fine unruly brown hair, is most unhappy to be sitting where she is, outside the new Headmaster's door. She keeps casting her anxious eyes up at his shining new nameplate: 'Dr K' it says. It still seems odd that it no longer reads 'Henry Chapman MA'. If Mr Chapman was still on the other side of that door she would have little to fear. On the other hand, she would have little to hope for either. The arrival of this fierce-looking man who has already shown how firmly he means to restore lapsed discipline has changed everything.
She just cannot sit still. She fidgets and frets, plucking at the hem of her gymslip, constantly fiddling with strands of her light auburn hair. Then she gets up and walks about, sighing and glancing at the door, before sitting tremulously down again. It seems an age ago since she knocked and was told to wait.
"Come in, Stephanie!"
The low but penetrating male voice from the other side of that door breaks the tension but increases her fears. She opens the heavy oak door and steps inside.
She has not seen him close to before; only at a distance, in assembly. He has taken off his gown and mortarboard, and he is turning the computer screen aside as she creeps in. Iron grey close cropped hair suits his heavy face and tight pursed lips; his eyes seem judgemental, but is that not a gleam of something else within them? He really is a big man. Stephanie's fears are now choking. Why did she ever think this was a good idea?
"Miss... Saunders, isn't it? Stephanie Saunders?" He rises and extends his hand. She had not expected that, and to her the hand she gives him feels like limp lettuce. To him it feels small, slim, and frightened. What has she done? "We haven't met yet, Miss Saunders, but I have studied everyone's file. Please take a seat and tell me what I can do for you."
Feeling slightly nauseous Stephanie tucks her gymslip beneath her and sits on the hard chair facing his desk. Too late to run away. "It's... it's about Henrietta Braithwaite, sir... Dr K."
Does she see his face darken, or is that merely her overwrought imagination? 'Exemplary thrashing in full assembly'...those words are still reverberating inside her head.
"Well, Miss Saunders?"
"I-I...wanted to let you know, I mean, that is - those girls she was fighting this morning-"
"Go on." There was a warning in his voice.
"I mean, I know you'd told us all in assembly yesterday that you would not tolerate fighting, and that you wouldn't hesitate to use c-c-corporal p-punishment to stamp it out-"
"So you were listening, at least."
"Yes Dr - sir. So I know Henry was wrong, but sir, ever since she started at Northwich those three girls have been bullying her rotten! They've been making her life an utter misery for six whole months now. Just because she's scholarship and not one of the knightly class like them - well, us. They've tried to blacken her name with tattle, and separate her from her friends like me, and they gang up on her when no one's looking, and they take her things, and call her names, and steal her homework! She's tried to ignore it, sir, she really has, she's done her best not to react, but today was just too much! They were saying... things... about her mother and father, and poor Henry just - lashed out. She completely lost it! She gave Tamara a black eye, and Georgiana a split lip, and then she threw Mindy down the steps. Just as you came round the corner, sir." Stephanie looked across at Dr K with her eyes full of appeal.
"I see," said Dr K after a pause. "And you think this excuses your friend's behaviour, do you?"
Stephanie looked abashed. "No sir, I suppose not. Not after what you said yesterday. But-" She plucked up her heart. "You need to know the truth, sir. It's not fair that poor Henry should be - um... th-thrashed tomorrow and those three just sit there smirking because they've got away with it! It'll just make it twenty times worse afterwards!"
Dr K smiled, though his eyes were hard. "You are of course entitled to your opinion, but I must think of the whole school. Discipline has become appallingly lax here. I intend to make this once more a place where girls may study and grow, safe within secure and beneficial rules." He paused, observing her keenly. "Systematic, continuous bullying, you say?"
"Yes sir."
"Out of pure snobbery?"
"Yes sir. Mind you, they're jealous too, cos Henry's very clever!"
"So I have been told." He twirled a pencil once around the fingers of his left hand. "And yet when I spoke to Miss Braithwaite earlier she said nothing about being bullied. She took the full responsibility for her behaviour - her outrageous behaviour - upon herself."
"Oh she would, sir, she would! She would never peach!"
"Very well, Stephanie. Leave this with me. You have done your duty, and I may say that you have been brave." He fixed her with a hard stare. "Because if I find that you have made up this story to save your friend, there will be two bare Northwich girls' bottoms up on that stage tomorrow morning!" Suddenly he smiled a big open smile. "Or maybe more, eh? You may go, Miss Saunders. Please keep this conversation between ourselves."
Henrietta Braithwaite - Henry to her friends - stood upon the Head's carpet for the second time that day. The first had been bad enough. From the moment he had told her what he thought of her behaviour, and what the consequences were going to be, she had been buried in a sealed vault of shame and dread. Lessons had passed in a daze of disbelief alternating with horrid imaginings. Surely Henrietta Braithwaite's own tender bottom was not going to be exposed to the entire school, and then thrashed! That couldn't happen. No girl had been caned since she had started at Northwich. The idea was so... so yucky! But of course it was going to happen. Tomorrow morning her bottom, whose soft pressure against the hard school seat she was now so aware of, was going to be alive with unimaginable pain. And everyone would be watching, and she just knew she wouldn't be able to bear it, and she would break down, and they would laugh at her and despise her even more.
And her bottom would be bare - somehow - and that man would be standing over her as she bent, with a cane! She rubbed at her suddenly moist eyes as Miss Fitzpatrick's voice faded in and out of her consciousness.
And now she was face to face with that man again, the last place on God's earth she wanted to be. What had she done now? Could her shame get any deeper? Just that one moment of weakness, and she had become a low crawling worm; a girl who was going to get the cane for wilful disobedience and outrageous, unbecoming behaviour. She felt hot and sick. She wished she could just evaporate.
Dr K bent his eyes upon her. He saw a small pale freckled young woman framed the woebegone anxious face of a girl who is overwrought by her consciousness of her guilt and shame. He knew it well. The awesome rituals of expiation were made to contain, use, and ultimately dissipate such feelings. She was trembling in her gymslip, but trying hard to control herself. He liked what he saw this time. Other young women of her age were free from all such restraints. Her wearing the gymslip, and her obedience now, were signs she was destined for higher things.
"Miss Braithwaite," he began in tones of great solemnity, "you will be wondering why I have summoned you again to my office. I fear you are faced with another inquisition. Perhaps you should take a seat." He indicated the chair, and Henry cautiously seated herself in front of him. Her eyes were fixed on his, big and brown and troubled.
"Miss Braithwaite, take a look at our founder." He pointed to the portrait upon the adjacent wall of a man all in black with a wary, intelligent face who was fiddling with a ring: putting it on, or taking it off. "Good King Richard III, who after defeating the usurper Henry Tudor on Bosworth Field turned his thoughts to the efficient administration of the kingdom. Alone among the monarchs of his time he recognised the qualities of women, particularly as administrators. He founded three colleges for the daughters of the knightly class who, from the ages of eighteen to twenty two, would be educated to form the backbone of his civil service."
Henry knew most of this already, of course. Recently her interest had been awakened by the extraordinary discovery of the hacked-about remains of the would-be usurper Henry Tudor beneath a car park in Leicester, of all places. She looked at good King Richard and wondered what he would have thought of her. Had not Shakespeare portrayed him, in his early play Henry Tudor, as a doughty warrior but a wise and far-seeing ruler? What would King Richard have thought of her throwing Mindy down the steps? She thought she could guess, and that birch rods would have been among his thoughts.
"Northwich of course is one of those colleges, and three times a year we say a mass for King Richard's soul. Since his time we have allowed girls who are not from the knightly class to enter our halls on scholarships if they merit it. Like you, Miss Braithwaite. But we expect such girls to strive to show the knightly virtues - honour above all." His look bore down upon her. "I have been given information about you today, Miss Braithwaite, that makes me doubt your suitability to remain here."
Henry gasped and clutched her breast above her heart. Oh no!
"You seem to have no concept of honour at all. I am bitterly disappointed in you. For not only have you blatantly disobeyed my new rule about fighting - for which I am going to thrash you tomorrow - you have during the previous months allowed yourself to be bullied! Is this not so? You have displayed the most despicable cowardice in the face of your peers. Why did you not stand up to them at once, and avoid the need to lose your self-control this morning? You will be expelled after your flogging, and-"
But Henry was no longer listening. Face enveloped in her handkerchief, she was sobbing and shaking. A few broken words emerged. "Sorry for trouble... thought they would stop if I... Mam and Da always told me..."
Dr K nodded to himself. He rose, took out a large handkerchief, put his arm around the weeping girl, and dried her tears for her.
"Here, here, blow into this. Henrietta, I am deeply sorry for this subterfuge, but I had reason to believe that you would never willingly give me the names of the girls who have been tormenting you. I had to make you break your silence some other way. My dear girl, I believe that your sense of honour is so acute that you would never betray even your enemies. So now I know the truth; you have been bullied, and you have borne it as best you could. Now you will tell me the names of the girls, and what has been going on all this time."
Red-eyed, Henry began her tale of woe. There was no point in pretending any longer.
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