The Matron of the Gaol – Part 2: Lights Out

She walked him along the cold gallery with the keys chinking at her waist, past the empty cells with their numbered doors, to Cell Seventeen, a narrow stone room with a plank bunk, a grey blanket, a high barred window and a tin cup on a shelf. She opened the door and stood aside.

"In."

He went in. The door swung shut, with a long iron clang that went through his chest. The latch was on his side, bright and plain, and his hand found it, and he felt the great, sweet relief of knowing exactly how safe the game was built.

"Prisoner Forty-two," came her voice through the grille.

"Matron?"

"Do you consent to the regime?"

"I do, Matron. Thank you."

"The Matron does not require thanks." A pause. "That was well said."

She came to him at intervals through the night, with a lamp and a ledger. She inspected the cell, and him, and found both wanting, in a long cool list of invented offences. She made him recite the regulations through the grille, and corrected each slip with a tap of the key on the iron. She set him tasks: to stand, to kneel, to scrub the flagstones with a brush, to hold silence for a full hour while she sat outside the door with a book, in plain sight, reading by the lamp. It was a discipline of rules, routine and attention, and under its severity ran a kind of unmistakable, watchful care. She checked on him every thirty minutes, and every thirty minutes asked, in the same flat voice, "Does Forty-two wish to continue?" and each time he said yes and meant it.

Near two, the lamp guttered.

"Discharge," said Winifred, softly.

It was her word. She set down the ledger. The cap came off, and with it the whole cold carapace of the Matron, and the woman who stood in the grey dress was flushed and gentle and a little tired. She unlocked the cell herself, and went in, and sat down on the plank bunk beside him with a blanket in her arms.

"How are you?"

"Admitted," said Edmund, with a damp, grateful laugh. "And, I think, discharged."

"Both." She drew the blanket round them and pulled him against her shoulder. "You were an excellent prisoner."

"Will there be another sentence?"

"The gaol has a women's wing with a very good punishment cell." She smiled in the lamplight. "I booked it for the spring."

"I'll bring my own tin cup," said Edmund.

"You will bring your number," said Winifred, "and you will answer to it."

More consensual femdom stories: Velvet Contract · Silk and Steel · Gentle Hands, Gentle Femdom