Chapter 2: Burrowing Away

Henry Lewis Warren was petrified. The moment that he had set eyes on Sylvia’s visitor he had known immediately who she was. She was a striking woman and the trouble was that the last time he met her, she was striking him. You wouldn’t easily forget her wherever you had met her, much less if you had – as Henry had – spent hours on a regular basis strapped across a wooden punishment frame while she had applied a wooden paddle to your naked backside. Perhaps she hadn’t recognised him, Henry thought. After all Henry told himself without much confidence, she had normally made him wear a rubber rabbit mask over his face. So she wouldn’t remember him, would she?

He watched with some relief as he saw her saying goodbye to Julia Fain at the other end of the office. There were plenty of raised eyebrows across the office at Raven’s appearance as she walked to the lift. The women obviously thought that her appearance was just a bit much compared with their own more conservative versions of power dressing. And then there were the men, who could be divided up into those like himself who looked down at their desks fearful of being caught with their tongues hanging out and the others that stared in disbelief at such an unapologetic representative of an oppressing class.

Henry was mainly relieved that there hadn’t been an embarrassing confrontation with Mistress Courten. After all, he hadn’t actually got around to cancelling his last appointment with her. It had been for an afternoon not long after the election, he recalled. He had put it in his diary as an intended treat after all the stress of the preceding weeks and in anticipation of a quiet time when the previous minister was returned to his position. That – as so much – had been turned over by the shock election result. The new Minister had got to work quickly and when he had tried leaving early a couple of days later for his appointment with Raven, one of his new Minister’s special advisors, a tall, elegantly dressed woman of Asian origins, had stopped him with a snarled, imperious, “ ... and where do you think you’re going? If you think you’ve got so little to do that you can think about leaving at this time you’re in for a shock. You’ll go when I say you can and not before!” After that he hadn’t really seen the point.

In retrospect, he felt quite guilty about not having been in contact with her. After all he had been visiting Mistress Courten for a long time. It had been an indulgence that he had kept secret for years. It wasn’t the sort of thing that a senior civil servant could be open about. Thinking back he must have been one of her first clients when she opened her dungeon. While he hadn’t been a frequent client, he supposed he must have seen her most months but he hadn’t been since the election. A casual observer might think that New Order Britain was the ideal place for someone of his tastes but somehow it wasn’t the same. He missed the sessions that they used to have and now he found himself wondering how he could arrange one again.