The girl was well secured at her wrists in the small of her back as she lay face down on the bed with her bare bottom elevated by two pillows. She was naked, her white skin stark in the morning light that streamed in through the window.

The bindings at her wrist were at her own request as she had a habit of reaching back during a thrashing and clutching at her bottom. She was young and stupid girl at the best of times, but he had to admit that she never displayed the least resistance during a correction, save that is for the habit of reaching, and always accepted the harshest birchings.

Today he was birching her for persistent laziness and a frustrating lack of application to her studies. Not that she even made that link. As far as she was concerned, she had put herself in his hands and had disappointed him in some manner. Ipso facto she had to be birched.

Ipso facto; a phrase drawn from the Latin he had so far failed to teach her.

The array of vivid finger width welts in red and purple that he scored over and over on bare bottom made her gasp and then scream until she was a sobbing wreck.

“Forgive me master,” she wailed.

He had been about to, but she was too accepting and too stupid, so taking up a fresh bundle of rods he set about her again and again until they were both exhausted.

Usually he would have let her rest, but today he had her kneel at the prie-dieu with the book he had set her and bid her learn the chapter on pain of being unseated for a month.

He had found Jane selling flowers in Covent Garden in 1876. There was something about her eyes that had drawn him to her. She was just the type he was looking for; bright-eyed and uneducated.

He had brought her a meal and enquired about her full name and family history before slipping forward in time. Various censuses for the years between 1881 and 1911 had her down as a huckster, but after 1921 there was no record of her at all. At first he had just assumed she had died of old age, after all by 1921 she would have been 65, but after checking the records he found that the great flu epidemic had taken her in 1919.

Returning to Victorian London he had asked her, “Tell me, would you like an education and to make something of yourself?”

That had been the beginning of her tuition, but after two years she had showed no sign that she would ever be anything but a stupid flower girl.

He had been born so far in time from Victorian London that sometimes he forgot where he was from. In his long years of time travel he had visited many human eras, some great ages of mankind’s journey and others black holes of lost potential.

London between 1850 and the Edwardian era had been like no other place he had ever seen. Capital of a great empire that threatened to span the globe, it had been at once a golden age of human development and a pit of squalor with a million lost souls devoid of their full potential.

He had hoped to prove this by taking Jane out of her destiny and resetting the balance through direct intervention. Now after almost two years in subjective time, it was obvious that he had failed.

Maybe it was some immutable law that one could not alter time, but that argument was too mystical for him. To time travel was to change time, the universe did not care anymore for the lives of kings and presidents that it did for the existence of a blade of grass. The pollen innocently collected on his coat would wipe out billions of plants from the time stream just as surely as if he had emerged next to Lee Harvey Oswald and shot him in the head before he could assassinate Kennedy.

He was either a part of the time stream or he was not and what had happened could not be undone for those who had already lived. Only for him could it change as he saw it, a player in his own alternate reality.

He had often wondered if time just reverted once he stepped out of any given time stream as if he had never visited it? Or if a parallel universe was created to follow on from changes he caused just by his presence?

From long experience, he knew that time travel had no consequence for the universe and the only permanent change he could ever make was on himself and the knowledge he gained.

Replacing his coat after birching the girl he sat in a chair to watch her read. Her lips moved as she earnestly applied herself, an attitude he knew would not survive her sore bottom.

Perhaps the change is too subtle, he thought. Maybe 80 years from now, or a hundred, her descendants will rise above their station as a result of something he had done?

As he thought on this he became excited. He could follow the time line to 1976 or perhaps 2021 and see? He knew that such linear shifts had to be done quickly in subjective time or the timeline realigned itself and it would be as if he had never interfered. In such cases, even if it were as he hoped, being unanchored in time he had no way of knowing which time stream he had rejoined or if he had ever made a difference.

“You had better learn it this time or you will be in the corner all Sunday,” he growled as he got to his feet.

“Yes Sir,” she said meekly, redoubling her efforts with the book.

The Time Traveller swept out of his suite of rooms and down the stairs to the street. From the back of his mind he activated the procedure and by the time his shoes hit the pavement outside he was more than a 100 years hence.

The street he saw was no shock to him. He had seen the 21^st century many times and knew it well enough to know that no one would give him a second glance even in his Victorian dress.

The air was fresher, but slightly sourer with chemicals than it had been a few moments before. Each century had its own smell he had found, which for most of history was usually dominated by manure and stale sweat. For a moment he wondered if the history of smells might not be a more fruitful line of research.

“Focus,” he chided himself.

As he spoke, a man passed him with a dog and glanced in his direction. Perhaps because of the frock coat and the winged-collar the man stared for a moment before hurrying on. At most points in human history, eccentric behaviour tended to draw a lot of attention, but in the scheme of things, early 21^st century London was more tolerant.

Confident that he had made the correct transition, the Time Traveller turned his attention to the task in hand. There were procedures for arriving in an exact time and place, but they were difficult. This time he didn’t need them and merely stepped forward to the Millennium, give or take a decade. Looking at a newspaper stand he ascertained that he was in 2012, a much more useful time than 1976, as the Internet was well developed in this London and he would have no trouble in looking up Jane’s descendants.

*

Kimberly kicked the vending machine and swore. It had just swallowed her last 50p and the damn coke can had got stuck. The noise of her assault drew glances from the other library users and for a moment she felt guilty and self-conscious. Then her usual belligerent self asserted itself and she glowered back at the librarian behind the desk who studied her with disapproving eyes.

Kimberly liked the library and hated that she liked it. At school she had thrown books at teachers and screamed that only dummies read stupid books. But in private when her mates were not around she devoured books by the shelf. Now school was over. It had been over for almost four years and she was still without a job.

The librarian had not stopped watching her. The clean but torn dungarees worn over a non-matching green and white striped top suggested a person more likely to steal or vandalise a book rather than read it. The scruffy top-knot of straw-coloured hair and the ancient cracked white trainers did little to soften the image.

In years past Kimberly would have given the bitch the finger, but her heart wasn’t in it these days. Did 20-year-olds even still do that? So instead she returned one last sullen look and trudged angrily back to her seat and the open book.

“Victorian London: Death, Disease and the Underclass,” she read as she turned the cover back to look at it again.

The cover was a photograph of a startled boy looking straight at the camera against the back drop of a squalid brick house somewhere in Seven Dials. A man passing by was out of focus like a ghost, too busy back in the day to even pose. Only the boy was clear, his sad empty eyes staring back at her from another time.

But it was the word underclass in the title that made her the most uncomfortable. It was way too close to home.

Usually Kimberly liked history. She consumed books on the past like another girl might read romantic novels. But her stories were way better, because they were true.

Recently she had been taken with Victorian England, although in point of fact it had been a book on 19^th century Edinburgh that had first got her attention. Until she had read that book she had been hardly aware that Scotland was a different country. Sometimes she had the feeling that there was an awful lot that she did not know.

She remembered once back at school how everyone was laughing at some girl on TV who had said that she thought France might be in Paris. From their mirth, she gathered that it wasn’t and it bothered her somehow that she did not know. However, her discomfort had not been enough to overcome her rage at her stupid teachers and go and find out.

Turning back to her book she opened it again and found the page with pictures of Victorian dress. The men looked so stern and sexy somehow and the women were divine. For a moment she imagined herself back in time, but the happy feeling quickly passed to be overtaken by a sense of loss. That world was dead and as closed to her as her own.

*

The Time Traveller, having ascertained that he had arrived in 2012 was struggling to find somewhere to access the Internet. It had been a while since he had last been in this time frame and he had forgotten some of the nuances of the age. A decade earlier and there would have been Internet cafés on every corner, but now he remembered that although Wi-Fi was commonplace, most people had their own portable devices.

“Damn and blast it,” he cursed. “Surely I don’t have to buy…”

His eyes fell upon a sign for the public library and he smiled.

“Ah yes of course,” he sighed.

The library was easy to find and it seemed to have whole floor devoted to PC use and Internet access. He was about to mount the stairs when he caught a glimpse of the books on the main floor.

“The end of an era,” he sighed. “Oh well, I have nothing but time.”

With a spring in his step he bounced into the reference section and began to eye the leatherette bound tomes bearing letters in gold. He loved books.

“A History of the English Speaking Peoples by Winston Spencer Churchill,” he announced in clear tones like a town crier, enjoying the looks of consternation on the faces of the other readers. He must have cut quite a figure in his frock coat and drainpipe trousers, he thought.

Then someone shushed him.

“So much for the theatre,” he mumbled crestfallen, then added brightly to no one in particular, “Oh well, onwards and upwards.”

Once the clown in the costume had moved on everyone went back to their books and paid him no mind. Everyone that is, but Kimberly. For her it was if someone had stepped from the page of her book. Even his manner was how she had imagined it. Hastily she closed her book and hurried after him, leaving Victorian London on the desk. Or so she thought.

The man was magnificent, like Darcy on the way to a wedding. Only part of her knew that she had the wrong era. She didn’t care.

The Victorian gentleman looked so serious, more like a young Peter Firth, from the TV spy thing, than the guy who played the king. Beneath his stern looks he had a twinkle that she liked, almost as if he was trying not to laugh or had some great secret.

When she found him he was sitting at a computer frowning at the screen. He worked the keys more like a piano than a bit of technology and despite his dexterity he looked somewhat clumsy, as if he wasn’t quite used to such precise tactile activity.

“You having some trouble,” she ventured.

He sniffed and after a moment’s hesitation he turned to look at her.

“This keyboard is a fright,” he beamed, “Out of style longer than my coat I’ll be bound.”

Then he turned back to the screen.

“It’s a pile of crap. They have had the same computers in here for years,” Kimberly agreed.

The man frowned and turned back to look at her.

“That’s an interesting accent you have there,” he said. “Some kind of throwback to another era. Very interesting vowels.”

She blushed. He was taking the piss, she knew it, but she didn’t quite know how. In fact she barely understood a word he was saying.

“Fuck you, I was only trying to help,” she spat angrily.

He frowned. “That can’t possibly be an appropriate response for a young lady can it?” He looked away to the side as if remembering something. “It has been a while, but that word is not to be an acceptable casual expression for another 50 years at least I thought.”

Now she knew he was taking the piss. He even used words like ‘appropriate’ and ‘acceptable’ like her teachers in school.

“How would you like my fist in your face?” She said angrily.

He turned then, swivelling the chair to face her and folded his arms. “How would you like a smacked bottom?”

She blushed furiously and felt a surge of light-headedness; a common response for her when someone mentioned spanking. She looked around her to see if anyone had heard before treating him to a tirade of vulgar abuse.

“My name is Dominic Phora,” he said smoothly, but with an edge to his voice, “How are you known?”

“What?” Kimberly stopped in mid tirade.

“Your name,” he growled.

“Kimberly. Why?” she said weakly, suddenly confused.

“Why? Because I never spank a girl unless I have been introduced,” he said.

“You have got…” She didn’t finish.

Dominic seized her easily and tipped her over his knee. For a moment he contemplated her ample rear and puzzled to how he might denude it, then realising the thin cotton was no protection, smacked her hard.

“Ouch, bejesus,” she yelped open-mouthed in shock.

The Time Traveller ignored her protests and with great sweeps of his arms spanked her soundly for several minutes.

Completely helpless, Kimberly mewed and struggled impotently across his lap until light tears of anger and embarrassment pricked at her eyes.

“Hey you, no horseplay in here,” a rather officious voice called out. “Take that elsewhere.”

The librarian, suspicious of the scruffy girl heading for the computer room, had followed Kimberly upstairs and was now glaring at the odd couple like a fishwife.

“So sorry,” Dominic replied, setting a puce-faced Kimberly back on her feet.

Kimberly danced on the spot clutching at her bottom and complained childishly about her treatment.

“You bastard,” she said with a pout.

“Do you want another spanking?” Dominic asked.

Kimberly blushed even more fiercely and bit her lip, too mortified to even look at the librarian. “No… please,” she gabbled, wide-eyed and with a new found respect.

“Good. Then I suggest you mind your manners before I take a stick to your bare bottom here in front of everyone.”

“Oh God no, please,” she gushed, stealing a glance at the still watching librarian.

The librarian smirked and watched while she waited for them to leave.

“I have what I want,” Dominic said in a dejected tone and got to his feet.

Kimberly watched him go with a sense of loss until he was out of sight. Only then did she feel like crying in earnest, but the by now grinning librarian was still looking at her. However, before she could move, Dominic put his head around the end wall and called back cheerily, “Are you coming?”

Almost forgetting the small blaze he had lit in her rear, her face lit-up and she bounded after him like a puppy who thought she had lost her master and found him again.

*

He was waiting for her on the library steps and she almost bumped into him in her hurry to catch up. Her bottom still burning, she hung back just out of his arm’s reach and shyly chewed at her lip.

“So you want to learn do you? How very interesting,” he said thoughtfully.

“You some kind of a teacher?” It was an accusation.

“Yes.” It was true in a way.

“What makes you think I want anything to do with you? You… you…” She wished she was angry. She had every right to be.

“Be quiet.” He held a solitary finger to his lips.

She obeyed.

“Where I come from children are seen and not heard. Impudent young misses are…”

“I am not a child.” She pouted.

“You are to me. Now don’t interrupt.”

She dragged one toe on the ground as her pout shifted sideways and she dipped her head.

“I am going to take you in  hand,” he said rubbing his chin. “Now be silent and listen. This is a onetime deal.”

She flicked her eyes up at him, the pout still defiantly pointing sideways.

“Any impertinence, any backtalk, foul language; indeed any behaviour at all with which I deem to take issue with and you will be soundly spanked. And spanked on your bare bottom regardless of who might be on hand to witness it. Do I make myself clear?” He waited.

She gaped at him, but her heart was racing. It was as if she had waited for this moment all her life. Surely she should speak out at this bizarre suggestion. Instead she blushed again and her hand strayed to her bottom.

“Good. Furthermore, if you cross me, I will more than just spank you, believe me. You are in for quite an education.”

This was perfect he thought. He was excited now. Why had he never thought of it before? He could take this girl out of her timeline and educate her by immersion. She was clearly a fallen one, but nonetheless, she had a keen interest in the past. Who better to educate? Jane was hopeless. She had no concept of history; she learnt by wrote and only then to please him? On the other hand this girl could be shown who she was and what her world was at one and the same time.

“Where are we going?” Kimberly asked nervously.

“Nowhere.” He shrugged. “Everywhere. Here in fact.”

The clean sharp brick of the library turn grimy before her eyes. Why it was this that held her attention she couldn’t say, not when cars, phone boxes and even the road vanished at the same time to be replaced by a single horse and carriage. Perhaps it was because it was the only building that was the same in the whole street.

“Fuck me,” Kimberly gasped.

A moment later she was upended across Dominic’s lap with her dungarees and knickers around her ankles being soundly spanked.

“That’s the way, give the boy what for,” cackled an old crone who had only just then emerged from the library. Her eyes were not good and the youth clearly had on trousers of some kind.

The red-faced Kimberly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; a dilemma soon settled by a slow burn in her bottom that left her panting hard and spluttering out sobs choked out with pleas for mercy.

“Good heavens it’s a girl,” the crone gasped.

Then some urchins, quickly gathering on the corner took up the chant. “Gawd, look at her arse, ain’t it ‘arf red.”

Fearing too much attention, Dominic hauled his new charge to her feet and even as she tugged up her clothes, he dragged her away.

*

Kimberly’s head was still fizzing incoherently as she tried to make sense of what was happening. The room was sane enough, if a little old-fashioned, but the scene from the window was a3D movie of Victorian London, only… more so. The smell was rank and the sounds outside was a cacophony of competing sounds, like nursery school kids playing shops in a zoo. Even so, something was missing and it took several moments for her to think what it was. The incessant hum of traffic that had been with her all her life was gone.

Dominic had given her a pill, which he said would help her make the adjustment. It had tasted bitter and she seized on the flavour as a crutch; something tangible and real.

As she calmed down to take things in, she again became aware of the tang in her bottom and the embarrassment of submitting to two spankings in less than a few minutes; both in public. Even the scenes outside did not obscure the memory of her dungarees and knickers at her ankles on a London street. She blushed until her ears burned and a hint of something unnamed clawed at her sex.

“Lore, I don’t know what you’re wearing but Mr Phora says you are to wear these,” the girl said, entering the room with a pile of clothes.

Kimberly dimly remembered that she had been called Jane and was some kind of ward or student of Dominic’s. “Where is Dominic?” She said.

Jane gasped. She was unused to such disrespectful familiarity.

“Mr Phora is out acquiring things more suited to living with us. No doubt there will be books,” Jane said tartly.

Kimberly tugged at her saggy dungarees and then eyed Jane’s attire. In books girls were always reluctant to be parted from their clothes but she would do anything to be dressed like her new companion.

In a few short moments Kimberly stood naked in the room and was hastily rummaging in the pile of clothes provided to work out what to put on first. Jane blushed at such enthusiastic nudity but did not avert her eyes. “Here let me help you,” she said.

“Where does this go? Kimberly asked holding something frilly to her breast.

Jane giggled. “Not there silly.”

By the time Dominic returned Kimberly was respectable and he was met at the door by two Victorian maidens.

“I like it,” he nodded, “It is a good start. Here are some other clothes and three books that you will read by the end of this week.”

“Week?” Kimberly frowned. “When will I be going home? I mean a week? I’ll be missed.”

It was lie. Kimberly knew that no one knew or cared where she was. She was so often late with the rent that it would be weeks before even her landlord made enquiries.

“You will be here until I see fit to release you,” Dominic said seriously. “But don’t worry. I can return you to the exact moment you left. You will never be missed, even if you live here years.”

At the word years Kimberly quailed. She believed him and for a moment she felt lost as if she had tumbled into a void and would fall forever.

“Do you regret coming now?” Dominic asked kindly.

“No,” Kimberly replied breathlessly. It was true.

*

Kimberly was kneeling on the bed and folded over four pillows so that they hugged into her lower belly. She was naked and her bare bottom was sticking up obscenely above the curve of her back.

Two days before she had been spanked on the bare bottom in front of Jane. She had made such a fuss that afterwards Dominic had made bend over and touch her toes for six biting strokes of the cane.

“I won’t do it,” she had raged.

But she had. And more readily than the Kimberly of a few weeks before would have believed.

Jane had openly enjoyed both the spanking and the cane strokes; laughing out loud. Later she had even gently mocked her friend as she rubbed cooling balm on to her sore buttocks.

Now the 21^st century girl was waiting a fresh correction.

She had gone out without permission and had not returned until after dark, her breath sour with beer.

In this era, such behaviour could cost a girl her reputation. Jane had been shocked. Once upon a time Kimberly would have been mystified, but in recent months she had come to understand, immersed as she was in Victorian London.

The birching was well deserved; she only wished he would get on with it.

“Will it hurt?” Kimberly whispered to Jane who was hanging back in the corner to watch what was to happen.

“More than you would believe,” Jane replied. “But you deserve it, so don’t go saying you don’t”

“I know,” Kimberly said dejectedly. “You’re going to enjoy this, aren’t you?”

“You bet. Every lash and bite of it; I hope he makes you l kiss and lick the rods and ask nicely for seconds,” Jane said eagerly.

“Would he do that?” Kimberly was wide-eyed.

“He did it to me once,” Jane said ruefully. “I cried for an hour afterwards, but the humble feeling I felt was kind of nice.”

“Yes,” Kimberly whispered. She knew what Jane was talking about. She felt the same after the spanking and being made to bend for the cane.

In fact Kimberly had felt it almost every time Dominic had caned her in the past few weeks. And he caned her a lot. If she had had one tenth of the discipline when she had been at school she would have a dozen master’s degrees by now, she thought bitterly. That was what Dominic was teaching her.

Then he arrived and the girls fell silent.

He was stripped to his shirt sleeves and the rod was tucked under one arm.

“You have a lot to learn,” he sighed.

“I know,” she said meekly, “Will you teach me?”

“Oh yes,” he rasped. “The lesson today is how to reck the rod.”

Kimberly looked away and fixed on a point ahead of her on the wall above the bed. She heard him move behind her and test the withes of birch in the air with an intimidating swish.

The first stroke seared her like a brand of living fire and she grunted. Tears sprang to eyes her almost at once as she waited for the burn to grow before he struck again.

“Do you feel that?”

“Yes Sir,” she yelled as he birched her again.

Jane hugged herself and fluttered with pleasure in the corner.

Kimberly’s bottom was already stained with a textured rash, but the Time Traveller had hardly started. This was going to take a while, he was in no hurry. After all he had all the time in the world.

The end?