HIRSTMERE HALL: THE FENCING MISTRESS

copyright: Lesley Tara, 2010


Parry! – lunge! – parry! – our blades made a sharp metallic sound as they clashed together. Then I over-committed myself in an attack and left an opening, which Miss Champney was quick to exploit. With lightning speed, the tip of her foil flicked against the padded collar of my protective tunic, and our practice bout was over. I wasn’t disappointed that she had won – she is my coach, and had been testing me on some new feints that she had demonstrated earlier in the training session.

My name is Rebecca, but everyone calls me ‘Becky’ for short. I am nearly sixteen and a half years old and a pupil at Hirstmere Hall, an exclusive boarding school for girls in the south of England – what we in Britain call a ‘public school’, but which in the USA would be called a private school. As we live at the school during the term, it has many facilities to fill our leisure hours and occupy our energies, although quite a few of us engage in our own very unofficial activities … energetic ones, too … well, what do you expect with three hundred teenage girls all cooped up together? I’ve heard that the school was quite a lesbian hotbed in the past, back in the 1960s and 1970s; I don’t know about that, but there’s certainly plenty of girl-on-girl action available now, if you are inclined that way. I am – I’m so inclined that I’m not leaning, I’m horizontal; preferably in my second-most-favourite position, which is on my back with my legs spread wide apart, ready for a female fuck-fest.

Anyway, one of the additional sports offered at the school is fencing, which I took up with enthusiasm about a year ago, and I’ve made good progress. The fencing tuition is given by Miss Champney, one of the science teachers; she is very skilled at the sport, and when at university was a member of the national team. Being single and living here in the school buildings (she is one of the teachers who also supervises the residential side), she is able to give individual coaching lessons in the early evening to the older girls such as myself. She takes over the smallest of the school’s three gymnasiums for this, and always locks the door on the inside – she says it could be dangerous if someone came rushing in by mistake, not wearing a helmet or anything, and also that great concentration is needed and it is essential that there won’t be any distracting interruptions.

On this spring evening, I was having one of my twice-weekly individual coaching sessions with Miss Champney (I also attend the team practice with the other girls). We had been working energetically for over thirty minutes, and it was time to move on to the other part of the programme. I froze when Miss Champney’s blade scored its touch on my neck, and then moved only my right arm to point my own foil down and away to my side.

‘I submit’, I said, looking directly at her. Saying this, rather than the usual term ‘I yield’, was my signal that I felt had practised enough and – with her approval, and if she was satisfied with my efforts – we could now have a rather different type of workout. I held my breath, as for a long moment she stood as still as a statue, appraising me, and then she took a step backwards into the ‘at rest’ position, brought her foil to the front of her helmet in formal salute, and nodded once in silent permission. With a pleased sigh, I removed my fencing helmet and placed it and my foil carefully on the floor beside me. Then I took up the position of submission: I sank down onto one knee, the other on the wooden floor, and looked demurely downwards.

I know very well that I am an attractive girl, and I don’t try to minimise it. I am quite tall at five foot ten inches (and still growing, I will probably reach six feet), and this gives me a long reach that is an advantage in fencing – Miss Champney is an inch taller than me. Like her, I am quite slender with arms and legs that are slim but strong; as well as the gymnasiums, the school has a well-equipped exercise room with rowing machines, bicycles, weights, presses and so on – it’s quite a busy and popular place. We differ in other ways: I’m a brunette, with almost black hair, quite wavy and shoulder length – for fencing, I pin it up under my helmet – and I’m actually more curvy than she is! Miss Champney has quite thin hips and small breasts, whereas mine have filled out in the last year – not large, just nicely average or even a little less, pyramidal and pointy C cups. Miss Champney says rather disapprovingly that their weight on my chest will slow me down just that tiny bit which will prevent me from getting to the highest level in the sport, even though my eye, my reflexes and my instincts are all very sharp. However, I don’t mind – I enjoy fencing and can beat most opponents (not her, of course), but I’m not ambitious to make the Olympic team, as she did in 2000 when she was twenty.

As I knelt, looking downwards at my teacher’s white shoes, I felt the touch of her fencing foil once again. Its blunt tip moved across my padded body-tunic and came to rest with unerring precision over the nipple of my right breast, which instantly hardened in response to the firm pressure. Miss Champney moved the tip of her foil in a tracery around the tip of that breast and then across to stimulate its neighbour in the same way, making me give a slight moan of sweet arousal.