Wynter Prendergast and Carol Everson have been lesbian lovers since their time as sixthformers at a posh private school. One day, the girls start reminiscing and remember their first time in bed together. Their housemistress caught them and sent them to the headmaster. He sent the girls down to the punishment room, in the bowels of the headmaster's lodgings. Both girls take ten hard strokes of the cane. It is the first chapter in the girls' long experience of corporal punishment within their relationship. (CA132)