Paula’s Puzzle Picture 5 — The Unjust Steward

From Fessée 7

Letter from Fessée 9

The Unjust Steward

Here is my solution to Paula’s puzzle picture The Unjust Steward.

The unemployed labourer is in arrears with the rent for his cottage. His landlord, the squire of the village, sends his steward to collect the money owing. When the tenant is unable to produce it the steward threatens him with eviction. The desperate man pleads for mercy and the steward then proposes a deal: instead of money he will take payment ‘in kind’. If the tenant’s wife and daughter, whom he holds equally responsible for the debt, will submit to corporal punishment at his hands, he will persuade the squire to forego that week’s rent, and on the same condition that of each week in future.

After protesting in vain the tenant sends for the two females and informs them of what he has agreed to. They are naturally aghast, but he tells them that it is the only alternative to eviction and after some argument, to which the steward listens sardonically. they both indicate that they are prepared to accept the conditions.

The steward decides to deal with the wife first, leaving the juicier morsel, her pretty teenage daughter, to the last. He orders the woman to kneel on a chair and raise her skirts and petticoats (she wears no drawers, of course). He then administers ten strokes with his cane on her bare bottom, after which she has to stand facing the window with her back to him and her backside, showing the marks of the caning, still exposed to his view.

He next orders the daughter to take her place on the chair and raise her skirts. She has just obeyed the order when her father, no longer able to bear the painful spectacle, intervenes to plead for her. This infuriates the steward and he berates the tenant, while the girl, already positioned for her beating with her teenage bottom bared, looks back over her shoulder fearfully.

The trouble is that the person I’ve assumed to be her father looks old enough to be her grandfather, while the one I supposed to be her mother, judging by the modest dimensions of her shapely bum, could be her sister. So could it be that the two victims of the Stewards’ taste for flagellation are the tenant’s granddaughters?

Perhaps Paula would tell us?

J.P., Devon