Jane felt sick with trepidation as she trailed upstairs, following the doctor and maid. In the room they entered on the first landing an old-fashioned medical couch dominated its centre. A glass partition separated it from the adjoining space. Jane lingered in the doorway, shifting uneasily from one foot to the other.
‘Up on the couch, please, ’ the doctor said, ushering her in and closing the door. Jane froze as he took off his jacket and started to roll up the sleeves of his crisp white shirt.
‘No, please…’ she mumbled, too shocked to put up any resistance, the maid too strong and too practiced. Soon Jane was supine on the couch, broad leather straps attaching her ankles and wrists to the four corners… Jane’s ambition to work in investigative television leads her into the clutches of the Ruskin Club, a secret brotherhood devoted to Victorian values and their corrective practices.

Naively she visits Ms Brentwood, a maker of Victorian corsets and strict disciplinarian, and when Jane’s deception is uncovered a month’s initiation by the Committee is her sentence.

And so she is introduced to the whip during treatments in the austere doctor’s examination room. As a stable girl at Hunt Hall, the major and his grooms chastise her further, and at Lord Waterhouse’s modern apartment she becomes the plaything of his wife and her spoilt friends. And while held in Sir John’s wine cellar, where she is chained during the Ruskin Club’s May Day celebrations, her tenacious producer, Ben Handford, comes looking for her…