The Wildest Heart

“What in hell do you mean, treating Tom that way? I tell you, girl, once and for all…”

He had begun to shout at me in his loud, blustering voice, and I smelled the liquor on his breath as he came closer. And then his words trailed away as his jaw dropped, and I saw the look in his eyes as they slowly widened and then became narrow.

“Good God!” he said, very slowly, and I saw the look of rage on his face replaced by something else. “Are you really the shy little spinster we all took you for? Is this what you’ve been hiding away all these months under those ugly clothes you wear? For what lover are you guarding those treasures I see, little Rowena?”

For those few moments, while he was talking to me in that strange, thick voice, while his eyes were moving greedily over my body, I remained as frozen as a marble statue, incapable of motion, or of coherent thought.

And then Sir Edgar began to laugh, and his arms reached for me.

“To think—to think you had me fooled—all these months, and right under my own roof too. Why, you’re a raving beauty, girl! The prettiest body—”

“No!” I remember saying. Had I already, without any experience to warn me, sensed his purpose? I had meant to scream the word, but it came out as a choking whisper from my dry throat.

And then, when he put his hands on me, it was too late. My pride would not let me cry out aloud and beg him for mercy, and nor, I think, would it have done any good, for he had become a man possessed by lust.

I struggled—I beat at him with my fists and kept on struggling until I was half-swooning with exhaustion. Somehow he had dragged me over to the bed, ripping my lovely sari off my body with his greedy, grasping fingers. His face loomed over mine and I heard him mutter hoarsely.

“God, you’re a lovely thing! I’ve got to have you, don’t you understand that? You’ve no right to hide such beauty away—no right to wear any clothes at all with a body like yours…”

He kissed me, his mouth covering mine, stifling me so that now I panted and gasped for breath and heard the strange, whimpering noises that came from the back of my throat.

The weight of his body pressed me down until I felt my back must surely break. But that pain was forgotten when a worse one took its place—a terrible searing agony like a knife thrust between my thighs. I would have screamed, then, if his mouth had not been pressed over mine. I remember that my body arched with shock as he gasped, groaned, and shuddered against me.

It was over. He still leaned heavily above me, his sweat dripping onto my still body, but the terrible pain I had felt was gone, succeeded by a sticky wetness that I knew was blood.

Of course. It’s normal for a virgin to bleed when she first lies with a man. I remember lying there, feeling as if every bone in my body had turned to water. I was no longer a virgin. I had been raped by my own stepfather. I watched his face change, its muscles growing slack as the taut expression of lust was wiped out by the gradual realization of what he had done.

He suddenly rolled away from me with a groan, and I lay there watching him as he staggered to his feet, fingers fumbling with his clothing.

“Dear God, Rowena! I didn’t know. Girl, just seeing you the way you were, half-naked—so lovely—I don’t know what got into me!”

“It’s too late to feel guilty now, isn’t it?”

Was that my own voice I heard, sounding so calm, so dead? Suddenly I felt a sickening feeling of distaste for the soiled, stained sheets I was lying on. Without looking at Sir Edgar, who still stood there watching me, I used the corner of the sheet to wipe the blood from my thighs fastidiously, and then I stood up, and brushed past him, to walk to the mirror.

I think I wanted to see if I had changed in any way—if my face would carry the marks of my experience, but it looked unchanged. Pale, still a stranger’s face, with black hair lying in tangles around it. “It shows in the eyes, when a maiden becomes a woman.” Where had I heard that? But my eyes showed nothing, except a kind of blankness.

Without knowing why I did it, I seized my silver-backed brush off the dressing table and began to brush my hair, with long, viciously tugging strokes. Perhaps I was suffering from shock, perhaps my strange action was due to my instinct of self-preservation that fought to keep me sane by forcing me to concentrate on some small, ordinary task.

Strange as it seems, I had almost forgotten Sir Edgar’s presence as I stood there at my mirror, with not a stitch of clothing to cover my nakedness. And then he came up behind me. I saw him in the glass, his eyes gleaming with a strange light, his mouth twisted in a smile.

“Damnation, but you’re a lovely creature! First virgin I ever took without paying for it. Only one who didn’t cry afterwards. You’re a strange girl, aren’t you?”

He put a hand on my bare shoulder, and although I stiffened, I didn’t flinch away from him. He gave a small, satisfied chuckle.

“You’re sensible. I like that. So cold, so lovely—” his voice dropped, and I heard him say softly, “You’re the kind of woman who can carry off diamonds, you know. With that dark hair and your eyes—yes, by God, you’re a diamond girl, all right! And I want to make it up to you. See here, Rowena, I’m not a brute, I’m a fair man, and I can be generous too.”

He quickly left the room and I remained standing, trancelike, before the mirror.

I saw something sparkling in his hand as he returned and my arms dropped to my sides, very slowly, as I felt him lift the heavy mass of my hair—felt a coldness like ice around my throat.

“There!” he said triumphantly. “There, now. Look at yourself in the glass, girl! You should not wear anything else. Diamonds—and maybe sapphires on some occasions, to match your eyes. What do you say, eh? I’d be kind to you—wouldn’t hurt you again for all the world. Dress you in jewels.”

His hands, with the reddish brown hairs on the back of his fingers, slid slowly down my shoulders, and still I did not move, but my eyes met his levelly in the glass.

“What exactly are you suggesting to me, Sir Edgar? Are you attempting to bribe me not to tell anyone what you have done, or are you proposing I become your mistress?”

I felt his fingers tighten about my arms for an instant, and then he swung me around to face him.