Moonspun Magic (Magic Trilogy 3)

She had to do something. Because if she didn’t, he would win. He would trap her and do just as he pleased with her. She would tell Elaine, she had to tell her cousin. Even as the thought sifted through her mind, she was shaking her head. Tell Elaine that her husband wanted to ravish her young cousin? She swallowed, picturing her humiliation when Elaine laughed at her, shook her head, and berated her for spouting such ridiculous, such mean nonsense. And she would. Unlike her husband, she was loyal and faithful.

She couldn’t stay here at Drago Hall. Not now.

Victoria lowered her face into her hands. She was shaking, but there were no tears. The feeling of helplessness was paralyzing. No, she thought, shaking her head, no. How could he want her? It made no sense. Elaine was beautiful, with her lustrous black hair and her pale green eyes, and accomplished, her fingers nimble with needlework and the keys of the piano-forte. And she was carrying his child, his heir, as he said every day now, as if saying it over and over would produce the male child he wanted. Elaine was his wife; she had no deformities. Surely he knew about her leg, Elaine must have told him. Victoria touched her fingers to the ridged scar on her left thigh, probing lightly at the now relaxed flesh, the smooth muscles. Once, when she was fifteen, she had run away from a teasing Johnny Tregonnet, run too hard and long, and Elaine had seen the result—muscles knotting, bunching beneath the jagged scar. She’d tried to be kind, but she’d been repelled at the sight.

How could he possibly want her? She was ugly, as defective as that poor hunter he’d shot.

Very slowly Victoria eased down under the goose-feather quilt. The night was long. She was cold, inside, so cold, and she was afraid.

She thought of David Esterbridge, but four years older than her almost nineteen. He’d proposed to her three times since the previous January. He was kind to her, generously persistent, weak, and the only child under his father’s thumb. She didn’t love him. But what else could she do? At least David would protect her. She would make him a good wife. Yes, she would. She would marry him and he would take her away from Drago Hall.

Away from Damien.

There were eight men in the beam-ceilinged drawing room of Treffy, the small hunting lodge owned by the old infirm Earl of Crowden. The caretaker had died and no one had told the old earl’s steward. The steward wouldn’t have cared in any case, for Treffy was falling apart and the old earl’s heir surely wouldn’t want the expense of putting it to rights. The lodge had been built in 1748, in the boring time of George II, and it was small by the standards of the time, boasting only seven rooms. It was, further, too isolated for most tastes, set in the middle of a thick maple-tree thicket. It was only three miles from the town of Towan, and Towan but half a mile from Mevagissey Bay. There was always the smell of the sea in the air, a feeling of dampness that lingered on clothes, and on the seats of chairs, and in the bed linen, what there was of that left.

The eight men weren’t concerned about dampness that night, or about any other lack of Treffy. In three minutes it would be midnight. They were ready, prepared for the upcoming ritual. Each had a preassigned position, each was to be standing facing the long table.

Rites and rituals, that was what the Ram demanded. Nothing was spontaneous. All actions were governed by rules, rules that the Ram had made and continued to make or change or modify when it suited him.

All eight men were dressed in black satin robes, their heads encased in black satin hoods. There were slits for their eyes and holes for their nostrils. There were no mouth openings. The satin was thin enough so that their speech was easy and not slurred. Their moans were perhaps muffled a bit, and that was as the Ram wished it.

The Ram had a book, a thin blood-red-vellum-covered book that only he could read. It was his guide, he would say. No one questioned the Ram anymore.

All enjoyed the wickedness of anonymity.

All were enjoying the spectacle of the fifteen-year-old girl who was lying on the scarred old oak table, her hands and feet pulled away and bound easily but securely with soft leather cords. She was clothed only in a long black velvet gown, her feet bare and clean, thank the powers.

She wasn’t particularly toothsome, one of the men had remarked, but the Ram had only shrugged and said, “Her body more than compensates for the plainness of her face. You will see. She is also a virgin, as the rules state she must be.”

What the Ram didn’t say was that he had duly paid the girl’s father ten pounds for her virginity.

And so they were waiting. The Ram had said that midnight was the hour she was to be broken in. They’d drawn lots from the pottery bowl, an ancient piece the Ram said had come from a ship of the Spanish Armada, blown to bits by Queen Bess’s sailors, and wrecked off the shores of Cornwall.

The Ram very calmly walked to the table, bent down, and kissed the girl full on the mouth. She whimpered, but no more. She’d been fed enough drug to do nothing more. Slowly the Ram walked to the end of the table. He freed her ankles, and slowly, as if to a strange cadence, he pushed her legs up, bending her knees until her feet were flat on the table. He told her to keep her legs open.

He looked at one of the men, the one who had drawn the first lot, and nodded. Johnny Tregonnet was ready, more than ready, he was eager, and he was rough as he drew up the girl’s gown, baring her to the waist.

The Ram had once stated, “A woman’s uses are below her waist. Her breasts are nothing but a distraction.”

No one knew if he had taken this from the red-vellum guidebook or from his own capricious nature. No one really cared, though a sight of really full breasts would have titillated some.

/> She bled as she was supposed to. Not copiously, for she was a peasant girl. The Ram remarked that peasant girls were like the stolid, gritty animals they tended. He then motioned for two of them to hold her legs wide, for she was growing tired.

She was deeply asleep from the drug when the eighth finished. It didn’t matter, said the Ram easily. It was better that a woman remain silent. It was a blessing.

The men were relaxed and drinking steadily now. This part of the ritual was a bit of an annoyance. To drink their brandy, they had to turn their faces away, lift their hoods, drink, then lower the hoods back into place before turning back to face the others. Each turned to look at the girl upon occasion. She lay in the shadowy light from the fireplace, now lightly snoring from the surfeit of drug the Ram had fed her.

The Ram sat a bit apart. He drank sparingly. He’d given them this girl to keep them in line. None of them, he mused many times, had the depth of spirit to truly become part of the rituals that nurtured a man’s soul. They were allowed to plow a girl only when he deemed it proper, and at no other time. He’d quoted from the book on that point: “The man’s sex is to prove to the female that he is the dominant, the master, the superior of the species.”

The Ram told them further that such proof wasn’t all that necessary in terms of repetition, for women knew themselves mastered, knew themselves the inferior, knew themselves the weaker.

Several of the men doubted that sincerely. Particularly the two who were married. The Ram, as if sensing their recalcitrance on this point, said strongly that the drug didn’t diminish the female’s knowledge that she was mastered, it merely kept her from voicing her beliefs too loudly, which would be an irritant.

No one knew that the girl’s father was ten pounds richer from this night. That was the Ram’s private counsel. It would have lessened their sense of wickedness if they’d known.

Vincent Landower wondered aloud if the girl could be pregnant. He looked at her as he spoke. She was still snoring, her legs splayed, the velvet bunched below her breasts. He thought a pregnant woman as appetizing as a gutted trout. And he voiced aloud his revulsion.

The others laughed, but the Ram didn’t. He said it would be interesting, his voice pensive, if she were. Which one of them would the child resemble?