RAVISHED
The Trials and
Tribulations of Goldilocks
BY
CHAZ THOMPSON
Published by Chaz Thompson at Smashwords
For more about Chaz Thompson visit
©2004 Chaz Thompson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author. Any similarities to people living or dead are coincidental.
Cover art ©2004 Chaz Thompson.
This ebook is
licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be
re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share
this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for
each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it,
or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to
Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting
the hard work of this author.
Special Thanks
To Gary Russell for his fine-toothed comb and his many hours of grooming the kinks from my oblique style. Thanks, Gary.
Table of Contents
foreward
Breaking and Entering
Warnings and Entreaties
Complications and Propositions
Plans Change and Someone Dies
Revelations, Unltimatums and Deliverance
Keep To The Path
A Ribbon Between Two Women
Ribbon Master
The Tip of a Knife or a Crust of Bread
Objects of Desire
Bitter Vows
A Reckoning
A Contract Is A Contract
The Three Bears
As Always
foreward
Too often in the course of history have multiple, occasionally simultaneous efforts confounded the ability to establish rightful credit for discoveries, inventions and, in this case, fairy tales. One of the earliest records of the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears can be attributed to an aunt, Eleanor Mure, who sometime in the mid-1800s developed the story for her nephew. It involved an old woman who invades the home of three domesticated bears, whereupon she takes assorted liberties with their food and furniture.
But a plethora of earlier published versions, not to mention those surviving exclusively in the oral tradition, have served as evidence that Ms Mure was not the originator of the story. In her defense, however, I will point out that the preceding stories varied so widely in their portrayals of the heroine that Ms Mure’s “adaptation” could be considered unique. In one of the previous forms of the fable, the old woman was a fox named Scrapefoot. Specifically, a she-fox, or harridan, which, according to my dictionary, is also defined as a woman regarded as scolding and vicious. Hence the possible confusion.
Regardless, it took the 1837 publication of Robert Southey’s The Doctor, with its “Story of the Three Bears” to propel the tale to fame. Though he retained the old woman as the central figure, the rest of the tale suffered considerable refinement over its predecessors. It wasn’t until Joseph Cundall, some twelve years later, changed the old woman to a young girl that the name became Silver Hair for his Treasury of Books for Young Children.
In 1858, Aunt Mavor’s Nursery Tales altered the name to Silver-Locks, and some ten years later, in Aunt Friendly’s Nursery Book, the name changed again, this time to Golden Hair.
Not until Old Nursery Stories and Rhymes, illustrated by John Hassal, circa 1904, was our heroine officially christened Goldilocks.
It is with respect to this tedious lineage, therefore, that I submit yet another incarnation of Goldilocks, one I am certain would have been accepted by the distinguished collection of aforementioned contributors with profound disapproval.
Si kholaimo may patshivalo sar o tshatshimo
-An old gypsy proverb
I. Breaking and Entering
1.
Just inches beyond his grasp, the General’s saber clung proudly to the stone wall over the fireplace, unwilling to yield its position at any price save death. Fastened to iron studs embedded in the coarse, soot-stained mortar, it protected the mantel with an aged threat perhaps rusty but not forgotten.
Damn it to hell. If only he hadn’t insisted on that particular angle. Instead of leaving it horizontal, which was common, he had positioned the blade with a defiant tilt upward, emphasizing the dried blood on the tip — the blood of Frenchmen doomed by Napoleon’s blind self-confidence — and consequently the handle was lower and farther away from the edge of the mantel. If only the old Englishman hadn’t been so sanctimonious about Britain’s victory, his sword might be within his grasp now that he needed it. Nothing would dare confront him then. Even his arthritis would surrender to the surge of adrenaline reawakened after so many years of retirement.
But an overstuffed armchair blocked him from getting closer, and the hindrance galled him. General Seabert Goodwin glanced at his wife, a rather thick, bosomy woman half his age, standing frozen in the doorway with their son snug at her hip, and he scowled as though the disadvantage was her fault. Don't wear it to church, she had said. We'll only be gone a couple of hours, she had said. And now look, an invasion in his absence and he was at a tactical disadvantage. See? His eyes flared. If I’d been wearing it I’d be armed now.
A loud crash from deep inside the shadows of the cottage snapped his silver beard up like a pointer catching a scent. Squinting into the dark, he cursed his vision and hearing for picking this night to betray him. He might as well have had his head in a bucket.
But one sense hadn’t deserted him. Maybe he couldn’t hear the burglar, or see anything except foggy twilight filtering through the cottage windows, but he could still smell as well as he ever had.
And the aroma confounded him.
He looked at his wife for confirmation, but she was white with fear and unreadable. Sniffing into the dark, he tried to deny the meaning of the pungent odor but failed. No, he was sure: it was sex. Hot and musty and sharp as garlic, it tweaked his nose shamefully, taunting him as no French soldier ever had.
Whoever it was, whoever had left the front door open, tipping him off, had defiled his home by copulating somewhere within, and the insult punted him forward a step. His wife reached out to catch him but he was committed to the movement and he shook her off, raising a finger to his lips to keep her quiet. As he gripped the hilt and lifted his heavy sword from the studs, he noticed the crumpled crocheted comforter falling from the seat of his armchair. More confident now, with his sword tip dragging along the wood floor, he pointed to the blanket and whispered hoarsely, “Someone’s been in my chair.”
His wife studied the evidence, confused, as the General crossed the room cautiously, his saber scoring a trail in the floor. “General,” she shouted softly, taking a step after him. When she saw the seat cushion askew in her own chair, the hairs on her neck stood on end. “Seabert. Someone’s been in my chair too!”
Whether or not he heard, he didn’t acknowledge her, but continued on through the kitchen, gripping his saber with both hands, the only way he could get it aloft. Waving it uncertainly, he recalled the rumors being circulated by the villagers lately, rumors of bears unafraid of people. Bears more aggressive than most. Downright vicious, some had said, though so far no lives had been harmed. So far, only property had been ransacked.
However, two families had left for London last month, and three the month before. No one had yet heard from them, though London was only a fortnight’s distance by slow horse. They had all appeared anxious to get their wagons through the woods, as though a warning unheeded burdened their axles, but they had departed earnestly nonetheless. Surely someone in Waineswick Parish should have received word by now. What if the bears—
Bah! Nonsense.
Something crunched under his boots and he retreated enough to survey dimly a spill of grain and tea and sugar across the floorboards. Dirty bowls and cups cluttered the table, more dishes than two people would use, all scattered and tipped as though tossed there offhandedly. A broken loaf of bread, partly eaten, rested in a constellation of crumbs, testimony to the brazen insolence still lurking in the dark. “Someone’s been eating our supplies,” he mumbled to his weapon, as though to incite the heavy steel into action instead of weighing him down.
Again he examined the food on the floor, saw something that could have been bear tracks.
Bah! He strained his spine upright, forcing the sword out ahead. “Bears don’t fuck in houses.”
The sun was nearly gone now, and venturing this deep into the house was like entering a cave. Without a lantern or even a candle it was hopeless. And his sword began to droop again, weary of the whole thing.
“General!” His son’s voice pierced the stillness as he galloped into the cottage. “General!”
“Anson!” General Goodwin spun, saber wagging limply in his fist.
But the boy had darted away from the kitchen and fireplace, to his toy box under the window, overcome by horror and grief. “It’s broken! It’s broken!”
Mrs. Goodwin dashed in after him, gaping apologetically at the General, hushing their son, who would not be appeased. “It’s all right, Anson. Shush now.”
“It’s broken!” He picked up the pieces of a toy wooden carriage, its top missing.
“Hush. The General will build another.”
“But I had two shillings inside.”
Another crash from behind the General, from one of the bedrooms, and he hoisted his saber two-fisted over his head with an emphysemic battle cry too long unused, and charged into the dark.
“Seabert!” his wife cried.
The pounding of boots, collisions with furniture, the General’s croaking wail and clang of sword climbed in pitch and clamor to a cacophonic crescendo, then ended with a sudden wheezing decline, like the last gasp of discord from a throttled bagpipe. Within seconds the cottage was eerily serene.
“Seabert!” Mrs. Goodwin looked around for a weapon, found none, stepped after the General, then remembered her son. She couldn’t leave him.
A rattling cough echoed through the kitchen and Mrs. Goodwin called, “Seabert!” again, but the cough diminished with a raspy exhale so extensive she was compelled to draw a deep, empathetic breath of her own.
Through the window above Anson’s toy box, bushes rustled and two blurs of shadow streaked into the trees, disappearing before Mrs. Goodwin could identify who — or what — they were. Distrustful of the sudden peace, she waited, listened, but nothing save a humid summer breeze through the open front door disturbed the room. Closing the door, she tried to remember where she’d left the flintbox.
“Anson, bring me the lantern.” She pointed across the room and the boy complied while she rummaged a shelf, knocking over sewing bobbins and pincushions.
“Was it the bears?” On the verge of tears, he held out the lantern. “Did the demon bears take my—”
“There’s no demon bears.” The General’s voice, gravelly with phlegm but strong, ended the speculation.
“Seabert!” She abandoned the shelf and helped him across the room to the sofa, letting him use the sword as a cane. “I saw two . . . or three, I’m not sure. Out the window. Was it—”
“Get some light in the room.” He settled onto the cushions and allowed Anson to scramble up next to him.
“They took my shillings,” he sobbed. “I had two.”
“Common thieves, my boy. Nothing more.” He smiled consolingly at Anson, but as the flint ignited the oily wick Mrs. Goodwin caught the grim expression he aimed at her, indicating the intruders were anything but common. “Escaped out the boy’s window.” He gripped the pommel, blade down, stuck in the floorboards, and rested his arm extended, which was how he used to sit after a battle. “I’ll have to fix it tomorrow. Or at least before autumn.”
Mrs. Goodwin put the glowing lantern on a table and knelt before the General, doing her best to disguise her own dread from their son. “Will they . . . will they come back, do you think?”
He turned his mouth down and scoffed at the thought. “They got what they came for and skedaddled.” He patted his son’s leg and smiled. “Couldn’t face the steel of a blade what fought with Wellington at Waterloo.” But again the fleeting look of concern suggested he had more to tell her in private. Under the gray of his poorly trimmed beard, he was paler than usual.
Later, after Anson had fallen asleep in his mother’s arms, the General ordered the boy be put in her bed. Offering no explanation, he trailed her closely, lantern high in one hand, his sword as a cane in the other, into their bedroom as though suspicious she might not obey. The shelf between their beds had been knocked to the ground, one of the crashes heard earlier, so she tucked Anson in from the far side, her face an open question to the General, who stood opposite, between the door and his bed. His was a solid, dense mattress so hard she couldn’t sleep on it, so she’d had him build a separate bed for her with her own mattress. A much softer mattress. “Too soft for a warrior,” he often complained. When she finished tucking Anson into bed, the General gestured for her to follow.
A blanket and a few planks of wood covered the window in Anson’s room now, but the General didn’t seem concerned about it as he led his wife to the bed. He kept his voice low, though he never did before when Anson slept, and it boded ill news to Mrs. Goodwin.
“It was dark as bloody midnight,” he hissed.
Sad that such darkness limited his fading vision, she nodded sympathetically and relieved him of the lantern so he could use both hands to support himself on his saber.
With the light at their waists, his beard threw scarring shadows across his cheeks and it weakened his features, usually so commanding and stern. “But their faces . . .” he swallowed thickly, “their faces were white. Bone white. Their eyes black as tar.” He looked at the bed. “I think they were hooded. And gloved. Aye, and sly as snakes. But that’s not the worst.”
She followed his gaze. Anson’s covers were a mountain range of misplaced peaks and valleys thrown onto the mattress at an odd angle or placed there strategically, but before she could consider the cause of such a configuration, the General spoke again.
“Can’t ye smell it?”
As if a vial had been uncorked right under her nose, she did smell it. Or something, anyway. Like chalk left on a hot stovetop. What . . . ?
“Ah, Mrs. Goodwin, have ye never smelled such sin before?” He seemed more irate at her denseness than at the smell itself, and hobbled away toward the window, sword ka-chunking in and out of the floor. “They satisfied themselves on our son’s bunk!”
Satisfied? She dissected the odor, still uncertain. Maybe if she adjusted the covers. She pulled them aside and . . . “Oh my.” The lantern nearly slipped from her fingers as she backed from the bed, hand to her mouth. “Oh my.”
Even on the gray, threadbare linen, the damp stains were obvious.
“I’ll haul it out and burn it in the morning.” Propped up by the sword, he flexed his back with renewed strength, or in anticipation of the labor ahead. “We’ll bring your bed in here for the boy. At least until I can build another.”
“But,” she let her hand fall to her throat, “where will I sleep?”
He faced her and announced his decree as though it should have been obvious. “With me, Mrs. Goodwin.” And in spite of his dour posture, he winked. “With me.”
2.
Beneath her alabaster mask, Wilona’s brow dripped with humidity, sticking her eyelids together and trickling down her neck in naughty rivulets to her breasts. Running made her bosom bounce painfully under the black robe, but she didn’t stop. Indeed, the danger of chase fuelled her onward, tingled through her muscles, across her skin like flames, and the burn only made her run harder.
And even though her giggling trailed her like a comet’s tail, she didn’t care. She couldn’t help it. With almost no breath to refresh her lungs, she couldn’t deny the laughter scorching her throat. It dominated her, devoured her, disarmed her of all earthly sensations but release. She had to keep laughing or she’d die.
The reflection of moonlight on water sparkled through the overgrowth of branches ahead, and she slowed at last, feeling around for her partner. “Where are you?” She tore the mask from her face and guzzled cool air, cherishing the evaporation on her cheeks, the vestige of hysteria waning in her chest. “Gareth?”
A crush of black tackled her, tumbled with her, laughed until she began laughing again too, and came to rest with her on top, at the edge of the forest near the lake. Streaks of muted, canary moonlight through blue elms painted erratic zebra stripes on their robes, crawled around them like fingers molding their every bend and seam until they settled at last, motionless.
His expressionless mask stared up from under his hood, shielding her from his runaway exhales, though their hearts hammered in tandem through their clothes. The pounding reverberated across her chest, down her hips, all the way to her toes, and she was glad she wore nothing under her robe. Gareth's pulse against her breasts renewed a sensation barely sated in Anson’s bed, barely experienced before the Goodwin family had arrived home from evening Mass, and every beat rejoiced in the memory. Rotating her chest slowly, she squashed her sensitive tips harder against his body, and the fire from the chase rekindled on her nipples. Even through two layers of cloth, he had to be feeling her rigid points on his ribs, had to be responding with his own cutting heat.
But his arms dropped dramatically to his sides and he let his head loll away with exaggerated exhaustion. Feigning exasperation, she flung her gloves aside, held his mask by the chin and turned his face skyward again. Through the tapered eyeholes his eyes were closed, and he looked dead.
Her humor drained away. “Don’t do that.”
Instantly, his eyes opened and she smiled.
“Much better.” She lowered her face to the mask, though his gloved hands remained on the ground, and her nose touched the nose of his disguise. His white mask, a masculine version of hers, carried the same design: tapered, black-lined eyes, black outline defining the base of the nose, and gilded lips, all sealed except the eyes. “Keep your eyes open.” She scrutinized him through the holes to be sure he followed orders, then closed her own eyes.
An owl hooted somewhere down the shoreline, and the echo warbled off the water acutely, accusingly, but she paid it no attention. Inside, she was running again, laughing again, expecting capture any moment, and it raised every hair on her skin like a lightning rod crackling with static.
Hands planted on either side of his head, she opened her mouth and placed her tongue between his gold-painted lips, then drew a wet path from corner to corner so slowly a thread of drool leaked onto his alabaster cheek. The mask tasted wintry and slick, gravely formal, lifeless, but that didn’t dissuade her. If anything, she blazed hotter under the black robe, steam escaping in thin ribbons from her collar and ankles, and she wiped her tongue deeper into the split of his frozen mouth.
Any moment she’d be caught, and the punishment for such behavior was unthinkable, so she ran faster, thighs twitching against his hips, toes curling in her boots. And sucking on the bottom lip of his mask she began to gyrate against him, searching for friction, for that delicious pressure both delirious and shameful, so utterly sinful she should be stripped and displayed before the world as the nasty, wanton girl she was.
Oh, but it was right there, the bite she yearned, balanced insufferably out of reach, yet coming closer, ever closer, and the bone-cold taste of mask bled like a razor of ice down her throat, blossomed where she ached the most and lifted her on a scream of ecstasy. Mouth and tongue still lapping, she groped for the hem of her robe, tucked and hiked an armful to her waist, freeing her legs, rousing the purple scream, the eternal scream, biting into her naked rose with a million tiny teeth and, “Gareth, I’m ready. I’m ready. Are you ready? Will you do it? Do it for me now. Please. Please, Gareth.”
He yanked her hood back, releasing an avalanche of radiant vanilla hair that covered their faces and enveloped him in a pithy cloud of sage and sweat.
“Now, Gareth. Please, now.”
His back arched, but instead of hiking his own robes up to his waist, he scooped his arms down his sides and with his wrists lifted her toward his face, his black-gloved hands cupping her bare bottom. Euphoric, she landed square on the mask with a moist grunt.
“Uh! Yes!” She clenched his hood, catching a handful of hair underneath, and jerked him up even as she drove her pelvis down. The nose of his mask struck and slid and the scream bit her again, a pitch higher, sharper, louder.
Gareth held her with both hands, mashed her flowing rose against the stiff bridge of his nose and gouged ruthlessly, using the mask in ways he could never use his face. He could never attack so viciously with his own face, though he’d attempted many times. And no matter how he tried to hurt her, she answered with a scrubbing ferocity capable of cracking the brittle mask to pieces. But he didn’t care. Let her buck and pound if it meant shattering the mask to powder. But the mask held, and his tongue longed for the taste of her nectar, the touch of her swollen folds, the scalding sin of her passion.
Her breathing doubled in tempo and tone, her grunts and gasps echoing through the forest like hatchet-strikes. And when she lacked the breath to make a sound, her body began punching a rhythmic racket of muscle and bone and wild, escalating convulsions as loud as any shout.
He heard the snap, hoped it wasn’t his nose, then a rush of air sprayed his cheek and he knew it wouldn’t be long. Her thighs squeezed his head and ears until the mask split just below his right eye and he prayed the cleft wouldn’t pinch her. Abruptly, her pumps turned into grinding vibrations, hot chills of torture and sweet cramps that pressed him deeper into the damp earth, rupturing the mask at last.
She choked under the weight of her spasm, thighs tightening on Gareth’s head, spine straight as an English oak. Her throat constricted as her legs tightened, crushing Gareth and smashing the fractured mask against his jaw until the alabaster crumbled like a biscuit.
Gloved fingers kneading her ass, he kept her snug against his chin, lest the splinters turned into knives, and restrained her as much as possible. Her hips had stopped slamming into him, but now she writhed in a kind of epileptic delirium, arching so far backward her hair whipped against his exposed shins.
Broken pieces of the mask flattened against his skin, trapped by her gushing rose and bramble, squashing his nose and mouth painfully, but through the cracks their flesh met and Gareth struggled to open the cracks wider. And though her spasms waned, he knew he could bring her up again if only he could clear the debris.
Her breath returned in slow, chopping gulps, her knees trembled at his ears, and the pressure on his face eased enough for flakes of mask to fall away, though most of it remained stuck in place. Her robe, bunched at his forehead, began to slide down her legs, covering his head, and he released her bottom to hoist it back up. He couldn’t speak through the shards of gilded lips covering his mouth, so he palmed her rear and elevated her only enough to let him swab his face against the insides of her thighs, clearing the larger chunks of alabaster and liberating his tongue at last.
Parched and sore, his mouth opened for the rain of her juice, a blessed quenching, filling him to overflowing, slathering his chin and throat with viscid, salty heat. And in return he sank his tongue in so deeply his teeth gouged her tender flesh, mauling as he wriggled, chewing as he swallowed, and Wilona only just landed from her flight before she lifted again like a kite, tendons wincing against his cheeks.
“Oh Gareth,” she sighed, and the owl hooted again, a reminder to keep running, keep flying, into the sky, to the stars, “Gareth, yes. Oh . . .”
Impatiently, he tore his gloves free and slid his hands along her bottom, fingers rooting under her robe for more skin, more naked muscle, around her quivering hips, and courted her back from the stars, back into his mouth.
“Who!” the owl announced, throaty and needle-straight, a beacon for the entire village to follow. “Who!”
Again her hips began rocking recklessly, responding to the flat of his tongue on her nub, and the brush of wind at her shoulder augured torches and pitchforks and sordid scandal. “Nngh,” she whimpered, goading the pinch of bliss deeper, faster, brighter, and—
“Who!” and—
“Nngh!” and—
Gareth gnawed and swallowed and sucked her pearl from its perch, stretching her into his mouth, draining her down his throat, and her pulse throbbed hot as an ember on his tongue.
The mob would have her soon. With each nip of his lips they advanced, ropes ready, whips snapping, stomping down everything in their path, but nothing could hold her back. It was too late now. The holy wrath between her thighs punched up through her stomach like a fistful of nettles and bucked her backward spastically. They’d all witness the truth of genuine rapture, her rapture, possessing her in horrid contortions too violent to defy.
Gareth let her fall back to his knees, her limbs clenched in seizure, but kept his hungry kiss buried in her marigold curls, manipulating her every shock and grimace with a flick of his tongue. A simple nip and she gushed anew, muscles warping from neck to toe. A mild nibble and she shivered, moaned, and ceded yet again to the purple scream.
Moonlight through the trees webbed their robes together as one and licked her pale legs, spread out awkwardly at opposing angles around his head. If the owl still hooted, she longer heard. She’d surrendered to the congregation. She’d been caught.
It seemed hours before he finally spoke, though the moon hadn’t moved an inch through the trees. Wilona knew he’d said something but she couldn’t make sense of the sounds. Her head seemed filled with a warm sap that caught his words like flies, engulfing them until they stopped buzzing, so she watched the light through the branches and waited.
He didn’t speak again, but what he had said before suddenly freed itself from the thick gum and she thought about his question.
“Was it worth it?”
3.
“What?” She closed one eye and watched the moon sidestep from one frame of branches to another, then switched eyes and it stepped back.
He kissed the inside of her thigh affectionately. “Two shillings. Was it worth it?”
She answered without giving much thought to her logic, preferring instead to languish like a smoldering cinder after a roaring fire. “It adds up.”
Her weight didn’t seem to bother him, so she remained on her back, her froth of blond leaking inches from his mouth. When he spoke, his breath caressed her with warm, downy gusts that any other time would have tickled. “How much do you have now?”
She calculated without concentrating on anything but the moonlight drying her pubes. “Seventeen pounds and six. And some coppers.”
“Really? That much?”
The steam had left her body and she was returning to earth, to the dreary truth that no one was chasing her after all, that in the morning she’d be back to blocking leather in her father’s cobbler-shop. She rolled off Gareth, onto her knees, and let the hem of her robe fall to the ground. “It’s not enough.”
He sat up, picked resilient flecks of alabaster from his jaw and neck. “How much do you need?”
A few feet away her mask monitored the sky from an island of leaves in a pool of mud, its bland expression mimicking her forlorn hope of freedom. She lifted it with one finger through an eyehole and let a stain of black drip back to the puddle. “We’ll have to get you another mask.”
He stood beside her, looking around for his gloves. “They won’t match.” He found one glove, then the other, but it turned out to be leaf. “Anyway, we’ll have to wait for the gypsies.”
She located her gloves quickly, and Gareth marveled that Wilona never had to struggle much to get what she wanted. “We’ll find one,” she said. “Somewhere.”
“Not around here we won’t.” He grabbed at another glove, but it was just another leaf. “Not without someone recognizing where it came from.”
“Here then.” She handed her mask to him. “I’ll get another.”
“Where?” He cleaned the mud from the mask with his robe sleeve. “And anyway, this is a girl’s mask.”
“Then if anyone sees you they’ll think you’re a girl.” She pulled his hood back, freeing his scraggly red hair, and kissed him. He was nearly a full head taller, forcing her up on her toes to reach his mouth, and he didn’t stoop to make it easier. Despite the difference in height, she outweighed him by a stone or less, just enough to undermine his self-confidence. Not that she was fat, but rather he was thin. Landing back on her heels, she cocked an eyebrow and smiled. “Only, I’ll know better.”
He dropped the mask and glove and scooped her up by her bottom, pushing her against a crooked elm. “I want to do it again.” He scraped her robes up her legs.
“I have to get home.”
“But we were interrupted.”
“You finished.” She didn’t resist physically, but her tone halted him like a wall. “All over that poor boy’s bed. Remember?”
He smiled. “And all over you.”
Her eyes thinned in an impish grin. “And all over me.” She pushed him away without making it a rejection, then picked up the mask and handed it to him again. “Come on. It’s a long walk.”
Before she could turn away, he snagged her robe in both fists and took her in his arms. “One of these days we’re going to do it proper, Miss Goldilocks.”
“Don’t call me that. It makes me sound like one of those idiot schoolgirls.”
“You are a schoolgirl.”
“Was a schoolgirl.” She disengaged his hands and brought them flat against her breasts. “I work for my father now.”
He allowed the distraction of her flesh, thought for a moment she might have changed her mind. Aye, these were not the breasts of a schoolgirl.
“And I’ll need to get some sleep, unless you want me to sew my thumb to a boot-seam, or fall into a tub of boiling lye.”
Even though she didn’t mean it, her rebuff sounded condemning, as though he was somehow less because her daily life was more laborious than his. “Sorry.” He dropped his hands. “I guess I ought to be grateful I’ve got it so easy.”
“Oh stop moping. You know I didn’t mean it that way.”
He picked up his glove and began searching again for the other. “No. You never do.”
Wilona turned away impatiently. “If I make you feel so guilty why don’t you just stay home?”
The swaying branches made the moonlight waltz under his feet, so he completely lost track of where his stray glove might have been. “Maybe I will.”
“Good.” With maybe ten feet between them, she snatched something off the ground and fired it back at him, but it fell short at his feet: his glove. “God, I can’t wait to leave this place.” Turning away, she dragged her feet through the dirt as though condemned to the workhouse. “I was born in the wrong city. Somebody in Heaven made a mistake. I belong in London with barons and esquires and Knights of the Garter.”
He waited until she was a good distance away before retrieving the glove, then followed without saying anything. In five minutes they reached Lowfell Lake Road and he tucked the mask and gloves inside his robe in case they encountered anyone. Just wide enough for a carriage, the path strayed erratically through the forest, and after another five minutes she showed no signs of slowing down for him, so he shouted, “When’s the wedding then?”
“You know right well when it is.” Her voice was loud even though she was far ahead. When she stopped and faced him, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. “But in case you’ve forgotten, it’s next summer. Everyone’s invited. The whole village. We’ll be celebrating for a week. But you know,” she put her hands on her hips and struck a fiercely inflated thoughtful pose, “I can’t seem to remember where we’re getting married.” As he closed the distance between them, she all but screamed in his face, “Oh yes, now I remember. I’m marrying him at your church!”
He didn’t look up as he walked past her, his voice so low it could have been just another flurry of leaves on the wind. “It’s not my church.”
“Sorry,” she bit her words into acrid pieces lest he fail to appreciate her anger, “at your father’s church.”
Not even the owl ventured a reply, and as Gareth shuffled up the road he submitted to her superior sarcasm, her incontestable ability to put him in his place yet again. Maybe he would stay home. Maybe he’d had enough. Maybe she had finally taught him the life of a minister’s son wasn’t such a horrible pain.
“Gareth.” She wanted to curse at herself out loud, but he might think she was cursing him. “Gareth, wait.” She started after him, too proud to run outright, but caught up with him quickly, nevertheless. “I have no choice. Why do you think I’m leaving?”
He shrugged, not because he didn’t know, because he wanted her to think he didn’t care.
“You think I want to marry him? He’s a stupid, beastly lummox. He’s got warts on his hands. He’ll never be anything more than a hat-maker’s son. He’s not even smart enough to take over when his father dies. You think I wouldn’t rather marry you?”
Gareth stopped so suddenly she slid on pebbles to keep from colliding with him. “Would you?” He didn’t sound pleased with the notion, and his words hit her accusingly. “Would you truly?”
“Well . . .” If forced to make the choice, sure. “Yes, of course. I’d rather—”
“You’d rather.”
Moonlight illuminated her blue eyes like sapphire stars, mesmerizing stars that could make a man forget himself if he wasn’t careful, especially if she aimed them with any kind of ulterior intent. How many school lessons had she avoided simply by blinking naively at her teachers — her male teachers — even before she fully realized the power she wielded? By now it had become a reflex, an automatic defense against the lost cause of her arbitrary whims, her fickle vagaries too unfathomable to address any other way. Gareth knew the look. He adored it. But this time it was blatant as a slap and he looked away.
She regretted her reaction instantly, but her disappointment appeared to be his fault, which made matters worse, so she gave up.
No, she wouldn’t “rather”. She didn’t want to marry anyone. “It doesn’t matter.” She began walking ahead of him again. “A contract’s a contract. I have no say in it.”
Arms crossed, he looked up at the sky, fully exposed over the open road, and shook his head in self-disgust. “Why are you so mean?”
Without looking back she replied, “Why are you so . . .”
Eyes still on the sky, he finished her question with a multitude of qualities. Stupid. Gullible. Childish. Randy. Looking back to the road, he was surprised to see she had stopped and was turned sideways, waiting.
“Are you coming,” her voice sounded utterly normal, and it settled his heart and bothered him at the same time, “or are you just going to stand there all night and mope?”
He ambled after her, and when he caught up he avoided looking at her. “Why am I so what?”
As they walked, she hooked her arm around his and rested her head on his shoulder with a pathetically resigned sigh. “So loveable.”
More confused than ever, he had to talk to keep from thinking. “So, you’re still going to run away?”
Along the side of the road, the ever-present furze shrubs with their yellow blossoms rustled in the wind. The villagers hated the overgrowth of evergreen weed, but she rather adored it. Not because it was pretty — it wasn’t — but because hidden under the little golden buds decorating the long stems were thorns, and she approved of such innocent charm possessing a bite sufficient to draw blood. “When I have enough.”
He kicked a stone. “You’ll end up in Newgate you know.”
At this she laughed, relieved that they were beyond the subject of marriage and love. “Don’t be silly.” Another scoffing guffaw and she shouldered him playfully. “They’re not going to send me all the way to London. The worst is they’d put me in the stocks for a day so everyone could gloat.” She eyed him, but he ignored her. “Anyway, the gypsies told me they don’t hang people for robbery any more. Not since last year.”
“At Horsemonger Lane they do.”
“No they don’t. Do they?”
He looked away, hiding a laugh.
“What are you sniggering at? If I go, you go too.”
He stopped and spun to face her. “I never stole a penny.”
“You helped me get in.”
“But I didn’t steal.”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re an accomplice.”
He walked off faster than before. “That’s it then. I’m not doing it no more.”
“It’s too late now.” She followed with a swagger. “You’re just as guilty as me. Might as well admit it.”
Gareth whirled and charged, head down, catching her by the waist and hoisting her onto his shoulder in one fluid movement. Jostling her harder than necessary, he took care not to hurt her, and overall he was less serious than he intended.
Her screams infected with giggles as he marched up the road, jarring her deliberately, she continued to jerk and flail. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to fuck you.”
“You already fucked me.” Her words oscillated unevenly as he jogged into the woods.
“I’m going to fuck you again.” He lifted her robe up, exposing her bottom, and fingered the cleavage where it met the backs of her thighs.
“Gareth! Someone’ll see us!”
“Don’t care.”
“Rape!” She tried to shout, but laughter consumed her and weakened her resistance.
Elms and willows chugged by upside down, and she was about to begin protesting in earnest when he flung her around, face down on a huge fallen log, her naked ass poised higher than her head.
Out of breath, she braced her hands against the bark. “Wait.”
“For what?” In one graceful sweep, he peeled his robes off over his head and let them drop behind him, leaving him naked, except for his boots. “So you can take charge? Not this time, Goldilocks.”
“But—”
“Shut up.” He shoved her robes higher, and when she struggled he snared her wrists, yanked them backward until she lost her leverage.
“Ow! That hurts.”
“Then quit fussing.”
In response, she twisted painfully, but it resulted in her round bottom tilting even higher, and Gareth took advantage by thrusting his hips, dropping his angry stalk in the fleshy furrow of her cheeks. His thighs against the backs of hers, he pinned her to the fallen tree and their bodies fused with fever. Panting into the damp wood, she tried wrenching her arms free, but he had the angle and she began to panic. It was hopeless. She wasn’t on top this time. She wasn’t giving him orders. She wasn’t commanding the fantasy. And until now, she had no idea he was so strong.
At first he seemed to be waiting, but when she stopped struggling she felt him sliding along her butt, his testicles slinking across her anus, and her panic bloomed into a kind of desperate anguish. With a wounded whimper she tensed and squirmed and she wanted to believe she was writhing to escape, that she could break free any moment, but the pressure on her ass aroused the legion of devil faeries lurking between her thighs, demanding satisfaction.
She tried to swallow, but with her head down her saliva pooled at her lips instead of her throat. Any movement seemed to argue his assault, but she couldn’t just do nothing. The devil faeries dancing from her sobbing slit demanded action, craved action, and she had no choice but to succumb.
Gareth countered her shudders with heavier thrusts, every stroke dragging his rage farther down until, with a cruel lunge he impaled her, spreading her thighs with his own, sinking into her surprised, delighted, victorious. Whether or not she still resisted, he didn’t care. He pumped with abandon now, hunched over her in a deliriously gruesome arabesque, growing wilder with every stab, deeper, harder, faster.
And though locked in submission, she thrashed with less restraint than ever before, bucking ferociously, maniacally, oblivious of everything but the taut iron sloshing hot inside her, cutting down devil faeries by the thousands. She wanted to scream his name, scream her surrender, but her throat was dry, her lungs seared to her heart, her brains a scramble of chaos crumbling away each time his pelvis pounded her ass.
When the fracture flashed silver behind her eyes, a scream did cut through the moonlight, a traumatic, petrified shriek emanating not from her vocal chords but from her body, from the devil faeries rebelling inside her, from the howl of his iron blade blowing apart in shards, each shard exploding in turn, and every burst exploding yet again. Riding the scream, she realized it wasn’t hers, but it whipped through her anyway, sharp as fangs, and it booted her back to the heavens even before she was close to landing, doubling the impact, strangling her senseless with glory and terror, legs stretched rigid and helpless. And then again, the scream ripped her wider, higher yet, and then again, and her knees clenched in divine agony until she was overwhelmed by screams, one after another after another, wringing her inside out, and Gareth pumping harder, slower, longer . . . slower . . .
Longer . . .
Slower . . .
Echoes of the scream shrank back into the woods as though sucked away, but she was too tired to follow, too tired to listen, too tired to wonder.
She didn’t know how long her arms had been resting at her sides. They were numb beyond aching, and when she tried to move them they slid down the log and dangled limp, hands near her head. Gareth had collapsed on her back, but braced on his elbows, so she hardly felt him. He cleared his throat, and she hoped he wasn’t going to speak and spoil the fading glimmer seeping from her pores, but he was only catching his breath. She closed her eyes and tried to relive the slaughter of so many devil faeries, but the veil between her memory and reality disintegrated when Gareth sneezed.
“Sorry,” he sniffed and pushed himself away.
Gradually, the feeling returned to her arms and she brought her hands up to her chin, making a support of sorts, while Gareth dressed behind her. And though her upside down head began to throb she didn’t want to forsake her faeries so soon. Not while some of them still buzzed faintly in her pelvis. Every joint and knuckle complained, but such a sweet suffering, and she slipped from the log to her feet, clinging to consciousness reluctantly.
“Are you all right?” Gareth adjusted the robe around his waist and tucked the mask and gloves back inside. Though not looking at her, he was obviously trying to hide a sadistic smirk.
Wilona nodded defensively, but his self-satisfaction was contagious, and she grinned. “What?”
He shrugged and looked away. “I’ve never heard you scream like that before.”
For a moment she teetered between her memory and the fear of being so out of control she wouldn’t know her own reactions, but she had no reason to deny his claim. She had certainly felt like screaming. She’d simply lacked the ability. “I didn’t scream.”
“Oh. I see.” He folded his arms across his chest and gave her a condescending look. “Whatever you say then.”
“Gareth, I couldn’t make a sound. You had me crushed on that log. If anyone was screaming it was you.”
His arrogance deflated as he re-evaluated the experience. If it wasn’t her, and it certainly wasn’t him . . . Together, they turned and examined the woods.
“Somebody screamed.” Wilona backed up close to Gareth and let him circle her waist with one arm.
They held their collective breath for a minute, expecting a remnant of the echo to ricochet meekly out of the dark and land at their feet, but the silence seemed to swell until it might swallow them whole, so Wilona edged toward the road. “We better hurry. It’s late.” She checked to be sure she still had her gloves under her robe. “And it’s too dark to go back the way we came out. And if there’s something out there . . .” She regarded the woods briefly but, unwilling to give the notion too much credibility, she let it die. “We’ll stay on the road.”
Gareth crossed himself out of habit, muttered part of a blessing in Latin, couldn’t remember the end of it, and followed Wilona. “What if someone’s hurt?”
“If that was someone screaming they’re not hurt any more.”
“What do you mean? You think they’re . . .”
“I don’t know.” She glanced about, but only to get reoriented, then led them around a grandfather elm to Lowfell Lake Road. “We better hurry.”
The tart aroma of pine needles and wild delphiniums gave way to a marshy, stagnant odor that erased the natural scent of the woods. Wilona kept her eyes dead ahead, her arms hugging her chest, but Gareth couldn’t help looking around, wary of every flicker of shade, mumbling, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil,” under his breath.
“Stop it.” She tried to sound unaffected, but their recent sexual escapade had sapped her strength and she worried she wouldn’t be able to run if she needed to. “You’re making me nervous.”
“Prayer is supposed to make you feel secure.” Something caught his attention ahead and to their right, a shadow within the shadows, but before he could focus it was gone. “For I know that Thou art with me. Thy rod and Thy staff—”
“Please, Gareth.”
He stared at the ground to humble himself, to repent so the ghost in the woods would go away, but the blood left his cheeks in such a rush he thought he might faint. “We’re being punished.”
“Nonsense.”
“Then what—”
“I don’t know. A bird.”
“A bird?”
“Or a . . . a badger.”
He thought about it, honestly considered it for a moment. “Why would a badger scream?”
“I don’t know. Bloody hell, Gareth, must you be so dense?”
The farther they traveled from where they’d heard the scream, the easier it was for Wilona to deny that she’d heard anything. “Maybe it was me.”
“But you said—”
“Come up here. Quit lagging. Take my hand.” She tugged and he loped forward dutifully. “You’re always lagging.”
“You’re always leading, that’s why.”
She tucked his hand under her arm and buried her impulse to bicker. The danger prowling the woods was far more intense than the mere risk of getting caught in the act of lovemaking, but the consequence was the same. Unknown and unpredictable, it stirred her faeries as no fantasy ever had, and a part of her sought to preserve the sensation. Coupled with the residue of the last hour still fresh between her legs, her expectations of more made her knees weak. “I can hardly walk.”
He didn’t know whether or not to be proud of what she was implying, but allowed the smirk to divert his attention from the woods. Walking a little straighter now, he removed his hand from hers and slid it around her waist.
Lowfell Lake Road wound northward without widening until it intersected with Thirsk Manor Road, an equally narrow path that hooked south and out of view, behind a gate and wall. Gareth stopped them at the mouth of the connecting trail and looked first down Thirsk Manor Road, then off at nothing, lost in thought.
“Gareth?” She gave him a shake to bring him back. “What?”
“This is grouchy ol’ Thirsk’s land.”
“So?”
“Well, think a minute. Where do they live?”
Annoyed, she tried to pull him along, but he refused. “What do I care? We’ve done one family tonight already.”
“No, listen. This road bends around and goes all the way back.” He pointed behind them.
Instinctively, she wanted to disagree, but he pointed roughly to where they’d just grappled on the log. “So?”
“You know ‘so’.” He let go of her and took a few steps toward Thirsk Manor Road. “Maybe it was Mrs. Thirsk.”
The momentum of her denial prevented her from conceding to his suggestion right away, but eventually she had to meet his eyes, albeit unenthusiastically. “They’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I know.”
One of the oldest families in the county, the Thirsks’ departure to greener pastures contributed to a division in the village not easily rectified. Most of Waineswick had enjoyed generations of prosperity and security sufficient to keep them loyal to the old ways of business and community values, supported by its political and religious leaders. A growing faction of its citizens, however, had acknowledged the rapidly expanding influences elsewhere and, one by one, families began leaving. Though technically William Thirsk was retiring from the business of banking and relocating with his wife to Bristol, where she had family, their exit was viewed as an endorsement of the new, industrialized ethics that lured good people away like moths to a very bright flame. Mr. Thirsk had been such a successful, well-respected bank manager, the general consensus held Mrs. Thirsk accountable for the decision to release their servants from service and move away.
“Do you think he suddenly went mad?” She meant for it to sound silly, to give them permission to shrug it off and go home, but Mr. Thirsk had a reputation for being brusque and humorless, and the joke fell flat.
“We have to tell someone.” He turned and began marching up Lowfell Lake Road.
“Gareth, wait.” She jumped to catch up, but her verve transferred to him, making him walk faster. “Wait. They’re bound to ask us what we were doing out here.”
“This is serious, Wilona.”
“But . . .” For a change, she felt helpless, at the mercy of a higher cause even she couldn’t refuse. By the time Lowfell Lake Road branched into Chesterfield Lane, she was fully resigned to running away as soon as she could collect her clothes and money. “Just one thing.” They’d been walking so long in silence that Gareth seemed to have forgotten her until she spoke. “Give me a chance to pack before you tell anyone.”
“What are you on about?” He didn’t slow, the tone of his question more incredulous than ignorant.
“You can tell them why we were out here if you want. You can make your confession and sleep better tonight. But I have to leave. Now.”
“But you don’t have enough. You said yourself.”
“Well, what choice do I have?” Her indignation boiled away the sediment of her fear, so she heaped more coals in the furnace. “They’re certain to start asking questions. And you have a hard enough time lying as it is. Promise to give me an hour or I’ll leave right now. I will. Otherwise I’ll never get out.”
He sighed deeply, which neither condoned her ultimatum nor condemned it, and his indecision infuriated her more.
“I’ve worked too hard to give it up just because you want to make a big deal out of nothing.”
“Nothing?” Conviction and purpose transformed him, gave him a secure buoyancy he otherwise lacked, and he seemed to enjoy the feeling. “I don’t call a scream like that nothing.” Content with his newfound confidence, he clutched her hand and forged ahead. “We’ll think of something.”
She wanted to believe his optimism, but with every step she grew more and more disappointed, and as the elms and oaks thinned to white birch and spindly poplars her doubt all but smothered the hope she’d been nurturing for so long. If she hadn’t been so tired she might have cried, but she’d learned the futility of that while still a child. If crying couldn’t bring her mother back, what good would it do her now? Nevertheless, her eyes fogged as she plodded along, and she paid little notice when Gareth paused at a wide, straight section of road.
The fields on both side of the highway rippled on the warm wind, the poplars sparse now, but high and majestic where they sprouted in conspiratorial groups, their moonshadows raking the tall grass. The village was just beyond the crest, less than a mile more, and its proximity filled her with a mix of relief and wretched gloom. Chimney smoke wafted up the road as though on patrol, with smaller scents of boiled horehound and raspberry leaves in pursuit, but their friendliness brought her no comfort. At first she thought Gareth had stopped to reconsider their options, but when she noticed his attention to the ground she wiped her eyes and stepped ahead, curious.
He didn’t have to point out his concern. A channel through the carpet of thick grass at the right of the road had been trampled nearly flat, revealing a trail that disappeared around a cluster of furze, but obvious in the moonlight. Where it emptied onto the road, smears of glistening muck stained the packed dirt, as though something had been carted leaking across the wagon path. On the left, the trail continued through the weeds and cut north, parallel with the road and over the hill, in the direction of the village.
Gareth bent near one of the smears, dabbed his finger and tilted it up to the moon.
“Is it blood?” She hoped that by facing her fear dead on the smudge might turn out to be simply mud, or oil, or dark red ink from a leaking bladder that had been lugged through the woods. Yet, in spite of their peril, in spite of the horrific omen bleeding from the veins of the earth, the itch between her thighs radiated maddeningly up through her ribs to her breasts. Instead of debilitating her with anxiety, the ripening nightmare irritated clit and nipple as no human hand possibly could, and any moment she would shove Gareth into the pasture for ten or twenty minutes of faerie-flogging.
“I think so.” Cleaning his smudged finger on his robe, he gauged the distance to the crest.
“Maybe it’s a wounded animal.”
His face didn’t change. “Maybe.”
“Gareth, of course. Something, a wolf, a wild boar, attacked, and Mrs. Thirsk screamed. Mr. Thirsk shot it and this is where it went. It’s probably dead by now.”
Eyes still on the crest, he said, “I didn’t hear a gunshot.”
“Then he . . . he stabbed it with something.” Out of ideas, she drew the hood over her head and tramped past Gareth toward the hill. Better to spend her energy in anger than to give in to the urge. “Oh, you can stay here and pray if you like. I’m going to change into my clothes and go home.”
Collecting his wits and jumping after her, he grumbled, “You are so bloody stubborn.” Just like that, his dominance vanished and she was giving the orders again, as though it had all been a sham.
“I just refuse to let my imagination run away with me, that’s all. Tomorrow someone will find a dead animal in the bushes and you’ll feel stupid for cowering at every cheep and chirp in the dark.” She pressed on, over the hill, welcoming the drowsy vista of Waineswick Parish cradled in the distant valley.
A broad, bushy hedge of speckled heath on their right ended at a brick wall, marking the Kerrick family property, a massive wedge of land rampant with gardens and cherry trees and a variety of domestic livestock, such as chickens and goats and a few horses. The main house sat near the leading point and overlooked the Y intersection where Chesterfield Lane met Mill Road, which continued up around the other side of the Kerrick plantation toward the Bitterleaf River and the MacFarlane family wool mill.
“I mean, honestly, Gareth, how do you expect me to accomplish anything if you can’t keep your head?” Though the wall was easily a foot thick and higher than their heads, she talked softer and crouched close to the brick to stay out of the moonlight. They could still manage another quick session, right here, with the lights of the village getting closer.
Gareth fell in behind her as though ordered, and his silence disturbed her more than his typical whining cautions or biblical citations.