Dr Casswell's Plaything (11 page)

She bade me sleep on a cot in her room in case she needed me during the night, and often she did. Many nights would I crawl into bed with the taste of her sex on my lips and fingers. It seemed there was not a minute for me to call my own. When Cassandra had done with me, the abbot would creep up to the cot, cock hard and ready, eyes dark with desire, and use me, holding me down, a hand over my mouth so I should not disturb his slumbering mistress, and although there were no more beatings, these cruel and jealous couplings with me hunched beneath him like some wounded animal were almost more painful.

And then, a month or so after her arrival, on the Sabbath, while I was attending her ladyship at the chapel, I caught sight of my lord and master kneeling by the altar rail. As he stood and turned to go back to his seat, our eyes met and my heart leapt. It was all I could do to stop myself crying out to him.

I prayed that my Lady Cassandra had not seen the impassioned look that passed between us, and when the service was done, I scurried from the chapel, gaze demurely on the cobbles, tucked tight in at her wide, while my heart beat like a drum in my chest.

After we had broken fast a page came to the chamber and bade me follow, saying one of his lordship’s children – whom I had not seen since Cassandra’s arrival – had been taken sick with a fever and was calling for me. Even Cassandra could not deny the call of a child, and so I followed the boy up to the nursery. I was anxious for the children, whom I have always held in particular affection.

But as I reached the first landing the master stepped out into my path and grabbed tight hold of me. Without a word he took me in his arms, and pulling me into the shadows kissed me fiercely, and I cannot deny I returned his passion with an equal vigour. I hungered for his body and firm touch. There was no time for finesse, no time for more than we had. Eyes dark with desire, body fierce and strong he pushed through an open doorway, holding me tight against the frame, his lips on mine, body pressed close to me, his hands on my breasts, lifting my skirts with haste, seeking my sex.

I caught tight hold of him, my hands eager to hold his manhood. I was already wet for him, eager and hungry for him. As my fingers closed around him he was already hard, throbbing, ready for me. For an instant I froze in case I had overstepped the mark, and he groaned softly and turned me in his arms so that I could bend over the stairs, and then he fucked me hard and true, driving again and again into my tight and tender quim, the very fury of his passion taking my breath away.

It did not take us long to make an end to it. We both burned red-hot with lust. I mewled and cried, driving my hips back into his belly, matching him stroke for stroke and he plunged again and again, crying out with pleasure.

At last he collapsed on top of me, whispering words of tenderness and such love that it took my breath away, and it has been these memories of all that passed between us, more than anything else, that has kept me going these weeks since that fateful day.

Back once more in Cassandra’s chambers she bade me how faired the child. I hesitated – I swear for no more than the barest of an instant – for lying comes hard to me. And then she smiled slyly and beckoned me closer. As quick as lightening her hand was up between my thighs and, too slow to resist her, she pressed home into my private parts. Triumphant she pulled away, her fingers slick with seed and the remnants of my pleasure. She sniffed her stubby fingers thoughtfully, eyes fixed on mine, her face a mask, and then said, ‘What is this then, girl, an assignation? On the Sabbath?’

I reddened and looked away.

‘So tell me, wench, who fucked you this fine morning. Which of the household has been this way?’ She snatched tightly my quim through the folds of my gown. ‘Tell me now or I will have you beaten soundly until you do.’

I shook my head, for I dare not speak.

Undeterred she caught hold of my hair and pulled my face close to hers. Her breath was foul, her touch unmerciful. ‘I shall have an answer or I shall have you beaten until you confess, now tell me who has rutted and rolled with you this morning, girl.’

Still I could not speak. Face contorted with anger she ripped away my Sunday gown.

‘Tell me!’ she shouted. ‘I will have an answer! Was it perhaps the man who has yet to share my cot? The man betrothed to me, promised to me in marriage who still chooses to share his favours with another? A man who even before his wedding vows are spoken betrays me thus with a serving girl?!’ Her voice rose in volume as she raged, and I feared for my life.

Finally she threw me to the floor, picked up a birch from the hearth and cracked it viciously across my back. It was a cruel blow and it felt as if I was cut in two by it, but before I could protest or appeal to reason, she hit me again and again, one stroke after the other in a blind and terrible fury.

No man was she, versed in the arts of the whip, but a wild and furious banshee. The birch caught my neck and face and as I rolled over to protect myself, it caught my breasts and belly and arms. No part of me was spared, and all the time she beat me her eyes were wild with fury and what seemed to me the most awful jealous rage.

‘I will not be shamed!’ she roared. ‘There is but one mistress in this house, and you will understand that, girl. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes, my lady, yes!’ I sobbed and shrieked, trying to roll away from her.

At last, when she had all but exhausted herself, she cried out, ‘Father abbot?!’

The king’s bastard must have been waiting close by, perhaps – for his tastes are cruel – he had be watching or listening to what passed between us, for he appeared in Cassandra’s chamber as if by magic.

She threw down the birch and said to him, ‘Make yourself ready, father, and take this miserable creature out of my sight, to the place we have spoken off. I shall prepare a letter for the abbot there. I want her gone today, before the sun is set.’

And so I found myself on the road to the Abbey of Saint Joseph.

Dressed in little more than rags, cold and afraid, barefoot and no more than a chattel, I can see no way out of my present dilemma save the intervention of heaven itself. Oh, how easily it seems I have come to this, fallen and lost. Settled in this evil place, each night I am expected to wait on the abbot and the debauched and depraved women who call themselves sisters of the church. I in my turn serve each of them, as a bedmate, as a slave, as a maid. Worse still, if by chance a traveller happens by and calls here for hospitality, then I am sent to warm their bed and next day am expected to confess my sins – if sins they are – to the abbot and his harpies, and beaten for my lusts and desires. If my tale is too innocent, if the man refused me, then I am beaten for lying, yet if it is too debauched they lay on the rod for my eager fleshly passions.

The journey to this dark and ungodly place was arduous – my body still torn and bruised from the mistress’s beating. The abbot would not take a wagon for it would slow him down. He was afraid, I think, to be too long from Lady Cassandra’s side, lest another should take her favour, so we rode. I on a mule, dressed in a manner befitting my station, for the irony is that through all of this, though I am a slave to Cassandra and my master, I am considered highborn and even in my disgrace I left the house dressed well from the dowry chest of my master’s previous wife.

Once out on the road it is hard to tell who had the more beatings, the mule or myself, as we made our way through the harsh winter landscape. The Abbey of St Joseph is several days’ hard ride from the castle. Each night when we had eaten, whether we stayed in an inn or camped out under the sky, the abbot would call me to him.

‘Girl, you are truly the spawn of a worldly devil, tempting a man from the straight and narrow with that body of yours,’ he would say, looking me over. ‘All day long as you ride alongside me the dark forces who inspire and rule you enter my head and set off such imaginings. Such possibilities, even the smell of you on the breeze, turns my thoughts away from the godly to the fleshly.’

I looked at his face, slack with overindulgence and wickedness. Could what he said be true? I thought not; surely it was the darkness in his heart that fired those thoughts. As a man of the cloth was he not supposed to fight such lusts and hungers that teased him away from the paths of righteousness?

But he would have none of it. He would have me stand by the hearth or the fire, regardless of how bitter the night, and take off my clothes. Naked, on my hands and knees, I would beg for mercy as he took off the thick belt he wore around his outer robes, and leathered me.

When he’d thrashed me he would lift the hem of his robe and have me take him in my mouth, sucking dutifully at his manhood, worshipping him in the most base and ancient of ways, and then he would spill his seed on my breasts or in my hair, or at the last moment pull away and drive without mercy into my quim.

Cold and badly fed, riding as little more than a camp follower to the abbot, my spirit was all but broken on the long ride to the abbey. I was never safe; all day long I felt the eyes of the men who accompanied us on me. They were part of Lady Cassandra’s retinue, no better than rogues and ruffians, and liked nothing better than watching me with eyes that burned with animal hunger. I am sure they heard what passed between the abbot and me at night. And on the one evening the abbot rode into a town to find better sport, they took it in turns to take me there amongst the earth and ashes.

But worse was to come.

At last, in the distance, we spotted the Abbey of St Joseph. It stood alone on a hillside, a bleak desolate place, and as we approached I had a sense of great foreboding.

The gates were manned by a novice monk, and dressed in the grey habit of his order, he was an ugly, twisted, hunchbacked boy who could barely speak, but what he lacked in words he more than made up for with the expression on his face. He eyed me with such a lust as I have ever seen on the face of one so young, his gawking made all the more noticeable for one supposedly in the service of the church.

I thought perhaps it was an oversight. Perhaps he had never seen a girl, perhaps his simple mind made his thoughts all the more obvious – but once taken inside I could understand why he behaved so; here at the Abbey of St Joseph it seemed that all appetites and lusts were indulged.

It was early evening as we rode into the beaten earth yard. The rush torches were lit and a small group of men were gathered in the doorway of the main hall. At first I believed they were supplicants or penitents, perhaps on a pilgrimage to one of the many shrines in the district.

As we were shown further in to the hall, I saw that they were watching some kind of tableau, and as I picked out the details my blood chilled.

There in the circle of men, their bodies picked out by firelight, were two females, engaged in an act of unnatural lust. They were sitting up on their knees. One was a large plump woman, blindfolded with her hands tied tight behind her back. Slick with sweat, her ample body was the colour of new milk, her hair a fiery red and her breasts, like plump pillows tipped with large nipples, were currently being manhandled by a slip of a boy who drew first one and then the other into his mouth. As he sucked hard and long the other female was servicing her from behind with a great carved phallus. Above them a raddled monk wielding a stick encouraged them on, with a crack across their ample buttocks if it looked as if either might be flagging.

At the far end of the hall, sitting on a raised dais, the father abbot of this den of iniquity looked down on the spectacle with delight while between his legs a young man crouched, avidly sucking his master’s raging cock. They were picked out by the flickering light from the fire and torches, which made it seem like a scene from damnation’s cradle.

Was this the abbey that the Lady Cassandra believed me so ideally suited to?

The abbot – an old man with thick grey hair – waved the boy away as we reached the platform, but not so far; no doubt as soon as our business was concluded the boy would be back to suck him. To one side of the old man stood a sister of the church. Dressed in a grey habit she was as thin as a whippet, her skin the colour of bad suet, her features dour, eyes haunted and unreadable and lips narrow. The way she looked me up and down made me shiver.

The abbot took the goblet she was holding and beckoned me closer. His eyes were glazed from a mixture of desire and wine. He took the letter proffered by the king’s bastard and read it slowly, lips moving as he deciphered the words. It seemed he was not altogether surprised by our arrival and greeted the king’s son in a manner that suggested they were old friends. He read Cassandra’s missive through once more and then dropped it to the floor, grinning. The nun retrieved it without a word.

‘So you were gifted to your master’s household by the church, eh girl? Her ladyship seems to think it is high time we took our gift back.’ He lifted a hand to encompass the hall. ‘Here we serve the community in whatever ways the community demands. For example, the good people of the town like nothing better than to come and watch the sisters hard at their work.’

On the floor of the hall the crowd, oblivious to our arrival, bayed and cheered the two women on.

He looked at me encouragingly, but I knew better than to speak.

‘They pay well, very well, for the privilege,’ continued the abbot, after a moment or two. ‘We, of course, distribute money to the poor and support our little community from the gifts and donations the faithful are kind enough to give. And from what my dear cousin Cassandra says in her letter, you would appear to be the perfect novice to join our little community, talented in all those ways that goodly women have, and versed as you are in the ways of obedience.’