now taste this wine?”
“I…I know not…what your lordship means,” stuttered the girl.
“Have you coupled with him, girl?” the lord said angrily. “Are you bovine, like the cows? I had thought that God had created a head to match the bounteousness of your limbs. You are the fairest creature I have seen among those who live on my land.” He paused, then added more softly, “I have watched you working in the fields.”
Christine, clutching her goblet tightly, looked down at the flagstones beneath her feet. She became conscious that her breathing was somehow difficult, shallower, more desperate, as though suffocated by the darkness of the room and Sir Richard’s presence.
He shifted down the bench to her side and whispered in her ear, “Are you untouched by man, Christine?”
She could smell the wine on his breath. Looking straight ahead and mustering as much dignity as she could, she said, “Sir Richard, if I am bid to answer to such questions, I will tell you that I am a Christian woman. The sacrament of marriage is as sacred as my prayers to the Holy Mother. Plainly, sir, I am pure in body, although I confess my venial sins readily to Father Peter. I will come to my husband as a maiden.”
“Good. That is how the Church dictates, despite the abasement of your rustic life. I am glad you shall go to the altar in goodly conscience, as our Lord demands.” Christine let out her breath in relief, but then Sir Richard contorted his face into a half-smile, half-sneer. “And your earthly lord demands his pleasure too…”
Before she could react, Sir Richard had taken her roughly by the shoulders and kissed her hard upon the lips. Her arms pinioned by his great bulk, Christine’s pewter goblet fell and clattered across the floor. She let out a strangled cry, staring in terror towards the door in the hope that the priest would hear her distress. Somehow she managed to loosen his grip and stood up as if to run. Sir Richard caught her hem and seized the sword upon the table. He crouched and, holding the weapon low and vertical, raised its tip to an inch beneath her chin.
“Christine,” he said calmly to the shaking girl, “I will have my pleasure of you this night. I will not take your maidenhood, but I will take you in Byzantine way. No one will hear you if you scream. There is no man nearby except that sodden priest who receives my stipend besides. You will do what you are bidden and then depart…I would rather there be no force, but if you resist I will have a soldier’s way and not that of a courtly knight.”
The summer ruddiness in Christine’s face had disappeared. She felt as though all the blood in her body had sunk into her feet and all the air had been squeezed out of her lungs. She gasped and cried out to the heavens: “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, our life, our sweetness…”
“You have no rosary, child,” said Sir Richard with mocking kindness. “No Hail Marys will help you. You can make your penance after.” His tone hardened. “Take off your robe or I will cut if off.” He let the weapon just touch her chin. “Take off your clothes now,” he shouted, his lips slightly flecked with foam and his eyes hungry with malice and lust. “Now. Now!”
She did his bidding and gently raised her robe over her head, then clutched it in front of her body.
“I will see it first. Let me see your maiden’s shame.” Again he raised his sword to her neck.
“Let it fall,” he shouted, as if to a band of soldiers.
She stood there, naked except for her new sandals, petrified, eyes squeezed shut, trying to cover herself with her hands.
“By the Holy Cross,” she heard him scream. “I will kill you now if you do not obey me. Take your filthy peasant’s hands away.” There was not a bat-squeak of pity in his words.
Tears poured down her cheeks as silently she prayed to St. Katherine the Martyr. Her eyes still shut, as if by not seeing she could not be seen, Christine lowered her hands.
“Aye, a goodly sight, that it is. Fine curves, strong legs and you have cleaned yourself,” said Sir Richard, as if he were appraising a fine horse. He took the wine jar off the table and sent his goblet away with a sweep of his arm. “Lay yourself upon the table. You can hide your shame. Lay on your belly along the table. Do it! Now!”
Her legs would hardly obey her, but she kneeled upon the bench and then forced herself to flatten her body across the table. Trembling in every muscle and teeth chattering, she felt utterly exposed, her body as white as the cloth on which she lay. She sensed her tormentor moving behind her and felt something tight around her right ankle and then her left as her legs were forced apart and tied fast with cord to the trestles beneath the table.
“Nay!” she screamed. She squirmed to unloosen the ankle bonds, but Sir Richard was too quick. He seized her wrists and forced them down and apart as he tied them to the thick trestle supports.
For a minute the lord surveyed his trussed prize, reliving his own sexual past. His wife, cold, always absent, thank God, a marriage forced upon him, a coupling of vast estates, not ardour. And before that, the beatings, the endless humiliations at the abbey. Isolated in Northumberland, far from family, sent to learn how to read and write about the saints; the bribes of the abbot, a leg of chicken perhaps, some stale bread more often, the whippings if he cried after he was tied and sodomised…Anger rose like bile, and he wanted to kill every living thing in creation, so that no one would know of his ignominy.
He raised his sword and gazed at her helpless, heaving, fleshy rump. Much better to thrust his steel into that instead of the bones in her back, more satisfying…
Sir Richard was brought back from the brink by a prayer he recognised from his schooldays, as Christine wept and prayed to all the saints she knew.
“Hold fast your tongue, and cease that prattle. Cease that noise, I say, or I will cut out your tongue, girl. Do not doubt my words.”
Christine did not. She managed to stifle her prayers.
Sir Richard’s mood swung back from frenzy to mock sympathy: “Few women of your position have tasted their lords. Consider this an extra wedding gift.” As he spoke, he stroked the contours of her back with the flat of his sword. “Hush, woman, a stallion-ride to hell is better than a feast of swords.”
Sir Richard loosened his leather belt and pulled up his robe as he positioned himself at the end of the table. He swallowed a deep draught of wine from the jar and swilled it around his mouth, then projected a mouthful of red spittle into his cupped hands. He rubbed them together enthusiastically, before rolling up his sleeves. Grunting at his own inspiration, the knight scooped a lump of goose-fat from a small wooden tub on the side-bench and anointed her rear, pausing to admire his handiwork. Satisfied with this preparation, Sir Richard pulled the girl towards the end of the table; the bonds stretched her arms and she screamed, but the movement allowed him to bend her almost at a right angle.
Then, legs astride, as if preparing for combat, he thrust himself hard into her. For a second, the breath was squeezed from her body. Then a red-hot searing pain ripped through her insides. The sound that emerged from her mouth was not so much a human scream, but more like the last mortal cry of a hunted deer. A long, eerie animal noise filled the large room. “Sweet Jesus, let me die,” she shouted.
“This is the devil’s ride, Christine,” he gasped. “The coupling the learned Greeks did applaud. I will leave the other to your husband. Be thankful that I leave a virgin for him.”
He pushed himself deep inside her, the more savage his penetration the better the revenge on those who had abused him in his youth. Every murder and every rape were steps to the complete oblivion of his shame. In his few reflective moments, he rationalised these actions as his physical confession, an atonement, a purging of his memory. His erect phallus was a sword of redemptive justice. Thus inspired, he grasped her hips to keep himself engaged while her screams and pain stoked his lust. “Aye…aye…this be a ride indeed…scream on then, girl…I… break my horses when they whinny thus.”
In his final thrusts, Sir Richard grasped the back of her neck with both his hands; Christine, shouting, crying, choking for breath, prayed for death to end her agony. She felt she was being crucified on her master’s table. As he reached his grunting climax, he collapsed on top of her with his full weight and sunk his teeth into the nape of her neck. The extra pain devoured her ebbing strength and she lost consciousness for a few blessed seconds.
As suddenly as he had attacked her, Sir Richard extricated himself from his victim. Half-heartedly, he wiped some of the blood from his stomach, and swiftly adjusted his clothing. His lust spent, he quickly undid the bonds.
Almost tenderly, he said, “Put on your dress.”
But she could not move nor speak; her wounded body pulsated with pain and her breath rattled from her parched mouth. With her arms stretched out, as if in rigor mortis, she appeared to be nailed to the wood. Roughly, he pulled her from the table and laid her along the side-bench.
“Compose yourself, girl. Here are five groats. If you speak of this again, you and yours will be ejected from this demesne. Be sure of that. You are a virgin still. Be thankful that I have taken my pleasure thus. Here, take this
