The Taker

the only test. The question now, of course, was where to go and what to do with my life.

Then, suddenly, I was aware of the presence of several people at my elbow. Adair, Alejandro, Tilde. Adair crouched next to me and whispered in my ear, “Come with me now, Lanore, and do not think of making a scene. There is jewelry, I’ll warrant, in your bag and if you call for help I will tell the authorities that you stole these valuables from my home. The others will swear to it.”

His hand nearly crushed my elbow as he pulled me from my seat. I felt his anger radiate like heat from a fire. I couldn’t look at any of them in the carriage on the way to the house-I just sat withdrawn into myself, my mouth rusted shut with fear. We’d barely gotten inside the front door when he reached out and slapped me hard across my cheek, knocking me to the floor. Alejandro and Tilde swept hurriedly behind me and out of the hall, like birds lifting from a field ahead of a storm.

From the fury in Adair’s eyes, he looked like he wanted to tear me to pieces. “What did you think you were doing? Where were you going?”

No words came to me, but as it turned out, he wanted no answers. He only wanted to hit me, over and over, until I lay in a broken heap at his feet, looking at him through swollen eyes and a haze of blood. His anger hadn’t subsided; that was apparent as he nursed his knuckles and paced in front of me.

“Is this how you repay my generosity, my trust?” he roared. “I take you into my house, my family, clothe you, keep you safe… In some ways, you are like a child to me. So it is understandable, how disappointed you have made me. I warned you-you are mine, whether you wish it or not. You will never, ever leave me, not until I allow you to go.”

Then he lifted me up and carried me to the back part of the house, the kitchen and servants’ domain though they’d all disappeared like mice. He carried me down a flight of stairs to the forlorn cellar, past crates of wine, sacks of flour, and unused furniture stored under drapes, through a narrow passage, its walls damp with chill, and finally to an old oak door, heavily scarred. The light in the room was dim. Dona stood by the door in a robe, tightly cinched at his waist, and he hunched over as though sick. Something terrible was about to happen if Dona, who usually delighted in the misfortune of others, was afraid. In his hand dangled a spider’s web of leather straps, a harness, but unlike any horse’s harness I’d ever seen.

Adair dropped me to the floor. “Get her ready,” he said to Dona, who began to peel off my sweaty, bloodied clothing. Behind him, Adair started undressing. Once I was naked, Dona began strapping the harness to me. It was a design of nightmares and began to contort my body in an unnatural position, a pose of utmost vulnerability. It bound my arms behind my back and pulled my head almost to the point of breaking from my neck. Dona let out a whimper as he notched up the straps, but he did not make them any looser. Adair towered over me, his manner menacing and his intent clear.

“The time has come to teach you obedience. I’d hoped, for your sake, it wouldn’t be necessary. It seemed that you were destined to be different-” He stopped, catching himself. “Everyone must be punished once, so they know what will happen to them if they try again. I told you you’d never leave me and yet you tried to run away. You’ll never try to run away again.” Adair wove his fingers into my hair and drew his face close to mine. “And remember this while you are back in your village with your family and with your Jonathan- there is nowhere you can go that I can’t find you. You can never escape me.”

“The girl…,” I tried to say through lips sealed with dried blood.

“This is not about the girl, Lanore. Though you should learn to accept what goes on in my house-you will accept it, and be a part of it, too. This is about you turning your back on me, refusing me. I will not allow that. Especially from you, I would not have expected that you-” He choked off the rest, thinking better of it, but I knew what he meant to say, that he did not want to regret giving a piece of his heart to me.

I won’t tell you what happened to me in that room. Allow me this shred of privacy, to keep from you the details of my debasement. It should be enough to know that it was the most horrific ordeal I have ever suffered. It was not just Adair who was my torturer: he enlisted Dona, too, though it was clearly against the Italian’s will. It was my taste of the devil’s fire that Jude had warned me about, a lesson that tempting the devil’s love is a great risk. Such love, if it can be called that, is never sweet. Eventually, you will experience it for what it is. It is vitriol. It is poison. It is acid poured down your throat.

I was barely conscious when they’d finished. I opened my eyes a slit to see Adair picking up his clothing from the ground. He was slick with sweat and his hair was plastered to his neck in dark curls. Dona had gotten his robe on, too, and was crawling on his hands and knees, pale and shaky, as though he might be ill at any second.

Adair raked his hands through his wet hair, then tossed his head in Dona’s direction. “Get her upstairs and have someone clean her up,” he said before exiting the room.

I winced as Dona undid the leather straps. They had bit into my skin, leaving me with dozens of cuts, the wounds opening again when the straps pulled against the dried blood. He left the horrible contraption on the floor-the straps shaping themselves into a hollow human form-and picked me up in his arms, the tenderest I had ever seen Dona, before or since.

He took me to the room with the copper bathtub, where Alejandro waited with buckets of hot water. Then Alejandro washed me gently, wiping away the blood and the fluids, but I could barely stand his touch and I couldn’t stop crying.

“I am in hell, Alejandro. How can I go on?”

He took my hand and daubed it with a cloth. “You have no choice. It might help to know that we have all been through this, each of us. There is no shame in what happened to you, not among us.” Even as he washed, my wounds were healing, the tiny slashes disappearing, the bruises yellowing. He dried me and wrapped me in a clean banyan, and we lay together on the bed, Alejandro nestled behind me, not letting me shrink from him.

“So, what happens next?” I asked, my fingers laced with his.

“Nothing. It will go back to as it was before. You must try to forget what was done to you today, but not the lesson. Never forget the lesson.”

The night before I was to depart for Boston was a miserable one. I wanted to be left alone with my worries, but Adair insisted on taking me to his bed. I was now terrified of him, needless to say, but he paid no mind to the change in my behavior; I suppose he was used to this from all his minions and expected I would come around again, in time. Or perhaps he didn’t care that he’d shattered my trust in him. I remembered Alejandro’s advice and behaved as though nothing had happened, trying to be as attentive as ever.

Adair had drunk heavily-perhaps to blot out what he’d done to make me so fearful of him-and puffed on the hookah until clouds of narcotic smoke filled the room. That night in bed I was a distracted, absent partner: all I could think about was what I was going to do to Jonathan. I was about to condemn him to eternity with this madman. Jonathan had done nothing to deserve this.

I had not worked out in my head what I would say to my family on my return to St. Andrew, either. After all, I’d disappeared from their lives when I’d run away from the harbor a year ago. Surely they would have made inquiries of the convent and the shipping master, only to be told that I’d arrived in Boston and promptly vanished. Perhaps they held out hope I was still alive and had run away in order to keep my baby. Had they checked with the authorities in Boston, harangued the constabulary to search for me until they lost hope and were sure that I had been murdered? I wondered if they’d held a mock funeral for me in St. Andrew-no, my father would not let them display such emotion. Instead, my mother and sisters would carry their grief around with them, heavy stones sewn under their skin, close to their hearts.

And what of Jonathan, for that matter-what did he think had happened to me? Perhaps he had thought of me as deceased-if he thought of me at all. Tears flooded my eyes instantly: surely he thought of me once in a while, the woman who loved him most in the world! But I had to face the fact that I was dead to everyone in St. Andrew. Survivors come to accept a loved one having passed away. They mourn for a while, weeks or months, but eventually the memory is consigned to the past and only visited occasionally, like a once beloved toy stumbled upon in the attic, patted lovingly, but then left behind again.

I woke in the half-lit hours of dawn, sweaty and disheveled from a restless sleep. The ship was to sail on the morning tide and I had to get to the docks before sunrise. As I leaned over to search for my discarded linen under the bedding, I drank in the sight of Adair, his head on the pillow. I guess it’s true that even devils look like angels in their sleep, when stillness and contentment are upon them. His eyes were closed, his long lashes brushing his