Chapter 7

A few days after the pair had drunk Grace’s homemade cider and awakened bleary eyed and none too well the next morning, an incident happened. They had just pulled up a row of potatoes and were taking them to the cellar to store in the dark, when they noticed two young men coming towards them. They were patently not nice young men. They were drunk and abusive young men. Catching sight of the two naked young women, they immediately made in their direction, expressing in short and extremely obscene words, what they were about to do to the young couple.

“What are we going to do, Grace” asked an apprehensive Caroline.

“Not ‘we’, my dear! It is what you are going to do! These thugs are on your property. You must defend your inheritance and get rid of them. Go on! Chase them off!”

“How can I, Grace? I’m just a girl and they are two strong young men.”

“Go and chuck them off your land, Caroline! I will never speak to you again if you don’t! You learned self-defense, didn’t you? Now’s your chance to show what you can do. Go and do it!”

“Could you do what you are telling me to do?”

“Yes! I have done it, and I still have the scars to prove how hard it was! It will be hard for you also, my darling, but you have no other choice. Go on!”

So, a petrified Caroline, spurred on by the inexorable refusal of her friend to lift a finger to help her -telling her rather, that the time had come to fight her own battle for her own land - advanced towards the sneering and jeering couple of hooligans.

“You two are trespassing and damaging growing crops by walking across my property. You will please leave.”

“And who’s going to make us if we don’t, darling!”

“I will! You have ten seconds to be on your way.”

Before she had time to start counting, one of the two lunged towards her, in an effort to bring her to the ground, the better to have his way with her. (Euphemism for rape - Author.). She kicked up hard and caught him in the throat. He staggered back, choking and gasping.

His companion was not quite so slow and he aimed a mighty punch at Caroline’s head which would have removed it from her shoulders had she not ducked away in time. Even so, he opened up a cut over her left eye, which immediately began bleeding copiously. She knew she must do something quickly, before her vision became too obscured for her to continue.

Flushed with triumph at his apparent destruction of Caroline, the jeering fellow stood in front of her, laughing at her bleeding face and getting ready to jump on her and rape her. Taking advantage of his over confidence, she kicked straight up between his wide-open legs and her second adversary fell writhing to the ground to join his still half-conscious friend.

Grace came up and looked at the fallen pair.

“See, Caroline! I told you could do it! Here! I’ve got a bit of rope. Let’s tie them up and dump them over the wall. They won’t trouble us again.”

By the time they had ejected the trussed up and cowed couple from the farm, Caroline’s face was covered with blood, which still oozed out of the cut over her eye. Grace took a look at it.

“A wound of honor, my darling Caroline! You’ll be so proud of that in years to come. You’ll always have the mark, you lucky girl! Now let’s go inside and patch you up!”

As she stood while her friend attended to the cut, Caroline asked whether Grace had ever had a similar experience of having to defend herself.

“You were looking at my scars a few days after you came here, I seem to recall. Oh, yes! I have sometimes had to do what you just did. Don’t be too full of yourself, Caroline - just be quietly satisfied with a job well done and humbly grateful that you were given the strength to do it. You did what was needed and what was right, but life requires no less than that from us all, every second of every day of our lives.”

“Do I get a day off tomorrow, Grace?”

“No, you certainly do not, my darling. If I had thought that to have been a serious question, I would have given you extra duties as a punishment!”

“It seems funny, sometimes, to be in such a subservient position to you! But I don’t mind. This is all so utterly right, somehow. I sometimes think you must be my guardian angel, lovely darling Grace!”

“Not an angel, but an Angle! I am the spirit of Old England and you are the future that I mean to shape!”

“You do talk such rubbish, sometimes, Grace, but I love you more with every day that passes!”

Grace smiled at this, but if Caroline had been looking more closely, she would have seen a deadly seriousness behind that tender visage and that loving, sweet smile.