Not much you can do to pass the time when you’re standing in the pillory, wrists and neck clamped between thick wooden boards, and locked shut for the night, unable to reach with your fingers to scratch the stubble of your cheek or stroke the hair out of your face. You hadn’t bothered tying it back. Now you wish you had.

You’re too tall for the infernal device, which keeps you in a vexatious half-hunch, unable to straighten up.

You can only stand there. Stand there and think. Which may be what the new magistrate intended. Stand there and think on your poor choice of companions.

An odd fellow, the magistrate. Pale, well-fed, bewigged, but severely dressed in somber coat, vest, and knee britches. All through the parade of malefactors called into court, he flicked a gaudy, perfumed handkerchief against the smell of these ‘rude mechanicals.’ He was much out of place here, so far from the city.

You hardly consider yourself a miscreant worthy of notice, much less worthy of jail and time in the stocks. You are a mere dabbler when it comes to living outside the law. Your companions were the blackguards, brigands, and scofflaws—every last one of them—and grown disfigured in their riotous living. You, being attractive to the roadhouse doxies with your fresh face and sturdy build, were kept as little more than a pet by these unsavory reprobates, in hopes of beguiling wealthy women traveling without male companions to part with their purses.

Their promises of speedy gain tantalized you, an easy way to satisfy a covetous wife and an insatiable sweetheart.

You had yet to see a penny, though they fished you like an angler.

Now, caught, they served you up to the magistrate like proper churchmen.

So it was you the magistrate singled out for punishment from among your confederates. An object lesson for the humble folk. To be made an example to all that your farmboy physique and your ruddy good looks—in his ponderous words—would not win any favors so far as this judicial personage was concerned. And perhaps—he intoned between snifflings into his handkerchief—you may learn the benefits that a newly married man should endeavor to spend his time in honest labor to satisfy a good wife, instead of wasting himself and his money on wanton trollops.

He stopped short of having you branded as a fornicator.

So your companions, wearing their sins on their ruddy, pocked, misshapen faces—as the magistrate read out—were released and bid to sin no more. While you—the pontificating old buzzard went on—would serve as an example of justice in this county and the blindness of this court to superficial beauties and unctuous speeches.

Which is disappointing because you’d hoped to have a little company during your public incarceration. They all—to a man—scuttled out of court the moment the magistrate released them, with barely a parting word of encouragement to you.

In fact, the ease with which they escaped any consequence at all made you wonder if they hadn’t planned all along to trade you for leniency from this pickled minister of justice.

So here you stood. Pilloried. Alone. From dark until dawn, without even the comfort of your erstwhile compatriots in mischief and rowdy drinking.

You can’t sleep, you’re forced to stay alert to keep your knees from giving way and choking yourself awake with a jerking strain of your neck and wrists.

For the first couple of hours, passersby were free to hurl mud and trash at you, enticed by your predicament. Mercifully few while daylight remained, and none at all once darkness fell, only moonlight now, which seemed to shine solely on the low platform where you stand.

So you sang, you orated, you tried composing poems but nothing helped—by the middle of the night you were crushingly bored and you shouted out invitations for any sort of diversion that would speed the night along. Beer. Beer would certainly dull the senses and lift the spirits.

Regrettable that you’d angered both your new wife and your even newer sweetheart.

Discovering each other when they appeared before the magistrate, each thinking they might fetch you home, they refused to speak any word in your favor. A pair of Furies, suddenly united in their vexation with you.

It must be near midnight as far as you can tell by the moon, reflected in the standing water of the rutted road along the town square. Your legs are tired, your back is sore, your wrists and neck are chaffed raw.

Footsteps. A watchman? A tradesman? More footsteps. A pair of apprentices hurrying home from their own night of revelry?

Maybe you can give them a shout when they pass, convince them to bring you a drink. Something to get you through these long hours of the night.

Steps come closer and you call out, asking if they’d do a fellow nightbird a favor.

They don’t answer, and you think they’re going to walk past you without so much as the courtesy of a hail.

But they don’t walk by. They climb up behind you, onto the platform. You call out to them again, saying how glad you are they stopped, asking if they’re here to release you. Leniency, maybe? An early parole? Outright pardon?

But they don’t.

They loosen your shoes and slip them off, removing your stockings. Unbuckling your trousers and untying your underdrawers, they shove them both down to your ankles, then slip them off you as well, lifting first one foot, then the other. You’d like to think these are to charitable souls who’ve brought a bucket to help you relieve yourself so you don’t soil your garments. But you see that’s wishful thinking as you watch your trousers and underdrawers sail past you—landing on the muddy ground in front of you where they’ve pitched them. Then, slicing your shirt up the back, they push the halves up around your neck, tucking them over your shoulders and out of the way.

The wood of the platform is cold on your bare feet. Your buttocks are chilled and your penis shrivels in the cool night air.

They slip a wooden frame between your knees that spreads your legs, and lifts you up off your feet so you’re folded over, your dick dangling.

One of the two behind you grabs your dick and gives it a shake, testing that it’s not snagged or caught. Large, rough hands. A fishwife’s hands. Or a blacksmith.