Chapter 9

But I wasn't thinking. I was reacting. Dear God, imagine it - after all these years, me, a humble peasant, about to fuck the daughter of the Marquis de Lyons! Raping her! Laying her down, tying her up and poking her holes!

What a thought!

But why not? Why shouldn't I do it?

Shouldn't she pay for the atrocities of her father? Didn't she deserve to be punished? And maybe she'd like it.

I took myself aside and calmed myself down. I took deep breaths. I shrugged, and when I came back, I stood in front of Christine and pointed towards the stone on which her clothes were to be placed. "This isn't about your father anymore," I said. "It's about me."

"You, monsieur?"

"It's about what I want and what I need, and I need to fuck you."

She nodded briefly, accepting fatalistically what I'd said, and very deliberately, she let go of my cock. She stood up and unfastened the cloth buttons on the left side of her dress. "You need to fuck me because it excites you and because it's been a long time," she offered somberly, and her fingers were shaking. "And when you do it you'll hurt me the same way my father hurt my mother."

"I didn't say that I'd hurt you," I countered irritably, because this constant niggling accusation was had no basis. "I won't hurt you. I promise."

"You'll hurt me," Christine whispered again, trembling and looking knowingly into my eyes. "You'll hurt me because I'm my father's daughter. You'll hurt me a lot. My screams will be music to your ears, and because I'm a woman, my pain will arouse you."

"No!"

"Yes, monsieur! Yes! Yes! Yes! Admit it! Imagine it!"

"I can't!"

"But you can, monsieur. Say the words. Say it: admit it."

"I can't," I groaned helplessly. "The sins of the father are visited upon the children and your father drove an irreparable wedge that killed my marriage. He laid out my mistakes for the vermin to see. But retribution isn't the answer."

Christine bowed her head. "Monsieur. Why do you lie? You'll hurt me because I'm an attractive woman and it's something that you yearn to do! The thought of it repels and disturbs you but you cannot resist. You like women. You like our tits and our pussies and you like causing us pain. This is your secret pleasure and it makes you a dangerous man! Admit it, monsieur! Tell me to be frightened."

"I do admit it. It's my weakness," I growled wretchedly, dipping my head. "I'm sorry. I keep fighting it but it's true. I want to fuck you because that's what I am."

"And you want to hurt me," she insisted. "Fucking isn't sufficient for a man such as yourself. Admit it, monsieur! You want to cause me maximum pain."

When I finally nodded, she hurriedly unfastened her dress, deliberately and nervously parting the material and pushing her bosom towards me as a woman does when she's aroused and wants to be noticed. "You're going to fuck me and hurt me because that's what turns you on, monsieur. I thought you were better than that, but father insisted that you weren't. He warned me. He said that you were the face of the Devil and that I shouldn't forget or let down my guard. He told me how you did this in your youth. He explained to me about the traveler at the lake and how you raped and abused her because of your weakness. He told me that to understand a man, any man; I must understand his demons and his inner desires. If a woman can do that and then face and endure them then she has mastered her Devil within..."

Her hands busied with the buttons on the other side of her dress. She seemed in a hurry to unfasten it, like she was on a personal mission. When she'd finished, she pulled the bodice from her shoulders and down the upper part of her arms, inviting me to look at her, fully knowing that it was like waving a ham under the nose of a starving man.

And I was definitely starving. I was desperate and in heat and so I growled, turning sharply away in anguish. "Every word of what your father told you about me is undoubtedly false," I averred. "It's not true. I repeat again that I'm not proud of what I've done."

"Then tell me, monsieur. Put me right. Tell me about the lake and about Isabelle. Tell me your side of the story."

So I told her.

I told her about the woman who'd stayed overnight at the tumbledown convent a short distance from the village. I told her about how she'd had dark brown hair, eyes the color of green grass and lips like the summer bougainvillea, and Christine was immediately enthralled. When I stopped for a moment to catch my breath, she begged me to continue.

"Don't stop," she urged, pulling her arms from their sleeves. "Please, monsieur. I'm listening. Go on, please, because there is more. Much more."

"What is there to say?" I stared up despairingly at the hanging stalactites through wet, misty eyes and I felt my soul inexorably drifting back to the lake.

"I ... I don't believe you, monsieur. Tell me, what are you hiding?"

Hiding? Only that Isabelle had gone to the willows to bathe. She was a rich lady and rich ladies always went there because it was secluded. The area was inside the convent wall, out of bounds, and in any case, there was a nun to keep guard, Ann Marie.

So, there I was, sixteen years of age, an orphan with a brother and three sisters to support. I was definitely a man, and like most young men I was curious about women, and so I slipped two coins into my pretty nun's palm and I slipped past her, down the narrow descending path towards the lake.

I knew her, you see. She was not much older than me and we'd grown up together in the village and so I could take liberties that she wouldn't have permitted in anyone else, and therefore I knew that she wasn't a good, holy kind of nun. She was too sensual, too material, too attached to this world. She was too interested in sex. Each time I came up from the lake she'd settle me down in the long grass and at her assistance, she's ask me what I'd seen, for how long and whether I'd played with my dick.

Then, she'd order me to take my cock from my pants and she'd study and observe it and she'd tell me to touch it, and I'd answer her thousands of questions, describing to her the things I'd witnessed, stroking myself throughout. She'd question me about the size of the various women's breasts and their shape, the firmness of their asses, the amount of hair on their pussies. She'd tease me and it was obvious that she was doing it to excite me and because she wanted me to jump her. Unfortunately for her, I was greatly in awe of the Church at that time and so Ann Marie was out of bounds to me, and as a result, our lovemaking was by proxy. She played with herself as she bathed and I watched her. And I played with myself while I described what I'd seen, and she watched me. These were our surrogates for sex and we were each addicted.

So on this particular day I slipped past my pretty nun and stepped down the path, through the tangled bramble and shrubs and into the forest, and from here the path dropped sharply towards the lake, and it turned, passing through a crumbling escarpment before leveling at the water's edge. Here, the water was calm, clear, and I scurried to my vantage point on the far side where I'd been many times before. By the time I got there I was aroused, breathing heavily and tense because the traveler had already pulled off her dress and her petticoats: her stockings and her chemise, and I watched as she lay them across an old rotting tree trunk.

I could see her clearly from the other side of the water and so I pulled out my dick as I habitually did and I stroked it. I watched as she removed her undergarments and dropped them on top of her other clothes, and once she was done, I saw Eve as I'd seen many similar Eves, only this one was delightfully firm breasted with a thicket of hair at the joint of her legs.

As I enjoyed her beauty, I played excitedly with my cock, expecting to see her enter the water, but instead, she sat on the felled tree to the side of her clothes and she removed several pins from her hair so that it tumbled across her shoulders. Then she ran her fingers through it, searching for tangles. Next she removed a necklace and a ring and she laid them carefully on her clothes. Finally, she looked around and seeing no one present, she leaned back, spread her legs wide and she touched inside, not slow and lingering and feminine as Ann Marie would have done it, but hard, cruel and brutal.

She lay with her legs brazenly apart and slightly raised, and she humped herself. She pulverized and hurt her pussy until it was puffy, bruised and raw, and still she kept going. I could hear her growls and screams that were joy and pain combined. Her back arched and her breasts became swollen and hard.

I was spellbound because despite coming to the lake so many times I'd never seen a woman act in such a violent promiscuous way, certainly not Ann Marie. Ann Marie did it slyly, secretly and longingly. She did it when she was in the water and with barely a murmur.

Isabelle's love, on the other hand, was in a different league of full frontal obscenity, and seeing it was like there was a touch paper being lit inside me, as if Isabelle was telling me how cheap and sluttish and whorish she was. She was begging me to do something, to fuck her, rape her. She were giving me the right to force my attentions, a duty to act, and because of it, on impulse, I got up and returned the way I'd come, up through the escarpment until I reached the fork at the top. One way led up to the road and Ann Marie while the other was the route to the lake. I could have gone to Ann Marie and grabbed her, kissed her, pushed her into the grass and fucked her in the way that men ought. I could have taken my pleasure in the normal romantic way and she'd have let me and she'd have been purring throughout, but instead I was drawn to the other path which led to the spot where the traveler was waiting, and I turned and hurried there, almost running, tumbling down the steep winding path.

I wasn't thinking. I was reacting and not acting; and at the bottom there was a clearing where there was some mud and weeds and there I saw this beautiful creature hurting her pussy and I rushed to claim it, and that's when she saw me.

She was startled, thinking that I'd stumbled there by chance. She tried to cover herself, expecting me to turn and depart as any French Gentleman would, but I was sixteen. I was Rustic. I wasn't a Gentleman and so when I didn't do as she expected she became upset. She jumped up and called out. She shrieked and cried to the nun at the top of the hill, and she stretched for her clothes.

But her Savior didn't come. Her Savior was my salaried accomplice. Her Savior was deaf. He was Judas, and so I nonchalantly tore the clothes from my traveler's hands and tossed them contemptuously away, throwing them to the air and I stood, tall, proud and manly, leering at her milky breasts and hair covered mound, at her white thighs and heaving shoulders.

Abruptly, she screamed again and begged me to leave. She said she had money and she reached amongst her clothes and she brought out a purse and she tipped out a large number of coins.

She held them as if from a disobedient child to a parent, pleading, crying and sobbing, and I thanked her and grabbed the coins from her hand as well as the purse that they'd come from.

The money did her no good, of course. Having thanked her, I removed my belt from my trousers and I wrapped it around her neck, and using the tail of it, I pulled her through the nettles and the brambles, tugging her behind me. I took her to the water and held her beneath it until the screaming stopped and she was broken.

She didn't cry after that, even when I took her away from the water and made her crawl through the mud with her face dirty and ghastly, her hands trembling and shivery. I lifted her ass and positioned it so that she knew what her punishment would be.

She let out a hideous scream. That was the extent of her protest: that repugnant noise. She knelt without moving or complaining and I rammed her from behind, and then, when I'd finished with her, I tightened the belt.

What do I say?

Am I proud of that day? No.

Have I regrets? Yes.

And yet despite those regrets, once I was finished she was purring with pleasure.

I paused because I was finding it difficult to speak.

Christine, however, didn't give me my space. Instead, her dress fell to her hips and she posed provocatively for me, turning this way and that so that I would get a good view. "I think," she said tentatively, "that it can't be easy for a woman to understand her own feelings when she's naked and a man is ogling her body and dominating her so forcefully. You actions did, I think, stir my mother's thoughts and emotions to the extent that she was left lost, excited and confused."

I coughed. "Ann Marie took her back to the convent." I sighed, staring into the past with eyes that were both distant and remote. "She was angry with me and I'd never seen her that way. She said I'd done wrong, that I'd regret it, that I'd been cruel. She made me apologize to Isabelle, and yet Isabelle, being Isabelle, stayed my hand and she thanked me, she kissed me, and after that, I heard nothing from either of them, not for a week. No one came to the house. No one complained. Isabelle and Ann Marie were locked in the convent and neither came out. Then one week later, I looked out of the window by chance and I saw four soldiers marching up the hill with Isabelle and Ann Marie between them and neither looked happy.

"As I've told you, I was orphaned at twelve with my parents dying from cholera, and now I was a man, sixteen years old with responsibility for Henri, my fourteen year old brother and my sisters: Esme, Nicolette and Adalyn, who were eighteen, fifteen and twelve years of age respectfully. I was their Guardian because I was the man.

"And so when the soldiers came to the house, the others were all looking to me for instruction, Adalyn first. 'What's going on?' she asked. 'Who are those soldiers?'

"'And who is that lady?' Henri added, before pausing, astonished, because 'the lady's' hands were bound behind her back all the way from her wrists to her elbows.

"The lady was Isabelle, of course, and she was dressed in an elegant cotton dress of a type that villagers couldn't even dream of. It was pale blue and decorated with tiny white pearls and lashings of lace. In addition to that dress, she wore tiny cloth shoes on her feet and gold earrings and broaches, a sapphire necklace and a comb in her hair. Her face was painted with paste. Yet her arms were bound behind her back as if she were a felon.

"More incongruous even than this though was the contrast between her opulent riches and Ann Marie's ascetic poverty. This difference was brutal for Ann Marie was dressed in a plain black scapula and had only a leather belt around the waist to offer her shape. Her face and hair were covered by a wimple and veil.

"And the best and worst of it was that they were coming to our house. It was then that I realized that Esme was alone in the kitchen and unaware of what was about to hit us, and that it was to the kitchen that the soldiers were heading. I flew there with Henri at my side and the other girls following just as the soldiers burst in through the door.

"I came in from one side and the soldiers from the other and between us was Esme with a headless chicken in her hands and bowl of feathers between her feet. There were turnips and swedes piled on the table, cut up and seasoned and ready for the pot.

"'What's going on?' Esme cried, glancing one way and another while jumping to her feet and clattering against a bowl of soft dough, stunned, bemused, because the soldiers were swarming through the kitchen door with Isabelle and Ann Marie lifted between them. The first soldier through the door glanced at Esme scornfully and the second one scowled.

"'So, ' the first one spat, looking in my direction but talking to Isabelle. 'Is this the one that did it?'

"She nodded.

"'And the others are his siblings?'

"There was a moment's silence followed by a strangled 'Oui, ' as Ann Marie was kicked.

"The lead soldier walked imperiously between Adalyn, Nicolette and Esme, staring down at each of them in turn. Esme was last.

"'As of a week ago, ' he said. 'The Comtessa was engaged to marry the Marquis de Lyons. However, the Marquis, being a devout, circumspect man has insisted that a virginity test be conducted prior to the wedding. This, the Comtessa now tells us, will fail because of an unfortunate incident at the lake.'

"The soldier took a deliberately salacious look at Esme's cleavage before wandering on. 'Therefore we can't take her to her planned destination as the Marquis won't take her, and as she's damaged goods, it's embarrassing to take her home.'

"He took his sword from its scabbard and studied its blade for sharpness. The other soldiers were fidgeting behind him.

"'Therefore we have a choice. We could stop in the middle of the next forest, remove the Comtessa's garments piece by piece and take advantage of her generous charms, leaving her there buried in the ground to ensure her silence, or we could do something else.'

"He walked back around the table, again starring at Nicolette and Adalyn before returning to Esme and peering at her cleavage.

"'You see, when the Comtessa was at the lake and she mislaid a purse of gold coins that constituted the down payment on her dowry. So we're suggesting this as a deal, that in return for that purse and the sexual favors of the fine ladies in this room, we'll provide you with a bride. The Comtessa's family may not like the marriage. They'll deem it inappropriate and disinherit her, but they won't be able to undo it.'

"'I don't have the purse, ' I declared abruptly. 'I lost it. And not only that, but I'm not ready to get married.'

"At this, the soldier grabbed hold of Isabelle and without any warning, he wrapped his arm round her chest and he slid a knife down through the top of her dress and into her cleavage, slicing into the cloth like butter and renting it apart. Isabelle struggled against him and protested, but despite her vigorous complaints he reached inside her dress and plucked out her breasts.

"As he did it, the other soldiers pinned me to the wall with their swords.

"'That's a shame. Maybe we can jog your memory, ' the first soldier said, fondling Isabelle's tits in a way that was deliberately purposed to excite me. 'If you get me the purse then I'll spare the younger of your sisters, ' he added, pinching Isabelle's nipples so hard that she cried out in pain. 'We'll just make use of the older one and the nun. On the other hand, if you refuse, then not only will your younger sisters enjoy the same pleasure as Esme and Ann Marie, but each of the ladies will be introduced to Matthieu, our fouet. And with this, he produced a large leather whip that he pulled across the face of Isabelle's breasts.'

"'Matthieu loves to play with young ladies." And he glanced wickedly in the direction of Nicolette and Adalyn. What are their ages? Fifteen? Twelve? It would be such a shame and yet it excites him.' He teased Isabelle's dress from her shoulders and lowered it to her waist. "We don't have a priest for the ceremony," he said, tugging at her buttons. "But we do have witnesses and having consulted with the nuns at the convent, apparently a marriage can be deemed lawful through its consummation." He dragged Isabelle's dress to the floor. "So what do you say? Do you want this woman as your wife?'