Dark Matter

After she was properly secured, one of the other men stood up from his chairs and started to whip her, all the time cursing her for a damned Roman Catholic whore, and other words most obscene, so that I began to apprehend some real danger to the girl’s life. And standing up myself, I remonstrated with these men most openly, calling them monsters to mete such treatment to a woman, and entreating them all to desist, although I looked only at the Major so that at last he recognised me, and with such anger in his yellow-looking eyes that it quite froze my blood. It may have been his eyes, but it was more likely the sound of a piece cocked and the chill of a pistol pressed against my cheek that was so disconcerting.

“What’s this girl to you, then?” asked a man behind me, whose voice persuaded me that he also must be Dutch.

“Nothing,” I replied. “I care not for Galloping nuns, Quests, or Beguines, but she is human and, being so young, seems hardly to deserve such abuse.”

“Abuse you call it,” laughed the man. “Why, we ain’t hardly started yet.”

At this point the Major ran quickly out of that terrible room and up the stairs. Meanwhile the naked girl on the floor looked up at me with a most peculiar indifference, as if she cared very little for my intervention, so that I wondered if she did not mind her pain, or even enjoyed her flogging, like the Major.

“Surely she doesn’t deserve such cruelty?”

“Doesn’t deserve it?” said the voice. “What has that got to do with anything?” The voice behind me was silent for a moment. “What are you doing here?” it said at last.

I pointed upstairs. “I came with him. Major Mornay. He brought me. Only I came with little understanding of what I was to see, for he did not warn me of anything.”

“It’s true,” said the Dutch woman who had admitted me. “He did arrive not long after the Major.”

The man holding the pistol stepped in front of me so that I could see him. A most ignoble ruffian he was, with a forehead villainous low, and boils like barnacles; his red eyes were fierce, and yet his hand trembled upon the pistol which now he waved up the stairs.

“Your friend has left,” he said quietly. “Perhaps you had better leave as well.”

I moved toward the stair, glancing back all the time at the girl on the floor, whose back and bottom were already striped like a maypole.

“She cares not what happens to her,” laughed the man. “It’s the price she pays to satisfy her cravings. I wouldn’t worry about her if I were you.”

And still the girl said nothing; and endured her whipping, which commenced as soon as I had mounted the stairs, without so much as a murmur.

I hardly knew whether to believe him or not, but leave I did, although I was part minded to mount the stairs and return with my pistol in my hand to see that nothing more happened to the girl. I might have shot the one with the boils, but the other men were armed as well, and I do not doubt that they would have killed me. And for a while I was haunted by the possibility that the girl was a real fille dévote monstrously abused and perhaps even killed for their delectation, since the men all had murder in their faces, and most obviously regarded Roman Catholics with such malice that they would hardly have shirked the commission of such a wicked crime.

Much relieved to be out of that evil house, and somewhat light-headed, too, for the cloying smoke had been as thick as the river fog, I took a deep breath of cold air, and thinking Major Mornay to be long gone, I started back the way I had come, toward the wall and the river. I had not gone ten paces when he stepped out from the door of a vile-looking tavern and, trembling with anger, confronted me.

“Why are you following me, Mister Ellis?” he asked and, drawing his sword, advanced upon me with such obvious intent that no other course lay before me but to draw myself and prepare to answer his attack. True, I had promised Newton not to fight, but I could hardly see how I was now to avoid it. I snatched off my hat for ease of movement and vision, although I would have parried his first thrust easily enough had I been wearing St. Edward’s Crown, for it was plain to see that Major Mornay was indeed drunk. Which at least explained why he had taken so long a time recognising me.

“Put up your sword,” I told him. “Or I shall be obliged to wound you, sir.”

With some ferocity he redoubled his attack, so that Iwas obliged to fence with him in earnest. And still not troubled by any of these attacks, I allowed him to meet me, hilt upon hilt, where, so close to me that I could smell the smoke that still lay upon his breath, he asked his question a second time.

“Why are you following me, Mister Ellis?”