A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [99]
I dropped onto my mat, feeling strange still, but not impossibly so, and drank some water and made myself eat, and felt the myriad of cells in my body return slowly to equilibrium.
The gears in my mind began to mesh again, and I sat back against the wall, and I thought.
I thought about Margery Childe’s sermon on light and love. I thought about Miles Fitzwarren and what his true nature must be to inspire such loyalty in Veronica.
I thought of the odd and long-forgotten fever I had run all those years ago after the accident, the muscle cramps and the illness that had seized me after the healing was well under way and the medications were withdrawn.
I thought of Margery, and wondered if it were possible that she spent her love on this man, my captor; whether she quenched the thirst she had spoken of with this clever, brutal man who so obviously enjoyed causing pain.
I wondered about the rapture of mystics and the cost of that ecstasy, and how it compared to the everyday passion of simple human beings.
I thought of my early childhood, and of what my mother would think, seeing her daughter in the cellar, and how my father would rage, and how my brother would calculate methods of escape.
I thought of Patrick and Tillie, until the smell of Tillie’s chicken cooking overcame the stench of paraffin.
I thought of Mrs Hudson, and her scones, and about how she had taught me to arrange my hair.
I drank again, deeply, ate half the bread, and found to my pleasure that a small and withered apple had been added to my cache, along with a second canvas bucket containing several inches of cold water and a scrap of face flannel. I ate the apple down to the stem, made good use of the water, and I began to feel like myself, strong and purified.
Two hours later, my captor returned, and it all began again.
Such was the pattern of my life for a long, long nine days, begun that Sunday and repeated some four dozen times. It became difficult to keep track of time. I knew just how many injections I had been given, from the growing pile of chips and stones I placed as markers in the southeast corner, but after a dozen had accumulated, I thought that my captor’s visits were becoming more frequent, from approximately every six hours the first days down to five, or even four.
There was no telling the hours. My natural time sense, normally quite clear, was muddied along with everything else by the increasingly frequent and, I thought, increasingly powerful doses of the drug. Occasionally, his thugs brought with them definitive odours—eggs and bacon on the breath meant it was morning outside; beer defined the latter end of the day—but it was uncertain, and the variations in my own meals—the apple was sometimes a tough carrot, an onion, three dried apricots, twice a knob of cheese, and several times a cold boiled egg—followed no pattern.
Only once was I aware of the passage of time, and that was after some two dozen stones had accumulated, and it came to me with conviction and bleak resignation that in the meeting room in Oxford gowned men and women were coming together, and I was not there. After that, it no longer seemed so vital to keep the clock in my head ticking. It became more of an effort to do my sixty circuits after each injection, to keep my hair bound and my body clean. It became less of a pretence to hold my arm still for Him to inject me. Had He ever let down his guard and arrived without his three thugs, I should surely have attacked Him, but He did not, and I did not. The bread that was left for me soon lost all small interest it once had had, and I lived on water and the extras.
The only variations were in the food I ate and the thoughts I occupied myself with. At first, I drove myself to mental gymnastics, verb forms and recitations,