London - Edward Rutherfurd [468]
“Really? We shall see.”
“You are not a gentleman,” she cried.
“I am an earl.” He turned and took her by the wrist. “And you belong to me.”
She tried to snatch her hand away, but he held her easily. She pulled again, violently, with all her force. His grip only increased. His free hand now caught her other wrist and, holding each he calmly drew them wide apart until her breasts were forced to brush against his chest. She found to her surprise that she could do absolutely nothing. She had never realized before how much physically stronger he was than she. Suddenly humiliated, she forgot even her own elegance, and jerked her knee sharply up to catch him in the groin.
It was a mistake. He swivelled just in time; her knee only hit his thigh; but she felt a spasm, then a great welling of rage suffuse his body, and knew, as though a red light had suddenly ignited in the back of her brain reminding her of ancient, more primitive human times, that he had the power to kill her with a single mighty blow.
He did not kill her. Letting go of one wrist, he slapped her hard in the face so that her head jerked back. Then, seizing her and lifting her bodily, he strode across and flung her on to the bed. A moment later, he was over her, holding her pinned.
“Now I will show you,” he breathed, “who is master.”
In the minutes that followed, despite the pain, it was his face that she chiefly remembered. Emerging through the bland mask he always wore, she saw features she had never seen before. Broad, hard, unyielding, it was the face of the ancient Bulls – yet, where theirs had been terrible when roused, in this face there was something petulant, spoilt, and therefore hateful.
Lord St James did not rape the countess – for the simple reason that law and custom both declared that such a word could not be applied when the victim was his wife. With a savage suddenness, he ripped her gown open and tore it off. Then, pausing only enough to loosen the flap of his breeches, he rammed himself into her viciously so that she cried out; and thrust with all his force, again and again, and again.
She was being hurt, badly. Her face was throbbing, too, from the blow he had given her. She could taste blood in her mouth. As much as the pain, the sense of being violated, humiliated, was terrible. She nearly screamed to the servants for help. Surely one of the footmen would hear. But what could they do? Challenge her husband and be dismissed? In any case, she was too proud to let them see this. Instead, summoning up all her remaining strength, she fought.
She had never had to fight before, but she did so now, like a wild cat. She tried to scratch, to kick, to bite, but found it was no use. The large, heavy man on top of her had her completely in his power. He was out to prove he was master. He was the earl, she was his wife. Her title, her house, her spending money and now, he was proving to her, her body, all belonged to him. And because God had made him a man, and her a woman, he had, in the end, the physical strength to dominate her and brutalize her as well.
“You will be mine, from now on, when I say, and as I please,” he said coldly, at last, when he had finished. Then he left the room.
Captain Jack Meredith sat on the little wooden bench and shivered. It was cold. The cell was small. Almost every crevice in the old stone walls could be seen by the light of the gnarled remains of a candle that guttered on the wooden table. For the last two hours he had pondered his situation, and always come back to the same conclusion. There was no way out.
He was in the Clink.
There were several prisons for debtors in Georgian London. The largest were the Fleet, outside Ludgate, and the Marshalsea in Southwark. But, as often happened, both were full that day and so he’d been sent to the nearest lockup with a vacancy, which happened to be the Clink. The little medieval prison of the bishops of Winchester had never been much of a place. Even in feudal days, when bishops ruled over the Liberty of the Clink and the brothels of Bankside, there had only