Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [211]
For three days it was the same. When Choufleur had finished, he went out, leaving her water and a slop bucket. On the gallery she heard him telling the servants that Madame was still ill and not to be disturbed; they were not even to enter the house, much less the bedroom. He had removed the rags of sheet so that she could drink and care for herself. When he returned he sometimes tied her hands again, or sometimes left them free. Always he came in the heat of the day, and both of them would be swimming in sweat when he battered her body with his. At evening he brought her a meal. Sometimes he left the plate for her to feed herself or, if her hands were bound, he spooned the food into her mouth. He slept elsewhere, but returned to use her at different hours in the night, and always in the morning.
What was most humiliating, frightening, was her own response. Nothing in her had risen to meet the cruelties of the Sieur Maltrot, ingenious as they often were. She had made her body a piece of wet rope for him, held her essential self remote and untouched. But with Choufleur there was love braided into the torment. That was different, much more powerful, much worse.
The chain was exactly long enough for her to reach the bedroom door, not long enough for her to cross the sill. As the bed was a massive affair of solid mahogany, no effort of hers could have budged it so much as an inch. If the grating of the chain across the floor ennerved her, she might carry it in her arms to stop the sound. There was a full-length mirror near the bed, and sometimes she wept herself dry before it, then stood there looking curiously at the ugly spectacle created by her swollen nose and reddened eyes. Sometimes she stood naked before the mirror, posing and draping herself in the chain. Sometimes she dressed herself and covered the iron collar with an arrangement of scarves. Then Choufleur would have to strip away all this fabric before he raped her senseless.
He did not wound her with fire or steel, only twisted her limbs this way and that, and forced himself in wherever it pleased him. He had the Sieur de Maltrot’s gold-headed sword-stick, and sometimes he threatened her with this, but never cut or struck her. On the morning of the fourth day he pounded the rivet out of the collar with the hammer and a spike, and left her free.
Nanon said nothing. She sat on the bed’s edge, touching the band round her neck where the collar had been, looking down at the floor without a thought.
“If you had left me,” Choufleur said in a low voice, “I would surely die.”
She did not answer, but raised her eyes when she heard his feet moving on the floor. With a practiced twist of the wrist, Choufleur unlatched the sword-stick and pulled free the blade. He braced the pommel against the door jamb and set the point under his left nipple. Nanon had leaped across the room before she knew she meant to move, knocking his weight away from the blade, which flexed and sprang free, then clattered off the wall. The point had raked a shallow red line across his ribs, and somehow there was a deeper bloodier cut in the butt of his palm, but both of them ignored it. Choufleur was crying uncontrollably. Babbling how he loved her, hated himself, he washed the chafe marks of the collar with his tears. Nanon whispered the soothing nothings suitable to an hysterical child. Soon she was weeping with him. They clung to each other like two drowning people, and in the end, they slept.
Afterward everything returned to normal, or as nearly as it could after what had passed before. The collar lay on its chain underneath the bed, hidden by the fringes of the coverlet. The servants returned to the house