“Why, there’s nothing shameful about virtue,” he says with a sly emphasis on the last word. Then he yawns and prods at me with his foot. “Do the bed, girl.”
I stumble up, glad to be farther away from him, yet even more eager now to finish up and be gone. I go into the alcove that cradles Master’s bed like a shrine. The polished bedposts gleam in the soft light, framing the dark jewel colors of the satin counterpane and a mountain of gold-braided pillows. I curl my pricked finger to my palm and reach forward, digging under the pillows with my other hand and fingers, feeling for the hems of sheets to turn down, when I hear him rise to his feet behind me.
“But there’s no point to virtue, either.”
His voice is right in my ear, and I am shoved facedown into the pillows, my flailing hands sliding over satin. My fingertips are so roughened from scrubbing that they snag at the fabric, but I’m still unable to get a purchase, as my chemise is thrown up around my waist and my legs are pried apart.
“Chevalier!” I gasp. “Please! No . . .”
But I am crushed with the impact of Master’s weight and his heat and all his fury as he falls on me from behind, tearing me up inside.
How it hurts, the sudden shock of it, the furious impact again and again. But humiliation ravages me more completely than any pain. I am weak, foolish. I can’t defend myself. His arms are stronger than mine, pinning me down as my clutching fingers rasp uselessly over the satin counterpane.
Searing pain and shock and shame overwhelm me. If only I could die, right here on this spot, yet I continue to feel everything, every lurch of his body against mine, every gust of his sour breath on my shoulder, my neck. Each instant is an eternity. The longer he bores into me, the less able I am to fight him, the less of me there is to defend, until I am an empty nothing. An object to be used at his whim. A thing.
He goes on grunting and sweating until he expels a last rush of wet, foul air, and he is finally done with slamming into me. He sprawls forward over my back to hiss in my ear.
“Your virtue is cured, Little Candle.”
Then he rolls off me into the embrace of his pillows, chest heaving. The tone of his words tells me how pleased he is with himself. He makes a dismissive gesture with his hand, and the empty thing I have become peels itself away from the fine counterpane.
I stagger for the door on shivery limbs, aching everywhere, mopping feebly at my legs with my chemise. I leave the candle behind, and I stumble through the dark rooms for the passage, bruising my toe on an end table, my knee on a door frame. But I cannot bear the light; I am too filthy to be seen, not by him, nor the ancestors hanging in the stairwell, nor what is left of myself.
I can hear the rain outside racketing at the glass windowpanes like savage laughter. Deep-bellied thunder booms, and I shrink from a flash of lightning, feeling my way to the stairs to crawl down them slowly, painfully, almost on all fours, hand over hand on the balustrades. I imagine I’m leaving a trail of slime behind me, like a garden snail, oozing over each carpeted stair. I can’t hide my shame. Everyone will see it, follow it, and know what I’ve become.
I am too filthy to live.
It grieves me to waken. Last night I felt snuffed out, a candle flame disintegrating into the black nothing, yet this morning my eyes open again. Death has not released me. But I am no longer alive, for a thing cannot live; it only is.
I go about my toilette as well as I might, reeking of shame. I’m certain they can all smell it on me. It is almost midday when he calls for his bath. Half a dozen stout body servants carry up buckets of hot water drawn from the well and warmed over the kitchen fire, baskets full of thick towels and fragrant oils that foam and soothe. But I will never be clean, never again.
What can I do? There is no one here I can confide in, no one to whom I dare confess my shame. The stranger who is my Aunt Justine will not comfort me for disgracing her. Madame Montant will turn me out, as she did the last foolish girl in my place. And where should I be then? Mama will not have me back. Without my situation, I am ruined, beyond all redemption, without friends or money or skills to sustain me. All I possess now is my shame, the burden I can never escape. It meant nothing to him, robbing me of my virtue, but a poor woman who loses her virtue has lost everything.
There was some disturbance this morning when Madame Montant, making her rounds, found the key to the cabinet I opened last night on the floor where I dropped it. But the cabinet was locked, nothing inside had been stolen, and since there was no obvious place to lay blame, the housekeeper could only conclude that it must have worked its way off her ring yesterday.
Days stretch into weeks, and I am quicker about my duties to avoid any contact with him, not even a glimpse. Madame Montant stops scolding me, pleased with my improvement. I speak to no one, and no further notice is taken of me. I try to believe that if I’m quiet enough, insignificant enough, someday I might disappear altogether, like the dew off a rose. I will escape my memory, my shame, even my flesh, and the torment of my life will end. I pray for that moment.
And yet I continue to live.
I can’t always get away quickly enough. This morning, he’s ridden early to hounds, and before I am done with my scrubbing, he and his men come roaring out of the park into the vast yard that lies out beyond the back of the moat, the dogs yelping at their heels. My chamber window affords a better view of their clamor than I wish to see, as the men form a hasty circle and restrain their dogs, then shout for the servants. It is even more distressing when I see what they’re playing at. A young doe has been wounded in the chase, and the servants drive her into the open for the hunters’ sport, into the circle of laughing men and slavering hounds. Blood gushes from a wound in her haunch, and the tormented creature limps about drunkenly as she struggles to leap on her lamed leg. Pawing desperately at the ground with her forehooves, she careens this way and that within the circle, veering away in panic from the noise and the scent and the thickening bloodlust of her captors. No one laughs more heartily than the chevalier. At last he gives a signal, and they loose the dogs. The doe freezes at the sight of the mad eyes and foaming mouths of hell that bear down upon her from all sides, the last thing she will ever see before they tear the life from her body.
He calls off the hounds while there is still enough carcass left to salvage, which he carries across the back bridge over the moat and into the house in triumph for Cook to clean and dress. Through the chambers he goes, trailing mud and blood from the kill that the maids will be expected to clean — again — as his hounds snarl and howl outside. I am ordered to the kitchen with my pail, and he appears to take no notice of me as he marches past; what is the ruination of a housemaid to him, after all? But at the last moment, he turns his fine head and looks directly at me with a look of smug satisfaction, of possession, the way he looks at any of the other things that he owns. And I wither where I stand, reduced to an object once more, in his sight. It makes him smile; my humiliation amuses him. He will never let me forget it.