Dungeon of Darkness

by April Hill

  Katherine sighed and permitted him to make love to her.

  * * * * *

  "Well, well," Grymwald murmured, his breath coming faster now as he inspected the scar. "What have we here?"

  He touched the spot with distaste, then squeezed it painfully. "Send for the good Father, Osbert, and instruct that he bring with him his instruments of examination. Perhaps our hard work in capturing the little whore will not go unrewarded. It appears there may be a bonfire in the Lady Drummond's future. I believe we have discovered a witch in our midst."

  CHAPTER SIX

  Night had fallen, and the darkness where Kathy lay was complete—and terrifying. At The Voice's order, even the dungeon's smoking torches had been extinguished, leaving the acrid odor of burned oil in the stale air and a grave-like coldness which seemed to penetrate her naked limbs to the bone. For long periods, there was nothing other than a distant sound of dripping water on which to concentrate and somewhere, the soft, unmistakable scurrying of rats. Now and then, she could hear one of the beasts squeal with that high-pitched unearthly sound that signified a quarrel— or a death.

  The muscles in her arms and legs ached dully, but the pain had eased somewhat as her limbs went numb with the cold. They had left her alone after discovering the little scar under her breast. Now, from what she had been able to understand from the conversation, they were awaiting the arrival of an unnamed "bishop," and for the appearance of a priest who had been summoned to interrogate her. Kathy shivered when she remembered how the priest had been described—as the "witch pricker." She tried not to think about the approaching morning and the echo of steps coming down the stairwell.

  She had given up working at her restraints, as the struggle used too much energy, which she suspected she would need later. Instead, she tried to think of Stephen, and of Duncan, and of the peaceful village of Cala, and of everything beautiful she had ever known and would quite possibly never see again. When that made her weep, she tried to concentrate again on Stephen's promise to her, made half in jest only the morning before. "If you ever run away like this again, my love, I promise that I will find you quickly, no matter how far you run, or where you hide. And I further promise that when you are caught, you will still remember that spanking when you are ninety-five years old and surrounded by our great-great grandchildren."

  Kathy smiled to herself in the darkness as she thought back to their three-month anniversary, a date made memorable by another of Stephen's promises. Unable to afford a gift more lavish than a bouquet of wildflowers and heather, he had blushed as he promised his bride of just three months a very special gift—an evening of sensual pleasure worthy of the occasion, and one she would remember always. Kathy accepted the bouquet and the promised "gift" shyly, but assured him that nothing could exceed the delight he had already provided her in their months, together. Stephen smiled and raised an eyebrow.

  "We shall see, my love. We shall see. After the festivities at Duncan's."

  Unfortunately, there had been an argument later that morning, during which she had lost her temper and thrown a jug of milk at her bridegroom's head, splashing the frothy contents across the two of them, the table, and the floor. She bolted for the door, suspecting that she had gone a bit beyond what Stephen would deem playful. Before she could reach the door, however, Stephen had caught her from behind and bent her across his muscled thigh.

  "Stephen!" she cried, as he threw up her skirts. "I'll not have you do this thing! On this, of all days!! I swear to you, if you..."

  But it was too late. Stephen had already raised his strong right hand aloft and brought it down with a resounding crack across the right cheek of her bare backside. Kathy shrieked and tried to kick him, and would have succeeded had the second stinging swat not made her lose her aim and her concentration.

  "Owwwww!" she yelped, using several very strong oaths to describe him as she kicked once again, this time catching him in the shin.

  Stephen rubbed his bruised leg and chuckled. "For that, my love, you are about to pay very dearly." He sat down on a bench, pulled her across his lap and finished the spanking with a big stirring spoon. Katherine howled mightily and threatened a great many dreadful things with which she was in no position to actually do. When he had finished, the bride's entire backside was on fire.

  "Now," he said, setting her on her feet. "I'll have my apology, and it had best be a sincere one. You've wounded me and wasted perfectly a jug of good milk we can ill-afford. Apologize, please."

  "You may go to hell, sir, and take your apology with you!" she replied smugly.

  It was, of course, the wrong thing to say.

  "Very well, then. Upon our return from the celebration, we will repeat what has happened here, and I will blister your pretty ass 'til you shriek the roof down, and then accept the required apology. Should that happen, I make you a firm promise that you'll not sit down easy for a week, and they may very well hear your screams all the way to Edinburgh."

  "You wouldn't!" she scoffed. "On the very eve of our anniversary?"

  "You think not?" he asked mildly. "The only decision to be made, my sweet, is whether

  this promised spanking is to happen now or when we return from the evening's festivities. The choice is yours."

  "And do you truly believe I would attend such a festivity now?" she cried. "After you've threatened me in such a vulgar manner?"

  Stephen laughed. "Kathy, my darling, I think you would not miss an opportunity to dance, even if your house and your hair were on fire, as well as your rump. Name the time—now, or later?"

  Forced to decide, or be late to Duncan's and the dancing, she had chosen "after," in the smug and certain conviction that Stephen would forget the more unpleasant "appointment" after downing several pints of ale and trading tales of the battlefield with Duncan and the other drunken knights. Accepting her decision, Stephen patted her on her slightly sore bottom and pushed her toward the bedroom. "We are already late, my sweet, so wash your face and comb your hair. At the risk of having another pitcher of milk tossed at me, you look as though someone had just whaled the daylights out of you. But please remember, that when we return tonight, I have promised you two things. When we have been married longer, you will know that I am a man of my word. I will never break a promise to you."

  After the celebration, they had been back in the cottage for less than five minutes when he appeared in the bedroom with the hairbrush, and though she sulked and scowled, she honored the bargain by accepting the promised spanking—in her fashion. She knelt dutifully, if sullenly, on the very end of their soft bed, her bottom raised and her lovely new dress pulled to her waist, waiting miserably for the first swat. Still a bit shy about being naked before him in this uniquely revealing manner without actually being in bed, Kathy reached behind to pull down the hem of her thin chemise, which barely covered her. From where her thighs met her ass, and all the way down to her nervously wriggling toes, she was fully exposed. Stephen couldn't help but smile at the picture his blushing bride made as she pulled the garment tight around her cheeks, providing herself a modicum of modesty, but also outlining the stunningly lovely curves of her round, full buttocks.

  And then, precisely as he had promised, he lifted her chemise and spanked her until she squirmed and yelped, and until each cheek glowed— and until Kathy offered a contrite, possibly sincere apology. Afterward, he made her stand with her nose against the wall for half an hour, with her skirt up and her bared, scalded bottom aglow. Kathy had learned something that night about her new husband. He always kept his promises, and he was never late! Later, pouting, with her feelings and her sense of justice injured, she had come to bed, but adamantly turned aside his attempts to make up, or to make love. It was then that he simply parted her unwilling thighs, lowered his handsome head between her opened legs and used his mouth and tongue to bring her repeatedly to levels of pleasure she had never thought possible. Yet more evidence that Stephen Lachlan always kept his promises.

  As she lay t
here in the darkness, Kathy tried to remember exactly when it had been, during this misbegotten adventure, that Stephen had last promised to find her—and to spank her, of course. Under the circumstances that would be a fairly small price to pay, even if he had remembered to bring along the riding crop and the damnable hairbrush!

  Unable to sleep, Kathy then tried to imagine Stephen and Duncan's movements after she had so foolishly deserted them in Thurlestone. Surely, they would have asked around the marketplace and looked for her everywhere. Why, she thought morosely, she had been so careful! And so devious!

  Kathy began to weep again, this time in earnest.

  * * * * *

  Almost unbelievably, she fell asleep for a time and then and awoke to the boom of a great door slamming. As she listened, she heard the clang of a metal gate and the very unwelcome sound of heavy footsteps on the stone staircase.

  "Good morrow, Mistress Drummond," The Voice said coldly. "I trust you slept well? I have brought a visitor who wishes to ask you a few questions. I have assured Father Duvalier of your complete cooperation in his investigation—well, perhaps we should say examination? Father Duvalier has recently made the difficult journey across the Channel from Poitiers, to assist us in the tiresome task of ridding this county of witches. He is something of an expert in his field, as the French have had considerably more experience in these matters than we have here. There are surely some things we can learn from the French, other than how to braise tripe, do you not agree?"

  This question appeared to require no reply, and Kathy did not need to inquire who the suspected witch might be. With no further introductions, the "examination" began.

  * * * * *

  When they reached the end of the alleyway and discovered Kathy missing, Stephen and McGregor had retraced their path through Thurlestone, searching each alley and questioning every passerby and marketgoer who might have seen the runaway. When they had no luck, they began again, and chanced by the gate of the small Convent of St. Baldred's at the precise moment a large and irate nun called Pentecosta was haranguing a disinterested tinker about "the young women of today." Sister Pentecosta rattled on at some length about a very specific young woman, who was "such a low sort" that she had snatched several items of soiled clothing.

  "Pilfered my wash right from the basket!" she complained. "And all of it belonging by rights to Mother Church and to poor, sorely afflicted Sister Mary Nicholas in particular! The dear old soul must now go about borrowing what she can, and her with no teeth and that awful itch in her lower parts."

  Sister Pentecosta described the thief as "flamed-haired and uncommon buxom," and suggested that when the unholy brigand was apprehended, she herself would be pleased to "flog the wench's bare bum 'til it were raw." Stephen explained through clenched teeth that the "wench's" first thrashing would be his to administer, but that if she so wished, the good sister could be third in line—after the gentleman next to him had finished with her.

  With the intelligence in hand that Kathy was probably wandering about dressed as shabby nun who scratched at herself with unusual frequency, they began searching again. Within minutes, Stephen found a tavern keeper at a place called The Hanged Goat, who recalled such an unlikely nun coming into his establishment. At approximately the same time, McGregor talked to a wine merchant whose aged donkey had been stolen on the same day. By a curious coincidence, the missing beast had been observed somewhat later, being ridden through the southern gates—by a disheveled, swearing nun, information the merchant had dismissed as the probable ravings of an anti-Papist.

  It was very shortly thereafter that they passed a man riding on an elegantly outfitted horse that drew McGregor's immediate attention. The cloth "caparison" covering the animal's hindquarters bore the chilling coat-of-arms of none other than Alric Grymwald. An obviously frightened merchant told them where to find the castle from which the rider had come. But none, the man warned, were ever welcome there.

  * * * * *

  As he and Stephen Lachlan galloped southward along the muddy, rain-soaked road, Duncan McGregor said little, but the fear on his weathered face was obvious to his younger companion. Lachlan shared his old friend's concern, for though Duncan himself had never told him the full story of Margaret Drummond's terrible death, he had heard much of it over the years from his mother, Johanna, and now understood McGregor's enduring hatred for Alric Grymwald. It was more than thirty years ago that Grymwald had kidnapped, raped, and then tortured to death the woman Duncan McGregor loved—a woman pregnant with McGregor's child when she died.

  The story was not unusual in a time when a host of greedy knights and barons took advantage of the endless struggle for the throne by building their own castles and declaring their own fiefdoms, letting others squabble over the larger issues of crowns and borders. Grymwald's father had been among the barons whose greed and power had made him a wealthy man. The soaring castle he built on land assumed by forged grant and illegal force was one of the grandest in the region.

  But history and an illicit sexual union were to dash Alric Grymwald's youthful expectations of riches. Henry of Anjou succeeded to the throne, and in a bold sweep of long-delayed justice, had ordered the castles illegally constructed during the long war to be razed forthwith, and the properties and lands of the fictitious barons confiscated. Ranulf Grymwald died in bitterness, and on his deathbed, left what remained of his estate to a favored nephew, denying his son Alric his now worthless title and his meager holdings.

  Ranulf Grymwald had harbored an ugly secret. His only child was the product of his unfaithful wife's short-lived liaison with a despised enemy—Alisdair Drummond, of Drumannach Castle.

  Before his own death, however, Alisdair Drummond had made provision for the bastard son he'd had conceived with another man's wife. If his legitimate son and Kathy's father, Edward, should die without progeny, the boy's elder sister, Margaret, would inherit. At the very end of this highly problematic line of succession was the bastard Alric, disinherited by one father and with almost no hope of inheritance from the other—unless all of the Drummond heirs were to die.

  Through the years, Alric Grymwald connived endlessly to regain power, but as each of his dishonest efforts failed, his bitterness grew, and so did his rage. His consuming hatred was for the Drummonds, whose wealth and property, but for an accident of birth, would have been his own. To add to his frustration, Grymwald had become obsessed with the one woman, of all women, he could never possess. He desired beyond all things and all reason, the beautiful Drummond daughter, Margaret—his own half-sister.

  And thus was the stage set for the terrible events at Drumannach Castle, in the long winter of 1190.

  Grymwald had come to accept that Margaret Drummond was forever inaccessible to him. And had their shared blood been all that kept her from his bed, he would have gladly overlooked that insignificant detail, but Margaret had repeatedly declined even his efforts at friendship, and that rebuff enraged him. He was, after all, an extremely handsome man, and a witty and intelligent one, surely good enough to share an afternoon's walk along the river, or polite conversation, yet her disdain for him remained apparent. When he demanded an explanation for her dislike, she had remarked cryptically about his "lack of principles." More than once, she had made veiled references to his reputed involvement in the murder of that odious Papist traitor, Thomas a' Becket.

  It was true, of course, an ill-advised and almost ruinous youthful effort to gain Henry's favor. Young Alric had played a small, albeit vital, part in the slaughter of Becket—the King's one-time ally and friend. Once Henry had named his trusted friend Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket had abruptly changed loyalties, and began taking his new role as protector of the Church's interests seriously. Enraged by what he saw as a betrayal, Henry tacitly approved of, and then regretted, Becket's murder. Alric Grymwald's participation in the plot had only escaped detection and the King's furious retribution by a stroke of luck.

  Still, respectful of her late father's wish that h
is bastard son be accepted by the family, Margaret had tolerated young Alric's presence until the evening when— in a drunken ardor— he had attempted to kiss her. Thereafter, the lady Margaret treated her half-brother as she might a crawling cockroach. Sensing his older sister's discomfort, seventeen-year-old Edward Drummond had ordered his father's bastard never to return to Drumannach. It had been the most humiliating moment of Grymwald's life.

  * * * * *

  As Alric Grymwald's obsession was reaching its murderous peak, Duncan McGregor was a still-impoverished young knight of twenty-eight, in the service of King Henry. In the spring of the year 1171, he had fallen deeply in love with a beautiful and proud young woman who had returned his love passionately, and without reservation. The lady's name was Margaret Drummond.

  This last degradation was more than Grymwald could bear, and a black and terrible rage had overcome him when he heard of Margaret's betrothal to Duncan McGregor. The lady he most desired and could never possess had chosen this Scottish cur.

  On the afternoon he took his revenge, Alric had no way of knowing that Margaret was carrying McGregor's child. Nor had he planned to rape her when he first saw her that morning, walking alone beside the river. When he had finished ravishing her, though, her revulsion and open disgust had driven him mad with rage. So great was his rage that the vengeance he visited upon this woman who had scorned him would be remembered by him as a thing of rare beauty, and lasting satisfaction.

  Duncan had come for him, of course, just as Grymwald had hoped when he sent a messenger to Drumannach, announcing the lady's death. It was a confrontation that Grymwald longed for, and his vengeance would only be complete when the Scottish pig's severed head was on a pike. Driven by the searing agony of his loss, and like the proud fool he was, McGregor had come alone, riding into the mouth of hell armed with nothing but a sword and dagger. He found his beloved's broken and savaged body where Alric had left it—nailed to the front gate.