Feature Writer: Nap /
Feature Title: Chronicles of WormsfordAD 1304 – The Monk and the Maidens /
Story Codes: Religious Themes, Young, Reluctant /
Link: http://www.asstr.org/~SirSnuffHorrid/Nap/nap019.html
Author’s Notes: This story is a fantasy for adults only. The author utterly condemns any form of actual abuse – physical, sexual, psychological and emotional – to any person of any age / Remember: Real children are precious and fragile. Please always treat them with kindness and respect.
Chronicles of Wormsford
AD 1304 – The Monk and the Maidens
In 1304, in the thirty-second year of the reign of King Edward of England, a monk named Brother Thomas was on a journey. His abbot had sent him on an errand that involved several days’ travel to Markham, a town some thirty miles away. His task successfully accomplished, Brother Thomas was making his way back through the forest of Wormwood to his monastery. Despite his vows of poverty and abstinence, Brother Thomas was a great glutton. He had stopped at a wayside tavern for a lengthy meal in which he had consumed numerous bowls of venison stew, a roast fowl, a couple of loaves, a large cheese, a dozen eggs, a number of strings of onions, a whole apple pie with a pint of cream, several quarts of ale and a flagon of warm red wine. Now he traveled through the forest, his great bulk swaying astride his long-suffering and overloaded donkey.
The maidens, named Joan and Emma, were two little girls from the village of Wormsford. They were cousins and had been cradle companions after their birth in the same week some ten years before, and had been the closest of friends and partners in mischief ever since. On this day, they had been sent into the forest by their parents to gather nuts to add to their families’ winter store of provisions. They had had a successful time and had collected two good sacks full, which pleased them, as it would spare them the anger of their fathers and a likely whipping.
Despite their love for one another, the two girls were quite unalike. Joan was slightly taller, slim, and dark of hair and eye. Emma was pleasingly plump, fair, and blue-eyed. Joan was sharp-witted and impetuous. Emma was slower, but willingly led. Both were now dressed in long loose, much darned woolen gowns, girdled at the waist with a plaited cord so that they could hitch the long skirt up above their knees for energetic work or play. Beneath this one garment, they wore nothing else. Naturally, their feet were bare.
Brother Thomas’s eyelids grew heavy. He wondered whether he may have had an onion or two too many. He pulled up the donkey, tied it to a convenient sapling and left it to graze while he planted his vast buttocks on a grassy bank, leaned his back against a tree and immediately fell fast asleep.
The maidens came across the monk snoring blissfully as they wandered homeward with their stuffed sacks. They giggled together, pointing at his great belly, his red face, and his fringed bald pate. This last gave the mischievous Joan had an idea. She drew Emma to one side whispered her instructions. Emma’s blue eyes went big and round and she nodded enthusiastically.
The girls hid their sacks beneath a nearby bush, and then taking a handful of nuts each, they hitched up their skirts and scrambled lithely up the tree beneath which Brother Thomas slept. Once up in the branches and concealed among the leaves, Joan took one of her nuts, aimed carefully and dropped it straight onto the tonsured bald head of the monk.
The nut bounced high with a satisfactory ‘Ping’. The girls stifled their giggles as the monk stirred briefly and then resumed his snores. Now it was Emma’s turn. Her first shot missed, but her second was right on target. The monk half woke with a start and the maidens held their breath as he rubbed his tonsured head before falling deeply asleep once more.
Joan waited a minute or so and then impatiently landed another accurate shot. This time the monk awoke with a grunt and looked around in a seemingly bewildered manner. But although Brother Thomas was a drunken glutton, he was no fool. He had seen the last nut roll across the grass after bouncing on his head. He knew he was not sitting beneath a nut tree. He decided someone was deliberately dropping nuts on him and he did not think it was a squirrel. He leaned back once more and closed his eyes – or so it seemed. In fact, he kept them slightly open and scanned the tree for movement
Now Joan became carried away. “Let’s drop two each together,” she whispered. Brother Thomas heard the whisper that before he would have taken for the rustle of leaves. The girls re-positioned themselves, making more noise than they realized and allowing Brother Thomas to pinpoint their locations. Not only that, he saw the bare legs of his tormentors, right up beneath their shortly kirtled skirts.
His greedy eyes took to their small bums and sweet maiden slits. He kept his face straight but grinned malevolently inside. He would have his revenge on this pair of brats, he swore, their bodies would pay for this affront to his. He was looking forward to it. For among the vows Brother Thomas routinely broke was that of chastity. But whereas it was usually the monastery’s young boy choristers who unwillingly provided relief for his erotic needs, today he would slake his lusts on two fresh maidens!
Brother Thomas waited. The overconfident maidens were concentrating only on their target. The quietly confident monk concentrated on his. The girls aimed carefully. Just as they dropped the nuts, Brother Thomas sprang.
He moved astonishingly quickly for such a big man. The girls had no chance to escape and his grabbing hands caught two ankles – one plump and the other slender. With a cry, both girls were dragged from their branch and fell crashing to the grass. All the breath seemed to be pounded from their lungs. But as they lay gasping, their brains just taking in their calamity, they found themselves hauled to their feet by their hair.
They screamed with pain and fear as they were dragged upright, but they were beginning to recover from their shock. In their mischievously adventurous lives, Joan and Emma had often been caught by their irate neighbors. The girls had a mutual understanding that if one could escape the consequences of their naughtiness she should, leaving the other to her painful fate. So now they fought furiously to try to break free from the monk’s grip in the hope that at least one of them might make a run for it. But the monk was too strong for them, his grip too firm.
Brother Thomas leered at his struggling captives. He was well pleased with his catch. He liked the look of Emma better – he preferred plenty of meat on the bone – but the slender Joan would tempt him with a different flavor. Callously he threw Joan back to the ground, again knocking the breath from her body. Despite this, Joan enterprisingly attempted to crawl away, but the monk pressed one sandal-ed foot to the small of her back and pinned her down. Having secured one victim, Brother Thomas turned his main attention to the other.
As she saw her friend brutally tossed to the ground, Emma tried to fight all the harder. She kicked and pummeled at the monk, but the blows from her small fists and bare feet just bounced off the solid slabs of fat flesh without harming him at all. He grinned close to her face and Emma recoiled from the stink of ale and onions on his breath. Holding the young girl easily in one hand, Brother Thomas grasped Emma’s gown and pulled it up over her head.
Emma hated the monk denuding her, but she was not surprised by it. It was customary to beat children on their bare bodies and Emma had frequently been thrashed this way in her ten years of life, not only by her parents, but also by any other adults in the village whom she had annoyed. She and Joan had wickedly tormented the monk and now she knew that unless they could escape they would suffer rightful retribution.
Brother Thomas hauled the gown from Emma’s body. He grinned lasciviously at the naked little girl who squirmed and twisted in his grip. Emma’s face, neck, arms and lower legs were all tanned from the sun, but her thighs, belly and chest remained white and it was on this pale area the monk’s eyes focused. Emma’s roundly sturdy thighs rose to broad hips – evidence that she was of good Anglo-Saxon childbearing stock.
Between Emma’s thighs, Brother Thomas’s eyes leered at a further indication of her future fertility – her large, bulging genital cleft. As yet, this immature sexual organ remained as bald as the monk’s tonsured head, and was all the more obvious as a result. Above this, Emma retained her childishly fat belly that disguised most of her waist, but higher still was yet another portent of her budding fruitfulness, as the twin cones of flesh that were her recently budding breasts wobbled as she struggled.
Brother Thomas twisted his prisoner around and stared at t he rear view. Emma’s full, fleshy buttocks stood out roundly. Brother Thomas grinned. He was more used to boys’ bums and this obviously feminine rotundity pleased him.
Brother Thomas’s flab concealed solid muscle and now he easily held Emma’s wrists in his left hand while his right ran over her wriggling juvenile body. He squeezed pinched and stroked wherever he willed, and it was Emma’s thighs, breasts, buttocks and cunt that attracted his predatory attentions. Even so, the young maiden was not altogether unused to such treatment.
When the village priest who had charge of the chapel dedicated to St. Cuthbert had caught her stealing apples, he had taken his chance to handle her intimately before beating her bottom and legs with a bundle of birch twigs. But on this occasion, after his preliminary examination, the monk threw Emma to the ground, and turned his attention to Joan.
Joan was suffering. The fall from the tree and the pulling of her hair had hurt, but when the monk had pinned her to the ground with his foot against her back he had not been too concerned how hard he was pressing and in his excitement over Emma’s nude body, he had become even less careful. Joan had felt as if she was being squashed into the ground like a beetle as she lay there screaming and desperately flailing her arms and legs. So now it was almost a relief to be released from the pressure and again be hauled to her feet by her abundant black hair. She saw that Emma was now lying face down against the grass with the monk’s left foot holding her down. She also saw that Emma was naked.
Joan was gasping for breath and had little strength left to resist the monk, though she writhed and wriggled like an eel in a desperate attempt to break free. But then the monk gripped her so tightly she could hardly move and started pulling off her gown. Like her friend, Joan was well used to being thrashed bare by anyone and everyone, but she had known the other villagers all her life – nearly everyone there was related in some way to everybody else – but this man was a stranger and Joan sensed that his interest in her naked body did not end in chastisement. But she could do nothing to oppose him and soon her gown was pulled from her body and tossed to one side.
Brother Thomas took hold of the naked, black-haired girl and easily held her at arms length. She continued to struggle and kick, but she could do nothing to hurt him and her ineffectual contortions just added to his pleasure. He looked at her gloatingly. She was slender with long legs, narrow hips and an almost flat chest, but she was extremely pretty with large dark eyes, a straight nose and a sweet mouth with full sensual lips. Yes, despite her slimness she would give him much pleasure. He twisted her around. As he had expected, her small bottom looked just like a boy’s!
Keeping a good grip on Joan, the monk quickly bent and picked up the cord that had been around her gown. He gripped her slim wrists in his huge left paw and looped the rope around them Joan screamed and struggled harder as she realized he was going to tie her up. Sometimes children were bound for a particularly severe whipping, but it had never been her father’s practice.
Having secured her, the monk pushed her back to the ground, but this time he went down with her so that his weight held down both Joan and Emma. The two girls, side by side, felt the breath squeezed from their bodies by the monk’s great body mass. Brother Thomas reached over and grabbed Emma’s cord belt. He used it to bind her wrists and then stood up, pulling both girls to their feet where they gasped and wheezed all fight for the moment gone.
“Well,” sneered brother Thomas, “a pretty pair of chicks fallen from their nest, I see, but neither yet fledged,” he ginned, emphasizing the point by holding both ropes in his left hand and rubbing the desperately squirming girls between their thighs with his right. “Now, kneel before me like the penitents you are,” he commanded.
The girls submissively dropped to the knees and then to their horror the monk pulled off his habit and stood massively naked before them. For the first time, they realized that this time their mischief was going to result in more than just a beating.
The girls knew all about sex. They had been born into a peasant community and had seen the bull mount the cows, the ram the ewes, the boar the sows, and the stallion the mares. Not only that, each had lived all her life in a single-roomed cottage with her family where privacy was impossible. Each had occasionally heard her parents’ sexual couplings. They had seen their older brothers grow from boyhood to adolescence. They knew what grown men looked like.
In the summer, it was not unusual for couples to rut at the edges of the fields with only the tall grass to conceal them, and along with the other children Joan and Emma had often crept alongside for a free show that had sometimes earned them a beating from the angry couple, though just as often the pair would be too immodest or aflame with passion to care about their juvenile audience. So now the monk’s nakedness was no surprise to them. But the Monk’s enormous body did frighten them. The expanse of flesh that they had found so funny when he was asleep now terrified them.
The monk towered above the kneeling girls. They saw his colossal legs, the vast expanse of belly, bull-like neck and arms as round as a young hog. But most of all they saw his huge prick, sticking up long round and hard, like a column of stone.
Joan was the first to recover her wits. Desperately, she twisted from her kneeling position and sprang like a slipped hound after a hare. But before she had gone two strides, the monk had nimbly tripped her legs from under her so that she sprawled headlong. Emma, inspired by her friend’s bid for freedom tried to take advantage of the diversion to take her own chance, but she was too slow and as she scrambled to her feet the monk pulled viciously on the trailing end of rope that bound her wrists so that she crashed to the ground on her back.
“Not so fast, my pretty pair,” Brother Thomas chuckled. “You have a penance to perform before you can be allowed absolution.”
Keeping a tight hold on Emma’s tope, the monk pulled Joan over to a sapling similar to the one to which he had tethered his donkey. He laid the girl on her side and pushed her back against it and twisted her tied arms behind the stem. Then he bent her legs at the knees, pulled her ankles up behind her to meet her bound wrists and bound them all together. So now, Joan lay on her side, her body uncomfortably bent and bound, and doubly unable to escape, secured by both the ropes and the sapling.
The monk was now free to concentrate on his main target, which was Emma. He hauled her back over to tree under which the girls had found him sleeping. Once again, he sat with his back to the trunk, but this time he arranged Emma so that the little girl’s head was against his mighty cock and her body was upside down over his belly and chest with her feet over his shoulders. He took hold of her fat little knees and pulled them so far apart that she squealed with pain.
“Now, take my cock in your mouth, you wanton brat,” he demanded.
Emma had no choice but to obey. With her wrists tied and her legs firmly gripped by the brutal Brother, she had no hope of escape and she knew he could hurt her horribly if she did not comply with his wishes. All her childhood experience had taught her to submit to the unavoidable. She opened her mouth wide and took in the foul glistening glans of the monk’s huge prick.
It filled her mouth and the weight of her inverted body made her head slip down, driving it further into her. She bucked her body as the bulbous head pressed against the back of her throat, pulling her head back a little and relieving the pressure slightly. She closed her lips on the monk’s mighty manhood and sucked urgently, using her tongue to caress its length – the sooner she could bring him off, the quicker she would escape this terrifying experience.
The monk moved; Emma’s body slipped and his big prick drove into her throat again. Once more, Emma bucked her body, pulling back her head and, as an unintended consequence, sliding her mouth along the long stem of brother Thomas’s cock. And so it went on, with Emma bucking and sliding, half choking as the monk’s knob pressed repeatedly against her tonsils, and desperately sucking and licking his shaft.
Joan helplessly watched her friend’s ordeal. She saw Emma’s bright blue eyes were round with fear and her nostrils flared as she sought to take in enough air to breathe. The girls knew about cock sucking. It was a common way of giving sexual pleasure while avoiding an unwanted pregnancy and they had spied on Joan’s older sister giving this gratifying service to Dick the wainwright. But that had been done with love and mutual desire, not as now with lust and selfish greed.
The monk grinned lasciviously as the young maiden’s back repeatedly arched and her plump round bottom thrust towards him. He held her thighs far apart and her bulging, girlish slit gaped slightly, revealing its damp interior. Brother Thomas bent his forward as he pulled Emma back and pushed his fat greasy face into the young girl’s groin. He licked and sucked at the unripe quim, tasting the juvenile juices.
Emma gagged and gasped as she gobbled desperately. The monk’s huge cock filled her mouth with more meat than the poor peasant girl customarily saw on her platter. It probed her gullet and half suffocated her as she struggled to swallow its length. She jerked her body and bobbed her head in a desperate attempt to make it shoot forth its seed before it completely choked her.
Brother Thomas was thrusting at Emma’s knee with his right elbow and pushing at her left thigh with his hand to keep her legs open. He fingered the young girl’s gaping cunt. He ran his thick finger along the raised and parted lips feeling the slippery secretions of the warm-blooded girl ease his way.
Emma could feel her huge captor touching her, handling her intimately with the cruel arrogance of power. She knew that she and Joan were helpless in the monk’s hands and the best they could hope for was that he might not treat them too cruelly. She felt his thick fingers open her, parting her outer lips, stroking the inner and slipping beyond. Emma was an active, hard-working peasant girl and her hymen had been repeatedly stretched and shredded until now little physical evidence of her virginity remained. Nonetheless, she was still very young and she squealed with pain as the monk’s fat finger invaded her immature vagina.
Brother Thomas delighted in the sensation of the warm, wet flexible walls of the sexual sheath that gripped his finger as he explored the inside of Emma’s cunt. Then, having traveled the short distance to her cervix, he withdrew. Instead, he felt for the secret bump of delight so recently discovered by the two girls. He searched for, and finally found, her little clitoris. He manipulated the secret part and felt it harden and rise from its protecting hood. As Emma felt the tiny finger of flesh treacherously harden and shuddered as a wave of hateful pleasure washed over her body. For despite her dreadful plight, her body could not help responding to the manipulation of her clitoris.
Joan continued to watch her friend’s assault. Because of natural childish curiosity, she and Emma had long ago explored their own bodies and discovered this area of perpetual pleasure. Once found, they often played with themselves in each other’s company, and sometimes they would sit opposite each other with their entwined legs stretched wide and intimately touch and stroke one another.
They felt no shame, only a delicious sense of sin. Now though, the monk’s fat fingers went where only theirs had been before and Joan looked on with horrified disgust at what her friend was being forced to endure. And when the monk’s blubbery lips had begun to slobber over Emma’s secret place, Joan felt astonishment and outrage in equal measure, for strangely the young maidens had never thought to use their lips and tongues on each other.
Brother Thomas grinned lecherously as he felt Emma’s physical reaction. It thrilled him to force her body to reluctant arousal. The surge of excitement was transmitted to his cock and balls. He grunted like a rutting beast of the field and thrust himself even deeper into the mouth of the child. Emma struggled frantically as a gush of semen spurted deep down her gullet.
Having made use of Emma’s mouth for his carnal satisfaction, the monk, Brother Thomas, dispensed with her for the time being. He tied her like her friend Joan by her binding together her wrists and ankles behind her back and around a growing sapling so that she could not escape. Once Emma was secured, the wicked monk untied Joan so that she could serve his pleasure.
Brother Thomas lasciviously ran his soft, hands over the slender body of the dark-haired ten-year-old. Joan squirmed with revulsion at his touch, but that only excited the monk the more. He slid his pudgy palms over her firm young body rubbing her almost non-existent breasts that scarcely rose above the planes of her chest. But strangely, her tiny soft pink nipples did respond enough to swell and harden in response to the monk’s manipulation. He chuckled with pleasure and bent his sweating face to kiss them with blubbery lips. Joan tried unsuccessfully to shrink away from his abhorrent touch, but it was impossible. Both girls were well and truly in his power.
Brother Thomas’s foul kisses moved over her flat belly and on to the small smooth mound at her groin with the cloven line of her maidenly quim below. His wet tongue slavered along her cunt lips, seeking entry to that private place. To her hot shame, she found herself responding, opening like the petals of a flower to his repugnant touch of his tongue.
She heard him gurgle with delight and shuddered as she felt him slip inside her, licking the inside of her parted lips. Yet still her body welcomed what her spirit would reject and she felt a flood of excitement wash over her. The monk skimmed his tongue up along the line of her slit, leaving the vaginal entry to find the tiny nub of her clitoris, which immediately rose from its protecting hood to its minute fullness. He teased it with his tongue and the captive child writhed in unwilling, wild response.
Brother Thomas removed his mouth from Joan’s sexual part, but only to use his fingers instead. Like her friend, Joan’s hard work in the fields and rumbustious games when at play had stretched and torn the thin membrane of her maidenhead until little of that barrier was left. However, the slender girl was not as broad in the hips as her Emma and her pelvis was still childishly narrow, so when Brother Thomas tried to insert a chubby, stubby finger into Joan’s underdeveloped cunt he found it a very tight fit and poked about between her lips trying to gain entry.
Poor little Joan squealed with pain as she felt herself forced open and spread her thighs as much as she could in an effort to allow him access to her inner sexual sheath. Luckily the young girl’s bodily tissue was naturally elastic and had already been lubricated by the monk’s spit and her own juices, and with a twisting push his assaulting digit pressed on inside her, though very tightly gripped.
Brother Thomas enjoyed the sensation of the maiden’s moist warmth as he investigated that humid channel, but he had a yearning to explore another and Joan soon felt the finger of his other hand pressing determinedly against her little bum hole. Once more Joan felt herself opened by the monk’s invasive finger, though this time it was her back passage that was forcibly entered. Thus the monk’s hands, left and right, impaled the squeaking little girl, front and rear.
Brother Thomas took his time touching up his young victim. He was in no hurry and she had no choice. He drove the fat finger on each of his hands in and out while Joan squirmed on the grassy glade beneath him. As he worked away at her, he could feel his fingertips press against each other, separated only by the thin membrane that separated vagina and rectum.
After some time of poking Joan’s bottom with his finger, the monk decided to poke it with his prick. He pulled his fingers from their holes with a pair of plops, and positioned the young girl so that she knelt with her head down, glossy black hair spread against the grass, and her boyish bottom pointed up as a good angle for his purpose. He pushed her knees wide, gripped Joan’s small cheeks and wrenched them apart, exposing her wrinkled pinkish-brown arsehole that was still slightly dilated from his probing finger.
Joan was moaning “No, no,” but in a helpless sort of tone, as if she knew it was no good pleading with the vicious cleric.
Sure enough, Brother Thomas took no notice of her whimpering entreaty, but presented the bulbous head of his, meaty cock to the tiny aperture through which he wished to push it. It seemed next to impossible – like the camel through the eye of a needle – but Brother Thomas was well used to buggering small boys and knew how to go about his t ask. With some grunting thrusts that would have pushed the child over had he not kept \a firm grip on her hips, he managed to force himself past her defending sphincter and ram himself at least part way inside her arse.
Despite their wide knowledge of sexual matters, the girls knew nothing of this practice and had never considered their bum holes as being used for anything other than shitting. Now poor Joan felt as if she was being split in half so widely did she feel her rectal ring was being stretched to accommodate Brother Thomas’s cock, which was now being jerked back and forth inside her.
Her arse hole felt like a circle of fire so great was the burning pain of the monk’s forced entry. Once again he put a fat finger into her cunt so that he could feel the pounding of his own cock through the thin membrane of her vaginal wall. After what seemed an age, but was in fact only about five minutes of this brutal treatment, the monk’s tempo quickened and he started to grunt and then to cry out in exultation. Moments later, Joan felt a sudden wet warmth flood her lower bowel.
Brother Tomas’s rapidly deflating cock slithered from Joan’s bum. An ooze of semen spilled from her bum hole and trickled down the line of her bum crease. He left Joan collapsed on the grass sobbing with pain and exhaustion. He picked up one of the girls’ discarded gowns and wiped his cock. He would have liked to have had one of them suck him clean, but the sun was becoming low in the sky and as he still had some way to go he could not long delay if he was to return before nightfall. And he still wanted some more revengeful fun from this pair of sinful children.
Brother Tomas untied Emma from the sapling and pulled her and Joan to their feet. By now even they – normally so resiliently defiant – had been shocked into submission and hardly struggled as he pushed them to face to face. He quickly bound their wrists together, Joan’s left to Emma’s right, and correspondingly on the other arms, then he tied all four together leaving a long length of rope over.
He tugged the girls across to a convenient tree that had a horizontal branch outstretched a yard or so above their heads. He threw the free end of the rope over this, pulled it tight until the shorter Emma stood on tiptoe and then knotted it securely. Next he took a couple more ropes from his saddle bags and bound the girls even closer together, one rope going around their bodies just below their armpits and the other around their waists.
Brother Thomas stood back and looked at his little helplessly dangling captives with a satisfied leer. They were pressed intimately together – tits to tits, cunt to cunt – only able to move their feet in a circle. Perfect! He left them hanging there and searched out some flexible willow wands that were quite thick, but very whippy.
He cut himself a good supply and returned to his unhappy prisoners who twisted their heads anxiously to watch his actions. He took up a position in front of the girls with Emma to one side and Joan on the other. He swung the stick, left and right, cracking against the girls’ bottoms. They yelled with pain and shuffled their feet, automatically trying to move away from the stinging switch. He swung again, beating their bottoms hard. More screams and struggles.
The girls were beginning to recognize that the only way either of them could avoid the length of whipping willow was to put her partner in the firing line. Despite their great love for each other, the girls soon struggled desperately to do just that. Each had something on her side. Emma was heavier and stronger, but being shorter had only her toes in contact with the ground. Joan had the advantage of being better balanced able to bring the whole force of leverage to her aid. So, the coupled girls were more or less equally matched and as the pain from the thrashing continued, they fought each other ever more furiously.
One moment Joan’s slender bottom would be to the fore and getting the full attention of the monk’s beating rod, and then agony would spur that child to force her friend round to take her place and Emma’s plump buttocks would be the receiving end. Then that screaming girl would wrench about her slim cousin to take the punishment, before positions were once more reversed.
Often, of course, neither of the girls had the advantage and then they would fight together wildly while both bottoms were lashed with the stick. So hard did Broth er Thomas beat that the rods regularly broke under the weight of the blows, but he would immediately replace it with another from the pile at his feet.
Eventually, even Brother Thomas grew tired of his game and he released the girls to writhe on her fronts howling with agony. For the monk had been very thorough and they were marked with crimson weals from their calves, along their thighs, over their buttocks, across their backs and finally their shoulders. But it was their bottoms that had taken most of the strokes and they were now a purplish mass of overlapping stripes.
Well satisfied with his work, Brother Thomas dressed in his habit, and took the girls’ sacks of nuts and tied them to his long-suffering mule. He then mounted and rode away.
Gradually, the girls recovered and pulled their smarting, aching bodies upright. They reached for their gowns with trembling hands and dressed themselves. They knew that they must now make their way homewards, but knew too what sort of welcome awaited them. Not only had they lost all the nuts they had gathered, but the valuable sacks as well. And they had clearly been soundly beaten, so their parents would assume they had been ill behaved – which in a way they had – and so would beat them again for good measure. And they would not dare to tell of the monk’s depraved sexual assaults in case they got the blame for that sin too. Overall, they had only pain and sorrow to look forward to.
Wearily, they set off to their village of Wormsford.
THE END