Page 6 of Seduced

She braced herself against the pain she had felt when she had had to do this once before. She braced herself against thepain she was feeling now, and the pain she would feel as soon as she started walking.

Pain was just pain—it wasn’t like starving to death again. That must be avoided at all costs. The pain, although it felt as if it would kill her, wouldn’t. It would pass soon, as it always did.

Besides, she deserved it.

…

In another life, she could have been pretty. Not beautiful, but pretty perhaps; that was what her brother said.

Once upon a time, her father had called her his beauty, but she might have imagined that. Her life before coming to her brother’s vicarage was a distant blur.

It was her brother who was right, she knew that. For one thing, she was lame, and that was what everyone tended to notice after her heart-shaped face, pink cheeks, soft brown curls and brilliant green eyes. People opened their mouths to voice their admiration, but then they saw her lame arm and the way she hobbled about on her bad leg, and closed it again.

Poppy didn’t mind.

She knew she would never be the heroine of a story, and was content to be the second character instead, or the last one, ignored by everyone and disappearing into the wallpaper of life. She could be satisfied simply to exist in her small, quiet life. No, she did not mind.

Not anymore, that is. She had shed so many tears about her lameness as a child, but now that she was nearing the mature, not to mention unmarried, age of twenty-two, she had decided to accept it.

Her father had the brilliant idea to study the Greeks in his youth, which was not the worst thing he had done in hispast—a passion for gambling and subsequently destroying himself was much more of a disaster—but it was pretty close. She was therefore plagued with a silly name like Persephone, but now that she was officially off the marriage mart, it made little difference.

When she began to grow up, she started introducing herself to her father’s parishioners as ‘Poppy’, because the poor people had enough problems already without her giving them a tongue-twister on top of everything. And that was that.

She was Poppy from then on.

Her father had been a vicar as well, a reformed rake and a gambler who had turned himself into a good man. They were poor as church mice, but they had been happy. At least she now thought they had been. Her brother had shown her the error of her ways, and had explained to her how their poor, misguided father had let her wander into sin thoughtlessly. Her freedom had been a form of disobedience most displeasing to the Almighty.

Sadly, she had been blissfully unaware of her own corruption for the first sixteen years of her life, and had been content with her simple, small life: tending to her garden, her animals, and her father.

Occasionally, she tended to the poor, especially the small children, but here in London it was harder to do so. For one thing, there seemed to be an endless supply of gangs lurking behind every corner, in every street, and, even more shockingly, these gangs were made up entirely of children driven to crime and cruelty by starvation. She felt for them, she really did, but there was no way to help or even approach them without getting severely murdered.

On the other hand, the one time she had dared to bring up the subject of helping the poor, her brother had absolutelyforbidden it. She had been ordered to do five hours of penance kneeling on the rice, just for suggesting that her place as little more than a servant in his household was not enough for her to lead a full and content life. She had tried to explain that that was not what she had meant at all, but that only earned her two additional hours.

That was back when he only made her kneel on rice.

Later, when he discovered how much sharper seeds were—flower seeds, fruit pips, pumpkin seeds, and so on—she was constantly struggling to walk, her limp growing much worse with every passing day. But penance was more important than being able to move without pain.

Soon, she would not be able to walk at all, Poppy mused as she crawled on her hands and knees out of the church.

“What took you so long?” her brother asked her when she hobbled home, nearly an hour later.

The walk from the chapel to the vicarage was barely twenty steps. It had taken her one hour to try to stand up and limp to the door.

“I’m sorry,” Poppy replied, keeping her head down. She should have known better than to reply. She could feel her brother’s rage in the air.

“You still have enough stubbornness in you to answer back, I see,” he said immediately. “I shouldn’t have been so lenient. The gates of hell are filled with people who were not loved as much as I love you. Your eternal soul is a serious matter, Persephone.”

There might have been a time, years ago, when Poppy might have felt the urge to scream at his words. But if there ever was such a time, she had long forgotten it.

She knew now that she deserved every single word he said.

And she might feel too numb inside to care for her immortal soul; she might indeed feel that there could not possibly be that much of a difference between eternal hell and this earthly hell she lived through every day, but this she knew beyond doubt: she deserved everything she endured, and more. She did not deserve his love or his forgiveness, for what she had done had been despicable.

Even if she did not, at the moment, remember exactly what it had been.

“Forgive me, brother,” she said, as he had instructed her. Her brother was quiet, waiting. Yes, this was what he wanted her to do. “Forgive my sins against you, which are many. I regret what I did, with all my soul.”

Her brother made a point of sighing deeply and rubbing the space between his eyebrows. His hair was thinning at the temples, but he had been considered quite handsome when he was younger. That was why he had managed to make so advantageous a match, and move to a parish in London. But now, he looked thin and tired all the time—a result of his very limited diet, which was done on purpose, as he believed it made him look ‘saintlier’.

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