Duty And Duplicity; Book 5 Of Poacher's ProgressChapter 18: The Sisterhood free porn video
Promptly at sunrise I arrived at the East Gate of Naples old city.
From the back of my hired horse I scanned the cluster of mules and men milling around the gate, and one man did indeed stand out from the crowd.
As Shadrach had said the man looked less intelligent than the mule he was holding, but it was not just his apparent lack of intelligence that drew my eye to him but also his lack of stature.
Although his torso appeared to be of normal size his legs were unnaturally short. His head appeared slightly misshapen and his mouth askew.
I rode over to him and asked, in Italian, if he was Pepe.
He nodded. “We walk. No horse.” With that, he started though the gate.
“Wait. I was told it was a three day round trip. Do you expect me to walk all the way there and back?”
“Yes.” His reply was delivered over his shoulder as he walked away.
“Wait, damn you, I need to return this horse to the livery stables,” I said, furious at this ... dwarf ... for his lack of respect.
He stopped and regarded me with a baleful stare, as did his mule.
“I stay five minutes only.”
I returned to the livery stable, and received a cussing from the ostler who had only just saddled and prepared my mount.
My fierce gaze had him holding his tongue, at least until I left the stable.
I made an undignified scramble back to the East Gate, where Pepe and his mule were in the process of exiting.
After an hour of walking along the main highway connecting Naples to the east coast port of Bar. Pepe led off onto a rough track to the right.
The steep incline had me puffing and panting after a few minutes, although Pepe and the mule made little of the climb.
By the time we reached the top of the ridge I was reeling with fatigue, with aching muscles I had not known existed.
We tramped along the ridge line for an hour, until again we faced a hard pull up to another ridge.
And so it went on until noon, when Pepe called a halt. I slumped to the ground, completely exhausted, while Pepe saw to the mule, and then started a fire. He handed me a goatskin full of water, which although welcome tasted of goat. He then passed me some cooked pasta in a bowl, which also tasted of goat.
It was going to be a long three days.
The rest of daylight was spent walking and ascending.
When it became too dark for Pepe to see the track we stopped and made camp. With a fire going, and the aroma of coffee brewing, I relaxed my aching muscles and sore feet. It was obvious now why a horse would have been an encumbrance. Even the sure-footed mule had difficulty on some parts of the track, and I am being generous in calling the torturous path we followed a track.
Pepe passed me a blanket, which smelled of mule, an odour only marginally more fragrant than that of goat.
“Sleep. We go daybreak.” It seemed Pepe was no conversationalist
We left at first light after a cupful of reheated coffee and a hunk of barley bread, which I continued chewing on for at least the next hour.
By keeping to the ridge line we made good progress, having only slight inclines and declines to traverse.
Around noon we began to descend into a narrow valley. Although it was mid-winter a pale sun shone, although until now I had not felt any warmth from the orb.
In the sheltered valley the heat of the sun reflected off the rocks, penetrating my thick garments, and I removed my jacket and threw it over my shoulder. We reached the valley floor and continued for several furlongs before reaching a sheer rock face, which stretched across the width of the valley.
Pepe approached a small postern gate set in the rock, and pulled on the rope hanging at the side of the gate. I heard the doleful clang of a bell.
Minutes passed, and then the door swung inwards. Pepe pointed to the open door.
“You go. I stay.” He began unharnessing the mule.
I squeezed through the narrow aperture, thinking the mule would have never have made the fit.
A cloaked and hooded figure beckoned me into a passageway, which must have been an adit, quarried by miners following a vein of rock bearing precious metal. The tunnel twisted and turned through the solid rock, and the marks made by picks could be easily seen, as were shelves, where lanterns or candles would have given some illumination to the miners toiling at the rock face. I estimated the tunnel being some hundred yards long, and at its end was another wooden door.
My guide, who I could now see was a woman wearing garments similar to those of a nun, opened the door. She pointed to single storey building a furlong away to my right.
“Sisterhood, “she said, motioning I should go along the narrow path which led to the building. Approaching the structure I thought it resembled a Roman villa, in fact when entering the courtyard I saw it was a Roman villa, with a red pantiled roof glowing in the afternoon sun.
A hooded figure in a flowing gown of vermilion stood in the courtyard.
“Please follow me,” she said in Italian.
I followed her along a colonnaded cloister to a wooden door. My companion knocked on the door, and a voice within replied. ‘Avanti’.
As I entered the room a woman stood up from behind a desk.
“Welcome to the Sisterhood. I am Mother Anthea. How may I help you?”
Her accent revealed Italian was not her native tongue, but I could not make a guess of her home country. She wore a cowl over her head, but from what I could see of her hair it was dark brown, as were her eyes. Her face was a lighter brown, not too far distant from the honey gold of Paloma, although I doubted the woman in front of me was an Oriental.
Her garment was a similar hue as she who had met me at the entrance to the villa, and I supposed the Sisterhood were all clothed likewise.
Mother Anthea wore a torque of several thick strands of gold twisted together. She saw where my eye looked, and fingered the ornament.
“This is my badge of office. It is reputed to have once adorned the neck of Alexander the Great.”
She indicated I sit, and she resumed her seat behind the desk.
I introduced myself as Colonel Greenaway.
“Shadrach of Napoli informed me my sister has found refuge here. Her name is Rebekah Greenaway, although you may know her as Becca di Acuto...”
“Becca has moved on.”
“Moved on! When did she leave? Where has she gone?”
“You misunderstand me, Colonel. Becca has moved on to another life, in a different place, as a different person.”
I put two and two together “You mean she is dead?”
Mother Anthea shook her head vigorously
“No. Her life energy has left the temporal body it inhabited and gone elsewhere. Into the vast pool of energy that surrounds us, that surrounds the earth, up to the very stars themselves. Energy cannot be destroyed. Becca’s body was weak, due to the cruel and brutal treatment she suffered. Her energy quit the broken vessel and now resides elsewhere.”
She saw I was about to question her. “I do not know where, no one knows.”
“Not even God?”
She gazed at me with tender eyes. “There is no God, Colonel. Though I can see you already know that.”
“Are you quasi- nuns, without an established church to manage and administer you?”
“We are the Sisterhood. We are drawn from many, and no, religions. We worship nothing, other than the beauty and immortality of the internal energy present in all life. That energy moves on when the body it inhabits gets too weak to encompass it. Becca’s energy could be anywhere, in any living thing in the universe.”
I saw I was dealing with a madwoman, and asked no more questions about energy or where Becky might be. She was dead, that was plain.
“Can you show me her grave, so I can pay my respects?” I said.
“We do not bury bodies but cremate them. The ashes of Becca’s body were scattered under an olive tree she enjoyed sitting under when she was stronger. Sister Siobhan can take you to the place.”
She rang a silver bell on her desk, and a few minutes later another vermilion cloaked and hooded figure entered the room. Mother Anthea made the introduction.
“This is Sister Siobhan, Colonel. Siobhan is from Ireland, and she and Becca conversed in English. The two formed a loving bond. Please show the Colonel where his sister was happiest, Siobhan my dear.
Sister Siobhan gave a slight bob of her head, and turned to leave.
“Follow me, Colonel,” she said in a pleasant toned, Irish accented English.
As we walked along the cloistered corridor towards a fountain on the far side of another courtyard, Siobhan began talking.
“Becky told me her life story, Colonel, or may I call you Jack?”
“Please do, Siobhan.” We smiled at each other.
“Becky spoke often of you, Jack, and said you would come for her.”
She stopped and faced me. “Her mind was gone when she first arrived here. Her body had been so badly treated Becky had hidden from reality, but the peace and tranquillity of this place allowed her to emerge from her darkness and converse with me.”
She grasped my hand. “I wrote down her story, up until the moment she was brutally abused by a group of Nubians for the delight and entertainment of the clientèle of that hell hole Cleopatra’s Palace. I will show you her story. It will chill your heart, but as her brother you are entitled to know the full story of how she ended as she did. Becky was wild and reckless, but was beguiled by others into the worst excesses of behaviour. Beneath her depravity was a simple, loving, young woman, and whoever it was corrupted her deserves your hate, not that sweet girl.”
“I know who to blame, Siobhan. Eloise de La Zouche is the culprit, and I swear she will pay for her crimes.”
Siobhan gazed at me in surprise. “Eloise de La Zouche merely dragged Becky deeper into vice and sin. Whoever instigated her descent is to blame.”
“I know Percy Shelley had some blame to shoulder, but he is dead, as is Giuseppe di Campania, who I had initially suspected was the instigator of Becky’s drug taking but was proved wrong. I hold Lord Byron in some way culpable, as it was after the breakup of her relationship with him that the decline of Becky’s morals can be traced, but of course he may have been an innocent bystander in those events.”
“Read Becky’s story, Jack, and then make up your own mind as to who was the greater villain.”
We had reached a solitary olive tree standing in the middle of a grassy sward, with a wooden bench beneath the spreading boughs.
I imagined sitting beneath its shade in the summer months, with the faint sound of the fountain playing in the background, gazing across the verdant valley spread before your feet, would be most pleasant, and beneficial to the inner self.
“Becky could not walk very far unaided, and I would push her wheeled chair under the tree and then sit on the bench alongside her, where we would talk. I asked if I could write down her story, and she agreed, as long as the manuscript remains here as a permanent memory of her, and as a warning to other young girls who use their talents in a way destined to lead them into the very pit of sin. I will go and fetch the manuscript,” said Siobhan, with a catch in her voice.
I stood in silent reflection, and only came to myself when Siobhan returned with a sheaf of papers, which she handed to me.
“I will leave you alone to read her story, Jack, but will return later.”
Before taking her leave she gently kissed my cheek.
I sat on the bench under the olive tree and read my sister’s sorry story from when she first realised she was blessed with beauty and intelligence, until her incarceration at Cleopatra’s Palace.
Most of her early years I already knew, although I was somewhat shocked to read of what she got up to in Stamford, the genteel market town she and Zinnia Teazle moved to when Becky left home. Likewise, her time in London was a revelation, and Becky spelled out, in no uncertain terms, what her publishers, Messrs Murdock and Turner, received in exchange for publishing her books.
It also verified Zinnia’s belief of what really happened in Marlow.
Becky had made Percy Shelley the same offer as Murdoch and Turner had accepted and enjoyed.What red-blooded man could resist the charms of someone with the beauty, intelligence, and it transpired, the sexual inventiveness, of my sister?
I actually blushed when reading her exploits, although truth to tell they were no more sordid or venal than mine own.
I wondered if Sister Siobhan had been embarrassed to hear of the sexual shenanigans Becky indulged in, frequently indulged in, during her stay in London.
However, when living with Lord Byron in Venice Becky channelled all her energy and effort in to becoming a successful author, using nothing other than her literary skill. Unfortunately, Byron was rather demeaning of her talent.
Although Becky acknowledged Byron’s pre-eminence as a poet and writer, she was not so impressed with his abilities as a lover. One evening, after a rather lacklustre performance by Byron, she informed him of his shortcomings. No man likes to have his prowess belittled, and Byron, lionised, and sought after by many women, took umbrage at Becky’s admonishment.
He stormed out of bed, out of the bedroom, then out of the house, and a few weeks later, out of Becky’s life.
Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned, and neither has a world famous poet’s pride when his manliness is questioned.
Aspen
- 26.01.2023
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