“Looks like you need some help,” The Stable Boy told Frederick, and in a moment he had slipped his muscled body between Felicity and Roxanna. He chuckled as he slid one arm beneath each of their shoulders and nuzzled Roxanna’s neck with his stubbly cheek. Roxanna felt a wave of icy heat wash over her body.

Frederick looked down at the trio in front of him. The bed, not so large to begin with, was getting crowded.

“Don’t worry, darling,” Felicity said with a lazy smile. “We’ll make room.”

Some time later—minutes? hours?—Roxanna found herself atop Zalathal the stallion, draped across his back as Frederick tickled her seductively with a piece of straw. Felicity was standing on a chair as the stallion unwillingly slurped a mixture of honey and oats off her stomach. The Stable Boy was on the chair behind her, stroking Felicity with practiced fingers as he murmured in her ear.

The Stable Boy’s eyes were glittering. He knew the time had come.

He licked his lips and whispered very softly into Felicity’s ear. Not an endearment, this time, but something else.

Felicity whirled and glared at Frederick. “You degenerate pervert!” she shrieked. Frederick turned and looked at her mutely—what could she mean?

“My darling—” he began wearily.

“NO!” Felicity cut off her husband. She pointed an accusatory finger at Roxanna. “It’s that hussy on the horse,” she said, her voice trembling with emotion.

“Felicity!” Frederick said. He was angry now. It would be just like his alcoholic harpy of a wife to choose this moment for outrage. “You’ve known for weeks that—”

“SHE’S YOUR SISTER!”

Having emptied herself of this immutable truth, Felicity slumped forward, gasping for air. Frederick’s eyes glazed in incomprehension. Roxanna’s expressed mute astonishment. The Stable Boy stepped down from the chair into the center of the room. He stood against the sunbeam from the window, the light so bright that his form was almost silhouetted against it. With his arms crossed across his chest and a malevolent smile setting his face gloriously ablaze, he seemed to hover just an inch above the carpet.

“Roxanna,” he said, “you never knew your father.”

Roxanna—the Lord bless and keep her—could not restrain herself. A tear rolled down her flushed cheek as she contemplated her unknown, long-lost paternal guardian.

“But YOU, Frederick,” said The Stable Boy, “you know Roxanna’s mother...or have you forgotten your childhood so thoroughly?”

Frederick continued to stare into The Stable Boy’s eyes. Language had abandoned him.

The Stable Boy leaned in towards Frederick’s ashen face, his voice now tinged with a vindictive hiss. “Sophie used to change your soiled bedsheets. She used to bring you eggs at breakfast. But when little Frederick’s disgusting little wishes had all been seen to, then she was free to sneak off to the study, where your father was waiting in all his decrepitudinous lust.”

All at once, Frederick realized. He fell to the floor.

“You remember Sophie, mother to your own Roxanna, your father’s housemaid—and house tramp!”

At this, Roxanna let out a long cry of anguish and rushed from the room. Her sobs and erratic footfalls faded down the hall.

“Roxanna!” screamed Frederick. Blinded by tears, he stumbled to the door and followed after. Felicity hurled books after him, screaming herself: “Go to her! Yes, go to her, sinner!!!”

Now she was hurling books at the walls. Now she was tearing the tapestries down and casting them to the floor. Now she was smashing Roxanna’s mirror. She whirled and raged, blind, mad, adrift in the tempest of her own making.

“Kill him,” said a voice. It was The Stable Boy, smiling softly. “Kill them both.”

Felicity could only obey.

The great bed had broken beneath the weight of its energetic occupants. Felicity now snatched up a thick splinter of wood and thrust it into the fireplace. Holding her torch aloft, she sprang upon Zalathal’s back. For a moment she hesitated, looking around her at Roxanna’s chamber. It had to burn. Almost delicately, she touched the flaming tip of the torch to the vanity table. The wood curled slowly away and then burst into flames. Felicity dug her heels into the stallion’s flanks.

“Onward, Zalathal!” she cried, echoing The Stable Boy.

And onward they sped, through the wide French doors and into the darkened hallway that was already filling with smoke. Felicity wielded the torch like a broadsword, swung it left and right. Slowly the dark house came alight with fire. She paused at the top of the great staircase. In the gray din below, she thought she saw a thread of golden hair. It disappeared, and then she saw her imbecile of a husband running in the same direction. He must not reach Roxanna! Felicity hurled the burning torch down the stairs at Frederick’s feet. Frederick shrieked and jumped back as a line of fire sprung up before him.

“Roxanna! My love!” Frederick sobbed, ineffectually trying to pirouette over the flames.

“Sinner!” screamed Felicity, charging down the staircase on Zalathal’s back, her naked breasts bouncing like individual Amazons.

Zalathal went faster and faster. It seemed as though the staircase would never end. Felicity thought her breasts would spin off into the fiery void of their own accord. And then there was Frederick, only a few feet away, his pale, wan face upturned and shocked, his watery eyes bulging and mouth gaping like a trout, and still Zalathal did not stop. Felicity charged over her husband. She heard the triumphant crunch of bone, the satisfying curtailment of her husband’s prayer as Zalathal’s powerful hoofs crushed his throat.

Frightened and frenzied, the stallion reared and Felicity fell onto the floor beside Frederick. Stunned, she looked up at the chandelier that was ablaze like molten gold above her. She saw it dimly wobble and fall, slowly, like an autumnal leaf from a tree. The hot crystals splintered all about her in bright glittering shards that pierced her naked skin. She turned and found Frederick and clasped his mutilated corpse in her arms. The flames drew around them like bed curtains: their eternal nuptials.

*********

In the smoke that clogged her throat and the soot that burned her eyes, Roxanna groped along the molding of the walls until she reached the door. Air! She sucked in great lungfuls of it as she ran as fast and far away as she could from that house of sin. She stopped finally on a hilltop overlooking the manor, unable to run anymore. Her head was light from all the smoke, but her body felt heavy and pendulous.

If she looked away from the house, it was a peaceful night. The dark sky was dotted with stars in the way that only the sky over a British moor could be. A cool mist crept over the purple hills toward her, and she longed for it to hurry, it looked so fresh and cleansing.

But she could not ignore the manor. Still, images of Frederick—he had surely perished by now!—swam before her eyes. She wanted to weep for the loss of her love, but could only tremble at the awfulness of her and Frederick’s sin. Fire had cleansed him of his guilt; he would suffer no longer, knowing that the euphoria they had felt had not been sent from on high but from the fiery pits below. But she would continue wandering this world, scrubbing pots in others’ kitchens, emptying chamber pots in others’ chambers, and all the time the emblem of her sin would grow.

She turned back toward the manor. One turret had already crumbled, groaning, to the ground. Flames leapt from every window and door—hellish orifices in neat rows. The entire roof of the great hall was a liquid pool of red and yellow. On and on it burned. Within her, another fire lapped ravenously, unforgivingly against the inner walls of her being, threatening to consume her. A rafter fell with an explosion, and Roxanna lifted her hands to shield her face. But then she stilled, staring down with horror at her once ethereally white hands. They were black with soot.

Her hands drifted downward to rest on her stomach. It curved softly beneath her sullied fingers. She closed her eyes.

The last pillars of the house crumbled in a roar. Earth and sky shook. The flames made a final, seething rally, and cast a heathen glow upon Roxanna’s swollen belly.