Interlude 1764
We knew her face the day Gideon brought her to the tree. So much of ourselves lay hidden within her features. The slope of my nose. The lovely quirk of Florence’s mouth, and her wild, dark hair. Felicity, Florence’s daughter, grown into a young woman of twelve, perhaps thirteen.
Felicity followed behind her father, her gaze lowered demurely, but we could see the vitality in her body.
How she placed her feet as if she were dancing rather than walking, and how she twitched her mouth when she saw something that drew her interest. She was a rebellion covered in a veneer of obedience: brought up under her father’s rule.
Despite his rigidity, he was unable to stifle the glamour in her blood. We smiled to see it, Florence and I.
There were others—a few other men with young girls in tow—but we could look only at Felicity as she came to the tree and took her place beside her father as he turned and addressed the group.
“Blessed are these young women who have come among us. Those who would seek God in all things. They who pledge their hands to His works; their lips to His praises; their bodies to His glory.” He smiled and withdrew a small flask from his breast pocket.
“Let those who are pure in body and pure in heart come now in holiest Communion with the Lord.”
We had no voice and could not scream. We could only watch as Felicity stepped forward and drank from the flask her father offered, the scent so pungent I immediately knew it for what it was. Opium poppy.
One by one, the other girls also drank, but their fathers did not. Florence and I looked down from our place in the tree, our arms reaching, but the young women and Felicity did not look up. They did not see us.
“Let us pray,” Gideon said, and the girls knelt before him, eyes closed, as he began to speak.
It did not take long for the opium poppy to take effect. The girls’ heads lolled on their necks, and their bodies slumped to the earth as they gazed confusedly about them with heavy lids.
Gideon and the other fathers moved over them, eased them backward with gentle hands, and arranged their hair, their skirts and aprons, like lovely poppets left on the forest floor. Felicity groaned, and I felt our inanimate bodies stiffen when Gideon put a finger to her lips.
He produced a Bible and opened it, the inner leaf marked with letters I could not see clearly but recognized as names. My own and Florence’s were written at the top.
“It will be as you said? And there will be no blasphemy in it?” one of the men asked.
Gideon looked at him sharply. “You would doubt the divine intercession of God? Did Abraham question when God commanded he kill his only son? No, sir. He did not. He has granted us blessings beyond compare. I myself have witnessed it as have each of you. It was a trial of the soul, but I obeyed the Lord’s command and took my wife’s blood in her untimely death.
For that faith, He has granted me favor. And you would question His will?”
We opened our mouths, an endless well of rage, but we remained silent. Invisible. Locked behind the barrier of the tree’s magic.
“No, Reverend Dudley. I only wish…” He looked at the girls beneath him, his breathing rapid. “I only wish not to see them hurt.”
“Be still, man. They will not be hurt just as my own wife was not. They will have the comfort of the poppy. They shall not remember their time here.”
The knife Gideon withdrew from his cloak was small, but its edge was cruel. He knelt before Felicity, the Bible beside him, as he lifted her skirt past her stockings and garters, the pale strip of flesh at her thigh exposed.
The other men did not avert their eyes but watched as Gideon drew the knife over Felicity’s skin, a scarlet pool of blood immediately forming.
Her eyes widened, tears forming at the corners, as she moaned.
She tried to lift her hand and push him away, but the movement was clumsy, and her arm dropped back to the earth.
With our broken, silent mouths, we pleaded with her to see us.
To look up into the tree and recognize the features in her own face, but she squeezed her eyes shut and kept them closed.
“Brothers, as the heads of each of our houses, let us share in this glory that is rightfully ours. He has made unto us a feast. It would be sacrilege to discard it.” He handed the knife to one of the others, who also knelt, lifted the girl’s skirt, and cut a line across her thigh.
Gideon dipped his finger into the blood on Felicity’s skin and lifted his hand.
“And from their blood will we prosper. Join me in this harvest, brothers. Drink and know the treasures promised by God.” He pressed the blood along the Bible’s inner leaf, marking it as something that belonged to him.
But it was not his. No matter how he claimed it.
Together, the men dipped their heads. Together, they placed their mouths along the delicate skin of the girls’ thighs. And together, they drank.