Blood burbled from the peasant woman's mouth. Limbs akimbo, swathed in a rough hemp dress, she looked like another mound of refuse adorning the raw dirt street.
Help. Help me. She slobbered useless pleas through the fountain of her puny life's blood.
The horse had collided with her at a trot when she had jerked into the road without looking.
A spasm? A paroxysm?
A hysteria?
Some deficiency of mind, spirit, or flesh to be sure, to toss herself with abandon into the road. The horse's hooves had made a mash of her breast. There was no medicine to cure such a wound. No salvation.
Help was a speedy journey to the afterlife.
The young lord obliged in his typical manner. He assailed her withering flesh with strikes of his riding crop.
Imbecile! Cretinous whore! Filthy vagrant!
This was an ill-timed inconvenience. He had an engagement in the afternoon with the fair Virginia of Lansdowne. They were to go riding, and as a first, without chaperone. Such was the esteem he had garnered with his consummate portrayal of a gentleman.
To have his horse mangled, his boots spattered with blood, to arrive late—if now at all?
It was inconceivable.
Damned maniac! Rug licker! Lunatic fool!
The riding crop zipped and swished. A wet slap of ripped skin adding every insult to injury.
Peasants gathered in a crowd. They gazed at the spectacle, mute and stupid.
The young Lord Archibald stopped to catch his breath.
The broken woman twitched.
No more pleas. The blood stagnant. Yet something still moved under her clothes. With trepidation, Archibald aimed his riding crop under the folds of the woman’s blood-stained dress and lifted the fabric to peer underneath.
The color drained from Archibald's rubicund jowls. He swore and stamped his boots into the squirming fabric.
Still flesh at last.
This woman is deformed, he spat to the onlookers. Have her body burned and bury the remains.
He drew his pistol. With a tender look, he patted Challenger’s mane one last time, and then fired a single shot into the charger's skull.
The echo rang through the village.
Bring me a horse, Archibald growled.
A horse was produced, a plodding Haflinger fit for hauling apple carts. Archibald saddled and rode off, gritting his teeth at the indignity he was forced to endure.
Oh, the humiliation!