The Widow's Tale (Sister Frevisse Medieval Mysteries Book 14) by Margaret Frazer

cloth like the one still jammed in her mouth was tied over her eyes and, held again by a man on either side, she was led blind from the room into the great hall. She strained to hear anything at all—some sign that someone was there to see what was happening to her—but all she heard was nothing.
    Then she was outside, was lifted astride a horse, with a man immediately swinging into the saddle behind her and other people mounting other horses around her. She tried to tell which way they rode from the manor and for how long, but she wasn’t sure. It was night, though, when they finally stopped and she was dragged down from the horse and into a building and through a room that smelled unclean. She was bumped carelessly against a doorframe, into another room, and a door was shut heavily behind her before, at last, someone took off the blindfold.
    She did not know where she was. The room was poor and bare, with a small, battered table with a single candle burning on it, two stools, a bed, a shuttered window. An inn somewhere? Someone’s house? Neither Laurence nor Colles were there, only Milisent and one of the men who had bound and blindfolded her in the parlor. When another man soon brought food—cold beef and bread and some thin ale—she was untied and ungagged so she could eat while Milisent did. She was too stiff beyond hope of making any move to escape nor did she try to cry out for help. Neither Laurence or Milisent was so careless as to have anyone near who would heed her if she did. Finished eating, she was allowed to see to her bodily necessities in a small, windowless side chamber with Milisent standing in the doorway to be sure she tried nothing foolish. What could I possibly try, Cristiana wondered dazedly. She could think of nothing. She could barely think at all by then, even when Milisent led her to the bed and shoved her down on its edge, for the man to tie her by both wrists to one bedpost, leaving her able to sit on the bed’s edge or uncomfortably lie down.
    The man left the room. Milisent readied for bed and—far more comfortably than Cristiana—lay down on the bed’s far side, saying, “Don’t think I’m enjoying having to keep you company,” before she rolled over and, by her breathing, was soon asleep.
    Cristiana did not have that mercy. Held by the rope, afraid of waking Milisent if she moved, her mind beating wildly from one thought to another, all of them desperate, all of them useless, it was a long while before—crying inwardly to Edward to make all this not be happening—she finally fell into something like sleep, though it brought her neither rest nor peace.
    The morning reversed the night. Milisent awoke, one of the men came in, Cristiana was untied, allowed her body’s needs, fed, then gagged and blindfolded again. To her shame she whimpered slightly. Milisent laughed. Again held firmly between two men but her hands unbound, she was led outside, where Milisent said, “You’re going to be put in horsecarried litter today.” Cristiana had a brief hope that with her hands free she might find some way of escape; but when a hand at the back of her head bent her over and shoved her forward to grope her way onto the litter—finding it a small one meant for one person—she had no more than eased her way around and into the cushioned seat than her arms were seized from either side and her wrists bound to the litter’s sides. Then her ankles were grabbed and likewise tied to something fixed that did not move when she tried to kick loose from it. Thwarted, tears coming anew at her helplessness, she flung her head backward hard against the end wall of the litter. It, too, was cushioned, and as she heard curtains drawn closed with the rattle of metal rings on both sides of the litter, she knew that—tied, gagged, and cushioned as she was—there would be no way to make anyone know she was in need of help.
    Through that day and two more she was carried in the litter, kept always gagged