"I am Pearl's father," Arthur said, at last. "I seduced your wife."
"There you are," Roger muttered into his ear. His voice was as rich and dark and cold as the waters of Hell. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"
It was the hardest thing he had ever said in his life. The lash-marks on his bare back burned down to his bones. "Please," he said, "punish me for it, as I deserve."
"You ask punishment from me, and not from God? Which sin, I wonder, is the greater?" His fingers danced lightly against Arthur's bowed neck, which was its own torment.
"Please," he pled.
"What do you say?" Roger asked, with a scholar's dispassion. "Does he deserve it?"
"You might as well give him what he wants," Hester answered. Hester. He couldn't see her - he couldn't look up to see her, but he didn't need to, the dark-clothed shadow sitting primly in the straight-backed chair against the wall, relieved only by the proud scarlet splash of her sin on her chest. "He's been good tonight."
The touch of Roger's fingers went suddenly from too little to too much, his doctor's hand finding the very points to make Arthur flare into pain, and he cried out - "Ahh!" -- in agony as the fingers moved to press sharp nails into his raw whip-marks, layered over all the old scars, pain on pain.
The desire spiked deep in his belly, and a smaller, cooler hand replaced Roger's on his neck, its gentleness all the crueller for the pain. "Very good," Hester said, satisfaction in her voice. She must have come to him without his hearing, while he was screaming. "Perhaps if he is still very good, I'll even let him pleasure me when you're finished."
God. A prayer rose in his mind, and then he pushed it away: God had no part in this, in this twisted penance, whatever it was that Roger's mercy had found for them all.