On one side of the market square was a raised platform. From the house behind a room opened on it, a big, shadowy room, whitewashed and stone-flagged, with a barred window high up near the ceiling.
Into that room Pansy was taken by her escort in a curtained litter.
During the journey to the market she had had the sensation of moving in some ghastly nightmare from which she could not wake herself, much as she tried.
It could not be possible that she, Pansy Langham, the fêted and much-courted heiress, was to be sold as one might sell a horse or a cow.
She had the horrible feeling of having lost her own identity and taken on someone else's, yet all the time remembering what had happened when she was Pansy Langham. She felt she must have slipped back hundreds of years to some previous existence, when girls were sold as slaves; for surely this appalling fate could not be happening to her in the twentieth century?
A riot of thought ran through the girl's head during the journey from the palace to the market; a riot of numb, sickly terror, the outstanding feature of which was an inability to credit the fate before her.
When Pansy reached the room she gave up all hope. She knew she was awake—painfully, horribly wide awake, with a future before her that made her shudder to contemplate.
There were a dozen or more girls in the room, but they were railed off from Pansy by a thick wooden trellis, like sheep in a pen; brown and black girls, the majority attired in nothing more than a cloth reaching from waist to knee. They had been chattering shrilly among themselves at her entry, apparently in no way appalled at the fate before them; but they broke off when she came in, and crowded to the lattice to get a closer view, gazing at the newcomer and giving vent to little exclamations of awe and envy and admiration.
Pansy's arrival brought a stout, bearded man in white burnoose in from the house behind.
His glance ran over the English girl, but he made no attempt to touch her. Then he looked at her escort, who had stationed themselves on either side of her.