"I know," said Rachel. "That is why I have not run away."
"You need not speak of running away," said Tilia loftily. "The door will be open for you whenever you wish to walk through it." Rachel believed that, just as she had believed gruff Lorenzo Celino when he told her she did not have to go to Tilia's house. But she also knew that if she had not come here, or if she chose now to walk out that door, these people would do nothing more for her.
Staying, much as she might hate what would happen to her, was better than wandering alone on the roads of Italy.
She looked up at the canopy over the bed. It was peach-colored, as were the bed curtains. The walls of the small room were hung with yellow silk drapes framing frescoes showing nude, smiling women fleeing from creatures that were half man and half goat, with things that stuck out before them like spears.
"Real men do not have pizzles as big as that," Tilia had said when she first showed Rachel the room, pointing with a grin at a bright red organ. "Although it may look that big to you the first time you see one in all its glory." Tilia had stopped joking then, and had carefully told her exactly what would happen on this night.
I am better prepared, Rachel thought, than many a woman is on her wedding night.
Indeed, her own mother, months before she died, had already explained much of this to Rachel. But the thought of her mother fairly broke her heart now. Her mother would cut her own throat if she could see Rachel in this place, about to let a man do this thing to her for money.
Her body shrank with dread.
She would rather, far rather, be the ignorant bride of a carpenter or a traveling merchant like her poor Angelo, who had been her husband in name only, or even the wife of a butcher, than to lie here in this gorgeously decorated room and give her most precious gift to a stranger who had bought the right to deflower her.
She found herself wishing poor old Angelo had asserted his right as her husband so that she could not now let her virginity be defiled.