The Devil's Surrogate

by

The Devil's
Surrogate first published in 2001 by Chimera Publishing. Published
as an eBook in 2011 by Chimera eBooks.

ISBN
9781780800554

www.
chimerabooks.co.uk

Chimera (
ki-mir'a,
ki-
) a creation of the imagination, a wild
fantasy.

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This work is
sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and
without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser. The author asserts that all characters depicted in this
work of fiction are eighteen years of age or older, and that all
characters and situations are entirely imaginary and bear no
relation to any real person or actual happening.

Copyright
Jennifer Jane Pope. The right of Jennifer Jane Pope to be
identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance
with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act
1988.

This novel is
fiction - in real life practice safe sex.

Well, here we
are again, back in the seventeenth century, and things are just the
same as when we left them some months ago, with our main heroine in
a very precarious predicament and a lot of other people variously
confused and frustrated by the machinations of our assorted
villains. But I promise you, all will be resolved, for good or bad,
by the end of this book; no more 'hanging on by the fingernails'
open-endings.

To those of you who wrote to me after reading
Cauldron of Fear
... yes, I
know it was a bit of a mean trick to leave everything so 'up in the
air' like that, yet it was gratifying to know so many of you had
enjoyed the book to the extent that you were left chewing on your
knuckles. However, I swear it was not my original intention. My
books (and I know it happens to other authors as well) have this
tendency to assume a life of their own in which events are governed
by the developing characters and I end up feeling like little more
than an observer recording what happens for the benefit of
posterity. In
Cauldron
, this happened to such an extent that... well, we basically
ran out of book, and short of chopping everything short in what
would have been a most unsatisfactory fashion, or ending up with a
volume so thick it would have been nearly impossible to publish,
there was nothing else for it but to make this a two book
story.

Back on the positive side, it is nice to know so many of you
enjoyed
Cauldron of Fear
for reasons other than the most obvious, and
especially that you appreciated the historical bits. I do like to
be accurate, and yes, I
have
always been a bit of a history buff. That's the
main reason I began the
Teena Thyme
series, and now I have the opportunity to bounce
our eponymous heroine around through the ages. If you haven't met
Teena yet, her first adventure takes her back into early Victorian
days, complete with tightly laced corsets, silk stockings,
villainous noblemen, and... well, that's another story and the book
is out there if you fancy it.

For the
moment, we're back in sixteen-sixty. For those of you who may have
missed the first volume, there's a bit of background in the
following prologues, together with a brief summary of the plot so
far. You can skip over both if you wish and probably enjoy this
volume just as much, but I think it will be worth a few minutes of
your time to do the job properly.

Well, enough
of the chat, apart from thanking you all once again for your
continued interest and support. Now let's turn the clock back
precisely three-hundred and forty-one years...

The
seventeenth century was both a curious century and an important one
in that it linked the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century.
If that sounds obvious, and even a bit silly, maybe it is worth
thinking about the fact that this particular span of one hundred
years linked the Elizabethan era to the beginning of what we now
can think of as the modern age, and so many things happened in that
time that it would take twenty volumes the size of this one to even
begin to do the subject justice.

Indeed, at the
birth of the seventeenth century, Elizabeth the virgin queen was
still on the English throne, albeit in the twilight years of her
long life and reign, and by the end of the century the country had
executed a king, experienced Parliamentary 'democracy', made great
strides towards colonising and 'civilising' great tracts of the
globe, and seen the real beginning of the first scientific age,
thanks to the enthusiasm and patronage of Charles II when he wasn't
bouncing around atop Nell Gwynne and others.

In between
times there was the Bubonic Plague, which decimated a large part of
the population, and the Great Fire of London, whose origin still
gives rise to much debate. Was it a plot by the powers that be to
cleanse the capital of the deadly plague virus? We will never know,
just as we will never know the real truth behind so many momentous
historical events, but then this is not a history book.

What we do
know, and what a lot of people forget, is that the Plague epidemic
of sixteen sixty-five was not the first time the deadly disease
reared its ugly head. For decades there were sporadic and mostly
isolated outbreaks, and thousands died prior to the final
apocalypse. The church preached that the Plague was a punishment
from God, and even hinted that the Plague might be the work of
witches, even though the bishops had by now decreed that there was
no such thing as witchcraft. Mind you, they had not quite gotten
around to actually outlawing the execution of witches as such, but
merely declared that perhaps witches did not really exist...
perhaps.

It seems crazy to us now looking back from the relative sanity
of our own times (and I use the term 'sanity' very advisedly) that
on the one hand the church could say witches did not exist, and on
the other hand it could still turn a blind eye when some poor young
wench or old crone was strung up for allegedly practicing the dark
arts. But then we have to understand that these were times of great
flux, lacking in the sort of communication we take for granted
today. Also, as one contemporary scholar put it, there was a
perceived difference between actually
being
a witch (the church said you
could not actually be one now) and
practicing
the Satanic arts. The fact
that the former had been decreed impossible did not preclude
unfortunate souls from being prosecuted and persecuted for still
believing it possible. Believing in the black arts was heresy, and
this was the crime for which women, and some men, were actually
sentenced.

The one
fortunate aspect of the situation for the unfortunate victims was
that at least by this time England had stopped burning heretics and
witches. Hanging, although not yet the relatively instantaneous
death it later became when the 'drop' method was universally
introduced, was a far preferable and less agonising way of going to
meet your Maker. Strangulation may not be nice, but compared to
writhing around as your flesh is roasted away... well, enough said,
I think.

The 'drop' method of hanging was finally officially introduced
and perfected as a method of swift dispatch in the middle to the
late nineteenth century, but it was in existence a long time before
that and originally employed in places such as Italy and the Balkan
States, as we know them now, at least by the more enlightened and
compassionate rulers, which made its use rare indeed. I mention
this in case some of you are wondering about the fact that its use
was touched upon in
Cauldron of Fear
and again in this book.

As for the
state of crime, law and order and justice in general, especially in
England, it would not be inaccurate to suggest they left a lot to
be desired. Cromwell had created the country's first standing army,
but as for civilian law enforcement, it was at best hit-or-miss and
at worst merely chronic. A patchwork of magistrates, constables,
wardens and local militia-style forces had sprung up without any
real order or organisation, and were generally run by whoever held
the most sway locally. It was a situation ripe for corruption and
good-old human nature was not slow to oblige.

It is also worth remembering, at least in order to get this
story into some sort of context, that slavery was still legal in
this country, as it was in most of the world, and not just the
enslavement of non-whites. Europeans could find themselves sold
into slavery by courts, whose authority was often quite dubious,
for the most trivial offence. Slaves made money, and people with
money seldom tended to be content with what they had, not when they
could make a lot more money with the aid of a few bought
testimonies and a few greedy magistrates and judges. Quite often,
in fact, these people
were
the magistrates and judges.

And so, dear
reader, armed with this little potted analysis, let us move on now
and view the unfolding events in the same dark light that was
all-pervasive back then...

(Note: Please
see Cast of Characters Appendix at the end of the book)

From
Cauldron of Fear

The girl was
young, fresh and virginal, even her shaven skull unable to disguise
her basic, innocent prettiness. Jacob Crawley, standing in the
shadows at the far end of the vault from where she hung chained
against the rough stone wall, licked his thin lips in
anticipation.

Quietly, with
a lightness of step that belied his fifty-something years, he moved
closer, until he hovered at the very edge of the pool of orange
torchlight that illuminated the captive wench, his black hair and
the long black cape he held about his tall frame blending with the
darkness behind him and rendering him all but invisible. He saw
that her eyes were closed and guessed she was probably fallen into
a light sleep of sheer exhaustion, despite the pain her enforced
position would be growing in her shoulders and arms, and in the
stretched muscles of her calves and thighs as they tried to take
some of her weight via the tips of her toes that barely touched the
cold floor.

Her breasts,
distorted somewhat by her stretched posture, were small and firm,
the nipples prominent and deeply coloured, as yet unmarked, per
Crawley's strictest instructions. He grinned maliciously to
himself, knowing that they would not remain thus for much
longer.

Between her
taut thighs, her shaven pudenda pouted alluringly, the chains at
her ankles holding her legs apart just sufficiently to prevent any
attempt at modesty, and Crawley felt a cold shiver of lust crawl
slowly up his spine. This one, he thought, was far too good to
waste on the scaffold, far too sweet a fruit to plant in the chill
earth beyond the consecrated ground of the churchyard. No, he
chuckled, this one would not be broken, though he knew she would
probably require a taste of his own peculiar skills and more than a
modicum of bending before she would be totally satisfactory.

Not that the
process would take that long; it seldom did. Two days, three at the
most. Three days that would to her, however, pass like a
millennium, so that when Crawley finally granted her even the
smallest measure of relief and the chance to avoid the fate to
which she would by then have consigned herself and probably even
craved, she would take it gratefully, no matter to what level of
degradation she must surely know she would sink.

Crawley
shuffled his position, the muscles in his right thigh having
stiffened in the damp air, and the slight sound brought the girl
immediately awake again, her wide brown eyes flickering from side
to side in alarm.